attack. He put down the coffee cup and ran quickly between the canyon of radio and communications equipment. He knocked on the general’s door. There was no answer. He tried the handle. The door was locked.
“General?” he shouted.
Inside, Freeman turned when he heard the knock. So did the women. One reached behind her, and Freeman saw the glint of what looked like a long syringe. The other one was already coming for him. As she lunged, he swung out of the way, now the other woman coming for him.
Freeman didn’t have time for the Sig Sauer nine-millimeter, barely making the Remington by his bed in time. He swung it in the general direction of the door and fired twice.
Outside, Norton heard the roar of the gun, a heavy thud, then another scrabbling noise. Freeman, his hair mussed, looked down at them. Nothing much was left of the photographer’s midriff but the bone of her spinal column as she slithered in the bloody ooze that had been her stomach; the other blonde, the prettier of the two, literally spouting blood, dead the second after the darts from the Remington load had hit her, each dart wound now a tiny fountain of blood.
“General!”
Freeman, running his fingers through his hair, putting the shotgun on the bed, pointing it away from the door, stepped over the two bodies, told them outside he was all right, then opened the door.
For a moment no one spoke, several men quickly exiting to be sick outside.
“Jesus!” said the normally restrained Norton, not yet realizing that a splinter from the door had grazed his eye bandage and caused a trickle of blood down his temple. “What in hell happened?”
Freeman walked back to the bed and reloaded the Remington. He was whey-faced but steady as a rock as he looked back down on the two OMONS. “I guess it’s what you call ‘equal opportunity’!” he said wryly.
It was a remark, though said in the near heat of the moment, that all but ended his career. La Roche’s tabloids went wild, FREEMAN JOKES ABOUT DEAD WOMEN.
“Christ—
“I know,” Norton counseled as understandingly as he could. “But I think for a while, General, you’d better let me handle all press releases. And I do mean
Back home every editorial writer was calling for Freeman to be disciplined.
It was a half hour before midnight when Jay La Roche’s private jet approached Anchorage. La Roche, not caring that his lawyers and others were looking — indeed, hoping they were — told Francine to take her bra off, that he wanted “a bit of tit for good luck.” This brought on gales of laughter from his hangers-on. Francine, trying to make the best of it, knowing she had little choice unless she wanted to end up getting another beating of the kind he’d handed out to his first wife, obliged.
Somewhat dreamy-eyed, but effusive nevertheless from what he called a “hand and nose job”—the nose referring to the snort of cocaine that now had him in its high — La Roche and his entourage were met at Anchorage airport by two well-dressed men who asked if they could speak to Mr. La Roche alone. He refused, saying grandly that anything they had to say to him they could say to his friends.
“Fine,” said one of them, the other quickly slipping on the handcuffs while the first arrested Jason La Roche for treason, specifically for “knowingly trading with the enemy of the United States in a time of war.”
There was near pandemonium as La Roche began screaming at the FBI men and telling his lawyers to pull their finger out and get “fucking moving.”
“Why — Why — you haven’t even read him his rights,” one of the lawyers whined.
“And I don’t have to,” reported the FBI agent. “Emergency Powers Act. You’re out of luck, mister.”
By this time, the FBI having alerted Anchorage airport earlier, several security officers were quickly on hand to help them board Jay La Roche on the next Alaska Airlines flight from Anchorage to Seattle, where he would be arraigned before a grand jury.
In Brooklyn, police were called to a domestic dispute, a man suspected of beating his wife. The couple’s two kids were being looked after by the neighbor who’d phoned. They got the woman out, but the man wouldn’t budge, and his wife, a Mrs. Lenore Ferrago, said that something had snapped in her husband since the war.
“Is there a gun in the house?” the SWAT team captain asked.
“Yes. An old pistol.” But she said she didn’t think he’d use it.
When they went through the door, they saw him at the fridge, the door open, and told him to put his hands up and not to move. He banged the door shut, turned toward them and shoved his hand inside his jacket. They felled him with two shots. There was no gun on him.
“It’s like he wanted to go,” said one of the cops. “Why?”
The SWAT captain shrugged. “Who knows? War’s over — you think everything’s gonna quiet down, and then all of a sudden, boom!”
In a ceremony set for March 30, Alexsandra Malof was to be presented with the Medal of Freedom. General Douglas Freeman, not for the first time in his career, was “recalled to Washington for consultation.” It was rumored that he would lose his command. Before he left Khabarovsk, he instructed Colonel Norton, on his behalf and in the interests of the long-standing friendship between the United States of American and her allies on Taiwan, to invite Admiral Kuang to have lunch with the general in Tokyo, where the general would break his journey en route to Washington.
While this meeting was taking place in Tokyo, in Khabarovsk a naked man with a small, red flag trailing from his rectum streaked through Freeman’s HQ.
Ten minutes later it was rumored that Aussie Lewis was taking bets — two to one on — that despite his wired-up broken jaw, Robert Brentwood would be eating solid food within six weeks. The bet was taken by Choir Williams and Salvini, but there was a great argument over what exactly constituted “solid.”
Later that afternoon, in Khabarovsk, along the bank of the Amur, two children watched a soldier who, without any formal introduction whatsoever, walked up to one of the members of the Polar Bear Club and said, “Olga?”
The big woman turned. “Da?”
“Name’s Lewis. Aussie Lewis. Pleased to meet ya, Oh. You like green horses?”
