By Order of the President

by W. E. B Griffin

“Sir, transportation to where?”

  Porter started to reply but stopped and took a small notebook from his shirt pocket. He flipped through the pages, then said, “You will report to the Special Activities Section, J-5, U.S. Central Command, MacDill Air Force Base, Tampa, Florida.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. And with all respect, sir, I again ask the nature of the charges against me.”

  “You will be informed in due time.”

  “Yes, sir. With respect, sir, in that circumstance, I will not consider myself under arrest to quarters until such time as I am advised of any charges against me.”

  Porter lost his temper. “You’re under arrest to quarters because I say you are! Is that clear enough for you, Major?”

  “Sir, if the colonel will consult the Uniform Code of Military Justice, 1948—I have a copy, sir—I think you will find that prior to being placed in confinement, including arrest to quarters, the accused will be notified of the nature of charges being considered against him.”

  “You’re a guardhouse lawyer, too, are you, Miller?”

  “Sir, I am simply informing you of my position in this matter.”

  Porter inhaled and then exhaled slowly.

  “Very well, Major Miller. I am informing you that in the very near future you will be advised of your travel plans. With that in mind, I am ordering you to remain in your quarters until that happens. Does that satisfy you?”

  “Yes, sir. So long as we are agreed that I am not in arrest to quarters.”

  “I suggest that you start packing, Major Miller.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Sergeant Fortenaux, you will station yourself outside Major Miller’s door and report to me immediately by telephone if the major leaves his apartment.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “May I suggest, sir,” Miller said, “that the sergeant could keep a closer eye on me if he was inside my apartment. I also suggest, sir, that if my neighbors see an armed Marine standing outside my door there would be talk.”

  Porter glowered at him.

  “Very well,” he said finally, then started for the door. He turned. “I’ll be in touch shortly, Major Miller, just as soon as your transportation has been arranged.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Porter went down the corridor to the door. After a moment, they heard it close.

  Miller went to the corridor to see if Porter was really gone, then turned to look at Gunnery Sergeant Fortenaux.

  “Relax, Roscoe,” Miller said. “I read the sign. I understand your problem.”

  “What sign is that, sir?”

  “The one behind Station One at the embassy: A MARINE ON GUARD HAS NO FRIENDS.”

  “That’s boot camp bullshit,” Fortenaux said. “What the fuck did you do?”

  “I’m going to make coffee. You want some?”

  Fortenaux nodded.

  They went into the kitchen.

  Miller took coffee from a cupboard and then pointed at the coffee machine.

  “If you think you can work that thing, I’ll take a shower.”

  “Go on,” Fortenaux said.

  Fortenaux, carrying two mugs of coffee, came into Miller’s bedroom as Miller was getting dressed. Miller took one and nodded his thanks.

  “Like I said, what the fuck did you do?” Fortenaux asked.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Something to do with that honky bitch from the CIA?”

  “Hey, Roscoe! How can we get pissed when they call us niggers if we call them honkies?”

  “Point taken,” Fortenaux said. “Something to do with that white lady bitch from the CIA?”

  Miller nodded. “But you really don’t want to know more than that.”

  “You in the really deep shit?”

  “I’ve got a pal who said he’s got me covered,” Miller said. “Until I learn for sure otherwise, I’m going to believe that.”

  “Your pal has the clout?”

  Miller nodded again.

  “And you trust him?”

  “He’s gotten me out of the deep shit before,” Miller said. “When I got shot down in Afghanistan, I knew I was really in the deep shit. I was bleeding like a stuck pig and I couldn’t walk fifty feet. And the weather was way below minimums, so I knew the candy asses wouldn’t launch a medevac chopper. And then all of a sudden a Black Hawk appears, right on the fucking deck. Charley’s flying it, wearing his rag-head suit and beard. He stole the Black Hawk to come and save my ass.”

  “You told me that war story. But not about your pal dressed up like a rag-head. He’s a spook, too?”

  “Yeah. And a Green Beanie. And we go all the way back to West Point. I trust him.”

  “Okay, then. You going to pack? Porter wasn’t kidding about getting you out of here quick. They were breaking their asses at the embassy getting you on the next plane out.”

  “I guess I better,” Miller said.

  “I’ll make sure they don’t rob you blind when the shippers pack you up,” Fortenaux said.

  “Thanks,” Miller said and went into a closet and started taking out suitcases.

  [FIVE]

  Room 426 Hotel Bristol Kaerntner Ring 1 Vienna, Austria 0840 7 June 2005

  Castillo pushed open the heavy draperies over the window beside the bed and looked out. He could see the rear of the Vienna State Opera and the red awnings over the sidewalk café of the Hotel Sacher on Philharmonikerstrasse.

  He had suspected as the bellman had led him down the corridor that he might have such a view but hadn’t been sure.

  He put his head against the glass and looked to see how much of the front of the opera and the Opernring—“The Ring”—he could see.

  Not much. It didn’t matter. He was simply curious.

  Once, when he’d stayed at the Bristol as a kid—Gross-pappa Gossinger loved the opera and they’d come at least once a year—his grandfather had pulled aside the drapes in their suite and motioned him over.

  He pointed down at the Opernring in front of the opera.

  “You see that, Karlchen?” he’d asked. “That’s Austria.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You see those three men, resetting a cobblestone?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “In Hesse, when a cobblestone needs resetting they send one man to replace it. That’s all it takes. In Austria, they send three men. One does the work. The second drinks a beer and eats a wurst. And the third supervises the other two.”

  “Poppa!” his mother had complained, which had only served to fuel his grandfather’s desire that his grandson should understand the Austrians.

  “Behind all this gemütlichkeit, Karlchen, they’re really a savage people.”

  “Poppa! Stop!”

  “You know they had an empire here, Karlchen?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And an imperial family?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Let me tell you what they did when a member of the imperial family died, Karlchen. They cut open the body and took out the heart and the guts. Then they buried the heart in one place, the guts in another, and the gutted corpse in Saint Stefan’s Cathedral. If that isn’t savage, what is?”

  “Why did they do that?” Karl had asked.

  “To make sure he was dead, I suppose,” his grandfather had said. “And I’ll tell you something else, Karlchen.”

  “Enough, Poppa!” his mother had said.

  “You know what the SS was, Karlchen? The worst of the Nazis?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Most of their officers, the bastards, were Austrians, not Germans.”

  At that point, his mother had dragged him out of the room and taken him to a pastry shop called Demel’s. Over a cup of hot chocolate almost hidden by a mountain of whipped cream, she had told him that Grosspappa had had bad experiences in the Army with the SS and Austrians.

  “What kind of bad experiences?”

  “In Russia, he saw all the terrible things the SS did, and he
had an SS officer on his staff who reported everything your grandfather did. But, meine hartz, all the Austrians aren’t like that, and you shouldn’t pay too much attention to Grosspappa.”

  The story about eviscerated imperial bodies had of course stuck in the mind of a ten-year-old boy, and, a decade later, Sergeant Carlos G. Castillo of the United States Corps of Cadets had found in the library of the United States Military Academy at West Point confirmation of both that interesting custom and of what his grandfather had told him about the officer corps of the Schutzstaffel: somewhere between seventy and eighty percent had been Austrian.

  He’d asked one of his professors about it. Colonel Schneider had told him it was probably something like the joke about people converting to Roman Catholicism trying to be more Catholic than the pope.

  “After the anschluss, Castillo, one way to keep from being treated as a second-class German because you hadn’t been born in Germany before the anschluss was to become a true believer in National Socialism and Adolf Hitler, and, if you could, join the SS and put on the death’s-head insignia. ”

  Castillo let the drape fall back into place and unpacked. Then he took a shower, put his dirty linen in a plastic bag to have it washed—he had no idea how long he would be in Vienna —and then left his small suite and walked down to the lobby.

  He stopped before entering the lobby and mentally filed away pictures of people sitting there who could see people getting off one of the elevators. That done, he started across the lobby and at the last moment stopped himself from picking up a copy of the international edition of the Herald Tribune that the hotel had stacked on a table for the convenience of its guests.

  Americans—and some English—read the Herald Tribune. A reporter from the Tages Zeitung probably would not.

  He went through the revolving door, declined the offer of a taxi, and went and stood on the corner for a moment, taking in the sights, and making mental notes of other people standing around where they could see who entered and left the Hotel Bristol.

  Then he walked down Kaertnerstrasse to Philharmonikerstrasse and turned left, walking past the sidewalk café of the Hotel Sacher, again making mental note of the people sitting at its tables.

  The bar inside the Sacher—just barely visible from the street—was where he was supposed to go every afternoon at five until Pevsner made contact.

  That done, he made his way to Demel’s and made breakfast of white chocolate-covered croissants and hot chocolate topped with whipped cream.

  He thought of his mother.

  And he thought: If I were Michael Caine or Gene Hackman or Whatsisname, the latest 007, and doing what I’m doing, I would have a gun. Several guns. With which, shooting from the hip, I could hit a bad guy at fifty yards and drop him permanently.

  But that’s not the case here.

  I’m about to meet with a really bad guy and I don’t have so much as a fingernail file with which to defend myself. I could have, of course, packed a fingernail file in my suitcase, thus eluding the attentions of my coworkers in the Department of Homeland Security at the airport.

  And a knife. But not a gun. The only way I could legally get my hands on a gun here is from the CIA and they wouldn’t give me one without authorization, which would be hard to get, inasmuch as they don’t know why I’m here and Hall is not about to tell Powell.

  Tonight, I can probably buy one. That will mean first finding a hooker and, through her, her pimp, and through him a retail dealer in firearms—as opposed to Mr. Pevsner, who is in the wholesale weapons business—who will get me a pistol of some sort for an exorbitant price, not a dime of which can I expect to get back from the government.

  But I can’t do that until late tonight, and it’s possible, but improbable, that when I go to the Sacher bar Pevsner will send someone to fetch me to the rendezvous. To which I would be very foolish to go without a weapon of some sort.

  To which I would be foolish to go armed with all the weapons in the combined arsenals of Mssrs. Caine, Hackman, and Whatsisname, 007.

  The answer is a knife. Knives.

  Despite the best efforts of professionals in the knife fighting profession to teach me how to use a blade, the archbishop of Canterbury is probably a better knife fighter than I am.

  But as it’s said, desperate times call for desperate measures.

  In a sporting goods store on Singerstrasse, not far from Saint Stefan’s Cathedral, Castillo bought two knives, telling the salesman he wanted something suitable to gut a boar, which he intended to hunt in Hungary.

  “I thought there were boar in Hesse,” the salesman said, more to make it known that he had cleverly picked up on Castillo’s Hessian accent—which Viennese believed was harsh and coarse—than anything else.

  “They’re a lot cheaper to hunt in Hungary,” Castillo replied, which happened to be true.

  He bought a horn-handled hunting knife with an eight-inch blade, a folding knife with a six-inch blade, and whet-stone and oil and took it all back with him to the Bristol.

  None of the faces of people standing around on the sidewalk or sitting where they could see who got onto the elevators looked familiar. Which meant that either Pevsner hadn’t sent someone to keep an eye on him or that whoever had been sent had been relieved and replaced.

  He went to his room, ordered a large pot of coffee, and, when it had been delivered, placed a towel on a small desk and began to sharpen the blades of both knives. When he’d finished, he worked on the mechanism of the folding knife until he was able to bring it to the open position with a flick of his wrist.

  Then he lay down on the bed, turned the television on, found the pay-per-view movie selection, and chose a film called The Package, starring Gene Hackman.

  VIII

  [ONE]

  Abéché, Chad 1325 7 June 2005

  There are no hangars at the Abéché airport, only an open-sided shack that serves as the terminal building for the one “scheduled flight” from N’Djamena each week—which is more often canceled than flown.

  There is not much call for transportation to Abéché, a town of some forty thousand inhabitants 470 miles east of N’Djamena, the capital of Chad. Most travelers catch rides on trucks—a three-day journey—if they have reason to go to what is actually a picturesque small city of narrow streets, falling-down buildings, markets—and mosques.

  But there is an airfield on which a Boeing 727 aircraft can land—except in the rainy season—and if it is the intention of those controlling the aircraft to strip the aircraft of its paint and registration numbers, then repaint it, and do so without attracting any attention whatever, Abéché is ideal.

  For one thing, the available labor pool is large and grateful for any kind of work and the wage scale is minimal. A job involving sandpapering paint off an aircraft under a “sun shield” patched together from tents is better than no job at all.

  And a patched-together sun shield on an airfield categorized in most official aviation publications as “dirt strip, no radio or navigation aids” is unlikely to attract the attention of those scrutinizing satellite photography looking for a missing Boeing 727.

  It took three days, with workers swarming around the wings and fuselage like so many ants feasting on a candy bar, to remove the markings of Lease-Aire LA-9021 from the wings, fuselage, and tail.

  It was taking considerably longer to repaint the aircraft in the paint scheme and appropriate registration numbers of Air Suriname. The generator providing power to the air compressor for the spray guns, which those in charge of the aircraft had thoughtfully shipped ahead of them by truck, had failed and there was no way of making repairs to it in Abéché.

  It was thus necessary to apply the paint—including a primer coat; they didn’t want the new paint scheme and markings to come off thirty thousand feet in the air—by hand, and the two men in charge of the aircraft were agreed that a genuine-looking—that is to say, neat—paint scheme was essential to their plans.

  They were also agreed, whe
n examining the progress of the work, that another three—perhaps four—days would pass before the job was finished.

  They had hoped to be finished long before then but it couldn’t be helped.

  It was the will of Allah.

  [TWO]

  Hotel Bristol Kaerntner Ring 1 Vienna, Austria 1650 7 June 2005

  When Karl W. Gossinger, of the Fulda Tages Zeitung, got off the elevator, he glanced around the lobby looking for a familiar face. There was none.

  He went onto The Ring through the revolving door and turned right, again looking for someone familiar. Then he started walking down Kaertnerstrasse toward Saint Stefan’s Cathedral.

  Walking was easier than he thought it would be. After experimenting, Castillo had decided the best way to carry the bone-handled hunting knife was to strap the sheath to the inside of his left calf with adhesive tape. It wouldn’t be easy to get at it there, but it would probably go unnoticed. The flip-open knife was in his shirt pocket even though that meant he had to keep his jacket buttoned.

  He was aware of the weight of the hunting knife, but he didn’t think it made him walk funny. The only problem was the flip-open: He would have to remember not to bend over.

  He turned left onto Philharmonikerstrasse and walked past the Hotel Sacher to the corner before turning and walking back and going into the bar.

  There were six people in the bar, four men and two women, none of whom looked as if they were likely to be connected with a big-time Russian arms dealer like Aleksandr Pevsner.

  Castillo took a seat at the bar and after studying the array of beer bottles lined up under the mirror behind the bar ordered a Czech beer, a Dzbán.

  It came with a bowl of pretzels, a bowl of peanuts, and a bowl of potato chips, which he thought was a nice custom until the barman laid the bill on the bar and Castillo turned it over to see that the beer was going to cost about eleven dollars, American.

  As discreetly as he could, Castillo studied his fellow drinkers in the none-too-reflective mirror. And turned his ears up. The couple at the end of the bar was speaking American English, which permitted him to devote his attention to the others.