We flew on toward the night, the oval porthole set into the curved fuselage of the plane allowing for direct view now that the craft was turned toward the west and the sun wasn’t dancing all over the plexiglass, making everything outside look like it was covered in old Christmas tinsel. I could see the waves down on the surface of the ocean. They looked like short little white worms that appeared briefly and then disappeared again. Forty thousand feet is about eight miles up in the air, and, what with atmospheric effects, that meant truly seeing something by looking down through the window was speculative at best.

I eased back into my window seat, invisibly making an effort to bring reality back to my mind and body. The inside of the plane was real. I was real. My life was out there, however, just as what was passing by at five hundred miles per hour, only millimeters from my right shoulder, was not. Somehow, my entire existence had been subsumed into an organization that only recognized reality when it was thrice proven, when it was confirmed and then reconfirmed twice again.

I glanced over at Nguyen in the middle seat. He was real. He was with me through thick and thin, just like when we were thrown together in the A Shau Valley. He’d taken me in, and I hadn’t known why, nor did I as we passed into the darkness together on the way to Los Angeles. Very briefly, and in the wrong place and position while getting aboard the United flight, I’d asked him why he was taking the time from his family and doing whatever it was he was doing to support his family, to be helping me. Kingsley had been close, the three of us jumbled together, getting to the very back of the plane

“Ten thousand dollars,” Nguyen said, before moving past me to put his carry-on in the overhead compartment.

“Me too,” Kingsley joined in, waiting for Nguyen to sit down so he could occupy his aisle seat.

I looked up at Nguyen struggling and then at Kingsley just standing there waiting.

Kingsley laughed, forcing me to smile, and only then did I sit back, pushing myself deep into my nook-like seat. I was home. My home, so far from my core real home, or was it? While they got themselves comfortable in the ‘luxury seats’ we’d been promised on the flight, seats 47 A, B, and C, I relaxed for the first time since the strangest two missions anyone could ever dream of had started. My night with Mary on Kauai had been tight. Like a thin wire pulled to the point where, if slightly touched, it almost gave out a musical note. I had been going back down, which she disagreed with, but not to the point where she would stop me. I would have stopped, but I was also happy that she hadn’t pushed her constructive version of the button I’d worn on the last dive. My phone call to Herbert at the airport had been in code, and I didn’t understand that either. He was on Oahu, so why in hell wasn’t he meeting me before I boarded to go home? I knew it didn’t matter, but that bothered me. I told him that I hadn’t done anything in either situation, but the people around seemed to believe I’d done it all. His response bothered me.

“That could go any way at all, but it didn’t,” he replied softly. “It went your way. They all think, but they don’t know. You know, but can’t tell. You didn’t do anything. It’s like archery, two arrows. He goes first. Shoots his arrow and misses the target. You do not shoot. You do nothing. You have won. Take it,”

“Okay,” I murmured, not truly understanding the analogy he’d used. “Where am I going next and when?” I asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.

“Majorca, soon,” Herbert said, and then hung up.

I’d stood in the tourist busy airport holding a phone to my ear but there was no one there. Nguyen and Kingsley stared from only a few feet away.

“I understand,” I said into the dead receiver, “and I’ll get right on it when we get to Albuquerque.”

The 747 taxied for a while, and then all four engines were fed with maximum pressure and the giant aircraft smoothly, like a massive horizontal elevator, accelerated down the runway. Once in the air and climbing, I finally got out of  the question Herbert left me with.

“Where’s My Yorka?” I whispered, more to myself than to anyone nearby on the plane.

“Spanish,” Kingsley replied, leaning slightly across Nguyen’s lap.’

I looked over at him, amazed that Nguyen appeared to be asleep in his seat already.

“The ‘y’ is not that,” Kingsley instructed. “Two ‘l’ letters together are pronounced as a ‘y.’ It’s mi-llorca or Mallorca,” he said, sounding like a professor, “which means it’s probably the island located just off the coast of Spain in the Mediterranean called that.”

“Why there of all places?” I said to myself, or thought I said to myself.

“It’s another island,” Kingsley said, hearing my comment and thinking it directed at him. “It would appear that we may be becoming experts in island occurrences.”

“Interesting,” I murmured, my thoughts, however, returning to the recent dive. “Why could I not be told what the cause of the UDT divers developing heart problems was before the dive?” I asked, my voice sounding a bit distant and absent of real care, but my mind concentrated on hearing a response

Nguyen and Kingsley looked at one another for a few seconds.

“They swallowed some of the liquid, which seems to be a common involuntary thing to do, except for you. Some humans appear to be allergic to it, not to mention that it’s also poisonous if consumed through the digestive system. They were afraid that if you knew that, you might swallow inadvertently in thinking about it during the dive.”

There was nothing I could think of to respond to the statement. The Agency had once again knowingly risked my life without telling me or giving me any input into the decision to make the dive. There was no place to go with my thoughts about it, although I perfectly understood why Kingsley and Nguyen had gone along with the medical decision. Would I have gone down if I’d known? I knew that question would haunt me for some time to come.

I sat back in my seat, determined not to sleep and screw up my timetable for getting back home. I needed to get there, get centered in, showered, and then down in my bed for a real night’s sleep. Mallorca would come soon enough I knew, as it seemed that missions with the Agency came up seemingly all on their own, while unrevealed leaders upstairs selected participants and then sent them off to execute such mission with a whole lot less prior planning and preparation than I would have every believed possible before becoming a part of it all. My thoughts turned to my parents, whom I hadn’t been allowed an opportunity to visit, even though the Agency had to know that they were within miles and closer for the entirety of my missions there. Emotional support and attachment didn’t seem to be part of the CIA’s motivational material or application. That would have to wait.

Somehow, I had to come to terms with what my father was and what I was about him. No matter how much I concentrated on trying to understand, there was no conclusion I could come to that had the two of us being anything like what I thought a normal father and son should be like. I closed my eyes. I had a son. His name was Michael. I could do one thing, and that was make sure that my relationship with him was as solid as a rock and not this fractured mess I was trying to patch together with my father.

“We are on final approach into LAX,” a voice said, next to my right ear as ai snapped awake.

“I looked out the window and then back towards Nguyen and Kingsley. Both men were smiling.

“I slept through the whole flight?” I asked, not needing an answer and not getting one.

Unaccountably, on final approach coming into the Los Angeles Airport, there was music playing through the overhead speakers. I recognized the unmistakable, calming but twangy singing of Cat Stevens, taking me back to my years in San Clemente:  “Oh, how can I try to explain? ‘Cause when I do, he turns away again. It’s always been the same, same old story. From the moment I could talk, I was ordered to listen. Now there’s a way, and I know that I have to go away
I know I have to go…”

Suddenly, in the middle of the song, the sound went dead.

Not in my mind, though. It was like I was being sent a message from God, even though I was certain God didn’t send people messages through song lyrics. Thinking that would be crazy, almost as crazy as most of my life had become

The landing was uneventful, only the fact that we would have to deplane and then catch another for the short eight-hundred-and-eighty-mile trip to Albuquerque being a bother. I was still tired. Kingsley somehow managed to pay somebody off who was driving one of those golf carts up and down the hallways. It took nearly half an hour to get to the next gate, mostly because a Chinese food place was along the way, and it served a Vietnamese noodle soup called Pho, and Nguyen couldn’t pass it up. All three of us sat on the cart, eating the different but very delectable soup. We rode to the gate and checked in. I went over to a bank of phones and called the CIA. I was told to hang up the phone and wait for it to ring, which I did, wondering how in hell the Agency could know the number to call back on in the middle of a major airport. The phone rang after less than thirty seconds.

“Beachball,” was all Herbert laconically said.

“Godfather,” I replied, as if I was associating in one of those psycho-therapy group encounters. Marco and Polo might have been better but whom would know.

“You’re down in L.A.,” Herbert murmured.

“Yes, thanks for letting me know,’ I replied, being a wise ass but not caring. “Mallorca, Spain,” I followed up with immediately.

“When? I have Bankers Life of Iowa, with Pat Bowman, International SOS with Colonel Weh, I have a Ph.D. program course of study, and I’ve got a family to try to slap back together after the Kauai mistake.” I stopped talking and waited.

“We’re not secure,” Herbert said, unsurprisingly.

“All I asked was when,” I said, whispering, while crouching down to be able to cup my hand over it and whisper into at the same time.

“Three days.” Herbert replied.

“I’m not diving again, at least for a while,” I said, meaning every word as the two missions had somehow sapped me of my normal core of energy, and I wasn’t getting it back like I’d thought I would.

“No, it’s a school there. English as a second language. It’s a woman there, the head of that school. No diving. No physical requirements at all. Not like those UDT Frogmen. You didn’t have to do that, not right there in front of everyone. They live, work, and train on Ford Island. Stop doing stuff like that.”

“Nothing happened there,” I said in surprise, holding the phone out from me like it was a foreign instrument.

“A broken finger here and a cheekbone there,” yes, something happened, and don’t go mission-related on me, as that was after the mission,” Herbert nearly spat out into his receiver.

I turned to face Nguyen and Kingsley. Nguyen still had a noodle stuck to one side of his mouth. I pressed the phone to my side so Herbert couldn’t hear.

“What did you guys do to those Frogmen on the island?” I hissed.

“The one was pointing at you, so I made him point somewhere else,” Nguyen said, managing to rescue and then consume the errant noodle.

“The other one was clumsy, fell down and hit his head but he was fine, really.” Kingsley said turning to look into Nguyen’s eyes and then both of them looking back at me with expressions of innocence only two three year olds would be proud of.

I pulled the phone up to the side of my head.
“There was a discussion, a disagreement, and then some physical confusion and articulation of the situation,” I said, before trying to change the subject. “When am I going to start training?”

“Training?” Herbert yelled into the receiver, for the first time. “You’re not CIA training material. You’re not UDT training material. You’re not Marine Corps training material. I have no idea what in hell you are other than the most difficult agent I’ve ever been assigned,” and then he hung up.

It was becoming a habit pattern that the more heroic my feats were, the less respect I seemed to be given. I also realized that I’d successfully changed the subject, but not necessarily to a better subject than the one I’d veered away from.

There were no three days, however. There was one day and one night, during which both periods I worked feverishly at the office, at home, and on the phone. My son was swimming eight and under at the nearby tennis and swim club, while my daughter was acting in one of her school plays, plus Christmas was right around the corner. Puerto Rico and all of that hostage rescue stuff had gone away only to be replaced by the demands of building a medical insurance company from scratch, starting a medical evacuation flight company and getting some more sales to make ends meet in commissions and finally putting off the men in Korea waiting for me to help install contracts there as well as write and get signed the agreement with the main hospital in Seoul to accept direct payments for our insureds.

With plenty of ‘counseling’ from my wife and arrangements with the Agency I departed on the connecting flight early the next morning to New York and on to Copenhagen and then Palma on Mallorca from there, assuring my wife that it was merely a diplomatic mission and that I’d be home in two days and have the extra time I’d been promised. She knew I was likely making things up as I went along, but said nothing. I could feel her disappointment in not only the situation but in me as the plane
The flights were grueling only in that the time was so long, and I couldn’t sleep on airplanes unless I had five empty seats across and was flying in the middle of the night, which were not the conditions I encountered.

Arriving, finally, late the next day, where I was, I found first the rental car agency called ‘Fine-tuned,’ and then, getting a map of the island from the strange outfit’s front desk, I figured out where the hotel was in a suburb outside the city along the Calvia coast.

The only good news wasn’t about the deteriorating weather, as huge storm clouds were rising across the horizon. The car was good news. It was a Dodge Omni, but not just any Dodge Omni. It was labeled on both sides as a GLHS, and then the name SHELBY was set in front of the Omni designation in silver tape. I smiled as I approached. I’d reserved an economy car, not the pocket rocket that I’d received had to be. I tossed my bag onto the passenger seat, went around, and got behind the wheel.
I reached across the dashboard and opened the glove box, relieved that there was a book inside. I read the identification title and, without opening the book, immediately knew what the smaller lever was. It was the actuator for the overdrive differential at the back of the car. The shift knob showed four forward gears and reverse. The overdrive wasn’t just a higher top gear. The very special car wasn’t only a veritable eight-speed. It was also turbocharged.

I started the engine, noting the tachometer on the dashboard with a red line of 6000. It took me only a few attempts and some accommodation of the unusual gearing to figure out that hitting the floorboard to 6000 in first gear took me to 32 MPH, then tapping the clutch, I pushed the smaller spring-actuated overdrive lever. The tach dropped to 4500 and then hit 6000 again, almost immediately taking the car to 53 MPH. I repeated the sequencing through the four gears but didn’t shift up from fourth because the Shelby was already doing 114 without it, and I was running out of open highway. I grinned to myself, loving everything about a car I’d never heard of, much less driven or wanted to drive.

The run around the inlet proved to be perfect in the rain and with a huge thunderstorm brewing up in the night, lightning hitting streaks of bright white looking like such strands of white hair blowing back and forth in a movie witch’s stringy long hair. I’d looked up the area surrounding the hotel on a Michelin map so nicely pinned to the wall in the lobby. The run around the inlet was four miles, although I could stand at the pool and look at the other side of the water to easily tell that the distance as the crow flies was only about three hundred meters.

I planned to run the distance, take my shoes off, place them in a hidden spot, and then dive off the cliff and swim across to the hotel. I shared my workout plan with Matthew, the concierge guy wearing a pin that had two gold keys crossed on his lapel, and he agreed with everything except for the swim, which he thought too risky at night, with high surf warnings and the potential of a building storm.

I got changed in the room where Dave White was getting ready to retire after too many drinks at the bar, I could change at the hotel once climbing out of the inlet, get in the Shelby and drive to collect my shoes. Dave, although a wet worker (as in blood), had no interest at all in working out at all.

There was nobody out as I considered implementing my workout plan. I hoped at some point in my future that my sleep habits, modified to the extreme in the A Shau Valley combat, would return to some sort of normalcy, but it wasn’t to be yet. A good run and cold swim would likely let me get a few hours after the workout I knew, especially if the hotel’s water heater was up to exceeding a hundred and thirty degrees, which I’d learned most were not.

The mission brief Dave had carried with him indicated that the mission should be relatively quick, simple, and peaceful, although why they’d sent one of the Agency’s premier knuckle draggers seemed at odds with such a conclusion, except for the fact that he was fluent in Spanish while I wasn’t. The woman who ran the International School in Palma was an asset of the U.S. Intelligence services and more. Many students at her school were from all sorts of communist or authoritarian countries, and those students were an avenue through which the CIA could reach and convince some foreign leaders or specialists to defect. The school had been extremely successful until a Spanish mafia chieftain sent his kids there. Suddenly, the woman was in danger, as the mafia wanted a good piece of the very profitable proceeds of the school’s tuition. When that proposal was deemed to be unworkable by the woman, then death threats followed. Someone, or some force, that being myself, David, and the CIA, had to be called in to reason with the mafia in hopes of avoiding the loss of the woman, the school or other potential violence.

I’d never dealt with the mafia before, and certainly had no experience with some arm of that kind of organization endemic to a foreign culture. The woman, whom we hadn’t yet met, arranged a meeting for the next day at the school with what she told them were the members of the school’s board of directors. I’d never served on a corporate board before. The whole mission seemed pasted together like some sort of puzzle where the pieces didn’t fit, so epoxy was used to make it all hold together. I was rapidly being introduced to the idea that many of the Agency’s missions were not the intricately planned and executed operations I’d always assumed.

By the time I was dressed out and ready it was raining heavily. Neither the colder temperature nor the wetness of the rain was anything other than welcome to me. The cold allowed for a faster run and the rain would prevent traffic or almost anyone being out along the way. The streetlights were few but sufficient to guide me.

Half an hour into the run part of my plan, I was approaching the end of the prominence leading to the cliff’s projecting outer edge. I turned my running into ambling for the last few meters, as I came around a vertical edge of fractured rock, beginning my search for the right hiding spot I could place my shoes in. I stopped and bent down slightly to examine a low bush when a chunk of wood came out of the dark. I caught only a glimmer of light that reflected from its wet round surface. I ducked, and the wooden bat struck the rock, having missed my head by an inch or less.

I went into a freezing shock, instantly turning to press my back into the rock face, both hands outstretched to steady me. My right hand grabbed a rock about the size of a small melon, which came loose in my hand, destabilizing my whole body to the point where I went down to my knees. The bat swung again, and the person being it still invisible. I was saved by my fall to the earth. From my tight crouch, I sprang upward before the bat was returned for another attempt. I plunged my rock-holding hand upward with all my might and felt it strike something solid but not so solid. The sound and feel were like hitting upward into the underside of a model Lincoln log house, with wet breaking wood, although no pieces rained down, instead a body coming out of the night and falling prone in front of me, the bat bouncing and rolling under the bush I’d been checking out.

My hand hurt. I pulled it back, forcibly releasing my fingers from the death grip I had on the rock. The rock stayed embedded in the underside of his head, the rain and poor light not allowing for close examination. I didn’t need it, though. I knew the man was dead. My hand-driven rock, punched up in panic and desperation, had penetrated up through the underside of his jaw and gone right up into his cranium.

I sat, cradling my hand and working the fingers to make sure I could swim, as I knew right away that I wasn’t going to run back to the hotel and expose myself to more potential and likely very deadly violence. I searched the body once I determined that my hand was probably just bruised a bit. There was nothing on him, only a watch and the bat lying nearby. He was fully clothed with no seeming protection against the rain and no flashlight to see better in the night.

The view from the edge of the cliff, looking down into the rolling, roaring, and smashing surf break on and into the rocks, was more than invigorating; it was exhilarating. I was in the water. I was one with the water. I moved slightly down and into myself, like a snake coiling without that structure. I didn’t have to think as I dived from the cliff into the tumultuous swelling and changing massiveness of what was below me. The water was cold, and I needed to be cold. The water was covered in salty foam, but I went right down through it, plunging as deep as my dive would take me. I lived above but went deep for life as the sea raged in its forever war against vertical faces of unbreakable dolomite rock faces that could only be conquered by the wear of time pounding their surfaces to be allowed in, through, and ever onward.

I came up through the top of a mighty swell and faded away with it as the rock walls rebuffed and beat back the sea’s attack. I used almost no effort, not fighting my way across the channel but letting the other side of the passage draw me to it. I rose and fell, swell after swell, until my feeble paddling inched me to the other side. In the middle of such wave-jousting turmoil, I felt safe, my journey slow but assured, as once away from rocky encounters, the water was soft, friendly, and mine.

The body of one once living lay unprotected from the grasping wisps of blowing foam and salty circumstance. My place in being a part of that lost life would never be found, the channel of monstrous sea fury a visage of impossibility to cross for any human other than a human creature of the sea, in the sea, with the sea and always moving with it away, not from the hardness of all land matter but simply in and out like a receding and flooding tide.

I could only see the shore up on the permission of the higher swells as I let the ocean water decide just how it was going to place this land animal among it, back onto the hardness of earth, the hardness of life, the grand hardness of life’s circumstance. The far shore was no shore at all. It was a series of fortified walls set perpendicular to the direction of the raging ocean. The walls would not give way to wet forces unless millennial time was to be applied. The one angled wall that came down from a corner of the hotel’s outdoor pool became my target of intent.

The surging swells were consistent in coming to the surface of that wall every eleven seconds, but varying in size from a few meters to up to ten meters. The big swells are not the danger unless the small swells are used as a welcome mat, in which case the great monster swells would then crush the little ones with whatever those attract. I waited, like a fisherman’s bobber, going slightly up and then down as just the right combination of dynamically changing wave altitudes had to be measured, gauged, and then guessed at.

My partner, David, was fast asleep in the room we shared, a hundred and fifty feet up from where I played with and inside my ocean. I could not use the lobby, the elevators, or even the stairs to reach that room as the body lying on the far shore would bring an ever-expanding set of human interest layers to the hotel when dawn opened and real life began all over again. I was not naked. I’d left nothing behind as I’d shed the shirt, the shorts, the shoes, and the socks as I’d made my way to the far point and my entry into the wildly loving ocean only minutes ago. No, I would have to climb when I was on wet land again. Our room was on the outer face of the hotel, and all those rooms had balconies. The balconies were made of heated and twisted black Spanish iron, the railings of teak with Spanish tiles for flooring.

I bobbed offshore, calculating the numbers I knew from before. The balconies were almost exactly six and a half feet from the top railing of one to the bottom bar of the next above, which was almost perfect for my height with arms extended, although I would climb to the balcony next door and go back and forth as I made my way up to the the fifteenth floor. Would the sliding glass door be open or at least unlocked? Would Dave not have taken a glass of wine or something stronger and stood to look out on the magnificence of the harbor, the far shore, and the Mediterranean Sea beyond before going to bed? I didn’t want to wake him. I didn’t know enough about him not to be concerned there. Was he a fucking new guy or a stranger to the wet work our missions sometimes devolved into?

The sea created just the right combination to eject me from its loving embrace. Two larger swells joined forces to sweep over a much smaller fellow traveler but did not break against the wall; instead, merely surging up it, like they’d gotten together to explore a bit. I was right there at the top of their game and literally, with only a few powerful frog kicks and pulls of both arms breast-stroke style, twisted around and sat on the edge of the wall. I was amazed but not stupid, so I moved away from the edge just as quickly as I could.

I crouched in the bushes that separated the civilized pool area from the wildness of the real nature’s waters. I was wet, but it was raining, so that was okay. I was only wearing my Hanes underwear, however, and no matter the time, that was not going to be acceptable attire for getting back through the lobby area, not if I didn’t want to be remembered as having come in at a certain hour in a certain condition anyway.

I looked at my wrist. I’d taken the man’s watch, which made me a bit uncomfortable, taking me back to the stuff we Marines still living would ‘inherit’ from the dead in the A Shau Valley, and the watch with radioactive dials told me it was almost three in the morning. The watch was a little loose, but it had a single deployment clasp that made it easy to put on or take off. That it was a brand called Audemars bothered me more than the fact that I’d taken a dead man’s watch as my own. Audemars was a Swiss brand of watch that was very costly, more than almost any Rolex, but not nearly as recognizable. The man had been of more substance than I’d guessed him to be, and that could be more than bothersome.
I

had to climb, awaken Dave, let him know that I’d killed my first human being since Vietnam, and then figure out who else had to die since the gauntlet had been thrown down, no doubt by the mafia chieftain, my workout plan reported by the hotel employee and possibly even Dave and my presence on the island by the woman running the school herself. There was no pulling out or pulling back, I knew, not if Dave and I wanted to survive. I so wished I had Nguyen and Kingsley at my side or waiting in the room, instead of a hungover knuckle dragger I’d never worked with before.

I crawled from my jungle-like hiding place and began my naked climb up the building. I whispered to myself Christ’s supposed last words spoken on the cross: “They know not what they do…”