by Ian Slater
“I’m going down to the 7-Eleven for the Times,” he told Margaret as she walked into the living room.
He’d always preferred the feel of a good newspaper, such as the old International Herald Tribune that he used to scan every day in Heidelberg during his Cold War posting in Germany. A good newspaper with a second cup of coffee was one of the great pleasures in life, and something he usually enjoyed after each morning’s ten-mile run, fantasies of coming in first in the Olympic marathon in his head, the crowd on its feet for his sensational last-minute dash to victory. Well, hell, Georgie Patton had made it to the 1912 Olympics.
“You haven’t been for your run,” she said at the very moment he’d thought it.
He smiled at the synchronicity. Here was a marriage, he hoped, that would last.
“Ah, I’ll run later.”
“Oh? This DARPA thing must be important then.”
“Well, I don’t like stories that are aired once then die, especially given that this is an election year. Something’s fishy. Might be something in the papers, though.”
“Douglas?”
“Yes?”
“While you’re on the phone with her, why don’t you invite the old tart around for dinner? I’d love to see the competition.”
He stood there stunned, as if a grenade had exploded nearby. Speechless.
“Oh,” said Margaret, her arms akimbo, smile gone, her tone acidic. “Why so shocked, Douglas? You two were very chatty last time there was a terrorist attack. I assume you want to chat again.”
“Margaret,” Freeman began, “I didn’t want you to think—”
“I’m already thinking it.”
“I’m sorry,” said the general. “Honey, honest to God, Margaret, there is no subterfuge in this. I just thought it more—”
“Discreet?” she proffered angrily. “To contact your tart from the 7-Eleven?”
“Don’t call her that. She’s just an old—”
“Tart,” said Margaret. “I know. I have the misfortune to see her regularly on the boob tube because my legendary general of a husband just happens to be obsessed with watching CNN. And guess who is one of the anchors?”
“Margaret, stop it! That’s enough, dammit. I merely want to know what happened to a story that was alive and well one moment and dead the next. Smells fishy, and I want to get to the bottom of it. You know as well as I do that I’m still on a Special Forces advisory retainer for the White House. The president himself wanted retirees kept on a potential call-up basis. We’re spread — our forces are spread too thinly all over the world. And seeing they’ve put me on retainer, small though it is, at least they’ve given me something after pushing me out, and the way I keep that unofficial job, with entrée to the national security adviser, I might add, is to stay current. It’s like anything else. If you’re not current, you’re dead.”
Margaret was rigid — glacial ice.
“Ah, dammit, I’ll call from here.”
“No, go. Go get the papers. Keep current. There might be a picture of her in the obituaries.”
Son of a bitch, this is getting out of control. All I said was I’m going to the 7-Eleven and, BOOM, I’m in a minefield!
Margaret turned abruptly, stormed out of the living room, and slammed the bedroom door.
“Shit!” said Freeman. I’m cut off for a week.
He put on his jogging suit, grabbed his old SF forage cap and his keys, along with his phone card and ID, and left, thinking again of Rudyard Kipling’s poem, the old imperialist’s advice to “fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—” But he knew Margaret was going to need more than sixty seconds. Sixty hours, maybe? Dammit, he should have just called Marte Price from home, just do it in plain sight, with Admiral Horatio Nelson’s stratagem in mind: “Never mind maneuvers. Go straight at ’em!”
Well, he thought, this is what you get when you try to do things by stealth, but then again, as a virile, fit man in his sixties, feeling closer to a fit forty, he was hugely flattered by Margaret’s jealousy. When she got that cold look, the softer features of her face taking on a distinctively intimidating expression reminiscent of Julia Roberts’s in Erin Brockovich, she was dauntingly beautiful. He strode down to the 7-Eleven.
“No, Douglas,” Marte Price assured him. “I don’t know anything about an attack on a navy base. Who told you there was?”
“Aussie Lewis. You remember him. He’s one of my old team. You interviewed him after the team cleaned up those gangs of no-hopers on the Olympic Peninsula up in Washington state.”
“Oh — wait a minute.” Freeman could hear the rustle of papers at her end. “Yes,” Marte said, “there was a news feed from some affiliate, something about a breaking and entering caper, but it all proved bogus.” Marte laughed. “Embarrassing as hell, really. We had to run a retraction. I don’t think,” she said, laughing, “that the stringer who phoned it in will be paid for anything he or she pitches at our newspeople now. Apparently it was just some rumor. Probably some blogger screwing with us.”
“Uh-huh,” said the general, wiping his forehead with the heel of his right hand as he held the phone in the other. “And my name, for the record, Marte, is Shirley, and I’ve got the biggest hooters in Monterey County.”
“Good for you, Shirley,” she quipped.
“Oh, come on, Marte. Give me a break. Don’t give me that stringer rumor crap. CNN has faster intel half the time than No Such Agency.” He meant the National Security Agency. “You don’t run anything unless it’s reliable, has to be fact-checked.”
“I’m sorry, Douglas, but I’m telling you the truth. I hate to say it, but sometimes we actually do make mistakes — like that kid in San Diego, remember? Back in forty-one, alone in the newsroom on the Sunday, December seventh? Couldn’t get any confirmation, but he was going to run the header ‘Japs Bomb San Francisco’ until they got it sorted out at the last moment.”
“Bad analogy, sweetheart,” said Freeman. “The Japanese—‘Japs’ is politically incorrect, Marte—did bomb us. The kid just thought it was ’Frisco instead of Pearl Harbor. But there was a bombing attack.”
“Douglas, I don’t want to be rude, but I’m busy. The story is there’s no story. Nothing happened. Nothing. Bad news source. Nada.” She paused. “I hear traffic. Why aren’t you calling from home? Afraid your new wife’ll find out?”
“Thanks, Marte,” he told her. “Take care.”
She hung up.
Bitch. Well, not really a bitch, but — a “bad news source”?
Douglas Freeman gleaned every headline in the 7-Eleven, including those in USA Today, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and La Opinión. Nada.
He went down to the beach and began his morning run. He hated jogging in sand but knew it increased his workout by a factor of two to three and tempered his calf muscles until they were as hard as the new hagfish and Kevlar bulletproof vests he’d championed. As he pounded up and down the dunes, he was confident he’d give any drill instructor anywhere a run for his money—with full modern combat pack of fifty to seventy pounds, which just happened to be the same amount of weight as the Roman legionnaires had carried on their twenty-mile-a-day marches. As usual when jogging, he imagined that he was in a history-making race, like Philippides who ran the twenty-six miles from Marathon to Athens to tell the Athenians to hold fast, that their army under General Miltiades, who had just whipped the Persians, was now on its way back to save Athens itself, which it did. Of course Philippides had collapsed and died the second after he’d delivered the fateful message.
By the time he’d reached home, Freeman was in full sweat.
“Sweetie, I’m home.”
“I can smell.”
Ouch. Maybe she would cut him off for a month?
“Sorry, I know I must pong.”
“Must what?” she asked sharply.
“Pong.”
“Is that—” There was a pause, and he thought he heard a stifled laugh, and
seized the opportunity.
“Yes, pong — means to really smell bad. An Aussie or Brit word. Not sure which. Aussie Lewis used to use it a lot. Guess I picked it up from him.” There was another long pause, and she appeared at the door in a smart fall suit of variegated autumnal tones: nothing too gauche but one that showed her ample bustline to best advantage.
“Where are you off to?” asked the general, a little cap-in-hand, a man who had once commanded thousands of men in the field, and the commander who had electrified America with his momentous “U-turn battle” against the Siberian Sixth Armored Corps during the U.S.-led U.N. “peacekeeping action” in the Transbaikal.
“I’m going out,” she said, checking her reflection in the hall mirror. “I told you last week. Linda Rushmein is giving a bridal shower for her niece, Julia.”
“Rushmein,” mused Freeman. “As in ‘rush mein dinner, mein Herr?’”
Margaret didn’t smile. “The shower will be later in the day but Linda’s asked me to help with the preparations. I won’t be back till late. She’s coming to pick me up.”
“That’s a long drive,” Freeman noted.
“Don’t wait up for me,” she said.
“Of course I will.”
“I can’t imagine why. I’ll be tired.”
“Then I’ll run you a hot bath,” Freeman said congenially.
She had put on gold, dolphin-shaped earrings. Freeman idly recalled that dolphins were the symbols of submariners. It got him thinking that perhaps this nonstory about a DARPA facility being attacked had to do with the new submarine base in Alaska. It might be a bit of a stretch, he thought, but a news source could say “West Coast” and still mean Alaska.
“You can stay up for me if you want,” said Margaret, “but I’m going straight to bed.”
“That’s what I mean,” he said cheekily, slipping off his jogging shoes. “I’ll be up!”
“Don’t be vulgar, Douglas.” She straightened her suit jacket, crimped her hair, then looked straight at him. “You’re famous, I’m told, for your commando raids and command of detail, meticulous planning, and concern for your troops. Well, through no fault of your own, you’ve been pushed into retirement by what Linda tells me is the iPod generation in the Pentagon. And I’m sorry for that, and I’ll try my best to be a good, loyal wife, but I’m serious, Douglas, I don’t want you flirting with other women. It’s something I abhor in men who are married and—”
“Flirting?” he interjected. “Margaret, I was thinking of you. I just thought it would be imprudent to be calling Marte Price from home. I’d probably feel the same if you had reason, however sound, to call an old beau, someone you had known—”
“Slept with, you mean, like you did with that tart.”
“That was before I met you — well, I mean, really got to know you after Catherine’s death. For Heaven’s sake, Margaret, get a grip. You’re blowing this way out of proportion. Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill.”
“It’s the lie, Douglas. It’s not that you’re phoning your old tart.”
“I’ve asked you before. Please don’t refer to her like that.”
“It’s not that you’re phoning your old tart. It’s this pathetic 7-Eleven cover story. Linda Rushmein tells me that even amongst your enemies in the State Department, whom you’ve raked over the coals for being professional liars, you’re thought to be an honest man. But I caught you in one of your own lies.”
His blood pressure was shooting up, and his grim-jawed George C. Scott in Patton face was set in Defcon 2—the penultimate defense condition before outright war. “Linda Rushmouth should keep her mouth shut. I did not call people in the State Department professional liars. I said that they lied because most diplomats were paid to lie.”
“Oh, don’t be so tendentious. It’s the same thing.” She snatched her raincoat from the hall rack.
“All right, all right,” he began, “it was foolish of me not to tell you I’d be calling her. It’s just that I could see no good reason to tell you and get you all upset. It was wrong of me to do it. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
There was a horn bipping outside.
“That’ll be Linda,” said Margaret. “I have to go.”
“Can you leave a number where I can reach you? I always like to have a—”
She scribbled the number on the yellow Post-it pad on the hall table.
“I love you, you silly woman,” he called after her. “And tell Linda Rushmein to get a muzzle. And don’t let her drive you home if she’s had too many. Those Krauts like their suds!”
Shouldn’t have said that, oaf. He would have bawled out a subordinate for such boorishness. As he looked into the hall mirror, he rebuked himself. Now you’ve done it, Freeman. You might be the hero from way back in the Far East against the Siberian Sixth et al. but here in Monterey you’re facing a domestic court-martial for a damn fool tactical move.
He descended to the basement, opened the Rolodex file in the cabinet near his weights, and looked up Alaska — naval bases. Nothing rang a bell. Perhaps this nonstory CNN had broadcast before they’d been obviously sat upon by the heavies from the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, et al. didn’t have anything to do with a naval base at all but was about an air force, army, or marine base, with an unmarked “black box” DARPA facility nearby? The Rolodex listed one DARPA facility attached to Elmendorf, the big air force base adjacent to Anchorage, Alaska, as well as other bases down Canada’s adjoining West Coast. Turning on his computer, he did a Net search for all armed forces bases. But there were no reports, not even a suggestion of a B and E, only assurances that the government was doing a good job with your tax dollars.
He called the White House, asking to speak to National Security Adviser Eleanor Prenty, the only connection he had with the administration as per his contract. He had promised he’d call only on matters of national emergency. He was put on hold. Usually the presidential staff, like those at State, didn’t take kindly to Freeman; he was likely to say what he thought, his words unadorned by the usual equivocation of career flip-floppers and yes-men.
He wouldn’t have made the call if he’d been able to get even a scrap of information about the “nonstory,” but there were no scraps. Still the very idea that terrorists might have penetrated DARPA security had set off his alarm bells. His personal interest in DARPA dated from when he’d sent a memo to the Pentagon, personally championing what otherwise would have been a small item in the press: the development of a hagfish slime-fiber weave vest. The slime’s molecular structure, he knew, was so strong that he suggested it be mixed with the latest Kevlar to make what he believed would be the toughest bulletproof vest possible, given the weight-to-load-bearing ratio of America’s fighting men and women. DARPA had run with the idea, and he was proved right. Since then, countless American and allied lives had been saved by the vests, and unfortunately the lives of American-hating terrorists who, just as Freeman had warned the Pentagon, had gotten their hands on either the chemical formula or the vests themselves so as to reverse-engineer their own. Of course it was only a matter of time before the DARPA vest went commercial anyway, but he’d hoped to give the Pentagon the heads-up to at least try to restrict the distribution of the vests. Had terrorists penetrated DARPA again? And if so, what was at risk? Or was he way off course, and Marte Price right — that it was nothing more than a badly sourced nonstory, a figment of some eager blogger’s imagination?
The White House operator told the general he’d have to leave a message or call back. Eleanor Prenty was in a meeting right now.
To calm down, he showered, opening his eyes every now and then to check that no one else was in the bathroom. As a youngster, he’d seen Hitchcock’s Psycho and after that murder in the shower scene he’d harbored a subliminal fear about showering with his eyes shut, training himself to keep his eyes open even while shampooing. It had saved his life in Iraq when a terrorist, breaching the U.S. security ring around Karbala, had come
in firing his AK-47. Freeman, having glimpsed him through an eye-stinging film of soapsuds, had dived, quickly knocking the terrorist over, grabbing him in a headlock and plunging the would-be assassin headfirst into a toilet and drowning him.
Hours later, sitting in the living room La-Z-Boy waiting for Margaret to come home and tired of surfing the Net for any possible DARPA connection, Douglas Freeman was starting to have grave doubts about Aussie’s story. He had killed the TV and turned to read his favorite passages from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, when the phone’s jangle startled him. It was Aussie Lewis.
“Hi, Aussie, what’s up?”
“We clear?”
“Clear fore and aft,” the general replied, his tone edgy after the fight with Margaret. “What’s up?”
“Uh, nothing much, General, but I’ve got a good bet.” There was a pause. “Does Mommy let you bet?”
“I’ll bet when I want,” said Freeman. It was an old Special Forces team joke that whenever you wanted to rib a guy, you just said, “Will Mommy let you do it?”
“Okay,” said Aussie. “This is straight from the trainer’s mouth, not the horse’s. Very interesting info on the eight horse in the sixth race at Churchill Downs. It’s been raining.”
The general was more alert now; this was how his SpecWar team’s military intelligence often came to him: not from neat official reports but from bits and pieces buried here and there in casual conversation which, because there was no record of it, could be “plausibly denied” by all team members should some snoopy congressman launch a fishing expedition into the financial heart of the General Accounting Office, trolling for black ops budgets.
