“She sure did, big guy,” Patrick said with a tearful smile. How in hell did I get so lucky to have a son like this? he thought. “She sure did.” He reached out, kissed the urn, and said, “Good-bye, sweetheart. I love you. Have a nice journey.” He then stepped back into the cockpit and held tightly on to Bradley’s life jacket as Luger gradually eased in the throttle. The big MerCruiser stem drive leapt to life. The speedometer topped sixty miles an hour, close to sixty- five—the Cobalt was fast, but it had never gone this fast ever before. Suddenly the ocean was as smooth as glass— there wasn’t a ripple as far as they could see, when moments before there was a light chop.

Bradley held the um tightly, tears flowing down his cheeks. He kissed the um, whispered, “Good-bye, Mommy. I love you. Come see me anytime,” over the loud hum of the engine, then held the um up over his head and tipped it slightly. In the blink of an eye, the um was empty, and he let it fly out of his hands.

The silvery ash never seemed to fall to the surface of the ocean, but gently floated upward into the sky until, several long moments later, it disappeared inside a sunbeam that had appeared through the clouds.

It seemed as if Patrick never let his son leave his arms for the next eighteen hours as they traveled from San Diego to Washington, D.C. They arrived and checked into the Hay-Adams Hotel, across the street from the White House, in a suite of rooms reserved for them by former president Kevin Martindale.

Patrick’s sisters Nancy and Margaret came in a short time later; they were going to be Bradley’s baby-sitters during the Night Stalkers’ post-action debriefing on the Libyan conflict and their role in it. The first of several meetings was scheduled for eight a.m. the next morning in the Old Executive Office Building with the senior White House staff, followed by more briefings at the Pentagon and the State Department—and then the congressional committees and subcommittees were going to hold hearings, both classified and unclassified. There was no telling how long the debriefings were going to last—and there was no indication yet on what the final outcome might be. They were all betting on confinement—Patrick had already had custody documents drawn up so his sisters could legally take Bradley with them, just in case.