Without remorse - Tom Clancy [26]
Kelly looked up, his blue eyes the color of ice as he searched for what he really felt. 'You guys are really worked up about this, aren't you?'
Sarah sipped from a drink she'd made for herself. She was rather a dumpy woman, short and overweight. Her black hair hadn't seen a stylist in months. All in all she looked like the sort of woman who, behind the wheel of a car, attracts the hatred of male drivers. But she spoke with focused passion, and her intelligence was already very clear to her host. 'Do you have any idea how bad it's getting? Ten years ago, drug abuse was so rare that I hardly had to bother with it. Oh, sure, I knew about it, read the articles from Lexington, and every so often we'd get a heroin case. Not very many. Just a black problem, people thought. Nobody really gave much of a damn. We're paying for that mistake now. In case you didn't notice, that's all changed - and it happened practically overnight. Except for the project I'm working on, I'm nearly full-time on kids with drug problems. I wasn't trained for this. I'm a scientist, an expert on adverse interactions, chemical structures, how we can design new drugs to do special things - but now I have to spend nearly all of my time in clinical work, trying to keep children alive who should be just learning how to drink a beer but instead have their systems full of chemical shit that never should have made it outside a god-damned laboratory!'
'And it's going to get worse,' Sam noted gloomily.
Sarah nodded. 'Oh yeah, the next big one is cocaine. She needs you, John,' Sarah said again, leaning forward. It was as though she had surrounded herself with her own storm cloud of electrical energy. 'You'd damned well better be there for her, boy. You be there for her! Somebody dealt her a really shitty hand, but she's fighting. There's a person in there.'
'Yes, ma'am,' Kelly said humbly. He looked up and smiled, no longer confused. 'In case you were worried, I decided that a while back.'
'Good.' Sarah nodded curtly.
'What do I do first?'
'More than anything else, she needs rest, she needs good food, and she needs time to flush the barbiturates out of her system. We'll support her with phenobarb, just in case we have withdrawal problems- I don't expect that. I examined her while you two were gone. Her physical problem is not so much addiction as exhaustion and undernourishment. She ought to be ten pounds heavier than she is. She ought to tolerate withdrawal rather well if we support her in other ways.'
'Me, you mean?' Kelly asked.
'That's a lot of it.' She looked over towards the open bedroom door and sighed, the tension going out of her. 'Well, given her underlying condition, that phenobarb will probably have her out for the rest of the night. Tomorrow we start feeding her and exercising her. For now,' Sarah announced, 'we can feed ourselves.'
Dinner talk focused deliberately on other subjects, and Kelly found himself delivering a lengthy discourse on the bottom contours of the Chesapeake Bay, segueing into what he knew about good fishing spots. It was soon decided that his visitors would stay until Monday evening. Time over the dinner table lengthened, and it was nearly ten before they rose. Kelly cleaned up, then quietly entered his bedroom to hear Pam's quiet breathing.
Only thirteen feet long, and a scant three thousand sixty-five pounds of mass - nearly half of that fuel - the Buffalo Hunter angled towards the ground as it accelerated to an initial cruising speed of over five hundred knots. Already its navigational computer, made by Lear-Siegler, was monitoring time and altitude in a very limited way. The drone was programmed to follow a specific flight path and altitude, all painstakingly predetermined for systems that were by later standards absurdly primitive. For all that, Cody-193