There was a hidden complex the size of twenty football stadiums carved out of the side of the mountain, into which hundreds of trucks and tanks, gasoline haulers and armored vehicles disappeared regularly during the daylight hours, only to proceed south again at night. According to the young officer, it was also an ammunition depot, as he had seen webbed ammo vehicles enter and leave empty.
Visions of the World War II German rocket base, Peenemünde, fueled the imagination of the interrogating intelligence officer, who now sat at his desk as director of Central Intelligence. To bomb out, to utterly destroy and close up such a massive complex, would not only be an immense strategic victory but also a much needed psychological boost to a military machine that was being worn down by the sheer perseverance of an enemy who had neither the use nor the need of false body counts.
Where was this enormous mountain sanctuary large enough to house an entire division and all its firepower? Where?
The young air force officer could not accurately pinpoint it on the aerial maps; he had been hiding and running for his life on the ground. However, he knew the coordinates where he had been shot out of the sky, and he believed that if he was chuted down in the area, he could retrace his escape route. In retracing it he was sure he would reach the ascending hills opposite the armed mountain retreat from which he had observed the activity. Not only sure, but positive; there was only one such group of hills, “like scoops of green ice cream piled on top of each other,” but not defined in the aerial photographs.
“I can’t ask you to do that, Lieutenant,” Gillette had said. “You’ve lost over twenty-five pounds and your physical condition is marginal.”
“I think you can and you should, sir,” replied the pilot. “The longer we wait, the more screwed up my memory gets.”
“For Christ’s sake, it’s just another depot—”
“Correction, sir, it’s the depot. I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere, and neither have you. It’s like turning part of the Grand Canyon sideways and driving into it! Let me go, Captain, please.”
“I sense a wrinkle here, Lieutenant. Why are you so eager? You’re a rational man; you’re not after extraneous medals, and this could be a very dangerous operation.”
“I’ve got all the reason I need, Captain. My two crewmen bailed out with me; they landed near each other in a field while I bounced through some trees, maybe a quarter of a mile away. I threw my chute under some branches and ran toward that field as fast as I could. I reached the edge of it at the same time as a group of soldiers came out from the other side—soldiers in uniforms, not kids in pajamas—and I knelt in the grass and watched those bastards hack my crew to death with bayonets! They weren’t only my friends, Captain, one of them was my cousin. Soldiers, Captain! Soldiers don’t bayonet prisoners in a field!… You see, I have to go back there. Now. Before it all becomes too much of a blur.”
“You’ll have all the protection we can give you. You’ll be wired with the most sophisticated communications equipment we have and monitored every step of the way. The Cobra choppers will never be more than three miles from your position, prepared to swing down at your signal and take you out.”
“What more can I ask, sir?”
A great deal more, young man, for you didn’t understand any more than I did. Covert Operations doesn’t work that way. There’s another morality, another ethic, the credo of which is “get the job done, whatever the cost.”
The young officer was flown northeast with a Cong defector who had lived on the Cambodian border. Both were parachuted at night over the vicinity where the pilot’s plane had gone down, and together they started the retrace. Gillette, the intelligence captain responsible for the mission, flew north, just south of Han Minh, joining the Cov-Op unit monitoring the two-man insurgency team.
Where are the Cobras? asked the intelligence officer from Command Saigon.
Don’t worry, Captain, they’re on their way was a colonel’s reply.
They should be there now. Our pilot and the Cong defect are closing in. Listen to them!
We’re listening, said a major who hovered over a radio. Relax. They’re reaching Zero target and we’ve got a perfect fix on their position.
If they give the signal, they’re roughly a thousand meters west of Zero, added the Colonel.
Then send in the Cobras! roared the captain from Saigon. It’s all we asked them to do!
When they do it, said the colonel.
Suddenly, there was an eruption of static accompanied by an erratic staccato of gunfire. Then silence—a dreadful silence.
That’s it! yelled the major. They’ve been cut down. Contact the bombers to move in and unload everything they’ve got! Here are the coordinates!
What do you mean, they’ve been cut down? Gillette shouted.
They were obviously found and killed by North Viet patrols, Captain. They gave their lives for an outstanding operation.
Where the hell were the Cobras, the choppers that were to take them out?
What Cobras? said the major from Cov-Op sarcastically. You think we were going to blow the whole show with Cobras in the air only miles from Zero? They’d be picked up by radar and that’s a goddamned mountain!
That wasn’t my understanding! yelled the captain. I gave that pilot my word!
Your word, said the colonel, not ours. We’re trying to win a war that we’re losing.
You bastards! I gave that pilot a promise—
Your promise, not ours. By the way, what’s your name, Captain?
Gillette, the intelligence officer replied, perplexed. Raymond Gillette.
I can see it now: Gillette’s Razor Cuts Off Major Supply Route! We’re also pretty big in the Press-Op department.
Raymond Gillette, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, raised his head, arched his neck, and again pressed his fingers against his temples. Gillette’s Razor had opened the corporate world for him at the expense of a young pilot’s life as well as that of his Vietnamese companion. Was he doing it again? With Hawthorne? Was it possible that there was another O’Ryan in the upper echelons of the CIA?
Anything was possible, concluded Raymond Gillette as he got out of his chair and walked to his office door. He was going to talk personally to every man and woman in the transmission unit, staring into their eyes and using the expertise of a lifetime to find a flaw in any of them. He owed that much to a dead air force officer and his Vietnamese scout from many years ago. He owed that much to Tyrell Hawthorne, to whom he had given his word only minutes before. He had to do better than that; he had to study each man and each woman in whose hands Hawthorne’s life would rest. He opened the door and spoke to his secretary.
“Helen, I want you to alert the Little Girl unit. All personnel are to meet me in Operations, room five, in twenty minutes.”
“Yes, sir,” said the gray-haired, middle-aged woman, rising from her chair and walking around her desk. “But first, I promised Mrs. Gillette that I’d make sure you had your afternoon pill.” The secretary extracted a tablet from a small plastic box, poured water from a Thermos into a paper cup, and handed both to the impatient director of the Central Intelligence Agency. “Mrs. Gillette insists you use the bottled water, sir. It’s salt-free.”
“Mrs. Gillette can be damned annoying, Helen,” said the DCI, throwing the pill in his mouth and drinking the water.
“She wants to keep you around, sir. She also insists, as you well know, that you sit down for a minute or two until the medication is digested. Please, sit down, Mr. Director.”
“You two are in cahoots, Helen, and I won’t have it,” said Gillette, smiling and sitting down in a straight-backed chair in front of his secretary’s desk. “I hate these damn things; they make me feel like I’ve had three bourbons without the pleasure of drinking them.”
Suddenly, without any indication of being in discomfort, Raymond Gillette lurched out of the chair, grimaced, and choked as he spread his fingers over his face and fell forward on the flo
or, his head angled into the front of his secretary’s desk, his mouth agape, his eyes wide. He was dead.
The secretary rushed to the office door, locked it, and returned to the corpse. She pulled the body away from the desk, dragged it into the director’s office, and placed it in front of the couch beneath the north window. She returned to the anteroom, closing her employer’s door behind her, and slowly, breathing steadily, picked up her secure telephone. She pressed the interagency extension for the officer heading up Task Force, Communications, Little Girl Blood.
“Yes?” said the male voice on the line.
“This is Helen in the DCI’s office. He asked that I call you and tell you to start testing your unit’s equipment as soon as you hear from Commander Hawthorne that he’s in place.”
“We know that; we all agreed fifteen minutes ago.”
“I imagine he didn’t want you to think you had to wait for him. He’ll be tied up in conferences most of the afternoon.”
“No problem. It’s a go as soon as we get the word.”
“Thank you,” said Scorpio 17, hanging up the phone.
27
It was 4:35 in the afternoon and Andrew Jackson Poole V was impressed as he sat at the desk in the Shenandoah Lodge in front of the equipment supplied by the Central Intelligence Agency. He had received the two components he had insisted upon: a reverse noninterceptor line to Hawthorne that bypassed the CIA traffic, a single yellow X on his screen indicating invasion; and a second miniature screen whose movable blip confirmed Hawthorne’s operating transponder. The personnel at Langley were outraged, believing their integrity was being challenged, but as Tye had made clear to the DCI, there could be another O’Ryan, whether Gillette wanted to consider it or not.
“You read me, Tye?” said Poole, flipping the switch on the small console to the isolated line that connected him to Hawthorne’s frequency.
“Yes, I do,” replied Tyrell in the car, his voice echoing over the speaker. “Are we alone?”
“Totally dedicated,” replied the lieutenant. “I can read these scans like findin’ honey in a biscuit. We’re one on one, no intercepts.”
“Anything from the hospital?”
“Nothing one way or another. All they’ll say is that Cath is stable, whatever the goddamn hell that means.”
“It’s better than the alternative, Jackson.”
“Man, you’re one cold prick.”
“I’m sorry you think that.… Where do the grids put me?”
“Oh, yeah, I’ve got you in operation and Langley has you southeast on Route 270, approaching a local intersection that branches off into 301. The girl on the map-screen says she knows it. There’s a run-down, third-rate amusement park on your left, where the Ferris wheel gets stuck, and you can’t win anything at the shooting gallery because the sights are fixed.”
“I just passed it. We’re in good shape.”
The console telephone erupted, its ring continuous. “Hold it, Tye, my emergency Langley connection’s blowin’ smoke. I’ll get back to you.”
Inside the car with the State Department plates, Hawthorne kept his eye on the road and the late afternoon traffic, but his mind was elsewhere. What could have happened at CIA headquarters that caused the emergency? Any and all emergencies should be coming from him, not from anything at Langley. He was within perhaps forty-five minutes of Chesapeake Beach and the O’Ryans’ summer house; if there was going to be an emergency, it would happen there. Tyrell felt the plastic lighter in his shirt pocket that emitted electrical impulses when he was out of the car and was being called. Poole had tested it; it worked, but it was weak, perhaps too weak. Had Langley found the malfunction? That could be an emergency.
“Good Lord, it’s terrible!” came Jackson’s excited voice, “but nothing’s changed. We go on!”
“For Christ’s sake, what’s terrible?”
“Director Gillette was found dead in his office. It was his heart; he had a history of cardiac problems and was on medication.”
“Who says so?” demanded Hawthorne.
“His doctor, Tye,” replied Poole. “He told the CIA medics that one day it was inevitable, but he didn’t expect it so soon.”
“You listen to me, Lieutenant, and listen hard. I want an immediate—and I mean immediate—independent autopsy on Gillette, concentrating on substances from the trachea to the bronchi and into the stomach. It’s got to be done within a couple of hours. Have it done now!”
“What are you talkin’ about …?” stammered Poole. “I told you what his own doctor said.”
“And I’ll tell you what Gillette told me barely three hours ago! ‘Coincidence is rarely, if ever, a factor.’ And the death of the director of Central Intelligence, who’s ultimately responsible for this operation, is just too goddamned coincidental! Tell them to look for evidence of digitalis!” he went on. “It’s as old as scopolamine before the Amytals, and every bit as effective. You don’t need a heart condition to blow a person into arrhythmia, and even with a mild dysfunction, a short dose will do it. It also disappears in the blood quickly.”
“How do you know that …?”
“Son of a bitch,” Hawthorne swore, “because I just know it! Now, move, and until you have an outside analysis with a lab that will go on record that he was clean, these communications are shut down. If and when you get such a report, give me five shocks on your transmitter. I won’t answer otherwise, and I don’t care if it takes all night!”
“Tye, you don’t understand. Gillette was found roughly two and a half hours ago. His body was taken to Walter Reed emergency—”
“A government-operated hospital!” exploded Hawthorne. “We’re shut down.”
“That’s just plain dumb,” Poole broke in. “I know this equipment, and Langley knows I know it. There’s no one tapping into us. I ran two invasives and both showed up. We’re one on one, nobody else here.”
“I’ve got a long litany of Washington double-crosses, Jackson. I say we could be.”
“Okay, let’s go bayou and say you’re right, which is impossible, and there are other nasty people in Langley like Mr. O’Ryan, who figure to follow you and treat you poorly. We cut the grids off, not communications.”
“I take off my belt with the transponder in the buckle and throw it out the window,” said Tyrell, no question in his words.
“May I suggest, sir, that you take the next U-turn, go back to that amusement park, and leave the goldarned thing near the fun house? Or maybe that Ferris wheel?”
“Poole, you really do have possibilities. I’m heading back to the fun house. I can’t wait till I hear about a team of deep-cover CIA agents assaulting the tunnel of love.”
“Or maybe, with luck, stuck on top of that Ferris wheel.”
The flagstone path led to the colonnaded entrance, the home a huge replica of a pre—Civil War plantation’s great house. Bajaratt walked up the steps to the thick, carved double doors, the bas-reliefs depicting the journeys of Mohammed as he came to understand the teachings of the Koran as shown to him by the mountain prophets. “Rubbish!” she whispered to herself. There were no exalted mountains, no Mohammed, and the prophets were ignorant goatherds! There was no Christ either. He was a radical Jew troublemaker manufactured by the semiliterate Essenes, who hadn’t the ability to cultivate their land. There was no God but the voice within the aroused individual, the inner commands that made a man or woman do what he or she had to do to fight for justice—for all who were oppressed. What else was there? The Baj spat on the flagstone porch, then composed herself, raised a ladylike hand, and pressed the bell.
Moments later the door was opened by a caftanned Arab, his robes gliding over the parquet floor. “You are expected, madame, and you are late.”
“If I were later still, would you have denied me entrance?”
“It is possible—”
“Then I shall leave—now,” said Bajaratt. “How dare you?”
A female voice came from within. “Please permi
t the lady to come inside, Ahmet Ashad, and do put away your weapon, it’s most discourteous.”
“It is not in evidence, madame,” the servant called out.
“That is even more discourteous. Show our visitor in.”
The room was a perfectly normal suburban living room in terms of its windows, curtains, and wallpaper, but that was where the ordinariness ended. There were no chairs, only enormous cushions placed around the floor with miniature tables in front of each. And reclining on one such hill of scarlet satin was a dark-skinned woman of extraordinary beauty and indeterminate age, her face a supple mask of classic features, yet warm, somehow not rigid or masklike at all. When she smiled, her eyes lit up like opals, communicating interest and genuine curiosity.
“Sit down, Amaya Aquirre,” she said in a soft, mellifluous voice that belonged to the emerald-green silk pantsuit she wore. “You see, I know your name and something more than that about you. As you can also see, I subscribe to the Arabic custom that we be on the same level—for us, the floor, as it is with the Bedouin sand—so that no individual has a symbolic position over the other. I find it one of the more attractive Arab concessions; we treat even our inferiors with equal eye contact.”
“Are you saying that I’m inferior?”
“No, not at all, but you are not an Arab.”
“I have fought for your cause—my husband died for your cause!”
“In a foolish expedition that served neither the Jew nor the Arab.”
“The Baaka permitted it, gave us its blessing!”
The Scorpio Illusion: A Novel Page 46