Payback wi-10, page 12
part #10 of WW III Series
“Right!”
“No, go and ask them, miss. Go and ask them.”
She did. It didn’t matter. “You should have turned off the hose first,” the official told Nick. “We’re experiencing a very severe water shortage.”
Nick, a banker, gave up, but Tom insisted on paying the fine. The banker refused. They were good neighbors.
“How’d she know about the hose being on?” asked Tom. “I mean, it was beside the house. You can’t see it from the street. Did someone phone it in?”
“That’s what I thought,” said Nick. “But apparently it was spotted by a police chopper.”
“What? I never heard a chopper.”
“Neither did I. They’ve baffled the engines so much now that you can’t hear them above three hundred feet till they’re right on you.” The banker looked around, making sure no one was within earshot. Even then he’d spoken so quietly that it was difficult to hear him. “Everyone’s being watched, Tom.” He’d paused, forcing a smile. “Have Eleanor tell the White House I’m not a terrorist, will you, Tom? That the flowers weren’t bombs.”
“I will,” Tom had said.
“Y’know, Tom, seriously, I tell all my people at the bank — unofficially, of course, nothing on paper — that when they’re on the road, if they want to have any poon tang, never do it in a hotel or motel room. Go out in a field, a barn, but not inside a hotel or motel.”
“You think it’s that bad?” Tom had asked, looking around again before he spoke.
“Tom, this country is wired like you wouldn’t believe. Cams — you know, the digitized pinhole cameras they put on everything from a Grand Prix driver’s helmet to bunging them into a quarterback’s helmet? Revolutionized sports coverage. It’s also revolutionizing spying. The people doing it call it ‘surveillance.’ ”
The bank executive glanced about. He had the hose going again, attending it, its pulse jet making a soft, stuttering noise. “One of my guys, mortgage assessor, got a knock on his door one night ’bout a week ago. Two FBI guys wanted to have a ‘chat’ about my mortgage guy having once reportedly said that the administration is full of loonies, that they sell arms to the Arabs, then the Arabs use them against us. And that he also said, ‘Gee, Olly, what’s going on?’ and they wanted to know what that meant.” Nick had paused and then asked Tom Prenty, “You remember the old Laurel and Hardy movies?”
Tom had thought about it. “No, why?”
“Well, in the old black-and-white movie days, Stan Laurel was a thin, dopey-looking screwup and Oliver Hardy was a big, overweight straight man. Laurel was always screwing up, and Olly’d go ballistic. Anyway, point is, the FBI guys asked my mortgage assessor what he’d meant. My mortgage guy explained about the two comedians — earlier generation, right? — but what he didn’t tell them was that the only place he’d mentioned screwup Stan’s line, ‘Gee, Olly, what’s going on?’ was in the rental car he was driving months before. He was too embarrassed to tell the FBI agents he’d been talking to himself while listening to some report about how security experts were worried about some of the Stingers we gave the Afghans years ago possibly turning up in America sometime in the future.” Nick paused again, then asked Tom Prenty, “You ever talk to yourself in the car?”
Tom Prenty hesitated, then shrugged, a little embarrassed. “Yeah.”
“So do I. I talk back at the radio — and the TV, when I’m a passenger — all the time, like when they reran an old documentary made in ’03 about that Dixie Chick telling a Brit audience how ashamed she was to be American during the Iraq War. I’m yelling at the screen and my wife says, ‘They can’t hear you!’ But you know, sometimes you get so pissed…Anyway, my mortgage guy was listening to this talk show and talked back sarcastically at the radio, about the U.S. doing a Laurel and Hardy bit with Stingers in Afghanistan, and he says to himself, ‘Gee, Olly, what’s goin’ on?’ ”
“You’re telling me,” Tom had said, “the rental car was wired?”
“Yeah, like those cars the cops use to catch car thieves.”
“Bait cars,” said Tom.
“Yeah. That’s it. Bait cars. What I’m afraid of is that the water police bitch is gonna write about me and the flowers in her report. You know, about Eleanor screaming to get the flowers out and her being on the White House staff—”
“You told the water bitch that?”
“Hey, I’m sorry, but I was so pissed about the hose fine, I was just explaining how it was I had to leave the hose running.”
Tom had put his hand reassuringly on Nick’s shoulder. “Ah, don’t worry about it.”
The banker’s face was creased with concern. “You think they’re winning?”
Tom looked at his neighbor, trying to parse the neighbor’s question. What did he mean by “they’re winning”? The government’s invasion of every American’s privacy? Or did he mean the terrorists were winning the war by turning America into a quasi — police state, a country of spy cameras, hidden recording devices, and informers?
“Tell Eleanor to make a joke of it or something at work,” Nick advised. “You know, how—”
“Otherwise they’ll think she’s nuts,” proffered Tom. “Cracking up. Is that what you’re saying?”
“It’s the times, Tom.”
“You sure your mortgage guy only said that about Laurel and Harley—”
“Hardy. In the rental car. Absolutely. He’s positive.”
“I’ll tell Eleanor.”
He did.
She was recalling the incident now, back home by order of the President. While her postpartum blues hadn’t torpedoed the marriage, they hadn’t helped. Unable to sleep, and feeling an acute need for junk comfort food, she got up, went to the kitchen, sniffed suspiciously at a “best before” date on a lump of cheese, decided to chance it, made herself a decaf tea, and wandered into the flickering blue light of Jennifer’s bedroom; the TV was still on. There was no sound, CNN showing pictures of the National Transportation Safety Board investigators treading painstakingly through reassembled bits and pieces of aircraft from JFK, LAX, and Dallas/Fort Worth.
Eleanor switched off the TV and looked down at Jennifer and Billy Bush, the two of them seemingly grafted together, the room redolent with the same soft, warm smell Jennifer had had as a baby. Had it been eleven years? It was just after the flowers incident that Tom had bought the stuffed “Gotta Have a Gund” pig. She’d taken his advice and made a joke about the flowers incident to several of her female colleagues at the White House. They’d all had a big laugh, several of the women swapping their own postpartum stories, funny now but not when they’d happened. No one thought she was losing it, but it transpired that Tom, who had seemed to be so kind and empathetic at the time, was more annoyed about it than his conversation with their neighbor indicated, and soon his annoyance grew into a sullen anger, exacerbated by Eleanor’s increasing attention to Jennifer, which, Tom charged, was robbing their marriage of any spontaneity. It meant he wasn’t getting enough sex.
She wanted to bend down now and pick Jennifer up, even though Jennifer’s baby days were long gone. Instead, she kissed her daughter, patted Billy Bush — then started in fright as the kitchen phone rang shrilly. She dashed out, for fear the ring would wake Jennifer. It was three in the morning, for crying out loud. It had to be the President. What now? “Hello?” she began in a whisper, pulling the sliding kitchen door closed so she could talk to the President in an ordinary, nonhushed business tone.
“Eleanor, I’m sorry to call at such an ungodly hour.” It was Freeman, calling from SOCOM — Special Operations Command — in Florida after an exhilarating two and a half hours en route from Monterey in an F/A-22 Raptor trainer on “super cruise” high above the western deserts. And yes, Eleanor agreed with Freeman, it was an ungodly hour. Besides, she’d been decompressing, as it were, from the tense teleconference during which Freeman had so tendentiously cautioned the White House that any payback mission would involve the President going ahead without conclusive evidence that the third missile was from a North Korean stockpile, a stockpile that, the CIA’s list of MANPAD MIDs had assured the White House, was in Kosong — just north of the DMZ.
“I wanted to apologize,” began Freeman, “for being a little—”
“Rude!”
“Ah, yes, well, I suppose that’s a fair description, but I don’t like that Air Force whiz kid.”
“Oh, I would never have guessed.”
“It’s a character flaw.”
“Yours or his?” she snapped.
“Mine,” he said sheepishly.
But she knew that in his own brusque way the general had “covered their collective ass” in the Oval Office. As he’d pointed out, should something go awry, the CIA should rightly take some of the fallout. But why was he calling her at 3:00 A.M.? “You having second thoughts?” she asked.
“Hell, no!”
She’d been careful not to mention anything specific on the phone, knowing that even the National Security Advisor’s phone could be tapped — but she knew the general knew she’d meant second thoughts about the in-out “snatch and grab” mission. “Ah,” she said, her tone lighter now, appreciating his apology. “So you’ve been so guilt-ridden by your response to Michael, you couldn’t sleep, is that it?”
She heard a snort of derision from the other end. “I want to call you at fourteen hundred tomorrow. I know how busy you are, so I wanted to reserve a straight-through call, on scrambler, no matter whether you’re in conference or whatever.”
Eleanor shook her head — the man was impossible. An apology, immediately followed by a demand to have her office cleared for a call at 2:00 P.M. tomorrow: “No matter whether you’re in conference or whatever.” The nerve of the man, thought Eleanor. He wasn’t even on the active list, a man who’d been put out to pasture, really, and now this demand to drop whatever she was doing at the White House tomorrow the minute he called. Cradling the cordless between her left cheek and shoulder as she reached over to open the fridge door, she took out a jug of orange juice then turned to reach up and take a glass from the cupboard.
“Douglas, do you remember Paul’s letter to the Corinthians?”
“Which one?” he asked. “There are two.”
My God, he can be annoying, she thought.
“First Corinthians, eight, one,” she said. “ ‘Knowledge puffeth up.’ ”
In response, he quoted Frederick the Great’s L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace. “I’ll call you at fourteen hundred hours tomorrow,” he said.
Light-headed with fatigue and hunger, despite the hit of the orange juice, Eleanor was feeling faintly hysterical.
“General, what do you call a Scotsman with three hundred girlfriends?”
“Don’t know.”
“A shepherd,” she said, giggling.
“That, Ms. Prenty,” the general replied with mock gravitas, “is politically incorrect.”
“Oh,” she responded. “Then why does a Scotsman wear a kilt?”
“Why?”
“Because a zipper would frighten the sheep.” She howled with laughter. “Are you still there, General?”
“Combat fatigue,” he joshed. “You get tired enough, you get silly. Major problem with flyers.”
She was so tired, she thought for a moment he meant junk mail flyers.
“I’m not in combat!” She yawned.
“Yes, you are,” he said, his tone suddenly changing. “We’re all in this war, civilian and enlisted.” It was a chilling comment, which sidelined her Scotsmen jokes, and she thought immediately of Jennifer…and then Tom, whom she and Jennifer saw only occasionally when he drove in from his Georgetown think tank. “I guess you’re right, Douglas.”
“Good night.”
Too tired to shower and change into her nightgown, she lay down on the tan velour love seat in the living room, the phone beside her, and tried to sleep. She couldn’t. Douglas Freeman’s comment about the flyers made her wonder why he’d mentioned them — perhaps because he’d been given carte blanche by the President he might be thinking of sending his team in on a HALO — high-altitude, low-opening — jump from one of the big Hercules transports. Even as she pursued sleep, she knew that there were dozens of U.S. flyers aloft in the darkness on combat patrol for America, some of their missions so long that their fighters and bombers had to be refueled two or three times during flight. One such long-haul Air Force transport would carry Freeman and his team of SpecFor warriors into harm’s way in — how soon did Douglas say? — six weeks at the earliest. The only way such crews were able to stay awake, Eleanor knew, was because of an open secret that armed forces public relations officers were forbidden to discuss when it came to long-haul “insertion” of a SpecOps team, namely that crews were popping five- to ten-milligram Dexedrine “go pills.”
CHAPTER TEN
MacDill, Florida
Insertion to target was one thing, extraction from target was another kind of beast altogether. This was especially true if things, in Choir Williams’s understated phrase, got a “bit sticky.” It was a phrase that came up as the general briefed his assembled team about the “macro,” or 3-D computer map, he’d selected for SOCOM’s Direct Action Mission 134, against the out-of-town Kosong launcher/missile warehouse. Freeman’s laser pointer moved south on the three-dimensional map from Kosong down along the North Korean coastline to the DMZ eleven miles away and back again to the location of the warehouse, a rectangular building that lay north-south between the two arms of a Y-shaped path that led up from a crescent-shaped beach. “Gentlemen,” he addressed the eight-man team, pausing to say, “that doesn’t mean you, Aussie.” There was a loud guffaw from Salvini who, with Choir Williams, was delighted with the general’s friendly jab at Aussie Lewis.
“Oh, very amusing,” said Aussie wryly, the give-and-take familiarity between the general and his team surprising Gomez and Eddie “Shark” Mervyn, two of the five SEALs Freeman had drawn from the nonactive list. The other three “nonactives” were “Bone” Brady, a six-foot-six African-American ex — college basketball star; Lieutenant Johnny Lee, a multilinguist; and a burly chief petty officer, Samuel Tavos.
Like most Special Forces, the five SEALs Freeman had chosen to join himself, Aussie, Choir, and Sal were used to the informal camaraderie of Special Forces, but it was obvious to them that Freeman had established a remarkably close bond with his former comrades.
“What we’ve got here,” explained Freeman, “is a quarter-mile-wide north-south fishhook-shaped harbor on North Korea’s rugged east coast. I emphasize rugged, gentlemen, and Aussie.” Salvini grinned, elbowing Aussie in the ribs.
“Harbor entrance is narrow,” continued Freeman, “less than a quarter-mile wide. Coastline along the southwest aspect of the harbor continues out seaward for a half mile, forming the shank of a fishhook shape, and ends up with an “up yours” finger of land jutting northward into the Sea of Japan, which all Koreans insist on calling the East Sea. The North and South Koreans are at one another’s throats, but they all hate Japan. I don’t want to excite you too much, but we’ll be entering the most dangerous space in the world. The crescent beach we’ll use as the point of insertion is a half-mile-long curve.”
Aussie Lewis glanced at the five “retired” volunteer SEAL combat swimmers. If you saw a Jimmy leg, a nervous up-and-down knee motion, it was a sure sign that the owner was anxious. There was no movement, however, among the five “Sheilas,” as Aussie had cheekily but good-naturedly dubbed them. In fact, if anything, the Sheilas looked bored, impatient for more details.
“General,” inquired Gomez, “has it occurred to anyone that the North Koreans might guess that our CIA forensic guys could have traced the MANPADs’ MID numbers to the Kosong depot?”
“Good point, Gomez. I’m pretty damned sure they know our CIA labs would detect the launchers’ numbers sooner or later, but that we wouldn’t dare risk a hit on Kosong because we’d know they’d be ready for us.”
“Either that,” put in Eddie Mervyn, “or they wanted to deliberately taunt us like they do every day along the DMZ and in Panmunjom. Dare us to do something, so they’ll have an excuse to resume their nuke reactor program. So they’ll have a reason to cut off nonproliferation talks.”
Freeman was pleased his specialists had kept savvy with the political situation, something that, like their foreign language training, distinguished them and the Green Berets from regular forces.
“Who can tell?” said Aussie wisely. “The North Korean Communist Party in Pyongyang is one of the most psychotic the world’s ever seen. Right up there with Saddam, Pol Pot, and Adolf.”
“Could be,” posited Choir, “that they don’t expect our guys to trace the launcher MID numbers at all. I mean, it’s one thing to put a launcher under an electron microscope, laser, or whatever, but they might not know we can match the number to a specific depot. That would mean we had a spy in North Korea tracking Kosong inventory.”
“Do we?” asked Aussie. “Have a spy in Kosong?”
“You think the agency’s going to tell me?” asked the general.
“No,” said Shark Mervyn, so called because of his swim speed attained with the Jhordan flippers, the revolutionary rubber swim fins that the U.S. Navy typically rejected when they were initially offered them by the ever-innovative Freeman but which had now become de rigueur for many combat swimmers, and mandatory for any combat swimmer on a Freeman mission. Aussie, Choir, and Sal, as well as Shark Mervyn, knew that not even the legendary general would be privy to whether the CIA or any other allied intel agency had a man “in place” in Kosong, and they didn’t resent it, because Freeman was playing the same kind of “need to know” game when he’d told the President, in the presence of the Joint Chiefs and Eleanor Prenty, that “Operation Payback” couldn’t begin in under six weeks.
The problems of planning such a mission were so myriad, they reminded Johnny Lee, the multilinguist on the team, of a set of matryoshka, Russian dolls. At first there seemed only one thing to look at, to understand, but inside each doll there was another.
