Having no desire to continue down this dark, depressing path, Lightfoot tried to lighten the mood. “Well, Colonel,” he stated blandly, “I want to be there when those good old boys take away your shoes and chain you to the stove.”

Looking up from the report she was reading, she laughed. Patting the 9mm pistol strapped to her web belt, she grinned. “While I’m not saying they’ll fail, I can assure there’ll be a few more geldings in this state by the time they’re done.”

Squeezing his knees together, Lightfoot grimaced. “Ouch! Just the thought of that is enough to bring tears to my eyes.”

Nancy wasn’t paying attention to his response. Instead something in the INSUM caught her eye. After looking up quickly to see where they were, she pointed to a convenience store on the right-hand side of the road. “Pull in there and find someplace away from everyone.”

Not asking why, Lightfoot hit the turn signal and made a New York right hand turn as he crossed from the far left lane in front of a pickup truck. Ignoring the horn blasts and the blasphemies hurled at them by the driver of the truck, Lightfoot drove to a spot where there were no other vehicles. After he had slipped the car into park, he turned to his colonel, who was furiously scanning the report on her lap. “What’s up, Colonel?”

Instead of answering, she asked for the military map of the area they always carried. When he handed it to her she looked over at him. “Do me a favor and get me a Diet Coke and a big, steaming cup of coffee.”

Realizing that officers tended to have some “peculiar” habits, he didn’t question her request. Sliding out of the sedan, he left her while he went in to pick up her soda and coffee as well as one for himself. By the time he returned she was poring over the map.

He hadn’t even managed to get himself settled before she turned to him. “If you found yourself here,” she asked, pointing to a spot on the map, “and decided that you needed to escape and evade a mechanized force, where would you go?”

With the need to balance the hot coffees and soda, it was several moments before Lightfoot was able to take up the map and study it. As he did that Nancy took her coffee, pried open the drinking spout, and fished the “Eye Only” letter out of the stack of envelopes and reports that sat between them. Holding the back of the letter above the open spout, she let the rising steam hit the glued flap of the envelope of the confidential correspondence between the State Adjutant General and the governor. Slowly she began to move the rest of the envelope flap along the plume of steam until the flap began to give.