Op-Center

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Gregory Donald was met at the cargo bay of the TWA plane by a representative of the airline and by the Deputy Chief of Mission, both of whom saw to the customs paperwork and loading of the coffin onto the 727. Only when the plane was airborne, and Donald had gently touched his lips to the tip of a finger and pressed it to the sky, did he turn and board the Bell Iroquois.

The helicopter made the trip from the airstrip in Seoul to the DMZ in just over fifteen minutes. Donald was met at the landing field by a jeep, which escorted him to the headquarters of General M. J. Schneider.

Donald was looking forward to the reunion. In his eventful life, Donald had met a few people who were arguably insane, but Schneider was the only one who wore four stars. A Depression baby who was literally left on the doorstep of the Adventurer's Club in Manhattan, Schneider had always fancied that his mother was returning to the scene of the crime and his father was a renowned hunter or explorer. He certainly had a build straight out of H. Rider Haggard: six-foot-three, lantern jaw, broad shoulders, and Mr. Olympia waist. He was adopted by a couple who lived and worked in the garment district, and enlisted when he was eighteen, just in time to fight in Korea. He was one of the first advisers into Vietnam, one of the last American soldiers to leave, and returned to Korea in 1976 when his daughter Cindy was killed in a skiing accident. At sixty-five, he still had what Donald once described as that "last Texican at the Alamo look": ready, willing, and able to go down fighting.

Schneider was a fitting counterpart to the North's General "Hair-trigger" Hong-koo, and worked surprisingly well with ROK's General Sam, with whom he co-commanded the Joint U.S./South Korean Forces here. Whereas Schneider was a man of flavorful language who believed in throwing everything he had at a problem, including tactical nuclear weapons, Sam was a cool, reserved fifty-two-year-old who favored dialogue and sabotage to head-to-head action. This being South Korea, Sam had to sign off on any military action; but the Sinophobic Schneider scared the North Koreans, a role Donald had always felt he cherished… and played to the hilt.

It was ironic, Donald thought as he entered the General's headquarters, a small wooden structure consisting of three offices and a bedroom, set on the south side of the compound. The two of them— Schneider and Gregory— couldn't be more unalike, yet they'd always seemed to "fit" together better than matched socks. Maybe it was because they were contemporaries who had come up through hard times, through back-to-back-to-back wars, or maybe Schneider was right when he'd called it the Laurel and Hardy syndrome: the diplomats made the fine messes, then the army had to go in and clean them up.

The General was on the phone when Donald arrived, and waved him in. After brushing off his dusty seat, Donald sat on a white leather sofa along one wall. Schneider was a stickler for clean.

"… don't give a foggy damn what the Pentagon says," Schneider was yelling, his voice surprisingly high and shrill for so big a man. "They killed a U.S. serviceman without so much as giving the aircraft a warning! What? Yes, I know we were over their country. But I hear they used some kind of computer voodoo to poke a stick in our spy eyes, so what choice did we have? And doesn't that make the bastards invaders too— hi-tech saboteurs? Oh, not according to international treaties? Well, stuff those, Senator. Let me ask you this: What are we going to do when the next U.S. soldier dies?"

General Schneider fell silent, but he wasn't still. His bloodshot eyes moved like little machines, and his head hung on his sloped shoulders as if he were a bull waiting for the torero. He picked up a letter opener and began jabbing it in a much perforated USMC cushion that seemed to be there for just that purpose.

"Senator," he said, calmer after nearly a minute of silence, "I will not precipitate an incident, and if you were here I'd put my toe to your butt for suggesting I might. The safety of my troops is more important to me than my own life, or anyone else's for that matter. But, Senator, the honor of my country is more important to me than all those lives put together, and I won't sit still while it's shat on. If you don't agree, I do have the telephone number of your hometown newspaper. I think your constituents might see things differently. No… I'm not threatening you. All I'm saying is that I'll keep watering the seeds till you grow some stones. Uncle Sam's already got one black eye. Anyone closes up the second eye, we better do more than not apologize. Good morning to you, Senator."

The General slammed down the phone.

Donald took out his pipe and began poking in tobacco. "That was a good one… about watering the seeds."

"Thanks." The General inhaled, left the letter opener sticking from the pillow, and straightened. "That was the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee."

"I gathered."

"Got sunflowers in his shorts, thinks he farts daylight," the General said as he rose and came around his desk.

"I'm not sure what that means," Donald admitted, "but it sounds good."

"It means he gets all these lofty goddamn ideas and confuses being intellectual with being right." He extended both hands and clasped Donald's between them. "Screw him. How are you holding up?"

"I still feel like I can pick up that phone and call her."

"I know. I was that way with my daughter for months. Shit, sometimes I still punch her number without picking up the phone. It's a natural thing, Greg. She should be there."

Donald blinked away tears. "Dammit—"

"Mister, if you need to cry, you go right ahead. Business can wait. You know that Washington doesn't like to get its ass to scrimmage till they've looked for every which way to punt."

Donald shook his head and resumed filling his pipe. "I'll be okay. I need to work."

"You sure?"

"Very."

"You hungry?"

"No. I ate with Howard."

"That must've been exciting." Schneider clapped a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. "I'm kidding. Norbom's a good man. Just a little cautious. He wouldn't send me more troops and matériel until he knew, for sure, that we'd be going to Defcon 3— even after our Recon Officer was shot."

"I heard about that on the flight up. The officer was a woman—"

"She was. Now we're hearing on NK Army radio that they think we're cowards for hiding behind women. I'll say this for the North: It must be nice not to have to worry about the PC crowd. Shit, not like the old days when you were the only diplomat in town. Now we've all got to have golden tongues."

"Things are not like they were."

"No, they are not. I tell you, I sit here, Greg, and sometimes I want to give it all up and go back to sewing labels in shirts, like when I was a kid. If something was right in the old days, or necessary, you did it. You didn't have to go to the U.N. with your hat in your hand and ask the effing Ukraine for permission to test bombs in your own goddamn desert. Jesus, General Bellini at NATO says he saw a TV interview with some goddamn Frenchmen who're still pissed at us for accidentally shelling their houses on D-day. Who the hell pointed a TV camera at these assholes and told them to bitch? What the hell has happened to common sense?"

Donald was out of matches and lit his pipe with the hand-grenade lighter on the General's desk. Only after he pulled the pin did he realize it might not have been a lighter.

"You said it yourself, General. TV. Everybody's got a forum to say their say now, and there isn't a politician who's cocksure enough not to pay attention. You should have told the Senator you have a friend at 60 Minutes. That might've shaken him up."

"Amen to that," Schneider said as the two of them sat on the sofa. "Well, maybe the wheel will turn again. It's like that slave in The Ten Commandments who wanted to see the Deliverer before he died— and there was Charlton Moses Heston there to catch him when he took a hatchet in the gut. That's what I want. Just once before I die, I want to see the person who's going to deliver us from bullshit, who's going to do what's right even if he takes an ax in the belly. If I didn't care so much about my goddamn men, hell, I'd march right into Pyongyang and box their ears myself for Recon Officer Margolin."

The strategy session was brief. Donald would accompany the next patrol, taking a driver of his own, a recon officer, a night-vision digital video camera, and a jeep, and making two passes along two miles of the DMZ. They would phone the visuals to Op-Center, and he would make another pass in two hours— time enough for noticeable changes to have occurred along the heart of the border.

The thirty-five-minute round trip was uneventful, after which the digital videotape was given to a communications officer for transmission to Bob Herbert.

While he waited for the next pass, Donald ignored Schneider's suggestion that he get some rest and went to the radio center, a shack with five cubicles, each of which was crammed with radios, telephones, and a computer with thick files of int-sigs— interval signals used to identify broadcasters— the exact location in degrees and minutes of every transmitter site in Asia and the Pacific— as well as the azimuth of maximum radiation in degrees from true north of the site— a kiloHertz frequency schedule to help pinpoint particular signals, and a SINPO troubleshooter program to help clear up any problems with signal strength, interference, noise, propagation, and overall merit of the signal.

Taking the cubicle vacated by the Communications Officer to whom he'd given the CD, Donald only cared about one transmitter. And he knew he'd have no trouble getting a message to a point less than five miles away.

He ran a computer check of the transmitters at the DMZ. There were two: shortwave and medium wave. He selected the former, operating at 3350 kHz, picked up the small microphone, and sent a terse voice message:

"To General Hong-koo, Commander of the Forces of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea at Base One, DMZ. Ambassador Gregory Donald sends greetings, and respectfully requests a meeting in the neutral zone at the General's convenience. Seek an end to hostilities and escalation, and hope you will favor us at your earliest convenience. "

Donald repeated the message, then reported to General Schneider. The General's own people had already told him what Donald had seen: that ranks were being closed at the front, with tanks and light artillery being moved in along with support personnel.

Schneider was neither surprised nor worried by the buildup, though he wished that General Sam would allow his troops to do likewise. But Sam wouldn't act without an okay from Seoul, and Seoul wouldn't authorize it until President Lawrence had upgraded the situation to Defcon 2 and conferred with President Ohn Mong-Joon. Donald knew that the former wouldn't happen without another incident like the Mirage, and that the two men would avoid talking, officially, until they and their advisers had already decided what needed to be done. That way, they could reach a quick consensus and show the world that they were of one decisive mind.

Meanwhile, Donald sat and waited to see whether the North would accept his invitation… and if they did, whether Schneider would see that as the act of a coward or a Deliverer.