Sudden Threat (45 page)

“Yes, good find there,” Fox agreed.

“So, we have Takishi turn up the volume with his tank divisions and push the administration into negotiating mode. No way in hell is anyone going to want to go against the equivalent of a tank corps in the Philippines.”

“What about the soldiers who are there?” Fox asked. “We just leave them, right?”

Diamond chuckled. “Hey, they signed up for it, so they deserve to stay put.”

“Yes, agreed. So, I’ve already denied several troop requests from Pacific Command and am diverting them to Central Command, and if you can kick old Jim Fleagles in the nuts and get him to use some ‘statecraft,’ well, that would be good.”

“I’ll call him shortly, just as soon as Stone leaves.”

As if on cue, Stone walked into the office. Diamond didn’t move, nor did Fox, relegating the senior ranking man to the “minion” table.

“What’s up guys? You said you wanted to talk about the situation?” Stone asked.

“Yes,” Fox said, picking up the remote and pressing play. “It seems that Mick Jagger is going to be asking, how shall I say it, to ‘gimme shelter’?”

The television showed Stone in full color playing the air guitar, then screaming, “Mick Jagger!” Next they watched as Stone slid behind Meredith and kissed her ear.

“Shall I go on?” Fox asked.

“You son of a bitch,” Stone said.

“Not nice to talk about my mother that way, Bob,” Fox said.

“Not nice at all,” Diamond added.

“Now here’s what were going to do,” Fox related. “State has lead on the Philippines. Defense focuses on Iraq. And while we can push a lot of forces in that direction, they will be a show of force. Nothing will become decisively engaged in the Philippines, and everything that is not already there will keep moving around the Celebes Sea, into the Indian Ocean, and into Kuwait and other parts of the Middle East to begin preparation for the destruction of Iraq.”

“You mean Saddam Hussein, right, Saul?” Stone rebuked.

“Whatever,” Fox replied.

“What, you think you’re the only player with dirt on somebody?”

Fox looked at Diamond, then at Stone and shrugged, as if to say,
Show me what you got.

“I will show you. I can play this game, too. Have been, you idiots,” Stone said, standing.

“Tsk, tsk, Bob,” Fox said. “Dick here will put this on his blog site in an hour if I don’t have a firm commitment from you on the Iraq plan.”

“In thirty minutes, I’ll put all the evidence of your short trading in AIG two days before Nine-eleven,” Stone said. “You think that won’t raise some eyebrows? Okay, so I was trying to get some skank, but at least I didn’t bet on the Nine-eleven attacks. And if you bet on those attacks, guess what, genius, you knew about them. And if you knew about them, you might have been involved in them. Need me to keep going?”

“What evidence do you think you have?” Fox asked, all of a sudden less confident.

“All that I need, and I can see I’ve got your attention.”

“Certainly have mine,” Diamond said.

“Well, I believe you were in on that short sale also, no?” Fox smiled.

Stone stood and said, “You know I wasn’t. Here’s the deal. We will send what we think we need to the Philippines, slip the Iraq war a year to next spring, and develop a better plan.”

“That’s unsatisfactory,” Fox replied.

“That’s the deal. I have compelling evidence of your shorting 500,000 shares of AIG two days before Nine-eleven. The insurance company dropped forty points over the next three months. How much is that, Saul? Two hundred million?”

“My name is nowhere on any of those transactions,” Fox said, a film of sweat forming on his brow.

“Maybe not, but we’ve traced it to you. Are you getting satisfaction now?”

“What about the Predator deal? Where did that money go?” Diamond asked, trying to rescue his friend.

“That’s classified, Dick, and I’m having your security clearance revoked immediately,” Stone said. He stood, walked to the DVD player, pulled the disc out of the machine, snapped it into little pieces, stuffed those into his pocket, and walked to the connecting side door.

Stopping in the doorway, Stone pointed at Fox, and said, “One word of this leaks, the world will know that you are a Nine-eleven coconspirator and that you became rich overnight. How many years do you think you’ll get? It won’t be much fun being ‘inside’; maybe even GTMO? Treason? How’s that sound?”

Fox nodded. Diamond looked at Fox, then at Stone.

Stone walked into his office and shut the door.

Phase V:
Hard Landing

CHAPTER 81

USS Carl Vinson, Celebes Sea

Admiral Jennings put the secure red-switch telephone back in its receiver and turned the plastic key that contained a digitized microchip to encode the phone conversation. Chairman Sewell had called him to tell him that the secretary of defense had authorized the plan for major combat operations in Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines.

In essence, they had already “pulled the trigger.” Jennings had, on the order of Sewell and the president, executed the initial phase earlier that morning by sinking the six ships anchored off the Luzon Straits. A Los Angeles-class submarine had systematically eliminated each vessel with a torpedo in the fore and aft hulls. The SEALs had provided critical information regarding hull density of the vessels, and sinking them had been a quite simple operation.

Jennings praised the actions of the submarine commander, realizing it was a “no-brainer” mission. They had been concerned about the modest Japanese submarine force, but intelligence indicated that the entire submarine fleet was operating somewhere between Taiwan and Japan, as was the rest of the Japanese Navy.

The American carrier battle group had stopped in the East China Sea near Okinawa with a threefold purpose. Its primary mission was to isolate all Japanese units from reinforcing the Philippine Theater of Operations (PTO). A secondary mission was to protect American forces stationed on Okinawa and in American bases on Japan. While the Navy would never admit it, the Japanese could safely assume that some of the ships in the carrier group contained nuclear weapons capable of targeting Japan. The last mission was to act as a deterrent to Chinese and Korean aggression in the area. While they were unprepared to complete that mission, the nuclear card again came into play in a big way.

President Davis had talked to the Korean and Chinese ambassadors, who were noncommittal in their response to him concerning their own security plans.

Then the president had called Mizuzawa and asked him to withdraw his troops from the Philippines. Mizuzawa told him not to waste his efforts, that Japan would rid the Philippines of the Islamic plague spreading across the island and restore the legitimate government of the Philippines.

“You have no right to intervene,” he had told the president. “Did we stop you from invading Afghanistan or Iraq or Panama?”

“We have every right to stop you from terrorizing the world again. I won’t let it happen,” the president had replied to Mizuzawa.

“We’re doing nothing more than you’ve done in the past. You need our help in this Global War on Terror, as you call it.”

“We can still negotiate this thing,” Davis had said, trying to calm and reassure the minister-run-amuck, as the other two battalions from the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division’s light infantry brigade were flying in C-17 aircraft, awaiting the clearance of the runway. And as the two Ranger battalions were jumping into Fort Magsaysay to stop the terror, the Marine expeditionary force sped toward the southwestern coast of Luzon to encircle the advancing Japanese divisions. U.S. Air Force and Navy pilots, as well, began the long and arduous process of fighting American-made, Japanese-flown jets to try to establish air superiority so the ground forces could conduct their business under an umbrella of protection.

Jennings sat in the command-and-control cell of his command ship off the western coast of Luzon, listening to spot reports as they came in from the J-2 (intelligence) and J-3 (operations) officers. There had been no time to establish massive forces as America had done during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. This was a joint contingency operation all the way, not unlike the recent action in Afghanistan. The Rangers had flown in from the Continental United States, the light infantry soldiers from Hawaii, the Marines from Okinawa, the Air Force from Guam and the continental United States, and the Navy from the Indian Ocean and Hawaii. All were supposed to converge on the island of Luzon, like dancing on the head of a pin, and mesh and coordinate and synchronize and come together as if they had practiced it a hundred times the night before.

Of course, they had not. And it did not.

The Rangers had landed and were experiencing heavy resistance from a large armored force, nearly a brigade of two hundred tanks. Caught off guard, and perhaps inserted by a naval commanding officer who did not quite understand their purpose, the Rangers were moving into the jungle, where they were more effective. But their mission had been to secure the prison camps that the ever-faulty intelligence system had declared “lightly defended.” Perhaps to a navy officer used to traveling on aircraft carriers, a brigade of tanks was no big deal. But it was devastating to the lightly armed Rangers, as they made their way back across muddy rice paddies and over the gently sloping terrain until they could blend into the jungle.

Lieutenant Colonel Buck’s light infantry battal-ion had the mission of securing the airfield at Subic Bay so the American forces could establish initial lodgments and receive additional forces. An armored brigade guarded that area as well and would be a tough foe for a light infantry brigade.

The Marines had been joined by another two brigades from Okinawa and were operating as an expeditionary force. They had the mission of destroying the two Japanese divisions that were guarding the Presidential Palace and the major financial institutions in the downtown district. Jennings had planned for them to attack from either side of Manila, performing a pincer movement to squeeze the Japanese out of the city and into the countryside, where their tanks would be forced to stay on the roads, providing easy targets for the aircraft.

It was a risky plan, particularly the Ranger action. He hoped they would be safe until he could shake some fighter aircraft loose to start hammering the tanks around Fort Magsaysay. He slowly shook his head, wondering about the Army’s light forces.

What use are they?
He vowed to get them some air support as soon as they could achieve air superiority.

The Marines had landed in the darkness of the night and were advancing smoothly on either side of Manila Bay with their 25 series Light Armored Vehicles and M1 tanks. The crew-cut marines followed the roads to Manila, peering through their sights like watching television.

Jennings realized that air power was going to have to play the critical role in the highly decen-tralized operation. They needed to destroy the scrappy Japanese Air Force before they could expect to reinforce the infantry on the ground, but the fact of the matter was that two Ranger battalions were already decisively engaged. Had they miscalculated as to how much they needed?

Did they have enough forces, he wondered?

And why had his requests for more troops been denied?

CHAPTER 82

Island of Luzon, Philippines

Through the greenish hue of his night-vision goggles, Captain Zachary Garrett could see about thirty tanks from where he was sprawled in the prone position atop a jagged ridge to the west of the airfield—the same direction from which Ayala had attacked his company and ultimately died. The early-morning air was relatively cool and damp with dew, but Zach knew that the steaming heat would quickly arrive with the sun.

The unsuspecting Japanese forces had not secured their rear area very well, unlike Zachary. The tanks he saw were lining up to move out in single file, practically in an administrative mode. He could see short men running about wildly waving their arms as if they were reacting to an emergency. The tanks were only five hundred meters away, and his Javelin tank-killing missiles should destroy them with ease. His company had procured twenty sights and over sixty rounds from the ammunition stockpile. There were more, but his men could not carry all of them.

Still, with his original nine sights from Hawaii, that gave him almost one weapons device per tank. Looking to his left, he saw Barker’s platoon lined up along the ridge, his men peering through the thermal sights, waiting for the signal. Taylor’s platoon was to the south, beneath the ridge, while Kurtz’s men were opposite him on the other side of Barker.

The other three companies from the battalion were prepared to assault from the North, across the airstrip, toward the pier. Garrett’s company was providing supporting fire for the attack. He was glad that he had a support-by-fire mission for a change. His men would welcome the relative safety of covered and concealed fighting positions as opposed to advancing on the enemy again.

Morale had risen significantly when the rest of the battalion had arrived. The men ate the extra rations that had been dumped by helicopter into their position the following morning. Their stomachs full, and their minds rested, they relished the thought of avenging the losses of Teller and Rockingham.

And then there was Matt, his brother. They had received word of the three hostages, and Zach had heard that Matt was one of the detainees. The thought of Matt as a hostage had worn on him, sapping his strength and diverting his attention. But something had transpired in him, temporarily at least, to allow him to command his soldiers. Partly, Zach knew that if anyone could survive in the Philippines, it was his brother. And partly, despite the pain, worry, anxiety, and frustration, he could feel the hand of God inside him, hammering the molten ore of his character and dipping another red-hot rod of support into the reservoir of his strength and pulling it out, steaming and rigid, once again allowing him to be himself.