I was ushered into a room that had a table and two chairs set in its center, and on the table were two large metal rings set very securely into a several-inch thick slab of hardwood that served as its top.

“Take a seat and wait for developments,” the big MP said, pointing at the far chair.

I noted that the Marine was a staff sergeant. I wanted to inform him that I was an officer and therefore deserved to be addressed using the word ‘sir’ after every comment he made, but my time in the valley had conditioned me. I was in a weakened situation and on unknown ground, so being called sir might be an accurate demand, and possibly one that might get me dead if I needed the help of the staff sergeant to prevent that result. I sat down, clasping both hands as I placed them between the big metal rings, obviously set into the table to secure suspects or prisoners with handcuffs. While in the hospital in Oakland, off the morphine and bored to death with daytime soap opera entertainment coming out of the cheap small television above my bed, I’d read as much as I could. The Count of Monte Cristo was my favorite novel, and I read it through several times, with only  General Sun Tzu’s ‘Art of War,’ taking up more of my time. The Count was and would be my bible but the Art of War was and would be my handbook of how to live my life in a complex unforgiving world I’d come home to.

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting,” I breathed silently for the staff sergeant to hear. I also knew never to fight on enemy ground from that same brilliant general.

“Thank you, staff sergeant,” I said out loud, “much appreciate your transporting me without the usual jewelry.” I looked and nodded down pointedly at the big iron rings on either side of my hands.

“Orders,” the staff sergeant replied, standing in a position that was half at ease and half parade rest. I knew he was waiting for something or someone simply because it would be too uncomfortable to remain in that position for a long time.
The door opened and a man wearing a gray suit walked in, closing the door carefully and quietly behind him.

“You can stand down, sergeant,” the man said, letting me know that he wasn’t a Marine in civilian attire. No Marine would call the staff sergeant by that simple ‘sergeant’ title, as it lowered his rank to that of buck sergeant. That single additional stripe on the staff sergeant’s shoulders meant everything to him, as it did for all non-commissioned officers of that rank.

The man pulled out the chair from under the edge of the other side of the table, and sat down, plopping a brown briefcase onto the tabletop, opening it, and then pulling a thin brown folder and a bright yellow Walkman from it.

Another Walkman, like the pilot’s inside the F-14. I was beginning to wonder if somehow the Japanese electronics firm that made them had some sort of contract with U.S. forces abroad.

The staff sergeant opened the door and slipped out without saying a word, raising my hopes. I was being trusted to be no threat to the civilian in front of me or I would have been wearing cuffs, I knew. Either that or none of the men I’d run into so far knew anything at all about my background. When still inside Oaknoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, the staff had somehow learned of my life in the Ashau as Junior and that time had not gone well until I was finally released. The CIA was evidently a much more closed system and the fact that I was ‘nobody’ once again, as I’d been at the Western White House, made me feel almost relaxed, even inside the obvious outer reaches of a military brig.

The man pulled the file across the small table, delicately opened it, and read the first page of its contents without saying anything until he finally looked up.

I looked back at him and waited. No questions were asked so no answers were required.

“I don’t like dealing with men like you,” he said and then waited as if expecting some answer to a question he hadn’t asked.

I said nothing, trying to give him as little in the way of a facial expression as I could. I knew that just because he was uncomfortable, or said so, didn’t mean he wasn’t vitally curious about me, my mission, or even if I was part of a mission. I wanted to ask him what “a man like you” meant but instead, once again, followed the Thorkelson/Bartok life insurance sales training that was not only drilled into the center of my brain but had proven itself so successful in keeping me from making unnecessary verbal mistakes when dealing with unknown and potentially dangerous opponents, like the man sitting in front of me.

The man sighed, and his shoulders dropped a bit.

“You are on the island of Okinawa, at the Camp Hansen Marine Base,” the man said with a professorial tone in his voice. “The island was returned to the Japanese a few years ago. Most people don’t recall or ever knew that. The Japanese are sticklers for detail and don’t accept strangers from strange lands landing on their island without proper pre-approval or paperwork. The fact that you landed here is not known to them, as far as I know, but if you were to be dropped at the civilian airport not far from here your passport would not have an entry stamp, much less one from the place you left before getting here, so that document’s useless.”

The man reached into an inside coat pocket and pulled out a small black booklet.

“This is called a ‘dip’ by those who carry it,” he said, shoving the booklet toward me across the table. “In reality, it’s a U.S. diplomatic passport. You’re about to become, very temporarily, an envoy of the United States. The authorities at emigration can’t ask you questions or do much at all except let you pass. We need a polaroid for the photo, so we have to wait for the guy who’s coming to take it and then get it properly pressed and embossed into the thing, or whatever they call that process.”

The man took a pack of Camel cigarettes out from the pocket on the other side of his coat. He tapped the pack heavily several times on the tabletop, tamping the tobacco down for whatever reason smokers did such things.

I wanted to ask him why smokers did such things, but I, once again, remained silent.
After the tamping, he carefully extracted one unfiltered cigarette from the pack and returned it to his pocket. He placed the cigarette between his lips, his hand shaking as he did so, and then he reached over and pushed a button on the Walkman. A song began to play. It was by Jefferson Airplane, and I loved it, never really paying attention to the lyrics, however. The first words came from the small machine as the man adjusted the volume down, “When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies…don’t you want somebody to love…”

The door opened and a Marine Lance Corporal came into the small room.

“Don’t generally take photos in the brig,” he said, with a big smile. When neither the other man nor me smiled back he quickly became all business and pulled a Polaroid camera from a canvas bag he carried.

“I have to set up the white screen behind you and then snap a shot or two,” the corporal said, bringing out a rolled bit of white cloth. He then walked to the wall behind me and used thumbtacks to hold it to the wooden surface.

I got up and stood with the cloth behind me, wondering if someone looking at the passport might notice just how amateurish a cutout Polaroid might look, as my regular U.S. passport was so professionally made. I shrugged. The corporal took a couple of photos, held out his hand for the ‘dip,’ pulled the cloth down, and was gone in seconds.

“He’ll be back in a few minutes,” the man said, matter-of-factly, lighting another cigarette. He offered one to me, but I shook my head, sitting down, now understanding that I might not be entering the confinement area of the brig but I wasn’t free to leave unsupervised either.

In only the space of a few minutes, the Lance Corporal was back, stepping through the door and extending his hand with the passport in it. He pulled a blue large envelope from behind him at the same time.

I looked at the envelope. It was a woven thing about the size of an eight by eleven piece of paper but it was deep blue with a beautifully done State Department design on both sides in silver.

“This is a diplomatic bag, which can’t be searched,” the smoking man in front of me said, his hand showing considerably less shaking than it had earlier.

He had been afraid, I realized.

“You, however, for supposed security purposes, can be searched so put all your stuff inside the bag except for the dip.”

“I only have my wallet, some cash, and my regular passport,” I replied.

“That’s your stuff then, plus what’s already inside the bag,” he replied as the corporal moved to the door.

“Whenever you’re ready,” the corporal said, never using the word sir, which seemed strange for his rank.

Marine enlisted, and even company grade officers, generally addressed just about every civilian they met as sir or ma’am.
“Your ride is waiting outside”. At that, he gently closed the door and left.

“What’s already in the bag?’ I asked, not bothering to see how the dip job had turned out. It didn’t matter, I understood. The men at the base knew what they were doing and had probably done it many times before.

“Some papers,” the man said, putting his cigarette out on the floor, as he’d done with the first one, before standing up to grind the butt into the bare unpainted or unstained wood. “You don’t want to read them although there’s no lock on the bag. Just my recommendation.”

I put my stuff into the bag, and noted the thin sheaf of papers inside, before zipping it shut. I could decide what to do when I was on the plane, I knew, so there was no point in delaying. I wanted out of the brig and off the base just about as badly as I’d wanted to get out of Korea.

The man went to the door, opened it, and then waited for me to exit before him like there was some pattern to the whole affair I’d just experienced. The corporal hadn’t been wearing a name tag and the man had never revealed his name or properly introduced himself. For a brief period, like in the F-14, I was the somebody and they were the nobodies. It was an odd feeling, which made me wonder if I was really cut out for the career that had likely been chosen for me.

I walked out of the building to where the corporal stood waiting behind what had to be the same truck I’d been brought to the building in. I dutifully crawled into the back of the thing. The corporal pulled the canvas down and, once again, I was in almost total darkness. It wasn’t a good feeling, but it was better than ending up deeper inside the brig, I knew.

The corporal had never said a word of goodbye or any of that. The truck began moving and I began waiting. My Seiko was back in the room at my old hotel, the one I hadn’t had time to call to have belongings sent to Albuquerque. I waited impatiently, trying to figure out how many hours a commercial flight from Okinawa to LAX, or wherever I might be flying would take. I couldn’t pass the time reading the file inside the bag as there was almost no light so I counted my breaths. Fourteen to a minute, four hundred and twenty to the half hour. The trip took just over forty-five minutes before the truck made its only stop. I wondered about the lack of traffic control devices but there was no way to resolve the mystery of how the vehicle made the trip without stopping.

A portion of the forward bulkhead moved, and a voice yelled back.

Naha Airport, at your service,” the invisible person said, “you can let yourself out.”

I moved the canvas and climbed down. The truck was moving away before I was fully down, but I managed not to fall, shaking my head in wonder. Who were these people I was supposedly teamed up with and why did they have to act with such silent suspicion and even a bit of fear, like I had some communicable disease, or worse?

“Just great,” I said to myself, standing in the sun. I presumed it was mid-day but had no real idea as I went into the main entrance to the modern-looking airport, no doubt built or rebuilt with U.S. taxpayer dollars. I had no ticket, no idea what airlines I was supposed to be on, or any other information.

“How in hell am I supposed to figure this puzzle out?” I said aloud, once I got inside the main hall of the airport lobby.

A long counter extended from one side of the airport to the other as I walked further inside. All the signs were in English with Japanese notations right above the English words.

I stopped at the counter, which was mostly empty. I caught the eye of a uniformed man and held out my dip toward him. He pointed to someone sitting at the counter further toward the far wall. When I got to him he merely held out his hand for my passport, which he glanced at, barely opening it at all.

“Hill,” the man said, shrugging one shoulder. “FTA gate 17 in one hour.”

The man made no move to either search me or take the blue envelope I carried in my left hand. I was relieved, to not only avoid that but to be expected, even if it was in using Chris Hill’s name. The man opened a vertical panel set into the counter and I stepped through.

“FTA,” I whispered to myself as I began walking the long length of the airport. When I came upon Gate 17 I was surprised. There was a 747 nosed into the window. I was able to read Flying Tigers along the side of the plane’s fuselage, as well as angled down the side of the 747’s huge tail. FTA had to stand for Flying Tiger Airlines but there was no ‘airlines’ printed anywhere on its surface. There was nobody in the waiting area so I sat down, trying to relax, although I knew in my heart of hearts that I would never really relax until I hit the ground in the continental United States.

Half an hour later, and suddenly, seemingly almost out of nowhere throngs of people showed up for the flight. Just before they came through the low uncontrolled gate an attendant appeared at the counter. I’d missed her approach because she’d accompanied the flight crew, all of whom took seats near the door down to the plane, as there was no passenger tunnel attached to the gate.

The attendant was polite and efficient, as I explained who I was and produced my diplomatic passport. The woman merely glanced at it and then pulled out a small folder from underneath the counter and slid it across the small panel at the top of that counter toward me.

I took the envelope and opened it, as she waved me aside. I went back to my seat, which wasn’t my seat anymore, as the crowd had taken up all the previously available ones. I leaned against a bare spot on one wall and examined the contents of the envelope. The envelope contained a copy of my ticket to LAX and a boarding pass. I was in seat 3A, which made me smile, as I assumed that somehow, maybe because of my ascension to Hill’s diplomatic status, I was in first class. The trip back home would be a bit more comfortable than I’d thought.

Boarding began with the crew departing first and then everyone else in one muddled mass. I waited. Being in first class meant that I didn’t have to worry and I had no carry-on bag, except for the envelope holding my stuff and the paperwork I was instructed to not read because I wouldn’t like the contents of what it said, which, of course, meant that I had to read it.

I boarded the plane last, climbing up one set of stairs attached to the airport, crossing the tarmac, and then climbing the steep staircase into the forward cabin of the plane. I climbed into disappointment. There was no first class. All the seating aboard was nine abreast, with two on each side of the two aisles and five in the center. My seat was an aisle seat in the center section.

The plane finished loading, taxied, and then took off in short order. Once in the air, I sat back to think before opening the blue envelope, which, in small letters, I hadn’t noticed before indicated it was a diplomatic bag. That made me smile.

“What else would it be?” I whispered aloud.

“Sir?” the young man next to me said.

“Oh, sorry,” I replied, struck by being called sir for the first time in quite a while.

I moved to zip open the bag but then stopped, as the young man spoke again.

“Nice bag,” he said, conversationally.

I exhaled gently, trying to be patient. I knew the flight was one of almost fifteen hours non-stop. There would be plenty of time to get acquainted and talk things over but I was becoming nervous about what might be written on the paper inside the bag. I didn’t need any suspicion or trouble, however, so I decided to wait before opening the bag.

“Thanks,” I replied, knowing that a single word wouldn’t end the conversation. I waited, but the wait wasn’t for long.

“You must be with the Department of State,” he went on.

“Yes,” I answered, before changing the subject. “What do you do that takes you to Okinawa, or are you from there?”

“I work in sales for a bicycle company named Trek, if you’ve ever heard of it. Okinawa’s like Guam in that bicycles are the most common form of transportation, so there’s a big market we want to break into.”

I sat and thought, slipping the blue bag into the folder set into the back of the seat in front of me. The man wasn’t likely a salesman. I had little evidence for my conclusion, other than that he’d called me sir in introducing himself to a conversation. Not only wasn’t he likely a salesman but he was nervous hence why he was talking to me at all. I tried to think of some reason why he’d be nervous, or even slightly fearful, and only one thing came to mind.

“Trek,” I said, rubbing my chin, as if in contemplation. “That company’s a real comer in the market. The new carbon fiber frame coming to market should catapult you guys into the forefront of the business.”

The young man changed before me, becoming expressive and enthusiastic as he described this new development in bicycle technology. I waited and listened, almost wanting to smile to myself, but remaining instead impassive but interested. Finally, after a full ten minutes, he stopped talking for a few seconds.

“Trek isn’t making a carbon fiber frame,” I said, quietly. “I made that up, so who are you really?”

“You made that up?” the young man asked, his voice going all shaky.

“Keep your voice down,” I said quickly, trying to settle him down. “What’s your name and who sent you?”

“Tom Kingston,” he replied. “I’m with the Agency, like you.”

I had to smile at that comment. He might be with the Agency all right but he was a long way from being like me.

“Why are you here, Tom? I asked.

“To protect you,” Tom replied, miserably. “There were death threats.”

“Are you armed?” I asked, my voice being lowered to a whisper as I leaned toward him.

“Yes,” he whispered back, looking around. He held his coat slightly open for me to partially see that he was wearing a shoulder holster with an automatic
upside down inside it.

“Have you ever shot it?” I asked, motioning for him to let go of the coat.

“At the range, once, in training,” he replied. “I’m an analyst, but I’m all they had to send for your protection.

“My protection?” I said, slightly shocked. “Now, without anyone seeing,” I said, grabbing the folded blanket that had come with the seat and pulling it apart, “Cover yourself and pass the weapon to me.”

“What are you going to do with it?” he asked, while he slowly complied with my request.

I took the weapon in my left hand, seeing enough of it under the blanket to realize it was an Austrian Steyr. I pulled the blue bag from where I’d put it, got it under the blanket, and eased the handgun into it.

“The only danger on this flight is this weapon going off, so we no longer have to worry about that.”

“Have you ever shot anybody?” Tom unexpectedly asked.

I looked over at him and wondered how old he was and why anybody in their right mind would have sent him armed aboard a passenger plane. The CIA was again sending me into a sort of bewildering belief, once again, that quite possibly it wasn’t nearly as well held together as I’d thought originally.
I took the sheaf of papers from the bag, glad I had it, as when we landed, I wouldn’t have to explain what I was doing with the Steyr. I sure as hell wasn’t giving it back to the near child next to me.

“How old are you?” I asked him absently, as I began to read the first page of the document.

“Twenty-three,” he said, and then launched into the telling of his life story.

I ignored him, nodding from time to time, although nothing was getting through to me because of what I was reading. I wasn’t going home. I was being sent to training directly from LAX to Cape May, New Jersey, a place I’d never been nor even knew where it was. I put the papers back into the bag.

There was no way I was going to Cape May, no matter what orders I might be given. I had to get home and see my wife, my daughter, and my cat, as well as visit the agency I was supposed to be running. Herbert was meeting me at the airport, according to the document, which was intended for him, I knew. I sat back as the kid ran on about himself. He was the same age as I was when I’d been in the Valley, and just about as naïve as I’d been. He wasn’t a kid at all, I realized and what I was might be yet to be determined.