The Book of Honor by Ted Gup

that which had been looted—including the remaining gold—and to return the heads of Mackiernan, Leonid, and Stephani, that they might be buried with their bodies. The camel head was taken on to Lhasa. While convalescing, Vassily carved three simple wooden crosses to stand above the graves on the Tibetan frontier.
    Mackiernan and the others were buried where they fell. The place was called Shigarhung Lung. There was no funeral for Mackiernan, then or ever. His grave was marked by Vassily’s cross. It read simply “Douglas Mackiernan.” He was buried beneath a pile of rocks, not unlike those many simple graves that he had paused to admire along the way and by which he had plotted his own course. Eleven days after the killing, the border guards who had killed him received forty to sixty lashes across the buttocks.
    On June 11, 1950, Vassily and Bessac finally reached the outskirts of Lhasa. In the final entry in the log, Bessac wrote, “Good to be here—Oh God.”
    In Washington, State Department and CIA officials fretted over how they might keep Mackiernan’s death a secret. They wondered whether, in the glare of public attention, his cover would be compromised. Such worries were overtaken by more pressing events. At 2:00 P.M. Washington time, June 24, 1950, thirteen days after Bessac and Zvonzov reached Lhasa, North Korean troops poured across the 38th parallel. The Korean War had begun.
    Far from Washington, along the quiet coast of southern Maine, Mackiernan’s first wife, Darrell, had just been told of Mackiernan’s death. Now she would have to tell their daughter, Gail, not yet eight. It was a warm June day. She knew that there would be no keeping the news from her daughter, that sooner or later it would seep out in the press. Besides, it had been years since her daughter had seen her father. Already Gail’s memories of him were faint. Still the little girl carried inside of her a gnawing pain that she had not heard from him in so long.
    She missed him terribly, and though she understood that her parents were divorced, in the way that any seven-year-old may be said to understand, she could not grasp why he had not come back to visit.
    Darrell decided that she would take Gail to their special place, that it was there she should tell her of her father’s death. From their home at 47 Fifteenth Street in Old Orchard Beach, mother and daughter drove to Kettle Cove near Cape Elizabeth. She parked in a lot where Gail could look out on Wood Island, the tiny island that as a toddler she had long imagined was China, where her father was working.
    The windows were down. The car filled with the sweet sea air. Now Gail’s eyes were again fixed on the island as her mother told her that her father would not be coming back. He had been killed far, far away. The little girl’s eyes filled with tears, her stare still fixed on Wood Island, as if it were there that her father had died.
    It was an equally sunny afternoon in Fairfax, California, as Mackiernan’s twins were taking their afternoon nap in the cribs and Pegge Mackiernan was finishing defrosting the refrigerator. There was a knock at the door. It was a gentleman from Washington, a Mr. Freeman. Pegge was embarrassed at the clutter in her living room but showed him in anyway.
    He waited until she had taken a seat on the sofa. He was brief and to the point. Doug, he said, had been killed trying to cross into Tibet. Her husband, he said, had already been buried. Freeman was a man with broad shoulders, and from the moment he had entered the room, he seemed to fill it. Now he expressed condolences on behalf of all those in Washington. Before he left, he advised Pegge: “Say nothing to the newspapers. Keep your own counsel. Be so grief-stricken that you can’t speak to anyone, and if you have a problem, let me know.”
    Pegge Mackiernan was now a widow with twins. Between changing diapers and caring for Mary and