It was General Freeman’s comment about the unusual number of airborne birds cluttering the satellite images of the area that had first aroused the MEU’s intel chief’s interest. Freeman had pointed out to him that the fact of the birds constantly rising, circling, and landing on the lake—“neurotically,” Freeman had said — pointed to a terrestrial anomaly that “must be frightening the shit out of the cranes, et cetera,” causing them to take flight much more often than what an ornithological report confirmed was normal. If there was an earthquake, Freeman had told the officers’ mess on Yorktown, the entire area would liquefy.
“It’s liquefied already, General.”
“True. What I meant, Captain, was that even the wooded areas that we might rely on would simply become a vast slurry. Awful for armor.” What spooked the marines’ intel officer most was the sheer volume of bird traffic being monitored in the “blue tile country,” the blue-tiled inner sanctum of the U.S.S. McCain’s signal exploitation space compared to what was normal. “Neurotic,” he decided, was an apt description of the avian activity.
Now Colonel Tibbet was inspecting the line of Stinger-mounted Humvees. Two swivel-mounted boxes on each one of the ten vehicles contained four anti-aircraft missiles, eight Stingers in all, a potent defense system by any measure. After a quick inspection of these units, he walked quickly past the supply Humvees which, because his mission was not an amphibious-landing op as such, would have to be delivered, together with extra fuel bladders, by helo sling and would have to carry the total supply load, from prepackaged meals to gas masks, a job usually shared by the marines’ five-ton trucks which the Yorktown’s big landing craft ferried ashore after the troops disembarked. But this KITDO, or kick-in-the-door operation, as the troops called it, to Lake Khanka was to be confined to airlift only. Tibbet was about to leave the vehicle deck and walk up one of the many internal ramps between decks to the big hangar, when he paused and called back to Peter Norton, “How’d you know it was General Freeman who sent that memo?”
“My dad told me, sir.”
“Your dad?”
“Yes, sir. He used to be the general’s 2IC.”
“Huh!” said Tibbet, wondering why the son of a G-2 hadn’t risen any higher than a driver. No shame in it, but not what you’d expect.
General Freeman’s stentorian voice coming on the Yorktown’s public address system sounded as if it was coming from on high, its tone brooking neither interruption nor contradiction.
“Shit,” opined one marine. “Sounds like Moses.”
This is no apology, Peter Norton told himself. This was an old blood ’n’ guts Georgie Patton speech. And what made it doubly impressive or eerie, depending on the audience of two thousand marines scattered throughout the ship, was Freeman’s likeness on the monitors to the controversial World War II general.
“Reincarnation,” said a machine gunner.
“Bullshit,” responded another. “What d’you think, Norton?”
Peter shrugged. “Don’t know.”
“It’s going around town,” boomed the general, “that I’m a ‘tired old horse’! Now, I take umbrage at that. I’ve been a horse’s ass, but I’ve never been ‘old’!” There was a smattering of laughter ’tween decks and on the Yorktown’s roof, where the flight crews in the preemptory ballet of war were busily parking the first five of the helo carrier’s fifteen big Super Stallions, the choppers in takeoff line, rotors still, folded like the wings of enormous, sleeping dragonflies. “What makes it worse,” continued Freeman, “is that the joker who said I’m a horse’s ass was a liberal Monday-morning quarterbacking son of a bitch who wouldn’t know a condom from a balloon.”
The marines roared their approval, getting into it now. Marine Commander Tibbet, high up on the island’s bridge, was shaking his head as he stared down at Freeman who, he saw, had climbed atop one of the big Super Stallion’s cockpits, even as its deck crew fit-tested the helo’s cargo hook and banana-shaped sling.
“That comment about liberals’ll be on CNN in about five minutes,” Tibbet complained to Yorktown’s diminutive Captain Crowley. “The man’s got no sense of — I don’t know—”
Why, Lord, why, Crowley petitioned Heaven, did he have to have George Patton reincarnated on his boat? A naval captain, like anyone else, abhorred controversy. Technically, Crowley mused, as long as Freeman’s on my boat, he’s under my command. Technically.
“Now,” continued Freeman, “I want to tell you men and women that if I were you, I’d be a mite teed off at suddenly being under the command of a horse’s ass!” A roar of laughter erupted ’tween decks, flowing up from the vehicle and hangar deck over the ramps, spilling out onto the flight deck. “But I’m here to tell you that I’ve seen my share of combat, and I’ve still got some ideas about how to deal with scumbags. And—” He was interrupted by another roar, this one of such anger that it startled Yorktown’s captain but turned Colonel Tibbet’s frown into a knowing smile: Their blood was up. “—And I want to tell you,” thundered the general, “that I and my team of veterans are here to work with you, not over you. This is from first to last Colonel Tibbet’s show. I’m here in an advisory capacity only, but you’ll see me around—” He paused. “—not sitting like a horse’s ass, but galloping in with your Super Stallions. And—”
There was clapping and cries of “Way to go, General!”
“And,” continued Freeman, arms akimbo, his camouflaged Fritz with its airborne strap cupping his chin, “I intend to shit all over those comrades who give our enemies the means to kill our children. Are you ready?”
“Hoo-ha!” came the guttural marine response.
“God bless you all,” Freeman told them, “and God bless America!”
The cheers of the marines were now interrupted by the coughing, spitting noise of the helicopter engines starting in unison, their collective roar amid the choking exhaust fumes drowning out the war cries of the first wave of 750 marines to embark on the mission which Freeman had suggested should be called Operation Bird Rescue. The president had thought it a brilliant choice, so politically astute that he had sent a short thank-you note.
The heavily laden marines filed up from the cavernous recesses of the Yorktown, moving antlike along the flight deck and disappearing into the bellies of the Super Stallions, whose giant rotors threw circles of dazzling, transparent sunlight, signaling that each of the choppers’ titanium-forged blades had now joined one of the earsplitting concerts of war.
In Yorktown’s landing force operations center, deep within the O2 deck, Freeman, like Tibbet, loaded for bear, was going over their joint plan of attack. Like all good plans in life and in battle, it was simple in concept. Of course the devil, as always, was in the details. First, Yorktown’s Cobra gunships would ride shotgun on both the northern and southern flanks of Yorktown’s helo stream. Second, the Cobras, fed SATPIX intel, would soften up all of the rebel AA defenses, leaving Tibbet’s first wave of infantry to go in and gut the ABC complex. HUMINT assets believed the two two-story structures, connected at their midpoints by a two-story ferro cement walkway and surrounded by a virtually treeless one-square-mile perimeter, comprised the central cog in ABC’s operation. The complex was believed to be the place where the manufacture of terrorist weapons had made what the Pentagon’s practitioners of the “dismal science” of economics referred to as a “quantum leap in economies of scale.” All of which was pretentious Pentagon jargon for the fact that terrorist weapons manufactured in the ABC complex had shifted from the garages of the Middle East to high-efficiency American-style assembly lines.