Without remorse - Tom Clancy [345]
'Coast Guard Forty-One, Coast Guard Forty-One, this is US Navy sailboat on your port beam, can we render assistance, over?'
'We could use some extra eyes. Navy. Who's aboard?'
'Couple of admirals, the one talking's an aviator, if that helps.'
'Join in, sir.' .
He was still alive. It was as much a surprise to Kelly as if would have been to Oreza. The water here was deep enough that he and the air tank had plummeted seventy feet to the bottom. He fought to strap the tank to his chest in the violent turbulence of the passing ship overhead. Then he fought to swim clear of the descending engines and heavy gear from what had seconds earlier been an expensive cruiser. Only after two or three minutes did he accept the fact that he'd survived this trial by ordeal. Looking back, he wondered just how crazy he'd been to risk this, but for once he'd felt the need to entrust his life to judgment superior to his own, prepared to take the consequences either way. And the judgment had spared him. Kelly could see the Coast Guard hull over to the east... and to the west the deeper shape of a sailboat, pray God the right one. Kelly disengaged four of the weight belts from the tank and swam towards it, awkwardly because he had it on backwards.
His head broke the surface behind the sailboat as it lay to, close enough to read the name. He went down again. It took another minute to come up on the west side of the twenty-six-footer.
'Hello?'
'Jesus - is that you?' Maxwell called.
'I think so.' Well, not exactly. His hand reached up.
The doyen of naval aviation reached over the side, hauled the bruised and sore body aboard, and directed him below.
* * *
'Forty-One, this is Navy to your west now... this doesn't look real good, fella.'
'I'm afraid you're right. Navy. You can break off if you want. I think we'll stay a while,' Oreza said. It had been good of them to quarter the surface for three hours, a good assist from a couple of flag officers. They even handled their sailboat halfway decent. At another time he'd have taken the thought further and made a joke about Navy seamanship. But not now. Oreza and Forty-One-Bravo would continue their search all night, finding only wreckage.
It made the papers in a big way, but not in any way that made sense. Detective Lieutenant Mark Charon, following up a lead on his own time - on administrative leave following a shooting, no less - had stumbled into a drug lab and in the ensuing gun battle had lost his life in the line of duty while ending those of two major traffickers. The coincidental escape of three young women resulted in the identification of one of the deceased traffickers as a particularly brutal murderer, which perhaps explained Charon's heroic zeal, and closed a number of cases in a fashion that the police reporters found overly convenient. On page six was a squib story about a boating accident.
Three days later, a file clerk from St Louis called Lieutenant Ryan to say that the Kelly file was back but she couldn't say from where. Ryan thanked her for her effort. He'd closed that case along with the rest, and didn't even try the FBI records center for Kelly's card, and thus made unnecessary Bob Ritter's substitution of the prints of someone unlikely ever to visit America again.
The only loose end, which troubled Ritter greatly, was a single telephone call. But even criminals got one phone call, and Ritter didn't want to cross Clark on something like that. Five months later, Sandra O'Toole resigned her position at Johns Hopkins and moved to the Virginia tidewater, where she took over a whole floor of the area's teaching hospital on the strength of a glowing recommendation from Professor Samuel Rosen.
EPILOGUE
February 12, 1973
'We are honored to have the opportunity to serve our country under difficult circumstances,' Captain Jeremiah Denton said, ending a thirty-four-word statement that rang across the ramp at Clark Air Force Base with 'God bless America.'
'How about that,' the commentator said, sharing the experience as he was paid to do. 'Right there behind Captain Denton