Covert Warriors

by W. E. B. Griffin

  How the aircraft—described, off the record, by senior Air Force officials as “years ahead of anything in the American arsenal”—came into U.S. possession remains a closely guarded secret, but it is known that the Central Intelligence Agency had a standing offer of $125 million for the delivery of one into its hands.

  Montvale announced at Andrews that the money would be paid to the two pilots who flew it into Andrews. They were identified only as “retired officers with an intelligence background.”

  Secretary of State Natalie Cohen, pointing to Montvale’s long and distinguished career in public service—he has been a deputy secretary of State, secretary of the Treasury, and ambassador to the European Union—said she could think of no one better qualified to be Vice President, and hoped his selection to that office would “put to rest once and for all the scurrilous rumors of bad blood between Montvale and the President.”

  President Clendennen immediately nominated Truman C. Ellsworth, who had been Montvale’s deputy, to be director of National Intelligence. That appointment, according to White House insiders, almost certainly was behind the resignation of CIA Director John Powell, although the official version is that Powell “decided it was time for him to return to private life.”

  The President announced that he was sending the name of CIA Deputy Director for Operations A. Franklin Lammelle to the Senate for confirmation as CIA Director. Lammelle, who has worked closely with both Montvale and Secretary of State Cohen, is widely believed to have been deeply involved with Montvale in the operation that saw the super-secret Russian Tupelov Tu-934A come into American hands.

  Presidential spokesman John David Parker said the President would have nothing further to say about the intelligence coup, stating that it “was, after all, a clandestine operation, and the less said about it, the better.”

  The problem was that Roscoe not only knew the backstory, which he had not written about, but had been part of it. He knew, for example, that the President had been known to refer to Montvale as “Ambassador Stupid, director of National Ignorance.” He also knew that President Clendennen, shortly after taking office, had ordered Montvale’s “Red Phone”—which provided instant access to the President and cabinet heads—shut off, and canceled Montvale’s access to the White House fleet of limousines and GMC Yukons, in the hope that this would encourage Montvale to resign, so that he could appoint CIA Director John Powell—who could, in the President’s judgment, find his ass with both hands—to replace him.

  He also knew, for example, that President Clendennen had named Ambassador Montvale to be his Vice President not as a reward for the intelligence coup, or because of his admiration for him, but because the alternative had been the virtually certain indictment of the President by the House of Representatives quickly followed by an impeachment trial in the Senate.

  Danton knew that the delivery of the Tupelov Tu-934A into the hands of the CIA had almost been a sideshow to what had really happened: Shortly before Clendennen had become President on the sudden death of his predecessor—an aortal aneurysm had ruptured— the United States had launched a preemptive strike on a biological warfare manufactory in the Congo.

  The manufactory and everything within at least two square miles around it had been bombed and incinerated with every aerial weapon in the American arsenal except nuclear. It was believed this action had removed all of an incredibly lethal substance known as Congo-X from the planet.

  This assessment was proven false when FedEx delivered several liters of Congo-X to the Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease—the euphemism for Biological Warfare Laboratories—at Fort Detrick, Maryland. This was shortly followed by the discovery of another several liters of the substance by Border Patrol agents just inside the U.S.-Mexico border.

  And this was shortly followed by the SVR rezident in Washington, Sergei Murov, inviting A. Franklin Lammelle, then the CIA’s deputy director of operations, for drinks at the Russian embassy’s dacha on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

  There he proposed a deal: The Russians would turn over all the Congo-X in their possession in exchange for the former SVR rezident in Berlin, Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky, and his sister, Lieutenant Colonel Svetlana Alekseeva, the former SVR rezident in Copenhagen, who had not only defected with the assistance of Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Castillo but had also spilled the beans to Colonel Castillo about the “Fish Farm” in the Congo. The Russians also wanted Colonel Castillo.

  When this proposal was brought to the attention of President Clendennen, he thought the deal made a great deal of sense, and ordered that it be concluded. When informed that Colonel Berezovsky and Lieutenant Colonel Alekseeva were not in the hands of the CIA, but in Argentina, with Colonel Castillo, who flatly refused to turn them over to the CIA, President Clendennen ordered Director of National Intelligence Montvale to send all the alphabet agencies of the intelligence community to find them and see that they were all loaded aboard the next available Aeroflot flight to Moscow.

  Frederick P. Palmer, the United States attorney general, later described this action as being of “mind-boggling illegality,” and suggested that if anything beyond President Clendennen’s caving in to the Russians was needed to convince the House of Representatives that articles of impeachment were in order, this would do it.

  And the story would have come out. The simultaneous offered resignations of Secretary of State Cohen, Director of National Intelligence Montvale, General Naylor, and even presidential spokesman Porky Parker could not be swept under the rug, even if a sense of duty might keep those resigning from making public why they could no longer serve President Clendennen.

  Attorney General Palmer, however, argued that the country could not take another impeachment scandal, and that it was their duty to stay in office, with the caveats that the President appoint Montvale as Vice President, that the President ask for DCI Powell’s resignation, and that he make other changes in the senior leadership that they considered necessary.

  The President, having no alternative but impeachment, quickly agreed.

  Roscoe Danton, running down the rumor that Lieutenant Colonel Castillo had snatched two Russian defectors from the CIA station chief in Vienna, had first encountered members of the Merry Band of Outlaws in Argentina during the time the alphabet agencies were looking for him.

  Without quite knowing how it had happened, he had wound up in Mexico embroiled in Colonel Castillo’s Merry Outlaws’ current operation.

  Castillo had learned that the Congo-X the Border Patrol had found just inside the Texas-Mexico border had been flown to Mexico in a Tupelov Tu-934A, and that the aircraft, presumably carrying more Congo-X, was on an air base on Venezuela’s La Orchila Island. He launched an operation to grab both the aircraft and the Congo-X.

  Roscoe J. Danton had been aboard one of the Black Hawk helicopters that landed on La Orchila Island. He had not been sure then, and was not sure now, whether he was there as a courageous journalist following a story no matter where it led, or whether he was a craven coward who believed the Merry Outlaws when they made their little joke, “Now that you know that, Roscoe, we’ll have to kill you”—and actually might have done so had he not climbed aboard the Black Hawk.

  Danton had managed to convince himself, before he had been so rudely awakened, that he had been more the professional journalist than professional coward. He had come to this conclusion after deciding that President Clendennen was a miserable sonofabitch for trying to swap Dmitri and Sweaty—who had also been on the Black Hawk—and Charley Castillo to the Russians.

  “After the island,” when he saw Castillo and Colonel Jake Torine preparing to fly the Tupelov Tu-934A to Andrews Air Force Base, he realized that he had been accepted by the Merry Outlaws as one of their own.

  There were advantages to this—for example, he had been given a CaseyBerry, over which the secretary of State had given him the scoop about the murders and kidnapping in Mexico—and he could see a cornucopia of other news that would come hi
s way in the future.

  But there were manifold disadvantages to his being a professional journalist that he could see as well.

  As Roscoe pulled on his shorts in his bedroom, he said: “Guys, I really don’t want to go out there. Why? Wolf News will carry the President’s press conference from the first line of bullshit to the last.”

  “You’re going, Roscoe,” Yung said. “Charley wants you to go.”

  “When you get down to it, guys, I’m really not one of you.”

  “Charley thinks you are,” Yung said. “That’s good enough for the executive combat pay committee.”

  “For the what?”

  “The executive combat pay committee,” Delchamps replied. “Two-Gun, Alex Darby, and me. We’re the ones who pass out the combat pay.”

  Yung added, “The committee asked Charley, ‘What about Roscoe?’ And Charley replied, ‘He was on the island, wasn’t he?’ ”

  “I was on the island as a journalist,” Roscoe replied. “A neutral, non-combatant observer.”

  But Danton thought, Shit, I don’t believe that.

  I was rooting for the good guys.

  And I took the Uzi that Castillo said I might need.

  “If that was the case,” Delchamps said, “we’d have to kill you. You know too much.”

  There he goes with that “we’d have to kill you” bullshit again.

  The trouble with that being I’m not sure it’s bullshit.

  I do know too much.

  “And if we killed you, then you wouldn’t get the million,” Yung said.

  “What fucking million?”

  “I could set up a trust fund for your kids, I suppose,” Yung said thoughtfully.

  “What fucking million?” Roscoe demanded as he rummaged through his tie rack.

  “Shooters,” Delchamps said, “roughly defined as everybody who went to the island, get a million. Plus, of course, everybody who went into the Congo. Charley, Sweaty, and Dmitri opted out.”

  My God, they’re serious! I’m being offered a million dollars!

  How much would that be when the IRS was through with me?

  Why am I asking?

  Pure and noble journalist that I am, I’m of course going to have to refuse it.

  What is this “pure and noble journalist” bullshit?

  What’s the difference between me taking free meals and booze from any lobbyist with a credit card and taking a million from the Merry Outlaws?

  I write what I want, period.

  And I was on that island, and I could have been killed.

  Roscoe had a sudden, very clear flashback to what had happened several years before at the National Press Club.

  Somebody had jumped on Frank Cesno, then high up in CNN’s Washington Bureau—and a hell of a journalist—about the recent tendency of TV journalists to paint themselves as absolutely neutral when covering a war.

  “Otherwise, both sides would think of us as spies, not journalists,” Cesno had announced, more than a little piously.

  Whereupon he had been shot out of the saddle by Admiral Stans-field Turner, who had been director of the CIA under Jimmy Carter.

  “Frank,” the admiral had said, “what do you think the Russians or the North Koreans—or anybody—think when they look at someone like you? Noble member of the Fourth Estate or spy?”

  “David,” Roscoe J. Danton inquired, “how much of a bite would the IRS take from that million?”

  [THREE]

  Auditorium Three

  CIA Headquarters

  McLean, Virginia

  1100 12 April 2007

  Auditorium Three, unofficially known as the Director’s Auditorium, was a multipurpose room which could be used as a small theater capable of hosting forty people in theater-style seating and another eight in more elegant seats in the front row, each provided with a small table and a telephone. It could also be used as a dining room capable of feeding as many as sixty people, with five tables, each seating a dozen guests.

  It was secure, which caused it also to be known as the Director’s Bubble, which meant that great effort was expended just about daily to ensure that nothing said or seen in the room could possibly be heard or seen anywhere else.

  That sort of security wasn’t a consideration today, where what was to be said by President Joshua Ezekiel Clendennen would be heard and viewed in real time all over the world.

  There was security, of course. Not only was this the headquarters of the CIA, but the President of the United States was going to be there. As were the Vice President, the secretary of State, and other very senior officials.

  There are so many Secret Service guys in here, Roscoe J. Danton thought as he entered Auditorium Three, that they’re falling all over each other.

  They’re competing for space with the State Department security guys—and gals—protecting Natalie Cohen, the Army security guys protecting Naylor, and the CIA’s own security guys keeping an eye on both Frank Lammelle and the store in general.

  Edgar Delchamps and Two-Gun Yung had dropped off Danton at the main entrance, saying they’d wait for him in the parking garage, which caused Danton to again recall the allegation—which he believed—that Delchamps had taken out a CIA traitor in the parking garage by inserting an ice pick into his auditory canal, thereby saving the Agency from the embarrassment that trying the sonofabitch would have caused.

  Some of the White House Press Corps filled most of the seats in the auditorium. There were far more members of that elite body than there were seats for them here today.

  When Roscoe had shown his White House Press Corps credentials to the first of three security points—the “outside” one, near the main entrance—one of Lammelle’s security people had handed him another credential, this one a plastic-sealed card on what Roscoe thought of as a “beaded dog tag chain.” He looked at it. It held his photo and the legend PRESIDENTIAL PRESS CONFERENCE AT CIA HEADQUARTERS 1100 APRIL 12TH 2007.

  “You’re on the reserved-seating list, Mr. Danton,” the man said.

  Roscoe found this interesting, because before he had been so rudely awakened, he had had no intention of coming out here today and hadn’t asked for credentials, let alone a reserved-seat reservation.

  He knew the protocol for events like this, at which there would be far more seats requested by members of the White House Press Corps than were available. The “host”—in this case, Frank Lammelle—and Porky Parker would put their heads together and decide who got in. And who would have to wait outside, fuming.

  Roscoe intuited that he was on the reserved-seating list because of Lammelle, not Porky Parker. While he had no problems with Porky, Porky could be expected to hand out reserved seats to the elite of the White House Press Corps, and Roscoe knew that he wasn’t a member of that elite. Close, but no golden ring.

  And he further intuited that it was due to his new status as a member—however uncomfortable—of the Merry Outlaws. At the beginning, Frank Lammelle had headed the CIA delegation of the alphabet agencies looking for Charley Castillo.

  Lammelle even had an air-powered dart gun—

  Straight out of a superhero comic book.

  Jesus, that would have made a great story if I could have written it!

  —with which he planned to tranquilize Castillo so that he would be amenable to being loaded aboard the Moscow-bound Aeroflot plane.

  After Vic D’Alessandro—surprise, surprise!—had shot Lammelle with Lammelle’s own Super Agent Whiz Bang air gun in Cancún—where his pursuit of Castillo had taken him—Lammelle had awakened in the middle of a desert in Mexico, at a secret airfield the Merry Outlaws had dubbed Drug Cartel International.

  There, when he saw what Castillo’s Merry Outlaws were doing, and compared it to what the President was trying to do to Castillo, Lammelle had changed sides. He hadn’t gone to the Venezuelan island but had made a large, maybe even essential, contribution to the operation.

  If I have a CaseyBerry, Roscoe thought, you can bet your ass Ca
stillo gave Lammelle one. And I can hear Castillo calling Lammelle on it, and asking, “Frank, can you get Roscoe into that press conference?”

  And that would neatly tie in with Delchamps and Yung—having easily slipped through the Watergate’s state-of-the-art, absolutely, positively guaranteed 24/7 security system—appearing in my bedroom this morning.

  Why the hell is it important to Castillo that I hear whatever bullshit our beloved Commander in Chief is going to spew today?

  When Roscoe passed through two more security points and finally got into Auditorium Three, a uniformed CIA security officer took a close look at his new presidential press conference credentials and showed him to a seat where he was buried between fellow members of the White House Press Corps. He had half expected to be seated in one of the VIP seats in front. He saw that Andy McClarren of Wolf News and C. Harry Whelan, Jr., had been so honored.

  Roscoe glanced at the open laptop computer of his seat mate, Pierre Schiff, of L’Humanité, and helpfully suggested that for about ten bucks, Schiff could go to Radio Shack and buy a screen that would keep people from seeing what was on his laptop screen.

  Schiff gave him a smile that would have frozen hot chocolate.

  Roscoe looked around the auditorium and saw mostly what he expected to see:

  There was a narrow stage holding a podium bearing the presidential seal. Against the curtain at the rear of the stage was a sea of American flags, plus the CIA flag, those of the Vice President of the United States, the secretary of State, the director of National Intelligence, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and two red flags, one with four silver stars on it and one with three.