Covert Warriors pa-7

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There is a precedent,” Clendennen then said, reasonably. “I don’t think anyone would argue that my trying to get Colonel Ferris back from those who hold him captive is anywhere near as important as the atomic bomb. Still, President Roosevelt didn’t think Vice President Truman had the need to know we had the atom bomb and elected not to tell him. And I don’t think Vice President Montvale has the need to know about what we’re about to do, and I have elected not to tell him. Any questions, General?”

  “No, sir,” Naylor said.

  “Okay. Now let’s get to the nuts and bolts of this operation. How are we going to get this civilian, what’s his name again?”

  “D’Alessandro, Mr. President,” O’Toole furnished. “Victor D’Alessandro.”

  “How are we going to get this man D’Alessandro from where he is-and by the way, where is he? Shouldn’t he be here? — to the Oaxaca State Prison?”

  After a moment, O’Toole realized the President’s question was not rhetorical.

  “Sir, I would recommend the use of a Black Hawk to get Mr. D’Alessandro from where he is-El Paso-to the prison,” O’Toole said.

  “Why not fly him there in a regular airplane?” the President challenged. “There’s an airport right by it.”

  He picked up the ruler again and pointed at the map with it. “Right here. How the fuck do you pronounce that again?”

  Clemens McCarthy correctly pronounced Xoxocotlan for the President.

  “What is that, Inca? Incan?” the President asked.

  “That’s certainly what it sounds like, Mr. President,” McCarthy said.

  The President turned to O’Toole.

  “I’m waiting, General.”

  “Sir?”

  “For you to tell me why Whatsisname is better off flying to the prison in a helicopter instead of using an airplane to fly to the airport with the unpronounceable name.”

  “Yes, sir. Sir, for the same reason I gave before. It will permit him to reconnoiter the area; he can do that better in a Black Hawk.”

  “Yeah, I suppose he can,” the President conceded. “Now, where are we going to get the helicopter?”

  “I would suggest, sir, that since we’re going to use Night Stalker birds to carry the Gray Fox-”

  “‘Night Stalker birds’?” the President interrupted. “What the hell are they? Is that?”

  “It’s how we refer to the rotary wing aircraft-the helicopters-assigned to the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, sir.”

  “I see that I’m going to have to get used to the terminology you people use. I’m the Commander in Chief, and I should know it, but sometimes I think you and General Naylor are speaking a foreign language.”

  “I can see where it might be a little confusing, sir,” O’Toole said.

  “Okay. I’ve got several questions. What kind of a helicopter are we talking about?”

  “UH-60Fs, sir. They’re specially modified Black Hawks for missions like this.”

  “And they have the range to fly to this prison from El Paso?”

  “Yes, sir. I believe they do.”

  “You believe they do? Don’t you know?”

  “I always like to consult the experts, Mr. President,” O’Toole said.

  “Who would that be?”

  “Colonel Arthur Kingsolving, sir. The 160th Regiment’s commander.”

  “Well, why isn’t he here?”

  Naylor offered: “We can have Colonel Kingsolving here in flight time from Fort Campbell, Mr. President.”

  “See, that’s what I mean,” the President said. “I sometimes think you’re speaking a foreign language. What the hell does ‘flight time from Fort Campbell’ mean?”

  “Colonel Kingsolving can be here, sir,” Naylor said, “in the time it will take him to fly from Fort Campbell. The 160th is stationed at Fort Campbell, sir.”

  “Why aren’t they stationed at Fort Bragg, with SPECOPSCOM?” the President asked. “What the hell are they doing way out in Kansas?”

  “Fort Campbell is in Kentucky, Mr. President,” Naylor said.

  “The President knows where Fort Campbell is, General,” McCarthy said.

  “Answer the question, General,” Clendennen snapped.

  “I wasn’t privy to the decision to station the 160th at Campbell, sir,” Naylor said. “It was made by the chief of staff.”

  “And he didn’t even ask you, or O’Toole here, where you thought such an important organization should be stationed?”

  “No, sir. He did not.”

  “Did you-or General O’Toole-complain when the chief of staff put this organization in the middle of Kentucky instead of Fort Bragg, where it should be?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “It was in the nature of an order, sir. Soldiers are expected to obey their orders, not protest them.”

  “An admirable philosophy,” Clendennen said. “I wish I knew how to instill it in the people around me.” He paused. “Okay. So where are we?”

  “We were talking about getting Colonel Kingsolving here, Mr. President,” Naylor said.

  “No. That’s already been decided. The question is how. Is there any reason he couldn’t come here in a Black Hawk?”

  “No, sir. The flight time would be longer, sir,” O’Toole said.

  “I’d already figured that out, General, believe it or not,” the President said. “Get him on the phone and tell him to come here in a Black Hawk. I’d like a good look at one. Mulligan, clear it for him to land on the West Lawn.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Mr. President,” Naylor said, “I would recommend having a Black Hawk sent to El Paso from Fort Campbell to take Mr. D’Alessandro to the prison.”

  “Do it,” Clendennen ordered.

  “And that would raise the question of Mr. D’Alessandro’s orders, sir. How is he to deal with this Mexican police chief?”

  “If this fellow is as good as you and O’Toole say he is, he should be able to figure that out himself, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Sir, as General O’Toole pointed out, he will have two missions. The first, he will have to know about that. That is, the arrival of Abrego at the prison. That’s the overt mission. The covert mission is to determine the best way of liberating Colonel Ferris. How much do you want O’Toole to tell him about that?”

  The President gave that question thirty seconds of serious consideration.

  “I was about to say, leave that to General O’Toole’s good judgment. He has experience in these matters. But then I realized I want General O’Toole here with me to answer the questions about this and that, ones that will inevitably arise. So, what I think we should do, General Naylor, is have you go to El Paso to give this man D’Alessandro his marching orders.”

  “General, my appearance at Fort Bliss would raise questions. .”

  “Who said anything about Fort Bliss? I want you to go to El Paso.”

  “Sir, Fort Bliss abuts El Paso. There is an Army airfield there, Biggs Army Airfield. If I went into El Paso International instead of Biggs, questions would be raised.”

  “Well, you don’t have to travel in that Gulfstream of yours-going there on a regular airline would be one way of avoiding attention, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir. If you think it’s best, I can go commercial.”

  “No,” the President then said. “There would be questions about that, too; why you weren’t traveling in your Gulfstream. Besides, it will be quicker going and coming, if I need you back here. So here’s your marching orders, General: Get down to El Paso. General O’Toole will have this man D’Alessandro waiting for you, and he will have arranged for a Black Hawk to take him to meet this Mexican cop. You will give D’Alessandro his marching orders, and as soon as he’s on his way to Mexico, you come back here. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir. And after Mr. D’Alessandro meets with the Mexican policeman, what should I tell him to do?”

  “Tell him to
go back to El Paso and await further orders. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll leave right away.”

  “Yeah,” the President said. “Have a nice flight, General.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  THREE

  Office of the Director Central Intelligence Agency McLean, Virginia 1310 20 April 2007

  “And what can the CIA do for the most important general in the world today?” A. Franklin Lammelle answered his telephone.

  “You know I don’t think that’s funny, Frank,” General Allan B. Naylor said.

  “It was a perfectly serious question.”

  “You can tell me where I can find Vic D’Alessandro.”

  “Two questions,” Lammelle said. “What makes you think I would know, and why do you want to know?”

  Lammelle held the commander in chief of the United States Central Command in the highest possible regard in terms of ability and integrity. But he didn’t like him very much-and sometimes not at all.

  Naylor was deeply into the West Pointer’s creed of duty, honor, country. And while that was certainly commendable, Naylor, Lammelle had decided over the years, just went too goddamn far with it.

  The best example of this was Naylor’s relationship with Charley Castillo. He had known Charley since he was a child. Charley and Naylor’s son had been a year apart in a private elementary school in Germany when Charley’s mother, suffering from terminal cancer, announced her desire to find Charley’s father. She had told Mrs. Naylor, her friend, that she’d been impregnated at seventeen by a dashing nineteen-year-old Army chopper jockey, who’d then disappeared. Mrs. Naylor pressed her husband, then-Major Naylor, to find the boy’s only living relative.

  Naylor had been happy to do it. He was a highly moral man who really loathed officers who knocked up young German women and never made the slightest effort to meet their responsibilities vis-a-vis their love child.

  Castillo’s father hadn’t been hard to find. He was buried in the Fort Sam National Cemetery beneath a headstone onto which had been chiseled a representation of the Medal of Honor.

  Charley’s status changed from that of a poor German bastard who had been shamefully treated by a U.S. Army officer-whose ass Naylor intended to burn-into the son of an officer who had been awarded the nation’s highest award for valor on the battlefield.

  The first thing Naylor had done was set in motion the legal wheels which would keep Charley’s substantial inheritance from being squandered by his newfound family. When that hadn’t proved to be necessary-Charley’s father’s family turned out to be as well off-stinking rich, to put a point on it-as his mother’s, “Uncle Allan,” as Naylor had quickly become, now turned his efforts into getting Charley into the Long Gray Line. His father’s Medal of Honor gave him a pass into West Point, and at West Point he would be imbued with the duty, honor, country philosophy which had guided Naylor all of his life.

  A. Franklin Lammelle knew that that had almost-but not quite-turned out the way Naylor had planned.

  Charley had graduated from the Military Academy toward the top of his class and been commissioned into Armor. Five generations of generals named Naylor had been Cavalry and then Armored officers.

  The Naylor plan for Carlos G. Castillo was working. Most of Naylor’s plans for anything worked; he was by then already a three-star general, and serving as General “Stormin’” Norman Schwarzkopf’s operations officer for Desert Storm.

  But then the plan went off the tracks.

  Some publicity conscious brass hats had decided it would be good public relations if the son of a MOH helicopter pilot also flew as a helicopter pilot in the upcoming Desert War I. A training slot at Fort Rucker “was found” for him, and Castillo was sent there to learn how to fly the Bell HU-1 helicopter. On his second day at the aviation school, it was learned that not only did Castillo already know how to fly but had more than 230 hours as pilot-in-command of the twin-engine version Huey. One of the subsidiaries of Castillo Enterprises was Castillo Aviation, which serviced oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico. Castillo had begun flying for Castillo Aviation as soon as he acquired his commercial rotary wing pilot’s license, which he had done when he was sixteen and a high school junior.

  The brass had regarded this as a fortuitous circumstance. The hero pilot’s son could go into Operation Desert Storm, once he finished transition training, flying the Army’s glamour machine, the Apache AH-64 attack helicopter.

  Once he got to Arabia, and realizing the twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant was not qualified to fly the Apache, the brass did the best thing they could think of to keep him alive. He was assigned as co-pilot to the most skilled and experienced Apache pilot in the unit.

  That plan went awry, too.

  Two hours into Desert Storm, the Apache, on a mission to take out Iraqi antiaircraft weapons, was struck, the pilot blinded, and Castillo wounded. Castillo was faced with the choice of landing the shot-up helicopter and waiting for help, or trying to get the pilot medical attention. He flew the smoking and shuddering Apache, at fifty feet above the desert, back two hundred miles.

  General Naylor learned for the first time that Second Lieutenant Castillo was not where he was supposed to be-at Fort Knox, undergoing Basic Officer’s Course training-when Castillo was marched into Desert Storm headquarters so that he could receive the “impact awards”-in other words, get the medals immediately-of the Distinguished Flying Cross and Purple Heart medals from the hands of General Schwarzkopf himself.

  Appropriate counseling was given to the officers who had put Castillo in the cockpit of an Apache he was clearly unqualified to fly, but that left the problem of what to do with Second Lieutenant Castillo. Loading him on the next airplane for Fort Knox would suggest that Castillo had done something wrong, and that was clearly not the case. And so would taking him off flight status.

  Checking the roster of units assigned to Desert Storm, Naylor thought he had found just what he needed: the 2303rd Civil Government Detachment. It was commanded by Colonel Bruce J. McNab, a classmate of Naylor’s. He hadn’t liked McNab at West Point, thought him to be an inferior officer, and was not surprised that he was still a colonel commanding an insignificant civil government unit. But the roster showed that the 2303rd had half a dozen Hueys assigned to it.

  Naylor called McNab and told him the story and said he was sending Castillo to him, and McNab was expected to keep the young officer out of harm’s way.

  “Just have him fly you around, McNab. Nothing more.”

  McNab had said, “Yes, sir.”

  The next time Naylor saw Castillo was just after the Iraqi surrender, when Colonel McNab showed up at Desert Storm headquarters with Castillo at the controls of McNab’s heavily armed Huey.

  They were there to personally receive from the hands of General Schwarzkopf impact awards of the Distinguished Service Cross (McNab), Silver Star (Castillo), and Purple Heart (both) medals. McNab also had the star of brigadier general and Castillo the Combat Infantry Badge pinned to their tunics by General Schwarzkopf.

  Naylor had learned only then that the “Civil Government Detachment” part of the 2303rd’s unit designation was disinformation. Its actual role in Desert Storm had been the direction, under the Central Intelligence Agency, of covert Special Operations.

  Naylor had been quietly furious that he had been kept in the dark, even more furious that Castillo had not been kept out of the line of fire, and had almost-but not quite-lost control when McNab told him he was taking Castillo, whom he described as a “natural warrior,” with him to Fort Bragg as his aide-de-camp.

  As far as A. Franklin Lammelle was concerned, what McNab “had done” to Castillo-turned him over the years into a legendary special operator-was the real source of the friction between McNab and Naylor. There was something in Naylor’s makeup that made him hate unconventional warfare and its practitioners.

  And, in Lammelle’s judgment, it was Naylor’s close personal relationship with Cas
tillo that made Charley unwilling on two significant occasions to accept that his Uncle Allan had been perfectly willing to throw him under the bus when ordered to do so.

  The first instance had been when Castillo, by then an Army lieutenant colonel heading up the President’s secretive Office of Organizational Analysis, had embarrassed the CIA by flying two senior SVR defectors out of Vienna to Argentina under the noses of Vladimir Putin and the CIA station chief in Vienna.

  Charles W. Montvale, then the director of National Intelligence, was not interested in Castillo’s explanation that he had done so because the Russian defectors had good reason to believe the SVR was waiting to grab them in Vienna’s Westbahnhof station, and that he had been unaware the CIA station chief in Vienna had been trying to set up their defection for some time.

  What concerned Montvale was that the CIA station chief had gone to syndicated columnist C. Harry Whelan, Jr., with the story that the President was illegally operating his own private CIA headed by Castillo, and that Presidential Agent Castillo had snatched the defectors.

  Montvale’s solution to that potential embarrassment to the President and the CIA was simple: Castillo would be retired from the Army for psychological reasons-that would explain his erratic behavior-and then turn the defectors over to the CIA.

  General Naylor, seeing the protection of the President as his primary duty, had gone along with Montvale. Castillo, the unconventional warrior molded by Bruce McNab, had to be shut down, and he sent one of his Adjutant General Corps colonels to Buenos Aires with Montvale to order Castillo: “Sign here. You’re now retired. Don’t let the doorknob hit you in the ass on your way out.”

  Castillo refused. The Russian defectors had told him that the SVR and others were operating a biological weapons laboratory and factory in the Congo-what the CIA had dismissed as being only a “fish farm.” Castillo saw it as his duty to prove, or disprove, what the Russian defectors said, and managed to convince McNab, by then a lieutenant general commanding SPECOPSCOM, that the allegations deserved to be investigated.