"James graduated from the Academy in 1972," she says in much more calm voice, "and within a year he had earned his way into the Concordat's Coldstream Guard --it's most elite combat unit. Into it's Bravo Detachment --the Hostage Rescue Team. During an age of constant hostage takings, hijackings, terrorist bombings...he kept very, very busy. As EurCon could not defeat the Concordat by conventional means...it resorted to unconventional ones...and James and Bravo Detachment were very busy indeed." "He was trained as an aeronautical engineer at Castle- Island Cambridge, so he specialized in planes when he joined Bravo Detachment --investigating plane crashes, flying planes, jumping out of planes, charging *into* planes, tracking, hotwiring, sabotaging, even blowing them up if necessary." "The strange thing was that his work wasn't secret at all-- no real reason to be, I guess; a plane hijacking or a bank hostage situation is pretty public. Being domestic work, mostly, he came home almost every night, and being declassified, he could talk about what he had done..." Her face touches with sorrow. "He had nightmares -- shaking nightmares-- the terror, the fear, the hatred...I was his companion through his darkest hours, his valleys; I was the one who took his confessions...the world saw only the fearless warrior...the man who added an almost unprecedented *second* Star of St. George to the one he had won before...I saw the man wracked with guilt about being not fast enough, not smart enough, to save every hostage, to catch every terrorist...the frustration on being unable to send some piece of scum back to hell because of some legal technicality, because there were things the "good guys" didn't do...the sheer hatred of those who would betray the Concordat, kill the innocent, for some half- baked ideal the perpetrator had never really sat down to *think* about..." She looks away into the distance for several moments. A tear silently rolls down one cheek. She looks down, suddenly, struggling to go on. "Bravo Detachment wasn't merely a combat team --it was a full-fledged investigative unit --think New Scotland Yard crossed with Rambo-- a bit like you were saying, Paddy, the folks who investigated and took down the dangers too much for the Police to handle. A lot like the Texas Rangers of old --the lawmen you sent in when the bandits have hanged the local sheriff and torched the marshal's office." "There were many legitimate enviromental advocacy groups in the Concordat at the time, trying to make headway against the skepticism of the Concordat...but there were many organizations that advocated much more radical solutions. And were willing to use much more violent means to achieve them. There were many that were almost on the verge of neo- Luddite, a reaction perhaps against Chancellor Mara and the establishment's push into high technology and the space race...if she was for it, therfore, they had to be against it. And certainly anything that sought to monkey-wrench the work of the Concordat was of interest to EurCon..." "James and his unit were on the trail of a web of radical eco-terrorist organizations ...again, organizations without a clue. Take the Galveston disaster that first put James and his unit on the trail -- no, refineries aren't the most perfectly benign things to have lying around. But it wasn't like it was deliberately polluting the enviroment --there were strict laws against that. And more to the point, when the group calling itself November 9th *did* blow up the refinery, the resulting massive fire blackened the sky and caused a black toxic rain of burning chemicals downwind for four days that defoliated and permanently poisoned hundreds of acres, a massive oil and chemical slick that slaughtered the bay and miles of beach, as well as permanently fouling the ground water, as well as killing hundreds of workers and fire-fighters! I wouldn't exactly call that a net *gain* for the enviroment..." "Or when November 9th blew up the Materials Research Center at Stanford, which singlehandedly set back solar-energy research by two years...or burned a Colorado greenhouse that they claimed was pursuing evil transgenic technology but actually housed an effort to save three highly endangered speicies of flowering trees..." "The irony," she says drily, "of November 9th being singularly responsible for the final extinction of those species of plants is amazing." "These acts, all within less than a week period, put November 9th on the map...and at the top of Bravo Detachment's hit-list...and frankly, when you have the whole weight of the Concordat against you, you don't last long. Less than a week and a half after Bravo started looking, November 9th's next plan --to disrupt the wedding of the High King-- was discovered just days before it was to happen. As every major leader in the Concordat assembled in London, a great global take-down was coordinated --James and his team was assigned to hit a November 9th cell just as it was sneaking equipment into London City Airport. To this day I don't know how James ended up all the way over there. James's team hit like a Texas tornado, stunners blazing -- the Concordat had invented and perfected effective sonic non-lethal weapons, and had begun issuing them to it's elite combat units-- and the cowards never knew what hit them." "To James's horror, they discovered exactly *what* equipment November 9th was bringing in for their next job --a multi- megaton Fusion Weapon. It wasn't a suit-case nuke --no, this was a *monster*. Just mere miles from the Palace at Wesminster. And the timer was already running." "God alone knows *what* November 9th thought they would accomplish by that act --how the enviroment would be saved by reducing London to ash..." Alex pauses. "There were no options and no time. Chancellor Mara was on the other side of the planet, helping survivors of a Venezulean earthquake. The bomb *had* to be gotten as far away from London as possible, as fast as possible. James ordered the bomb immediately loaded aboard a nearby airborne Valkerie assault transport --a small, high-speed transport plane-- and James immediately took off, firewalling the engines, gunning for the North Sea, some seventy-miles East past Gravesend." "He was a pilot, this was a plane, twenty million lives in the very heart and soul of the Concordat were at stake. I don't think it ever even occured to him to find someone else to fly." Alex pauses again, trembling with emotion. "He actually *did* survive the explosion," she finally says, very quietly.