General Coppersmith sent Dugan down to Yokohama to talk to a man who had some special and recent information about the Siberian-Manchurian border, both sides of which were controlled by the Communists, Russians facing Chinese. With Dugan definitely out of the way, he telephoned Colonel Landsiedel to come on over.
Meanwhile he gave Sarah dictation.
"The gamble is atrocious. Smooth professional half-criminal spies, like the Europeans who made a business of espionage, could not be persuaded to go into a half-Arctic wilderness with six divisions of police troops between themselves and the next safe place. And there is no point in asking the Japanese to do a job like this. They might get caught or end up on the wrong side. It had to be an American. Those tenses are all wrong, Sarah. Don't take it down."
"Yes, sir." She started to get up.
"No, don't go away. Just sit. I want somebody to talk to. You'll do." He looked down at the trim feminine figure, at her softly wavy brown hair, her gray-blue-eyes. She made the immaculateness of her uniform seem dainty instead of military.
Coppersmith knew why he was angry. He wanted to go himself. Twenty years ago, he would have fought for the chance. But he couldn't do it, now. He dared not risk capture; his mind was too full of things that the Russians wanted to know. Physically, he could not trot prodigious distances through rain and snow in the high latitudes. He could not move week after week among strangers, his life hanging on each casual word. This man Dugan was valuable, but he was still expendable. And Dugan, though no youth, was much harder and tougher than himself.
"Do you like him, Captain?" said Coppersmith. "You've been palling around with him."
Sarah looked serious. "Very much. He is a very humane sort of person. He likes everybody. But I don't know whether he has ever been candid. He's always on guard."
"That's no wonder," said Coppersmith. He stopped pacing and stood right in front of her. She bent her neck back, looking upward at him and then gave up. She looked at the notebook in her lap. She straightened out an imaginary wrinkle in her skirt. At last the silence compelled her to look all the way up to the general's face. He was standing so close to her that he seemed to reach to the ceiling. He was staring down at her. When she stirred, he became aware of her again.
"Sorry," he said. "So he's on guard. He ought to be. I've told you about him, haven't I?"