Ian Slater: Payback

“What changed his mind?” yelled a tank commander, bringing his 125mm to bear on the hitherto pursuing Russian T-80s.

“Dunno,” said his driver. “Maybe Bob Norton shamed him.”

But no one had shamed Douglas Freeman. He had sprung a trap born of the kind of attention to detail, to the kind of crucial minutiae for which he’d become known over the years. He knew that at minus sixty-nine Fahrenheit the waxes in the T-80s’ more poorly refined Russian lubricating oils would start to settle out, despite the heat of the engines. This meant that whereas the American M1 Abrams would keep running, the Russian T-80s’ fuel and hydraulic lines at minus sixty-nine degrees would quickly gum up, the waxes like cholesterol-clogged arteries. So that now the American armor made sweeping U-turns in the snow, the full-fledged retreat of only minutes before becoming a full-fledged attack against the Russian T-80s, which were coughing, spluttering, and stopping, “sitting ducks,” the T-80s not only unable to turn on their tracks but unable to rotate or swivel their 125mm main gun turrets.

It was a slaughter not seen since the crushing defeat exacted by the Israeli armies against the numerically superior divisions of Arab armor in the ferocious Six-Day War.

Overnight, “Freeman the Runner” had become “Freeman the Fox.” But that was years ago, and although he and his SpecFor team of Aussie Lewis, Choir Williams, Sal Salvini, and Medal of Honor winner Captain David Brentwood had done brilliant work since, all over the world and at home in the Pacific Northwest in the world war against terrorism, he and his team were “demobilized” as quickly as he’d been called to serve in crises. For while, like Patton, he had a genius for war, he was, in the words of National Security Advisor Eleanor Prenty and others in preceding administrations, an “unmitigated disaster” in peace.

Though a man capable of deep reflection, Douglas Freeman was in the main a man of action and a persistent advocate of his own ideas. Which was why he was more than surprised now to receive a call from Eleanor Prenty, who, after reading Jenkins’s elegant biography of Winston Churchill, found herself repeatedly struck by the differences and similarities between Douglas Freeman and England’s greatest prime minister. Churchill, like Freeman, at times annoyed others with the pushy side of his personality, but this side was always balanced by an unfettered willingness to dive into danger or, as Churchill’s cousin on his American mother’s side would have said, “into harm’s way” for his country as well as for his personal ambition. But there the analogy ended, for while Churchill brilliantly excelled in politics, Freeman did not. His place was in the field.

Eleanor said nothing about the Churchill analogy, flattery not her strong suit.

“General Freeman. Eleanor Prenty here.”

“Douglas, please,” he said, switching the TV to Mute.

“Douglas, you’ve no doubt seen the news?” He could feel the fatigue in her voice.

“I have. Those — bastards.”

“Any ideas? I thought I’d pick your brain — pass your ideas off as my own at the next National Security meeting.” It was nice of her, he thought, to say that, and a courtesy — it must have been terrible at the White House as the news came in, worse than 9/11 in some ways, three simultaneous widely spaced hits, an east-west-south triangle of catastrophies, the vulnerability not just of New York but of the entire nation on show, which was no doubt, Freeman told Eleanor, why al Qaeda had done it.

“You think there’s any possibility it’s not al Qaeda?” she asked.

“Maybe a branch plant, like Hamas, but these hits, same time…Look back at the attacks on our embassies in Africa, the USS Cole, et cetera. Terrorists like the number three. Question is, Ms. Prenty—”

“Eleanor.”

“Question is, Eleanor, does it matter what name the scumbags use? We’ve been hit again.”

“You’ve had a lot of experience combating these people. Any chance that there might be a home-grown element involved? You know, a Timothy McVeigh, Oklahoma City type?”

“No, I don’t think so. Right-wing, left-wing nuts may be against the government, but when someone from abroad hits Uncle Sam, they draw together against the common enemy. I’m pretty sure what we’re looking at are raghead — offshore terrorists.”

“Well, Gen — Douglas,” began Eleanor, “I’m glad I picked your brain.” She paused. “How’s retirement?”

“Dreadful. This goddamned rule of ours that anyone in the military over sixty has to be put out to pasture is nuts. I’m fitter than when I was in my forties. Look at Doug MacArthur. He was seventy when he made the landing at Inchon. And that professor, Barzun, wrote From Dawn to Decadence at ninety-three. They still give him an office and—”

“Yes, Douglas, I take your point. But Professor Barzun isn’t expected to lead men into battle.”

“Goddammit, Robert E. Lee was fifty-six at Gettysburg, and had three horses shot from under him, and—” Freeman paused and took a breath. “Sorry, Eleanor. You’ve been courteous enough to seek my advice and here I am carrying on like a prima donna.”

“Well, Douglas,” she said good-naturedly, “you are a prima donna.”

“Yes, but I’m damned grateful to you for making the call. I appreciate that. I’ll put my thinking cap on and if I come up with anything that might be useful to the administration, I’ll give you a bell.”

“A bell?”

It was a Limey expression Freeman had picked up years before when doing a refresher Spec Ops training session with the elite British Special Air Service SAS at Brecon Beacons in Wales, a course that another American legend, Colonel Charlie Beckwith, a Green Beret captain at the time, had adopted for instructing U.S. Special Forces personnel.

“I’ll give you a bell,” the general explained to Eleanor, “call you.”

“Fine.”

“Ah, may I ask,” Freeman ventured, “did the Joint Chiefs suggest you call me or—”

“It was on my own recognizance,” she said.

“Huh. Well, that’s the nicest ‘no’ I’ve heard. So, I’m still in the doghouse with that bunch?”

“You’re not the only prima donna, Douglas. They like recognition too.”

“Touché! Bye!” he told Eleanor as they ended the conversation.

The point was that Freeman hadn’t had any recognition, any publicity, for at least a year. What was it, mused Freeman, that General Simons, a young Turk, a go-getter brigadier general at the Pentagon, had called him in a memo? “Granny Freeman.” Anybody over fifty-five in America was relegated a has-been.

“By God—” Freeman had begun as he put the phone down.

“Nice chitchat,” said his sister-in-law from the kitchen. Was it a question or a criticism? She had this tone that permanently fluctuated between disdain and bland observation. Freeman was never sure.

“It was the White House,” he told her. That should rock her socks.

“I don’t like garlic,” she replied, ignoring the White House remark, “so I’ve made a Caesar salad with romaine and low-fat egg. You can fill up on bread rolls.”

“Fine,” he said, mumbling subversively to himself, “Making a damn Caesar without garlic!” Besides, he was a high-protein, low-carbohydrate general, something he insisted on, used to insist on, in his armored division’s mess.

“What was that about, Douglas?” asked Margaret.

“Nothing,” he lied, his sister-in-law one of the few people to whom he found it more expedient, and less troublesome, to lie, something he normally despised, but he’d always found it particularly difficult to deal with what he characterized as overbearing women, unless they were in the military, in the same world. Which had made for his on-and-off romance with the famed, tough-minded, if beautiful, Marte Price of CNN, a woman against whom, many interviewees had concluded, “there was no known defense.”