Hazardous Duty pa-8

by W. E. B Griffin

So, what to do? Billy dearly loved Max IV, but he had come to love Madchen, too, and couldn’t find it in his heart to banish her, after what Max IV had done to her.

  The answer came quickly: give Max IV to Karlchen.

  Karlchen was the Colonel’s grandson.

  Karlchen had played with Max I as an infant; they had loved each other at first sight. When Max II had come along, same thing. It was only because of Karlchen’s mother’s awful sickness, her arguments that with the Colonel and her brother gone, and her being sick, she couldn’t care for the dog, that he hadn’t given Max II to Karlchen right then, to take his mind off things.

  But Billy had taken Max II to Rhine-Main airfield to see Karlchen off to the United States just before his mother died. When Billy saw how the boy, crying, had wrapped his arms around the dog, he decided that Max II should go with him.

  That had resulted in a front-page headline by the bastards at the Frankfurter Rundshau: “Tages Zeitung Publishing Empire Chief Jailed for Punching Pan-American Airlines Station Chief Who Refused Passage for Fifty-Kilo Dog.”

  Things were different when Madchen banished Max IV from the canine connubial bed. Karlchen was now not only a man, but in the Colonel’s footsteps, an oberstleutnant in the American Army himself. He denied being an intelligence officer, but Billy had been around armies long enough to know better than that. Run-of-the-mill lieutenant colonels don’t fly themselves around the world in Gulfstream III airplanes.

  The next time Karlchen — now known as Charley — appeared in Budapest, Uncle Billy explained the Max IV — Madchen problem to him. Charley had understood.

  “Let’s see what he does when I tell him to get on the airplane. I’m not going to force him to go.”

  He stood inside the door of the Gulfstream.

  “Hey, Max,” he called in Hungarian. “You want to go to Argentina with me?”

  Max looked at Billy for a moment, then trotted to the airplane and took the stair-door steps three at a time.

  Billy Kocian went back to the penthouse in the Danubius Hotel Gellért and shared three bottles of the local grape — known as Bull’s Blood — with Sándor Tor. Tor, after doing hitches in the Wehrmacht, the French Foreign Legion, and the Budapest Police Department, was now chief of security for Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., and Billy’s best friend.

  During their conversation, Billy told Sándor that he now knew what his father must have felt like “when, wagging my tail like Max just now, I left home to go in the goddamn Wehrmacht.”

  “Let me get a quick shower and then I’ll get dressed, and we’ll go for a walk,” Castillo now said to Max IV. “I just can’t go back to sleep.”

  Max leapt with amazing agility and grace for his size onto the bed, put his head between his paws, and closed his eyes, as if saying, “Okay, you have your shower and I’ll take a little nap while I’m waiting.”

  * * *

  Charley came out of the bathroom and asked, “Ready?”

  Max got gracefully off the bed, walked to the French doors, and waited for Charley to open it. When he had, Max went through it, walked to a five-foot-tall marble statue of Saint Igor II of Kiev, who had been Grand Prince of Kiev before becoming a monk, which stood in the center of the patio, and raised his right rear leg.

  “You know what’ll happen if Sweaty sees you pissing on her favorite saint again.”

  Max ignored him, finished his business at hand, and then walked to the opening in the patio wall leading to the walkway and waited for Charley to join him.

  The walkway led toward the shore of Lake Nahuel Huapi. When Charley went through the opening, lights along the path automatically came on.

  Nothing of La Casa en el Bosque or its outbuildings was visible from the lake, or from the Llao Llao Hotel, which was across the lake, but the reverse was not true. At four places along the nearly half-mile shoreline there were, just about entirely concealed by huge pine and hardwood trees, four patio-like areas from which just about all of the lake, and the hotel, was visible.

  To a soldier’s eye, and Charley was a soldier, the patios appeared to have been designed and installed by someone familiar with the finer points of observation posts and machine-gun emplacements. While he had never seen a machine gun or a mortar tube in any of them, he would not have been surprised if such could be installed in minutes.

  He didn’t know if the patios and the neat little buildings that might be holding machine guns and mortars had been there when Aleksandr Pevsner had bought the place — that it was a clone of Hermann Göring’s Karin Hall was very interesting — or whether Aleksandr Pevsner had put them in.

  Just that they were there, and manned around the clock.

  And being a soldier, Charley knew that when he and Max got to the patio now, they had arrived as the corporal of the guard, so to speak, was about to post the new guard.

  There were five men on the patio, four sturdy, good-looking men with Uzi submachine guns hanging from their shoulders and a huge man, a Hungarian by the name of Janos Kodály, who had been in the Államvédelmi Hatóság before becoming Aleksandr Pevsner’s bodyguard, and was now in charge of his security.

  They all came to attention — Castillo was not surprised, as he knew the four men were all ex-Spetsnaz, the Russian equivalent of Special Forces, and what to do when an officer appeared was a Pavlovian reaction for them — when Charley and Max walked onto the patio.

  “Cтоять вольно,” Charley ordered in Russian, and the men stood “at ease” in response to Charley’s Pavlovian reaction. Then he switched to Hungarian and said, “Janos, aren’t you a little long in the tooth to be playing Corporal of the Guard at this hour?”

  Two of the ex-Spetsnaz apparently spoke — or at least understood — Hungarian, because they smiled.

  Janos didn’t reply directly, instead saying, “My Colonel, there is a thermos of tea.”

  “Great,” Charley said.

  * * *

  When he was five, Charley’s great-aunt Erzsebet Cséfalzvik, his grandfather’s sister, had decided to teach him how to speak Hungarian. His response had been amazing. Within a week, he was chattering away fluently with the old woman, which greatly annoyed his mother, who did not speak Hungarian.

  By the time he left for the United States, Aunt Erzsebet had died, but he had heard some of her story, and later learned the rest.

  She was considerably older than her brother. As a very young woman she had married a Hungarian nobleman whom she had met while he was a student at Philipps University in Marburg an der Lahn. That explained why Karlchen’s mother had sometimes derisively referred to her as “the Countess.”

  There was some kind of bad blood between her and the Gossingers — Charley later learned his great-grandfather had been violently opposed to her marriage — and she never returned to Germany until after World War II. Then she showed up at her brother’s house in Fulda, destitute and starving. She had been evicted from “the estates” by the Communists, and had nowhere else, no one else, to turn to.

  She earned her keep when Charley’s grandmother died soon after his mother was born. Aunt Erzsebet had raised his mother.

  As long as she lived, the old woman regaled Karlchen with tales of life in Hungary during “the Good Times.” He regarded them as being something like the story of King Arthur in Camelot, nice, but unbelievable.

  When he was six, Karlchen was enrolled in Saint Johan’s School, which was experimenting with the notion that a good way to teach a foreign language to the young was to start when they were young. Karlchen was enrolled in the English program, and was old enough to understand this had caused problems between his mother and his grandfather. Something to do with his mysteriously missing father.

  Two weeks into that program, Charley’s teacher asked him, “I didn’t think you spoke any English at all.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “And all of a sudden you do?”

  “I guess I got that from Allan,” he had truthfully replied, in Engli
sh, making reference to his new buddy, an American boy by the name of Allan Naylor. “I started to talk to him, and pretty soon it got easy.”

  By the time Karlchen went to the United States as Carlos Guillermo Castillo, he spoke Hungarian, Russian, French, Slovak, and Italian, in addition, of course, to German and English.

  And he was also smart enough to know that his unusual facility with languages caused people to look upon him as some sort of freak, so he kept his mouth shut about it.

  When two weeks of conversation with his newfound cousin Fernando Lopez had him speaking Spanish as well as Fernando, whose mother tongue it was, he kept that under his hat until his newfound abuela commented on it.

  He started to lie to her, to tell her he had studied Spanish in Saint Johan’s School, but when he saw his grandmother’s eyes on him, he realized he couldn’t lie to her, and told her the truth.

  His abuela told him that she thought it would be a good idea if he didn’t tell people about that gift from God; they probably wouldn’t understand.

  Later, when the Army sent him as a young lieutenant to the Language School at Monterey for the basic course in Cantonese Chinese, he was rated as having “native fluency” in Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese, when given those tests.

  At this point another mentor, this one Brigadier General Bruce J. McNab, offered advice much like that offered by his grandmother.

  “What we are going to do, Hotshot, is lose this report from the Language School. If those chair warmers in Washington learn about this, God only knows what they’ll come up with for you to do. They took a superb officer, Lieutenant General Vernon E. Walters, who has the same affliction you do — he hears a language and then can speak it — out of uniform and made the poor bastard ambassador to the goddamned United Nations.”

  There had been one final contact with Karlchen’s first language instructor. In 1990, the newly independent government of Hungary had returned to their rightful owners all properties of the Hungarian nobility that had been seized on one pretense or another — or simply seized — by Admiral Miklós Horthy, the Hungarian regent; the Nazis, who replaced the admiral; and the Communists, who replaced the Nazis.

  This included the estates of the late Grafin — Countess — Erzsebet of Cséfalzvik. In her last will and testament, the countess had left all of her property of whatever kind and wherever located to her beloved grandnephew, Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger, and decreed that the Cséfalzvik titles would pass on her death to her aforesaid beloved grandnephew.

  Billy Kocian took over the administration of the estates, which included Castle Cséfalzvik, now a hotel, the farmlands, the vineyards, and considered then decided against moving into the Cséfalzvik mansion in Budapest. Instead, he rented it to a Saudi Arabian prince who was fascinated with Hungarian women and was willing and more than able to pay whatever asked to rent a suitable place to entertain them.

  Billy Kocian also told Karlchen that if he was waiting for him to address him as His Grace, Duke Karl I of Cséfalzvik, it would be wise not to hold his breath.

  [TWO]

  La Casa en el Bosque

  San Carlos de Bariloche

  Río Negro Province, Argentina

  0930 7 June 2007

  Following Morning Prayer in the chapel, breakfast was served in the Breakfast Room of La Casa, which overlooked the mansion’s formal gardens.

  Charley had attended Morning Prayer because he knew if he didn’t Sweaty would deny him the privileges of their prenuptial couch and also because he liked the ceremony itself. Much of the service was sung — men only, including about a dozen ex-Spetsnaz — and their voices had a haunting beauty.

  His Eminence was in fine voice, and showed no signs of suffering from all the wine of the previous evening.

  The breakfast that followed was literally a movable feast. Just as soon as His Eminence had expressed his gratitude to the Deity for the bounty they were about to receive, white-jacketed servants began rolling in that bounty on carts. There was champagne and cognac (Argentine, and labeled as such because the Argentines could see no reason to give the French exclusive rights to those appellations for sparkling wine or distilled white wine); salmon (Chilean, from a bona fide fish farm Aleksandr Pevsner owned there); caviar (Uruguayan, which Aleksandr Pevsner decreed as just about as good as that from the sturgeon in the Black Sea); the expected locally sourced eggs, breads, ham, trout, and fruit; and the not expected — Aleksandr Pevsner’s favorite breakfast food, American pancakes, served with what he called “that marvelous tree juice,” or maple syrup.

  Sweaty beamed when His Eminence called to her to sit beside him at the long table. “And you, Carlos, my son, on my other side.”

  And her smile grew even broader when His Eminence said, “I think the time has come to discuss plans for the wedding.”

  It disappeared a moment later when His Eminence went on, “Starting with when. How long do you think your intended will be gone?”

  “Gone where, Your Eminence?” Svetlana asked.

  “Wherever this ‘extended hazardous active duty’ Colonel Naylor told us about takes him. How long would you say that’s going to take him?”

  Svetlana was struck dumb.

  “Carlos,” His Eminence went on, “is really fortunate in that very few brides-to-be have the sort of experience you do. Most would not understand how important answering the call of duty is.”

  “Your Eminence,” Charley said, “I never like to take risks without a good reason, and I don’t see any good reason to take this one.”

  “But I would suggest your friends do,” His Eminence reasoned, “otherwise they wouldn’t be here.”

  His Eminence leaned over and looked past Svetlana to Jake Torine, who was sitting farther down the table.

  “Colonel, why do you think Colonel Castillo should take this assignment?”

  “Your Eminence,” Charley said politely, and then very quickly realized (a) that his temper was rising, (b) had in fact risen, and (c) that he had every right to be pissed—Who the hell are you to be deciding what I should or should not do? — went on, somewhat less politely, “I don’t give a damn what Jake thinks. It’s my ass on the line here, not his. Or, for that matter, yours.”

  “Carlos!” Sweaty said, horrified.

  The archbishop was unruffled.

  “Perhaps you would be good enough, my son, to tell me why you are so opposed to doing your duty?”

  “Generally, because it’s not my duty, and specifically because I don’t want to wind up in the basement of that beautiful building on Lubyanka Square.”

  The beautiful building to which he referred had been built in Moscow in 1900 as luxury apartments renting for two or three times the norm. The Trump Towers or the One57 building of its time, so to speak. In 1919, the capitalist tenants were evicted by Felix Dzerzhinsky so that the building could be put to use for the benefit of the workers and peasants. The Cheka moved in, and the storage areas in the basement were converted to cells. The building has been occupied ever since by successor organizations to the Cheka.

  His Eminence apparently knew about Lubyanka, but was again unruffled.

  “And you believe, my son, that would be inevitable?”

  “I don’t play Russian roulette, either,” Charley said.

  Vic D’Alessandro laughed, then raised his hand and asked, “Permission to speak, Colonel, sir?”

  “If you think this is funny, go fuck yourself,” Charley replied.

  “I’ll take that as ‘Permission granted,’” D’Alessandro said. “Thank you, sir.”

  Charley gave him the finger.

  “Your Eminence,” Svetlana said, “I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive my Carlos. He tends to forget his manners when he’s a little upset.”

  The archbishop graciously gestured that he was prepared to forgive Svetlana’s Carlos, and then that D’Alessandro should continue.

  “Your Eminence, I have known Colonel Castillo since he was a second lieutenant
maybe five months out of West Point,” D’Alessandro said. “When I met him he already had the Distinguished Flying Cross and his first Purple Heart—”

  “Jesus Christ!” Charley said.

  “If you love God, you should not blaspheme, my son,” the archbishop said. “Please continue, Mr. D’Alessandro.”

  “And in the next couple of weeks,” D’Alessandro went on, “he had the Silver Star, another Purple Heart, and an assignment as aide-de-camp to an up-and-coming new brigadier general.

  “At that point, we began to call him, and he thought of himself, as ‘Hotshot.’”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?” Charley demanded. “And I never thought of myself as ‘Hotshot.’”

  D’Alessandro laughed, shook his head, and then went on, “And what Hotshot decided then was that he had the Army figured out. Just so long as he kept getting medals, he wouldn’t have to do what ordinary soldiers spent most of their time doing.”

  “I don’t think I understand,” the archbishop said.

  “Napoleon said, ‘An army travels on its stomach,’” D’Alessandro said. “He was wrong. The army travels on paper.”

  The archbishop shook his head, signaling he still didn’t understand.

  “Soldiers, Your Eminence, especially officers, spend a great deal of time making reports of unimportant things that no one ever reads. For all of his career, Charley skillfully managed to avoid doing so. But that’s over.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Castillo asked.

  “Solving your problem with the President.”

  “By writing reports?” Castillo asked. “Reports about what?”

  “On the way down here, Frank Lammelle sent me this,” D’Alessandro said, as he took out his CaseyBerry. “He recorded it while the President was telling everybody about his latest brilliant idea. Pay attention.”

  He played the recording.

  “Well,” D’Alessandro then asked Castillo, “what did you get out of that?”

  His Eminence answered the question.

  “Paraphrasing what the President said, he wants to involve Colonel Castillo as a knowledgeable, objective observer of the piracy and drug problems to see how those situations are being handled, and to report his observations and recommendations directly to him. What’s the problem there? That sounds reasonable. It doesn’t even seem hazardous.”