Payback

Omura at virtually point-blank range, had been “stopped hot,” as they said on the police shooting range, by the newly arrived Hagvar vest, “thank God for that new Hagvar stuff.”

“Hagvar,” said Suzuki as he covered Omura’s face with the blood-soaked newspaper. “What kind of a name is that? Sounds like some Nordic god. Hagvar!”

“I don’t know exactly what it is,” said Jenny Osaka. “Some fish stuff and new Kevlar. Whatever it is, we owe our lives to it.”

“Amen to that.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Upon hearing yet another news clip of Freeman calling the North Korean government “scumbags” and “the gutless child murderers of Pyongstink,” General Lesand, amid a group-viewing by the Joint Chiefs, shook his head again. “The President better put a leash on that man.”

“Yes,” agreed the Army Chief of Staff.

“No,” demurred the Chief of Naval Operations, surprising his colleagues. “Not yet.” The CNO was a wiser, older man than the Air Force, Army, and Marine Chiefs, and he reached back in memory to the unbleeped words of a sound tape of the inimitable Winston Churchill, who, in his speech to celebrate the first substantial victory against the Nazis’ vaunted Afrika Korps at El Alamein in 1942, warned his already weary and blitzed population, “Now this is not the end, this is not even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

There would be battles yet to come and, Freeman’s diplomatic failures notwithstanding, there would be more paybacks to come until the scumbags’ nests were found and destroyed, as many as possible per one hit but, if necessary, as Aussie said, “one by bloody one until the job is done.”

On the Yorktown, as earth passed into night and a translucent blue haze lay over the East Sea and the Sea of Japan, the sun a disc of beaten gold, Freeman, a sheaf of e-mail hard copies in his hand, climbed high up the stair ladders to find a place on the ship’s Vultures’ Row, not because it afforded him a vulture’s view of the dangerous, accident-prone business of combat aircraft taking off and landing, but because it afforded him a private place where he could be alone and think upon yet another victory in his legendary career. He thought of Bone, for whom a memorial service, with a recovering Chief Petty Officer Tavos attending, would be held on Yorktown.

The general read the congratulations from the President, the Congress, and the Joint Chiefs, as well as the news story sent to him by his son about the fierce citizen-lobbying in Congress for a law requiring all commercial aircraft using U.S. airspace to install Israeli-type anti-MANPAD technology. Most important to him was the e-mail from Mr. and Mrs. Jason Brady. It told the general of their pride in a son who had served so gallantly, and thanked the general for the first e-mail he’d sent — to them, assuring them that their son had died in combat, that the North Koreans had not captured him at all, that he had not been tortured, as the “donkey press” had first reported.

The general thought too of his fears, of the persistency during his nocturnal sleep of the faces of men and women with whom he had served, some of whom had been killed. What place his obsession with sweet onions and blue exhaust had to do with anything he didn’t know, and was too wise to pursue it now, for it was like trying to make sense of any complex array of thoughts and images that populate our conscious and unconscious dream hours. He knew there must sometimes be connections — perhaps there was more to the sweet onion odor he had detected coming from the kitchens aboard McCain prior to the launch of the RS. And maybe not. Only time would tell, he mused: yesterday is history, today is a gift, tomorrow a mystery.

The next message, and the last before he and the team would go to bed before the media frenzy that was awaiting them at the end of their two-stop flight to San Francisco via Hawaii, was from Margaret. She said she had gotten a new DVD but didn’t know how to work it. “Would you help me, Douglas?” she wrote.

“I will,” he murmured to the wind, smiling to himself as he remembered their time in bed before he’d left on the mission, how she’d giggled at his talk about Walla Walla onions. Then suddenly, like a name you’ve been trying for days to recall, Freeman made the vital “connect” between the low-sulfur sweet onions and the bluish-tinged, high-sulfur exhaust from the missiles. It was the answer to what had been bugging the general ever since he’d spoken to the President before the mission, when he’d been talking about how “a grain of sand in your sock” keeps irritating you when “you can’t find it.” The onion-missile connect had meshed with one of sociologist Riefelmann’s Zusammenschmelzen moments, the fusing of two initially unrelated thoughts, in this case onions and missiles, into a third. The latter was Freeman’s realization that it might, indeed it should, be possible for CIA forensics to analyze the burned sulfur detritus from the Guatemalan-triggered explosion at Dallas/Fort Worth, where the backup MANPAD had been detonated in the relatively confined space of the waiting room. And then to match the chemical fingerprint of the sulfur’s unique structure with that of sulfur mines in North Korea or elsewhere in the world, and to trace the transportation of the sulfur from the mine to where the missiles were actually being made. Then the U.S. could send in a team to execute an in, do it, out mission, or what Aussie would call “a little mine demolition.”

Exhilarated by the thought, the general was also exhausted, as were his men. Right now, he and the team needed rest. Even so, when it came time for him and his team to disperse at LAX, to return to their women, see their children, and get back to Monday night football, to take time to live — sort of — the general had yet another surprise for the team.

EPILOGUE

At Los Angeles Airport, Freeman shook each hand, looking straight and clear into each man’s eyes. His eyes watered, he explained, because of “all the crap and dust blown up here around LAX from the hot Santa Anna winds.

“I’m going to need you guys when I plan our next mission — wherever that’ll be.” The team looked at him in astonishment, but Freeman didn’t blink, adding, “It could be sooner than we think, the way this world is. So I want one sure way of contacting each of you at any time. I don’t want to try chasing someone down because they’re out shopping with Mommy at Wal-Mart.” He grinned at Aussie. “Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Good.”