by Lewis Perdue
CHAPTER 10
The morning sun struggled up over Napa Valley and glowed off the vast quilt of wine-grape trellises carpeting the valley floor. Southeast of Rutherford, retired general Clark Braxton raised his face to take in the brushy seismic mountains that rose steeply to define the east and west flanks of the valley. A small scattering of long-extinct volcano cones studded the table flat valley floor and rose a hundred feet or more above the surrounding vineyards like carefully placed stones in a raked-gravel Zen garden. Their scarcity turned the old volcanoes into objects of intense desire and envy, coveted as trophy home sites by the very wealthy who inflicted their architectural whims on the general public.
Braxton ran swiftly into the westernmost shadows of one such cone, finishing a ten-mile run in and through St. Helena. A hundred yards behind him, Dan Gabriel's steady, even breathing grew louder. Braxton picked up his pace around the red-and-whitestriped road barrier leading onto his fortified estate and saluted the guard inside the stone and bulletproof-glass hut. The guard, charged with making sure only the proper vehicles were allowed beyond, returned the salute.
A tastefully landscaped visitors' parking lot shaded by scores of olive trees lay to the right, mostly empty save for a black Lincoln Town Car and a dowdy plain blue sedan with U.S. government license plates. Neither of the cars' occupants were visible, and they had obviously taken the small, well-appointed aerial tram that conveyed privileged guests up the precipitous slope to Castello Da Vinci, the General's massive Renaissance palace atop the old volcanic cone commanding a 360-degree view of the valley.
Deliveries and tradespeople used a massive freight elevator running from the wine caves at the base of the old volcanic cone up to the mansion's service entrance. A smaller, parallel shaft housed a cylindrical and opulently appointed, glass-sided elevator that granted an elite subset of his guests access to marvel at the General's massive tenthousand-square-foot wine cellar, filled with a multimillion-dollar collection from the world's premier chateaus and wineries.
Clark Braxton was renowned for the intensity of his passion for collecting—wine, historical military medals, cigars, stamps, coins, among many. The press had written extensively about his near-maniacal obsession with making sure his collections were complete at all costs. He never collected art, he had told Fortune, because it was impossible ever to have a complete collection. "All it takes is one empty spot to ruin the whole thing, like a single drop of vinegar in a fine claret."
Fortune had concluded, "General Clark Braxton brings the same sort of intense passion to wine as that which made him famous as a combat field commander. He is known in the esoteric world of wine as a collector's collector and a man who will make no compromises in his near-maniacal quest to fill empty slots in his collection."
Braxton picked up his pace as he approached the steep cobblestone drive where only the General's private vehicles and those of his armed guards were allowed. In front of the gate and again another ten yards inside sat twin retractable, steel vehicle barriers sturdy enough to resist the impact of a fully loaded semi at more than fifty miles per hour.
Flanking the gate now, two armed outriders sat astride idling trail bikes, whose exhaust systems had been extensively engineered to provide maximum power despite their whispering quietness, which assured the General tranquillity during his famous earlymorning runs. In their earpieces the men listened to the terse reports from their counterparts on identical bikes bringing up the rear.
The outriders, along with the sentries behind the greenish blue armored glass of the guard huts, were only a handful of the extensive, well-trained, and heavily armed security staff paid by Defense Therapeutics to make sure their chairman met with no harm from the legions of religious fanatics, kidnappers, terrorists, antiglobalization protesters, extortionists, white militia groups, and other assorted mentally marginal groups who viewed him as the distilled essence of everything they hated about the United States. Security was always paramount for a company like Defense Therapeutics, which developed and manufactured biowarfare vaccines, nerve gas antidotes, battle-hardened diagnostic devices, electronic dog tags, and other military medical supplies.
One cycle rider put a hand over the microphone at his throat and leaned over to his comrade.
"The old man's an inspiration," he said.
"Fucking unbelievable," the second rider agreed. There was no disguising the admiration in both men's voices.
Braxton turned around and ran backward. "Come on, Dan!" His voice boomed now as loud and unwavering as it had been in combat.
"You're getting soft, soldier!" Despite the chronic pain from half a dozen actionrelated wounds and injuries, including the head wound that had nearly killed him, Braxton prided himself on being as fit and physically capable at sixty-four as he had been at thirtyfour. That, along with his legendary heroism in battle, had propelled him to the very top of the presidential polls.
"I'll still beat you to the top, sir!" Gabriel yelled.
Braxton laughed as he turned and launched his sprint up the 15 percent grade. The driveway spiraled counterclockwise up the weathered volcanic cone for a quarter of a mile. Braxton called it "a real man's 440."
Along the left side of the drive ran a sheer wall of fractured, red volcanic tuft. Olive trees defined the perimeter of the outer curb, teasing sightseers with lacy glimpses of the valley floor.
Gabriel audibly picked up his pace now. He was a sharp, tough man who had been Braxton's capable sword arm during his endlessly trying political years as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Gabriel later became head of West Point when Braxton resigned to become chairman of Defense Therapeutics.
Braxton bent forward into the steep slope, challenging gravity as if he were heading back up Hamburger Hill.
"I imagine the incoming slugs," he told the interviewer from Forbes. "You never forget that battle separates the quick from the dead, and I always wanted to be the quickest. It's amazing how light your boots can be when you're trying to outrun the devil."
Behind them, the cycle-mounted armed guards paced the duo at a distance.
Ironically, his near-fatal head wound had not come from a hill but from a griddleflat rice paddy in the Mekong Delta when a Vietcong ambush wiped out most of his Ranger unit. The initial VC attack with RPG-7s tore through their two Hueys. Braxton saw the first one go off like a bomb in midair. Braxton, then a freshly minted major and less than a month in country, hung on to his surviving chopper as they pancaked hard into the paddy and came under withering AK-47 fire. Braxton pulled his remaining men together and charged their attackers.
"Did you see the videotape of that old CBS footage?" the first armed outrider asked.
"Who hasn't?" said the second man. "I mean, all that footage with Cronkite's voice showed the American people a real giant. A genuine hero."
The first man nodded. I never get tired of watching it. Talk about inspiring."
On the VHS tape, now copied to scores of DVDs and streamed from the web sites of Clark Braxton's most admiring supporters, viewers watched Cronkite call it "the aftermath of hell": four wounded GIs thigh deep in mud surrounded by black-clad bodies floating in the nearby water. But the image that found an immediate place in the American heart and its mythology was the close-up on Major Clark Braxton's face, particularly the scorched, twisted, foot-long rod of Huey fuselage that had entered his forehead a hairbreadth away from his right eye and emerged from the top of his head. From his hospital bed in Saigon, a rank second lieutenant among the survivors, Dan Gabriel, had told the CBS war correspondent that the sight of Braxton, a man with a hideous wound who should have been dead, broke the nerve of the Vietcong, who were gunned down as they fled.
"He never even lost consciousness," the first outrider said as they moved stealthily up the steep drive. "Jesus! He never even hesitated a second!"
And that look of surprise on his face when the cameraman pointed out the fucking metal sticking out of his head," said the second outrider. "Fucking amazing!"
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When he received his Congressional Medal of Honor, Braxton still wore a bandage over his postsurgical wounds. Postsurgical evaluation of Braxton indicated no physical or neurological impairment, a finding consistent with a small number of similar wounds carefully cataloged by medical science. Interviews with his instructors at West Point indicated his actions that day in the Mekong Delta had demonstrated far more courage under fire than expected from a student whom they had once considered better suited for logistical and administrative command. Clearly, they said, battle was where the true man had emerged.
Braxton's legend grew through two more tours in Vietnam. He became the frontline commander the army called on when things got tough. Hanoi considered him so effective they marked him for assassination with a $1 million bounty on his head.
Army psychologists noted that Braxton's mania for collecting began about this time.
Now, as Dan Gabriel's footsteps grew closer, the General picked a memory to sustain himself. This time it was the charge he'd led to rescue a trapped squad of Marines at Hue. He felt his body respond as he visualized the terrain, recalled the clash of weapons, and smelled the stench of spent ordnance and open abdominal wounds. But Gabriel's ten more years of relative youth started to show as the men neared their finish line, another red-and-white barrier laid across the road with a guard hut beside it. Discreetly disappearing into the landscaping on both flanks of the gate was a double row of electrified metal fencing crowned with concertina wire.
At that moment, Braxton's wireless phone vibrated on his belt. With Gabriel's footsteps pounding in his ears, Braxton ignored the phone and urged his burning quadriceps into a final burst of energy, carrying him past the finish line inches ahead of Gabriel.
Braxton broke his pace then and allowed Gabriel to shoot past him.
"You peaked a bit too late," Braxton said as he searched for the precisely sportsmanlike tone the situation demanded. He kept the gloating to himself: it offered nothing to be gained.
Gabriel fell in beside the General. "Thanks, sir."
"Soon," Braxton said as he grabbed his phone and looked at the caller ID, "you'll be beating me." He smiled as a short message scrolled across his screen. The rules he had established with her required no voice mails, no trails. "VT86D," read the short text message.
Braxton worked on suppressing the broad smile he felt within. Vanessa Thompson was dead, and along with her one more of the few remaining barriers capable of derailing his presidential run. He looked at his Rolex. "Okay, we have twenty-five minutes before your briefing."
Gabriel looked at the Swiss Army sports watch on his own wrist. The altimeter function he had selected at the bottom of the hill indicated they had climbed a little more than two hundred feet straight up since passing the gate at the bottom of the driveavay. He pressed the watch's time button, then said, "Roger that, General."
They returned salutes from the guards who buzzed them through the last set of gates, which gave on to a Tuscan courtyard filled with exquisitely tended landscaping. The entire complex, named Castello Da Vinci by wealthy financier Kincaid Carothers, had once sat atop a hill overlooking Siena and, according to painstakingly preserved historical records, had been designed in 1502 by Leonardo da Vinci as a fortified sanctuary for his patron Cesare Borgia.
Leonardo's talents as a military architect have received little attention, but he had designed fortifications and invented weapons far ahead of their time. Borgia worried there might come a time when he would need a Renaissance bunker of sorts, and naturally he turned to Leonardo for help.
Carothers, whose company once exercised hegemony over the issuance of American Treasury bonds, had the entire structure disassembled in 1936, stripped, shipped to America, and reassembled. A briefly wealthy dot-com CEO bought the villa from one of the Carothers heirs before the first Internet meltdown. Defense Therapeutics had purchased it out of bankruptcy for a song equivalent to a coda and two arias. The corporation then signed the deed over to Braxton as a bonus. Framed copies of magazine articles about Castello Da Vinci lined many of the hallways. They appeared mostly in extravagantly snotty home and architectural magazines, and some dated back to the 1930s. One even detailed how Carothers had spent lavishly to prepare the site exactly as it had existed in Tuscany, duplicating many of the tunnels and underground safe-room chambers, leading to speculation that Carothers had once feared a workers' or domestic Communist uprising.
"Okay then, let's hit the showers. You know how I hate to be late." Braxton broke into a slow jog.
Gabriel smiled faintly. The General never arrived late.
CHAPTER 11
Twenty minutes later, Gabriel carried his notepad and the folder of materials the General had left in his room and made his way to the only new structure in the compound, a marble-sided pool house outfitted as Braxton's private office and conference room. A tall, beefy man with a discreetly shouldered sidearm stood by the multipaned glass doors of the pool house, saluted Gabriel, then opened the door for him. Braxton tried to hire the best of former military, including those from the Special Forces. Gabriel learned the General had even hired several veterans of Task Force 86M, Gabriel's old command. The most elite of the elite, 86M was a small, tight group of specialists.
Gabriel returned the salute. "Good morning."
"Morning, sir."
Inside, the door to the women's room opened as Gabriel stepped inside. He
recognized Brigadier General Laura LaHaye as she emerged.
"Hey, Dan," she said as she offered her hand. She was a tall lean woman in her late
forties with a long, pointed jaw, permanent scowl lines, heavy eyebrows, and three
Ph.D.'s. Gabriel knew her as the non-communicative head of an extensive, black-funded
operation about which he had learned very little even when he worked for the Joint Chiefs. LaHaye controlled several super-secret operations attached to the Army's
Research, Development, and Engineering Command, but like himself, even those at the
top of RDECOM did not know the full extent of her operations even as they were required
to provide support and logistics for her work. Gabriel's access at the Pentagon allowed him
to learn that she had significant operations at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center at
Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and, strangely at the DOD Combat Feeding
Program at the Natick, Massachusetts, Soldier Systems Center.
"Laura." He shook her warm, dust-dry hand. "Good to see you again." "It's been too long," she said, returning his handshake. "How's life up there on the
Hudson?"
He caught her insinuation immediately: "up there" meant ivory tower, out of touch
with reality, and too far away from the orbits of military power circling the Pentagon. "Surprisingly stimulating; he replied, then made an obvious show of checking his
watch. "Three minutes. We better get moving."
She nodded and the two of them followed the aroma of freshly brewed coffee to
the conference room. When they entered, Gabriel spotted Clark Braxton in conversation
with Defense Therapeutics CEO Walter Bentley and Wim Baaker, who was a top official
with the NATO Pharma Lab in the Netherlands. With them was a short, round man
Gabriel did not recognize. The men stood by an antique mahogany sideboard covered with
a lavishly arrayed continental breakfast heavy on yogurt, freshly sliced fruit, and cheese.
A single table had been set for them, its white tablecloth laid with gleaming silver
flatware. An overhead projector sat on a metal projection stand next to the table. "Dan, Laura!" Braxton called out. He gave his watch a faint glance before smiling.
"Come on in and get some coffee before we start."
LaHaye and Gabriel nodded their greetings.
"You're looking well this morning Greg," LaHaye said to the pudgy man. "Thank you, Laura," the man said.
At the sideboard, all six people swapped handshakes and greetings. "Dan, I don't think you've met Greg McGovern," Braxton said of the short, round
man. "Greg is the head of research and development at Defense Therapeutics.' Pastry crumbs clung to the corner of McGovern's mouth. He reeked of an overdose of expensive cologne. Braxton spoke often about this man, expressing his exasperation over the scientist's slovenly ways, but always conceding this as an acceptable trade-off for
McGovern's near-Hawking-like genius in molecular pharmacology.
"Pleasure," Gabriel lied as he shook McGovern's clammy hand slick with pastry
butter. Gabriel resisted the immediate impulse to wipe his hand on the thigh of his pants. "Good," Braxton said as he picked up a plate and loaded it from the breakfast
buffet. "Let's move along. We have a lot to cover this morning."
Gabriel made a pretense of spilling the first couple of pieces of fruit, which offered
the opportunity to wipe off his hand as he cleaned up the convenient mess. Two audiovisual functionaries pulled down blackout shades over the numerous
windows and lowered the screen in front of the overhead projector.
"Your standing in the polls has certainly skyrocketed," said CEO Walter Bentley. "My campaign people are awfully talented," Braxton said modestly "They've been
working very, very hard."
"The Democrats and Republicans seem to be working hard for you as well,"
Bentley said with a chuckle. "The more mud their candidates sling, the better you look." "Well, it's still early in the primary season," said Braxton. "We have a long way to
go to maintain our lead so we can lance the abscess which threatens our way of life." Braxton stood up, holding his coffee cup in one hand. The lights dimmed
