Without remorse - Tom Clancy [217]
And Ritter knew how to jerk Roger around, didn't he? All that war-plans stuff was pure horseshit. Roger had his office walls covered with photos from The Old Days, when he'd flown his goddamned airplane all over hell and gone, pretending that he was personally winning the war against Hitler, just one more fucking war that good diplomacy would have prevented if only people had focused on the real issues as he and Peter hoped someday to do. This thing wasn't about war plans or SIOP or any of the other uniformed bullshit that people in this section of the White House Staff played with every goddamned day. It was about people, for Christ's sake. Uniformed people. Dumbass soldiers, people with big shoulders and little minds who did nothing more useful than kill, as though that made anything in the world better. And besides, Hicks fumed, they took their chances, didn't they? If they wanted to drop bombs on a peaceful and friendly people like the Vietnamese, well, they should have thought ahead of time that those people might not like it very much. Most important of all, if they were dumb enough to gamble their lives, then they implicitly accepted the possibility of losing them, and so why then should people like Wally Hicks give a flying fuck about them when the dice came up wrong? They probably loved the action. It undoubtedly attracted the sort of women who thought that big dicks came along with small brains, who liked 'men' who dragged their knuckles on the ground like well-dressed apes.
This could wreck the peace talks. Even MacKenzie thought that.
All those kids from his generation, dead. And now they might risk not ending the war because of fifteen or twenty professional killers who probably liked what they did. It just made no sense. What if they gave a war and nobody came? was one of his generation's favored aphorisms, though he knew it to be a fantasy. Because people like that one guy - Zacharias - would always seduce people into following them because little people who lacked Hicks's understanding and perspective wouldn't be able to see that it was just all a waste of energy. That was the most amazing part of all. Wasn't it clear that war was just plain awful? How smart did you have to be to understand that?
Hicks saw the door open. MacKenzie and Ritter came out.
'Wally, we're going across the street for a few minutes. Could you tell my eleven o'clock that I'll be back as soon as I can?'
'Yes, sir.'
Wasn't that typical? Ritter's seduction was complete. He had MacKenzie sold enough that Roger would make the pitch to the National Security Advisor. And they would probably raise pure fucking hell at the peace table, and maybe set things back three months or more, unless somebody saw through the ruse. Hicks lifted his phone and dialed a number.
'Senator Donaldson's office.'
'Hi, I was trying to get Peter Henderson.'
'I'm sorry, he and the Senator are in Europe right now. They'll get back next week.'
'Oh, that's right. Thanks.' Hicks hung up. Damn. He was so upset that he'd forgotten.
Some things have to be done very carefully. Peter Henderson didn't even know that his code name was cassius. It had been assigned to him by an analyst in the US-Canada Institute whose love of Shakespeare's plays was as genuine as that of any Oxford don. The photo in the file, along with the one-page profile of the agent, had made him think of the self-serving 'patriot' in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. Brutus would not have been right. Henderson, the analyst had judged, did not have sufficient