By Order of the President

by W. E. B Griffin

  “ ‘Okay,’ he goes on, ‘first we torch my machine and then we get the hell out of here. Anybody got a thermite grenade?’

  “It took us fifteen days to walk out of there—we couldn’t make very good time bringing Captain Haye along with us—longer than your, quote, war, unquote, in Iraq—and when the colonel heard what Walker had done he pinned the CIB on him. I heard he was the only Signal Corps aviator with the CIB.”

  “I’ve heard that story before,” General McNab said as the waitress approached carrying a tray with three bottles of Schlitz and three frosted glass mugs. “Welcome home, Mr. Casey.”

  The men watched quietly as the waitress distributed the drinks before each, then said, “I’ll be back shortly for your order,” and turned and left.

  “Yeah,” Casey said when she was gone. “I never volunteered for Special Forces, General. I mean, yeah, I signed the papers, but the guy who recruited me was a lying sonofabitch, but I was eighteen years old and too dumb to know it.

  “I was a ham—a radio amateur—when I was a kid, and, before I got drafted, I took the exam and got an FCC first-class radio telephone license. They sent me right from basic training to Fort Monmouth and put me to work as an instructor. Everybody but me was a sergeant, so I spent more time on KP than instructing.

  “So this guy shows up and says if I volunteer for Special Forces, where they really need radio guys, I get to be a sergeant. So I signed up.

  “What that bastard didn’t tell me was that I got to be a sergeant after I got through jump school at Benning and the Q Course at Mackall.”

  “Does that sound familiar, Lieutenant Castillo?” General McNab asked, and then explained, “Lieutenant Castillo is himself a very recent graduate of the parachute school at Fort Benning and the Q Course.”

  Casey looked at Castillo but didn’t respond to McNab’s statement.

  “So I finished the Q Course,” he went on, “and they made me a buck sergeant, gave me a five-day leave and shipped my just-turned-nineteen-year-old ass to ’Nam, which turned out to be one of the less pleasant experiences of my life. I did all of my time in ’Nam on an A-Team, mostly in Laos.

  “But I managed not to get blown away and they sent me home. A long-haired sonofabitch and his girlfriend—who wasn’t wearing a bra; I still remember her tits—spit on me in the airport and called me a ‘baby killer.’

  “I got the same sort of shit in the Atlanta airport; this time, the spitter looked like my grandmother. And then I got here and went through separation processing. I figured it was good-bye, fuck you, and don’t let the doorknob hit you on the ass on your way out. There was a final ceremony. The only reason I went was because I figured the bastards were entirely capable of court-martialing me for AWOL.

  “So this sergeant major lines us all up, calls us to attention, and out marches this feisty little Green Beanie light colonel.

  “ ‘Take your handkerchiefs out, girls,’ he said. He meant it. So in a minute or so we’re all standing there holding our handkerchiefs. ‘All right, girls,’ this bastard said, ‘blow your noses.’

  “We wondered what the fuck was going on, but he was the sort of officer you did what he said so we all blew our noses.

  “ ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Put them away. Crying time is over. I know you all feel you’ve been crapped on by everybody from God on down in the chain of command. But the truth is, you’ve been given a gift. For one thing, you’re part of a brotherhood of warriors. You’ll never lose that. And you better understand that what you’ve been through has turned you into something special. You can do anything, anything you put your mind to doing. You’re ten steps ahead of everybody else. You can be anyone you want to be. I don’t feel sorry for you. I’m proud to have served with you. I salute you.’

  “And he saluted, said, ‘Dismiss the formation, Sergeant Major,’ and marched off.”

  Casey and McNab locked eyes. There was no question in Castillo’s mind that General McNab had been that lieutenant colonel.

  “So I went back to Boston and tried to drink all the beer in the VFW post,” Casey went on, “and then my father said I had to start thinking of my future and that maybe I should take advantage of my veteran’s preference and get on with the city as a fireman, or a cop, or maybe at the post office.

  “I didn’t want to deliver the mail or be a cop or a fireman and I began to wonder how much of that light colonel’s spiel was the real thing and how much was bullshit. Maybe I could do what I wanted to do.

  “It took me a couple of days to get my shit together, but one day I went out to Cambridge, to MIT, asked to see a professor of electrical engineering and told him I had flunked out of high school but had learned in ’Nam that I knew more, understood more, about signal radiation than most people and that I wanted to learn more. There aren’t very many poor Irish kids with lousy high school records in MIT, but that fall I was one of them. The first year, I went to MIT in the daytime and to adult education at night and got a high school diploma.

  "I graduated with a B.S.—summa cum laude—two years after that and got my master’s and Ph.D. in three more years. I was still at MIT when I started up AFC.”

  “I gave that same thanks-and-so-long talk fifty, a hundred times,” McNab said.

  “But you meant it, right?”

  McNab nodded.

  “So, at the risk of repeating myself, welcome home, Sergeant Casey,” McNab said. He raised one of the beer bottles in salute.

  “Thank you,” Casey said, raising a bottle to meet Mc-Nab ’s and, now following suit, Castillo’s.

  “So what can we do for you?” McNab asked.

  “It’s payback time,” Casey said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Me to you,” Casey said. “Unless I’m very wrong— which doesn’t happen often—your communications gear is five, ten years behind state of the art.”

  McNab took a moment before replying.

  “You’ve got equipment you think the Army should buy, is that it?”

  “I’ve already got some equipment I think—I know— Special Forces should have,” Casey said. “But I have no intention of getting involved with the Army procurement system or Fort Monmouth.”

  “I’m not sure I follow you,” McNab said.

  “No charge. I’ll show you what’s available. Take what you want. I’ll charge it off to research and development,” Casey said. “And, down the road, you give me your wish list and I’ll see if AFC can make it work.”

  “You’re talking about a lot of equipment,” McNab said. “You must know that.”

  “I know. I’m a rich—very fucking rich—Irishman, which I know I wouldn’t be if I hadn’t taken the chance that you meant in your speech and got my shit together and went out to MIT.”

  “Jesus Christ!” McNab said.

  “No strings, General,” Casey said. “When I heard what you guys were doing over there in Iraq, I decided it was high time I got back together with my brothers. So here I am.”

  “Before you change your mind, how do we start this?” McNab asked.

  “Why don’t you send the boy wonder here back to Nevada with me in the Lear?” Casey said. “Let him do some preliminary reconnoitering?”

  “You mean now?” McNab asked.

  “I think I’d like another beer and maybe something to eat first.”

  “Pack, Charley,” General McNab ordered.

  Castillo started to stand.

  “Shortly,” Casey said, motioning with his beer for Charley to stay seated. He looked at McNab. “If you don’t mind, General. It’s been too long since I last broke bread with my brothers.”

  SPRING 2005

  [TWO]

  303 Concord Circle Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania 1655 9 June 2005

  Charley Castillo’s cellular phone tinkled as Betty Schneider turned the car into the drive of a brick colonial house sitting behind half an acre of immaculately manicured lawn.

  “Hello?”

  There was no reply, but there was the fai
nt hiss of a connection suggesting there was someone on the line.

  “Hello?”

  There was still no reply.

  After a moment, the hiss stopped. Castillo pushed the CALL END key.

  Castillo looked out the window and saw they were close to the three-car garage. There was an apartment over the garage; he had stayed in it when, in his last year at West Point, the Army-Navy game had been played in Philadelphia.

  He also saw Major General H. Richard Miller, Sr., USA, Retired, who was walking purposefully across the lawn toward a flagpole. When he reached it, he stopped and looked at the Ford Crown Victoria.

  Betty stopped the car and they all got out.

  “I could use a little help here,” General Miller called. It was clearly an order.

  Major H. Richard Miller, Jr., trotted toward his father and the flagpole. Betty looked at Charley and saw that he was sort of standing at attention. When Major Miller reached the flagpole, he, too, came to attention. General Miller began to slowly lower the national colors. Major Miller put his hand over his heart. When Betty looked at Castillo, she saw he had his hand over his heart and put her hand on her breast.

  Major Miller caught the end of the flag as it approached the lawn and he and his father then folded it in the prescribed manner, ending up with a tightly folded triangle, which he then tucked under his arm.

  “Okay,” Castillo said and started to walk toward the Millers.

  “Yes, sir,” Betty said and followed him.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” Castillo said.

  “The colors have been lowered; it’s evening,” General Miller corrected him. He looked at Betty Schneider.

  “General, this is Sergeant Betty Schneider of the Philadelphia Police Department,” Castillo said.

  “How do you do, Sergeant? Welcome to our home.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Betty replied.

  A trim, gray-haired, light brown-skinned woman ran across the lawn to them, cried “Charley!,” grabbed both of Castillo’s arms, rose on her toes, kissed him, and said, “Thank you, Charley! God bless you!,” and then hugged him tightly.

  “Helene,” General Miller said, “this young woman is Sergeant Schneider of the Philadelphia Police Department.”

  “We finally got Dick released into our company, Mrs. M.,” Charley said. “But I had to promise you’d keep him chained in the backyard.”

  Mrs. Miller shook her head, then put out her hand to Betty.

  “I’m very pleased to meet you. Welcome!”

  “Thank you,” Betty said.

  Castillo’s cellular tinkled again.

  “Hello?”

  “Hiya, Charley! How are things in Bala Cynwyd, P.A.?”

  Charley recognized the voice of Howard Kennedy, Aleksandr Pevsner’s former FBI agent personal spook.

  “How nice of you to call, Mr. Kennedy,” Castillo said.

  Major Miller’s eyes lit up.

  “Aren’t you going to ask how I know where you are?”

  “You have friends from the old days, right?”

  Castillo noticed curiosity on Betty’s face and disapproval on General Miller’s.

  “I don’t know about ’friends,’ ” Kennedy said. “But you’ve heard, I’m sure, that money talks?”

  If he knows I’m here in Bala Cynwyd—nobody knew we were coming here—he’s got somebody in the cellular phone business. They can trace a call to the nearest cell antenna. That’s what the first no-answer call was all about. He wanted to locate me before he talked to me.

  “So I’m told.”

  “You want to tell me who’s answering your phone in the Mayflower?”

  What the hell! Don’t lie unless you have to.

  “One of Secretary Hall’s Secret Service guys. His personal detail. My boss thought you might call and he didn’t want me to miss it.”

  “Not somebody from the Fumbling Bureau of Investigation, Charley? Please don’t lie to me, Charley.”

  “No. As a matter of fact, right now Secretary Hall’s relationship with the FBI is rather strained.”

  “I would really hate to think that you were trying to set up some sort of a rendezvous between me and my former colleagues, Charley. That would distress me almost as much as it would distress Alex.”

  “Neither you nor he have to worry about that, Howard.”

  “Good. When Alex is distressed, he can get very unpleasant. For the moment, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I like you, Charley. Respect you. I checked you out. There’s more to you than your West Point poster boy image suggests. I think we could become pals.”

  Does he mean that? Or is he schmoozing me?

  “What did you want to tell me when you called the Mayflower?”

  “Alex wanted me to tell you that that airplane’s no longer where we told you it would be,” Kennedy said.

  “No longer, or never was?”

  “No longer. Since last night.”

  “How do you know?”

  “And something else. In addition to changing the registration numbers, they took all the seats out and put in fuel bladders.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Well, I know somebody who talked to somebody who talked to the truck drivers who took the bladders to Abéché.”

  “And how did somebody who talked to somebody know of your interest?”

  “Just between us, Charley, a mutual friend of ours in the air cargo business flew them from Mogadishu—you know that’s in Somalia, right?”

  “I even passed Basic Geography 101 at West Point,” Castillo said.

  “Do they grade on the alphabetic or numerical scale at West Point? I always wondered.”

  “Numeric. You were saying these bladders were flown to where?”

  “N’Djamena. That’s in Chad, I suppose you know.”

  “Is it really? When did our friend do this?”

  “About three weeks ago. And knowing our friend would be a little curious about why anyone would want fuel bladders in Chad, I asked the pilots to snoop around a little. They found out they were to be trucked to Abéché.”

  “I wonder why our friend’s customer didn’t want them flown directly to Abéché?”

  “Putting all the little dots together, are you? I wondered, too.”

  “And putting your little dots together, what did you conclude? ”

  “I’ll bet I concluded the same thing you have,” Kennedy said. “I hope you understand, Charley, that if our friend had any idea about Abéché he would have declined the charter. As I hope we’ve made clear, our friend really wants to avoid the spotlight of public attention.”

  “So that’s how you know—actually, think—that the airplane was in Abéché?”

  “No. I have what the FBI would call ‘eye witnesses’ to that.”

  “I don’t suppose you know where the airplane is now? Or have the new registration numbers?”

  “New registration numbers and a new airline paint job. No, I don’t.”

  “Wonderful!”

  “But I’ll bet it isn’t in Somalia . . .”

  “Why fly the bladders from there if the airplane was going there, right?”

  “Great minds travel similar paths.”

  “Got a guess where it might be?”

  “Not a clue. But I’m working on that, and the new identi fication, even as we speak. If I find out something, you’ll be the first to know.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I don’t suppose you have anything you’d like to share with me?”

  “Not now. Maybe tonight.”

  There was a pause before Kennedy went on.

  “Charley, I really don’t want to accidentally bump into anyone working for my former employer.”

  “I understand.”

  “I really hope you do. I’ll be in touch, Charley.”

  The line went dead.

  I wonder where he is? Probably New York, because it’s easier to be le
ss visible in a big city than a small one. But maybe Washington. Hell, he could be anywhere.

  And even if the agency or the FBI somehow latched on to that call and traced it, it was almost certainly made over a cellular he bought at a newsstand and dumped in a trash can the moment he hung up on me.

  I wonder what the hell he did that he’s so afraid the FBI will find him?

  Castillo became aware that General and Mrs. Miller, Dick, and Betty were all looking at him.

  Mrs. Miller broke the silence first. “Come in the house, Charley,” she said. “Everybody’s here to say thank you.”

  “I’ve got to make a call,” Charley said. “I really do. It’s important.”

  “Then we’ll give you a minute,” General Miller said.

  “Why don’t you come with us, Betty,” Mrs. Miller offered, “and meet the rest of the family? Perhaps you’d like to freshen up.”

  “Thank you.”

  Castillo waited until they disappeared into the house and then looked at Dick Miller.

  “Kennedy,” he said.

  “I heard.”

  “The plane is not there. It was. They tossed the seats out and loaded fuel bladders . . .”

  “Loaded? Or installed? Hooked up?”

  “He didn’t say. One of Pevsner’s airlines hauled the bladders from Mogadishu to N’Djamena. Then they were trucked overland to Abéché.”

  “You believe him?”

  Castillo nodded.

  “He has no idea where the airplane is now and is really worried that I’m going to flip him to the FBI.”

  “Is there a warrant out for him?”

  Castillo shrugged.

  “Go in the house, Dick. This won’t take me more than a minute.”

  Miller looked at the house. His older brother and his aunt Belle were in the door about to come on the lawn.

  “Keep me in the loop, right?” Miller said and then moved to intercept Kenneth Miller and their aunt Belle.

  Castillo punched the autodial button that would connect him with the White House switchboard.