Acts of Vengeance

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE YELLOW RIBBONS

That bitch, thought Whitney Babcock.

He was into his third Scotch, no ice, when the special segment of The Nightly Report began. When the face of Claire Phillips appeared on the television screen, Babcock felt his headache intensifying. I should have thrown her off the ship when I had the chance.

He was alone in his Georgetown apartment. Outside, long shadows of evening covered the tree-lined street. Ten minutes into the program, during the first commercial break, his telephone rang. It was the line used by the White House staff.

“Are you watching?” asked Dan Summerville, White House Chief of Staff.

“I am.”

“It’s worse than we expected.”

Babcock’s eyes stayed riveted to the flickering screen. The break was over and the Phillips woman was back. The camera switched from her face to a map of Yemen. She was talking about a place called Al-Hazir.

“Why didn’t someone stop it?” Babcock said. “One phone call from the White House to the television network would have squashed it.”

“You still don’t get it, do you, Whit? Do you really think the President would let himself get implicated in a scandal like this?”

Babcock remembered that he had never liked Summerville. He was the President’s crony and longtime hatchetman.

“Scandal? That woman doesn’t have anything—”

“She has the biggest terrorist story of the year. In a few minutes, you’re going to see a recently retired two-star admiral give his version of what happened in Yemen.”

“Fletcher?” Babcock’s voice cracked. “He doesn’t have a clue about what was going on.”

“Keep watching. In front of eighty million viewers, he’s going to say that someone colluded with a terrorist who killed two hundred Americans and torpedoed our mightiest aircraft carrier.”

With a mounting sense of dread, Babcock was getting the picture. After the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, the American public was in no mood to hear about deals made with terrorists. Instead of blaming the Yemen debacle on the President, or the Battle Group Commander, or the Joint Chiefs, the administration had selected another scapegoat.

“I need to see the President right away,” said Babcock. “I’ve got to talk to him.”

“Forget it.”

“Dan, please. This is my career on the line. I should at least have a chance to offer my resignation.”

“That’s not an option. You were fired at four o’clock this afternoon.”

Babcock felt a fresh stab of pain emanating from somewhere behind his eyes. He took a long pull from the glass of Scotch. “Why wasn’t I told?”

“You can read the President’s statement in the paper tomorrow. But it won’t be exactly what he said in private to the National Security Council.”

Babcock hated to ask, but he had to know. “Uh, what did he say, exactly?”

“He was pretty explicit.” Summerville paused, and Babcock could tell that he was enjoying himself. “He said — and I’m quoting verbatim here — ‘Inform that supercilious little prick that he is going to swing in the breeze. This administration will have nothing to do with him.’ ”

The words penetrated Babcock’s brain like hammer blows. He wondered if the President really said that. Summerville was a sadistic bastard.

It didn’t matter. He lowered the telephone and stared at the television. He could hear Summerville still talking. He had heard enough.

On the screen was the face of Langhorne Fletcher. He looked different out of uniform. He no longer had that avuncular image, but looked more like a rumpled academician. He was talking about chains of command and presumptive authority and deadly force. As Fletcher spoke, the image switched to a map of the Gulf of Aden.

Another image appeared. Babcock sat upright in his chair and stared at the screen. It was a still shot of a man on the bridge of a Navy vessel, grinning and looking like a young MacArthur in his starched khakis and aviator sunglasses. In the background, Babcock could hear the voices of Claire Phillips and Langhorne Fletcher.

They were talking about him.

“… while the marines were under fire from terrorists, you say this National Security Council staff member, Whitney Babcock, refused to authorize the use of deadly force?”

Fletcher was nodding his head. “That’s essentially correct.”

“While at the same time he was communicating secretly with the terrorist leader?”

“Yes.”

Claire Phillips looked thoughtful. “Admiral, wouldn’t you call that an act of disloyalty?”

“No,” said Fletcher. “I would call that an act of treason.”

“If so, won’t it lead to a congressional investigation of Mr. Babcock? An indictment, perhaps?”

“So I have been informed,” said Fletcher. “I have offered the investigators my full cooperation.”

At this, Babcock rose and walked away from the television. For a while he stared out the window. Washington was in the thrall of late summer. The canopy of foliage covered the sidewalk on either side of the street. In the deepening shadows he could see joggers and Rollerbladers and a couple pushing a pram.

He pulled open the drawer of the antique writing desk. The oiled .38 Smith & Wesson lay in its felt-lined box. It had five rounds in the cylinder.

He picked up the revolver, hefted it, peered into the muzzle. The pistol both fascinated and repulsed him. He had never actually fired the thing, though he had rehearsed it many times in his imagination.

It had been so close. Almost within his grasp. Yemen and its oil deposits and a new order in the Middle East. He would have been hailed as the rising star of global politics.

No more. He wouldn’t appear on the cover of Time magazine as Whitney Babcock — warrior-statesman. Instead, he would forever be Whitney Babcock — traitor.

With that thought, he raised the pistol to his temple.

The USS Reagan headed into a fifteen-knot wind. It was a classic Virginia coastal summer morning — milk-hazy sky, the sea sparkling like a field of jewels.

On the forward flight deck, clouds of steam billowed over the parked warplanes, giving them a ghostly, preternatural appearance. Helmeted deck crewmen scuttled beneath the jets like crabs in a mist. The howl of a hundred jet engines resonated over the steel deck. One after the other, every ten seconds, fighters hurtled down the catapults.

Poised on the number one catapult, Maxwell shoved both throttles to the full-thrust detent. At the center of the deck, between the two catapults, he could see the shooter. One last look inside his cockpit — no warnings, no lights. He tilted his helmet against the headrest and gave the shooter a curt salute — the ready signal.

Two and one-half seconds later, he felt the acceleration ram him back in the seat. In his peripheral vision, the gray mass of the USS Ronald Reagan swept behind him.

It had taken nearly four weeks for the shipfitters to apply the temporary patch to the carrier’s punctured outer hull. Escorted by a flotilla of protective vessels, which this time included two Los Angeles — class submarines, the Reagan passed through the Strait of Hormuz, around the shore of Yemen, northward through the Red Sea to the Suez, then westward beyond Gibraltar and into the Atlantic. The voyage took thirteen days.

Maxwell could see the shoreline of Virginia. After joining up with his fifteen Super Hornets of VFA-36 overhead the ship, he waited another ten minutes while all the squadrons of the air wing aligned themselves into a seventy-five-ship gaggle.

With CAG Boyce leading in a VFA-34 Bluetail Hornet, the massive formation swept over the beach below False Cape, then turned north toward the Oceana naval air station. Roaring low over the sprawling base, the armada passed in review.

It was a ritual of carrier aviation. At the end of a long cruise, the jets of a carrier air wing catapulted for the last time from their ship and flew home. Waiting ashore were wives, children, parents, lovers, well-wishers — and mourners. Not all who sailed on the Reagan were coming home.

Fifteen seconds apart, the jets screeched down on the concrete of Oceana’s long runways. As Maxwell led his squadron to their assigned parking row, he noticed the hangar closest to the flight line. An entire side of the building was covered with a giant yellow ribbon. Then he saw the crowd — at least a thousand — gathered in front of the hangar. They were waving yellow ribbons. A valiant squad of shore patrolmen was trying to hold the crowd back.

As the pilots climbed out of the jets and started across the ramp, the crowd stopped waiting. They surged through the restraining ribbon. Children squealed, women yelled, and the pilots broke ranks and sprinted toward them.

The two groups melded together like a confluence of flooding streams. Women and kids and girlfriends were swept up, whirled and kissed and squeezed. Gallons of tears gushed down all their cheeks, held back during six months of separation and pain and worry.

Maxwell worked his way through the crowd. He knew no one was there to meet him. He had no wife, no children, no immediate family, at least none who bothered with such things. Claire was in Washington, tied up with the Babcock story.

How many homecomings like this had he been through? The Gulf War had been the mother of all homecomings. That was before Claire, before Debbie. His father, of course, had been away.

That was a lifetime ago. Now Debbie was gone. So was his father, at least in spirit. Claire had her own life. The world had changed.

When he’d nearly reached the hangar with the yellow ribbon hanging from the side, he looked back. The crowd resembled celebrants after a World Series victory: yellow ribbons, hugs, kisses, grinning faces everywhere. It was a special moment.

“Welcome home, sailor.”

The voice came from behind him. He turned, and a smile spread over his face. “You’re supposed to be in Washington.”

Claire was clutching a yellow ribbon. Around her neck was the scarf he had bought for her in Dubai. The easterly breeze ruffled her chestnut hair, sweeping the thin linen skirt around her legs. Maxwell had never seen her look more beautiful.

“I told them I had something more important to do.”

He took her in his arms, pressed her to him. He could think of nothing to say. For a long while he held her, closing his eyes against the bustle and the tumult of the crowd around them.

Finally he looked at her and said, “I love you, Claire.”

She smiled. “Took you long enough. You said it without being coached.”

“I’m a slow learner.”

“It must run in the family.”

He was looking at her, puzzling over her words, when he became aware of another presence: a tall figure, ramrod straight, familiar and formidable.

“I think she means me,” said Vice Adm. Harlan Maxwell.

The deep voice triggered a flood of memories, good and bad. “Dad?”

The older man was clutching his own yellow ribbon. “If you and Claire would rather be alone… then I understand.” He looked awkward, unsure of himself.

That was different, thought Brick. One thing Admiral Harlan Maxwell had never been was unsure of himself.

Brick thought for a second; then it came to him. He looked at Claire. “You brought him.”

“It was your father’s idea. He called last night and suggested it.”

“I’m the one who’s the slow learner,” said the admiral. “I’ve been a damned fool. I almost lost you in Yemen, and I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if” — Harlan Maxwell’s voice cracked, and he struggled to keep his composure — “if I hadn’t told my son how… how proud I was of him. That I loved him.”

Brick was stunned. He felt as though he were dreaming. For most of his life he had wanted to hear those words.

His father hugged him, then kissed him on the cheek. Through the cotton shirt Brick could feel the thin frame, the bony shoulders. His father was showing his age. The years had slipped away from them.

They had both been fools, thought Brick. Prideful and stubborn and wrong. They had a lot of catching up to do. This was as good a place as any to begin.

“I love you, Dad,” he said.