Beware the Jabberwock (Post Cold War Thrillers)

by Chester D. Campbell

  "You're not thinking—?"

  "I'm only considering what you suggest could happen." The General raised his eyebrows, lining his forehead with deep wrinkles. "You have had several presidents die in office. And, we, of course, once had a succession of short-lived chairmen."

  The American pondered the thought, a grim look on his face. The President was in obvious good health. His death could only come at the hands of an assassin. A rather severe solution. But, under the circumstances, was it unthinkable?

  The information he had received from the General confirmed his belief that this President was allowing things to move in a direction that threatened the very existence of the nation. In a way, this was war. A war of survival for the United States of America. What was it Barry Goldwater had said? Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice...moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. The man in the White House had become the most dangerous of enemies. He held the power to destroy two hundred years of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He had to be stopped, and there was only one sure way of doing it. He would have to become a casualty of war.

  “You have placed the problem in its proper perspective,” the General said. “Nothing short of a dramatic removal of the men at the top would shock our people back to their senses."

  The Foxhunter stared at him. Conspiracy at the top had been a staple of Russian rule since the time of the czars, but was America all that different? "We would have a much more conservative vice president moving up," he said, adding to himself, one we should be able to manipulate with much greater success.

  "My country most assuredly has more suitable men ready to step into the breech."

  The more the American thought about it, the more appealing the idea became. The system had its checks and balances, but sometimes it could get so far out of balance that the checks acted more like roadblocks, deterrents to effective action. This Congress was far too liberal, and the executive branch appeared unable to cope with it. Should something happen to the President, his more conservative replacement would enjoy a wave of popular sympathy, plus the traditional "honeymoon" accorded a new chief executive. It could provide just the thrust needed to turn things around.

  Yes, he agreed with the Russian's assessment. There appeared to be no other choice. Even so, he knew he was not the final arbiter. He would take back the recommendation, but it would be up to others to make the decision. His job was that of a quarterback, calling the signals, putting the ball in the hands of those who would score.

  As the General poured more coffee, the Foxhunter’s voice turned almost playful, something quite out of character. "You don't happen to have a couple of Lee Harvey Oswalds stashed away in Lefortovo, do you, General?"

  "No Oswalds. This will require the greatest degree of sophistication. It should be a single stroke." The Russian's words came in bursts, like automatic rifle fire. "Done with the leaders together. Somewhere outside our own countries. With traces leading away from us. Pointing toward a third party."

  "You're talking about a major operation. Multiple resources. It would take time to set up."

  "Without doubt. We will have to wait for the right opportunity. Hopefully my people will be able to hold things together until then. It will require innovation. Absolute surprise. I am sure my patrons would be willing to commit whatever human resources are necessary. As for monetary resources." He winced. "We are somewhat limited."

  "Money will be no problem if my backers like the idea. We'd want people intimately involved in the operation, of course."

  He didn't trust the General and his communist cohorts any more than they trusted him. They would require close scrutiny all the way. He looked back at his co-conspirator. "We're talking about pretty drastic measures, General. I can't say for certain they'll buy it, but when I relay the information you've just given me, I believe they will agree this is really the only way to go."

  He knew their patience with the White House had moved well beyond the breaking point. A joint operation with the Russians should scotch any fear that the other side might take advantage of the chaos to make some treacherous move. Or so it seemed.

  When the meeting was ready to break up around two forty-five, the General's voice took on a note of caution. "This will require the greatest of secrecy, my friend." The "my friend" was slipped in as naturally as if they had been old college chums meeting after a long-delayed reunion. "We have taken great pains to conceal this meeting. When you are ready to proceed, and I trust that you will, place an advertisement under 'Happy Days' in the Announcements category of the Sunday Washington Post classified section. It will say, 'A. You must run at least twice as fast as that! Queen.' I'll promptly contact you to determine our future course."

  The General was genuinely fond of English literature. The work of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, had a particular appeal to his sense of the absurd. He saw the indomitable Alice as brilliant and shrewd, blithely unconcerned by what others might take as human tragedy. She dropped down the rabbit hole and stepped without hesitation through the looking glass into a world of illusion. She would have made a terrific spy, the profession he pursued following Cambridge, first with the Red Army's intelligence arm, the GRU, and later with its more powerful sister service, the KGB.

  THE GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS

  Chapter 3

  When the cuckoo clocks that lined the shelves of Vienna's tourist shops showed two forty-five p.m., it was eight forty-five a.m. in the Eastern Time Zone of the United States. At that moment, a stocky man with a full beard came bounding down a rugged mountain trail near the Tennessee-North Carolina border like a lumbering green bear. Dressed in olive drab pants and parka, hunched by a backpack of the same shade, he appeared to move at an almost heedless pace.

  He hit a glaze of soggy leaves as he tromped around a turn where the narrow trail circled a sheer ledge. For a harrowing instant, he felt his feet go airborne. Frantic, he grabbed at the slim gray trunk of a beech sapling that angled overhead from the steep hillside.

  The small tree arched like a pulled bow, but its roots held.

  He struggled to regain his balance, chest thumping. He stared over the ledge at the rock-strewn creek bed fifty feet below. A long sigh escaped his cracked lips in a soft hiss of steam.

  Thank God for small beeches, he thought.

  In five years of roving every kind of trail imaginable and battling through wild, almost impassable mountain backcountry, he had never come this close to a calamity. In a previous chapter of his life, he had developed a reputation as a cool professional, always on alert for the unexpected. Had he let the previous day's success lull him into a complacency that became an invitation to disaster?

  The twisting path was a primitive one, perhaps blazed by Indians. In more recent times, it had accommodated prowling black bears. He had spotted the occasional gash in the bark high on a tree, claw marks of a wanderer scavenging the woods for acorns and nuts and anything else that might satisfy a ravenous appetite before the onslaught of winter snow.

  That was part of the fascination of the Great Smoky Mountains, a rugged wilderness area that had lured him out of a self-imposed exile among the oil fields of Alaska.

  He squinted with watery blue eyes, gazing down the trail where it writhed into the morning mist like a trapped snake, squeezed at its sides by towering hemlocks. At this altitude, most of the trees had already shed their leaves in late October though the slopes still brightened with occasional flashes of amber, rust, and orange.

  Burke Hill had left his perch well above the four-thousand-foot level at daybreak. Now he approached the hidden spot he had stumbled upon some months back, a narrow corridor that linked the old footpath with a seldom-used Jeep trail.

  Bent like an old man beneath the bulky pack of equipment, he scraped the mud-crusted boots on a tangle of roots. At the moment, he could easily have passed for ten to twenty years beyond the fifty-five he admitted to. His muscles ached from tedious hours of endless squ
atting. Stationed near an icy stream bolstered by a melting early snowfall from high on the slopes of Mt. Guyot, he had clutched the Nikon with its front-heavy telephoto lens until his fingers resembled lead claws. Then he huddled for the second straight night beneath a rock ledge as the temperature dipped below the freezing point.

  By now the hardships and solitude of the trail had become second nature. The discomforts he took as part of the price of life in the wild. As for the isolation, he had always been more of a loner than a joiner. He wasn't known as Mr. Congeniality during a hectic ten-plus years in the FBI, either. Not that he hadn't made several good friends, but he was usually too intensely preoccupied with his job to indulge in partying or sports.

  The final pages of that chapter had nearly wrecked his life. The strain of supposedly breaking with the Bureau and joining the underworld had reached a cataclysmic climax when his idol, J. Edgar Hoover, had disowned him as though the entire charade had been the Gospel truth, to use his mother’s words. He had bought into Hoover’s charge that he was a miserable failure.

  The nearest thing to subterfuge he engaged in these days was to stand as rigid as a tree trunk to catch a mother bird in her nest, or to hide in a clump of mountain laurel as a wild turkey strutted past. Trained in the use of sophisticated camera equipment, he had found the patience and stealth required for photographic surveillance uniquely suited to the demands of nature photography. The result had been a challenging new career that made use of old talents and abilities. He was, in essence, a wildlife spook, but one object had eluded him.

  Early on, a park biologist had casually mentioned the mink, that small brown creature whose expensive fur made women melt. Only a few had been spotted in the Smokies over the years, and nobody had managed to photograph one. They spent much of their time in the water. The normal pattern was to travel on land at night. Mink passed their springs and summers deep in the forest and ventured down to the lower, more open areas only during the bleak days of winter.

  Ever since he first heard about the mink, it had nagged at him. He had always responded to challenges, and this challenge soon became an obsession. He kept part of his brain alert for the distinctive footprint—four small toes, plus an inside fifth, that might show along the trail.

  Earlier in the week, he had spotted fresh tracks beside a high stream. A two-day stakeout paid off shortly before dusk yesterday. He rigged makeshift reflectors, using aluminum foil, to focus the afternoon sunlight where the tracks led to a burrow beneath a pile of rotting logs. He also mounted flash units to cover the area. After hours of patient waiting, buffering the camera's electronics against the cold, he watched in fascination as the sleek brown animal made a cautious appearance. As it struck an obliging pose, chin up to reveal its characteristic patch of white, he snapped a series of available light shots, praying the fast film would be sufficient. Then, for insurance, he fired off as many quick strobe shots as the autowinder would allow before the startled mink squealed its objection and dived for the water, discharging a musky odor in its wake.

  WASHINGTON, D.C. - NOVEMBER

  Chapter 4

  Readers plowing through the bulky classified section of The Washington Post on the Sunday morning following Thanksgiving took the brief announcement item signed "Queen" as a teaser advertisement or some weirdo's joke. Less than a handful recognized it as a literary quotation. Other than the party who had authorized its placement, only one knew its true meaning. He promptly put in a call to the Aeroflot office at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport and left a cryptic message for relay to Moscow.

  That same day in the Georgetown section of Washington, Judge Kingsley Marshall, a man who had used a curious mixture of jurisprudence and computer education as the launching pad for a career in the cloakless and daggerless side of the Central Intelligence Agency, received a birthday present mounted in an attractive frame from the man responsible for boosting him to the top of his field. It was a magnificent color photograph of a sleek brown mink beside a mountain stream, eyes alert, chin up, displaying the distinctive patch of white.

  Marshall beamed, standing back to admire it. "Beautiful, Charlie. I'm gradually rebuilding my wildlife collection, you know. Damned little of it was left after that fire at our old house in the Poconos. Who's the photographer?"

  "A man named Burke Hill. Lives out from Gatlinburg, Tennessee in the Smoky Mountains. I'd bought some of his mountain scenery through a gallery in Gatlinburg. They told me about this new one and it sounded just right for you."

  "You guessed right, old friend," said the Director of Central Intelligence, still marveling at the picture. The mink seemed almost alive. "This one is going on the wall of my office at Langley."

  That decision triggered one of those unintended consequences that would set Burke Hill off on the adventure of a lifetime.

  Senator Charles Gravely grinned with satisfaction at the reception of his gift. He might have still been in the House, or worse yet back home in the district, if he hadn't talked Marshall into taking a sabbatical from the CIA to run his senatorial campaign. After that, the sharp-witted intelligence analyst who retained the title he’d earned in a brief stint as a district judge remained a valued advisor until the top slot at Langley had come open. As a key member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Gravely had prevailed upon the President to give Kingsley Marshall the appointment.

  FLORIDA – MAY 1992

  Chapter 5

  "Boats For Hire" announced the large black and white sign at the entrance to Peyton's Boat Yard, a run-down nautical menagerie on the panhandle coast at Port St. Joe. "All kinds, all uses" said smaller lettering beneath. It was a Friday morning, the third week in May, and crusty old Scooter Peyton, as he was known along the coast, reflected on the state of the boat rental business. He had seen it worse, he guessed, though he couldn't remember exactly when. A few close friends would have been quick to point out that Scooter was at his best when his jaundiced eye saw things at their worst. He had the tawny color and the sharp bite of a jigger of very old Kentucky bourbon. And, as with that famed Southern elixir, most folks found Scooter Peyton could be stomached best in small doses.

  His stock included a wide variety of boats, from small fishing craft, the type that appealed to most tourists, to sailboats of up to thirty feet, a couple of weather-beaten shrimpers, even a battle-scarred old Navy surplus LCM, military shorthand for Landing Craft, Mechanized. Why he hadn't sold that wretched monstrosity for scrap, he wasn't sure. Likely a stupid exercise in sentimentality. He had helped rescue more than one floundering landing craft as a Navy CPO in the South Pacific during World War II. There it sat on a wooden slip next to the protected inlet, waiting like a bride at the altar knowing the groom would never show. The steel ramp that had once been lowered to faraway beaches to off-load vehicles and troops clung to its sides, forming what looked from above like a bread pan fit for King Kong.

  Peyton sat with feet propped on the edge of his desk in the small, paper-strewn office that occupied a corner of the main boat shed, listening to the ping, ping, ping of a hammer chipping paint. The only relief from the drabness of the place was a several-years-old calendar on the faded gray metal wall. It featured a large photo of a smiling, deeply-tanned girl in a red bikini. He wasn't dead yet, Scooter would let you know in a hurry.

  When he detected the sound of a car rolling along the graveled drive, he didn't bother to get up, figuring it was just old Homer, the decrepit mail man. But when he finally looked around, there stood a stranger dressed in khaki pants, a green knit shirt and a white cap with a blue anchor stitched on the front. Dollar signs suddenly flashed in front of his bloodshot eyes.

  "You Mr. Peyton?" the stranger asked. "I'm Blythe Ingram. I understand you have a landing craft for rent."

  "Uh...well," Scooter stammered for a moment. "You sure come to the right place, mister. I got the only one for miles around. How long would you need her?"

  A short man with a husky build and tanned face and arms, products of
weekends spent on his prized toy, a powerful inboard that came close to qualifying in the yacht category, Ingram glanced at the outdated calendar. "I'd say about three weeks should do it. Is the boat in seaworthy condition?"

  "Yes, sir. Been in dry dock for a while. Setting there just waiting for somebody to put her keel in the bay. Got your own crew?"

  Ingram nodded. "I'm a former Marine. I've handled landing craft."

  "If you don't mind my asking, what do you intend to use that old scow for?"

  "I'm with PWI. I've got a couple of vehicles and some equipment to haul out to Oyster Island for a series of tests we're running." He shrugged as if it were no big deal.

  A small blip on navigational charts of the Gulf of Mexico, Oyster Island lay twenty-eight nautical miles south-southwest of Apalachicola. Shaped somewhat like an oyster shell, it measured only about one mile by a mile and a half, hardly enough to produce a hiccup should the vast sea choose to swallow it up some stormy night.

  "PWI. That'd be—"

  "Pan West Industries. We own the island. PWI's a defense contractor."

  Scooter's brow rumpled as he nodded. "Just about the biggest, ain't you? Yeah, I saw the Coast Guard Notice to Mariners. Stand clear for the next thirty days, ain't it?"

  "Right." Ingram grinned. "We're having a little fireworks. Don't want anyone getting hurt."

  "I thought you folks had your own boats or helicopters or planes?"

  Why is the old cuss so damned inquisitive, Ingram wondered? He hadn't planned to say any more than necessary. His instructions were to keep everything low key, remain as inconspicuous as possible. But, he realized, the owner of a rental boat was entitled to know what his equipment was to be used for.

  "Most of the time we do," Ingram said. "This is just a small project, though. It wasn't worth tying up the PWI fleet."