The doyen of naval aviation reached over the side, hauled the bruised and sore body aboard, and directed him below.
* * *
‘Forty-One, this is Navy to your west now… this doesn’t look real good, fella.’
‘I’m afraid you’re right. Navy. You can break off if you want. I think we’ll stay a while,’ Oreza said. It had been good of them to quarter the surface for three hours, a good assist from a couple of flag officers. They even handled their sailboat halfway decent. At another time he’d have taken the thought further and made a joke about Navy seamanship. But not now. Oreza and Forty-One-Bravo would continue their search all night, finding only wreckage.
It made the papers in a big way, but not in any way that made sense. Detective Lieutenant Mark Charon, following up a lead on his own time – on administrative leave following a shooting, no less – had stumbled into a drug lab and in the ensuing gun battle had lost his life in the line of duty while ending those of two major traffickers. The coincidental escape of three young women resulted in the identification of one of the deceased traffickers as a particularly brutal murderer, which perhaps explained Charon’s heroic zeal, and closed a number of cases in a fashion that the police reporters found overly convenient. On page six was a squib story about a boating accident.
Three days later, a file clerk from St Louis called Lieutenant Ryan to say that the Kelly file was back but she couldn’t say from where. Ryan thanked her for her effort. He’d closed that case along with the rest, and didn’t even try the FBI records center for Kelly’s card, and thus made unnecessary Bob Ritter’s substitution of the prints of someone unlikely ever to visit America again.
The only loose end, which troubled Ritter greatly, was a single telephone call. But even criminals got one phone call, and Ritter didn’t want to cross Clark on something like that. Five months later, Sandra O’Toole resigned her position at Johns Hopkins and moved to the Virginia tidewater, where she took over a whole floor of the area’s teaching hospital on the strength of a glowing recommendation from Professor Samuel Rosen.
EPILOGUE
February 12, 1973
‘We are honored to have the opportunity to serve our country under difficult circumstances,’ Captain Jeremiah Denton said, ending a thirty-four-word statement that rang across the ramp at Clark Air Force Base with ‘God bless America.’
‘How about that,’ the commentator said, sharing the experience as he was paid to do. ‘Right there behind Captain Denton is Colonel Robin Zacharias, of the Air Force. He’s one of the fifty-three prisoners about whom we had no information until very recently, along with . . .’
John Clark didn’t listen to the rest. He looked at the TV that sat on his wife’s dresser in the bedroom, at the face of a man half a world away, to whom he’d been much closer in body, closer still in spirit not so long before. He saw the man embrace his wife after what had to be five years of separation. He saw a woman who’d grown old with worry, but now was young with love for the husband she’d thought dead. Kelly wept with them, seeing the man’s face for the first time as a thing of animation, seeing the joy that really could replace pain, no matter how vast. He squeezed Sandy’s hand so hard that he almost hurt it until she rested his on her belly to feel the movement of their soon-to-be firstborn. The phone rang then, and Kelly was angry for the invasion of the moment until he heard the voice.
‘I hope you’re proud of yourself, John,’ Dutch Maxwell said. ‘We’re getting all twenty back. I wanted to make sure you knew that. It wouldn’t have happened without you.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ Clark hung up. There was nothing else to be said.
‘Who was that?’ Sandy asked, holding his hand in place.
‘A friend,’ Clark said, wiping his eyes as he turned to kiss his wife. ‘From another life.’