Ian Slater: Darpa Alpha

Then, just as suddenly, another connection presented itself. Eleanor Prenty and Eleanor Roosevelt. He sat back, massaging his neck muscles.

Was there anything more that he could glean from Aussie’s conversation? The general had long been a believer, as all who had served under him knew, in Frederick the Great’s adage “ L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace! ” And it sure as hell was going to take audacity to call his wife in the middle of Linda Rushmein’s shower so soon after the verbal firefight over Marte Price. But the damned computer was down and he was impatient. Besides, the fact was that Margaret was fluent in French. He wasn’t.

“Hello?” It was Linda Rushmein on the phone.

“Hi. It’s Douglas Freeman here. Could I speak to Margaret?”

“I didn’t think you two were on speaking terms,” replied Linda tartly.

“Could I speak to my wife, please?”

Cold as ice. He could hear women’s laughter in the background, but when Margaret came on there wasn’t a trace of humor in her voice. “Yes?” It was as if he was a telemarketer interrupting dinner.

“Hi, sweetie,” said the general. “How’s the party going?”

“Fine. What do you want?”

It felt like he was standing in a force 8 gale without his thermal underwear. “Look, I’m sorry to bother you, Sweetie.” Crawl on your belly, General. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

“What do you want, Douglas?”

“Well, first I want to apologize. That was thoughtless of me going out earlier to call like that, but you see it was important that I use a landline other than the one in the house. I’m in a phone booth now.”

“Is this more secret stuff?” She made it sound seedy.

“It’s more secure on an outside landline,” he told her. “Anyway, I’m sorry I upset you. I can fully understand how you must have seen it.”

“That’s big of you,” she said icily.

“Look,” began Freeman, “this might seem strange, but something very important’s come up and I need your help.”

“Do you? Isn’t Marte smarter?”

He took a deep breath. “No,” he answered slowly. “And as far as I know she didn’t take French in college, as you did. And you keep it up, right?”

“I read French. I don’t speak it — well, hardly at all.”

“That’s fine.”

“What is it?” she asked impatiently. “I have to get back to the party. They’re about to give Julia the gifts.”

“Right. What does this mean?” He spelled out Pend Oreille.

“I’ve never heard of a French word ‘pend,’” responded Margaret. “But ‘oreille’ is ‘ear.’ Why?”

The general was looking down at his tightly folded copy of the TPC — Tactical Pilotage Chart — F-16B. The shape of Lake Pend Oreille could be seen as that of an ear. “Pend” was maybe a hybrid word from the English “pendulous”—long, hanging down. Long ear. The shape of the lake was roughly like that of an ear, with a longer than usual lobe. Long ear. Big ear.

“Love you, Margaret.”

There was a pause, her voice lowered. “You too, you big oaf.”

“See you later, Sweetheart.”

“I’ll be late.”

“Not too late, I hope.” Margaret heard the excitement in his voice but it seemed to have been aroused more by her translation of “oreille” than by her impending return to Monterey. “I’d like to show you something,” Freeman told her. “It’s not an ear, but it’s long.”

“Really, Douglas!” But he could tell the ice had been broken. “I have to go,” she told him.

“Bye,” he said and, with his heart pounding, quickly dialed information for Vancouver, Canada, and asked for the history department at the University of British Columbia where, several years earlier, he’d taken a “War and Society” course as part of the post-9/11 NORAD — North American Defense Pact — liaison officer exchange program. It had been a course primarily on the history of war and its impact on any number of societies — how Rosie the Riveter had expanded the rights of women during the war, how war had revolutionized technology and vice versa, and how, for the Confederates, the first Battle of Bull Run turned from certain defeat to victory, due in large part to the military’s use of railways to rush Southern reinforcements to Bull Run in time to turn the tide for Stonewall Jackson.

The general asked to speak to Dr. Retals. Not there. Home number? The department secretary was polite, but firm. They couldn’t give out home numbers. And so he dialed the regular information number for area code 604 and asked for a David Retals who, if he remembered correctly, lived in or around the university area, out in the Dunbar-Point Grey area. On a Post-it, the general had written, “Big Ears, Eleanor Roosevelt, Idaho.”

“Hello?”

“Dr. Retals?”

“Yes?”

“General Douglas Freeman here. I took your course on war and—”

“I remember, General. How are you?”

“Fine, Doc. I need to know something, and I needed it yesterday.”

He heard Retals give a short laugh. “You were always in a hurry, General, except, as I remember, with your final paper.”

“That should have been an A, Doc,” the general charged. “You gave me a B-plus. I was sorely disappointed.”

“You were sorely late . An hour late, as I recall.”

“My damn computer had crashed.”

“That’s what they all say. How can I help you?” asked the professor congenially, obviously amused by his former student’s complaint about receiving a B-plus instead of an A for a late paper — and this coming from the legendary American officer whose standing order was that his officers’ mess at breakfast, lunch, and dinner must be closed exactly fifteen minutes after opening so as to punish latecomers and impress upon all the need for punctuality.

“Do you know of any connection, Doctor, between Eleanor Roosevelt and a Lake Pend Oreille?”

“Oh yes. The lake’s in Idaho, right?”

“Yes, sir,” said Freeman.

“Well,” began the historian, “early in the Second World War, Eleanor Roosevelt was on a flight out west on some business for FDR and, looking down on the Rockies, she saw this astonishingly beautiful lake just west of the Bitterroot Range in Idaho. Anyway, she made a note of it and when she returned to Washington, D.C., she recommended it to FDR, who, at the time, urgently needed a safe inland naval training base that would be well away from the East and West coasts, safe from any possible attack, particularly by the Japanese Navy’s air arm. The lake she’d seen turned out to be ‘Pend Oreille.’ It’s around ninety thousand acres, if I remember correctly, and very, very deep, over a thousand feet down in places. Anyway, after training more than a quarter of a million U.S. Navy personnel, mostly submariners in World War Two, this training center on the lake — the navy’s second largest training base in the world at the time — was decommissioned in—” The professor paused. “—I think it was sometime in 1946. I’d have to check that. Anyway, though it was decommissioned, it wasn’t forgotten. The staff was greatly reduced in size, down to a couple of dozen people at most. I believe the navy turned it into some kind of research station. That’s all I know, really.”

“Professor, if you were a woman, I’d kiss you.”

The professor laughed easily, remembering how the general hadn’t been so jolly when he’d received the B-plus.

“Thanks a million, Doc. I owe you one.”

“Not at all,” said Retals. “May I ask what you’re up to?”

“Deter, detect, defend,” answered Freeman. It was NORAD’s motto, which the professor had mentioned more than once in his course.