In Monterey it was still dark, and in a modest bungalow’s bedroom, the phone rang — eight times before retired General Douglas Freeman finally relented. Half sitting up, careful not to disturb his wife, Margaret, he glanced at his watch. It was 5:00 A.M. What the hell—? He knew it had to be something wrong with his son Dan, who was posted in the Middle East, for anyone to be calling at this ungodly hour. The “crump” of high surf pounding the beach sounded to him like distant artillery, a creeping barrage. He fumbled sleepily for the phone. “Hello?” he growled, his voice gravelly and nasal in his sudden awakening. “Hello?”
“General Freeman?”
“Yes. Who is this?”
“Aussie Lewis,” came the jovial voice. In the background was the sound of either a Special Forces team checking weapons or metal crates banging together.
“Aussie? What’s wrong?”
“We clear fore and aft, mate?” came Aussie’s voice, his Australian twang still distinctive, though he’d been a U.S. Special Forces commando and a naturalized American for fifteen years.
“Yes,” said the general. “Clear fore and aft.”
“What is it?” pressed the general. Freeman was one of America’s legendary commanders but right now all he was was a rather grumpy, impatient retiree who needed his sleep.
“Well,” said Aussie Lewis, “there’s this old sailor who decides to have a last fling. So, he goes down to the waterfront and picks up this lady of the evening. Well, they’re goin’ at it and he says, ‘How’m I doin’?’ and she says, ‘You’re doin’ about three knots.’
“‘What d’you mean, three knots?’ he asks her and she says, ‘Well, you’re not hard, you’re not in, and you’re not gettin’ your money back!’”
This was followed by raucous laughter from what sounded like a football team. The metallic sound the general had heard earlier, he decided, must have been the rattle of beer cans.
“Son of a bitch!” said General Douglas Freeman. “You rang to tell me a joke — an old joke at that — at 0500?”
“Oh, shite!” came Aussie’s response. “I thought it was 0800 hours.”
“You must be on the East Coast,” said Freeman, “and pissed as usual.”
“Yes and no, General,” answered Aussie. “A few of the old team got together for an ad hoc reunion. We’re seeing the sights in Washington, D.C. Saw the World War II monument yesterday. See where all our friggin’ taxes go. The monument’s A-okay, though. We all like it. ’Bout time all those people had something to honor them. Anyway, I thought I’d give you a bell, see how you were, you being retired and all. Thought you could do with a bit of a laugh.”
Freeman smiled, relaxed, and sat back against the bed’s headboard, Margaret stirring sleepily beside him. “Well, thanks, Aussie. And you’re right. Ever since the yuppies in the Pentagon requested I take retirement because of my — well, what they said was—”
“Your penchant,” answered Aussie, “for ‘politically incorrect statements.’ You called those congressmen on the Appropriations Committee — let’s see, what was it? Oh yeah, ‘A bunch of broad-banging bureaucrats.’ Don’t think you can say ‘broad’ anymore,” continued Aussie. “Sexist.”
“Hmmm, I suppose,” the general conceded ruefully. “Never mind that it was the truth. That bunch on the Appropriations Committee should’ve voted more money for DARPA.”
“That’s what the team’s been talking about here.”
“Where’s ‘here’—a dive?”
“Of course not, General. We’re on top of the roof at the Willard Hotel. Breakfast. We can see the White House from here.”
“Hope they can’t see you guys. Who’s there?”
“In the White House? The president, I guess.”
“No, you dork. Who’s with you at the Willard?”
“Ah, lessee. Salvini, alias the Brooklyn Dodger, Choir Williams, the bloody Welsh tenor — he’s singing, God help us — and yours truly. Couldn’t get Eddie Mervyn or Gomez out here. After that Korean stint we did they went home to Mommy. They live on the West Coast.”
“I know,” said Freeman. He knew exactly where every member of his old team was located and how he could reach them — quickly, if needed — including Medal of Honor winner David Brentwood, who was laid up at the moment with a flare-up of an old shoulder wound.
“Oh,” added Aussie, “I’m getting crap for not mentioning Johnny Lee, our multilingual expert. He’s here too, pissed out of his mind. That DARPA outfit you were talking about?”
“What about it?” said the general.
“You know,” said Aussie. “This B and E at the naval facility.”
“Break and enter?” said the general, sitting up higher against the headboard, his face clouding over. He prided himself on being current, particularly in this long, hard war against terror which, as Bush had told the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, would be the “work of decades”—how history was once more witnessing a great clash like that of the Cold War. Only this war on terror was a damn sight hotter, and it was for that reason that the general had vociferously argued for more money to be allocated for DARPA’s black box stuff. DARPA needed all the funding it could get, even if it meant hiding it so deep within the GAO’s — the General Accounting Office’s — records that to locate it would be like trying to find the proverbial needle in a bureaucratic haystack. The general was very up-to-date vis-à-vis DARPA, but he hadn’t heard anything about a B and E against any DARPA installation.
“What happened?” he asked Aussie.
“No details really,” said Aussie. “On the idiot box — breaking news. Oh, guess it must have been about an hour ago. Oh four hundred your time.”
“I didn’t see anything,” said the general. “I was watching a late movie. What channel?”
“CNN.”
“Huh,” said Freeman. “Those people know more than the CIA half the time.”
“Tell me about it,” answered Aussie, having to raise his voice against the sound of the beer cans.
“Which facility?” Freeman pressed; he could hear the usually quiet Welshman Choir Williams singing “Goodbye” from White Horse Inn.
The Willard wouldn’t put up with that for long.
“That’s what we’ve been tossing around over a few beers here,” said Aussie. “The location of the facility. Your old CNN flame, Marte Price, broke into the newscast, said there’d been a B and E at a highly sensitive naval base out your way.”
“My way?” said the general, adding wryly, “You mean somewhere between San Diego and Alaska?”
“Yeah, pretty broad isn’t it?” responded Aussie. “I dunno, but we all got the impression it was on the West Coast — somewhere out there. All she said was something about a naval facility ‘out west’ but — just hold on a mo, General.” Then Freeman heard Aussie asking the others, “She did say it was a naval facility out west, right?”
There was a chorus of boozy agreement.
“Yeah, General,” continued Aussie. “She said it was a ‘highly classified’ naval facility that had been broken into. Security guard killed.”
“And—?” pressed Freeman.
“That’s it. No film, just the verbal report.”
“But they must have aired the story again later? More details?”
“Nada,” said Aussie. “We were up playing a few hands of poker. We would’ve heard any more news about it. My guess is DHS must have come down on CNN like a ton o’ bricks to kill the report. ’Course, at the time of the newscast, most people were in bed anyway. That always helps to squelch a story.”
“You weren’t in bed,” said the general.
“Well, you know how it is, General. Team likes to stay up — stay current.”
“And I don’t?” the general joshed.
“Oh no,” said Aussie. “We know you’re up-to-date. But you’ve probably been busy staying up with your wife.”
“Cheeky bastard!”
“Oh no,” replied Aussie again, with mock embarrassment. “Oh, I didn’t mean anything untoward, General, or anything under covers, if you know what I mean?”
“I do. You’re pissed and you’re insolent. Call me back if you hear anything on that DARPA facility — where the hell it is.”
“Roger that,” said Aussie. “You sleep tight now.”
The general put the phone down and shook his head.
“Who was that?” asked Margaret, opening her eyes. Their brilliant turquoise color always surprised her famous or, perhaps more truthfully nowadays, once-famous husband.
“Ah, the boys,” replied the general. “They’re tying one on.”
Margaret had to think about that phrase. It wasn’t one she normally heard amongst her friends at the church socials, even those put on for the benefit of retired service folk who, with so many other Americans, had suffered catastrophic losses, personal and financial, when the family breadwinner had been killed in the long, ongoing war against terror.
“Aren’t you coming back to bed?” Margaret murmured, taking a sip of water from the glass on the bedside table as Freeman opened the closet, reaching in for his long gray robe. He didn’t answer her, already deep in thought about the DARPA burglary, if that’s what it had been, and surfing channels on their bedroom TV as he slipped his feet into his moccasins. Nothing about a break-in at any military base. Perhaps Aussie had glimpsed part of an old documentary tape. Freeman recalled how just the other day he had pulled a newspaper out of the magazine rack and was halfway through reading an article on yet another terrorist raid in Britain before he realized the paper was a month old.
Margaret drew the duvet over her eyes to shut out the flashes of light from the television. “Douglas? What are you doing?”
“Oh, sorry.” He stabbed the power button, shutting off the TV. Something wasn’t right. Aussie had said all of them saw it. “Think I’ll stay up awhile,” he told Margaret. “Get some juice, maybe have a cup of coffee.” He glanced at his watch which, from old “in-country” habit he wore so that the face was under his wrist and reflections from its quartz face couldn’t be easily seen by the enemy.
“I’d like some company,” Margaret persisted, “and something in your robe tells me that you would too.”
“Margaret!” he said, feigning shock but pleased by her sudden sauciness. “Time for me to get up,” he added. “Nearly reveille.”
“You are up,” she said. “C’est magnifique! I’d like you to come down.”
“Mrs. Freeman!” he said, turning and looking down at her. “You astound me. You wouldn’t have said that six months ago — in French or English!”
“No,” she conceded, pulling down the covers invitingly. “I wouldn’t, but you know how these sudden conversions can be.” She was right. Once Douglas had told her how Catherine, his late wife and Margaret’s sister, had hoped that he and Margaret would “get together” should Catherine’s melanoma spread and make Douglas a widower, Margaret had experienced a surge of excitement. “I suddenly felt free,” she told him now. “That’s the truth of it, Douglas. Catherine set me free. Since then I’ve been — I don’t know. I feel like a new woman.”
“You are,” he said understandingly. She had, he knew, been straining to be free. He was at once enormously flattered that she had so secretly loved him all those years and sorry that the tension created in her by her suppression of her love had more often than not resulted in hostility. “I know. I only hope you’re not sorry that you’ve ended up with this retired old fart who still can’t leave the wars behind him.”
“You most certainly are not an old fart. Why, you jog more miles in a day than most marathoners. You, Douglas Freeman, are as fit as a young buck.” But she could see that, as virile as he was, his mind was elsewhere right now and, sliding back under the pink eiderdown, she said, “Oh all right, I’ll wait. I know you won’t settle until you check out this DARPA thing.”
“You were listening in,” he said, pretending shock. “I thought you were asleep.”
“I was, my darling, until I felt you sit straight up as if there was a spider in the bed. Go on,” she said teasingly. “Go down to your Rolodex.”
“Don’t you make fun of my Rolodex file, lady. When the power fails on my laptop, I have my cards. Hard copy, Margaret.”
“Oh,” she said, holding back a laugh.
He smiled as he drew the charcoal-gray Truman Show robe, an old gift from his actor nephew, tighter about his waist against the hard slab of his abdominal muscles. “You’re very nice,” he continued, “as I’m about to rediscover in that nest of yours once I find out what the—” He hesitated, refusing to use even the most commonplace blasphemy in her presence. It was a leftover from his marriage to Catherine. “Once I find out whether a DARPA facility’s been penetrated.”
“Penetrated?”
“Stop it, woman! Is that all you can think of?”
“Right now, yes.”
“Get up and make me some coffee.”
“Oh, tush!” she said. “Make it yourself.”
Freeman grinned and walked through to the kitchen via the living room, past a portrait of his ancestor, William Douglas Freeman, whose American rifleman’s forest green and chocolate brown uniform in the painting contrasted with the bloodred and white uniforms of the 1812 British regulars. A photo of his twenty-year-old son Dan and his girlfriend was on the lamp table along with a vase of sweet-smelling pink Mojave roses, a birthday gift to Margaret from Dan, who, in the general’s view, was finding it difficult to accept that his father had not only remarried but had married his aunt.
He watched CNN. There was nothing about a break-in at any defense base, let alone any DARPA facility. Had Aussie and the other SpecForces seen it on another network? There were so many now. He channel-surfed while Margaret’s ancient coffeemaker gurgled and spat. She saved everything. He had a rule: For every new thing that came into the house, an 1,100-square-foot bungalow, some old thing had to go out. In their first real quarrel after getting married she’d suggested he be put out. He smiled at how they’d laughed afterward and enjoyed passion-fueled sex that had left the argument in its wake.
On NBC there was yet another story about a series of terrorist alerts throughout the world. In London, a taxi bombing at Heathrow Airport had killed eight — twenty-three injured, six critically — and there was a threat in Washington state, but no reference to a West Coast naval base. Mention of Washington, however, reminded him that the U.S. Navy did have several highly sensitive installations up in Washington state.
Taking his coffee into the hallway, the general, who had been retired by a White House that hadn’t appreciated his blunt public description of jihad, studied his wall map of Cascadia, the Pacific Northwest made up of British Columbia, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington state. First there was the extensive sub base on the stunningly beautiful Hood Canal, surely at the top of any terrorist’s list. And then there was the huge naval air station on Whidbey Island east of the Canadian-U.S. Strait of Juan de Fuca. The latter, usually mispronounced by Aussie in crude allusions, was the egress channel for the big American Trident boomers and the hunter-killer attack subs out of Bangor, Washington. Then there was the huge Cold War SAC — Strategic Air Command — bomber base at Fairchild near Spokane way out in eastern Washington in the sagebrush country where the gargantuan B-52s flew over the sun-twinkling sprinklers that appeared like white lace across the irrigated farms and dry, coulee-rutted earth. Closer to the coast there was the army’s Fort Lewis near Tacoma. It was here on this enormous base that Freeman had last attended a DARPA demonstration, having been accidentally invited by a Pentagon clerk who hadn’t realized that the general was now on the “has-been” list.
But, according to Aussie, it hadn’t been an army barracks that had been hit but a naval base. He knew there were naval, civilian-staffed bases, secret research stations, tucked away along the coast from San Diego to San Francisco. And there were, since 9/11, several other locations on the West Coast with its thousands of inlets and bays. These mostly consisted of cutting-edge university labs with minimum, if any, real security, the academic community not naturally disposed to the presence of armed guards, arguing, with a good deal of merit, that low profiles in fact afforded more real security than any official display of armed security and high-profile signage, the latter best exemplified by the “Use of Deadly Force Authorized” sign at the entrance to the secret Bangor sub base that everyone knew about.
Freeman thought, as he sipped the strong, black coffee, that right then he couldn’t have given Aussie, Margaret, or anyone else a good, rational argument for his suspicion that it was probably the DARPA installation outside Bangor on Puget Sound’s Hood Canal or the naval testing lab near Keyport, thirty-five miles west of Hood Canal in Puget Sound, but he felt it in his gut. He called one of his many contacts in the Puget Sound area and discovered that his hunch was, as Aussie would have said, as useful as “tits on a bull.” Completely off track.
He did a computer news search of all the major naval establishments on the West Coast. Nothing. Next, he did a specific search on the Net for any current media mention of naval establishments on the East Coast. None had been referred to by either the networks’ anchors or their affiliates in the last twenty-four hours, and there was nothing on the main blogs. Of course, he reminded himself, these days the government, citing the Patriot Act in this long war against terror, had annoyingly, if understandably, shut down thousands of Internet sites with hitherto available defense-related information and links. The American Civil Liberties Union was particularly vexed by FBI and Homeland Security “visits” to any blogger who persisted in Internet searches vis-à-vis classified defense establishments.
In frustration, Douglas Freeman decided to call Marte Price. Surely his occasional trysts with her after Catherine died, when Marte was embedded with various units of his overseas, ought to be worth something. Besides, he had never been cavalier with Marte, never treated her as a “ready lay” but as a good-looking, savvy newswoman who, on tough, life-endangering assignments, needed the same kind of sexual release he did. It had been discreet — or as discreet as any liaison can be in the field. It had, of course, been strictly against army rules and regulations, but the war had slammed peacetime propriety hard up against the certainty of their own mortality. He had seen her a few times since and spoken with her on the phone. But now that he was remarried, he knew that a call to an old flame from his own house would not be a good tactical move. And the call would have to be made on a land line. Anyone who used a cellphone these days for anything confidential had no idea of just how pervasive the National Security Agency phone taps were, especially since 9/11. Not even Voice Over Internet Protocol-encrypted phone data was being respected by the NSA.
“I’m going down to the 7-Eleven for the Times,” he told Margaret as she walked into the living room.
He’d always preferred the feel of a good newspaper, such as the old International Herald Tribune that he used to scan every day in Heidelberg during his Cold War posting in Germany. A good newspaper with a second cup of coffee was one of the great pleasures in life, and something he usually enjoyed after each morning’s ten-mile run, fantasies of coming in first in the Olympic marathon in his head, the crowd on its feet for his sensational last-minute dash to victory. Well, hell, Georgie Patton had made it to the 1912 Olympics.
“You haven’t been for your run,” she said at the very moment he’d thought it.
He smiled at the synchronicity. Here was a marriage, he hoped, that would last.
“Ah, I’ll run later.”
“Oh? This DARPA thing must be important then.”
“Well, I don’t like stories that are aired once then die, especially given that this is an election year. Something’s fishy. Might be something in the papers, though.”
“Douglas?”
“Yes?”
“While you’re on the phone with her, why don’t you invite the old tart around for dinner? I’d love to see the competition.”
He stood there stunned, as if a grenade had exploded nearby. Speechless.
“Oh,” said Margaret, her arms akimbo, smile gone, her tone acidic. “Why so shocked, Douglas? You two were very chatty last time there was a terrorist attack. I assume you want to chat again.”
“Margaret,” Freeman began, “I didn’t want you to think—”
“I’m already thinking it.”
“I’m sorry,” said the general. “Honey, honest to God, Margaret, there is no subterfuge in this. I just thought it more—”
“Discreet?” she proffered angrily. “To contact your tart from the 7-Eleven?”
“Don’t call her that. She’s just an old—”
“Tart,” said Margaret. “I know. I have the misfortune to see her regularly on the boob tube because my legendary general of a husband just happens to be obsessed with watching CNN. And guess who is one of the anchors?”
“Margaret, stop it! That’s enough, dammit. I merely want to know what happened to a story that was alive and well one moment and dead the next. Smells fishy, and I want to get to the bottom of it. You know as well as I do that I’m still on a Special Forces advisory retainer for the White House. The president himself wanted retirees kept on a potential call-up basis. We’re spread — our forces are spread too thinly all over the world. And seeing they’ve put me on retainer, small though it is, at least they’ve given me something after pushing me out, and the way I keep that unofficial job, with entrée to the national security adviser, I might add, is to stay current. It’s like anything else. If you’re not current, you’re dead.”
Margaret was rigid — glacial ice.
“Ah, dammit, I’ll call from here.”
“No, go. Go get the papers. Keep current. There might be a picture of her in the obituaries.”
Son of a bitch, this is getting out of control. All I said was I’m going to the 7-Eleven and, BOOM, I’m in a minefield!
Margaret turned abruptly, stormed out of the living room, and slammed the bedroom door.
“Shit!” said Freeman. I’m cut off for a week.
He put on his jogging suit, grabbed his old SF forage cap and his keys, along with his phone card and ID, and left, thinking again of Rudyard Kipling’s poem, the old imperialist’s advice to “fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—” But he knew Margaret was going to need more than sixty seconds. Sixty hours, maybe? Dammit, he should have just called Marte Price from home, just do it in plain sight, with Admiral Horatio Nelson’s stratagem in mind: “Never mind maneuvers. Go straight at ’em!”
Well, he thought, this is what you get when you try to do things by stealth, but then again, as a virile, fit man in his sixties, feeling closer to a fit forty, he was hugely flattered by Margaret’s jealousy. When she got that cold look, the softer features of her face taking on a distinctively intimidating expression reminiscent of Julia Roberts’s in Erin Brockovich, she was dauntingly beautiful. He strode down to the 7-Eleven.
“No, Douglas,” Marte Price assured him. “I don’t know anything about an attack on a navy base. Who told you there was?”
“Aussie Lewis. You remember him. He’s one of my old team. You interviewed him after the team cleaned up those gangs of no-hopers on the Olympic Peninsula up in Washington state.”
“Oh — wait a minute.” Freeman could hear the rustle of papers at her end. “Yes,” Marte said, “there was a news feed from some affiliate, something about a breaking and entering caper, but it all proved bogus.” Marte laughed. “Embarrassing as hell, really. We had to run a retraction. I don’t think,” she said, laughing, “that the stringer who phoned it in will be paid for anything he or she pitches at our newspeople now. Apparently it was just some rumor. Probably some blogger screwing with us.”
“Uh-huh,” said the general, wiping his forehead with the heel of his right hand as he held the phone in the other. “And my name, for the record, Marte, is Shirley, and I’ve got the biggest hooters in Monterey County.”
“Good for you, Shirley,” she quipped.
“Oh, come on, Marte. Give me a break. Don’t give me that stringer rumor crap. CNN has faster intel half the time than No Such Agency.” He meant the National Security Agency. “You don’t run anything unless it’s reliable, has to be fact-checked.”
“I’m sorry, Douglas, but I’m telling you the truth. I hate to say it, but sometimes we actually do make mistakes — like that kid in San Diego, remember? Back in forty-one, alone in the newsroom on the Sunday, December seventh? Couldn’t get any confirmation, but he was going to run the header ‘Japs Bomb San Francisco’ until they got it sorted out at the last moment.”
“Bad analogy, sweetheart,” said Freeman. “The Japanese—‘Japs’ is politically incorrect, Marte—did bomb us. The kid just thought it was ’Frisco instead of Pearl Harbor. But there was a bombing attack.”
“Douglas, I don’t want to be rude, but I’m busy. The story is there’s no story. Nothing happened. Nothing. Bad news source. Nada.” She paused. “I hear traffic. Why aren’t you calling from home? Afraid your new wife’ll find out?”
“Thanks, Marte,” he told her. “Take care.”
She hung up.
Bitch. Well, not really a bitch, but — a “bad news source”?
Douglas Freeman gleaned every headline in the 7-Eleven, including those in USA Today, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and La Opinión. Nada.
He went down to the beach and began his morning run. He hated jogging in sand but knew it increased his workout by a factor of two to three and tempered his calf muscles until they were as hard as the new hagfish and Kevlar bulletproof vests he’d championed. As he pounded up and down the dunes, he was confident he’d give any drill instructor anywhere a run for his money—with full modern combat pack of fifty to seventy pounds, which just happened to be the same amount of weight as the Roman legionnaires had carried on their twenty-mile-a-day marches. As usual when jogging, he imagined that he was in a history-making race, like Philippides who ran the twenty-six miles from Marathon to Athens to tell the Athenians to hold fast, that their army under General Miltiades, who had just whipped the Persians, was now on its way back to save Athens itself, which it did. Of course Philippides had collapsed and died the second after he’d delivered the fateful message.
By the time he’d reached home, Freeman was in full sweat.
“Sweetie, I’m home.”
“I can smell.”
Ouch. Maybe she would cut him off for a month?
“Sorry, I know I must pong.”
“Must what?” she asked sharply.
“Pong.”
“Is that—” There was a pause, and he thought he heard a stifled laugh, and seized the opportunity.
“Yes, pong — means to really smell bad. An Aussie or Brit word. Not sure which. Aussie Lewis used to use it a lot. Guess I picked it up from him.” There was another long pause, and she appeared at the door in a smart fall suit of variegated autumnal tones: nothing too gauche but one that showed her ample bustline to best advantage.
“Where are you off to?” asked the general, a little cap-in-hand, a man who had once commanded thousands of men in the field, and the commander who had electrified America with his momentous “U-turn battle” against the Siberian Sixth Armored Corps during the U.S.-led U.N. “peacekeeping action” in the Transbaikal.
“I’m going out,” she said, checking her reflection in the hall mirror. “I told you last week. Linda Rushmein is giving a bridal shower for her niece, Julia.”
“Rushmein,” mused Freeman. “As in ‘rush mein dinner, mein Herr?’”
Margaret didn’t smile. “The shower will be later in the day but Linda’s asked me to help with the preparations. I won’t be back till late. She’s coming to pick me up.”
“That’s a long drive,” Freeman noted.
“Don’t wait up for me,” she said.
“Of course I will.”
“I can’t imagine why. I’ll be tired.”
“Then I’ll run you a hot bath,” Freeman said congenially.
She had put on gold, dolphin-shaped earrings. Freeman idly recalled that dolphins were the symbols of submariners. It got him thinking that perhaps this nonstory about a DARPA facility being attacked had to do with the new submarine base in Alaska. It might be a bit of a stretch, he thought, but a news source could say “West Coast” and still mean Alaska.
“You can stay up for me if you want,” said Margaret, “but I’m going straight to bed.”
“That’s what I mean,” he said cheekily, slipping off his jogging shoes. “I’ll be up!”
“Don’t be vulgar, Douglas.” She straightened her suit jacket, crimped her hair, then looked straight at him. “You’re famous, I’m told, for your commando raids and command of detail, meticulous planning, and concern for your troops. Well, through no fault of your own, you’ve been pushed into retirement by what Linda tells me is the iPod generation in the Pentagon. And I’m sorry for that, and I’ll try my best to be a good, loyal wife, but I’m serious, Douglas, I don’t want you flirting with other women. It’s something I abhor in men who are married and—”
“Flirting?” he interjected. “Margaret, I was thinking of you. I just thought it would be imprudent to be calling Marte Price from home. I’d probably feel the same if you had reason, however sound, to call an old beau, someone you had known—”
“Slept with, you mean, like you did with that tart.”
“That was before I met you — well, I mean, really got to know you after Catherine’s death. For Heaven’s sake, Margaret, get a grip. You’re blowing this way out of proportion. Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill.”
“It’s the lie, Douglas. It’s not that you’re phoning your old tart.”
“I’ve asked you before. Please don’t refer to her like that.”
“It’s not that you’re phoning your old tart. It’s this pathetic 7-Eleven cover story. Linda Rushmein tells me that even amongst your enemies in the State Department, whom you’ve raked over the coals for being professional liars, you’re thought to be an honest man. But I caught you in one of your own lies.”
His blood pressure was shooting up, and his grim-jawed George C. Scott in Patton face was set in Defcon 2—the penultimate defense condition before outright war. “Linda Rushmouth should keep her mouth shut. I did not call people in the State Department professional liars. I said that they lied because most diplomats were paid to lie.”
“Oh, don’t be so tendentious. It’s the same thing.” She snatched her raincoat from the hall rack.
“All right, all right,” he began, “it was foolish of me not to tell you I’d be calling her. It’s just that I could see no good reason to tell you and get you all upset. It was wrong of me to do it. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
There was a horn bipping outside.
“That’ll be Linda,” said Margaret. “I have to go.”
“Can you leave a number where I can reach you? I always like to have a—”
She scribbled the number on the yellow Post-it pad on the hall table.
“I love you, you silly woman,” he called after her. “And tell Linda Rushmein to get a muzzle. And don’t let her drive you home if she’s had too many. Those Krauts like their suds!”
Shouldn’t have said that, oaf. He would have bawled out a subordinate for such boorishness. As he looked into the hall mirror, he rebuked himself. Now you’ve done it, Freeman. You might be the hero from way back in the Far East against the Siberian Sixth et al. but here in Monterey you’re facing a domestic court-martial for a damn fool tactical move.
He descended to the basement, opened the Rolodex file in the cabinet near his weights, and looked up Alaska — naval bases. Nothing rang a bell. Perhaps this nonstory CNN had broadcast before they’d been obviously sat upon by the heavies from the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, et al. didn’t have anything to do with a naval base at all but was about an air force, army, or marine base, with an unmarked “black box” DARPA facility nearby? The Rolodex listed one DARPA facility attached to Elmendorf, the big air force base adjacent to Anchorage, Alaska, as well as other bases down Canada’s adjoining West Coast. Turning on his computer, he did a Net search for all armed forces bases. But there were no reports, not even a suggestion of a B and E, only assurances that the government was doing a good job with your tax dollars.
He called the White House, asking to speak to National Security Adviser Eleanor Prenty, the only connection he had with the administration as per his contract. He had promised he’d call only on matters of national emergency. He was put on hold. Usually the presidential staff, like those at State, didn’t take kindly to Freeman; he was likely to say what he thought, his words unadorned by the usual equivocation of career flip-floppers and yes-men.
He wouldn’t have made the call if he’d been able to get even a scrap of information about the “nonstory,” but there were no scraps. Still the very idea that terrorists might have penetrated DARPA security had set off his alarm bells. His personal interest in DARPA dated from when he’d sent a memo to the Pentagon, personally championing what otherwise would have been a small item in the press: the development of a hagfish slime-fiber weave vest. The slime’s molecular structure, he knew, was so strong that he suggested it be mixed with the latest Kevlar to make what he believed would be the toughest bulletproof vest possible, given the weight-to-load-bearing ratio of America’s fighting men and women. DARPA had run with the idea, and he was proved right. Since then, countless American and allied lives had been saved by the vests, and unfortunately the lives of American-hating terrorists who, just as Freeman had warned the Pentagon, had gotten their hands on either the chemical formula or the vests themselves so as to reverse-engineer their own. Of course it was only a matter of time before the DARPA vest went commercial anyway, but he’d hoped to give the Pentagon the heads-up to at least try to restrict the distribution of the vests. Had terrorists penetrated DARPA again? And if so, what was at risk? Or was he way off course, and Marte Price right — that it was nothing more than a badly sourced nonstory, a figment of some eager blogger’s imagination?
The White House operator told the general he’d have to leave a message or call back. Eleanor Prenty was in a meeting right now.
To calm down, he showered, opening his eyes every now and then to check that no one else was in the bathroom. As a youngster, he’d seen Hitchcock’s Psycho and after that murder in the shower scene he’d harbored a subliminal fear about showering with his eyes shut, training himself to keep his eyes open even while shampooing. It had saved his life in Iraq when a terrorist, breaching the U.S. security ring around Karbala, had come in firing his AK-47. Freeman, having glimpsed him through an eye-stinging film of soapsuds, had dived, quickly knocking the terrorist over, grabbing him in a headlock and plunging the would-be assassin headfirst into a toilet and drowning him.
Hours later, sitting in the living room La-Z-Boy waiting for Margaret to come home and tired of surfing the Net for any possible DARPA connection, Douglas Freeman was starting to have grave doubts about Aussie’s story. He had killed the TV and turned to read his favorite passages from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, when the phone’s jangle startled him. It was Aussie Lewis.
“Hi, Aussie, what’s up?”
“We clear?”
“Clear fore and aft,” the general replied, his tone edgy after the fight with Margaret. “What’s up?”
“Uh, nothing much, General, but I’ve got a good bet.” There was a pause. “Does Mommy let you bet?”
“I’ll bet when I want,” said Freeman. It was an old Special Forces team joke that whenever you wanted to rib a guy, you just said, “Will Mommy let you do it?”
“Okay,” said Aussie. “This is straight from the trainer’s mouth, not the horse’s. Very interesting info on the eight horse in the sixth race at Churchill Downs. It’s been raining.”
The general was more alert now; this was how his SpecWar team’s military intelligence often came to him: not from neat official reports but from bits and pieces buried here and there in casual conversation which, because there was no record of it, could be “plausibly denied” by all team members should some snoopy congressman launch a fishing expedition into the financial heart of the General Accounting Office, trolling for black ops budgets.
“It’s been raining,” Aussie repeated.
“Uh-huh.” Horse racing was the team’s venue of choice for issuing an alert to the other team members, the track chosen somewhere in the world where there’d been bad weather in the last twenty-four hours.
The general was already Googling Churchill Downs: an inch of precipitation in the last twelve hours.
“The eight horse,” Aussie told him, “is a good mudder. So put a packet on him if you want to make a bundle.”
“I don’t know,” said the general, feigning disinterest should his phone be tapped by any of the myriad agencies that were now watching their own citizens more closely than ever before in the ongoing war against terror. “There must be other nags in that race who can run in the mud, Aussie.”
“Yeah, but not like this one. Jockey told me this horse loves the mud, digs deep, no slipping and sliding. The mother of all mudders, General.”
“I don’t know,” the general repeated. “Unlike you Aussies, I’m not the betting type. A ticket in the Power-ball now and then, maybe, but you know what they say about the lotteries.”
“Yeah, yeah, tax on the stupid. Our mate Choir’s been singing that song to me for years. ’Course he doesn’t gamble,” continued Aussie sarcastically. “He invests. But he’s not on my case today. He’s got one hell of a hangover from last night, and has to hightail it to catch a flight back to — where’s that burg he lives in in Washington?” It wasn’t a burg, it was a small township nestled in the hills on the eastern edge of the Cascade Mountains.
“Winthrop,” the general answered, and answered jokingly, “He’s not sick already?”
Choir Williams, one of the toughest of the tough in Special Forces, having been trained first by the British SAS, Special Air Service, at Brecon Beacons in Wales. He was notorious for getting motion sickness. Choir, they used to joke, would get sick on an early-morning dew, but, like his grandfather and so many others who’d been violently ill on that gray, ugly morning of June 6, 1944, in Normandy, once he was in action, it was the enemy’s turn to suffer.
“He’ll be fine,” said Aussie, rubbing it in. “I’ll give ’im a coupla greasy fried eggs ’fore he leaves.”
Choir’s terse response could be heard in the background.
“You be sure to make the bet, General,” Aussie pressed. “The eight horse. I guarantee it.”
“Oh,” came the general’s retort. “So you’ll give me a refund if it doesn’t win or place?”
“Stone the crows!” said Aussie. “I’m not that stupid.”
“I’ll think about it, Aussie. Thanks for calling.”
When Freeman hung up, he scribbled “8, Churchill Downs” on his bedside Post-it pad and got up to spin the Rolodex file for the team’s letter-for-number code that had been disguised on one of the three-by-five-inch index cards. The cards contained everything from specs about the new weapons coming out of DARPA to the dimensions of the new Wasp-class carriers of the kind that the team had used on earlier missions and which housed helos and vertical takeoff and Joint Strike Fighter aircraft. The Rolodex also held the specifications for the object that looked like a marking pen that the general nearly always carried in his shirt pocket when out of the house.
Consulting the Rolodex’s file for this day’s one-time pad — that is, this day’s number-for-letter code — he wrote down a seven-digit number prefixed by a three-number area code. But to make sure his end was as secure as Aussie’s had been, the general would now have to use a landline outside the house. He knew the NSA had hired hundreds of Arab-speaking translators post-9/11, but he suspected some Arab agents must have slipped through the net, using the NSA’s intercepts for their own intelligence networks. Such was the paranoia of the world after 9/11.
He grabbed his Windbreaker and zipped it up, feeling a stiff breeze coming off the ocean, and headed down to the 7-Eleven again. He stood impatiently while a lanky, dirty-haired, earring-in-tongue youth of about twenty, who could see that the general was anxious to get on the phone, turned his back on Freeman and proceeded to loll against the wall of the phone booth, indulging himself in a long, banal conversation with his girlfriend, the communication consisting of repetition of “y’know” and “totally” and “like.” Like the general would, you know, like to pull the insolent son of a bitch right out of the phone booth and totally put him in the Marine Corps; give him a Parris Island haircut, feed him to the drill instructors, and teach the kid a few manners.
The youth was picking his teeth with a broken fingernail as the general left, cooling down, telling himself he’d been through his own rebellious time as a young man, but assuring himself that he’d not put anything in his body that didn’t belong there. As his self-righteous mood abated, he walked off to another phone booth four blocks away to dial the number Aussie had given him.
“Hello?” It sounded like Aussie, but there was a lot of static on the line.
“Clear?” intoned the general.
“Clear,” came the reply.
The general hesitated. As his old Special Forces outfit knew, he was a stickler for details. It wasn’t only his normal disposition that made him so but the experience of having a mission in Iraq compromised because of an English-speaking insurgent having successfully imitated a U.S. Ranger, calling down mortar rounds on U.S. positions. The interloper had used only “clear” instead of the full “clear fore and aft,” but had sounded so much like an American that the SpecFor team had taken out four Rangers before realizing they’d been set up for a blue on blue. And so the general, although he was 90 percent sure it was Aussie on the other end, said, “Clear is insufficient reply. I say again, clear is insufficient reply.” The static increased. The general heard, “Clear fore and aft.”
“What’s up?” asked the general, still on guard. Since 9/11, nothing was safe — voice mail, e-mail, snail mail, and especially text of any kind. What was it J. P. Morgan had advised? “Never write anything down.”
“Got a phone message this afternoon. From an old girlfriend of ours.”
“Yes?” said Freeman. The static eased up, but then surged.
“Well, she said she couldn’t talk earlier because of the pressure of work.”
The general still felt uneasy, the static doing nothing to abate his lingering suspicion.
So, thought Freeman, Homeland Security or the FBI had gotten to Marte.
“What did she say?” asked Freeman, maintaining a casual, almost bored, tone.
“She said she wished she could have explained more but that her brother had been in the room.”
“Uh-huh,” said Freeman. Big Brother. A CNN boss? Or a DHS official?
“Did she like the card I sent her?” It was the team’s phrase for more information.
“Oh yeah. She said it was a little sentimental but every word was true. She loved hearing your story about Eleanor Roosevelt, the French fries, and that kid who told her she had such big ears.”
Freeman was so keen to jot down the message, he had at first mistakenly taken out the fake DARPA marking pen from his shirt pocket instead of the regular ballpoint before reminding himself of the “no text” rule. He’d have to commit it to memory.
“Oh yeah,” said the general, laughing casually. “I remember that incident — cheeky damn kid. Where was that? On the campaign trail for FDR down in Louisiana?”
“No, you’re way off.” It was said good-naturedly. “No, remember, the story was that she was flying out west for FDR and it was some VIP’s kid on the plane who insulted her.”
“Yeah,” said Freeman in the tone of one who was just now recalling the full details of an old joke. “And she says to the cheeky kid, ‘Never mind my ears. Your nose is longer than a French fry,’ right?”
“That was it. But I never believed that bit about her saying that to the kid. From what I remember of my history lessons, Eleanor Roosevelt wasn’t like that. So, okay, she mightn’t have looked like a Hollywood film starlet, but she was a kind woman and she did a hell of a lot for this country. She was FDR’s right-hand woman, right?”
“Right,” said Freeman, committing these three things to memory: Eleanor Roosevelt, the kid’s supposed comment about her “big ears,” and “French fries.” None of these words used by Aussie were likely to trigger automatic NSA, FBI, or DHS phone taps. Besides, the computer-heavy NSA, quite apart from the DHS and the FBI, simply didn’t have enough manpower. The computers were programmed so that certain giveaway phrases such as “terrorist,” “assassination,” “attack,” and “the Great Satan” would automatically trigger an NSA computer to record the conversation for later analysis. On the off chance that any terrorist infiltrator from any of the security agencies had been plugged in, neither Freeman nor Aussie had made any reference to a DARPA breaking and entering. And Eleanor Roosevelt, French fries, and big ears weren’t the kind of words that would alert NSA’s terrorist surveillance.
“Gotta go,” said Aussie. “Someone else wants to use this phone.”
Back at the house, the general brewed another cup of “velvet Java,” as he liked to call the smooth, black liquid that dripped from Margaret’s old but thorough filtration system. As he waited for his favorite Pyrex glass mug to fill, the one with the faded insignia of his old Third Army on it, he mused over three things. First, Aussie’s mention of “an old girlfriend of ours” clearly referred to Marte Price. Second, she had felt her message urgent and sensitive enough to call Aussie Lewis, whose number she would have from one of her interviews with the general’s team following one of their celebrated raids. And third, she wanted to get the message to Freeman quickly without phoning him directly, having eschewed e-mail, snail mail, or courier service — all of which could be, and were being, opened under the Patriot Act. If DHS and the other agencies had come down on her so hard about this “nonstory,” then they were certainly going to check any e-mail or phone calls from and to her office and home. She had done the smart thing, obviously having left the office, and chosen a landline to call Aussie. But what in hell did her message mean? He shook his head in ironic acknowledgement of the odd, ofttimes mundane, names that had been used to hide military secrets and the turning points of history: “Climb Mount Nikita,” the three words that launched the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, and the names Juno, Sword, Omaha, Utah, and Gold, the designations of the four beaches used in the Allied invasion of Normandy, and, for Freeman, the moving line of Paul Verlaine’s poetry, “…blessent mon couer d’une langueur monotone”—“…wound my heart with a monotonous languor”—being the long-awaited signal that galvanized the Maquis, the French Resistance, to rise en masse against the Nazis. At least Freeman now realized that the original B and E story was true, and that Aussie’s phone message from Marte Price was trying to help him identify the base.
All right, then, how about Eleanor Roosevelt? What did her name signify in history? Freeman remembered how Marte had once lamented to him that one of the most depressing things in her career as an investigative reporter and news anchor was discovering just how ignorant Americans are of history. Not only the history of far-off places such as Iraq but the history of our own country as well. And, she’d noted, the ignorance wasn’t confined to the United States. She’d told him how she’d had to cover the visit of one of Canada’s former prime ministers, Paul Martin, who was giving a televised speech at a military base to celebrate the D-Day landings in Normandy but who called it the “invasion of Norway.” And there was the Canadian cabinet minister who didn’t know the difference between France’s pro-Nazi Vichy government and the famous Battle of Vimy Ridge in World War I, where the Canadians had charged and broken the German line. But Marte hadn’t told him anything special, or at least anything that he could remember, about Eleanor Roosevelt. And what on earth had she to do with Aussie’s mention of French fries and big ears? Freeman, an avid history buff, had never heard such a story about FDR’s wife, and believed that a child’s supposed insult to the first lady was a red herring that Aussie had dropped into the conversation merely to get the phrase “big ears” into the message. The general had considered the possibility that a callow youth could have actually said something so rude and hurtful to the first lady; there had certainly been a lot of cruel, if unpublished, allusions to her looks during the war by many who had opposed FDR. It had been bad enough that FDR had polio, the scourge of his generation, and was in iron leg braces and a wheelchair, the press having had a gentleman’s agreement that they would never photograph the leg braces or focus in too closely on the two Secret Service men who had to stand by the president at every function, holding him by cupping his elbows. Marte and Freeman had talked about that little-known historical fact and how JFK’s severe back pain and his Addison’s disease had also been kept from the public.
Freeman smiled affectionately at the memory of their chat about FDR, and he did recall Marte pointing out how the first lady had done so much good, not only for the wartime generation but for everyone, how the guy in the street, like his father, had loved FDR, the man in the wheelchair who had served the longest term, more than thirteen years, of any U.S. president, and who had led America out of the terrible years of the Depression. He had stood up against Hitler and helped save England, despite the pervasive mood of isolationism against him, and had vowed to stop the stomach-turning brutality that was the modus operandi of the marauding empire of Japan. And through it all, Eleanor, like so many uncomplaining wives, had borne her husband’s darkness with him and had become indispensable.
Freeman had been Googling the Net for “Eleanor Roosevelt,” “French fries,” and “big ears” connections all afternoon. By the time the evening news came on, he was getting a headache from staring at the flickering screen. Nothing about any break-in at a military base. He remembered Watergate; that had started to unwind because a B and E had been reported. The story that was grabbing TV headlines this day was another “worm” attack on the Net. Some jerk, working for a big corporation, had left a port open on his laptop and the perpetrator had downloaded the worm into the corporation’s mainframes. Once more he went to his laptop, bringing up databases for Eleanor Roosevelt and cross-referencing keywords from them with defense-based links. What he found were “umpteen” entries, as Margaret would have described them if she were still speaking to him.
Eleanor Roosevelt had sure traveled. He Googled “big ears” specifically on the defense contractor linkages. Nothing. There was an “Ears,” or rather “Golden Ears” provincial park in Canada not that far north of the big sub base at Bangor on Washington state’s Hood Canal, but there were no references indicating a joint U.S.-Canadian armed forces base. But when he saw that this provincial park, the equivalent of a state park in the United States, was landlocked, he thought of a possibility so obvious he was embarrassed that it hadn’t occurred to him earlier. Was it possible that there was a navy DARPA base somewhere inland in the United States? It didn’t make sense, but he ran it. There were only a few, but one of them was in Idaho. Potatoes? French fries? A possibility.
He zoomed in. It was situated on a lake, Pend Oreille, in the Idaho panhandle, thirty-six miles northeast of Spokane. Spokane itself was east of semi-arid desert country, much of it now irrigated, but Pend Oreille was in a thickly forested valley between the eight-thousand-foot-high Bitterroot Range and the Cabinet Mountains wilderness area which, the general noted, placed the lake between northeastern Washington and northwestern Montana in an area that thousands of years ago had been deeply scoured by glaciers. Then the computer crashed. Why, he had no idea, but it forced him to curb his excitement, having to admit, with a crossword puzzle addict’s reluctance, that even if he was correct in his assumption that Idaho was a key to unlocking Marte’s message, it was still only one of three clues he’d been given, and nothing was making sense. He needed to know more before he could call National Security adviser Eleanor Prenty with his theory that someone was trying to kill a story about a B and E just as someone in the Nixon administration had tried to kill Watergate.
Then, just as suddenly, another connection presented itself. Eleanor Prenty and Eleanor Roosevelt. He sat back, massaging his neck muscles.
Was there anything more that he could glean from Aussie’s conversation? The general had long been a believer, as all who had served under him knew, in Frederick the Great’s adage “L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace!” And it sure as hell was going to take audacity to call his wife in the middle of Linda Rushmein’s shower so soon after the verbal firefight over Marte Price. But the damned computer was down and he was impatient. Besides, the fact was that Margaret was fluent in French. He wasn’t.
“Hello?” It was Linda Rushmein on the phone.
“Hi. It’s Douglas Freeman here. Could I speak to Margaret?”
“I didn’t think you two were on speaking terms,” replied Linda tartly.
“Could I speak to my wife, please?”
Cold as ice. He could hear women’s laughter in the background, but when Margaret came on there wasn’t a trace of humor in her voice. “Yes?” It was as if he was a telemarketer interrupting dinner.
“Hi, sweetie,” said the general. “How’s the party going?”
“Fine. What do you want?”
It felt like he was standing in a force 8 gale without his thermal underwear. “Look, I’m sorry to bother you, Sweetie.” Crawl on your belly, General. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
“What do you want, Douglas?”
“Well, first I want to apologize. That was thoughtless of me going out earlier to call like that, but you see it was important that I use a landline other than the one in the house. I’m in a phone booth now.”
“Is this more secret stuff?” She made it sound seedy.
“It’s more secure on an outside landline,” he told her. “Anyway, I’m sorry I upset you. I can fully understand how you must have seen it.”
“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 call 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?”
“Soon as you give me one of your High Tails.” It was the latest class of Honda Executive jet, small, fast, but big enough to carry the team, their combat backpacks, and Prince.
“Do we have any of those?” asked Eleanor. “In the armed services, I mean.”
“Four,” Freeman told her. “Two on the West Coast, two on the East.” It was obvious to Eleanor that he’d already thought it through. “Aussie Lewis, Salvini, and our multilingual expert, Johnny Lee, can get the Honda out of Andrews Air Force Base in D.C. The rest of us, on this side of the country — myself, Choir, Eddie “Shark” Mervyn, Gomez, and our new guy, Tony Ruth — he’s an ex-army Ranger — we can take one of the two Hondas DOD has on the West Coast, the eight of us rendezvousing at Fairchild Air Force Base.”
“The big base in Washington state,” she proffered.
“Affirmative,” answered Freeman. “Forty clicks west southwest of the Ear — I mean Pend Oreille.”
All that Eleanor had been told about the region was that it was beautiful and brutally rough terrain. “Be careful, Douglas. The Man will give you forty-eight hours. By then the guys at the Pentagon’ll be stirring their battalions and wanting to move in.”
“No sweat,” replied Freeman. “That’s all we need. This hunt was made for my team. Forty-eight hours? We’ll corner the bastards in half the time.”
“Good hunting then,” she said. “Remember, forty-eight hours, Douglas. That’s all the lead time we can give you. Any more will be politically as well as militarily untenable once the public starts pressuring whoever the congressperson is for northern Idaho. It could be the election issue of the year.”
“Rita Carlisle,” said Freeman.
“What?”
“The congresswoman for Idaho,” the general told Eleanor, “is Rita Carlisle. Fifty-two and a looker.”
“I’ll take your word for it but listen, we need to know one thing,” Eleanor said. “I’ve been so busy listening to you I almost forgot. We haven’t been briefed as to exactly what has been stolen, I mean what’s on the disk. All the Pentagon can tell us is that it’s Flow-in-Flight data and that the DARPA scientists at the Navy base were operating above Top Secret level, and Eyes Only. So when you get to the lake, you’d better check with the director of the DARPA installation — or what’s left of it. He’s on the daytime staff, and the White House’ll give him authority to discuss it in more detail with you. We can’t figure out what they’re going to do with the information they’ve stolen. After all, the terrorists don’t have a navy.”
Freeman was surprised by her remark. He put it down to fatigue, for wasn’t it obvious what the terrorists were going to do with it? Whatever it was DARPA had been testing at the naval base, the terrorists were sure to use it against the United States. “Damn terrorists didn’t need a navy to attack the USS Cole,” Freeman said. “Used a rigid inflatable packed with C4.”
“And Douglas?”
“Yes?”
“The Pentagon set up DARPA at Pend Oreille, but apparently not even the Joint Chiefs were told exactly what the scientists were working on. Right now, the Pentagon’s highly pissed with the civilian scientists for not requesting full Defcon 1 security for the lake. The Pentagon says that this is what happens when you don’t insist on military oversight of DARPA contracts — that civilians, scientists, know squat about security. In all fairness, though, the base is at the end of a lake that’s used a lot for recreation and so without moving the base, ironclad security would have been impossible anyhow.”
“Don’t worry,” Freeman assured her. “I’ll try not to get in a brawl between anyone, but I’ll find out exactly what was on that disk and why they needed such deep water.”
“Whatever it is,” Eleanor cautioned him, “keep it to yourself. The Man does not want whatever it is going public. It’s bad enough a research installation was broken into.”
“Of course,” Freeman assured her. “I’ll keep it strictly within the team.”
“Godspeed, Douglas.” He could hear the worry in her tone.
When Margaret returned late from the bridal shower for Linda Rushmein’s niece, she could smell fresh coffee, but Douglas wasn’t there. There was a note:
“Margaret: On SpecFor mission. President’s orders. Will contact you ASAP. Be out of touch for a few days. If you need any further explanation, pls ring Eleanor Prenty, national security adviser, at the White House. Her # is in my Rolodex. She’ll fill you in, as far as security allows. All my love, Douglas.”
Bewildered, she dropped onto the sofa. Unlike her dearly departed sister Catherine, she was not used to coming home to find her husband having left home so abruptly. Where was he? What was he doing? How would she know when he’d call? Questions, she knew, that were being asked daily by the loved ones of thousands of U.S. servicemen and servicewomen. But for Margaret, it was far from the norm. Too far, in fact. Was this what her life was going to be like living with “retired” General Douglas Freeman? Glory be, she had thought they would sail congenially together into the golden twilight of retirement. Instead, he was gone. She knew she shouldn’t be resentful, but she was.
What could she do? She switched on the TV. If it was this DARPA thing he’d mentioned, whatever it was precisely, if it were that important, surely there’d be something on the news by now?
There wasn’t. The lead story was about a jailed Enron executive who had presumably been attacked by a fellow inmate, but all he would say was that he’d accidentally tripped, from the second floor, out a window. CNN reported the phone lines were jammed following the story by calls from people who’d been forced out of retirement by Enron’s collapse back in 2003–2004, suggesting that he should have “tripped” from the Enron tower instead. The remainder of the news consisted of the day’s wrap-ups of the opening barrages in the presidential primaries. A candidate in New Hampshire was running on a platform of getting to the root of the problem of the war on terror by “making friends with the Muslim fundamentalists.” Well, at least, Margaret thought, Douglas wasn’t home to hear that. His blood pressure was okay but it wasn’t that good.