Ian Slater - Payback

“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.”