Tom Clancy's op-center_ acts of war - Tom Clancy [172]
"Paul," it read, "welcome home. I was afraid you might take a cab."
The car took Hood home first. He held Bicking's hand between his before climbing out.
"How does it feel to have been the pawn of two Presidents?" Hood asked.
The young Bicking smiled and replied, "Invigorating, Paul."
Hood spent an hour lying in bed with his kids. After that, he spent two hours making love to his wife.
And after that, with his wife curled beside him, her hand in his, he lay awake wondering if he'd made the mistake of his life telling Mike Rodgers about the pardon.
* * *
SIXTY-FOUR
Thursday, 1:01 a.m.,
Over the Mediterranean Sea
When Mike Rodgers had first enlisted in the Army, he had a drill sergeant named Messy Boyd. He never found out what Messy was short for, but it had to be short for something. Because Messy Boyd was the neatest, most punctilious, most disciplined man that Rodgers had ever met.
Unfailingly, Sergeant Boyd drilled two things into his men. One was that bravery was the most important quality a soldier could have. And the other, that honor was even more important than bravery. "The honorable man," he had said, paraphrasing Woodrow Wilson, "is one who has squared his conduct by ideals of duty."
Rodgers took that to heart. He also borrowed the copy of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations Boyd kept on his desk. That started him on his twenty-five-year love affair with the wisdom of the great statesmen, soldiers, scholars, and others. It turned him into a rapacious reader, devouring everyone from Epictetus to St. Augustine, from Homer to Hemingway. It made him think.
Maybe too much, he told himself.
Rodgers sat on the wooden bench in the bumpy fuselage of the C-141B. He was absently listening to Colonel August tell Lowell Coffey and Phil Katzen about their Little League home-run rivalry with each other.
Rodgers knew that he had never acted in a cowardly way, nor had he ever behaved with dishonor. Yet Rodgers also knew that because of what had happened in the Middle East, his career as a soldier was over. He had thought it ended when he failed to retake the ROC from the Kurds at the Syrian border. That had been clumsy and stupid, the kind of mistake a man in his position could not afford to make. But with the death of the PKK leader he had found new life. Not as a soldier in the field, but as a soldier in the fight against terrorism. What would have begun in the courtroom would have become a brave and honorable battle against a terrible scourge.
Now, he thought, there's nothing.
"General," August asked, "what was the name of that catcher who ended up beating us both out in fifth grade?"
"Laurette," Rodgers replied. "I forget her last name."
"Right," said August. "Laurette. The kind of girl you wanted to sop up with a biscuit. She was that lovely, even behind her catcher's mask, glove, and a wad of Bazooka bubble gum."
Rodgers smiled. She was cute. And that home-run showdown had been quite a race. But races ended with one winner and several losers.
Like the race we just ran in the Middle East.
The winner there had been Striker. Their performance had been exemplary. The losers? The Kurds, who had been crushed. Turkey and Syria, which still had millions of restless citizens within their borders. And Mike Rodgers, who had bungled security, escape, judging the character of a loyal coworker, and handling a prisoner of war.
America had lost too. It had lost by tucking Mike Rodgers back in his Op-Center cubicle instead of supporting him in the war against terrorism.
And it is a war--or at least it needs to be.
As he'd lain there in the infirmary, Rodgers had sharpened his thinking about that. He'd planned to use the podium of his court-martial to declare that any nation which