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a call from the captain. Vrieger's pull came from somewhere else. As Doug watched him order his third bourbon of the afternoon, it struck him that the thing about Vrieger, which he'd sensed ever since that summer in the Gulf, was how the events they had been through had acted on him like a trance, as if no matter where he might be, no matter what might be going on around him, he was still fixed back in that one place: the Combat Center of the Vincennes, July 3, '88, his finger on the launch button. The years hadn't changed that. Doug saw it in the constancy of his gaze at the television: that permanent alert habitual in the survivors of emergency.

"We're going back in, you know," Vrieger said. "You understand that, right? We're going all the way to Baghdad. They're polishing the missiles as we speak. Fifth Fleet's already scheduled the hardware for the Gulf."

Doug hailed the bartender and ordered another beer.

"Cat got your tongue?" Vrieger asked, a note of aggression creeping into his voice. "I don't know about you," he went on, "but the ones I remember are the women. The ones in those black sack dresses with their heads covered, just the slits for the eyes. The wailing that came out of them. You remember that? It's strange, isn't it? Down on the ground like that by the coffins, being held back by their families, like they can't control it. You wonder: Why don't we do that? Grieve like that, I mean. Give in to it. Grief's like an illness here. A disease."

The TV camera panned across a column of Israeli tanks filing through clouds of dust into the West Bank.

When his drink arrived, Doug asked the bartender if he minded changing the channel. The guy reached up and hit the Plus button once, leaving them with a close-up of a rotating diamond ring set in a velvet case above another ticker, this one running with product detail and a number to call.

"Is it that easy for you?" Vrieger said.

"What?"

"To turn it off. To forget."

"Who said I was forgetting anything?"

Placing his empty tumbler upside down on the bar, Vrieger tilted his head to examine the cut of the glass. "Well, tell me then. I'm interested. How do you hold it? What we did."

This was why Vrieger had called. And maybe why Doug had come.

That summer of '88, a few days after they had shot down the airliner, a crew member from the USS Sides had told a reporter for some newspaper that he had seen bodies falling from the sky. On their return to San Diego, the entire crew of the Vincennes had been awarded combat action ribbons for their engagement of the Iranian gunboats. Vrieger had won the navy's commendation medal for heroic achievement. He'd had to carry that around, too, all these years.

Doug took a cigarette from Vrieger's box and lit it. "You know what the Iranians did?" he said. "After they signed the cease-fire with Iraq? They went into their gulags and rounded up all the political prisoners - leftists, mujahideen, whoever they thought might take advantage of the armistice. And they murdered them all. Either you repented and started praying or they murdered you. Tired old guy rotting in some cell for years? Pop. Sixteen-year-old kids? Pop. Girls? They raped them first and then popped them. Wives brought in to see their husbands hanged. That's what they do to their own people. I'm not even talking our guys - Beirut, Khobar Towers - none of that."

Vrieger's next bourbon arrived. Without the cable news to soak up his watchfulness, he gazed into the amber liquid with a kind of dejected fervor, as if staring into the dark mouth of a tunnel, listening for the roar. "Interesting," he said.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You're still bound to the wheel of fire."

"Here's where I lose you."

"Yeah," Vrieger said, "that's right." With a slightly trembling hand, he raised his glass to his lips and drained it. "That's King Lear being woken by his daughter at the end of the play. When his world has gone all the way to shit. You do me wrong to take me out of the grave, he tells her. Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears do scald like molten lead." He paused, his mouth in a slight wince, as if he were physically pained by the words. "You're still in