Tom Clancy - Without Remorse

No.

Not a waste of time. That was her task in life, to make sick people well. She'd done that. She was proud of that. It was not wasted time. It was stolen time. Stolen time, two stolen lives. She started crying and had to go to the downstairs bathroom, grabbing tissue to wipe her eyes. Then she looked in the mirror, seeing eyes that she'd never beheld before. And seeing that, she truly understood.

Disease was a dragon that she fought forty hours or more per week. A skilled nurse and teacher who worked well with the surgeons on her unit, Sandra O'Toole fought those dragons in her way, with professionalism and kindness and intelligence, more often winning than losing. And every year things got better. Progress was never fast enough, but it was real and could be measured, and perhaps she'd live long enough to see the last dragon on her unit die once and for all.

But there was more than one kind of dragon, wasn't there? Some couldn't be killed with kindness and medications and skilled nursing care. She'd defeated one, but another had killed Doris anyway. That dragon needed the sword, in the hands of a warrior. The sword was a tool, wasn't it? A necessary tool, if you wanted to slay that particular dragon. Perhaps it was one she could never use herself, but necessary nonetheless. Someone had to hold that sword. John wasn't a bad man at all, just realistic.

She fought her dragons. He fought his. It was the same fight. She'd been wrong to judge him. Now she understood, seeing in her eyes the same emotion that she'd beheld months earlier in his, as her rage passed, but not very far, and the determination set in.

'Well, everybody lucked out,' Hicks said, handing over a beer.

'How so, Wally?' Peter Henderson asked.

'The mission was a washout. It aborted just in time. Didn't even get anyone hurt in the process, thank God. Everyone's flying home right now.'

'Good news, Wally!' Henderson said, meaning it. He didn't want to kill anybody either. He just wanted the damned war to end, the same as Wally did. It was a shame about the men in that camp, but some things couldn't be helped. 'What happened exactly?'

'Nobody knows yet. You want me to find out?'

Peter nodded. 'Carefully. It's something the Intelligence Committee ought to know about, when the Agency fucks up like that. I can get the information to them. But you have to be careful.'

'No problem. I'm learning how to stroke Roger,' Hicks lit up his first joint of the evening, annoying his guest.

'You could lose your clearance that way, you know?'

'Well, gee, then I'll have to join Dad and make a few mill' on The Street, eh?'

'Wally, do you want to change the system or do you want to let other people keep it the same?'

Hicks nodded. 'Yeah, I suppose.'

The following winds had allowed the??-135 to make the hop in from Hawaii without a refueling stop, and the landing was a gentle one. Remarkably, Kelly's sleep cycle was about right now. It was five in the afternoon, and in another six or seven hours he'd be ready for more sleep.

'Can I get a day or two off?'

'We'll want you back to Quantico for an extended debrief,' Ritter told him, stiff and sore from the extended flight.

'Fine, just so I'm not in custody or anything. I could use a lift up to Baltimore.'

'I'll see what I can do,' Greer said as the plane came to a halt.

Two security officers from the Agency were the first up the mobile stairs, even before the oversized cargo hatch swung up. Ritter woke the Russian up.

'Welcome to Washington.'

'Take me to my embassy?' he asked hopefully. Ritter almost laughed.

'Not quite yet. We'll find you a nice, comfortable place, though.'

Grishanov was too groggy to object, rubbing his head and needing something for the pain. He went with the security officers, down the steps to their waiting car. It left at once for a safe house near Winchester, Virginia.

'Thanks for the try, John,' Admiral Maxwell said, taking the younger man's hand.

'I'm sorry for what I said before,' Cas said, doing the same. 'You were right.' They, too, had a car waiting. Kelly watched them enter it from the hatch.

'So what happens to them?' he asked Greer.

James shrugged, leading Kelly out and down the stairs. Noise from other aircraft made his voice hard to hear. 'Dutch was in line for a fleet, and maybe the CNO's job. I don't suppose that'll happen now. The operation - well, it was his baby, and it didn't get born. That'll finish him.'

'That's not fair,' Kelly said loudly. Greer turned.

'No, it isn't, but that's the way things are.' Greer, too, had a ride waiting. He directed his driver to head to the wing-headquarters building, where he arranged a car to take Kelly to Baltimore. 'Get some rest and call me when you're ready. Bob was serious about what he said. Think it over.'

'Yes, sir,' Kelly replied, heading to the blue Air Force sedan.

It was amazing, Kelly thought, the way life was. Within five minutes the sergeant drove onto an interstate highway. Scarcely twenty-four hours earlier he'd been on a ship approaching Subic Bay. Thirty-six hours prior to that he'd been on the soil of an enemy country - and now here he was in the backseat of a government Chevy, and the only dangers to which he was exposed came from other drivers. At least for a little while. All the familiar things, the highway exit signs painted that pleasant shade of green, traveling in the last half of the local rush hour. Everything about him proclaimed the normality of life, when three days earlier everything had been alien and hostile. Most amazing of all, he'd adjusted to it.

The driver didn't speak a word except to inquire about directions, though he must have wondered who the man was that had arrived on a special flight. Perhaps he had many such jobs, Kelly mused as the car pulled off Loch Raven Boulevard, enough that he'd stopped wondering about things he'd never be told.

'Thanks for the lift,' Kelly told him.

'Yes, sir, you're welcome.' The car pulled away and Kelly walked to his apartment, amused that he'd taken his keys all the way to Vietnam and back. Did the keys know how far they had come? Five minutes later he was in the shower, the quintessentially American experience, changing from one reality into another. Another five and he was dressed in slacks and a short-sleeve shirt and headed out the door to his Scout, parked a block away. Another ten and he'd parked the car within sight of Sandy's bungalow. The walk from his Scout to her door was yet another transition. He'd come home to something, Kelly told himself. For the first time.

'John!' He hadn't expected the hug. Even less so the tears in her eyes.

'It's okay, Sandy. I'm fine. No holes or scratches or anything.' He was slow to grasp the desperation of her hold on him, pleasant as it was. But then the face against his chest started sobbing, and he knew that this event was not for him at all. 'What's wrong?'

'They killed Doris.'

Time stopped again. It seemed to split into many pieces. Kelly closed his eyes, in pain at first, and in that instant he was back on his hilltop overlooking sender green, watching the NVA troops arrive; he was in his hospital bed looking at a photograph; he was outside some nameless village listening to the screams of children. He'd come home, all right, but to the same thing he'd left. No, he realized, to the thing that he had never left, which followed him everywhere he went. He'd never get away from it because he'd never really finished it, not even once. Noteven once.

And yet there was a new element as well, this woman holding him and feeling the same blazing pain that sliced through his chest.

'What happened, Sandy?'

'We got her well, John. We took her home, and then I called today like you told me to, and a policeman answered. Doris and her father, too, both murdered.'