Shadowfires

to convey a threat: “Listen, asshole,
when you get stateside again, just remember
I'll be there, waiting for you. I'll know when
you're coming home, and I'll have a greeting ready for you.”
    Ben had not taken the threat seriously. For one thing, well before
the court-martial, Sharp's hesitancy on the battlefield had grown worse, so bad on some occasions that he had come perilously close to disobeying orders rather than risk his precious skin. If he had not been brought to court for theft, black-marketeering, drug dealing, and statutory rape, he very likely would have been arraigned on charges of desertion or other offenses related to his increasing cowardice. He might talk of stateside vengeance, but he would not have the guts for it. And for another thing, Ben was not worried about what would happen to him when he went home because, by then, for better or worse, he had committed himself to the war until the end of it; and that commitment gave him every reason to believe he would go home in a box, in no condition to give a damn whether or not Anson Sharp was waiting for him.
    Now, descending through the shadowy forest and at last reaching
the first of the half-cleared properties where houses were tucked in
among the trees, Ben wondered how Anson Sharp, stripped of rank and
dishonorably discharged, could have been accepted into training as a
DSA agent. A man gone bad, like Sharp, usually continued skidding
downward once his slide began. By now he should have been on his
second or third term in prison for civilian crimes. At best, you
could have expected to encounter him as a seedy grifter scratching
out a dishonest living, so pathetically small-time that he did not
draw the notice of the authorities. Even if he had cleaned up his
act, he could not have wiped a dishonorable discharge off his record.
And with that discredit, he would have been summarily rejected by any law-enforcement agency, especially by an organization with
standards as high as those of the Defense Security Agency.
    So how the hell did he swing it? Ben wondered.
    He chewed on that question as he climbed over a split-rail fence
and cautiously skirted a two-story brick and weathered-pine chalet,
dashing from tree to tree and bush to bush, staying out of sight as
much as possible. If someone looked out a window and saw a man with a
shotgun in one hand and a big revolver tucked into the waistband at
his back, a call to the county sheriff would be inevitable.
    Assuming that Sharp
wasn't lying when he had identified himself as a Defense Security Agency operative-and there seemed no point in lying about it-the next thing Ben had to wonder about was how far Sharp had risen in the DSA. After all, it seemed far too coincidental for Sharp to have been assigned, by mere chance, to an investigation involving Ben. More likely Sharp had arranged his assignment when he had read the Leben file and discovered that Ben, his old and perhaps mostly forgotten nemesis, had a relationship with Rachael. He'd
seen a long-delayed chance for revenge and had seized it. But surely
an ordinary agent could not choose assignments, which meant Sharp
must be in a sufficiently high position to set his own work schedule.
Worse than that: Sharp was of such formidable rank that he could open
fire on Ben without provocation and expect to be able to cover up a
murder committed in the plain sight of one of his fellow DSA
operatives.
    With the threat of Anson Sharp layered on top of all the other
threats that he and Rachael faced, Ben began to feel as if he were
caught up in a war again. In war, incoming fire usually started up
when you least expected it, and from the most unlikely source and
direction. Which was exactly what Anson Sharp's appearance was: surprise fire from the most unlikely source.
    At the third mountainside house, Ben nearly walked in among four
young boys who were engaged in their own stealthy game of war,
alerted at the last minute when one of them sprang from cover and
opened fire on another with a cap-loaded machine gun. For the first
time in his life, Ben experienced a vivid flashback to the war, one
of those mental traumas that the media ascribed to every veteran. He
fell and rolled behind several low-growing dogwoods, where he lay
listening to his pounding heart, stifling a scream for half a minute
until the flashback passed.
    None of the boys had seen him, and when he set out again, he
crawled and belly-crawled from one