“We can sit here all day and argue the finer moral points of what has happened, but it has already happened. There are important issues that have to be decided very shortly, and I need to go back to the President and inform him of all that has occurred.”
Decker nodded.
“It is over.”
“What about Looking Glass?” Trace asked.
“How are you going to explain that?”
“The same way The Line got rid of so many of its enemies over the years. We will control the report issued by the investigation board.
They won’t find much of the E4B to investigate anyway. It went down over deep water. We regret the loss of the crew, but we had no choice.
They were preparing to cut in to the satellite media coverage of the ceremony and broadcast a message from General Martin.
It would have blown the lid off this country. We couldn’t allow that.
We also couldn’t allow the Joint Chiefs to survive.
“Most of the people who were on board the SHARCC and the Barbel submarine didn’t know what they were involved in.” He looked at Boomer and Trace.
“They were simply following orders. They’ll be quietly transferred.”
“The DIA men?” Boomer asked.
“They were The Line’s agents,” Skibicki answered.
“The rest of them will be taken care of.”
Decker pointed about the room.
“This group of people will go back to their lives and their careers, and that is why, General Maxwell, you are here. You need to go to the President and tell him it is over. He has Hooker’s diary. I assume he does not want that information made public.
Neither do we wish our activities made public. It’s over.”
Lieutenant Colonel Falk suddenly spoke from where he had been monitoring the radios.
“Keyes and his team are all dead.”
Boomer stood.
“Playing God didn’t work out too well, did it?”
“What about Hooker?” Decker asked.
“Did they get him?”
“I’m listening to the naval security frequency,” Falk said.
“I can’t tell. There are a lot of bodies there. Sounds like it was a blood bath. They probably got him.”
CHAPTER 29
Boomer and Trace dropped General Maxwell off in the underground garage of the Royal Hawaiian. They watched as he went into the elevator to go to talk to the President.
They knew that the men in the underground room at Pearl Harbor were scattering, covering their tracks.
Trace turned to Boomer in the car where they sat.
“Since you’ve had time to consider this, what do you think?”
“I hate to say it,” Boomer said, “but I have to agree with Colonel Decker’s plan. We keep the lid on this whole incident. We mourn the loss of General Martin and the others on board the E-4B as a tragic accident. Then we move on. Quite frankly, there’s no other option.”
“And how do we stop this from occurring again?” Trace asked.
“I don’t like the idea of a cover-up; even the word bothers me,” Boomer agreed.
“But if we expose what has just happened, then we will eventually be forced to reveal all that was in the diary, and that is unacceptable.”
“Why?” The edge in Trace’s voice surprised him.
“It was secrecy that shrouded The Line for so many years and allowed it to grow and fester. Now we’re doing the same thing.”
“It would tear this country apart to find out what was in that diary,” Boomer said.
Trace looked at him.
“You were very big on expediency being no excuse, yet here we are talking about expediency requiring…” Trace searched for the right words… “requiring a bodyguard of lies.”
“Secrecy was The Line’s strength while it was alive,” Boomer acknowledged.
“But there are those who do know the truth,” he continued.
“You and I know what happened.”
“Fat lot of good that will do,” Trace said.
“Colonel Rison knew the truth, and it didn’t stop anything. And he eventually died because of this. How do we know The Line is finished?
They haven’t found Hooker’s body. We don’t even know if Hooker was the main man behind The Line.
Maybe there are others in other places.” Trace shivered.
“To think this all started at West Point.”
Boomer’s face was drawn with exhaustion, but he had been doing some hard thinking in the past few hours.
“It would be easy to say getting rid of the academies would prevent this from happening again, but I’m not sure they were the problem.
There definitely need to be some changes made. An opening up of the curriculum and more interaction between the military and the civilian community. Right now we have two separate societies in our country and it’s particularly pronounced in the officer corps. We need to get the people who guard our country more in tune with the country and out of their own separate existence.
“We need to remember something else,” he said.
“The people who stopped The Line were mostly Academy graduates also.
Let’s not condemn the system because, as the facts have shown, the system did indeed work.”
Boomer shrugged.
“But I don’t know. I don’t know what is going to happen.” Boomer put his hand on Trace’s shoulder.
“How do you feel?”
Trace shook her head.
“I don’t feel like I helped save the country. I feel like a sponge that was dipped in dirty water and rung out a few times too many.”
Boomer felt the same.
“We don’t have to wait here for Maxwell. He’s probably going to be with the President quite a while.”
“Just give me a couple of minutes,” Trace said.
“I don’t feel too good. I didn’t feel good listening to Decker in that underground bunker, and I still don’t feel right.”
Trace had touched on something that had bothered Boomer also.
“There was too much explanation by Decker,” Boomer said.
“I agree with you: It doesn’t feel right. I still don’t understand why we got involved.”
“They, the Special Op people, didn’t involve us,” Trace said.
“The Line did when they found out about my book.”
Boomer disagreed.
“No, Decker set me up for a reason even before that.” He remembered something he’d forgotten to ask her in the excitement of the morning.
“Why did you write that note on the pages you gave Harry?”
“Things didn’t seem right,” Trace said.
“The inflight refueling seemed a bit much for Skibicki to arrange, but after hearing Decker’s explanation, I guess that part fits together now. Plus, what was on those pages made me nervous.”
“What do you mean?” Boomer asked.
“The whole Pearl Harbor thing,” Trace said.
“What are you talking about?” Boomer was lost.
“You didn’t read the pages themselves?” Trace asked.
“No, just your note.”
“You need to read them,” Trace said.
Boomer pulled the Ziploc bag out of his pocket. He opened it and pulled out the wrinkled pages.
15 November 1941
Getting Roosevelt to act is like trying to lead a stubborn mule. The State Department still thinks we can do things the old way, with nicely worded telegraphs. Tell that to the people of Nanking in China. When will the fools in this country see reality?
18 November 1941
With or without the President, war is coming. The consensus of the staff is that we must enter it as prepared as possible, but more importantly, the country must enter it whole heartedly. It is obvious from the magic interceptss what is going to happen. the chief can’t velieve the audacity of the Japanese, to strike directly at Peral is daring but ultimately stupid.