Payback wi-10, page 9
part #10 of WW III Series
Lesand thought the President’s use of “blower” was particularly apt for the ego-driven Freeman, and added, “I’m sure he’ll have something to blow about.” There was a ripple of laughter in the situation room as Eleanor dialed.
CHAPTER SIX
Surely, Margaret thought, she was still in her postcoital dream. The epitome of the American soldier, the kind of man for whom a baby boomer’s concern over the thread count of a bedsheet would seem incomprehensibly effeminate, was bringing her breakfast in bed: “soldiers” of toast set in a star pattern radiating out from her blue-and-white windmill-patterned Delft china eggcup. And as well as receiving a large glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and a cup of fresh coffee, there was one of her hothouse roses on the breakfast tray. The rose, though having been quickly decapitated and plunged, rather than arranged, into an eggcup, nevertheless retained its fragrance.
“How sweet!” she said, sitting up, hurriedly fixing the pillows behind her with one hand, clutching her pink nightie close to her with the other.
The kitchen phone was ringing and Douglas thought it would be Aussie or Sal.
It was Eleanor Prenty. Naturally, she couldn’t speak to him about the upcoming and necessarily highly classified SpecOp against Korea. The White House, she said, meaning herself, appreciated his expertise and readiness to help with the MANPAD “incidents.”
“MANPAD attacks!” he corrected her. His immediate correction of her use of “incidents,” typical of his outspokenness, showed the lack of the kind of diplomatic finesse that had resulted in General Marshall in 1944 giving Dwight Eisenhower command of D-Day rather than Ike’s fellow West Pointer George Patton. Patton, despite his superior command of the language of Lafayette as well as an encyclopedic knowledge of Caesar’s chronicles, couldn’t overcome such linguistic habits as referring to his Soviet allies as “commie sons of bitches”—to their faces. But if at times Freeman was as direct and as rough with the language as a drill sergeant to a recruit, he could be elegant in speech and manner if the mood took him. Most important to Eleanor, as National Security Advisor, he was also smart.
“Douglas,” she asked, “I’d like your opinion on something. I’m sending someone over from an office in Monterey for a chat. Strictly verbal.” He knew she meant the FBI.
He wasn’t fooled for a second. Maggie Thatcher and Indira Gandhi aside, the fact, as Douglas Freeman saw it, was that women were far more reluctant to commit bodies to action than were men. For most women, like Catherine, God rest her soul, and Margaret, intuitively wanted, believed, there could always be peaceful resolutions. A sexist view, he told himself, but true. Yes, there were female fighter pilots, naval aviators even, and damned good ones, such as those on Admiral Crowley’s McCain carrier battle group, but they remained the exception that proved the rule. Most women didn’t like to fight, and Eleanor, he could tell from her tone, her firm grasp of realpolitik notwithstanding, wanted to be sure of something, which Freeman suspected had something to do with the ever-rising public clamor for a Freeman-like “in, hit, out” op. She needed moral support.
“When can I expect your courier?” he asked Eleanor.
“About noon your time in Monterey.”
“Very good. And Eleanor…”
“Yes?”
“I appreciate you bringing me in from the cold.”
“Oh, Douglas, you’re not in exile.”
He almost said, “Sure as hell feels like it sometimes,” but that was nosing into self-pity country, and that, in the general’s eyes, was as contemptible as being a yuppie thread-counter.
“I haven’t had breakfast in bed,” began Margaret, “since…” She paused, dabbing her lips with the paper-towel napkin that Douglas had made into a sort of triangle and plopped near the edge of the tray. “I can’t remember when,” she continued joyfully. “You’re so gallant.”
She knew she would never forget the unselfish way in which he had lain with her after. In almost everything she’d read or heard about sex, the man so often just rolled over or left. Or snored.
As he removed the tray, telling her someone was coming to the house at noon, she started. “My glory!”
“I’m sorry,” he said, recalling how giving Catherine such short notice of an impending visitor had always jolted her into a cleanup frenzy, with expectations of her having to prepare a first-rate lunch into the bargain. “Don’t worry, sweetheart,” he told her. “I’ll take him out to lunch. You won’t have to—”
“No, no,” Margaret said. “You don’t have to be sorry.” He had completely misunderstood her reaction. She was staring at his pajamas. It was as big as it had been last night. “Does it take days to — well, you know…” She giggled. “To go down?” She was blushing in her surprise at his size, but enjoying it.
“It’s hard to get it down,” he said, smiling, “when there’s such a beautiful woman around.”
There was a strained silence; then suddenly she beckoned him, open-armed. “Oh, Douglas, I’ve never been so happy. I didn’t imagine—”
“Shush,” he said, and this time threw the bedclothes aside with abandon.
She was thrilled and alarmed. “I haven’t showered, I haven’t—”
“To hell with showering,” he told her. “I want to smell you, every part of you — I want to consume you, every inch of you.”
She drew him to her with such violence and speed, it excited him even more and, lifting her translucent nightie, he began kissing her thighs, moving quickly from one to the other and then, suddenly, shockingly, she felt his tongue in her, at once hard as steel, soft as velvet, its fierce probing and sucking of the warm juices between her legs sinking her into paroxysms of pleasure, her head lolling side to side in a surrender so wildly complete she knew she’d do whatever he wanted. She cupped his hands on her breasts, crying, arching her body, and begging him to go further, deeper, praying it would never stop. The thought, albeit fleeting, of him leaving her, going away, was an unbearable torture. She wouldn’t let him.
CHAPTER SEVEN
At the White House, the press conference was minutes away, the President’s press officer, Melvin Spinner — a name made in hell for a White House press officer — quickly briefing him on a Gallup poll that revealed the American people’s major concern was the presence of terrorist sleeper cells within the United States.
The President met the problem head-on in the media scrum: “This administration is doing all we can to flush out these terrorist cells, but, as this latest outrage against the American people has clearly demonstrated, it’s the weapons they are using that pose an equal danger.”
“Mr. President,” asked the New York Times reporter, Steve Loren. “There’s a rumor in the intelligence community that the missiles used to down the three planes are indisputably North Korean. Can you comment on that?”
“This administration doesn’t formulate policy on rumors, only on facts. As I’m sure you can appreciate, Mr. Loren, the debris caused by such attacks makes it extremely difficult to identify the actual missiles used in the launchers we’ve found, and their country of origin. It’ll take time, possibly several months, to make that precise determination, if indeed we can find an identifiable weapon part in the rubble.”
“Excellent!” said the Chief of Naval Operations, watching the telecast on the Oval Office TV.
“Yes,” agreed the Army Chief of Staff Kruger. “This way, those bastards in Pyongyang won’t expect a hit for about a year.”
The other Joint Chiefs, the Air Force’s Lesand and the Marines’ General Taft, also approved of the President’s adroit political — indeed, military — sleight of hand.
“Eleanor,” said the CNO, “I suggest we arrange a leak in a few days that we suspect the launchers are from Iran, or Syria. Give our North Korean thugs an even greater sense of security.”
She nodded. “We should feed it to Loren at the Times. Show him one of the Syrian launchers we captured in Africa.”
It made Eleanor uncomfortable, lying to the press, and she only ever did it when absolutely necessary. Now, any reservations she might have had were squashed by the need to avenge the mass murder of so many Americans, in the same way the Clinton administration had to lie about an “accidental” bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in May of ’95 when NATO intelligence discovered the Chinese were using their embassy to forward Milosevic’s orders to the Yugoslav embassy.
As she left the Oval Office to pass her note to the President, the Joint Chiefs were having their own ad hoc council of war. The CNO initiated it with a sudden turnabout suggestion, while Eleanor Prenty was attending the press conference, to conscript “George C. Scott” into unofficial service for the Joint Chiefs. “Why not,” the CNO suggested, “invite him to lead a SpecFor payback attack on Kosong in the next two to three months, seeing as how the CIA’s confirmed all three launchers have come from there?”
Lesand concurred, but added, “He’ll have to plan it carefully to the very last detail. We don’t want to be even peripherally involved in a repeat of Jimmy Carter’s ‘Operation Rice Bowl’ fiasco when our Special Forces flew into that talc-fine dust storm—”
“The haboob,” cut in Kruger.
“Well, whatever kind of boob it was,” said the CNO, “it downed our Sea Stallions at Desert One and scuttled the whole damn mission, so instead of getting our hostages out of Iran, we only worsened the situation.”
Lesand nodded gravely. “Rice Bowl” in 1980 had ended in disaster as a Delta Special Ops helo, choked by the talc-fine dust, collided with one of the big C-130 Hercules. The aborted mission had not only failed to rescue any of the American hostages in Tehran, 250 nautical miles away, but had also left the Iranian Muslims with five state-of-the-art Sea Stallions, which, because they’d been abandoned intact in the desert rather than being “sanitized”—gutted of highly secret codes and equipment — meant that the Iranians also garnered an enormous intelligence coup. It had cost Carter the presidency, and scores of Pentagonians their careers.
“Why not?” said Lesand, seizing the CNO’s inspired APM — ass-protecting maneuver — of letting Freeman take all the risk. “Douglas is always champing at the bit, a warrior born and bred. But where do we get the team? No one in his right mind—”
“Douglas,” said the CNO, his use of Freeman’s first name contributing to the apparent reasonableness of the proposal, “has his own SpecOp team.”
“In service?” pressed Lesand.
“No. Ex-service Special Forces guys.” Which was as pleasant a way as any of pointing out, without actually saying it, that if nonservicemen with no ID, using off-shelf weapons of choice, the weapons’ MID numbers removed — not by some half-assed-qualified ex-armorer behind a pawnshop cage but laser-removed by the agency — were caught, it could be officially “deniable” that these were U.S. troops, but rather that they were renegade former soldiers, like the patriotic readers of magazines such as Soldier of Fortune, which had once offered $50,000 to anyone who could get a piece of the Communists’ celebrated 600-pound red, white, and blue North Korean flag that flew over the heavily NKA-patrolled sector of the DMZ. The flag, standing over 500 feet high, was the tallest in the world and was situated in Kijong-dong, a so-called North Korean village in the 148-mile-long, 21/2-mile-wide demilitarized zone. The village was in fact completely deserted, nothing more than a “Ptompkin Village”—Hollywood-like facades built to create the impression of order and prosperity, its flag a continuous challenge to soldiers of fortune.
In short, the Chief of Naval Operations, Lesand of the Air Force, Army General Kruger, and the Marines’ Taft were agreed that unlike “Operation Rice Bowl,” or “Desert One Slaughter,” as the media and public had understandably dubbed it, this payback operation against North Korea could not be officially sanctioned or made up from any “active list” of Army, Air Force, Marine, or Navy personnel. And they agreed that the public pressure for the President to do something should mean the President would go for the idea of a strike in a month, rather than two to three months. If Douglas Freeman and Co. succeeded, the payback op would be an unambiguous message to the North Koreans that, their 832 nuclear-warhead-capable rockets notwithstanding, the United States would in no way cower before terrorists, as Chamberlain had against Hitler and the Nazi terror.
On the other hand, if the attack failed, U.S. policy would be to officially deny any involvement, the President already having made the shrewd observation to Eleanor and the Joint Chiefs that in the press of world opinion, those who were vehemently hostile to America were going to think the worst of the United States whatever happened. And if North Korea, God forbid, captured any of the SpecFor team and paraded them before international media crews, there would be nothing to prove an officially sanctioned raid.
The generals conceded it would be a weak denial — but well within the modus operandi of the diplomats in Foggy Bottom — and official records would show Douglas Freeman’s team were not on the active list.
“Yes,” said the President upon his return from the press conference ahead of Eleanor, who was still answering questions, “I think Douglas would be the ideal man, though I’m not sure I want him to physically be involved in the attack. After all, he is officially retired.”
When Eleanor returned from the press conference, where she had reiterated the possibility of there being a plethora of MANPAD bases in other hostile countries, in order to draw attention away from North Korea, she was taken aback by the Joint Chiefs’ mercurial turnaround. Having at first resented the National Security Advisor’s seeking the ex-legend’s advice, they now actively sought his involvement in a SpecOps attack. She was angry. Had the “boys,” as she called them whenever she sensed a “gang-up,” really thought that Eleanor Prenty — even if she hadn’t gained her Ph.D. in political science and international relations or attended the postgrad intellectual marathon “War and Society” course that they and Freeman had — wouldn’t be able to see through their ass-saving plan? If the raid against the launcher warehouse near the port of Kosong, which lay at the foot of the wild and rugged Taebek Mountain range worked, the chiefs would claim much of the glory. If it didn’t succeed, they’d disown it — in keeping with the traditional military axiom that victory has a hundred parents, while defeat is an orphan.
“General Freeman’ll see what you’re up to in a flash,” she chastised them, trying to contain her disgust, though she recognized that in the hard world of realpolitik, the generals did have a point in that the U.S. could simply disown Freeman and his team if he failed, disavowing any official U.S. involvement.
“You think he’s the only one who’s been asked to go in sans ID to serve his country?” the Marine commandant chided her.
“No,” she admitted. “I don’t.” She’d seen the commandant’s service record. He’d done such unofficial missions — like the SEALS who, disembarking from U.S. subs in what was clearly the sovereign North Vietnamese coast zone, had swum up from the littoral sea into the rat-infested sewers of Hanoi and planted what were still referred to in “Eyes Only” files as “devices.”
“What d’you think?” the President cut in as he watched the networks broadcasting his news conference. “Think I convinced them North Korea isn’t our target?”
“I think so,” said Eleanor, trying to cool down. “I saw Steve Loren of the Times adding the usual suspects to the list — al Qaeda, Libya, et cetera.”
“You can read upside down from twelve feet away?” the CNO asked her lightheartedly.
She smiled. Not even the Joint Chiefs knew about the pinhead-sized overhead cam that took in the reporters’ notes from behind the press gallery. A sign of the times.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Douglas and Margaret lay satiated once more, but something had changed in him, his lust now expended in the petit mort, the little death, that so often followed the physiological climax. The momentary emptiness, for some, the search — the yearning — for meaning, however brief, that at times attaches itself to sexual exhaustion, visited him, and he held Margaret closely. For a moment she became Catherine, the woman he’d loved, and who, like so many military wives, had sustained him through the vicissitudes, the multitudinous trials, of service life so alien to the public they protected.
A pang of guilt assaulted him. Was he using Margaret as a surrogate Catherine? Or was he merely indulging in that near-obsessional compulsion he had to overanalyze, a disposition that had been at the heart of his success as a career soldier? He stroked her hair, an attempt to repay her sincerity, her obvious love for him, in kind. For the first time in a long while, General Douglas Freeman, retired, was confused. War, for all its myriad details, was a simpler thing all round than love. What he needed, he told himself, was clarity, to get back into the war, for he believed that ultimately it was what a man did outside of bed — his job—that defined who he was. For Douglas Freeman and his ilk, the politically incorrect, honest-to-God truth was that peace is hell.
But at least now, he mused, he had contributed something in a military sense to the White House’s understanding of the weaponry unleashed in this latest terrorist blitz of the war. He was also harboring the conceit that despite his retirement status, his body belied his age. His abs didn’t have the hard, washboard look of the 24-7 gym fanatics, but rather exhibited the solid no-flab toughness of a Special Forces warrior ten years younger, despite the occasional “guerrilla” attack, as he described an occasional weakness in his left knee, brought on by the kind of subzero cold he’d experienced during his command of the U.S.-led U.N. force. But the knee had never bothered him with his occasional sexual liaisons with CNN’s Marte Price, or now with Margaret.
For a moment he felt boyishly self-congratulatory, as if what in fact had been his relatively rare sexual adventures with the two women had been more regular occurrences. And his mind was in good shape too. The White House — well, maybe just Eleanor, but she was the President’s National Security Advisor — was sending an FBI agent to confer with him. That was something.
