Eleven Days (23 page)

The trip was out of the ordinary—another piece of cool candy that came with the godfather’s role now, the sugar fed to bureaucrats and politicians to dull their cynicism, the inevitable by-product of congressional life in the partisan era. Their looped tapes of ambition, achievement, and risk demanded something sweet to cut the stress. You could not know the things you learn and know at his level without feeling a deep paranoia and almost hopelessness about the state of things. If Sara knew more, she might concur. But then no one wanted the mothers to know too
much because then they would never let their sons become soldiers or sailors. And so rather than say anything else, he simply explains to her that there is very little she can understand, that she must trust that the operators know what they are doing.

“Operators.”

“Yes, operators.”

“I don’t like that word.”

“Well, Sara, that’s what they’re called. It’s a term of honor.”

“They’re so young.”

“They’re exactly the same ages as the guys who’ve fought in wars for generations. For centuries.”

“The Marines on the train looked like high school kids.” Her voice breaks on the word
high
.

“They probably were.” He takes her hand.

“But—”

“No, but think about how young you were when you took on big responsibilities.”

“Motherhood is not a war.”

“Would you die for your child?”

“Of course.”

“War is the ability to die for another person without hesitation. War is the belief in the value of another person’s life above belief in the value of your own. We send them to war at that time in their lives for specific reasons. They graduate to situation rooms at other times in their lives for other reasons.”

He is surprised by her passion on these subjects, and teases her that she should have stayed in Washington. Her enthusiasm is fueled by exhaustion and excitement. She cannot wait to see her son. She wants to know what he was doing. She wants to know more details. The godfather says he knows very little, but that the informal “civilian QRF” that came together to secure this plane
and her presence on it was powerful and impressed even him. He tells her the person who arranged for her to go see her son must have known someone very high up the chain of command. And then he abruptly changes the subject, as he realizes this conversation is only leading to a place where she’ll realize the reason she is being sped to her son is that the chances of her finding him alive are slim. “You want to know what the true ‘axis of evil’ is?” she asks. “Men keeping confidences with other men.”

“ ‘Axis of evil,’ ” the godfather says, smiling. “David never liked that phrase. He preferred ‘crescent of concern.’ ”

As the plane lands, she asks why they’re finally having this conversation.

FRANKFURT INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, GERMANY
FEBRUARY 2011

Jason appears to be waiting for a commercial flight, but it is not a real commercial flight. The men and women who board it will not all land at its stated destination. Because these are not ordinary passengers; this is not an ordinary flight. There are no civilians on the flight, although there is no indication of that at the gate. Everything looks normal.

The commercial airliner has been arranged for use by the Teams in order to avoid being detected in foreign air space. The purpose of this particular mission is the insertion of a small NSW team in a foreign country. Team guys and other SOF personnel occupy this entire leg of the flight. Forty minutes after takeoff, the plane will change course. Jason and his Team will parachute out. Jason has done this before. It’s not stressful. This will be the last thing he does here before heading home to train with a new Team, for a late spring mission. Because he focuses on one hour at a time, he is not thinking much about that yet. This insertion should be simple. He has done many like it before. He is hungry, so goes to find something to eat before boarding.

Near the gate there is a coffee shop. The girl who rings up his drink puts a little sparkly red sticker—a star—on Jason’s cup and says, “Happy Valentine’s Day. Don’t break any hearts.” There is
a man there, at the sugar stand, and he holds his cup up; he has two stickers. “I think she prefers older men,” he says. Jason had seen him before; he had been talking with some of the other guys earlier which meant he was on the flight. Like Jason, he’s wearing ratty olive cargo pants, a polo shirt—and a beard. He asks Jason to sit with him, and he does. He asks Jason his last name, and Jason lies. He asks Jason what he does, and Jason lies again; he’s not unsuspicious. Lying’s a default setting in these circumstances, another skill. If the man presses, Jason has various levels of lies, as even the most persistent questioners tend to pull back after the third try. He guesses the man is former military. Maybe he’s a contractor. He’s old. Then the man mentions working in Saudi, for a Jeddah-based private aviation corporation. Then he mentions David and uses Jason’s surname. And so they begin to talk.

The man knew David well. At least, he knows a lot about what David did—or claims to. Jason listens. His mother had never discussed these things with him, so he was always left to make them up. He would absorb bits and pieces here and there—something about the Kennedy administration, something about Laos and Vietnam, something about the Agency and a Project Phoenix, and something about the importance of data and statistics. He had always concluded that his father was a kind of private investigator: he followed dangerous people into dangerous places; he collated facts. He knew his father had had a role, ultimately, at a desk at CIA and that he hated it, and he knew that his father had later left for the Middle East—perhaps to make money, perhaps for love. There were always rumors. But his mother didn’t seem to care about the details. She cared about the emotions. And in any event, they had only ever treated David as the one who abandoned them, the one who never said goodbye. Sara likely thought through all those years that his absence was too painful for Jason to discuss.
An unforced error, on her part, unforced errors being the essential occupational hazard of motherhood.

The man at the gate tells Jason about his father’s work for Kennedy and clarifies—“technically, he was staffed under Ted Sorensen, writing. I’m sure you’ve read all those speeches.”

“No, sir.”

“You’ve never read JFK’s speeches?”

“No, sir.”

“ 
‘Ask not what your country can do for you but—’
 ”

“ ‘—What you can do for your country.’ I know that one, sir.”

“ 
‘In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility. I welcome it’
?”

“I never heard that one.”

“Well, Kennedy had a lot of flaws, but he had superb command of the English language. He was
very
young—not too much older than you are now—well, close enough that were he alive and the age that he was when he assumed office you’d consider him a generational peer. And he was running a country at the height of its power and at the height of a cold war. He made some good decisions and some bad ones, but he made people believe—he made people believe that there was something worth fighting for. That’s powerful. He was a hero, too. That helped.”

“It’s hard to imagine what a cold war is like.”

“It is now, isn’t it? Well, it was horrible.”

“I know President Kennedy understood the importance of Special Operations Forces.”

“He did. When you send a group of covert operatives to invade a country and they get slaughtered on the beach, it’s a stark reminder that tanks and nukes serve to assist, but not replace, wise manpower.”

“Tanks, nukes, and mercenaries.”

“I met your father in Vietnam. I led a SOG team. You know about SOG? The Studies and Observations Group.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You could as well call today’s Special Operations Forces our global Studies and Observations Group, given what we did and what these guys do today, in some respects. We did what you might call ‘field studies.’ Mopping up the messes after Arc Light strikes, that kind of thing. Some of the assets we had in Vietnam were Buddhists, did you know that? Your father found that very amusing. He was a bit of a Buddhist himself.”

“Really?”

“He knew a lot about it. The Four Noble Truths. ‘The path to the cessation of suffering.’ You don’t remember—he never talked about those things with you?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, we never knew if he brought that knowledge with him or if he learned it on the job. Certainly helped. He knew how to talk to those people and understood that if we needed them, we would have to speak their language. They formed our informal intelligence network. Our HUMINT. Our RUMINT.”

“He never talked about that time in his life. At least not—at least not that I remember. I was little when he left.”

“All the SOG teams and our subsidiaries—you know, like the frogmen—had access to discretionary funds for recruitment, but the guys we found on the ground were mainly Buddhists. Buddhists for the foreign war effort; how about that?”

Jason has never heard the frogmen described as “a subsidiary of SOG,” but it’s best to be polite in these cases. This man may know a lot. This man may know absolutely nothing. Jason was
trained not to trust, but he was also trained to behave. And he was curious. “I’ve seen some pictures.”

“It was wild. Nobody had M-4s fresh off the production line. We had sawed-off Swedish-Ks, untraceable. And one guy”—he is laughing now—“one guy carried a kitchen cleaver.”

“A kitchen cleaver?”

“Yeah. It scared the shit out of everyone. And he used it, too. It had a case. Its handle was carved into the shape of a monkey’s head.”

“It sounds interesting.”

“What does that mean?”

“It sounds more … free.”

“What’s your definition of ‘free’?”

Jason notices a gold chain around the man’s neck, but he cannot see what’s on the end of it. He’s wearing bracelets, too, like a kid. The bracelets are made of woven, brightly colored plastic threads—pinks and reds and golds. He also has an orange ribbon tied around his wrist, with words written on it but the words have cracked and faded. Jason wonders what it was about him that this man recognized. He has no defining attributes, by contrast—and by design. His sleeves cover his ink.

“I gave your dad some
boots
,” the man continued, emphasizing the last word, as if he were holding them in his hand now. “The DOD kitted them out for us with little footprints on the soles—so the impressions they left in the grass or mud looked like shoeless VCs, not Charlies, had been there. We had a great time. There was a VIP room at the officers’ club at CCN HQ, in Nha Trang. David loved it there. You could tell when he was in residence because of his songs.”

“Songs?”

“Yeah. You know”—and at this point he starts to sing softly—“ ‘He’s got the whole world in his hands’?”

“Yes, I know that song, sir.”

“Yeah. Yeah, well, David changed the lyrics and he sang, ‘I’ve got a CAR-fifteen in my hands. I’ve got a CAR-fifteen in my hands. I’ve got a CAR-fifteen in my hands, I’ve got the whole world in my hands.’ ”

“And,” Jason says, dispassionately. “Did he have a CAR-fifteen?”

“Your father became as invaluable a resource to them as they were to him; he was always slipping in to do little deals to make their lives better.”

“Deals?”

“Deals. He brokered the sale of a used fire truck to a group of Montagnards. In exchange for their weapons.”

“That’s creative.”

“Well, the guys wanted the weapons, and the Montagnards wanted that truck. Your daddy liked to think of himself as the diplomat, making peace all around.”

“Sounds more like an arms dealer.”

“But he didn’t profit! He couldn’t add. Have you ever seen a Montagnard? They rode that thing back and forth to work every day. I never saw that in a history book. That was David. He wanted to be accepted by the military guys. He wanted to be accepted by the intelligence guys. He wanted to be loved by the Vietnamese. He didn’t want to be seen as an observer, as an Ivy League … dove.”

“But he didn’t want to fight.”

“He lost his chance. He was better behind a desk.”

“Too short for Spec Ops.”

“Well, he liked to say he was seven feet tall when he stood on his brain.”

“I guess he always knew what to say.”

“And he knew what to believe. He—the guys at State used to say that your father saluted the flag with his soul.”

The man tells Jason a story about the last time he saw David, twenty years ago, and how David had spoken proudly about his only son. Jason tells the man that “today,” Valentine’s Day, is his father’s birthday. He says that his dad would call home on this day each year and always said he was calling because it was easier to remember than his son’s birthday. Jason says that every single year when that call came, his mother would give the same speech about how lazy men are, and about the fact that David was Phi Beta Kappa
summa cum laude
at Yale, and had nominally worked in “intelligence,” but he still could not remember his only child’s birthday. Sara said “intelligence” was not the right word for it; that they should call it “boarding school”—because once you entered it, you got to do a lot of damage under the aegis of forces acting
in loco parentis
.

“Did your father ever talk about Skull and Bones?”

“No, sir.”

“Skull and Bones is a secret society at Yale. And many of its members, at one time, were tapped to go into service for the government.”

“Interesting,” Jason says, not finding it interesting at all.

“Service like working for the OSS.”

“Yes, I’m familiar with the OSS. But my father wasn’t in that.”

“No, it was over before his time. But he would have been aware of it. Its lure set a standard for the last bits of lure left, for those who were keen to do something in service to their government at the time when he graduated.”

“Lure. Well, I’ve read a bit about their training.”