“I appreciate you bringing me in from the cold.”
“Oh, Douglas, you’re not in exile.”
He almost said, “Sure as hell feels like it sometimes,” but that was nosing into self-pity country, and that, in the general’s eyes, was as contemptible as being a yuppie thread-counter.
“I haven’t had breakfast in bed,” began Margaret, “since…” She paused, dabbing her lips with the paper- towel napkin that Douglas had made into a sort of triangle and plopped near the edge of the tray. “I can’t remember when,” she continued joyfully. “You’re so gallant.”
She knew she would never forget the unselfish way in which he had lain with her
As he removed the tray, telling her someone was coming to the house at noon, she started. “My glory!”
“I’m sorry,” he said, recalling how giving Catherine such short notice of an impending visitor had always jolted her into a cleanup frenzy, with expectations of her having to prepare a first-rate lunch into the bargain. “Don’t worry, sweetheart,” he told her. “I’ll take him out to lunch. You won’t have to—”
“No, no,” Margaret said. “You don’t have to be sorry.” He had completely misunderstood her reaction. She was staring at his pajamas. It was as big as it had been last night. “Does it take days to — well, you know…” She giggled. “To go down?” She was blushing in her surprise at his size, but enjoying it.
“It’s hard to get it down,” he said, smiling, “when there’s such a beautiful woman around.”
There was a strained silence; then suddenly she beckoned him, open-armed. “Oh, Douglas, I’ve never been so happy. I didn’t imagine—”
“Shush,” he said, and this time threw the bedclothes aside with abandon.
She was thrilled and alarmed. “I haven’t showered, I haven’t—”
“To hell with showering,” he told her. “I want to smell you, every part of you — I want to consume you, every inch of you.”
She drew him to her with such violence and speed, it excited him even more and, lifting her translucent nightie, he began kissing her thighs, moving quickly from one to the other and then, suddenly, shockingly, she felt his tongue in her, at once hard as steel, soft as velvet, its fierce probing and sucking of the warm juices between her legs sinking her into paroxysms of pleasure, her head lolling side to side in a surrender so wildly complete she knew she’d do whatever he wanted. She cupped his hands on her breasts, crying, arching her body, and begging him to go further, deeper, praying it would never stop. The thought, albeit fleeting, of him leaving her, going away, was an unbearable torture. She wouldn’t let him.
CHAPTER SEVEN
At the White House, the press conference was minutes away, the President’s press officer, Melvin Spinner — a name made in hell for a White House press officer — quickly briefing him on a Gallup poll that revealed the American people’s major concern was the presence of terrorist sleeper cells within the United States.
The President met the problem head-on in the media scrum: “This administration is doing all we can to flush out these terrorist cells, but, as this latest outrage against the American people has clearly demonstrated, it’s the weapons they are using that pose an equal danger.”
“Mr. President,” asked the
“This administration doesn’t formulate policy on rumors, only on facts. As I’m sure you can appreciate, Mr. Loren, the debris caused by such attacks makes it extremely difficult to identify the actual missiles used in the launchers we’ve found, and their country of origin. It’ll take time, possibly several months, to make that precise determination, if indeed we can find an identifiable weapon part in the rubble.”
“Excellent!” said the Chief of Naval Operations, watching the telecast on the Oval Office TV.
“Yes,” agreed the Army Chief of Staff Kruger. “This way, those bastards in Pyongyang won’t expect a hit for about a year.”
The other Joint Chiefs, the Air Force’s Lesand and the Marines’ General Taft, also approved of the President’s adroit political — indeed, military — sleight of hand.
“Eleanor,” said the CNO, “I suggest we arrange a leak in a few days that we suspect the launchers are from Iran, or Syria. Give our North Korean thugs an even greater sense of security.”
She nodded. “We should feed it to Loren at the
It made Eleanor uncomfortable, lying to the press, and she only ever did it when absolutely necessary. Now, any reservations she might have had were squashed by the need to avenge the mass murder of so many Americans, in the same way the Clinton administration had to lie about an “accidental” bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in May of ’95 when NATO intelligence discovered the Chinese were using their embassy to forward Milosevic’s orders to the Yugoslav embassy.
As she left the Oval Office to pass her note to the President, the Joint Chiefs were having their own ad hoc council of war. The CNO initiated it with a sudden turnabout suggestion, while Eleanor Prenty was attending the press conference, to conscript “George C. Scott” into unofficial service for the Joint Chiefs. “Why not,” the CNO suggested, “invite him to
Lesand concurred, but added, “He’ll have to plan it carefully to the very last detail. We don’t want to be even peripherally involved in a repeat of Jimmy Carter’s ‘Operation Rice Bowl’ fiasco when our Special Forces flew into that talc-fine dust storm—”
“The
“Well, whatever kind of boob it was,” said the CNO, “it downed our Sea Stallions at Desert One and scuttled the whole damn mission, so instead of getting our hostages out of Iran, we only worsened the situation.”
Lesand nodded gravely. “Rice Bowl” in 1980 had ended in disaster as a Delta Special Ops helo, choked by the talc-fine dust, collided with one of the big C-130 Hercules. The aborted mission had not only failed to rescue any of the American hostages in Tehran, 250 nautical miles away, but had also left the Iranian Muslims with five state-of- the-art Sea Stallions, which, because they’d been abandoned intact in the desert rather than being “sanitized”— gutted of highly secret codes and equipment — meant that the Iranians also garnered an enormous intelligence coup. It had cost Carter the presidency, and scores of Pentagonians their careers.
“Why not?” said Lesand, seizing the CNO’s inspired APM — ass-protecting maneuver — of letting Freeman take all the risk. “Douglas is always champing at the bit, a warrior born and bred. But where do we get the team? No one in his right mind—”
“Douglas,” said the CNO, his use of Freeman’s first name contributing to the apparent reasonableness of the proposal, “has his own SpecOp team.”
“In service?” pressed Lesand.
“No. Ex-service Special Forces guys.” Which was as pleasant a way as any of pointing out, without actually saying it, that if nonservicemen with no ID, using off-shelf weapons of choice, the weapons’ MID numbers removed — not by some half-assed-qualified ex-armorer behind a pawnshop cage but laser-removed by the agency — were caught, it could be officially “deniable” that these were U.S. troops, but rather that they were renegade former soldiers, like the patriotic readers of magazines such as
In short, the Chief of Naval Operations, Lesand of the Air Force, Army General Kruger, and the Marines’ Taft were agreed that unlike “Operation Rice Bowl,” or “Desert One Slaughter,” as the media and public had
