By Order of the President

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Point taken.”

  “Charley Castillo is a natural for Special Forces,” McNab said.

  “Because he slings your dune buggy under a Huey?”

  “No. I mean he has a feel for it.”

  “I don’t think I follow you,” Naylor said. “What makes you think that?”

  “I don’t know how much you got to hear about the Russians we grabbed?”

  “Not very much,” Naylor admitted. The incident had been talked about, but not much, because it had been classi fied top secret, and he hadn’t had any bona fide need to know.

  “Okay. Quick after-action. After the air war started, when Chuck Horner had given us air superiority, that gave us more freedom of action with our choppers. The Air Force really wanted a Scud and I was asked if I thought I could get them one. I checked and there was one about eighty klicks into the desert. They were getting ready to shoot it at this place. Anyway, I staged a mission, two Apaches and four Black Hawks. Forty, forty-five minutes in, five minutes to take out the crew, fifteen minutes on the ground to figure out how to pick the sonofabitch up . . .”

  “You didn’t know you were going to move it?”

  “We figured we would improvise,” McNab said, a little sarcastically. “And forty-five minutes out. It should have gone according to schedule, but when my guys got on the ground they found that all the guys with their hands up weren’t Iraqis. We had two Iraqi generals, one Russian general, one Russian colonel, and half a dozen other non-Iraqis. The generals were visiting the site; the others were there to make sure the Scud shot straight. They would really have liked to hit this place. We weren’t on the ground long enough to really find out for sure, but Charley . . .”

  “You’re talking about Castillo? He was on this operation? ”

  “I tried very hard, Allan, to keep him alive. He wasn’t in on the operation. We were sitting in my Huey thirty klicks from the Scud site, in the middle of nowhere. We had to get that close so we could talk to the choppers and I could relay the word that we were coming out to our air defense people. Okay?”

  Naylor nodded he understood.

  “So they give us a yell, tell us about the Russians and what are we supposed to do with them? Then I had to go to the site, of course. So we went to the site. It took us no more than ten minutes or so, but that added ten minutes to the operation time. The Iraqis were about to figure out that all was not well. And I had to decide what to do with the Russians, which depended on who the Russians were, and do that in a hell of a hurry.

  “When I got out of the Huey, I muttered something like, ‘I wish I spoke better Russian,’ or words to that effect, and Charley says, ‘Sir, I speak Russian.’ So I took him with me. And found out he speaks Russian like a native. And German.

  “So, five minutes after we touched down, thanks to Charley, I knew who was going with us and who we were leaving behind. We brought out one Iraqi general, one Russian general, one Russian colonel, and three of the technicians, who were probably ex-East Germans who moved to Russia. We weren’t there long enough to find out for sure.”

  “And the Scud, of course,” Naylor said.

  “Yeah, and the Scud. One of the Black Hawks just picked it up and flew off with it.”

  “Well, a Black Hawk can carry a 105mm howitzer, its crew, and thirty rounds,” Naylor began, then paused and added, “The story that went around here was that half a dozen Iraqi helicopters had defected.”

  “That happened because we came here, because of the prisoners, not where we were supposed to go, and got picked up on radar. And somebody with a big mouth here let the press know six choppers were approaching the border but were not to be shot at. We had to give some explanation.”

  “If you can’t tell me, don’t. But what happened to the prisoners?”

  “We turned the Iraqi over to the Saudis and then we flew the officers and the technicians to Vienna on Royal Air Arabia and put them on an Aeroflot flight to Moscow. Still wearing the clothes they were wearing when we grabbed them. And with copies of the pictures we took of them at the site . . .”—McNab smiled—“. . . including some of them with my guys’ arms around their shoulders, apparently having a hell of a time.”

  “What was that all about? Sending them to Moscow?”

  “That came from either the agency or the State Department. I don’t think—at least, I never heard—that anything was ever done officially, a complaint to the UN or something, that Russians were servicing the Scuds. But they couldn’t deny the whole thing. We had the pictures, and somehow they lost their identification papers and we found them.”

  “That’s a hell of story,” Naylor said.

  “Which I will deny ever telling you, of course, should someone ask. The point of me telling you this war story was so I could explain why, before we got back here, I could see a hundred places where Charley would be useful with his languages, and then when we took the Russians to Vienna and I saw him working with them I decided I wanted him. Had to have him.”

  “What he should be doing is time with troops, now that this war is over,” Naylor said. “You did it, and I did it, when we were second lieutenants, and he should, too.”

  “I thought it was a waste of my time when I did it,” McNab said. “I knew I wasn’t going to spend thirty years of my life with cannons going off in my ears. And you know as well as I do if Charley goes back to Aviation they’ll pull this ‘like father, like son’ bullshit all over again. He’ll spend his time giving speeches to Rotary Clubs and you know it. And I’m not kidding about needing him. If I had to come up with the two most important skills for an aide to a Special Forces general, they would be: fly a helicopter and speak as many languages other than English as possible.”

  “And what if I say no, Scotty? What if I say, ‘This young officer has done too many unusual things already in his brief career and now it’s time that he had a large dose of normal.’ ”

  “I hope you don’t, Allan. I would hate to remember this so far heartwarming reunion of ours with rancor.”

  As if on cue, Master Sergeant Dunham put his head in the door.

  “Sir, Second Lieutenant Castillo wonders if you can spare him a moment?”

  Naylor made a send-him-in gesture with his hands.

  Except that he wasn’t wearing an Arabian headdress, Castillo was dressed very much like Colonel McNab. The buttons of his khaki African Hunter’s Safari Jacket were closed, but he was wearing shorts and knee-high stockings. A CAR-16, the “carbine” version of the standard M-16 rifle, was slung from his shoulder.

  Naylor didn’t see any grenade outlines.

  But he saw enough to realize that the young lieutenant had fallen under the spell of—as he thought of it, had been corrupted by—Scotty McNab and there was no way he would be happy doing what he really should be doing.

  Castillo saluted and then saw Colonel McNab.

  “I didn’t expect to see you here, sir.”

  “You can hug that ugly old man, Charley,” McNab said. “I did.”

  “God, it’s good to see you, Charley,” Naylor said and spread his arms.

  “It’s good to see you, sir.”

  They embraced.

  “I just told Colonel McNab, feeling like a father selling his daughter to a brothel keeper, that if you’re insane enough to want to get involved with Special Forces I will give you my very reluctant blessing.”

  “I really would like to go, sir.”

  “It’s done, then,” Naylor said. “Colonel McNab, why don’t you kill, say, thirty minutes—go slit a few throats; blow something up—and give Charley and me a few minutes alone?”

  VI

  SPRING 2005

  [ONE]

  The Mayflower Hotel 1127 Connecticut Avenue NW Washington, D.C. 1655 31 May 2005

  “So you became this Green Beret colonel’s fair-haired boy?” Fernando asked.

  Castillo nodded. He asked with a raised eyebrow if Fernando wanted another drink. Fernando held out his empty glass.


  “ ‘Fair-haired boy’ does not accurately describe what I was,” Castillo said. “But I went right to work for him.”

  “He could arrange your transfer just like that?”

  "The C-5 landed us—and McNab’s dune buggy—at Dover Air Force Base, in Delaware,” Castillo said. “McNab told me to get the dune buggy to the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg and when I had I could take ten days off after which I was to report to him at Bragg. I asked him how I was supposed to get the dune buggy off the air base, much less to Fort Bragg. He said he was sure I would figure something out and left me there, right then, standing beside the dune buggy on the tarmac, in my short pants, bush jacket, and ghutra.”

  “Short pants? Bush jacket? And what?”

  “And knee-high stockings,” Castillo said. “Don’t want to forget those.”

  Fernando’s face showed he wanted an explanation.

  “I got the story from guys who were with him before I got there,” Castillo said. “He lined them all up, said that he had looked into previous hostilities in the area, and learned that the Brit uniform had been short pants, bush jackets, and knee-high stockings. He had therefore purchased, with his discretionary operating funds, a supply of same from a hunting outfitter in Nairobi. They made, he said, a lot more sense than what the Army was issuing to ordinary soldiers.”

  “And the other thing? The goot-something?”

  “That came next,” Castillo said, smiling. “According to the story I got, he went on to say that Lawrence of Arabia, who had been a very successful irregular warrior in the area, always wore a ghutra an iqal, the standard Arab headdress.” He made a circular movement around the front of his head.

  Fernando’s nod told him he had the picture.

  “Actually, there’s two kinds, one with a red-and-white headcloth. That’s the shumagh,” Castillo went on. “With a white headcloth, it’s a ghutra. Since Lawrence had learned it was a practical item of military clothing for Arabia, that was good enough for McNab and his special operators. It obviously made more sense than a Kevlar helmet, since they were going to be out on the desert in the sun a lot. He had acquired a supply of them—one size fits all—in Riyadh.”

  “And you all actually wore this thing?”

  “I admit, some heads turned when we showed up in Riyadh,” Castillo said, chuckling.

  “So how did you get the dune buggy to Fort Bragg?”

  “I knew how far I would get if I went to the Air Force with my problem—especially in my Lawrence of Arabia uniform—so I went into Dover, rented a ton-and-a-half truck from U-Haul, loaded the dune buggy aboard, and drove to Bragg. Thank God for the American Express card. Then I went home, spent ten days with Abuela and Grandpa, and then went back to Bragg.”

  “While I sat in the goddamned desert,” Fernando said, “drinking lukewarm bottled water and eating MREs.”

  “I admit I was really beginning to think that I was something special,” Castillo said. “Which notion was promptly taken from me when I got to Bragg. By then, he was Brigadier General McNab. I expected either thanks or even congratulations for getting his damned buggy to Bragg. Instead, he chewed me out for not protecting the footlocker full of scotch and cognac . . .”

  “What?”

  “Before the Marines liberated Kuwait City, Special Ops guys were there. Including McNab. His first stop was the U.S. embassy, where he blew the door on the crypto room and filled a footlocker with the booze the diplomats had locked up before getting out. I had forgotten it was still on the dune buggy.

  “He said if I was going to be in Special Forces, I was going to have to understand that Special Forces people could be trusted with anything but somebody else’s whiskey and I could consider myself lucky that nobody at SWC thought I could possibly have been stupid enough to leave it on the dune buggy and that it had still been there when he collected the buggy.”

  Fernando laughed.

  “And then he said he was going to charm school . . .”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t know what it was, either,” Castillo replied. “What they do is gather all the just-promoted-to-brigadier-generals together, usually at Fort Leavenworth, the Command and General Staff School?”

  “I know about Leavenworth,” Fernando said.

  “. . . and the chief of staff and some other really senior brass tell them how to behave as general officers. McNab said the real purpose was to make sure the new generals didn’t get too big for their black braid trousers . . .”

  “That’s right,” Fernando said. “Generals have two lengths of half-inch braid the seam of their trousers, don’t they? I’d forgotten that.”

  “. . . and with that in mind, I was on the four-forty flight from Fayetteville to Columbus, Georgia, via Atlanta, where, starting the next morning, I was to begin the course of instruction leading to being rated as a parachutist.

  “ ‘Don’t pay any attention to their bullshit, Charley,’ McNab said. ‘They still think what they call “airborne”—vertical envelopment, which means a thousand hanging targets floating down onto a field—is modern warfare, and getting those wings is an end in itself. Just keep your mouth shut, get through the course, and then come back here and we’ll get you some useful training.’

  “So less than twenty-four hours after I arrived at Bragg, a decorated, wounded hero who had been on a couple of interesting operations, and was now to be the aide-de-camp to the deputy commander of the Special Warfare Center, I found myself lying in the mud at Benning with a barrel-chested hillbilly sergeant—his name was Staff Sergeant Dudley J. Johnson, Jr.; I’ll never forget that—in a T-shirt with AIRBORNE printed on it standing over me screaming—I couldn’t do forty push-ups—that he couldn’t understand how a fucking flaming faggot—I loved that line—like me got into the Army, much less into jump school, and I better get my act in gear or he would send me back to whatever fairy-fucking dipshit outfit I came from so fast my asshole wouldn’t catch up for six months.”

  “I know the type of gentle, nurturing, noncommissioned officer to which you refer,” Fernando said, laughing. But then he had a thought and asked: “Didn’t he know you were a lieutenant? Had been in Desert Storm? Worse, that you were a West Pointer?”

  “That I was a lieutenant? Yeah, sure. But rank doesn’t count in jump school. And I was still a second lieutenant. He probably thought I’d just graduated from OCS, or, more than likely, from some ROTC college. He didn’t think I’d been in Desert Storm, because I was there. McNab brought me home a couple of days after the armistice. And I’d already learned what wearing a West Point ring means . . .”

  “What?”

  “People watch you closely to see if you’re really perfect and are absolutely delighted when you fuck up. So my ring went in my toilet kit beside my wings. I was pretty stupid, but I knew better than to show up at jump school wearing pilot ’s wings.”

  “But you muddled through?” Fernando asked.

  “I could even do fifty push-ups by the time I finished.”

  “Was there a temptation to show up at the graduation ceremony wearing your wings, ring, and DFC?”

  “Yeah. But I didn’t. I’d worked for McNab long enough to know that when he said I was to keep my mouth shut he meant that I was to keep my mouth shut. And Staff Sergeant Dudley J. Johnson, Jr., was really just doing his job, trying to get people through jump school alive. I did see him, come to think of it, a year, eighteen months later. He had applied for Special Forces and reported in to the SWC to go through the Q Course. It was McNab’s turn to give the welcoming speech, and there behind him, in Class A uniform, wearing a green beanie, with the rope of an aide hanging from his epaulets, was this familiar-looking lieutenant, an aviator.”

  Fernando chuckled.

  “I did check to see how he was doing,” Castillo said. “He didn’t make it through Camp Mackall. They busted him out as ‘unsuitable.’ ”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It can mean any number of things, but it’s us
ually because the raters, which include other trainees, conclude that he would be either a pain in the ass in an A-Team or that he couldn’t carry his share of the load. Special Forces requires more brains than brawn. You can’t make it on the number of push-ups you can do.”

  “Then how the hell did you get through if it takes brains?”

  Castillo looked at him thoughtfully a moment.

  “Fernando, I’m not trying to paint myself as John Wayne, but when I decided to have this little tête-à-tête with you I decided I was going to tell you everything I could.”

  “Okay, Gringo. I understand.”

  “I had already passed the real test; I’d been on operations and carried my weight. The instructors at Mackall knew that, so they knew all they had to do with me was give me skills I didn’t have and polish the very few I already did. Aside from having my ass run ragged, I actually liked Mackall. The instructors knew what they were teaching and they wanted you to learn. I can’t remember one of them ever shouting at me, even when I did something really stupid.”

  “Interesting,” Fernando said.

  “My weekends were free,” Castillo went on. “I spent them proofreading the How to Fight in the Desert literature General McNab was preparing. And staying current as an aviator.”

  “How did this affect your social life?”

  “If you mean how did I find time to get laid, I didn’t.”

  “Poor Gringo.”

  “Anyway, I finally finished the course and went to work as his aide.”

  “Passing hors d’oeuvres and shining shoes?”

  “At oh-dark-hundred, his driver picked me up at my BOQ and drove me to Simmons Army Airfield, where, if I was lucky, the guy given the great privilege of being the general ’s copilot that day had already checked the weather and had the Huey ready to go. Nine times out of ten he had not, so I did the weather, got the Huey up and running, and flew it to Smoke Bomb Hill. Then I went inside, got the coffeepot running, and checked the overnight mail. By then his driver had picked him up and delivered him to headquarters. Then the three of us took a three- or four-mile run around scenic Smoke Bomb Hill to get the juices flowing. Following which, we returned to the office where I spent part of the day taking notes at meetings of one kind or another to which the general was part, and the rest of the day flying him wherever he thought it would be advantageous for military efficiency for him to drop in unannounced. Camp Mackall, the stockade. .."