The Hunters

by W. E. B Griffin

  “For your information, Corporal, Major Castillo has been promoted to lieutenant colonel,” McNab said.

  “If it is appropriate for me to say so, sir, it is a well-deserved promotion. Maj…Lieutenant Colonel Castillo is a fine officer under whom I am proud to have served.”

  Vic D’Allessando was smiling widely at a thoroughly confused Sergeant Major Davidson.

  “So you guarded the helicopter?” McNab pursued.

  “Yes, sir. Until the situation got a bit out of control, when I realized it had become my duty to enter the fray.”

  “‘The fray’? Is that something like a firefight?” McNab asked.

  “Yes, it is, sir. Perhaps I should have used that phrase.”

  “How exactly did you enter the fray, Corporal?” McNab asked. “When the situation got a bit out of control?”

  “Sir, when it became evident that one of the villains was about to fire his Madsen through a window into a room into which Maj…Lieutenant Colonel Castillo had taken the detainee, I realized I had to take him out. Regrettably, he managed to fire a short burst before I was able to do so.”

  “How did you take him out?”

  “With a head shot, sir.”

  “You didn’t consider that it would be safer to try to hit him in the body?”

  “I considered it, sir, but I was no more than seventy-five meters distant and knew I could make the shot.”

  “Is that all you did, Corporal?”

  “No, sir. I took out a second villain perhaps fifteen seconds later.”

  “With another headshot?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Just to satisfy my curiosity, Corporal,” McNab asked, “were you firing offhand?”

  “Yes, sir. There just wasn’t time to adjust a sling and get into a kneeling or prone position, sir.”

  “Colonel Castillo has told Mr. D’Allessando that there is no question you saved his life. Sergeant Major Davidson and myself are old friends of Colonel Castillo’s and we are grateful to you, aren’t we, Sergeant Major?”

  “Yes, sir. We certainly are.”

  “Just doing my duty as I saw it, sir.”

  “The yare going to bury Sergeant Kranz at sixteen hundred today in Arlington. If Sergeant Major Davidson can spare you from your duties here, I thought perhaps you might wish to go there with Mr. D’Allessando and me.”

  “Yes, sir. I would like very much to pay my last respects.”

  “Have you a dress uniform?”

  “Yes, sir. But I’m afraid it’s not very shipshape, sir.”

  “Well, I’m sure Sergeant Major Davidson will be happy to see that it’s pressed and that you’re at Pope at twelve hundred, won’t you, Jack?”

  “My pleasure, sir,” Sergeant Major Davidson said.

  VII

  [ONE]

  Ferihegy International Airport

  Budapest, Hungary

  1655 6 August 2005

  Hungary is not a member of the European Union. It was therefore necessary for Otto Görner and Karl W. von und zu Gossinger to pass through immigration and customs when the Eurojet Taxi deposited them before the small civil-aviation building.

  But it was just the briefest of formalities. Not only were their passports quickly stamped by the officer who came aboard the twin-engine jet aircraft but he volunteered the information, “Your driver is waiting, Úr Görner.”

  Then he left without even looking at the luggage the pilot and copilot had carried down the stair door.

  “Thanks for the ride and the cockpit tour,” Castillo said, in English, offering his hand to the pilot.

  “My pleasure, Colonel,” the pilot replied, also in English—American English.

  “Maybe we can do it again.”

  “Any time. You’ve got our number.”

  There had been no other passengers on the flight from Leipzig, which made Castillo wonder if that was coincidence or whether the Cessna Citation III had been sent to pick him up because there would be no smaller aircraft available for some time and Montvale had ordered them to put him at the head of the line.

  Just after they had gone wheels-up, he had made his way to the cockpit and asked, in English, “How’s chances of sitting in the right seat and having you explain the panel to me?”

  The copilot had exchanged glances with the pilot, who nodded, and then wordlessly got up.

  “Thanks,” Castillo said to the pilot as he sat down and strapped himself in.

  “Anything special you want to see, Colonel?” the pilot had asked, in English, making it clear that there was no reason to pretend he was anything but an employee of the agency or that Castillo was a German businessman named Gossinger availing himself of Eurojet Taxi’s services.

  “How long do you think it would take to show a pilot—several hundred hours in smaller business jets—enough to make him safe to sit in the right seat?”

  “These are nice airplanes,” the pilot said. “They come in a little hot, and sometimes, close to max gross, they take a long time to get off the ground, but aside from that they’re not hard to fly. How long it would take would depend on the IP and the student. But not long.”

  “I’d really be grateful to be able to sit here and watch until you get it on the ground in Budapest. Is that possible?”

  “You know how to work the radios?” the pilot asked and when Castillo nodded the pilot motioned for him to pick up the copilot’s headset and, when Castillo had them on, pointed out on the GPS screen where they were—over the Dresden–Nürnberg Autobahn, near Chemnitz.

  I think Montvale will learn that I wanted to sit in the cockpit, but I don’t think he’ll think it’s anything but my boyish enthusiasm for everything connected with flying.

  “Good afternoon, Úr Görner,” Sándor Tor greeted them inside the civil-aviation building. “The car’s right outside.”

  “Sándor, this is Herr von und zu Gossinger,” Görner said. “And this, Úr von und zu Gossinger, is Sándor Tor, who was supposed to keep Kocian from falling over his goddamned dog and down the stairs.”

  “Úr Görner…” Tor began, painfully embarrassed.

  “And also, incidentally, to telephone me immediately, at any time, if anything at all out of the ordinary happened to Úr Kocian.”

  “Úr Görner…” Tor began again, only to be interrupted again by Görner.

  “Why don’t we wait until we’re on our way to the hospital?” Görner said. “Then you can tell us everything.”

  “I wish God had put me in that hospital bed instead of Úr Kocian,” Tor said, emotionally.

  I think I like you, Sándor Tor, Castillo thought.

  In 2002, Otto Görner had reluctantly concluded Eric Kocian, in his eighties, needed protection—protection from himself.

  The old man was fond of American whiskey—Jack Daniel’s Black Label in particular—and driving fast Mercedes-Benz automobiles. A combination of the former and his age-reduced reflexes and night vision had seen him in half a dozen accidents, the last two of them spectacular. The final one had put him in hospital and caused the government to cancel his driver’s license.

  Otto Görner had come to Budapest and sought out Sándor Tor right after he’d been to Kocian’s hospital room.

  “We’re going to have to do something or he’s going to kill himself,” Görner had announced. “It won’t take him long to get his driving license back—he knows where all the politicians keep their mistresses. We have to get this fixed before that happens.”

  “You mean get him a chauffeur?”

  Görner nodded.

  “Good luck, Úr Görner,” Tor had said. “I’m glad I’m not the one who’s going to have to tell him that.”

  Görner had smiled and, obviously thinking about what he was going to say, didn’t reply for a moment.

  Then he said, “Let me tell you what he said in the hospital just now. Not for the first time, he was way ahead of me.”

  Tor waited for Görner to go on.

  “‘Before you
say anything, Otto,’ he said, the moment I walked in the door, ‘let me tell you how I’m going to deal with this.’”

  “I can’t wait to hear this,” Tor said.

  “‘Sándor Tor will now drive me around,’” Görner quoted.

  “No,” Tor said, quickly and firmly, not embracing the idea at all.

  “I told him you were the director of security, not a chauffeur,” Görner said.

  “And?”

  “‘Did you think I don’t know that?’” Görner quoted. “‘As director of security, he carries a gun. I’m getting too old to do that anymore, too. Further-more, Sándor can be trusted to keep his mouth shut about where I go and who I talk to. I don’t want some taxi driver privy to that or listening to my conversations. And, finally, Sándor’s a widower. Driving me around may interfere with his sex life, but at least he won’t go home and regale his wife with tales of what Kocian did today and with whom.’”

  “No, Úr Görner,” Tor repeated, adamantly.

  “I told him you would say that,” Görner said. “To which he replied, ‘I’ll handle Tor.’”

  “No. Sorry, but absolutely not.”

  “Do you know, Sándor, how far back Eric Kocian goes with Gossinger, G.m.b.H.?”

  “Not exactly. A long time, I know that.”

  “He was with Oberstleutnant Hermann Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger at Stalingrad,” Görner said. “They met on the ice-encrusted basement floor of a building being used as a hospital. Both were very seriously wounded.”

  “I’ve heard that the Herr Oberst had been at Stalingrad…”

  “Eric was an eighteen-year-old Gefreite,” Görner went on. “He and the colonel were flown out on one of the very last flights. The colonel was released from hospital first and placed on convalescent leave. He went to visit a friend in the Army hospital in Giessen and ran into Kocian there. Eric had apparently done something for the colonel in Stalingrad—I have no idea what, but the colonel was grateful—so the colonel arranged for him to be assigned to the POW camp he was going to command. The alternative for Kocian was being sent back to the Eastern Front.

  “They ended the war in the POW camp and became prisoners themselves. Kocian was released first. He went home to Vienna and learned that the American bombs that had reduced St. Stephen’s Cathedral and the Opera to rubble had done the same to his family’s apartment. All of his family, and their friends, were dead.”

  “Jesus!” Tor exclaimed, softly.

  “His only friend in the world was the colonel. So he made his way back to Germany and Fulda. The presses of the Fulda Tages Zeitung were in the basement of what had been the building. Eric arrived there a day or so after the colonel had been given permission by the Americans to resume publishing. They had found his name on a list the SS had of people they were going to execute for being anti-Nazi and defeatist and he was thus the man they were looking for to run a German newspaper.

  “The problem was the presses were at the bottom of a huge pile of rubble that had been the Fulda Tages Zeitung building. Eric Kocian began his journalistic career making one whole Mergenthaler Linotype machine from parts salvaged from the dozen under the rubble.

  “A year later, when the Wiener Tages Zeitung got permission from the Americans to resume publishing, Eric was named editor in chief primarily because he had already been cleared by the de-Nazification courts and also because their Linotype machines had to be rescued from the rubble of the Wiener Tages Zeitung building. It was understood that Eric was to be publisher and editor in chief only and that older, wiser, bonafide professional journalists would really run things.

  “When the colonel went to Vienna for the ceremonies marking the first edition, he found that Eric had fired the older, wiser, etcetera people, hired his own, and was sitting at the editor in chief’s desk himself.”

  “That sounds like him,” Tor said, chuckling.

  “Well, he kept the job and now he’s the oldest employee of Gossinger, G.m.b.H. Further, I learned that when the colonel and his brother were killed it was Eric who went to the colonel’s daughter and got her to give me the job of running the business. So I think I owe him.”

  “I understand.”

  “I realize you don’t owe him a thing—”

  Tor held up his hand.

  “When my wife was dying, he held my hand, and, later, he got me off the bottle,” Tor said. “Okay, until I can get somebody he can live with, and vice versa—but only until then, understand—I’ll keep an eye on him.”

  Somebody Eric Kocian could live with had never appeared. And Tor learned some what to his surprise that he actually had time to both serve as director of security for the Tages Zeitung and keep an eye on the old man.

  The job now was more than keeping Kocian from behind the wheel of his Mercedes. A year before, Kocian had begun investigating Hungarian/ Czech/German involvement in the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal. It personally outraged him.

  And when those who had been engaged in it learned of Kocian’s interest in them, they were enraged. There had been a number of threats by e-mail, postal mail, and telephone. Eric Kocian grandly dismissed them.

  “Only a fool would kill a journalist,” he said. “The slime of the world need darkness. Killing a journalist would turn a spotlight into their holes and they know it.”

  Sándor Tor didn’t believe this for a minute, but he knew that arguing with the old man would be futile. Instead, he had gone to Otto Görner with his fears.

  Tor had said, “I think we had better have someone keeping an eye on him around the clock.”

  “Do it,” Görner had replied.

  “That’s going to be expensive, Úr Görner. I’m talking about at least one man—probably two—in addition to myself, plus cars, around the clock.”

  “The cost be damned, Tor. And, for God’s sake, don’t let the old man know he’s being protected. Otherwise, we’ll have to find him to protect him.”

  I’m pleased to meet you,” Castillo said, in Hungarian, as he offered his hand. “And you should consider that Úr Görner is even more fond of Billy Kocian than I know you are and is therefore even more upset than you or I about what’s happened.”

  “Before God, no one is more sorry than me,” Sándor Tor said. “I love that old man.”

  Now I know I like you.

  [TWO]

  Room 24

  Telki Private Hospital

  2089 Telki Kórház Fasor 1

  Budapest, Hungary

  1730 6 August 2005

  There was a heavyset man in his fifties sitting in a heavy well-worn captain’s chair in the corridor beside the closed door to room 24. He watched as Görner and Castillo walked down the corridor, and then, when it became clear that Castillo was going to knock at the door, announced, “No visitors.”

  That’s a cop, Castillo thought, or my name really is Ignatz Glutz.

  “It’s all right,” Otto said. “We’re from the Tages Zeitung.”

  He took a business card from the breast pocket of his suit and handed it to the man. The man read it.

  “He said, ‘No visitors,’ Úr Görner.”

  “Why don’t I tell him I’m here?” Görner said and reached for the door handle.

  “He’s got his dog in there,” the man said.

  Görner opened the door just a crack and called, “Eric, get your goddamned dog under control. It’s Otto.”

  “Go away, Otto Görner!” Kocian called out.

  “Not a chance!” Otto called back. “Put that Gottverdammthund on a chain. I’m coming in.”

  The response to that was animal—a deep, not too loud but nevertheless frightening growl.

  “Got a little cough, have you, Oncle Erik?” Castillo called.

  “Goddamn, the plagiarist!” Kocian said.

  Görner pushed open the door to room 24.

  Eric Kocian was sitting against the raised back of a hospital bed. A large, long black cigar was clamped in his jaw. A roll-up tray was in front of him. It held a lapt
op computer, a large ashtray, several newspapers, a cellular telephone, a pot of coffee, and a heavy mug. Kocian’s some what florid face, topped with a luxuriant head of naturally curling silver hair, made him at first look younger than he was, but his body—he was naked above the waist—gave him away.

  What could be seen of his arms and chest—his left arm was bandaged and in a sling and there was another bloodstained bandage on his upper right chest—was all sagging flesh. There were angry old scars on his upper shoulder and on his abdomen.

  Görner had two thoughts, one after the other, in the few seconds before Max, now growling a mouthful of teeth, caught his attention.

  My God, he’s nearly eighty-two.

  God, even the damned dog is bandaged.

  Görner, who usually liked dogs, hated this one and was afraid of him.

  Castillo was not.

  He squatted just inside the door, smiled, and said, conversationally in Hungarian, “You’re an ugly old bastard, aren’t you? Stop that growling. Not only don’t you scare me but that old man in the bed is really glad to see us.”

  The dog stopped growling, sat on its haunches, and cocked his head.

  “Come here, Fatso, and I’ll scratch your ears.”

  “His name is Max,” Kocian said.

  “Come, Max,” Castillo said.

  Max got off his haunches and, head still cocked, looked at Castillo.

  “Watch out for him, Karl!” Görner exclaimed.

  “Come, dammit!” Castillo ordered.

  Max took five tentative steps toward Castillo.

  Castillo held out his left hand to him.

  Max sniffed it, then licked it.

  Castillo scratched Max’s ears, close to the bandage. Max sat down again, pressing his massive head against Castillo’s leg, and licked his hand again.

  “Max, you sonofabitch,” Kocian said. “You’re supposed to take his hand off, not lick it like a Kartnerstrasse whore!”

  “He knows who his friends are,” Castillo said. “So who shot you, Eric? More important, who shot Max?”

  “He wasn’t shot,” Kocian said. “One of the bastards clipped him with his pistol.”