War of Eagles

TWENTY-EIGHT

“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 were 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.