by Ben Shapiro
Brett looked at the president incredulously. “What do you take me for, Mr. President?” he said.
Prescott’s eyes narrowed. “A smart man.”
“Then I’m a damn fool,” Brett said. “I’ve got men in the field, and I’m not going to abandon them just because some floozy is telling purple stories.”
Prescott laughed. It sounded tinny in the carpeted room. “That’s what I like to hear, General. A fighter. That’s what you’ve always been, right?”
Brett didn’t answer.
“Good,” the president continued. “You’re dismissed.”
At 1:00 a.m. the next morning, the phone rang.
“General Hawthorne,” the president said, “you have been reassigned, back to Afghanistan. Thank you for your service.”
That was last January.
Prescott played the situation beautifully, at least politically. He acknowledged that more troops would be needed, but slashed Hawthorne’s recommendation from eighty thousand to twenty thousand. He placed a six-month timeline on the surge, and pledged openly that Americans would be out of the country totally by the end of the year.
By June, the president accelerated his timetable and began withdrawing troops. Some had served just a few weeks on the ground before being pulled back to bases in Europe. The pace escalated. Week after week, more troops came out. By the end of the month, Prescott’s redeployment was nearly complete, with just a couple thousand troops scattered around the capital city itself.
The result was predictable—the Taliban assumed that they had the US on the run.
They were right.
Safe areas shrunk in Helmand Province and Kandahar. Afghan troops went AWOL, melting into the Taliban ranks, recognizing that once the US was gone, they’d have no protection. If there was one thing Brett had learned about the Afghan population, it was that they could shift their political allegiances on a dime. It was how they had survived so long.
They stationed Brett in Kabul, told him to make nice with the locals, smile for the cameras. They told him to follow the lead of Ambassador Beauregard Feldkauf—a major donor to the president, who for some reason had requested Afghanistan as a post. He then proceeded to bungle the job so badly that none of the local Afghan warlords would even talk to each other. Hoping that he’d be able to influence local policy on behalf of the troops, Brett complied.
Meanwhile, the Taliban moved.
Then, yesterday, everything went to hell all at once.
At 9:13 a.m., the Taliban launched three simultaneous raids on the outskirts of Kabul. The raid kept US troops and their sparse allies occupied for just a few precious minutes—long enough for a fuel truck to drive into the center of the city. The driver approached the crowded Kabul furushgah, parked the vehicle, and then whispered to himself, “Allahu akhbar!”
The explosion of his suicide vest blasted outward, through the cabin, into the enormous gas tank. Before anyone could react, six thousand gallons of fiery gasoline spewed into the center of the market. Troops rushed to the scene to find hundreds of burning human beings crying out for relief, the charred flesh of children smoking in the streets. The troops sprang into action, trying to administer aid, trying to save lives. They’d been hamstrung by the administration when it came to killing terrorists, but at least they could help victims. Dozens and dozens of troops rushed to the site.
They never saw the second truck, parked near a fruit stand.
Until it exploded.
Men and women screamed as white-hot shrapnel blew through their bodies. Brett could hear it all the way from the embassy. It was a classic technique, and Brett knew he should have seen it coming: use a first bombing as a magnet for help, then hit with a larger second bomb, taking out the relief force. He silently cursed himself.
“All troops back to the embassy, fall back to the embassy,” he shouted at his aide. “They’re coming…”
That’s when Brett saw it.
Approaching slowly but steadily, bouncing along the poorly paved road, a white van. The big black letters “UN” marked its side.
The driver’s mouth moved in a silent whisper. Over and over, over and over.
Allahu akbar.
The explosion rocked the building, blowing Brett off his feet, grabbing his lungs and squeezing the air out of them. He struggled to his knees as streams of Taliban fighters sprinted through the gaping, flaming hole in the fence.
Brett had just enough time to marvel in grim admiration at the planning—the Taliban had obviously infiltrated dozens of fighters into the nearby homes. And it wasn’t just the fighters in the streets: women and children had now occupied the square, and were throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at the embassy, providing civilian cover for the Taliban. If the Americans opened fire, they’d be blamed for a massacre.
When Brett turned back to give his men orders, he saw the ambassador in the corner, cowering under a desk, clutching his briefcase to his chest. He was screaming at Brett in his high-toned, Boston Brahmin accent, “Your job is to keep me safe! So do your goddamn job!”
“Shut the fuck up,” Brett said.
The coldness in his tone stunned the ambassador into silence. Then, an odd, keening noise emanated from his mouth. It rose higher and higher, louder and louder.
So Brett punched him in the mouth. Not hard. Just enough to stun him.
“Get your pansy ass onto the roof right now,” he said, slowly, glaring.
Now, Feldkauf nodded. Brett motioned, and the Marines pouring into the compound formed a phalanx around the ambassador, whose eyes had gone blank with fright and shock. The group moved toward the staircase.
The helicopter pad was on the roof. It was already overloaded—every staffer with an ounce of brains had rushed to the roof after the fence came down. Brett flashed back to the old videos of the last helicopter leaving Saigon, with all the wailing civilians attempting to climb onto the landing skids. Feldkauf took one look at the crowded helicopter, filled with civilian staffers.
Then he pointed at one woman. She was crying. “Off!” he cried. “I’m the ambassador.”
She was crying, too. “Mr. Ambassador,” Brett said, “we can get you out another way.”
“Screw that!” Feldkauf was nearing hysterics again. “That’s my helicopter, and I’m getting on it! And I’m in charge!”
The woman got off the helicopter, sobbing.
From the street, the noise rose, then fell silent. Her sobs echoed in the quiet, along with the whop-whop-whop of the chopper blades.
Brett moved to help the woman when the bullet struck her in the throat, tearing it open. She looked up at him, blood gurgling onto the roof. The blood pumped out, slowly. She tried to speak, grabbed Brett’s hand hard. Then her eyes went cold.
Brett hit the deck as bullets began taking down the people on the roof, one by one. “Move toward the center of the roof,” he yelled. “They can only spot you from the street.”
The helicopter rotors went transparent, and the machine began to take off. Brett caught Feldkauf’s eyes. If I see you again, you son of a bitch, Brett thought, I’ll make you pay for that. But Feldkauf didn’t see him. He was too busy smiling, a trickle of blood spilling down his split lower lip.
Brett heard the alarm go off. The compound had been breached.
“Men, gather up!” Brett shouted.
Bullets smashed through the windows and glanced off the cement facing of the building in unpredictable patterns. The courtyard was filling up again, new Taliban fighters taking the places of the old. From below, on the first story, Hawthorne could hear the whining strains of an Arabic melody—one of the Taliban fighters had apparently brought a boom box along. Hawthorne stifled a bitter grin. They’d been so comfortable with their plan that they’d even brought their primitive iPods.
Brett took quick stock of his men.
Thirty left.
Just thirty.
“You,” he said, pointing to a dozen men. “Pin them down at the front of the building. The rest of you, come with me. We will see you all at the airport. Good luck.”
Brett led his group downstairs.
When they hit the stairwell above the bottom floor, he turned to his men. “Okay, boys,” he said, calm. “Here’s the plan. We fight through these bastards. Then we flank them, and hit them from the east side of the courtyard. We’ll catch them in a crossfire from the roof, then make our way to the airport. Got it?”
The men nodded.
“Go,” Hawthorne barked.
One of Hawthorne’s men, Sothers, a twenty-one-year-old private, burst through the door—and immediately took a bullet to the jaw. His helmet popped off like the top of a Pez dispenser, blood and brains pouring out on the floor.
Brett recognized the mistake immediately: the Taliban had cut off all the exits. The embassy was a death trap.
That’s when he saw the smoke.
It poured beneath the door, waves of smoke, with fire licking around the hinges. He could smell the gasoline from the fire, so strong he almost choked on the stench. Brett cursed himself for his carelessness, picked Sothers up, slinging him over his shoulder.
“Back to the roof,” he shouted, panting.
Then he sprinted back up the stairs, his sweat mixing with Sothers’s blood, covering his face in ooze. He heard the sharp whizz of a bullet ping off one of the railings—he heard it sizzle as it approached—and then he heard it sink deep into Sothers’s back with a sickening thunk. He bashed the second-floor door open with his forearm, and he found two of his men lying on the carpet, bleeding profusely.
“Report!” he shouted.
A sergeant yelled to him, “Sir, we’ve lost Martinez and Thomas. We can’t hold them here. They’re breaking down the door, and they’ve got snipers across the way firing at us continuously. We don’t have enough cover.”
“Get your asses to the roof, now!”
The men found the stairwell again and dashed up the metal stairs, their feet clanging.
Brett counted the men as they reached the roof, one by one. Only twenty-four left now.
And no place to go.
Except down.
Hawthorne recognized it right away. The building was surrounded on all sides by open space. It was at least a forty-foot drop to the ground. But that didn’t change the situation.
“Men, listen up,” said Hawthorne. “We’re going over the side of this building. When you hit the ground, don’t try to land on your feet. Let your knees buckle and roll. You’ll be fine. We’re all going to be okay.”
He pointed at a young private, perhaps twenty-three. “You go first,” he said.
The private was shaking. “I have vertigo, sir.”
“Son, you don’t get your ass over the side of that building, they’re going to kill you.”
The private’s eyes were welling up with tears now. “I can’t, sir.”
Hawthorne ran over and grabbed him by the back of the uniform. “Come with me, Marine.”
He stood him at the edge of the roof. Then, before the kid could protest, Hawthorne acted. “Buckle and roll,” he said, then pushed him from the roof.
The kid plummeted faster than Hawthorne could have predicted. But the kid had enough brains to listen. He hit the ground and rolled forward, then stood up, shaken but alive. Hawthorne dropped the kid’s weapon down to him.
The other soldiers formed a line, then rolled off one by one. “Hurry it up,” Hawthorne kept muttering. “Hurry it up.” The gunshots were close now, the smoke thickening around the outside of the building. Brett could hear the approaching whine of the Arabic singer. “Get your asses over the side of that building!”
One of the men landed awkwardly, and he shrieked as his ankle cracked. The other Marines silenced him. Hawthorne glanced down the side of the building, hoping nobody had heard. The area was still empty, and he could see his troops below. “Maybe,” he thought, “just maybe, we have a shot.”
Then, almost in slow motion, Brett heard the door behind him open. The big metal door creaked on its rusted hinges, and the Arabic whine blared through.
Brett moved his bulk quickly—more quickly than he had since high school—and opened fire on the Taliban fighter behind him, blowing him back down the stairs. The thought flashed across his mind that the Pentagon would be beside itself knowing it had a general officer in a close-quarter battle. Then he thought that Prescott probably wouldn’t care, so long as it didn’t make too much news.
Brett didn’t have time to think about what he did next—he just did it. He rolled toward the opposite edge of the roof, away from the enemy soldiers, and fell off the roof forty feet toward the ground.
Time slowed as he fell, the wind brushing his blood-smeared cheeks. He had time to think that he’d fallen in the wrong position, that his arm was awkwardly stretched behind him. Then he hit the earth, and the searing pain in his arm told him that he’d broken it. Worse, the smashing noise from his waist told him his comms were dead. Above, he heard the Taliban men running toward his side of the building.
He struggled to his feet, his nerves shrieking in excruciating agony, and staggered toward a nearby alley. He didn’t even hear the bullet coming—when it hit him in his broken arm, he didn’t even feel it.
It had been three hours. Brett sat in another alley in the slums of the town, separated from his men—if any of them were still alive—listening to the silence of a city at peace. A city in the enemy’s hands.
He gripped the empty pistol tighter.
Washington, DC
“We simply can’t pay for it, sir.”
White House chief of staff Tommy Bradley was standing over the president’s desk in the Oval Office, a sheaf of budget papers in his hand. Crumbled, wrinkled papers covered in red notes. The numbers just didn’t add up.
And President Mark Prescott didn’t care.
“Listen to me, Tommy,” said the president. “My reelection relies on our ability to secure funding for this action. You know that. I know that. The polls show it. We don’t have a choice in the matter.”
Tommy gritted his teeth. He knew Prescott was right. The president had been dropping precipitously in the polls—his critics blamed his policies for widespread inflation and unemployment. Prescott was deathly afraid of becoming Jimmy Carter, and he was right on the precipice of having his worst fears realized.
When Mark Prescott ran for president, he didn’t know what he’d be inheriting. He was no babe in the woods—he was a hardened ideologue, a product of the Chicago machine, the handpicked protégé of the power brokers—but he hadn’t quite contemplated the nature of the country he’d be handed once elected. He campaigned on great blustering clouds of rhetoric, his boyish good looks, and a record obscured by a complacent media. He came out of nowhere, they said, an inspirational figure unlike any candidate since John F. Kennedy. He answered no difficult questions, evaded all the exposés about his early political career, his rocky marriage, his connections to some of the more shady characters in town. He brushed off all the attacks on him as the cynical manipulations of a tired opposition.
It didn’t hurt that his opponent, General Hart, had been a militant and boring old man; it also didn’t hurt that his presidential predecessor had been an unpopular member of Hart’s party. Prescott linked Hart to the president, and the country bought into it.
Once Prescott entered office, however, he soon realized that the stock market crash had been a mere symptom of the nation’s economic ills. The country was running a massive national debt and a trade deficit beyond reckoning. The unemployment rate had climbed beyond 10 percent and was headed toward the 15 percent mark—if you counted those who had stopped looking for a job, the real unemployment rate was closer to 25 percent.
So
Prescott did what Prescott knew how to do: he survived.
The easiest way to survive: end his predecessors’ wars, no matter what the cost, then pump up the spending at home. There was no glory to be won on the poppy fields of Afghanistan. Everlasting glory didn’t come in the form of military victory in this day and age—it came in the form of everlasting social programs that grew and inured to the benefit of all Americans. FDR was worshipped not because of World War II, but because of Social Security; LBJ had lost Vietnam, but he’d won the Great Society.
Big men, Prescott knew, required big governments. And big governments required big spending.
So Prescott spent. He spent on green technologies, on education programs, on food stamps and highways and medical mandates. He spent on vacations and dinners and public works projects. Every dollar spent, he told the American public, created five dollars—no, ten!—in commerce. The money could either be hidden in the mattresses of the rich, or it could be shared with everyone.
His poll numbers went up initially. He waited for the inevitable economic bump that would enshrine his legacy and assure his reelection.
And nothing happened. The economy sputtered and spluttered along, not quite collapsing, but certainly not booming. Even members of his own party wondered whether Prescott would win a second term.
Then, a miracle.
In the middle of the night, Prescott woke up with a phrase ringing in his brain. Over and over. It was as though a higher power had placed them in his mind. He grabbed a pen from his bedside drawer and wrote it down: Work Freedom.
The Work Freedom Program.
Prescott’s Work Freedom Program.
Everyone recognized the value of freedom. But what did that mean other than the right to a job? Freedom meant nothing if you couldn’t put bread in your children’s mouths at night. And America was a country of workers. Freedom was work, and work was freedom. Work Freedom. Simple. Easy. Repeatable.
