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By Root 1202 0

beacon. The glorious Russian army had in the distant past rained explosive devices on the area—devices designed to look like toys, shaped like butterflies, kites, or brightly colored plastic, to attract the curiosity of unsuspecting children. Clearly the purpose of whoever had dreamed up the devices was to murder and maim children before they could mature into fighters. The downed pilot knew the mujahideen held a dim view of the policy; they simply handed over anyone with a shred of foreign uniform to their women. Many Iranian mountain women had lost their young to the brightly colored presents dropped from the sky. The pilot also knew that these women were adept at skinning sheep and kept remarkably sharp knives for the purpose. He crept still further into the cleft, pulled out his sidearm, and shoved its barrel in his mouth, ready to pull the trigger.

But the chopper wreckage was too hot to rummage inside, and the fighters must have been in a hurry to leave the area. After a while, before he passed out again, the pilot stopped hearing their elated chatter.

Back at the post, Major Marino was already writing his report to justify having lost his flying detail when the beacon signal tripped a receiver at the comms shack. An excited sergeant brought the news and the hope of someone still alive after the fiasco, but Marino put on a face of deep regret and cited the lack of pilots. Then the sergeant meekly quoted from memory the seven Army Core Values, stressing the fourth, Selfless Service: Put the welfare of the nation, the Army, and your subordinates before your own.

When the sergeant’s eloquence failed to elicit any reaction, he further pointed out that Marino was a certified chopper pilot. Naturally, Marino didn’t plan on piloting a chopper into the growing dusk, with the light swiftly waning beyond the mountains, and into hot mujahideen territory. He wouldn’t have changed his mind but for the regulation sidearm the sergeant pushed against Marino’s temple as he started a slow yet firm countdown.

That evening, as Major Marino basked in the glory of rescuing the downed pilot, he ordered the sergeant’s arrest.

When the pilot was finally discharged from the military hospital where they had tried to rebuild his leg, the sergeant had already been court-martialed and dishonorably dismissed. With an almost useless leg, the pilot accepted a generous pension deal, resigned his commission, and went looking for the ex-sergeant.

Tyler shook his head. He gripped his left knee, and all the bitterness it had come to represent receded into the misty background of his mind. Then he keyed a string of numbers into the safe’s keyboard, leaned over a dark oval window, and inserted his index finger into a slot. With the biometric check complete, something snapped within the bowels of the steel monolith and its door swung on silent hinges. The lower shelf held a stack of data disks, slim computer hard drives, and a bunch of inexpensive cell phones in a plastic bag. The top shelf was crammed with neat bundles, four deep, each holding $100,000. The cash was the second payment provided by the senator for the doctor and the controller, and it would also serve as the slush fund to cover other operational expenses. Altogether enough to bankroll a new life. Or several new lives.

Leaving the safe door open, Tyler turned to the window overlooking a corner of his farm.

Finding the sergeant had been a bitch. Almost a decade later, the pilot, ex–Chief Warrant Officer Harper Tyler, tracked Henry Mayer, the sergeant, to the Washington, D.C., sewers.

“Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.” Senator Palmer whispered Van Dyke’s poem to silent bookshelves. Locked in his study, he was surrounded by books on ancient literature, history, and political philosophy. He hoped for, and at the same time dreaded, the ring of the secure phone. He felt powerless, reduced to the role of a mere observer to the drama unfolding before