Overture to Disaster (Post Cold War Political Thriller Trilogy Book 3)

by Chester D. Campbell

  "Sure. Come on anytime, Roddy. I'll be here until around two. Then I have a business meeting to attend."

  He hung up the phone and turned to Yuri Shumakov, his voice more confident. "She's got connections. Look, I doubt if my house is safe after this, or your motel. I'm going home to throw some things in a suitcase, then I'll drop by La Palma and pick you up."

  Shumakov hurried out to his rented Nissan and Rodman wheeled his Toyota out of the employee parking area. He headed down the four-lane highway toward Chapala, remembering too late that he should have asked Pablo Alba not to give out any information about this morning's flight to Tequila. Still, he wasn't too worried. He had a good head start on Major Romashchuk, who would have to maneuver through a precarious mountain trail and then drive all the way back from Tequila. He hoped for some sticky tapatío traffic tie-ups on the Anillo Periferico, the circumferential thoroughfare that skirted the suburbs.

  As he raced down the highway, he fretted over what he had gotten himself into and how he might possibly get himself out of it. Equally as disturbing was the question of what Romashchuk and Adam Stern had in mind for the chemical weapons. And what, if anything, he might do to thwart them. Despite the obvious attempts to distance himself from his Air Force past, he hadn't managed to re-program his mind. He still thought like a military officer.

  He was nearly home before all of that mental friction finally produced a spark of hope. It required going all the way back to that winter at Eglin Air Force Base when he was recuperating from his crash injuries. He recalled the surprising visit by Greg, the mysterious CIA operative, who had offered to be of help if he ever needed it. Roddy had saved the phone number. Why, he wasn't sure. He'd had no thought he would ever use it. Greg had written the number inside the flap of a Holiday Inn matchbook. As best he could remember, it was in a large brown envelope that contained some of his old Air Force records.

  As soon as he pulled into the driveway, he jumped out of the Toyota and hurried inside. He found the envelope in the back of a desk drawer and poured out the contents. There lay the book of matches. The number had a Northern Virginia area code. He dialed it and waited.

  After a few rings, a recorded voice answered. "You have reached Information Consultants. After the beep, please leave your name, phone number and message. It will be date-time stamped automatically. I'll return your call as soon as possible."

  Damn, he thought at the beep's forlorn sound, I should have known he wouldn't be at home. He was about to hang up when he changed his mind.

  "This is is Colonel Roddy Rodman, Greg. I've got a problem, but I can't stay—"

  "Give me your phone number and stand by," a voice broke in. "I'll get right back to you, Colonel."

  "It's country code five-two," Roddy said quickly. Then he gave the city code and his phone number and heard the line go dead.

  Greg was as mysterious as ever, he thought. He hoped the CIA man would, indeed, "get right back." Roddy glanced at his watch. It had been about an hour since they had witnessed the mortar firing in the barranca. He calculated it would take Major Romashchuk an hour and a half to reach the airport, nearly two hours to make it all the way here. But what if the Major had other people in Guadalajara? He could easily stop along the way and make a call, dispatching someone immediately to the airport or Lake Chapala.

  During his sojourn in Mexico, Roddy had learned to slow down and pace himself in the leisurely Latin manner. When a native promised something "mañana," it could be tomorrow, or next week, or next month. Now he found himself moving with an unfamiliar urgency. He hurried into the kitchen, stuck a filter into a small coffee maker, spooned in two measures of coffee and filled the decanter with water. He had just flipped on the switch when the phone rang.

  District of Columbia Suburbs

  41

  Murray Bender sat at the desk built into the corner of the room he used for an office. The solid, knotty pine paneling, which had darkened several shades over the years, marked it as somewhat beyond the age of thirty and originally a den, although it had also seen service as a bedroom before Bender bought the house. That was five years ago, when the communist conspiracy was headed for the scrap heap and the Central Intelligence Agency had decided to bring him in from the cold. His talents would be utilized for special assignments.

  They put him in a small office with a telephone that rarely rang for any important reason. He hated Langley. He was a field man, had always been a field man, would always be a field man. For the most part it had been a lonely, boring, physically stressful existence. Making contact with agents who might be real or bogus, people with axes to grind or grandiose ideas of the money they could make peddling secrets, most of which were hardly worth passing on to headquarters. Tracking down lost contacts or whole networks that had disappeared with the poof of a soap bubble. Long stints of surveillance in rain or snow, in sweltering heat and bitter cold. But he had a natural inclination for the clandestine life. He liked operating on the fringe, on his own, with no one to monitor his comings and goings. He had been married twice, briefly. Neither woman could abide his sudden departures on "business trips" that might last anywhere from a couple of days to several months. He had boundless patience and enough acting talent to have landed a role on Broadway. And with an actor's ear for accents and dialects, he could be convincing in whatever part he was called on to play. But in the final analysis, what he really loved was matching wits with the opposition. Most of the time he had come out on top.

  After a couple of years at the Agency's massive house of mirrors on the Potomac, doing mostly mundane things between occasional "real" assignments, Bender had been sent off to Cambodia to follow up on what appeared to be a fairly solid report of an American POW being held by a faction of the Khmer Rouge. It was during the agonizing congressional hearings on the POW-MIA problem when everybody was attempting to dodge the blame for years of denial that there was, indeed, a problem. Word filtered back to Langley that Bender, too, had become a prisoner. Unfortunately, the operation had been mounted in such a rush that some of the niceties of informing congressional watchdogs had been overlooked. Rather than risk the embarrassment of another hearing on who had screwed up this time, the guilty party on the seventh floor decided it would be "in the best interest of the service" to cut him loose and deny any knowledge of his mission. The gentleman hadn't reckoned with the wily field man's ability as a survivor. He had managed to convince two of his guards that he was actually a French trader who possessed a fortune in gemstones stashed away just inside the Thai border. He would happily share this booty with them if only he could get to it. Once they were inside Thailand, he managed to sneak word to the police that his escorts were Khmer Rouge illegals.

  When he discovered that he had been "written off," Bender told his superiors where they could shove their agency and turned his talents to the role of "consultant." Oddly enough, now he seemed content to spend a good deal of his time in his own office, working with a new toy that had come to fascinate him—the latest high-speed, high-resolution, high-capacity personal computer. After spending most of his life gathering raw intelligence, now he dealt mostly with the finished product. He had access to hundreds of data bases that contained literally millions of facts, including the latest details on various international hotspots. Added to that was a CD ROM drive that gave him the ability to instantly call up information from a wide array of discs containing everything from magazines and encyclopedias to business and financial documents and reports.

  As soon as he hung up the phone that sweltering June morning in the D.C. suburbs, he typed in a few characters and all of the telephone country codes flashed on his color screen. He scanned down to fifty-two. Mexico. He did the same with the city code and read "Chapala." Using an atlas disc, he quickly filled the screen with a map of the Guadalajara-Lake Chapala area.

  The desk held two telephones, one white, one black. White for business carried out in the open. Black for what black had always meant to Murray Bender, covert operat
ions. Roddy Rodman's call had come in on the white line. He picked up the black phone and dialed the number in Mexico.

  "Sorry for the delay, Colonel," he apologized. "I had to switch to my secure line. Well, it isn't really secure. Not like the Agency's scrambled circuits. But I'm sure it isn't tapped. Nobody has access to it but me and my buddy at the phone company."

  "You never admitted who you worked for before," Roddy reminded him.

  He gave a grunt that passed for a laugh. "I can say anything I damn well please since I left there. I'm in the information business now. I gather and disseminate information on companies, countries, people, places, things. Whatever the client wants, I can usually provide. You said you had a problem. What's happening there in Chapala?"

  "Didn't take you long to pinpoint me," Roddy said, obviously impressed. "Some pretty frightening things are going on, Greg. What do you know about the Foreign Affairs Roundtable?"

  "First, I buried Greg somewhere in Southeast Asia. I go by my real name now, Murray Bender. You're interested in the FAR, huh? Well, it's an outfit you won't find much about from either official or unofficial sources. Even the Agency has very little on it."

  "Really?"

  "Really. I learned the hard way it's a subject you don't dig into."

  "Why?"

  "The Director and his top deputies are FAR members. The official line says it's an organization of distinguished citizens interested in the study of foreign policy. They operate out in the open, have a nice New York headquarters with the name out front. But folks in the know tell me it works from a hidden agenda. Seems their real interest is in controlling the world economic system for their own benefit."

  "Interesting. That's the impression I got from a guy I had as a passenger last week. I've been flying helicopters in Guadalajara since I retired."

  As he talked, Bender had switched to a program that stored facts he had compiled on a variety of subjects. After typing in "FAR," a new screen appeared.

  "According to my notes, the FAR is led by big international bankers like Bernard Whitehurst, who's the chairman, some multinational business leaders and a few heavyweight political types. They are allied with similar people in Europe and elsewhere through an organization called the Council of Lyon. The Council's leadership, a secretive group known as the 'Trustees,' decides what sinister activities they get involved in. Who was your passenger?"

  "A New York writer named Bryan Janney. He was working on a book that would expose what the Roundtable is really up to."

  "He probably won't get too far with the project. They have a neat way of handling such people. Whenever somebody hints at the conspiracy, they feed their pals in the news media stories designed to ridicule the guy. By the time they get through with him, he's thoroughly labeled as a kook. Nobody would listen to him."

  "He'd have been lucky to get that treatment. This guy wound up dead."

  "That's a bit surprising. He must have been onto something that could really hurt," Bender ventured. What he had heard, from one of his very knowledgeable and equally reliable sources, indicated they usually operated with more finesse than that.

  "He had learned the FAR was sending a character named Adam Stern to Guadalajara. Something to do with what was taking place at a cabin up in the mountains."

  Bender frowned and shook his head. "I hope he didn't get you involved."

  "I flew him up to take a look at the cabin. Apparently Stern found out I was the pilot."

  "Colonel, I'm afraid you're right. You do have a problem. I knew Stern when he worked for the Agency. He's a vengeful bastard and a deadly one to boot. He comes from the Wild West school of marksmanship. Shoot first and ask questions later."

  "I found out something else. His threats caused a man to lie on the witness stand at my court-martial. You were right that day you came to see me. I was the fall guy for General Patton. He's the bastard who caused my chopper to get shot down."

  "That figures."

  "But Stern isn't really my problem now," Rodman continued, his voice taking on a new urgency. "He went back to New York. It's the guy he met with down here, what he's doing at that cabin in the mountains. Seems he's a former KGB major who brought some Soviet chemical weapons into Mexico. I flew over the cabin again this morning and saw them shooting mortars out of the back of a dump truck."

  Oh, God, thought Bender, he's been hitting the bottle again. He had heard about Colonel Rodman's drinking problem. The part about Adam Stern he was prepared to accept, even the murder of a writer who had stumbled onto some incriminating evidence. But this business about an ex-KGB major and Soviet chemical weapons was a bit too much. Firing mortars from a dump truck? What the hell would a former KGB officer be doing in Mexico? Since their old Soviet patrons had been discredited and Castro was practically a basket case, the Mexican communists had about faded from view. Best to humor the Colonel, he thought.

  "Does this KGB major know about you?" he inquired.

  "I'm sure Stern told him about me. That's the most pressing problem. He could be on his way to my house right now."

  "Then I'd get the hell out of Dodge, Colonel."

  "I intend to soon as I get off the phone. But I had hoped you might have some ideas on where I could turn next. Maybe somebody at the CIA I could trust, somebody in a position to take some action."

  "I'm afraid I'm not very welcome around Langley anymore. The Agency tried to make me the fall guy for one of the top boys who screwed up. I told them to stick it up their ass and quit. I can sympathize with how you feel about General Patton."

  Regardless of that wild tale about chemical weapons and ex-Soviets, Colonel Rodman had genuine problems, Bender realized. Besides the threat posed by Adam Stern, there was the matter of the court-martial. The Colonel must have turned up some new evidence. If there was any possibility of getting his name cleared and his conviction reversed, he deserved a try. Bender thought for a moment.

  "There is one guy I know of who has connections right to the top of the government. He's his own man. He isn't controlled by anybody. Do you remember a few years ago when some renegades from the CIA and KGB plotted to assassinate the American and Soviet presidents up in Toronto? Without any official help, this guy stopped them. More recently, he was involved in a situation in the Far East at the request of the President. It was so hush-hush I only picked up some hints about it."

  "Who is he and where do I find him?"

  "Name's Burke Hill. He's an official with an international PR agency in Washington. Back years ago he was an FBI agent. Hold on a second."

  Bender slipped another disc into his CD ROM drive and typed in "Worldwide Communications Consultants." The telephone number popped onto the screen. He picked up the white phone and dialed. When the Worldwide operator answered, he asked for Burke Hill. He was told Mr. Hill was currently visiting the Mexico City office. He asked for the number.

  "Well, your luck is running good on this count, Colonel," he said into the black phone. "Hill is in Mexico City."

  Major Nikolai Romashchuk had fired two high explosive mortar shells toward the far end of the barranca that morning as he patiently explained the planned operation. Then he stood by and observed as the leader of the Shining Path group, a dark-skinned, black-eyed young man called Pepe, and two of his fellow Peruvians fired a volley of shells. After suggesting some changes in their technique, he had them fire another volley. At virtually the same moment, a helicopter suddenly popped over the rim and clattered across a few hundred feet above the canyon floor. The aircraft appeared to be headed directly toward the truck, then suddenly veered away and began to climb as it retreated above the canyon wall. The other two guerrillas, who had demanded they be provided AK-47s for guard duty, began firing into the air. One thought he had hit it, but he wasn't sure.

  After the small chopper disappeared, Romashchuk turned to Pepe with malevolence in his eyes. "Tell your people not to shoot at any more aircraft unless they're damned sure they can bring it down. I have a good idea who was flying
that one. I intend to find out for sure. Keep your men here. And don't, under any circumstances, let anybody disturb that other crate."

  Romashchuk and Julio Podesta, his Mexican sidekick who had driven the truck on the trip to Veracruz, headed for the Jeep and were soon raising a cloud of pinkish dust as they struck out for Tequila. The narrow, rutted road, which was frequently washed out in places, snaked around and over the volcanic hills, leaning at precarious angles at times. He maneuvered the Jeep a bit faster than they had dared drive the truck, but it was still a good forty minutes since the helicopter's unwelcome intrusion by the time they reached the town of Tequila.

  Romashchuk stopped at a small store where he had used a pay phone previously and called Aeronautica Jalisco. A girl answered.

  "This is Señor Gruber," he said in his most convincing manner. "I was to have joined Señor Rodman on his flight to the mountains around Tequila this morning. Something delayed me, however, and I couldn't make it. Do you know if he has returned yet, and who went with him?"

  "I'm sorry, Señor," she said, "but I know nothing about it. You will have to talk to Señor Pablo Alba, our director of operations. He should be back in about an hour."

  Romashchuk thanked her and hung up.

  "Damn," he grumbled at Julio. "We have to talk to a man named Alba, who won't be back for an hour."

  "We could be at the airport by then," said Julio with a shrug.

  "You're right. We might as well go on. It's in the direction of Rodman's home. It will save us some time if we need to go after him there."

  42

  Roddy was surprised when Elena met them at the door. She was dressed in a well-tailored green business suit, her dark hair pulled to the back and twisted into a bun. Her face, though still attractive, had an unfamiliar stark, almost austere quality to it. And then he realized he was seeing the cool, pragmatic, determined businesswoman for the first time.