Lett got good steak and fresh eggs. He knew what that meant. Whenever troops got a special hot meal up on the line it meant they were being sent into one hell of a meat grinder. But this time Lett was a troop of one. He ate his special meal alone in a windowless room at the Main House while he was briefed on his assignment. To soften the blow, they threw fresh fruit into the bargain, mango and pineapple. Lett hadn’t touched the aromatic coffee, but when the dirty lowdown started to sink in, he gulped down the fine stuff to look alive and sharpen up and absorb each and every detail that may save him or fuck him.

Selfer himself led the briefing at first, just like old times. Selfer didn’t bother with upbeat now. Over the bamboo wallpaper hung maps of Honolulu on the island of Oahu. Lett was to enter the city and bring back someone Selfer called a “target person.”

Then Lansdale strode in, and Selfer stepped aside. That old boiling heat swelled inside Lett again, but he kept a lid on it. Lansdale’s jovial way cloaked what was an iron glove. Peppering his instructions with his upbeat sayings, Lansdale told Lett that if his target wasn’t cooperating, then Lett was to eliminate with the “merry utmost of unholy bias,” grinning all the while as if delivering an original limerick. This, Lansdale added, was the least they could do for all the civilians their target had helped the Japanese kill—for Lett’s target had sold out hundreds if not thousands of civilians in China and later in the Philippines. “They severed the heads of children,” Lansdale reminded Lett. But he sounded as if he were selling detergent on a radio show. On top of that, Lansdale was telling him to be prepared to kill someone for reasons that Lansdale, and only Lansdale, gave him—reasons Lett was to take as simple facts.

Selfer, meanwhile, played the diligent boy scout to Lansdale the frisky scoutmaster. It made Lett’s stomach turn, but he shoveled the eggs in anyhow. His gut only turned further when he realized he felt something like empathy for Selfer, who kept his head lowered and his hands clasped in front of him like Lett imagined a man about to be beheaded by a samurai sword-wielding Japanese officer might do—all he had to do was kneel down and it was done. Lett listened to Lansdale, nodded, and glared at Selfer when he had the slightest chance, but Selfer wouldn’t return the gaze.

“Good luck, hero,” Lansdale said.

After he strode out, Lett glared all he wanted.

Selfer waited a moment before stepping over to him. “This will get you cured,” he said through clenched teeth. “It’ll be the test of your treatment. Your final stage. You succeed, you’re home free.”

“That’s good. You memorize that?”

“This is no time for jokes,” Selfer said.