Ian Slater: Payback

“Son of a bitch,” said Sal softly. “You did it, General.”

“ We did it,” the general corrected him. “Only wish that Bone were here to see it.”

“Maybe,” said Gomez, “he is.”

Freeman shrugged noncommittally, then added, “Well, I know for sure who is going to see it — those lying sons of bitches in Pyongyang. They’re going to see that we caught them with the smoking gun. We’ll get it on CNN and Al Jazeera.”

“The American-haters,” put in Aussie, “won’t believe it.”

“You’re right,” the general replied. “But they’re not the ones we need to see it. We need every American and ally and potential ally in this war to see it — to see just what we’re up against — child-murderers.” The general paused and looked from man to man. “We, gentlemen, are going to do what JFK did when he gave those pictures of the Cuban missile sites to our U.N. ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, to take to the U.N.” Freeman smiled at the thought. “Stevenson asked the Soviets whether they had put any intercontinental ballistic missile sites within ninety miles of American soil. The table-thumping Soviets denied it, then Stevenson had his assistants uncover the map stand with all the photographs of the Cuban sites. Commie sons of bitches had to ’fess up, and Kennedy got their missile-loaded ships to turn back and dismantled the missile sites in Cuba. U.S. lost some good men getting those U-2 pix of the sites, like we lost Brady at Kosong. But we nailed the bastards.”

“Give ’em shite, General,” said Aussie.

“Rest assured, gentlemen,” promised Freeman, “I will. And I have a hunch that the White House isn’t going to want this ad hoc phone conference on scrambler at all. I think that they’ll want to hear about the contents of this box quickly in—”

“Plain bloody language,” cut in Aussie.

He was right. The White House did want to hear it in plain language. But not as bloody as that which normally peppered a soldier’s battlefield vocabulary, and so the Yorktown ’s skipper, under the CVBG’s commander, Admiral Crowley, instructed Yorktown ’s TV room’s satellite-to-ship-to-shore producer to put the general on a seven-second delay with the White House in order to delete any “impolitic rhetoric…vis-à-vis the North Koreans.”

The director of ship’s signals aboard Yorktown had to bleep Freeman four times in as many minutes as he “unloaded” and, as Marte Price would later report to the world, “lit into the North Korean Communists and their ‘running-dog lackey’ terrorists”—using the Korean phrase Johnny Lee had quickly tutored him in. The general also lit into “those damn closet Commies who still lie waiting in the new Russia to seize power, republic by republic”—a comment that struck everyone as odd, but the general wasn’t convinced North Korea didn’t have some “old commie supporters” abroad, as he told Aussie.

A sanitized version of the general’s Yorktown —White House conference, albeit with him standing in front of Yorktown ’s camera, his sodden uniform stained by Brady’s blood, was broadcast on the networks an hour later. But even with the editing, the force of his words, fused like armor-penetrating rounds by Bone’s painful absence, still electrified America, along with the MANPAD evidence the team had uncovered, and the general’s explicit warning that for as long as America and her allies had been fighting terrorism, it was unfortunately, as the British had so persistently cautioned, “early days yet.”

“Muslim fanatics,” said Freeman, “are like any other. They are unrelenting. And to defeat them, the American-British-Australian coalition, and all those who have the guts and political will for the long haul against terror, must be just as unrelenting in our determination to exterminate the vermin. To do this we must spill our treasure and, what is much worse, our blood. But there is no other way.”

And so the general continued to give them “shite.” What the general habitually and contemptuously referred to as the “Useless Nations” for once became useful under the glare of not only the American public but anyone who even contemplated boarding an airliner in the future. The U.N.’s Secretary General endorsed a General Assembly motion to immediately stop all technical aid to North Korea, but under the urging of the United States, food aid for the suppressed people of North Korea, especially for children, was to continue.

All through the Pentagon, clutches of officers were watching a tape of Marte Price’s “exclusive” interview with Freeman, the audio gaps caused by the bleeps in this tape resulting in a segmented sound track that Freeman would subsequently describe to Marte Price as having been sabotaged by Big Brother.

“Which Big Brother?” Marte had pressed in the pre-broadcast interview, the kind of question that endeared her to him. “They’re everywhere, Douglas.”

“Marte,” he’d told her, “next to mass murder, the worst thing, the very worst thing, these bastard terrorists have done to us is to excite those who love bossing other people around, spying on them, cutting into freedom of speech, freedom of movement. Hell, I never used one profanity in my teleconference, but the White House had to go and bleep me.”

“You did call the North Koreans scumbags, General.”

“Well, dammit, they are. Any creep who makes missiles to use for the express purpose of blowing children and other civilians out of the air is a scumbag, and needs to be bagged as scum!”

“Can I use that, Douglas?”

“You betcha.”

She used it, and the Pentagon saw the interview. Halfway through, General of the Air Force Michael Lesand was shaking his head as he heard Freeman’s epithets for the North Korean leadership, the epithets, articulately spoken, clearly calculated to tell the world just what General Douglas Freeman thought of those “gutless child murderers in Pyongstink who provided shoulder-fired missiles to terrorists.”

Of the three terrorist “duos,” one pair, the Guatemalans at Dallas/Fort Worth, killed themselves and several passengers with what the FBI now determined was their backup Igla 2C in the map case, the first Igla having been the missile that had brought down the Brazilian airliner.

Of the other four remaining terrorists, two were run to ground, found at JFK, as Freeman had postulated to Eleanor, toweling themselves down in one of the international terminal’s “Executive Class” bar-equipped suites. At LAX, the two Army of Palestine terrorists were cornered in one of the circular waiting rooms, screaming in Arabic, until they were felled by the SWAT team’s shotgun-fired nonlethal bean bags and taken away.

Ironically, had the Dear Leader and his North Korean henchmen kept quiet about the Kosong raid, they might have gotten away with their lie that the missile and launcher displayed by Freeman were fake, or that the Americans had bought them to try to frame the NKA. But all the histrionics of denial with which Pyongyang initially greeted the “blatant attack on our freedom-loving people” were undone the moment they’d tried to make propaganda out of a false confession from Bone. By showing Bone Brady’s face to the world, admitting the American attack had taken place, they were now caught utterly off guard when the launcher and missile with the Korean MIDs were presented by Freeman, the rest of the SpecFor team’s faces being blacked out on Freeman’s orders — not to deny them the glory of their moment, but to protect their identities.

Homeland airport security, quite independent of Freeman’s message to search their infrared tapes at Honolulu Airport had, as a matter of post-9/11 standard procedure, already done so. They could see two possible intruders who had crossed from the civilian section of the huge airport into the “Restricted — Deadly Force Authorized” area between 2200 and 2247 hours on the night during which the big SOCOM — Special Operations Command — Galaxy had landed with its cargo of all-weather-wrapped equipment aboard.