Payback

children on these three planes. Canadians have had a free ride for the last fifty years under our defense umbrella. The damn root causes now are the same as the root causes on 9/11—those Arab loonies who hate Israelis more than they care about their own ‘martyr’ children hate us and the Brits and the Aussies so much, they’re obsessed with killing us. Not our military, mind you — oh no, blowing up a plane full of poor kids whose big crime was going to visit London. By God, if I had my way I—”

“Turn the TV off,” advised Margaret. “It’s bad for your blood pressure. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

And wasn’t that the truth, he thought. He’d done some great work for the government. They knew it, he knew it, but, crises aside, they didn’t want him. “A loose cannon!” the State Department had said. “George Patton’s ghost,” the doves had called him. “Out of control.”

Well, yes, all right, he wasn’t always that diplomatic, but, goddammit, in the field he was at his best.

Marte Price was back on-screen, but it was a few seconds before he consciously registered her appearance, the general momentarily lost in the reverie of old memories, Marte Price’s words unheard as he remembered her breaking the news of how on coming up against the crack Siberian Sixth Armored Corps in the dreadful depths of a minus-sixty-two-degree Lake Baikal winter, he’d ordered his armor to retreat “with all possible speed.” Not since the withdrawal of the Marines from the Chosin Reservoir in the Korean War or the withdrawal from Vietnam had the United States seemed so humiliated. But at least the Marines had been true to the Corps’ Semper Fidelis—Always Faithful — and had refused to leave their dead, and it was a heroic, fighting withdrawal along the valley road from the reservoir, with the Chinese Communists swarming down on the bedraggled American column from the snow-covered hills on either side. Their commander would deny it was a retreat, characterizing it instead as “an advance in another direction.” But when the American public had heard during the U.S.-led intervention in the Far East that Freeman — he whose favorite military dictum, like that of Patton, was Frederick the Great’s “L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace”—Audacity, audacity, always audacity — had ordered his armor crews to retreat in haste from the Siberian Armored, there was a similar mood of shame that had not been experienced since the frantic withdrawal of the U.S. from Saigon. As Freeman’s M1 Abrams, to the disgust of his tank commanders, fled the Russian T-80s, which, sensing fright, only increased their rate of pursuit through the taiga’s deep snow and forest, Freeman had kept asking his meteorological officer for the temperature. The general’s action, reported the American division’s psychiatrist later, had seemed to fit the classic definition of avoidance behavior under pressure. His apparent obsession with the temperature was typical of people under extraordinary stress, like anxious travelers who, laden down with anxiety about flying, bookings, and business meetings, will suddenly turn all their attention to some inconsequential detail of clothing, where an errant piece of fluff or tiny stain on a jacket is seized upon as a worry bead in order to find temporary refuge from the far more seemingly unmanageable problems at hand. In Freeman’s case, the psychiatrist saw the general’s obsession with the temperature of the “damn forest” as Freeman’s second in command put it, as a classic example of “extreme” avoidance behavior. Several of the U.S. tank platoon commanders were in tears of utter frustration as they were commanded by Freeman to run away, at full speed, from the pursuing Russian armor. Yes, it was true that they were outnumbered by the Russians two to one, but for the Americans, the descendants of the men who fought up the slopes of Mt. Surabachi, fighting Japanese every step of the way before planting Old Glory atop it in the hell of the battle for Iwo Jima, the humiliation of this U.S. retreat at speed, as snow and forest whipped by, was too much. With the wind-chill factor, the temperature hit minus sixty-seven, and while several M1s were taken out by the T-80 hounds despite the M1s’ evasive twists and turns, the thermometers dropped to minus sixty-nine, at which point Freeman abruptly ordered his M1s, through his second in command, Bob Norton, to make a U-turn en masse and engage “targets of opportunity.” Sensibly, the Russians slowed, so as not to overrun and risk “blue on blue,” or, in this case, “red on red.”

“What changed his mind?” yelled a tank commander, bringing his 125mm to bear on the hitherto pursuing Russian T-80s.

“Dunno,” said his driver. “Maybe Bob Norton shamed him.”

But no one had shamed Douglas Freeman. He had sprung a trap born of the kind of attention to detail, to the kind of crucial minutiae for which he’d become known over the years. He knew that at minus sixty-nine Fahrenheit the waxes in the T-80s’ more poorly refined Russian lubricating oils would start to settle out, despite the heat of the engines. This meant that whereas the American M1 Abrams would keep running, the Russian T-80s’ fuel and hydraulic lines at minus sixty-nine degrees would quickly gum up, the waxes like cholesterol-clogged arteries. So that now the American armor made sweeping U-turns in the snow, the full-fledged retreat of only minutes before becoming a full-fledged attack against the Russian T-80s, which were coughing, spluttering, and stopping, “sitting ducks,” the T-80s not only unable to turn on their tracks but unable to rotate or swivel their 125mm main gun turrets.

It was a slaughter not seen since the crushing defeat exacted by the Israeli armies against the numerically superior divisions of Arab armor in the ferocious Six-Day War.

Overnight, “Freeman the Runner” had become “Freeman the Fox.” But that was years ago, and although he and his SpecFor team of Aussie Lewis, Choir Williams, Sal Salvini, and Medal of Honor winner Captain David Brentwood had done brilliant work since, all over the world and at home in the Pacific Northwest in the world war against terrorism, he and his team were “demobilized” as quickly as he’d been called to serve in crises. For while, like Patton, he had a genius for war, he was, in the words of National Security Advisor Eleanor Prenty and others in preceding administrations, an “unmitigated disaster” in peace.

Though a man capable of deep reflection, Douglas Freeman was in the main a man of action and a persistent advocate of his own ideas. Which was why he was more than surprised now to receive a call from Eleanor Prenty, who, after reading Jenkins’s elegant biography of Winston Churchill, found herself repeatedly struck by the differences and similarities between Douglas Freeman and England’s greatest prime minister. Churchill, like Freeman, at times annoyed others with the pushy side of his personality, but this side was always balanced by an unfettered willingness to dive into danger or, as Churchill’s cousin on his American mother’s side would have said, “into harm’s way” for his country as well as for his personal ambition. But there the analogy ended, for while Churchill brilliantly excelled in politics, Freeman did not. His place was in the field.

Eleanor said nothing about the Churchill analogy, flattery not her strong suit.

“General Freeman. Eleanor Prenty here.”

“Douglas, please,” he said, switching the TV to Mute.

“Douglas, you’ve no doubt seen the news?” He could feel the fatigue in her voice.

“I have. Those — bastards.”

“Any ideas? I thought I’d pick your brain — pass your ideas off as my own at the next National Security meeting.” It was nice of her, he thought, to say that, and a courtesy — it must have been terrible at the White House as the news came in, worse than 9/11 in some ways, three simultaneous widely spaced hits, an east-west- south triangle of catastrophies, the vulnerability not just of New York but of the entire nation on show, which was no doubt, Freeman told Eleanor, why al Qaeda had done it.

“You think there’s any possibility it’s not al Qaeda?” she asked.

“Maybe a branch plant, like Hamas, but these hits, same time…Look back at the attacks on our embassies in Africa, the USS Cole, et cetera. Terrorists like the number three. Question is, Ms. Prenty —”

“Eleanor.”

“Question is, Eleanor, does it matter what name the scumbags use? We’ve been hit again.”

“You’ve had a lot of experience combating these people. Any chance that there might be a home-grown element involved? You know, a Timothy McVeigh, Oklahoma City type?”

“No, I don’t think so. Right-wing, left-wing nuts may be against the government, but when someone from abroad hits Uncle Sam, they draw together against the common enemy. I’m pretty sure what we’re looking at are raghead — offshore terrorists.”

“Well, Gen — Douglas,” began Eleanor, “I’m glad I picked your brain.” She paused. “How’s retirement?”

“Dreadful. This goddamned rule of ours that anyone in the military over sixty has to be put out to pasture is nuts. I’m fitter than when I was in my forties. Look at Doug MacArthur. He was seventy when he made the landing at Inchon. And that professor, Barzun, wrote From Dawn to Decadence at ninety-three. They still give him an office and—”

“Yes, Douglas, I take your point. But Professor Barzun isn’t expected to lead men into battle.”