Two men got out of the vehicle. One of them was a barrel-chested, very short, totally bald civilian wearing a T-shirt on which was painted in red the legend “Chief Snake Eater.” The second was a small, muscular, ruddy-faced man sporting a flowing red mustache. He wore aviator sunglasses and a camouflage-patterned Battle Dress Uniform.
An Air Force senior master sergeant came quickly out of Base Operations, his mouth open as if to say something — for example, “Can’t you see the sign, stupid?”—and as quickly he closed his mouth and went back in the building.
There was a red plate above the bumper of the SUV with three silver stars on it, indicating that it carried a lieutenant general. Lieutenant generals, like diplomats in any country but their own, can park just about wherever they want to, and this is especially true on an air force base where the commanding general has but one star to dazzle his underlings.
Moreover, the senior master sergeant recognized the man wearing the camo BDUs as Lieutenant General Bruce J. McNab, commanding general, United States Special Operations Command. He recognized the civilian, he had seen him many times before, often in the company of General McNab, but he couldn’t put a name on him. Very few people outside the upper echelons of the Special Operations community could.
The civilian’s name was Victor D’Alessandro. He was a civilian employee of the Department of the Army, a GS-15, which regulations stated entitled him to be considered an “assimilated colonel” when it came to providing quarters and so forth. He had retired from thirty years and three days of Army service as a chief warrant officer, grade V (CWO-5), which had paid him essentially the same pay and allowances as a lieutenant colonel. And before becoming a warrant officer, junior grade (WOJG, pronounced Woe-Jug), Mr. D’Alessandro had been a sergeant major.
The C-37A/Gulfstream V taxied up to the visiting aircraft tarmac a minute or so later. The upper portion of its fuselage was painted in a gleaming white, and the lower portion pale blue. There was no reference to either the U.S. Air Force or the U.S. Army 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. There was an American flag painted on the vertical stabilizer.
When the aircraft had stopped, the stair door behind the cockpit windows unfolded even before the whine of its engines died. A tall, erect lieutenant colonel of Cavalry who was in his thirties came nimbly down them, marched up to General McNab, saluted crisply, and announced, “General Naylor’s compliments, General. The general asks that you attend him aboard the aircraft.”
General McNab returned the salute.
“I hear and obey, Colonel Naylor,” McNab said, and walked toward the Gulfstream.
“Hey, Vic,” Lieutenant Colonel Naylor said, and extended his hand.
“How they hanging, Junior?” Vic D’Alessandro replied, and then wrapped his arms around him affectionately.
“One beside the other,” Naylor said, and waved D’Alessandro toward the airplane.
When he entered the Gulfstream, General McNab saw that General Naylor was sitting in what he thought of as “first class,” the foremost section of the passenger compartment, which held two chairs and a table.
He marched down the aisle, came to attention, saluted, and barked, “Lieutenant General McNab, Bruce J., accepting General Naylor’s kind invitation.”
Naylor was aware that McNab was being a wiseass again — what custom dictated that he should have said was “General McNab reporting as ordered”—and that saying what he had was to remind Naylor that he did not have the authority to order McNab to do anything.
He decided to let it ride.
He returned the salute, waved McNab into the other chair at the table, and said, “Thank you for meeting me, General.”
And then when he saw Vic D’Alessandro coming down the aisle toward them, Naylor added, “I was hoping for a private word with you.”
“Well, if you insist, I’ll send Vic away,” McNab said. “But if you’ll let him stay, that’ll save me the trouble of having to tell him later everything that happened here. I tell my executive secretary everything. Otherwise, you’ll understand, he couldn’t do his job.”
Naylor thought: McNab is entirely capable of having D’Alessandro on his organization chart as his executive secretary. He would find that amusing.
Naylor extended his hand.
“How are you, Mr. D’Alessandro?”
“I’m fine, thank you, sir.”
“Getting right to the point,” Naylor said. “I’ve just come from the White House.”
“I know,” McNab interrupted. “Frank Lammelle told me what happened there and said you’d be stopping by. Would it save time if we cut to the chase?”
“Lammelle told you?” Naylor asked coldly.
“He called me on my trusty CaseyBerry,” McNab said. “No. Correction. He called Vic on Vic’s trusty CaseyBerry, and told Vic when he found me to tell me you’d just broken ground at Andrews and were headed here. When I got the message, I called Frank and he told me why you were coming to see me. So can we cut to the chase?”
The “CaseyBerry” to which McNab referred was a cellular telephone resembling the BlackBerry. Officially, its name was Casey XP-13, which stood for Experimental Prototype, Version 13. It had a number of characteristics the BlackBerry did not have.
BlackBerrys communicate with “cell tower” antennae scattered widely across the United States and other places on earth. The CaseyBerrys communicated with satellites scattered twenty-seven thousand miles above the earth. CaseyBerrys automatically encrypted and decrypted whatever they transmitted (voice or images) in a code that even the vast National Security Agency batteries of computers at Fort Meade could not break.
This was because the designer and builder of the NSA code-breaking systems, Aloysius F. Casey, Ph.D., also designed the CaseyBerry XP-series communication devices.
* * *
Shortly after the First Desert War, Dr. Casey, the chairman of the board of the AFC Corporation, flew to Fort Bragg, N.C., in one of the firm’s Learjets. He had an appointment arranged by his U.S. Senator with the then newly appointed deputy commander of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center, Brigadier General Bruce J. McNab. McNab had returned from the war with his third Distinguished Service Cross, a Brigadier General’s Star, and the young second lieutenant who had been his personal pilot and whom he had named to be his first aide-de-camp.
McNab, suspecting that Dr. Casey was trying to sell the Army something, ordered his young aide-de-camp, whose name was C. G. Castillo, to get rid of Casey.
“I don’t care how, Charley, just keep that politically well-connected salesman away from me.”
Thirty minutes after meeting Dr. Casey, and after taking him on a helicopter tour of Smoke Bomb Hill, Blood Alley, and other Fort Bragg — area tourist attractions in which he thought Casey might be interested, Lieutenant Castillo telephoned General McNab and told him he thought the general really ought to talk to Dr. Casey.
“You better be right about this, Charley,” McNab replied. “Okay, bring him to lunch.”
Castillo was right about Dr. Casey. At lunch, Casey told them that during the Vietnam War he had been the commo sergeant on a Special Forces “A” Team. He told them that when he came home to Boston, instead of going to work for the post office or getting a job as a bus driver, as “somebody like me” was expected to do, he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and applied for admittance.
“I told them I didn’t have a high school diploma, but I’d been in the American Amateur Relay League since I was ten, and that I hadn’t met anybody in the Army who knew as much about the propagation of radio waves as I did, and I wanted to learn more. So they asked me a couple of questions… Correction, they questioned me for a couple of hours, and decided to give me a chance.
“I wouldn’t have had the balls to ask MIT to take a chance on a poor Irish kid from South B
oston if I hadn’t been a Green Beanie, so now it’s payback time.”
“I gather you made it at MIT?” General McNab asked, much more cordially now that he recognized Dr. Casey as a fellow Green Beanie.
“I got my bachelor’s and my high school diploma the first year, my master’s the next, and my Ph.D. in my third. I spent another year there teaching — that was payback I figured I owed — and while I was doing that, I started the company.”
“What do you mean, Dr. Casey, that it’s ‘payback time’?” Lieutenant Castillo asked.
“I told you once, Hotshot, to call me Aloysius,” Dr. Casey replied. “Don’t piss me off by making me tell you again.”
At this point, Dr. Casey, as was his wont, went off on a tangent.
“General, Hotshot here, who doesn’t look like he’s old enough to vote, is sporting wings and a Combat Infantry Badge. He’s got both?”
“And a Silver Star, two Purple Hearts, and a Distinguished Flying Cross,” General McNab replied.
“I’ll be goddamned,” Casey said, and then came back on course.
“What I mean is that I’m going to pay back what I got from Special Forces by giving you the best commo going.”
“That’s very kind of you,” McNab said. “But I’m sure you remember Special Forces gets its commo gear from the Signal Corps. Even if we had any money, and we don’t, we couldn’t buy—”
“You’re not listening. I didn’t say I wanted to sell you commo gear. I said I was going to give you commo gear. Payback is what I said.”
“That kind of equipment would entail a great deal of money,” McNab said.
“Yeah, well, my tax people tell me I can write it off as research and development. I’ll call what I give you prototypes or something.”
“And how soon were you planning to start doing something like this, Dr. Casey?”
“You can call me Aloysius, too,” Casey replied. “What I’d like to do is take Hotshot here out to Vegas this afternoon. I’ll show him what I have that I think Special Forces could use, and he could tell me what Special Forces needs and I’ll start working on that.”
“Why don’t you call me Bruce, Aloysius?” General McNab said.
“I couldn’t do that, for Christ’s sake, you’re a fucking general.”
“You have a point there, Aloysius,” General McNab said, and then turned to Lieutenant Castillo. “Go pack your bag, Charley, you’re going to Las Vegas.”
* * *
“And what did the director of Central Intelligence tell you, General, on your trusty CaseyBerry?” General Naylor asked.
General Naylor had seen CaseyBerrys function often enough to be familiar with their capabilities. He knew, too, that while Mr. Lammelle and General McNab, and McNab’s executive secretary, and Secretary Cohen — and others — had one, he didn’t.
This annoyed him greatly, and his annoyance spilled over into lost temper, as it often did when he was dealing with General McNab.
“Perhaps why I don’t have a CaseyBerry?”
“Yes, sir. He touched on that subject.”
“And what did he say?”
“If memory serves, sir, and mine usually does, he said something like, quote, Thank God, Naylor doesn’t have a CaseyBerry. If he did, he would have known where Charley is, and would have told our Loony Tune Commander in Chief, and we would really be up the creek on this. End quote. That is just about verbatim, sir.”
“He actually referred to the President in those terms?”
“Well, he knew that no one who would hear him would disagree with his characterization of President Clendennen.”
“And what do you think Mr. Lammelle meant when he said if the President knew where Castillo is, we would be…”
“‘Really up the creek on this’?”
“Yes.”
“DCI Lammelle feels, sir, and I agree with him, that disabusing the President of his notion to re-involve Castillo in the drug wars and involving him in the piracy problem is not going to be possible. So what he suggests, and Secretary Cohen concurs, is that we give the appearance of going along with it, until the President tires of it, whereupon he will come up with another nutty idea and forget this one.”
“Go on.”
“DCI Lammelle suggested that if you, he, Natalie Cohen, and I gave Colonel Castillo our word that he would not be loaded on an Aeroflot airplane and shipped to Siberia, he might be induced to appear to have answered the President’s call to hazardous duty.
“He would go to Mexico and, after reconnoitering the situation there, offer a solution to the drug problem that the President would feel was unsatisfactory.”
“Which would be?”
“I’m sure the general is aware of the scurrilous rumor circulating that the unofficial motto of Special Forces is ‘Kill everybody and let God sort it out.’”
“I’ve heard that,” Naylor said.
He thought that over for a long moment and then said, “That just might work.”
“We have a problem there, I’m afraid,” McNab said.
“Why? As long as the President thinks his orders are being obeyed, he’ll be less prone to order any additional action. If he can be stalled, so to speak, for sufficient time—”
“The problem is once again, sir, Lieutenant Colonel Castillo, Retired.”
“How so?”
“I spoke to him about an hour ago—”
“Amazing device, that CaseyBerry, isn’t it?” General Naylor interrupted.
“Yes, sir, it is. I outlined the parameters of the situation to Colonel Castillo, sir, and asked him how he would react to the suggestion that he accept a recall to active hazardous duty for a period not to exceed ninety days.”
“And what did he say?”
“He broke the connection without saying anything, sir.”
“He hung up on you?”
McNab nodded and then said, “I gave him ninety seconds in the belief that would be sufficient time for him to recover from his fit of hysterical laughter, and called back. Sweaty took the call—”
“‘Sweaty’?” Naylor parroted. “Oh, the Russian woman.”
“Yes, sir. Former Lieutenant Colonel Svetlana Alekseeva of the SVR. Now known as Susanna Barlow. Colonel Castillo’s fiancée.”
“His what? He’s going to marry her?” Naylor asked incredulously.
“Yes, sir. Just as soon as they can somehow get the government of the Russian Federation to declare her former husband, SVR Polkovnik Evgeny Alekseev to be deceased. Colonel Castillo is a gentleman, and gentlemen feel an obligation to marry women carrying their unborn children.”
“She’s pregnant?”
“Yes, sir, I understand that to be the case.”
“McNab, I have the feeling you’re mocking me,” Naylor said furiously.
“As you well know, since our plebe year at Hudson High, just being in the same room with you has induced an uncontrollable urge in me to mock you, even when you’re not in your Self-Righteous Mode, as you are now. But if you can bring yourself to call me Bruce, I will stop doing so now and we can see about solving the problem at hand as two old soldiers and classmates should do.”
Naylor glared at him for a long moment, and finally said, “Please do.” And then, after another pause, added, “Bruce.”
“Allan, I would not have violated Charley’s privacy by telling you that Sweaty’s in the family way, except that it’s obviously a fact bearing on our problem.”
“Understood. Thank you,” Naylor replied, and again added “Bruce” after a pause.
“When Sweaty came on the line, I gathered that she was less than enthusiastic about Charley doing what the President wants him to do. She said if I ever brought the subject up again, she would castrate me with a rusty otxokee mecto nanara.”
“With a what?”
“Latrine shovel.”
“Have you any suggestions on how we can solve our problem?” Naylor asked.
“As a matter of fact… Natalie says the las
t thing we can afford to happen is for C. Harry Whelan, Junior, or Andy McClarren to wonder what the hell you’re doing in Argentina and start asking questions—”
“I’ve been ordered to go down there,” Naylor interrupted.
“… so you can’t go down there.”
“What’s the alternative?”
“You want it step by step, or all at once?”
“All at once.”
“We’re all agreed on this, Allan. Frank, Natalie, and me.”
“Understood. Let’s hear it.”
“Frank’s Gulfstream comes here and picks up Vic D’Alessandro—”
“I think I see where you’re headed,” Naylor said.
“Stop interrupting me, for Christ’s sake, Allan!”
“Sorry.”
“And picks up Vic D’Alessandro, who is Charley’s oldest friend in Special Operations except for me. When Charley was flying me around in Desert One, Master Sergeant D’Alessandro was on the Gatling gun in the back.”
“I wasn’t aware of that.”
“I guess if you’re the most important general in the world, nobody can tell you to shut up.”
“Sorry,” Naylor said, and then, “I mean it. I’m sorry, Bruce, please go on.”
“And Charley’s oldest friend,” McNab went on.
Naylor opened his mouth to ask what was meant by that, but with a massive effort didn’t speak.
McNab pointed at Lieutenant Colonel Allan B. Naylor.
“They’ve been buddies since they were in short pants in that school in Fulda…”
“Saint Johan’s,” Lieutenant Colonel Naylor furnished.
“Unfortunately, Colonel, you’re apparently a chip off the old blockhead,” McNab said. “Shut up. When I want input from you, I’ll tell you.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
“That was when Charley was only Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger. Later, when he had also become that famous Texican — one Carlos Guillermo Castillo — Junior here followed him to West Point. Most recently, he was involved — on the fringes, to be sure, but involved — in Charley’s brief but successful incursion in the People’s Democratic Republic of Venezuela.
“Vic and Junior are, Natalie, Frank, and I feel, the ideal people to tell Charley all sides of the story. The three of us also feel that it is only fair to offer Charley the advice of fellow Outlaws we feel he might wish to bring with him, should he decide to go on active duty. People he trusts almost as much as he trusts Sweaty, who therefore may be able to overcome Sweaty’s rather firm position.
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