Black Ops
Page 51
“Goddamn you, Fernando,” María said furiously. “I knew it all along, and you kept saying I had a dirty, suspicious mind.”
“Where is the Gringo?” Fernando asked.
“Fernando!” Doña Alicia said warningly.
“Who?” Svetlana asked.
“Carlos Guillermo Castillo, or Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger, or whatever name he’s using today.”
“I let him sleep; he was exhausted.”
“I can imagine,” María said with a knowing look, then sipped her coffee.
Svetlana shrugged. “I guess that bull is out of the barn, too.”
“Is Estella aware of the sleeping arrangements?” Fernando asked.
Svetlana nodded.
He looked at Doña Alicia and grinned. “Well, that explains the missing housekeeper, doesn’t it, Abuela? She heard us land, saw you get off the plane, and decided that anywhere else would be the safest place to be.”
The kitchen door opened again. Corporal Lester Bradley, USMC, walked in. “Well, the Marines have landed,” Fernando said, “but I don’t think the situation is well in hand.”
“Be quiet, Fernando,” Doña Alicia said. “Hello, Lester.”
“Ma’am,” Bradley said politely.
“Semper Fi, Les,” Fernando said.
“I told you to be quiet,” Doña Alicia said. “What can we do for you, Lester?”
Bradley turned to Svetlana.
“Colonel, do you know where the colonel is?”
“What did he call her? ‘Colonel’?” María said.
“The colonel is looking for his goddamn bathrobe, that’s where he is,” Castillo called from the corridor, and then came into the kitchen, buttoning the shirt he’d worn the previous day. Its tail covered—mostly—his undershorts.
Svetland pulled the robe tighter around her as she crossed her arms. “Oops!”
“Surprise, surprise, Casanova,” Fernando said.
Bradley said, “Sir, Mr. D’Allessando’s on the AFC. He says it’s important.”
“Stall him for a couple of minutes, Les.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lester quickly disappeared from the room.
“I didn’t know you were here, Abuela,” Castillo said.
“We sort of guessed that,” María said.
“Or you,” Castillo added.
“We were just having a nice chat with Svetlana, Carlos dear,” Doña Alicia said. “Fernando and María were nice enough to fly me up here, and now they’re about to leave.”
“And you’re not?” Fernando asked.
“I need to talk to Carlos,” Doña Alicia said. “Privately.”
Fernando, to no one in particular, said, “That’s what she used to say in the old days when the Gringo was caught, so to speak, with his hand in the cookie jar. It means she’s about to drag him to the stable and have at him with a quirt.”
“I’ll have someone drive me home,” Doña Alicia said. “You and María want to get back to the children, I’m sure.”
“I wouldn’t think of leaving until I hear how the two colonels met,” María said. “You’re old Army buddies, is that it?”
“Something like that,” Castillo said. “I’ve got a plane here; I’ll take Abuela home.”
“I saw the Lear in the hangar,” Fernando said. “What happened to your G-III?”
“I’ve got to take that call,” Castillo said, avoiding the question. “You’re going to have to excuse me.”
“May I stay, Carlos?” Doña Alicia asked.
He looked at her for a moment.
“You know you don’t have to ask, Abuela,” he said finally.
[THREE]
0735 8 January 2006
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Vic,” Castillo said. “I was in bed.”
“I heard about that,” D’Allessando said. “When do I get to meet her?”
“Soon enough. Look, Lester’s rounding up the others; it’ll take a minute.”
“Everybody knows everything, right?”
“Right.”
“You were just a wee slip of a lad when I taught you that,” D’Allessando said.
“And you still had hair, Vic. It was a long time ago.”
“Actually, I thought about those days this morning, while jogging around Smoke Bomb Hill with Colonel Hamilton.”
“And the general?”
“I have no idea who you’re talking about, Colonel,” D’Allessando said.
Castillo waved for Bradley to bring the crowd into the room.
“Everybody’s here, Vic,” Castillo said.
Including my grandmother, whom I’m not going to run off; she’s not a Russian spy. I’m sleeping with the Russian spy. Who is here with her brother, also a Russian spy, who just shook hands with my grandmother.
“Hello, one and all,” D’Allessando said. “Our problem is Colonel Hamilton, with whom, as I just told Charley, I took a jog down memory lane around Smoke Bomb Hill. He was crushed to learn that the barrack in which he once commanded a platoon was long ago torn down.
“He also told me, ‘Of course I’m going into the Congo.’ ”
Castillo said, “Absolutely out of the question. He can go as far as Bujumbura, and even that makes me uncomfortable.”
“Well, you’re going to have to tell him that, Charley.”
“I’m a lowly lieutenant colonel. He’s a more than a little starchy full bird. Get McNab to tell him.”
“Get who?”
“General McNab.”
“I thought he told you . . .”
“Told me what?”
“The general doesn’t know you anymore,” D’Allessando said. “He hasn’t seen you since you went off to Washington a long time ago, where he hears you went off the deep end. He knows you snatched two Russian spies away from the CIA and won’t give them back. He thinks you’re a disgrace to the uniform and has already taken steps to see that you’re booted out of the Army. He wouldn’t talk to you even if, by some wild stretch of the imagination, you had the effrontery to try calling him.”
Castillo saw the look on Svetlana’s face and then on Abuela’s.
“I’d forgotten,” Castillo said.
I remember him telling me, “From the moment I walk out that door, I don’t know where you are, or what you’re doing, or anything about you except that I agree you’re not playing with a full deck.”
But, until just now, what it meant just didn’t sink in.
“Keep it in mind, Charley,” D’Allessando said.
“Where is Colonel Hamilton?”
“I choppered him out to Camp Mackall. I thought maybe seeing what the guys in the last stages of training have to go through might discourage him. I’m not holding my breath, Charley.”
“Get him back. Get him on the horn. How long will that take?”
“An hour, give or take.”
“Do it. Anything else?”
“Air Tanzania is all painted and ready to go. Uncle Remus is in the process of picking shooters; he’s almost finished, he said. The maps we got from the Air Force at Hurlburt have been digitalized and sent to you. Lester didn’t tell you?”
“Not yet. I’m going to have to go buy printers—”
“And/or some external drives. Those things do eat up the bytes.”
“I remember. That it?”
“I’ll call you when I get Hamilton back to civilization. D’Allessando off.”
“Russian spies?” Doña Alicia asked. “General Naylor said something about that.”
“General Naylor said something?”
“He came to see me. Very upset.”
“Well, Abuela, I’m as anxious to hear about that as you are to hear about the Russian spies. But for right now, as I go to take my morning shower, you’ll have to be satisfied with me pointing them out to you.”
He pointed.
“Oh, my!” Doña Alicia said.
“One of them is not only a Russian spy, but steals people’s personal robes.”
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“I’ll go find Estella and get some breakfast started,” Doña Alicia said.
[FOUR]
0840 8 January 2006
“Actually, Carlos,” Doña Alicia said as she poured tea into Svetlana’s cup, “General Naylor got quite emotional toward the end. He said he felt responsible for so much that’s happened to you in the Army.”
“I would love to have seen that,” Castillo said. “ ‘Old Stone Face’ emotional?”
“He said that he should have known the Army would do something—because of your father and the Medal of Honor—like send you to the Desert War before you were prepared, and done something to stop it.”
Castillo shook his head. “Fernando was over there, and he was even less prepared for that war than I was. I knew more about flying helicopters than he did about commanding a platoon of tanks.”
“And then he said—and this surprised me, because I always thought they were great friends—that his greatest regret was in sending you to General McNab after you were shot down and they gave you the medal. He said that once you were ‘corrupted’ by General McNab, everything followed. I thought ‘corrupted’ was a very strong term.”
“Just to keep the record straight, Abuela, they gave me the medal for not getting shot down. And Naylor sent me to McNab to keep them from putting me in another Apache, which he correctly suspected they would do. I really wasn’t qualified to fly Apaches, and if I had kept it up, which I would have been stupid enough to do, I probably would have killed myself. General Naylor’s conscience should be clear on that score.”
She looked at him but didn’t say anything.
Castillo went on: “And General McNab didn’t corrupt me, Jack Davidson corrupted me—”
“Go to hell, Charley,” Davidson said, laughing.
“—because every second lieutenant is taught to find a good senior NCO, then do what he says and follow his example. And what this corrupter of young officers did was teach me how to blow safes and steal whiskey.”
Davidson laughed again.
Doña Alicia shook her head. “Carlos, I’m being serious here.”
“So am I, Abuela. Go on, Jack, fess up. Tell Doña Alicia that you talked me into sling-loading a dune buggy under McNab’s Huey so we could ‘reconnoiter the American embassy in Kuwait by air and land before the Marines could get there.’ And that when we got to the embassy, you blew the safe and stole all the diplomats’ whiskey.”
“Really?” Svetlana said. She did not seem disapproving.
“He’s an evil man, Sweaty,” Castillo said. “Rotten to the core.”
“Sweaty?” Doña Alicia repeated.
“Was that before or after you made the Russian colonels sing ‘The Internationale’?” Dmitri Berezovsky asked.
“What?” Doña Alicia asked.
“A couple of days after, Colonel,” Davidson said. “We needed a little something to drink to celebrate the Well Done message we got from Bush One.”
“What Russian colonels singing?” Doña Alicia asked.
Berezovsky and Davidson related the Russian and American versions of the story.
“I should be ashamed of myself,” Doña Alicia then said. “My curiosity always seems to get out of control. We were talking about how bad General Naylor feels about your . . . retirement.”
“He shouldn’t,” Castillo said seriously. “He went along with Montvale because that’s what he thought his duty called for him to do. I did the same thing; I did what I thought was my duty. I’m not angry with Naylor, Abuela. Really. He’s always been one of the good guys.”
“What are you going to do when this is over and . . .”
“When I am ‘Lieutenant Colonel Castillo (Retired)’? Right now what I’m thinking is that I’ll move into Sweaty’s new house in the Pilar Golf and Polo Country Club and maybe even learn how to play golf. Or polo. Or both.”
My post-retirement plans are a little vague, probably because I don’t want to even think about them.
What the hell am I going to do?
I can’t imagine playing golf or polo. . . .
“What about coming back here?” Doña Alicia asked.
Lester came into the kitchen, saving him from having to answer the question.
“Mr. D’Allessando’s got Colonel Hamilton on the AFC for you, Colonel.”
And what happens to you, Lester, when this merry little band folds its tent and steals off into the night?
“Thanks, Lester.”
He motioned for everybody to follow him into the library, where Bradley had the AFC set up.
[FIVE]
0855 8 January 2006
When Castillo walked into the library, he saw that the first steps to convert it into the Command Post for what he was now thinking of as Operation Fish Farm had been taken by Corporal Bradley. The AFC had been set up on a table near a window. A bed for the 24/7 posting had been dragged in from somewhere and there was a coffeemaker on another table against the wall.
Chairs had been arranged around the table, and there were lined pads and several ballpoint pens on each pad. Aside from that, there was nothing on the table but Castillo’s and Davidson’s notebook computers and the AFC handset. The rest of what they were going to need was going to have to wait until Lester or Jack went shopping.
Castillo took the seat at the head of the table, with his back to the fireplace, which held a crackling fire. Dmitri Berezovsky took the seat on the left side of the table. Davidson slipped into the seat across from him. Svetlana and Doña Alicia sat together on the left at the other end of the table, and Bradley sat across from them.
A Winchester lever-action .44-40 rifle was mounted on pegs above the fireplace. Large, accurate-scale models of a U.S. Army AH-64 Apache attack helicopter and an M1A1 Abrams tank sat on the mantelpiece under it. Castillo had bought the Apache model in the bookstore at Fort Rucker shortly after having been rated in that aircraft and had it shipped home. Fernando had done about the same thing with the Abrams model: bought it at the Fort Knox bookstore and sent it home just before shipping out for the Desert War.
The Winchester was a family treasure, having been used on many dozen occasions to protect the Double-Bar-C and its cattle from marauding Apache Indians.
The M1A1 Abrams was named for one of the Army’s most distinguished Armor generals, Creighton W. Abrams. Among his great achievements, Abrams, as a lieutenant colonel, had broken through the German ring surrounding Bastogne to rescue the 101st Airborne.
The AH-64, an instructor at Rucker had told Castillo before he’d even been allowed to get close to one of them, was named after the Apache Indians in tribute to their characteristics as warriors. Castillo had had trouble believing his ears—and even more keeping his mouth shut.
He had thought of that instructor every time he had climbed into an AH- 64 Apache thereafter, wondering again and again if the Pentagon chair-warmer—or chair-warmers, plural—who had given it that name because of the warrior characteristics of the Apache Indians had done enough research. For example, to learn, as Castillo well knew, that the Apaches had expressed their contempt for settlers against whom they waged war by capturing settlers and hanging them alive upside-down over a small fire and slowly roasting their brains. Or, for example, leaving their captors spread-eagle in the desert sun with eyelids hacked off and enough small bloodletting incisions made in the genital area to attract ants and other desert fauna.
And now Castillo thought of chair-warmer types again as he reached for the SPEAKERPHONE button on the AFC.
“Good morning, sir. Castillo here.”
“So it says on this amazing device,” Colonel Hamilton replied. “I am taking Mr. D’Allessando’s word for it that we are now in Class One encryption.”
“Yes, sir, we are.”
“I have been hoping you would get in contact, Colonel Castillo, inasmuch as General McNab has informed me the press of his other duties forces him to leave this operation in your hands, so to speak.”
“Yes, si
r. That is my understanding.”
“Are you alone, Colonel? Mr. D’Allessando suggested you might wish him to be privy to this, and he’s with me.”
“I have my people with me, sir, and we’re on speakerphone.”
“Specifically, our new Russian friends?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Colonel Berezovsky, I regret I didn’t have more time to talk with you and your charming sister when we were in Florida,” Hamilton said. “But if you will continue to be available while we’re doing this, no real harm done.”
“Good morning, Colonel,” Berezovsky said. “We will be here.”
“There are some things that have to be done in the immediate future, Castillo, before Mr. DeWitt and I go into the Congo.”
“Sir, I wanted to talk to you about that,” Castillo said.
“About what?”
“Sir, what I’m thinking is that it would better if you didn’t actually go into the Congo.”
“That’s absurd. Wherever did you come up with that?”
“What I was thinking would make more sense, sir, would be if you remained outside the Congo—say, in Tanzania or Chad. . . .”
“I repeat, that’s absurd.”
“Colonel, you’re too valuable an asset to be put at risk.”
“I will make that judgment, Colonel. I have made that judgment. Now, as I was saying—”
“Sir, with respect, I must insist.”
“Colonel, you are in no position to insist on anything.”
“Sir, as you told me, General McNab has been forced to place this operation in my hands.”
“What General McNab said to me, Colonel, was that in the inevitable event we should find ourselves in disagreement, we could not look to him for resolution; we would have to do that ourselves.”
“Yes, sir, I understand that. Sir, may I say that I regard myself as the operation commander and you, sir, as very likely our most important asset, and that it is therefore my responsibility to protect you to the best of my ability.”
“What did you say your class was? At the Academy?”
“ ’Ninety, sir.”
“Then I can’t believe you said what you just said. You’re a West Pointer.”