The flight from Kuala had exhausted him—just sitting in that damn seat, waiting through what seemed an eternity. He’d tried the phone, but it hadn’t worked. The Gulf of Thailand was still an empty corner of the world. He hated empty places, dark places. He hated small places even more. Recurring nightmare: he comes awake, starts to sit up in bed, and wham, his forehead hits something with such force that he sees stars. Then he realizes that the air is heavy with his own breath and he can’t sit up without braining himself. He knows, then, that he is in a coffin.

He knew a CIA guy called Richie Jones, who’d run afoul of the Khmer Rouge and been buried alive. Somebody who’d been in that prison compound had reported that you could hear him screaming for about half an hour. From Ohio State to a lonely hole in the jungles of Cambo. Had Mr. President ever been told about Richie? Had Mr. Director of Central Intelligence known or cared? Weep a tear for the Buckeye state, for it has lost a son.

To die the way covert ops died in the field, damn hard and damn alone—Jesus God, pass the bottle. And to do what he and his crew were doing, to live the way they were living, chasing these monsters in the sewage and the filth of some of the world’s most terrible cities, getting yourself eaten if you weren’t careful—Jesus God, pass the bottle again.

He was tired. They were all tired. It had been a hard operation, soaked in the blood of fine men and women. And what a death. It’d be better to be buried alive by a bunch of twelve-year-old Khmers with AK-47s and dead eyes, than to be stung in the neck by one of those filthy things.

Long before he’d been forced to come back, Asia had been a place he wanted to put behind him. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, 1971 to 1973. In those days, life had less value than dirt out here, especially American life, and most especially the life of a clean-cut CIA virgin with a buzz haircut and wire-framed glasses. He had made it through the Parrot’s Beak massacre when Danny Moore had been pulled apart between two backfiring tractors. He had lived through six weeks in a bamboo cell with nothing but roaches and rats for food, while Betty Chang was methodically raped to death and George Moorhouse starved. He had survived because he was too ugly to rape and so cussed that he could crack rats and drink ’em, blood, guts, and all.

He fumbled in the little cabinet that was supposed to be stocked with booze. “Got any vodka in this thing?”

“No, sir.”