Mission Compromised

by Oliver North

  Newman was wide-eyed. “And you just said you weren't a spy, you were just an infantry officer?”

  “I haven't forgotten everything that the real William P. Goode taught me,” said North with a smile. Newman had many more questions, but he didn't want to take a chance on being seen talking to North.

  “Thanks,” said North as he held up the passport, saluted with it, and put it into his pocket.

  Newman nodded, and said, “I'm looking forward to our next meeting being held under more relaxed circumstances. Thank you for coming. I owe you big-time, Colonel.”

  “You don't owe me anything. You were a good Marine. I hope you stay out of trouble over there in that snake pit. Call me if you need me. Give my love to your wife.” With that, he strode off and disappeared into the trees toward the Fort Myer Gate. Newman stood for a few minutes, transfixed by the six men frozen in the moment of raising a flag atop an extinct volcano. As he turned to walk back toward the Key Bridge, he could just make out the inscription, emblazoned in gold letters on the base of the statue. They were, as every Marine knew, the words describing the Iwo Jima landing by the very man who had ordered it, Admiral Chester Nimitz: “Uncommon valor was a common virtue.”

  TWA Flight 919

  ________________________________________

  32,000 feet above Atlantic Ocean

  GPS: 37°12' 03” W, 48° 23' 14” N

  Thursday, 16 February 1995

  1333 Hours, Local

  Rachel Newman had just finished the meal service for the first-class cabin of the flight from London's Heathrow that would be landing in Dulles in another four hours or so. She began to stow away the utensils and utility service materials in the tiny galley. Her friend Sandy was helping the other flight attendants in the back of the plane, but when they were caught up, she joined Rachel in First Class.

  The last row of the front cabin seats were empty, so the two women sat down to catch their breath while the passengers, now fed and relaxed, made no demands.

  “That's a pretty gold chain,” Rachel said of Sandy's new jewelry. “What kind of stone is that in the mounting, a sapphire?”

  Sandy nodded and smiled. “Yes, thank you. I love it. It was a Valentine's Day gift from Tom. He's a great husband,” she said with a little giggle.

  “Oh, yes … that's right. Valentine's Day.” Rachel couldn't help herself. Her voice was tinged with disappointment, and maybe even a little envy. “I guess my guy has been so tied up on whatever he's doing in Washington—what am I saying? He's hardly ever in Washington. He's probably in North Carolina at Fort Bragg. In fact, he's been so busy and so exhausted, he probably doesn't know where he is, let alone what day it is.” She forced a grin and added, “Well, I suppose I forgot his gift too. I did leave a Valentine' on his pillow though. I don't think he found it, or I'd have heard from him by now. But I'm not sure. We're like the proverbial ships …”

  “… passing in the night,” they both said in unison.

  “Most husbands tend to be forgetful …” Sandy said after a pause in the conversation.

  “Uh-huh,” Rachel replied. “But this one is hopeless.”

  Only the dull, muffled sound of the jet engines and the hiss-ssss of the air outside the skin of the aircraft filled the air inside the plane. Occasionally the two women heard a subdued laugh from someone watching the in-flight movie, but things were really quiet.

  Rachel closed her eyes and hoped Sandy would not stay on this theme. Sandy didn't take the hint. “Have you served him divorce papers yet?” she asked.

  “Not yet. But I did see a lawyer about it.”

  Sandy turned toward her coworker and was wide-eyed. “Rachel, I was kidding! I was just trying to be clever because you said he forgot Valentine's Day. That's not grounds for divorce in any marriage.”

  Rachel sat back in the leather seat, angry for jumping to conclusions and revealing too much. “I ... I told you on our last flight together … I've been thinking about divorce for more than a year,” she said. “I even got up the nerve to test the idea with Peter when we were together after Christmas at his folks—I mean, he was in Fort Bragg over Christmas and didn't even call. He was ‘kind’ enough to give me two whole days the week after New Year's, and we spent that at his parents. I got mad and told him that our lives didn't seem to be in sync and that it's been like that ever since we got married. I asked him if he'd feel better if he were single again.”

  “What'd he say?” Sandy asked quickly.

  “Nothing. He said he didn't want to talk about it while we were at his folks' house. Then I asked him when we should talk about it—he just said, ‘Later.’ But he never said when, exactly.”

  “Sounds like he isn't against the idea of divorce. Maybe he's been thinking about it too,” Sandy suggested. “But you guys shouldn't give up. I mean … you can't just throw away, what is it—ten years?”

  “It'll be fifteen years in June,” Rachel sighed. “You know, Sandy, I really don't want a divorce. But I can't live like this anymore. He doesn't even try to make me a part of his life. He can't talk about his work. ‘For security reasons,’ he says. But surely there are some things he can share. He leaves me every couple of weeks or months, and he's gone for weeks and even months at a time. He says he can't tell me where he goes and what he does. I even accused him of having some bimbo on the side that he goes off to see. That made him mad because he couldn't sense that I was kidding. Oh, Sandy, it doesn't pay to marry a military guy—they just leave a girl in a constant state of frustration. I'll never understand the military. I know that I just plain don't get them.”

  “Have you guys sought help, you know, like a marriage counselor or a pastor?”

  “I suggested a shrink once, but I couldn't get him to go,” Rachel said. “But not a pastor … neither one of us is very religious,” she added.

  “So, how are you going to handle it?”

  Rachel smiled. “You know that valentine that I put on his pillow? It was one of those silly ones. It said, ‘I've decided that for Valentine's Day I'm giving you something you've always wanted.’ And then you open it up and it says, ‘A divorce!’ I wanted to be there when he opened it so we could discuss the matter, but we just never connected. And I had to go back to work. But before I left Dulles, I met with an attorney, and she's going to draw up the papers so I can serve him when I get back.”

  “Listen to me, honey,” Sandy said, suddenly serious. “You guys have got to get together and discuss this. Don't burn any bridges. Yeah, maybe he does want a divorce too. But I don't think that divorce is the answer.”

  Rachel didn't respond. She loved Sandy—she was in fact becoming her best friend. But she felt that Sandy would find a way to reduce all of Rachel's and Peter's problems to a simple formula, patched together with a couple of Bible verses. As if on cue, Sandy said, “I can make an appointment with our pastor, Rachel. Please look at another option.”

  In order to change the subject and end, or at least postpone, the discussion, Rachel said, “Yeah, maybe, Sandy. Anyway, I'm not going to smack him in the face with divorce papers the minute I get back.”

  “Honey,” Sandy said in her sweetest Southern drawl, “I know you'll do the right thing. Just pray about it first. Ask God to give you wisdom.” Then, sensing that Rachel did not want to talk about it any longer, she said nothing more.

  Rachel, however, surprised herself. She did want to talk some more—but not about divorce. “We have had some good times, too,” she recalled with a smile. “I remember when I first met him; he was so handsome and courteous. I'd never been shown such courtesy in my life. He was so sweet.”

  Rachel shook her head sadly and said, “I don't know exactly when things changed. I wonder if it wasn't just after my first miscarriage …”

  Sandy said nothing. She sensed that her role now was to be a sympathetic listener.

  Rachel continued. “I lost a baby when I was six months pregnant—a little girl. We even had a name picked out—Laurel Marie,” she expla
ined, adding, “I lost the baby in August, and in September—-just ten days later—P. J. was assigned to the Second Force Reconnaissance Company as platoon commander and ended up spending more time at Fort Benning, Georgia, and Little Creek, Virginia, than he did at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, where he was supposed to be based. I pleaded with him to postpone taking all those trips, and he told me it was impossible. I grieved for more than two years over the miscarriage, but Peter wasn't there.…” Her voice trailed off.

  Sandy nodded to let Rachel know that she was listening but let her friend continue talking. “I went back to work six weeks after the baby died,” Rachel said drearily. “Peter buried himself in his work too. That was when he went to Jump School and underwater swimmer's school.” She giggled. “Doesn't that sound redundant—‘underwater swimmer’? Where else does anybody swim?”

  The two of them laughed. “Peter and I reconciled right after that. He came home—let's see, home then was in Virginia, back at Quantico, where he was when we first met—and we had a whole month together before we moved. The Marines call moving PCS, for ‘permanent change of station.’ We both expressed regrets at the way things were going and he apologized, said he wanted to start over, and we had a great reconciliation. That was in March and April. Sometime during that interval, we made another baby,” she smiled.

  Then her face darkened again. “But six months later, I lost a second baby,” she said forlornly.

  “Oh, I'm sorry, Rachel,” Sandy said, putting her hand sympathetically on her knee.

  “We—I mean the doctors and me—we were trying so hard and being so careful. But when this baby was six months along, she died too. Another girl. We didn't even have a name for her 'cause we were so scared that it might happen again. And it did …” she said.

  “Peter couldn't understand it,” Rachel added. “He thought there was something wrong with him—like ‘toxic sperm’ or something,” she said.

  Sandy looked puzzled. “Really? Is there such a thing?” she asked naively.

  “Of course not,” Rachel said. “But since the doctors had no physiological reason for my miscarriage, I suppose Peter suspected either a psychological reason on my part or something physical from him. I don't know. We never really talked about it.

  “About ten years ago, though, I had had enough of constant moving and living in shoebox-size officer's quarters. I told Peter that it was hard for me to commute by air to my base at Dulles. I was having to fly commuter planes to St. Louis or some other place to get a connecting flight to Dulles. Sometimes I'd have to leave a day early just to meet my schedule. I told Peter that we needed to buy a place near Dulles and have a permanent home. He could stay in the Transient Officer's Quarters or the Bachelor Officer's Quarters or whatever they call it, if he wanted to, but I wanted something permanent, and I kind of hoped that maybe if we settled down, we could have babies—without the problems we had before.”

  “Is that when you bought the house in Falls Church?” Sandy asked.

  Rachel nodded. “He commuted to Quantico every day all the way from Creswell Drive. It was quite a haul back and forth every day—and he had pretty lousy hours then, too, but he never complained. Still, things never got better between us. I don't get it. He's always ready to head off to trouble. Since we've been married, he's been to Beirut and Grenada. Then he went to all that stuff down in Central America and to Panama and then the Middle East—first in Desert Shield, then Desert Storm. He's always running off somewhere to save the world, but he never seems to want to stay home to save our marriage.”

  “Is he out now? When I saw you guys over the holidays, he was wearing civilian clothes and wearing his hair longer—well, longer for him,” she laughed.

  “No, he's still a Marine,” Rachel answered. “He works at the White House,” she added simply. “He says it's better PR if the public doesn't see a lot of uniforms running around. They might think it's a military government, I guess.”

  “Are you sure it isn't just the President?” Sandy asked. “My husband says that this president doesn't like to have uniforms around him because he hates the military. Maybe it reminds him that he was a draft dodger,” she added.

  Rachel shrugged. “Maybe … I've heard that, too, but never from Peter. He's always so loyal to everyone he works for.”

  Sandy apologized. “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. You were saying you got fed up with Peter always running out on you for another mission. That must have made you kind of lonely, especially when he was in Desert Storm and all those other things,” she suggested.

  Rachel nodded again, but she wasn't going to tell Sandy about Mitch, the pilot with whom she had been having an affair for the past eleven months. Instead she said, “Yes, it's lonely, but my job is just as much to blame as his. I'm gone a lot too. But I don't want to wake up one day and find out that I've wasted most of my years in a marriage that means nothing to either one of us. If that's really the case, we both need to make a clean break and start over.”

  Sandy bit her tongue. She wanted to say lots of things that she felt Rachel needed to hear, but now was not the time. She looked at her watch and said, “I'd better go back and help the crew in coach. We'll talk again, honey. Maybe on the next flight we have together.”

  U.S. Commerce Department

  ________________________________________

  15th Street entrance

  Washington, D.C.

  Thursday, 16 February 1995

  1645 Hours, Local

  Bob Storey was a general's general. Everybody knew that. He looked like a general, talked like a general, carried himself like a general. That's why Silicon Cyber Technologies International had hired him. Marty Korman, SCTI's founder, CEO, and chairman of the board had hired Major General Bob Storey the day he retired from the U.S. Air Force for one reason: he wanted to round out his stable of retired military brass hats—men who looked good even out of uniform. Korman wanted men who understood the ways and wiles of Washington, who knew their way around the E-Ring at the Pentagon, who looked good at press conferences, and who could snow the pompous politicians in Congress with all kinds of military tech jargon if they got out of hand.

  But now Storey was becoming a pain in the neck himself. Storey was asking questions—questions about the leading-edge technology SCTI was developing, questions about who was using the hardware and software that SCTI had developed, and whether the selling of this technology was truly in “the national interest of America” or even legal under the restrictions that Congress had placed on high-end computer technology earlier in the nineties.

  Korman had just finished a humiliating hour meeting with high-level bureaucrats at the Commerce Department. And right now he was furious. They had turned down an export license for his nonmilitary SCTI software for the nations of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. What galled him most from the meeting was not so much the denial of the license but that during the meeting, the Commerce Department weenies had produced a memo showing that his own General Storey had recommended against granting the license. The loss of a multimillion-dollar sale to a couple of Middle Eastern countries wasn't that important to Korman. What was important was that his trusted employee suddenly got a case of conscience.

  Korman exited from his meeting at the Commerce Department and all but ran down the stairs from the building. He had called ahead to have his company jet file an earlier flight plan back to California, now that his trip to Washington was fruitless. As he sped down Constitution Avenue in the backseat of the Cadillac that had picked him up at Dulles, waited for him, and was now taking him back to the airport, Korman swore loudly to no one in particular, adding, “Who does this guy Storey think he is?”

  The limo driver responded, “What was that, sir?”

  “Shut up—just hurry up and get me back to where you picked me up.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Korman grabbed his cell phone and scrolled through the tiny directory. When he got to his office number, he punched the Call icon. “S
ally get me Storey's personnel file and have it out on my desk when I get back to Los Angeles.” While she had him on the phone, Sally Pearson, his personal assistant, quickly briefed him on other matters he needed to attend to when he returned to the West Coast. Korman dictated a few memos, asking Sally to cancel an appointment that he had forgotten about when he left the night before on his Gulfstream IV for the flight to his early morning meeting. “See if Jerry can reschedule for next Thursday at the same time,” he told Sally, wrapping up the last of the urgent matters.

  Marty Korman wasn't used to being told that he had a bureaucratic problem with an export license—or anything else for that matter. Korman liked to tell people that he could do anything, even the impossible. After all, he'd boast, hadn't he personally started SCTI in his garage after he left Los Alamos National Laboratories? That wasn't entirely true—he had a partner who deserved at least half the credit. But Korman had spent countless, thankless hours, two wives, and incredible sums of other people's money building his company, and now he had succeeded beyond even his own great expectations. It seemed ludicrous that a simple matter like government licensing should now control his opportunities for success. He made a note to call his “friends,” Simon Harrod at the White House and Senator James Waggoner up on Capitol Hill, again on Monday. For a few seconds, Korman toyed with the idea of calling the President or the Vice President, but he had never done that before. The obese National Security Advisor was his access to all things at the White House. And he figured that POTUS and VPOTUS, as Harrod referred to them, were his silver bullets. He didn't want to fire those shots until he had to.

  And then in disgust, he thought, What good are the best politicians money can buy if you can't get hold of them when you need them? As the car sped west on the Dulles Access Road, he swore again—but this time to himself.