He handed the Overnight envelope to Captain Walsh.
“Hold that by its edges, Al,” he ordered. “Gloves would be better. It will probably be futile, but we will have tried.”
“Something wrong, General?” the FedEx courier asked.
“Nothing for which you could possibly be held responsible,” General McNab said. “And now, although I would rather face a thousand deaths, I must go treat with General Naylor.”
The courier looked confused.
Colonel Caruthers, who recognized the remark as a paraphrase of what Confederate general Robert E. Lee had said immediately before leaving his headquarters to surrender the Army of Northern Virginia to Union general Ulysses S. Grant, failed to keep a smile off his face.
The courier started back to his delivery truck as General McNab walked toward Staff Sergeant Robert Nellis, who was standing by the open front passenger door.
“Bobby,” he said, “can you find Pope Air Force Base by yourself, or would you rather that I drive?”
“I’ll drive, General,” Sergeant Nellis said, smiling.
“It’s easy to recognize,” General McNab said as he slid onto the seat. “Just look for lots of airplanes and fat people in blue uniforms.”
Colonel Caruthers and Captain Walsh quickly got into the Suburban, and they drove down the driveway and turned right onto Reilly Road.
As the Suburban carrying General McNab pulled into one of the RESERVED FOR GENERAL OFFICERS parking spaces beside the Pope Air Force Base Operations building, the glass doors fronting on the tarmac opened and a half dozen Air Force officers, the senior among them a major general, came out and formed a three-line formation.
The major general stood in front. A major, wearing the silver cords of an aide-de-camp, took up a position two steps behind and one step to the left of him. The other four officers formed a line behind the aide-de-camp, according to rank, with a brigadier general to the left, then three full colonels. All stood with their hands folded in the small of their backs, in the position of parade rest.
“Seeing all that martial precision,” Lieutenant General McNab announced, “I am sorely tempted to go out there and give them a little close-order drill.”
His sergeant driver smiled. His aides-de-camp did not. They knew he was entirely capable of doing just that. Both were visibly relieved when McNab got out of the Suburban, walked to the corner of the building, and called, “Good morning, gentlemen. Beautiful day, isn’t it?”
The major general turned toward him and saluted.
“Good morning, General,” he said, and then broke ranks to go to McNab and offer his hand.
“Would you care to bet if El Supremo will be on schedule?” McNab asked.
For an answer, the major general pointed down the runway, where a C-37A—the military version of the Gulfstream V—was about to touch down.
As the sleek twin-engine jet completed its landing roll, the Air Force major general trotted back to resume his position in front of his officers.
General McNab folded his arms on his chest.
The Gulfstream V was painted in gleaming white on top, and pale blue beneath. There was no reference to the U.S. Air Force in its markings, although it carried the star-and-bar insignia of a military aircraft on its engine nacelles. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA was lettered on the fuselage above the six windows. An American flag was painted on the vertical stabilizer.
The plane stopped on the tarmac, the whine of its engines died, and the stair door behind the cockpit windows unfolded. A tall, erect officer with four stars gleaming on the epaulets of his dress uniform nimbly came down them.
He was General Allan B. Naylor, whom—to his embarrassment—C. Harry Whelan had accurately described to Andy McClarren of Wolf News as the “most important general in the world.”
Whelan’s argument was that since the Chief of Staff of the Army no longer actually commands the Army—but rather administers it—and that since Naylor, as Commander in Chief of the United States Central Command directly commanded more Army and Marine troops, more Air Force airplanes, more Navy ships and aircraft, and more military assets in more places all around the world than any other officer, that made him the most important general in not only the Army, but the most important officer in uniform.
Even Andy McClarren, who had been the most watched news personality on television for ten years and counting—in large part because of his skill in being able to argue the opposite position of whatever position his guests took—couldn’t disagree with that.
General Naylor exchanged salutes with the Air Force major general, and then shook hands with him and all of the officers, and finally turned to General McNab, who saluted.
“Good morning, Bruce,” General Naylor said.
“Good morning, General,” McNab said. “And how are things on beautiful Tampa Bay?”
The United States Central Command headquarters was on MacDill Air Force Base, Tampa, Florida.
Generals Naylor and McNab had been classmates at the United States Military Academy at West Point. They hadn’t liked each other as cadets, and a number of encounters between them as they had risen in rank in their subsequent service had exacerbated that relationship.
General Naylor didn’t reply. Instead, with a smile, he motioned for McNab to board the Gulfstream. McNab, in turn, motioned for his aides-de-camp to get aboard. When they had done so, he followed them, and when he had done so, General Naylor followed him.
The stair door started to close as the engines started.
When the Gulfstream started to move, the Air Force general called his formation to attention and saluted. When the Gulfstream was on the taxiway, he turned to the brigadier general and softly commented, “That should be an interesting flight.”
The friction between Generals McNab and Naylor was well known to senior officers of all the armed forces, and it went beyond “Isn’t that interesting?” or “What a shame.”
The United States Special Operations Command was subordinate to the United States Central Command, and when, at about the same time, Naylor was about to be named Commander in Chief of CENTCOM and McNab to be commanding general of SPECOPSCOM, it was almost universally recognized as one of those rare situations that would see the best possible man assigned to both jobs.
It was also just about unanimously agreed that making “Scotty” McNab subordinate to Allan Naylor was going to be like throwing lighted matches into a barrel of gasoline.
General McNab took an aisle seat in the luxuriously furnished cabin. As General Naylor walked past him en route to the VIP section—two extra-large seats and a table behind the door to the cockpit, which could be curtained off from the rest of the passenger compartment—McNab held up his hand.
Naylor looked down at him.
McNab said: “General, before they start the in-flight movie, there’s something I’d like to show you.”
“You don’t need an invitation to ride in front, Bruce, and you know it,” Naylor said.
He gestured for McNab to follow him.
McNab rose, and gestured for Captain Walsh to follow him.
Reaching his seat, Naylor took it and then, when McNab had taken the opposing chair, asked, “What have you got?”
Captain Walsh extended a pair of rubber gloves to General Naylor.
Naylor looked questioningly at McNab.
“Gloves?”
“I don’t think they’ll be able to get fingerprints off that, General,” McNab said, indicating the FedEx Overnight envelope. “But they may.”
Naylor took the gloves and pulled them on.
Walsh handed him the envelope, and Naylor took from it a sheet of paper and an eight-by-ten-inch color photograph.
The photograph showed a man dressed in a T-shirt and khaki trousers. He was sitting in a folding chair, holding up a copy of Mexico City’s El Heraldo de Mexico. On each side of him stood a man wearing a black balaclava mask over his head and holding the muzzle of a Kalashnikov six inches from the victim’
s head.
“That’s yesterday’s newspaper,” McNab said.
The sheet of paper, obviously printed on a cheap ink-jet printer, carried a simple message:So Far He’s Alive.
There will be further communication.
“Who is he?” Naylor asked calmly. “He looks familiar.”
“Lieutenant Colonel James D. Ferris,” McNab said. “The officer whom—with great reluctance, you will recall—I detailed to DEA, from which he was further detailed to be—overtly—one of the assistant military attachés at our embassy in Mexico City. Covertly, I have been led to believe, he was ordered to advise the ambassador in his relentless and never-ending attempt to reason with the drug cartels.”
“I can do without the sarcasm, General,” Naylor said.
“Ferris marches in the Long Gray Line beside his classmates Lieutenant Colonel Randolph Richardson, Jr., and our own Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Castillo, Retired. He has a wife at Fort Bragg and three children. Small world, isn’t it?”
“Where did you get this?” Naylor asked.
“A FedEx delivery man handed it to me just now when I walked out of my quarters to come here.”
“It’s addressed to LTC McNab.”
“I noticed. It may be a typo, or it could be on purpose. My gut feeling is that it’s on purpose.”
“To attract less attention?” Naylor asked.
McNab nodded.
“I’ve been wondering if another . . .”
“Was sent to me?” Naylor finished for him.
McNab nodded again.
“Captain,” Naylor said politely, “would you ask Colonel Brewer to come up here, please?”
Colonel J. D. Brewer was Naylor’s senior aide-de-camp.
“We have been cleared for takeoff,” the public-address system announced. “Please fasten your seat belts.”
“No FedEx Overnight envelope or other communication relative to this at MacDill, General,” Colonel Brewer reported five minutes later, as the Gulfstream reached cruising altitude.
Naylor looked at McNab.
“What’s the plan at Andrews?” McNab asked.
“A Black Hawk will take us to Langley; we meet the others there.”
“Including Natalie?”
“I have been led to believe the secretary of State will be there.”
His tone made it clear that he thought General McNab should not refer to the secretary of State by her first name.
“I call her Natalie because I like her, General,” McNab said. “She’s my kind of gal.” And then he quoted the secretary of State: “ ‘You miserable goddamn shameless hypocritical sonofabitch!’ ”
It was what Secretary of State Natalie Cohen had said to President Clendennen in the Situation Room of the White House on February 12, immediately after the President had announced that “for the good of the country, for the good of the office of the President, I am inclined to accept Ambassador Montvale’s offer to become my Vice President.”
It was the first time anyone in the room had ever heard her say anything stronger than “darn.”
“My God!” Naylor said.
“She calls a spade a spade,” McNab said. “There aren’t many other people in Foggy Bottom—offhand, I can’t think of one—who do that.”
Naylor looked at McNab as if he were forming his words. When finally he said nothing, McNab went on:
“We can ask her at the agency if she’s been contacted, and I’m sure that among Lammelle’s gnomes is someone who can lift any fingerprints there might be on the envelope.”
Franklin Lammelle was DCI, director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
“All right,” Naylor said. “And the CIA would be the most logical choice to deal with this situation, right?”
McNab didn’t reply.
“McNab, you’re not thinking of going down there to rescue Colonel Ferris, are you?”
“General, I would say that none of us has enough information to make any decisions on how to deal with this,” McNab said. “But we can think about it while we’re at Langley doing our bit to help the President get reelected.”
“Is that how you think of it?”
McNab didn’t reply directly, instead saying, “Having complied with Action One of the SOP by notifying my superior headquarters of the situation, with your permission, General, I will now take Action Two.”
General Naylor nodded his permission.
“Al,” McNab said to Captain Walsh, “would you please bring the Brick up here?”
Sixty seconds later, Walsh laid the Brick on the table. It had been provided to General McNab by the AFC Corporation free of charge. The chairman of the board of the AFC Corporation, Dr. Aloysius Francis Casey, had, during the Vietnam war, been the communications sergeant on a Special Forces A Team.
He credited that service for giving him the confidence to do such things as apply for admission to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology without having a high school diploma, and then shortly after being awarded his Ph.D. by that institution, starting the AFC Corporation, which quickly became the world leader in data processing and encryption.
“Like the jarheads say, General,” he had told then–newly promoted Brigadier General McNab when he flew, uninvited, in one of AFC’s Learjets to Fort Bragg, “once a Green Beanie, always a Green Beanie. And now it’s payback time.”
The translation was that he was willing to provide the Special Operations community with the very latest in communication and encryption equipment free of charge. When he left Fort Bragg that day, he had taken with him Brigadier General McNab’s aide-de-camp—“You can call me Aloysius, hotshot,” Casey had told then–Second Lieutenant C. G. Castillo—so that Castillo could not only select from AFC’s existing stocks of electronic equipment but could also tell what communications abilities Delta Force and Gray Fox wished it had.
General McNab now opened the attaché case. A green LED told him the system was in STANDBY mode. He flipped a few switches and other green LEDs illuminated. One was ENCRYPTED VOICE COMMUNICATION, one ENCRYPTED DATA COMMUNICATION, and one ENCRYPTED SCAN.
General McNab removed a device about the size of a cigarette lighter from the attaché case, put it to his eye, aimed it at the FedEx Overnight envelope, and then at the photograph and message it contained.
A red LED illuminated briefly over the legend ENCRYPTED DATA TRANSMISSION IN PROGRESS, and then went out.
General McNab then picked up a telephone handset and pushed a button.
“Yes, sir?” the voice of Major General Terry O’Toole, deputy commander of SPECOPSCOM, came over the Brick’s speakers after bouncing off a satellite 27,000 miles over the earth.
“Terry, I just sent you what was handed to me as I walked out of my quarters this morning,” McNab said.
“I’m looking at it, General,” O’Toole said.
“Load up your wife and get over to Colonel Ferris’s quarters. Show her this, tell her we’re working on it, and to keep her mouth shut about it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell her as soon as I learn anything, I’ll let her know.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll be in touch.”
“Yes, sir.”
McNab replaced the handset and closed the attaché case.
[TWO]
Apartment 606
The Watergate Apartments
2639 I Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C.
0935 12 April 2007
“I would much rather drip ice water in his ear,” Edgar Delchamps said as he stood beside the bed of Roscoe J. Danton. “But we’re a little pressed for time.”
He picked up the foot of Danton’s bed, raised it three feet, and dropped it.
“You sonsofbitches!” Mr. Danton said upon being roused from his slumber.
He sat up suddenly, and then pushed himself back against the headboard.
“Rise and shine, Roscoe,” David W. Yung, Jr., said.
“How the hell did you two get in here?�
� Danton demanded.
“And good morning to you, too, Roscoe,” Delchamps said.
“The door was open,” Yung said.
Mr. Danton’s door came equipped—in addition to the locking mechanism that came with the knob—with two dead bolts, both of which Danton was sure he had set.
“How did you get through the lobby?” Danton challenged. “Or into the garage?”
“There didn’t seem to be anyone on duty,” Delchamps said. “Up and at ’em, Roscoe. Before we go out to Langley I want to pick up a little liquid courage at the Old Ebbitt Grill. They serve a magnificent Bloody Mary.”
“I’m not going out to Langley,” Roscoe said.
“And we have to talk about your million dollars,” Yung said.
Danton eyed Yung. What did he say?
Roscoe J. Danton was a little embarrassed to privately admit that he was more than a little afraid of both men. While he didn’t think David W. Yung, Jr., was capable of the sort of violence attributed to Edgar Delchamps, on the other hand, Yung’s peers—that was to say, others in Castillo’s Merry Band of Outlaws—called him Two-Gun, and Roscoe didn’t think they’d just plucked that out of thin air.
“Time, Roscoe, is of the essence,” Delchamps said. “Remember to wash behind your ears.”
Roscoe had some time—not much—to once again think his situation over during his ablutions.
He had come close to what President Clendennen derisively called “Castillo’s Merry Band of Outlaws” in the practice of his profession, which was to say running down a story. That was a bona fide journalistic accomplishment; he was the only journalist ever to do so, and Roscoe took some justifiable pride in his having done so.
Among other things, it had resulted in a page-one, above-the-fold story in The Washington Times-Post:BRILLIANT INTELLIGENCE COUP SEES MAJOR CHANGES IN WHITE HOUSE
By Roscoe J. Danton
Washington Times-Post Writers Syndicate
Covert Warriors Page 5