Payback

eternity, the sense of peace it gave her, the sea so reassuring that she didn’t feel insignificant by its vastness but rather felt her soul was part of it. Freud, she told Douglas, called it the “oceanic feeling,” the sense of oneness with everything and everyone around you.

“But I don’t want to walk by the sea,” he said. “I want to stay here with you. Forever.” It was a moment so magical for her, her satiation so complete, she suddenly felt sad that it would end. Douglas said nothing. She murmured, and soon fell asleep in his arms.

Slowly, with all the care he would have used extricating himself from a booby trap, he slipped his battle- scarred arm from beneath her and started quietly toward the bathroom. He stopped, retraced his steps, and, adopting that “I’m not here” technique that hide-and-seek children instinctively know and soldiers relearn and refine so as not to give away their presence, he unplugged her bedside phone and, once in the bathroom, used reams of toilet paper and quietly ran the faucet, rather than use the shower, whose noise might waken her. In the kitchen, he closed the door and turned the volume on the cordless phone way down before he poured two large breakfast glasses of juice, noiselessly searching the cupboards for a breakfast tray — she’d be as ravenous and thirsty as a SpecFor warrior back from a snatch and grab.

The kitchen phone rang as he dropped bread into the toaster. “Freeman.”

“Morning, General.” He’d expected it to be Aussie Lewis or Choir Williams, but it was neither. The line was a bit fuzzy. “Sal here, General.”

“Oh — hello, Sal. Sorry, didn’t recognize you. What’ve you got?”

“I got a call from Aussie. He and Alexsandra have gone down to some fucking Wal-Mart sale. Furniture and —”

“Don’t you bad-mouth Wal-Mart, you Brooklyn hick,” the general joshed. “Wal-Mart’s got stuff on shelf that takes quartermasters two years to get!” It was true. SpecOps had often gotten “off shelf” stuff from commercial outlets that the Pentagon bureaucracy would have taken months to procure and for which it more often than not paid exorbitant prices with taxpayers’ dollars. Especially for electronic gear.

“My apologies to Mr. Wal-Mart,” said Salvini.

“So Alexsandra’s buying patio furniture,” said the general. “Is that why you called me?” He grabbed two eggs and held them under a lukewarm faucet so they wouldn’t crack when it came time to start boiling them.

“Aussie just e-mailed me. One of his mates at the Pentagon says all three discarded launchers — you ready for this? — are North Korean MIDs.”

Initially the general was disinclined to believe it, yet if there was one leadership outside that of al Qaeda that would have the balls to openly attack the United States — or rather, be crazy enough to openly give al Qaeda MANPAD launchers — it would be the oxymoronically named Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, whose “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il was as much a psychopath as Kim Il Sung, his equally crazy American-hating father, who’d started the Korean War all by himself.

“You said all three discarded launchers. I thought only two have been found.”

“No, three. Just found one at Dallas/Fort Worth. All have North Korean manufacturer identification numbers,” continued Sal. “But it’s an Igla launcher from JFK. A Russian-made launcher, which means a Russian-made missile. ’Course, I know that doesn’t mean dick in terms of where it came from. Any terrorist or dictator with the bread can make the things under license. Same as we sublicense our aircraft parts — everything, that is, except the wings.”

“Well, I can tell you one thing, Sal,” responded the general in the understatement of the morning, “those DPRK serial numbers aren’t going to go down well at the White House.”

“President’s gonna go ape,” said Sal. “First North Korea’s been taunting us with their nuclear WMDs and my Pentagon buddies say they’re already making Chinese and Russian MANPADs under license from China and Russia. It’s a shopping bazaar for terrorists over there, General.”

“Well,” said Freeman, “I know what the Koreans’ll say — that they manufacture the MANPADs under sublicense, same as we sublicense the Stingers made in Germany. Whoever buys them, it’s not North Korea’s problem.”

“Yeah,” said Sal, “but the Krauts don’t sell our Stingers to terrorists. ’Sides, the President’ll have to do something. These attacks can’t stand. ’Specially not now after this Guatemalan thing.”

“What do you mean?” asked Freeman in alarm.

“You know,” said Sal. “On CNN. FBI agent, or maybe it was the SWAT guy, ran the Guatemalan and he fired the friggin’ thing. Must have had it wired to bypass the trigger circuit. An old terrorist trick in case they get caught in transit. Over twenty killed and wounded, glass and blood everywhere.”

“My God!” said Freeman, switching on the small kitchen TV. “You’re right, Sal. We’re going to have to launch a major payback on this one. Problem is exactly where?”

“Wherever the MID numbers take us to in North Korea,” said Sal. What the hell was the matter with the general? Salvini wondered. Sounded as if he’d been laid—dopey. It was a word Salvini had never thought of before to describe the general, even after he’d reportedly “embedded” CNN’s sexy Marte Price.

“In a way it’s worse than 9/11, Sal. I don’t mean in the number killed or airlines involved, I mean the triple play these bastards have been able to pull off, thousands of miles apart.”

“That’s what I mean,” said Sal. “If we can’t catch all the terrorists that slip into the country, we have to at least take out their source of supply.”

“Of course,” the general agreed. “But where in North Korea? Dammit, it’s the size of Alaska.”

“I know,” said Sal.

CHAPTER FIVE

Down in the White House’s situation room, so often erroneously, if sensationally, described as “the war room,” the President, with full concurrence of the Joint Chiefs and an exhausted Eleanor Prenty, had indeed decided on a retaliatory strike, the kind they’d so often condemned the Israeli government for during the Palestinian Intifada’s suicide attacks against Israelis. But as with most of the Israeli public, the Americans were infuriated by this murderous attack against their own civilians, so many of them children, the public in no mood for half measures, endless fruitless gabfests in the United Nations General Assembly or Security Council.

Doves at the State Department argued forcefully, along with the French, Germans, and Belgians, that there was no evidence it had been a North Korean attack, only that North Korean—made launch equipment had been used. Indeed, the New York Times editorial argued that the attacks could well have been by al Qaeda or any other group that could just as well have used stolen U.S. Stinger missiles. The paper suggested that the post-hostage situation at Dallas/Fort Worth might reveal some vital intelligence that had not yet been discerned that would not implicate North Korea. Such intelligence, the paper contended, would avoid the possibility of a “nuclear exchange,” which, given the treaty of friendship between North Korea and China, could quickly escalate into a full-scale nuclear war, notwithstanding Russia’s de facto associate membership in NATO. Yes, the U.S. could expect immediate help from Japan, at which North Korea had already fired nuclear-warhead-capable-missiles to demonstrate that it could strike Japan at will.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, on the other hand, made much of the “strained relationship,” to put it mildly, between Tokyo and North Korea’s capital of Pyongyang, citing how Kim Jong Il had ordered the kidnapping of Japanese off Japan’s bathing beaches over the past forty years by North Korean special forces. These Japanese abductees had been on a beach one moment, disappearing the next. Taken back to North Korea by submarine, they had been forced, by threat of murdering their families back in Japan, to train North Korean spies on how to infiltrate Japan’s large Korean workforce. It was a technique, the Atlanta Journal- Constitution pointed out, that the North Koreans had borrowed from Japan’s wartime use of Japanese immigrants to Hawaii, these spies having relayed vital information to Japanese headquarters for the stunningly effective attack against Pearl Harbor.

The Washington Post weighed in with an editorial that doubted the likelihood of the