Huntington Winchester nodded, extracted his hand from the president’s grasp, and led the way to a portable bar. “I know you don’t drink, but I’m having one. You want a Coke or something?”
“Club soda with a twist.”
With the drinks in hand, the two men sat in easy chairs near the window. The White House was visible through the bare treetops of Lafayette Park.
Winchester took a sip of whiskey, then spoke: “The Marines tell me Owen, a sergeant named Martinez, and an Iraqi soldier named Abdul Something tried to pull a wounded Iraqi woman from a car with a bomb in it. They knew it was there and tried to rescue her anyway. Martinez said it was Owen’s idea, and I believe it. That was Owen; that was the way he thought. If there was a way, he would have tried it.
“The bomb exploded when they were only a few feet from the car. Killed Owen instantly, mangled Martinez’s arm. The Iraqi soldier escaped with only a concussion. The woman they were trying to rescue died in the helicopter that took her and Martinez to the hospital.”
The president didn’t say anything. Sometimes there isn’t anything to say.
Winchester took another pull on his drink, which looked like Scotch or bourbon. Then he said, “They’re trying to save Martinez’s arm. He may lose it.”
After a while, Winchester added, “You know the amazing thing? I don’t personally know anybody else who has a son or daughter in the military. None of the people on my staff, none of my executives, none of our friends, none of the people at my clubs, no one.”
The president sipped at his club soda.
“Kids from our socioeconomic group aren’t supposed to join the military,” Winchester continued. “They never think of it, and if they do, their parents demand that they change their minds. And having a draft wouldn’t change that. I was too young for Vietnam, but all the older men I know managed to avoid the draft back then some way or other, or if they did get drafted, they wound up on a general’s staff in Europe or Tokyo. Caught the clap three or four times and had a marvelous time. Not one of them actually went to Vietnam and risked his precious ass.
The president shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He was old enough for Vietnam, yet somehow ended up in the National Guard, which in those days rarely got called up for active service overseas. Today, in the absence of the tens of thousands of young men a military draft would bring in, the National Guard and reserves were getting called up for extended active duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Just how he managed to land that Guard billet when the waiting list had hundreds of names on it was a question that he had asked his father, who merely shrugged. “I didn’t call anyone,” his father the senator had said, and the president had believed him. The truth was the senator didn’t have to call — his influential friends would take it upon themselves to ensure that the senator’s son didn’t have to join the common herd in the Army and risk life and limb in combat. And no doubt that is what happened. That’s the way it has always worked in America for the scions of wealth and privilege.
Of course, the president had known all that even then. The question to his father was the sop to his conscience. He didn’t want to go to Vietnam — no one he knew did — and since he was his father’s son, he didn’t have to. Being mortal clay, he had let it go at that. Still, the memory of that little compromise with fate wasn’t anything to be proud of.
“Owen enlisted in the Naval Reserve three years ago,” Winchester continued, “after his sophomore year in college. He was in premed, knew he wanted to be a doctor, help people. Signed up to be a corps-man. Took all the training, did the drills on weekends, all of it, and then four months ago his unit was called up and sent to Iraq. He was in his first year of Harvard Medical School.
“His mother didn’t want him to join the military three years ago, and she threw a fit when his unit was called up. Demanded that I pull strings — call you and our senators and Admiral Adams.” Adams was the chief of naval operations. “Yeah, I know Adams, too. We’ve bird hunted in South Dakota together.”
He sighed and took another slug of his liquor. “I refused. Told her this was Owen’s choice, and I was proud of him. The truth was that if I had pulled strings and denied him his opportunity to serve, an opportunity he sought, he would have felt betrayed. I couldn’t do that to him.” He took a deep breath, exhalerJ slowly.
When the news came last week that he was dead, Ellen told me she was divorcing me. She’s moved out, hired a lawyer. The process servers are probably looking for me right now.”
“I’m sorry, Hunt,” the president said. He put the club soda on the stand beside the chair; he didn’t want any more of it.
“Owen was our only child. God fucking damn!” Winchester finished his drink. “So here I sit, dumping all this shit on you, as if you weren’t carrying enough of a load as it is.”
“You’re my friend, Hunt. Have been for twenty years.”
“You have a lot of friends,” Huntington Winchester said. He went to the bar and poured himself another, came back and resumed his seat. He eyed the president carefully.
“The real problem is that people in my class view the war on terror as a nuisance, something that doesn’t really affect us. Blue-collar kids join the military and risk their lives and limbs; notour kids, who are getting first- class educations and going to med school, or law school, or getting a finance degree and joining some Wall Street firm. We sit in our big houses with maids and chauffeurs and modern art collections and all the rest of it, reading in the newspapers about suicide bombers murdering people and watching the mayhem on television. We think it is someone else’s fight. It isn’t. That’s what Owen understood. It’sowr fight.”
“We are fighting the terrorists, Hunt,” the president said. “The best way we know how. Is it going well? Depends on whom you ask. But we’re doing our best. I assure you of that.”
Winchester wasn’t buying. “Our enemies are not the thugs who kidnapped that man from that car in Iraq, murdered Owen and that woman. Our real enemies are the people who put them up to it — the imams who preach hate, who are defending a fossilized religion that has been unable to come to grips with thirteen centuries of change, and the people who are financing terrorism, the scum who enjoy seeing other people suffer or who want to buy peace for themselves. Those people are the enemy.”
He picked up the daily paper, which was lying on the couch. “Look at this — another ignorant, illiterate holy man hiding in Pakistan has exhorted the faithful to attack Americans, anywhere they can be found.” He tossed the paper across the room. “Car bombs in London, shaped charges in Iraq, nuclear threats from Iran … ‘Death to America!’”
“Trying to silence individual voices won’t do much good, Owen. The war will be won when Muslims classify these people as lunatics and ignore them.”
“By God, those bastards want a fight,” Winchester snarled. “We should give them one. How many innocent people have to die to satisfy these fanatics’ thirst for blood before that wonderful day comes?”
The president didn’t reply. He glanced at Winchester’s drink, wishing he could have a sip of it.
“I have some friends,” Winchester continued, staring at the president’s face, “some of them Americans, the rest Europeans. We’ve talked about this for years, about the fact that we owe civilization more than paying taxes and tut-tutting at the fucking golf club.”
“You’ve given your only son, Hunt. Sounds to me as if you’ve put more than your share into the collection plate.”
“My friends and I are businessmen, bankers and shippers. The thought occurred to us that locked somewhere in the records of our daily businesses are the money trails that terrorists leave behind whenever they move money or material across borders. We do business worldwide. We can help find the people who are moving the money, and behind them, the people who are financing the terrorists. From there we can work backward to the preachers of hate who are firing up the fools.”
“Who are your friends?” the president asked.
Winchester gave him names and companies.
“And after you identify these people?” the president asked.
“We’ll put up the money to finance assassination squads to kill them.”
The president didn’t say a word. He didn’t really want to hear this. Any of it.
“I want your help,” Winchester continued, his eyes holding the president’s. “We have money, enough to fund an army, and we’re willing to spend it. But we need some help data-mining our records. It’s all there if we can just dig it out. And we need some hard men who can pull the trigger and thrust in the knife. I want you to find the people who can help us.”
“If this ever comes out,” the president said frankly, “the least that can happen is your companies gets a black
