That said, receiving an attagirl from the one person who actually knew the lengths to which the men and women Irene had the pleasure of leading went to in order to ensure that their countrymen could sleep safely in their beds at night was rewarding. But in this case, Irene took no joy in the president’s pronouncement. While her gaze was centered on her boss, Irene’s peripheral vision was locked on someone else.
General Alton Rex.
“Excuse me, sir, but I have a couple of questions.”
If experience was any guide, the military officer’s statement was a bit misleading. The Air Force general’s questions were really objections masked in the pretense of ensuring that he understood the plan Irene had just briefed. In the best of scenarios, the military and the CIA worked together seamlessly. In the worst, they squabbled over battle space, mission creep, and access to resources. Irene had served with several chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and while she hadn’t always seen eye to eye with her uniformed counterparts, she’d respected them and their opinions.
Not Rex.
“Of course,” President Alexander said. “Go ahead.”
“Yes, sir,” Rex said with a smile. “I’m just a farm boy from Omaha, but I’m not sure I understand what we’re trying to do here.”
Like his perfectly bronzed skin and sparkling white teeth, General Rex’s modest-beginnings shtick was artificial. As the leader of an organization that numbered more than twenty-one thousand people encompassing a multitude of races, religions, and creeds, Kennedy did not draw conclusions about a person based on their upbringing. While her formative years had been spent overseas rather than milking cows, as Rex liked to claim, the general’s hardscrabble childhood wouldn’t bother her in the least.
Had it been true.
While an expert on dairy farms Kennedy was not, she had a finely tuned bullshit detector, and the Air Force officer registered off the scales. After enduring his farm-boy routine one time too many, Irene had made some quiet inquiries. Turns out that Rex had grown up on a farm in the same manner in which Irene had been crowned Miss Maryland, which was to say not at all. Rex’s father had been raised several houses up the road from a dairy farm and had milked cows as a teenager. While Rex had certainly visited the farm on occasion during trips to see his paternal grandparents, he’d never worked there. For reasons known only to him, the general had appropriated his father’s experience.
As lies went, Rex’s falsehoods weren’t exactly treason, but Irene was more concerned with the motivation behind the mistruths than the words themselves. The general deliberately manipulated facts to suit a narrative he’d constructed. As a case officer, Irene made her living through misdirection, but her deceptions targeted the enemies of her country, not the people charged with keeping it safe.
Along with his fake tan, wrinkle-free face, dyed hair, and whitened teeth, Rex’s altered background was an attempt to create a better version of himself. A version that might be more attractive to the talent management people who recruited talking heads for cable news programs. Irene could forgive the man his vanity, but she could not tolerate his selfishness. White House staffers were famous for lining up their exit opportunities while still serving in the administration, but in some ways this was to be expected.
Not so for the president’s military advisors.
The man charged with counseling the president on all things armed forces–related should be wholly focused on his current job, not a lucrative postmilitary career. But each interaction with Rex seemed to confirm that the general did not share her convictions. Unfortunately, her boss had not arrived at the same conclusion.
Yet.
“What we’re trying to do here is save one of your Rangers,” Irene said, her delivery deadpan. “The ground force commander’s assessment is that the area of operations where Sergeant Saxton is likely being held is too heavily trafficked by enemy combatants to conduct a clandestine reconnaissance. This plan is designed to addresses the military’s blind spot.”
“By sending a single CIA asset on a suicide mission?” Rex said, slowly shaking his head. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t see it.”
Irene had weathered many a meeting that hadn’t gone her way. Washington’s petty politics and the oversize personalities grated on her but paled in comparison to the life-and-death situations her people faced in the field. If listening to blowhards bloviate on topics they didn’t understand was Irene’s cross to bear, so be it. Her years in management had made Irene something of a savant when it came to her ability to refrain from issuing an oftentimes justified emotional response to the idiocy she so often encountered.
She didn’t lose her cool.
Usually.
“I apologize if I’m misunderstanding your point,” Irene said, locking gazes with Rex, “but I could have sworn our military adhered to a certain policy when it came to the men and women who voluntarily serve in its ranks. I will never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy—isn’t that how the Ranger Creed goes?”
That was precisely how the Ranger Creed went.
Irene’s photographic memory made recall of the phrase a simple measure, but the optics of her question were not lost on Rex. Prior to his current role, the general had helmed Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC. The aviator’s appointment as the JSOC commander had not been without controversy. Unlike the snake eaters who usually occupied this role, Rex was an AC-130 pilot.
Even worse, he was an aviator with very little combat experience.
While Rex had checked the required boxes by first serving as the commander of 1st Special Operations Wing located at Hurlburt Field in Florida, he’d spent the majority of his time as a company and field-grade officer in staff billets rather than the cockpit of an AC-130J Ghostrider putting steel on target. As a nonshooter, there was a better-than-even chance that the general had never heard of the Ranger Creed, to say nothing of his ability to recite it from memory.
For a moment, Irene saw what lurked behind the general’s congenial act. His warm blue eyes turned to shards of ice as the wattage on his bright smile dimmed. The index finger on his right hand was the real tell. The offending digit didn’t so much move as vibrate, like a violin’s plucked string.
Then his grin widened, and the squall passed as quickly as it had arrived.
“I’d never bet against a spy’s memory,” Rex said, “but in my business, we can’t always bring everyone home. The mission comes first. Sometimes this means America’s sons and daughters bear the cost of our poor choices. I advised against the raid on the HIG compound in the first place. I thought it was too provocative and had the potential to hang our service members out to dry. Now that the operation has gone off the rails, I don’t think we should be throwing good money after bad. No one wants to rescue Sergeant Saxton more than me, but we run the risk of further antagonizing our Pakistani allies with a second covert operation conducted on their doorstep. I think this is a bridge too far.”
Irene felt her blood pressure skyrocket even as her cold intellect prepared to rebut Rex’s outrageous statements claim by claim. If the general was willing to sacrifice the lives of his troops on the altar of international diplomacy, so be it.
She was not.
Irene was opening her mouth to begin Rex’s verbal dismemberment when President Alexander’s voice cut through the air.
“Your concerns are duly noted, General Rex,” Alexander said. “Again. I approved Irene’s operation and she’s going to run it. Questions?”
“No, sir,” Rex said, his smile somehow even brighter. “I wish the best of luck to Director Kennedy’s agent.”
Kennedy had purposefully refused to reveal anything substantial about the operation, citing the old sources and methods standby even though Rex had pressed. She had no reason to suspect that the pompous aviator would actively sabotage her operation, but she wasn’t taking any chances. When Rapp had called her from Jalalabad to brief his concept of the operation, the details had given her pause. What he was proposing was extreme even by his standards.
Then again, extreme times sometimes called for extreme measures.
Rapp’s success depended on absolute operational secrecy. Under no circumstances would she divulge the details of Rapp’s plan to this crowd. For reasons she still didn’t quite understand, Rex seemed to take her refusal to elaborate as a personal affront. While Rex hadn’t asked her outright for the identity of her agent or the insertion plan’s particulars, the Air Force general had certainly nibbled around the edges. Government service types commonly desired access to classified material beyond their need to know for a variety of reasons, but this behavior was usually driven by a single cause.
Pride.
People wanted to be able to say that they were in the know when it came to clandestine or covert operations, even if they personally had nothing to do with the mission. Every training session on the handling of sensitive or classified material always began by stressing that a person’s level of clearance had nothing to do with their importance.
While this was true in theory, the principle wasn’t so clean in practice.
In a town in which status was derived from a person’s proximity to power, everyone wanted to be in the room where it happened. For the president’s staff and the sycophants who surrounded him, not possessing a security clearance was a barrier to entry. In order to truly be in the inner circle, an aide needed to have the requisite color badge and the appropriate initials after their name.
