Fifteen hundred hours is three o’clock to those who don’t talk military, and the word “exactly” was harshly underlined three times, like if I came one minute late, well… there’d be this firing squad thing.

My watch said ten minutes till one. No problem. That left two hours to take a long, relaxing shower, scrub the whiskers off my chin, and get changed out of my plaid Bermuda shorts and sweaty T-shirt and into a fresh uniform. That’s when I remembered my watch was on Bermuda time. I glanced at the clock on the wall: ten minutes till three.

I turned to Wilson. “This note says you’re supposed to have me in the Commander in Chief’s office in ten minutes, or else. I don’t mean to worry you, Chuck, but I sure hope you can get me there in… oops, look! Only nine minutes.”

Poor Wilson’s eyes went wide and his face quivered with fear. He grabbed my duffel, threw it over the counter, clutched my arm, and began tugging me back across the lobby.

We got all the way out the doors before he realized we’d released Vasquez and the sedan. Wilson’s head spun around like a madman’s until he saw a guy climbing into a black taxi about ten yards down. He sprinted over, grabbed the shoulder of the poor soul, and flung him backward.

“Military necessity!” he yelled.

I climbed into the back right behind him and listened patiently as he screamed at the driver to spare no gas. We were down to eight minutes. The hack punched the pedal and we sped out of the parking lot.

The Yongsan Military Garrison is divided into two halves. The side we were on contains mostly housing and support facilities – the hospital, the veterinarian, the grocery store, and such. The two halves are divided by a major intracity artery, and the headquarters for all the military forces in the Korean alliance is located guess where? On the other side, of course.

We got to the gate and could look across the road to the entrance of the other half of Yongsan; only this was where things suddenly looked hopeless. The road was choked with Korean protesters holding up signs, some of which were in English and said pretty despicable things, and some of which were in Hangul, which is the Korean script, and who cared what they said, because what you don’t know don’t hurt you.

Captain Wilson gave me a nice grin as he yelled at the driver, “Gun it! Drive through them!”

“What?” the driver screamed.

Wilson lurched forward and screamed in his ear. “Go! Honk your horn! Drive! Get us across this damn road!”

The driver punched his horn, hit the gas, and we sprang forward through a crowd of Koreans frantically diving every which way.

Somehow, almost miraculously, we made it across without killing anybody. At least, I don’t think we killed anybody, because there were none of those awful crunching sounds you hear when you run something over. I heard three or four bodies slam loudly against the side of the taxi, but hopefully all they got were bruises for their trouble.

I said, “I really wish you hadn’t done that.”

“Huh?”

“That,” I replied, pointing through the rear window. “That was a really bad idea.”

“But you did it. Back at Osan.”

“Where it was entirely different,” I informed him. “We were on military property. This highway belongs to the city of Seoul. Also, those were peaceful protesters, not blood-crazed rioters flinging rocks and Molotov cocktails.”

His eyes got watery. “You mean, I screwed up?”

“You screwed up bad,” I assured him, just as we pulled up to the front entry of the big headquarters building.

As I climbed out, I bent over, looked into his downcast eyes, and said, “Look, you get in trouble, give me a call. I’ll serve as your attorney. Okay? Don’t worry, I hardly ever lose.”

He suddenly grabbed my arm and shook my hand, and was still mumbling pleading things at my back as I walked through the grand entrance of the headquarters. Infantry officers might not have a real high regard for lawyers, but they kiss your ass pretty good when they think they need you.

The full colonel who was obviously the general’s gatekeeper looked up from his desk when I barged in and gave me an instantly disapproving glare. He looked down at my sandals, paused at my plaid shorts, then dwelled speculatively on the letters on the front of my T-shirt, which read “Go Navy, Beat Army.” Poor choice on my part, I suppose. He must’ve been a West Pointer, because that’s when his eyes really caught fire.

“Who the hell are you?” he demanded.

“Major Sean Drummond,” I said. “I just got to the hotel and there was a note at the desk that said if I wasn’t here at 1500 hours, I’d get castrated.”

I grinned stupidly. My wisecrack was supposed to soften the mood, show I was one of the guys, elicit a sympathetic smirk.

Oops. He leaped up and said, “You’ve made it all the way to major and never learned to salute when you report to a senior officer?”

He definitely was a West Pointer, because you can’t ever salute or say “sir” enough to the bully boys from the Hudson.

I whipped off a humdinger of a salute. “Major Sean Drummond, reporting as ordered, sir.”

This seemed to mollify him somewhat. Not a lot; only somewhat. He returned my salute, and hot damn, if it wasn’t more of a humdinger than mine. You could almost hear the air crackle, his hand sliced through it so fast.

“You’re the lawyer, right?” he asked.

“I am a lawyer, sir,” I dutifully confirmed.

“Your co-counsel is already in General Spears’s office.”

“My co-counsel?”

“That’s right,” he said, glancing down at his watch. “Unlike you, she arrived right on time.”

“She?”

“What are you waiting for?” he barked, pointing a long, stern finger at a hand-carved wooden door.

I got the message. I walked over, knocked gently, and entered the office of General Martin Spears, Commander in Chief of every military thing south of the 38th Parallel.

The first thing I saw was the back of the woman who was standing in front of the general’s desk. There was a shock of gleaming dark hair that hung like a shimmering flag all the way to her rump. She was short and slender with wide shoulders. She wore the traditional garb of a female lawyer: a dark blue pinstriped pantsuit cut to look neither sexy nor nonsexy. It didn’t seem compatible with her long hair. She looked like a tiny ballerina who’d gotten her wardrobe mixed up.

Something was disturbingly familiar about her.

Spears tore his piercing eyes off her and targeted them at me. He was a thin, late-middle-aged man with sparse, graying hair, a face like a bloodthirsty Mohawk, and eyes that looked menacing enough to shoot tank rounds at you.

I swiftly marched forward, his eyebrows making me painfully aware how shabbily and inappropriately I was dressed. I hoped that if I did this just right, he might, maybe, hopefully, please God, ignore my attire. I stopped in front of his desk and, inspired by the example of the colonel in the general’s outer sanctum, rocketed my right hand to my right brow so hard I nearly punched a dent in my forehead.

“Major Sean Drummond, reporting as ordered, sir.”

He nodded and then glumly murmured to the woman, “Your co-counsel has arrived.”

She slowly turned her head and I nearly fell out of my chair. Actually, I wasn’t sitting in a chair. But you get the point.

Katherine Carlson had been in my class at Georgetown law school eight years before. Actually, not just in my class, she was first in my class. She was the smartest damn thing anybody ever saw: summa cum laude as an undergrad at Harvard, full scholarship to law school, editor of law review, and – please believe me when I say this – a royal pain in the ass.

If you’ve heard the phrase “made sparks fly,” that understated what happened anytime Katherine and I got within spitting distance of each other. We made trees explode into flames. The law professors hated us. The other students hated us. Hell, even the janitors hated us. They didn’t hate me personally. Or her personally. They hated us.