Even good news could be ominous. General Arima was spending a good deal of time on TV, and he was doing well at it. The latest news was that any citizen who wanted to leave Saipan would be granted free air fare to Tokyo for later transit back to the States. Mainly what he said was that nothing important had changed.

"My ass," Pete Burroughs growled at the smiling face on the tube.

"You know, I just don't believe this," Oreza said, back up after five hours of sleep.

"I do. Check out that knoll southeast of here."

Portagee rubbed his heavy beard and looked. Half a mile away, on a hilltop recently cleared for another tourist hotel (the island had run out of beach space), about eighty men were setting up a Patriot missile battery. The billboard radars were already erected, and as he watched, the first of four boxy containers was rolled into place.

"So what are we going to do about this?" the engineer asked.

"Hey, I drive boats, remember?"

"You used to wear a uniform, didn't you?"

"Coast Guard," Oreza said. "Ain't never killed nobody. And that stuff"—he pointed to the missile site—"hell, you probably know more about it than I do."

"They make 'em in Massachusetts. Raytheon, I think. My company makes some chips for it." Which was the extent of Burroughs's knowledge.

"They're planning to stay, aren't they?"

"Yeah." Oreza got his binoculars and started looking out windows again. He could see six road junctions. All were manned by what looked like ten men or so—a squad; he knew that term—with a mixture of the Toyola Land Cruisers and some jeeps. Though many had holsters on their pistol belts, no long guns were in evidence now, as though they didn't want to make it look like some South American junta from the old days. Every vehicle that passed—they didn't stop any that he saw—received a friendly wave. PR.

Oreza thought, Good PR.

"Some kind of fuckin' love-in," the master chief said. And that would not have been possible unless they were confident as hell. Even the missile crew on the next hill over, he thought. They weren't rushing. They were doing their jobs in an orderly, professional way, and that was fine, but if you expected to use the things, you moved more snappily. There was a difference between peacetime and wartime activity, however much you said that training was supposed to eliminate the difference between the two. He turned his attention back to the nearest crossroads. The soldiers there were not the least bit tense. They looked and acted like soldiers, but their heads weren't scanning the way they ought to on unfriendly ground.