was likely to say what he thought, his words unadorned by the usual equivocation of career flip-floppers and yes- men.
He wouldn’t have made the call if he’d been able to get even a scrap of information about the “nonstory,” but there were no scraps. Still the very idea that terrorists might have penetrated DARPA security had set off his alarm bells. His personal interest in DARPA dated from when he’d sent a memo to the Pentagon, personally championing what otherwise would have been a small item in the press: the development of a hagfish slime-fiber weave vest. The slime’s molecular structure, he knew, was so strong that he suggested it be mixed with the latest Kevlar to make what he believed would be the toughest bulletproof vest possible, given the weight-to-load-bearing ratio of America’s fighting men and women. DARPA had run with the idea, and he was proved right. Since then, countless American and allied lives had been saved by the vests, and unfortunately the lives of American-hating terrorists who, just as Freeman had warned the Pentagon, had gotten their hands on either the chemical formula or the vests themselves so as to reverse-engineer their own. Of course it was only a matter of time before the DARPA vest went commercial anyway, but he’d hoped to give the Pentagon the heads-up to at least try to restrict the distribution of the vests. Had terrorists penetrated DARPA again? And if so, what was at risk? Or was he way off course, and Marte Price right — that it was nothing more than a badly sourced nonstory, a figment of some eager blogger’s imagination?
The White House operator told the general he’d have to leave a message or call back. Eleanor Prenty was in a meeting right now.
To calm down, he showered, opening his eyes every now and then to check that no one else was in the bathroom. As a youngster, he’d seen Hitchcock’s
Hours later, sitting in the living room La-Z-Boy waiting for Margaret to come home and tired of surfing the Net for any possible DARPA connection, Douglas Freeman was starting to have grave doubts about Aussie’s story. He had killed the TV and turned to read his favorite passages from Thucydides’
“Hi, Aussie, what’s up?”
“We clear?”
“Clear fore and aft,” the general replied, his tone edgy after the fight with Margaret. “What’s up?”
“Uh, nothing much, General, but I’ve got a good bet.” There was a pause. “Does Mommy let you bet?”
“I’ll bet when I want,” said Freeman. It was an old Special Forces team joke that whenever you wanted to rib a guy, you just said, “Will Mommy let you do it?”
“Okay,” said Aussie. “This is straight from the trainer’s mouth, not the horse’s. Very interesting info on the eight horse in the sixth race at Churchill Downs. It’s been raining.”
The general was more alert now; this was how his SpecWar team’s military intelligence often came to him: not from neat official reports but from bits and pieces buried here and there in casual conversation which, because there was no record of it, could be “plausibly denied” by all team members should some snoopy congressman launch a fishing expedition into the financial heart of the General Accounting Office, trolling for black ops budgets.
“It’s been raining,” Aussie repeated.
“Uh-huh.” Horse racing was the team’s venue of choice for issuing an alert to the other team members, the track chosen somewhere in the world where there’d been bad weather in the last twenty-four hours.
The general was already Googling Churchill Downs: an inch of precipitation in the last twelve hours.
“The eight horse,” Aussie told him, “is a good mudder. So put a packet on him if you want to make a bundle.”
“I don’t know,” said the general, feigning disinterest should his phone be tapped by any of the myriad agencies that were now watching their own citizens more closely than ever before in the ongoing war against terror. “There must be other nags in that race who can run in the mud, Aussie.”
“Yeah, but not like this one. Jockey told me this horse loves the mud, digs deep, no slipping and sliding. The mother of all mudders, General.”
“I don’t know,” the general repeated. “Unlike you Aussies, I’m not the betting type. A ticket in the Power-ball now and then, maybe, but you know what they say about the lotteries.”
“Yeah, yeah, tax on the stupid. Our mate Choir’s been singing that song to me for years. ’Course he doesn’t gamble,” continued Aussie sarcastically. “He
“Winthrop,” the general answered, and answered jokingly, “He’s not sick already?”
Choir Williams, one of the toughest of the tough in Special Forces, having been trained first by the British SAS, Special Air Service, at Brecon Beacons in Wales. He was notorious for getting motion sickness. Choir, they used to joke, would get sick on an early-morning dew, but, like his grandfather and so many others who’d been violently ill on that gray, ugly morning of June 6, 1944, in Normandy, once he was in action, it was the enemy’s turn to suffer.
“He’ll be fine,” said Aussie, rubbing it in. “I’ll give ’im a coupla greasy fried eggs ’fore he leaves.”
Choir’s terse response could be heard in the background.
“You be sure to make the bet, General,” Aussie pressed. “The eight horse. I guarantee it.”
“Oh,” came the general’s retort. “So you’ll give me a refund if it doesn’t win or place?”
“Stone the crows!” said Aussie. “I’m not
“I’ll think about it, Aussie. Thanks for calling.”
When Freeman hung up, he scribbled “8, Churchill Downs” on his bedside Post-it pad and got up to spin the Rolodex file for the team’s letter-for-number code that had been disguised on one of the three-by-five-inch index cards. The cards contained everything from specs about the new weapons coming out of DARPA to the dimensions of the new Wasp-class carriers of the kind that the team had used on earlier missions and which housed helos and vertical takeoff and Joint Strike Fighter aircraft. The Rolodex also held the specifications for the object that looked like a marking pen that the general nearly always carried in his shirt pocket when out of the house.
Consulting the Rolodex’s file for this day’s one-time pad — that is, this day’s number-for-letter code — he wrote down a seven-digit number prefixed by a three-number area code. But to make sure his end was as secure as Aussie’s had been, the general would now have to use a landline outside the house. He knew the NSA had hired hundreds of Arab-speaking translators post-9/11, but he suspected some Arab agents must have slipped through the net, using the NSA’s intercepts for their own intelligence networks. Such was the paranoia of the world after 9/11.
He grabbed his Windbreaker and zipped it up, feeling a stiff breeze coming off the ocean, and headed down to the 7-Eleven again. He stood impatiently while a lanky, dirty-haired, earring-in-tongue youth of about twenty, who could see that the general was anxious to get on the phone, turned his back on Freeman and proceeded to loll against the wall of the phone booth, indulging himself in a long, banal conversation with his girlfriend, the communication consisting of repetition of “y’know” and “totally” and “like.” Like the general would, you know, like to pull the insolent son of a bitch right out of the phone booth and totally put him in the Marine Corps; give him a Parris Island haircut, feed him to the drill instructors, and teach the kid a few manners.
The youth was picking his teeth with a broken fingernail as the general left, cooling down, telling himself he’d been through his own rebellious time as a young man, but assuring himself that he’d not put anything in his body that didn’t belong there. As his self-righteous mood abated, he walked off to another phone booth four blocks away to dial the number Aussie had given him.
“Hello?” It sounded like Aussie, but there was a lot of static on the line.
“Clear?” intoned the general.
“Clear,” came the reply.
The general hesitated. As his old Special Forces outfit knew, he was a stickler for details. It wasn’t only his
