"Yeah?"

"Dr Ryan, this is the ops room. Swordsman," the watch officer said.

"Okay." Jack hung up. "Damn."

"What's the matter?" Cathy asked from the doorway.

"I have to go in. By the way, I have to be in tomorrow, too."

"Jack, come on -"

"Look, babe, there are a couple of things I have to do before I leave. One's happening right about now - and you can forget that, okay? - and I have to be in on it."

"Where do you have to go this time?"

"Just into the office. I don't have any overseas stuff planned at all, as a matter of fact."

"Supposed to snow tonight, maybe a big one."

"Great. Well, I can always stay over."

"I'm going to be so happy when you leave that goddamned place for good."

"Can you stick with me just a couple of months more?"

" 'Couple of months'? "

"April first, I'm out of there. Deal?"

"Jack, it's not that I don't like what you do, just that -"

"Yeah, the hours. Me, too. I'm used to the idea of leaving now, turning into a normal person again. I gotta change."

Cathy bowed to the inevitable and went back to the kitchen. Jack dressed casually. On weekends you didn't have to wear a suit. He decided that he could even dispense with a tie, and also that he'd drive himself. Thirty minutes later, he was on the road.

It was a gloriously clear afternoon over the Straits of Gibraltar. Europe to the north, Africa to the south. The narrow passage had once been a mountain range, the geologists said, and the Mediterranean a dry basin until the Atlantic had broken in. This would have been the perfect place to watch from, too, thirty thousand feet up.

And best of all, he would not have bad to worry about commercial air traffic back then. Now he had to listen to the guard circuit make sure some airliner didn't blunder into his path. Or the other way around, which was actually more honest.

"There's our company," Robby Jackson observed.

"Never seen her before, sir," Lieutenant Walters said.

'Her' was the Soviet carrier Kuznetzov, the first real carrier in the Russian fleet. Sixty-five thousand tons, thirty fixed-wing aircraft, ten or so helicopters. Escorting her were the cruisers Slava and Marshal Ustinov, plus what looked like one Sovremenny- and two Udaloy-class destroyers. They were coming east in a compressed tactical formation, and were two hundred forty miles behind the TR battlegroup. Half a day back, Robby thought, or half an hour, depending on how you looked at it.

"We give 'em a fly-by?" Walters asked.

"Nope, why piss 'em off?"

"Looks like they're in a hurry " the RIO said, looking through a pair of binoculars. I'd say about twenty-five knots."

"Maybe they're just trying to clear the strait as quick as they can."

"I doubt that, skipper. What do you suppose they're here for?"

"Same as us, according to intel. Train, show the flag, make friends and influence people."