Payback

“Goddammit, Robert E. Lee was fifty-six at Gettysburg, and had three horses shot from under him, and—” Freeman paused and took a breath. “Sorry, Eleanor. You’ve been courteous enough to seek my advice and here I am carrying on like a prima donna.”

“Well, Douglas,” she said good-naturedly, “you are a prima donna.”

“Yes, but I’m damned grateful to you for making the call. I appreciate that. I’ll put my thinking cap on and if I come up with anything that might be useful to the administration, I’ll give you a bell.”

“A bell?”

It was a Limey expression Freeman had picked up years before when doing a refresher Spec Ops training session with the elite British Special Air Service SAS at Brecon Beacons in Wales, a course that another American legend, Colonel Charlie Beckwith, a Green Beret captain at the time, had adopted for instructing U.S. Special Forces personnel.

“I’ll give you a bell,” the general explained to Eleanor, “call you.”

“Fine.”

“Ah, may I ask,” Freeman ventured, “did the Joint Chiefs suggest you call me or—”

“It was on my own recognizance,” she said.

“Huh. Well, that’s the nicest ‘no’ I’ve heard. So, I’m still in the doghouse with that bunch?”

“You’re not the only prima donna, Douglas. They like recognition too.”

“Touche! Bye!” he told Eleanor as they ended the conversation.

The point was that Freeman hadn’t had any recognition, any publicity, for at least a year. What was it, mused Freeman, that General Simons, a young Turk, a go-getter brigadier general at the Pentagon, had called him in a memo? “Granny Freeman.” Anybody over fifty-five in America was relegated a has-been.

“By God—” Freeman had begun as he put the phone down.

“Nice chitchat,” said his sister-in-law from the kitchen. Was it a question or a criticism? She had this tone that permanently fluctuated between disdain and bland observation. Freeman was never sure.

“It was the White House,” he told her. That should rock her socks.

“I don’t like garlic,” she replied, ignoring the White House remark, “so I’ve made a Caesar salad with romaine and low-fat egg. You can fill up on bread rolls.”

“Fine,” he said, mumbling subversively to himself, “Making a damn Caesar without garlic!” Besides, he was a high-protein, low-carbohydrate general, something he insisted on, used to insist on, in his armored division’s mess.

“What was that about, Douglas?” asked Margaret.

“Nothing,” he lied, his sister-in-law one of the few people to whom he found it more expedient, and less troublesome, to lie, something he normally despised, but he’d always found it particularly difficult to deal with what he characterized as overbearing women, unless they were in the military, in the same world. Which had made for his on-and-off romance with the famed, tough-minded, if beautiful, Marte Price of CNN, a woman against whom, many interviewees had concluded, “there was no known defense.”

Freeman thought of Marte now as a counterpoint to his sister-in-law, against whom he had no known defense and who, on his annual obligatory visit, caused him more irritation than the Siberian Sixth. Marte Price, veteran correspondent of many wars, was outwardly tougher than his sister-in-law, but once the dust of her hard, unyielding battlefield interviews settled, she left the fighting behind, and in Iraq one night had presented a softer, feminine persona in the metamorphosis from khaki, flak jacket, and goggled Fritz to perfumed lace. As battle had raged in the distance, the tough, world-wise face of someone who’d seen and reported on the worst of war took on the gentle smile of a woman who unashamedly confessed her need to receive passion with the same urgency as she was willing to give it. She had taken him by storm that night, giving a new meaning to his axiom of L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace.

“Was this a planned mission, General,” she had asked sweetly in the quiet that had followed their tryst, “or a target of opportunity?”

He had never answered, any reply he might have been formulating stymied by a fierce salvo of Republican Guard artillery. Two hours into a fast U.S. Armored counterattack, the Republican Guard was quickly silenced. But by then Marte was back on air, and in the way that some of the most important questions are put in abeyance by events, Marte had never asked the question again. Had she been asking if he loved her? He didn’t know for sure, and if that is what she had meant, he still didn’t know the answer. He liked her, of course, but was she, as she jocularly, if basely, put it, a “target of opportunity”?—good sex for a legendary general whose secret was that he was inwardly shy of women unless they, like him, were fellow warriors? And thoughts of his late wife, Catherine, interceded now and then, causing him to question his loyalty. In his soldier’s heart he held loyalty as the preeminent virtue, and although it had been years since Catherine’s death, he still missed her, despite the fact that she’d liked Jane Fonda even after the actress happily posed for a North Vietnamese photo op, sitting on one of the AA guns they used to shoot down Americans. Freeman had suggested Ms. Fonda should have sat on an antipersonnel mine instead. It was one of the few political arguments he and Catherine had had — something that he and Marte Price had avoided under the most ancient military axiom of “no shop in the mess”—in his and Marte’s case, “no shop in the bed.”

He’d expected a call from her before or during a commercial break in CNN’s coverage of what was fast becoming known throughout America as the “Triple Play.” In fact, he had thought it had been Marte calling him, for his “military take” on the attacks for CNN, and was surprised when he’d heard Eleanor Prenty on the line.

“We have to do what the Israelis do,” Freeman told the TV. “Hit ’em back. Fast. ’Course, the goddamn namby-pamby liberals’ll start whining about root causes again.”

“Must you always be so blasphemous?” said Margaret. “Really, Douglas, for a man of your supposed talents, you’re appallingly vulgar.”

Freeman rose in heat, his anger pumped up not only by what the terrorists had done but by the impotence of his retired status, as well.

“I’m off. This is the last visit, Margaret. I’ve kept my word to Catherine religiously, visiting you every year. But you are a royal pain in the butt! I consider my duty to Catherine fulfilled.”

“A man of your word, I see.”

He paused at the kitchen door. “I don’t understand you. You insult the hell out of me. You obviously don’t like me visiting. What possible reason…” And then she looked at him hard, unhesitatingly into his gunmetal-blue eyes, and her firm, discipline-red lips quivered. In that second Douglas Freeman understood the meaning of her emotional hurt, the tremor passing through her. This real Margaret beneath the always immaculately dressed woman in her meticulously kept house. And he flushed with embarrassment, finally realizing that his sister-in-law’s hostility, her often cold demeanor, had all been a front to cover the guilt she obviously felt for having coveted her sister’s husband. Like a hitherto blurred picture snapping into focus, the sudden sensuousness of her mouth explained at once something that had always perplexed the legendary warrior — why his sister-in-law had never asked him to stop his yearly weeklong visit, why she hadn’t released him from his wife’s deathbed request — to “keep an eye out,” as Catherine had phrased it, for her sister’s well-being. He stood there, guilty of one of the shallowest assumptions of callow youth: that aging invariably erodes sexual desire, that a woman — in this case, in her mid- fifties — could not possibly yearn for the kind of passionate intensity that he and Catherine had known when they were young and that he still longed for.

She was in love — only the quivery lip asking him not to go had revealed it, giving the lie to her usual buttoned-down sense of propriety.

“Stay for tea?” she said, the banal phrase pregnant with import, her normally stern gaze and bearing having given way to a schoolgirlish nervousness, her entire sophisticated frame seeming to have collapsed under the admission of her eyes.

“Thank you,” said Freeman gently, as flummoxed as she was about what to say next. “Perhaps later.” He paused, and the legendary commander, who had never been known to be at a loss for words, couldn’t think of anything else to say other than to make a vague hand gesture toward the living room.

“Yes, of course,” she replied, her voice having quickly recovered a tone of indifference. She turned abruptly to the sink. “I’m sorry.”

“No, no.” He went in to watch the TV again. FOX network was running a special.

“Huh,” grunted Douglas, clearing his throat awkwardly. “FOX put out a call for any amateur videos of the planes taking off.”