SONNY THORNFIELD STEERED the rusty green johnboat through the darkening swamp with his left hand and held a gun on Jimmy Revels with his right. After three days in Double Eagle captivity, the young Negro wasn’t much of a threat. Revels lay in the bottom of the boat, barely conscious, his hands bound behind him. The most he could do now would be to jump out of the boat and drown himself rather than be shot. Sonny had considered simply dumping him among the huge cypress trees, but there was some chance that a fisherman might find his body before the gators did, and Sonny didn’t want to take the risk.

Sonny wasn’t sure he would survive the night himself. After four years of successful Double Eagle operations, things had finally gone about as wrong as they could go. Three days ago, they’d been on the verge of accomplishing phase one of the mission Frank Knox had outlined on the sandbar that first day back in the summer of ’64. But at 4 P.M. on Thursday, Frank had been killed, and five hours later the Eagles had been ordered to stand down. Sonny had no problem with this decision. In his opinion, the Double Eagles without Frank to lead them had no business taking on operations of national scope. But Snake had different ideas. Juiced on white lightning and stoked on speed, Snake Knox had seized upon the notion that if they didn’t go through with Frank’s original plan, then his older brother had died for nothing.

The black boy in the bottom of the johnboat was the bait Frank had finally settled on, the bait that would lure in the big targets. They couldn’t have found a more perfect victim. A former navy cook and noted musician, Jimmy Revels had not only met Martin Luther King in person, but also had worked tirelessly to register black voters in Mississippi. He’d redoubled his efforts in the wake of Robert Kennedy’s announcement that he would run for president, which had earned him a personal phone call from Kennedy only a week ago. By an odd coincidence, Revels had also worked for Albert Norris before joining the navy. Stranger still, Revels was the younger brother of Viola Turner, Dr. Cage’s nurse, the woman Sonny had secretly lusted after for years. Sonny didn’t pretend to understand the mechanics of fate, but he felt that all these connections had somehow brought about Frank’s death and stranded them in their current predicament.