Mission Compromised (10 page)

 

“P. J., I'm so sorry about Jim,” said Rachel as she came out of the kitchen to greet her husband when he arrived home from the airport.

“Yeah, so am I,” Newman replied, brusquely brushing by his wife who had reached up to embrace him.

She reacted with anger at the rejection. “Why, P. J., why? You didn't give me a chance to go with you on Monday. I should have gone to your parents with you,” Rachel said as he walked upstairs to change into his uniform.

“You had crew training,” he replied without stopping.

“Crew training! Sure I had crew training, but if you had simply paged me at Dulles, you know that I would have met you at National and flown up with you. I loved Jim, too, you know,” she said, following him into their bedroom.

“Look, this is a family matter,” he stated with a flat tone of finality, not noticing the tears starting to well up in his wife's eyes.

“A
family matter!
What are you saying? I'm a Newman, too, for heaven's sake. I'm your
wife
, Peter!
Your sister
introduced us! What could you have been thinking by shutting me out of your life at a time like that?” Rachel picked up a book from the dresser and threw it at her husband. It hit him squarely in the chest, but he merely caught it and tossed it onto the bed, acting as if it had never happened. In her rage, Rachel turned and left the room, crying. He heard the front door slam as he buttoned up his uniform shirt. He checked the alignment of his shirt, belt buckle, and trousers in the mirror and headed back down the stairs, out the door to his car, and set off for HQMC. He noticed as he backed out of the driveway that his wife's Chevy Blazer was gone.

 

 

The funeral service for Captain James Bedford Newman was held October 14 at the Old Fort Meyer Chapel—where John and Alice Newman had been married thirty-nine years before. It was a cool, clear day, and the church was filled with his parents' friends and comrades from wars and duty stations past. Jim's Delta Squadron commander was there, along with a heavy contingent of generals and colonels—some retired, others still on active duty—with whom father and son had served. The Secretary of the Army offered a eulogy and read Jim's citation for the Distinguished Service Cross. The blue-and-white medallion and a Purple Heart were affixed to the American flag that draped Jim's government-issue, gunmetal-gray coffin.

The words of the presiding chaplain weren't much of a solace to Peter, although he noticed that his mother and sister somehow seemed buoyed when one of his brother's fellow Delta troopers described how Jim had “come to know the Lord” a few months before his gruesome death in Somalia. Newman vaguely wondered what the young man meant.

As they always do on these solemn occasions, the Army's old guard provided a fitting send-off for one of their own: the pallbearers and honor guard in dress uniform; the horse-drawn caisson with the flag-covered casket aboard; the Army band, slowly leading the entourage through Arlington Cemetery's winding roads, flanked by row after ordered row of white stone grave markers. “So different in life, so much the same in death,” they seemed to say.

When they arrived at Jim's gravesite, Peter and his father were seated beneath a white awning on either side of the grieving mother.
Nancy and her husband, Dan, in their Navy dress uniforms, sat to her father's right. Peter in his Marine dress blues and Rachel in a black dress sat to his mother's left. After the chaplain read again from the Scriptures, they concluded with the Lord's Prayer. Then a bagpiper—a tradition in Jim's Delta Squadron, one of his mates said—played “Amazing Grace.” As he did so, the captain in charge of the honor guard presented Nancy and Rachel each with a rose from the floral display at the foot of the bier.

Immediately after the piper's rendition of the ancient hymn came three volleys of gunfire—the final salute for a fallen warrior. Then, in the sudden silence, the mournful, haunting sound of “Taps” wafted over the green hillside where Jim's body would be laid to rest. As the bugler played the last, lingering notes of the military requiem, Peter could feel more than hear his mother weeping silently beside him. His father, stone-faced and wearing his dress uniform with a brigadier's single silver star on each epaulet, held her hand.

Peter watched, almost detached, as the honor guard smartly removed the colors from atop Jim's coffin, folded the flag in a ceremonial triangle so that only the white stars on the blue field showed, and handed it to Lieutenant General Paul Stenner, the commanding general of the Joint Special Operations Command, one of the Army's most distinguished soldiers. The general gently reattached the Distinguished Service Cross and the Purple Heart to the folded flag and then bent over and presented the banner to the grief-stricken mother. Only then did he speak, and his words surprised Newman: “Your son was a very good and brave man, Mrs. Newman. You have much to be proud of. We shall miss him, as I know you will. I look forward to seeing him again. Until then, I shall pray that our Savior—in whose presence your son now rests—will ease our pain and grief.”

At that, the highly decorated officer, who had bent before the weeping mother who clutched the flag to the front of her black dress, stood erect and saluted. As he did so, Peter noted that the tall, thin general had two thin trickles of tears running down his face.

Although he had been present at a number of military funerals, Peter had never before seen a high-ranking officer make such deeply personal spiritual comments. It made him a bit uneasy.

 

 

There was no obituary published for Captain James Bedford Newman, or for any of the other Delta operators who died in Somalia. The government that had sent them there wasn't willing to admit, even when they were dead, that their unit even existed.

The week before Jim was buried, the President ordered fifteen thousand U.S. reinforcements—including a new Delta squadron—to Somalia. But it was all for show. By the time the leaves from the trees in Arlington Cemetery had fallen onto the fresh sod covering Jim Newman's remains, the withdrawal of those same units would be underway and a new UN emissary would be negotiating with the brutal warlord, Aidid.

Before those same trees over Captain James Newman's grave would bear the first buds of spring, the “massacre in Mogadishu” would have far-reaching consequences. The Secretary of Defense, who had presided over the debacle, would resign in disgrace. Mohammed Aidid, the target of the operation, would be invited to Egypt to present his ideas for “peace” in Somalia. And Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the carnage in the “Black Sea,” would quietly return to Khartoum, Sudan, to plot his next assault on the Americans, whom he described as “Satan's agents in the world.”

 

 

Back at his desk at HQMC, across the street from his brother's grave, Peter Newman was still filled with quiet rage. Even more than a year following his brother's death, he couldn't decide whom he despised more, the politicians who had sent his brother to his death and then abandoned the mission, or the man whose thugs had killed him. He did not know then that there might be another target for his willful vengeance—a charismatic Saudi millionaire and militant Islamic radical who had declared
jihad
, a “holy war,” against the United States.

 

CHAPTER THREE

Situation Room

________________________________________

The White House

Washington, D.C.

Tuesday, 29 November 1994

1520 Hours, Local

 

N
ewman, are you still with me?” the National Security Advisor asked. Harrod had finished his phone call and was back, sitting across the Situation Room's long, mahogany table. Harrod had been watching from across the room while the Marine major wrestled with his inner demons.

“Yes, I'm with you,” Newman answered as he regained his composure. “Exactly how do you propose that I can make sure that Aidid is caught and made an example to others, Dr. Harrod?”

“Do you know what the Special Projects Office does, Mr. Newman?”

“No. Special Ops, sure, but I've never heard of the Special Projects Office.”

“Good. That's the way it's supposed to be. Officially it doesn't exist. In fact, it really hasn't existed since your predecessor left here exactly eight years ago this week.” Harrod was riffling the corners of the pages he had shoved into the green-covered file labeled
TOP SECRET.
He had yet to open it again since Newman walked into the room.

Newman looked puzzled. “My predecessor?”

“Yes, your predecessor, another Marine—Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North.”

For the second time in ten minutes, Newman was stunned. “Oliver North?” Newman's mind quickly analyzed the situation before him and said sharply, “Look, if you think I'm going to accept a job only to go down in flames like he did, you'd better think again. I'll resign my commission first.”

“You don't have to do that. But I was led to believe that you wanted to see your brother's killers punished, to avenge his death,” Harrod replied calmly.

In the nearly fourteen months since his brother had been killed, Peter Newman had indeed said those exact words countless times. And now he was wondering how the National Security Advisor to the President of the United States would know that. After pondering the question for a moment, he stopped trying to figure out how this sentiment had gotten across the Potomac River and decided to see what it was all about.