By Order of the President

by W. E. B Griffin

  “. . . who plan on crashing it into the Liberty Bell.”

  “Where’d you get this, Mr. Castillo?” McNab asked.

  “From a Russian, an arms dealer. One of the names he uses is Aleksandr Pevsner. Another is Vasily Respin.”

  “I know the gentleman by both names. He’s a genuine rascal,” McNab said. “This sounds like a CIA fantasy. You said you got it? Where?”

  “From Pevsner. In Vienna.”

  “What’s in it for him? Don’t tell me altruism.”

  “He wants attention diverted from some of his business activities.”

  McNab grunted.

  “Anyway,” Castillo went on, “the last word we had was that the airplane—now repainted with the registration numbers of Air Suriname—was last seen in N’Djamena, Chad, after a flight from Khartoum. Khartoum has no record of Air Suriname 1101 in Khartoum in the last six months.”

  “That could happen,” Colonel Torine said and made a gesture with his fingers suggesting a bribe.

  Castillo didn’t respond, instead going on: “The airplane took on fuel, and filed a flight plan to Murtala Muhammad International, in Lagos, Nigeria. And never got there.”

  “Where do you think it is?” Colonel Torine asked.

  “Kennedy thinks it’s in South America,” Castillo said, “by way of Yundum International . . .”

  “Kennedy, who’s Kennedy?” General McNab interrupted. “And where is Yundum International?”

  “In Gambia, a hundred miles south of Dakar,” Colonel Torine answered. “Another place where the more generous you are, the fewer questions are asked about where you really came from, or are really going.”

  “Who’s Kennedy?” McNab pursued.

  “Pevsner’s guy. American. He’s ex-FBI,” Castillo said.

  “First name Howard?” McNab asked.

  Castillo nodded.

  “He’s renegade FBI, if it’s the same guy I think it is,” McNab went on. “A guy from the FBI was here, asking that if we ran across him anywhere to please let them know right away.”

  “That’s a whole other story, sir, but I’ve seen his dossier. He hasn’t been charged with anything.”

  “And I’m sure he gets a nice recommendation from Pevsner, right?” McNab said.

  Castillo didn’t reply.

  “Where in South America?” McNab asked.

  “I’m not sure it could make it across the drink to anywhere in South America from Yundum,” Colonel Torine said. “Or from anywhere else on the West Coast of Africa. How is it configured?”

  “It came out of passenger service with Continental Airlines, ” Castillo said. “All economy class, 189 seats.”

  “That probably means the short-haul configuration,” Colonel Torine said as he took a pocket-sized computer from the pocket on the upper left sleeve of his flight suit. He started tapping keys with a stylus. “Typically, that would mean a max of about 8,000—there it is, 8,150 gallons. Giving it a nominal range of 2,170 nautical miles. That’s without a reserve, of course.”

  He rapidly tapped more keys on the computer with the stylus.

  “Suriname isn’t in here,” he announced. “But Georgetown, Guyana, is. That’s right up the coast—no more than two hundred miles from Paramaribo, the only airport I know of in Suriname that’ll take a 727. It’s 2,455 nautical miles from Dakar to Georgetown. A standard configuration just couldn’t make it.”

  “The fuel bladders,” Castillo said.

  “Okay, let’s factor that in,” Colonel Torine said, rapidly tapping the stylus. “A standard U.S. Army fuel bladder— that’s another assumption we’ll have to go with, that the bladders are Army bladders—holds five hundred gallons . . .”

  “How did the 727 get to Africa in the first place if it doesn’t have the range to cross the Atlantic?” McNab asked, and then, as the answer quickly came to him, added, “Sorry, dumb question.”

  Torine answered it anyway.

  “More than likely via Gander, Newfoundland, to Shannon, Ireland. That’s the longest leg—about seventeen hundred nautical miles, well within the range of a short-haul 727. Then down across France to North Africa, and so on.”

  Castillo had several unkind thoughts, one after the other. The first was that General McNab’s question was, in fact, dumb. McNab rarely asked dumb questions.

  Well, Jesus, he’s just flown back and forth to North Africa and run a Gray Fox operation that went down perfectly. He’s tired. I know how that is.

  And while I’m still impressed with Torine’s pocket computer, and with his dexterity in punching the keys with that cute little stylus, this is a little late in the game to start figuring how far the 727 can fly.

  As if he had read Castillo’s mind, Colonel Torine looked at him and said, “I guess I should have done this earlier, but, frankly, I’ve been working on the assumption that the 727 was headed for Mecca.”

  What did he say? Mecca? What the hell is that all about?

  “Excuse me, sir?” Castillo said.

  Torine’s face showed I have just let my mouth run and he looked with some embarrassment at McNab.

  “Tell him,” McNab said, and then before Torine could open his mouth, went on: “General Naylor, probably because he thought I didn’t have the need to know, did not elect to share with me why we were looking for the 727 in Chad, but . . .”

  He gestured with his hand for Torine to pick up the story.

  Torine looked at Castillo.

  “You know who General McFadden is?”

  “General Naylor’s deputy commander at MacDill?” Castillo replied.

  “Right,” Torine said. “We go back a long way. When General McFadden called me to lay on the support of the C-17 for the McNab mission, he told me, out of school, that despite the current wisdom at CentCom that the 727 was going to fly to Philadelphia and crash into the Liberty Bell he thought that there was a good chance it was going to be flown to Mecca and be crashed into the ka’ba, thereby really enraging the Muslim world. It’s an American airplane; they would probably find the body of the American pilot . . .”

  “Jesus!” Castillo said.

  “Which made a lot more sense to both of us than the Liberty Bell,” McNab said. “And still does.”

  “General, I really think Philadelphia is the target,” Castillo said.

  “Far be it from me to question the judgment of the president ’s personal representative,” McNab said. “Tell us about the fuel bladders, Torine.”

  God knows I am an expert on McNabian sarcasm, and, again, there’s more to that crack than what it sounds like. What the hell is he hinting at?

  “Okay, where was I?” Torine asked, consulting his computer again. “Okay. A bladder holds five hundred gallons. We don’t know how many bladders were loaded aboard in Abéché . . .”

  “I can find out, probably, when I get to Cozumel,” Castillo said.

  “. . . but more than one. So let’s go with what we know. Two bladders, 1,000 gallons,” Torine went on, stabbing at his pocket computer with his stylus. “Figuring .226 nautical miles per gallon, that’s . . . an additional 226 miles of range—2,170 plus 226 is 2,396. They’d run out of fuel 59 miles out of Georgetown.”

  “Factor in another couple of bladders,” McNab ordered. “Tell me how many bladders it would take to give them the fuel they need. For that matter, tell me how many bladders they can get on that airplane.”

  “Okay,” Torine said. “Two more bladders would give them another 226 miles. That’d get them across the drink with 160-odd miles to spare. Six would get them there with almost 400 miles to spare.”

  “We better figure they had eight,” McNab said. “What about the weight?”

  “I don’t think it would be a problem,” Torine said. “Let me check.”

  There was a knock at the door. D’Alessandro went to it and opened it.

  A Special Forces master sergeant was standing there.

  "You’re wanted on the secure line, Mr. D’Alessandro,” he said.

>   D’Alessandro opened the drawer of a desk and took out a telephone. He spoke briefly into it and then extended it to Castillo.

  “Castillo.”

  “Dick, Charley,” Major H. Richard Miller, Jr., said. “We have confirmation that the two guys who were at Britton’s mosque were also at Spartan. Where they were certified in the 727.”

  “Great. That pretty much settles it, wouldn’t you say?”

  “It looks that way,” Miller said. “There’s something else, Charley.”

  “Okay. Go ahead.”

  “Betty Schneider said to give you a message.”

  “Equally great. What is it?”

  “She said to give this to you verbatim, Charley,” Miller said, uncomfortably.

  “Well, let’s have it.”

  “She said, ‘Don Juan: I should have known better. Signature, Sergeant B. Schneider.’ ”

  “Oh, shit!”

  “What the hell did you do to her, Don Juan?”

  “Is that all, Dick?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” Castillo said and handed the telephone to D’Alessandro.

  I guess that Highway sergeant finally got around to telling Frankie Break-My-Legs, “Ha-ha, you know what the Secret Service calls Castillo, Lieutenant? ‘Don Juan.’ ”

  Goddammit to hell!

  Castillo sensed McNab’s eyes on him.

  “That was Miller, sir,” Castillo said. “We have confirmation that the two Somalis who were in Philadelphia were at Spartan —the Spartan School of Aeronautics—in Tulsa and are qualified in 727s.”

  “Well, then I guess the ka’ba’s safe from these lunatics,” McNab said. “Is that good or bad?”

  “I crunched the numbers for ten 500-gallon bladders, 5,000 gallons,” Colonel Torine said. “At 7 pounds a gallon, that would be 35,000 pounds. That would add 1,130 nautical miles of range—a total of 3,305—and still leave it 22,295 pounds under max gross takeoff weight.”

  “So they can fly just about any place they damn well please,” McNab said. “What about direct to Philadelphia?”

  “No,” Torine said. “That’s about 3,500 nautical miles. But let’s be sure.” He stabbed at the computer with the stylus. “3,361 nautical miles. Too far. Not even factoring in a reserve, that’s 65 miles short. And even factoring in more bladders, why would they want to arrive in Philadelphia with nearly empty tanks?”

  “Good point,” McNab said. “Presuming they learned from 9/11, they want to arrive with as much fuel, as an explosive, as possible. Or possibly—always look on the dark side—with as much trinitrotoluene as they can carry.”

  Torine started stabbing with the stylus again.

  “Hold off on that,” McNab ordered, touching his arm. “Okay, let’s go with the assumption the airplane is somewhere in the upper east quarter of the South American continent, maybe even in Suriname. I’m presuming the CIA has been told what your friend the ex-FBI agent told you, Mr. Castillo?”

  “They haven’t been told where it came from.”

  “Okay, they already have egg on their face about this, so I think we can assume there’s been satellites all over that part of the globe, just as soon as they could be redirected. They were probably spinning their wheels during the night, but at daylight I think we can assume they’re going to find it.”

  “Kennedy says he knows where it is and will tell me when I go down there.”

  “Go down where?” McNab asked.

  “Cozumel, off the Yucatán Peninsula.”

  “I know where it is,” McNab said. “Why won’t he tell you on the telephone?”

  “I don’t know,” Castillo replied. “But we have to play under his rules.”

  “When are you going down there?” McNab asked.

  “As soon as we finish here,” Castillo said, “and I report to Secretary Hall how you plan to neutralize the 727.”

  McNab looked thoughtful for a moment and then said, “Gentlemen, will you give Mr. Castillo and me a moment alone?”

  Not looking very happy about it, everybody filed out of the room. McNab closed the door and turned to Castillo.

  “The problem is not how to neutralize it, Charley,” he said, “but how quickly we can do so.”

  We’re back to “Charley”?

  “I’m not sure I follow you, sir.”

  “What did you do, forget everything you learned in the stockade?” McNab asked, not very pleasantly.

  “Okay,” McNab went on and looked at his watch. “It’s oh-seven-fifty-five. Let’s assume that at this very moment analysts at Langley and Fort Meade are going over the first of the daytime imagery downloads. It would be nice if they came up with a nice clear photo of this airplane sitting on an airfield in Suriname, but I don’t think we better count on that. Realistically, what they’re going to come up with is half a dozen images that might be—even probably are—of our 727. But they’re not going to pass that on to the DCI, much less the president, until they’re sure. They’ll direct the satellites for better pictures, and if they have assets on the ground—do you think there’s much of a CIA operation in Suriname, for instance? I don’t—they’ll send him word to make a visual. How long is that going to take?”

  “Hours,” Charley said.

  “How long is it going to take you to fly to Cozumel in that pretty little airplane of yours?”

  “It’s 930 nautical miles. A little under two hours. Maybe a little less; when Fernando checked the weather a half hour ago, there were some favorable winds aloft.”

  “So what we’re saying, Charley, is that you will get a location on the 727 from his guy before the NSA and the CIA finish making sure they’ve found it. Presuming they do find it.”

  Castillo nodded.

  “You trust your guy, Charley?”

  Castillo nodded again and said, “Yes, sir.”

  “During those two hours, Gray Fox will be standing around with its thumb up its ass,” McNab said.

  “I’m not sure I know where you’re going with this, General, ” Castillo said.

  “I’m a little disappointed this hasn’t occurred to you,” McNab said. “But let’s take it from the top. We can assume that when we get a firm fix on the 727, we’ll be ordered to neutralize it.”

  "Yes, sir.”

  “How would you do that?”

  Jesus Christ, why lay this on me? You’re the guy who runs Gray Fox.

  “What I thought you would do, sir, would be send a Gray Fox team—with Little Birds2—to wherever it is and neutralize it. Knock out the gear, maybe, or blow it up.”

  “And when would I do that?”

  “As soon as you got the word, sir.”

  “And what’s the sequence of events? You should have thought about this, Charley. You’re about to be Lieutenant Colonel Castillo. You’re supposed to think ahead. Give me the sequence.”

  “I confirm the location, notify Secretary Hall—and you, to give you a heads-up—Hall tells the president and/or the secretary of defense, who tell CentCom to lay on the operation. And they give you the order.”

  “And then,” McNab picked it up, “conferring with his staff to make sure everybody agrees on what should be done, General Naylor orders the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment at Fort Campbell to prepare half a dozen Little Birds, say, four MH-6Hs and two AH-6Js—we’re not going to have to fight our way onto the airfield, but it never hurts to have some airborne weaponry available. And then CentCom orders the Seventeenth Airlift Squadron to send a Globemaster to Fort Campbell to pick up the Little Birds and bring them here so we can load the Gray Fox people . . .”

  Now I know where you’re going. And you’re right, I should have thought about this.

  “All of which is going to take time,” Castillo offered.

  “Yes, it will, Charley. You and I have been down that road together too many times before.”

  McNab let that sink in.

  “Apropos of nothing whatever, Mr. Castillo, simply to place the facts before you,
there are AH-6Js and MH-6Hs at the Special Warfare Center, for training purposes. There are thirty-odd special operators—most of them Gray Fox—eating their breakfast off trays inside the Globemaster that just brought them home from Morocco. By now, the C-17 III should be refueled . . .”

  “You think I should ask General Naylor,” Castillo said.

  “Charley, I know you love him and I do, too, but Allan Naylor is not a special operator. He likes to—I guess has to—do things by the book.”

  “What are you thinking? Mount them up and send them to Hurlburt?”

  Hurlburt Field, in the Florida panhandle near the Gulf Coast beach resort of Destin, is the home of the USAF Special Operations Command.

  McNab nodded.

  “You can get to anywhere in South or Central America from Hurlburt a lot faster than you can from here. Or Fort Campbell.”

  “Without asking General Naylor?”

  “Without asking anybody,” McNab said. “If the special assistant to the secretary of homeland security—sent here, according to National Security Advisor Dr. Cohen, at the personal order of the president—were to suggest to me that prepositioning a Gray Fox team at Hurlburt—from which it could easily be stood down—was a good idea, I think I’d have to go along.”

  Castillo didn’t say anything for a long moment.

  “That’s a hell of a decision for a major to make,” he said, finally. “When he finds out—and he will—Naylor is going to be furious.”

  “Yeah, he will,” McNab agreed. “With both of us.” He paused and then went on: “What separates really good officers from all the others, Charley, is their willingness to order done what they know should be done and fuck the consequences. Your call, Charley.”

  After a moment’s pause, Castillo said, “Do it.”

  McNab nodded.

  “Anything else you need here?”

  “I’d like a C-22 pilot to come with me. I need an expert.”

  McNab nodded again, went to the door, opened it, and called, “Colonel Torine, will you come in here, please?”

  Torine came into the office and closed the door.

  “I think it would be a good idea if you went to sunny Cozumel with Charley. He needs a C-22 expert.”

  “From the look on his face, I don’t think he thinks that’s such a good idea,” Torine said.