by Ian Slater
“General Freeman?”
“Yes. Who is this?”
“Aussie Lewis,” came the jovial voice. In the background was the sound of either a Special Forces team checking weapons or metal crates banging together.
“Aussie? What’s wrong?”
“We clear fore and aft, mate?” came Aussie’s voice, his Australian twang still distinctive, though he’d been a U.S. Special Forces commando and a naturalized American for fifteen years.
“Yes,” said the general. “Clear fore and aft.”
“What is it?” pressed the general. Freeman was one of America’s legendary commanders but right now all he was was a rather grumpy, impatient retiree who needed his sleep.
“Well,” said Aussie Lewis, “there’s this old sailor who decides to have a last fling. So, he goes down to the waterfront and picks up this lady of the evening. Well, they’re goin’ at it and he says, ‘How’m I doin’?’ and she says, ‘You’re doin’ about three knots.’
“‘What d’you mean, three knots?’ he asks her and she says, ‘Well, you’re not hard, you’re not in, and you’re not gettin’ your money back!’”
This was followed by raucous laughter from what sounded like a football team. The metallic sound the general had heard earlier, he decided, must have been the rattle of beer cans.
“Son of a bitch!” said General Douglas Freeman. “You rang to tell me a joke — an old joke at that — at 0500?”
“Oh, shite!” came Aussie’s response. “I thought it was 0800 hours.”
“You must be on the East Coast,” said Freeman, “and pissed as usual.”
“Yes and no, General,” answered Aussie. “A few of the old team got together for an ad hoc reunion. We’re seeing the sights in Washington, D.C. Saw the World War II monument yesterday. See where all our friggin’ taxes go. The monument’s A-okay, though. We all like it. ’Bout time all those people had something to honor them. Anyway, I thought I’d give you a bell, see how you were, you being retired and all. Thought you could do with a bit of a laugh.”
Freeman smiled, relaxed, and sat back against the bed’s headboard, Margaret stirring sleepily beside him. “Well, thanks, Aussie. And you’re right. Ever since the yuppies in the Pentagon requested I take retirement because of my — well, what they said was—”
“Your penchant,” answered Aussie, “for ‘politically incorrect statements.’ You called those congressmen on the Appropriations Committee — let’s see, what was it? Oh yeah, ‘A bunch of broad-banging bureaucrats.’ Don’t think you can say ‘broad’ anymore,” continued Aussie. “Sexist.”
“Hmmm, I suppose,” the general conceded ruefully. “Never mind that it was the truth. That bunch on the Appropriations Committee should’ve voted more money for DARPA.”
“That’s what the team’s been talking about here.”
“Where’s ‘here’—a dive?”
“Of course not, General. We’re on top of the roof at the Willard Hotel. Breakfast. We can see the White House from here.”
“Hope they can’t see you guys. Who’s there?”
“In the White House? The president, I guess.”
“No, you dork. Who’s with you at the Willard?”
“Ah, lessee. Salvini, alias the Brooklyn Dodger, Choir Williams, the bloody Welsh tenor — he’s singing, God help us — and yours truly. Couldn’t get Eddie Mervyn or Gomez out here. After that Korean stint we did they went home to Mommy. They live on the West Coast.”
“I know,” said Freeman. He knew exactly where every member of his old team was located and how he could reach them — quickly, if needed — including Medal of Honor winner David Brentwood, who was laid up at the moment with a flare-up of an old shoulder wound.
“Oh,” added Aussie, “I’m getting crap for not mentioning Johnny Lee, our multilingual expert. He’s here too, pissed out of his mind. That DARPA outfit you were talking about?”
“What about it?” said the general.
“You know,” said Aussie. “This B and E at the naval facility.”
“Break and enter?” said the general, sitting up higher against the headboard, his face clouding over. He prided himself on being current, particularly in this long, hard war against terror which, as Bush had told the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, would be the “work of decades”—how history was once more witnessing a great clash like that of the Cold War. Only this war on terror was a damn sight hotter, and it was for that reason that the general had vociferously argued for more money to be allocated for DARPA’s black box stuff. DARPA needed all the funding it could get, even if it meant hiding it so deep within the GAO’s — the General Accounting Office’s — records that to locate it would be like trying to find the proverbial needle in a bureaucratic haystack. The general was very up-to-date vis-à-vis DARPA, but he hadn’t heard anything about a B and E against any DARPA installation.
“What happened?” he asked Aussie.
“No details really,” said Aussie. “On the idiot box — breaking news. Oh, guess it must have been about an hour ago. Oh four hundred your time.”
“I didn’t see anything,” said the general. “I was watching a late movie. What channel?”
“CNN.”
“Huh,” said Freeman. “Those people know more than the CIA half the time.”
“Tell me about it,” answered Aussie, having to raise his voice against the sound of the beer cans.
“Which facility?” Freeman pressed; he could hear the usually quiet Welshman Choir Williams singing “Goodbye” from White Horse Inn.
The Willard wouldn’t put up with that for long.
“That’s what we’ve been tossing around over a few beers here,” said Aussie. “The location of the facility. Your old CNN flame, Marte Price, broke into the newscast, said there’d been a B and E at a highly sensitive naval base out your way.”
“My way?” said the general, adding wryly, “You mean somewhere between San Diego and Alaska?”
“Yeah, pretty broad isn’t it?” responded Aussie. “I dunno, but we all got the impression it was on the West Coast — somewhere out there. All she said was something about a naval facility ‘out west’ but — just hold on a mo, General.” Then Freeman heard Aussie asking the others, “She did say it was a naval facility out west, right?”
There was a chorus of boozy agreement.
“Yeah, General,” continued Aussie. “She said it was a ‘highly classified’ naval facility that had been broken into. Security guard killed.”
“And—?” pressed Freeman.
“That’s it. No film, just the verbal report.”
“But they must have aired the story again later? More details?”
“Nada,” said Aussie. “We were up playing a few hands of poker. We would’ve heard any more news about it. My guess is DHS must have come down on CNN like a ton o’ bricks to kill the report. ’Course, at the time of the newscast, most people were in bed anyway. That always helps to squelch a story.”
“You weren’t in bed,” said the general.
“Well, you know how it is, General. Team likes to stay up — stay current.”
“And I don’t?” the general joshed.
“Oh no,” said Aussie. “We know you’re up-to-date. But you’ve probably been busy staying up with your wife.”
“Cheeky bastard!”
“Oh no,” replied Aussie again, with mock embarrassment. “Oh, I didn’t mean anything untoward, General, or anything under covers, if you know what I mean?”
“I do. You’re pissed and you’re insolent. Call me back if you hear anything on that DARPA facility — where the hell it is.”
“Roger that,” said Aussie. “You sleep tight now.”
The general put the phone down and shook his head.
“Who was that?” asked Margaret, opening her eyes. Their brilliant turquoise color always surprised her famous or, perhaps more truthfully nowadays, once-famous husband.
“Ah, the boys,” replied the ge
neral. “They’re tying one on.”
Margaret had to think about that phrase. It wasn’t one she normally heard amongst her friends at the church socials, even those put on for the benefit of retired service folk who, with so many other Americans, had suffered catastrophic losses, personal and financial, when the family breadwinner had been killed in the long, ongoing war against terror.
“Aren’t you coming back to bed?” Margaret murmured, taking a sip of water from the glass on the bedside table as Freeman opened the closet, reaching in for his long gray robe. He didn’t answer her, already deep in thought about the DARPA burglary, if that’s what it had been, and surfing channels on their bedroom TV as he slipped his feet into his moccasins. Nothing about a break-in at any military base. Perhaps Aussie had glimpsed part of an old documentary tape. Freeman recalled how just the other day he had pulled a newspaper out of the magazine rack and was halfway through reading an article on yet another terrorist raid in Britain before he realized the paper was a month old.
Margaret drew the duvet over her eyes to shut out the flashes of light from the television. “Douglas? What are you doing?”
“Oh, sorry.” He stabbed the power button, shutting off the TV. Something wasn’t right. Aussie had said all of them saw it. “Think I’ll stay up awhile,” he told Margaret. “Get some juice, maybe have a cup of coffee.” He glanced at his watch which, from old “in-country” habit he wore so that the face was under his wrist and reflections from its quartz face couldn’t be easily seen by the enemy.
“I’d like some company,” Margaret persisted, “and something in your robe tells me that you would too.”
“Margaret!” he said, feigning shock but pleased by her sudden sauciness. “Time for me to get up,” he added. “Nearly reveille.”
“You are up,” she said. “C’est magnifique! I’d like you to come down.”
“Mrs. Freeman!” he said, turning and looking down at her. “You astound me. You wouldn’t have said that six months ago — in French or English!”
“No,” she conceded, pulling down the covers invitingly. “I wouldn’t, but you know how these sudden conversions can be.” She was right. Once Douglas had told her how Catherine, his late wife and Margaret’s sister, had hoped that he and Margaret would “get together” should Catherine’s melanoma spread and make Douglas a widower, Margaret had experienced a surge of excitement. “I suddenly felt free,” she told him now. “That’s the truth of it, Douglas. Catherine set me free. Since then I’ve been — I don’t know. I feel like a new woman.”
“You are,” he said understandingly. She had, he knew, been straining to be free. He was at once enormously flattered that she had so secretly loved him all those years and sorry that the tension created in her by her suppression of her love had more often than not resulted in hostility. “I know. I only hope you’re not sorry that you’ve ended up with this retired old fart who still can’t leave the wars behind him.”
“You most certainly are not an old fart. Why, you jog more miles in a day than most marathoners. You, Douglas Freeman, are as fit as a young buck.” But she could see that, as virile as he was, his mind was elsewhere right now and, sliding back under the pink eiderdown, she said, “Oh all right, I’ll wait. I know you won’t settle until you check out this DARPA thing.”
“You were listening in,” he said, pretending shock. “I thought you were asleep.”
“I was, my darling, until I felt you sit straight up as if there was a spider in the bed. Go on,” she said teasingly. “Go down to your Rolodex.”
“Don’t you make fun of my Rolodex file, lady. When the power fails on my laptop, I have my cards. Hard copy, Margaret.”
“Oh,” she said, holding back a laugh.
He smiled as he drew the charcoal-gray Truman Show robe, an old gift from his actor nephew, tighter about his waist against the hard slab of his abdominal muscles. “You’re very nice,” he continued, “as I’m about to rediscover in that nest of yours once I find out what the—” He hesitated, refusing to use even the most commonplace blasphemy in her presence. It was a leftover from his marriage to Catherine. “Once I find out whether a DARPA facility’s been penetrated.”
“Penetrated?”
“Stop it, woman! Is that all you can think of?”
“Right now, yes.”
“Get up and make me some coffee.”
“Oh, tush!” she said. “Make it yourself.”
Freeman grinned and walked through to the kitchen via the living room, past a portrait of his ancestor, William Douglas Freeman, whose American rifleman’s forest green and chocolate brown uniform in the painting contrasted with the bloodred and white uniforms of the 1812 British regulars. A photo of his twenty-year-old son Dan and his girlfriend was on the lamp table along with a vase of sweet-smelling pink Mojave roses, a birthday gift to Margaret from Dan, who, in the general’s view, was finding it difficult to accept that his father had not only remarried but had married his aunt.
He watched CNN. There was nothing about a break-in at any defense base, let alone any DARPA facility. Had Aussie and the other SpecForces seen it on another network? There were so many now. He channel-surfed while Margaret’s ancient coffeemaker gurgled and spat. She saved everything. He had a rule: For every new thing that came into the house, an 1,100-square-foot bungalow, some old thing had to go out. In their first real quarrel after getting married she’d suggested he be put out. He smiled at how they’d laughed afterward and enjoyed passion-fueled sex that had left the argument in its wake.
On NBC there was yet another story about a series of terrorist alerts throughout the world. In London, a taxi bombing at Heathrow Airport had killed eight — twenty-three injured, six critically — and there was a threat in Washington state, but no reference to a West Coast naval base. Mention of Washington, however, reminded him that the U.S. Navy did have several highly sensitive installations up in Washington state.
Taking his coffee into the hallway, the general, who had been retired by a White House that hadn’t appreciated his blunt public description of jihad, studied his wall map of Cascadia, the Pacific Northwest made up of British Columbia, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington state. First there was the extensive sub base on the stunningly beautiful Hood Canal, surely at the top of any terrorist’s list. And then there was the huge naval air station on Whidbey Island east of the Canadian-U.S. Strait of Juan de Fuca. The latter, usually mispronounced by Aussie in crude allusions, was the egress channel for the big American Trident boomers and the hunter-killer attack subs out of Bangor, Washington. Then there was the huge Cold War SAC — Strategic Air Command — bomber base at Fairchild near Spokane way out in eastern Washington in the sagebrush country where the gargantuan B-52s flew over the sun-twinkling sprinklers that appeared like white lace across the irrigated farms and dry, coulee-rutted earth. Closer to the coast there was the army’s Fort Lewis near Tacoma. It was here on this enormous base that Freeman had last attended a DARPA demonstration, having been accidentally invited by a Pentagon clerk who hadn’t realized that the general was now on the “has-been” list.
But, according to Aussie, it hadn’t been an army barracks that had been hit but a naval base. He knew there were naval, civilian-staffed bases, secret research stations, tucked away along the coast from San Diego to San Francisco. And there were, since 9/11, several other locations on the West Coast with its thousands of inlets and bays. These mostly consisted of cutting-edge university labs with minimum, if any, real security, the academic community not naturally disposed to the presence of armed guards, arguing, with a good deal of merit, that low profiles in fact afforded more real security than any official display of armed security and high-profile signage, the latter best exemplified by the “Use of Deadly Force Authorized” sign at the entrance to the secret Bangor sub base that everyone knew about.
Freeman thought, as he sipped the strong, black coffee, that right then he couldn’t have given Aussie, Margaret, or anyone else a good, rational argument
for his suspicion that it was probably the DARPA installation outside Bangor on Puget Sound’s Hood Canal or the naval testing lab near Keyport, thirty-five miles west of Hood Canal in Puget Sound, but he felt it in his gut. He called one of his many contacts in the Puget Sound area and discovered that his hunch was, as Aussie would have said, as useful as “tits on a bull.” Completely off track.
He did a computer news search of all the major naval establishments on the West Coast. Nothing. Next, he did a specific search on the Net for any current media mention of naval establishments on the East Coast. None had been referred to by either the networks’ anchors or their affiliates in the last twenty-four hours, and there was nothing on the main blogs. Of course, he reminded himself, these days the government, citing the Patriot Act in this long war against terror, had annoyingly, if understandably, shut down thousands of Internet sites with hitherto available defense-related information and links. The American Civil Liberties Union was particularly vexed by FBI and Homeland Security “visits” to any blogger who persisted in Internet searches vis-à-vis classified defense establishments.
In frustration, Douglas Freeman decided to call Marte Price. Surely his occasional trysts with her after Catherine died, when Marte was embedded with various units of his overseas, ought to be worth something. Besides, he had never been cavalier with Marte, never treated her as a “ready lay” but as a good-looking, savvy newswoman who, on tough, life-endangering assignments, needed the same kind of sexual release he did. It had been discreet — or as discreet as any liaison can be in the field. It had, of course, been strictly against army rules and regulations, but the war had slammed peacetime propriety hard up against the certainty of their own mortality. He had seen her a few times since and spoken with her on the phone. But now that he was remarried, he knew that a call to an old flame from his own house would not be a good tactical move. And the call would have to be made on a land line. Anyone who used a cellphone these days for anything confidential had no idea of just how pervasive the National Security Agency phone taps were, especially since 9/11. Not even Voice Over Internet Protocol-encrypted phone data was being respected by the NSA.
