"But you don't know?"

"That's right. I don't know for sure."

But that, of course, was a lie.

He thought to himself: Did you kill anyone, grandfather?

And then the honest answer: Yes, I did. I killed a man. And not with a bomb dropped from the air. But it's a long story.

He felt the obituary in his pocket, tapping the fabric of his shirt with his hand.

And now I can tell it, he thought.

The old man stared up into the sky once again, and sighed deeply. Then he turned to the task of discovering the narrow inlet into Whale

Harbor. He knew all the navigation buoys by heart, knew each light that dotted the Florida shoreline. He knew the local currents and the daily tides, could feel the slip of the boat through the water, and knew if it was being pulled even slightly off its course. Steering through the darkness, he traveled slowly, but steadily, with the utter confidence of a man walking late at night through his own house.

Chapter One

The Navigator's Recurring Dream

He had just awakened from the dream when the tunnel coming out beneath Hut 109 collapsed. It was just before dawn, and it had been raining hard off and on since midnight.

It was the same dream as always, a dream about what had happened to him two years earlier, as close to being as real in the dream as real was until the very end.

In the dream, he didn't see the convoy.