Clay strolled beside the long club building toward their barracks in Block 19. “Unless Rudder gives us another night exercise.”

Gene groaned.

Two days earlier, the Rangers had run the assault course until two in the morning with live ammunition firing overhead. Then reveille at 0545.

They passed the library. Lights shone inside, but dimly. Was Leah still there? The library closed at nine thirty, but it was almost ten thirty. And an awful lot of men roamed in the dark.

Clay frowned. “Say, go on without me. I’m going to see if Leah needs an escort to the bus stop.”

“An escort?” Gene mimed dipping a girl low and smooching her.

“An escort only. A lady shouldn’t walk around alone at night.”

“Whatever you say, Pax.” Gene strolled away, singing “Here comes the bride . . .”

Clay rolled his eyes and trotted up the stairs. This would be hard to live down.

The sign on the door read “closed,” but Clay tested the doorknob and it opened. The library was dark except the central reading area—which was empty. “Leah?”

A muffled thump and a shuffling sound came to his right, from behind the circulation desk, inside a darkened room.

Every sense went into high alert. Someone was in there. If it were Leah, she would have said something.

Clay had nothing to use as a weapon. He wiggled loose his necktie, which could be used against him, and he stuffed it in his pocket.

His heart rate rising, Clay padded around the circulation desk, low and swift. Was it a thief? But what was there to steal in a library? Or had a soldier sneaked in with a girl for a tryst? Clay would feel real stupid if it turned out to be a raccoon.

The half door in the desk stood open, and Clay darted through and crouched in the attack position outside the back room.

A tryst, all right. In the dimness, a man knelt buttoning up his pants beside a woman on the floor, more undressed than dressed.

Disbelief and rage billowed up. Two years before it had been Adler and Ellen in a tangled mass of bare limbs and discarded clothing on the garage floor. His girlfriend. His brother.

But this was Leah! A gag slashed white across her face, and her eyes met his—frantic and terrified. And there was blood.

Clay’s rage snapped to the man, a soldier in khakis. A knit cap with two holes cut in it concealed his face.

No time to analyze. Clay leapt over Leah and tackled her assailant.

They grappled, and the attacker flipped Clay onto his back. The man reached for something on the ground, and light flashed on steel.

A knife! Clay parried the thrust, then jabbed straight fingers into the man’s windpipe, the same move Lyons had used so effectively on him.

The assailant coughed and jerked back. Enough for Clay to kick free.