Second Watch by J.A. Jance Page A

death, and more than a little jet-lagged, so they gave me time to get settled in. Since I had nothing better to do, I started reading the book that very night on a cot in a four-man tent where it was far too hot to sleep anyway.
    I have never been a history buff. Mr. Gleason’s American history class at Ballard High School was beyond boring. I sat in the back row and fell asleep at my desk almost every day while he droned on and on from a wooden desk at the front of the classroom. Believe me, I wasn’t the only one of my classmates who dozed his way through the Gettysburg Address and the bombing of Hiroshima.
    But somehow, The Rise and Fall grabbed me, from the very first words, because I could see that this was an evil that had been allowed to grow and fester. When the people who should have been paying attention didn’t, the Third Reich had come very close to taking over the world.
    Saturday during the day I went out on patrol for the first time, accompanied by Corporal Lara and two other guys, Mike and Moe. Their last names are lost to memory now, but they both hailed from West Virginia, where they had grown up hunting and fishing. Both of them were said to be crack shots. All three of the other guys on patrol that day were younger than I was, but they had all been in the service and in country for several months. The truth is, I was scared as hell, but I tried not to let on. I also figured that since I was going out with some of C Company’s most experienced soldiers, I was probably in fairly good hands.
    We came back in without any of us having fired a shot. We were in the chow line when Lieutenant Davis showed up. He made straight for me.
    “How’d it go?” he asked.
    “There wasn’t much happening out there today,” I told him.
    He grinned. He had a funny, lopsided grin that made you feel comfortable around him—as long as you hadn’t screwed up. If you had screwed up, he’d read you the riot act with enough cuss words to turn the air blue, and when he was finished with you, it was clear that whatever mistake you might have made, you wouldn’t be making that one again.
    I was standing there, holding my plate and my silverware.
    “Sit,” he said, motioning me toward a table. “Eat. Don’t let me stop you.”
    I sat. He settled down on the camp stool across from me.
    “You’re from Seattle.”
    It was a statement, not a question. Obviously he’d been going through my file. “Yes, sir.”
    “Always wanted to go there,” he said. “My girlfriend is living in Florida at the moment, but that’s where some of her family lives now—the Seattle area. I’m hoping they’ll send me to Fort Lewis, south of there, when I get back stateside.”
    He paused for a moment and seemed to be examining a mental list of things he wanted to discuss.
    “I understand your BA is in Criminal Justice?” he asked.
    “That’s right,” I said with a nod. “I want to be a cop. That’s what I’m hoping anyway.”
    “Do you have a girl waiting for you?”
    “Fiancée,” I said. “Karen. We decided not to get married until I get home.”
    “Probably a good idea,” he said. “Your paperwork says your name is Jonas. Unusual name. Is that what you go by?”
    Jonas is an odd name, unless maybe you’re busy curing polio. As a little kid growing up with that none-too-common name, I hated it as soon as I learned to write it. I would have loved to be a Jimmy, or a Johnny, or even a Richard. So Jonas was bad, but once you combined it with my middle name, Piedmont, and tacked a Beaumont on the end, it became that much worse.
    Year after year, in grade school and later in high school, I had to do battle with new teachers and explain that the name in their grade books wasn’t the name I wanted to be called. I was happy for them to use my initials, J.P., in class, while most of the kids I grew up with called me Beau. The fact that the lieutenant had bothered asking if I had a preference about what people called me made