She heard a snort of derision from the other end. “I want to call you at fourteen hundred tomorrow. I know how busy you are, so I wanted to reserve a straight-through call, on scrambler, no matter whether you’re in conference or whatever.”
Eleanor shook her head — the man was impossible. An apology, immediately followed by a demand to have her office cleared for a call at 2:00 P.M. tomorrow: “No matter whether you’re in conference or whatever.” The nerve of the man, thought Eleanor. He wasn’t even on the active list, a man who’d been put out to pasture, really, and now this demand to drop whatever she was doing at the White House tomorrow the minute he called. Cradling the cordless between her left cheek and shoulder as she reached over to open the fridge door, she took out a jug of orange juice then turned to reach up and take a glass from the cupboard.
“Douglas, do you remember Paul’s letter to the Corinthians?”
“Which one?” he asked. “There are two.”
“First Corinthians, eight, one,” she said. “ ‘Knowledge puffeth up.’ ”
In response, he quoted Frederick the Great’s
Light-headed with fatigue and hunger, despite the hit of the orange juice, Eleanor was feeling faintly hysterical.
“General, what do you call a Scotsman with three hundred girlfriends?”
“Don’t know.”
“A shepherd,” she said, giggling.
“That, Ms. Prenty,” the general replied with mock gravitas, “is politically incorrect.”
“Oh,” she responded. “Then why does a Scotsman wear a kilt?”
“Why?”
“Because a zipper would frighten the sheep.” She howled with laughter. “Are you still there, General?”
“Combat fatigue,” he joshed. “You get tired enough, you get silly. Major problem with flyers.”
She was so tired, she thought for a moment he meant junk mail flyers.
“I’m not in combat!” She yawned.
“Yes, you are,” he said, his tone suddenly changing. “We’re all in this war, civilian and enlisted.” It was a chilling comment, which sidelined her Scotsmen jokes, and she thought immediately of Jennifer…and then Tom, whom she and Jennifer saw only occasionally when he drove in from his Georgetown think tank. “I guess you’re right, Douglas.”
“Good night.”
Too tired to shower and change into her nightgown, she lay down on the tan velour love seat in the living room, the phone beside her, and tried to sleep. She couldn’t. Douglas Freeman’s comment about the flyers made her wonder why he’d mentioned them — perhaps because he’d been given carte blanche by the President he might be thinking of sending his team in on a HALO — high-altitude, low-opening — jump from one of the big Hercules transports. Even as she pursued sleep, she knew that there were dozens of U.S. flyers aloft in the darkness on combat patrol for America, some of their missions so long that their fighters and bombers had to be refueled two or three times during flight. One such long-haul Air Force transport would carry Freeman and his team of SpecFor warriors into harm’s way in — how soon did Douglas say? — six weeks at the earliest. The only way such crews were able to stay awake, Eleanor knew, was because of an open secret that armed forces public relations officers were forbidden to discuss when it came to long-haul “insertion” of a SpecOps team, namely that crews were popping five- to ten-milligram Dexedrine “go pills.”
CHAPTER TEN
Insertion to target was one thing, extraction from target was another kind of beast altogether. This was especially true if things, in Choir Williams’s understated phrase, got a “bit sticky.” It was a phrase that came up as the general briefed his assembled team about the “macro,” or 3-D computer map, he’d selected for SOCOM’s Direct Action Mission 134, against the out-of-town Kosong launcher/missile warehouse. Freeman’s laser pointer moved south on the three-dimensional map from Kosong down along the North Korean coastline to the DMZ eleven miles away and back again to the location of the warehouse, a rectangular building that lay north-south between the two arms of a Y-shaped path that led up from a crescent-shaped beach. “Gentlemen,” he addressed the eight-man team, pausing to say, “that doesn’t mean you, Aussie.” There was a loud guffaw from Salvini who, with Choir Williams, was delighted with the general’s friendly jab at Aussie Lewis.
“Oh, very amusing,” said Aussie wryly, the give-and-take familiarity between the general and his team surprising Gomez and Eddie “Shark” Mervyn, two of the five SEALs Freeman had drawn from the nonactive list. The other three “nonactives” were “Bone” Brady, a six-foot-six African-American ex — college basketball star; Lieutenant Johnny Lee, a multilinguist; and a burly chief petty officer, Samuel Tavos.
Like most Special Forces, the five SEALs Freeman had chosen to join himself, Aussie, Choir, and Sal were used to the informal camaraderie of Special Forces, but it was obvious to them that Freeman had established a remarkably close bond with his former comrades.
“What we’ve got here,” explained Freeman, “is a quarter-mile-wide north-south fishhook-shaped harbor on North Korea’s rugged east coast. I emphasize
“Harbor entrance is narrow,” continued Freeman, “less than a quarter-mile wide. Coastline along the southwest aspect of the harbor continues out seaward for a half mile, forming the shank of a fishhook shape, and ends up with an “up yours” finger of land jutting northward into the Sea of Japan, which
Aussie Lewis glanced at the five “retired” volunteer SEAL combat swimmers. If you saw a Jimmy leg, a nervous up-and-down knee motion, it was a sure sign that the owner was anxious. There was no movement, however, among the five “Sheilas,” as Aussie had cheekily but good-naturedly dubbed them. In fact, if anything, the Sheilas looked bored, impatient for more details.
“General,” inquired Gomez, “has it occurred to anyone that the North Koreans might guess that our CIA forensic guys could have traced the MANPADs’ MID numbers to the Kosong depot?”
“Good point, Gomez. I’m pretty damned sure they know our CIA labs would detect the launchers’ numbers sooner or later, but that we wouldn’t dare risk a hit on Kosong because we’d know they’d be ready for us.”
“Either that,” put in Eddie Mervyn, “or they wanted to deliberately taunt us like they do every day along the DMZ and in Panmunjom. Dare us to do something, so they’ll have an excuse to resume their nuke reactor program. So they’ll have a reason to cut off nonproliferation talks.”
Freeman was pleased his specialists had kept savvy with the political situation, something that, like their foreign language training, distinguished them and the Green Berets from regular forces.
“Who can tell?” said Aussie wisely. “The North Korean Communist Party in Pyongyang is one of the most psychotic the world’s ever seen. Right up there with Saddam, Pol Pot, and Adolf.”
“Could be,” posited Choir, “that they don’t expect our guys to trace the launcher MID numbers at all. I mean, it’s one thing to put a launcher under an electron microscope, laser, or whatever, but they might not know we can match the number to a specific depot. That would mean we had a spy in North Korea tracking Kosong inventory.”
“Do we?” asked Aussie. “Have a spy in Kosong?”
“You think the agency’s going to tell me?” asked the general.
“No,” said Shark Mervyn, so called because of his swim speed attained with the Jhordan flippers, the revolutionary rubber swim fins that the U.S. Navy typically rejected when they were initially offered them by the ever-innovative Freeman but which had now become de rigueur for many combat swimmers, and mandatory for any combat swimmer on a Freeman mission. Aussie, Choir, and Sal, as well as Shark Mervyn, knew that not even the
