Staff Sergeant Lightfoot slowly drove along the unimproved road in blackout drive as Nancy Kozak, holding a thermal viewer to her eyes, looked for something, anything, that would give away the paratroopers. Lowering them in an effort to give both her arm and her eyes a rest, Nancy muttered, “You know this is totally screwed up.”

“How so, Colonel?” Lightfoot asked as he strained to see the road ahead.

After three nights of coming out in search of the paratroopers, Nancy found that she was beginning to have second thoughts about what they were doing. Turning to face her companion, she looked across the radio console that separated them. “I’ve been thinking about this, Sergeant Lightfoot. If we’re right, these are the people who tried to overrun us at the ammo site. They’re the ones who killed …”

“Colonel,” Lightfoot stated flatly, “don’t go there. They’re American soldiers, just like you and me. They were doing their job, just like Fran, Chester, and Dave. That things got so screwed up between us and the people in Washington wasn’t our fault. And it isn’t theirs. What happened, happened. All we can do now is act upon those beliefs that each of us hold dear.”

Nancy remained silent. They had been over it all before. In her heart she knew what they were doing was right. Still, as she went back to her search for the paratroopers, she could not escape the fact that this was definitely the strangest situation she had ever found herself in.

She was just getting her elbows in a comfortable position so that she could keep the thermal viewer propped up when a sharp black blob appeared in her field of vision. The thermal sight was set so that cool objects, including the ground, appeared green. Anything that retained or gave off heat became a progressively darker shade of green until items that were very hot showed up black. Blinking her eyes, Nancy concentrated on the suspect object. She was getting tired. After having put in a full day of playing postman for the Adjutant General, the pair had spent the previous two nights wandering about the hills in search of the paratroopers. After another long day, they had picked up where they had left off. Aware of the effects of exhaustion, Nancy took great care to ensure that her eyes, burning from hours of viewing the world through the thermal sight, weren’t playing tricks on her.

When she saw the object bob about and she was sure that it wasn’t her or the movement of the vehicle, she knew. “Slow down,” Nancy ordered in a low voice as she attempted to focus on the heat source she had detected.