“Are they going?” Margaret asked, closing the book she had hoped might distract her from the media circus outside their house.
“Not yet,” answered Douglas Freeman. He felt foolish, standing in his robe by the living room’s rose red drapes, peering through a narrow slit in the curtains. “I think they’re just moving cables, lights, and stuff around. Difficult to tell in the glare. Dozens of lights. Like we’re on Oprah.”
“We are,” Margaret said tartly. “We’re the sensation of the moment.”
Douglas looked around at her. “Well, Mrs. Freeman, you are sensational.”
A smile escaped. “You’re not bad yourself, General.”
He returned the smile. “Why don’t you go off to bed, Sweetheart? Might as well get some rest.”
She sighed. “No point. I couldn’t possibly doze off with that mob camped outside. Could you?”
“Yes. A soldier learns to sleep anywhere he’s not needed for the moment. He might have to go days if the balloon goes up.”
“Then you should rest now. No point in staying up.” The red drapes turned pink as a beam of light swept the length of the room.
“What on earth was that?”
“A damned searchlight. You’d think we were in a POW camp.”
“We are prisoners,” Margaret said resentfully.
The general, hands thrust hard into his pockets, walked over to the living room sofa against which his wife’s face looked even paler than Tony Ruth’s had in the moments after the cable had beheaded the SpecFor warrior.
Douglas took his wife’s hand. It felt remarkably warm. “I’m sorry you’ve had to get caught up in all this.”
“I’m a soldier’s wife now. You told me once that it comes with the territory. With command.”
“It does, but usually you can keep family out of it. I shouldn’t have come home, should’ve stayed away…”
She lifted her free hand, slipped it around his waist, and nuzzled into him. “Some of them were here, camped outside the house, before you even arrived at the airport.”
“They’ll go away,” he told her, “soon as the next story breaks.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “We’ve got enough provisions. We can stay holed up in here for—” She shrugged. “—as long as it takes.”
“You mean,” Douglas added, forcing a grin, “until the milk runs out!”
Margaret didn’t ask for much, but one of the first things Douglas had found out — the first night of their honeymoon — was that Margaret had a sacrosanct ritual. At 10:30 she would shower, prepare her bowl of cereal, pour the milk, and scan the “funnies” as she ate, finishing before the news at eleven. Sex was nonnegotiable until the weather forecast was over and the sports report threatened. But this night the general knew there was no chance of any conjugal enjoyment. Like many another soldier, postcombat coitus came in second only to slaking your thirst. But defeat, failure on the scale of the DARPA ALPHA murders and the nation-threatening theft that came with them, could rob a man, especially a commander, of any emotion other than self-punishing regret, the awful, accusatory postmortems of “what ifs” and “if onlys” that undermined self-confidence in the field and the bedroom. What he needed, he knew, was a win, a victory, a chance at a victory, to redeem himself in his own eyes and the team’s.
“They’ll go away,” Margaret told him. “They have the attention span of a newt.”
“A what?”
“A newt.”
Freeman laughed. “You nit!”
And that started her off giggling, “nit” and “newt” shooting back and forth between them like fireflies in the gloom, a burst of manic energy, as inexplicable as it was unexpected, fueling the exchange, then vanishing as quickly as it had appeared.
“Dammit,” said the general, getting up, walking over to the drapes for a brief reconnaissance, then to the kitchen. “I should have choppered the team ahead of where we were getting the bip from the transmitter on the disk. Gone ahead and set up an ambush.”
Margaret knew little if anything about military tactics, but she intuitively sensed a spouse’s duty to support whatever decision the other had made, unless there was something to be gained by a useful suggestion. What would that be? she wondered. She tried to recollect what he’d told her about the “op” on his return, but she simply found it too tiring to keep up with all the details, some of which she realized she had probably picked up from Marte Price’s Newsbreaks on CNN.
“Why didn’t you go ahead on the trail and—” Good grief, she hadn’t meant to say that, but it was what his musing had suggested to her, and besides, wasn’t he asking himself the very same question?
“I didn’t do it,” he bellowed from the kitchen, “because there’s not just one trail up there! It’s rugged mountain country. Wild country. Trappers’ve been going through those forests for hundreds of years. One trail! Son of a bitch, there’s a hundred trails, all hidden in the forest. I had to move fast, Margaret — with only seven men!”
“Well, then,” she said sharply, “you did your best. And that’s all anyone can do.” She paused. “Anyway, what’s done is done.” There was an edge to her voice that was a caution, a yellow light for this conversation to end, not to cry over spilt milk. She couldn’t stand it if there was even a hint of self-pity.
“Where’s the damn decaf?” he bawled.
“Where it always is. Right cupboard above the sink. Men!”
“What?”
“I said, ‘Men.’ You never know where anything is.”
“I would if this cupboard was organized. Goddamned jumble in here. Dark as Hades!”
“Turn on the light!” she admonished.
He stood grumpily by the kettle, ordering the water to boil faster, until he realized he hadn’t depressed the “on” switch. As the water began roiling, its subdued sound like the far-off rumble of artillery, the cold kettle of a few minutes ago grew warm and shuddered slightly as if it were coming to life. “Would you like a cup?”
“Decaf?” she said. “Sure.” His offer, her acceptance, constituted a cease-fire.
“Sorry,” he said, as he handed her the white mug, his second favorite, with the Brits’ Special Air Service insignia and motto “Who Dares, Wins.”
“Sorry for what?” she said, affecting surprise.
“Being so damned egotistical.” He sat down carefully in his TV command chair. “Must have seemed that I’m more concerned about my reputation than about my team.”
Margaret smiled diplomatically. “Ego’s first cousin to morale.”
He looked at her pensively. “Was that a shot?”
“An observation,” she replied coyly. “Do you know a general without an ego?”
He was about to answer when they heard a rumble outside and the rose red drapes were once again swept by lights.
“They’re moving,” she said, more out of hope than conviction. Douglas listened intently. Like the nuclear subs that kept a library of ships’ sounds and “noise shorts” in their sonar libraries, he had, over his years as a man who had soldiered all over the world, compiled an impressive sound library of his own. Blindfolded, he could tell precisely what kind of tank or armored personnel vehicle was approaching, friend or foe.
“Nothing new out there,” he concluded.
“Then what’s all the noise about?”
“Warming up,” he said. “Ready to leave. Or just repositioning.” He got up quickly and went to the slit in the drapes. “Flashlights moving about,” he said. “Fog’s thicker. If I didn’t know better, I’d say they were laying smoke to hide in.”
“We’re the ones hiding,” said Margaret.
“I have a feeling,” he mused, “I don’t know why.” He paused. “Do you ever have that feeling,” he asked her, “deep inside you, a premonition almost, that something you wouldn’t normally expect—”
“Déjà vu?”
“No…” He turned away from the drapes and she could see the expectation in his eyes. “I mean that you just know something is going to come along to help you out of a tight spot.”
“Intuition,” said Margaret.
“Yes. Intuition.”
“Do you remember,” he continued, “when Patton was in the doghouse with Ike over slapping that soldier in Sicily?”
“No.”
“Well, for a while Patton thought he would be locked out of the D-Day invasion.” Freeman, still trying to ascertain whether more media were arriving, withdrawing, or repositioning, turned around and looked at Margaret. “He said, ‘God will not allow it. I must fulfill my destiny.’” Douglas Freeman paused, as if expecting his wife to agree that he, Douglas Freeman, would, like Patton, end up fulfilling his destiny, end up victorious despite the slough of despondency in which he now found himself. He could see, had known in fact for a long time, that while Margaret would comfort and support him for better or for worse, she would not lie to him.
“I wouldn’t know,” she told him. “I don’t have such premonitions.”
“I feel it,” he told her, turning back to spy on the media. “I know, Margaret. I’ll — my team’ll — get another chance to run those scumbags to ground!”
It was precisely at that moment, eleven minutes after three in the morning, that the phone rang. Margaret answered, and though sure that it was yet one more reporter, tried to sound civil. “Freeman residence.” It was a woman’s voice, saying that she was calling from the Pentagon and inquiring as to whether General Freeman would be available to take a call in ten minutes from the CNO — chief of naval operations?
“Yes,” Margaret answered her, hung up, and relayed the message to Freeman.
“Ah,” said Freeman. “The CNO.”
“What’s the navy got to do with it?” Margaret asked.
Douglas smiled at her. It wasn’t a husband-to-wife expression but rather that of a patient adult to a child. “Big navy chief,” said Freeman. “Boss of DARPA ALPHA. It’s a naval base — not army.”
“I’m not that dumb, Douglas.”
“What—” He paused, seeing his reflection in the wall mirror. He looked like Patton, with Ike about to reinstate him. “Did I sound patronizing?” he asked Margaret.
“Yes,” she said. “Perhaps you might try being a little less sure of yourself when this naval person calls. Pride goeth before a fall!”
“Naval person!” he joshed. Her naïveté regarding military ranks, indeed regarding all things military, at once amused and pleased him. It meant he could always tell her something new about American defense, about a soldier’s life, discuss a fresh topic over dinner instead of sitting there boring her. Mundane table talk, and its sheer repetition, he believed, could finally be every bit as damaging to a marriage as an affair.
“How long did the operator say?” Douglas asked. “Ten minutes?”
“Yes,” said Margaret. “Don’t be impatient. You know how people are. Ten minutes could mean half an hour.”
Tired of pacing back and forth past the light-suffused drapes in the living room, he decided to go to his study, switched on the computer, and called up his team’s e-mail addresses — all except Ruth’s. Margaret brought in his coffee, and the general could see that despite her overall cooler demeanor, his wife was excited, too, but worried. Hoping for him that, like Patton, he would get another chance to track down his enemies, but worried, like so many military spouses who never got used to seeing their loved ones going into harm’s way.
The phone rang, startling her, Douglas indicating that she take the call — a little psychology in order, he thought.
“Freeman residence.”
A demanding voice asked, “Do you use grain-fed beef and organic vegetables?”
For a second Margaret hesitated. Was it Aussie Lewis? she wondered. Was it code? “To whom would you like to speak?”
“What — is this the Dim Sum Restaurant?”
By then Douglas was on the line. “No,” he said emphatically. “You’ve got the wrong number.”
There was a click and the hum of the line.
“What a rude person,” said Margaret. “The least he could have done was apologize.”
“Is Dim Sum open twenty-four hours?” asked Douglas.
“Yes. I think our number must be very similar. Why, is there something wrong?”
“No,” said Douglas tentatively, thinking it over, then more assertively, “No. But this whole business about the terrorists, I mean, puts you on edge.”
Margaret concurred. “Everyone’s on edge. Have been since we found out our own government has been listening in on all our calls.”
When the phone rang two minutes later, Douglas took it. It was a Pentagon operator, presumably the same one who had called Margaret. She apologized to the general, but the CNO had been delayed. He would be calling shortly, however. Douglas said that was fine and thanked her for calling. He put the phone down.
“Godammit! He’s delayed!”
Margaret could see that he was worried that the delay might mean he was out of the running.
“Don’t fret,” she told him.
Freeman nodded amicably. “You’re right. You know why?” Before she could answer, he told her, “It’s because I still have that intuition. This is no courtesy call at—” He glanced at his watch. “—0330.”
“You’re right,” Margaret said, “unless the chief of naval operations wants to order takeout!”
They both laughed. Margaret decided she’d now have a cup of Evening Star herbal tea. It was said to calm the nerves, creating an ambience of tranquility, an ambience that was shattered by the shrill ring of the kitchen phone. Not wishing to seem too eager, Freeman hesitated for a moment as he took the receiver from his wife, giving her a wink and a smile. She was pleased. He was ready. How often had he told her that luck is no more than being packed, ready to act on a moment’s notice?
“General!” The drawl of hard consonants was unmistakable.
“Aussie?”
“The one and only, General. Sorry for calling so early but I wanted to give you a heads-up before the media get to you.”
“Well, mate,” replied Freeman, “you’re a bit late. They’ve parked outside — en masse.”
“So you’ve heard already?”
“Heard what?” Freeman asked impatiently.
“The scumbags,” said Aussie. “They’ve bought it.”
Margaret was straining to hear what Aussie was saying, her face muscles tightening as she tried to make sense of it. Douglas, she saw, looked stricken.
“Where?” Freeman asked Aussie.
“On the Canadian side. Apparently the RCMP were called. Funny thing, though — I mean funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha — was that it was a coupla civilians who tipped the Mounties.”
For Freeman the image of a scarlet-tuniced Mountie with the distinctive peaked hat, brown leather riding boots, and yellow-striped riding britches leapt to mind, even though the general knew that this was the ceremonial garb of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and not the more utilitarian khaki, yellow-banded cap, and yellow-striped navy trousers that constituted the workaday uniform of Canada’s famed federal police.
“A firefight?” he asked Aussie.
“No,” Aussie replied. “Not a shot fired from what I was told. They went off the road into a great bloody ravine, snowing like crazy.”
“Who told you this, dammit?” pressed Freeman, who was anxiously awaiting the CNO’s call and growing more tense by the second with the knowledge that because Margaret had declined to pay extra for call waiting, the CNO was probably trying to get through right now.
“Mate o’ mine in our Mountain Division told me,” Aussie explained. “Gave me a bell.”
“Bell” was British and Aussie slang for someone phoning you. Freeman was struck anew by how cellphone communication had revolutionized life. In this case it had allowed Aussie Lewis’s buddy in the field to effortlessly transmit the news before official channels.
“So you’re telling me,” said the general, “that the terrorists are confirmed dead?”
“Yeah. Thought I’d give you a bell before Marte Price and the jackals hit you with it out of the blue.”
“Can you call your buddy back and get more details?”
“I tried, General — knew you’d want more info, but I can’t reach the bugger.” Aussie momentarily lost his accent as he affected the neutral tone of the ubiquitous cellphone operator: “The customer you have dialed is away from the phone or temporarily out of the fucking service area. Please try again.”
“Do you know where the ravine is?” the general asked Aussie.
“Somewhere near Ripple Mountain, Mike said, just north nor’west of the border corner area between Idaho and British Columbia. Mike — my buddy — said the Mounties had to chopper in to retrieve the bodies.”
“An accident?” said Freeman.
“Looks like it. Minibus they were in went off the road on a curve. Black ice all over, apparently. The weather channel’s been telling people to stay off the roads up there. Hell, General, they are—were—towelheads. Desert guys. It’s a sure bet that they knew squat ’bout driving in snow.”
“Towelheads,” said Freeman. “All of them?”
“Not all. Two were Brit Muslims, I think. You know, British citizens.”
“You sure about that?”
“Well, that’s what Mike told me. His Mountain Division company was sent up to help the Mounties. Intel section took mug shots. Bingo! For every one of the pricks there was a match either on Interpol’s or our Homeland Security’s wanted-terrorist list.”
Freeman sat down hard at the kitchen table, holding the phone in a peculiarly disembodied way, as if he’d had the wind punched out of him. By now Margaret had the gist of Aussie’s call, and whereas her husband seemed undone by the news of the terrorists’ demise, Margaret struggled to contain her delight. He wouldn’t have to leave her, or put himself in harm’s way, now, if she had heard correctly, that the DARPA ALPHA murderers were dead. She heard her husband’s urgent, almost desperate, tone as he pressed Aussie Lewis, “Are you positive that they’re all dead? Did your buddy, Mike, actually see them in the ravine?”
For the first time Margaret thought she detected a hesitancy in Aussie’s voice and strained to hear, helped by the fact that Aussie’s voice was loud to begin with. “Well, General, I’m not sure whether he personally saw the scumbags, but he’s a trustworthy bloke. Doesn’t bullshit. Anyway, the jackals’ll soon know, I guess. Marte Price and her wannabes in the press will be in a race to get it on the air. Big story. I reckon they’ll be coming to you for your reaction anytime now.”
“Thanks for the heads-up, Aussie. I ’preciate it.”
Freeman gently returned the phone to its cradle, and sat in silence. He could hear the kitchen clock. He dropped a lump of sugar into his black coffee, stirring it for what to Margaret seemed like an inordinately long time until she couldn’t bear it any longer. “What are you worrying about now?”
“Have you ever heard or read a news story that got all the facts straight? I haven’t. They always get something wrong, particularly body counts.” He sipped the coffee while looking through the living room at the drapes. It seemed as if the glare had abated. He turned to Margaret. “Do you remember 9/11? How the number of dead was always wrong? Incomplete? And that big mine disaster in ’06, down in West Virginia? CNN said all the church bells were ringing, all the miners safe. Then we heard, no, there had been a mix-up in communications. They were all dead except one man who survived.”
“Douglas, you seem disappointed they were found. I mean, I would have thought that grisly as it all is, you must be—” She stopped, unsure of what word she should use.
“Happy,” he said, “that they’ve been found? I suppose so, but that note the creeps left for me makes it personal. Besides, Aussie’s information isn’t something I’d take to the bank. It’s secondhand info that Aussie’s buddy in the Mountain Division got from somebody else, and where did they get it from? First thing you learn in this trade, Margaret, is that the first reports are invariably wrong.”
“I take it then that you think there’s a possibility that not all of those horrible people are dead?”
“Yes, and what irks me—” He was interrupted by the guttural sound of trucks and vans starting up outside, headlight beams lighting up the kitchen blinds.
Margaret walked over to her husband. “Douglas, I don’t want you to be irked by anyone. The disk those people stole has been destroyed, hasn’t it? I mean CNN is saying what you said, that the terrorists must have transmitted the information via hilltop modem, or whatever those things are called, and then the disk was smashed.”
“So?” he asked sharply.
“Then they’ve won, haven’t they?” She regretted her words the moment she’d uttered them. “I mean,” she added quickly, “you did your best, darling, and it’s over.”
“That, Margaret, is what sticks in my craw. Can’t you understand?”
“So it’s a matter of hubris,” she retorted.
“And murder,” he shot back. “Cold, premeditated murder of Americans. Civilians.”
“My point is, Douglas, what can you do? The damage has already been—”
The phone rang and the CNO, having no way of knowing that General Freeman had been informally briefed by Aussie Lewis, informed Freeman that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had retrieved bodies thought to be those of the terrorists from a ravine not far from the U.S.-Canadian border.
Douglas now understood why all the media vans and satellite dish trucks were leaving. For the media it was over, the gaggle of reporters no longer interested in Freeman’s thoughts on the subject. He asked the CNO how many bodies had been found.
“There’s some confusion about that,” the CNO replied. “As there often is in these kinds of situations, General. If it’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s to be circumspect about giving out precise numbers. Mounties inform me the snow was deep, some of the bodies almost entirely buried in the drifts. I think it’ll take a day or two to know for certain. They were all in U.S. Army uniforms, though, and no dog tags, so there’s no doubt about them being the terrorists. I’d say it was a lucky break for us except that I think we have to assume the DARPA ALPHA data have been transmitted. I’ve forwarded the information you got up there from your interview with Dr.—”
Freeman heard the rustle of paper, then the clack of computer keys on the other end, and guessed that the CNO was trying to retrieve the head scientist’s name.
“Moffat,” Freeman suggested. “Richard Moffat.”
“Yes, that’s it. I’ve sent the information to the DI.” He meant the director of intelligence. “Meanwhile the bodies are being flown to Vancouver to see whether we can get any leads from them: Who they were, where they were from, et cetera. I’ll let you know. I apologize for calling you at such an ungodly hour, but I wanted to thank you for your—” There was an awkward pause. “Ah — for your getting right onto it.”
Freeman thanked him for his courtesy.
“You did your best,” Margaret told him. Her comfort did nothing to assuage his feeling that he’d failed. If only he and the team had caught the bastards before they had a chance to burst-transmit the data. If only the prick’s vehicle had plunged into a ravine before they’d had a chance to transmit the information that would change the world. If only. Ah, he was thinking too much about himself. By way of an antidote for his futile brooding, he e-mailed Choir Williams about Prince. That beloved spaniel was the best damn tracker dog in America. In the world!
At dawn his computer signaled he had mail. Prince was dead.
That was the most savage, the single most demoralizing hit he’d taken in the whole business. It wasn’t that he was uncaring about Tony Ruth’s death. The decapitation of anyone was as grim a sight as any combat soldier has to look at, but human beings bore their own responsibility, and in this case Tony had gone willingly, like his team members, following the general as they had before into what Freeman’s soldiers knew, despite what the relativist moralists of academe might say, were crucial battles against evil. A job for which they volunteered. Not so the likes of Prince, Freeman mused, an animal that had no choice but that was nevertheless with them in harm’s way. And anyone who thought a canine wasn’t conscious of fear was a fool. And while there was no animal-human bond stronger than that between Choir and Prince, it would affect the whole team. In a moment of self-doubt, Douglas Freeman wondered whether they would ever volunteer to follow him again. Of course they would, and he jettisoned the doubt almost as quickly as it had assailed him, kicked it out in disgust, for it was nothing more than self-pity in disguise. There was no room for self-pity in a world in which hundreds of thousands of children perished each year of starvation and preventable diseases, and where there were breeding grounds for teenagers who would blow themselves up in the insane terrorism waged against the West.
He recalled what Margaret had said regarding the futility of worrying about the possibility that one of the terrorists might still be on the loose. The data — she was right — were almost certainly in the hands of whoever had paid enough to get them who had financed the attack.
The phone rang. “Hello,” said Margaret in her usual courteous manner, then suddenly her tone turned icy. Covering the mouthpiece, she hissed, “It’s that tart of yours.”
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 told 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?”
Charles Riser, despite his prodigious knowledge of Oriental culture, did not know what tancho meant, and asked Bill Heinz, the embassy’s military attaché.
“Japanese crane,” replied Bill. “You’ve probably seen lots of ’em on postcards, Japanese watercolors. They’re a big deal in Japan.”
Now that Riser knew what tancho meant, his China hand’s knowledge came into play. “Well, one of the biggest sanctuaries would be Lake Khanka, the one up beyond Harbin. I think it straddles the Sino-Russian border.”
Riser e-mailed a coffee-quaffing Douglas Freeman about Lake Khanka. It was a huge four-thousand-square-kilometer body of water and marshland, ninety kilometers long and in places seventy kilometers wide, that constitutes one of the largest bird sanctuaries in the world. The wetlands and lake are fed by the upper course of the Ussuri River in a large depression where terrible forest fires over thousands of years had apparently rendered an area which should have been thick, boreal forest now only sparsely treed, leaving meadows and some copses of Mongolian oak. It was also reputed to be the last great refuge of the endangered far eastern leopard and Siberian tiger, and a vital refuge for hundreds of thousands of migrating birds, including the tancho. He also added, courtesy of Bill Heinz’s files, that there had been repeated complaints by Chinese “enviro nuts” about some kind of armament testing in the area adjacent to the lake.
In their computer-cum-music room Freeman forced himself to contain his excitement as, having quickly scanned Charlie Riser’s e-mail, he called up his meticulously cross-referenced military-industrial files, which he was confident were better than the Pentagon’s intel. “Lake Khanka” had rung a distant bell in his memory about Sino-Soviet border disputes, and its significance fairly jumped out at him from the monitor: Lake Khanka, at latitude 44 degrees, five minutes north, longitude 132 degrees east, on the far eastern Russia-China border, was less than fifty kilometers north of the Deng Jiang sulfur mine, sulfur being essential for any armaments, including the newer Man Portable Air Defense rockets of the kind that had downed his SpecOps Chinook at Priest Lake. Calling Margaret over, he pointed to the area map he had called up, zooming in on the area, highlighting a place southwest of the lake called Gayvoron, noting that it must be the railhead.
“Oh no,” said Margaret as she saw him snatch a light Windbreaker from the hallway. “Surely you can call from home.”
“Not this one, sweetie,” the general replied, grabbing his cap, giving her a peck on the cheek. “Sweetheart, Murphy is always hanging around. Get sloppy on security just once and it’s like leaving your car unlocked.”
From the repaired phone booth down by the 7-Eleven, Freeman dialed the White House and this time was immediately put through to Eleanor Prenty.
She got right to it. “You’ve read the summary, Douglas?”
“Yes. And I’ve deduced that everything points to those scumbags’ camp definitely being situated around a place called Lake Khanka. It’s situated in—”
“Yes, we know,” Eleanor cut in impatiently.
“What?” He was stunned. “You know it’s Lake Khanka?”
He heard a sigh that conveyed to him a sense of patient resignation on the other end. “Douglas, I think you’re one of the most brilliant military commanders this country’s ever had, your failure to catch these terrorists notwithstanding. But you—” She was sighing again, really pissing him off. “Like us all, I guess, you have some surprising blind spots.”
“Such as?” he asked grumpily. “My failure to catch these terrorists notwithstanding.”
“Don’t be childish, General. I haven’t got the time. None of us have. Remember, you and all other senior officers, active and retired, supported the Patriot Act.”
Now, as Aussie Lewis might have said, the penny dropped in Freeman’s brain. “Son of a — you’ve been tracking my Internet inquiries.”
“I have not. NSA has. Surely you must know that their computers are surfing the Net 24/7. As soon as certain phrases or terms pop up, the computers automatically tag and record them. Hell, Douglas, they do the same with me. You might not realize it, but some terrorist cells have staged random break-and-enters so they can use a citizen’s computer. That way any backtracking of the terrorists’ METAs to that ordinary citizen’s line is futile.”
“METAs?”
“Messages to activate,” explained Eleanor. “It’s an NSA acronym.”
Freeman’s brain was racing, despite his acute fatigue. “So you knew? I mean, NSA put the forensic analysis together with my computer files on Lake Khanka and Gayvoron?”
“It was your sulfur mine around which all the forensic stuff jelled,” Eleanor told him.
“Then it’s a matter for our air force,” said Douglas. “I expect Moscow’ll be as pleased as we are to take out a terrorist camp.” He was thinking of how the CIA and KGB had joined forces and worked so well together to prevent a planeload of Russian nuclear scientists from leaving Russia for Iran.
“It’s not as easy as that,” cautioned Eleanor. “The president’s been in contact with the Russian premier. There’s no way Moscow will allow a bombing mission on Russian soil. Besides, even if they did, we’d need much more precise targets than Lake Khanka and environs. Do you know how big that place is?”
“Of course, you’re right,” commented Freeman, embarrassed by not having seen such an obvious problem. He sure as hell needed some sleep.
“Plus,” continued Eleanor, “once it gets out that we want to go after them by bombing, there’ll be an outcry from every environmental group in the world. Can you imagine it, Douglas? Americans bombing a hallowed bird sanctuary? We’re hated enough already around the world, without every bird lover and Audubon Society on earth screaming bloody murder!”
“So what’s the best they’ll allow us?” pressed Freeman. “What kind of force can we mobilize?”
“Moscow’ll allow an MEU to be ferried in by air and for us to hit the terrorists’ camp. But we’ve only got twenty-four hours, max.”
The general was rapidly estimating how much time it would take for a SOC MEU, a special-operations-capable Marine Expeditionary Unit, of two thousand men to be dispatched, fight a winter battle, win, and withdraw. “That’s hardly enough time to—”
“Well, that’s all the time they’ve given us, Douglas. It’s nonnegotiable. Moscow wants to clean up its backyard terrorists as much as we do ours. But even with all the goodwill we’ve engendered between us since the end of the Cold War, they’re still very prickly about the whole thing. It’s a political minefield for the guys in the Kremlin. We’re damned lucky they’ll let us in. Thank God for the KGB-CIA joint venture against the nuclear scientists trying to hightail it to Iran. At least that’s set a precedent.”
“Well, do we have any HUMINT on the area?”
“We have several agents out of Harbin. Taiwanese sleepers. CIA has asked them to send out burst intel transmits to the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwanese straits. Our MEU attached to the fleet will be going in from the Yorktown.”
“Well, that’s the best news I’ve heard so far.” Freeman’s last SpecOp, into North Korea, had gone in from Yorktown. It was a 45,000-ton Wasp-class LHD-26B landing-helicopter-dock ship, part of the U.S. Marines’ “Gator Navy,” so-called because of the potent amphibian force the marines had proved to be in the victorious but bloody landings from Guadalcanal to Saipan. It was complete with forty-five assorted choppers, several of the hybrid Ospreys, two V/STOL–Vertical or Short Takeoff or Landing planes — Joint Strike Fighters, and three LCACs, which were hovercraft landing craft.
“We have another piece of information,” Eleanor told him. “Our military attaché in Berlin has received HUMINT from Germany that nanotech high-precision lathes are on the move east. Anyway, the president wanted me to seek your counsel.”
“I don’t know,” mused Freeman. “It’ll be a very tricky operation, any which way you look at it.”
“That’s why,” said Eleanor, “the president wants you to lead it. Will you?”
The moment he hung up, Margaret knew. “Surely you didn’t accept it?” she asked. Freeman said nothing. “Oh, Douglas! I’m no politician, but can’t you see what this is?”
“An honor.”
“Honor? It’s — oh, Douglas—”
“I wish you’d stop saying, ‘Oh, Douglas.’ Anybody’d think I’d robbed a goddamn bank!”
But she wouldn’t be deterred. “I’m no military expert, Lord knows, but I can see a trap when it’s staring me in the face. I haven’t spent all my time going to bridal showers with Linda Rushmein.”
“Margaret!” he said sharply. “It’s obvious why I was chosen. I’m the only goddamned general who’s—”
“Don’t use that language, please!”
“I’m the only general,” he said, looking for all the world like Patton uncaged, “who’s had firsthand experience in the taiga, in the U.N. mission I led. I mean, my whole team has firsthand experience of the terrain, and—”
“Douglas, Douglas, do you honestly believe that you were the first choice?”
He said nothing, but the tension could have been cut with a knife.
“It’s a trap, dear, a political trap. Even I can see that. No one who cares about his career would dare volunteer. Can’t you see they’re using you? What do they care? They’re appealing to your ego, Douglas.”
He gave her a long, hard look and turned sharply about, snatching up the TV remote. “It’s a matter of honor. The president asked. The president of the United States of America has asked me to finish the job that I started. He’s obviously got more confidence in me than—” He strode off into the living room to get the latest update.
Margaret sat, or rather slumped, down in her lounge chair. After a long silence, she asked, very carefully, “Does the president have any idea of how many terrorists are in this wretched camp near—”
“Lake Khanka,” he said quietly. “No, no one knows. It could be a small outfit or a big complex. We’ll have to wait for a recon report from HUMINT.”
“From what?”
“People on the ground. In the area. Spies,” he said irritably. “Informers.”
She had her arms folded tightly below her breasts, the normally soft features of her face hardened in her fear for him. She remembered how Catherine used to pray for him every night he was away. “You could be killed.”
“If their base, if those people, get a chance to tool up for hypersonic weaponry, Margaret, a lot of people, including a lot of Americans, are going to get killed.”
To make matters even worse for Margaret, CNN’s Marte Price, in an exclusive from Washington, D.C., was confirming that the die had been cast. As she spoke a retaliatory U.S. force was being readied for an attack on the terrorists’ camp at some as yet undisclosed location overseas. CNN’s Pentagon correspondent reported that the force would most likely be deployed from one of the United States’ carrier battle groups. Such a group would most likely consist of a carrier, two frigates, two guided-missile Aegis cruisers, four destroyers, a replenishment vessel, and two nuclear attack submarines, all in the service of protecting a Wasp-class helo carrier transport carrying 2,100 combat troops of a Marine Expeditionary Unit under the command of a “full-bird” colonel. It was not known, she told her viewers, who would lead the assault, but it was rumored by confidential sources within the administration and the Pentagon that several of the armed services’ highest-ranking field commanders had strenuously objected to any precipitous action, citing the unmitigated disaster that was President Carter’s attempt in 1980 to rescue American hostages in Iran in a similar “in-out” lightning strike. It seemed that no one who valued their career prospects wanted anything to do with what Marte Price was characterizing as a “high-risk undertaking.”
“Did you hear that?” Margaret asked her husband.
He pretended not to hear. Closing his eyes, he recalled the last known positions of the U.S. Navy’s carrier battle groups, and deduced that unless there had been a radical shift in their combat patrol areas, it would be Admiral Crowley’s Seventh Fleet CBG which would be closest to Lake Khanka. If this were the case, the MEU he was to lead would be that of Colonel Jack Tibbet aboard the Yorktown, one of Admiral Crowley’s twelve-vessels. Scuttlebutt had it that because the navy, as were the other branches of the American armed forces, was dangerously overextended, it might well be that Crowley, who used to be captain of the carrier McCain as well as overall admiral of the fleet, would have to serve as captain of Yorktown as well as admiral of the fleet for the duration of this mission.
“I mean, Douglas,” Margaret pressed him, “aren’t you getting too old for…” It was the worst possible thing she could have said.