Ian Slater - Darpa Alpha

“And,” added Eleanor, “if we do pick up their trail again, his team might be useful.”

“If we don’t pick up something, it’ll cost me the presidency.”

Eleanor Prenty knew he was right, and it wasn’t her habit to throw him a soft pitch. The Iranian hostage crisis had cost Jimmy Carter the presidency. And though you couldn’t put a price on American lives, she knew that the loss of the top secret data from DARPA ALPHA, and the fact that no backup disk was in sight, would in the long run be much more punishing for the country. His opponent knew it; everyone knew it.

“I’ll have to put it to rest,” he said solemnly.

Eleanor was alarmed. Did he mean he would have to absorb the loss politically, as Carter had done after the attempted rescue of American hostages by the American commando force had crashed and burned in the desert night, holding the administration up to more ridicule by the Iranian revolutionaries? “You mean, Mr. President, that we’d have to eat it?”

“No, no. By putting it to rest I meant we’ll have to run it down, go after the terrorists no matter where they go. No matter what people say about Bush going into Afghanistan and Iraq, it showed the world that we’ll go in anywhere and go in unilaterally if we have to. We’re not letting people come into this country, murder our people, and think they can ever find safe haven.”

Eleanor Prenty was visibly relieved, but only temporarily, because both she and the president knew that all the tough talk in the world was nothing more than rhetoric unless the intelligence community could locate the receiver and the specific location of the stolen property. No one in America wanted another wild-goose chase for WMDs that didn’t exist. That had been a monumental intel disaster. What had Colin Powell and then three-star General Freeman called it? “The mother of all intel screwups!”

“The problem then,” the president reminded Eleanor, “was that we didn’t have enough agents on the ground, relied too much on high-tech, satellite photos, et cetera. It takes years to build up the kind of HUMINT networks like Al Qaeda had.” The Rose Garden’s sharp, unforgiving thorns suddenly appeared to him as ill omens. He turned away from the garden, and Eleanor saw that his hands were clasped so tightly that they were bone white, drained of blood. And National Security Adviser Eleanor Prenty knew that unless, in the parlance of the media, something broke, and soon, not only the presidency but the fate of the entire country would be in terrorist hands. The country’s chief executive and commander in chief looked across the Oval Office at Frederic Remington’s bronze sculpture, “The Bronco Buster,” alive with furious action.

“We’ve alerted all carrier groups, right?”

“Yes.” It was what all presidents had done in times of crisis, to extend the country’s reach and allow it to strike back if possible. But where?

“Would you want to involve Freeman again?” Eleanor asked.

“Yes. He may have lost them but he was Johnny-on-the-spot. And because he’s already been up against them, he might know something, deduce something, that we can’t.”

“I agree. We owe it to him.”

“No,” the president said. “We don’t owe him anything. He volunteered. We owe the man he lost and those who were murdered.”

An aide entered with the latest intel report. The president scanned it. “Nothing,” he concluded, dropping the file on the desk. “Not even a possible recipient of the info. Can you believe that?”

“Well,” Eleanor told the president, “I’m not at all surprised.”

The president looked haggard, defeated. “Well, all we can do right now is pray. Pray for a miracle.”

“Are they going?” Margaret asked, closing the book she had hoped might distract her from the media circus outside their house.

“Not yet,” answered Douglas Freeman. He felt foolish, standing in his robe by the living room’s rose red drapes, peering through a narrow slit in the curtains. “I think they’re just moving cables, lights, and stuff around. Difficult to tell in the glare. Dozens of lights. Like we’re on Oprah .”

“We are,” Margaret said tartly. “We’re the sensation of the moment.”

Douglas looked around at her. “Well, Mrs. Freeman, you are sensational.”

A smile escaped. “You’re not bad yourself, General.”

He returned the smile. “Why don’t you go off to bed, Sweetheart? Might as well get some rest.”

She sighed. “No point. I couldn’t possibly doze off with that mob camped outside. Could you?”

“Yes. A soldier learns to sleep anywhere he’s not needed for the moment. He might have to go days if the balloon goes up.”

“Then you should rest now. No point in staying up.” The red drapes turned pink as a beam of light swept the length of the room.

“What on earth was that?”

“A damned searchlight. You’d think we were in a POW camp.”

“We are prisoners,” Margaret said resentfully.

The general, hands thrust hard into his pockets, walked over to the living room sofa against which his wife’s face looked even paler than Tony Ruth’s had in the moments after the cable had beheaded the SpecFor warrior.

Douglas took his wife’s hand. It felt remarkably warm. “I’m sorry you’ve had to get caught up in all this.”

“I’m a soldier’s wife now. You told me once that it comes with the territory. With command.”

“It does, but usually you can keep family out of it. I shouldn’t have come home, should’ve stayed away…”

She lifted her free hand, slipped it around his waist, and nuzzled into him. “Some of them were here, camped outside the house, before you even arrived at the airport.”

“They’ll go away,” he told her, “soon as the next story breaks.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “We’ve got enough provisions. We can stay holed up in here for—” She shrugged. “—as long as it takes.”

“You mean,” Douglas added, forcing a grin, “until the milk runs out!”

Margaret didn’t ask for much, but one of the first things Douglas had found out — the first night of their honeymoon — was that Margaret had a sacrosanct ritual. At 10:30 she would shower, prepare her bowl of cereal, pour the milk, and scan the “funnies” as she ate, finishing before the news at eleven. Sex was nonnegotiable until the weather forecast was over and the sports report threatened. But this night the general knew there was no chance of any conjugal enjoyment. Like many another soldier, postcombat coitus came in second only to slaking your thirst. But defeat, failure on the scale of the DARPA ALPHA murders and the nation-threatening theft that came with them, could rob a man, especially a commander, of any emotion other than self-punishing regret, the awful, accusatory postmortems of “what ifs” and “if onlys” that undermined self-confidence in the field and the bedroom. What he needed, he knew, was a win, a victory, a chance at a victory, to redeem himself in his own eyes and the team’s.

“They’ll go away,” Margaret told him. “They have the attention span of a newt.”

“A what?”

“A newt.”

Freeman laughed. “You nit!”

And that started her off giggling, “nit” and “newt” shooting back and forth between them like fireflies in the gloom, a burst of manic energy, as inexplicable as it was unexpected, fueling the exchange, then vanishing as quickly as it had appeared.

“Dammit,” said the general, getting up, walking over to the drapes for a brief reconnaissance, then to the kitchen. “I should have choppered the team ahead of where we were getting the bip from the transmitter on the disk. Gone ahead and set up an ambush.”