On the second evening a fishing skiff found him. Three men hauled him over the gunwale like a tuna and gave him water from a plastic jug, and he remembered nothing about the next five days except heat and the throb of an outboard and a man's voice singing the same few lines of a song, over and over.
When he woke properly he was in a stone room with a dirt floor somewhere in the mountains of eastern Yemen, with a chain on his ankle and a boy of about fourteen sitting in the doorway with an assault rifle across his knees.
He was there for seven months.
He did not tell Elena much about those seven months, and he did not tell the debriefers anything they hadn't already worked out from his body. He was sold twice. He was photographed, once, holding a newspaper, and the photograph went somewhere and was looked at by people in rooms in Washington and Muscat, and then those people began, very quietly, to talk to one another. He learned enough Arabic to ask for water and to understand when the men around him were arguing about what he was worth. On the bad nights he lay on his back on the floor and recited the names of his men, every one, all seven, in order of seniority, and then Reyes's nine, and then the fourteen crewmen of the Anahita he'd counted twice on the fantail, because he'd counted them and so they were his too. And on the very worst nights, he went over and over the moment in the breach, the hand flat on his chest, pushing, and tried to find the version of it in which he was quicker, or stronger, or smarter, or just a few pounds lighter, and both of them came out.
He never found it.
In October, a man in a clean white dishdasha and a grey beard came to the stone house in a Land Cruiser with Omani plates and spoke for a long time with the men who held him, and drank tea with them, and laughed with them, and at the end of the tea the chain came off Carter's ankle and he was put in the back of the Land Cruiser under a blanket and driven for nineteen hours, and then flown, and then he was in Germany, at Landstuhl, in a room with no windows on a floor with no name, and a Navy captain in civilian clothes was sitting across a table from him with a file folder and a cup of coffee he hadn't touched.
"Commander Carter," the captain said. "My name is Harlan Briggs. I'm going to tell you some things, and I'm going to need you to listen to all of them before you say anything. Can you do that?"
He could do that.
What Briggs told him, over the next two hours, came down to a handful of facts, laid out one after another on the table like cards.
The first was that the Navy had declared him dead. There'd been a memorial service at Little Creek in April; his mother had been given his folded flag. His name had been cut into the black granite in Virginia Beach beside Mike Chardi's and Andre Oduya's. He'd been awarded the Navy Cross, posthumously, on the sworn statements of Lieutenant Thomas Reyes and his sailors.
The second was that his release had cost something. Briggs would not say what, or who had paid it, and Carter understood he was not ever going to be told. But it had been done through the man in the white dishdasha, on the personal assurance of very senior people that the United States had not negotiated with the men who held him. If an American officer believed dead for seven months reappeared in public, the question of how would be asked loudly and by everybody, and the answer would get the man in the white dishdasha killed, and his sons, and close the only channel of its kind the United States had into that part of the world.
The third was that the men who had held Carter had his photograph and his name, and a long memory. Carter's mother was seventy-three and lived alone in Tucson. The families of his men lived in houses whose front doors opened onto streets in Virginia Beach.