Payback wi-10, page 11
part #10 of WW III Series
“Ah, how do you know the missing launcher belonged to a Stinger, Mike?” asked Freeman.
Eleanor Prenty, the fatigue bags under her eyes looking even worse on the TV screen, was still trying to appear calm — after thirty-six hours without sleep — but inside she was on the boil. Freeman, she knew, wanted, ached, to be recognized for his ability rather than being shunted aside, like so many, by mandatory retirement rules and regulations which all too often assumed you became brain-dead at an arbitrarily, bureaucratically imposed age. But his combatively delivered “Mike,” Eleanor knew, was precisely the kind of petulance that quickly shifted people’s attention away from the kind of respect Freeman had earned on the battlefield to his reputation as a diplomatic disaster.
“The videos we’ve seen, General,” the Chief of Naval Operations told Freeman, “and the several eyewitnesses we’ve spoken to so far would seem to indicate pretty conclusively that the missile in question was a Stinger. The twin rectangular flap-ears antenna and—”
“ ‘Seem to indicate’ is the operative phrase, Admiral,” cut in Freeman. “Now, I’m no flight engineer like Mikey here, and the flight angle on those videos may make it look like it’s a boxy antenna, a Stinger, that we’re seeing, but it could be another enemy-made MANPAD.” He was recalling what Aussie Lewis had said about the similarity of the Stinger antenna to that seen on the missile in the Dallas/Fort Worth video. The missile that Mikey Lesand and the admiral were convinced was a Stinger could well be an improved Chinese Anza.
“How about the eyewitnesses, General?” retorted the CNO, the President, listening intently, giving no indication how much this Stinger/non-Stinger debate counted in what would ultimately be his decision following the Joint Chiefs’ and his National Security Advisor’s input.
“These eyewitnesses,” asked Freeman, “civilian or military?”
“Civilian, I believe,” answered Eleanor crisply.
“Not worth a damn,” said Freeman. “They’re not trained.”
“One was a member of the press,” the CNO retorted.
“Huh!” grunted Freeman, sitting back in exasperation, but in what Eleanor, her nerves frayed, was afraid might look like plain insolence to those in the Oval Office.
“Media types are even worse than civilians,” continued Freeman. “If I had a dime for every time some correspondent called an armored car or a Bradley a tank, I’d be a wealthy man. The State Department’s made serious foreign-policy blunders believing some radio report of enemy ‘tanks’ invading some foreign burg.”
“So, General,” cut in Eleanor, her no-nonsense tone reinforced by her stony stare into the Oval Office’s camera, “some witnesses make mistakes. But let’s get back to the point, shall we? Even if this third rocket, MANPAD, or whatever you call the thing that murdered over three hundred Americans at Dallas, is a Stinger, the CIA tells us the launchers we’ve found for these—” She glanced down at her notes. “—Vanguard and Igla, both come from the same source. North Korea, a place called Kosong.”
“Yes,” said Freeman, charmingly agreeable, as if he’d known the name of the place all along. “Kosong.”
“Good!” said the President, relieved by Freeman’s unqualified concurrence with his Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“I just don’t want you guys to go into Kosong,” said Freeman, “and have the attack get into trouble because of incomplete CIA intel, Mr. President.”
The Joint Chiefs were trying to conceal their surprise with, and their resentment of, Freeman. The gall of the man! How in hell did he know they had already decided on an attack, before the suggestion had been finalized, the CNO in particular noting that Freeman had said the attack, not an attack, as if the self-assured son of a bitch could read their minds.
“I just thought it prudent,” Freeman continued, “that it should be a matter of record for the administration that, if anything was to go wrong with the mission, the White House had to act on the incomplete information it had at the time, but with due deliberation. Like the allied attack on Iraq. The WMDs.”
The general’s phrase, “incomplete information,” and his mention of WMDs, the supposed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, produced dead air in the Oval Office, the silence pregnant with the WMD nightmare.
“You think,” said the President in a tone of deceptive calmness, “we should wait — try to find the third missile’s remnants? We already have the three launchers and their MIDs.”
The President and the Joint Chiefs were expecting the usual unequivocal answer from the no-holds-barred general, but instead Freeman replied, “I don’t know, Mr. President. I’m a soldier, not a politician — and I say that with respect, sir, for you and the awesome responsibility you have.” And the general meant it. He was thinking. He habitually railed against government ineptness as much as any other taxpayer in the country, but he was too smart not to know how different a politician’s lot was, trying to legislate in a sea of competing interests.
“Personally, Mr. President, I don’t think we’ll ever find the missile fragments after the kind of heat generated by the explosion of the planes’ fuel tanks. And…” He left his sentence uncompleted until the President, sensing Freeman’s as yet unspoken reservation, asked him to continue. The general wasn’t a man who normally held back. “Sir, you know how sometimes — maybe during a campaign — my uncle was a congressman—”
“Yes, I know. Go on.”
“Well, sometimes something bugs you, like a grain of sand in your sock. You search for it but you can’t find it.” He paused. “I’m not putting it well, but the truth is, every time I think about those missiles I think that something’s wrong.”
“Hundreds of Americans dead,” put in the Air Force’s Lesand. “That’s what’s wrong.”
That did it for Freeman. No way was he going to tell them about the onions. They’d think he was nuts.
“A hunch,” pressed the President.
“Yes, sir.”
The President nodded, his fingers pressed together like a church spire as he thought. “I appreciate your honesty, General. I do know the feeling — a hunch that something’s not right.” He paused, then looked directly into the cam. “Up in Topeka, Kansas, in one rally, I had a gut feeling something was out of whack. Tell you the truth—” He turned in his swivel chair to the Joint Chiefs and Eleanor. “—I thought there was going to be an assassination attempt.” He turned back to face the camera. “But nothing happened, General, despite my hunch. Everyone’s on edge. Times in which we live.”
“I won’t argue with that,” agreed Freeman.
“What we need, however, if we do an in-out job on Kosong, is launcher evidence brought back from that damned warehouse. Or something else concrete that nails the bastards, like the U-2 photos Kennedy got of the Cuban missile sites that were pointed right at us. Something that we could present publicly, as our U.N. ambassador Adlai Stevenson did with the U-2 photos in the U.N. just after the Soviets had denied it to the world. ’Course,” the President continued, “half the world’s not going to believe us, and never will, but it’s our allies I’m thinking of. They should be shown hard evidence.”
No one said anything for a moment, Freeman glancing at Eleanor Prenty, both of them knowing that everyone in the room recognized the importance of hard evidence, given how the difficulty of finding evidence of weapons of mass destruction had proved to be a massive headache for George W. Bush during the Iraqi war. The President turned back to Freeman. “Would you organize such an attack, General?”
Eleanor saw the sudden fire in Freeman’s eyes. “Yes, Mr. President. Gladly.”
“Good.” There was an audible sigh from the Joint Chiefs.
“Good man, Douglas!” It was the CNO, any previous sharp exchange forgotten.
“General,” said Air Force General Lesand, “we’ve picked you because you’re not officially on the books. You’re retired.”
Freeman was ahead of them. “I understand, Mike. No ID. And nontraceable weapons — off the shelf, commercial.”
“North Korean if we can get ’em,” put in Marine Commandant Taft.
The voice-directed camera in the Oval Office panned to the President, his red-and-blue Yale tie against the pin-striped navy blue suit immaculately matched. “I’m going to leave all the details in your hands, Douglas, which of course means I don’t want you in the raid itself. I want you at mission control offshore, making sure everything comes together.”
Son of a bitch. Freeman was stunned. He had expected to be on the point, but here they wanted him in some damn CCC, Combat Control Center, his eyeballs turning red from staring at one mini TV monitor after another, staying in constant contact with his men, who would be doing the tough, physical commando action, the “hard yakka,” as Aussie Lewis called any on-ground combat, where you actually saw the enemy’s faces, or the begoggled gas masks that protected identity as well as gas-porous skin.
“General,” added the President, seeing Freeman’s acute disappointment, “the Joint Chiefs think you’re the perfect man to set this up. I concur. Your experience and knowledge of that part of the world are as legendary as your military successes.”
“Thank you, Mr. President,” said the Legend graciously, but his face was funereal. He craved action. Yes, he understood the need for a high degree of coordination, that a team without a good coach on the bench could fail, but he craved the battle, the ear-dunning sounds, the smell of shot and wrenching clash of steel that terrified most men and terrified him. But it was there that he sought reassurance, reaffirmation that he still had it, still possessed the internal fortitude that, like the great hidden bulk of the enormous bergs that were calved at the ends of the earth, he could sustain himself through the roughest seas that either man or nature could throw against him.
“When can you have a force ready, General?” asked the President, adding, “you’re on the retired list, which politically speaking is good if, God forbid, anyone gets wind of it. We can simply say truthfully that you’re no longer on the active list. But having said that, I must emphasize that no one else on your team can be on the active list either. I’m giving you carte blanche regarding supplies and transport from Special Operations Command in Florida. Given that, when’s the earliest you can go? I can have General Lesand here get you a ride as second man on a Raptor trainer.” The President added, smiling, “If you’re not afraid of heights?”
“I’m ready to go now. Could be at MacDill in Tampa within three hours, Mr. President. But the mission itself, training, equipment, et cetera — earliest would be six weeks. Absolute minimum, given the distances, the—”
“Tell you the truth, General,” the President cut in, “I was hoping for something closer to a month, given the public’s outrage, but I guess we can live with six weeks. If you run into any bureaucratic crap,” he said, glancing purposefully at the Navy, Air Force, and Army Chiefs and the Marine Commandant, “call me.”
When the meeting ended, the telescreens blank, there was some mumbling in the Oval Office about Freeman’s tendentious argument over the make of the third missile and whether it really mattered. Clearly, whatever it was, it had been fired by terrorists.
“That’s unimportant,” commented the CNO. “At least we’ve got a loose cannon out of our hair. And we’ve told him not to take anyone on the active list. If anything goes wrong—”
“If anything goes wrong,” interjected the President, “we’ll be in the soup along with the general. We can deny it all we like, ‘not officially sanctioned,’ et cetera, et cetera, ‘soldiers of fortune,’ but unless Freeman’s team brings back a clearly identifiable launcher and missile from Kosong as proof positive for our allies that we’re up against the North Koreans, we’ll have the U.N. and every other America-hater all over us.” He paused and looked hard at each one of them. “That’s why your ‘loose cannon’ was nice enough to say, ‘I don’t want you guys getting into trouble because of incomplete CIA intel,’ like the Bay of Pigs or another WMD problem. You’re right — diplomatically Freeman is a loose cannon. I wouldn’t make him ambassador to Tonga, but he understands the danger of a credibility gap. He did well to warn us. Some other generals,” continued the President, “would have given me ‘yes sir, no sir, three bags full.’ He’s not a yes-man, whatever you say.”
“My apologies, Mr. President,” said the CNO.
“Not necessary, Admiral.” The President smiled. “I didn’t say he was wasn’t a pain in the ass.” The ensuing laughter cut through the tension and fatigue. The President asked his National Security Advisor to stay behind. “Eleanor,” he told her, “you’re to go home, give young Jennifer and that stuffed piglet of hers a big hug, then go to sleep for twenty-four hours. You look done in. I won’t call you unless something urgent comes up.”
Eleanor smiled at the mention of the stuffed piglet, “Billy Bush,” a name suggested to Jennifer jointly by Eleanor’s husband, Tom, an ardent Clinton fan, and Eleanor, who’d voted for the first President Bush in college. It had been a fun political compromise by a couple whose marriage, friends had said, wouldn’t last more than a year because of Eleanor’s stressful position as an advisor in the White House. They were wrong — it had lasted eleven years, five months, and four days, the couple’s mature approach to “no politics at home” having held until the 2003 war against Iraq. The strain over that one was too much. What had begun as a domestic “spat” over what neighbors would cattily refer to as the “flowers” incident, seemingly patched up between Eleanor and husband Tom Prenty, in fact marked the beginning of a fissure in their relationship. In time it became a gulf between them into which poured a flood of recriminations and mutual complaints hitherto put on hold and subsumed by the sheer pressure of Eleanor’s work as National Security Advisor and Tom’s job as critic of the administration for a Washington think tank.
Eleanor and Tom Prenty had tried to stay together for that most ubiquitous of reasons, the children — in their case, Jennifer — but a bright young psychiatrist had emphasized what they already knew, that the effect of the constant guerrilla warfare at home, which had already caused one nanny and two temporaries to quit, was undoubtedly having a much more severe effect on their only child. A trial separation, “to cool down, regroup,” the doctor suggested, might be in order.
“Won’t that hurt Jennifer even more?” Tom had asked.
“Not if you explain your absence as job-related and if you part on amicable terms. Half of upper-income earners in the Beltway spend long periods away from home. If you get back together, fine. If not, we’ll discuss how to proceed further.”
“How about — you know, weekend visits?” suggested Eleanor.
“In my experience,” responded the counselor, “children — Jennifer’s eleven, right?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, well, ironically, they see these weekend visits as the end. Dad or Mom away on business keeps hope of reconciliation alive. And if that doesn’t happen, then they’ve already been weaned somewhat for the divorce. Besides, she’ll be busy at school. St. Andrew’s, right?”
“Yes,” said Eleanor, with a twinge of guilt. She was a big proponent of public schools — publicly — but St. Andrew’s was private.
“And there’s another benefit,” the psychiatrist continued. “Time out will give you two a chance to get things into perspective. Absence may not make the heart grow fonder, but it tells you how important or not it is to have the other one around.”
They had agreed reluctantly and with Valda, a British au pair, age twenty, whom Jennifer adored and who was taking a year off from international relations at the London School of Economics “to see just what Americans were like,” things were working out pretty well. But there were nights — Eleanor’s feeling of loneliness exacerbated by her lack of sleep — when gazing down at her daughter and Billy Bush held tightly to her, she wanted Tom there, just to share the joy of looking at their child, silently reliving the excitement and sheer terror of the first weeks.
She’d read every prenatal book she could lay her hands on, and when Tom had brought her and baby Jennifer home and Eleanor had seen the profusion of congratulatory flowers and cards, she’d taken Jennifer into the luxurious Consumer Reports—prepared nursery, placing her down with exemplary care, and burst into tears. She didn’t have a clue what to do with this little human. Tom had tried to reassure her, but when he picked up his child he did so with such apprehension, so slowly, holding his breath, it looked to postpartum Eleanor that he could have been lifting a bomb ready to go off.
“Oh God!” she’d said suddenly. “Tom — Tom!”
He’d turned, whey-faced. “What’s wrong?”
“Get those flowers out of here.” She remembered a little girl in the French town of Grasse, when Eleanor and the busload of tourists were being shown through one of the small but famed perfume factories in the Côte d’Azur. Suddenly there’d been a terrible commotion. The young girl was frantic. She couldn’t breathe, the perfume aromas, combined with the smell from a purple rush of lavender growing by the roadside, so intrusive that they were overwhelming her lungs, her face starting to turn blue, becoming cyanotic.
“Tom, get the flowers out!”
A neighbor watering his lawn, though loath to interfere in a domestic dispute, hearing Eleanor screaming, dropped the hose and ran to the Prentys’ door to see if he could help. Eleanor opened it. He’d been shocked by her distorted features. “Get rid of the flowers!” she’d shouted.
The neighbor, Nick Jensen, took one look at her face and did as she ordered, rushing past her, grabbing the bunches of flowers, and dumping them on the front stairs, which quickly became festooned with the variegated bouquets. Nick Jensen was fined $225 for disobeying Rockville’s watering restriction ordinance: “failing to attend sprinkler.”
“But it isn’t a sprinkler, it’s a goddamned hose!” Nick told the stern female conservation official.
“It’s a sprinkler when you leave it running by itself,” the resolute officer had replied sternly.
Nick explained that he hadn’t had time to turn it off. “There was this emergency next door—”
