by Clancy, Tom
“I am Father Powys Bradbury,” the priest said. His voice was soft but firm. The two men continued to approach one another. “Why have armed men come to our compound?”
“To take you with us,” the leader replied.
“Me?” Bradbury demanded. The priest stopped just a few feet from the taller man. “Why? What have I done?”
“You are an invader,” the man told him. “You and your kind will be driven out.”
“My kind?” Father Bradbury said. “I am no invader. I have been living here for eleven years—”
The leader interrupted with a sharp gesture to the men behind him. Three of the soldiers jogged forward. Two of them seized Father Bradbury by his forearms. Tswana Ndebele made a move as if to protest. The motion was met by the distinctive click of a rifle bolt.
Ndebele stopped.
“Everyone stay where you are, and there will be no casualties,” the leader declared.
“Do what he says,” Father Bradbury shouted. He did not struggle, but he did look toward the leader. “I tell you, you have the wrong man.”
The leader did not respond. The two men continued to hold the priest in his place.
“At least tell me where you’re taking me,” the white-haired clergyman implored.
The third militiaman went behind the priest. He pulled a black hood over Father Bradbury’s head. He tied it tightly around the clergyman’s throat. Father Bradbury gagged.
“Please don’t hurt him!” Ndebele cried.
Father Bradbury wanted to reassure the director that he would be all right, but he could neither turn nor yell. It was all he could do to breathe in the tight, stifling mask.
“You don’t have to do this!” the priest gasped. “I’ll go peaceably.”
Hands pushed roughly against Father Bradbury’s shoulder blades. He stumbled forward. Only the men holding his arms kept him from falling. They tugged him up and ahead. The priest went with them.
Father Bradbury said nothing more. It was all he could do to breathe. The heat was terrible, and the darkness was unnerving. He also did not want to show fear to these men.
But Father Powys Bradbury could not hide his fear from God. And it was to God whom he spoke silently as the militiamen led him from the compound. The priest silently recited his morning prayers and then prayed for himself. He did not ask God for salvation but for strength. He also prayed for the safety of the friends he left behind and for the souls of those who had abducted him. Then he prayed for one thing more.
He prayed for the future of the land he had come to love.
THREE
Washington, D.C. Tuesday, 7:54 A.M.
It was a dark, rainy morning and DiMaggio’s Joe was not as jammed as usual. That was fine with General Mike Rodgers. He had been able to find a parking spot directly outside the coffee bar. And he spotted a small, clean corner table on the inside. He walked to the back of the room, slapped his damp cap and his copy of the Washington Post on the empty table, then got in line.
The line at the counter moved quickly, and to Rodgers’s amazement, the display case actually had what he wanted. He paid for his oversized corn muffin and an ultratall cup of coffee. Then he returned to the table and sat on the stool, facing the back wall. He gazed into the past. He had to remind himself why he had become a soldier in the first place. And this was certainly the place to do it.
The legendary DiMaggio’s Joe was located in Georgetown on the corner of M Street and Wisconsin Avenue. The coffee shop had been established in 1966 by a transplanted New Yorker named Bronx Taylor. Taylor was a New York Yankees fan back when the Washington Senators were their rivals and people could still smoke in coffee shops. The widower had retired and moved to Washington to be close to his daughter and son-in-law. He needed something to do, and he decided to be provocative. Taylor succeeded. Fans of the baseball Senators used to come in to yell at Taylor. They were all blue-collar workers back then. Janitors from Georgetown University, bus drivers, barbers, and butlers and gardeners from the tony old houses. The men would come in and deride the Yankees over juice, sausage, and watery eggs. And pie. And coffee. And a smoke or two. And more coffee. Taylor made a fortune at this little place.
When Bronx died four years ago, his daughter Alexandra took over. The diner was gentrified. The woman replaced the catsup-stained white tile walls with wood paneling. Instead of a counter and booths with large, solid Formica tables, there were now wood stools with stands that had wobbly metal lattice tops. And Alexandra no longer served just one kind of coffee. For that matter, she no longer served just coffee. There were flavors and fragrances and blends that ended in an é. Rodgers still ordered plain and black coffee, even though it tasted as if it were brewed with potpourri.
Apart from the name of the place, Alexandra had left one thing more or less intact. Taylor had covered all four walls with framed photographs and faded newspaper front pages. The pictures were of Yankee Stadium and the star players of the 1940s and 1950s. The yellowing headlines in coffee-stained frames boasted of winning plays, pennants, and world championships. Alexandra had collected them all on the back wall, and they were the only reason Rodgers still came. The mementos took him back to the summers of his youth.
Rodgers grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, which was closer to Boston than to New York. But he was still a Yankees fan. The Bronx Bombers had flash, confidence, and poise. They were also largely responsible for his becoming a soldier. Mike Rodgers could not hit a baseball worth a damn, as his lifelong friend and former Little League teammate Colonel Brett August often reminded him. Rodgers had the eye, but he did not have the power in his arms. Rodgers sure could shoot, though. He started by building orange-crate pistols. They used tightly stretched rubber bands to fire squares of cardboard with surprising accuracy and force. Then he graduated to Daisy BB guns. The sleek Model 26 Spittin’ Image was his first. Then his father bought him a Remington Fieldmaster .22 caliber pump to hunt small game. Rodgers shot the squirrels, birds, and rabbits that fellow students used for dissection in biology class. What he did would not be fashionable today. But in the early 1960s, it earned Rodgers a commendation from the school principal. The teenager’s interest in firearms led him to study history. To this day, weapons and history remained his greatest passions.
Those and the New York Yankees, he thought as he looked up at a sun-browned photograph of Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris with their bats slung casually across their shoulders.
Thanks to the Yankees, Rodgers associated the idea of wearing a uniform with belonging to an elite team. Since the Yankees did not need a sharpshooter—except when Boston fans came to town—Rodgers turned his sights on that other great team with uniforms, the United States military. Rodgers’s extended tours of Vietnam and his devotion to the service had kept him from having any long-term relationships. Except for that, the forty-seven-year-old general never regretted a day of the life he had chosen.
Until four months ago.
Rodgers finished his coffee. He looked at his watch. There was plenty of time before he had to be at Op-Center. He went to the counter to order another ultratall cup.
As Rodgers waited patiently in the short line, he looked around at the young faces. They were mostly college faces with journalists and members of Congress here and there. He could tell them all at a glance. The politicians were the ones lost in newspapers, looking for their names. The reporters were the ones watching the politicians to see who they sat with or who they ignored. The students were the ones who were actually discussing world events.
Rodgers did not see any future soldiers among the many students. Their eyes were too lively, too full of questions or answers. A soldier needed to be committed to just one thing: following orders. The way Striker had done.
Striker was the elite rapid response military arm of the National Crisis Management Center. Rodgers was the deputy director of the NCMC, familiarly known as Op-Center. Upon joining Op-Center shortly after its inception, Rodgers had formed and trained the unit.<
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A little over four months ago, while parachuting into the Himalayan mountains, General Rodgers and Colonel August had watched as all but one other member of Striker was shot from the sky. In Vietnam, Rodgers had lost close friends and fellow soldiers. On Striker’s first foreign mission, he had helped them through the death of Private Bass Moore. Shortly after that, he had seen them through the loss of their original field commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Squires. But Rodgers had never experienced anything like this.
Even worse than the scope of the slaughter was the helplessness Rodgers felt watching it happen. These young soldiers had trusted his judgment and his leadership. They had followed him without hesitation out the hatch of the Indian Air Force AN-12. And he had led them into an ambush. Rodgers was seasoned enough to know that nothing was guaranteed in life and war. But that did not stop him from feeling as if he had let the Strikers down.
Op-Center’s staff psychologist Liz Gordon told Rodgers that he was suffering from trauma survivors’ syndrome, a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. The condition manifested itself as lethargy and depression resulting from escaping death that took others.
Clinically, that might be true. What Rodgers really suffered from was a crisis of faith. He had screwed up. Being a soldier was about risking your life. But Rodgers had gone into a situation without being aware of an obvious potential danger. In so doing, he had disgraced the qualities his uniform meant to him.
But Liz Gordon had told him one thing that was certainly true. If Rodgers continued to dwell on what had gone wrong, he would be no good to Op-Center or its director, Paul Hood. And both needed him now. Striker had to be rebuilt, and Hood had to deal with ongoing budget cuts.
Enough, thought the general. It was time to get out of the past.
Mike Rodgers turned from the back wall. He sat down, unfolded the newspaper, and scanned the front page. Rodgers was one of the few people at Op-Center who still read a printed newspaper. Paul Hood, intelligence chief Bob Herbert, FBI liaison Darrell McCaskey, and attorney Lowell Coffey III all got their news on-line. To Rodgers, that was like engaging in cybersex. It was a result without an interactive process. He would rather have the real thing.
Ironically, the New York Yankees were mentioned in an article below the fold. The piece described some megatrade with the Baltimore Orioles. It sounded to Rodgers as if the Birds were getting the better end of the deal. Even the Yankees were not as sharp as they used to be.
Of course, no one dies when the Yankees make a bad call, Rodgers reflected. He looked at the other headlines.
The one that caught his attention was beside the baseball article. It was about an apparent paramilitary action in Botswana. The nation rarely showed up on the morning intelligence reports. The government in Gaborone was stable, and the people were relatively content.
What was most surprising were the eyewitness accounts of the action. At least four dozen armed men entered a tourist compound. After firing a few warning shots, they abducted a Catholic priest who ministered at the adjoining church. The priest was well liked and had no known enemies. The kidnappers had not demanded a ransom.
Rodgers’s immediate thought was that the priest had heard someone’s confession, and the men wanted the information. But why send a small army to grab a single individual? And why attack in daylight instead of at night? To make sure the army was seen?
Rodgers would have to see if Bob Herbert had any information about the kidnapping. Even when he was down on his abilities, Mike Rodgers could not help but ruminate about military issues. The army was not just his profession but his avocation.
He read the rest of the front page while he finished his coffee. Then he refolded the newspaper and slid it protectively under his arm. Rodgers made his way through the pinball array of tables to the front door. He pulled on his hat and stepped onto the slick pavement.
The rain was heavy, but Rodgers did not mind. The gray tones of the morning suited his mood. And though the dampness did not feel comfortable, he was surprised to find that it made him feel good. The pictures reminded him of what he had dreamed. Each droplet reminded him of what he had. Something that his former teammates did not possess: life.
As long as Mike Rodgers had that, he would continue to do the one thing that had ever really mattered.
He would strive to be worthy of his uniform.
FOUR
Washington, D.C. Tuesday, 8:33 A.M.
The National Crisis Management Center was housed in a two-story building at Andrews Air Force Base. During the Cold War, this nondescript, ivory-colored structure was one of two staging areas for flight crews known as NuRRDs—Nuclear Rapid-Response Divisions. In the event of a nuclear attack on the nation’s capital, their job would have been to evacuate key officials. Ranking members of Congress, the entire cabinet, and both officers and logistics experts from the Pentagon would have been flown to secret bunkers built deep in Maryland’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Their task would be to keep food and supplies flowing to soldiers, police officers, and civilians, in that order. They would also have worked to keep open as many routes of communication as possible. Other leaders, including the president, vice-president, their top military advisers, and medical personnel, would have been kept aloft aboard Air Force One and Air Force Two. Both planes would have flown at least five hundred miles apart. They would have been refueled in-flight and protected by an escort of NuRRD fighter jets. This would have allowed the commander in chief and his successor to remain separate moving targets.
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the downsizing of the Air Force’s NuRRDs, evacuation operations were consolidated at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. The newly vacated building at Andrews was given over to the newly chartered National Crisis Management Center.
The two floors of upstairs offices were for nonclassified operations such as finance, human resources, and monitoring the mainstream press for possible hot buttons. These were seemingly innocent events that could trigger potential crises. They included the failure of Third World governments to pay their troops, accidents such as a U.S. submarine ramming a foreign fishing vessel or yacht, the seizure of a large cache of drugs, and other seemingly isolated activities. But nothing was ever isolated. A disgruntled military could stage a coup. A sunken ship may have been an attack on intelligence-gathering capabilities. And the drug bust might lead to violent clashes as other dealers moved in to fill a void. All of these were events that fell within Op-Center’s sphere of activity.
The basement of the former NuRRD building had been entirely refurbished. It no longer housed living quarters for flight crews. It was where the tactical decisions and intelligence crunching of Op-Center took place. The executive level was accessible by a single elevator that was guarded on top 24/7. Paul Hood, Mike Rodgers, Bob Herbert, and the rest of the executives had their offices down here. The small offices were arranged in a ring along the outer wall of the basement. Inside the circle were cubicles that housed the executive assistants as well as Op-Center’s intelligence gathering and processing personnel. On the opposite side of the room from the elevator was a conference room known as the Tank. The conference room was surrounded by walls of electronic waves that generated static to anyone trying to listen in with bugs or external dishes.
Bob Herbert pushed his wheelchair down the oval corridor. His coat was damp, and his ears were cold, but he was glad to be here. This was an important day.
Herbert had nicknamed this hallway the Indy 600. According to his wheelchair odometer, it was exactly 600 yards around. There were no windows down here, and the rooms were not spacious. The facility reminded Herbert more of a submarine than the headquarters of an agency. But the building was secure. Anyway, Herbert never believed all that crap about people needing sunshine to brighten their mood. The thirty-nine-year-old intelligence head only needed two things to make him happy. One was his motorized wheelchair. The balding intelligence expert had lost the use of his legs in the Beirut embassy bombing in 1983. Only
the quick work of physician Dr. Alison Carter, a visiting foreign service officer, had prevented him from losing his life. The wheelchair did not just keep Herbert mobile. It had a foldaway arm, like an airplane seat, that housed his computer with a wireless modem. Everything Herbert needed, including E-mail addresses to order pizza, were literally in his lap. Op-Center’s technical expert, Matt Stoll, had even installed a jack for a satellite dish. At times, Herbert felt like the Bionic Man.
The other thing that made Herbert happy was when outsiders left him and his coworkers alone to do their jobs. When Op-Center first began operations, no one paid them much attention. Whether they were saving the space shuttle from saboteurs or Japan from nuclear annihilation, everything they did was covert. It passed under the radar of the press and most foreign intelligence services. The relationships they established were ones they chose to establish. They did so quietly with Interpol, the Russian Op-Center, and other groups.
Unfortunately, the dynamics changed drastically after Paul Hood personally resolved a highly public hostage standoff at the United Nations. Foreign governments complained to the White House about Hood’s unsanctioned military activity on international territory. The Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and even the State Department complained to the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee. They accused Paul Hood of usurping personnel and chartered responsibilities from both agencies. The Pentagon said that Op-Center had monopolized the spy satellite capabilities of the National Reconnaissance Office.
All of that was true. But the truth did not always tell the whole story. None of these activities were done for the aggrandizement of Paul Hood or the NCMC. Under Hood, Op-Center functioned without the bureaucracy, infighting, and egos that undermined the effectiveness of those other agencies. That helped Op-Center to achieve its chartered goal: to save lives and protect American interests.