Peter had found a little room off Puller’s headquarters and there, with an old Coke machine moaning over his shoulder and girl scout mottos like “Always do your best!” on the rickety walls, he looked at a copy of the single communication Aggressor-One had sent from the mountain.
I wish to say furthermore that you had better prepare yourselves for a settlement of that question that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it. The sooner you are prepared for it, the better.
There was something tantalizing in it, ironic. A strange feeling he got, that it wasn’t a madman’s document, but something far subtler.
It’s a game, he thought.
This guy is playing a game.
But against whom? And why? Why a game? Why now, a game? As if it’s not quite enough to blow the fucking world away, to turn us to ash and dust; he’s got to tweak our nose somehow.
He looked at the “signature” at the end of it: “Commander, Provisional Army of the United States.”
Well, your standard-issue right-wing nutcase psycho, staple of fifty bad movies and a hundred bad novels. It fits perfectly: the inflated rhetorical tone, the sense of epic proportion, the delusion of one self-styled “great man,” reaching out from his wisdom to twist history in the proper direction.
Why don’t I believe it, he wondered.
Because it’s too pat?
Because it matches all our expectations?
Because I’ve a feeling Aggressor-One has seen the movies and read the books too?
He touched his temple, feeling his head begin to throb. Now, try to relate this, the screwball declaration of intent from Aggressor-One, up there with his MX, to this, the mountain of teletype printouts that were being sent from the FBI, at Dick Puller’s order, on the investigation into his identity.
Quickly his eyes sped over the data. A crash team from the FBI special antiterrorist squad, working with the assistance of personnel officers at the Department of Defense and Defense’s big mainframes, had done a fast shakeout on military personnel with a certain pattern of experience in conjunction with a certain range of political belief, which itself had been extrapolated from a cluster of skills necessary to plot, stage, and execute the silo takeover and an assumed cluster of ideological beliefs necessary to provide the key ingredient: the will.
Among the plotting coordinates in the search for Aggressor-One were one or more of the following:
—Special Operations experience, including Special Forces (Army), Ranger (Army), Air Commando (Air Force), SEAL teams (Navy), and Marine Recon (Marine Corps); Central Intelligence Agency Special Operations Division (comprised primarily of veterans of the foregoing) and including those with experience in Operation Phoenix in Vietnam and counterinsurgency among the Nungs in South Central RVN; or experience in counterinsurgency operations in the third world, as in guerrilla hunt