“Sure,” DeLuca said, wondering who LeDoux could have brought by.
“Listen—there’s something I wanted to say before they come in,” LeDoux said. “You’re going to be reading about this in the papers in the next couple months. You remember your friend Doc?”
“Yeah,” DeLuca said. “Chaptered out on a sanity thing.”
“Right on the details but wrong on the conclusion,” LeDoux said. “Apparently he’d gone up the chain of command about some things he said he’d seen going on in the prison at Baquba. Interrogators doing things to prisoners. When nothing happened, he went off the reservation with the media. As I’m just now coming to understand it, some people were trying to have him declared insane to discredit him, but it’s going to come out that everything he said was true. I’m having the whole thing investigated, including the coverup, but a lot of people are going to look really bad. I just wanted you to know. It doesn’t really concern you, but I know Doc was a friend of yours.”
“I appreciate it,” DeLuca said. “He never said anything to us about prison abuse.”
“I also wanted to tell you that the people in the hall are good people. I’ll personally vouch for all of them. I may not always agree with all of them, but I wanted you to know my thoughts about them.”
“If you’ll stand by them, that’s good enough for me,” DeLuca said.
“Let’s let ’em in, then,” General LeDoux said. “By the way, I’d like you to meet Kathryn while you’re in town, but we’ll talk about that later.”
First to enter was DeLuca’s brother-in-law, Tom, who smiled and shook his hand. Tommy was followed by five men and a woman, who formed a semicircle at the foot of his bed.
“Sergeant David DeLuca, 419th Counterintelligence Battalion,” General LeDoux said by way of introduction, “my old and good friend, I’d like you to meet, from your left, John Maitland, commander of INSCOM, Colonel Jose Canales, DIA Pentagon liaison, Warren Benjamin, deputy director of Homeland Security, Ross Schlessinger, deputy director of the CIA, Carla White, White House’s National Security adviser, and Senator Danforth Sykes, from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.”
“Senator,” DeLuca said, trying to sit up. “Tommy. Everyone. You’ll excuse me if I don’t get up, but I don’t have any pants on.”
Tommy laughed, but the others seemed rather serious.
“It’s good to see your spirits are up,” Tom said. “How’s your neck?”
“Not that bad, really,” DeLuca said. “I gather you’re not all here to inquire about my health.”
“We’re all hoping you get better,” LeDoux said. “I’ve debriefed the committee as thoroughly as I could, but they wanted to meet you in person. We’ve got a little business to do here. Colonel Canales?”
“Sir,” the colonel said. He looked way too young to be a full bird colonel, a clean-shaven Latino in his late thirties, DeLuca guessed. “Sergeant, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Believe me, I’ve heard a lot about you. I think the general asked me to start because I’m going to be the good-news/bad-news guy here. So which do you want first?”
“Whichever you’d prefer, Colonel,” DeLuca said.
“I’d prefer to keep the bad news to myself, but unfortunately, I can’t. Here’s the good news,” he said, reaching into the briefcase he was carrying and extracting six hard-shell clam cases, which he opened one at a time. “This is the Purple Heart. You were probably expecting that. This is the Bronze Star, with an attachment for valor. This is the Silver Star, also with an attachment for valor. In addition, you’ve earned a Soldier’s Medal, a Legion of Merit, and an Army Commendation Medal. We’re giving these to you because we wanted you to know, up front, that we recognize the work you’ve done and appreciate the sacrifices you’ve made. Your work in the Sunni Triangle was truly remarkable, and we wanted you to know that we know that.”
DeLuca looked at the medals, then at LeDoux, wondering what the trick was.
“Thank you, sir,” he said. “I think we had a lot of luck on our side.”
“Well,” Colonel Canales said, “judging by your record, either you’re the luckiest man in the world, or your intelligence and skills have more to do with your achievements than luck. We don’t give medals for luck.”
“Okay,” DeLuca said. “What’s the bad news?”
Canales folded the clamshell cases and placed them back into his briefcase.
“The bad news is that these are yours, but we can’t give them to you. Yet. We’re going to have to hold them in abeyance.”
“It’s all top secret, Dave,” LeDoux said. “TS/SCI until further notice. You can’t talk about what you did. Ever.”
“The president is also aware of your service,” said Carla White, a woman of perhaps forty. “He asked me personally to tell you how much he appreciates it, but unfortunately, it’s been determined that everything about Mohammed Al-Tariq and Alf Wajeh is too sensitive and impingent upon national security to allow for dissemination of any kind. We’re just too vulnerable, and if we expose our vulnerabilities, we’re inviting attack. We can’t do it. We’d like to invite you to the White House and throw you a state dinner, but unfortunately, the best we can do is to thank you privately.”
“That’s all right,” DeLuca said. “I’ve already had dinner.”
“We do expect you’ll receive the recognition you’re due in the fullness of time,” Ross Schlessinger, the CIA deputy director, said. “We just can’t tell you when that might be. We keep a book at the CIA of the names of men who’ve done things we can never talk about, but we think it’s important for them to know that we know.”
“I’m not going to lose any sleep over it,” DeLuca said. “There’s obviously more though, right? You wouldn’t all be here like this if all you wanted to do was pat me on the back and then tell me to shut up, I’m guessing.”
“There’s a bit more,” Warren Benjamin said. “I don’t know if you’ve been following the papers, but you’re probably aware that ever since 9/11, we’ve been looking at intelligence and trying to figure out where we fucked up. And how not to fuck up again. So you’re going to be hearing, in the next few months, or years, stories about all kinds of ways we fucked up, and some of them are going to be exaggerated or off base, but some of them are going to be true. The two ways that concern us most here are that there wasn’t enough coordination between the various agencies, and there was too much reliance on electronic intel at the expense of human intelligence. Plain and simple, we need more boots on the ground—assisted by all the technology we can bring to bear, but boots on the ground.”
“By the way,” Schlessinger said, “if I may interrupt, speaking of intra-agency rivalries, I gather your people have told you about my man Timmons, the case officer who was running Mahmoud Jaburi. Timmons has been reassigned.”
“It’s a new world,” Benjamin continued. “We don’t really need guys sneaking around Moscow in black trench coats anymore. We need to adjust to the new map. It’s not China or Russia anymore. It’s Nigeria, and North Korea, and Uzbekistan and Kashmir and Sudan and Bali, and all the little countries and groups and organizations on the fringe of globalization who figure if they can’t have a piece of the pie, they’re going to take a shit in the pie so nobody else can eat it. Excuse the turd-pie analogy, but I think it fits.”
“You’ve obviously never eaten an MRE,” DeLuca said. “Turd pie is one of the better offerings.”
“INSCOM is putting together a new agency,” John Maitland, the INSCOM commander, said. “A special-access program, on a black budget. We’re looking for people with exactly your skill sets to go into Africa and North Korea and wherever we need you to go and work the human intelligence so that we can find the new bad guys before they get organized. We’re the new global police, whether we like it or not, and we’re going to need global policemen like you to walk the beat for us. And to go undercover when you need to. So that’s why we’re here. We want to offer you a job.”
“A job?” DeL
uca said.
“Doing exactly what you were doing in Iraq, but with a wider agenda,” Canales said. “Running small-scale missions and special ops crews and coordinating larger operations when need be. Hearts and minds. The things you already do well.”
“Who would I be working for?”
“You’re looking at us,” LeDoux said. “Colonel Canales is your hands-on contact, under me, and I report to the committee. You’d have an unlimited budget, full hands-off authority, and all the toys you could possibly dream of. You’d be CI: Team Red. Red as in hot spot. You always said this would be a great job if the army would just let you do it right, so that’s what we have in mind.”
“My wife wants me to quit,” DeLuca said. “We were talking about opening a bar.”
LeDoux looked at Maitland, who nodded. Schlessinger nodded as well.
“We’ll build you a bar,” LeDoux said. “We really want to give you whatever you want, Dave.”
“Can I keep my team?”
“We have a saying in Congress,” Senator Danforth Sykes said. “‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but if it breaks, blame the other party for not fixing it.’ We want you to keep your team. I talked to Dan about you. You couldn’t come with any higher recommendations, and I trust my son’s opinion.”
Dan had been transferred from Balad to the Landstuhl Army Medical Center in Germany, where the doctors had worked to repair his damaged kidney.
“How’s Danny boy doing?” DeLuca asked.
“He’s better,” the senator said. “I have to say, on a personal note, I was upset when he said he wanted to stay in CI, but we’ve had a good talk about it and I’ve accepted his decision. It’s been a bit remarkable, to his mother and me, how much he seems to have matured in the last year. What you’ll be doing is important, Sergeant. I dare say vital. And my son believes you’d be the best person to head the team.”
“You must be glad you found the WMD you’ve been looking for,” DeLuca said. Maitland, Schlessinger, White, and Sykes all exchanged glances.
“We’re not going to release that, at the present time,” Carla White said.
DeLuca wanted to say, “Then before the next election, perhaps?” but he held his tongue. Maybe he was just being cynical. It was none of his business—these were not the games he had any interest in playing.
“We’re also prepared to give you a field promotion, here and now, with commensurate pay scale,” Canales said. “You can take your pick. Sergeant first class, warrant officer, lieutenant if you want to join the officers’ corps.”
“No thanks,” DeLuca said. “I’ll take warrant officer.”
“Well,” Colonel Canales said, “General LeDoux predicted you were going to say that.”
“And I want my team paid at least as much as the private contractors get paid.”
“Not a problem,” Canales said.
“Can you give us an answer now?” Maitland said. “Or would you like twenty-four hours?”
“I’m going to have to talk to my wife,” DeLuca said.
“Of course,” Carla White said. “We understand. The president has been saying he wants to recognize the sacrifices made by the families of our service members by building them a monument. He thinks we have enough monuments to soldiers and not one to stand for what their families have suffered and experienced. We’ve actually been looking at places on the Mall in Washington to do something.”
“Well,” DeLuca said. “That sounds a lot like political bullshit to me, frankly. I think the families would be more grateful if you fix the VA system.”
He saw LeDoux try to stifle a smirk.
“We’re going to do that, too,” White said.
“My guy at USAMRIID says you probably stopped somewhere between two and three hundred million deaths,” Maitland said. “Just so you know.”
“But why keep score?” DeLuca said. “I’ll think about it. That’s all I can tell you.”
He knew, about five minutes after they left the room, that he was going to take the job. He didn’t feel forced. Somebody else could do it if he didn’t. He knew that. He was going to take the job, simply because right now, there was no better way for him to live, no other way that he could make the same level of contribution to the country that had given him a home, and a dream. Corny as it sounded, this was truly how he could be all that he could be. He thought about it for another hour, but he kept coming up to the same conclusion.
He wasn’t sure how he was going to say it, but he knew approximately what he was going to say when his wife arrived, dropping her suitcase inside the door to his room.
She looked at him for a long time, tears welling up in her eyes.
“We have to talk,” he said to Bonnie.
“That’s my line,” she said. “We’ll talk, but right now, would you mind holding me? Because I really need you to.”
“I might be a little rusty at it,” he said.
“We’ll start slow,” she said.
“Good idea,” he said.
She lay down beside him and rested her head on his chest.
About the Authors
DAVID DEBATTO has served in the active duty Army, Army Reserve, and Army National Guard as a German linguist, counterintelligence course instructor, and counterintelligence special agent. He served in Europe at the height of the Cold War in the late 1970s to early 1980s and in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 where his Tactical Human Intelligence Team (THT) hunted Saddam, WMD, and top Ba’ath party leaders. He is currently writing the second of this four-part series for Warner Books along with Pete Nelson as well as articles for major publications such as Vanity Fair, Salon, and The American Prospect. He is also a frequent guest on major television and radio news programs giving his analysis of breaking stories in the global war on terrorism. David lives in Massachusetts with his wife and two Bengal cats.
PETE NELSON lives with his wife and son in western Massachusetts. He got his MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1979 and has written both fiction and nonfiction for magazines, including Harper’s, Playboy, Esquire, MS, Outside, The Iowa Review, National Wildlife, Glamour, and Redbook. He was a columnist for Mademoiselle and a staff writer for LIVE magazine, covering various live events including horse pulls, music festivals, dog shows, accordion camps, and arm wrestling championships. He’s published twelve young adult novels, including a six-book series about a girl named Sylvia Smith-Smith, which earned him an Edgar Award nomination from the Mystery Writers of America. His young adult nonfiction WWII history, Left for Dead (Random House, 2002), about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, won the 2003 Christopher Award and was selected for the American Library Association’s 2003 top ten list. His other nonfiction titles include Real Man Tells All (Viking, 1988), Marry Like a Man (NAL, 1992), That Others May Live (Crown, 2000), and Kidshape (Rutledge Hill, 2004). His novel The Christmas List was published by Rutledge Hill Press in 2004.
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