What now?

This superior told him not to offer any information to Cornwall if she were to call, but Cornwall…

Lots of memories come back from his tour at FOB Healy with the captain. Her sharing candy and snacks from her packages from home. The time he lost all his socks after washing them, and how she shared her socks with him. And twice when he and she had gone to the shelter when Taliban units had sent mortar fire into the small base, and how scared he was, oh God, and the captain had just put her arm around him and that bit of comfort had seen him through that shelling.

“Lieutenant, what is it? I don’t have much time.”

He takes a deep, reassuring breath.

“Call me back in ten minutes, Captain. I’ll have what you need,” he says.

CHAPTER 77

HER WRISTS are still sore, but Rosaria Vasquez is holding the steering wheel firmly as she is driving east to Florida. Why Florida?

Because Senior Warrant Officer Fred McCarthy told her to go there.

She winces, recalling the sharp and cutting words he used as weapons against her, all the way from calling her a useless ROTC officer who went into the Army for three hots and a cot, up to calling her a stupid coward.

“A library!” he shouted. “You got ambushed in a goddamn library?”

Nothing she could have said would have turned back that anger, so she had taken it in silence, until finally there was a quiet moment and he said, “Gulf Coast of Florida. Get your sorry ass out there as soon as possible.”

“Then what, sir?”

“Then you’ll have actionable intelligence, and you act on it, Vasquez, and when the day is over, I want one of two things in your hand: Cornwall’s dog tags, or Cornwall’s dog tags and a copy of her toe tag. It finishes today, it finishes now. Got it?”

Rosaria nods in memory as she speeds east on Interstate 10, going through a strip that boasts gun shops, dollar stores, gas stations, hairdressing outfits, and everything and anything else a high-speed traveler needs on his or her way to the beaches of paradise.

She gently moves the steering wheel, wrists still aching, her eyes swollen with tears, her insides empty, only knowing that yes, when she gets to the Gulf Coast, she will end it.

In a quiet wooded area near the Fort Belvoir Country Club, Lieutenant Preston Baker waits, leaning up against the wide trunk of an old oak tree. Thirty minutes earlier he called his contact and followed his directions.

There is movement out there, footsteps, and then the senior officer stands on the other side of the tree trunk, so he can be heard but not seen.

“So she called, then?”

“Yes,” Preston says.

“What did she want?”

“Information about the prisoner who died in captivity, over at FOB Healy.”

“What kind of information?”

Preston tries to focus on the good news he received today, about a facility being readied for Dad. His father, who had sweated and worked and thought to design and build the aircraft that had defended this nation for decades…abandoned in his time of need, but Preston is going to take care of him.