by Marcus Wynne
“Tell me about the filling in the slot piece,” Hunter said.
Mike and Bob exchanged worried looks. Morgan smiled at their discomfort.
“We’d want you to carry a gun on some of our jobs. Work with some of our paramilitary and direct action people from time to time, who would be in a country you would be laying over in. Since you can carry in and out without a problem, it would help us out, on operations of national importance, to have someone of your expertise watching our guys’ backs. And yes, your Administrator has already approved this…look, understand this, Hunter: this is a tasking from your chain of command in response to our request. But I’m here to tell you, if you’re not interested in playing, just say so. We’ll find a way to get the job done without you.”
Bob shifted in his seat and said, “The Administrator wants this…”
“Doesn’t matter what he wants,” Morgan said. “If the man doesn’t want to do it, we don’t want him.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t want it,” Hunter said. “I said I wanted to know what I’m expected to do. That’s a reasonable request.”
“Yes,” Morgan said. “It is.”
“I’ll do it,” Hunter said. “What’s next?”
“Training,” Morgan said. “We’ll have you down to Williamsburg for two weeks TDY, go through our basic tradecraft 101. Then a little jaunt out to Harvey’s Point. Then you go back to work, just like you normally do. On those missions when we need you, we will contact you directly -- not the FAM chain of command, directly. You’re under our operational control in those instances. Again, with the full agreement and concurrence of your administration. We want you to sign some non-disclosure agreements, standard stuff, basic handling of classified information applies. Need to know only, and after this point, no one in the FAM program needs to know what you’re doing with us, except your Administrator, and he gets a direct briefing from the DCI. That’s how far up the food chain you’re going to be.”
“How do I handle the training?” Hunter said.
“You have a reputation for taking time off to attend private training. This will be more of the same. You’ll file a leave slip, you take your leave. We’ll make it up to you. It will be approved, and you come play with us. Then we’ll put you to work.”
“Who will I be working with?” Hunter said.
Morgan smiled. “I think you already know the answer to that question.”
1
So it began.
First was the tradecraft course, a fast “shake and bake” course designed for foreign assets to get them up to speed in a hurry. A minimum of classroom time, a maximum amount of time practicing on the streets of Williamsburg, Washington DC and Baltimore the hard skills that make up the skill set of the intelligence and urban special operations operator: brush passes, identifying, setting up and serving dead drops; covert recognition and signals; counter surveillance and surveillance, with an emphasis on solo activities, the “singleton” course…
Then the paramilitary short course at Harvey’s Point -- weapons, where he ended up showing the pistol instructors more than they’d shown him, foreign weapons, where the staff, halfway through the first day, handed him a set of keys to the arms room and told him to help himself while they had coffee; explosives, where he paid more attention, though he wondered out loud why he would need to know how to build a car bomb or plant explosives under a car seat.
More exercises, concluding with a long 4 day weekend in which he dodged role players and even some real police in Richmond, VA, servicing a dead drop, and then in an interesting wrench in the works, tasked to pick up an asset whose cover had been blown, and get him out on a pipeline he had to set up from scratch.
Hunter had done well on that. He’d cultivated a source at the local general aviation airport, and gotten a plane ride for the two of them out of Baltimore and then to Fayetteville, North Carolina, home to Fort Bragg and the Special Forces, where he linked up with a friend of his, a retired first sergeant, who drove them the long way around back to Williamsburg.
The instructors had laughed out loud, and shook their head at his improvisation, and later, in the bar, bought him all the beer he could hold.
“Nobody’s ever done it that way,” the senior instructor, a seasoned paramilitary hand who had retired from Special Forces before he’d retired from CIA. “But I reckon that’s what comes from having an airborne staff sergeant cut loose amongst all these officer types!”
Hunter drained his beer with satisfaction.
So far, life was good.
2
His instructions came to him via e-mail. Once a day he logged onto Hotmail from his PDA, and opened his account name [email protected]. In the DRAFTS folder there would be a draft message if he had an assignment. If not, nothing. But if there was, there would be brief, succinct and cryptic plain English directions for him to follow: “After you check into your hotel on the second leg of your mission, go for a walk from the hotel to the Holiday Inn.”
The first time he’d done just that, and saw scrawled on the sidewalk a smear of white chalk that had been his signal while in training at Williamsburg. He’d gone into the coffee shop the mark was in front of and taken a seat at the rear, and then after a few minutes, a Greek man at a near by table got up and handed him a newspaper.
“I think you dropped this, sir,” he said, in perfect English. And then left.
Hunter flipped open the paper and midway through was a sheet of onionskin with a sketch map of a route from the coffee shop. Halfway through the route he felt a bump and a hand touch, briefly, his front pocket, and as he went on, he felt the small lump of some item slipped in there. He finished walking the route, and then made his way back to the hotel, where he found a small capsule that appeared to have rolled up pieces of very thin paper inside. On a mandatory visit to the embassy to read traffic, a consular officer he’d never seen before came up to him, and said, “I think you have something for me.”
“Sure,” Hunter said. He shook the man’s hand and palmed off the capsule. The young consular officer nodded and walked away, and no one noticed.
That was the thing that struck Hunter most about this whole business of tradecraft, spookdom, special operations -- it went on in plain sight all around the civilians, but they never noticed. The tic and tug of body signals, the chalk marks in plain sight, the brush pass, the hide in open view e-mail messages that never went anywhere…it was as though he were in a foreign country and he was the only person who spoke the language, and everyone else was effectively deaf, dumb, and blind.
At first, the novelty was exciting. But after a time, a short time, the mundane reality of the intelligence world set in. It’s a cautious life, not the life of a gunfighter or a door kicker, it’s a life of procedure rigidly adhered to, the demands of tradecraft calling for a higher standard than most would ever understand, the avoidance of risk, the emphasis on blending in and being innocuous…
…the world of deception. Total deception.
It was one thing to be undercover as an air marshal, to practice tradecraft to protect one’s self on the ground from both random crime and targeted terrorism; it was another thing, a strangely exhilarating thing, to be undercover within that cover, to be hiding his activities on behalf of the Agency within his duties as a FAM, to often be accomplishing his missions within the context of another mission, in the view and plain sight of his other marshals.
He had always been a loner, and his penchant for solo wanderings had long ago ceased to cause any discussion. Every once in awhile, a new operator would make some comment about how Hunter thought he was better than everybody else, or that he was anti-social, but the other team members shut them up and clued them in fast enough. Sometimes, just for the appearance, and also as an exercise in his growing skill at deception, Hunter would invite someone else along while he walked a route, sometimes even when he did a brush pass or serviced a dead letter box.
They never saw a thing.
He neve
r got any feedback, though he was sure he was observed from time to time. As his intuitive abilities grew, there were times when he looked up to see someone watching him, or sensed, rather than heard, the click and whir of a camera near him. But he never sensed hostile intent there…instead, faint and far off, the sense that he was being judged and evaluated and assessed in preparation for something bigger…
Something more dangerous.
In Frankfurt’s Flughaven airport, in the English language bookstore, while he lingered and paged through magazines, an older woman picked up a guidebook on Frankfurt restaurants and edged up beside him.
“There are some wonderful restaurants here, young American,” she said, smiling, her English excellent through her accent, which sounded more like old Berlin instead of Frankfurt.
“Yes,” Hunter said. “I’ve found that be so.”
“You like German food? Good,” she said, smiling. “You should try this place. She handed him the book, an index card marking a place. He opened the book and saw that the index card was actually a postcard, with the black and white grinning visage of Felix the Cat.
Alleycat.
The card marked a restaurant called The Basler Eck, right before the bridge over the Main River, down the street from the Frankfurt Central Train Station. Lightly penciled in the margin of the book was the notation 8 p.m.
Alleycat.
At a quarter of 8, Hunter eased through the heavy oaken door into the crush of bodies wreathed in cigarette smoke and smell of fresh ales, the clatter of dishes and beer steins and jovial shouting over the din. The door opened into the bar, and then off to one side was an alcove where a Junoesque blond with a demented leer presided over a greasy podium.
Behind was a smoky, dark warren of little nooks with tables in them, with a few spread out across the floor, mainly filled with Germans, though he spotted in one corner a gaggle of flight attendants, American, he thought, and ducked his head so they wouldn’t recognize him. But then, they probably would not, as he wasn’t in his usual FAM uniform of leather jacket, levis, baggy sweatshirt and running shoes. He was dressed European, in a white button shirt worn open at the collar beneath a rumpled black cotton sportcoat and dark denims and black lace ups, and with his stubble looked like any other German out for a drink and a meal.
At the podium, the big blond leered at him.
“Ein Tisch für eine Person, bitte,” Hunter said.
“Ja, liebchen,” she whispered in a smoker’s husky voice.
He followed in her wake to one table, then pointed at one in the back, a corner table with a good view of the restaurant into the bar. He settled himself down, and glanced at the tables around him. Two tables away from him, Paul Raven looked up from a platter of roast pork and potatoes and winked.
Hunter had walked right by him.
Raven grinned and waved him over to the table. Hunter picked up his menu and went to sit down, angling his chair so he could still see the main floor and bar.
“Nice diffusion,” Hunter said.
Raven just grinned. “You have to be the black hole, young gun. The attention either slips over you or just disappears….”
“Good to see you, Paul…”
“Likewise, Hunter.” The older man smiled and gripped Hunter’s hand hard. “Damn good.”
“So what’s good?”
“It’s all good. Try the jaeger schnitzel, it’s great. Hans makes the gravy, nothing from a can here, will make your eyes cross it’s so damn good.”
Hunter waved the waiter over, pointed at the jaeger schnitzel. The waiter nodded and hurried away.
“So I guess I need some work on my vision skills, huh?” Hunter said.
“You gonna run with the big dogs, you got to pee on the tall trees, dude,” Raven said, a wicked grin in place. His face was seamed more than Hunter remembered, and there were new shocks of gray in his thin hair. “Course, it’s always a challenge when you got to go against the old gray dog…”
“Tell me about it,” Hunter said. “I owe you a thanks for getting me into this stuff…”
“They didn’t give you a pay raise, though, did they?” Raven said.
“Why would they?”
“You’re a servant of two masters now, young Jedi. You serve both the black and the white. You should be drawing two salaries.”
“I’d just spend it on knives, anyway,” Hunter said lightly.
“Seriously, Hunter. If you’re going to continue doing this…and I hope that you will…you should be compensated for the extra work. GS-13 isn’t bad for what you’re supposed to be doing, but we’re getting a lot of bang for our buck with you…wouldn’t be like we can’t afford it. Paying you, I mean.”
“I don’t think that’s legal.”
“I don’t much care if it is or not. We can pay it into an account, Aruban probably, and you can draw from it whenever you want. Or bank it for retirement. Or give it to the orphans. Spend it on some training.”
“No need for that, Paul…”
“Bullshit. There’s always a need for money, Hunter. You’re still in the young and idealistic stage of your career. Wait a while. Things will change. Take what you can for yourself, because there will come a time, trust me on this, that you will want to walk away. And who knows? Maybe it will actually be the right time for you to walk away. Not too early, because you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering ‘What if?’. Not too late, because you’ll go out like a doddering buffoon, and that’s how people will remember you. Go out at the right time, with money in the bank, go sit on the beach, or travel around and do the training and research you always wanted to do but didn’t have time or money to do. Have a life outside the mission, outside the work…”
“Do you? Have a life? Outside the mission, outside the work?”
Raven looked away, and for the first time, Hunter really saw the face beneath the face the Alleycat held up for the world to see, and it was a glimpse of an old man getting older, a man alone and bitter and sad…just a glimpse, and then he was gone…
“I thought I did,” Raven said. “Had a wife, a daughter. My wife said I sacrificed my family on the alter of Service to the great god Duty. Pretty good line, I thought. You don’t want to go that way, Hunter. At the end of the day, you’ll be left with a reputation, a name…but that isn’t going to sustain you when you’re alone in your house, with no one around you, an empty bed, and the absence of a child ringing like the silence after the tolling of a great bell. At the end of things, Hunter, the only thing worth having are those people who love you and the people you love.”
He looked away again, then back at Hunter. “And the money, of course.”
Raven laughed, and to anyone else, it would have sounded rich and full and hearty and true.
But not anymore, not to Hunter.
“Thanks for telling me that, Paul,” Hunter said. “I never knew you were married. Or had a kid. Do you see them?”
“No,” Paul said. Something dark stirred in the back of his eyes as he gazed at Hunter. “My life right now doesn’t allow for that. Something to think about for yourself, Hunter.”
“I was married…”
“Yeah, I know,” Paul said. “We worked her up when we did our clearance on you.”
Hunter didn’t know how he felt about that; it was always such a one way street with Raven. The older man knew so much, and knew so much about him, and he knew so very little about this man.
“I think about having a family, sometimes,” Hunter said. “Think I’d like to get married again, have a kid, have a couple of kids. Down the road.”
“Make sure you make the right decisions on what road you’re on and what turns you take, then,” Raven said, a note of harshness in his voice. “You’re a soldier in a war now, Hunter. And it’s just going to get worse. This war started in the 70s, when the Iranians took down our embassy in Tehran. You get bits and pieces of it from the traffic and your intel guys; I get a lot bigger picture. As you will, you continue to play in our
league. The Russians built the perfect training ground for the Islamic extremists, the Wahabists, in Afghanistan. And we’re just starting to see the next generation come out of there. We’re watching a lot of these groups, especially those being funded in Iraq and Iran and Syria…there’s a big Saudi connection too, but the politicians just about shit themselves you start talking about discreet Saudi funding for terrorist operations.
“There’s a guy we’re watching, Osama bin Laden. You ever hear of him?”
“No.”
“You will, someday. Mark my words. He’s got money, smarts, and an organization. We’re tracking down his fingers in all kinds of pies. He’s the leading exponent of 4th generation warfare out there…Musashi and Sun Tzu would be watching him if he’d been Chinese back in the day. How’s your reading coming?”
“Good. Tell me more about this…”
“It’s not just about random terrorist groups striking out to espouse their philosophies any more…that’s evolved. There’s a consensus, and you see groups all around the world united under Islam, and America is the Great Enemy, the Great Satan. They hate us out of envy for our lifestyle, and everything we do, everything we hold dear, from religious freedom on out, is anathema to them…it’s not like they’re drawing together so much as they are all independently working towards the same goal…and you’ve got people as disparate as Caucasians from Chechnya to Filipinos in Mindanao all getting money from people like bin Laden and his organization -- all to kill and attack Americans. They’re all bent out of shape about our troops in Saudia…the Islam holy land they see as being desecrated by “crusaders.”
“They’re not going to go away, and there is no negotiating with them. Give them the time, leave them alone, and they will come up swinging with deadly force. They’re out there, trying to collect nukes -- like those hundred missing suitcase nukes the Russians can’t account for, or biological warfare stuff from the Biopreparat lab staff that went unemployed after the fall of the Soviet Union…and someday, they’re going to strike the mainland US.