Remembering a sullen looking character with tousled hair and a slight limp, I said, “That was the guy we met in the hotel.”
“Shenlee insisted we act fast. The other thing, there couldn’t be any way to trace this operation back to the DOD or to any government agency. You know how persistent some of these reporters can be.”
“And Jerry was just dumping all this into your lap?”
“He was also dumping a great deal of money into my lap—which was when I knew this had to be a high-priority operation. There couldn’t be any signed contracts—which meant it had to be freelance and totally black. I had to see that you guys got weapons, and I had to arrange to run the operation. Something else was there couldn’t be any screw-ups.”
I winced when Buck said that. By getting myself captured, I’d screwed things up very badly.
“My only contacts turned out to be you, Angel, and Larry. I couldn’t get anyone else on such short notice. Under other circumstances, we would have had five people, and I could have run it out of Camp Bond-steel. Since it was freelance, absolutely and totally black, I had to run you guys out of a tiny apartment in Pristina, with the electricity going on and off and the lights not working half the time. I had a couple of cell phones, a secure laptop, a flashlight, and a bunch of telephone numbers, but not much else. Now and then, I’d try for a catnap. You can imagine how it was, sitting there day after day with earphones and a couple of monitors, wondering what was going on, and feeling pretty helpless.” When I nodded, Buck said, “I was able to keep track of you guys off the satellite. When Angel called and told me you were a prisoner, I got over there as quick as I could. You know the rest.”
Recalling my debriefing in the military hospital, I asked Buck about Colonel Sylvia Frost.
“Colonel Frost works for the deputy secretary of defense. In fact she’s the deputy secretary’s special emissary, and when she’s involved in something you can bet that he’s also involved in a significant way.”
I said, “That’s more evidence that this Ramush Nadaj rendition was a high-priority operation.”
“Very high, Alex.” Buck looked at me over the top of his beer mug. “You should also know that it was Colonel Frost who pulled the strings to get you onto Camp Bondsteel. When the Force Protection people wouldn’t let us on the base, I had them phone Shenlee back in D.C. for me. I got through, but he didn’t have any answers. He gave me Colonel Frost’s number. She came up with the Captain Sanchez identity on the spot. Then she personally called Colonel Brooks.”
“He’s the CO of Bondsteel?”
“Yes, and one very tough hombre. But like everyone else, he knows better than to mix it up with Colonel Frost. That was how you got admitted to the military hospital so fast. If it was anyone else on the phone, it wouldn’t have happened.”
Buck didn’t say it, but we both knew it was the medical people on Camp Bondsteel who pulled me through. I wouldn’t have survived twenty-four hours in a Kosovo hospital, assuming that Kosovo has hospitals. Maybe I’d been obnoxious during the debriefing, but considering what I went through in Kosovo, I didn’t see where I owed anybody anything.
“By the way, Colonel Frost graduated numero uno in her class at West Point. I thought you should know.”
“That’s very impressive. She’s also very attractive, if I’m allowed to say that.”
“I’m glad to see you still notice those things.”
“Ha ha.”
“Here’s a nugget of gossip. When she was out in Afghanistan, she supposedly got the hots for another officer. The word is they spent a lot of time in each other’s room in the Ariana Hotel in Kabul.”
“Boys will be boys, and girls will be girls.”
Buck lowered his voice. “People often find her difficult. Around the office she’s known as Colonel BOW.” When I frowned, Buck said. “Colonel Bitch-on-Wheels.”
“So she’s a tough boss. What do her people think they’re getting paid for?”
As the waiter set down two more mugs of beer, I watched Buck smear some Stilton cheese on a slab of dark bread. “You’re not suggesting I owe Colonel Frost an apology.”
Between bites, he said, “Like I say, Alex, Colonel Frost has forgotten you and your obnoxious behavior.”
Recalling the debriefing, I said, “I did an awful lot of kvetching.” Courtesy of my mother, I command an extensive vocabulary of Yiddish expressions, spoken with a Bavarian lilt.
Buck nodded. “I heard. She definitely showed superhuman restraint. As have many of your friends and colleagues on occasion.”
After a minute, I said, “If the Nadaj rendition goes back to Colonel Frost, then—”
“Then it goes back to the deputy secretary of defense.”
I said, “And from him to the secretary of defense.”
“We’re both thinking the same thing, Alex. The government is eager to get its mitts on Nadaj.”
“What the hell did he do?”
Buck shook his head. “No idea.”
Chapter 6
Friday, January 18, 2008
“My friends would hate me if they knew some of the things I’ve done to make a living,” I said.
Eight months had elapsed since my meeting with Buck at Arlington Cemetery.
Jerry Shenlee touched a finger to his rimless glasses and gazed at me across the table with a noncommittal expression. “I’m surprised you still have friends. Most of us don’t.”
Shenlee is clean shaven, has a square, mildly flushed face, and wears his red-blond hair cut short, in the military style. He retains a kind of flinty look, a characteristic he acquired growing up on the plains of North Dakota and that he’s never quite been able to shake. But the important thing is, he fits in at the Pentagon, which is where I understand he now spends a good deal of his time.
It was just after eight, and Jerry and I were having breakfast in AP Smith’s Restaurant on Main Street in Saranac, a town in the northern foothills of the Adirondack Mountains—and a place in which I’ve come to feel very much at home.
As Jerry and I spoke, I began to feel a growing sense of alarm. “What’s up?”
“When you hear what it is, you’ll know what’s up.”
When I first met Jerry, he was a newly minted Annapolis grad, a spiffy-looking young guy attached to the 766th MI Detachment, with a windowless basement office located in one of the detachment’s sections at Tempelhof in West Berlin. Like a lot of us, Jerry Shenlee’s come a long way since the days of the Cold War.
Something else about Shenlee: I’ve never seen him smile. On this day, he appeared particularly grim. He was wearing a gray sports jacket, open collar, khaki-colored pants, and, on his wrist, a G-Shock digital watch. As I silently watched, he pushed aside his cup of cold tea, reached down and pulled some colored folders out of his briefcase, a couple of which had “CONFIDENTIAL” stamped across the top. The folders were filled with forms, letters, printouts, and who knew what else. I assumed that Shenlee had my 201 personnel jacket, evaluations, and detailed reports on some of the “special projects” I’ve been involved with over the years.
When they say “special projects,” think “special ops.”
As he leafed through his folders, he shook his head. “If our government is good at anything, Klear, it’s creating paper and keeping tabs on people.”
“Tell me about it,” I said as I poured out some more coffee, resigned to the fact that this was Shenlee’s little party and he was calling the shots.
It was Friday, already a nice day, and the sun was slanting through the restaurant’s big front window. Since it was mid-January, Smith’s was close to full, jammed with skiers eager to get out on the slopes. I live in Saranac and with my business partner occasionally drop into Smith’s for lunch, almost never for breakfast.
“When did you get in?” I asked.
Without looking up, he said, “Yesterday, late afternoon. Flew up from McGuire on a Cessna 35A, real comfortable. Stayed the night in the Saranac Inn. Nice place.”
“I was surprised to hear from you.” When Shenlee asked why, I said, “I’m retired.”
“Who told you that, Klear? Who ever said you were retired?”
“I decided to retire. Bought into a business. It was a personal decision. Anything wrong with that?”
Ignoring my question, he went back to reading for a minute, then said, “You were in the Balkans. That wasn’t so long ago.” He fixed me with an accusing stare.
“Sure. I was there—let’s see—five times in all. The first time, as I recall, I was on vacation—saw the sights, went to the beach, that sort of thing.”
“Where in the Balkans? If I may ask.”
“Croatia, mostly.”
“Split’s in Croatia, right?” When I nodded, he said, “I hear they have quite a few nude beaches there, with nice lookin’ babes strollin’ around.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“I’ll bet. And you were involved in the Milosevic rendition. The best renditions are the ones that no one knows are renditions. What did you do on that one?”
As Shenlee polished his glasses with a napkin, I said, “I was part of an eight-man team. We waited around in Bosnia till Special Ops got things organized.”
“Where in Bosnia?”
“On Eagle Base. You know it?”
Shenlee put his glasses back on. “Sure. Near Tuzla. Okay, what I’m most interested in is this other thing—this Kosovo rendition last year. March, am I correct?” When I nodded, he said, “From what I’m reading here, things didn’t go so well on that one.”
“They could have gone better,” I said, taking a last bite from my plate of toast and trying to be noncommittal.
Shenlee pointed to something in one of his folders. “It says here your partners in Kosovo were Angel and Scott.”
“We could’ve used another guy over there.”
Shenlee looked irritated. “How’s Scotty doing? Has he settled down?”
“He’s doing fine, Jerry. He’s married again and he says he’s never been happier.”
“I’m sure.” At that moment Jerry and I were thinking the same thing. One of my two partners on the Kosovo operation, Larry Scott, had been fired from the Company years before when the details of his private life became fodder for a supermarket tabloid. He’d had two girlfriends, one of them a fellow Company employee, both of whom he’d made pregnant, a circumstance that didn’t go down well with his wife, who at the time was also pregnant.
But the fact was, Larry had been a fine and dependable operations officer, the kind of low-maintenance operative who’s hard to replace. Once the smoke from the tabloid affair cleared, he found he was still in demand, which I suppose was fine with Larry since by that time he had so many mouths to feed.
Shenlee said, “So what happened? That op sounded like a piece of cake.”
“We flew into Skopje, stayed the first night at the Alexander. We originally thought Nadaj was down in Macedonia, somewhere in the hills in the Albanian sector. Scotty had arranged for a van in Skopje and for Nadaj to be extracted with a chopper out of Kosovo.”
Shenlee nodded. “What went wrong?”
I resisted the urge to say “Everything.” Instead I said, “I landed in the military hospital in Camp Bondsteel, Jerry. From there I was medevaced to the military hospital in Landstuhl. It was nearly three weeks before I was well enough to fly back to the States. I spent nearly three weeks as an outpatient at Walter Reed.”
“From what I understand, Klear, Nadaj’s still on the loose. If you guys had done that job right, he’d be in The Hague now, on trial. Or else in jail.” Shenlee took another sip of tea. “Talk about your screw-ups—”
“What did he do that deserves a trial in The Hague?”
Like I said, we’d taken Slobodan Milosevic out of circulation. That one had gone down without a hitch, and I knew Jerry had the account of that operation in his folders. But the Ramush Nadaj rendition turned out to be a greater challenge than the Milosevic rendition.
Anyway, the truth was we’d blown the Nadaj mission—and that in combination with the fact that I hadn’t heard anything from anyone in the last half year, led me to think I was out of the picture, and that I was retired.
Maybe I wasn’t yet a candidate for a psychiatrist’s couch, but a couple more experiences like the one in Kosovo and I definitely would be.
I’d concluded that I wouldn’t be hearing from anyone anymore. In one of my evaluations, an Air Force colonel who didn’t appreciate my original way of thinking had referred to me as a “loose cannon to end all loose cannons.” The way the intelligence brass thinks, that kind of remark can be a career killer. Anyway, after the First Gulf War I decided it would be a wiser career move to submit my resignation and, like Larry Scott and a bunch of other guys and gals, move over to working on a contract basis. I thought I would like the idea of being able to say yes or no to a job.
Mostly I said no, not that there were that many offers. Things were pretty quiet on the special ops front for a while, at least until some explosive-laden trucks destroyed our embassies in Nairobi and Kenya. I only began receiving calls after the civil war heated up in Bosnia and the UN decided to intervene. I would have said no to the Kosovo operation if it hadn’t been Buck Romero who’d asked me.
But now I definitely wasn’t going to accept any more contracts. My experience with so-called special operations, which had begun with a long-ago interview in a Fayetteville, North Carolina, cafeteria, was officially over. “So long, guys. It was nice knowing you.”
“What’s this business you’ve got?” Shenlee asked suddenly.
“I supply ice to restaurants and hotels.”
He made a wry face, showing he was unimpressed. “Klear, I’ll be candid. You’re going to have to put your ice business on hold. Someone very high up picked out your name for this assignment.”
“I’m retired, Jerry.”
As he studied the check, Shenlee said, “You look okay. You work out regularly?”
“Sure. I haul a lot of ice. What do you people want me to do anyway, climb the Matterhorn?”
On the way to the door, I thanked him for breakfast.
“Thank the American taxpayer, Klear.” Out on Main Street we made room on the sidewalk for a young couple, each with skis on their shoulders, and an attractive young mother, slim and brunette. As she pushed a stroller with one hand and led a youngster eating an apple with the other, she smiled a “Good morning.” I smiled back.
At that moment, a husky blond guy wearing a blue pullover over a flannel shirt, jeans, and brown work boots tossed down his newspaper, gave us a wave, a loud hello, and climbed down from the cab of a refrigerator truck parked at the curb. It was my partner, Gary Lawson, and the truck was one of the two we owned. I’d told Gary to pick me up at Smith’s after breakfast.
After I’d introduced Gary to Shenlee, Gary looked at me. “I just got a call. The country club’s lookin’ to throw a party tomorrow night, Alex. All kinds of food deliveries will be coming in, and they’ll be wantin’ a full load, three o’clock at the latest.”
Shenlee’s mouth was set in a grim line. When I glanced toward him, he frowned, shook his head, then drifted up the sidewalk to where he was out of earshot.
At that moment I was reminded of a long-ago barroom conversation with a veteran spook, a guy we called Bud, who was already well into his cups. “Once you’re in,” Bud said, slurring his words ever so slightly and raising his bourbon glass, “you’ll never again be out.” Bud’s observation was based on experience, his own no doubt. When he put down his glass, he grimaced. You were so right, Bud.
Quietly, I said, “I have a feeling I’m going to be tied up for a day or two, Gary. Can you get Ross to help out on the delivery?” Ross is one of the more dependable locals, a retired New York City cop who we call whenever things get busy.
Looking puzzled, Gary glanced toward Shenlee, who was now standing with his back to us and gazing off in the direction of Haystack Mountain, which
was silhouetted against the bright sky. Shenlee’s greeting to Gary had been true to form, a polite nod, and I had a feeling Gary hadn’t exactly taken a shine to my old friend. Who could blame him?
“I don’t get it, Alex,” Gary said after a second. “Why pay Ross? What’s up that’s so goddamned important?” Before I could answer, he shrugged. Maybe he saw an impatient glint in my eye. “Sure, Alex,” he said before I could answer. “No problem. I’ll call Ross.”
Gary was too considerate to ask questions, and I was grateful to him for that. Gary is a good guy, hardworking and anxious to succeed, and Saranac is a friendly town. As I watched Gary climb into the cab and slam the door, I took a deep breath. When I saw him pick up his cell phone, I knew he was punching in Ross’s number. He loudly gunned the engine, and a couple of seconds later with the phone at his ear, he had the truck out in traffic and was gone.
I felt a pang of frustration somewhere in the pit of my stomach as I realized I wished I was with him. We’d get our machines working, load up our trucks, haul the ice out to the club, and while the members partied in the club’s big ballroom, Gary and I would end the day drinking beer and laughing it up with the club’s crew. I didn’t like the idea of having to spend time with Shenlee—and discussing the topics I suspected he wanted to talk about. That stuff was all part of my past, and I wanted to keep it there—in the past. But I didn’t see that I had a choice.
As we walked down the sidewalk in the direction of Sears, Shenlee said, “Pack an overnight bag. Be at the airport at noon. We’ll be taking a ride in that Cessna I mentioned.”
“I have a date tonight. I told my girlfriend we’d—”
“I’m sure your girlfriend has a telephone. Call her. Tell her you’re tied up.”
“Suppose I say I’d rather not go? Suppose I say I’m through with special operations?”
Shenlee flashed a disgusted look. “C’mon, Klear, don’t play games. You’re going. Get packed!”
The Rendition Page 6