Hazardous Duty pa-8

by W. E. B Griffin

  Otto still retained fatherly feelings for Charley. He had functioned as a de facto stepfather to him until, shortly before his mother’s death, Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger had been taken to the United States to become Carlos Guillermo Castillo.

  And Otto didn’t like Russians generally and hated the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki with a cold passion. Charley had dropped that nugget of information — that Sweaty had been an SVR lieutenant colonel — into his announcement of his pending marriage, deciding that getting that out in the open sooner was better than later.

  The term “SVR podpolkovnik” had produced in Otto’s mind the stereotype of a short-haired female with stainless steel teeth who looked like a weight lifter. When Sweaty came down the aircraft door stairs his face had shown his surprise at what he was getting — a spectacularly beautiful redhead — instead of what he had expected.

  His biggest surprise, however, was to come shortly after they were loaded into Otto’s Jaguar Vanden Plas, when, with visible effort, Otto produced a smile and inquired, “My dear, now that you’re here in Hersfeld, what would you like to do?”

  “Aside from going to the cemetery, which of course my Carlos wants to do before anything else, we’re completely in your hands, Herr Göerner.”

  Charley was shamed to painfully remember his reaction to that had been thinking, What the hell is Sweaty talking about?

  “Karl wants to go to the cemetery?” Otto had asked incredulously.

  “He’s told me what a saint, a truly godly woman, his mother was,” Sweaty went on. “I want to be there when he asks her blessing on our marriage.”

  “Karl’s mother was truly a saint,” Otto agreed.

  Charley was even more ashamed to remember his reaction to that, his thinking: Jesus Christ, she’s amazing. She hasn’t been in his car thirty seconds and she’s put ol’ Otto in her pocket. Well, you don’t get to be an SVR podpolkovnik without being able to manipulate people.

  Proof that Otto was in Sweaty’s pocket had come almost immediately. As soon as they got to the house — several minutes later — Otto turned from the front seat and announced, “There’s no sense in you two going into the house. I’ll have someone take care of your luggage and then Kurt can take you to the cemetery.”

  The only reason, Charley remembered with chagrin, that he hadn’t congratulated Sweaty on her manipulation of Otto on the way to the cemetery was because the chauffeur would have heard him.

  Sweaty looked up at Charley.

  “Aren’t you going to pray?” she asked.

  “I’m an Episcopalian,” he said. “We pray standing up.”

  That’s bullshit and I know it is. What it is is yet another proof that I’m a shameless liar. I wasn’t praying.

  And don’t try to wiggle out of the shameless liar business by saying that you’re a professional intelligence officer trained to instantly respond to a challenge by saying whatever necessary to get yourself off the hook.

  Sweaty stood, took his hand, and kissed him tenderly on the cheek.

  “I’m glad we came here,” she said.

  They started back to the car.

  “What exactly did you pray for?” Charley asked.

  “That’s between God, your mother, and me.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay,” Sweaty said, obviously changing her mind. “I asked God to reward your mother for being such a good mother to you, and to give her everlasting peace now that I’ve taken over for her. And I asked your mother to pray to the Holy Virgin that I will be as good a mother to our baby as she was to you. And you?”

  The reflexes of a professional intelligence officer trained to instantly respond to a challenge by saying whatever necessary to get himself off the hook kicked in automatically.

  “I asked God to give my mother peace, and prayed for you and our baby,” he heard himself say.

  Where the hell did that come from?

  It doesn’t matter. If I didn’t actually do that, I should have.

  God, if there are really no secrets from You, You know that.

  And by the way, thank You for Sweaty and the baby she’s carrying.

  When they got back in the car, Sweaty asked, in Russian, “Kurt, do you speak Russian?”

  When it became evident that Kurt did not speak Russian, Sweaty said, in German, “I was just curious.”

  Then she switched back to Russian.

  “Well, what do you think is going to happen tonight? Do we get to fool around in your childhood bed, or is Otto the Pure going to put us in separate rooms at opposite ends of that factory you call a house?”

  “Sweaty, I just don’t know.”

  God, if You didn’t hear me the first time, thank You for this woman.

  [TWO]

  When they got to Das Haus im Wald they found the Merry Outlaws, less Master Sergeant C. Gregory Damon, Retired, John and Sandra Britton, and Vic D’Alessandro — whom they had left behind in Budapest to deal with the logistical and other problems of getting into Somalia on some credible excuse — sitting in an assortment of chairs and couches in the top-floor living room of the House in the Woods snacking on a massive display of cold cuts. Castillo saw that Peg-Leg Lorimer was working at his laptop.

  Floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows showed fields green with new growth and what at first glance appeared to be an airfield. The Gulfstream V on which they had flown first from Cozumel to Budapest and then here was parked near a runway beside a Cessna Mustang, the smaller jet bearing German markings. There was also what looked like a deserted control tower, a four-story structure built of concrete blocks, the top floor of which was windowed on all sides.

  It was not a deserted aviation control tower, however. It had been built by the hated East German Volkspolizei after the Berlin Wall had gone up to keep an eye on the fence that then had separated East from West Germany, and had run through the Gossinger property.

  When the Berlin Wall — and the fence — came down, Castillo, who had been born and spent the first twelve years of his life in Das Haus im Wald as Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger, and now owned the property, ordered that the guard tower be left in place as a monument to the Cold War.

  Castillo went to see how Peg-Leg was coming with his SitRep, saw that he was nearly finished, and then inquired, “What time is it in Washington?”

  “Peg-Leg’s finished?” Lieutenant Colonel Allan B. Naylor asked.

  “How does that translate to hours and minutes?” Castillo asked.

  Allan gave Charley the finger, then said, “Five minutes after ten in the morning.”

  Peg-Leg pressed a button, and a printer began to whine, purr, and ultimately began to spit out printed pages.

  He handed them to Castillo, who read them, then handed them to Naylor.

  “Nice job, Peg-Leg,” he said.

  “What happens now?” Lorimer asked.

  “You get to ride to Berlin in the Mustang, where you will take these magnificent documents to the embassy for transmission. Meanwhile, Colonel Naylor and I will take Sweaty and whoever else wants to go on a tour of where we were innocent children together.

  “Tomorrow, presuming the Somali experts finally get here, we will drive to Cologne, where we will board Die Stadt Köln, a five-star river cruiser which we have chartered to ensure our conversations will not be overheard by the forces of evil, and sail up and down the Rhine River for four days.”

  “Wait until Lammelle gets the bill for that,” Dick Miller said.

  Naylor said, “Charley, I think it would be better if I went to Berlin with Peg-Leg.”

  Castillo considered that a moment, and then said, “Yeah. That’s not a shot at you, Peg-Leg. What I’m thinking is that an active duty light colonel from Central Command is liable to get more cooperation from the military attaché than some retired warrior such as you and me. And I don’t want that stuff delayed.”

  [THREE]

  Office of the Secretary of State

  The Harry S Truman Building

  2
201 C Street, N.W.

  Washington, D.C.

  1125 15 June 2007

  The secretary of State, on occasions like this, was extremely jealous of both Truman C. Ellsworth, the director of National Intelligence, and A. Franklin Lammelle, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. It had to do with their freedom of schedule and of travel.

  If they wanted to go somewhere, they got in their airplanes and went. With the exception of the President, no one had the authority to ask them where they were going or why. No one had that authority vis-à-vis the secretary of State, either, but the secretary of State was a public figure, and by definition the DCI and the DNI were the opposite. No one was supposed to know what they were doing.

  For most of her life, until she had become secretary of State, Natalie Cohen had really believed that lying and deception had been not only wrong but counterproductive. She had learned that from her father, an investment banker. It had attracted her to Mortimer Cohen, also the son of an investment banker, whom she had married three months after graduating from Vassar.

  Two sons had quickly followed, and she had tried — and thought she had succeeded in — instilling in them the high moral principles of her father and their father. She had been, she believed, a good Jewish mother to her boys, devoting her life to them until the youngest had gone off to preparatory school. The question then became what to do with the rest of her life.

  She was well schooled in economics — it had been her major in college — and she had learned a good deal more about finance, in particular international finance, from both her father and her husband.

  But neither, for reasons she understood, was happy with the prospect of her leaving her empty nest to join either of their firms. She was determined, however, to leave that empty nest, and the first thing she did was volunteer her services to various charitable organizations, including, for example, the United Jewish Appeal.

  She immediately proved herself to be very good at two things: the raising of money, and the straightening out of the often out-of-kilter administration of such organizations. She moved from good works to the State Department when the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, a Princeton classmate of Mortimer’s, asked her to join his staff as financial adviser.

  She moved from the UN to the State Department itself, where she was appointed deputy assistant secretary of State and given responsibility for doling out the taxpayers’ money to various foreign governments for various reasons. She held that position until there was a change of administration. She resigned when it became apparent to her that the new President posed a real threat to the United States, and she could not in good conscience work for him.

  She devoted the next three years and some months raising money for the campaign of the man who was to become Joshua Ezekiel Clendennen’s predecessor. During that period, she got to know him well, and Mortimer joked that when he gave speeches on international monetary and economic problems and their solutions, the candidate sounded like Natalie.

  As it became increasingly apparent that her guy was going to move into the White House, Natalie, who by then was familiar with the way Washington worked, knew that there was going to be some sort of reward for all the millions she had raised.

  And that worried her because the most likely reward was for her to be appointed the President’s ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary to the State of Israel. Considering, as she did, Israel as her spiritual homeland was not the same thing as being overjoyed at the prospect of moving there for four years.

  She had been to Tel Aviv often enough to know that it was hot, muggy, noisy, and crowded. Furthermore, the ultraorthodox Jews who had so much power in Israel made her uncomfortable. Finally, the ambassador’s residence there was not nearly as comfortable as either their house in Washington or their apartment in New York. And equally important, she was about to become a Jewish grandmother, and eagerly looking forward to that.

  The man-who-was-to-be-President elected to learn the election results in the Plaza Hotel in New York. Before going there, there was a really small dinner — designed primarily to give him a little rest so that he would be better prepared for whatever happened — at the Cohens’ apartment two blocks away on Fifth Avenue.

  Natalie and Mortimer had seriously considered not going to the Plaza at all. Watching the returns on Wolf News in their living room with their feet on the coffee table held far more appeal than did the Plaza. But the candidate insisted.

  “I need you around me, Natalie,” he said.

  So they went with him.

  And thirty seconds after Andy McClarren of Wolf News called the election, the President-elect said, “Natalie, my first appointment will be my secretary of State. Guess who?”

  “I have no idea, Mr. President-elect.”

  “I’ll give you a hint. She just fed me dinner.”

  That marked, she often thought, the end of her innocence. She had quickly learned that while lying and deception were still wrong, she could not honestly argue that they were counterproductive. The exact opposite now seemed inarguably to be the case.

  Some of the proofs of this were major, and some relatively minor, as her current problem showed.

  The basic, major problem was that Joshua Ezekiel Clendennen was as mad as a March hare. There was no question in Secretary Cohen’s mind about either that, or that he posed a genuine threat to the security of the United States.

  The law provided a solution to that problem. But it was very complicated. The Cabinet and certain other officers, in a meeting presided over by the secretary of State, would hear the evidence in the matter. Presuming they agreed that the President’s mental state was such that he could not perform the duties of his office, that committee would inform the Vice President and speaker of the House of their judgment, and that the Vice President — who was also president of the Senate — now was in charge, pending action by Congress.

  So many things could go terribly wrong, producing chaos in the country even exceeding the chaos and paralysis of the government the impeachment proceedings of President Nixon had caused, that Secretary Cohen had decided it would be undertaken only as the absolute last resort.

  And she was very much, even painfully, aware that the decision whether or not to remove President Clendennen was hers alone. The makeup of the “committee” that she chaired under the law was not precisely defined in the law.

  Frederick P. Palmer, the attorney general, had told her — unofficially — that it could be interpreted to mean that her authority to convene the committee carried with it the authority to decide which senior officials should be on it.

  She had run with this. The committee she was about to convene now included Palmer, Secretary of Defense Frederick K. Beiderman, DNI Ellsworth, DCI Lammelle, FBI Director Mark Schmidt, and two men who she realized had no right to be on the committee except for her decision to include them. They were General Allan B. Naylor and Lieutenant General Bruce J. McNab.

  McNab had insisted the meeting be held. President Clendennen’s appearance at Fort Bragg convinced him the Chief Executive was over the edge and had to go.

  Cohen had included Naylor because she concurred that he was, as Wolf News’ Andy McClarren had dubbed him, “the most important American general.” If the absolute worst scenario — civil insurrection — happened, he would be the man best able to apply martial law and — equally important — to end it when that became possible.

  When she telephoned Naylor to tell him they needed to meet, she had to be evasive to the point of not telling him that they were going to the Greenbrier. Frank Lammelle had told her that even encrypted conversations over the White House circuits were intercepted and decrypted by the NSA at Fort Meade, and that an astonishing number of people in many intelligence agencies had access to the intercepts — including outside contractors on occasion.

  The one thing that absolutely could not be allowed to happen was for President Clendennen to learn of the meeting.

  She had had the
same problem when she spoke with the FBI director, the secretary of Defense, and the attorney general. But not when she talked to Lammelle or McNab. Charley Castillo had equipped the latter, as he had Cohen, with CaseyBerry telephones. The interception equipment at Fort Meade had been designed and installed and was maintained by Aloysius Casey, Ph.D., and his design of the CaseyBerry ensured that the computers at Meade could not decrypt anything sent over the CaseyBerry network.

  The secretary had just finished her last call — with Defense Secretary Beiderman — setting up the travel arrangements for the meeting at the Greenbrier when the Communications Center duty officer appeared at her door.

  “Madam Secretary, there is a message from Lieutenant Colonel Naylor.”

  “Thank you, Martha.”

  The duty officer laid the messages on Cohen’s desk and she read them:

  TOP SECRET

  URGENT

  DUPLICATION FORBIDDEN

  TO: POTUS

  SUBJECT: CGC

  VIA SECRETARY OF STATE

  MAKE AVAILABLE (EYES ONLY) TO:

  DIRECTOR, CIA

  SECRETARY OF DEFENSE

  DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE

  C IN C CENTRAL COMMAND

  SITREP #3

  US EMBASSY BERLIN 1900 ZULU 15 JUNE 2007

  1-FOLLOWING FLIGHT TO BUDAPEST, MR. D’ALESSANDRO, THE BRITTONS, AND DAMON WERE PUT IN CONTACT WITH PERSONNEL WHO WILL ARRANGE THEIR INFILTRATION INTO SOMALIA AND THEIR EXTRACTION THEREFROM.

  2-REMAINING PERSONNEL OF OPERATION OUT OF THE BOX THEN FLEW TO HERSFELD, GERMANY, WHERE THEY WILL CONFER WITH CERTAIN JOURNALISTS KNOWN TO BE EXPERT REGARDING THE SOMALI PIRATE SITUATION.

  3-MR. DANTON’S REDACTED NEWS STORY ATTACHED WILL PROVIDE OTHER DETAILS. AS OF THIS TIME LTC CASTILLO STATES HE CANNOT ESTIMATE DATE OF SOMALIA INSERTION WITH MORE PRECISION THAN “WITHIN THE NEXT WEEK OR TEN DAYS.”

  RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED.

  NAYLOR, LTC

  TOP SECRET