by Clancy, Tom
Both men said they would.
Carrie left, wondering if she had just gotten a taste of her own little Chou-like rebellion.
Maybe it’s just the man’s exhaustion and the regime change talking, she thought.
General Carrie hoped that was the case.
Bob Herbert would be a difficult man to replace.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Washington, D.C. Wednesday, 2:16 A.M.
“What the hell was that all about?” McCaskey asked when General Carrie had left the floor.
“What do you mean?”
“Please, Bob. This is me you’re talking to—”
“We were just having a discussion,” Herbert insisted.
“You were baiting her.”
Herbert said nothing for a long moment. Why bother? Herbert did not see challenging the general as a bad thing. This was not the military. He had a right to question his superior. But he did not want to debate that with McCaskey. Not at this hour with all they had to do.
“Shouldn’t we be more concerned about the other general?” Herbert asked.
“Yeah. We should.”
“If Tam Li has got some kind of expansionistic ideas in his head, we need to gather intel on him. We should also figure out who to support in this showdown.” Herbert snickered. “Some choice. An aggressive general or a backward-looking Commie.”
“You know, we could use a little military-style discipline here,” McCaskey went on.
The former G-man was obviously not ready to talk about Tam Li.
“What makes you say that?” Herbert asked. “Not just my big mouth—”
“Someone slipped us an e-bomb a couple of months back,” McCaskey said. “Maybe that would not have happened if we had been sharper.”
“That was done by a CIA-connected son of a bitch,” Herbert said. “He had the resources and credentials to put that baby wherever he wanted.”
“He put it here.”
“Do you think General Carrie or anyone could have prevented that?” Herbert asked.
“I don’t know,” McCaskey said. “Since yesterday I’ve been thinking about what Op-Center would be like under the military.”
“Blindly aggressive,” Herbert said.
“Bullshit,” McCaskey said.
“You think so? I’m not a big Paul Hood fan right now. I don’t like what he did to Mike, and I did not appreciate a lot of the crap he brought to his relationships with Liz, Martha, and Ann. Hell, he didn’t get along with women in general. But apart from the e-bomb, the roughest times we’ve ever had involved operations that were under the command of Mike Rodgers, Charlie Squires, and Brett August. All military personnel.”
“That’s what happens when you get things done,” McCaskey said. “There’s a price.”
“A higher price when you rush in without sufficient intel,” Herbert said. “You know me, Darrell. I’m not against kicking ass. What I don’t like is doing it without forethought. I think a lot of what Mike did was knee-jerk. It was his way of carving a corner of Op-Center independent of Paul. One of his earliest missions, to North Korea, was undertaken without an okay from Paul.”
“They both had issues,” McCaskey agreed. “And they’re both gone. We’re starting fresh. And the question is, what’s the best way to deal with crises today? Not five or ten years ago, but now?”
“And your solution is what? Shoot first?”
“More like fire first,” McCaskey said.
“You lost me.”
“When we sense a crisis coming, we should ignite it in such a way that we’re able to direct the flow,” McCaskey said. “It’s like smoke eaters who set backfires to control bigger ones.”
“Which they do in conjunction with using water and flame retardant,” Herbert pointed out. “Sometimes those backfires get out of hand.”
“That’s where intel comes in,” McCaskey replied. “We look at a situation and determine which tactic will work best. Sometimes, the fire-first method is the best. To date, Op-Center has been like the forest ranger in a tower who sees the smoke, watches the wind, observes the flames, sends out warnings, and finally acts. By that time you can lose half the forest. You know what all this keeps slugging me back to, Bob? When we were kids and there was all of the information about how life would be under Communism.”
“That was propaganda,” Herbert said. “It was in the comic books I read, it was even in the goddam World Book Encyclopedia, little cartoons of Stalin controlling people like puppets.” He moved his fingers as if he were playing with marionettes. “It was shameless overkill, Darrell.”
“No. It was education. A crash education in a real danger.”
Herbert shook his head. “That’s like calling segregation a means of classification. Yes, the Reds were a danger. But so were the witch hunts, and they were happening right here! The cure was worse than the disease. We were being frightened, Darrell. On purpose, by those in power so they could remain in power.”
“We have a major disagreement there, friend. There were opportunists and tyrants, but most of the people I knew were patriots. Veterans of World War II and Korea who knew firsthand that Communism was a threat. They were the reason I became an FBI agent. I was scared by the thought of being manipulated and cornered, and I wanted to fight it. The operative word is fight, Bob. We went against the Chinese and their agents in Korea, in Vietnam, and we scraped to a standstill. We outspent the Soviet Union on an arms race until they imploded. But never once have we taken the war to them. We parry. We react. We don’t put anyone on the defensive. I get the sense General Carrie will do that. She was here less than a day, and she fielded a Special Ops team.”
“Great. So we become ‘Ops-Center,’ with a little Stalin controlling the strings of her agents and sleeper cells.”
“I don’t quite see General Carrie as Joseph Stalin.”
“Yet. Or maybe Stalin is waiting in the Joint Chiefs.”
“Bob, you are way overreacting,” McCaskey said.
“I’m way tired,” Herbert said. “Maybe that has something to do with it.”
“I hope so, because we are only doing what our enemies are doing,” McCaskey said.
“That’s a moral strike against it.”
“It’s an amoral world!” McCaskey replied. “Either we become part of it or we take more and more hits. Bob, these marines are no different than the regional Op-Center we tried to get going a couple of years ago, except that the troops are mobile and stealthy. Their job is to gather information and act if they have to. Set backfires. You’ll see, Bob. This is going to work.”
“You’re aware that backfire has another meaning,” Herbert pointed out.
McCaskey frowned. “Now you’re just being ornery.”
“I prefer realistic.”
“You can prefer what you want. You’re cynical and pessimistic. I have more faith in our system than that.”
“Oh, I have faith in the system,” Herbert replied. “It’s some of the people who scare me. You know what’s the weirdest thing of all?”
“I’m afraid to guess.”
“I’m relieved that Paul Hood is in the field, too,” Herbert said. “We’ve got some maturity and restraint out there.”
McCaskey grinned. “There was a time when Bob Herbert would have described that as being a pussy.”
“It is,” he replied. “Maybe that’s what you need when there are soldiers running around half-cocked.”
There was an awkward silence, not because the men disagreed. They had disagreed many times in the past. The silence was because of the bad pun.
“I think I’m going to pull a Carrie and head home,” McCaskey said. “If I’m lucky, Maria won’t wake up and want me to brief her on what’s been going on here.”
“I’ll be interested to know what she says about all of this,” Herbert said.
“I can answer that,” McCaskey said as he headed for the door. “She’s going to want to know why she wasn’t on the field team.”
“Tell her they wer
e all of Asian descent.”
“She’ll just want to organize a team of Spanish descent,” McCaskey said as he headed out the door. “Good night.”
“Night.”
Herbert sat there. He was not looking at the monitor. He was reflecting on the last comment McCaskey had made about him, that the old Bob Herbert would have signed up for militancy. That was true. He still favored offense, only the venue had changed. It was no longer about a force of arms but a force of ideas. That was the war brewing in China, a conflict of the old way versus a new way.
Meanwhile, there is still some old-way crap going on, Herbert reflected. Explosions around the world and a possible attempt to blow up a rocket carrying a nuclear-powered satellite. They were all being distracted by the larger picture, which was being dictated and defined by the apparent militarization of Op-Center. The immediate question was how to put out this fire, which was itself apparently a backfire against some internal problem they did not yet understand.
Herbert turned his tired eyes back to the monitor. As he looked back over the data, his mind kept switching to Striker and the actions they took. Preventing a war between the Koreas. Stopping a coup in Russia and averting civil war in Spain. Sacrificing their lives to prevent India and Pakistan from going to nuclear war. All successes, as far as the bottom line goes.
Quick, expensive, decisive victories, he thought. Who could argue with that, other than the widow Melissa Squires and the families of the dead?
Herbert was confused. But there was one thing he held to, and that was the value of intelligence in making decisions and planning actions. There was no arguing the wisdom of that as a course of action.
It was, after all, called intelligence.
TWENTY-NINE
Beijing, China Wednesday, 2:00 P.M.
The ambassador never showed up.
Paul Hood waited in the room for two hours, then finally went for a walk to find out what was going on. He bumped into Wesley Chase, who, as it happened, was on his way to see him.
“I’m so very sorry, Mr. Hood. The ambassador was on the telephone for quite some time and then left the embassy,” Chase told him.
“Is something wrong?”
“This is an embassy, sir,” Chase smiled. “Something is always wrong. But Mr. Hasen said that if he does not see you before then, he will see you tonight at the reception.”
“For—?”
“The start of the celebration of the fifty-eighth Chinese National Day,” Chase informed him. “He will be there, along with the prime minister and other dignitaries. He said this will give you a chance to talk to Mr. Le Kwan Po.”
“Does he speak English?”
“No. But there will be translators, including his daughter Anita. I will give you a full briefing on the personnel before you go. In the meantime, he asked that an office be placed at your disposal. The driver who met you at the airport will also be free to take you anywhere you may want to go.”
“I may take you up on the sightseeing later,” Hood said. “In the meantime, I’d like to go to the office.”
Chase extended an arm down the hallway. Hood went back to his room to get his briefcase. Then he let the ambassador’s executive assistant show him to the guest office.
“Is the ambassador available by phone?” Hood asked.
“The ambassador went to see the prime minister with his translator, no one else,” Chase told him. “The president and I have a cell phone number in the event of a crisis. Short of war or a death, neither of us would interrupt the ambassador during a mission of state.”
“Don’t you usually go with him to these meetings, just in case someone has an emergency that does not quite qualify as a crisis?” Hood was not being facetious. It was unusual for an aide not to be present to tug on an ambassador’s sleeve in case information or an opinion were needed.
“I usually go with him but not this time,” Chase admitted.
“May I ask why?”
“You may, but I don’t have an answer,” Chase said. “The ambassador did not ask me to go.”
“Is there anything you can tell me about the ambassador’s morning?” Hood pressed.
“To tell the truth, Mr. Hood, I do not know very much, and what I do know I am not at liberty to discuss. I am sure you understand.”
“Actually, I don’t. I am here at the request of the president—” Hood went silent. Suddenly, he understood. He was here to talk to the prime minister, which was typically the ambassador’s job. Joseph Hasen had gone to see the prime minister first. He was probably being territorial if not downright preemptive. “You know what? It isn’t important why he went,” Hood said.
Chase gave him a puzzled look as they walked. Hood ignored him. The former head of the underground NCMC was going to have to get better at being an aboveground diplomat.
The office was located just around the corner, past the oil portraits of former ambassadors. The large canvases were hung on ivory white walls. The walls were plain, save for the ornate crown molding along the top. The door to the office had marble pilasters topped by a frieze of junks sailing from east to west. Hood tried not to read any warnings of conquest into that.
“My intercom number is four twelve,” Chase said as he left. “Is there a message in case the ambassador calls?”
“Only that I’d like to talk to him as soon as possible,” Hood replied.
“I’ll tell him,” Chase promised.
The aide left the door open behind him. Hood closed it. The office was actually a desk stuck in a small library. There was no computer, just a phone on the desk. Visitors probably brought their own laptops. Hood felt a chill of disorientation. The office underscored how different his life was now from only two days ago. He walked slowly across the Persian rug. It was a silk tribal rug from K’om, patterns of dark earth colors surrounding the portrait of a woman. There were burn marks along the edges and bloodstains on the woman’s cheek. Hood had read about the rug in the briefing folder. It had once been in the ambassador’s office in Teheran. Hasen’s brother-in-law had been an attaché there when the Iranians took over the embassy. He managed to escape by pretending to be Iranian. He had wrapped the body of a dead “freedom fighter” in the rug and dragged it out to make his story more convincing.
There wasn’t an office like this at Op-Center, one with history on the floor and volumes stacked on seven tiers of built-in bookcases. Even the records room was mostly digital. It was erased during the e-bomb attack, then replaced with copies from other agencies. Looking around, Hood got a sense of the magnitude of loss the Egyptians experienced when the library at Alexandria burned.
When was that? Hood wondered.
That information was somewhere in here, in one of the encyclopedias or dictionaries. He would have to go and find it if he wanted to know, not plug keywords into a search engine.
Like this mission, he thought. He had to go somewhere, and now he had to search for information. That was his new life. He would no longer be struggling against the chairman of the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee for funding, he would be trying to run the ball around ambassadors and their staff, heads of state and their staff, and every organization in Washington that had information he might need. The size of the task suddenly became very apparent.
And daunting, bordering on frightening. It was astonishing that anything got done. He looked down at the rug. He did not approve or sympathize, but he understood the frustration that pushed radicals to do what they did.
“Which means you’ve got to push back,” he murmured.
As he thought that, his brain shifted to a default setting: Sharon. He did not like the fact that his subconscious apparently regarded her as an anarchist. He felt ashamed. He went to the desk and sat in the leather seat and decided to push back. At the real enemy, not the one in his head.
It was very early in the morning in Washington. Hood called Bob Herbert at Op-Center. If he did not find the intelligence chief at the office, he would not bothe
r him at home.
Herbert was there.
“This is why bureaucracy sucks,” the intelligence chief said.
Declarative statements like that passed for “Hello” from Bob Herbert, especially when he was working on a project. Caller ID had liberated him even further. It allowed him to vault right into a complaint without the inconvenience of having to wait for an answer to “Who’s this?”
“What’s wrong?” Hood asked.
“The retooling of Op-Center, which was done to streamline our operation, has left me with all my old associates plus a new one,” he said. “It’s a good thing I’m in my chair, because this Mississippi boy ain’t finding his footing.”
“You want to talk about it?” Hood asked.
“No. I’m done.”
Herbert was always blunt and aggressive, but he never whined. And he did not displace his anger the way Hood did. He smacked the source, hard.
“Are we getting anywhere?” Hood asked.
“No, as I just told Frau Feldherr,” Herbert replied.
Well, at least Hood knew who had triggered this outburst. General Carrie had been at Op-Center two days, and Herbert already saw her—or the people she represented—as the gestapo.
“I heard from Mike a few minutes ago,” Herbert went on. “He’s in Beijing at the Grand National Hotel. He was going to catch some winks, then meet up with his Xichang people. What about you?”
“Apparently, I won’t know anything new until I go to the National Day reception tonight,” Hood told him.
“I wonder when we’re going to know anything, and if we’re going to like what we find out,” Herbert said.
“You lost me.”
“About Op-Center,” he said. “Maybe you and Mike are lucky to be out there, doing something else.”
“Did something happen?” Hood asked.
“Not really. Some words with Carrie, then with Darrell.”
“That’s nothing new for you, Bob,” Hood said.
“I know. I just get this sense that something is ramping up,” Herbert told him. “Something not good. The DoD effectively takes over Op-Center, and the president pulls its top guy out to keep him close. That doesn’t sound like rewarding Paul Hood for services rendered. Plus, we’ve got marines at our disposal. I was talking to Mike about that before. Striker redux. It sounds like a strategic realignment.”