“Well,” said David, “they might be right, General. A carrier and a nuclear sub isn’t too bad.”
Both men picked unenthusiastically at their appetizers, brought to them by a young, sullen Vietnamese woman who was complaining bitterly and loudly to a customer who looked like a regular, “… is because we Asian. FBI, Home Defense, come here. They think we terrorists. Blow up ships. We good citizens, Mr. Norman. We good citizens of United States.”
“I know, Sally. They’re just checking everyone out.”
“They check you out?” she asked, furiously wiping off a table at the back of the restaurant.
“Well, I don’t—” began Mr. Norman.
“See?” the woman said, using her white cloth as a pointer. “They no ask you. They think we terrorists. Not good for customers.”
“Neither,” Freeman told David, “is yelling,” the general pleased to see that his and David’s main dishes were being happily delivered by one of the two Vietnamese waiters whose smiling dispositions were a welcome respite from “Sullen Sally.”
The general, however, always a stickler for personal hygiene, scowled in disgust. “Did you see his fingernails?” he asked Brentwood, who, as unobtrusively as possible, pulled his right hand from the table, resting it in his lap, not sure of the state of his own fingernails. “Goddammit,” continued Freeman, “those two guys look as if they’ve been in a brawl.”
“Maybe over Sally,” joked David, trying to find as many cashews as he could in the mixed vegetable, chicken, and rice dish.
“Well, she roughed them up pretty good,” said Freeman. “Look at their wrists. And the one who served us — looks like she tried to strangle him. Either that or cut his throat. Great bloody welt around his neck.”
“I wouldn’t like to tangle with her,” said David.
Freeman hadn’t realized that Sally had overheard some of their comments, and she opened up on him. “I no beat anyone, mister. They,” she said, indicating the two waiters, “go down, help pull sailors from the sea. That how they get burn.”
David was embarrassed. Hadn’t Freeman heard about the local Dunkirk effort? Hundreds of people coming from all points on the sparsely populated coast to help in the rescue of the survivors, often at great personal risk, many of the rescuers having to wade out into burning oil slicks to reach the victims.
“Dey have burn all over body, helping sailors.”
“I’m sorry,” Freeman said. “I didn’t realize. You’ve done a great job. Thank you.”
Sally pointed back at the restaurant kitchen. “We give hot food to saved people. Many hours.”
“Yes,” said an abashed Freeman. “I’m sorry, miss. I was way out of line.”
David nodded, about to give his heartfelt thanks, but before he could respond further, they had visitors. Two morose-looking men in shades had entered the East-West Café and were walking toward their table.
“FBI or Homeland Defense,” Freeman told David, who was taking a sip of his green tea.
The agents identified themselves, and without any apology for interrupting the two men’s meal, explained that a NSA computer phone scan had picked up Freeman’s e-mail to Captain Brentwood, and would the general be good enough to explain his comment, of which they had a copy, that “I don’t think the towelheads are behind this at all.”
“By ’towelheads,’ gentlemen, I meant Arabs,” Freeman told them. “Yes, I know that their 9/11 attack was brilliantly coordinated and executed. But they used our planes, our technology. But do you know how many people this strait thing up here would require — what kind of operation you would need for military targets? Not Trade Towers, gentlemen, but two capital ships. Scores of the bastards — that’s what it would take to pull it off.”
“Who then, General?” asked one of the agents.
“Don’t know, son,” Freeman replied. “But I’ve been reconnoitering the area on my own. Not enough towelheads around. Haven’t seen one damn A-rab on this coast. Not one.”
“So you don’t think it’s Muslims?”
“I didn’t say that. What I am saying is that with all our carrier groups already spoken for on so many different terrorist fronts — Middle East, East Africa, West Africa, the Philippines, et cetera — we’d only have the McCain’s battle group to referee the Taiwan Strait, because we’re boxed in here. The most powerful nation in the world can’t move its warships out of the Northwest through this choke point because we don’t know what the hell’s going on.”
“What would you suggest we do?” asked the older of the two agents.
“Tell the government to give me access to Darkstar. I’ll use my own team.”
“Your team?”
“SpecFor boys. You just get me the authority — tell this Admiral Jensen to let me use Darkstar. I’ve got a few ideas.”
Once he’d heard this, all David could think of was getting back to Fort Lewis to see whether the endless exercising he had done since Afghanistan would prove the doctors wrong — whether through sheer will he could make his hitherto dead right arm, specifically its recalcitrant elbow, bend enough to support the front weight of the new F2000 bullpup rifle.
It didn’t matter who had started the war in the Taiwan Strait, the PRC — People’s Republic of China — or the ROC — Taiwan. If Taiwan fell, the quake through the world’s financial markets, especially that of the U.S., was certain to plunge the West into its worst recession since the collapse of ’87.
“Admiral,” the President appraised McCain’s Crowley, “you’re the only flat top we’ve got in this ball game. I’ll do what I can to bleed off elements from the Gulf and elsewhere, but if you wait for them to join you I suspect it’d be too late.”
“I understand, Mr. President. We’ll give a good account of ourselves.”
“I know you will. Your boy excited?”
It took Crowley aback that a President, in the midst of such a clear and present danger to the nation, was nevertheless so alert to the fact — the non — politically correct fact — that young men and women from West Point to Annapolis would see in the terrible act of war in the Strait of Juan de Fuca against their country the opportunity of a lifetime. Military men understood youth’s eagerness for combat. But for a civilian like the President, with no military experience, to be equally aware — though obligated, as the nation’s Chief Executive, to do all he could to stop the war — at once pleased and alarmed Crowley. However eager the uninitiated soldier might be, Crowley knew that the more a soldier saw of his grizzly trade up close, the less he wanted to see. Except for those like Douglas Freeman, who, in the darkness of his inner journeys, had recorded illegally in his combat diaries, that, “God forgive me, but, like old Georgie Patton, I do so love it.” The sting of battle beckoned to him, the ever-present call of Thermopylae, of being one of those who, on some great and terrible day, would save the nation in its hour of peril.
And here in Port Townsend, in his hotel bathtub, Douglas Freeman contemplated America’s present peril, the greatest, it seemed to him, since the nation teetered on the verge of destruction — the White House in flames, the British columns advancing, the Continental Army in bitter retreat. The call reverberated in him as deeply as it had in Churchill, another great aficionado of bathtub contemplation.