"Damn it, Frank. We were supposed to have dinner with the Pattersons. Remember?"
He closed his eyes. He'd completely forgotten about that, even before Goldman had entered his office. "No," he said. "I forgot. Were they upset?"
She shrugged. "It's kind of becoming a habit, you know? So, something came up that you couldn't call home?"
He thought about that. The truth was he hadn't even thought about calling, not after he'd been taken into the underground combat center. "No. I couldn't. I was with your dad all night."
She arched one perfect eyebrow at that. Mentioning her father was virtually a code phrase between them, meaning he'd been engaged in business that he simply wasn't allowed to discuss. Not with anyone, even her. "And you didn't check your messages."
"No, damn it!" he snapped. "I didn't! What we were dealing with… well… I wasn't at my desk, and I couldn't get away. That's all!"
He saw her eyes darken and felt the rise of her anger, but she nodded after a moment. "Fine. I'm going back to bed."
"You didn't need to stay up for me."
"Of course not! My husband could be lying dead in an alley somewhere. He never calls, and I never know when or if he's coming home! I should just go to bed and wait for the police to call me! Of course I can sleep when I don't know if I'm going to be awakened by him coming in at dawn, or by a phone call from the hospital!" Whirling, she stormed down the hallway toward the stairs. "Becca, please… "
"You know where the blankets and pillows are. You can sleep down here! If you ever sleep, of course!" She was crying now. "Sometimes I don't know whether I married a man or a computer!"
"O… kay," he said softly after she was gone. He heard the bedroom door slam upstairs. "Looks like I fucked up again, big-time."
He was too damned tired to be angry in response. The exchange they'd just played out was fast becoming the rule rather than the exception. Late hours at the Pentagon, missed dinners and social events, forgotten opportunities to call…
Rebecca put a high priority on social formalities and propriety. He understood why that was important to her. She'd gone through seven kinds of hell from her father when she'd broken off an engagement to elope with a certain young submarine officer. She'd been accused of impropriety and worse, he knew. She'd been fighting clinical depression for years, now, and was taking Valium to combat it. Lately, it had been as though she was trying somehow to demonstrate she was socially competent, going through the proper whirl of dinner parties and social engagements, as if to prove to the world that she could do the social thing with the best of them.
Dinner parties, while a grim necessity for any naval officer, were simply not on Gordon's priority list… not in the top twenty, at any rate. For the past year, especially, he'd been bearing down on his career to the virtual exclusion of everything else, taking on more and more responsibilities at ONSOC, working longer hours, and generally obsessing over the future course of his naval career. That career had very nearly become beached. He'd been working hard to catch up… and to prove, especially to Goldman, that he had what it took to skipper a nuke boat of his own.
He was only recently beginning to understand that excluding everything but career in his life was also excluding his family. He rarely saw Ellen and Margaret, his two girls, anymore. And Rebecca… were hermoods and down periods worse, lately? "Excitable depression," her doctor had called her condition. The Valium, he'd warned, only suppressed the moods, and couldn't in any way be considered a cure.
So far as Gordon was concerned, everyone got a little down from time to time. If Becca would just get over it, pick up and get on with her life, everything would be fine. Fine.
He looked at his watch. Almost 5:30… and though he was tired, he didn't feel like he could sleep at all. For a moment, he hesitated, wondering whether or not he should go upstairs and try to talk to Becca.
Another part of his mind translated 0530 hours EST to 1230 hours in Lebanon. Where were the SEALs left on the ground after the evacuation at LZ Bravo? How were they planning on reestablishing contact and getting picked up?
He decided to go back to the office and wait the situation through… both situations, in Lebanon and at home. He rubbed his eyes, then giggled at a sudden, wry gallows-humor thought. Which was the more desperate situation right now? The Bekaa Valley? Or Becca's Valium?
Maybe, he decided, he was more tired than he knew. No matter. He could catch a nap on the sofa in his office later, and maybe get caught up on the Quarterly Reports that were due next week
Quietly, and with a last guilty glance up the stairs, he let himself out the front door.
They waited until well past dark to slip from their safe place.
They'd spent the daylight hours hiding in a storage shed behind a garage on the outskirts of Habbush. Hidden behind stacks of parts crates, rusted engine blocks, decaying tires, piles of chain and cable and rusted-out oil drums, they'd watched the day pass through the narrow gaps in the splintery boards that formed the shed's back wall. From there, they'd seen soldiers passing through in convoy, heading east, up the mountain face. Judging by their uniforms, they were government soldiers, troops answering to the Christian-rightist Beirut government… but that didn't make them the good guys, not by a long shot. Had they been Israeli — the IDF controlled this region, at least in theory — Randall might have attempted contact… but these were the people who'd orchestrated more than one massacre of civilians in the past few years, including the brutal slaughter of eight hundred civilians — mostly women and children — in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in southern Beirut five years before. The Christian Phalangists were at least as bloody-handed as the Shi'ite Hezbollah, and Randall was taking no chances on an encounter with either group.
Spinelli was just hanging on. He'd lost a lot of blood before they'd finally been able to pack the wound well enough to stop the bleeding, and he was drifting in and out of consciousness, drugged with morphine and weak from loss of blood.
There wasn't a lot they could do for him, though, and it was too risky going out in daylight. Habbush was on one of the country's main east-west roads, and that road paralleled the western end of a thirty-inch oil pipeline that stretched all the way across Lebanon, the southwestern corner of Syria, and all the way across Saudi Arabia to Dhahran and Bahrain on the Persian Gulf; an offshore terminal fed oil tankers gathering at the coast from Europe and the Americas. Because the pipeline was a strategic asset — and an obvious target for terrorists — it was heavily patrolled.
But at the pipeline terminus there would be a fair-sized dock area and plenty of boats and small craft. It was worth the risk if they could get down there. They just couldn't risk doing it in the light.
Once it was completely dark, however, they gently carried Spinelli out to the truck, which they'd parked under the shed's rotting eaves, and laid him on a mattress they'd found in the building. They'd wrapped Lieutenant Gallagher's body in a sheet of canvas and taped it up in a makeshift body bag earlier. Still disguised as militia — Christian or Islamic scarcely mattered now — they set off down the mountain road at a sedately inconspicuous pace.
McKenna's Arabic got them past two more checkpoints without incident. Passwords, it seemed, were not necessary if you could claim with enthusiastic shouts and gestures that you were looking for American commandos who'd attacked a camp in the Bekaa Valley, and who might still be in the neighborhood.