THURSDAY, DECEMBER 12
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Rena can sense at once that they are in trouble.
As with any crime, they need evidence from the scene, and they sent Walt Smolonsky to Oosay with a forensics team to examine the damaged compound. Even that devolved into controversy. The FBI is angry about an outside group fouling its crime scene. The State Department is angry about jurisdiction in general. The CIA is worried about anyone being inside the new secure American building called “the Barracks.” The trip turns into a group tour—Smolo and two forensics consultants they’ve hired, an FBI team, plus monitors from State, CIA, and DIA. They fill two vans.
After only a day, Smolo sends an encrypted message saying there are serious questions about the administration’s account. The compound’s gates were clearly detonated by some explosive device, not overrun, which suggests a level of premeditation to the attack.
They are still trying to track down the Liberty Brigade guards who vanished into the countryside. The five people who had been staffing “the Barracks” that night are also gone. They are private military contractors, and now they are “on leave” in Europe—which is as suspicious as it is frustrating.
Morat and Washington both teem with rumors—everything from the attack being an accidental U.S. drone strike now being blamed on the Moratians to the attack being a fake, a so-called false flag, to create sympathy for U.S. policy. There are also varying reports of a mysterious “man on the roof.” Some witnesses described the figure as someone with binoculars who appeared to be monitoring the compound before anything began and remained on the roof throughout. Who was he? Had someone found him? There were more questions than answers, and before long the mysterious figure would fade from interest.
Wiley and Lupsa have assembled all of it, everything they could glean from public records about the incident into different digital files—one each about the protest in Oosay, the political situation in Morat, extremist groups in the region, and the key players who might be hiding something from the president. In the firm nomenclature, these background dossiers are called “Wileys” and are so thorough and nuanced they are considered a unique asset of the firm.
“Wileys” also fit with Rena and Brooks’s own approach to investigation. At West Point, Rena’s favorite professor was a man named Stanley Atkins, a civilian historian and a Napoleonic scholar whose orations were closer to sermons than class lectures. “To survive in battle,” Atkins would tell students on the first day, “I don’t know if it helps to believe in God. But I know you should believe in preparation.”
As they prepare for this investigation, Rena and Brooks believe the key is understanding the late General Brian Roderick.
“There is a good deal known about the general, a lot more than about most one-star brigadiers,” Wiley says, handing out printed copies of her file on the third day of the investigation. “Journalists loved him. He was a prominent character in two major books on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
“Our man was brave,” Brooks says as she reads. “Roderick was deployed in the Middle East longer than any other officer in the U.S. military, much of it on the front lines.”
“Two and a half years in Fallujah,” Rena says, reading.
Fallujah was an Iraqi hellhole—the site of a bloody years-long operation to hold the city, taking it, losing it, retaking it, and trying to hold it.
“And he was a renegade,” says Brooks. Wiley and Lupsa’s file describes how Roderick preferred to stay near the battle’s edge rather than in a commander’s tent and disliked the new method of officers watching battles from drone cameras.
When he visited primitive combat outposts, he avoided staff officers, who Roderick thought were too eager to please and hence inclined to varnish the truth. He gravitated instead to kids whose body armor bore the insignia of lance corporal, the second-lowest rank. These were the everyday soldiers who did the inglorious work of war and nation building, understood the war better, and were more inclined to honesty.
He had similarly unusual views about getting close to the local residents whose countries he was trying to liberate or rebuild, the file says.
Roderick was often out of uniform, in plain clothes or native garb. He spent hours with civilians close to the ground, sitting in cafes and the homes of ordinary people—not high-ranking local officials.
“He argued we couldn’t help rebuild countries whose people and cultures we didn’t understand,” Wiley has written. Roderick forged widespread relationships with these people, and from these hundreds of hours on the ground began developing his own thoughts about what was wrong with U.S. policy.
He began to believe both party orthodoxies about the war on terror were wrong. Conservatives—and many Pentagon officials—tended to advocate massive troop presence and staying the course. Roderick thought those policies were doomed to inspire more terrorism.
Liberals tended to favor keeping a small footprint for as short a time as possible. Roderick thought that would leave the region in chaos.
He finished a Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins while on active duty. In his dissertation he argued that the data proved American policy was failing in the Middle East and Africa. In 2004 there were 21 Islamic terrorist groups in 18 countries, he had written. By 2017, there were more than 40 operating in over 30 countries.
Roderick began to develop a new theory on how to fight the war on terror, which he gave the clinical name “Multidimensional Global Security.”
It was built on four ideas. The first was that the United States needed to replace what looked like military occupation to root out extremists with intensive nation building at the local level that would win over local populations. This work should be done painstakingly, he argued, thoroughly reestablishing civil society in one city or area at a time before moving on to the next. “Establish a deep and functioning society in one place. Prove our concept and our sincerity. Then repeat. It will begin to develop its own momentum. Right now we are failing in many places and proving our own inability—however good our intentions,” he wrote.
The second concept was that this work should be done largely out of uniform. It should look civilian.
The third concept was about length of commitment. Roderick felt the United States needed to convey to the countries where it was involved that it was there for the long haul, a commitment of at least a decade, to prove we were serious. Anything less, Roderick argued, would be doubted by the people in these countries and worked to the advantage of the jihadists, who are playing the ultimate long game. “These people believe we will abandon them as soon as we can and that the extremists will return and retaliate.”
It was an impossible commitment to make politically. That was precisely why, Roderick argued, it was so vital a commitment to communicate. “We did in it Europe. We did it in Korea. Why can’t we do it in the Middle East and Africa?”
The final element of Roderick’s approach was in some ways the most controversial: it leaned heavily on global covert special ops rather than conventional troops on the ground. In effect, at the same time we were building civil societies from the bottom up, Roderick advocated we use those local contacts to engage in an intense campaign of assassination to cut off the heads of terrorist groups worldwide. His plan for daily military presence was fairly small. He didn’t like carrying on low-level civil war everywhere.
What some thought paradoxical was that Roderick had come up through special operations—the military euphemism for classified and often brutal secret warfare. In some circles, that background gave his nation-building theories added credibility. In more Machiavellian quarters at the Pentagon, Roderick’s background as a secret soldier raised questions about whether he had gone over a cliff—or whether his civilian nation-building ideas might be a cover story for what was a massive covert war in Africa and the Middle East.
For all that Roderick had his detractors, however, he was universally acknowledged for his courage and his battle acumen. He was considered one of the bravest leaders in an American uniform and one of the single best leaders of frontline troops and of special operations—a rare combination. That had made him immune to being ignored or entirely put out to pasture.
“What do you think he was doing in Oosay?” Brooks asks Wiley.
“He was on the ground. Talking to local people,” Wiley says.
“But according to the public reports, he was meeting high-ranking Moratians in the Manor House. Not going undercover in cafes.”
“Maybe those days were over,” Wiley says.
Rena knew Roderick by reputation. “Or maybe not,” he says.