Winter Warning

by Jerome Charyn

  “Stef,” the Big Guy said, with a delirious fire in his eyes, “I’m gonna turn this room into a command post. We can get around Ramona and bypass the Bull and the rest of my national security mavens. They can’t help us here. This will be our very own caper.”

  Stef was still morose. “Mr. President, I don’t get it. I’m a pilot, not an intelligence officer.”

  “Ah,” Isaac said, like a chess wizard, “but you have information in your skull that’s indispensable. You were an eyewitness.”

  “Witness to what?” Stef had to ask, more flustered than ever.

  “The Camp David Accords.”

  “I told you, sir. I wasn’t in command. I was a pick-up pilot, the mascot of the pack.”

  “But you took Ariel Moss on a ride across the mountain, and it’s Ariel who interests me right now.”

  Isaac told Stef the details of Ariel’s mysterious visit to Aspen Lodge with the former chief of Shin Bet as his bodyguard and companion. Ariel had insisted on meeting Isaac at Camp David, but kept referring to the mountain as Shangri-La, and seemed obsessed with FDR—Roosevelt’s retreat, Ariel called it. But there was hardly a trace of Roosevelt on the mountain—the rustic cabins were gone, so were the outhouses, the water troughs, and the fishing holes. There hadn’t even been a high-wire fence or a gate, just a deserted road, a sentry, and a shack full of Marines. Yet Ariel kept harping back to this earlier time. Someone must have talked to him about Roosevelt’s days and nights on the mountain, and summoned up Shangri-La.

  “Who could have talked to Ariel Moss about FDR?”

  “I don’t know,” Stef shouted at the Big Guy, with a merciless thumping in his brain.

  “Sure you do,” Sarah said. “He was in the archives. I went through all the manifests. He was right there with you, and he was also at Warm Springs with FDR—or Mr. Frank, as he called him. He was one of the rare polio victims who was ever cured.”

  Raymond Tollhouse, Stefan Oliver muttered to himself. He was the fool of fools. Tollhouse was commander of Squadron One while Ariel Moss and Sadat were at Shangri-La, and had singled Stef out from the raw recruits, shepherded him right into the squadron. Stef would have remained in Stuttgart, with a remote, forgotten crew, if it hadn’t been for Colonel Ray, who was promoted to general right after his tour with Squadron One. And yet, for some unfathomable reason, Colonel Ray had fallen out of Stef’s universe. Tollhouse had been one of his instructors at Quantico, had first introduced him to the intricacies of the Night Hawk. Now he had to conjure up the same secretive man for Sidel and Sarah.

  “Tollhouse,” he said. “Colonel Ray was the only one of us who’d actually visited the mountain with FDR. He was the president’s mascot—in 1942.”

  “Like a batboy, but without a baseball team,” Isaac said.

  “So he knew the landscape by heart,” Sarah said.

  “Every inch of the terrain.”

  And suddenly the words flew out of him with all the intricate magic of a musical score.

  “He would have remained a cripple if it hadn’t been for Warm Springs.”

  Roosevelt himself had contracted infantile paralysis as an adult, and had come to this tiny rural retreat in Georgia with its bubbling spring water, a politician exiled from his own career. He had this insane belief that he could find a miraculous cure in warm mountain water. He stayed at the Meriwether Inn, a run-down hotel for rich people who wanted to escape the infectious summers of Savannah. FDR had his own ambitious plan. He started a little clinic at the Meriwether, a rehabilitation center for polio victims, and invested half his fortune in the clinic. His mother thought he was insane. But Mr. Frank won her over with that patrician charm of his. He also won over the nation and was elected president in 1932. He still visited Warm Springs whenever he could, swam with all the other “polios,” and didn’t have to hide his crippled legs. Warm Springs had become his winter retreat.

  And that’s how Tollhouse entered the tale. Polio victims had to travel in the baggage car if they wanted to go anywhere by train. Tollhouse had come all by himself from Savannah, a ten-year-old cripple, to enroll in Mr. Frank’s rehabilitation center. And the president, who couldn’t take a single step on his own, met Tollhouse at the station. Two of his handlers lifted up his wheelchair, and Mr. Frank plucked that boy out of the baggage car with the powerful arms of a swimmer. Tollhouse had been locked in the dark without food or water. Suddenly there was a blaze of light, as the porter opened the baggage car door. And the first thing he discovered was Mr. Frank, biting into his cigarette holder, smiling with all the warmth in the world at a frightened, sickly boy.

  “Colonel Ray would have done anything for FDR—strangled a widow, drowned a kitten, anything.”

  “Raymond was his poster child, his own big success story,” Sarah said.

  “No, no,” Stef insisted. “It wasn’t anything like that. FDR was generous to all the kids at the polio clinic. But he couldn’t visit Warm Springs much after the war began. That’s why he had Shangri-La. It was his mountain retreat in Maryland. And he liked having Raymond around.”

  “As his batboy,” Isaac said. “The kid couldn’t have been more than fifteen in ’42. Raymond must have been fixated on Shangri-La—and Warm Springs—most of his life.”

  “I suppose,” Stefan said.

  Tollhouse had a couple of tours in Nam, where he was on loan to an Air Cav medivac unit; he rescued Marines from every sort of hellhole. He returned to the States a war hero and was assigned to Squadron One. But he developed a mysterious limp, almost a vestige of the polio he’d had as a boy, as if his own body had become a haunted house. He left the Marines and started his own security firm.

  “Called it Wildwater,” Stefan said. “He was a sentimental son of a bitch. And he had to name his new company after the wild mountain water he remembered as a boy—at the clinic. He couldn’t bear leaving Roosevelt country. His training grounds are on Pine Mountain, in the hills above Warm Springs.”

  Sarah’s smile seemed elliptical; all her flirting was gone. Stef could have been some stranger. “It was a kind of calculated sentiment, Colonel,” she said. “Tollhouse was the helicopter pilot to three presidents—a perfect calling card. He had access to the biggest corporations and banks. Did he try to lure you to Wildwater?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t bite.”

  “Even so,” she said, “he could rely on your logistics. You were a known item, inside his domain.”

  “Then you’re telling me it was a Wildwater strike?”

  The colonel felt trapped in the middle of a cockeyed caper in the Cosmetology Room. Did they really think he had conspired with his former commander to harm the president?

  “Doesn’t it make sense?” she asked. “That mad mercenary from Warm Springs has access to all the power lines. He bribes the chief electrician—and boom, his men disappear into the storm without harming a soul.”

  Stef began to see blood spots in his eyes. This captain with the raven hair had become his nemesis now. “Are you saying that I was his spotter? We were in lockdown, dammit.”

  She was sparring with Stef as if he were a child.

  “You wouldn’t have to be a communications wizard to override our codes,” she said. “Isn’t it a little too strategic, Mr. President, that the colonel here developed a sudden amnesia about General Tollhouse?”

  “Stop it!” Isaac said. “You’re squabbling like a couple of brats. This is the only team we have. If we unravel, we’ll have nothing. And Ramona wins. She’ll send the Bull and his ninjas from the Bureau to Wildwater. We’ll have a bloodbath and won’t learn a thing about Tollhouse’s staged destruction. I’m his one casualty. He caught me with my pants down.”

  Stef was more confused than ever. He preferred an ex-cop who stumbled about in a snowstorm rather than a president who played spymaster in a beauty salon.

  “Am I gonna go undercover?” Stef asked with a curl of his lip. “Do I make a pilgrimage to Tollhouse on Pine Mountain?”

  “No, no,”
Isaac said. “We leave Wildwater alone. What matters now is who the hell hired him? We’ll all have to dig.”

  “Fine,” Stefan said, feeling like a pilot and a navigator again. “Boss, are we all equals here?”

  Isaac mused for a moment. “Sure—we’re equals. Forget that I’m commander in chief.”

  “Then you shouldn’t bring any software up to this salon. Ramona will find out, and she’ll shut us down. You ceded this mansion to her, and you can’t take it back. Rogers should do all her digging at Quantico, where she won’t be compromised by a chief of staff who’s a ballbuster.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m going to collect my little boy from the Secret Service.”

  And Stefan Oliver fled this lunatic salon without looking back at Isaac or the captain from Quantico.

  He thought of resigning, but he’d miss that white-topped gondola, and he’d miss Sidel, a president who seemed to wear a wound as palpable as the damn Glock in his pants. He had considered joining Wildwater after his last tour, but Stef was a bit naïve. He hadn’t realized that Tollhouse ran a bunch of mercs. He thought he’d be guarding bank presidents on some fancy loop and earning a $100k a year, with his pension as a maraschino cherry. Instead, he’d be carrying mercs on commando raids for South American dictators and drug lords. His $100k would be choked with blood. Tollhouse had lied to him. Stef fell for that tale of a security firm rising out of Roosevelt’s waters. But FDR had died in 1945 of a cerebral hemorrhage at the Little White House in Warm Springs, and there was very little trace of him on Pine Mountain.

  Tollhouse was the new manor lord of the mountain springs, and he milked money for his own cause.

  The colonel read to his little boy. He wasn’t that inventive. He’d borrowed the same books that his own father had read to him—Bambi, Pinocchio, and The Three Musketeers, stories inherited from generation after generation of military brats. Max loved Pinocchio the best, and his eyes would gleam with terror and delight every time Pinocchio was swallowed by Monstro the whale. Stef had forgotten that there was no whale in the book, just a mile-long shark; Monstro was Uncle Walt Disney’s creation. Perhaps Stef had seen the film too many times, and his own father had also been confused, but Max loved to imagine the boy with the pointy nose, who was as disabled as himself—a bundle of wires and wood—flopping around in Monstro’s belly.

  “Aw, Pa, doesn’t Monstro have a heart, like you and me?”

  And that’s when Stef heard the double click from the White House operator, who told him that a Mr. Wildwater of Warm Springs was on the line.

  “Are you available, Colonel?”

  Stef took the call. “You motherfucker,” he said, “why are you pestering me here?”

  He recognized the guttural laugh of Raymond Tollhouse.

  “Stef, who else can I talk strategy with, huh? You were on the mountain with Big Balls. I would have liked to play a little ping-pong. But I forgot my paddle, and you were in lockdown.”

  “Do you want to be in permanent lockdown? Half a dozen agencies must be listening to this call.”

  “And I probably do business with every single one of them,” Tollhouse said, with all the cockiness of a retired Marine general. “I’m untouchable, kid. You’ll have to come to terms with that. I broke into the president’s most guarded facility—Shangri-La—and could have tapped him on the shoulder. What does that tell you, huh? His life isn’t worth shit.”

  Stefan Oliver felt abused; he’d been Tollhouse’s protégé, had followed right behind him as the president’s pilot and commander of Squadron One, had worshipped his warrior’s unselfish devotion. Tollhouse had bolted from his squadron and attached himself to Air Cav, because the Marines didn’t have a medivac unit in Nam. He didn’t care about rank or prestige; he went deep into Indian country to save the lives of wounded jarheads, carrying Marines for miles across rice fields and mountainous terrain—he was pilot, nurse, marksman, and fairy godmother. He never grandstanded, never even sought recognition for himself and his unit. And here he was with all his hoopla. It sickened Stef.

  “Go away,” he said. “You proved your point, General. How many millions did you make on this op?”

  “More than you and I could ever spend in our lifetimes. Tell your president that he should come to Pine Mountain. He might have a real revelation.”

  “He’s not interested in your mountain, General, only in who hired you.”

  “Tell him it was the United States,” Tollhouse said and hung up on his protégé.

  Stef considered running downstairs to the beauty salon, but he realized that the Secret Service had tapped into the line and was probably preparing a transcript of the conversation for the president. So he went back to Monstro the whale. Max fell asleep in his pajamas, and Stef couldn’t sit still. He wandered from room to room, his mind ablaze. What could have tempted a war hero like Tollhouse to become such a renegade? Not money alone. He’d never been that interested in loot.

  The president’s pilot heard footsteps in the corridor. It couldn’t have been a maid at her ironing board, not at this hour. He stepped out and saw the captain from Quantico, wearing one of Sidel’s fluffy flannel robes. She looked like a transient from the far side of Lafayette Park.

  “The Big Guy wants me here,” she said. “It wasn’t my idea.”

  His boss was playing Cupid, and Stef was angry at the idea. Isaac could be his own fucking matchmaker. “Did you listen to my conversation with Tollhouse?”

  “Of course.”

  “He said the United States hired him. What the hell does it mean?”

  She had the same damn elliptical smile. “That’s above your pay grade, Colonel.”

  He wanted to slap the smugness out of her, teach her a lesson.

  She searched his eyes and her face softened a bit. “I’m sorry, Stef. When I realized it was a Wildwater op, I thought you had given away our codes and was steering him from inside the facility. I was wrong.”

  She was standing close to Stef, her body like a magnificent furnace in the winter iciness of the attic. Her pungent bouquet of sweat and perfume aroused him. She put one of her arms around his neck. He undid her robe with one flip of his finger. She was wearing a bra and silkies. They leapt at one another like big, strong cats and crashed into an ironing board. Stef hadn’t been near a woman ever since he lost Leona. He delivered a mourner’s kiss, tender and a little cruel. He sucked on her navel like an embalmer, as if he meant to drain her blood. He felt like a captive all of a sudden, overwhelmed by this captain from Quantico.

  7

  The colonel’s conversation with “Mr. Wildwater” hopped across Washington’s intelligence circuits like a sizzling wire. It seemed that half the planet had listened in, and now Isaac had to meet with his national security mavens in the lower dungeon of the West Wing. He had little faith in these wise men. So he sat with Sarah and Stef.

  Tim Vail, Isaac’s national security advisor, was the magician here with his monitors and electronic maps; he could create and destroy entire universes on a side wall with his silver wand, but he couldn’t conjure up a single glimpse of the razzia at Cactus. Some mischievous troll must have pulled the plug—all the surveillance cameras had been shut off.

  Tim still had his sense of majesty; he balked at Colonel Oliver’s sudden appearance in the Situation Room.

  “Mr. President, your helicopter pilot lacks the clearance to powwow with us.”

  “Well, Tim, put on your blinders and pretend he isn’t here. But be a good fellah and explain to me why General Tollhouse has the notion in his head that the United States hired him to shoot up Camp David?”

  Isaac’s resident boy genius had graduated summa cum laude from Harvard at nineteen and felt superior to everyone in the room, including his own boss.

  “It’s not that simple, sir. We did hire Wildwater to test our security at David and review whatever fault lines we had in our system. His record was impeccable. He’s a war hero, for Christ’s sake.”

 
; “And you gave him our call signs?” Isaac asked, while he swiped away Tim’s silver wand. Tim seemed a little lost. “We had to, sir—it was part of the security package.”

  “So he shut his eyes, said ‘Open Sesame,’ and marched right into Ali Baba’s den.”

  Tim slumped in his leather chair. “We couldn’t anticipate that—”

  “He would make fools of you all and mount a raid on a facility he was supposed to monitor. Why don’t you shut him down?”

  Tim fell silent and slumped deeper into his chair, impotent without his silver stick. The Bull had to pinch hit for him. “We can’t, Mr. President. We’d cause a national crisis if it ever got out. He’s still under contract to us. He’s been invaluable. He comes through in all the tight spots.”

  “And you couldn’t gallop to Warm Springs and slap the shit out of him—for starters?”

  “The Washington Post would have a field day,” Ramona said. “They’d pronounce it a civil war within the president’s closet.”

  “Why? Mr. Wildwater doesn’t work for me.”

  Ramona wouldn’t slink into her chair like Tim. “I’m afraid he does, sir.”

  “That’s grand,” Isaac said. “So Wildwater fucked me and sent us the bill.” He brooded in his chair. “That’s why you wanted to stop Ari Moss in his tracks. It wasn’t about K Street and the Jewish lobby. It wasn’t about politics at all. He sensed that some bad stuff was going down. Ramona darling, was I the very last to learn about the raid? Did Tollhouse warn you of his little exercise in advance?”