Special Ops

by W. E. B Griffin

  “My God, where did he get that idea?”

  “It fits neatly in with Kasavubu’s belief that the Belgians will do whatever they have to take the Congo back,” Captain Portet said. “He thinks the Belgians were behind the Katangese Rebellion—”

  “The Belgians sent troops to put the Katangese Rebellion down,” Jack argued.

  “Kasavubu believes it gave them an excuse to send troops down to restore colonialism. And he believes the jump on Stanleyville was going to be more of the same thing.”

  “Jesus!”

  “What Mobutu said was that Kasavubu’s unwillingness to accept this—Kasavubu’s willingness to accept the Belgian intervention at Stanleyville, in particular—proves that Kasavubu is unfit to lead the country, and will have to be replaced.”

  “Did Kasavubu really think the Belgians were going to stand idly by as the Simbas killed the Europeans one by one?” Jack asked angrily.

  “Kasavubu believes the Congolese Army, under the leadership of Lieutenant General Mobutu, would have dealt with the problem in good time,” Captain Portet said sarcastically. “Mike Hoare’s mercenaries, much less the Belgian paras, were not necessary. ”

  “Jesus,” Jack said. “Was it the booze talking?”

  “Sure. But in vino veritas, Jacques.”

  “You said Mobutu thinks Kasavubu has to be replaced. Who does he have in mind?”

  “Who do you think? He almost came out and said it, and believe me, Jacques, there is no question in my mind that sooner or later, probably sooner, Mobutu is going to stage a coup against Kasavubu, and probably succeed. I want to get out before that happens—or the other inevitable thing happens. The result in either case being chaos.”

  “What other inevitable thing?”

  “The Communists have another shot at taking over that part of the world. They’re not through, and I don’t like to think what would have happened in Stanleyville if they had managed to get arms to Olenga.”

  “What will happen to Air Simba?”

  “I’m going to sell it to one of Joseph Désiré Mobutu’s cousins,” Captain Portet said. “That was another interesting thing he said at dinner. He said that he has a cousin who would like to ‘take a position’ in Air Simba. I wondered who taught him to say ‘take a position.’ ”

  “ ‘A cousin’?”

  Again his father didn’t respond directly.

  “And I realized that once the camel’s nose came under the tent, we could kiss Air Simba good-bye, anyway. In two months, there would be fifty more cousins on the payroll, fighting over which one got to put his hand in the cash register today.”

  “Where would he get the money?”

  “He told me his cousin ‘found himself in a strong cash position’ and was ‘looking for a suitable investment opportunity.’ I told him that while I was here, I would come up with a price. I know what it’s worth, so the price will be that, plus the price of the house, the cars, the furniture, everything else. For that his ‘cousin’ can have a fifty-percent ‘position’ in Air Simba.”

  “And you won’t go back for the rest?”

  His father shook his head, no.

  “I’ll come out of the Congo considerably richer than when I went in,” he said. “Which is more than a lot of other people can say.”

  “And what are you going to do?”

  “There’s a lot of old Boeing 707s on the market,” Captain Portet said. “I’m going to buy a couple of them, maybe three or four, and start up an air cargo, or maybe air cargo/passenger charter operation here. Operating into South America, and maybe, even probably, into Vietnam. That war seems to get bigger by the day.”

  “Yeah,” Jack agreed.

  “Are you going to have to go over there?”

  “I don’t know. Christ, I hope not. Before the Stanleyville thing came up, I didn’t think so. They assigned me to the Instrument Examiner Board at Fort Rucker—”

  "You were flying?”

  “They don’t let enlisted swine fly. What they had me doing was writing the written parts.”

  “Any regrets about not being an officer?”

  “Not until Marjorie. Or until that got serious. I don’t think Marjorie cares, but her family, both sides, have been officers for generations.”

  “I think you made a good choice there, but with her background, is she going to be happy married to an airplane driver?”

  “I guess we’ll have to find that out,” Jack said. “But to keep the record straight, I did a little flying. When they were getting the B-26s ready for the Congo, they didn’t have anybody who knew how to fly them, so they looked the other way and turned me into an IP.”

  “Where’d you get B-26 time?”

  “I got about twenty hours just before I became an IP,” Jack said. “They were really desperate. I even flew one to Kamina, because there was no one else around who could. But to answer your question, what I’m hoping to do is finish my time giving written instrument exams at Fort Rucker.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” his father said.

  “You know something I don’t?”

  At that moment, what turned out to be a fifteen-pound grouper struck the port line, the rod bent nearly double, the reel screamed, and they jumped out of their chairs to help Jeanine. Jack’s question never got an answer.

  [ THREE ]

  Walter Reed U.S. Army Medical Center

  Washington, D.C.

  0930 12 December 1964

  Brigadier General James R. McClintock, Medical Corps, U.S. Army, a tall, silver-haired, hawk-faced man of forty-six, arrived in the ward unannounced. He was wearing a white smock over a uniform shirt and trousers. The smock bore an embroidered caduceus, the insignia of the U.S. Army Medical Corps, but it did not have pinned to it, as regulations required, the small oblong black piece of plastic he had been issued, and on which was engraved his rank and name and branch of service.

  He did not, General McClintock often informed his aide-de-camp when the question of the missing name tag came up, have to look down at his chest to remind himself who he was, and if there was a question as to his identity in the minds of the staff, the aide should tell them.

  General McClintock was alone when he got off the elevator. Usually he was trailed by at least his aide, and most often by a small herd of medical personnel, and these people were most often smiling nervously. In addition to being an internist of international repute, General McClintock had a soldier’s eye. When he visited a ward, in other words, he was just as likely to spot a military physician whose hair was too long, or whose shoes needed a shine, as he was to find a misdiagnosis or something wrong with a patient’s chart.

  He walked across the highly polished linoleum floor to the nurses’ station. There were three nurses and two enlisted medical technicians inside. The nurses looked busy, so General McClintock addressed one of the medical technicians:

  “Hand me Captain Lunsford’s chart, will you, son?”

  “Yes, sir,” the technician, a specialist six (an enlisted grade corresponding to sergeant first class), responded. He knew who General McClintock was, and, consequently, his response was far more enthusiastic and militarily crisp than usually was the case. So much so that it caught the attention of the senior nurse, Major Alice J. Martin, ANC, who had been standing with her back to the counter, talking on the telephone. She glanced over her shoulder, hung the phone up in midsentence, and walked quickly to the counter.

  “May I be of help, General?” she asked.

  “I thought I’d have a last look at Captain Lunsford before he’s discharged,” McClintock said.

  He took the chart, which was actually an aluminum folding clipboard, and which with all the forms clipped in various places inside was nearly three inches thick, from the medical technician, nodded and smiled, and said, “Thank you.”

  Major Martin headed for the opening in the nurses’ station.

  “That won’t be necessary, Major,” he said. “I won’t need you. Thank you.”

/>   “Sir, he has visitors,” Major Martin said, more than a little annoyed and disappointed not to be able to exercise her prerogative of accompanying the chief of internal medical services while he saw a patient on her ward.

  “Well,” General McClintock said, “he’s about to have at least one more.”

  “He’s in 421, General,” Major Martin said.

  “Yes, I know,” General McClintock said. “Thank you.”

  He walked down the corridor, his rubber-heeled and -soled shoes making faint squeaking noises on the waxed linoleum.

  When he pushed open the door to 421, there were three men inside, including the patient, who was sitting, dressed in civilian clothing, smoking a very large light green cigar, on the bed. The patient started to get off the bed when he saw General McClintock, but McClintock, smiling, quickly put up his hand to stop him.

  “Stay where you are, Captain,” McClintock said.

  General McClintock saw that the room was decorated for the holiday season as seen through the eyes of an officer like this one. The patient had obviously visited the Post Exchange Branch, where he had purchased not only a plastic model of the HU-1B “Huey” but four adorable little dolls. One of them was Santa Claus; two were dressed as nurses and one as a doctor.

  The Huey was hanging from the central light fixture. The adorable nurse and doctor dolls were hanging, their necks realistically broken, from pipe-cleaner nooses attached to the Huey’s skids. Santa Claus straddled the tail boom of the helicopter, cradling a machine gun in his arms.

  The chart described the patient as a Negro male, twenty-six years old, five feet eleven and one half inches tall, weight 144 pounds. There was a note stating that this was twenty-one pounds less than he had weighed at his last annual physical examination.

  Dr. McClintock noted quickly, professionally, that the patient’s eyeballs were clear. When they had brought him in, he looked as if he had been liable to bleed to death through the eyeballs. And he had been ten pounds lighter then than he was now.

  Dr. McClintock guessed the patient’s visitors to be his father and brother, not because they looked alike, but because he had been ordered to restrict his visitors to his immediate family. The younger of them, the brother, a tall, light-skinned, hawk-faced man, was well, even elegantly, dressed in a superbly tailored glen plaid suit and a white-collared faintly striped blue shirt. The father was short, squat, flat-faced, very dark, and what Dr. McClintock thought of as “comfortably crumpled.” He wore a tweed jacket, rumpled flannels, rubber soled “health” shoes and a button-down collar tattersall shirt without a necktie.

  “How do you feel, Captain?” Dr. McClintock asked.

  “Frankly, sir,” Captain Lunsford said politely, “not quite as happy as I was an hour ago, when I thought I was being turned loose.”

  Dr. McClintock raised his eyes from Lunsford’s chart and smiled. “All things come to he who waits, Captain,” he said. “We’re still going to turn you loose. But not just now. Soon.”

  “Today?” Lunsford asked.

  “Today,” McClintock said. “Shortly.”

  “May I see the chart, Doctor?” Lunsford’s father asked. When McClintock looked at him in surprise, he added, “I’m a physician. ”

  “Excuse my manners, General,” George Washington Lunsford said. “Doctor, may I present my father, Dr. Lunsford? And my brother, Dr. Lunsford?”

  “How do you do, Doctor?” McClintock said, handing the elder Dr. Lunsford the chart.

  “Dad is a surgeon, Doctor. My brother is a shrink,” Lunsford said. Then, when McClintock smiled, he added, “Before Charley became a shrink, Dad used to say that shrinks were failed surgeons. ”

  “George, for Christ’s sake!” the younger Dr. Lunsford snapped.

  “I’ve heard that,” Dr. McClintock said, smiling, “but rarely when one of them was in the same room.”

  “My God!” the elder Dr. Lunsford said. “I have never seen a case of that before.” He extended the chart to Dr. McClintock, pointing at a line with his finger.

  “It’s pretty rare,” Dr. McClintock said. “Your son has been regarded as a gift from heaven by our parasitologists. I understand he has his own refrigerator in their lab.”

  “I’ll bet he does,” the elder Dr. Lunsford said, and showed the chart to his other son, who shook his head in disbelief.

  “And they are going to give him his own glass cabinet in the Armed Forces Museum of Pathology,” Dr. McClintock said, smiling. “Several of our intense young researchers suggested, more or less seriously, that we just keep him here as a living specimen bank.”

  “Do you realize how sick you were?” Dr. Lunsford demanded of his son. “For that matter, still are?”

  “I didn’t really feel chipper, now that you mention it, Dad,” Captain Lunsford said, “but there is a silver lining in the cloud. I have been given so many different antibiotics that it is not only absolutely impossible for me to have any known social disease, but I may spread pollen, so to speak, for the next six months or so without any worry about catching anything.”

  Dr. McClintock and the elder Dr. Lunsford chuckled. The younger Dr. Lunsford shook his head in disgust.

  “We think, Doctor,” Dr. McClintock said, “that everything is under control. We were a little worried, frankly, about the liver, but that seems to have responded remarkably—”

  He stopped in midsentence as the door to the room opened suddenly and two men in gray suits walked briskly in. One of them quickly scrutinized the people in the room, then walked quickly to the bathroom, pulled the door open, and looked around inside. Then he stepped inside and pushed the white shower curtain aside.

  The other went to the window and closed the vertical blinds, then turned to Dr. McClintock.

  “Who are these people, General?” he demanded.

  “Who the hell are you?” Captain Lunsford demanded icily.

  The wide, glossily varnished wooden door to the corridor opened again.

  The President of the United States walked in. On his heels was Colonel Sanford T. Felter, who was wearing a rumpled and ill-fitting suit.

  “You can leave, thank you,” the President said.

  “Mr. President—” one of the Secret Service men began to protest.

  “Goddamn it, you heard me!”

  The two Secret Service men, visibly annoyed, left the room.

  “How do you feel, son?” the President asked Captain Lunsford with what sounded like genuine concern in his voice.

  “I’m all right, sir, thank you,” Lunsford replied, a tone of surprise in his voice.

  “This your dad?” the President asked.

  “Yes, sir, and my brother.”

  “Well, you can be proud of this boy, Mr. Lunsford,” the President said. “He’s something special.”

  “It’s ‘Dr.’ Lunsford, Mr. President,” Captain Lunsford said.

  “No offense, Doctor,” the President said. “I didn’t know. Usually Colonel Felter tells me things I should know, like that.”

  “None taken, Mr. President,” Dr. Lunsford said.

  The President turned to Captain Lunsford.

  “I’m having a little trouble with Congress about your Belgian and Congolese medals,” he said. “You’ll get the authorization— you and the sergeant—but it may take a while. So, in the meantime, I thought maybe this might make up for it.”

  He held out his right arm behind him. Felter put an oblong blue box in it. The President opened the lid and took out a medal.

  “That’s the Silver Star, Captain,” the President said. “I understand it will be your third. I can’t believe the others are more well-deserved than this one.”

  He stepped to Lunsford and pinned the medal to the lapel of his coat. He did not do so properly; it promptly fell off. Lunsford, in a reflex action, grabbed for it, and the open pin buried itself in the heel of his hand.

  “Shit!” he said involuntarily, and then, immediately, “Excuse me, sir.”

  “I understand
,” the President said, chuckling, “that ‘it’s the thought that counts.’ ” And then there was concern in his voice, as Lunsford pulled the pin free from his hand. “You all right, son?”

  “Yes, sir,” Lunsford said.

  “I told the chief of staff to find out if there is some reason your name can’t be on the next promotion list to major. I have the feeling he’s not going to find any.”

  Lunsford looked at him but didn’t say anything.

  “You’re one hell of a man, Captain,” the President said. “I’m grateful to you. Your country is grateful.”

  He shook Lunsford’s hand, then punched him affectionately on the shoulder, and then shook the hands of Lunsford’s father and brother.

  The President nodded at Dr. McClintock, murmured, “General, ” and, adding, “Let’s go, Felter,” walked out of the room.

  “See you soon, Father,” Felter said, and followed the President out of the room.

  “It was very good of you, Mr. President, to make the time for Captain Lunsford. I appreciate it,” Colonel Felter said as the presidential limousine headed back to the White House.

  “If I had the time, I’d go to Fort Bragg and pin a medal on that sergeant who parachuted with the Belgians, too,” the President said. “Goddamn, men like that make you proud to be an American. ”

  “Yes, sir, I agree,” Felter said.

  “What’s going to happen to him now? When he’s fit for service? ”

  “He’ll be an instructor at the Special Warfare Center at Bragg.”

  “Teaching what?” The President chuckled. “How to run around in a leopard skin in the jungles of Africa and stay alive?”

  “Yes, sir. That sort of thing.”

  “I thought I was making a joke. You’re implying we’re going to continue to be involved in the Congo.”

  “In sub-Saharan Africa, yes, sir, I’m afraid we will be.”

  “But the Simbas are finished,” the President argued, and then asked, almost menacingly, “Aren’t they?”

  “I think it’s safe to say that Olenga is finished, Mr. President. But I think there will be others like him, and the next time, the Soviets will be prepared to help them.”