Corcovado, Or Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars

"Yup, but I went to a YMCA camp up on Lake Champlain a few summers, before we left Vermont. Sailed Sunfish, things like that...and I guess I caught the bug then."

"And then?"

"I sailed some with Dad. We went down to Isla Mujeres once, and that did it."

"What was your first boat?"

"Altair. I went to the Seattle Boat Show about ten years ago, and when I saw her I just knew. She was a dealer's demo, they made me a really good deal and I jumped on it."

"She was your first boat? Really?"

"Yup."

"Why?"

"I was, I'd been thinking about something like that for retirement, maybe, I guess, like the two of us would sail away, do the South Pacific thing, something like that."

"Gutsy move."

"It was a good deal."

"Must've been. So, what now?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, what's next for the two of you?"

"The two..."

"You and Altair? What's the next chapter look like?"

"I don't know."

"Gonna sell her?"

"I don't know, Melissa."

"'Cause if you are, mind if I make an offer?"

He smiled. "I wouldn't hold your breath."

"What did you think of Sullivan?"

"Who?"

"Brigit? You know, the doc who, like, saved your life?"

"What about her?"

"She liked the boat. Liked being out there."

"So?"

"I just wondered."

"I think I've seen her twice. Maybe a half hour total."

"My guess is you'll see more of her."

"Oh? And what about you...will we see more of you, too?"

"You can count on that, Jim."

"Why does that sound more ominous than..."

"I don't have any romantic interests, Jim, if that's what you're getting at."

"Ah. So, this is just all business?"

Goodway shrugged...but she nodded too.

"Good," he said. "Because when Ted told me you cried after I came out of surgery, well, let's say I was a little confused."

"Just empathy, Jim. Nothing more."

"Okay. So, is this more like professional interest?"

"That's a little more complicated, I think."

"Uh-huh. So, tell me. When did you first meet my mother?"

Chapter 7

"What's this?" Elizabeth said, taking the rifle from the range instructor.

"It's a modified Model 70."

"What's it for...?"

"It's a sniper rifle, Cadet. And since you had the best overall score on the range, the chief wants to see how well you handle this."

"Now?"

"Yes," the instructor said, and not a little sarcastically, "now. Maybe while the sun's still out, ya know?"

"Yessir," she said, taking the rifle. It was at least twice the weight of the M16 she'd used on the rifle portion of her three weeks at the FBI Academy's famed range, where she had "aced" all three parts of the program: pistol, rifle and shotgun. When she'd taken a first on Hogan's Alley the range superintendent took note and asked to see her overall scores, then he'd called Washington. Shooters like her, he knew from decades of experience, only came along once in a blue moon.

She took the weapon, opened the bolt and checked the chamber, saw it was clear. "What's it chambered for, sir?"

".308; you'll be using a hot load this morning, and...it kicks like a mule," he added, grinning.

"Yessir."

"Need a coat? It's cool out this morning."

"I'm good, sir."

He liked her. Hell, he thought, everyone liked her. PMA, Positive Mental Attitude - and she had it, in spades. Never complained, always calm, even out in the swamps when a water moccasin swam by; she was a real team player - and an empath, to boot. He was hoping she'd do good out here, he'd told himself as they walked along, if only because he might get to spend more time with her down in Georgia. 'Yeah,' he sighed inwardly, 'I like her a little too much...'

They walked from the armourers shack over to the main range, and she noted the Academy Director was already out there - standing with three men she'd never seen before - and one man was dressed in black BDUs, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses. They all had binoculars - either in hand or around their necks, and they were all staring at her.

"Here," the instructor said as he held out a plain white box. She counted twenty hand-loads inside, and they were pristine, the tips some sort of deep red-colored plastic-like material. "Take five," her instructor added.

"Position, sir?"

"Prone. Use the sandbags or the bi-pod. Your choice."

"Yessir." She looked downrange, saw just one target set-up at the 500 yard mark, then she turned and felt the wind on her face. She made a few adjustments on the rifle's scope then loaded the weapon, still looking around, still checking her surroundings - just like her grandfather had shown her all those years ago. She finished loading the cartridges, looked around one more time, then gently laid the weapon down before she knelt behind the sandbags.

Her first shot missed dead-center by a quarter-inch, and the man in the black BDUs nodded as he grinned. Her next two rounds were centered, her shots so well-placed after that she was only making one hole a little larger.

"Okay, I've seen enough," the man in the BDUs said to the Assistant Director of Operations. "When can I have her."

"She graduates on the third."

"What's her class rank so far?"

"First. By a wide margin."

"What did she want to do?"

"New York."

"Anyone talk to her about this yet?"

"No, she's all yours."

"Thanks. I think," 'Zeke' Cromwell said. "Now?"

"Might as well get it over with. One way or another, she goes with you - but try to let her think it was her choice."

Cromwell looked at the woman as she stood. No self-satisfied grin...no, and she was looking right at him. Like she understood he was the only person out there who recognized what she had just done.

Because he was.

He'd only seen shooting like hers a few times in almost ten years. As head of the Bureau's Tactical Rifle Squad, he was in charge of training all the Bureau's so-called snipers, only now they were down to the bare minimum. They needed fresh talent, and her kind didn't show up very often.

He walked over to her, took the weapon from her hand and looked through the scope.

"Fair shooting," Cromwell said. "Ever use this weapon before?"

"No, sir."

"Uh-huh. Let's take a walk," he said, slinging the rifle. "We need to talk."

+++++

He was sweating - profusely - holding himself up on the bars under each hand, letting the prosthetic take all his weight - again. He felt his knee give out and caught himself before he fell - again - then he cursed - again.

"Your nerves are raw, Jim. It'll be a few more weeks, so you're just going to have to tough it out."

The first time he'd said "Easy for you to say," his therapist, a second Gulf War vet and a double amputee, had lifted up his pant legs and shown him exactly what he was up against. He'd nodded his resolve that day and had been pushing hard ever since. Every time he rolled from his room at the VA down to the PT facility he got another lesson in resolve, in the brute determination needed to beat this kind of self-pity, this type of mind-raping depression.

After a week of this, Ted showed up, back from Boston for a long weekend, and this time he had a girl with him when he walked in his room.

"Dad?" Ted said, knocking on the door. "You up?"

He was still sweating, still trying to not cry from the pain. "Paco! You made it! And who's this with you?"

"Dad, this is Susan. Susan, Dad...I mean, Jim."

She was a little shy, he could tell that much, but she was a looker. Bright brown hair, deep brown eyes - kind eyes, he saw. Empathic. He held out his hand and he watched her come and take it. "Nice to meet you," he said.

She nodded. "You to. I've heard a lot about you."

"Nothing good, I hope," he said, smiling. "Take a seat, both of you."

"Dad, you need some water?"

He nodded his head. "This ain't the Ritz, that's for sure," he sighed, still smiling, as Ted poured him a glass of tepid water.

"How's it going so far?" Susan asked.

"I don't know. No frame of reference, I guess."

"Mind if I take a look?" she asked, and he looked at her, then at Ted - who only shrugged.

"And why would you want to do that?" he asked.

"I did my undergrad in PT, I'm a first year."

"A first year?"

"Med school, at Tufts."

"I'm curious," he said. "Are you two friends, or is this a business call?"

"I love your son, and I think he loves me. I hope that answers your question."

"We met last year, Dad, before all this went down. Things have kind of taken off since I got back."

"I see. Well, what do you want to look at?"

"The incision, sir," she said as she rolled up his pajama leg. She looked it over, palpated the area then nodded. "Some adhesions, and I think I feel a staple."

"A staple?" he said, feeling a deep well of anger erupting.

"Mind of I go talk to the floor nurse?" Susan said.

"No, not at all." He watched the girl walk out of the room then turned and looked at his son. "What's this all about, Ted?"

"She was kind of the resident genius with a lot of the pre-meds last year. She was helping me with the M-CATs."

"How'd you do?"

"530s. I think I have a shot, anyway. If I don't get in first try I think I'll try that flight school out in Phoenix."

"Good. If you place well Ben will get you an interview."

Ted nodded. "What do you think of her?"

"Hell, Paco, I just met her...?"

"You always told me first impressions are the most important."

"Yeah, I did, didn't I?"

"So?"

"Compassion and empathy. That's what I see."

Ted smiled. "That's Susan, to a 'T'."

"Is this serious?"

"I wanted to talk to you about that..." but he stopped when Susan and an intern walked into the room.

"Okay, show me what you felt," the intern said.

He held up his stump and Susan palpated the area again. "Here," she said. "There's already some tissue encapsulation, and it feels warm to me."

The intern felt his stump and nodded his head. "It's a wonder no one's caught this..." he sighed. "Okay, I'm off to X-ray," he said as he walked from the room.

His temperature was 101, and climbing.

+++++

She stepped off the train in White River Junction, saw James and Jim standing by the old Victorian-style terminal building - then her boy rushed up, wrapped his arms around her legs before she bent over, picked him up and held him close.

"Oh, my Jimmy-boy," she whispered. "Oh, how I've missed my little Jimmie-boy..."

Her husband hung back and watched for a bit, then he walked across the platform - not sure how he felt just then.

She held Jimmie as she watched James walk their way, looking at her as she'd expected he might...a little bemused, yet more than a little wary. She'd written him, told him the Bureau had whisked her off to Fort Benning, Georgia, for two months of what amounted to the full Special Forces sniper school. This was, she added, an unexpected new direction, and she didn't yet know what to think about it, but, her letter concluded, she promised it wouldn't effect their lives together.

Now she had a week off, one whole week with her family, before she had to report for duty in D.C., so she had one week to make good on that pledge. As they drove up to St Johnsbury in an early winter's snow, she held on to her son, held him close, missing the happy innocence in his eyes more than anything else...yet she knew something had changed. Something inside herself, she thought. She was being trained to be, she was reluctant to admit, an assassin, and she felt her basic humanity being stripped away with every round fired on the range. That she hated these crime lords was never in question...but had her hatred taken her to a place where violence was the only answer?

When she played with Jimmie in the snow that week, all those doubts played-out in her mind's eye. Could she, when it really counted, "reach out and touch someone" with a .308 round to the head? If she could, what would keep an ever-escalating series of hits and counter hits from developing? Wouldn't she be endangering her family, putting all of them in the crosshairs?

James had insisted, when told of her assignment, that they never tell their son about all this. It would warp his view of who and what his mother was, he told her, and she had reluctantly agreed - and in the process finally admitting to herself the real ambivalence she felt about this new direction. She had originally been recruited with one purpose in mind: to help infiltrate Chinese gangs on the Lower East Side, in order to disrupt the flow of drugs and slaves, usually children, into the country. After years on the state task force, after years of threats and intimidation, she'd known she had to either quit or take it to the next level. When she thought of all the girls in the pipeless, the thousands of half-starved, terrified children she'd interviewed over the years, she knew she couldn't turn back. So, she'd gone to Quantico.

And now, this unexpected new direction.

After dinner her first night home she stayed up with Jimmy, telling him about Washington, D.C. and all the sights she'd take him to see when it got warmer, and she'd seen echoes of her own innocence in his eyes. She'd seen firsthand how lucky they were, her family in Vermont - and all the other innocent, wide-eyed families in the United States. How lucky they were not to have children swept up in the same dragnets as these Chinese girls - only then be hauled off to some foreign country and auctioned off as slaves. When she'd learned what these women were forced to do...

No, hatred was not too strong a word, yet at one point she realized she was beginning to hate humanity. Cartels in Asia and Eastern Europe rounded up these girls, shipped them to willing parties all over the world, wherever there was enough money to sustain trade in human flesh -

Only now, Hoover and Dulles had agreed...the US was going on the offensive. A concerted effort was being made to identify the ringleaders of these cartels - globally - and when they couldn't be compromised or taken into custody, they would be eliminated.

And when, after her recruitment, she'd learned about the program, she'd had no problem signing on. Enough was enough, she told herself, and James, too. All this misery had to end, one way or another, because if drugs kept coming into the country...well, everyone from Eisenhower down knew all would be lost. The girls, she knew, were just the means to an end. Opium and heroin were the end, and in every way possible. And when she looked at her boy it all made sense.

+++++

He came out of his latest surgery feeling more defeated than ever before, yet he resumed his battles on the physical therapy floor with a vengeance. He had lost more than seventy pounds since the summer before, and his face was now a gaunt, faded mask, a gray caricature of his former self. And now, after a month of more hellish agony, to cap it all off it was Thanksgiving week, that All-American orgy of gluttonous over-consumption, and Ted was bringing Susan to Altair, again.

And he was going home today, too. To Altair, for the first time since he'd left Desolation Sound.

His bags packed, his prosthetic on, his canes at the ready - just in case - he was still not ready when Ted and Susan knocked on the door. But Ted looked worried when he came into the little room, though she looked a little too resplendent in a rosy-cheeked way - like she was pregnant, he thought, as he looked into her guileless eyes. That would explain the look of baffled misery in his son's eyes, wouldn't it?

And then a third face slipped into the room...that red-headed doctor from Canada, the family doc that had come out to the boat...

'Why is she here?' he wondered, as his eyes went from the physician's to his boy, and back. 'Ah...collusion...'

"Dad? Do you remember..."

"Doctor Sullivan. Of course I do."

"Brigit," the physician replied quickly. "And this is not a professional call."

"Ah, well, to what, then, do I owe the pleasure of your company?"

"I asked her to come, Dad," Ted said. "Didn't want you to feel left out."

"Left out?" he asked, his face a blank.

"You know...the odd man out...three's a crowd...that kind of thing?"

"Ah."

"You ready to go?"

"As I'll ever be," he said as he forced himself up, taking almost all his weight on with his right arm - with his left on the bed-rail. He put his wait forward and winced, then grabbed his son's shoulder. "Lead on..." he panted, "just not too fast."

"You got it, Pops," Ted whispered. "Susan, could you grab his duffel?"

He didn't hear a reply, only the searing wave of lava running up his right thigh into his back - then he saw a nurse out in the hall, with a wheelchair - and he sighed as another wave, this time relief, rolled over him. He put his hands out and almost fell into the chair, and he felt his hands shaking, perspiration running down his forehead as helping hands gripped him, helped him settle in the chair.

There was an old Toyota Land Cruiser waiting out front and more helping hands lifted him in, and he saw Sullivan take the wheel and drive through the U-W campus on the way to the lake. She knew, he saw, the way - and when she turned into the marina parking lot he knew she'd been here before. 'How odd,' he thought.

There were friends waiting by the gate, friends from Delta, and he felt a surge of gratitude as he looked at the wall of familiar faces. More hands took hold, familiar hands, and he fell back and let them carry him to another wheel chair, and he tried to hide his embarrassment but knew it wasn't really necessary. Not with this bunch. Not now - not ever, he told himself. Down the ramp, through the gate, then there she was: Altair. Her hull still gleaming, a freshly polished navy blue. More people were already on deck, too.

Then, the moment of truth, the thing he'd practiced a week for. The steps - from the dock to the deck. He looked at them like he might a coiled mass of rattlers, then he looked down at his leg.

Okay. Let's do it.

Someone held out a cane and he took it, pushed himself upright - then he reached out and took hold of a lifeline in one hand, the cane in the other - and he walked to the steps, never taking the first tread out of his sight. He lifted his thigh and pulled on the lifeline as he pushed off with the cane, then his left foot followed and he steadied himself.

Two more, he whispered someplace deep inside. He pulled again, lifted his stump again as he pushed off with the left - and he was up one more.

One more, he sighed. One more pull, one more push, then he was over the bulwarks, spinning to sit on the coachroof - aghast at the searing pain.

And once...he thought he saw Melissa out there too, maybe wiping away a tear...but when he looked again the image was gone.

+++++

Her last night at home, a little after midnight, she went into Jimmy's room...to check on him. Something had woken her, something out of the ordinary. A noise, something out of place - and then she saw flashlights on the snow outside his window. Using what cover she could, she made her way to the window...

And saw half a dozen state troopers outside, looking at foot-prints in the snow.

She went to her son's bed and checked his forehead, and when he sighed she backed out of his room, put her shoes on and slipped downstairs to the front door. Two troopers were there, waiting for her.

She looked at one of them.

"Two men, a neighbor saw them and called it in."

"Dressed?"

"All white. Winter camo. Over their faces, too."

"Armed?"

The trooper nodded. "Yes, Ma'am. Both of them."

Her stomach knotted. Blown already, but how was that even possible...? Unless...

"Any tire tracks?"

"Possible set, about two blocks over. And the local PD had a suspicious vehicle call on a tan Impala with New York plates earlier this evening."

"That fits," she said, nodding. "Did they call you guys?"

"Yes, Ma'am. We let D.C. know, too. There's a lead on the vehicle. Possibly seen west of Woodstock, maybe headed for Rutland."