"So what'd you tell 'em?"

"Said I was an East German, training with their Viet friends."

The colonel laughed at the idea.

"How'd you get away?"

"I got away."

"It was supposed to be a quiet recon."

"It wasn't quiet."

"Shit, you're telling me. Their radio is already screaming to high heaven. They say thirty-eight 'innocent peasants' are dead."

"Most of them were soldiers."

"They blame us; probably they'll get one of their pious friends to raise hell at the UN."

"Why shouldn't they blame us? We did it, didn't we?"

Stratton wrenched himself from a tangle of sodden sheets. His watch said 5:47.

It was still dark in Peking. His eyes felt gummy, his mouth wooden. He glanced at the bottle of whiskey he had bought the night before in the hotel lobby. Less than half full, and still open.

He had not drunk like that for a long time. And he had not hurt like that for a long time. David Wang's death had triggered reactions and dreaded memories he thought he had buried for good.

From the street below came the muted whir of cyclists, harbingers of the morning rush hour. Stratton rejected his body's urging for sleep. His mind would not sleep. Naked, he lurched to the bathroom and turned on the hand shower, hardly noticing that the water was stone cold.

A wrinkled woman with blue-rinse hair and stiff new Hong Kong sandals sat across from Stratton in an anteroom at the U.S. Embassy. Sitting next to her, but obviously on a separate mission, was a slender middle-aged man with a leathery face, a smoker's face. He carried a suede valise.

"How is your tour?" the old woman said to Stratton.

"Not too good," he said hoarsely. News of David Wang's death had left him numb.

Sadness itself was slow in coming. Another old friend dead and-as in Vietnam-Tom Stratton was a long way from tears. Instead he fought a deep, dull melancholy.