By Order of the President

by W. E. B Griffin

  [THREE]

  Camp David Catoctin Mountains, Maryland 1700 9 June 2005

  The president of the United States, who had been resting his hand on the king with which, when the telephone light flashed, he had been about to checkmate the secretary of Homeland Security, finally took his hand away and leaned back in the pillow-upholstered armchair and tried to make sense of the one side of Hall’s telephone conversation he could hear.

  After a moment, he gave up on that, too, and pushed a small button under the table beside his chair. A moment later, a white-jacketed steward appeared.

  “Yes, Mr. President?”

  “Booze time,” the President said. “A little Maker’s Mark for me . . .”

  He stopped, said, “Matt?,” and, when Hall looked at him, mimed drinking a shot.

  “Scotch, please,” the secretary of Homeland Security said.

  “And scotch. Cheap scotch. The secretary of Homeland Security is not looked favorably upon by his president at this time.”

  The steward, a dignified, gray-haired black man, smiled. “One good bourbon and one cheap scotch. Yes, sir. Something to munch on, Mr. President?”

  “In lieu of the hearty meal customarily offered to the condemned, why not?”

  The steward smiled again and left.

  “Okay, Charley,” Matt Hall said to the telephone. “Keep at it. Let me know if anything comes of it.”

  He thoughtfully put the telephone back in its cradle, leaned back in his chair, and raised his eyes to the president.

  “First things first,” the president said, pointing to the chessboard on the low table between them. “Checkmate.”

  The secretary examined the board.

  “Shit.”

  “I always beat you,” the president said. “Why are you surprised?”

  “I was hoping your mind might be on other things,” Hall said. “That was Major Castillo.”

  “Our no-longer-so-secret secret agent,” the president said. “I picked up on that much.”

  “He just had another call from Howard Kennedy, the ex-FBI man who now works for the Russian arms dealer.”

  “And?”

  “Kennedy told him the 727 was in Abéché but has left. With new—unknown—identification numbers, and painted in the color scheme of an airline. Which airline, no one knows. Nor did Mr. Kennedy have any idea where the airplane might be now.”

  “God!”

  “Charley—Castillo—said something else. Kennedy knew where Castillo was—made a point of letting him know he knew. Charley said the only way he can think of that Kennedy could know that was he has a contact with the cellular telephone people, who can trace a call to the nearest antenna.”

  “In other words, this Kennedy character can do what the FBI can’t do without getting a warrant from a federal judge?”

  Hall nodded.

  “Castillo also said Kennedy seemed very worried that we were going to tip off the FBI about him. Castillo said he has no idea where Kennedy is—was—and Kennedy knows that. So Kennedy’s worries are a little unusual.”

  “Is there a warrant out for this fellow?”

  “I don’t know. I told you, the FBI . . . Mark Schmidt himself was . . . Schmidt gave me a hard time about getting Kennedy’s dossier. I had to really lean on him to get him to promise to get it to me by nine o’clock this morning.” He paused. “And, I’m embarrassed to say, I haven’t checked to see if he actually came up with it this morning.”

  “Okay. Try this on. Mark Schmidt, the FBI, knows this Kennedy is a really bad apple. He’s an embarrassment to them. They don’t want you or anybody to know how high this bad apple rose in the bureau or how much trouble he caused.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, so maybe that doesn’t justify Schmidt’s ignoring Natalie Cohen’s memo that you were to get whatever you asked for. That’s a separate issue and I’ll deal with that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But why should I be expected to believe anything this guy says? Your man . . .”

  “Charley Castillo? He’s now my man, is that the way it is?”

  “No. Sorry. Bad choice of phrase. I set this up. Castillo is my responsibility. My Major Castillo tells us that the reason Kennedy is being so helpful is that he wants us to stop watching him closely. He sure sounds helpful when he tells us where the 727 is, but, before we can do anything about it, lo and behold he tells us the airplane isn’t in Chad anymore. Why should we believe that it ever was there?”

  “All I have, Mr. President, is what Castillo tells me. He believes him, and Charley is very good at separating the truth from the bullshit.”

  The president snorted.

  “And what is our secret agent doing right now? Where is he?”

  “He’s at Miller’s father’s house outside Philadelphia. Miller’s father is a retired two-star general. The counterterrorism people in the Philadelphia police department are going to set up a meeting between Castillo and Miller and some police working undercover with Muslim groups—two kinds, Arab-type Muslims, and converts to Islam, mostly African Americans—to see if they can come up with a Somalian connection.”

  The steward came into the room carrying a tray with two large glasses dark with whiskey, together with a bowl of ice and a pitcher of water.

  “One very good bourbon for the president,” he said. “And one really cheap scotch for the secretary.”

  “Thank you very much,” Hall said, smiling.

  “The reason we got it cheap, Mr. Secretary, is that nobody wanted to buy it. Can you believe that stuff sat in a barrel in Scotland for twenty-four years before they could sell it?”

  “Now that we know where you stand, Jerry,” the president said, “that means that I am not the only friend Matt Hall has in the whole world.”

  The steward left.

  “What now, Mr. President?” Hall asked.

  “Natalie said I should go back to Washington about now. Maybe with your resignation in my pocket. So what I’m going to do is wait until we hear from General Naylor that the 727 is not in Chad and never has been.”

  “Mr. President, I serve at your pleasure,” Hall said.

  “Would you like me to prepare my resignation?”

  “No. I may have to ask for it eventually, but I don’t like throwing people to the wolves because of my mistakes, especially when they’ve done nothing but their very best to do what I told them to do.”

  [FOUR]

  Abéché, Chad 2305 9 June 2005

  Two men dressed in the loose cotton robes worn by inhabitants of the Chadian desert sat in a small, light tan-colored tent three hundred yards off the end of the runway of the Abéché airfield.

  One was Sergeant First Class Frederick Douglass Lewis, a very tall, very thin twenty-six-year-old from Baltimore, in whose home was hung a framed photograph of himself in full uniform. He was shown with his arm around an African—a very tall, very thin Watusi—in a sort of a robe, standing on one leg, sort of supporting himself on a long spear. Both men were smiling broadly at the camera. On closer examination, one might notice both men had the same face. Lewis, who was pretty good at screwing around with digital photographs, had superimposed his face on that of the African tribesman.

  He had also superimposed the face of his wife on a photograph of Janet Jackson in a very revealing costume. Mrs. Lewis, whose father was pastor of Baltimore’s Second African Methodist Episcopal Church and still carried a lot of that around with her, had not been amused.

  Sergeant Lewis was the Gray Fox team communicator. He sat down with a communications device between his legs, making minor adjustments trying, as he thought of it, to make all the lights go green.

  It was taking a little longer than it usually did, but finally all the LEDs were green.

  “We’re up, Colonel,” Sergeant Lewis said.

  Lieutenant Colonel Thomas J. Davenport, who commanded Gray Fox and who was unusually in personal command of this team operation, gave Sergeant Lewis a thumbs-up signal
but did not raise his eyes from the communications device on the ground between his legs. It looked, more than anything else, like a small laptop computer.

  He read what he had typed:

  1. ALL WELL.

  2. (PROB-NINER) BIRD WAS HERE UNTIL DUSK YESTERDAY.

  3. RECON PRODUCED:a. COVERT INTERROGATION OF FIFTEEN NATIVES INDICATES (RELIABILITY EIGHT).• I. A “BIG AIRLINER HERE.”

  • II. AIRLINER MARKERS WERE STRIPPED AND NEW MARKERS PAINTED; NO DETAILS ON NEW MARKERS AVAILABLE YET.

  • III. ALL AIRLINER SEATS REMOVED.

  • IV. LARGE “RUBBER TENTS” PLACED ABOARD; DESCRIPTION OF SAME FITS (PROB-FIVE) FUEL BLADDERS.

  • V. AIRLINER NOT REPEAT NOT FUELED.

  • VI. WITH EXCEPTION OF AIRCRAFT CREW (TWO-MAN) WHO WERE IN "PILOT’S UNIFORMS” AND NEGROID IN APPEARANCE, NO WHITE MEN OR “OTHER WESTERNERS ” WERE SEEN.

  b. FOLLOWING SUPPORTING DETAILS:• I. HAVE PLASTER-CAST IMPRESSION LARGE AIRCRAFT TIRES.

  • II. PURCHASED ONE THREE-PLACE AIRCRAFT SEAT FROM MERCHANT.

  • III. HAVE APPROXIMATELY ONE HALF POUND OF STEEL WOOL SCRAPS FROM PAINT REMOVAL.

  4. SUMMARY:a. A LARGE JET TRANSPORT AIRCRAFT WAS HERE.

  b. MARKINGS WERE REMOVED AND REPLACED; SEATS REMOVED; FUEL BLADDERS PLACED ABOARD (PROBABLY NOT INSTALLED).

  c. AIRCRAFT DEPARTED FOR UNKNOWN DESTINATION AT DUSK YESTERDAY.

  The first paragraph—“All well”—covered a lot of ground: Six men, and all their equipment, had successfully made a Halo parachute descent from a jet transport at 35,000 feet and landed with all their equipment (and themselves) intact and functioning precisely where they had intended to land. They had carried out their reconnaissance mission without being detected, which of course also meant that no one had been killed, injured, or lost.

  The second paragraph reported—with a probability factor of nine on a one-to-ten scale—what Colonel Davenport believed to be the facts. The rest of the message gave his reasons and his best guesses.

  There was no address and no signature. The way the system was set up at the moment, the message was going to Lieutenant General Bruce J. McNab only and he knew that only one person could have sent it.

  When Colonel Davenport pushed the SEND key, the message would be first encrypted and then sent to a satellite circling the earth at an altitude of 27,000 miles. The satellite—having been programmed to do so—then would relay the message to a device that another Gray Fox communicator had set for General McNab in the VIP Guest Quarters assigned to him at the Royal Air Force Base at Medina, Morocco. There, when General McNab typed in the seven-digit access code, the message would be decrypted and displayed on the screen of what without the secret communications technology would be an ordinary laptop computer.

  The entire process would take from three to ten seconds, depending mostly on how quickly General McNab typed in the access code.

  Colonel Davenport looked at Sergeant Lewis, who checked to make sure all the LEDs were still green and then gave Colonel Davenport a thumbs-up.

  Colonel Davenport pushed the SEND key and then straightened up and flexed his shoulders.

  For some reason, whenever he was involved in something like this Colonel Davenport always thought of the signaling device that had fascinated him when—then a young lieutenant —he had first seen it in the museum at the Army Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.

  Like the signaling device he was using now, the purpose was to communicate between a scouting unit and a headquarters.

  The device at Huachuca—which Davenport guessed had lain in a warehouse at the old Indian fighting post in the desert for maybe a century before someone had stumbled across it and decided it belonged in the museum—had never been issued. It had looked as if had come from the factory in Waltham, Massachusetts, last week.

  It was mounted on a varnished wooden tripod, the legs of which were adjustable both for height and for uneven terrain. On top—where a camera would go—was a collection of simple mirrors, a lever, and a sighting device.

  Cavalry patrols scouting for hostile Indians carried the signaling device with them, and, while looking for the Indians, also kept an eye open for high ground from which they could see their command post and on which the device could quickly be set up.

  The transmission of data was simplicity itself: The rays of the sun were reflected by mirrors toward the command post. Operating the lever blocked the reflected sunlight. Momentarily removing the blocking bar sent a Morse code “dot.” Holding the lever down a little longer sent a “dash.”

  Sending data in this manner had been, of course, a lengthy process, but it had been infinitely faster than sending a trooper galloping across the plains to report the hostiles had been located.

  If the minutemen had had something like the cavalry signaling device, Colonel Davenport thought, it would have been unnecessary for Paul Revere to gallop out of Boston crying, “One if by land, two if by sea!”

  He also theorized that the cavalry had probably used two, three, or an infinite number of the signaling devices in series. That is, when the scouting party’s device was out of line of sight with its headquarters, devices were set up on hills in between so that sun flashes could be relayed from one signaling device to another. That would require, of course, that the data sent would have to be recorded at an intermediate station and then retransmitted.

  That would take a good deal of time, of course, but it was still a hell of a lot faster than having a trooper gallop back carrying the message. And, of course, the flashing of sunlight was far faster than the Indian’s means of long-range communication, holding a blanket or deer skin over a smoky fire and sending smoke in bursts into the air.

  For his part, Sergeant Lewis was not surprised that all the green LEDs were up when he looked nor, twelve seconds later, when two amber LEDs flashed, telling him the message had been delivered to the designated addressee and that decryption of same had been successful.

  This was pretty good goddamned gear. State of the art. Lewis knew for a fact that the Army didn’t have anything like it; that Special Forces gear, while good, wasn’t as good as this stuff, which only went to Delta and Gray Fox.

  This stuff came right from the R&D labs of AFC, Inc., in Nevada. There was a story that the guy who ran AFC, and who got this stuff to Delta and Gray Fox, had once been the commo sergeant on an A-Team in Vietnam. That sounded like bullshit—God knows, half the stories you heard about stuff like this were bullshit—but it was sort of nice to think it might be true.

  Thirty seconds after the amber LEDs flashed, a yellow LED began to flash. Sergeant Lewis pushed the RECEIVE VOICE button and, three seconds later, a blue LED flashed a few times and then remained illuminated.

  “Stand by for voice, Colonel,” Sergeant Lewis said as he put a small earphone in his ear.

  Lieutenant Colonel Davenport put a similar earphone in place, then moved a small microphone in front of his lips.

  "You reading me, One-Oh-One?” the voice of Lieutenant General Bruce J. McNab asked.

  "Five-by-five, sir.”

  There was a delay of about seven seconds, during which time Colonel Davenport’s words were digitalized, encrypted, transmitted into space, retransmitted from space, decrypted, and played in General McNab’s ear, and then General McNab’s reply went through the same process.

  “Good show, One-Oh-One,” McNab’s voice said in Davenport ’s ear. “Pass the word. I’m working on getting you picked up at first light. So . . .”

  The voice shut off abruptly.

  Encrypting and transmitting voice communication was somewhat more difficult than doing so with data and the communications equipment had certain limits.

  Seven seconds later, the message resumed.

  “. . . get Sergeant Lewis sober and out of the whorehouse by then. Bring the souvenirs. More follows in one hour. Acknowledge. Scotty out.”

  Sergeant Lewis was known as Gray Fox’s designated driver and his devotion to his wife was reg
arded with something close to awe by his peers.

  “Acknowledged,” Colonel Davenport said into his microphone. “One-Oh-Two, I say again, One-Oh-Two out.”

  Sergeant Lewis looked at Colonel Davenport.

  “Sir, the general knows that I don’t use that stuff anymore and . . .”

  “If I were you, Sergeant, I would take the general’s comments as a compliment.”

  “Yeah,” Sergeant Lewis said after a moment, and then he asked, “This was your one hundred and second Halo?”

  “After the first one hundred, they get a little easier to do,” Colonel Davenport said.

  [FIVE]

  Office of the Secretary of Defense The Pentagon Arlington, Virginia 1710 9 June 2005

  Mrs. Teresa Slater, who was forty-two, naturally blond, pleasantly buxom, stylishly dressed, and who had worked for the Honorable Frederick K. Beiderman, the United States secretary of defense, for half of her life—Beiderman had brought her with him from the Ford Motor Company and, quietly, and perhaps illegally, personally made up the substantial difference between what he had made Ford pay her and what the government paid her now—put her head in his office door.

  “General Withers is here, sir,” she announced.

  “How nice! Would you ask the general to come in, please?” he replied, loud enough for whoever was in the outer office to hear.

  “Yes, sir.”

  She smiled at him. She was aware that the secretary of defense regarded the commanding general of the Defense Intelligence as a PB who was UN because he was VFG at what he did.

  They had brought the acronyms with them from Detroit, too, where they had been used between them to describe a vast number of Ford executives. They stood, respectively, for “Pompous Bastard,” “Unfortunately Necessary,” and “Very Fucking Good.”

  Lieutenant General William W. Withers, USA, carrying a small leather briefcase, marched into the secretary’s office a moment later, trailed by a lieutenant colonel and a first lieutenant. Both wore the insignia of aides-de-camp and each carried a heavy leather briefcase.