Second Watch by J.A. Jance

some kind of required ID card that hadn’t been made known to me. “What cards?”
    He reached into his pocket and pulled out a box of playing cards. Counting out four of them, he handed them over to me. “These,” he said.
    They were crisply brand new, with no ground-in red dust, but otherwise they were ordinary in every way—with one notable exception.
    “These are all the same card,” I pointed out, looking down at a handful of matching aces of spades. “Shouldn’t they all be different?”
    “Welcome to ’Nam,” Lieutenant Davis said. “And to the world of modern warfare. Here in C Company, we’re playing head games with Charlie, a form of psychological warfare. He’s a superstitious kind of guy, so when we take someone out, we leave a little message—a calling card, if you will—as though the card we left on him had his name on it. Like he was marked for death.”
    Lieutenant Davis closed the box and put the rest of the deck back in his pocket. “I gave you four,” he said. “If you’re a good shot and need more, you know where to find them. Oh, and something else.”
    He reached inside his shirt and pulled out the copy of The Rise and Fall I had seen him reading earlier that afternoon . It was frayed and tattered, and the pages were stained reddish brown from the dust. It was also thick—sixteen hundred pages’ worth.
    “It’s not mine,” he told me. “I borrowed it from Lieutenant Fowler, one of the other lieutenants. I decided not to finish it this time through. As I said, I already know how it ends, so I told Lieutenant Fowler I was lending it to you. This will give you something to read in your spare time, and when you finish, there’ll be a pop quiz.”
    With that he turned and sauntered away. I was surprised to see what looked like a long sword hanging on his back. I turned to one of the guys in the tent, Corporal Lara.
    “Is he serious? He’s going to give me a test on this?”
    “That’s just Lennie D.’s way of keeping us all engaged,” Lara assured me. “He’ll expect you to read the book, and he’ll talk to you about it, but there won’t be an actual test.”
    “And he’s serious about the cards?”
    “Dead serious,” Lara told me. “In fact, he and the other three lieutenants wrote to the card company, and they sent them back packs of cards that are full of nothing but aces of spades. I saw a copy of the letter. They said they were glad to do their part to win the war. And that’s what C Company is called—ace of spades.”
    “So what is he, some kind of card shark?”
    “No, Lennie D.’s a West Pointer. A good guy, too. He’s been in country a long time—going on seven months. He’s a born leader, and he’s turned C Company into the best there is. He’s been scheduled to go on R and R several times, but they keep putting it off. Heard he’s got a girlfriend, a flight attendant, who’s supposed to meet up with him in Tokyo. Somebody was saying they might get married while he’s there on leave.”
    I thought about Karen. What if I didn’t come home? Would she marry someone else? Would her old boyfriend, Maxwell Cole, the guy I’d stolen her from, come nosing back around? But we had talked it over before I left and we’d both decided we’d be better off waiting until I came home before scheduling a wedding. Now I wasn’t so sure.
    I held up the book. “He really expects me to read this whole damned thing?”
    “The whole damned thing,” Corporal Lara agreed. “And believe me, you’ll make a better impression on Lennie D. if you do it immediately, if not sooner.”
    “What’s the deal with the knife?”
    “It’s not a knife,” Lara corrected. “It’s a Montagnard sword. There’s probably a story behind it, but it goes with him everywhere. Everybody else complains about carrying their packs. He carries his pack and the sword, and never gripes about it, either.”
    That Friday was my first night in camp, fresh from basic training, scared to