The sergeant's nametag read cantrell, A.O.

"Excuse me, Sergeant Cantrell. Nils Thorkelsen, Fresno Bee. Got a minutel"

The man stopped, but did not reply. He stared through Thorkelsen, did not bother dropping his travel bag.

Thorkelsen tried to explain the feeling he had gotten about the returning prisoners of war, and that he had sensed something unique about Cantrell. "Could you tell me why that is?"

"I'm uneducable."

"Eh? Could you try again?"

"I can't be programmed."

Debatable. The man's a zombie, Thorkelsen thought. He stood as still as death, the weight of his bag unnoticed.

"And the others can be?"

"Yes."

"Have they been?"

"Yes."

A fountain of information here. "How? For what? Would you explain?"

"Brainwashing. The best ever. Their mission is to resume positions in the imperialist armed forces and society, assuming positions of control as available, and await orders. Some will enter business or politics. Most are unaware of their status. They will be activated by a post-hypnotic key at the proper time. One thousand Trojan horses."

Cantrell spoke without emotion or inflexion, as if repeating a message he had often rehearsed for this one telling.

"Not that many prisoners are being returned."

"Some must be retained for other employment."

"How can you tell me this? If the others can't?" There had never been a hint of such a thing, though it was clear the Pentagon was covering something. That, it was pretty clear, was simply a prohibition on discussing maltreatment while interned.

"I couldn't be programmed. They couldn't break me."

Debatable, Thorkelsen thought again. Not much of a man remained here.

He had his major story. A story of the decade. A sure prizewinner.

If it could be proven.

Prisoners of war returned as Communist agents… Nobody would believe it. "How come they let you go, if you're beyond control?"

A frown twisted Cantrell's face. "Bureaucratic error. The kind of screw-up that happens whenever people saddle themselves with the idiocy of a government. I didn't set them straight." He began to show a little animation delivering that remark.

"What do you plan to do with this knowledge?"

"Nothing. I've done it." He seemed puzzled by the question. "You ask. I have to tell. They succeeded that much. I talk. I talk. I talk."

"Shouldn't somebody be warned?"

"Why?"

"I don't understand. Why not?"

"Because I don't give a fuck. The Chinese did this to me. But you put me where they could get their hands on me."

The Chinese? "A pox on both our houses?"

"Yes."

Certain he was interviewing a madman, Thorkelsen shifted his questioning to the mundane. "What're your plans now? What're you going to do with all that back pay?"

"Buy me a guitar."

"Eh?"

"Buy me a guitar. They wouldn't let me have a guitar."

"That's all? That's your only ambition?"

"Yes. It's been six years. I'll have to learn all over again."

Thorkelsen was convinced. This pot wasn't just cracked, it was shattered. Maybe the VA could put the man's head back together again.

"Thanks for your time, Sergeant. And good luck." He was so sure it would draw belly laughs he promptly forgot the whole thing.

It didn't come back to him till, three years later, while working for a Los Angeles paper, he noted an AP wire-service story about a navy captain, ex-POW, who was resigning his commission to run for Congress.

"Hey, Mack," he called to his editor. "You see this about this ex-POW running for Congress in the Florida primary?"

"Yeah. Need more like him. 'Bout thirty of those men in the House, we might start getting this country back to what it's supposed to be."

"I don't know…"

"What do you mean? A few real patriots up there…"

"I mean he might not be a patriot."

"What? After what he went through for his country? The camps, the-"

"Exactly. No, wait a minute. Let me tell you. When I was with the Bee they used to send me to Beale every time a planeload of prisoners came in. The third or fourth time I interviewed this army sergeant. A really spooky guy. He was a nut, but he had a good story."

"Such as?"

"Such as the Chicoms brainwashed all our prisoners before the North Viets returned them. Turned them into agents. He claimed most of them wouldn't even know they were agents till they got their orders from Peking. All they would know was they were supposed to get into important positions in the Pentagon, and in government and business. They were sort of, like, hypnotized as well as brainwashed."

Thorkelsen's editor hailed from Orange County, Bircher country, and could believe in seven more outrageous communist plots before the first edition every morning. And his strongly conservative paper was in dire need of something that would catch the imagination of a predominantly liberal market.

When the man's jaw finally rose and his brain had at last finished pursuing the germs of a hundred new conspiracy theories, he asked, "What about MIAs? Did he say anything about them?"

The man was planning a campaign, Thorkelsen saw. Allegations of a plot wouldn't get him the attention he desired. He had made a career of crying wolf. But an apparent break in the MIA question… that would grab national attention. While he had it, his message could be delivered. The nation could be awakened.

"Find that soldier, Nils!" Mack ordered. And he meant it. "Find him and drain him like a spider would. Every detail. His whole story, from the minute he was captured. You get the name of just one MIA, we can hold the whole world by the nose while we pound it with this other thing."

And for the next hour Thorkelsen endured a harangue damning the eastern Jew liberal press and the investigative reporting that had toppled Richard Nixon. Now those self-righteous hypocrites were going to get a shithouseful dumped right back in their laps.

But Cantrell had left no trail. It took Thorkelsen more than a year to identify and trace his man, now the bass guitarist of an obscure British rock group.