“Which would be?”
“I’m sure the general is aware of the scurrilous rumor circulating that the unofficial motto of Special Forces is ‘Kill everybody and let God sort it out.’”
“I’ve heard that,” Naylor said.
He thought that over for a long moment and then said, “That just might work.”
“We have a problem there, I’m afraid,” McNab said.
“Why? As long as the President thinks his orders are being obeyed, he’ll be less prone to order any additional action. If he can be stalled, so to speak, for sufficient time—”
“The problem is once again, sir, Lieutenant Colonel Castillo, Retired.”
“How so?”
“I spoke to him about an hour ago—”
“Amazing device, that CaseyBerry, isn’t it?” General Naylor interrupted.
“Yes, sir, it is. I outlined the parameters of the situation to Colonel Castillo, sir, and asked him how he would react to the suggestion that he accept a recall to active hazardous duty for a period not to exceed ninety days.”
“And what did he say?”
“He broke the connection without saying anything, sir.”
“He hung up on you?”
McNab nodded and then said, “I gave him ninety seconds in the belief that would be sufficient time for him to recover from his fit of hysterical laughter, and called back. Sweaty took the call—”
“‘Sweaty’?” Naylor parroted. “Oh, the Russian woman.”
“Yes, sir. Former Lieutenant Colonel Svetlana Alekseeva of the SVR. Now known as Susanna Barlow. Colonel Castillo’s fiancée.”
“His what? He’s going to marry her?” Naylor asked incredulously.
“Yes, sir. Just as soon as they can somehow get the government of the Russian Federation to declare her former husband, SVR Polkovnik Evgeny Alekseev to be deceased. Colonel Castillo is a gentleman, and gentlemen feel an obligation to marry women carrying their unborn children.”
“She’s pregnant?”
“Yes, sir, I understand that to be the case.”
“McNab, I have the feeling you’re mocking me,” Naylor said furiously.
“As you well know, since our plebe year at Hudson High, just being in the same room with you has induced an uncontrollable urge in me to mock you, even when you’re not in your Self-Righteous Mode, as you are now. But if you can bring yourself to call me Bruce, I will stop doing so now and we can see about solving the problem at hand as two old soldiers and classmates should do.”
Naylor glared at him for a long moment, and finally said, “Please do.” And then, after another pause, added, “Bruce.”
“Allan, I would not have violated Charley’s privacy by telling you that Sweaty’s in the family way, except that it’s obviously a fact bearing on our problem.”
“Understood. Thank you,” Naylor replied, and again added “Bruce” after a pause.
“When Sweaty came on the line, I gathered that she was less than enthusiastic about Charley doing what the President wants him to do. She said if I ever brought the subject up again, she would castrate me with a rusty otxokee mecto nanara.”
“With a what?”
“Latrine shovel.”
“Have you any suggestions on how we can solve our problem?” Naylor asked.
“As a matter of fact… Natalie says the last thing we can afford to happen is for C. Harry Whelan, Junior, or Andy McClarren to wonder what the hell you’re doing in Argentina and start asking questions—”
“I’ve been ordered to go down there,” Naylor interrupted.
“. . . so you can’t go down there.”
“What’s the alternative?”
“You want it step by step, or all at once?”
“All at once.”
“We’re all agreed on this, Allan. Frank, Natalie, and me.”
“Understood. Let’s hear it.”
“Frank’s Gulfstream comes here and picks up Vic D’Alessandro—”
“I think I see where you’re headed,” Naylor said.
“Stop interrupting me, for Christ’s sake, Allan!”
“Sorry.”
“And picks up Vic D’Alessandro, who is Charley’s oldest friend in Special Operations except for me. When Charley was flying me around in Desert One, Master Sergeant D’Alessandro was on the Gatling gun in the back.”
“I wasn’t aware of that.”
“I guess if you’re the most important general in the world, nobody can tell you to shut up.”
“Sorry,” Naylor said, and then, “I mean it. I’m sorry, Bruce, please go on.”
“And Charley’s oldest friend,” McNab went on.
Naylor opened his mouth to ask what was meant by that, but with a massive effort didn’t speak.
McNab pointed at Lieutenant Colonel Allan B. Naylor.
“They’ve been buddies since they were in short pants in that school in Fulda…”
“Saint Johan’s,” Lieutenant Colonel Naylor furnished.
“Unfortunately, Colonel, you’re apparently a chip off the old blockhead,” McNab said. “Shut up. When I want input from you, I’ll tell you.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
“That was when Charley was only Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger. Later, when he had also become that famous Texican—one Carlos Guillermo Castillo—Junior here followed him to West Point. Most recently, he was involved—on the fringes, to be sure, but involved—in Charley’s brief but successful incursion in the People’s Democratic Republic of Venezuela.
“Vic and Junior are, Natalie, Frank, and I feel, the ideal people to tell Charley all sides of the story. The three of us also feel that it is only fair to offer Charley the advice of fellow Outlaws we feel he might wish to bring with him, should he decide to go on active duty. People he trusts almost as much as he trusts Sweaty, who therefore may be able to overcome Sweaty’s rather firm position.
“To accomplish that, Frank’s Gulfstream will fly Vic and Junior to scenic Tocumen International Airport in the Republic of Panama, where they will board—on the CIA’s dime, by the way—yet another Gulfstream, this one owned by Panamanian Executive Aircraft, a wholly owned subsidiary of the LCBF Corporation.
“It will then fly to Argentina piloted by Colonel Jacob Torine, USAF, Retired, who was Castillo’s de facto chief of staff in the glory days of the Office of Organizational Analysis and later in the era of the often-maligned-by-the-President Merry Outlaws.
“His co-pilot will be Major Richard Miller, USA, Retired. On one hand, Major Miller is much like Colonel Naylor. He, too, marches in the Long Gray Line, and his father, too, is a general officer. On the other, before he got himself shot down and pretty badly banged up in Afghanistan, Miller was one hell of a Special Operations pilot and not only with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.
“All of these people will confer with Castillo and his charming fiancée, and then we will hear whatever it is he has to say.
“That’s our best shot at this problem. The final decision, of course, is up to you, Allan. If you want to go to Argentina and deal with Charley yourself, no one can—or should—try to stop you.”
Tapping the fingertips of both hands together, General Naylor considered the question for a full thirty seconds, and then said, “Bruce, please call Mr. Lammelle and ask him to send his airplane.”
McNab nodded and then looked at Vic D’Alessandro, who gestured with his CaseyBerry.
“ETA here is fifteen minutes, General,” D’Alessandro reported.
II
[ONE]
The House on the Hill
Las Vegas, Nevada
1605 5 June 2007
The eavesdropping on the communications of the world by the National Security
Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, is a rather simple procedure: They record everything said over the telephone, over the radio—and sometimes heard by cleverly placed “bugs”—by those in whom the several intelligence agencies of the United States are interested and then run it through a computer that filters out the garbage and after cracking any cryptography involved transfers the good stuff to another tape that is then distributed to the appropriate intelligence agency for analysis.
The idea is simple, the technology required is not.
Before the AFC Corporation took over the supplying of the technology—hardware and software—the NSA was relatively as deaf and useful as a stone pole. Afterward, of course, it was not.
Before the AFC Corporation took the NSA contract, Dr. Aloysius Casey— by far the majority stockholder in AFC, and both its chief engineer and chairman of its board of directors—could not be honestly said to have been putting victuals on his table with food stamps.
After the contracts went into force, though, he really prospered.
To the point where he had confided to his friend Charley Castillo—to whom he no longer referred to as “Hotshot”—that he had more money than he knew what to do with. He confided this to Castillo not only as a friend, but also because he knew that Castillo, too, had more money than he knew what to do with.
One of the things Casey had done with his wealth was of course to provide prototype equipment free of charge to the Special Forces community, but this—especially after Casey’s platoon of tax lawyers taught him how to charge this off as “research and development”—didn’t make much of a dent in the bottom line.
He had spent a hell of a lot of money building the House on the Hill for Mary-Catherine, whom he had married immediately after returning from the war in Vietnam. Their first home had been a basement room in her parents’ row house in South Boston. She had supported him emotionally—his and her parents thought he was either nuts or smoking funny cigarettes—when he went to MIT. And supported them financially by stuffing bags for long hours in a Stop & Shop Supermarket.
They had four years together in the House on the Hill, and then cancer got Mary-Catherine. Got her very quickly, which was the only good thing that could be said about that.
A year after Mary-Catherine left him alone—they’d never been able to have kids—in the House on the Hill, the demise of both the Office of Organizational Analysis and the Merry Outlaws, which was a brief reincarnation of the former, caused two of its members to be without work.
Casey had come to know both of them, and felt a kinship with both.
One of these was First Lieutenant Edmund “Peg-Leg” Lorimer, MI, USA, Retired, who had worn the Green Beret as an “A” Team commo sergeant—which logically really resonated with Casey—before getting a battlefield commission. He had been an officer just long enough to make first lieutenant when he was wounded in—and ultimately lost—his left leg just above the knee.
The other was Gunnery Sergeant Lester Bradley, USMC, Retired, who was twenty-one but looked much younger. He had been part of Castillo’s operation from the very beginning, even before they had been first formalized as the Office of Organizational Analysis.
Then a corporal in the Marine Guard detachment at the American embassy in Buenos Aires, Bradley had been sent—as the man who could best be spared—to drive an embassy truck carrying two fifty-five-gallon barrels of helicopter fuel to Uruguay. He was pressed into service in support of a hastily organized raid Castillo had undertaken to snatch Dr. John Paul Lorimer, a renegade American, for forcible repatriation to the United States.
Dr. Lorimer and Lieutenant Lorimer, it should be pointed out, were in no way related.
Castillo had handed Bradley an M-14 rifle and ordered him to do what he could to protect the fuel while he and other Special Operations operators—plus an FBI agent also pressed into service from his duties in the Uruguayan embassy looking for dirty money—conducted the raid.
The raid had promptly started to go sour, and might have failed—probably would have failed—had not Bradley taken out two of the bad guys with head shots, fired offhand from one hundred yards from his M-14 rifle and the FBI agent, taking his pistol out of its holster for the first time ever except on the FBI Academy’s pistol range at Quantico, used it to take out two more of them.
When he returned to the United States, then-Major Castillo had reported to the President—President Clendennen’s predecessor—that, since they obviously couldn’t be returned to their embassy duties, he had brought Corporal Bradley and FBI Special Agent David W. Yung home with him. He also reported that Dr. Lorimer had been killed by what they had learned were agents of the SVR as he was opening his safe. The safe had a little over sixteen million dollars’ worth of bearer bonds in it the SVR thought was theirs, Castillo told the President, and he had brought that home, too.
The President had a solution that dealt with what should be done with Castillo, others on the raid (including Bradley and Yung), and the money. He issued a Top Secret Presidential Finding establishing the Office of Organizational Analysis, named Castillo its chief, assigned Bradley, Yung, and everybody involved in the raid to it, and funded it with $500,000 from his Confidential Fund.
“In the meantime, Charley,” the President went on, “understanding I’m not telling you to do this, if you should happen to find sixteen million in bearer bonds somewhere on the sidewalk, you might consider using that for the expenses of OOA until I can come up with some more money for you.”
Special Agent Yung, who was an expert in the laundering of funds, established an account for the Lorimer Charitable & Benevolent Fund in the Riggs National Bank in Washington, and deposited sixteen million dollars in bearer bonds into it.
That was the beginning of what would become the LCBF Corporation, which was formed after, shortly before his untimely death, the President found it necessary to disband the OOA and order its members to disappear from the face of the earth.
When that happened, neither Lieutenant Lorimer nor Sergeant Bradley had anywhere to go. Neither had any family to speak of, and they had been retired from the service. Neither could Bradley continue to be Castillo’s shadow. Among other reasons for that was a redheaded Russian called Sweaty, who while she really liked Lester, did not want to have him around for breakfast, lunch, and dinner seven days a week.
Aloysius Casey offered both men a job working for the AFC Corporation laboratories in Las Vegas. He was working on a new project for the gaming industry, a computer-driven system that would, when completed, discreetly scan the faces of guests as they entered the lobby and instantly come up with their biographies, credit ratings, and the balances in their bank accounts. This would be of great interest to the gaming industry, and one of the titans of that industry, who had become a pal of Aloysius, told him that they would pay through the nose for it if he could make it work.
Aloysius, not sure if he believed it, told Peg-Leg and Lester that he thought they would be useful to him as he perfected the new system. He also said that, until they got settled, they could stay with him in the House on the Hill.
“There’s certainly plenty of room,” he said.
In addition to the twenty-three rooms in which Aloysius was—with the exception of the Mexican couple who took care of him—rattling around alone, there were four “guest cottages,” each consisting of a bedroom, a living room, a game room complete with nickel slot machines—their motherboards rigged to pay out more than they took in—and a complete kitchen.
Lester moved into one of these cottages next to the putting green, and Peg-Leg into the one nearest the pool, which he used often for therapeutic reasons connected with the damaged muscles of his leg.
From the beginning, things went well—except for the incident with the motorcycle. One day when Lester was in the lobby of Mount Vesuvius Resort & Gaming Palace watching people come in, so he could determine the best
location to place the scanning cameras, he had an idle moment and dropped a quarter into a slot machine, just so he could see how it worked without anybody seeing him watching.
There then suddenly came a bleating of trumpets, the flashing of lights, the screaming of sirens, and a recorded voice repeatedly bellowing, “There is a winner!”
Lester had won the Grand Prize offered by that slot machine—an absolute top-of-the-line Harley-Davidson that was sitting on a pedestal just inside the lobby. Aloysius suspected a glitch in the slot machine’s motherboard, as that particular motorcycle had been sitting there for as long as he could remember and no one had ever won it.
The thought of Lester riding that monster up and down the Strip and then up and down the mountain every day brought forth in Aloysius what he thought of as a manifestation of the Special Operators creed that one Special Operator always covers another Special Operator’s back, but was probably more of a manifestation of previously unsuspected paternal instincts.
He conferred first with Peg-Leg, who then told Lester that while he was happy with Lester’s good fortune, his peg leg would keep him from ever getting on the motorcycle with him.
In his next tactical move, he conferred over the CaseyBerry system with David W. Yung, now the chief financial officer of the LCBF Corporation, and who was managing Lester’s investment portfolio, and got him to agree to tell Lester that the purchase of an automobile of any kind would interfere with the growth of the portfolio.
The CIA had promptly paid to the LCBF Corporation the $120 million it had been offering to anyone who could deliver a Top Secret Russian Tupolev Tu-934A aircraft to them when Colonel Jake Torine and Lieutenant Colonel Charley Castillo had brought one back with them from the Venezuelan incursion known as Operation March Hare.
The Executive Compensation Committee of the LCBF Corporation—David Yung and Edgar Delchamps—had determined that Lester was one of those entitled to one of the one-million-dollar (after taxes) bonuses to be paid to active participants in Operation March Hare.
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