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“Thank you,” she said.

“You have been told that we may be here for a day or two?”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“You are prepared? I mean in terms of… uh… clothing? That sort of thing?”

“Captain Stanfield told me to be prepared for anything, Commander,” she said.

Bitter decided there was no double entendre intended. And besides, she had this time referred to Captain the Duchess Stanfield as “Captain Stanfield, ” not “Elizabeth.”

“Good,” Bitter said, then left the car and marched up to the hut closest to the sign.

While there was a place for women in uniform, he thought on the way— Sergeant Draper was obviously releasing an able-bodied man for more active service—there were nevertheless problems because of their sex. Overnight accommodations for a male driver, for instance, would be much less difficult to arrange.

When he pushed open the door of the hut, a seaman spotting the gold braid of a senior officer on Bitter’s cap brim called “Attention!”

“As you were,” Bitter said, a reflect action. He had just located an interior door with a sign reading LT CMDR J. B. DOLAN nailed to it when Lieutenant Commander Dolan himself appeared to see who had come into the office.

“I’ll be goddamned,” Lt. Commander Dolan said. “Look what the tide washed up!”

He walked quickly across the room, his hand extended. He was a heavyset, balding man in his middle forties, and a broad smile was on his face. The last time Bitter had seen Dolan was in China: John Dolan had been on one end of the stretcher that carried Bitter aboard the transport plane that flew him to the Army General Hospital in India. Dolan had been one of the legendary enlisted Navy pilots, a gold-stripe chief aviation pilot. In China he was the maintenance officer of the First Pursuit Squadron of the American Volunteer Group.

Canidy’s cryptic remark about the “agent-in-place” at Fersfield now made sense.

“Chief, I’m glad to see you,” Bitter said warmly.

“Chief, my ass, it’s commander, Commander,” Dolan said, grinning broadly and pointing to the gold oak leaf he had pinned to his collar. “How the hell are you, Mr. Bitter?”

Old habits die hard, Bitter thought. Dolan could not break the habit of referring to junior naval officers as “Mister.” And then he admitted: And I could not instantly or easily accept seeing him as a commissioned officer whose rank equals my own.

“I’m doing pretty good, John,” he said. “I’m back on flight status.”

“I saw you limping when you came up the walk,” Dolan said, making it an accusation.

“That’s the damp weather,” Bitter said.

“That sonofabitch,” Dolan said, laughing. “He told me the new skipper was a candy-ass from the Pentagon.”

“Well, the Pentagon part is right,” Bitter said.

“Goddamn,” Dolan said, “I am glad to see you. This operation is strange enough without some paper-pusher coming to run it.”

“I’m glad to see you, too, Dolan,” Bitter said.

“And maybe just a little surprised to see me in uniform?”

“Yes,” Bitter confessed. When he’d last seen him, Dolan had been waging a futile battle to get back on flight status. He had a bad heart.

“I tried to get recalled from retirement when I came home from China. BuPers says ‘No way.’ So I went to work for Boeing; I knew some guys there from the old F-4B. Then this candy-ass commissioned civilian from BuPers shows up and tells me that the Navy has changed its mind. I told him to go fuck himself. Two days later, he’s back. If I will come back with the understanding that I will go overseas immediately, the Navy will make me a lieutenant. So I figure what the hell, if they want me that bad, they want me bad enough to make me a lieutenant commander. I know the regulation, and the regulation is that you retire in the highest grade you held for thirty days in wartime. So I figure that I can put in thirty days before my medical records surface and they retire me again. But this time it’ll be as a lieutenant commander, which pays a hell of a lot better than what I was getting as a retired chief. So I tell him,‘Lieutenant commander, and you

got a deal.’

“Two days later, he’s back with the commission and swears me in. And he’s got my orders. I’m to report to Norfolk for further shipment. Apartments are hard to come by in Seattle, so I don’t even give mine up. I buy two sets of blues and a couple of shirts, leave my car in the gas station, and get on a plane to Norfolk. I figured my medical records will catch up with me right away, but that I can stall them for thirty days. So I’d be back in Seattle in five, nor more than six weeks.

“When I get off the plane in Norfolk, I am met by a good-looking blonde with hair down to her ass who talks like Katharine Hepburn. She drives me to Andrews Air Corps Base outside D.C., and thirty minutes later, I’m on my way here. Canidy was waiting for me at Croydon with a shit-eating grin from ear to ear.”

“And you came here?”