Ian Slater: Payback

Freeman thought of Marte now as a counterpoint to his sister-in-law, against whom he had no known defense and who, on his annual obligatory visit, caused him more irritation than the Siberian Sixth. Marte Price, veteran correspondent of many wars, was outwardly tougher than his sister-in-law, but once the dust of her hard, unyielding battlefield interviews settled, she left the fighting behind, and in Iraq one night had presented a softer, feminine persona in the metamorphosis from khaki, flak jacket, and goggled Fritz to perfumed lace. As battle had raged in the distance, the tough, world-wise face of someone who’d seen and reported on the worst of war took on the gentle smile of a woman who unashamedly confessed her need to receive passion with the same urgency as she was willing to give it. She had taken him by storm that night, giving a new meaning to his axiom of L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace.

“Was this a planned mission, General,” she had asked sweetly in the quiet that had followed their tryst, “or a target of opportunity?”

He had never answered, any reply he might have been formulating stymied by a fierce salvo of Republican Guard artillery. Two hours into a fast U.S. Armored counterattack, the Republican Guard was quickly silenced. But by then Marte was back on air, and in the way that some of the most important questions are put in abeyance by events, Marte had never asked the question again. Had she been asking if he loved her? He didn’t know for sure, and if that is what she had meant, he still didn’t know the answer. He liked her, of course, but was she, as she jocularly, if basely, put it, a “target of opportunity”?—good sex for a legendary general whose secret was that he was inwardly shy of women unless they, like him, were fellow warriors? And thoughts of his late wife, Catherine, interceded now and then, causing him to question his loyalty. In his soldier’s heart he held loyalty as the preeminent virtue, and although it had been years since Catherine’s death, he still missed her, despite the fact that she’d liked Jane Fonda even after the actress happily posed for a North Vietnamese photo op, sitting on one of the AA guns they used to shoot down Americans. Freeman had suggested Ms. Fonda should have sat on an antipersonnel mine instead. It was one of the few political arguments he and Catherine had had — something that he and Marte Price had avoided under the most ancient military axiom of “no shop in the mess”—in his and Marte’s case, “no shop in the bed.”

He’d expected a call from her before or during a commercial break in CNN’s coverage of what was fast becoming known throughout America as the “Triple Play.” In fact, he had thought it had been Marte calling him, for his “military take” on the attacks for CNN, and was surprised when he’d heard Eleanor Prenty on the line.

“We have to do what the Israelis do,” Freeman told the TV. “Hit ’em back. Fast. ’Course, the goddamn namby-pamby liberals’ll start whining about root causes again.”

“Must you always be so blasphemous?” said Margaret. “Really, Douglas, for a man of your supposed talents, you’re appallingly vulgar.”

Freeman rose in heat, his anger pumped up not only by what the terrorists had done but by the impotence of his retired status, as well.

“I’m off. This is the last visit, Margaret. I’ve kept my word to Catherine religiously, visiting you every year. But you are a royal pain in the butt! I consider my duty to Catherine fulfilled.”

“A man of your word, I see.”

He paused at the kitchen door. “I don’t understand you. You insult the hell out of me. You obviously don’t like me visiting. What possible reason…” And then she looked at him hard, unhesitatingly into his gunmetal-blue eyes, and her firm, discipline-red lips quivered. In that second Douglas Freeman understood the meaning of her emotional hurt, the tremor passing through her. This real Margaret beneath the always immaculately dressed woman in her meticulously kept house. And he flushed with embarrassment, finally realizing that his sister-in-law’s hostility, her often cold demeanor, had all been a front to cover the guilt she obviously felt for having coveted her sister’s husband. Like a hitherto blurred picture snapping into focus, the sudden sensuousness of her mouth explained at once something that had always perplexed the legendary warrior — why his sister-in-law had never asked him to stop his yearly weeklong visit, why she hadn’t released him from his wife’s deathbed request — to “keep an eye out,” as Catherine had phrased it, for her sister’s well-being. He stood there, guilty of one of the shallowest assumptions of callow youth: that aging invariably erodes sexual desire, that a woman — in this case, in her mid-fifties — could not possibly yearn for the kind of passionate intensity that he and Catherine had known when they were young and that he still longed for.

She was in love — only the quivery lip asking him not to go had revealed it, giving the lie to her usual buttoned-down sense of propriety.

“Stay for tea?” she said, the banal phrase pregnant with import, her normally stern gaze and bearing having given way to a schoolgirlish nervousness, her entire sophisticated frame seeming to have collapsed under the admission of her eyes.

“Thank you,” said Freeman gently, as flummoxed as she was about what to say next. “Perhaps later.” He paused, and the legendary commander, who had never been known to be at a loss for words, couldn’t think of anything else to say other than to make a vague hand gesture toward the living room.

“Yes, of course,” she replied, her voice having quickly recovered a tone of indifference. She turned abruptly to the sink. “I’m sorry.”

“No, no.” He went in to watch the TV again. FOX network was running a special.

“Huh,” grunted Douglas, clearing his throat awkwardly. “FOX put out a call for any amateur videos of the planes taking off.”

“Oh.”

The legend was tapping the La-Z-Boy’s armrests nervously. “Ah…yes. Got a whole bunch of videos — from parents, friends, and the like, I guess…you know, seeing loved — you know, relatives and stuff taking off. ’Specially those children on the President’s trip to London, you know.”

“That’s terrible.” It didn’t sound like her. Her tone now had much more warmth and was relaxed, or at least trying to be. Freeman was castigating himself for being so damn inarticulate, three times using the phrase “you know,” which he’d always forbidden his officers and men to use, the general opining that it was a sloppy avoidance of the need — indeed, what he believed was the obligation — to be as specific as one could. It was a lazy phrase and one that could cost lives in urgent combat communication.

FOX was airing two video sequences on a split screen, which in one half showed a quarter second or so of the missile streaking toward the other half of the screen, in which he could see the doomed 7E7 at JFK. The plane had reached takeoff speed and had just started to lift when the MANPAD’s warhead detonated against the alloy of the upper superstrong wing skin. The strength of the new composite wing, as the FOX Network’s aeronautical expert explained, was probably responsible, together with the strong carbon fibers embedded in the 7E7’s vertical and horizontal tail sections, for buying the plane’s frame a few vital seconds that allowed some of the passengers to exit from the aircraft’s port side.

When the expert mentioned “embedded,” Douglas Freeman, video-recording the telecast, immediately thought of the “embedded correspondents” in the second Iraq War, and Marte Price in particular. Momentarily he felt guilty, an affliction that rarely even showed up on his mind’s inner radar screen. It was as if his sister-in-law could read his thoughts of Marte, of his infrequent but intensely sexual rendezvous with the correspondent.