I know your service, Master Chief, and I’ll be sitting at the very next table on Friday.”

“Thank you, Master Chief,” I said to him.

“Don’t thank me just yet,” Vance said.

“Just make sure your boy sits up straight in that bleacher row.”

At three thirty, as I was pulling out of the museum lot, my cell phone buzzed in my belt holster.

It was Petty Officer First Class Kenneth Oakes calling from our squad bay at Little Creek.

“Sarah, you need to get down to the north dunes at Sandbridge Beach now,” Kenneth said.