War of Eagles Read Online Free Page A

Ted Dreiser was Air Force, and the new vice president, Bruce Perry, was former Air Force.
    End of story.
    Or so General Carrie had thought.
    At eight P.M. the night before, the woman had received a call in her home in Alexandria, Virginia. She was being summoned to the White House for a short meeting with the president, the vice president, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Raleigh Carew. All she was told was that the president had a question for her.
    A student of the history of American intelligence, Carrie knew that presidents rarely asked idle questions. At the very least, every query they made caused a snap-to ripple down the appropriate chain of command, just in case he decided to follow through. Sometimes, seemingly simple questions caused more dramatic responses. In 1885, President Grover Cleveland summoned Adjutant General R.C. Drum to the Executive Mansion to ask him a question about a foreign military installation. The officer was mortified to admit that he did not possess the information the president required, though he promised to get it. Drum did so and immediately organized the Military Information Division, which quickly grew from a single officer and four clerks to fifty-two officers, twelve clerks, and sixteen attachés. The MID collected data on geography and foreign armies and gave spying instructions to the attachés. The material the MID collected on military assets in Cuba, Mexico, and Samoa saved countless American lives during the Spanish-American War of 1898.
    Carrie’s driver took her to the West Wing, where she met with the three men for a total of ten minutes. There was, as promised, just one question. The president gave her until this morning to answer it. The question was a little larger than she had anticipated, but General Carrie took some comfort from the fact that she had five hours more to answer it than Adjutant General Drum had.
    General Carrie was up before her husband, who was himself an early riser. That was when the doctor usually read his medical journals, from about five A.M. to six-thirty. The sixty-year-old Johns Hopkins graduate believed that a doctor was like a general: having a lot of degrees, like having a lot of soldiers, wasn’t what made you effective. The trick was having the right ones, the best ones. Dr. Carrie was always on the lookout for those.
    As requested, the general had responded to the president, in writing, by seven A.M. The letter was faxed to the White House and to the Pentagon. Original copies would be hand-delivered later in the day. For now, President Debenport had the answer he wanted. And General Carrie had a little more history in her dossier.
    At seven-fifteen, Carrie received a call from the vice president’s chief of staff. A new driver, a civilian driver, would be coming to get her at seven forty-five. He would be carrying instructions in a sealed envelope. She would have two days to get her footing before meeting again with the president.
    It was all very quick and definitely very gratifying. And through it all, as ever, her husband of thirty-eight years held her sure and steady, as he held a scalpel.
    A nondescript navy blue sedan pulled into the driveway at exactly seven forty-five. The tall, lean neurosurgeon had delayed going to the hospital to hug his wife before she left. The woman, five foot seven and jogging-slender, pressed her head to his chest. He put a big hand around her short-cropped white hair. Morgan Carrie had earned a bronze star for her work with the 312th Evac unit in Chu Lai, Vietnam—where she met her husband—and later ran special intelligence ops behind enemy lines in the Persian Gulf. Yet when her husband held Carrie like this, she felt like an alabaster doll, fragile and fair, and not a commander of fighting men and women. Which was fine. When her husband sat on the sofa with her and watched Italian operas on DVD, he was not a confident surgeon but a teary schoolboy with trembling hands. Forget sex: this comfort level