The Awkward Squad: Part III

by Ian McDuff

This, of course, is a continuation of the series begun for my own ‘Hidden Talents: Smart Boys With Glasses’ Challenge, the last of the four Summer Challenges here.

It’s an AU – or AR, depending on your definitions of those subgenres. It’s about as A as an AU/AR can be. (Which has allowed a few minor adjustments to chronology. I should also warn the reader that this portion, somewhat to my own surprise, continues to deals with the events and sequelæ of 11 SEP 01. [This thing is turning out to be longer than I expected.])

Every matter of fact alluded to here, I hasten to add, is from open-sourced material, and has been reported in the legitimate press somewhere in the world. That may startle those who get their ‘facts’ from NPR and the New York Times, but it is so. That some are in profound denial about what is going on in the war on terror in no way changes the facts on the ground, and he who runs may read.

Any analyses and extrapolations, however, are my own; and anyone who thinks this work of fiction in any way represents the opinions of any department, section, directorate, or task force of the United States Government, or any officer or employee thereof, is, well, crazy enough to believe that the SDBs are in sober reality so many NIOs, case officers operating under NOC, and so on.

AU or not, AR or not, I like to think of this as an AH. Alternate History. A counterfactual.

It’s dedicated to all my friendslist at LJ, but particularly to Jo … because this is also my entry in her Protector!Sync challenge. Enjoy.

The first indication of how fundamentally the world had changed was not long in coming.

When Lance had come back, as from the dead, from the wreckage of the Pentagon, he had said, simply, ‘JC. Gentlemen. A quick shower, if I may, and then let’s begin.’ But of course, it had not been that simple.

He had taken his shower, a tepid one, wanting heat to help scrub away the carrion stench and the reek of aviation fuel, but unable to bear the heat he craved. When he emerged, moving a trifle carefully, clad in loose sweats from his Academy days, sweats worn comfortable by interminable hours of PT, his team had greeted him almost tentatively, unwilling to be the first to ask. Kevin, uncharacteristically moved and uncharacteristically awkward – for, almost as much as JC, Kevin was possessed of the negligent, instinct grace of a puma – had touched hands with him, lightly, and just nodded, his eyes unexpectedly misty. Joe, of course, had no inhibitions, and wrapped him in an ursine hug that was as comforting as his USNA sweats. AJ had gripped his forearm with a grip of iron, looked sharply into his eyes, and conveyed everything that needed saying, wordlessly. Howie had embraced him gently, with the lightest and most feathery of chaste kisses to the cheek. And Brian had simply taken both of Lance’s hands in his own, touched his forehead to Lance’s, and said a brief and heartfelt prayer of thanksgiving to God, to which, Lance was surprised to note, his own ‘Amen’ was almost choked.

JC was nowhere in the room. Lance raised an eyebrow, and Brian slanted a grin at him, nodding his head towards the French windows that led out to the green sward of lawn.

On the West Bank, in Ramallah, in Nablus, Palestinians were ululating their cries of victory, handing out celebratory sweets, candy to celebrate mass murder, and praising the name of Osama bin Laden. ‘This is a sweet from Osama bin Laden.’

‘Hey.’

JC was silent, merely turning to bury his head in Lance’s shoulder as they wrapped themselves around one another.

‘Hey, now. We made it, darlin’. We made it.’

‘You’re hurt.’

‘I’ve been sunburnt worse’n this in Mississippi.’

‘I love you.’

‘Well, good. I’d hate to be in love with a man who didn’t love me back. Hon, we are going to be all right.’

‘You don’t know that. All those people. My God, all those people. They thought. They thought they were going to be all right.’

‘I know. And we failed them. All of us. But what’s different is, we – you and me – we can make sure we’re going to be all right and that everyone else is, too. That’s our job. And we have to do it.’

‘I know.’

‘Mr President? I have the Prime Minister on the line.’

‘Put him on through, son.’ POTUS rubbed his eyes, and picked up the receiver. ‘Tone?’

‘Even the sky looks different.’

‘No contrails, babe. Except for our fighters. It’s the same God’s sky as it ever was. That’s what skies used to look like.’

‘Chris is stuck in Chicago.’

‘Chris, I expect, will turn up any minute. Kirkpatrick doesn’t get stuck. If he had to commandeer a whole Air National Guard wing.’

‘I guess. I mean. I thought you. I thought you would never come back through that door again. If you can, yeah, okay, Chris can paradrop on the lawn if you say so.’

‘Mr President.’

‘Condi. What y’got for me?’

The members of the JTRRWG, minus Chris Kirkpatrick, were sitting around the conference table, beginning to emerge from their first, numb shock.

‘There has to be a response.’

‘Shouldn’t we identify a target, first? Preferably the right one?’ Kevin was more or less himself again.

‘That’s what they pay us to identify,’ Lance said, mildly enough. ‘But I think Howie’s statement was a proem, a preliminary to something else. Go on, Howie.’

‘The first question, to my mind, is, What warnings did we miss. For example, what about the climate at Durban last month? The –’

‘You’re assuming already that this is the act of foreign terrorists, and I think I know what stripe, even, of foreign terrorist you’re thinking of, and that’s just jumping to conclusions! Just like people did in the first hours after OKC, and boy were they embarrassed when it turned out to be a bunch of home-grown, fascist wing-nuts –’

‘Says who, cuz? Lord Almighty, Kev, that may have been the politically convenient conclusion the previous administration wanted to peddle, but you ain’t that stupid, that don’t hardly explain a-tall all those so-called coincidences with Nichols, McVeigh, and Ramzi Youssef, KSM, Omar Abdel Rahman, and Hussain al-Hussaini.

‘Let’s look at the string here. Nineteen and ninety-three. Who was it again tried to blow up the WTC?’

‘The cell that couldn’t shoot straight, is who. Going back for the deposit on the rental truck –’

‘One moment,’ said Howie. ‘Let’s start at the start. Aden, 1992. OBL’s first attempt at attacking US armed forces personnel overseas. He chanced it because the lesson he’d already drawn, even then, from Somalia, was that the US is a paper tiger, that this country’d cut and run the minute we took casualties. So he tried it on, in Yemen, and we did absolutely jack shit about it. Same time, 1992, he issued a fatwah against Operation Restore Hope in Somalia. Remember: from 1991 to 1996, al-Qaeda was HQ-ed in the Sudan, not Pakistan or Afghanistan. That’s when it started to snowball: that was the encouragement, the validation of his belief in our weakness. OBL even claims responsibility, on an overall basis, as the ultimate author of the Mogadishu situation. So?’

‘But you’re already fingering one target, damn it, without a scrap of intel!’

‘No. Entiende. What point I am making is this. We do not, the government as whole does not, have literally unlimited resources to devote to this matter, important though it is. And even if we did, we cannot afford to become fixated on this matter to the exclusion of all else: we dare not, for example, take our eyes off of North Korea altogether. Intelligence, war, life, does not occur in a vacuum, Kevin. Therefore, we must prioritize: that is my first point. All I am suggesting until further data begins to come in is that we determine the possible actors against whom to bring this home, in order of likelihood and priority. And I am further suggesting that a priority means a priority: the great error of the past administration, and indeed of the first Bush administration and even that of Ronald Reagan as regarded the Marine barracks in Lebanon, though not the Libyans, was to approach such matters as if preparing a case at law. But inaction emboldens enemies, and we do well to remember that. That is my two-fold point.’

The FBI was becoming increasingly convinced of the nature and proximate source of the attacks. Quite soon, Mohammed Atta’s luggage would be found, and in it, a set of instructions for the mass murders. Translated, they read:

15) Pray the morning prayer in a group and ponder the great rewards of that prayer. Make supplications afterwards, and do not leave your apartment unless you have performed ablution before leaving, because the angels will ask for your forgiveness as long as you are in a state of ablution, and will pray for you. This saying of the Prophet was mentioned by An-Nawawi in his book, The Best of Supplications. Read the words of God: ‘Did you think that We created you for no reason…’ from the Al-Mu’minun Chapter.

Smile in the face of hardship young man /
For you are heading toward eternal paradise

‘Personally,’ Lance said, ‘I don’t care whether this was done by al-Qaeda, by the Aryan Nation, or by eco-terrorists –’

‘You think the Sierra Club are eco-terrorists,’ Kevin snorted.

‘Horseshit. But eco-terrorists do exist, and if you think that’s a right-wing fantasy, ask Morris Dees: the Southern Poverty Law Center has the ALF and the ELF, among others, on its watch-list of radicals and terrorists. Point is, whoever is behind this, Howie is right: we can’t diddle around striving for an absolute certainty that is, in the very nature of things, impossible, and we must respond with force, commensurate, yes, but forcibly, to punish and to deter.

‘Let me remind you that right now, we are the government, in a sense: the brains of it: we are – I expect there’ll be shakeups, but right now we are – the only bunch of swingin’ dicks in US service that has access to, and is preee-cisely tasked with analyzing and making recommendations based on, all intel data received – regardless of source, turf, and Chinese walls. So I reckon it behooves the hell out of us to deal with it.’

Joe spoke up then. ‘In my city, right now, the only sound other than ambulance sirens and weeping is the bagpipes already beginning to play. I refuse to have the blood of the innocent on my hands, too, Kevin: I’m no more for rushing to judgment than you are. But I will be damned if I’m gonna sit on my fat, hairy ass, either, and be paralyzed by the fear of rendering a judgment, and still be sitting there when the next strike comes because we didn’t get it outta neutral, capisce?’

The phone rang, and AJ grabbed it. ‘JTRRWG, Duty Officer McLean speaking.’

POTUS had a full plate: he was bombarded with contradictory threat analyses, he had to deal politely with interruptions ranging from the sublime to the annoying, he was inundated with official messages of solidarity, NATO had invoked its mutual defense clause for the first time since its formation…. But he had taken time to give explicit instructions to the AG and the FBI Director. Notwithstanding the Chinese wall restrictions of the past, all evidence and all leads were to be copied to another agency, one that had not previously been heard of. This matter was not going to be treated like a potential Federal prosecution, but as an act of war.

AJ put down the receiver with an eloquent look. Before he could explain further, however, the security alarms went off for the compound and there was something of a commotion outside, carried into the room by the gate intercom, in which Chris Kirkpatrick’s piercing tones could be shrilly heard. ‘God motherfuckin’ damn it!’ Chris yelped. ‘Fuckin’ gate code! Shut up, you fucker,’ he swore at the alarm.

‘I see Chris is back,’ JC observed, with his first smile of the day. They went out to see in what new and memorable way their colleague had managed to get himself entangled this time.

Lance just shook his head at the sight. Down the long slope of lawn to the fence and the road, at the end of the drive, a quarter mile away, Chris was pounding on the keypad for the gate’s entry buzzer, as a squad of United States Marines, armed and alert, looked on with carefully neutral expressions, pointedly not smiling.

AJ sighed. ‘Great. Fuckin’ jarheads on my lawn. Fuck. I’ll buzz the fuckers in, but I fuckin’ want it understood it’s under fuckin’ protest.’

END