“General,” inquired Gomez, “has it occurred to anyone that the North Koreans might guess that our CIA forensic guys could have traced the MANPADs’ MID numbers to the Kosong depot?”
“Good point, Gomez. I’m pretty damned sure they know our CIA labs would detect the launchers’ numbers sooner or later, but that we wouldn’t dare risk a hit on Kosong because we’d know they’d be ready for us.”
“Either that,” put in Eddie Mervyn, “or they wanted to deliberately taunt us like they do every day along the DMZ and in Panmunjom. Dare us to do something, so they’ll have an excuse to resume their nuke reactor program. So they’ll have a reason to cut off nonproliferation talks.”
Freeman was pleased his specialists had kept savvy with the political situation, something that, like their foreign language training, distinguished them and the Green Berets from regular forces.
“Who can tell?” said Aussie wisely. “The North Korean Communist Party in Pyongyang is one of the most psychotic the world’s ever seen. Right up there with Saddam, Pol Pot, and Adolf.”
“Could be,” posited Choir, “that they don’t expect our guys to trace the launcher MID numbers at all. I mean, it’s one thing to put a launcher under an electron microscope, laser, or whatever, but they might not know we can match the number to a specific depot. That would mean we had a spy in North Korea tracking Kosong inventory.”
“Do we?” asked Aussie. “Have a spy in Kosong?”
“You think the agency’s going to tell me?” asked the general.
“No,” said Shark Mervyn, so called because of his swim speed attained with the Jhordan flippers, the revolutionary rubber swim fins that the U.S. Navy typically rejected when they were initially offered them by the ever-innovative Freeman but which had now become de rigueur for many combat swimmers, and mandatory for any combat swimmer on a Freeman mission. Aussie, Choir, and Sal, as well as Shark Mervyn, knew that not even the legendary general would be privy to whether the CIA or any other allied intel agency had a man “in place” in Kosong, and they didn’t resent it, because Freeman was playing the same kind of “need to know” game when he’d told the President, in the presence of the Joint Chiefs and Eleanor Prenty, that “Operation Payback” couldn’t begin in under six weeks.
The problems of planning such a mission were so myriad, they reminded Johnny Lee, the multilinguist on the team, of a set of matryoshka, Russian dolls. At first there seemed only one thing to look at, to understand, but inside each doll there was another.
Freeman sighed. “So we’re faced with a thicket of variables. Only one thing’s certain.” He turned his wrist over and glanced down at his no-glare combat watch. It was 50 hours, almost time to call Eleanor Prenty. “And that,” he continued, “is that the sooner we hit the pricks, the better chance we have of a successful mission. Any country in its right mind wouldn’t launch an attack from halfway across the world for at least a month — and not until it had the U.N. on its side.”
Aussie folded his arms tightly and smiled enigmatically at Choir and Salvini, or at least it appeared so to Gomez and Mervyn and the other three new boys, who suspected Aussie, Choir, Salvini, and perhaps the general, of having some private agenda. But far from Aussie’s grin being a shared expression of smug self-congratulation between the general and his two fellow veterans, his reaction was one of admiration for the general’s deft appraisal of the complex political and military variables involved and his signature grasp of detail. Indeed, Aussie’s smile was simply one of appreciation for the way in which General Douglas Freeman, with his Rolodex cards, had succinctly prepared them all for what Aussie could sense was about to be a “shocker.”
The latter, in this case, was the call the general was now making to the National Security Advisor in Washington, D.C. It was precisely 1400 hours, the time he had told her he would call. Heightening the attention among his audience of eight SpecFors, the general asked Eleanor Prenty if she was the only one in her office.
“I’m the only one,” she assured him, and he told her he’d brainstormed the attack and, pending her approval, was about to go from “macro” to “eyes only” superclassified “micro” details with his eight-man team.
“Eight?” One of the five new boys, Lieutenant “Bone” Brady, could hear her clearly. And then, sounding as if she thought she’d misheard the general, she said, “You mean eighty?”
“No,” replied Freeman. “Eight, plus me.”
“But — but surely, Douglas, you need more men than that?”
“Not for an in-out quick demo.”
“Demo?” She was still tired, having gotten only three hours sleep, and for a second she misinterpreted the general’s abbreviation as “demonstration.” It was an easy mistake to make, as there’d been ongoing demonstrations outside the White House ever since the missile attacks, most signs demanding retaliation against the terrorists, others proclaiming that “Violence Begets Violence,” “Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right.” Noticeably there were no signs accusing North Korea, the majority of the American public having assumed that the terrorist attacks on the three aircraft had been unleashed by al Qaeda and Co. sleepers.
“Demolition,” explained Freeman.
“Oh, yes, of course.”
“I’ve been on the blower and computer,” he informed her. “Transport’s all set.”
“Uh-huh,” said Eleanor, moving past her illuminated globe, closer to her office window — a Secret Service no-no — and gazing at the protesters ringing the south lawn. If they only knew what the White House knew, she mused.
One of her assistants knocked on her door. She didn’t answer, honoring Freeman’s request — demand — that she set aside this time exclusively for him. He told her he’d been working his old network nonstop since his Oval Office meeting the day before. So what did he want? wondered Eleanor. Brownie points for working hard? Working hard was de rigueur in the White House, and anywhere else in America if you wanted to survive. Besides, Freeman, his ego and pride notwithstanding, wasn’t the self-congratulatory type. There was no doubt about his self-confidence, but he wasn’t like one of those men Eleanor knew, such as her estranged husband, Tom, who expected a medal every time they performed an extracurricular task, like loading and unloading the dishwasher or putting a clothes wash in the dryer.
“I’m glad everything’s coming together,” she responded, her attention wandering back to the protestors’ signs, one of which, “NUKE ’EM!” she hadn’t seen before. What scared her was that there were people around like the onetime head of the Air Force, General Curtis Lemay, who had pressed the administration to nuke the Soviet Union and China in the crucial window of opportunity during the Korean War.
She saw another “NUKE ’EM!” sign, and realized how prudence favored a retaliatory commando in-out attack. Such a strategy would satisfy the public’s demands for action against the terrorists without giving in to the extremists who had come out of the woodwork, urging a nuclear strike against North Korea. “If I can do anything,” Eleanor told Freeman, “to help meet your six-week deadline, just tell me.”
“Thanks,” he said, “but we’re good to go. Now. We’ll be on a bus in four hours. Loaded for bear.”
Eleanor was suddenly aware that Freeman had said something about a bus, Special Forces jargon for transport aircraft.