Which was nothing, as it turned out. Rukhsana found out from a usually reliable source in the U.S. embassy in Islamabad that the Pakistani government had been assured that no incursion whatever was being planned or even considered.

The worst thing about an event like this, besides the hell of not knowing what’s happening to the victims-the loved ones, as they always call them-is that life goes on. Traffic flows, the noble buildings still stand whitely there in Washington, people go to their jobs and eat and to bed, and after the shock is a little past, so do the not exactly bereaved, carrying on in a suffering somewhat worse than an actual death in the family, because of the torture of hope.

Me too. I thought I would go nuts if I had to hang around the house, so the day after they showed the hostage tape I went to my regular PT session and sweet-talked Brenda Crabbe into filling out a report that said I had got all the benefit out of PT that was there to be got and, if the docs agreed, I was good to go.

The following day I drove down to Fort Belvoir in northern Virginia to return to my job. Fort Belvoir is a sort of military mall that the army uses to house units that they can’t figure out where else to put, stuff like the Defense Logistics Agency and the Institute of Heraldry. Soldier Magazine is there and so is the Tactical Intelligence Support Detachment, which is us. You would think that an organization as secret as the TISD would want to stay anonymous, but no, we have a sign and a shield too, a sword cutting a chain and a Latin motto. I showed my special ID to the guard at the desk and he ran it through his computer. My army records are completely fraudulent. I’m supposedly serving in some regular unit somewhere if anyone wants to look, which suits me okay. I’m kind of a fraudulent character to begin with.

I went in to see our first sergeant, whose name is Cheney, Ronald D., although everyone calls him Dick and blames him for Iraq, in one of those boring jokes that stick to any unit. Big guy with a narrow horse face and a dimple in the middle of his chin, a lifer like me. The first thing he said when I went in there was, “What’s wrong with your eyes? They’re all red.”

I said something about getting soap in them in the shower, and he asked me how the PT was going, and I said I should be yelling hoo-ah in a matter of weeks. Then I asked him where our guys were and he said, “Team One’s in Iraq; Team Two’s in Afghanistan; Team Three’s in transit somewhere, they didn’t tell me where yet, but I’m guessing Pakistan; and Team Four’s on stateside rotation for rest and training. Did you hear about Claiborne?”

“Not hurt?”

“Shit, no. He’s leaving. He came in here and I had his reenlistment papers all ready and he said to run them through the shredder; he was going to take a job with some security outfit. Blackwater or one of those.”

“That’s fucked up,” I said. “God, Buck Claiborne! Why would he do something like that?”

“He said they were going to pay him over a hundred grand a year plus benefits, and no army chickenshit either. He didn’t say anything to you?”

“No. He was always talking about telling the service to go fuck itself, but I thought it was just talk. Well. That’s a kick in the ass.”

“Roger that. Funny he never mentioned it. You guys were pretty tight.”

Yes, we were. Buck Claiborne saved my ass when the house fell on me. He was probably the largest person ever to successfully complete Special Forces training, which tends to favor moderate-sized people like me. I was a little hurt that he hadn’t told me he was getting out. I don’t have many close relationships with the men I work with, but I thought he was an exception and I was obviously wrong. I wanted to change the subject.

I said, “I guess we weren’t that tight. By the way, has there been anything down about this terrorist kidnap yet? The Craig thing?”

Cheney said, “No, nothing. That’s up in Pak, no?”

I said it was. Our unit is descended from the one that rescued General James Dozier in 1981, when the Red Brigades snatched him. Organized for tight coordination of comint and action, we led the carabinieri commandos right to the apartment where Dozier was being held and they rescued him without firing a shot.

If no one had alerted us on the kidnapping it was more bad news. If it wasn’t us it was probably nobody, which meant the U.S. was really not going to lift a finger.

“Could you keep your ears open on that, Top? I’d like to know if anyone gets an alert on an op, anything they have going to spring them.”

He didn’t reply for a moment, looking me over. “Sure, no problem. What’s your interest?”

“Oh, one of the victims is someone I know,” I said, and then I said I’d sure like to go downrange and he said, What, you can’t wait to kill again? and I said, Yeah, it’s an all-consuming need. He laughed and said I was getting pretty short myself, and was I planning to do a Claiborne when my enlistment ran out next month? and I said, Oh, sure, like they’d let me go. As a matter of fact, reenlistment is a formality with me; the army has this little catch that they can extend you indefinitely if you have a vital skill essential to national security, which I do with my languages and cultural knowledge of South Asia, so I might as well get the re-up bonus. I am a well-paid slave soldier, like a Mameluke or a janissary.

We bullshitted for a while about army stuff, and he gave me some paperwork to fill out, and as I was leaving he said, “You know, I saw an old pal of yours the other day, Captain Lepinski, only he’s a major now. They assigned him to JSOC staff, the fuckhead.”

I said, “I’m glad to hear it. You can always trust the army to reward good work. What’ve they got him doing?”

“I don’t know. Shuffling paper. Personnel assignments, the usual shit.”

I thought that was a good thing to learn about Lepinski, because the Joint Special Operations Command staff is the outfit that cuts all our orders. I said, “Well, he probably won’t kill anyone doing that.”

I sat down at a spare desk and looked over the crap that had accumulated for me during my time away from the unit, the usual army chicken-shit, but there was one item that drew my interest. It was an evaluation form for a course I’d been to just before the operation that had got me hurt, a course about how to handle a situation where terrorists had got hold of a nuclear weapon.

I recalled it pretty well, although it must’ve been six months back. I’d been called in to see Captain Stoltz. Brian Stoltz is not a bad guy for an officer, he’s a wiry little son of a bitch like me, fair but cruel. I wouldn’t say we like each other, but we get along. He’s a runner-set some kind of record when he was at the Point-and likes to take us running carrying heavy equipment. His nickname in the army is Flyin’ Brian, but we usually say the Fly. Mine is Ice, as in Ice Tea. Billy’s was Rowboat. Is.

I knocked and walked in and saluted and he sat me down in a side chair and asked me how I was, by which I knew I wasn’t in trouble and he was going to stick me with some pain in the ass that someone had passed down the line. So after the chat, he said, “Congratulations, you’re our new CBR NCO.”

I said, “Thank you, sir. I appreciate the honor.”

He said, “And fuck you very much. There’s a course, starts tomorrow.”

I said, “What kind of course? I already had CBR training.”

“This isn’t a bullshit course,” he said. “It’s about nuclear weapons, very high level. I’m going too.”

I asked him if I should be worried and he said the brass was and had sent the word down that every unit with clandestine insertion capability had to have one officer and one NCO down to the company level familiar with the design and appearance of nuclear explosives.