Choke Point wi-9

by Ian Slater

  Freeman grunted. “Whenever they say a thing’s foolproof, you’d better start looking for the fool.”

  David laughed, but it was forced, both men veteran comrades in arms using their natter about the F2000’s specifications as a stand-in for the subject they were both avoiding. It was distinctly un-Freeman-like to step around painful questions. Indeed, it was his unflinching willingness to confront unpleasant situations head on that had contributed in no small measure to his legend in both the military and Washington, D.C. The wounded Medal of Honor winner wondered how long the general could hold his fire.

  “Started exercising?” asked Freeman.

  “Yes. Trying to cut down on the pain pills.”

  “Don’t, if they help you get through exercises. Knew a guy once — would never take pills. Rambo type. Thought he was going to win the game all by himself. But couldn’t fit into the team. Wouldn’t pass the ball.”

  “Uh-huh. Know the type. Remember—”

  “Wouldn’t take pain pills,” cut in Freeman. “Not even a damn aspirin. Thought it was wimpy. Being a sissy. Out on an exercise one night up at Fort Lewis, he got a goddamn headache from the howitzer batteries uprange. Must’ve been a migraine. Wouldn’t take a pill. Got so damn disoriented by this migraine, saw the steps, made so much noise going through the brush, couldn’t concentrate, and gave the whole squad away. Reds nailed us before we could hit the kill house.”

  “Steps?” asked David.

  “What? Oh, yes. Steps going up in front of you like a serrated castle wall. It’s called the ’castle’—an aura a lot of migraine sufferers see before an attack, distorts their vision. Usually the steps come with a background of green — most beautiful damn green you’ve ever seen. You take the pills then, you’ve got a chance of beating the headache or at least reducing the severity—”

  The general stopped, the abruptness confirming what Brentwood had already realized. “You suffer from them, General.”

  Freeman, the soldat extraordinaire, or what his enemies called “soldier eccentric-aire,” nodded. “Never told anyone that before. Strictly between you, me, and the gate post. Understood?”

  “Of course.” It had been the best the general could do in approaching the as yet hidden subject of his visit, delaying the unasked question by dredging up the story of the man who wouldn’t take medication and of how he himself was a secret migraine sufferer. It was a kind of “I understand pain too” quid pro quo. So now he could ask the question, soldier-to-soldier. Seven commandos in. Six commandos dead.

  “So what went wrong, David? You fuck up?”

  David moved awkwardly in the bed and, pulling out his bedside table drawer with his good left hand, unscrewed a smoke-grenade-size vial and lifted it to his mouth, swallowing two more Oxycodone.

  “That bad, eh?” said Freeman, taking the vial from him, screwing the top back on, dropping it into the drawer.

  “It was a shoelace,” said David cryptically.

  “Shoelace? You starting a quiz program? What the hell does that mean? You tripped, fired your weapon, is that what happened?” He paused. “Blue on blue? That what we’re talking about, David?”

  “No, sir, I didn’t shoot my own men. Though I might as well have.”

  “Hey!” snapped the general. “I don’t want any sniveling cry-baby, mea culpa, poor-me, self-pitying shit. What’d I tell you boys — all my boys? Look at it square on. You’ve always stood up. Taken full responsibility. Goddammit, I wrote you up for the gong. Saw the President pin it on your chest, remember? But taking responsibility isn’t the same as making a clear analysis. I haven’t read the goddamn AAR.” He meant the After Action report. “I’m retired, remember? Bastards don’t let me see anything ’cept the damn USO schedule — when some blond big tits is going to work up the boys so they spend the next week beating their meat ’stead of keeping their mind on the job. All I know is that seven of my boys went out and six didn’t come back. What went wrong? What’re the AAR’s ’Lessons Learned’? We’re gonna be in this godforsaken place for years, no matter what the White House says. Stuck here and in the other six Stans. Same in Iraq. What can we learn from your experience, Captain?”

  David explained about the shoelace — the damn German tenor — how it was that Jamal got ahead of him as they’d run for the entrance.

  “So that accounts for why this Jam got it instead of you. Nothing else.” Before David could reply, the general asked, “You think Li Kuan was there?”

  “I don’t know, General. Light was pretty bad. Didn’t see any pockmarked guy.”

  “But you think they were waiting for you?” the general pressed. “A trap?”

  David shrugged, his legs relaxing, the Oxycodone giving him a buzz. “We spotted one sensor. Could’ve missed others, maybe tripped one.”

  The general nodded, gazing out at the Hindu Kush. “Lost your confidence?”

  David’s forehead creased. It made him look much older, puzzled. “I don’t know. Sometimes I think no. Other times—”

  “At night?” said Freeman, turning around.

  “Mostly,” replied David.

  “Don’t think too much. Set an exercise goal — push yourself harder every day but don’t use it as penance. Channel it for Operation Payback.”

  “Haven’t heard of that.”

  “Neither have I,” said Freeman, “but it’ll come. You heard about the Chinese — going into Kazakhstan after the terrorist staging areas?”

  “Saw a bit on CNN.”

  Freeman pulled out a khaki handkerchief and began roughly polishing the goggles he habitually wore in the region. Wrapped around the old khaki Afrika Korps cap — a gift which, like the goggles, had been passed down from one of Rommel’s staff — the goggles made him look like the famed Desert Fox himself, especially when he rode in one of the open Afghanistan Humvees, standing up and using the.50 caliber machine gun as an armrest that vibrated noisily as the vehicle sped across the Afghan plain.

  Freeman placed the goggles around the peaked cap. “I still maintain an extensive list of contacts in the forces,” he told David. “Keep tabs on what’s going on. Saw the report Beijing’s military attaché sent Washington. Said a young American girl was murdered because she overheard a couple of Li Kuan’s al Qaeda boys talking about making trouble in China’s Northwest — Xinjiang. Given what the President just said on the box, I take it Beijing figures we won’t object to whatever the PLA does because it’ll be fighting terrorists.”

  “We’re all against terrorists,” said David.

  “The Beijing attaché says this young woman, Riser — if I remember correctly, Amanda Riser — overheard these two creeps in a place called Barberry’s Pub Café in Suzhou.”

  “Suzhou?” David couldn’t place it.

  “About four hundred miles south of Beijing, on the Grand Canal,” said Freeman. “Point is that Barberry’s Pub Café is a bar.”

  David was ensconced in the initial euphoria of the Oxycodone smothering the pain, finding it difficult not to close his eyes and luxuriate in the temporary escape. But he was far from what the unit’s pharmacist would call “Zombiefied.” “Uh-huh,” he responded, gazing out at ice cream clouds rising majestically in the endless blue of the Afghan sky. “Muslims, especially fanatical Muslims, don’t drink. They certainly don’t go to bars.”

  “Right,” said the general, slapping on his cap and pulling out a business card from his load vest. “You need to talk, David, you can reach me at this number. It’s the USO.”

  “I’d have thought Washington would have put you back on the active list.”

  “They won’t even return my calls. Still pissed at me about the first Iraq war. Told ’em Bush Senior should’ve given Schwarzkopf the green light to roll on into Baghdad and kill the son of a bitch. Remember the old lube an’ oil change commercial, ’You pay me now or you pay me later’? Not going to Baghdad then meant we gave ’em twelve more years to build up their terrorist networks and finance al Qaeda.”

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sp; “You should call ’em about the bar,” David said, his gaze held captive by the majesty of the ice cream cumulonimbus rising and spreading into a line of bruising anvils. There was going to be, as Jamal would have said, “one mother of a storm” over the Hindu Kush. It would be an icy rain. He was thinking about the Barberry’s Pub Café again. “General?”

  Freeman was pulling the goggles snugly below the Afrika Korps cap as the normally reserved Brentwood, in a painkiller-induced devil-may-care tone — one he’d normally use for a fellow Special Forces warrior and not a general — repeated forcefully, “Why don’t you call our military attaché in Beijing? About the bar?”

  “I will.”

  With that, the general collected his swagger stick. “Soon as I get back to USO HQ.”

  “Where’s that?” asked David.

  “Tora Bora,” replied Freeman, and gave a swashbuckling salute with the swagger stick, as Rommel might have done. Douglas Freeman despised what the SS and other Jew-hating Nazi scum had done, but in the Wehrmacht, the German army, there had been some soldiers of honor, and for Freeman, Rommel had been one of them.

  David tried to write his weekly letter to his wife Melissa, but it was difficult — he told her he hoped he could handle an F2000 and convince them he was still battleworthy. For encouragement he drew on all the “impossible” diagnoses he knew and which were habitually cited by Special Forces as examples of grit overcoming extraordinary personal difficulties: Adolf Galland, Germany’s top air ace, had only one eye — cheated on the eye chart exam. How could he do that — fly a Messerschmidt 109 and later, in 1945, the Me 262, the worlds’ first jet fighter, with just one eye? He would have had no spatial perspective, no depth of field. And Douglas Bader, the Brit. Lost both legs in an air crash before the war. They said he could never fly again. “Not in a fighter, old chap!” He did, became an ace, was captured by the Germans, escaped so many times the commandant confiscated his tin legs.

  But David’s all-time favorite was a man who had nothing to do with war, but with the combat of the soul: Lance Armstrong. Testicular cancer, lung cancer, brain cancer, and he fought back to win the toughest race in the world, the 2,160-mile-long Tour de France. Five times in a row! Most Americans, besotted by football, hockey, and basketball, didn’t comprehend the Herculean stamina and iron will that it took to be first among hundreds of the world’s elite cyclists. Some fool Frenchman complained, “But ’e is on chemicals.”

  “That’s chemotherapy, you idiot!” came another American’s reply.

  So, dammit, David thought, he could sure as hell learn to stay in the fight, to do what he’d been trained for. For now, however, his letter to Melissa would have to be painfully typed out on a computer, then sent to the unit censor, since e-mail contact with home had been temporarily suspended because of terrorist hackers who’d penetrated the U.S. Army’s computer network. The physical effort of having to type with his left hand afforded him much more time than he usually had to think about what he wanted to say to her and, most important, what to leave out. Besides, he knew he’d have to lead into it — cushion the news of his savage wound.

  Dear Melissa,

  Greetings from nowhere. This has to be the most forsaken place on earth. God was punishing somebody when he made this sun-baked jumble of rocks and dirt. Our unit G2 tells us it’s about the size of Texas. I asked him how many square miles of water there are and he just laughed. Zip. Zero. Nada. You see a tree here, you practically die of shock. And the people. I keep thinking when I was a kid — bashing the fridge to close it and saying there was too much damn food in there. Dad got after me for cussing and tore a strip off me for saying there was too much food — how great it was to live in a country where I could say that. “Poor” doesn’t even begin to describe the people here. A lot of them haven’t even got shoes, sandals — anything. Had one of them, a scout, on one of our missions. It was 35 degrees, just a tad above freezing, and he had nothing on his feet. Least we didn’t have to do that at—

  He was about to write “Fort Benning,” but censored it himself and instead put “camp.”

  I can’t like them, though. Remember how all the media used to talk about Northern Alliance against the Taliban? Well, at the end of the day I wouldn’t give you a dime for any of them. Most of them are still nothing but mercenaries — sell their own mother. Change sides like they change shirts — which, come to think of it, isn’t a good analogy. I’ve never seen one of them wash, let alone change. But you get what I mean — no loyalty at all to one side or the other. It’s all filthy lucre. Sort of like our Congress — ha, ha! On the other hand, I know we have to be here. After 9/11 we had no choice but to hunt the Taliban and al Qaeda down. And then go get Saddam. You remember the day one of our guys climbed up on Hussein’s statue and they pulled it down? And I’ll tell you one thing, we’re going to be here for years, and no matter what our politicians say. We pull out now, after having thrown out the Taliban, the creeps’ll come back from their hideaways in Pakistan in six months and we’ll have terrorist training camps all over. The present government we put in wouldn’t last for a week if we weren’t here. Look at the assassinations of officials since we’ve been here. And anyway, I don’t trust one sect more than the other when it comes to any idea of reform. The way they still treat women — no better than baggage. That’s getting better now but it’s going to take a long time. What gets me is the Afghans say they want an end to war but the first thing they want to get their hands on is a Kalashnikov. It’s like Northern Ireland and all those other places, I guess — fighting’s become a habit. Sometimes I don’t think they know what the heck they’re fighting for — it’s just what they know how to do.

  Anyway, sweetie, these are some of the reasons I’ll be glad to get out of the place, which brings me to the big news: I’m coming home! High time, eh? Got some shrapnel in the right arm. It’s slowed me down a bit so they’re shipping me to Fort— for some R and R. You know, some physio — hot tub, that sort of stuff. Before you know it I’ll be good as new — back in the unit.

  He ached, needed to tell her how badly he felt about losing his men, but he knew she’d worry about him worrying — and what could she do? “You can tell me anything, David,” she’d told him. “I don’t want you carrying the load all by yourself, honey. No matter what it is. Okay?”

  “Okay,” he’d agreed, but how could he explain it to any civilian? And she was alone. All he could do was write the six KIAs’ next-of-kin, and knowing that they’d all write back to him, thanking him for his thoughtfulness in writing them, made him ill. And they’d trust him all the more because he was a hero, a Medal of Honor winner, which made him inwardly cringe.

  He signed off with “Lots of love to everyone,” kisses and hugs, aware that he hadn’t told her how long his R&R at Fort Lewis in Washington State, and therefore their reunion, would be.

  At USO Headquarters at Tora Bora, where he could use a secure land line, the general called the Beijing embassy, asking for the military attaché. He was transferred to Riser instead, and introduced himself, adding, “Sorry about your girl, son.”

  “Thank you, General. You wanted to speak to the MA. He’s out at the moment. Friendship Store.”

  Freeman knew the place — overstaffed by semicomatose Chinese salesgirls who were about as enthusiastic about selling merchandise to “Big Noses” for urgently needed U.S. dollars and euros as they were about joining the PLA’s reserves, which had begun to decline as the younger cell phone — Internet generation of Chinese became less enamored with the PLA’s slogan of “Unite against the running dog lackeys of the right” and more interested in getting the latest burned American CDs.

  “General, he’s just come back,” said Riser, handing the phone to Bill Heinz, who respectfully heard the general’s concern about the Muslims in a bar, the same point General Chang had brought up with Riser and thus indirectly with Heinz.

  “Good point, General. I see you’re sharp as ever. I still remember your tip-off abou
t the Patriot missile. But it’s not unusual for Muslim terrorists to go to bars.” The MA was calling up his computer file on all suspects thought to be involved in the planning as well as the execution of the 9/11 attack. Among them were three men who were at a skin palace, The Pink Pony, a Daytona Beach strip club featuring “totally nude XXX naked dancers,” the night before the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon.

  “Huh,” responded Freeman. “Those fundamentalists sure get around town.”

  “Sure do, General. ’Course, those three suspects might not have been drinking, unlike Li Kuan’s boys in Suzhou.”

  “Guess not,” said Freeman wryly. “Too busy slobbering over pussy at the Pink Horse.”

  “Pony.”

  “Whatever, drinking or perving, seems as if they’re using bars and strip joints to fit in. No doubt their religious sensitivities are offended. They’re just whoring and boozing out of a sense of duty.”

  “Probably,” laughed Heinz. “Maybe getting a taste of the seventy-two virgins they’ll get when they hit us again.”

  “So the info from Suzhou isn’t suspect just because the Muslims were hitting the sauce?”

  “Not as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Thanks for your time.”

  “My pleasure, General.”

  When Bill Heinz replaced the phone, Charlie Riser asked him about his reference to the general and the Patriot missile.

  “Freeman,” Heinz explained, “cottoned on to a bizarre fact — that in a certain range the Patriot missile could be accidentally launched by a baby’s scream. Freeman warned them. They did tests. He was right.”

  “They fix it?” asked Riser.

  “Oh, yeah. Real quick.”

  Charlie Riser was impressed. “Anything he doesn’t know?”

  “Yeah,” answered the military attaché. “How to get on with politicians and their staff. Too blunt.”

  Indeed, it was the general’s prickly relationship with the present administration which was responsible for Eleanor Prenty’s delay in returning Freeman’s call to her. Besides, SATPIX taken over the darkness of the far western Pacific were coming in fast and furious, showing cluster “blossoms,” explosions of light, near the line of the South China coast, specifically in Shantou and other bases in Fukien Province. Both the NSA and CIA had alerted Eleanor, but she’d decided not to wake the President until she realized that the lat/long coordinates of these “blossoms” were actually on the Chinese coast. The explosions caught by the satellite’s zoom eye were revealed to be in Shantou, Dongshan, Xiamen, and Pingtan — all major PLA navy bases directly across the strait from Taiwan. “Sea scratches,” long white lines, could also be seen through the intermittent cloud cover offshore, the wakes indicating that the vessels were approaching the Chinese coast.