The crash was gone—first from print, then from milblogs. Will Holmes looked lucky. He knew luck wasn’t luck. It was preparation and follow-through. He’d bungled the planning on Potomac Pilot, so the back end had to be rulebook. He did some last-minute tinkering to make sure the mishap report was clean. He got ahead on arranging for the National Guard to move the pilot out of Andrews but not to Balad. He couldn’t have her in Iraq. He thought Bagram should be the assignment. If she was detailed there to Special Operations Forces for close air support under a classified program, she’d be insulated. There weren’t any land-launched missiles in Afghanistan that could so much as smudge a fighter jet. Plus, Special Forces was using so many drones, they might never need her.

He told himself he’d looked out for men under his command. So what if she wasn’t under his command. He had an interest in making sure she didn’t find out how the crash happened, didn’t he? Keeping tabs was nothing more than insurance. He got notes from her doctor visits sent automatically. She was repairing fine. He got her file, read about the fuck of a father, the dead mother. He got a full rundown from the shrink session. He saw that her wingman and his wife were the ones on her Notify List. Her in-the-event-of-my-death went to them too. So he made sure the wingman also got a Bagram assignment. The guy was too curious about the crash for Will’s taste, but the pilot, she was stand-up. Having the wingman at Bagram would shut down his scratching around Washington for answers. It would also keep him from going to a reporter if he got hold of anything he shouldn’t. Yeah, the fire was out. Pretty soon the embers would dampen.

Another blaze had a headwind. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had voted on and approved the creation of, and then regular updating of, a report from every known Intelligence Community component. Committee members tried to tell Will they needed it because the Iraq prewar intelligence didn’t pan out—to Will it had; Baathists had moved the WMD and hidden them in Syria. (He was putting together a covert team to find them. The way it was lately, he might have to lead the thing in-country himself.)

This report from SSCI—always pronounced “sissy”—was bigger than the Family Jewels, the post-Watergate review that listed every CIA activity in conflict with the National Security Act. Sissy wanted details not just of the CIA’s sensitive activities but also of every IC agency’s. Some of these were ongoing operations. Any disclosure would be bad. And he couldn’t keep Potomac Pilot out of the next quarterly update.