“The end of what, sir?”
Naylor hesitated, and then said, “I think it would be best if you heard this from Secretary Beiderman, General.”
Beiderman’s look of surprise-even shock-quickly turned into one of resignation-he had been had, and he knew it-and then into one of hate and loathing.
For a moment, he just sat there, and then he exhaled and leaned toward the red phone.
“General, the President seems to think you are involved in a conspiracy that will see him resign, which would put Vice President Montvale in the Oval Office.”
There was a long moment, and then General McNab said, very softly, “Mr. Secretary, would you please repeat that? I want to be absolutely sure I heard you correctly.”
My God! Naylor thought. McNab knew right away not only what’s going on but how to deal with it.
Thank God!
After a moment, Beiderman repeated, “General, the President seems to think you are involved in a conspiracy that will see him resign, and would put Vice President Montvale in the Oval Office.”
Another pause, and then McNab said, “And you, Mr. Secretary, do you think I have been, or that I am, involved in a coup d’etat such as you describe?”
“No, of course I don’t,” Beiderman snapped. “But that’s what the President apparently believes, and that’s what we have to deal with.”
“First, Mr. Secretary,” McNab said, “let me categorically deny that I am now or ever have been involved in something like that. And with equal emphasis let me say that I have no intention of requesting retirement at this time. The President has-and for that matter, as you well know-you and General Naylor have-the right to relieve me of command of SPECOPSCOM at any time.
“But for me to resign under the circumstances you have laid out would be a tacit admission that I have been involved in a coup d’etat. And that’s treason, Mr. Secretary!”
“Now, calm down, General,” the secretary of Defense said. “No one’s accusing you of treason.”
Naylor began: “General McNab-”
“Treason is a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice,” McNab interrupted him with cold anger in his voice. “I demand a court-martial!”
Naylor thought, Please, God, McNab, don’t get carried away!
“No one’s talking about a court-martial, General McNab,” he said.
“I am!”
“General, what Secretary Beiderman and I have been talking about is that when POTUS has a chance, over a few days, to reconsider what must be honestly described as an overreaction to what happened at Arlington and the Mayflower. .”
“An ‘overreaction’? It’s insane, that’s what it is!”
“Watch your choice of words, General,” Naylor ordered sharply. “You’re speaking of the Commander in Chief.”
“Yes, sir,” McNab said after a moment.
“As I was saying, Secretary Beiderman and I have been discussing the possibility that, after a few days, POTUS may reconsider and possibly even regret what can only be described as his loss of self-control.”
Beiderman put in: “Get out of Dodge, so to speak, for a few days. Until this thing has a chance to blow over.”
“And where should I go for a few days until this thing, this outrage, this insanity, blows over?” McNab demanded.
“If you were not at Fort Bragg, General,” Naylor said, “if you were not at Fort Bragg when Secretary Beiderman and I arrived with the packet of photographs. .”
“Go to Afghanistan, for Christ’s sake,” Beiderman snapped. “Confer with your people there. Just be unavailable.”
After a moment McNab said, “Yes, sir, Mr. Secretary.”
Congratulations, Mr. Secretary, Naylor thought. You are now a coconspirator.
The flashing LED on the red telephone stopped flashing.
“What the hell?” Beiderman demanded incredulously. “Did he hang up on us?”
Naylor held up his hand and then extended his arm and looked at his wristwatch.
Precisely sixty seconds later, he pushed a button on the red telephone. The LED began flashing.
“SPECOPSCOM,” a new voice come over the circuit. “General O’Toole speaking, sir.”
“This is General Naylor. Let me speak to General McNab, please.”
“Sir, I’m sorry. He’s not here.”
“Where is he?” Beiderman demanded.
“Sir, he’s on his way to Afghanistan.”
“As soon as you can get in touch with him, O’Toole, have him call me,” Naylor ordered.
“That will probably take about an hour, sir.”
“As soon as possible,” Naylor said, and hung up.
He met Beiderman’s eyes, and said, “Done.”
“And now O’Toole knows all about this,” Beiderman said.
“No. O’Toole’s the SPECOPSCOM deputy commander. McNab would have to tell him he was going to Afghanistan.”
“Including the circumstances? These circumstances?” Beiderman asked. “So what do we do now, General?”
“We wait to see what happens when POTUS gets his temper under control.”
“And if he doesn’t? If this makes him even more angry? God, Naylor, if he ever finds out what you and I just did. .”
“If POTUS doesn’t get his irrational behavior under control, which is a possibility, I’m afraid then you and I and the other rational people around him are going to have to worry about how to protect the country from that.”
After a long moment, the secretary of Defense said very softly, “I’ve been wondering who would be the first to actually say that out loud.”
FIVE
El Tepual International Airport Puerto Montt, Chile 1945 17 April 2007
As the PeruaireCargo 777 taxied down the runway toward the refrigerator warehouses, Castillo saw that there were two other Boeings on the field. Both were identical to the aircraft on which they had flown from Cozumel-all Boeing 777-200LRs, just about the last word in heavy long-haul transport aircraft.
One bore the insignia of PeruaireCargo, and the other the paint scheme of Air Bulgaria, which Castillo could not remember ever having seen before.
But I will bet my next-to-last dime that it, too, belongs to Aleksandr Pevsner-or one of his several dozen wholly owned subsidiaries.
The Air Bulgaria freighter is about to carry a load of Argentine beef and Chilean salmon to Europe.
Maybe not to-what the hell is the capital of Bulgaria? — Sofia! — but to somewhere in eastern Europe. The PeruaireCargo 777 is almost certainly about to fly a hell of a lot of the same to San Francisco. Or to Chicago. And maybe on the way home, stop by Birmingham to pick up a load of nearly frozen Alabama chickens for the German market.
Ol’ Alek seems to have a lock on the international movement of perishable foodstuffs.
And the international movement of God only knows what else that God only knows who wants moved very discreetly from hither to yon and is prepared to pay whatever it costs.
Despite his protestations that he’s absolutely through doing that sort of thing.
Where the hell is the Lear?
There were no other fixed-wing aircraft on the tarmac. Castillo had expected to see Pevsner’s Learjet 45.
The only aircraft visible besides the huge cargo jets were two Bell 206L-4 helicopters, both painted with the legend CHILEAN HELICOPTERS S.A.
They were probably used to ferry the crews here from Santiago or wherever the hell else they were whooping it up between flights.
But where the hell is Pevsner’s Lear?
“I don’t see the Lear,” Castillo said to his seatmate, who was in the process of applying lipstick, an act he found quite erotic.
They were in the small section of a dozen seats behind the bulkhead that separated them from the flight deck.
“Alek knew when we would arrive,” Sweaty said. “It will be here.”
The massive 777 stopped moving.
Max, who had spent just about all of the flight sound
asleep, now awoke. He sat on his haunches and looked expectantly at the cabin door.
One of the crew came into the passenger compartment. There were seven men, all Russians, on the crew. All of them wore wings. Five of them wore the four-stripe shoulder boards of captains, and the other two the three-stripe shoulder boards of first officers.
The ranks didn’t seem to matter, as one of the captains functioned as the steward, cooking and serving lunch and making drinks, and the last time Castillo walked into the cockpit to see where the hell they were over South America, one of the first officers was occupying the pilot’s seat.
He had come first to the conclusion that Russians did things differently, and then idly wondered what kind of passports the crew was carrying, and then decided that they more than likely had a selection of passports from which to choose, depending on where they had landed.
As a stairway mounted on a pickup truck was backed against the fuselage, the captain worked open the door.
When there was the light bump of the stairway contacting the aircraft, Max jumped to his feet, effortlessly shouldered the captain out of the way, and ran down the stairway.
“Isn’t that sweet?” Castillo said. “He can’t wait to see his babies.”
“He’s been on this plane for nine hours. I know what he wants to do,” Sweaty said, then immediately stopped, realizing that she had been had.
“I better get down there before those two guys at the bottom of the steps see Max and wet their pants,” Castillo said, and started to get out of his seat.
“My God,” Koussevitzky suddenly said. “It’s Blatov! And Koshkov!”
Koussevitzky beat Castillo to the door.
Castillo got there in time to see the two men salute, and heard one of them say, “Kapitans Blatov and Koshkov reporting for duty, sir!”
Koussevitzky ran quickly down the stairs and the three men embraced. Castillo-moving slowly-made it all the way down the stairs before they broke apart. When they did, he saw tears running down all of their cheeks.
“Colonel Castillo, may I present Kapitans Blatov and Koshkov, late of Vega Group Two?”
Both Blatov and Koshkov snapped to attention and saluted.
Castillo returned it, in Pavlovian response, and then put out his hand.
Koussevitzky saw the lack of understanding on Castillo’s face.
“It was General Sirinov’s plan, Carlos,” Koussevitzky said, “that should something go wrong on La Orchila Island, a second Tupelov based in Cuba would fly in our reserve force.”
“But by the time we got there, Podpolkovnik Castillo,” Kapitan Koshkov said, “all we found was Major Koussevitzky resting against what was left of the hangar wall, drinking emergency liquid against the pain of the wound Podpolkovnik Alekseeva had given him.”
Castillo looked at him and thought: Emergency liquid? What the hell is that?
“Emergency liquid?” he asked.
“Vodka, Carlos,” Koshkov explained with a smile. “One knows when one has been really accepted as a Spetsnaz when the officer inspecting your equipment before a mission does not inspect your two water bottles to make sure one of them doesn’t contain emergency liquid.”
Kapitans Koshkov and Blatov then snapped to attention again and raised their arms in a salute.
“Well, what have we here?” Tom Barlow asked, offering his hand. “A veterans’ convention?”
“It is good to see you again, Polkovnik Berezovsky,” Blatov said. And then quickly added, as Sweaty came off the stairs, “And you, Podpolkovnik Alekseeva.”
Sweaty extended her hand. Koshkov and Blatov bent over it and kissed it.
Unless both of them had really been into the emergency liquid, I don’t think a U.S. Army female light colonel has ever had her hand kissed by two captains.
“How did you get out?” Sweaty asked.
“It was only a question of time, Podpolkovnik Alekseeva, until they got around to deciding we were involved in the La Orchila Island disaster.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“We are Spetsnaz, Podpolkovnik Alekseeva,” Koshkov replied. “We can do anything.”
Castillo pushed back a grin as he thought: Years ago, when I was a bushy-tailed Special Forces captain, we used to say, “Green Berets can do anything immediately. The impossible takes a little longer.”
He took another, closer look at Captains Koshkov and Blatov and decided, presuming they could speak English, they’d fit right in in the Stockade.
“Either of you speak English?” Castillo asked in English.
“About as well, Colonel,” Koshkov answered in English, “as you speak Russian.”
“I once studied to be a poet in Saint Petersburg,” Castillo said. Both smiled broadly.
“So, I understand, did Vladimir Vladimirovich,” Blatov said. “That’s the word going around.”
“What are you doing here?” Koussevitzky asked.
“We’re going to take you to Casa en el Bosque,” Koshkov said.
“In those?” Castillo asked, indicating the Bells.
Koshkov nodded.
“They’re really very nice little helicopters,” he said.
“Very nice little helicopters,” my ass. The factory calls them Long Rangers but they’re better known as Super Rangers. High-inertia two-bladed rotors. Lots of power. Just the thing to fly through the Andes as darkness falls, presuming you have the know-how to fly them. Say a hundred hours under a good instructor.
I wonder where Alek Pevsner got them?
“How much time do you have in them, Captain?” Castillo asked.
Koshkov thought a minute, shrugged, then said, “About ten hours.”
Ten hours?
Max interrupted his thought by walking up to Koshkov, sitting on his haunches, and offering his paw.
Max likes him. I’ll be damned!
Koshkov stiffened; his face showed fear.
He confirmed this by announcing, “I’m not a friend of dogs.”
“Well, you better shake that one’s paw, or he’ll eat you,” Castillo said.
With great reluctance, Koshkov stooped and took Max’s paw.
“Get in the chopper, Max,” Castillo ordered, gesturing.
Max dutifully trotted to the closest helicopter and jumped inside. Koshkov was visibly relieved.
When Castillo got to the Bell, there was a man in the co-pilot’s seat. A good pilot-say, one with a hundred hours under a good instructor-could fly a Super Ranger by himself, but a co-pilot, even one presumably with less than ten hours in the bird, was a nice thing to have.
“May I sit there, please?” Castillo asked politely.
The co-pilot didn’t like that, but Koshkov signaled for him to give up his seat, and he did so.
Once he was seated in the co-pilot’s position, a quick look at the interior of the Bell-especially at the panel-told Castillo that it was brand-new. The forward and side-looking radar screens, the GPS screen, and the radar altimeter bore the logos of the AFC Corporation, and that translated as “damn the cost, get the best.”
He strapped himself in and put on the helmet that the co-pilot had reluctantly turned over to him.
“Test, test,” he said through the throat microphone.
“Loud and clear,” Koshkov reported. “Ready?”
“One thing, Captain Koshkov,” Castillo said. “If at any time during this flight I put my hands on the controls and say, ‘I’ve got it!’ and you don’t instantly take your hands off the controls, I will order Max to pull you out of your seat by sinking his teeth into your throat, and then, when we get on the ground, I will tell him to eat you, starting with your penis and testicles.”
It did not produce the reaction he expected.
Koshkov smiled at him and said, “If at any time during our flight the co-pilot desires to take control of the aircraft, the pilot will be honored to turn it over to the author of Light Helicopter Operation in Extreme Altitude and Mountainous Terrain Conditions.”
�
��Where the hell did you see that?”
“By Major C. G. Castillo, Chief Flight Examiner, 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment,” Koshkov finished. “I used it to teach the subject when I was at the Spetsnaz aviation school.”
“I will be damned.”
“When we land, you can tell me how I did,” Koshkov said. “Picking it up now.”
The Bell lifted gently off. Koshkov lowered the nose, and then made a running takeoff.
VII
ONE
Casa en el Bosque San Carlos de Bariloche Rio Negro Province, Argentina 2105 17 April 2007
At just about the moment the AFC GPS showed that they were over the estate, floodlights came on, illuminating the polo field, which was, Castillo judged, about 500 meters from the mansion.
As Koshkov brought the Super Ranger in for a smooth touchdown, with the second chopper following, Castillo saw there was a welcoming party.
Standing in front of the stable-which also served as a hangar-was a large welcoming party: Aleksandr Pevsner; his wife, Anna; and their three children, Elena, Sergei, and Aleksandr. Elena held one of Max’s pups in her arms.
Janos, Pevsner’s huge Hungarian bodyguard, stood where Castillo expected him to be, three feet behind Pevsner.
Standing three feet away was Berezovsky’s wife, Lora, and their daughter, Sof’ya, who was holding another fruit of Max’s loins in her arms. And to one side stood four women, three with small children in their arms, who had to be the wives of the pilots.
If it weren’t for those dozen or more guys, all armed with Kalashnikov rifles, standing behind everybody, trying to be as discreet as possible, this would be a touching scene. If this were December, it could be Home for Christmas.
“How’d I do?” Koshkov asked as he braked the rotors.
“Not bad for someone who obviously has no natural flying talent at all,” Castillo said.
Koshkov smiled and shook his head.
Max, seeing his pups, was first off the Super Ranger. With some trepidation, first Elena and then Sof’ya put their now-squirming pups on the ground. In attack mode, the dogs raced toward their father. Together, they weighed about half as much as Max.
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