Ian Slater - Darpa Alpha

“I’ve been thinking about that note you got,” said Margaret as they entered the house. “What a horrible thing to read. But that man’s pride will be his undoing, Douglas.” She shook her head, tight-lipped and censorious as she took off her coat and headed off to unload the dishwasher.

Freeman felt distinctly uncomfortable, remembering the flashes of immodesty after his famous U-turn against the Russians.

“Yes,” Margaret declared, “that horrid note of his might yet haunt him.”

“If he isn’t already dead,” said the general.

“I shouldn’t say it, I suppose — I mean, it’s not very Christian — but I hope he’s dead.”

“So do I,” said Freeman, but it sounded to Margaret more like an obligatory response than a fervent wish. She straightened up from the dishwasher and fixed him with her gaze. “No,” she charged. “Not truly. You’d prefer — I mean, you’d like to chase him down.”

The general said nothing, topping up his coffee.

“Douglas?”

“What?”

“You like it, don’t you?”

“What do you mean, woman?”

“I mean, you men. You like fighting, don’t you?”

“Well, if that isn’t a blatant sexist remark I don’t know what is. If I said anything like that about women, Linda Rushmein and her night riders’d have me in irons.”

She ignored his comment. “Douglas!”

He met her stare but couldn’t sustain his look of hurt surprise. He blinked first, shifting his gaze to the small, triangular pane of glass high in the kitchen door, out into the darkness. “I love it,” he said gently. “God forgive me, but I do.” He faced her again. “To fight for the right. I suppose that sounds pompous, naïve even, but I believe there is evil in the world, Margaret. And what they did up there was evil to the core. Even if I didn’t like the sting of battle, I’d have a duty to pursue them if I could.”

“You did your best, Douglas.”

He was afraid that she might be right. “I’m dog tired,” he told Margaret. “I’m going to grab some shut-eye.”

“Dawn is breaking.”

“So, I’m tired. Aren’t you?”

“Yes, but—”

“It’s not against the law,” Freeman cut in.

“I merely said—,” she began.

“You’ve got this Anglo-Saxon hang-up about sleeping during the day. Goddammit, half the country—”

“Don’t be blasphemous.”

“Then don’t be so damn pious. You have these damn silly rules. Because your folks were farmers doesn’t mean it’s a sin to do things differently.”

“I was merely surprised at someone who—”

“Don’t be. I’ve had just about all the surprises I can deal with at the moment.”

“It isn’t my fault, General , that you didn’t run those — those monsters to ground.”

“Never said it was.”

“You know, Douglas, you’re right. You do need sleep. A lot of it.”

“You’re a Republican!”

That did it. They burst out laughing at their childishness, a dam of anxiety broken, the tension swept away in a torrent of running giggles, adult normalcy returning only when the full measure of the terrorist attack on DARPA ALPHA was reiterated, albeit reluctantly, in a terse news report they watched on TV, National Security Adviser Prenty having to admit under persistent questioning that not all of the “murderers,” in the administration’s phrase, had been accounted for.

“How many are still at large?”

“One,” she replied tersely.

“Is that hard intel?” pressed a correspondent from Fox. “Or soft intel?”

Eleanor kept her composure. It was a question born of the media’s skepticism following the Iraqi WMD fiasco. “It’s hard intel,” she said. “From the D.N.I.”

“There’s something else,” said Douglas, his arm around Margaret’s shoulder, holding her close.

“What do you mean?” Margaret asked.

“Something’s wrong. I can smell it. They know something else. I’ve known Eleanor Prenty for donkey’s years and she’s got something else on her mind. She’s keeping something back.”

“Well, I would think,” Margaret said tartly, “in that case she would have the common courtesy to let you know exactly what’s going on.”

Douglas Freeman agreed. Margaret had a point, and a strong one at that. Even if the White House didn’t want to inform him, as a matter of courtesy hadn’t it occurred to them that he might still have something to offer by further debriefing?

Belying his present low expectation of the administration, a call came twenty minutes later during the only bathroom break Douglas Freeman had taken all morning, and so it was that the general took one of the most important calls of his life and in the history of the Republic while sitting on the can, the exhaust fan purring softly in the background and he afraid to flush as he listened to the White House operator instructing him that a Homeland Security agent in Monterey was en route, as she spoke, to deliver a packet to the general by hand. After reading it he was to call National Security Adviser Prenty, but not from his home number.

“Well?” Margaret asked, as Freeman, with a preoccupied air, zipped up and buckled his belt, the puzzled expression still with him.

“The White House,” he explained, “is sending me something.” He looked at his wife, who, after handing him his cellphone, had lingered outside the bathroom door. “What in damnation’s so important that she couldn’t tell me on the phone? Whole country knows by now what happened.”

“Perhaps they’ve found the missing terrorist in hiding or something, and don’t want it made public. It could alert him.”

“Huh, he’s already been alerted. Rest of his gang found dead. No, it’s probably something—” The front door chimes sounded, their mellifluous notes in marked contrast to the tension both Douglas and Margaret felt.

It was the DHS agent, a tall African American clad in a dark blue suit. His striped DHS identity card was clearly visible through the front door peephole.

“That was quick,” observed Freeman, venturing a smile, which wasn’t reciprocated. The whole world seemed tense.

The full forensic report was twenty-one pages of graphs and columns galore — all measurements from microns to centimeters, weights in milligrams. His eyes raced over the information, stopping at the written summary that covered the last two pages. For Douglas Freeman, one of the most important nuggets of information was a brief footnote that mentioned that the rocket used against them on the helo at Pend Oreille was made in either Poland or China, given the composition and ratio of aluminum to steel. A splinter sample from the wooden grip of the shoulder-fired rocket launcher showed that it had at one time been infested with pine beetle, bore holes visible during examination, the insects’ secretions showing that this species of pine beetle was found in the Russian taiga.

The paper on which “AMERICANS SUCK” had been written was of Chinese manufacture, the ink used very definitely “China black,” a high-quality calligraphic ink compound manufactured almost exclusively in Harbin in China’s far northeastern province of Heilongjiang, whose Heilong River (Amur to the Russians) bordered Russia’s Far East, the river once the site of fierce Sino-Soviet clashes during the latter half of the twentieth century. This was Freeman’s country, where he’d fought against the Siberian Sixth.

Debris from the punctured fuselage of the downed Chinook from Priest Lake had been run through the spectrometer, where the traces of sulfur used in the warhead registered. The structure of the sulfur was typical of that found in what used to be called the “Manchurian mines,” that is, northeastern China.