Black Ops

by W. E. B Griffin

  Nothing beyond “in another of Pevsner’s safe houses.”

  You should have asked how to get in here, stupid!

  It didn’t turn out to be a problem.

  First, a black KIA sport utility vehicle with darkened windows appeared from the side of the gatehouse in the area between the barriers and stopped its nose against the interior barrier. A large and sturdy man in a business suit got out of the KIA, in the process unintentionally revealing that he carried a large semiautomatic pistol in a shoulder holster.

  Next, the red light in a traffic signal mounted on the side of the gatehouse went off and the signal’s green light came on. The exterior barrier then rolled slowly to one side. When there was room, Davidson drove up to the KIA as the barrier now behind him closed.

  The man who had gotten out of the KIA walked to the BMW, smiled, and bent down beside it.

  When Davidson rolled down his window, Max erupted from the backseat, where he had been sitting beside Edgar Delchamps, put his head between Davidson and the lowered window, then growled deep in his chest and showed the man his teeth.

  The man jumped three feet backward—moving so quickly that Castillo thought he was going to lose his balance.

  The man quickly regained his composure.

  “El Coronel Munz has been expecting you, gentlemen,” he announced. “If you’ll be so kind as to follow me?”

  The interior barrier rolled away, and they followed the KIA down a serpentine macadam road that skirted the golf course—as they did, Castillo concluded that the club had two eighteen-hole courses—then past four polo fields, two of which were in use, and then an enormous building with half a dozen tennis courts that suggested it was the Club House.

  Finally, they approached the sort of compound of houses he had seen from the road.

  There was no road in front of the houses, just a line of six-foot-high fencing, nearly invisible from even a short distance away. A second look showed that inside the fencing there was an even less visible line of wire suspended between insulators two or three feet above the grass.

  That’s motion sensing, Castillo decided. The outer fence is designed to keep the golfers, and their golf balls, off that last expanse of grass. The motion-sensing wire inside goes off if something larger than a golf ball gets close to the houses.

  Whoever designed this knew what he was doing, and was not constrained by financial considerations.

  Proof came as they approached the houses from the rear. He now saw that the houses were lined up in a gentle curve, their front doors facing away from the road and toward yet another guard shack and barrier. Two other KIAs, identical to the one they were following, sat facing out just inside the barrier.

  The barrier here was different. It consisted of four five-foot-tall painted steel cylinders about eighteen inches in diameter in the center of the road. They could be raised and lowered hydraulically. They sank into the road as the lead KIA approached.

  Inside the compound, the KIA stopped before the third house, and the man got out and nodded toward the house.

  The house, of timbered brick, looked as if it belonged in the Scottish Highlands as the ancestral hunting lodge of at least a duke.

  Offering his unsolicited observation that “these fucking Krautmobiles weren’t designed for full-size people,” Edgar Delchamps opened the rear door of the BMW and started to haul himself out.

  He had one leg out the car’s door when Max saw not only that the door of the house had opened but who had come through it.

  He exited the car in a leap, using Delchamps’s crotch as the springing point for both rear legs, which served to push Delchamps back in his seat. Delchamps said unkind things about Max and his mother.

  Max bounded to Svetlana, yapping happily and dancing around her. She bent and scratched his ears.

  Then she saw Castillo and waved to him.

  Max lapped her face and then ran to Castillo, who was by then out of the front seat. Max yapped at him as if saying, “Hey, boss! Guess who I found here?” before returning to Svetlana, where he stood on his rear legs and draped his paws over her shoulders.

  A very large man rushed out the front door, looking as if he was in the act of drawing a lethal weapon from a shoulder holster.

  “Nyet!” Svetlana ordered in a voice befitting a podpolkovnik of the Sluzhba Vnezhney Razvedki on a Moscow parade ground. The man stopped as if frozen.

  Svetlana’s voice softened as she pushed Max off her shoulders, then dropped to wrap her arms around his neck. “It’s okay, Stepan. Max is our dog, isn’t he, my Charley?”

  Castillo nodded.

  He walked up to her. She kissed him chastely and not very possessively on the cheek.

  “You remember Edgar, of course, honey?”

  “Certainly,” she said. “He’s the one who took the stitches out of my good purse.”

  She looked at Delchamps and then at Castillo. Then she pulled Castillo’s face to hers and kissed him on the mouth—passionately, possessively, and at length.

  “Please come in the house, Mr. Delchamps,” she said a moment later. “We’ll have a cocktail, and then I will show you and Mr. Davidson around our house.”

  She tucked her hand under Castillo’s arm, leaned her head against his shoulder, and led him into the house.

  “What’s this ‘our house’ business?” Castillo asked.

  “I love it,” she said. “And so will you when you see it. I’m going to buy it. And this is Mr. Lee-Watson, who’s going to sell it to me.”

  Three people were standing in the high-ceilinged foyer: El Coronel Alfredo Munz, Corporal Lester Bradley, USMC, and a very tall, elegantly tailored man in his forties.

  “Delighted to make your acquaintance, sir. Cedric Lee-Watson.”

  His accent suggested he was the duke who owned this Scottish Highlands castle.

  Castillo took the proffered hand and looked at Munz, asking with his eyes, Who the hell is this guy, and what’s he doing in Pevsner’s safe house?

  “Mr. Lee-Watson handles real estate for our mutual friend in Bariloche,” Munz explained.

  “Indeed, for he whose name is only rarely, and then very carefully, spoken,” Lee-Watson said.

  “Cedric built this place—the club—for our friend,” Munz said.

  Lester Bradley caught Castillo’s attention. “Colonel, can I see you for a minute, please?”

  “What’s up, Lester?”

  “Privately, sir?”

  “Won’t that wait until after I show him the house?” Svetlana protested.

  Castillo took Bradley’s arm and led him farther into the house, to one side of a wide stairway at the end of a foyer.

  “Okay, what, Lester?”

  “As soon as I got the AFC set up, there was a call for you from Mr. D’Allessando.”

  “What did he want?” Castillo asked, surprised.

  On his retirement from twenty-four years of service—twenty-two of it in Special Forces—Chief Warrant Officer Five Victor D’Allessando had gone to work for the Special Operations Command as a Department of the Army civilian. Theoretically, he was a technical advisor to the commanding general of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg. What he actually did for the Special Operations Command was not talked about.

  “He said a friend wants to talk to you, sir.”

  “Well, get on the horn and get him back, Les.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Bradley walked to the foot of the stairs, then ran up them, taking them two at a time.

  Svetlana, trailed by Delchamps, Davidson, and Lee-Watson, crossed the foyer to Castillo.

  “Vic D’Allessando was on the horn,” Castillo reported. “He said a friend wants to talk to me.”

  Delchamps and Davidson both shrugged, indicating they had no idea what D’Allessando might have on his mind.

  Everybody started up the stairs to the second floor.

  [THREE]

  Ten minutes later, as Svetlana and Lee-Watson had just abou
t finished showing all the comforts the master suite offered, Bradley walked in and announced, “I’ve got Mr. D’Allessando for you, sir. The AFC is just down the hall.”

  Delchamps read Castillo’s mind.

  “You want us to wait here, Ace?”

  Castillo exhaled audibly.

  “The wheezing, I suspect, reveals a certain indecision,” Delchamps said.

  “I was thinking that Svetlana probably should hear this,” Castillo said.

  “Or wondering how you could keep her from hearing it?” Delchamps said.

  Svetlana flashed him an icy look.

  “I was about to say, ‘What the hell, the barn door’s open; there’s no way to get the cow back in,’” Delchamps went on, which earned him an ever more frigid glare, “but I was afraid she might take it the wrong way.”

  Davidson chuckled.

  “Mr. Lee-Watson, will you excuse us for a few minutes? There’s an important call I—we—have to take.”

  “Of course.”

  The AFC radio was set up on a small escritoire in a small room off the corridor. There was an interior door. Castillo opened it and saw that it opened on the bedroom of the master suite.

  He closed the door, and noticed that Bradley was about to leave the room. “Stay, Lester,” Castillo said, and sat down carefully on an elegantly styled and obviously fragile chair.

  “Thank you so much, my ever thoughtful Charley,” Svetlana said sarcastically.

  He started to get up to give her the chair, then changed his mind.

  “You’re welcome,” he said, and checked the LEDs on the AFC. They were all green. One of them indicated the conversation would be conducted with the protection of AFC Class One encryption, which Aloysius Francis Casey had personally informed him that even the master National Security Agency eaves-droppers at Fort Meade, Maryland, could not penetrate.

  Castillo pushed the SPEAKERPHONE button.

  “How they hanging, Vic? What’s up?”

  There was no immediate reply, and when a reply did come, it was not in D’Allessando’s familiar Brooklynese but rather in the crisp diction that immediately and unequivocally identified the other party to Castillo as Lieutenant General Bruce J. McNab, Commanding General of the United States Special Operations Command: “Colonel Castillo.”

  “Good evening, sir.”

  “I wasn’t sure Vic could get through to you, Colonel. I didn’t think they would permit you to take one of Aloysius’s radios on your terminal leave.”

  “General, I’m not on terminal leave.”

  There was a pause.

  “But now that I have you, Colonel: Although you have caused me a lot of grief during our long relationship, on balance you were far more useful than I ever thought you would be. Given that, I wanted to tell you personally that I did my best to dissuade General Naylor from going along with Ambassador Montvale. I failed. I’m sorry, and I wanted to tell you that myself.”

  “Sir, I am not on terminal leave.”

  “Well, if you’re not, you soon will be. Colonel Remley, my G-1, is on his way down there with the appropriate papers for you to sign.” He paused. “That presumes, of course, that he can find you. He’s not one of us, so that’s quite possible. Where are you?”

  “Sir, I met briefly with Colonel Remley. And Ambassador Montvale. Several hours ago. They are both by now on their way back to the States. I declined to sign whatever it was he wanted me to sign.”

  “Did Colonel Remley inform you that I had sent him down there at General Naylor’s direction to have you sign your acceptance of the medical board’s conclusions?”

  “No, sir. Neither your name nor General Naylor’s was mentioned. Ambassador Montvale made it quite clear he wanted me to sign whatever Colonel Remley had for me to sign. I declined to do so.”

  “Charley, if the President has decided it’s time for you to go, it’s your duty to go. You should know that.”

  “Sir, the President is unaware of what Ambassador Montvale had planned for me.”

  This time the pause was longer before McNab spoke again.

  “Forgive me, Charley. I am ashamed to say I was sitting here trying to decide who would be more likely to lie to me, you or that lying sonofabitch Montvale.”

  “No apology required, sir.”

  “How much truth is there to the tale Montvale tells that you—for reasons he can’t imagine—snatched two Russian defectors from the CIA station chief in Vienna and flew them to Argentina?”

  “They were never in the hands of the CIA, sir.”

  “But you did fly them from Vienna to Argentina?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Off the top of my head, Charley, that sounds as stupid as . . . well, for example, as borrowing a Black Hawk. Why the hell did you do that?”

  “You mean borrowing the Black Hawk? Or flying the Russians here?” Castillo asked innocently.

  “You know goddamn well what I mean, Charley,” McNab said. But he chuckled.

  “Sir, at the time I thought it—both things—was the thing to do.”

  “And now that you’ve had time to reflect?”

  “Now I know, sir, that I did the right thing. Both times.”

  “Why?” McNab asked simply. “Skip the part about Dick Miller and his people still being among the living.”

  “Sir, I had good reason to believe the SVR was onto them, and unless I got them off the train and out of the Westbahnhof in Vienna, they’d be grabbed.”

  There was another long pause before McNab went on: “That raises the questions ‘What train?’ ‘What were you doing on the train?’ and ‘How did you get together with the Russians in the first place, since getting the bastards to turn is none of your goddamn business?’ But I will not ask them, because that is what is known as water under the dam. Pick it up where you got them out of the Westbahnhof and to Gaucho Land instead of turning them over to the agency in Vienna.”

  “Sir, the Russians suspected that the CIA station chief also knew the SVR was onto them and was going to let them hang in the breeze. I think they were right.”

  “Montvale’s version is that you rode into town like Jesse James and blew up the carefully laid plans of the CIA to arrange their defection.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m aware of his story.”

  “You don’t sound very repentant about all this, Charley. Even though it’s going to end your colorful military career on something of a sour note.”

  “Sir, what I got from the Russians is worth more than my career.”

  “Their heartfelt gratitude for helping them dodge the SVR?”

  “Sir, they’ve put me onto an operation in the ex-Belgian Congo—run by Iranians with other raghead cooperation and funded by oil-for-food money—that’s going after our water supplies.”

  “And you don’t think the agency, as incompetent as we both know it sometimes can be, doesn’t know the bad guys would love to poison our water supply? And if they’re seriously working on an operation would know just a little bit about it?”

  “As of a couple of hours ago, the agency believes—sir, this is just about verbatim—that, quote, there is no discernible activity there of interest to the United States. They are apparently experimenting with fish farms, unquote.”

  “How the hell could you possibly know that?”

  “I heard the DCI tell Montvale that. We were in the embassy in Buenos Aires, and Montvale called him.”

  “And you think the agency is wrong?”

  “Yes, sir. I believe they are.”

  “One of the defectors told you that?”

  “Both of them did, sir.”

  “And you believe them?” McNab asked incredulously. “Two whys, Charley: Why would they tell you, and why do you believe them?”

  “I can give you a long answer, sir, or—”

  “Short one first.”

  “They happen to be Christians who take it seriously and don’t want several million innocent people poisoned.”

  “Jesus Christ! A
nd you believe that?”

  “I do, and so does Edgar Delchamps.”

  “The guy who stuck a needle in the traitor’s neck in the Langley parking lot?”

  “That has been alleged, sir. He and Alex Darby, the station chief here, both believe what the Russians have told us.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but what I’m hearing here is that a brand-new lieutenant colonel with a well-deserved reputation for being a world-class loose cannon, an agency dinosaur who takes out people he doesn’t like in the CIA’s parking lot, and another agency type who got himself banished to Gaucho Land because he still thinks the Russians are a threat all have decided, based upon what a couple of Russian defectors—who the Russians say took off because they stole three million dollars, not because they’re born-again Christians—told them that there is a bona fide terrorist threat that the agency, having looked into it, says is nonsense. Does that sum it up fairly accurately, Colonel Castillo?”

  “Yes, sir. That’s about it.”

  “And what do these three lunatics plan to do about it?”

  “This lunatic, sir, is going to go over there and find out for himself what’s going on.”

  “And then?”

  “Either take it out myself or lay proof on the President’s desk of what’s going on.”

  “All by yourself, John Wayne?” McNab asked, bitterly sarcastic.

  There was a moment’s pause before Castillo responded.

  “Well, sir, now that you’ve brought it up, I was hoping I could borrow Uncle Remus for a couple of weeks. He has the right complexion and he speaks Swahili.”

  “If you are referring, Colonel Castillo, to Chief Warrant Officer Five Colin Leverette of this command, he not only speaks Swahili, but Lingala and Tshiluba as well. And not only is Mr. Leverette far too valuable to be put at risk in a dangerous—not to mention unsanctioned—operation such as you propose, but he is far too wise and experienced to even momentarily consider volunteering for anything like it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  There was a very long pause.

  “Lieutenant generals, as you should know, Lieutenant Colonel Castillo, do not bargain with lieutenant colonels.”

  “Yes, sir.”