Ian Slater: Payback

“Flat-headed bolt cutters, roger.”

Eleanor Prenty’s phone rang, and her assistant, Flax, answered. He was a flaxen-haired “brain” from Harvard, or was it Yale? All she remembered was his paper on post — Cold War international relations. He’d warned that globalization — the global village — had its upside, but that if you thought nationalism was on the wane, watch the news. You could wish for Rousseau’s uplifting general will if you wanted, but at the end of the day it was Thomas Hobbes — he of the life of man, without a tough government, being nothing more than “poor, nasty, brutish, and short!” or, as one clock-harried Oxford Ph.D. candidate hurriedly scrawled on his exam, “poor, nasty, British , and short.” In any event, Eleanor had liked her flaxen-haired assistant, whom she’d nicknamed “Flax,” to his hidden displeasure, because he understood that this world war against terrorism couldn’t be fought according to the rules of World War II, that all terrorists were people who, like the worst of the Nazis, would wave a white flag to coalition troops as if to parley when in fact all they would really do would be buy enough time to reload and kill the coalition messenger. No, you had to do what the Israelis did in ’04: go after the head of the snake and kill them any way, anywhere that you could, and Eleanor had spent a great deal of her time as National Security Advisor convincing the President that he must make it clear to all other countries that the United States would go wherever necessary to kill the snakes, and it wouldn’t bother with time-wasting legalese.

Yorktown ’s TV studio was setting up a scramble-phone conference with her and the general, but it would take a half hour to get it done unless she elected to talk to Freeman in plain language. Admiral Crowley was advising that, given the carrier group’s position off North Korea and, effectively, China, he thought it best to wait for scramble.

“I agree,” Eleanor told Flax. “Tell them I’ll wait. Last thing we need is to be overheard by—” She stopped herself. She’d almost said “Beijing,” which was presently locked in yet another bitter intellectual property and copyright battle over illegal use of Microsoft and U.S. software programs. “Tell them I’ll wait for the scramble.”

Aboard Yorktown , Freeman’s team, though still wet through from the rain during the firefight on Beach 5, took no time in getting to the box. Freeman, thorough as usual, didn’t rule out the possibility of a booby trap, and had requested time in one of the big steel- and ceramic-lined armories down on the 04 level. Here, the armory doubled as a bomb disposal bay deep within the Wasp-class carrier.

Whereas Sal had been itching to open the box during the run back from the North Korean coast, now he, like the others, wasn’t in any great hurry to find a box of dirt or a bomb.

When Lee arrived, his arm bandaged, the general asked, “Break anything, Johnny?”

“No, sir. Not a pension wound. I’ll be okay.”

The general smiled at Lee’s “no pension wound,” but the others were so burned-out, as one of the Marines had observed upon their crawling out of the vomit-reeking RS, that even with the best will just now they couldn’t find anything to smile about. What made the mood even worse was that the huge ship, filled with 1,600 Marines and over a thousand officers and crew, was alive with computers, not only desktop military operational computers but hundreds of laptops, being used by on- and off-duty crew, and “every damn one of ’em,” as Freeman had observed somewhat sullenly, was showing the CNN/Al Jazeera feed. Until they’d entered the creamy white, ceramic-lined armory, none of his team, except for Gomez, had seen the TV picture of Bone. That had changed a second after Johnny Lee had entered the armory. The armory’s computer, on a swivel mount for armorers to check weight-to-power loads for Yorktown ’s VTOL — vertical takeoff and landing — aircraft, as well as for the big ship’s helicopters, was now showing the latest CNN/Al Jazeera feed. The team fell into a gloomy silence when they saw Bone’s bandage-wrapped head filling the computer screen. He looked bruised, though with his black skin this was difficult to discern, his eyes bloodshot and fixed in a thousand-yard stare, which the team, but not the public at large, knew was the stare of a dead man. Gomez still couldn’t bring himself to look, averting his eyes from the screen, fixing his gaze instead on the armory’s bright red fire axe.

“Yes, Erin,” came Marte Price’s voice on CNN. “That’s the only picture Al Jazeera has of the man whom the North Koreans claim is an American Special Forces soldier. It’s a photo, I believe — a still shot, not from a video.”

“ ’Course it’s fucking still ,” snorted Aussie. “He’s dead , you twit!”

“They must’ve dragged him out of the surf,” said Sal.

“Which is more than we did,” confessed Freeman, but it was said not in a tone of guilt but more in the manner of acknowledging a bad tactical error. The Marines, he knew, wouldn’t like it. They had a code: they never left their dead. Even during a terrible winter rout, such as the fighting withdrawal from the Chosin Reservoir in October 1950, with 120,00 °Chinese coming down at them from either side of the snow-covered valley, cutting off their retreat to Wonsan, they had fought carrying their dead. What would they think of the general, General Freeman, leaving one of his own behind off Beach 5?

But SpecOps was a different ball game. In an “INDIO”—in, do it, out — op, as many out of Fort Bragg’s SpecOp school called such missions as Freeman’s attack on Beach 5, everyone understood that if you took a “lethal” or were otherwise fatally wounded, rather than let you be taken prisoner it was your comrades’ responsibility to think of the team.

The NKA were calling Bone an “imperialist lackey, cannon fodder for American imperialist aggression against the freedom-loving people of the Democratic Republic of Korea.”

“Ever notice,” said Aussie, “how all these bloody dictators call their countries the ‘Democratic Republic’? Whenever you hear that, you know they’re fucking tyrants.”

Sal grabbed the big flat-headed bolt cutters after Gomez and Eddie had gone over the box for any signs of a trip mechanism wire or of tampering with the box’s sides, bottom, or lid. He found it impossible, however, to even slide the head of the big cutters far enough under the first of the four metal straps to get a grip.

“Fuck forensics!” said Aussie irritably, striding over and heaving the red fire axe out of its holder. “Here, let me have a whack at it. Stand back.”

The other seven tired men, including the general, did as he said, and Aussie brought the heavy fire axe down hard on the first metal band, which sprang apart, its zinging sound echoing in the armory. He whacked the second band, and they heard the wood splinter along with the vibration from the first band still reverberating. Aussie paused. None of them had slept after the grueling eight-hour mission, and the high adrenaline rush had been replaced by what Aussie habitually called the “three-ton-truck” that weighs anyone down after their body has been on a high-alert, high-stress job, made worse by people trying to kill you.

Aussie paused for breath, then whacked the box twice more and pried it open. “Well, I’ll be screwed!”

“Not by me, you won’t,” intoned Sal dryly.

“Nor by me,” said Choir — Johnny Lee, Gomez, Eddie, and the general all grinning like the proverbial Cheshire cat.

“It better not be fake,” said the general, looking down.

It wasn’t, the launcher sky blue, and, cradled by its side, the Igla 2C, its brownish translucent nose shining brightly against the armory’s white ceramic dazzle. And on the launcher’s shaft, the small yet distinct Korean lettering and MID number.