Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,

Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,

Be in their flowing cups freshly remembered

This story shall the good man teach his son,

And Crispin Cnspian shall ne'er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remembered-

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers

For he today that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother Be he ne'er so vile.

This day shall gentle his condition

And gentlemen in England now abed

Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Cnspin's Day.

-W Shakespeare, Henry V.

Every normal man must be tempted, at tunes, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats -H L Mencken.

June 7, continued.

"Here's the way it works," Henry Bowman said to his prisoner as he rolled the foam earplugs between his fingers, compressing them. "I've got a few things to do. I'm going to let you sit here and think about what you're going to say to me when I get back. Jackson's taped up, same as you, on the other side of the barn. I'm going to ask her a bunch of questions, and I'm going to ask you the same questions. I already know the answers to most of them, but you won't know which ones. When you lie or hold out, it's going to get a lot worse." Henry slipped the plugs, one at a time, into Blair's ears. They started to expand slowly.

Wilson Blair could not see his captor, nor in fact had he ever gotten a look at his face. Blair was sitting on the ground with his spine against the six-inch diameter trunk of a silver maple. His arms were behind him, taped together from the wrists to the elbows. He had zero leverage, and it hurt. Duct tape also encircled his forehead and neck, binding his head to the tree and rendering it almost immobile. The roll was still attached to the last wrap around the trunk.

"Open up," Henry commanded from Blair's back as he reached around the tree trunk and showed the man a golf ball in one hand and the wicked looking Applegate knife in the other. Blair grudgingly opened his mouth, only half noticing that the golf ball seemed to be dripping with moisture.

Henry popped the golf ball past Blair's teeth and shoved the point of the knife firmly against the flesh behind the man's chin to force his mouth closed. He held the knife there as he grabbed the roll of duct tape with his free hand and wrapped four layers around Blair's mouth, neck, and the tree trunk, then covered the man's eyes with the last turn.

"I'll be back in fifteen minutes," Henry Bowman said in a loud voice so that Blair could hear him through the earplugs. "Remember, it can get a lot worse." As Henry walked over to the side of the barn where G.G. Jackson was similarly restrained, he heard Blair making tortured, guttural noises through his nose. Wilson Blair was now acutely aware that the liquid coating on the golf ball in his mouth was not water.

Henry had taped Jackson to a wheeled platform truck that Allen Kane used to move ammo crates. He pulled another pair of foam earplugs from his pocket, and spent the next two minutes administering the same treatment to the woman agent.

"I'll be back in fifteen minutes," Henry lied again as he wrapped the duct tape around Jackson's head. Before he covered the woman's eyes, Henry saw them bulging and beginning to water, and her nostrils flaring. After wrapping the tape over her eyes, Henry checked once more that all her bonds were secure and there was no way she could escape, and walked quietly back to where Wilson Blair sat against the tree.

Blair's upper body was heaving, and the cords in his neck stood out as he tried to move his immobilized head. His jaw was working, trying to move the golf ball around to a different spot in his mouth, in the vain hope that such action would lessen his agony. At the angle his arms were held, Blair had no leverage, and the many wraps of tape were not about to fail.

Henry smiled and walked back around the house. I don't think you can die from Habanera juice in your mouth he thought to himself. But I guess we'll find out. He looked at his watch as he trotted back to the barn. Almost midnight. Good thing I never needed all that much sleep he told himself. What Henry Bowman had to do next was going to take a lot longer than fifteen minutes.

June 8.

It took more effort than Henry ever would have imagined to get the jacket and shirt off the black corpse, but when he finally accomplished this and tried them on, they were a decent fit. Levar Williams had stood a good four inches taller than Henry, and Bowman knew that the black agent's pants would be much too long. The ones worn by the white man who had the MP5 looked to be a little big in the waist, but about the right length. It turned out that they were, and after he cinched the belt tight, Henry decided they would pass muster. Henry took off the jacket and shirt, and put the collar of the shirt in a basin of cold water to soak out the bloodstains. Then he used his double-edged folding knife to cut the rest of the clothes off the four dead ATF agents.

Now for the bad part Henry said to himself as he stripped to his underwear in the back corner of the shop, put his shoes back on, and reached up to the section of pegboard where Allen Kane hung his various types of hand saws. His eyes then fell on a kukri, the curved weapon used by the Ghurkas in Nepal, that lay on Kane's workbench. Henry had once used a kukri to cut a yellow pine two-by-four in half with three strokes. Might as well try them all he thought, as he took two saws from the pegboard, and grabbed the heavy blade with his other hand.

By the time Henry had finished his grisly chore, he was covered with blood. He washed himself off with the garden hose before loading the cargo in the back of the van. Then he washed up again, returned to the shop, and started to go through the personal effects of the six government agents.

In addition to their badges and federal ID, each of them had the usual assortment of family photos and personal items. Seeing those things made Henry feel worse about what he had done. He put them aside and popped the latches on the briefcase Wilson Blair had been carrying.

What he found inside made him forget all about family snapshots, and he put his head in his hands. What am I going to do now? he asked himself. Then he remembered something that he seen when he was twenty years old.

For a period of about two decades, the men of the Amherst College Glee Club had gone on goodwill concert tours every other summer, singing in a number of foreign countries. Henry Bowman had gone to Europe one summer with the Glee Club, and during the time the group was in France, Henry and a friend had rented a car on one of their few free days. They had visited the museums and beaches at Normandy, where Henry's Uncle Max had landed in a glider on June 6, 1944.

There had been restored gliders, period photos, descriptions of the planning of the invasion, and many other impressive exhibits at the various museums, along with the terribly moving sight of the vast expanse of perfectly aligned crosses in the cemetery. The thing that Henry Bowman remembered most vividly, however, was a small exhibit of memorabilia from past D-Day anniversaries that one of the museums had assembled.

One of the items was a June 6 clipping from an American newspaper printed many years after the war. It showed a paunchy man wearing glasses and sitting in an overstaffed armchair in his living room, drinking a beer. The story focused on the human-interest angle, describing how, in May of 1944, the man's family had been sent a telegram saying that he had been killed in action. Several months later, the family had learned that their son was still alive. The reason for the error was that the young G.I. had been captured by the Germans in France, but had later managed to kill one of his captors, change clothes and I.D. with him, and bluff his way to safety in a German uniform. In the meantime, the Nazis had found a corpse dressed in U.S. fatigues with U.S. dogtags around its neck, and had dutifully notified the proper authorities.

The author of the newspaper item had focused on the family's joy those long years ago at learning their son was alive and well, and on what the man had done with his life since. Henry Bowman, however, had found something much more amazing in the yellowed article. In telling his story to the reporter, the man had used barely a whole sentence mentioning what he had been doing in France several weeks before the Normandy invasion, before detailing his capture and escape. He had parachuted, alone, into occupied France in midApril. His assignment had been to destroy and disrupt German communications in any way he could, while avoiding detection or capture.

"I can't believe this!" Henry Bowman had said to his friend. There was a smaller photo of the man that the paper had printed, taken at the time he had enlisted. He looked like he worked in a gas station. Henry had stabbed his finger at the small picture in the framed clipping.

"Here's some nineteen-year-old kid from Moosefuck, Georgia. You know he doesn't speak a word of any foreign language, and probably hasn't ever been a hundred miles outside where he was born, before he joined the army.

"Now they slap a 'chute on him, hand him a pair of wire cutters and a couple tins of beef jerky, and say 'Good luck, Duane. Go knock out all the radio transmitters you can, and cut a few phone lines while you're at it, but for Christ's sake don't get caught. Food? Shelter? Krauts everywhere? Everybody speaking languages you don't understand? Hell, boy, you'll figure something out. Reinforcements? Well, son, that's top secret, and fact is, it's still in the planning stage. Let's just say you shouldn't count on any backup for, oh, a couple months, okay? See you later,' and they boot his ass out the door of a Gooney Bird at ten thousand feet in the middle of the night over enemy territory. Jesus!"

"Looks like he did okay," his friend had said.

"No shit," Henry had replied. Henry Bowman had never forgotten the enormity of what that young man had been expected to do, and had done willingly.

Well, Duane Henry said to himself as he looked at the contents of the open briefcase, you got lots more'n a set a wire cutters, plenty to eat, and there ain't but two enemies in this territory, and they's tied up. Whatcha bitchin' for, boy?

"Okay, it's time to talk," Henry said to G.G. Jackson after he had used one of the keys on his keyring to snag the foam earplugs and pull them out of her ears. He flicked open the blade of his knife and carefully sliced through the layers of tape covering her mouth.

An hour and a half of extreme discomfort coupled with sight and sound deprivation had taken its toll. G.G. Jackson had barely enough strength to weakly spit out the golf ball. She made a series of horrendous hacking noises as she fought for breath through the layers of mucous that had been draining down her throat. Henry held a dipper of water to her lips, then followed it with a piece of bread.

"Long as I keep getting answers, you can keep getting more. If you stop, well, I've got another golf ball here."

"No!" she gasped. "No, I'll tell you. 'S nothin' to me. 'Sped you know most of it a'ready," she panted. Then she began to talk.

In less than ten minutes, G.G. Jackson was repeating herself. It seemed obvious to Henry that she was a foot soldier, and had not been a part of the strategy session where the raid had initially been planned. "Which agents were on the other raid teams?" Henry asked suddenly. Jackson replied immediately.

"Don't know none of 'em. Blair, he picked 'em all. Talked 'bout how good this was going to look, how we was all going to get on the news, like it would mean a big promotion. Was another team in Ohio for Millet's place, an' one in Missouri for that other fella. You want names, get him to turn on that computer of his he so proud of. It pro'ly tell you name, address, an' what they eat f'breakfast. It's under the front seat of the van."

Computer? I missed the laptop when I loaded up the van Henry though, reprimanding himself silently. I'll give it a once-over while he stews a little longer.

"What about the funny money?" Henry demanded, suddenly changing the subject to keep the woman offbalance. Jackson looked blank, then shook her head.

"Wasn't no money," she said as she spat and swallowed. "Wasn't gettin' paid no extry. Blair promised us two more days off, full pay, for workin' at night. Just bust in an' drag out all the guns. Take lots of pictures."

Henry nodded. He had found enough camera gear in the van to outfit a mobile news crew. He decided not to mention the pictures he had found to Agent Jackson. He was virtually certain that she knew nothing about them.

"I think it's time I had a talk with your boss," Henry said, and began walking towards the house. It would only take a minute to find the computer and see if any of the files on it were encrypted before interrogating the ATF supervisor.

Wilson Blair had had an even stronger reaction to the hot pepper juice and had been in even worse shape than G.G. Jackson. It took almost fifteen minutes before he was able to communicate intelligibly. That was more than enough time for Henry to position the small tape recorder behind him in the grass. The batteryoperated unit was one that Allen Kane, like most firearms dealers, used whenever he talked to ATF agents on the telephone. When Blair did start talking, he began spilling his guts.

Henry had suspected that Blair would know a lot more about the raid than the young black woman. He had not counted on the fact that Wilson Blair was the one who had conceived and designed the entire operation. Over the next half hour, he told Henry about the entire three-part raid, starting with the phone taps. Henry's guts turned over when he realized that it was only because he had used his cellular instead of Allen's phone that he'd been able to surprise the six-agent raiding party.

Henry Bowman knew that his life was now irreversibly altered, and that this would be the case regardless of where he had been that evening-at home in Missouri, with Allen Kane in the mountains in Idaho, or sitting in Kane's Indiana shop. Henry cursed his luck, then flashed back to what he had told Danielle Pelletier more that two decades before when she'd found out he'd tried to enlist in Vietnam: When you get the opportunity to control more of your own f uture, grab it with both hands. He nodded to himself. At least this way, Henry thought as he stared at the back of Wilson Blair's head, I've got some say in what happens next.

At about one-thirty in the morning, Wilson Blair finally decided that maybe this man was not going to kill him as he had the four others, and the ATF supervisor risked asking a few questions of his own. "What is your name, and what agency do you work for?" Blair finally demanded. "Why have your people interfered with our operation? And why won't you let me see your face?"

Jesus! Henry thought. This guy still thinks I'm a fed! He considered this for a few moments, trying to figure out how to make it pay off for him. The beginnings of a plan were starting to take shape in his mind. Take some brass Henry thought, then smiled sardonically to himself. Brass, hell. After the first one, the rest are free. Right, Duane?

"I suspect you know the reason I have not told you or Miss Jackson my name, nor let either of you see my face," Henry said evenly. "And you should take great comfort in it. When we are done here, I am authorized to arrange for your safe pick-up, and entry into the Witness Protection Program if, and I stress the word, if I determine such action does not pose an unacceptable security risk.

"Frankly, Mister Blair, I dislike unnecessary loose ends, and I would just as soon dispose of your corpse at the same time as the others." There's the stick Henry thought with a grim smile. Now for the carrot.

"Our Commander-In-Chief, however, feels that those who help him resolve a difficult problem should be protected, even when those people are themselves the original cause of that problem. That is why, on my orders, you will be given a new identity and a new job in a new location."

"What about my family?" Blair asked reflexively.