Numbered Account

Nick curled his fingers around the railing of the dock and peered into the night. Red storm lamps flickered at the ports of Wollishofen and Kilchberg, and on the Gold Coast, at the Zurichhorn and Kusnacht. Snow swirled in unseen eddies while agitated currents slapped the ice extending from beneath the dock's pilings. He turned his face into the wind, willing the nettly gusts to wash away the memory of Thorne's last words.

Semper fidelis.

Three years had passed since Nick had signed his separation papers. Three years since he had shaken hands with Gunny Ortiga, delivered one last salute, then walked out of the barracks into a new life. A month later he was searching for an apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, buying textbooks, pens, and paper, and generally living in another universe. He recalled the looks he had attracted that first semester at business school. Not many students walked across Harvard Yard with a marine crew cut, hair trimmed high and tight, shiny whitewalls and half an inch of fuzz on top.

He had been gung ho from the day he arrived at Officer Candidate School until the day he got out. Loyalty to the Corps went beyond politics and beyond mission. It sat in your gut forever like an unexploded grenade, and even now three years since he last wore a uniform, just hearing another's call of Semper fi triggered an unwanted flood of memories.

Nick stared into the snow and cloud that lay on top of the lake like a fleecy blanket. He mulled over the timing of Thorne's contact. Why today? Did Thorne know about the Pasha's biweekly calls? Did he know that Nick handled the Pasha's account? If not, why had he mentioned Cerruti? Or had Nick been contacted only because he was an American?

Nick didn't know the answer to those questions. But the timing of the visit aroused his distrust of coincidence- a distrust bred from experience. The gameboard was extending its field.

"Semper fidelis," Thorne had bidden. Always faithful.

Nick closed his eyes, no longer able to fight back the torrent of memories that cascaded before him. Always faithful. Those words would belong forever to Johnny Burke. They would belong forever to a steaming swamp on the forgotten corner of a secret battlefield.

***

First Lieutenant Nicholas Neumann USMCR is sitting in the forward operations center of the assault ship USS Guam. The room is hot and cramped and rancid with the sweat of too many sailors. The Guam, commissioned from the San Diego Naval Shipyard twenty-seven years before, is moving at flank speed through the calm waters of the Sulu Sea off the coast of Mindanao, southernmost island in the Philippine archipelago. It is five minutes before midnight.

"When is the fuckin' air con gonna be restored on this goddamn boat?" Colonel Sigurd "Big Sig" Andersen yells into a black phone swallowed by his meaty palm.

Outside the air temperature is a mild eighty-four degrees Fahrenheit. Inside the steel hull of the Guam, the temperature has not descended below ninety-five for the past twenty-seven hours, when the central air-conditioning unit quit in a spasm of fits and coughs.

"I am giving you until 0600 to fix that unit or else there is going to be a goddamned mutiny and I am going to lead it! Is that clear?" Andersen slams the phone down onto the wall-mounted cradle. He is commander of the two thousand United States Marines aboard ship. Nick has never witnessed a senior officer so completely lose his cool. He wonders if it's the heat that has precipitated the violent discharge. Or if it's the presence of a shifty "civilian analyst" who boarded the Guam at their last port of call in Hong Kong, and who has spent the last eighteen hours holed up in the radio room engaging in a top-secret tête-à-tête with company unknown.

Jack Keely sits three paces from Nick. He is smoking a cigarette and nervously pinching the copious rolls of fat that fall over the belt of his trousers. He is waiting to begin his briefing on a clandestine operation Nick has been chosen to lead. A "black op," in the parlance of spooks and their obedient surrogates.

Andersen collapses into a beat-up leather recliner and motions for Keely to get up and begin speaking.

Keely is nervous. His audience numbers only seven, yet he fidgets constantly, transferring his weight from one foot to the other. He avoids eye contact and stares at some fixed point on the wall behind Nick and his fellow marines. Between draws on his cigarette, he provides sketchy details of their assignment.

A Filipino, one Arturo de la Cruz Enrile, has been speaking out against the government in Manila, demanding the usual reforms: honest vote counts, redistribution of land, better medical care. Here on the southwestern corner of Mindanao, Enrile has built a following of between five hundred and two thousand guerrillas. They are armed with AK-47s, RPGs, and RPKs: leftover weaponry from the Russkies' vacation fifteen years ago.