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"What's going on?" Rick said. "And what the hell is that?"

"This is so cool. It just came out, and we got one of the first off the assembly line. This" – Eps swept his hand towards it like a model on a game show showing off a Cadillac convertible – "is a Digi-Log Remote Interactive CRT. With this, we can use a phone to go right into the computers at work."

"Why in God's name would you want to?"

Steve replied, "Mostly so we don't have to drive all the way to Bethesda every time the PDPs go down and everyone starts running around with their hair on fire." He turned back to the table. "See, it's got a full keyboard, a monitor. Everything you need."

Rick pointed at the odd rubber cups at the back. "What are those for?"

Scotty, who was peering deeply into the tiny green letters on the tiny green monitor, silently shook his head at this display of ignorance.

Eps piped up. "Those are for the phone. You call up the computer and stick the phone right in there."

"Computers have phone numbers?"

"Sure." Steve grinned. "And we've got their phone book. That's really what we're doing – seeing what other computers we can get into."

"Again. Why?"

"It's fun. Hell, it's a game. We programmed most of the systems in town and friends of ours set up the rest. Consequently, we know most of the backdoors and system hacks."

Rick held up a hand. "Stop. ‘Backdoor' almost makes sense, but what is a ‘system hack'?"

Scotty didn't even look up. "One system hack is putting in a backdoor."

Rick stared at him for a moment in mock anger. "OK, don't explain it to me." He turned back to Steve. "So, what are these games?"

"They try to protect their systems, and we try to break in."

"What do you get when you break in? Military secrets? Unlimited checking?"

Scotty finally sat back from his intense scrutiny of the monitor. "No, we just go in and look around. See if the other guys have any cool new tricks. Maybe leave them a note."

"It doesn't sound like fun to me, but what do I know? I think a good time is riding motorcycles way too fast." Rick headed back upstairs. "Good night, guys."

 

In his bedroom, Rick stripped, put on a pair of running shorts and a T-shirt, and began the long ritual of going to sleep. Sleep, especially dreamless sleep, was a hard target. Memories were the enemy and exercises were the weapons of battle.

Except for his bed, which he still made with military precision, the only furniture in the room was a weight bench with carefully laid-out bars, collars, and plates. He began with some stretching, concentrating on his right arm and side, where scar tissue tended to tighten up during the day.

Then he began the hour-long workout he had developed and specifically structured for strength, speed, and power rather than muscle bulk. The VA doctors had been pleasantly surprised when he regained the use of his right arm and hand. After one of his regular exams, a doctor had told him that his body was held together by a web of muscles that had grown stronger to take up the work of all the cartilage and tendon lost in battle and the long series of surgeries that had followed. The doctor predicted that Rick would end up a cripple anyway – explaining that, over time, most people lost interest, stopped working the muscles, and lost the use of the limbs they'd regained with such difficulty.

Rick thought that since military doctors became officers the moment they signed up, the chances were good that he could prove this guy wrong – just like any other officer. Vietnam hadn't left him with a high opinion of military leadership and judgment.

He'd been working out steadily since he got out of rehab, weights at night and his little pink rubber ball all day. Not only had he retained the use of his arm, but he was also pleased to find that he was now surprisingly strong. The other day, one of the secretaries had asked him to move a typewriter from one side of her desk to the other. He'd stood on one side, reached over, grabbed the typewriter and the typing table together, lifted both straight up and over the desk, and then gently lowered them to the floor in front of her. He hadn't missed the looks that almost everyone in the newsroom had given him for that stunt.

Time passed, and he fell into the calm mental state that came with steady exercise. He went back over the incidents on 18th Street and at the airport. If they were connected, who was the driver, and why would anyone want to hit him? It was serious enough in regular city traffic, where the drivers acted as if he didn't exist, but he couldn't shake the feeling that this time he was a target.

Eventually, the exercise took over his mind completely, and he stopped thinking about anything. When he finished, he took a bath – one of the few failings of this house was a single bathroom and no shower – got into bed, and fell asleep immediately.

 

 

Rick woke with his throat locked, straining to hold back the scream. His heart was pounding and the bed was soaked in sweat. The yellow sodium light from the streetlights outside filled the room. He'd taken down the curtains when he first moved in – their moving shadows were too lifelike. He needed his environment to be fixed, solid, and without nuance.

He looked at the clock on the windowsill.

Three hours.

Not bad. Three hours would get him through the next day.

That's all he could expect. Most days, it was the best he could do.

Gradually, his heartbeat slowed, the screams in his throat retreating to wherever they went in the sane times.

He swung his legs off the bed and sat, rubbing his face with his hands. Then he got up and paced, taking slow, deep breaths and shaking the tension out of his arms and back.

Eventually, he stripped and remade the bed with the clean sheets he'd left neatly folded on the closet shelf. Then he dressed – making sure that he put on all the insulating layers he owned.

It was time to dance.

First, the sharp twists and blind turns up Beach Drive in Rock Creek Park and then a slash run back through the early morning traffic on Reno Road. That should work.

It was still a couple of hours until dawn. He could still be on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in time – right when the sun came up.

Rick moved quietly, so as not to disturb his housemates, and headed downstairs and out the back door.

His housemates heard the back door lock click and relaxed in their beds knowing that now they could finally sleep without sharing the tortured agony of Rick's war.

CHAPTER 9

 

After the battle in the Ia Drang Valley, after the long, painful journey through aid stations to MASH units to hospitals in Japan and, finally, VA centers in the United States – after he took off the uniform and folded it away in a box at his father's house – Rick had gone to college.

He didn't wear his old GI jacket, didn't write letters to newspapers, didn't march in protests or counterprotests, didn't throw his medals away – in fact, he didn't look at them at all. His classmates knew he was older, quieter; he asked a lot of questions in class, but they were real questions, not opinions disguised as questions. He didn't make many choices, like a career or even a major. He just took whatever classes seemed appealing.

The image of a career – or marriage or a future of any kind – had been erased in the battle that had wiped out so many of his friends. He almost didn't graduate, but a professor whose son was never coming back from the war approved him for a general studies degree, saying with a note of sadness that Rick would have lots of time to figure out what he really wanted to do with his life.

He spent a year living in a dorm before he rented his own apartment. The young guys who lived on his hall learned not to make loud noises – his response to the idiot who had set off an M-80 firecracker right outside his window had been particularly impressive.

He had to explain to Andy, his roommate, why he should simply
tell
him that the dining hall was about to close. Shaking him awake triggered automatic battle reflexes. He had to buy the poor guy a nice tie to cover the finger-shaped bruises around his neck. Andy said everything was fine, but for the rest of the semester, Rick noticed that his roommate would only speak to him from the safety of the doorway. After that, he made sure to live in places where he could at least sleep alone.

He was adrift, looking for a new life where the sun shone and there were fewer terrors in the shadows. Living within the memories of Vietnam was too painful, so he tried desperately to be normal – much like his dad in 1946 – just someone trying to get on with an interrupted life. The people around him caught the request implicit in his silence and did not ask to share his thoughts or try to ease his burden.

Except Dina Scholten.

He was sitting alone at lunch one day, and she sat down with her tray, looked straight at him, and said, "Tell me about your war."

Rick had looked at her for a long moment. He saw a chubby girl with a severe haircut and brown eyes that were sharp but, as far as he could see, still open. Her mind wasn't already made up. It was just possible that she had meant what she said, that she wanted to know about his war – not to harangue him about the one she saw through a political lens.

So, he told her. Not all of it, and not the worst of it, but for the first time, he talked about some of what had happened in the green shadows under the thick jungle canopy.

She listened and asked thoughtful questions about the things she didn't understand. She was interested but didn't show any sympathy or pity or outrage or any of the other cheap emotions he had feared.

She was back at lunch the next day, and the day after that. She began to talk about her childhood as a "red diaper" baby raised by aging revolutionaries in Brooklyn, her work at a legal clinic in a housing project, and her dreams of a career in politics. They eventually discussed the Meaning of the War – from morality to political reality, to patriotism, to what it meant to those fighting it, and those marching against it.

After Dina was accepted at Georgetown Law School, they continued to have lunch once a week, sharing a Greek appetizer platter at the Taverna Cretekou, just east of the Capitol. Dina said that the smashed caviar was better there than anywhere else – even in the Greek neighborhoods of Queens.

Rick blinked as he came in from the bright sunshine. He scanned the dining room crowded with aides and interns making the most of their fifty minutes away from the halls of power. Dina waved from the back of the room, but he'd spotted her customary outrageous hat and was already heading to the table. As he walked up, he caught a brief glimpse of the other woman seated across from Dina. She was much shorter, slim, with an interesting body. A round face, with solemn dark eyes, was framed by long, straight black hair.

Dina introduced her as Eve Buffalo Calf, a Northern Cheyenne law school graduate working as a legal adviser with the American Indian Movement while studying for the bar exam. Rick didn't know much about AIM except that their "warriors" had taken over the abandoned Alcatraz Prison in San Francisco for a while and then occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs down at the Interior Department a month ago and trashed the place on the way out. On the other hand, he had known and liked a number of soldiers who came off the reservations and certainly was open to the idea that the government had thoroughly screwed the tribes.

The waiter came for drink orders and both the women ordered Irish coffee. Rick asked for just plain coffee as strong as they could make it.

The dark-haired girl said, "You don't drink?"

"I'd love to, but it's never worked out for me."

Eve gave him a quizzical look. "What's that mean?"

Rick liked her directness. "Well, it's how I ended up in Vietnam, for one thing."

"You got drunk and enlisted? That's a fairly popular way to spend a Saturday night back home."

Rick laughed. "No, I wasn't the one drinking. My mom was an alcoholic, and… well, a lot of children of alcoholics simply run away – usually emotionally. I ran away for real and ended up in the Army. It seemed like a good idea at the time."

"And now?"