“I just thought, you know, why does he have Stone do his dirty work?”
“You can ask the man,” Fox said, indicating he was ready to move on.
“Yes, well, Rathburn is dead, and Takishi is both out of control and under control, if you know what I mean.”
“Yes, good find there,” Fox agreed.
“So, we have Takishi turn up the volume with his tank divisions and push the administration into negotiating mode. No way in hell is anyone going to want to go against the equivalent of a tank corps in the Philippines.”
“What about the soldiers who are there?” Fox asked. “We just leave them, right?”
Diamond chuckled. “Hey, they signed up for it, so they deserve to stay put.”
“Yes, agreed. So, I’ve already denied several troop requests from Pacific Command and am diverting them to Central Command, and if you can kick old Jim Fleagles in the nuts and get him to use some ‘statecraft,’ well, that would be good.”
“I’ll call him shortly, just as soon as Stone leaves.”
As if on cue, Stone walked into the office. Diamond didn’t move, nor did Fox, relegating the senior ranking man to the “minion” table.
“What’s up guys? You said you wanted to talk about the situation?” Stone asked.
“Yes,” Fox said, picking up the remote and pressing play. “It seems that Mick Jagger is going to be asking, how shall I say it, to ‘gimme shelter’?”
The television showed Stone in full color playing the air guitar, then screaming, “Mick Jagger!” Next they watched as Stone slid behind Meredith and kissed her ear.
“Shall I go on?” Fox asked.
“You son of a bitch,” Stone said.
“Not nice to talk about my mother that way, Bob,” Fox said.
“Not nice at all,” Diamond added.
“Now here’s what were going to do,” Fox related. “State has lead on the Philippines. Defense focuses on Iraq. And while we can push a lot of forces in that direction, they will be a show of force. Nothing will become decisively engaged in the Philippines, and everything that is not already there will keep moving around the Celebes Sea, into the Indian Ocean, and into Kuwait and other parts of the Middle East to begin preparation for the destruction of Iraq.”
“You mean Saddam Hussein, right, Saul?” Stone rebuked.
“Whatever,” Fox replied.
“What, you think you’re the only player with dirt on somebody?”
Fox looked at Diamond, then at Stone and shrugged, as if to say, Show me what you got.
“I will show you. I can play this game, too. Have been, you idiots,” Stone said, standing.
“Tsk, tsk, Bob,” Fox said. “Dick here will put this on his blog site in an hour if I don’t have a firm commitment from you on the Iraq plan.”
“In thirty minutes, I’ll put all the evidence of your short trading in AIG two days before Nine-eleven,” Stone said. “You think that won’t raise some eyebrows? Okay, so I was trying to get some skank, but at least I didn’t bet on the Nine-eleven attacks. And if you bet on those attacks, guess what, genius, you knew about them. And if you knew about them, you might have been involved in them. Need me to keep going?”
“What evidence do you think you have?” Fox asked, all of a sudden less confident.
“All that I need, and I can see I’ve got your attention.”
“Certainly have mine,” Diamond said.
“Well, I believe you were in on that short sale also, no?” Fox smiled.
Stone stood and said, “You know I wasn’t. Here’s the deal. We will send what we think we need to the Philippines, slip the Iraq war a year to next spring, and develop a better plan.”
“That’s unsatisfactory,” Fox replied.
“That’s the deal. I have compelling evidence of your shorting 500,000 shares of AIG two days before Nine-eleven. The insurance company dropped forty points over the next three months. How much is that, Saul? Two hundred million?”
“My name is nowhere on any of those transactions,” Fox said, a film of sweat forming on his brow.
“Maybe not, but we’ve traced it to you. Are you getting satisfaction now?”
“What about the Predator deal? Where did that money go?” Diamond asked, trying to rescue his friend.
“That’s classified, Dick, and I’m having your security clearance revoked immediately,” Stone said. He stood, walked to the DVD player, pulled the disc out of the machine, snapped it into little pieces, stuffed those into his pocket, and walked to the connecting side door.
Stopping in the doorway, Stone pointed at Fox, and said, “One word of this leaks, the world will know that you are a Nine-eleven coconspirator and that you became rich overnight. How many years do you think you’ll get? It won’t be much fun being ‘inside’; maybe even GTMO? Treason? How’s that sound?”
Fox nodded. Diamond looked at Fox, then at Stone.
Stone walked into his office and shut the door.
Phase V: Hard Landing
Chapter 81
Admiral Jennings put the secure red-switch telephone back in its receiver and turned the plastic key that contained a digitized microchip to encode the phone conversation. Chairman Sewell had called him to tell him that the secretary of defense had authorized the plan for major combat operations in Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines.
In essence, they had already “pulled the trigger.” Jennings had, on the order of Sewell and the president, executed the initial phase earlier that morning by sinking the six ships anchored off the Luzon Straits. A Los Angeles-class submarine had systematically eliminated each vessel with a torpedo in the fore and aft hulls. The SEALs had provided critical information regarding hull density of the vessels, and sinking them had been a quite simple operation.
Jennings praised the actions of the submarine commander, realizing it was a “no-brainer” mission. They had been concerned about the modest Japanese submarine force, but intelligence indicated that the entire submarine fleet was operating somewhere between Taiwan and Japan, as was the rest of the Japanese Navy.
The American carrier battle group had stopped in the East China Sea near Okinawa with a threefold purpose. Its primary mission was to isolate all Japanese units from reinforcing the Philippine Theater of Operations (PTO). A secondary mission was to protect American forces stationed on Okinawa and in American bases on Japan. While the Navy would never admit it, the Japanese could safely assume that some of the ships in the carrier group contained nuclear weapons capable of targeting Japan. The last mission was to act as a deterrent to Chinese and Korean aggression in the area. While they were unprepared to complete that mission, the nuclear card again came into play in a big way.
President Davis had talked to the Korean and Chinese ambassadors, who were noncommittal in their response to him concerning their own security plans.
Then the president had called Mizuzawa and asked him to withdraw his troops from the Philippines. Mizuzawa told him not to waste his efforts, that Japan would rid the Philippines of the Islamic plague spreading across the island and restore the legitimate government of the Philippines.
“You have no right to intervene,” he had told the president. “Did we stop you from invading Afghanistan or Iraq or Panama?”
“We have every right to stop you from terrorizing the world again. I won’t let it happen,” the president had replied to Mizuzawa.
“We’re doing nothing more than you’ve done in the past. You need our help in this Global War on Terror, as you call it.”