Black Ops

by W. E. B Griffin

  Castillo glanced at Dewitt.

  DeWitt . . . DeWitt, he thought, then a faint bell tinkled in his memory banks.

  “When I saw Colin,” the fat man was saying, “I said, ‘I just saw Hotshot Charley and he looked right through me.’”

  “To which I replied,” Leverette picked up, “ ‘DeWitt, I hate to tell you this, but you are no longer the Green Beanie poster boy you were in The Desert.’ ”

  “Master Sergeant DeWitt!” Castillo said, suddenly remembering.

  “And then,” DeWitt said, “we said—simultaneously—‘Let’s pull his chain.’ Which we then proceeded to do, with what you’ll have to admit was conspicuous success.”

  “I will now say something I didn’t have the courage to say in The Desert,” Castillo said. “Go fuck yourself, DeWitt!”

  “It’s really good to see you, Charley,” DeWitt said. He spread his arms wide and a moment later they were embracing, pounding each other’s backs.

  “Now that the show is over,” Delchamps said drily, “may I infer from that obscene display of affection that you have crossed paths on the road of life?”

  “You know General McNab?” DeWitt asked.

  Delchamps nodded.

  “He was then a colonel,” DeWitt went on, “running special ops in The Desert. I was his intel sergeant. Right after it started, the colonel came to me and said he had a new chopper driver, a twenty-one-year-old, five-months-out-of-Hudson-High who he wanted to keep alive because he already had the DFC and a Purple Heart and somebody like that would probably be useful somewhere down the pike.

  “He was bad enough when he got there, but after he grabbed the Russians—”

  “ ‘Grabbed the Russians’?” Berezovsky parroted.

  DeWitt looked at him for a moment before replying. “This is probably still classified Top Secret, Kill Anybody Who Knows, but what the hell. The Scotchman?”

  “This Colonel—General—McNab?” Svetlana asked.

  “Yes, ma’am. That’s what we call him—behind his back, of course. Anyway, the Scotchman mounted an operation to grab a Scud. You know what a Scud is?”

  “A Russian missile based on the German V-2,” Svetlana said matter-of-factly. “The Iraqis had a number of the R-11/SS-1B Scud-A’s, which had a range of about three hundred kilometers.”

  This earned her a very strange look from Master Sergeant P. B. DeWitt, Special Forces, U.S. Army, Retired, but all he said was, “Yes, ma’am. What we wanted to do was grab one, first to see if it was capable of either being nuclear or to put chemicals or biologicals in the head, and then to send it to the States.

  “So we mounted an op to go get one. Two UH-60s—”

  He looked at Svetlana, who nodded.

  “The Black Hawk,” she said.

  “—with a reinforced A-Team—”

  Svetlana nodded again.

  “—with Charley flying the colonel in a Huey.”

  Svetlana nodded her understanding one more time. Castillo saw that Leverette and Delchamps were having a hard time keeping a straight face.

  “So over the berm we go,” DeWitt went on. “We reach the Scud site. Everything goes as planned, until somebody notices that among the people lying on the ground with their hands tied behind them there’s a lot of heavy brass. First thought, Iraqi brass. Then Hotshot Charley here hears a couple of them whispering to each other in Russian. So he says—in Russian, the first time any of us knew he spoke it—‘All Russians please stand up and start singing “The Internationale.’ ”

  Berezovsky laughed.

  “So that was you, Carlos!” Berezovsky said. “When I debriefed them after you sent them home, they said that the Americans had a Russian who sounded as if he was from Saint Petersburg.”

  “Why do I think I’m not fully briefed on this situation?” DeWitt asked.

  “Sergeant DeWitt,” Delchamps said. “Permit me to introduce Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky and Lieutenant Colonel Alekseeva, formerly of the SVR.”

  “No shit?”

  “And you thought she was just Charley’s latest redheaded lady friend, right, DeWitt?” Leverette asked.

  “They didn’t tell me about you making them sing ‘The Internationale,’” Berezovsky said. “You really made them do that?”

  “People tend to do what heavily armed men with black grease all over their faces tell them to do. We even took pictures of the chorus and gave everybody a copy before we put them on the Aeroflot plane to Moscow.”

  “I guess the pictures somehow got lost,” Berezovsky said, chuckling.

  “Is somebody going to tell me what’s going on around here?” DeWitt asked.

  “I want to hear the rest of the story,” Svetlana said. “Including all about Carlos’s previous redheaded girlfriend.”

  “The Green-Eyed Monster just raised its ugly head. Actually, it’s ‘rather attractive redheads,’ plural,” Delchamps said.

  Svetlana, in Russian, raised questions about the marital and social disease status of Delchamps’s ancestors.

  He laughed delightedly.

  “There were no women in the desert,” DeWitt said. “Colin was just talking. Anyway, we brought two Scuds back, sling-loaded under the Black Hawks, and the Russians. We took their identification and mug-shotted them, and then the agency sent a plane in and flew them to Vienna. Charley went along with them and saw them take off for home.”

  “You know,” Delchamps said conversationally, “I’ve noticed that Vienna has a lot of women, many of them Hungarian, with red hair. Did you go right back to the desert, Carlos, or take a little vacation first?”

  “Carlos taught me how to do this, Mr. Edgar Delchamps,” Svetlana said, and gave him the finger. Then she turned to DeWitt. “Why do you call him ‘Hotshot Charley’?”

  “There was a character in the comics, a fighter pilot, they called ‘Hotshot Charley,’ ” DeWitt said. “And it fit him like a glove. Here he was, a twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant, and he already had the DFC, and now there was a DP TWX from the President—”

  “A what?” Berezovsky asked.

  “A message from the President. DP means Direction of the President. It has the highest priority. Former DCI Bush was the President then, and he was so excited that he forgot he wasn’t a sailor anymore. The message read: ‘Pass to all hands Operation SNATCH’—that’s what we called the op—‘Well done. George H. W. Bush, Commander in Chief.’ That’s pretty heady stuff, especially for a second lieutenant. And it went right to his head.”

  “Untrue. I have always been the epitome of modesty and self-effacement,” Castillo said.

  Leverette laughed out loud.

  “I can see him now,” he said, “strutting around in his desert suit, a CAR-4 in one hand, a .45 in a shoulder holster, frag grenades in his shirt pockets, a KA-BAR knife stuck in his boot top, and peering through his aviator sunglasses as master of all he surveyed.”

  DeWitt chuckled.

  “The cold, honest-to-God truth, ma’am,” DeWitt said, “was that Hotshot Charley here thought he was God’s gift to the Army and that it was necessary for me to sit on him pretty hard from time to time. As a general rule of thumb, second lieutenants don’t like sergeants telling them what to do. And then making them do it.”

  He looked at Castillo.

  “But it worked, didn’t it? Here you are, two wars later—three if you count the one we’re in with the Muslims—a light colonel doing interesting things for the President himself.”

  “Raining on your parade, DeWitt, what I am is a light colonel who is not only in the deep stuff up to my ears, but is getting booted out of the Army at the end of this month.”

  DeWitt looked at him for a long moment, then at Leverette, who nodded.

  “Are you going to tell me what happened?” DeWitt asked. “Not to mention what the hell is going on around here?”

  “It’s liable to cast a pall on our lunch,” Castillo said. “Let’s let fate decide. You ever been to Sub-Saharan Africa, DeWitt?”

&nb
sp; “Yeah, and I didn’t like it much.”

  “The Congo?”

  “Both of ’em. There’s two, you know. And Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, places like that. I was bodyguarding a candy-ass from the agency who was ‘observing’ the UN. He didn’t speak any of the languages—”

  “And you do?”

  DeWitt nodded.

  “Uncle Remus and I spent a wonderful year at the Language School in the Presidio. Just before we went to The Desert.”

  “Why don’t we talk about this situation over lunch?” Lorimer said.

  “Mr. Ambassador,” Castillo said when he had finished what in effect was a briefing about the chemical factory, “we were hoping you could tell us something of the Congo. We’re really in the dark, and only you and DeWitt have ever been there.”

  Ambassador Lorimer looked at him coldly.

  Oh, shit, I called him “Mr. Ambassador.”

  What he’s doing now is considering how to point out to me how unforgivable that blunder is.

  “It’s been some time, of course, since I have been there,” Lorimer finally said. “But on the other hand, I spent a long time in that part of the world, and I have since—akin to someone not being able to stop looking at a run-over dog—kept myself as up to date on it as possible.”

  “Please, whatever you could tell us, Philippe,” Castillo said.

  “Better,” the ambassador said. “The best way to do what you ask, I think, is to begin at the beginning. But where is the beginning?”

  He paused as he considered his own question.

  “In 1885,” he began, “the Association Internationale Africaine, chairman and sole stockholder Leopold the Second, King of the Belgians, announced they now owned what today we call the Democratic Republic of Congo. Nobody challenged him. The Germans were doing the same thing—I can’t recall the name of their company—in what is now Burundi, Rwanda, and Tanzania, and the French right next door in what later became known as Congo-Brazzaville.

  “They were going to bring Christianity and culture to the savages, and also see about making a little profit from the copper, rubber, other minerals, and from whatever else they could exploit.

  “They established the capital in a town they called Leopoldville, now called Kinshasa, and others at the interior navigational end of the Congo River. They called this one, now called Kisangani, the one in which you are interested, Stanleyville, after the famous explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who went looking for a missionary who was bringing Christ to the savages in the bush and had gone missing.

  “Stanley found him on the rapids of the river and with great élan said, ‘Doctor Livingstone, I presume,’ as we all heard about in the eighth grade.”

  There were the expected chuckles.

  “This went on for about twenty years,” the ambassador continued. “Then, somewhere around 1906 or 1907, the King got some bad press, a lot of it American. An English diplomat named Roger Casement toured the Congo and learned that the Belgians had been unkind to the natives; Casement said they had starved to death or murdered large numbers—thousands upon thousands—of them.

  “We Americans tend to be a little self-righteous, and there was a predictable hue and cry in the press.

  “To which King Leopold replied that he had no idea that anything of the sort was going on and he would put an end to it. The Belgian Government, in the name of His Majesty, Leopold Two, annexed the Congo in 1908, with unspecified compensation to the Association Internationale Africaine.

  “The bad press stopped, and now the Belgian parliament was in charge of improving the lot of the natives, who now found honest employment harvesting rubber, extracting copper, etcetera for Belgian firms, many of which had close ties to the Association Internationale Africaine.

  “This situation lasted until 1960, and to be honest, what was termed ‘paternalistic colonialism’ wasn’t all bad. They brought schools, religion, and medicine to the Congo. Their hearts were in the right place, but very little of it stuck on the natives. It’s politically incorrect to say this, but the natives of Sub-Saharan Africa weren’t ready to govern themselves.

  “I guess the best way to make that point is to quote Doctor Albert Schweitzer, organist, philosopher, and physician, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his lifelong humanitarian services to Africa. He built a hospital in French Equatorial Africa and did a great deal else for Africans, to whom he referred to his dying day as ‘Les Sauvages.’

  “I was in Leopoldville as a junior consular officer in June 1960 when the Belgians gave in to UN pressure—a lot of that generated by the United States—and granted the Congo its independence. It became the Republic of the Congo. So did the former French colony Middle Congo, next door. So we had two new independent countries with the same name. They became Congo-Brazzaville and Congo-Kinshasa, when the new government renamed Leopoldville.

  “At that time, there were two—yes, two—university graduates in Congo-Kinshasa. There were some other very bright people, however. Some were friends of mine. I had one particular friend, a fellow named Joseph Désiré Mobutu, who had been a corporal in the Belgian gendarmerie. He loved to hear about the formation of the United States. I used to loan him books. He was really impressed with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

  “As soon as parliamentary elections could be held, they were. Mobutu was at the inauguration. In his new uniform. He was now a colonel in the Congolese Army.

  “Things promptly started to come apart. Katanga, where the copper mines are, could see no reason to share its wealth with the rest of the country and announced its secession under a lunatic named Moise Tshombe. The Congo’s second-richest province, Kasai, also announced its independence a couple of weeks later. A military coup broke out in the capital and there was rampant looting.

  “The prime minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, turned to the Soviet Union for help. Khrushchev promptly started to send technicians and some really fancy weaponry to the Congo. They denied anything but honorable intentions.

  “And we denied, of course, that we were sending weapons and CIA people to ‘advise’ President Joseph Kasavubu, even though that was about as much of a secret as the fact that it will grow dark when the sun goes down tonight.

  “In my long government service,” Lorimer said, looking at Castillo, “I never saw a sitting U.S. President or heard from one. But the word going around then was that President Eisenhower was not going to tolerate the Russians in Sub-Saharan Africa and that he had decided that Nikita Khrushchev’s pal Lumumba was a bump on the road to international peace, harmony, and goodwill, and therefore had to be—to use the euphemistic terms I have heard so often since becoming friendly with Charley—whacked, terminated, eliminated.

  “What happened was that in December 1960—this is six months after independence, mind you—Kasavubu overthrew the government. To make sure he wouldn’t come back, Lumumba was removed from the scene, it was rumored, by Colonel Joseph Désiré Mobutu.

  “When I asked my old friend, the great admirer of Washington and Jefferson, that he tell me the rumors were not true, his response was that it would well behoove me to keep my nose out of Congolese internal affairs, and further that it might be a good idea for me to request a transfer home before something happened that would force President Kasavubu to declare me persona non grata.

  “I received the same advice from a co-worker at the embassy who I had reason to believe was getting his orders from Langley, Virginia. Consequently, I remained in the Congo as long as I could, another six months.

  “Then, after an assignment to the Philippines, I returned in time for the tragedy at Stanleyville. That was August to November 1964. I left the day we jumped the Belgian Paras on Stanleyville; a large Belgian Army medical officer took one look at me and ordered me onto an airplane. Actually, he carried me onto it.

  “I haven’t been back to the Congo since. But in 1965, shortly after by then-Lieutenant General Mobutu had become commander in chief of the Army and had appointed himse
lf president for five years”—he looked at Svetlana a moment—“I was then political counselor in our embassy in Copenhagen; we must exchange opinions of what makes a really good smorgasbord when we can find the time”—he looked back at Castillo—“someone, who I suspect was the agency man who advised me to seek a transfer, apparently remembered that I had once been friendly with the general, and of course that I had been in the bush outside Stanleyville during the tragedy and I was proposed as ambassador to what was by then Zaire. The word quickly came that I was considered not acceptable. I later learned that my report on what had happened there was considered insulting to Congolese national dignity.”

  He stopped, looked thoughtful, exhaled audibly, and finished: “Further deponent sayeth not.”

  “Sir,” Castillo said after a moment, “please don’t misunderstand this. That background was fascinating, but what I hope you’ll tell us is what we can expect when we get there.”

  “ ‘We get there’?” Lorimer parroted.

  “Yes, sir,” Castillo replied, not taking his point. “Me and my team.”

  The ambassador remained silent and glanced at the others as he considered his reply.

  Then he looked at Castillo and said: “First of all, my dear friend, if you were found anywhere near Stanleyville—and found you would be, with that rosy complexion—you would be killed and possibly cannibalized. The liver of a white man is considered good juju against bullets.

  “As to what anyone else might find, if they were foolish enough to go to that area, it would be the sad remnants of a European attempt to superimpose their culture on the Congo. The Europeans, if I have to say this, are long gone. The airport—which used to have daily flights of Boeing 707 aircraft to and from Brussels—has been closed for years. There is rampant disease. And little or no electricity because little or no oil makes it up the Congo to power generators small or large. They would find stacks of decomposing bodies in the bush not unlike what the Khmer Rouge scattered around Cambodia. Need I go on?”

  Castillo didn’t reply.

  “The only way you could destroy that factory would be by air,” Lorimer said.