Darpa Alpha

“Oh no,” replied Aussie again, with mock embarrassment. “Oh, I didn’t mean anything untoward, General, or anything under covers, if you know what I mean?”

“I do. You’re pissed and you’re insolent. Call me back if you hear anything on that DARPA facility — where the hell it is.”

“Roger that,” said Aussie. “You sleep tight now.”

The general put the phone down and shook his head.

“Who was that?” asked Margaret, opening her eyes. Their brilliant turquoise color always surprised her famous or, perhaps more truthfully nowadays, once-famous husband.

“Ah, the boys,” replied the general. “They’re tying one on.”

Margaret had to think about that phrase. It wasn’t one she normally heard amongst her friends at the church socials, even those put on for the benefit of retired service folk who, with so many other Americans, had suffered catastrophic losses, personal and financial, when the family breadwinner had been killed in the long, ongoing war against terror.

“Aren’t you coming back to bed?” Margaret murmured, taking a sip of water from the glass on the bedside table as Freeman opened the closet, reaching in for his long gray robe. He didn’t answer her, already deep in thought about the DARPA burglary, if that’s what it had been, and surfing channels on their bedroom TV as he slipped his feet into his moccasins. Nothing about a break-in at any military base. Perhaps Aussie had glimpsed part of an old documentary tape. Freeman recalled how just the other day he had pulled a newspaper out of the magazine rack and was halfway through reading an article on yet another terrorist raid in Britain before he realized the paper was a month old.

Margaret drew the duvet over her eyes to shut out the flashes of light from the television. “Douglas? What are you doing?”

“Oh, sorry.” He stabbed the power button, shutting off the TV. Something wasn’t right. Aussie had said all of them saw it. “Think I’ll stay up awhile,” he told Margaret. “Get some juice, maybe have a cup of coffee.” He glanced at his watch which, from old “in-country” habit he wore so that the face was under his wrist and reflections from its quartz face couldn’t be easily seen by the enemy.

“I’d like some company,” Margaret persisted, “and something in your robe tells me that you would too.”

“Margaret!” he said, feigning shock but pleased by her sudden sauciness. “Time for me to get up,” he added. “Nearly reveille.”

“You are up,” she said. “C’est magnifique! I’d like you to come down.”

“Mrs. Freeman!” he said, turning and looking down at her. “You astound me. You wouldn’t have said that six months ago — in French or English!”

“No,” she conceded, pulling down the covers invitingly. “I wouldn’t, but you know how these sudden conversions can be.” She was right. Once Douglas had told her how Catherine, his late wife and Margaret’s sister, had hoped that he and Margaret would “get together” should Catherine’s melanoma spread and make Douglas a widower, Margaret had experienced a surge of excitement. “I suddenly felt free,” she told him now. “That’s the truth of it, Douglas. Catherine set me free. Since then I’ve been — I don’t know. I feel like a new woman.”

“You are,” he said understandingly. She had, he knew, been straining to be free. He was at once enormously flattered that she had so secretly loved him all those years and sorry that the tension created in her by her suppression of her love had more often than not resulted in hostility. “I know. I only hope you’re not sorry that you’ve ended up with this retired old fart who still can’t leave the wars behind him.”

“You most certainly are not an old fart. Why, you jog more miles in a day than most marathoners. You, Douglas Freeman, are as fit as a young buck.” But she could see that, as virile as he was, his mind was elsewhere right now and, sliding back under the pink eiderdown, she said, “Oh all right, I’ll wait. I know you won’t settle until you check out this DARPA thing.”

“You were listening in,” he said, pretending shock. “I thought you were asleep.”

“I was, my darling, until I felt you sit straight up as if there was a spider in the bed. Go on,” she said teasingly. “Go down to your Rolodex.”

“Don’t you make fun of my Rolodex file, lady. When the power fails on my laptop, I have my cards. Hard copy, Margaret.”

“Oh,” she said, holding back a laugh.

He smiled as he drew the charcoal-gray Truman Show robe, an old gift from his actor nephew, tighter about his waist against the hard slab of his abdominal muscles. “You’re very nice,” he continued, “as I’m about to rediscover in that nest of yours once I find out what the—” He hesitated, refusing to use even the most commonplace blasphemy in her presence. It was a leftover from his marriage to Catherine. “Once I find out whether a DARPA facility’s been penetrated.”

“Penetrated?”

“Stop it, woman! Is that all you can think of?”

“Right now, yes.”

“Get up and make me some coffee.”

“Oh, tush!” she said. “Make it yourself.”

Freeman grinned and walked through to the kitchen via the living room, past a portrait of his ancestor, William Douglas Freeman, whose American rifleman’s forest green and chocolate brown uniform in the painting contrasted with the bloodred and white uniforms of the 1812 British regulars. A photo of his twenty-year-old son Dan and his girlfriend was on the lamp table along with a vase of sweet-smelling pink Mojave roses, a birthday gift to Margaret from Dan, who, in the general’s view, was finding it difficult to accept that his father had not only remarried but had married his aunt.

He watched CNN. There was nothing about a break-in at any defense base, let alone any DARPA facility. Had Aussie and the other SpecForces seen it on another network? There were so many now. He channel-surfed while Margaret’s ancient coffeemaker gurgled and spat. She saved everything. He had a rule: For every new thing that came into the house, an 1,100-square-foot bungalow, some old thing had to go out. In their first real quarrel after getting married she’d suggested he be put out. He smiled at how they’d laughed afterward and enjoyed passion-fueled sex that had left the argument in its wake.

On NBC there was yet another story about a series of terrorist alerts throughout the world. In London, a taxi bombing at Heathrow Airport had killed eight — twenty-three injured, six critically — and there was a threat in Washington state, but no reference to a West Coast naval base. Mention of Washington, however, reminded him that the U.S. Navy did have several highly sensitive installations up in Washington state.

Taking his coffee into the hallway, the general, who had been retired by a White House that hadn’t appreciated his blunt public description of jihad, studied his wall map of Cascadia, the Pacific Northwest made up of British Columbia, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington state. First there was the extensive sub base on the stunningly beautiful Hood Canal, surely at the top of any terrorist’s list. And then there was the huge naval air station on Whidbey Island east of the Canadian-U.S. Strait of Juan de Fuca. The latter, usually mispronounced by Aussie in crude allusions, was the egress channel for the big American Trident boomers and the hunter-killer attack subs out of Bangor, Washington. Then there was the huge Cold War SAC — Strategic Air Command — bomber base at Fairchild near Spokane way out in eastern Washington in the sagebrush country where the gargantuan B-52s flew over the sun-twinkling sprinklers that appeared like white lace across the irrigated farms and dry, coulee-rutted earth. Closer to the coast there was the army’s Fort Lewis near Tacoma. It was here on this enormous base that Freeman had last attended a DARPA demonstration, having been accidentally invited by a Pentagon clerk who hadn’t realized that the general was now on the “has-been” list.

But, according to Aussie, it hadn’t been an army barracks that had been hit but a naval base. He knew there were naval, civilian-staffed bases, secret research stations, tucked away along the coast from San Diego to San Francisco. And there were, since 9/11, several other locations on the West Coast with its thousands of inlets and bays. These mostly consisted of cutting-edge university labs with minimum, if any, real security, the academic community not naturally disposed to the presence of armed guards, arguing, with a good deal of merit, that low profiles in fact afforded more real security than any official display of armed security and high-profile signage, the latter best exemplified by the “Use of Deadly Force Authorized” sign at the entrance to the secret Bangor sub base