Donald shook his head and resumed filling his pipe. "I'll be okay. I need to work."

"You sure?"

"Very."

"You hungry?"

"No. I ate with Howard."

"That must've been exciting." Schneider clapped a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. "I'm kidding. Norbom's a good man. Just a little cautious. He wouldn't send me more troops and matériel until he knew, for sure, that we'd be going to Defcon 3-- even after our Recon Officer was shot."

"I heard about that on the flight up. The officer was a woman--"

"She was. Now we're hearing on NK Army radio that they think we're cowards for hiding behind women. I'll say this for the North: It must be nice not to have to worry about the PC crowd. Shit, not like the old days when you were the only diplomat in town. Now we've all got to have golden tongues."

"Things are not like they were."

"No, they are not. I tell you, I sit here, Greg, and sometimes I want to give it all up and go back to sewing labels in shirts, like when I was a kid. If something was right in the old days, or necessary, you did it. You didn't have to go to the U.N. with your hat in your hand and ask the effing Ukraine for permission to test bombs in your own goddamn desert. Jesus, General Bellini at NATO says he saw a TV interview with some goddamn Frenchmen who're still pissed at us for accidentally shelling their houses on D-day. Who the hell pointed a TV camera at these assholes and told them to bitch? What the hell has happened to common sense?"

Donald was out of matches and lit his pipe with the hand-grenade lighter on the General's desk. Only after he pulled the pin did he realize it might not have been a lighter.

"You said it yourself, General. TV. Everybody's got a forum to say their say now, and there isn't a politician who's cocksure enough not to pay attention. You should have told the Senator you have a friend at 60 Minutes. That might've shaken him up."

"Amen to that," Schneider said as the two of them sat on the sofa. "Well, maybe the wheel will turn again. It's like that slave in The Ten Commandments who wanted to see the Deliverer before he died-- and there was Charlton Moses Heston there to catch him when he took a hatchet in the gut. That's what I want. Just once before I die, I want to see the person who's going to deliver us from bullshit, who's going to do what's right even if he takes an ax in the belly. If I didn't care so much about my goddamn men, hell, I'd march right into Pyongyang and box their ears myself for Recon Officer Margolin."

The strategy session was brief. Donald would accompany the next patrol, taking a driver of his own, a recon officer, a night-vision digital video camera, and a jeep, and making two passes along two miles of the DMZ. They would phone the visuals to Op-Center, and he would make another pass in two hours-- time enough for noticeable changes to have occurred along the heart of the border.