Rose told me. “But now you’re really in the fire.” His voice came over my headset as the Cessna moved through the night sky. The stars drifted slowly past at the windows. Sporadic lights appeared below and went slowly by. I was sitting up front in the passenger seat. The headset blocked out the noise from the pounding engine, but that pounding still surrounded me, surrounded everything. Rose’s voice was small and distant at the center of that rhythm, but I could hear his words clearly. “Washington has shut our mission down completely,” Rose went on. “Shut us down and shut us out. I was afraid even to try to get you protection for your escape, afraid they’d alert the guards—and that the guards would shoot you. The best I could do was post Mike out there with an off-road vehicle and the best surveillance equipment I could find so he could track you whenever you made your run for it. But all the same, you’re just plain lucky you got out of Abingdon alive. You have no idea how much danger you were in.”
