Colt spun and came to attention, feeling silly as he looked down at the ruddy-faced Navy captain in an olive drab flight suit striding toward him. The man’s face gave nothing away, but Colt clearly remembered the dressing down he had received and braced himself for a continuation of that. Somehow, Colt suspected he had found out that he had stolen the JSF’s maintenance data and probably blamed him for the attack on the ship the night before.
“I owe you an apology, young man,” CAG said, reaching out to take Colt’s stunned hand. “I don’t have all the details yet… hell, I’m not even sure I’m cleared to have all the details… but I should have taken your warning more seriously.”
Colt blinked away his surprise. “Thank you, sir.”
“Everybody on this ship owes you an immense debt of gratitude, and I wanted to personally tell you that I fucked up. You tried warning me that something was wrong, and I blew you off. If there is anything you need from me in the future, don’t hesitate to call on me.”
“Thank you, sir,” he said again, relaxing for the first time since Dave had told him an Osprey was coming to pluck him off San Clemente and take him to the carrier.
CAG released Colt’s hand, slapped him on the shoulder, and with a grin said, “There’s a certain cruiser CO who wants to know who she’s putting a medal in for. Should I tell her it’s the same one whose wings she wanted taken away?”
In spite of everything, Colt laughed.
CAG turned to Chief Cooper, who was standing quietly off to the side, and said, “You get this man back to North Island.”
“Aye aye, sir,” the chief replied.
“Bravo Zulu, Mother,” CAG said. “Bravo
The woman known as Mantis sat in a chair on the front porch of her modest mid-century house in Willow Glen. It was a cool morning, and she enjoyed sipping on her tea as she watched the traffic passing in front of their house, young hipsters running the Silicon Valley rat race.
The door behind her opened, and her husband stepped out onto the porch, walking around her to sit in the chair at her side. She didn’t acknowledge him, but he hadn’t expected her to. She focused her attention on a bench in the park across the street in what had been a morning ritual every day for the last thirty years.
“Do you see it?” he asked.
She took another sip of her tea and nodded, replying with a muted, “Mmm.”
He said nothing else, and she finished the cup in silence. She carried it back into the house and washed it along with the kettle she had used to prepare her morning oolong. She returned them to their places in the cupboard next to the stove, and the canister containing the tea leaves to the pantry.
Her husband remained in his chair, his eyes also fixed on the park bench, while he waited for his wife to return. When she did, he asked, “Shall we take a walk?”
The married couple walked from their front porch to the park across the busy street. The bench they had been watching was on the opposite side, hidden behind the thick bushes and trees lining the park’s boundary, and only visible because she trimmed them down. If they could not see the bench from their front porch, it would complicate things.
They walked in silence along the sidewalk, circling the block to enter the park from the far side. The cement walkway angled in from the street, and they passed between steel bollards designed to prevent vehicles from accessing through the gate. It was cooler still in the park. The low clouds overhead clung to the valley and soaked everything in a thin layer of dew, and they dodged low-hanging fir branches bordering the path.
It was a short walk to the bench from there. They didn’t hold hands or engage in idle conversation, surveying the park to look for something that wasn’t there. School was in session for a few more weeks, although most families with young children had long since moved from Willow Glen. It had been years since they had heard the laughter of playing children in the open space, but still they looked.
When they reached the bench, they sat together near the middle. He Gang removed the newspaper he had tucked under his arm and opened it wide. It was a local paper, printed in Mandarin, but he wasn’t interested in what it had to say and only pretended to read it as his eyes scanned across the top of the page.
“We’re clear,” he whispered.
Fu Zan reached under the bench and felt inside the cranny. She retrieved a small tube the size of a pack of gum and removed the lid to pull out a rolled scrap of paper. She handed it to her husband, replaced the lid, and returned the tube to the carved-out hollow in the bench’s frame.
As he unrolled the slip, he turned the newspaper’s page and looked for the correct key. His eyes danced between the scrap and the business section, completing a task that was all but second nature to him. As he did so, his wife swiped her hand along the edge of the bench near her right knee and wiped clean a thin chalk line that had not been there the day before.
