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caught him with a tightly spaced pattern—three shots stitched up the side from hip to chest. The terrorists were stumbling over one another, some trying to escape, others lunging for cover. They were disoriented in the dark, and the room was cluttered with overturned chairs.
    Good training made the difference. Despite the rocky start, the Filipinos recovered well. The soldiers worked the perimeters, moving quickly with a maximum of force to keep up the shock value. They swept through the three rooms with precision, progress punctuated by the crack and flash of rifle fire. They encountered some resistance toward the back of the building, and Cooke could hear the report of weapons toward the river. A few stray rounds whacked by his head, powder flying off the walls of the farmhouse, but by the time Cooke reached the back of the building, it was all over.
    The words crackled over his headset as the other teams reported. “Alpha. Clear.” Cooke stepped out of the back of the house and approached a body that lay sprawled in the grass, his M-4 at the ready. “Bravo. Clear.” Cooke kicked a handgun away from an outstretched hand and nudged the body over. “Charlie. Clear.” Aguilar’s voice sounded both excited and relieved. The lights came back on in the house as someone restarted the generator. Cooke pushed up his night goggles. The man lay in the oblong patch of light that reached out from the back doorway. Dirt was smudged on the man’s face, caked on his lips and nostrils by the blood.
    The dead man had been clutching something in one hand, as if protecting it in his last moments. Cooke squatted, picked the videocassette up, and wondered what it contained that was so important. Aguilar approached him.
    “The trucks are here, Sergeant Cooke.” The American could see the spill of light from the vehicle-mounted flood lamps. The Filipino forces dragged the dead out of the farmhouse and lay them in rows. Specialists who had arrived with the trucks began to examine the building and its contents. Someone snapped a picture of the dead bodies. The prisoners lay face down while plastic cuffs were yanked tight around wrists. Their mouths were taped shut. There’s my tape , Cooke thought idly. The prisoners were hooded and manhandled into the trucks.
    Aguilar gestured at the building. “All secured. We’re policing the building now. Our intel was good—there was a meeting of some sort here. They were watching something on a TV screen.”
    Cooke held the black oblong videocassette gingerly and showed it to Aguilar. There was Arabic writing on the white label, but it had a dark smear across it. “Probably make some interesting viewing,” the American said. Aguilar nodded, but was more focused on policing the area and seeing to his men. Cooke scanned the area: sprawled bodies in the grass, the wet-eyed, hunched prisoners being trucked away. He smelled blood and cordite and his own sweat. Cooke wondered again what was on the videotape, what had been so important that his team had been rushed into action, but he was used to a world where not all his questions got answered. Most days, it was enough to get through an op in one piece . Mission accomplished , he thought. He straightened up and turned the tape over to one of the specialists working the scene. Then Cooke put it out of his mind and went to see how the wounded sergeant was doing.

4
FAMILIARS
    I sold my car when they did away with my job at Dorian University. With a life-long and inadvertent genius, I had managed to alienate both upper administration and the faculty there. The two groups were usually at each other’s throat, engaged in an academic blood feud whose mythic origins were by now irrelevant. The struggle gave meaning and shape to their lives, however. They would fight about anything—or nothing, for that matter. It was a refreshing change of pace for them to share a common object of contempt. Or it would have been if I hadn’t been that object.
    Academia