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  Smith lit his own cigarette. “Driscoll will be fine. Nothing can stop him. All he needs to stay in business is a fixed opinion and a broadband connection.”

  “If only we’d left that story alone, it would have been forgotten already.”

  “That’s what I tried to tell you at the time, but you were most insistent, Colonel. It was your decision.” Smith leaned forward. “In fact, everything we did over the last two days was your decision. And that’s what you’re going to tell them back at HQ.”

  “But you were running the show yesterday! That’s what we agreed.”

  Smith cocked his head, smiling. “But Colonel, I am just a humble captain, a lowly gunner eking out the last few years to his pension. Do you mean to say that you abdicated your command to such a one as me? That won’t wash back at HQ.” Smith smiled. “Besides, Colonel, you are the one who privately stole secret technology from our allies to sell on his own account and then lost it inside the Embargoed Zone. If I thought I was going to take the drop, I’d have no choice but to mention that.”

  “You bastard! You wouldn’t!”

  Smith stopped smiling. The two men stared at each other grimly until Smith smiled again. “Am I bluffing?” he asked.

  “No,” White said. He sank lower in his chair and gestured vaguely around him. “It doesn’t look like I’ll be coming back here, Smith. I suppose you’ll have to be acting CO until they appoint a replacement. Oh, well. All I can do now is polish my boots, stick out my chest, and try and talk my way out of it.”

  Smith nodded approvingly. “That’s the spirit, sir. And may I say again how smart you look in your nice air force uniform.”

  “Bullshit,” said the colonel, rising slowly to his feet. “Look.” He pointed to his chest. “The shirt’s ruined—all gray and streaked and mottled-looking! It’s supposed to be regulation white!” He shuffled toward the door. “I gave it to one of those slags who run the VIP compound so she could launder it, and this is how it came back to me! And it’s the only regulation shirt I have on the base! So now I have to go to the most important interview of my career looking like a tramp . . . .” He trailed off in disgust.

  As his hand curled around the doorknob, his rage spilled over. “And when I took it back to the girl and told her to sort it out, she actually refused—the little bitch of a sergeant refused a direct order from me! She said it wasn’t her fault, that it was because of some dodgy new washing machine the general made them install yesterday morning. She said it’s ruining everything they put in it!”

  “Ah, yes,” said Smith. “Our general is very fond of that old grift: you put in for a new piece of equipment from the supply corps, and then when it comes through, you sell it, pocket the money, and replace it with something cheaper from the local black market. The general is very friendly with the local gypsies, as it happens.”

  The colonel left the room. Smith waited until the door clicked shut and then smiled to himself and sucked in a mouthful of McMuffin. He was still chewing when the phone rang. He picked it up.

  “Captain Smith?” It was a woman’s voice, cold, knowing. “This is the bureau of the chief of military intelligence. I have some people from Washington on the line who want to talk to you on a matter of the gravest importance. They’re going to ask you some questions, and I strongly advise you to cooperate.” The phone clicked.

  “Oh, dear God,” Smith whispered.

  “Captain Smith?” It was a grim baritone voice. “This is Special Agent Winton from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Smith shut his eyes and rocked back and forth in his chair. “I’m joined by Special Agent McCabe from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and by Chief Officer Birnbaum from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.” Smith clutched his head in silent despair. “Oh,” Winton added, “there’s also Special Agent Zanetti from the Drug Enforcement Administration.”

  Smith stopped rocking. “Drug enforcement?” he whispered.

  Agent Winton went on: “Tell me, Captain, what do you know about the Aryan Brotherhood?”

  Smith blinked, sat upright. “Only what I saw on the Discovery channel.”

  “Good. Then you’ll know that they are a brutal white supremacist prison gang involved in the traffic of drugs and weapons into and across the United States. Captain, we have recently obtained compelling evidence that the Aryans have linked up with terrorist groups active in your Embargoed Zone. We view this alliance as a major new threat to homeland security, and we’re going to need your help to fight it—your cooperation has already been cleared with your own people, all the way to the top. It’s not going to be easy, Captain, but with enough firepower, men, and money, I’m sure we will prevail.”

  “You can count me in,” said the captain stoutly. “I’m your man.”

  Smith placed the telephone reverently back on his desk, stood, and walked slowly around his office. He glanced at the papers protruding from his fax machine, then dumped them in the bin. Stretching, he smiled sadly at the dead, yellowing terrorists whose pictures lined his walls, then tripped back to his desk and reached for the phone again.

  “Daddy Jesus? . . . Yes, good morning to you, too. And what a lovely morning it is. Look, something has come up—can you get Cobra on the phone for me? . . . No, he’s not going into the program yet. Tell him I have some new work for him. But try and be nice to him this time: we might have to ask him to get some tattoos.”

  EPILOGUE

  The blast from the first missile sent Moon flying across the room. His back thudded dully against the gunmetal door, and his eyes misted over. “So this is what it’s like,” somebody murmured. As he slid to the floor, he was dimly aware of sharp hooves trampling him and the screaming of terrified beasts. The building itself began to heave and dance. The air was full of stinging fragments of brick and concrete, and as Moon closed his eyes for what he hoped would be the last time, he saw rubble and dust flood the room from all sides. He could no longer hear very much, but he felt hot animal breath on his face and then sharp, peglike teeth fastened into his shoulder, and he guessed that he was screaming. But his back was no longer supported, and he was toppling backward, and the donkey had released his shoulder and disappeared from the equation. Something else was biting his legs now, a growing viselike pressure, and Moon opened his eyes and saw that he was lying in the glare of two bright golden eyes and that his legs were being crushed together by a metal door, which was grinding slowly shut on them. Desperately he twisted himself onto his side, freeing his legs enough to pull them through the door after him. On his stomach, he crawled a few feet more into the light and collapsed there, gasping. A damp concrete floor heaved beneath him, yet the sound of the shells was muted now by more than his own broken eardrums. What is this place? he wondered, and then the two golden eyes blinked—first one, then the other—and he realized that they were headlights and that someone or something had just crossed in front of them. A moment later his ribs were jabbed painfully, and Moon understood that someone was kicking him.

  “You there!” shouted a querulous voice. “What are you doing in this tunnel? Go back at once—you’re not allowed to be here!”

  Twisting onto his side again, Moon squinted into the glare and beheld his new adversary. Above him stood a small, dumpy woman of about sixty who was glaring down at him with an expression pitched neatly between anger and exasperation. She had gray hair and wore thick-framed owl glasses, a beige sleeveless safari vest, pressed blue jeans, and a pair of clean white sneakers, one of which now kicked him in the belly.

  “Get out!” she shouted, blinking crossly. “I’m only allowed to take donkeys through the tunnels—those are the rules. I’ll open the door again so you can go back where you came from.”

  Moon felt the ground heave as another salvo of shells fell outside. The old lady was, he reflected, by quite a long way the least scary thing he had encountered in what felt like a very long time. He heaved himself to his feet: he towered above her.

  “I’ll be killed if I go ba
ck out there,” he told her. “You can’t make me.”

  She took a step back from him. “I could always shoot you,” she said doubtfully. “That’s what the general told me to do if a terrorist ever tried to escape this way. Oh, dear . . . oh, dear.”

  And Moon now saw what he had not noticed before, that in her left hand, down by her side, the old lady was holding an automatic pistol. He watched its barrel lift toward him. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he said aloud, and closed his eyes.

  And then he heard a click, and then another, and another, and Moon opened his eyes to see the old lady, her gun still pointing at his face, tugging vexedly at its double-action trigger, the hammer swinging forward and back on an empty chamber.

  Gently, he relieved her of the pistol. “I think you’re supposed to pull back this slide thing here at the back before you can shoot someone,” he told her. “Otherwise it’s not really cocked, or something like that.”

  “Oh, dear,” she said again, and blinked at him through her large spectacles. “I knew I shouldn’t have come here without my gypsies. I’m not supposed to. But I just so wanted to feed the poor things, and the gypsies were all rather drunk today—they came into some extra cash this morning, I don’t know how . . . . Are you going to kill me now?”

  Moon stretched his aching shoulders, looked at the pistol in his hand, then shoved it into his waistband, as he’d seen in the movies. “Not if you get me out of here.”

  She shook her head quickly. “I can’t do that. The tunnels are so secret that hardly anyone knows about them—apart from the top generals and the gypsies, of course. If they found out that the tunnels had been compromised, they’d stop letting me use them for my rescues.”

  Now that Moon’s eyes had grown used to the tunnel, he could see that the headlights belonged to an all-terrain vehicle that was attached to a trailer loaded with hay bales. The ATV almost filled the tunnel, and he smelled rather than heard that its engine was still running. He looked at the old lady again. “Who are you?” he demanded.

  She drew herself up a little straighter and stuck her chin out. “People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.”

  Moon shrugged. “Fine,” he said. “That makes sense, I suppose. Listen, we have the same problem: you don’t want me to be in this tunnel, and I don’t want to be in it either. And neither one of us wants anyone else to ever know that I was here. So I’ll tell you what: if you can get me to the other side of the wall safely, I promise that I will utterly disappear and you’ll never hear of me again.” He was handling this quite well, he realized. He thought of the girl. She would have been quite pleased with him.

  The old lady looked at him suspiciously. “You won’t do any terror?”

  “I won’t do any terror.”

  “And you’ll let me have my gun back? It’s only that the general gave it to me himself. He’s very fond of animals.”

  “I’ll give you your gun back when we’re on the other side. But I’ll keep the bullets if you don’t mind. I expect you can always get some more.”

  She pondered his proposal. “But how do I know you won’t tell people about all this?”

  Moon wormed his way between the bales on the trailer. “Because no one would want to believe me.”

  Somewhere in the darkness, far off down the damp, echoing tunnel, a donkey brayed.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Nuala Haughey, Gabrielle Hetherington, Roisin O’Loughlin, both John O’Loughlins, Peter Straus, Jon Riley, John English, Richard Arcus, Nathaniel Marunas, Eric Lowenkron, Jeroen Kramer, Conn ÓMidheach, Andrew Cuthbertson, and Maeve McLoughlin for their support and/or suggestions and to Sarah Bannan and all at the Arts Council of Ireland, which provided generous assistance.