Sudden Threat (28 page)

“What?” Fox said loudly from behind Thompson.

“Yes, sir. About eighty insurgents stormed the ammunition location. The company performed well, though, killing seventy and taking ten prisoners. We, um …”—it was hard to say. Thompson had never been in combat, something he was concerned about, but still, to lose a soldier, anybody’s solider, was painful—“We lost two soldiers in the fight. One enlisted man was killed at Subic, and an officer, a lieutenant, was killed at the embassy. He jumped off the helicopter and saved the embassy doctor. When he was getting back on, he was shot in the back.”

“What the hell are you telling me, Lionel?” Stone screamed, standing up. “Just what in the hell is going on? There’s no war in the Philippines! We’re fighting in Afghanistan and getting ready to fight in Iraq! This isn’t part of the plan!” He cadenced his words, as if Thompson could not understand him. He picked up a glass paperweight with a picture of a bear inside, a gift from a Korean diplomat, and chucked it at the wall.

Thompson was beginning to feel uncomfortable, but he could handle it. He’d never been in a worse situation, but had seen far greater displays of emotion from battalion and brigade commanders over far pettier issues.

“Sir,” he said, “there’s one more item of infor-mation you need.”

“What’s that, the Abu Sayyaf now has Chinese nukes aimed at us?” he said angrily, firing another shot at the messenger.

“No sir. The ambassador sent a Special Forces team into Mindanao a few days ago. Some Filipino helicopters were supposed to pick them up today, but obviously they did not. No one has heard from the team for four days.”

“How did all of this happen, Lionel? Tell me. How did we let this happen?”

“Sir. I just got off the phone with the Pacific Command intelligence guys. They said that a week ago they got the order from us to collect intelligence in the East China Sea. They’ve been focused like a laser beam on China and Taiwan.”

Stone looked at him with a dumbfounded expression. He remembered his promise to the Japanese ambassador. And he remembered thinking,
Yeah, that should work.

“Get me Chairman Sewell,” Stone said flatly, reaching for his phone. He dialed and told his wife that he was going to be working late. Waiting for the chairman, he thought to himself:
Bobby old boy, you deserve an Oscar. The Rolling Stones would be proud
.

Fox and Diamond began to shift uncomfortably in their chairs. Fox was dressed in a dark blue suit with a gray silk shirt, while Diamond was wearing a dark gray suit with a blue silk shirt.
Photonegatives,
Stone thought.

“Who authorized all those troop movements to the Philippines?” Fox asked, standing in front of Stone’s desk.

“That is depleting our focus on Iraq. Jeopardizing the mission,” Diamond said.

“Yes, jeopardizing the mission,” Fox added.

“This is a one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing thing. I can guarantee it,” Stone said angrily.

“We need to get both hands out front where we can see them,” Fox said. He held his hands in front of him to emphasize his point.

“Both hands,” Diamond added, doing the same as Fox.

To Stone, both men looked like mimes pressing their hands against invisible walls. “Don’t worry, guys, it’s under control. I’ve got Central Command bringing me the plan this week.”

“We might have to go this spring. Just do it,” Fox said. “Get in front of this developing Pacific thing.”

“We don’t have the munitions,” Stone said. “We can’t get there from here.”

“What we lack in armament we will more than compensate for by surprise,” Diamond countered.

“Why are we arguing about this? We all agree on the strategy,” Stone said.

“Do we, Bob?”

Stone assessed the two men, still sitting in their chairs. They had just heard that American lives were lost in the Philippines and they knew damn well that the fight in Afghanistan was a slow-motion strategic nightmare.

While the soldiers on the ground were performing magnificently, Stone knew that the strategic window to crush Al Qaeda had slammed shut as the enemy senior leaders escaped through the rugged Hindu Kush. Stone’s position all along had been now that 9-11 had occurred, the nation should use the event as a rallying cry to attack Islamic fundamentalism everywhere. Hence, the gambit in the Philippines. It had everything to do with putting pressure on the global extremist network. The threat was so obvious to him. Stone wondered how Fox and Diamond could blindly sit there and ignore the evidence: that Iraq, while important, needed to wait.

“We do. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve work to do.”

Diamond and Fox followed one another out, and Stone shut the door behind them.

Walking to his desk, he picked up his phone, thinking,
the glider is aloft. Let the winds of chance buffet it and pray for a soft landing.
He dialed Rathburn’s number, and frowned when he didn’t receive an answer. He was certain the hostage thing was an elaborate plan that Rathburn had hatched. An improvisation, for sure, but a delicious one nonetheless.
Matt Garrett, our number one operator, is a hostage!
Not to worry though. Stone left a message:

“This is Mick leaving a message for Keith. It appears we have satisfaction. Good job. Ring me back straightaway. Cheers.”

CHAPTER 49

Stone sat at the head of the table as the usual group shuffled into the conference room on the E-ring in the Pentagon. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, each of the service chiefs of staff, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and various other high-level political appointees gathered as they feverishly worked through the night on a response.

Stone shook his head at the first slide, which determined that the first priority was to save American lives. The next slide showed actions that had been taken to date.

On Stone’s order, Special Operations Command had alerted the Ranger battalion dedicated to quick-reaction force duty, which was the second battalion stationed in Fort Lewis, Washington. C-17 Globemasters were flying into McChord Air Force Base next to Fort Lewis. Likewise, he alerted other elite forces located in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He gave the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division in Hawaii a warning order to have a brigade combat team ready for deployment in less than twenty-four hours.

Again, on Stone’s order, the Air Force chief of staff had alerted the fighter squadron at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam. They were put on strip alert, as there was no clear mission, yet. He ordered the movement of cargo aircraft to bases along the West Coast.

The commandant of the Marine Corps, General Rolfing, gave the marines in Okinawa the mission to be on their vessels in less than twelve hours, steaming south to a position to be determined. The key was to get them moving. And they would be soon. While Stone also approved this order, Rolfing would have done it anyway. The Marines always marched to the sound of the guns.

The chief of Naval Operations made the critical decision to halt the movement of the supply ship that was a day’s steaming time from Subic Bay. If he let it continue, the soldiers might be able to use it for a way out, but it would also be too lucrative a target. It was doubtful, if the insurgents now controlled the small Philippine navy, that the ship could get in unescorted as was initially planned. At Stone’s direction, he also put the Fifth Fleet on alert.

The men sat in the “tank,” a secret briefing room near the chairman’s office in the Pentagon. Available to them was every type of sophisticated communications and monitoring system in the world: secure telephones, secure radios, secure satellite radios, huge television screens that monitored CNN and could pick up foreign stations, and satellite downlinks. The chairman sat in the middle of one of the long sides of the mahogany table. The chiefs of staff surrounded him on either side. Seated across from him was Stone, who spoke first.

“Gentlemen, we have a serious situation on our hands. It is a situation that has gotten out of hand very rapidly. We must get a handle on it ASAP, develop a strategy to recommend to the president, then be able effectively to execute it better than we—well never mind. We need to fix it. I’m pretty sure we don’t have a plan for this, so let’s figure out how to extract ourselves from it and drive on,” Stone said somewhat incoherently.

Chairman Sewell, Stone’s military counterpart, leaned forward and laid out the situation as he saw it. He was an Army four-star general who had risen through the ranks from private. He had attended the University of North Carolina on a ROTC scholarship, where he played right tackle on the football team and had earned the Hughes award for the top ROTC candidate of his year. He had large arms that strained the material of his uniform, look-ing somewhat awkward. He had gone completely bald, with only gray stubble on each side to remind him that he had ever possessed hair. His face was round, and his jowls hung low like a bulldog’s. He had diagonal eyebrows that converged near the bridge of his nose, giving him a sinister look.

He believed strongly in protecting his war fighters and wanted some quick, decisive action to get his young troops out of harm’s way. But he knew it would not be that easy.

“The first thing we have to keep in mind is that we have a few personnel that we know of in captivity, Secretary Rathburn, Matt Garrett, and the pilot. Anything we do must be tempered with the realization that it might backfire against them—”

“As far as I’m concerned, that’s a primary consideration, but again, it can’t be a massive operation,” Stone interrupted.
Could Keith Richards really be a hostage?

“Right,” Sewell continued, cutting an annoyed glance at the SecDef. “We’ve got an A team on Mindanao that’s probably about out of gas. They were supposed to be picked up near the City of Cateel yesterday, 1600 Philippine time.” As he talked, a lieutenant colonel pointed to a huge map of the Philippines, showing the town of Cateel.

“We’ve also got a light infantry rifle company at Subic Bay. We think the commander has moved. It was probably a smart idea; we’ll see. So basically, we’ve got three groups of people we have to get, and we don’t have any real idea where any of them are. My first inclination is to let Special Ops prepare for the extraction of the hostages. We should be able to get a fix on their location in a couple of days—”

“Couple of days?” Stone questioned.

“Sir, we cannot go get people if we don’t know where they are. It’s that simple,” Sewell shot back, looking Stone directly in his eyes. Stone looked away.
All part of the act
.

“Fred, how soon can you have an expeditionary brigade under way from Okinawa?” he asked General Fred Rolfing, the first black commandant of the Marine Corps. Rolfing looked like a Marine. His hair was cropped tightly to his dark skin. He had a thick, square jaw that sported an eight-centimeter scar he had received in hand-to-hand combat in Vietnam.

“Twelve hours,” he said, without flinching. A Marine expeditionary brigade (MEB) included an air attack team, a regimental landing group, and its own organic service support group. It was a completely self-sufficient battle group capable of conducting sustained operations. The Marine aircraft group of the MEB included twenty AV-8B Harrier fighter aircraft, twenty-four F/A-18 fighter aircraft, and over seventy cargo helicopters. The ground element consisted of seventeen tanks and three infantry battalions. The entire MEB nearly had the firepower equivalent of an Army infantry division. “But it will take away from our Iraq prep. Those guys are getting under way for the Middle East.”

Stone thought that was a good comment. Iraq prep. It was all about Iraq prep, wasn’t it?

He looked at Dick Diamond and Saul Fox. With every mention of this unit or that unit being possibly diverted away from “Iraq prep,” both Diamond and Fox appeared visibly to take a body blow, like a fastball to the stomach.

To avoiding protesting too much, Stone let Sewell take the lead.

“So our first move is to get people ready. Tad, you’ve got the Rangers ready go right now, correct?” Sewell asked. General Tad Murphy was the new Special Operations commander. He had been in the position for less than a year and had established himself well. But he knew a simple Ranger mission would not get the job done. Nor would a Marine expeditionary brigade. They needed some good intelligence and they needed to be able to talk to someone in authority, whoever it might be.

“Yes, sir. But let me say something,” Murphy said. The others looked at him. It was nearly 0300 hours, and everyone was tired. No one was in the mood for any pontificating.

“Sir,” he said looking at Stone, “I have to say that this looks like the next front in the GWOT. This Iraq thing will take hundreds of thousands of soldiers to do it right, so we will have to determine what the main effort is,” Murphy continued.

Fox coughed, “That’s preposterous, General.”

Stone rubbed his face.
Hmm, how to play this one?
Side with my deputy or encourage the counterplan?
Stone was reveling in the discourse and determined he should remain consistent.

“Let me make one thing clear, everyone. Iraq is a go. So we have to plan around it. Anyone who can’t live with that can go find another job,” Stone said.

Two Oscars in one day,
Stone thought.
Iraq is a go!
Genius.
By so strongly arguing for the affirmative, a simple debating technique, he was certain that someone would begin to harden their position against going to Iraq, the counterplan. If that failed, well, Wood and Watts, the bass and lead guitarists, would certainly come to the rescue.

And the real problem, Stone thought, was that the best way to kill a venomous snake was to cut off its head. By shifting focus to Iraq, Stone believed America’s hand was releasing the viselike grip on the neck of the viper and sliding along the scaly abdomen, opening the possibility for another fanged attack.

But thankfully, the Rolling Stones had a solution for this little problem, and it hadn’t cost the American taxpayer a dime.