Ian Slater: Payback

The general read the congratulations from the President, the Congress, and the Joint Chiefs, as well as the news story sent to him by his son about the fierce citizen-lobbying in Congress for a law requiring all commercial aircraft using U.S. airspace to install Israeli-type anti-MANPAD technology. Most important to him was the e-mail from Mr. and Mrs. Jason Brady. It told the general of their pride in a son who had served so gallantly, and thanked the general for the first e-mail he’d sent — to them, assuring them that their son had died in combat, that the North Koreans had not captured him at all, that he had not been tortured, as the “donkey press” had first reported.

The general thought too of his fears, of the persistency during his nocturnal sleep of the faces of men and women with whom he had served, some of whom had been killed. What place his obsession with sweet onions and blue exhaust had to do with anything he didn’t know, and was too wise to pursue it now, for it was like trying to make sense of any complex array of thoughts and images that populate our conscious and unconscious dream hours. He knew there must sometimes be connections — perhaps there was more to the sweet onion odor he had detected coming from the kitchens aboard McCain prior to the launch of the RS. And maybe not. Only time would tell, he mused: yesterday is history, today is a gift, tomorrow a mystery.

The next message, and the last before he and the team would go to bed before the media frenzy that was awaiting them at the end of their two-stop flight to San Francisco via Hawaii, was from Margaret. She said she had gotten a new DVD but didn’t know how to work it. “Would you help me, Douglas?” she wrote.

“I will,” he murmured to the wind, smiling to himself as he remembered their time in bed before he’d left on the mission, how she’d giggled at his talk about Walla Walla onions. Then suddenly, like a name you’ve been trying for days to recall, Freeman made the vital “connect” between the low-sulfur sweet onions and the bluish-tinged, high-sulfur exhaust from the missiles. It was the answer to what had been bugging the general ever since he’d spoken to the President before the mission, when he’d been talking about how “a grain of sand in your sock” keeps irritating you when “you can’t find it.” The onion-missile connect had meshed with one of sociologist Riefelmann’s Zusammenschmelzen moments, the fusing of two initially unrelated thoughts, in this case onions and missiles, into a third. The latter was Freeman’s realization that it might, indeed it should , be possible for CIA forensics to analyze the burned sulfur detritus from the Guatemalan-triggered explosion at Dallas/Fort Worth, where the backup MANPAD had been detonated in the relatively confined space of the waiting room. And then to match the chemical fingerprint of the sulfur’s unique structure with that of sulfur mines in North Korea or elsewhere in the world, and to trace the transportation of the sulfur from the mine to where the missiles were actually being made . Then the U.S. could send in a team to execute an in, do it, out mission, or what Aussie would call “a little mine demolition.”

Exhilarated by the thought, the general was also exhausted, as were his men. Right now, he and the team needed rest. Even so, when it came time for him and his team to disperse at LAX, to return to their women, see their children, and get back to Monday night football, to take time to live — sort of — the general had yet another surprise for the team.

At Los Angeles Airport, Freeman shook each hand, looking straight and clear into each man’s eyes. His eyes watered, he explained, because of “all the crap and dust blown up here around LAX from the hot Santa Anna winds.

“I’m going to need you guys when I plan our next mission — wherever that’ll be.” The team looked at him in astonishment, but Freeman didn’t blink, adding, “It could be sooner than we think, the way this world is. So I want one sure way of contacting each of you at any time. I don’t want to try chasing someone down because they’re out shopping with Mommy at Wal-Mart.” He grinned at Aussie. “Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Good.”