Special Ops

by W. E. B Griffin

  He glowered at Felter for the perhaps ninety seconds it took the White House operator to get the Chairman on the line and to ring the presidential phone.

  He snatched the telephone almost angrily from its cradle.

  “This is the President, Admiral,” he said, and then he winked at Felter. “I’ve just given Colonel Felter a special mission. I want you to make sure that whatever he asks for, he gets. Clear? Whatever he asks for.”

  He put the telephone back in its cradle.

  “Relax, Sandy,” the President said. “We just called each other’s bluff. You won.”

  Felter remained at attention.

  “Sit down, Sandy, and finish your drink,” the President went on.

  Felter looked at him, bent down and picked up his Bloody Mary, and drained it. He held the glass up and looked at the President. “With your permission, sir?”

  “And give me another little taste, too,” the President said, extending his empty glass.

  As Felter was refilling their glasses, the President called his name, and Felter turned and looked at him.

  “To keep the air clear between us, Sandy,” the President said, “I had already decided that shooting the sonofabitch would be about the dumbest thing we could do. And just between you and me, I knew what the Director was trying to do: He thought he had himself a win-win. You got rid of Guevara for him, and the trouble that would cause would make me get rid of you.”

  Felter nodded, finished pouring the drinks, and walked to the President and handed him his. The President raised his glass and knocked it against Felter’s.

  “Pick yourself a good deputy for this,” the President said. “I don’t want you spending all your time ‘controlling’ Señor Guevara. ”

  “Yes, sir.”

  IV

  [ ONE ]

  226 Providence Drive

  Swarthmore, Pennsylvania

  1520 14 December 1964

  H. Wilson Lunsford, M.D., answered the door of his home. “Good afternoon, Doctor,” Colonel Sanford T. Felter said. “It’s good to see you again, sir, and I apologize for the intrusion.”

  “I’m sure you consider it necessary, Colonel,” Dr. Lunsford said. “Won’t you please come in?”

  “How is he?”

  “He and his buddy have been at the scotch since lunch,” Dr.

  Lunsford said, and then, when he saw the look on Felter’s face, added: “Dr. McClintock at Walter Reed gave me tranquilizers for George to dispense as I saw fit. He said he thought there might be some depression. He and his buddy are having a good time, and the only price they’re going to have to pay is a hangover. I’m a lot happier giving him scotch than some exotic chemical.”

  He motioned for Felter to precede him into the house, then down a corridor, and then stepped quickly ahead of him to open a door. Through it, Felter saw that it was a game room. There was an antique billiards table in the center of the room, and there were leather armchairs and a couch against one paneled wall, and there was an octagonal card table with a green felt playing surface in a corner.

  “Your guest, George,” Dr. Lunsford said.

  When Father Lunsford saw him in the doorway, he—a Pavlovian response—came quickly out of his chair.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” he said, just a little thickly.

  Felter waved him back into his chair and walked up and gave him his hand.

  “Sorry to intrude, Father,” Felter said. “It couldn’t be helped, and I won’t be long.”

  Then he turned to make his manners to Father’s buddy, who had also stood up when he entered the room, and was standing now.

  Felter had been mildly curious about whom Father Lunsford would have for a buddy, and mildly concerned that, in the company of some high school or college chum, the scotch might loosen Father’s tongue a little too much.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” Father’s buddy said, also a little thickly.

  The last time Felter had seen Captain John S. Oliver was in the office of Major General Robert Bellmon. Oliver—whom Bellmon has described as “as good an officer as they come”—was Bellmon’s aide-de-camp.

  “Hello, Oliver,” Felter said. “Good to see you.” Then he blurted what was in his mind. “I didn’t know you two knew each other.”

  He was genuinely surprised. Oliver was an Army aviator, a Regular Army officer out of Norwich, who had already been accepted into what Felter thought of as the establishment. He knew that Bob Bellmon would have been happy if John Oliver and Marjorie had hit it off. This was, he realized, the first time he had ever seen Oliver—and he had been with him often—looking as if he had as much as sniffed at the neck of a beer bottle.

  “Captain Oliver and myself, Colonel, have been anal orifice comrades since he saved my bacon in Vietnam,” Father said.

  “Sit down, Johnny,” Felter said.

  “With the colonel’s kind permission, I will adjourn to the gentlemen’s facility,” Oliver said, carefully pronouncing each word, and walked a little unsteadily out of the room.

  Father looked at Felter.

  “His lady love told him it was either her or the Army,” Father said. “He chose the Army, and she wasn’t bluffing.”

  “I had no idea,” Felter said.

  “And now he is sadly contemplating all those nights in the future, alone in a soldier’s bed.”

  “What did she have against the Army?”

  “She lost one husband, and decided she wasn’t equipped to lose another. No problem with him, Colonel. I’ll take care of him. He’s one of the good guys.”

  “General Bellmon thinks very highly of him,” Felter said, thinking out loud.

  “He’s Johnny’s general?” Father asked, and when Felter nodded, went on: “Yeah, he got Johnny a deal—”

  "’Deal’ ?”

  “You know he’s no longer a dog-robber?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Well, he’s not. He was good at it, but he hated it, and he was up for reassignment, and his general got him some kind of special job—executive assistant or something—to a General Rand, who’s going to have some new kind of division at Benning . . .”

  “George Rand,” Felter supplied. “They’re calling it the 11th Air Assault Division.”

  “Right,” Father said. “Anyway, Johnny told me that his general—Bellmon, you said his name is?”

  “Bellmon,” Felter said. “He’s an old friend of mine.”

  “. . . Bellmon told him that if he did a good job for this General Rand, he could expect to make major on the five percent list within a year.”

  Up to five percent of the promotions on any promotion list may be awarded without regard to their seniority (time in grade) to officers who have demonstrated outstanding capabilities.

  That makes sense, Felter thought. He’s an usually bright officer; he worked hard for Bob Bellmon, and because he worked for Bellmon he knows a lot more than most captains do about aviation, and he’ll work hard for George Rand, who’ll write him another outstanding efficiency report, and he’ll earn a place on the five percent list.

  “I’m sure he could,” Felter said. “Father, quickly, before he comes back: I don’t need an answer right now, although I’d like one, but would you be willing to continue working on Africa?”

  “Jesus Christ, I haven’t been home seventy-two fucking hours, and you’re asking me to go back to the fucking African jungle?” Lunsford flared, then got control of himself. “Sorry, sir. I know you wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t necessary. What went wrong over there now?”

  “I don’t think you’ll have to go back in the jungle, Father,” Felter said. “The deal is this. I’ve managed to convince the President that Che Guevara has to be watched—”

  “In Africa?” Lunsford asked dubiously.

  “Yeah, in Africa. Later, Central and South America. But right now in Africa.”

  “Why don’t we just shoot the sonofabitch? I heard he shot, or had shot, a thousand people in cold blood in Havana. . . .”
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  “The figure was higher,” Felter said. “And that’s what the CIA wants to do—terminate him.”

  “It sounds like a good idea to me. But why me?”

  “I’m not asking you anything like that, Father. And actually, we don’t—the President and I don’t—want him terminated. We don’t want to turn him into a martyr.”

  “You don’t want to turn who into a martyr?” Captain John S. Oliver asked, cheerfully, as he came back into the game room.

  And then he saw the looks he got from Felter and Lunsford, and it cut through the alcohol.

  “Sorry, sir,” he said. “I’ll wait outside.”

  “Come in, close the door behind you, and sit down, Captain,” Felter ordered.

  The tone of Felter’s voice, too, cut through the alcohol. “Colonel, no excuse, sir, but I’ve had a couple of drinks,” Oliver said. “Maybe it would be better if I . . .”

  Felter pointed to a chair, and Oliver sat down.

  “You are advised, Captain, that what we are discussing is classified Top Secret,” Felter said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “When there is time, there will be another classification, Top Secret Slash Something. You understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There’s no reason not to label this right now,” Felter said. “Okay. The material we will discuss is classified Top Secret Slash Ernesto . . . make that Top Secret Slash Earnest. Got that, the both of you?”

  “Yes, sir,” they said, nearly in unison.

  “I understand you will be going to work for General Rand at the 11th Air Assault at Benning,” Felter said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “General Rand will not be cleared for Top Secret/Earnest, and neither will anyone else at Benning,” Felter said. “Which means that he cannot be made privy to Slash Earnest information. Clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “When are you going to Bragg, Father?”

  “Actually, we were talking about driving down there tomorrow, ” Lunsford said. “Not for duty. We know some people down there we haven’t seen since Vietnam.”

  “The only person at Benning who will be, for the foreseeable future, cleared for Earnest will be General Hanrahan.”

  “I understand, sir,” Lunsford said.

  “I don’t, sir,” Oliver said.

  “We’re going to keep an eye on Che Guevara,” Felter said. “Maybe cause him some trouble, but we are not, repeat not, going to terminate him, and we’re going to do our damndest to make sure Langley doesn’t terminate him, either.”

  “It’s probably the alcohol, sir, but I still don’t understand,” Oliver said. “Che Guevara in Cuba?”

  “He’s leaving for Africa in a couple of days,” Felter said. “To get to the point here, I want to make Father the project officer.”

  “He just got of there, barely,” Oliver said.

  “I don’t want him to get involved with anything like that again,” Felter said. “I want him to run this.”

  “Explain ‘run this,’ please, Colonel,” Lunsford said. “And ‘project officer.’ ”

  “Set up a team, as small as possible, but as large as you need. You’ll run it. The first priority will be to keep me up to date on what he’s doing, and where.”

  “Won’t the CIA be doing that?”

  “Yeah, they will, and I will have—which means you will have— access to what they develop. But I want independent reports. And, where and when possible, I want to destroy his image.”

  “His image?”

  “Right now, he’s sort of like a movie star, David the guerrilla taking on the nasty North American Goliath, and so far, winning. If Goliath terminated him, that would make Guevara a martyr, and that would cause us a lot of trouble. Goliath would look like a real sonofabitch, for one thing, and Castro and/or the Soviets would quickly replace him, and we would be no better off. What I think Guevara has in mind is taking a small force, no more than two hundred men—which is how many people Castro took into the Sierra Maestra mountains—to Africa, to the Congo, and repeating what Castro did in Cuba. I’d like him to fail.”

  “The Russians are going to help him, of course,” Lunsford said. “And Mobutu and Kasavubu aren’t going to stand by and let Guevara take over the Congo. And ‘termination’ is about the first thing that’s going to occur to Mobutu.”

  “If we had absolutely nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, to do with it—and I don’t mean credible deniability, Father, I mean we have absolutely nothing to do with it—that wouldn’t be too big a problem. But what I’d like to see is Señor Guevara leaving Africa with his tail between his legs.”

  “Humiliated, is what you’re saying?” Lunsford asked thoughtfully.

  “Right.”

  “Money talks,” Lunsford said. “I learned that over there. Keeping track of him wouldn’t be much trouble.”

  “Money will not be a problem,” Felter said.

  “Do I get to pick my people?”

  “Yes.”

  Lunsford looked at Johnny Oliver.

  “Doubting Thomas,” he said. “There’s a certain exquisite irony, wouldn’t you say?”

  Oliver chuckled.

  “Who’s he?” Felter asked.

  “Master Sergeant William Thomas,” Lunsford said. “He was with us when we walked out of Laos.”

  “Actually, sir,” Oliver said. “He carried Major-Designate Lunsford out of Laos, bitterly complaining every step of the way.”

  “And when he returned to Bragg, when offered his choice of language training at the Presidio, chose Swahili in the smug, if naive, belief that it would see him sent not only as far from Vietnam as possible, but would see him sent to the land of his ancestors, teaching the savages close-order drill, and where his position would offer him a never-ending procession of willing, nubile, sixteen-year-old maidens.”

  “Where is he?” Felter asked.

  “At Bragg,” Oliver said. “Teaching escape and evasion. I called him to tell him Father had made it out of the Congo.”

  “And will he volunteer?”

  “Sure,” Lunsford said, as if the question surprised him. He looked at Felter. “And I want Jack Portet, too.”

  “That may pose a problem,” Felter said.

  “Colonel, he knows the country, he speaks Swahili and French, he knows people, white, black, colored, and savage all over—”

  “Define ‘savage’ for me, Father,” Felter said.

  “There are four kinds of people in Africa,” Lunsford said. “The whites, the blacks, the colored—the mixed-bloods and, for some reason I haven’t entirely figured out, the Portuguese—and the savages, who are the Africans who came out of the trees last week.”

  He looked between them.

  “Okay. So it’s not a very nice word. Do you know a better word for somebody who beheads somebody else with a machete, then broils his or her liver for lunch? I saw them do that in Stanleyville. ”

  Neither Felter nor Oliver responded.

  “And just for the record, my liberal friends, that great humanitarian Albert Schweitzer who spent his life trying to help them, called them ‘les sauvages’,” Lunsford said.

  “Sergeant Portet is about to get married to Marjorie Bellmon,” Felter said. “And is therefore unlikely to be willing to volunteer for anything.”

  “They’re going to get married?” Oliver asked. “I thought I saw that coming.”

  “I’ll need him, Colonel,” Lunsford said.

  “I gather you’re going to take the job?” Oliver asked.

  “What the hell, Johnny, I’ve already seen Vietnam, and I don’t want to spend the next three years of my life at Bragg teaching clowns to make fire by rubbing two sticks together.”

  [ TWO ]

  SECRET

  Central Intelligence Agency Langley, Virginia

  FROM: Assistant Director For Administration

  FROM: 18 December 1964 0405 GMT

  SUBJECT: Guevara, Ernesto (Memorandum #1.)


  TO: Mr. Sanford T. Felter Counselor To The President Room 637, The Executive Office Building Washington, D.C.

  By Courier

  In compliance with Presidential Memorandum to The Director, Subject: “Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara,” dated 14 December 1964, the following information, provided by the FBI, is furnished: (Reliability Scale Five).

  SUBJECT departed John F. Kennedy airfield, New York City, aboard Air France Flight 305 at 2105 GMT 17 December 1964. He was accompanied by Héctor GARCÍA and José R. MANRESA. All are traveling on Cuban Diplomatic passports, and are ticketed to Paris, France, with an intermediate stop scheduled at Gander, Newfoundland.

  CIA surveillance of SUBJECTS will begin at Gander, and dossiers of SUBJECTS GARCÍA and MANRESA will be furnished for your possible interest within 24 hours.

  Howard W. O’Connor

  HOWARD W. O’CONNOR

  SECRET

  [ THREE ]

  Office of the Commanding General

  The Army Aviation Center and Fort Rucker, Alabama

  18 December 1964

  Major General Robert F. Bellmon was, as he privately thought of it, up to his ass in paper, and it took some time before he noticed Captain Richard J. Hornsby was standing in the office door.

  “Have you got something for me, Dick?”

  “Yes, sir,” Captain Hornsby said. “This TWX just came in, and I thought you would like to see it.”

  Bellmon took it and glanced at very quickly. It was a routine message, signed by some colonel for the adjutant general. It was probably, he decided, one more admonition to him to limit drinking by the troops over the holidays, or failing that, to keep them from killing themselves on the highway full of holiday cheer. Whatever it was, it probably could have waited until he wasn’t quite so up to his ass in paper. Hornsby, who was new, didn’t have the experience to make judgments about what messages were worthy of his immediate attention.

  “Thank you, Dick,” Bellmon said, and picked up the TWX, which was printed on a roll of yellowish teletype paper, and read it. His lips tightened. He clenched his teeth and was aware that his temples were throbbing.