by Ian Slater
“That’s big of you,” she said icily.
“Look,” began Freeman, “this might seem strange, but something very important’s come up and I need your help.”
“Do you? Isn’t Marte smarter?”
He took a deep breath. “No,” he answered slowly. “And as far as I know she didn’t take French in college, as you did. And you keep it up, right?”
“I read French. I don’t speak it — well, hardly at all.”
“That’s fine.”
“What is it?” she asked impatiently. “I have to get back to the party. They’re about to give Julia the gifts.”
“Right. What does this mean?” He spelled out Pend Oreille.
“I’ve never heard of a French word ‘pend,’” responded Margaret. “But ‘oreille’ is ‘ear.’ Why?”
The general was looking down at his tightly folded copy of the TPC — Tactical Pilotage Chart — F-16B. The shape of Lake Pend Oreille could be seen as that of an ear. “Pend” was maybe a hybrid word from the English “pendulous”—long, hanging down. Long ear. The shape of the lake was roughly like that of an ear, with a longer than usual lobe. Long ear. Big ear.
“Love you, Margaret.”
There was a pause, her voice lowered. “You too, you big oaf.”
“See you later, Sweetheart.”
“I’ll be late.”
“Not too late, I hope.” Margaret heard the excitement in his voice but it seemed to have been aroused more by her translation of “oreille” than by her impending return to Monterey. “I’d like to show you something,” Freeman told her. “It’s not an ear, but it’s long.”
“Really, Douglas!” But he could tell the ice had been broken. “I have to go,” she told him.
“Bye,” he said and, with his heart pounding, quickly dialed information for Vancouver, Canada, and asked for the history department at the University of British Columbia where, several years earlier, he’d taken a “War and Society” course as part of the post-9/11 NORAD — North American Defense Pact — liaison officer exchange program. It had been a course primarily on the history of war and its impact on any number of societies — how Rosie the Riveter had expanded the rights of women during the war, how war had revolutionized technology and vice versa, and how, for the Confederates, the first Battle of Bull Run turned from certain defeat to victory, due in large part to the military’s use of railways to rush Southern reinforcements to Bull Run in time to turn the tide for Stonewall Jackson.
The general asked to speak to Dr. Retals. Not there. Home number? The department secretary was polite, but firm. They couldn’t give out home numbers. And so he dialed the regular information number for area code 604 and asked for a David Retals who, if he remembered correctly, lived in or around the university area, out in the Dunbar-Point Grey area. On a Post-it, the general had written, “Big Ears, Eleanor Roosevelt, Idaho.”
“Hello?”
“Dr. Retals?”
“Yes?”
“General Douglas Freeman here. I took your course on war and—”
“I remember, General. How are you?”
“Fine, Doc. I need to know something, and I needed it yesterday.”
He heard Retals give a short laugh. “You were always in a hurry, General, except, as I remember, with your final paper.”
“That should have been an A, Doc,” the general charged. “You gave me a B-plus. I was sorely disappointed.”
“You were sorely late. An hour late, as I recall.”
“My damn computer had crashed.”
“That’s what they all say. How can I help you?” asked the professor congenially, obviously amused by his former student’s complaint about receiving a B-plus instead of an A for a late paper — and this coming from the legendary American officer whose standing order was that his officers’ mess at breakfast, lunch, and dinner must be closed exactly fifteen minutes after opening so as to punish latecomers and impress upon all the need for punctuality.
“Do you know of any connection, Doctor, between Eleanor Roosevelt and a Lake Pend Oreille?”
“Oh yes. The lake’s in Idaho, right?”
“Yes, sir,” said Freeman.
“Well,” began the historian, “early in the Second World War, Eleanor Roosevelt was on a flight out west on some business for FDR and, looking down on the Rockies, she saw this astonishingly beautiful lake just west of the Bitterroot Range in Idaho. Anyway, she made a note of it and when she returned to Washington, D.C., she recommended it to FDR, who, at the time, urgently needed a safe inland naval training base that would be well away from the East and West coasts, safe from any possible attack, particularly by the Japanese Navy’s air arm. The lake she’d seen turned out to be ‘Pend Oreille.’ It’s around ninety thousand acres, if I remember correctly, and very, very deep, over a thousand feet down in places. Anyway, after training more than a quarter of a million U.S. Navy personnel, mostly submariners in World War Two, this training center on the lake — the navy’s second largest training base in the world at the time — was decommissioned in—” The professor paused. “—I think it was sometime in 1946. I’d have to check that. Anyway, though it was decommissioned, it wasn’t forgotten. The staff was greatly reduced in size, down to a couple of dozen people at most. I believe the navy turned it into some kind of research station. That’s all I know, really.”
“Professor, if you were a woman, I’d kiss you.”
The professor laughed easily, remembering how the general hadn’t been so jolly when he’d received the B-plus.
“Thanks a million, Doc. I owe you one.”
“Not at all,” said Retals. “May I ask what you’re up to?”
“Deter, detect, defend,” answered Freeman. It was NORAD’s motto, which the professor had mentioned more than once in his course.
“Ah,” said the professor. “A word of advice?”
“Shoot,” said Freeman.
“Be careful, General. Idaho can get cruelly cold.”
“The globe’s warming, Professor.”
“Not everywhere.”
* * *
Now that he had something definite, Freeman called Eleanor Prenty again from the 7-Eleven. She was in yet another meeting. He was persistent, insisting that his call was “most urgent,” a matter of “the highest national security,” and that he had information which, if it got out, could acutely embarrass the administration, particularly in this, its election year.
He was put on hold, his ears assaulted by the most discordant jazz he’d ever heard. Whoever was on the horn sounded as if he were playing underwater and the tape or disk was past its prime, probably scratched. To Freeman, it sounded little better than static. Being on hold was a damn insult. Here he was, able to prove that it had taken him less than twenty-four hours to discover that whichever security agency was trying to keep the lid on the B and E at Pend Oreille wasn’t quite up to the job, and what did they do? Put him on hold. It was what Aussie Lewis would call a “piss-poor start.”
“Douglas?” The national security adviser sounded polite, but was clearly under a lot of strain, her voice rough with fatigue.
“Eleanor, I’ve just earned that retainer you pay me and then some.”
“How?” she asked impatiently. No doubt he’d dragged her away from yet another of the endless chain of meetings with the president and other nonretirees.
“Eleanor, I have a rock-solid source in the press who confirms that a naval research base has been hit. I know where it is. It’s landlocked and its name refers to part of the anatomy.”
“I know,” she said.
“What? Son of a—”
“Are you on a landline, Douglas?”
“I may be kept out of the loop,” he said testily, “but I’m not stupid. Of course I’m on a landline!”
“Douglas, calm down. I wasn’t lying to you when we spoke earlier. I mean, I wasn’t giving you the brush-off. The CIA, FBI, and DHS have been sitting on this. It’s so explosive they didn’t ca
ll it through until they thought they’d figured out exactly what had happened. I assume you know how much the president hates speculation. He wants hard facts from the agencies when they tell him something has fallen off the rails. Not first impressions, but solid facts. From what we can gather, a computer disk has been stolen, and U.S. forces from the Tenth Mountain Division were seen by some residents in the area riding down toward the base. Defense tells us that the Tenth Mountain Division shouldn’t have been anywhere near Pend Oreille.”
“Switcheroos!” said Freeman.
“What?”
“Switcheroos, terrorists, infiltrators, wearing the other guys’ uniforms. Hell, we’ve done the same thing in SpecOps for years.”
“Well, whatever happened, the disk is gone and apparently it contains highly sensitive data. I’m not even cleared to that level.”
It didn’t surprise Freeman, for while he knew that most people would find it difficult, if not impossible, to understand how someone as highly placed as the national security adviser might not be privy to such information, it was often the case. Indeed, in the new Office of Scientific Intelligence the distribution of DARPA files, Freeman knew, was obsessively controlled.
“Look,” Freeman advised the national security adviser, “even from what little you’ve told me and from what I’ve heard about Homeland Security or whoever it was killing the story after an initial blurb on CNN, this is clearly a no-wait situation. We don’t need a lot of suits from either the Intel agencies or Foggy Bottom discussing the options. There’s only one thing to do. Go find the pricks who stole the disk. With the right transport I can have my team rendezvous and be on the trail within eight hours.” He hurried on, “Hell, one of my men—” He was thinking of Choir Williams. “—lives in the area in question.” He said nothing about young Prince, Choir’s K-9 dog, who was one of the best trackers he’d ever seen, next to the team itself. “This is what we do, Eleanor.” Then he added, with some force, “I brought home the bacon from Korea, didn’t I?”
“Yes,” she agreed, he and his team had successfully carried out a predawn raid on the coast of North Korea, in one of the most hostile military areas in the world, and brought back vital intel. Freeman’s team had done precisely what the so-called “U.S. Paratroopers” had done at the DARPA installation on Pend Oreille, except that Freeman and his team hadn’t murdered civilians in cold blood. They had fought their own kind — warriors — in the North Korean raid.
Freeman, voice controlled but tight with the tension of expectation, said, “I say again, Eleanor, what we’ve got to do is go find these people before they get the disk out of the country, right?” Before she could answer, he was asking, “Have your people alerted all ports, airports and—?”
“We have. And we’ve got hundreds of DHS and FBI agents swarming through every airport in the Northwest. All border personnel have been alerted and are triple-checking every passport. The air force, coast guard, and navy on both coasts are also on alert. That means no plane or vessel is leaving the country until we say so.”
“Time, Eleanor,” the general stressed. “By the time the top brass in the Pentagon get their heads around this, these jokers will be on the West Coast. For Heaven’s sake, give me the green light. Let my team go after ’em. We’re always ready to go on short notice, you know that. Send in the heavyweight battalions later if I don’t get them. But let’s go while the trail’s still hot. I checked the long-range forecast, and in a few days there’s going to be a big snowfall up there. That’s not going to help track ’em, Eleanor. It’s a wilderness up there — one of the last great wild places in America. And with our regular forces already stretched thin all across the world, what you need is a small, self-sufficient, well-trained ready-to-go group on the ground now. Dammit, we can smell a terrorist.”
Was her sigh one of disbelief or fatigue?
“You all right? he asked.
“Do you fight as fast as you talk, Douglas?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he answered good-naturedly, before he was back on the attack, telling her, “We’ve trained for it, Eleanor. It’s what we do,” he repeated. “When my guys move through the kill house at Fort Bragg, they’re not only practicing close quarters combat, they get to use their noses, smell memory. People with different diets give off different-smelling perspiration. My guys use their noses or, by God, I don’t pass them.” He didn’t mention Prince; once that “puppy,” as Freeman sometimes called Choir’s fully grown dog, got onto a scent he was like a magnet to a fridge. Wouldn’t let go.
“Eleanor?”
“Yes?”
“How many of our people were killed up there?”
“I’m not certain as yet,” she replied, “but we think around a dozen. Not all the pix have come through from the FBI. It’s not like suicide bombers, Douglas. I mean, the sheriff who was first on the scene said nothing much seems disturbed, no butcher-shop massacre, not like the mess suicide bombers leave behind. First photos show one body slumped, sitting on the floor, back to a door. If you didn’t look closely and see the body, a man—” She needed a second to regain her composure. “Even the bullet holes aren’t messy, at least not in the pictures I saw. It’s so — so surreal, as if some of them’ve just gone to sleep on the floor, except for an older man slumped down by the door. He looks—” She couldn’t go on for several more moments.
“He—” began Eleanor, “—the older man, I mean, he — was no older than my dad. It was just so cruel, Douglas. They weren’t even soldiers, just civilians, scientists, doing their—”
Freeman spoke softly. “I know. These terrorist bastards. They’re not warriors. They’re vermin.” He paused, could hear her breathing. “Eleanor, for God’s sake, give me the green light.”
“Can you stay on hold for a few minutes?”
“Sure,” he answered, without a trace of annoyance. “I like jazz.”
While he waited, shifting the receiver from one hand to the other, the jazz static attacked again, this time murdering “Stranger on the Shore.” It was only now that Freeman saw the muscular youth, the one he’d seen before, silver stud in his tongue. He’d been waiting impatiently for the phone and was now moving menacingly toward the general. What bothered Freeman most was that he’d been so focused on talking with Eleanor that he’d missed seeing the youth. “I’m going to be awhile here,” Freeman told him cordially. “It’s an urgent call. You’d be better off to use the phone a couple of blocks from here.” What, wondered Freeman, was a kid, even a deadbeat, doing without a cellphone? Did he have anything to do with Pend Oreille or was he a wild card looking for trouble, courting it to fizz up his gray existence where the only certainty was uncertainty?
“Can’t use it,” said the kid sourly, his jaw jutting in the direction of the phone. “It’s busted.”
“Listen,” said Freeman as politely as time would allow, “I’m sorry, but this is an urgent call, so if you could give me a little space here—”
The youth, more sullen and unkempt up close than he’d appeared earlier in the day, came even closer. Freeman could smell him — sour body odor — and glimpsed soap dripping from a squeegee poking out from behind his waist. “Not much traffic around here,” the general commented, while wondering who in hell would use such a deadbeat as HUMINT? Then again…
Freeman took a pace toward the youth, who backed off. The phone was dangling.
“Sorry, Eleanor,” the general said, picking it up. “Had to get rid of a varmint.” But Eleanor wasn’t on the line, and he was still in no-man’s-land, on hold. He could see the youth returning with an older rube, the latter covered from head to hairy arms in alarming tattoos, his head clean shaven. He held a baseball bat in his right fist. There was more metal hanging from his neck, waist, and wrists than that hung on a Louisiana chain gang.
“You got a problem with muh boy?” the man bellowed.
“No problem,” said Freeman. “Just waiting on a long distance call. Federal business.”
“I don’t
give a fuck what business it is,” growled the tattooed skinhead. “Now get away from that fucking phone. Let muh boy use it.”
The general knew that getting away from the phone was precisely what he should not do. The phone cubicle’s sides and top meant that the only way Mickey Mantle could get to him with the bat was head-on; either that or the rube would have to stoop low enough to try to get the general’s legs, which would put the rube at a momentary disadvantage.
“Get out of the fuckin’ booth! Now!” roared the bat-wielding tough. He made as if to get ready for a home run with the bat.
“You ever heard of DARPA?” asked the general.
“Drop that fuckin’ phone!!”
“DARPA makes good products,” the general said calmly, reaching up to his shirt pocket with his free hand, taking out what looked to the tough like a retractable pen, the general holding it toward the man’s gut, then clicking it as he would a ballpoint. The bang was so loud Freeman couldn’t hear anything for several seconds, his ears ringing, the man grunting, stumbling backward, an astonished look on his face as he fell flat on his butt, his legs jerking spasmodically on the sidewalk like a child’s in tantrum, the baseball bat spilling out noisily onto the road. The general unhurriedly retrieved the bat as the man, now flat on his back, groaning, brought his hands to his chest where the hard rubber bullet from the general’s nonlethal “pen” had struck him at point-blank range.
The general pointed the bat’s handle at the astonished son. “Now you take Daddy home to Mommy. He’s gonna need about three pounds of ice on his belly and a change of underpants. And call the police if you want. It’d be my pleasure. Now scram!”
As the tattooed man limped slowly off, touchingly assisted by his scruffy offspring, the general returned to the phone that had again been dangling free during the fracas.
“Douglas!” Eleanor was shouting in alarm. “Are you all right? Was that a shot I heard?”
“Car backfiring,” said Freeman. There was no point in worrying her. “So what does the Man say?”
“He says go. But there’s one thing. We’re going to have to release it to the media. That DARPA place is not too far from a little township; the story’s bound to get out and the president doesn’t want to be caught looking flat-footed. So we’re just going to say — if we’re asked — that the president has dispatched a Special Forces unit to track these terrorists down.” She paused. “When can you leave, Douglas?”
