‘How was the trip?’ He turned to see Admiral Podulski, dressed in wrinkled khakis and far too cheerful for the moment.
‘Aviators gotta be crazy,’ Kelly bitched.
‘Does get kinda long. Follow me,’ the Admiral ordered, leading him into the superstructure. Kelly looked around first. Constellation was on the eastern horizon and he could see aircraft flying off one end while others circled to land on the other. Two cruisers were in close attendance, and destroyers ringed the formation. It was part of the Navy which Kelly had rarely seen, the Big Blue Team at work, commanding the ocean. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing.
‘Russian fishing trawler, AGI.’ Podulski waved Kelly through a watertight door.
‘Oh, that’s just great!’
‘Don’t worry. We can deal with that,’ the Admiral assured him.
Inside the superstructure, the two men headed up a series of ladders, finding flag quarters, or what passed for them at the moment. Admiral Podulski had taken over the Captain’s in-port cabin for the duration of the mission, relegating Ogden’s CO to his smaller accommodations nearer the bridge. There was a comfortable sitting room, and the ship’s captain was there.
‘Welcome aboard!’ Captain Ted Franks said in greeting. ‘You’re Clark?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Franks was a fifty-year-old pro who’d been in amphibious ships since 1944. Ogden was his fifth and would be his last command. Short, pudgy, and losing his hair, he still had the look of a warrior on a face that was by turns good-natured and deadly serious. At the moment, it was the former. He waved Kelly to a chair next to a table in the center of which was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
‘That ain’t legal,’ Kelly observed at once.
‘Not for me,’ Captain Franks agreed. ‘Aviator rations.’
‘I arranged for them,’ Casimir Podulski explained. ‘Brought ’em over from Connie. You need something to steady down after all that time with the Air Scouts.’
‘Sir, I never argue with admirals.’ Kelly dropped two ice cubes into a tumbler and covered them with alcohol.
‘My XO is talking with Captain Albie and his people. They’re all getting entertained, too,’ Franks added, meaning that every man had two miniatures on his assigned bunk. ‘Mr Clark, our ship is yours. Anything we have, you got it.’
‘Well, Cap’n, you surely know how to say hello.’ Kelly sipped at his drink, and the first touch of the booze made his body remember how wrung-out he was. ‘So when do we start?’
‘Four days. You need two to recover from the trip,’ the Admiral said. ‘The submarine will be with us two days after that. The Marines go in Friday morning, depending on weather.’
‘Okay.’ There was nothing else he could say.
‘Only the XO and I know anything yet. Try not to spread things around. We’ve got a pretty good crew. The intel team is aboard and working. The medical team gets here tomorrow.’
‘Recon?’
Podulski handled that one. ‘We’ll have photos of the camp later today, from a Vigilante working off Connie. Then another set twelve hours before you move out. We have Buffalo Hunter shots, five days old. The camp is still there, still guarded, same as before.’
‘Items?’ Kelly asked, using the code word for prisoners.
‘We’ve only got three shots of Americans in the compound.’ Podulski shrugged. ‘They don’t make a camera yet that can see through a tile roof.’
‘Right.’ Kelly’s face said it all.
‘I m worried about that, too,’ Cas admitted.
Kelly turned. ‘Captain, you have an exercise place, something like that?’
‘Weight room, aft of the crew’s mess. Like I said, it’s yours if you want it.’
He finished off his drink. ‘Well, I think I need to get some rack time.’
‘You’ll mess with the Marines. You’ll like the food here,’ Captain Franks promised.
‘Fair enough.’
‘I saw two men not wearing their hard-hats,’ Marvin Wilson said to the boss.
‘I’ll talk to them.’
‘Aside from that, thanks a lot for your cooperation.’ He’d made a total of eleven safety recommendations, and the owner of the cement company had adopted every one, hoping for a reduction in his insurance rates. Marvin took off his white hard-hat and wiped the sweat from his brow. It was going to be a hot one. The summer climate was not all that much unlike Moscow, but more humid. At least the winters were milder.
‘You know, if they made these things with little holes in them for ventilation, they’d be a lot more comfortable to wear.’
‘I’ve said that myself,’ Captain Yegorov agreed, heading off to his car. Fifteen minutes later he pulled into a Howard Johnson’s. The blue Plymouth took a spot along the west side of the building, and as he got out, a patron inside finished off his coffee and left his spot at the counter, along with a quarter tip to thrill the waitress. The restaurant had a double set of doors to save on the air-conditioning bill, and when the two men met there, just the two of them, moving, with the glass of the doors interfering with anyone who might be observing them, the film was passed. Yegorov/Wilson continued inside, and a ‘legal’ KGB major named Ishchenko went his way. Relieved of his burden for the day, Marvin Wilson sat at the counter and ordered orange juice to start. There were so many good things to eat in America.
‘I’m eating too much.’ It was probably true, but it didn’t stop Doris from attacking the pile of hotcakes.
Sarah didn’t understand the Americans’ love for emaciation. ‘You lost plenty in the last two weeks. It won’t hurt you to put a little back,’ Sarah Rosen told her graduating patient.
Sarah’s Buick was parked outside, and today would see them in Pittsburgh. Sandy had worked on Doris’s hair a little more, and made one more trip to get clothes that befitted the day, a beige silk blouse and a burgundy skirt that ended just above the knee. The prodigal son could return home in rags, but the daughter had to arrive with some pride.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ Doris Brown told them, standing to collect the dishes.
‘You just keep getting better,’ Sarah replied. They went out to the car, and Doris got in the back. If nothing else, Kelly had taught them caution. Dr Sarah Rosen headed out quickly, turning north on Loch Raven, getting on the Baltimore Beltway and heading west to Interstate 70. The posted limit on the new highway was seventy miles per hour, and Sarah exceeded it, pushing her heavy Buick northwest toward the Catoctin Mountains, every mile between them and the city an additional safety factor, and by the time they passed Hagerstown she relaxed and started enjoying the ride. What were the chances, after all, of being spotted in a moving car?
It was a surprisingly quiet ride. They’d talked themselves out in the previous few days as Doris had returned to a condition approximating normality. She still needed drug counseling, and seriously needed psychiatric help, but Sarah had already taken care of that with a colleague at the University of Pittsburgh’s excellent medical school, a sixtyish woman who knew not to report things to the local police, assured that that part of the matter was already in hand. In the silence of the car Sandy and Sarah could feel the tension build. It was something they’d talked about. Doris was returning to a home and a father she’d left for a life that had nearly become a death. For many months the principal component of her new life would be guilt, part earned, part not. On the whole she was a very lucky young lady, something Doris had yet to grasp. She was, first of all, alive. With her confidence and self-esteem restored she might in two or three years be able to continue her life on a course so normal that no one would ever suspect her past or notice the fading scars. Restored health would change this girl, returning her not only to her father but also to the world of real people.
Perhaps she might even become stronger, Sarah hoped, if the psychiatrist brought her along slowly and carefully. Dr Michelle Bryant had a stellar reputation, a correct one, she hoped. For Dr Rosen, still racing west slightly over the legal limit, this was one of the hard parts of medicine. She had to let the patient go with the job not yet complete. Her clinical work with drug abusers had prepared her for it, but those jobs, like this one, were never really finished. It was just that there came a time when you had to let go, hoping and trusting that the patient could do the rest. Perhaps sending your daughter off to be married was like this, Sarah thought. It could have been so much worse in so many ways. Over the phone her father seemed a decent man, and Sarah Rosen didn’t need a specialization in psychiatry to know that, more than anything else, Doris needed a relationship with an honorable and loving man so that she could, one day, develop another such relationship that would last her lifetime. That was now the job of others, but it didn’t stop Sarah from worrying about her patient. Every doctor can be a Jewish mother, and in her case it was difficult to avoid.