by Ian Slater
Marte wanted to know if the general had any comments vis-à-vis the discovery of the bodies in the ravine.
“No comment,” he told her.
“Huh, that’s unlike you, General. I’ve never found you lost for words.”
“I’m not lost. There’s nothing to say.”
“There are a lot of people in Washington questioning Eleanor Prenty giving you the assignment.”
“I was ready,” he told her. “That’s all. My intention was to get into the area quickly, hopefully to slow them down while our regular forces had time to get in there. With so many of our SpecForces in the Middle East I had one reserve team ready to go. It’s as simple as that.”
“Hmm. What would you advise the president to do now — if your opinion was sought?”
“I haven’t been asked, and besides, it’s not my place to advise the White House.”
“Oh crap, Douglas. You were trying to run this thing from Day One. Don’t go all humble on me. What would you do now?”
He knew what Marte was up to. She was trying to get a good fight going between the guy who blew it and the administration, a quick, feisty sound bite that would rile the White House in an election year.
“I have no comment, Marte.”
“Okay, but off the record. Do you think we’re in trouble with this one?
“CNN?”
“No, us — you, me, America.”
Shit. Obviously she didn’t know about the pieces of melted black plastic in the Ziploc bag, the melted plastic that had been the DARPA ALPHA disk.
He was too slow to reply. With the intuition of a topnotch reporter, she sensed something was wrong, something was being held back.
“C’mon, Douglas. You know I’ve never violated a confidence. Tell me, is this big?”
“No comment.”
Replacing the receiver, Douglas met Margaret’s jealous stare full-on. “You can come with me if you like, but I’ve got to give her a more honest answer than that, Margaret.”
“Why didn’t you tell her—”
“Not here,” he cut in. “Not with the possibility of NSA and Homeland Security ears listening in. All the other stuff, the CNO, Aussie — that’s all right. NSA probably already knows all that, but they don’t know what I think.”
Margaret saw that his intensity wouldn’t brook her jealousy of the tart, not now. “I’ll get my coat. The fog’s bound to be chilly.”
And it was in the fog on the way to the 7-Eleven that she asked him just how bad he thought the situation was.
“For me? I’m in the doghouse.” Dog — he thought of Prince. You could see the wonderful devotion in a dog’s eyes. He liked cats too, but dogs better. They needed you.
“No,” Margaret said. “I know how bad it is for you. You look tortured tonight. I mean, tell me honestly, just how bad is it for the country?”
“It’s bad, Sweetheart.” He slipped his arm about her warmth, her perfume reminding him of the Hawaiian islands, the corny love songs he’d heard coming from around Fort DeRussy’s outside bar next to the Hilton, the pink flamingoes. “Hypersonic is unbelievably fast,” he told her. “A hypersonic torpedo, nuclear warhead, could be fired at a U.S. port from a trawler hundreds of miles offshore. We’d have no chance of an intercept.”
Margaret felt a shiver and leaned closer to him and very quietly asked him, “Who do you think sent those killers to steal it from us?”
“I don’t know. It could be any of half a dozen countries, from Iran to China.”
“Good Lord,” she said, her voice a whisper in the fog, the sound of the sea muffled behind its curtain. “Could we do anything if we knew?”
“Hell, yes. We’ve got carrier groups all over the globe. We could launch a—” He stopped, two figures emerging out of the thick fog no more than ten feet in front of them. They turned out to be young lovers, the man nodding at them. “Good evening.”
“Evening,” Freeman replied, and a few seconds later, said, “It’s killing me, Margaret.”
“I know,” she said. Every muscle in his body was tense. “What are you going to tell—”
“Marte? The truth. That if they, whoever they are, have time to tool up, we’ll be sitting ducks. So that if we do find out who they are, we’ll have to move fast. There’s nothing like getting the press behind you. Cuts a lot of red tape, really gets things moving.”
“Let’s pray,” she said.
“I already have.”
His conversation with Marte was devoid of warm-up, in part because he was tired and needed rest; in part because, as a matter of courtesy to Margaret, he didn’t want it to be a long, sit-down, old-times kind of conversation.
“What,” Marte asked, “might happen if we don’t contest this?”
“Catastrophe for world stability.”
“By which you mean all of us in the West? You don’t have to be politically correct with me, Douglas.”
“That’s why I wanted to talk. Most reporters are afraid to just come out and say that for all our faults, the West is still the best, and you and I know that as well as the Muslim terrorists. The runaway train coming at us is China.”
“You think Beijing’s behind these murders?”
“No, but anyone who hasn’t had their head in the toilet for the last ten years knows that there’s going to be an East-West war. When China’s insatiable appetite for oil, coal, bauxite, and so on can’t be satisfied by legitimate means, then push is shove, and the arms dealer is a kingmaker.”
“So the United States has to go wherever this leads us and get the technology back.”
“Right. Or if they have the machinery set up, ready to turn out prototype rounds, we’ll have to go in and destroy it.”
“Like Iran and the enriched uranium.”
“Yes, and here’s where I get blunt, Marte.”
“Gee, that’ll be a change.” He heard her laugh. “Shoot,” she said.
“We need the media to say what I’ve said, to stress the importance of us being willing to go where we have to to get it back.” He paused to look out at Margaret and give her a wave. She smiled, blew him a kiss — as if they were newlyweds. Marriage was the one good thing when your job has just run off the road.
“That’s a tough one, Douglas,” he heard Marte say. “I mean, the administration doesn’t want to look like it’s incompetent — dropped the — what is it, Flow-In-Flight?”
“Yes.”
“On the other hand,” said Marte, “the White House has to sell the truth, which I assume you’re telling me, to the public in order to win support for any unilateral kick-ass we might have to do, if we know where it is.”
“Exactly,” said the general. “Big problem, though, is — was — Iraq in ’05. No WMDs found, so why should anyone believe the government’s perceived need to go in — wherever — to stop them using what we shouldn’t have lost in the first place. Checkmate, right?”
“The bodies, Douglas.”
“Say again?”
“The Americans who were murdered. WMDs are concepts, apparitions. But here we have the pictures of the murdered scientists, and the old guy up by that lake, the name of which none of us can pronounce.”
Douglas pronounced it phonetically, as if it had been written in English. “Lake Pond-Oh-Ray. The worst,” he continued, “the absolute worst, were the children.”
“Children?”
“At the campsite.” Somehow she hadn’t heard all the details. He told her the essentials, of the bloody, indiscriminate trail that the terrorists had left from DARPA ALPHA to Priest Lake.
“That’s good; that’s better than any WMDs. Children — people hate that. They’ll want to go after the bastards, and never mind the ‘no extradition treaty’ bullshit. America will go anywhere after scum who murder children.” He could hear the soft tap of keys on a laptop.
“Any other details?” she asked. He hesitated. “One of the children was unrecognizable.” He told her about the wolves. He said he had to go, and to
ld her it’d be nice if CNN could help the family survivors, if there were any.
When he came out of the booth, the ocean flooded his senses and he took a deep draft of sea air, something he’d always loved since the moment he’d first sniffed the sea a thousand years ago when his dad had taken him on camping trips. No campers then — just a small pup tent, a Coleman stove, condensed milk, two fishing rods, and the world was simple.
Margaret hadn’t said anything yet about the conversation with Marte Price, but felt she should say something to show it didn’t bother her, for it did bother her. “Say what you wanted?”
“Yes,” he said. “I did.”
“Feel better?”
“I feel like a shower.”
She was nonplussed.
“What’s that special bath the Jews have?”
“I don’t know. A bath’s a bath.”
“No,” said Douglas. “A rabbi told me about it once, when you take everything off that separates you from God, from the purity of the water. Women have to take off all makeup, eye shadow, false nails — everything — so that they can get clean again.”
“You don’t feel clean?” she asked.
“Doesn’t matter how you deal with this scum. Some of it inevitably rubs off.”
“Oh, Douglas, you can’t really mean that?”
“I do right now.”
“You’re tired.”
As they returned home the fog was thicker and Freeman, despite his usual disparagement of anything smacking of superstition, took the worsening of the weather as an omen that the world, that time itself, was closing in on him. It wasn’t self-pity but it was a glass-half-empty moment, and on the evidence of the DARPA ALPHA debacle, he felt it was a realistic assessment.
“I’ve been thinking about that note you got,” said Margaret as they entered the house. “What a horrible thing to read. But that man’s pride will be his undoing, Douglas.” She shook her head, tight-lipped and censorious as she took off her coat and headed off to unload the dishwasher.
Freeman felt distinctly uncomfortable, remembering the flashes of immodesty after his famous U-turn against the Russians.
“Yes,” Margaret declared, “that horrid note of his might yet haunt him.”
“If he isn’t already dead,” said the general.
“I shouldn’t say it, I suppose — I mean, it’s not very Christian — but I hope he’s dead.”
“So do I,” said Freeman, but it sounded to Margaret more like an obligatory response than a fervent wish. She straightened up from the dishwasher and fixed him with her gaze. “No,” she charged. “Not truly. You’d prefer — I mean, you’d like to chase him down.”
The general said nothing, topping up his coffee.
“Douglas?”
“What?”
“You like it, don’t you?”
“What do you mean, woman?”
“I mean, you men. You like fighting, don’t you?”
“Well, if that isn’t a blatant sexist remark I don’t know what is. If I said anything like that about women, Linda Rushmein and her night riders’d have me in irons.”
She ignored his comment. “Douglas!”
He met her stare but couldn’t sustain his look of hurt surprise. He blinked first, shifting his gaze to the small, triangular pane of glass high in the kitchen door, out into the darkness. “I love it,” he said gently. “God forgive me, but I do.” He faced her again. “To fight for the right. I suppose that sounds pompous, naïve even, but I believe there is evil in the world, Margaret. And what they did up there was evil to the core. Even if I didn’t like the sting of battle, I’d have a duty to pursue them if I could.”
“You did your best, Douglas.”
He was afraid that she might be right. “I’m dog tired,” he told Margaret. “I’m going to grab some shut-eye.”
“Dawn is breaking.”
“So, I’m tired. Aren’t you?”
“Yes, but—”
“It’s not against the law,” Freeman cut in.
“I merely said—,” she began.
“You’ve got this Anglo-Saxon hang-up about sleeping during the day. Goddammit, half the country—”
“Don’t be blasphemous.”
“Then don’t be so damn pious. You have these damn silly rules. Because your folks were farmers doesn’t mean it’s a sin to do things differently.”
“I was merely surprised at someone who—”
“Don’t be. I’ve had just about all the surprises I can deal with at the moment.”
“It isn’t my fault, General, that you didn’t run those — those monsters to ground.”
“Never said it was.”
“You know, Douglas, you’re right. You do need sleep. A lot of it.”
“You’re a Republican!”
That did it. They burst out laughing at their childishness, a dam of anxiety broken, the tension swept away in a torrent of running giggles, adult normalcy returning only when the full measure of the terrorist attack on DARPA ALPHA was reiterated, albeit reluctantly, in a terse news report they watched on TV, National Security Adviser Prenty having to admit under persistent questioning that not all of the “murderers,” in the administration’s phrase, had been accounted for.
“How many are still at large?”
“One,” she replied tersely.
“Is that hard intel?” pressed a correspondent from Fox. “Or soft intel?”
Eleanor kept her composure. It was a question born of the media’s skepticism following the Iraqi WMD fiasco. “It’s hard intel,” she said. “From the D.N.I.”
“There’s something else,” said Douglas, his arm around Margaret’s shoulder, holding her close.
“What do you mean?” Margaret asked.
“Something’s wrong. I can smell it. They know something else. I’ve known Eleanor Prenty for donkey’s years and she’s got something else on her mind. She’s keeping something back.”
“Well, I would think,” Margaret said tartly, “in that case she would have the common courtesy to let you know exactly what’s going on.”
Douglas Freeman agreed. Margaret had a point, and a strong one at that. Even if the White House didn’t want to inform him, as a matter of courtesy hadn’t it occurred to them that he might still have something to offer by further debriefing?
Belying his present low expectation of the administration, a call came twenty minutes later during the only bathroom break Douglas Freeman had taken all morning, and so it was that the general took one of the most important calls of his life and in the history of the Republic while sitting on the can, the exhaust fan purring softly in the background and he afraid to flush as he listened to the White House operator instructing him that a Homeland Security agent in Monterey was en route, as she spoke, to deliver a packet to the general by hand. After reading it he was to call National Security Adviser Prenty, but not from his home number.
“Well?” Margaret asked, as Freeman, with a preoccupied air, zipped up and buckled his belt, the puzzled expression still with him.
“The White House,” he explained, “is sending me something.” He looked at his wife, who, after handing him his cellphone, had lingered outside the bathroom door. “What in damnation’s so important that she couldn’t tell me on the phone? Whole country knows by now what happened.”
“Perhaps they’ve found the missing terrorist in hiding or something, and don’t want it made public. It could alert him.”
“Huh, he’s already been alerted. Rest of his gang found dead. No, it’s probably something—” The front door chimes sounded, their mellifluous notes in marked contrast to the tension both Douglas and Margaret felt.
It was the DHS agent, a tall African American clad in a dark blue suit. His striped DHS identity card was clearly visible through the front door peephole.
“That was quick,” observed Freeman, venturing a smile, which wasn’t reciprocated. The whole world seemed tense.
The full forensic report was
twenty-one pages of graphs and columns galore — all measurements from microns to centimeters, weights in milligrams. His eyes raced over the information, stopping at the written summary that covered the last two pages. For Douglas Freeman, one of the most important nuggets of information was a brief footnote that mentioned that the rocket used against them on the helo at Pend Oreille was made in either Poland or China, given the composition and ratio of aluminum to steel. A splinter sample from the wooden grip of the shoulder-fired rocket launcher showed that it had at one time been infested with pine beetle, bore holes visible during examination, the insects’ secretions showing that this species of pine beetle was found in the Russian taiga.
The paper on which “AMERICANS SUCK” had been written was of Chinese manufacture, the ink used very definitely “China black,” a high-quality calligraphic ink compound manufactured almost exclusively in Harbin in China’s far northeastern province of Heilongjiang, whose Heilong River (Amur to the Russians) bordered Russia’s Far East, the river once the site of fierce Sino-Soviet clashes during the latter half of the twentieth century. This was Freeman’s country, where he’d fought against the Siberian Sixth.
Debris from the punctured fuselage of the downed Chinook from Priest Lake had been run through the spectrometer, where the traces of sulfur used in the warhead registered. The structure of the sulfur was typical of that found in what used to be called the “Manchurian mines,” that is, northeastern China.
Margaret saw her husband’s brow furrowed with such intense concentration that she barely recognized him. She knew it was said of him that, like so many good leaders, he was a “quick study” and could home in on a vital piece of wheat amid the chaff of countless reports that used to flood his desk. And though he was retired, his was an administrative skill which he had kept honed daily, skimming through the plethora of newspapers, blogs, and magazines and journals from The Economist to Foreign Affairs. And so the e-mail he was about to send to an old friend, Charles Riser, who was presently U.S. cultural attaché in Beijing, was markedly short and to the point. And because the general was not privy to the present official ciphers or codes, the message was transmitted in plain language. Using the forensic report’s mention of the tancho as the vital clue for Riser, the e-mail, subject “Ornithologists’ Destination,” read “Group wishes to visit migratory bird sanctuary for tancho. Can you suggest prime location?”
