"But I mean . . ."
"Chet, come on. We had our kicks. Now you can tell your pals about it and I can tell mine. We'll both get a lot of mileage out of it, won't we?"
"I never intended to tell anybody ..."
But she was already moving away from him, striding toward the men who were running up from the vans. One of them, a civilian, had a camera. He dropped to one knee and snapped a half-dozen pictures of Linda as she walked toward him, holding the plastic bag of film up in one hand and smiling broadly, like a fisherman who had just bagged a big one.
Kinsman stood there with his mouth open-
Jill came back to him. "Well? Did you get what you were after?"
"No," he said slowly. "I guess I didn't."
She started to put her hand out to him. "We never do, do we?"
Age 30
KINSMAN SNAPPED AWAKE when the phone went off. Before it could start a second ring he had the receiver off the cradle.
"Captain Kinsman?" The motel's night clerk.
"Yes," he whispered back, squinting at the luminous digits of his wristwatch. Two twenty-three.
"I'm awfully sorry to disturb you, Captain, but Colonel Murdock himself called ..."
"How the hell did he know I was here?"
"He doesn't. He said he was phoning all the motels around the base. I didn't admit that you were here. He said when he found you he needed you to report to him in person at once. Those were his words, Captain: in person, at once. Something about a General Hatch."
Kinsman frowned in the darkness. "Okay. Thanks for playing dumb."
"Not at all, Captain. Hope it isn't trouble."
"Yeah." Kinsman hung up. For a half-minute he sat on the edge of the king-size bed. Murdock's making the rounds of the motels at two in the morning, Hatch is coming to the base, and the clerk hopes it isn't trouble. Funny.
He stood up, stretched his lanky frame, and glanced at the blonde wrapped obliviously in the bed's tangled sheets. With a wistful shake of his head Kinsman padded to the bathroom.
He shut the door softly and flipped the light switch, wincing. He turned on the coffee machine that hung on the wall above the light switch. It's lousy but it's coffee. Almost. As the machine started gurgling he rummaged in his travel kit for his electric razor. The face that met him in the mirror was lean and long-jawed and just the slightest bit bloodshot. He kept his hair at a length that made Murdock uncomfortable: slightly longer than regulations allowed, not long enough to call for a reprimand.
