Black Ops

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Washington is a strange place, Dmitri,” Ambassador Lorimer said. “President Truman was informed of the nuclear weapons that the United States was developing only the day after President Roosevelt died. While Truman was Vice President, he was not told one word—he had been kept completely in the dark.”

  “So, you are agreeing that my going to the President makes sense?” Castillo said.

  “From my vantage point, which I am aware is one of near-total ignorance, it looks to me as if it is your only viable option.”

  Castillo nodded thoughtfully. “Then yes, sir, Mr. Ambassador, I would be very grateful if you would prepare a paper like that.”

  “Then I shall, even though I am about out of patience with your refusal, my friend, to address me by my Christian name.”

  “I’m in, Ace,” Delchamps said.

  “Me, too,” Darby said.

  Castillo looked at Davidson.

  “Jesus Christ, Charley! Do you have to ask? Yes, sir, Colonel, sir, I will go with you to see the President, sir. Not only that, I will bring Uncle Remus and this bald, fat, ugly old man with me, and do my best to keep them sober.”

  [THREE]

  Cozumel International Airport

  Cozumel, Mexico

  2005 5 January 2006

  Castillo saw that Miller had a hard time getting out of the co-pilot seat—that it was painful for him—but pretended not to notice.

  It was understandable. Castillo was a little stiff, too, and during the long flight often had been reminded of his wounded buttocks and leg.

  And it had been a long one indeed: Six hours fifteen minutes from Punta del Este across the South American continent to Quito, Ecuador, and then after an hour for fuel and a really bad chicken supper, another three hours and something from Quito to Cozumel.

  On both legs he had sent Miller back to the passenger compartment so that he could stretch out on one of the couches with his knee unbent for an hour or so. And on both occasions, Svetlana had come forward and sat in the co-pilot seat. They had tried to hold hands, but the Gulfstream flight deck had not been designed for romance, so they just sat there and watched the fuel gauges drop and the GPS image of the Gulfstream inch its way across the map.

  There had been plenty of time to think, and a lot to think about, and a number of decisions to be made, one of which he thought of as Step One of Biting the Bullet.

  Castillo started to implement Step One of Biting the Bullet now, after Miller left the cockpit and he heard the whine of the stair-door motor.

  As he reached for the AFC handset in its rack beside the co-pilot seat, Svetlana again came into the cockpit. She asked with her eyebrows what he was doing.

  To hell with it; she’ll learn what’s going to happen soon enough anyway.

  He pointed to the handset. She handed it to him, then slid into the seat and listened to his side of the conversation.

  “C. G. Castillo,” he said to the handset.

  “Yes, Colonel Castillo?”

  The voice-recognition circuit reacted more quickly, he thought, than a human operator would have answered.

  And it doesn’t sound at all like a computer-generated voice.

  “General Bruce J. McNab. Encrypted Level One.”

  “One moment, please.”

  Then McNab’s voice: “Thank you ever so much for checking in, Colonel. I was beginning to wonder if you had decided to retire earlier than scheduled.”

  “Good evening, sir.”

  “Or if you were in the arms of the Argentine cops in Gaucho Land. I presume you’re aware of the FBI backgrounder?”

  “Yes, sir. You’ve seen it?”

  “Oh, yes. And the ‘locate but do not detain’ message.”

  “I didn’t hear about that one, sir.”

  “Well, if you ever try to come to the United States, you’ll know why the Border Patrol is so fascinated with your passport.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where the hell are you?”

  “Sitting in the airplane—we just landed—in Cozumel.”

  “A fuel stop? Or are you planning to rest from your trip overnight?”

  “Both, sir.”

  “I’ve given some thought on how to get together—”

  “Sir . . .”

  “—since your coming to Fort Bragg would be ill-advised. What I’ve been thinking—”

  “Sir . . .”

  “—is that I would fly to Rucker, which wouldn’t attract any attention, then chopper down to Hurlburt. No one would even know I’d done that. And—I presume you have your German passport—if you went through immigration at Lauderdale—”

  “Sir . . .”

  “Goddamn it, Charley, stop interrupting me! If you went through immigration at Fort Lauderdale, which makes even more sense now that you’ll be coming from Cozumel, since they’re both vacation spots, you could fly on to Pensacola—”

  “Sir, I’m not coming to see you.”

  There was a short pause before McNab replied, “Say again?”

  “I’m not going to come see you, sir, at least—”

  “Your coming to me was not in the nature of a suggestion, Colonel. More like an order. You remember, from your time in the Army, what an order is, right?”

  “I’m going to see the President, sir.”

  There was a long pause.

  “He sent for you?”

  “No, sir. I’m going to call him and ask to see him just as soon as I get off the horn with you, sir.”

  There was another long pause before McNab said, “Charley, I don’t think the President is going to buy ‘I’m sorry, and it won’t happen again, sir.’”

  “What I’m hoping he will buy, sir, is that there is a chemical laboratory and factory in the Congo.”

  “You’re aware, of course, that the CIA thinks what that is is a fish farm.”

  “I’m taking Mr. Delchamps with me, sir.”

  “Ol’ Lethal Injection in the Neck Delchamps? You know what the agency thinks about him.”

  “And Mr. Darby.”

  “He who sees a Mad Russian bent on world domination behind every tree?”

  “And Jack Davidson and Uncle Remus and P. B. DeWitt. They all have—”

  “P. B. DeWitt? My P. B. DeWitt? Master Sergeant Phineas Bartholomew DeWitt, Retired?”

  “Yes, sir. He’s one of the China Post guys I hired to sit on Ambassador Lorimer.”

  “I haven’t seen him since his wife’s funeral,” McNab thought aloud.

  “They all have talked to the Russian defectors and believe them, sir. And so does Ambassador Lorimer. And the ambassador has prepared a background paper for the President, sir, outlining the history of the factory site, when the Germans—”

  “And it is your intention to march all these people into the Oval Office—he’s not there, by the way, he’s in Saint Louis, giving a speech—and then what?”

  “Try to convince him there is a chemical lab and factory, sir. And get his permission to take it out. There’s no way I can do that myself.”

  “I recall suggesting something like that to you, Colonel,” McNab said sarcastically. “Now listen to me carefully, Colonel. This is what they call a direct order. You are not to get on the horn to the President. You are not going to see the President.”

  Castillo did not reply.

  “What you are going to do, Colonel, and again this is a direct order, you are tomorrow morning going to enter the United States as Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger at Fort Lauderdale. You then are going to fly to Pensacola, Florida. When you have procured suitable accommodations in some luxury beachside hotel, you will then contact me on the AFC—I will most likely already be in Fort Rucker—and I will give you my ETA at Hurlburt, to which you will send Jack Davidson to pick me up. No. Make that P. B. I want to have a word with him.”

  Castillo didn’t reply.

  “I hope that silence I hear,” McNab said a long moment later, “is not one of the finest officers I have ever known contem
plating willful disobedience of a lawful order.”

  Yes, sir.

  That’s exactly what it was, General.

  Key word “was,” as I consider you one of the finest officers I have ever known.

  And without question you’re thinking a helluva lot smarter than I am right now.

  Case in point: Me even considering disobeying your order. . . .

  “Sir, I’ll get on the horn just as soon as we’re in the hotel in Pensacola.”

  After another long moment, McNab said, “Get some rest, Charley. It’s a long flight from Gaucho Land and tomorrow’s probably going to be pretty busy. Out.”

  “Break it down,” Castillo said, and turned to Svetlana.

  She met his eyes for a long moment and then turned away to put the handset back in its holder. And then she got out of the co-pilot seat and went into the passenger compartment.

  Castillo had the feeling she had wanted to say something but had changed her mind.

  He looked out the cockpit window and saw that Mexican customs and immigration officials were examining passports and aircraft documents. Behind their truck were two white GMC Yukon XLs with the Grand Cozumel Beach & Golf Resort logotype on their doors.

  Four gorillas—these looked Mexican—stood by the GMCs, waiting to make themselves useful.

  [FOUR]

  The Tahitian Suite

  Grand Cozumel Beach & Golf Resort

  Cozumel, Mexico

  2125 5 January 2006

  “So that’s it,” Castillo said. “For a number of reasons, instead of going to see the President tomorrow, we’re all going—except, of course, Svet and Dmitri, who will stay here and watch the waves go up and down—to see General McNab tomorrow. Maybe, after he hears what all of us have to say, he’ll say, ‘Okay, go see the President.’ And maybe not.”

  “Well, I know McNab well enough to know he’s not doing this to cover his ass,” Leverette said. “So what’s he thinking?”

  Castillo shrugged. “We’ll just have to wait and find out. Without him, we’re dead in the water. And I have had, since I had our little chat, another unpleasant thought. Even if I went to the President and he believed me, he would want a second opinion about staging an op to blow the place up, and the man he’d go to for that second opinion would be Lieutenant General Bruce J. McNab.”

  “May I speak, Colonel?” Berezovsky said.

  “Colonel”? That sounds pretty serious.

  “Of course,” Castillo said.

  “And does that ‘what anyone knows, everyone knows’ rule of yours apply to me and Svetlana, or would you rather hear what I have to say in private?”

  “Let’s hear it, Dmitri.”

  “Does the name Colonel Pietr Sunev mean anything to you?”

  “Ol’ Suitcase Nukes himself,” Delchamps said. “Talk about egg on the agency’s face!”

  Castillo chuckled. “Yes, we have heard of him, Dmitri. Friend of yours?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. Or he was.”

  “I’m in the dark,” DeWitt said.

  “Dmitri’s former associates,” Delchamps furnished, “let the agency find out that about a hundred briefcase-size nuclear weapons had been cleverly smuggled into the States, and were scattered all over the States waiting to be detonated at the appropriate moment—”

  “And,” Darby picked up, “this was confirmed by a Russian KGB defector named Pietr Sunev—”

  “Who then led the boys in Langley on a merry chase all over the country,” Delchamps resumed, “during which they found no bombs, because there were none.”

  “But,” Darby interjected, smiling, “Colonel Sunev was such a nice guy and a convincing liar—and knew how to work a polygraph—that the agency believed him so much that—”

  “They never used more efficient—if less pleasant—truth detectors on him,” Delchamps said.

  “—believed him so much,” Darby went on, “that they gave him not only a very substantial tax-free payment for his services but also put him in the CIA’s version of the Witness Protection Program, which gave him a new identity—”

  “As a professor of political science!” Delchamps interjected. “I always loved that little nuance.”

  “At a prestigious left-wing college—”

  “Grinnell. In Iowa,” Delchamps furnished.

  “—from which one day the professor disappeared—with, of course, the money he had been paid. To turn up a week or so later in Moscow.”

  “That’s the man,” Berezovsky said.

  “You guys done good with that operation, Dmitri,” Delchamps said.

  “That operation did go well,” Berezovsky said. “And I would rather suspect that General McNab is aware of it.”

  “What you’re suggesting now is that he thinks you’re Sunev Two?” Castillo asked, now quite serious.

  “The United States would be excoriated in world opinion,” Svetlana said, “if a team of your Spetsnaz was killed or captured trying to destroy a fish farm in a country whose population is starving. It would be worse if your aircraft was successful in destroying it.”

  “Where are you going with this?” Castillo asked.

  “I think it would be much smarter, my Carlos, for Dmitri and me to go with you tomorrow than for us to stay here and watch the waves go up and down.”

  “To do what?”

  “To convince General McNab of the truth,” Berezovsky said. “And to make ourselves available, if that should become necessary, to the appropriate authorities.”

  Delchamps grunted. “Let me give you a scenario, Dmitri. You go through agency debriefing, which means this time the use of the less pleasant methods of truth detecting, and they believe what you have to say. Which isn’t much. What you have told us is hearsay. We believe you, but that won’t count with the agency. What they are going to think is that here is the guy—”

  “And his sister,” Darby interjected.

  “—who humiliated the station chief in Vienna, and thus the agency. They conveniently will conclude that you are the embezzlers the Russians say you are, and have concocted this fantastic story, à la Sunev, to cover your ass, and the thing for them to do is turn you over to Interpol for return to Russia.”

  “Neither of you is going to turn yourselves in to the agency,” Castillo said.

  “If you think that through, Colonel,” Berezovsky said, “that is not your decision to make. How would you stop us?”

  Castillo met his eyes. “How about reminding you of your wife and daughter in Argentina?”

  “Did you notice how well my wife and Susanna Sieno got along? Even better than you and I, Carlos. Both women know of the roles their husbands play in the world in which people like you and I live. From time to time, when God wills it, unpleasant things happen.

  “We are back, Carlos, to what we have talked about before. The sin of omission. If I went back to Argentina without seeing this through, that would be a sin. What happens now is in the hands of God.”

  No, it fucking well isn’t.

  It’s in the hands of C. G. Castillo—but I don’t have a fucking clue how to handle it.

  When you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, stall.

  “Dmitri, if I allowed you and Svetlana to come with us to Florida, would you give me your word, swear to God on the lives of your family, you wouldn’t turn yourself in to the agency without talking to me first?”

  Berezovsky considered that a moment.

  “I so swear,” he said, and crossed himself.

  And I swear that you’re going back to your wife and little girl if I have to drug you, roll you in a carpet, and ship you as FedEx freight.

  Or carry you on my back.

  And I’ll die before I see Svetlana in the hands of the agency, who would—Delchamps is right on the money about that—send her back to Russia and then congratulate themselves for “dealing with the situation in a way that reflected credit upon the agency.”

  [FIVE]

  Svetlana was wrapped in
a white terry-cloth robe—under which Castillo happened to notice she wore the lacey red underpants he had first happened to see in Vienna’s Westbahnhof—and leaning on the jamb of the bathroom door as she watched him conduct business on the telephone.

  She asked with her eyes what was going on. He signaled for her to wait.

  “I appreciate your understanding,” he said into the phone. “The animal is a symbol of the strength and devotion of the Lorimer Fund, and I can’t imagine Max not being at a board of directors meeting.”

  Svetlana raised her eyebrows even higher in question, as whoever Castillo was talking to said something else.

  “Thank you very much,” Castillo said politely, “but I think we can make do with the space in the larger suite for our meeting.”

  The door chime sounded and Svetlana, in bare feet, ran quickly to answer it.

  Castillo saw that it was a room-service waiter pushing a cart on which sat a champagne cooler and something else he couldn’t see.

  “I’m afraid we won’t have time for offshore fishing,” Castillo went on, “but I must admit it certainly sounds like fun.”

  The room-service waiter opened the champagne and Svetlana attacked whatever else was on the table by jabbing at it with a fork.

  “A cocktail party at the pool is something we’ll have to consider when we get there,” Castillo said. “But that, too, is certainly an interesting option.”

  Svetlana signed the room-service check and showed the waiter out the door, carefully fastening the lock after he’d gone.

  She returned to the room-service cart, picked up two champagne stems with the thumb and two fingers of her right hand, then picked up something with her left hand and walked to Castillo.

  “We look forward to seeing you, too, and will do so tomorrow,” Castillo said, his tone suggesting he was past ready to finish the business conversation. “Thank you so much for your courtesy.”

  He hung up the telephone and said to it, “Sonofabitch wouldn’t stop selling!”

  Then he looked up at Svetlana.

  He started to say something else but could not, because she had thrust something into his mouth.

  “Beluga,” she said, and showed him the label on the small jar.