“Heather, Brian here,” one of the male anchors said, being the first to recover. “Is ‘Ghost’ with the U.S. government?”
“I don’t know,” Heather admitted. “He said he tracked us here, not how or why. Just something about being on an airplane and a truck. Getting bent, whatever that means, in an airplane.”
“Is he special operations?” Brian asked. “Ranger or SEAL?”
“Uhm, Brenda said she thought he was a Ranger,” Heather replied. “She used to have a Ranger boyfriend and he was always saying ‘hoowah’. Mr. Ghost made us all say ‘hoowah’ before he’d release us.”
“He what?” Linda gasped.
“He made us all give him a big yell ‘hoowah,’ ” Heather said, shrugging and bringing nipples almost in view. “He said he needed help and if he couldn’t get a big hoowah, we weren’t worth saving. I think…” She paused and frowned, then shrugged again. “It had been… really terrible. Really really terrible. And a lot of the girls had just gone, like, out of it. I think he was trying to shock us back to reality or something. It helped, in a way, and I’ll never think of hoowah the same again, that’s for sure.”
“Okay,” Linda said, frowning. “I guess I wasn’t there and I won’t judge.”
“Oh, no, judge,” Heather replied. “He’s like some icon of everything girls hate about men. Sexist, overbearing, foulmouthed, insensitive to an amazing degree. And as soon as some of us get over what’s happened in this room, to Clarissa and some of the rest of us, he’s going to get screwed to death. If this is what it takes to keep this,” she said, waving at the room, “from happening, then I’m all for it. Male-dominated society? Screw that, this room, this is male-dominated society. America’s heaven compared to this room, compared to these people. And if it takes guys like Ghost to keep us safe, then I’m all for it. When I get back I’m going to go to the ROTC department and kiss every single person in the building.” She paused and grimaced. “I’m not going to have sex with any of them, because I don’t want to see a dick for a long time, but I’m going to kiss them. Even the girls.”
“Heather,” Brian said, carefully. “It sounds like you’ve had, well, a life-changing experience in more than one way.”
“If you mean politically,” Heather said, frowning, “you bet your ass. I’m a journalism major and a card-carrying liberal. At least, I was. I spoke out against ‘Cliff’s War on Terror’ and protested and all the rest. The hell with that. This is every decent person’s war on terror, every American’s war on terror, especially every woman’s war on these Islamic motherfuckers. Nuke these fuckers. Nuke every god damned one of them. Fuck the ‘religion of peace.’ I won’t shed a tear. And I’m going to vote Republican the rest of my life!”
“MR. SECRETARY! MR. SECRETARY!”
“Calm down!” Brandeis said, waving his hands. “Let me make my statement first. Yes, we were aware that there was an agent in place. We were aware that the girls were being held somewhere in a building we code named Aleppo Four, which was a suspected site of WMD design and possibly construction. We had been in contact with the agent, Codename Ghost. He was to find out where in the facility the girls were being held, because otherwise we suspected they’d be killed while the special operations team was looking for them. We lost contact with him and he apparently determined that the plight of the girls was so severe that he had to take action. He, apparently, sabotaged the WMD facility and somehow made his way into the section housing the girls and rescued them. This is from your news reports; we don’t have contact with him at this time. There was a plan to retrieve the girls that was waiting on his report. When we noted the activity at the facility, we put the plan in operation. It is ongoing at this time. That concludes my statement. I will now take salient questions.”
“Mr. Secretary!” one of the reporters shouted. “How long until—”
“I said salient questions,” Brandeis snapped. “That means questions I can answer. I’m not going to give you a timetable because then the Syrians will have it.”
“Mr. Secretary,” a female reporter said, waving her hand. “The Syrians have denied responsibility and…”
“Lady, I’ve been looking at Predator drone footage for the past hour,” the secretary said, shaking his head. “The Predator has been watching the whole incident. The call was tracked by technical means to Aleppo Four. NSA has traced the video link to Syria. The girls are in Syria. This is an act of war. We’re going to treat it as such. Embeds are going to accompany the relief forces. You’ll be able to see for yourself where the girls were being held. So, please, don’t bother believing the Syrians, they lie about what they had for breakfast. I’m tired of the news media being enamored of the Baghdad Bobs of the world. When we tell you something, it’s the truth or the best we can determine of the truth. Just about everything that you get from our enemies in the Middle East is lies. So would you please quit spreading the lies and maybe spend some time spreading the truth? The truth is, fifty girls were kidnapped by terrorists, not freedom fighters, not militants, terrorists. They were loaded on a plane in the Athens airport, flown to Algeria to refuel, in a section the government has spotty control of, by the way, then flown to an airbase in Syria, transported by truck to Aleppo Four and have been held in an underground room, stripped, tortured, raped and murdered. This is the truth. This is the face of our enemy. This is what the War on Terror seeks to end. And we are going to end this particular battle by pulling the girls out and turning Aleppo Four into a smoking crater. As a WMD facility, a secret one that has been used in an act of war, we could, under our guidelines, do that with nuclear weapons. It would not even count as ‘first use.’ A biological agent is WMD. Chemical weapons are WMD. Nukes are WMD. We consider all of them equal. Keep that in mind. Keep that in the front of your mind. Nukes equal gas equals germs. One single Sarin round used on our people or our troops means we can destroy anything in the supplying country with nuclear weapons and all our nuclear release procedures are satisfied. Just because we haven’t done that in the War on Terror, doesn’t mean we won’t.”
At that the room went silent until one of the reporters raised his hand.
“Does that mean the U.S. intends to use nuclear weapons on Syria?” the reporter asked quietly.