Blink of an Eye

by William S. Cohen

  The phone rang, and he turned away from the window, catching a quick glance at himself. Still got a chin, he thought, No wattles yet. The 4:30 A.M. daily workouts are killers, but they help.

  But looks were deceiving. Outwardly, he still appeared strong and vigorous. At just under six feet tall and a trim one hundred and ninety pounds, he looked as if he could still go a few rounds with someone twenty years younger. But fatigue seemed to be his constant companion these days. The long trips, once so easy to bounce back from, were draining. He needed more rest, but rest didn’t go with his job description.

  Just another few months to go, he told himself, and I’ll get back to a more normal life. But the realist within him laughed at the absurdity of what he was thinking. It was a joke. He had never known anything close to being normal. In fact, he didn’t have a clue to the definition of the word.

  Somewhere—maybe it was by William F. Buckley—he had read, “Industry is the enemy of melancholy.” Maybe that was it. The reason he kept putting in eighteen-hour days, inhaling ten to twelve cups of coffee just to stay alert and keep an edge. He didn’t want to deal with the downtime. There was too much melancholy in his blood.…

  Falcone went back to his desk and sat down just as the phone rang. He picked up the handset and before he could say “Hello,” he heard: “Goddamn it, Sean. The Man just knocked it up to DEFCON Four.”

  Gabe Wilkinson sounded as if his usual slow burn was speeding up. “The commands will think we don’t know what we’re doing.”

  “Well, Gabe—”

  “I know what you’re going to say. In fact, a lot of the time we do know what we’re doing.”

  “Cool down, Gabe. I’m on your side on this. What’s the latest?”

  “The latest is this DEFCON thing. I know he’s commander-in-chief. But there’s a convention coming up and he’s about to be renominated. When that happens, he’s a presidential candidate in a tough race. Screwing around with our alert status looks a little like political stuff. There’s a lot of running around here and other places. The Elkton attack triggered dozens of false terrorist reports.”

  “As usual, Gabe. The bloggersphere is steaming with crazy reports. A couple of airliners made emergency landings after passengers claimed they were seeing suspicious activity. And I just got a Secret Service report of an actionable death threat in Dallas. Cops there yanked the guy in. But there’s no way the President is going to call it off, Gabe.”

  “Dallas? What the hell is he doing in Dallas?”

  “It’s a big fund-raiser in a big state, Gabe.”

  “Quinlan should make him turn around. But he won’t. I don’t trust that son of a bitch Quinlan, especially about anything that’s military.”

  “We’re trying to work the DEFCON switch into his Dallas speech, Gabe. Calm reaction to a crisis. That’s the message.”

  “Thanks for the message.”

  “The President will be back here by early evening. He wants a Principals Meeting in the Situation Room around ten. I was just about to call you.”

  “I’ll bet you were.”

  “Gabe, you’re always first on my list.”

  “Bullshit. Here’s what I really called you for.” Wilkinson’s voice changed to its normal cool tempo. “The Elkton is still afloat. Those sailors did a helluva good job bailing her out. Casualties still twenty-one KIA. We think they recovered most of the remains. Some are just scraps enough for DNA. Sixteen wounded, three seriously. Choppers got them all to our military hospital in Baghdad. Thank God we didn’t close that down yet.

  “We poured in a lot of force protection: choppers, strike forces. We’re packing the waterfront with everything we can find. Two destroyers are peeling out of the Persian Gulf task force and heading for Basra. The city is tight as a drum.”

  “Where was the force protection when the bad guys hit the ship?” Falcone sighed.

  “We got word from State that we were not to provide full force protection because State wanted a ‘peaceful image.’ Don’t get me started, Sean. Shades of the USS Cole. I hope the fucking Secretary of State will be able to make it to the Principals Meeting. He’s the son of a bitch to ask.”

  “I know.”

  “That whole goddamn Goodbye Day bullshit was Bloom’s idea. He said that, as secretary of state, he was going to run it, not the military. Can’t believe that President Oxley signed off on that.”

  “It happened pretty fast, Gabe,” Falcone said, shaking his head. “I didn’t get much notice.”

  “No choppers. No big show of force protection. Bloom wanted it all to look good, like we were leaving the country in competent civilian hands. All PR. And, from what I hear, he gave GNN an exclusive. So, goddamn it, there they were with the cameras when the bad guys arrived.”

  “There’s hell to pay, Gabe. The Iraqis insisted they had all the force protection that was needed and for us to stay out of it. We’ve got to find out what happened. And find out fast.”

  “There’s a bunch of FBI and CIA people leaving Andrews in about an hour. I’ve got a Marine colonel with them who’ll be reporting directly to me. And I’ve been trying to track that GNN report about the Iranians being to blame. We’ve got nothing on that.”

  “And I just talked to the CIA,” Falcone said, trying to keep his voice from sounding weary. “Nobody over there can confirm GNN. Where in hell did GNN get that? We’re trying to get some dope on that Bladerunner that GNN mentioned. But tell me about what’s happening with the ship.”

  Falcone was looking at one of the screens on the wall nearest his desk. The screen showed a close-up of the hole torn in the Elkton’s hull. GNN REPORT: TERROR AT SEA kept running across the bottom of the screen. He assumed that Wilkinson was looking at the same image.

  “There’s a heavy-lift ship and tugs on the way from Dubai. As I understand the operation, the heavy-lift ship will fill her ballast tanks to submerge her deck. Then the tugs will maneuver the Elkton to position her over the heavy-lift ship, which will then empty her tanks so that her deck slowly rises until the Elkton sits on blocks on the deck. Then she gets carried to a U.S. shipyard. With an escort of the destroyers.”

  “And the dead?”

  “Remains get … get field-prepared in Baghdad and flown to Dover for … for preparation for burial.”

  “Get me an estimated time of arrival at Dover. I’m going to want you and the President there.”

  “Well, it’s Navy. So Ken and, I guess, all the Joint Chiefs will be there. I’ve got to get back to work.”

  “So do I. See you tonight,” Falcone said, hanging up, and wondering how many minutes he had until the next phone call.

  4

  FALCONE, WHO had a reputation for telling the truth, felt a wince of conscience after Wilkinson left. In Falcone’s code, the omission of an important fact was tantamount to a lie, so it was damn close to a lie to withhold information from Wilkinson. Falcone realized that if he had admitted knowing about Goodbye Day twenty-four hours before word was passed to the general and Secretary of Defense George Kane, Wilkinson would have lumped him and William Bloom together. And Falcone did not want that to happen. His delicate relationship with Wilkinson depended on the chairman of the Joint Chiefs seeing himself as an ally with Falcone and a bureaucratic foe of Secretary of State Bloom.

  Falcone was remembering when he first heard about Goodbye Day. President Oxley had been talking to him about the pullout from Iraq. “I don’t want any more analyses, Sean,” Oxley had said. “God knows I have enough of them. I want pure Falcone.”

  And that was what Falcone had given him. Falcone had been against what he called a stupid, meaningless war. “It was insane to go into Iraq in the first place,” he had said. “We disbanded the military, broke up the leading political party, and became an army of occupation rather than set up a provisional government. We didn’t know what we were doing. But it would be even more stupid to pull out all the troops now, without knowing what we’re doing.

  “Sure, the Americ
an people are tired of the war. Thousands dead. Tens of thousands wounded. But pulling every soldier out could leave our embassy people in real danger. It’s the largest embassy we have in the world. One hundred and four acres. Big as Vatican City. We need to have a reserve force to handle contingencies.”

  “Sean, the Iraqi government wants us out.”

  “You mean Prime Minister Chalabi? That’s just saying that Iran wants us out. He’s their mouthpiece,” Falcone said with disgust.

  “It’s not just Chalabi. The American people want us out. So, we’re getting out.”

  Oxley had told him about Bloom’s plan to publicize the final withdrawal with Goodbye Day images. Falcone had urged Oxley to scrap the idea. “A pullout, slow and quiet? Okay, Mr. President,” Falcone had said. “But withdrawal should be an offstage process. It’s no occasion for a television event.”

  “Sorry, Sean. I’ve already committed to Bloom on this. It might even be a model for Afghanistan. Not tomorrow, of course, or even next year, but one day.”

  “Jesus, Mr. President!” Falcone had exclaimed, leaning forward and pounding his fist on the President’s desk, directly above the panel bearing a carving of the Presidential Great Seal. The eagle in the seal faced toward the thirteen arrows of war in its left talon instead of the olive branch in its right talon, as in the official Great Seal.

  “Sorry for the emotion,” he hastily added, staring at the seal. He leaned back and said, “You know what I think about your decision to stay there for another four years. We don’t need that kind of force, not with those numbers.…”

  “I don’t get you, Sean. First, you want me to keep our soldiers in Iraq when everyone is telling us to get out. Then you want to get out of Afghanistan when our military says we need to stay.”

  “I’m not saying pull everyone out. Just that we need to cut the numbers way down. Give our kids a break. When you think about Afghanistan, sir, I suggest that you also think about that British soldier in Rudyard Kipling’s poem. Iraq is a country. Afghanistan is a wild, ancient land where foreign soldiers wind up dead.”

  “You recited that poem to me a long time ago, Sean.”

  “Well, a couple of verses. But, with all due respect, here’s the stanza to remember:

  When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,

  And the women come out to cut up what remains,

  Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

  An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.”

  “Thanks for the lesson, Sean. But, getting back to Iraq, Goodbye Day stands.”

  *

  LESSONS. Sometimes Falcone wondered what lesson he had learned that got him to this office looking at that telephone and waiting for it to ring.

  He had walked away from the Senate and from public service more than a decade ago. He had grown weary of it all, the superficial greeting of people he knew he would never see again, his hand stretched out for campaign contributions. It was the worst part of political life, the constant search for more and more money to feed the giant media outlets that had become the lifeblood of persuading the public that you stood for truth, justice, and the American way.

  He had grown sick of it. The arteries of our democratic system so clogged with special-interest groups and their lobbyists. They can hit a button and suddenly flood Congress with five thousand letters overnight. Or fifty thousand e-mails. Or checks. People writing big checks with the expectation that there was something you were going to give them in return. How about just good governance? Sure. Get real. How about a vote for my company, my union, my industry, my save-the-polar-bears charity?

  After two terms in the Senate, he had had enough. Let someone else carry the torch. Someone who was hungry for the job. Someone, hopefully, who wanted to do good for the country, and not just feed off the fleeting adoration granted to those who carried the title of United States Senator.

  Yet here he was, back in the middle of it all. And just what good was he doing? Giving advice that Oxley pretended to listen to and then ignored? We were sending our kids right into the heart of hell. Not once, but two, three, even five times. And for what? Prevent Al Qaeda from slipping back from Pakistan to set up safe havens? Tame the warlords and Taliban? Drag a fourteenth-century country into the twenty-first? Many had tried and all had failed.

  That’s what Kipling was saying. Afghanistan was a goddamn graveyard. Don’t send your boys to die there … Or have them come back, Falcone mused, without limbs and with nightmares that never go away.

  Falcone knew what battle did to soldiers. What fighting ghosts was like. In the stillness of night, even now, when he lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, he could still hear the sounds of war, the screams of the dying. He could still feel the bloated leeches emerge almost from inside his skin, sucking his life blood away before he could flick them off.… Guilt sometimes seized his mind, calling him back to those minutes when he had failed to see how close the VC were.… He had lost count of the times he had gone over the terrain and failed to notice the signs that were there to see. If only he had talked with the villagers, if only he had listened, respected their customs and fears. If only he had seen the right things, had done the right things.… He could still.…

  The phone rang again, breaking Falcone’s dark mood. The label said PRESIDENT, but Falcone knew it would be Ray Quinlan.

  “Sean, listen.”

  What the hell else do you expect me to do? Falcone thought. When Quinlan was agitated, which was most of the time, his voice had an undertone of snarl. And he certainly was agitated.

  “We’re about to land. The President will try not to do any talking on the tarmac. I’m shoving him right into the limo. And I told him not to say anything to the traveling press. But as soon as he gets to the rally, he’s going to get hit with this thing. So I’ve gotta know the latest.”

  Falcone told him what he had been told by Wilkinson and asked about the change in DEFCON.

  “DEFCON? I don’t know any of that military shit, Sean. I’m in a hurry. See you later.”

  Quinlan hung up before Sean could ask for a copy of the President’s planned remarks. And, as usual, no time for goodbye. Well, maybe working with an arrogant bastard like Quinlan isn’t worth it. But did I really have any choice once the President called, asking me to help my country one more time? Maybe for the last time?

  For a few moments, Falcone fell into a reverie again. When he retired from the Senate, he decided to practice law. Not the run-of-the-mill type of Washington lawyering, billing fat-wallet clients in eight-minute increments of his time. No, he wanted something more, something different. And he was a man used to getting what he wanted.

  He was granted a full partnership with DLA Piper, the largest law firm in the world, with forty offices spanning the globe. He made a seven-figure salary, not counting his annual bonus, which was ample by anyone’s standards. And the only thing the firm asked for this princely sum was his advice on national security and global affairs. He was worth it. After all, he was regarded as a war hero, a man who had endured extreme torture as a prisoner of war in the notorious Hanoi Hilton in North Vietnam. He never liked the notion that he was considered a hero. For what? he used to muse publicly. Getting captured?

  But, looking back on those years as a prisoner, he often thought about that dark cell, not as an ordeal but as a strange sanctuary. His cell was where he found and nurtured the discovery that he had an ability to sort things out, to look through events and see their causes, to search through complex situations for shards of simplicity.

  In that cell, to keep himself from going mad, he had tried to channel his mind. He would conjure up visions—of city centers, of skyscrapers—and then he would build them, brick by brick, or block by block, the evolving images becoming clearer as his ability to concentrate improved. Sometimes, he felt that he could step into his creations, walk around, and spend time in an alternate world. He had never told anyone about this Zen-like life in the cell. But he often told h
imself that when he finally emerged from his cell, he was not the man who had entered.

  The phone rang.

  “This is Anna, Sean. I would like to see you as soon as possible.”

  Anna Dabrowski, the deputy national security advisor, was extremely polite and always followed the rules. Every time he heard her soft, tentative voice, Falcone remembered for an instant how difficult it had been to get her to call him Sean, and how, during their first awkward meeting a couple of months ago, she had called him “Mr. Falcon,” “Senator Falcon,” and “Mr. Advisor.” And he remembered how embarrassed they both were when he informed her that his name was pronounced Shawn Falcone-e. “My first name doesn’t sound like it looks. And my last name has three syllables. Anna, blame my name on having an Irish mother and an Italian father.”

  He realized at that first meeting that she hadn’t been born when he was in Vietnam, was probably in high school when he was in the Senate, and was studying Arabic at the American University in Beirut when he went to DLA Piper. She had blushed—actually blushed—when she tried to explain that she had frequently read his name but had never actually heard it.

  “Anna, come on in,” he said on the phone. She stepped across the hall from her small office and entered his. She never entered without a preliminary phone call. As usual, she wore a dark suit over a white blouse, a fluffy collar her only touch of femininity. Her blond hair was gathered in what he assumed was the only bun in the White House. She wore rimless glasses in a silvery frame. She had once told him that she had an aunt back in Chicago who would not respond to a letter unless it was addressed to Miss Eva Dabrowski because without Miss, her name looked like it belonged to a careless woman.

  In a moment, the door opened and she stood there self-consciously, as if she had never entered his office before. He motioned her to a seat.