“Let’s not forget Patton and Dornan.”
We clinked bottles.
“Feel like getting drunk?” he asked.
“Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do.”
Chapter 37
Washington DC
I watched as the maître d’ at the Capital Grill escorted Cheryl and Mike to my table. I was seated at one of the big round tables in the far corner. I stood and gave Cheryl a hug and then Mike. The waiter came over and poured both of them a glass from the bottle of wine that was already on the table. I ordered a few appetizers and told the waiter we were going to talk a while before ordering dinner. The expensive Bordeaux must’ve bought some goodwill, because he didn’t seem concerned about my plans to ruin a quick turnover of the table.
“Everything go OK in Morocco?” Mike asked.
“Mission accomplished. A bit messy, but we got the job done.”
“A couple of A-list assaulters would’ve come in handy on a job like that.”
“You won’t get any arguments from Migos or me on that. There were no style points earned on that one.”
“I saw the post-op satellite imagery. You would’ve done less damage if you shelled the place with a battleship.”
“It wasn’t surgical, but we didn’t have great intel and we were understaffed.”
“Did you at least interview some of the people on that list of names I sent you?”
“I did; I picked two. They start next month.”
“Who did you pick?”
“Savage and Sorenson, same profile as before.”
“Both from the Unit?”
“Yes, good guys, they’ll fit in. When do I get my woman back?”
“Soon, she’s almost done. Everybody loves her at the Company. My boss doesn’t want her to leave.”
“Tell the Director that if I don’t get my girl back, I’m going to unleash Evan Moskowitz on him.”
“We approached Evan; he says he’ll only talk with you.”
“We’ve bonded; who can blame him?”
“You need to wean him away from that.”
“I’ll try. Working with him isn’t exactly my dream job.”
“I’ll report that upstairs. It might help get your shopping list approved.”
“I give you ALICE, David Forrest, and Cheryl for way too long. I offer you Evan Moskowitz on a silver platter, and all I ask in return is to replace a few items of equipment. So far, the only answer I’ve received is crickets.”
“Ninety-two million is a lot of money.”
“It’s not my equipment. I just borrow it to use in the service of God and Country.”
“I’ll try that line tomorrow.”
“I would appreciate it. The hangar and offices will be finished next month. Now I need my toys replaced.”
“And you can’t do it yourself?”
“I have a short, angry office manager at Trident headquarters who won’t let me.”
“Maybe it’s time to stop with the expensive wines, cut back, tighten the belt, downsize the yacht, live like a normal person.”
“That’s not practical, my lifestyle is part of my cover. It’s a spy thing. Besides, I paid to rebuild Clearwater; it’s only fair the Agency pays its share to rebuild Trident.”
“I’ll get it done somehow.”
“Thanks. I would think the leadership would be throwing money at you. When gas was at six bucks a gallon there was no way the guy in the White House was going to get re-elected, now at least he has a shot. He should show some love.”
“Things are calming down. That’s for certain.”
“Did you get the credit or did some political infighter steal your glory?”
“I got some of the credit—also some of the blame. Not everyone is happy Evan Moskowitz is still converting oxygen to carbon dioxide.”
“Let me know, and I’ll have Evan do a deep dive into whoever it is. He must have something to hide if he’s so threatened by him.”
“Probably not a good idea to run a background on the Director of National Intelligence.”
“I’ll hold off for now, but just say the word and we’ll proceed. Evan is like a puppy who’s desperate to please.”
We finished the appetizers and ordered steaks. Mike left, and Cheryl and I stayed for coffee.
“You’ve been awfully quiet,” I said.
“You and Mike had some ground you had to cover. I didn’t want to interfere.”
“You’re never interfering. Are you ready to leave this town?”
“I can’t wait. I’m excited about what we’ve accomplished, but I missed you.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that; I was getting jealous of David Forrest.”
“He’s a great guy. You may have reason to worry.”
“He named his computer; that should be a disqualifier right there.”
“Let’s go. I think I know how to cure your jealousy,” Cheryl said while reaching under the table.
“Check, please!”
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Other books by James Lawrence
ARABIAN DECEPTION
ARABIAN VENGEANCE
ARABIAN FURY
TURN THE PAGE FOR A STUNNING PREVIEW OF
ARABIAN DECEPTION
THE FIRST NOVEL IN THE ARABIAN ADVENTURE SERIES
BY JAMES LAWRENCE
Chapter 1
Washington, D.C.
Pat pulled into a parking space at the Pentagon in his ’98 Ford Windstar minivan and began the trek across the icy asphalt to the building entrance. It was still dark, almost dawn on a late winter morning, and his face and hands were stinging from the cold. It had been ninety-two degrees when he had left Baghdad the previous week, and it was going to take some time to adjust this weather.
Pat was on a one-year assignment at the Pentagon, prepositioned for his class date next year at the National War College. He regretted never buying an overcoat for his Class A uniform; the green polyester suit was useless against the wind and cold. The work he did in the military rarely required dress uniforms, and it had just never made sense to spend money he didn’t have on the accessories. By the time he stepped into the entryway and passed through security, his fingers were so frozen, he had trouble removing his access badge from his pocket.
He managed to find his office without having to ask anyone for directions, a big improvement from his first few days on the job, which had occurred last week. Pat shared an office with two other colonels and a major. Officially, they all had grand titles, but when he had first arrived and asked his office mates what they did, they’d all chimed in unison, “Slide monkeys for the chief.” Pat’s orders to the Pentagon had assigned him to the Army Special Operations Cell within the Army’s G3 shop, but when he had shown up, he had been redirected to the Army Chief of Staff’s Office and placed in a small windowless office with the other “Slide Monkeys.”
Their four desks are all crammed together, facing each other bullpen style, where they all could see each other over their computer monitors. Pat could feel the attention of the other three guys as he removed his uniform jacket and hung it up on the stand behind his seat. The chief’s inner circle consisted of a group of hand-selected officers from his previous commands. The chief was a tanker, an armor officer, and those commands were all armor and cavalry units. As an infantry officer with a Special Operations background, Pat was the oddball of the group.
Colonel Chris Mattingly was the senior officer in charge of their little section. He was an outgoing, friendly guy. He had worked with the chief off and on for the past twenty years. On Pat’s first day, Pat had asked him how he’d wound up getting transferred.
“The guys at infantry branch told me the prepo to D.C. was a reward from a grateful nation. Working as a slide monkey in a dungeon didn’t seem like much of a reward,�
�� Pat had said.
After spending the previous year in Iraq as a JSOTF commander and the two years before that in Afghanistan as the commander of a Tier 1 special mission unit, Pat felt like he deserved some downtime to get reacquainted with his family. Pat’s wife was barely talking to him, and his youngest hadn’t recognized him the last time he’d come home on leave. Instead, Pat wound up in a job where he was spending two hours a day commuting in D.C. traffic on top of the fourteen hours a day he spent making PowerPoint slides and attending briefings.
“Pat, you’ve been brought into our little section because you’re a snake eater. And the SecDef has a special fondness for snake eaters. The SecDef’s Green Berets conquered Afghanistan on horseback and you, the hero, Colonel Pat Walsh, personally captured Saddam Hussein. The boss brought you here to be the horse whisperer to the SecDef. The man is infatuated with Green Berets, Delta, SEALs, Rangers and all that Special Operations ninja stuff that’s not worth a damn in a real war, and the chief thinks you’re going to be the magic microphone he needs to get his message through to his boss.”
Pat just shrugged his shoulders. It seemed pretty stupid, but it wasn’t his fight. He just figured he’d roll with it and mark his time until his class started at the National War College.
Now on his second week, resigned to his role, Pat slid into his workstation.
“What do you need me to do?” Pat asked Chris after he sat down.
“Review this slide presentation. You’re going to brief sometime today, whenever the boss gets in to see the SecDef,” said Chris.
“I’m going to brief Secretary Rumsfeld?” Pat asked.
“Yeah, the chief will back you up. Is that a problem?”
“No, not really.”
“What’s the highest level you’ve ever briefed?” asked Chris, sensing Pat’s anxiety.
“POTUS,” Pat said.
“Which one?”
“All of them, since Reagan.”
“Really?”
“We get a lot of oversight on my side of the business,” Pat said.
“This should be a walk in the park for you. Familiarize yourself with the presentation and be ready to brief when called,” Chris said.
For the first time, Pat noticed the fatigue on Chris and the rest of the team. “Have you guys been up all night putting this briefing together?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Chris said.
“You should’ve told me. I would’ve stayed.”
“It’s okay, we needed you to be fresh this morning,” said Chris.
Pat spent the next two hours going through the briefing, rehearsing his lines, which were written below in the notes section.
“You’re on. The chief is waiting for you,” said Chris.
Pat put his jacket back on and Chris grabbed a laptop and walked with him into the Army chief of staff’s waiting room. Chris breezed by the secretary with a nod and led him into the office.
The general was a small but imposing figure. Pat had never met him before, but he had read a lot about him. He’d lost half of his left foot in Vietnam and was highly regarded as a deep thinker and a futurist. They shook hands.
“Are you getting settled?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. The family is moved in and the kids are already in school.”
“Where are you living?”
“Woodbridge.”
“How’s the commute?”
“It’s between one and two hours depending on the traffic.”
“D.C. traffic is enough to make you miss Iraq,” he said.
“It’s good to be back.”
“What are your thoughts on the brief?”
“Makes sense to me,” Pat said.
He chuckled. “Let’s get moving.”
They filed out of the office by seniority, the chief in the lead and Pat in the back. They wound through a maze of hallways for a while and then took a private corridor into the SecDef’s office suite. The conference room furnishings consisted only of a single rectangle table with six seats around it. Chris connected the laptop to the AV system. Minutes later, the SecDef and two of his assistants came in. Chris and Pat popped to attention. The SecDef didn’t greet either of them. He took a seat at the head of the table and acknowledged the chief with a nod. Two assistants in civilian attire sat on his right. Neither introduced themselves. The chief and Chris sat on his left. Pat stood at the end of the table next to the screen and waiting for his cue to start talking.
The SecDef stared at Pat for what felt like minutes. It was an uncomfortable silence, and Pat looked to the chief for a signal.
“Sir, today we would like to brief you on some analysis and recommendations for your consideration regarding future troop levels in Iraq,” the chief interjected.
“Has Dick Myers seen this?” asked the SecDef, referring to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“No, sir,” replied the chief.
The SecDef was silent and went back to staring at Pat some more. He was an older gentleman, with silver-gray hair and steel-rimmed glasses. He and Pat were ten feet apart, and Pat could feel him studying the details of his uniform.
“How long have you been in the service, Colonel?” he asked.
“Twenty years,” Pat replied.
His eyes went from Pat’s uniform to those of Chris and the chief.
“Why do these two other officers have eight rows of ribbons and a bunch of badges, and you only have only one row and only two badges?”
“I choose not to wear everything I’m authorized, sir.”
“Why?”
“The ones I don’t wear are just participation awards, and when I wear a lot of badges and medals on my uniform, it makes me feel like a South American dictator,” Pat replied.
“I can’t see from here. Tell me about the ones that have meaning to you.”
“Purple Heart with three oak leaf clusters, Bronze Star with V device and four oak leaf clusters, Silver Star with oak leaf cluster and Distinguished Service Cross,” Pat replied.
The SecDef went back to staring at him for another minute and then he took out a mechanical pencil from his pocket and made some notes on the notepad in front of him. Finally, he looked up.
“Begin,” he said.
“Sir, this briefing is classified top secret. The subject of this briefing is the proposed force levels for Operation Enduring Freedom…” For the next forty-five minutes, Pat went through the slides and briefed the Army chief of staff’s recommendation for increasing the force levels in Iraq. The SecDef and his staffers didn’t ask any questions, but occasionally the chief would cut in on him and provide additional information and insights. The logic behind the argument was straightforward. Basically, it was a historical comparison of US Peacekeeping missions and the ratios between US troops and the occupied populations. The conclusion of the briefing was that the people of Iraq were no less hostile than the people of Kosovo and that if they used the same ratios that had been required to pacify the population of Kosovo, in Iraq, it would require a minimum of four hundred thousand additional troops.
“Sir, this completes the briefing, subject to your questions,” Pat said as he grabbed for the bottle of water on the table in front of him.
“You realize that this subject has already been reviewed and a decision has been made by the National Command Authority,” the SecDef said to the chief.
“Yes, sir, I do, However, I felt compelled to provide you this information, because I don’t think the historical context has ever been fully considered,” replied the chief.
The SecDef started tapping his heavy mechanical pencil against the table. Then he turned to Pat. As if noticing the name tag on my uniform for the first time, he said, “What about you, Walsh? What do you think?”
“Sir, I was in Iraq from the invasion in March 2003 until last week. At first, we were welcomed as liberators, but over the past year, the situation has grown increasingly hostile. The population is turning against us. I think you either have to go big
or you have to get out, because right now, we seem to have enough people on the ground to provide our enemy plenty of soft targets of opportunity, but we don’t have sufficient forces to suppress the threat sufficiently to prevent those attacks,” Pat said.
“Suppress the threat—what does that even mean?”
“It means to neutralize through show of force. Excluding the crazy suicidal people, who are rare, if people know they’re guaranteed to die if they rise up, as a general rule, they don’t rise up. Showing force reduces attacks,” Pat replied.
“What did you do in Iraq?” asked the SecDef.
“I commanded a Joint Special Operations Task Force responsible for the prosecution of high-value targets,” Pat replied.
“And how’s that going?”
“We’ve taken out almost the entire deck of cards from Saddam Hussein, the Ace of Spades, all the way down to the Two of Clubs, and yet the security situation isn’t improving.”
The SecDef returned his attention to the chief. He started out politely in a Yankee patrician dialect, the kind Pat imagined you got from one of those elite boarding schools in New England. In a scholarly and at times slightly sarcastic manner, he rebutted point by point every element contained in the briefing. He took pains to ridicule Pat’s comment on “suppressing the threat” by explaining that you didn’t need people in the modern era to accomplish that task. He explained that all you needed was the effective employment of technology and Special Forces. A couple of times the chief tried to respond, but the SecDef cut him off each time with a hand gesture. Pat started to lose focus when he realized that it wasn’t a conversation, it was a reprimand. At the end, the SecDef launched into a tangent on “known knowns,” “known unknowns,” and “unknown unknowns,” followed by an explanation of military tactics that was completely foreign to anything Pat had ever been taught, so Pat just stood at a rigid position of parade rest and watched as the SecDef became more and more condescending, sarcastic, insulting and abusive to Pat’s boss. After a twenty-minute berating, the SecDef and his two minions got up and walked out, leaving the three of them at the table.
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