Ian Slater - Payback

“Yes — yes, I’ll tell the President,” Salvini heard her tell the general. “But you realize he’ll have to give the final green light.”

“That’s why I’m calling you!” said Freeman, his tone one of annoyance. Didn’t she get it — why he’d set up the phone call to her at precisely 1400 hours, how it had to be on scrambler from MacDill, how he’d insisted she be the only one in her office now?

Salvini, whose acute hearing was well known in Freeman’s old group, listened for the National Security Advisor’s reply. There was none. Sal could see the general’s phone hand turn white, he was gripping the receiver so tightly. The prospect of the general not being given Presidential authorization for Operation Payback against Kosong after so much painstakingly detailed preparation, together with the adrenaline coursing through the general’s veins at the thought of commanding a punishing hit against the MANPAD storage facility, would be akin to Eisenhower’s refusal to let George Patton be part of D-Day. It didn’t bear thinking about.

“Ma’am,” pressed Freeman — it was a plea. “Could you please ask the President right now ?”

“Can you hold?” she asked.

“Like a bulldog,” the general replied.

As the team waited in the nondescript hut off one of the runways at MacDill, the general imagined he could smell onions in the way that as smells often trigger the memory of one’s experiences, one’s memory of an experience can in turn recall the smells experienced at the time. Maybe it was nothing more, mused the general, than the kind of obsessive thoughts you sometimes have under the pressure of anxiety — used to bother him as a boy in church, the obsession then that he’d suddenly blurt out something blasphemous — the obsessive thought going around and around in one’s head, the brain’s way of providing something identifiable around which free-floating anxieties could accrete, the obsessive thought like a worry bone to a dog, something concrete to gnaw on.

“Like a song you can’t get out of your head,” Catherine had once told him, trying to be helpful.

“No,” he’d replied. “A song’s pleasant. These nutty obsessive thoughts aren’t. Like a song you don’t like but it keeps going round and round in your damn head anyway.” Was this recurring memory smell of onions merely that, a recurring annoyance, or did it have a deeper significance? Resurrected on the day after the MANPAD attacks, it might, he thought, be nothing more than the kind of crazy thought people have in a moment of disbelief, as when over three thousand Americans were murdered on 9/11, the kind of seemingly unrelated thoughts that the brain quickly brings to mind in order to mitigate the horror of the reality before it. Perhaps.

Salvini heard Eleanor Prenty come back on the line. “General, the President says, ‘Go!’ He’s delighted — said it was smart thinking, hitting the terrorists before anyone, especially the terrorists, would expect it. But there is one thing.”

Uh-oh, thought Salvini.

“The President wanted to know how you could possibly have organized an strategy plan so quickly.”

“I did what Georgie Patton did,” Freeman replied, the blood suffusing his phone hand as he explained how, wherever Patton was, even when he was on holiday in Europe, he would study the topographic and Michelin road maps of the towns and countryside, compiling his own private files of possible contingency plans. And planning for a hit on North Korea, he told Eleanor, was a natural, ever since the Korean War ended in an uneasy, dangerous, nail-biting armistice. “And my retirement, ” Freeman continued pointedly, “has helped considerably. Kept me occupied updating my files. I have a plan on how to attack Buckingham Palace, should it ever be occupied by terrorists. And one for the Élysée Palace, especially if the Frogs are still in it.”

Salvini didn’t hear the National Security Advisor’s sigh, but did hear her ask, “Have you ever thought of joining the Diplomatic Corps, Douglas?”

“Every damn day!” He was getting cocky again, primed to go. “Thank you for speaking to the President so quickly. I know how busy you people are. I’ve seen three presidents grow old before their time.”

“And three advisors,” said Eleanor.

“You’re as young-looking as you were in college.”

“Don’t lie to me, Douglas.”

“Young in spirit,” he said.

“One more thing.”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“I assume we can contact you through SOCOM HQ at MacDill. They’ll be monitoring the mission, probably via Japan.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said clearly, not wanting to go into detail, adding, “Some of my old buddies cut through a lot of red tape. I won’t go into mission details with you. That way when we come back with a launcher and missile from Kosong and show North Korea’s a terrorist base, you won’t be able to give the media any SOCOM details of our mission. You can tell ’em the truth and say you don’t know. That way we don’t compromise any further DA missions.”

“Will your friend Marte Price know?” He knew the National Security Advisor must know of his occasional “liaisons,” as he liked to call them, with America’s preeminent female correspondent. Even so, Eleanor’s question took him by surprise.

“I told her that if I’m given the green light to talk to the press after the mission, she’d be first to know. She’s already sniffing about. I asked her not to push it — go public with anything — and in return I’d give her first dibs, if my talking to the press was okayed by the boss. But of course there’d be no classified technical information.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Eleanor said in a quietly serious and personal tone, which, apart from the general, only Salvini could hear. “Douglas, I have to be honest with you. Although the Joint Chiefs, your buddy Mikey included, have done everything to speed up your procurement requests and limit the number of personnel who need to know to a bare-bones minimum, their computer threat assessment analyses have unanimously classified Payback as OTC.”

“Officers Training Corps?” proffered Freeman jokingly.

“You know what I mean, an ‘Off the Chart’ mission — beyond the ‘Highly Dangerous’ classification. On a scale of one to ten, they concur that it’s a minus five.”

“That all?”

Well, at least he wasn’t lacking in confidence. But she knew it would take a lot more than that to pull it off. “Douglas…”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Godspeed.”

At Macdill Air Force Base, Freeman strode into the office of a harried and surprisingly young quartermaster general. The quartermaster knew nothing about the mission, only that a long-haul aircraft was being requested, this time by a General Douglas Freeman, now listed on the “nonactive” roster. It couldn’t be very important. He jerked his thumb back impatiently toward a clump of three C-130s, each with four Rolls-Royce Allison turbo props, over 17,000 horses in all. The C-130 Herk had always been one of America’s heavy lifters. Powerful enough to haul five standard pallets or ninety-two troops into action, it could also be an ambulance for seventy-four litter patients and cruise at 33,000 feet with a payload of 40,000 pounds for 2,250 miles. All of which would have made it ideal for transporting what was vaguely designated by the general’s team as “the equipment,” as well as Freeman, Aussie, Choir, Salvini, Lieutenants Bone Brady, Lee, Gomez, Shark Mervyn, and Chief Petty Officer Tavos, both Gomez and Mervyn listed in SOCOM’s nonactive roster as “technician-specialist.” “One of those Herks,” said the quartermaster impatiently, “will haul all you need.”