"What nuclear bombs?" The old man shook his head. "What are you talking about?"
Hawkins peered intently into the old man's eyes and felt a sinking sensation. His instincts told him the man was telling the truth. All this for nothing. He looked at Richman, who grimaced and shouted in his team leader's ears, "Another dry well."
Hawkins wearily nodded, the adrenaline of the mission rapidly dissipating.
Richman squeezed his arm. "Sorry about the girl. She was in bed with the man when we went in. I didn't see the gun."
Hawkins ran a hand across his brow. "It doesn't matter." He went forward in the cargo bay, away from the other members of his team. He slumped down on the cargo web seat against the side of the aircraft. He peeled off his thin black gloves and the glint of gold on his left hand caught his eye. With his right hand he twisted the ring, feeling it cut into the flesh beneath. His eyes remembered the fear in the woman's eyes in the room. He didn't know who she was or why she was there. He had spotted the derringer a second before he fired, but he had no way of knowing for sure if she had intended to use it. It had been reflex-the killing reflex that had been drummed into him for years.
Hawkins felt a black void open in his chest — a void he'd felt often in the past four years. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to block out all the memories, but failed. Unthinking, his right hand left the ring and stole down to his right hip and unsnapped the cover on his pistol holster. He pulled the Beretta 9mm out and instinctively flipped off the safety.
A tap on the shoulder startled him.
"Sir, we've got a message for you on SATCOM." A commo man stood there, holding out the headset for a satellite radio, looking curiously at the pistol in his commander's hand. Hawkins followed the man's gaze and blinked. He awkwardly put the gun back in its holster and took the headset. "Hawkins here."
"Hawk, this is General Lowry. We've got an F-14 waiting on board the carrier all fueled and waiting for you. As soon as you get on board you go to that bird."
Hawkins shook his head to clear it. "What about debrief?"
"Don't worry about debrief. Richman will handle it. Something's come up."
Hawkins felt the trepidation of another mission. "You have a line on the other nuke?"
"No." There was a slight pause. "You get on that Tomcat and you go wherever it takes you. That's all I've got."
"Can you give me an idea where it's taking me, sir?"
There was a long pause. "From what I understand, you're going to Australia."
"Australia? Why?"
"To tell you the truth, Hawk, I don't know what's going on. This is coming from the very top. Just do what you're ordered to. Out."
The radio went dead. Hawkins ripped the headset off and slammed it against the floor, ignoring the looks of his team members. He pressed his fists against his temples, trying to block out all the faces, and one face in particular-a woman still alive, at least physically, lying on another bed, covered with a white sheet up to her neck, her large eyes staring aimlessly straight ahead.
The five men at the table to the left of the band's stage had begun verbally grading the women going to the bathroom over thirty minutes before. Their scale ranged from negative ten to a seven for a mini-skirted young girl. Don Batson had ignored their raucous laughter. In the drunken glow of seven beers he was much more interested in the woman seated next to him. Linda was one of his graduate assistants and their relationship had recently become much more than professional.
Don looked much younger than he actually was, an almost indistinguishable sprinkling of gray in his black hair, a hint to his thirty-eight years. Black steel-rimmed glasses framed a remarkably unlined face and covered dark eyes that blearily took in his surroundings. Only in the light of day could the redness in his nose and sprinkling of burst blood vessels in his cheeks be spotted. He kept his body in good shape at the university gym and sweated out" the alcohol every day. Don Batson took everything life had to offer him with eager arms. At the present moment one of those arms was occupied with Nancy's thigh, squeezing the smooth flesh in anticipation of a night's pleasure.
Peter, one of Don's third-year undergraduate students at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, had just finished describing his experiences the previous summer during an internship with a mining consortium in Colorado. As the humorous story drew to a close, Don finished his mug of beer and then leaned forward.
"I've got a small problem that I want you to solve." The younger students groaned with mock horror while Nancy smiled, used to Don's favorite game-setting up problems that required innovative solutions. He looked at her. "I don't want you answering either-you've heard it before."
Sure he had their attention, he continued above the muted clatter of the bar. "You have a half-inch diameter, two-foot-long steel tube welded onto a steel deck, the tube standing perpendicular. The top is open. You also have a hanger, a pair of pliers, a four-foot piece of string, and a piece of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven typing paper.
"A Ping-Pong ball is placed in the top of the tube and slowly settles to the bottom. The diameter of the tube is barely one eighth of an inch larger than the circumference of the Ping-Pong ball. Your job"-he grinned-"should you choose to accept it, is to get the Ping-Pong ball out of the steel tube given what's available to you. And the Ping-Pong ball must be intact-no using the hanger to puncture it and pull it out."
Don sat back and listened to several of the usual solutions, pointing out how each one wouldn't work. Finally, he took pity on his students. "All right. Listen up. There's a teaching point here, as always. You all have focused on the material I gave you and not on the problem. You have tunnel vision. Someone give characteristics of the object you wish to remove from the pipe."
"It's round," one student drunkenly declared.
"True," Don acknowledged. "What else?"
"It's white," another announced to laughter.
"What else?" Out of the comer of his eye Batson noted that the men near the bathroom had now written numbers on napkins and were holding them up as women walked past.
"It bounces."
"Good. You're on the right track. More physical characteristics. How would you describe a Ping-Pong ball to someone who's never seen one?"
"It's a hollow plastic sphere."
Don smiled. "All right. What does a hollow plastic sphere do?" Seeing the frowns, he tried explaining further. "You've already said it bounces. What else?"
"It floats."
"Exactly!" Don looked at the student who'd come up with that. "How can you use that to get the ball out of the tube?"
"Well, you pour water in and it will float to the top." The student shook his head. "But you didn't give us any water as part of the material we could use."
Don shook his head. "That just reinforces the teaching point. You have to examine the problem without constricting yourself by given or known parameters. What do you always have with you when you approach any problem?"
"Your mind?"
"Yes," Don replied. "And your body. Isn't your body capable of producing fluid sufficient to get the Ping-Pong ball out of the tube?"
"Oh, gross," one of the students commented as he realized what Don was saying. "You mean take a leak in the pipe?"
"Exactly!"
With that, two men in three-piece suits slowly walked in the front door and gazed about, referring to a photo the lead man held in his hand. They looked out of place among the cowboy boots and hats.
"And speaking of that," Linda announced, "I have to take a little trip. Get me another beer, please," she whispered in Don's ear as she got to her feet.