“METAs?”
“Messages to activate,” explained Eleanor. “It’s an NSA acronym.”
Freeman’s brain was racing, despite his acute fatigue. “So you knew? I mean, NSA put the forensic analysis together with my computer files on Lake Khanka and Gayvoron?”
“It was your sulfur mine around which all the forensic stuff jelled,” Eleanor told him.
“Then it’s a matter for our air force,” said Douglas. “I expect Moscow’ll be as pleased as we are to take out a terrorist camp.” He was thinking of how the CIA and KGB had joined forces and worked so well together to prevent a planeload of Russian nuclear scientists from leaving Russia for Iran.
“It’s not as easy as that,” cautioned Eleanor. “The president’s been in contact with the Russian premier. There’s no way Moscow will allow a bombing mission on Russian soil. Besides, even if they did, we’d need much more precise targets than Lake Khanka and environs. Do you know how big that place is?”
“Of course, you’re right,” commented Freeman, embarrassed by not having seen such an obvious problem. He sure as hell needed some sleep.
“Plus,” continued Eleanor, “once it gets out that we want to go after them by bombing, there’ll be an outcry from every environmental group in the world. Can you imagine it, Douglas? Americans bombing a hallowed bird sanctuary? We’re hated enough already around the world, without every bird lover and Audubon Society on earth screaming bloody murder!”
“So what’s the best they’ll allow us?” pressed Freeman. “What kind of force can we mobilize?”
“Moscow’ll allow an MEU to be ferried in by air and for us to hit the terrorists’ camp. But we’ve only got twenty-four hours, max.”
The general was rapidly estimating how much time it would take for a SOC MEU, a special-operations-capable Marine Expeditionary Unit, of two thousand men to be dispatched, fight a winter battle, win, and withdraw. “That’s hardly enough time to—”
“Well, that’s all the time they’ve given us, Douglas. It’s nonnegotiable. Moscow wants to clean up its backyard terrorists as much as we do ours. But even with all the goodwill we’ve engendered between us since the end of the Cold War, they’re still very prickly about the whole thing. It’s a political minefield for the guys in the Kremlin. We’re damned lucky they’ll let us in. Thank God for the KGB-CIA joint venture against the nuclear scientists trying to hightail it to Iran. At least that’s set a precedent.”
“Well, do we have any HUMINT on the area?”
“We have several agents out of Harbin. Taiwanese sleepers. CIA has asked them to send out burst intel transmits to the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwanese straits. Our MEU attached to the fleet will be going in from the Yorktown.”
“Well, that’s the best news I’ve heard so far.” Freeman’s last SpecOp, into North Korea, had gone in from Yorktown. It was a 45,000-ton Wasp-class LHD-26B landing-helicopter-dock ship, part of the U.S. Marines’ “Gator Navy,” so-called because of the potent amphibian force the marines had proved to be in the victorious but bloody landings from Guadalcanal to Saipan. It was complete with forty-five assorted choppers, several of the hybrid Ospreys, two V/STOL–Vertical or Short Takeoff or Landing planes — Joint Strike Fighters, and three LCACs, which were hovercraft landing craft.
“We have another piece of information,” Eleanor told him. “Our military attaché in Berlin has received HUMINT from Germany that nanotech high-precision lathes are on the move east. Anyway, the president wanted me to seek your counsel.”
“I don’t know,” mused Freeman. “It’ll be a very tricky operation, any which way you look at it.”
“That’s why,” said Eleanor, “the president wants you to lead it. Will you?”
The moment he hung up, Margaret knew. “Surely you didn’t accept it?” she asked. Freeman said nothing. “Oh, Douglas! I’m no politician, but can’t you see what this is?”
“An honor.”
“Honor? It’s — oh, Douglas—”
“I wish you’d stop saying, ‘Oh, Douglas.’ Anybody’d think I’d robbed a goddamn bank!”
But she wouldn’t be deterred. “I’m no military expert, Lord knows, but I can see a trap when it’s staring me in the face. I haven’t spent all my time going to bridal showers with Linda Rushmein.”
“Margaret!” he said sharply. “It’s obvious why I was chosen. I’m the only goddamned general who’s—”
“Don’t use that language, please!”
“I’m the only general,” he said, looking for all the world like Patton uncaged, “who’s had firsthand experience in the taiga, in the U.N. mission I led. I mean, my whole team has firsthand experience of the terrain, and—”
“Douglas, Douglas, do you honestly believe that you were the first choice?”
He said nothing, but the tension could have been cut with a knife.
“It’s a trap, dear, a political trap. Even I can see that. No one who cares about his career would dare volunteer. Can’t you see they’re using you? What do they care? They’re appealing to your ego, Douglas.”
He gave her a long, hard look and turned sharply about, snatching up the TV remote. “It’s a matter of honor. The president asked. The president of the United States of America has asked me to finish the job that I started. He’s obviously got more confidence in me than—” He strode off into the living room to get the latest update.
Margaret sat, or rather slumped, down in her lounge chair. After a long silence, she asked, very carefully, “Does the president have any idea of how many terrorists are in this wretched camp near—”
“Lake Khanka,” he said quietly. “No, no one knows. It could be a small outfit or a big complex. We’ll have to wait for a recon report from HUMINT.”
“From what?”
“People on the ground. In the area. Spies,” he said irritably. “Informers.”
She had her arms folded tightly below her breasts, the normally soft features of her face hardened in her fear for him. She remembered how Catherine used to pray for him every night he was away. “You could be killed.”
“If their base, if those people, get a chance to tool up for hypersonic weaponry, Margaret, a lot of people, including a lot of Americans, are going to get killed.”
To make matters even worse for Margaret, CNN’s Marte Price, in an exclusive from Washington, D.C., was confirming that the die had been cast. As she spoke a retaliatory U.S. force was being readied for an attack on the terrorists’ camp at some as yet undisclosed location overseas. CNN’s Pentagon correspondent reported that the force would most likely be deployed from one of the United States’ carrier battle groups. Such a group would most likely consist of a carrier, two frigates, two guided-missile Aegis cruisers, four destroyers, a replenishment vessel, and two nuclear attack submarines, all in the service of protecting a Wasp-class helo carrier transport carrying 2,100 combat troops of a Marine Expeditionary Unit under the command of a “full-bird” colonel. It was not known, she told her viewers, who would lead the assault, but it was rumored by confidential sources within the administration and the Pentagon that several of the armed services’ highest-ranking field commanders had strenuously objected to any precipitous action, citing the unmitigated disaster that was President Carter’s attempt in 1980 to rescue American hostages in Iran in a similar “in-out” lightning strike. It seemed that no one who valued their career prospects wanted anything to do with what Marte Price was characterizing as a “high-risk undertaking.”