Payback

“No, sir. Not a pension wound. I’ll be okay.”

The general smiled at Lee’s “no pension wound,” but the others were so burned-out, as one of the Marines had observed upon their crawling out of the vomit-reeking RS, that even with the best will just now they couldn’t find anything to smile about. What made the mood even worse was that the huge ship, filled with 1,600 Marines and over a thousand officers and crew, was alive with computers, not only desktop military operational computers but hundreds of laptops, being used by on- and off-duty crew, and “every damn one of ’em,” as Freeman had observed somewhat sullenly, was showing the CNN/Al Jazeera feed. Until they’d entered the creamy white, ceramic-lined armory, none of his team, except for Gomez, had seen the TV picture of Bone. That had changed a second after Johnny Lee had entered the armory. The armory’s computer, on a swivel mount for armorers to check weight-to-power loads for Yorktown’s VTOL — vertical takeoff and landing — aircraft, as well as for the big ship’s helicopters, was now showing the latest CNN/Al Jazeera feed. The team fell into a gloomy silence when they saw Bone’s bandage-wrapped head filling the computer screen. He looked bruised, though with his black skin this was difficult to discern, his eyes bloodshot and fixed in a thousand-yard stare, which the team, but not the public at large, knew was the stare of a dead man. Gomez still couldn’t bring himself to look, averting his eyes from the screen, fixing his gaze instead on the armory’s bright red fire axe.

“Yes, Erin,” came Marte Price’s voice on CNN. “That’s the only picture Al Jazeera has of the man whom the North Koreans claim is an American Special Forces soldier. It’s a photo, I believe — a still shot, not from a video.”

“ ’Course it’s fucking still,” snorted Aussie. “He’s dead, you twit!”

“They must’ve dragged him out of the surf,” said Sal.

“Which is more than we did,” confessed Freeman, but it was said not in a tone of guilt but more in the manner of acknowledging a bad tactical error. The Marines, he knew, wouldn’t like it. They had a code: they never left their dead. Even during a terrible winter rout, such as the fighting withdrawal from the Chosin Reservoir in October 1950, with 120,00 °Chinese coming down at them from either side of the snow-covered valley, cutting off their retreat to Wonsan, they had fought carrying their dead. What would they think of the general, General Freeman, leaving one of his own behind off Beach 5?

But SpecOps was a different ball game. In an “INDIO”—in, do it, out — op, as many out of Fort Bragg’s SpecOp school called such missions as Freeman’s attack on Beach 5, everyone understood that if you took a “lethal” or were otherwise fatally wounded, rather than let you be taken prisoner it was your comrades’ responsibility to think of the team.

The NKA were calling Bone an “imperialist lackey, cannon fodder for American imperialist aggression against the freedom-loving people of the Democratic Republic of Korea.”

“Ever notice,” said Aussie, “how all these bloody dictators call their countries the ‘Democratic Republic’? Whenever you hear that, you know they’re fucking tyrants.”

Sal grabbed the big flat-headed bolt cutters after Gomez and Eddie had gone over the box for any signs of a trip mechanism wire or of tampering with the box’s sides, bottom, or lid. He found it impossible, however, to even slide the head of the big cutters far enough under the first of the four metal straps to get a grip.

“Fuck forensics!” said Aussie irritably, striding over and heaving the red fire axe out of its holder. “Here, let me have a whack at it. Stand back.”

The other seven tired men, including the general, did as he said, and Aussie brought the heavy fire axe down hard on the first metal band, which sprang apart, its zinging sound echoing in the armory. He whacked the second band, and they heard the wood splinter along with the vibration from the first band still reverberating. Aussie paused. None of them had slept after the grueling eight-hour mission, and the high adrenaline rush had been replaced by what Aussie habitually called the “three-ton-truck” that weighs anyone down after their body has been on a high-alert, high-stress job, made worse by people trying to kill you.

Aussie paused for breath, then whacked the box twice more and pried it open. “Well, I’ll be screwed!”

“Not by me, you won’t,” intoned Sal dryly.

“Nor by me,” said Choir — Johnny Lee, Gomez, Eddie, and the general all grinning like the proverbial Cheshire cat.

“It better not be fake,” said the general, looking down.

It wasn’t, the launcher sky blue, and, cradled by its side, the Igla 2C, its brownish translucent nose shining brightly against the armory’s white ceramic dazzle. And on the launcher’s shaft, the small yet distinct Korean lettering and MID number.

“Son of a bitch,” said Sal softly. “You did it, General.”

“We did it,” the general corrected him. “Only wish that Bone were here to see it.”

“Maybe,” said Gomez, “he is.”

Freeman shrugged noncommittally, then added, “Well, I know for sure who is going to see it — those lying sons of bitches in Pyongyang. They’re going to see that we caught them with the smoking gun. We’ll get it on CNN and Al Jazeera.”

“The American-haters,” put in Aussie, “won’t believe it.”

“You’re right,” the general replied. “But they’re not the ones we need to see it. We need every American and ally and potential ally in this war to see it — to see just what we’re up against — child-murderers.” The general paused and looked from man to man. “We, gentlemen, are going to do what JFK did when he gave those pictures of the Cuban missile sites to our U.N. ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, to take to the U.N.” Freeman smiled at the thought. “Stevenson asked the Soviets whether they had put any intercontinental ballistic missile sites within ninety miles of American soil. The table-thumping Soviets denied it, then Stevenson had his assistants uncover the map stand with all the photographs of the Cuban sites. Commie sons of bitches had to ’fess up, and Kennedy got their missile-loaded ships to turn back and dismantled the missile sites in Cuba. U.S. lost some good men getting those U-2 pix of the sites, like we lost Brady at Kosong. But we nailed the bastards.”

“Give ’em shite, General,” said Aussie.

“Rest assured, gentlemen,” promised Freeman, “I will. And I have a hunch that the White House isn’t going to want this ad hoc phone conference on scrambler at all. I think that they’ll want to hear about the contents of this box quickly in—”

“Plain bloody language,” cut in Aussie.

He was right. The White House did want to hear it in plain language. But not as bloody as that which normally peppered a soldier’s battlefield vocabulary, and so the Yorktown’s skipper, under the CVBG’s commander, Admiral Crowley, instructed Yorktown’s TV room’s satellite-to- ship-to-shore producer to put the general on a seven-second delay with the White House in order to delete any “impolitic rhetoric…vis-a-vis the North Koreans.”

The director of ship’s signals aboard Yorktown had to bleep Freeman four times in as many minutes as he “unloaded” and, as Marte Price would later report to the world, “lit into the North Korean Communists and their ‘running-dog lackey’ terrorists”—using the Korean phrase Johnny Lee had quickly tutored him in. The general also lit into “those damn closet Commies who still lie waiting in the new Russia to seize power, republic by republic”—a comment that struck everyone as odd, but the general wasn’t convinced North Korea didn’t have some “old commie supporters” abroad, as he told Aussie.

A sanitized version of the general’s Yorktown—White House conference, albeit with him standing in front of Yorktown’s camera, his sodden uniform stained by Brady’s blood, was broadcast on the networks an hour later. But even with the editing, the force of his words, fused like armor- penetrating rounds by Bone’s painful absence, still electrified America, along with the MANPAD evidence the team had uncovered, and the general’s explicit warning that for as long as America and her allies had been fighting terrorism, it was unfortunately, as the British had so persistently cautioned, “early days yet.”

“Muslim fanatics,” said Freeman, “are like any other. They are unrelenting. And to defeat them, the American-British-Australian coalition, and all those who have the guts and political will for the long haul against terror, must be just as unrelenting in our determination to exterminate the vermin. To do this we must spill our treasure and, what is much worse, our blood. But there is no other way.”

And so the general continued to give them “shite.” What the general habitually and contemptuously referred to as the “Useless Nations” for once became useful under the glare of not only the American public but anyone who