to full before the speed fell below thirty knots.
“Touch and go. Flaps up.” Alan ran the flaps all the way up with one hand, trying to watch the airspeed while keeping the plane centered on the runway. The airspeed needle passed through fifty-five knots and he pulled back lightly on the stick. His eyes flickered to the rate of climb; he was trying to hold on five degrees, with reasonable success. The plane began to climb away. Rafe spoke to the tower again and turned to Alan. “Nice job. You might have a stick hand, at that. Now ascend to 5500 and turn on course 172 for Naragansett. We’ll land there for lunch.”
The plane was Rafe’s. He kept it at Quonsett while he attended the War College. As a senior 0–4 with no kids and a busted marriage that so far hadn’t cost him alimony, he could maintain the sleek Cessna 182 in top condition and decorate the dash with gauges that were meaningless to Alan.
“You landing on the altimeter?” he asked casually, fiddling with the pocket on his windbreaker.
“Is that wrong?”
“Unfortunately, it just broke.” Rafe grinned and taped a piece of cardboard—he had been planning this, the sonofabitch—over the altimeter dial. “You liked flying with me off the boat, you get to learn my way.”
Rafe’s way was unnerving. Alan watched the ground, then started to glue himself to the angle-of-climb monitor. The airfield was down there, visible, and Alan was well into the approach, yet he felt lost. He kept waggling the wings to get a better view of the ground, and once, he almost panicked when he saw that he was in a 15degree descent instead of being level, but he fought the machine and himself and at last achieved lineup with the runway.
“How’s Rose?” Rafe asked.
Alan took a deep breath. “Rose was pregnant,” he said. “She lost the baby.”
He watched the runway and made a minute correction.
“Never try to correct so close to the ground!” Rafe shouted, and the wheels touched. He modulated his voice. “Nice landing, Buddy.”
“She fell down a ladder during sea trials on her new project.” Alan was thinking of Rose, the pale face on the hospital sheets, the limp hand in his, the averted face. No tears. Rose.
“Fucking A, Alan, that sucks.” With the engine at idle and no slipstream, the utter honesty of Rafe’s comment struck him. That was how it had been at the squadron. Confrontation, joy, sorrow—all right there. Not a lot of bullshit. “She taking it out on you?”
Two nights before, he had tried to make Rose talk about it and he still saw her gesture—hands raised on each side of her head, fingers spread, blocking out sound, sight, him; her voice, I’ll deal with it! Just let me deal with it! The hands, the voice shutting him out—
It was Rafe’s turn to try to smile, wryly now. “You don’t hide things very good, Spy.” He unbuckled his harness. “Get a hundred hours’ real time and you can solo in my plane. You’ll be a good pilot. Just stop paying such close attention to everything.”
Words to live by. Just stop paying such close attention. Right.
Houston.
Rose tears down the corridor and out a fire door, banging the handle with both palms to get it out of her way. The rental car waits in the parking lot and she almost runs to it. Drive as fast as she dares to the airport, dump the car; run to the check-in, only ten minutes to spare, slam down the ticket, run for the departure lounge—
If only I can stay busy. If only I can move fast enough. If only—
Work is a drug. She hates the evenings and the nights. Evenings, there isn’t always enough work to keep her mind from going back to it. Nights, there is never enough sleep, always the waking, the thinking, the pacing around the house or the hotel room. It is better on the road, because there is no Alan beside her there to remind her of what they have lost. Because of her. Because of going too hard, trying too hard, wanting too hard—
It was her fault. Not Valdez’s fault. Valdez had fallen on her, but that was because she had been hurrying him up on deck. Trying too hard. Going too fast. Her fault.
Now, so as not to remember, she tries to go faster. Cursing the people ahead of her in the aisle of the plane, the ones who left their overhead crap until the last moment, the ones who have to chat up the flight attendant, the ones who can’t walk fast enough. She hurries around them, almost running toward the terminal, toward the new rental car, the new offices. If she can only go fast enough—
Late that night, she calls Alan, as she does every night. She feels exhausted but doubts she will sleep. She hopes she has enough paperwork to last until tomorrow. She keeps her voice light, nonetheless. She must succeed in making everything seem okay, because he talks of other things: His job bores him. He has had lunch with Abe Peretz. He has heard nothing from O’Neill or Dukas; he is worried about them. What are they doing?
She tries to enter into his concern. Maybe it will get her through the night. What are O’Neill and Dukas doing? What are O’Neill and Dukas … ? All she can think about is the baby and the accident, and she turns on the light and begins to memorize the launch-parameter codes for Peacemaker.
August
East Africa.
Harry O’Neill had made a mistake.
In fact, he had made the biggest mistake a case officer can make.
He had fallen in love.
With one of his agents.
All case officers, it is said, sleep with their agents—surely an exaggeration—but they don’t fall in love. It is the falling in love that is the mistake.
And he knew it was a mistake, and he was happy. He was happier than he had ever been in his life, happy in a way that reconciled him to his father’s snobbery and his ex-wife’s nastiness, to his own self-doubt and to the dangers of his mistake. If his life ended tomorrow, he told himself, he would say it had been worth it.
“I love you,” he said to her. “You make me happy.”
Elizabeth Momparu looked at him. Her eyes were slightly swollen from sex and sleep and fatigue, and when she half-closed them to look at him, they seemed to turn up at the corners. She had a fair idea of how she looked to him but no notion of how she really looked to him—the most beautiful, the most wonderful, the most enchanting woman in the world. She had had a lot of men, white and black. Some of them had said they loved her. She had thought she had loved three. She had never known one like Harry.
“I like being with you,” she said. “I like being safe with you.”
They were sitting on the terrace of a game lodge in eastern Kenya. Night was almost there, coming fast; the retreating day had left a reddish light that made everything—waterhole, thorn trees, sky—seem like an old color slide that had lost all its blue and green. In front of them was a low wall, and a dropoff of twenty feet to an artificial waterhole that would be floodlighted later. For now, only rock hyraxes the size
