But he felt cold.

“Colonel, you are all right?”

It was General de Rujijo, now in his camouflages with his black beret. The high-polish Colt automatic hung in a shoulder holster under his left arm.

“I am fine, sir,” said Shreck.

“You look under the weather, Colonel.”

“No sir. Not at all.”

“Good. I have a little present for you. From my very own archives.”

He snapped his finger and an aide brought over a briefcase. The general reached inside and pulled out a black plastic box that Shreck recognized as a videotape cassette.

“I record all my battalion’s operations,” said the general. “For training purposes. This is a copy of the action on the Sampul River. You should find it educational, how well our troops mastered their lessons.”

Shreck had an impulse to smash the man’s skull in. But he smiled grimly and took it from him.

“I have many more,” said the general. “You may have that one.”

“Yes sir. Thank you, sir.”

The general smiled with courtly dignity, saluted and when Shreck returned the salute, he turned and walked away.

Shreck looked at his watch; the chopper was late, nothing ever happened on time in this goddamned country.

“Colonel, you seem especially morose today.”

Of course it was old Hugh, who was never quite as drunk as he seemed, even if, at eleven A.M., he had a gin and tonic in his hand and a pinkish hue to his face.

“That asshole just presented me with a tape of the Sampul River job. I guess the point he’s trying to make is that we’re all in this together, like it or not. If he goes down, the tape reaches somebody important and we all go down.”

“The general is a practical man.”

“It makes me sick that a motherfucker like de Rujijo thinks he’s got us. He reminds me of some of those shit-ass gook generals in their fucking jumpsuits who made it out in seventy-five with a couple of hundred million bucks in the sack.”

“Raymond, I’ve always appreciated your tact. You never say what you think, do you?”

“I don’t get paid to think, Mr. Meachum. I didn’t go to Yale, like you did. We both know that.”

“Of course not. Well, the general. The general has his uses. He’s a dreadful man, a war criminal most certainly. A great importer of la cocaína. But he and he alone was not responsible for what happened with the Panther Battalion troops on the Sampul River. We made that mess, too. You, Colonel, too. You were there. Those were your trainers in the field. And, if we are to be responsible adults, we must clean it up.”

That didn’t really satisfy Shreck of course: it was too easy.

“We did what we did,” he said, “in perfect awareness of the consequences and the risks – and the costs. We did it because we believed in the long run it would save far more lives than it took.”

“Indeed we did. That, after all, is the sort of calculus they pay us for, isn’t it? But that same principle extends to this last operation, which you implemented so well in New Orleans. It costs us two men – an intellectual bishop with a surprisingly intractable moralistic streak, and a beat-up war hero who’s a complete gun nut. If we don’t use those men, and somehow the archbishop’s will prevails and it comes out about Panther Battalion, and who did what and why, then the left and the right in this bloody little country will never ever get together. There will be no treaty; the fighting will go on, the thousands will continue to die – ”

“Come on, Mr. Meachum, that’s not what worries you. What worries you is that the lefties might win here, even as communism is crumbling or has crumbled all over the world, and we’ve kicked ass bigtime in the Persian Gulf. That’s what sticks in your craw.”

The old man smiled one of his mischievous Meachum smiles, then faded behind a mask of remoteness.

“Well, Raymond, believe what you will and for whatever reason you wish. But agree with me on this one sound operating principle. That this man Swagger must be found and destroyed.”

“We’ll get him.”

“Speaking of which, I had an idea. The Electrotek 5400. State of the art, is it not?”

“You know it is.”

“It seems a shame to let it sit up in New Orleans until the general figures out how to get it back through customs. It occurs to me how very useful it might be to you in your quest.”

“Jesus,” said the colonel.

“Yes, I thought you’d be pleased. You see, Raymond, even though you don’t think so, we do take care of our own. We always have. We always will. And I’d destroy that tape if I were you.”

“I will,” said Shreck, looking at the goddamned thing in his hand.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

He drove through brightness. There was brightness everywhere. The sun was a blaze, a flare; the white sand picked it up and threw it back. He drove squint-eyed because he had no sunglasses. He drove straight on because he did not want to stop to rent a room, knowing his face was the most famous in America. He lived on candy bars and Twinkies and Cokes from desolate gas station vending machines and thanked God he had had a couple of hundred bucks in his wallet. He drove through the pain and the anger; he just committed himself to driving and he drove.

Now it was hot. He was in desert. The spindly cacti that played across the low rills looked as if they could kill him; in some religious part of his brain they looked like crucifixes, though of course he was not a Catholic but some sort of Baptist back when his daddy had been alive. Ahead, the road was a straight, shimmering band in the heat; mirage rose off it in the light and dust devils swirled across it. Onward he drove.

He held right at seventy, just five miles over the speed limit. He was in his third stolen car, a 1986 Mercury Bobcat, but always before he stole a car he switched its plates with another vehicle’s. That was an old trick he’d heard about on Parris Island, from some tough young black kid, probably now long dead in Vietnam.

It was strange: from the long, wet haul across the swamp, hoarding cartridges, hunting to live, taking only the surest of shots; then, when he was down to his last, he came across something like civilization. He threw the gun away and nabbed a car; and then a long eighteen-hour driving stretch that brought him to desert. Ten hours in Texas. New Mexico was shorter. He was now in Arizona. Texas was long past, though it had been a long, long stretch in Texas. He knew he was almost there. And what was there? Maybe nothing. Maybe this was it. But there was no other choice. He’d thought it out. No, no other place to go that would not get him caught because they’d be looking for him everywhere. But here there was a chance.

He came over a rise. A little town in the desert, a spread of buildings, with bright tin roofs glowing in the sun, lay just ahead. There’d be some kind of law here too, but he didn’t care. Far off, he could see the purple crests of mountains, but for now just this spread of buildings in the desert. He slowed.

The town came up fast.

AJO, ARIZ., the sign said, POP. 7,567.

He drove through, shielding his eyes against the dazzle. Bank, strip mall, convenience store, two gas stations, one main drag, what looked to be some tract houses where a lot of water had produced what passed for green, a McDonald’s, a Burger King, another gas station, Ajo Elementary School, and then, yes, finally, Sunbelt Trailer Park.

Bob pulled in. Drove all this way for such a scruffy little place, huh? Maybe a hundred trailers, maybe a hundred palm trees, it all looked the same to him.

He almost lost it right here at the end. Some pain fired up behind his eyes and his whole body felt itchy or patchy, as if he’d come down with a terrible skin disease. The entry wound hurt something terrible; a low throbbing against his nipple where the bullet had driven through him.