The Shooters

by W. E. B Griffin

  “A good spook always takes good care of his sources. You might want to write that down, Ace.” He stood up and said, “It’s been fun, fellas. We’ll have to do it again sometime. Let’s keep in touch.”

  And then he walked out of the living room.

  “What about me, Karl?” Alfredo Munz asked.

  “I brought you along so you could be with your family and take them home,” Castillo said. “But having heard all this, how would you feel about coming to work for us? We could really use you.”

  Munz didn’t reply, and seemed uneasy.

  “What is it, Alfredo?”

  “I need a job,” Munz said. “As much as I would like to do whatever I can to help you, I just can’t support my family on my SIDE pension.”

  “I told you a long time ago we’d take care of you,” Castillo said. “So that’s not a problem. You’ve been on the payroll of the Lorimer Charitable & Benevolent Trust as a senior consultant ever since we took that chopper ride to Shangri-La.”

  “Why do I suspect you are lying, my friend?”

  “Because I am,” Castillo said. “But the only reason you haven’t been on the payroll is because I’m stupid. You may have noticed.”

  “No,” Munz said, emotionally. “The one thing you are not is stupid.”

  “Well, I have noticed, Colonel,” Miller said. “I’ve known him a long time. And with that in mind, I brought the question up to Mrs. Forbison—you met her last night?”

  Munz nodded.

  “And Agnes decided that since you are, or at least were, a colonel, we should bring you on board as a Lorimer Charitable & Benevolent Trust LB-15, which is the equivalent of a GS-15 in the Federal Service. And, according to Army Regulation 210-50, a GS-15 is regarded as the equivalent of a colonel. The pay is $89,625 a year to start. Would that be satisfactory to you?”

  “You are fooling with me, right?”

  “Not at all.”

  “That much? My God, that’s two hundred and seventy thousand pesos!”

  Castillo thought, surprised: Miller isn’t just making all that up. He and Agnes have given this thought, done the research, and come up with the answer.

  “The Internal Revenue Service will take their cut, of course,” Miller said. “But that’s the best we can do.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” Munz said.

  “‘Yes’ would work,” Castillo said.

  “If I retire, Charley,” Torine said, “will you hire me?”

  “If you’re serious, Jake, sure,” Castillo said.

  “Let me give that some thought,” Torine said seriously.

  “I myself go on the payroll the first of October,” Miller said, “as an LB-12, at $64,478 per annum.”

  Oh, God, that means they’re physically retiring him. Involuntarily.

  “Sorry you took a hit. So long, and don’t let the doorknob hit you on the ass on your way out.”

  “What’s that ‘LB’ business?” Castillo asked.

  “Lorimer Bureaucrat,” Miller said. “An LB-12 is equivalent to a major and a GS-12.” He looked at Castillo. “After I gnashed my teeth in agony while rolling around on the floor at Walter Reed begging for compassion, the Medical Review Board gave me a seventy-percent disability pension. Permanent.”

  “You all right with that?” Castillo asked softly.

  “I’d rather have my knee back,” Miller said. “But with my pension and my salary as an LB-12, I’ll be taking home more than you do. Yeah, I’m all right with it. And somebody has to cover your back, Colonel, sir.”

  “I hate to tell you this, but I already have a fine young Marine NCO covering my back.”

  “Don’t laugh, Charley,” Torine said, chuckling.

  “I’m not laughing at all; I owe him,” Castillo said. He paused, then said, “Well, before we went off on this tangent, Jake was saying something about me being dangerous.”

  “And I wasn’t joking, either. Only you could get us into something like this. You are dangerous.”

  “I thank you for that heartfelt vote of confidence,” Castillo replied. “And moving right along, what shape is the airplane in?”

  “If you had read the log, First Officer, you would know that we’re pretty close to a hundred-hour.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Not a major problem,” Torine said. “We can get it done when we’re in Vegas.”

  “‘When we’re in Vegas’?” Castillo parroted, incredulously. “You want to tell me about Vegas?”

  “I guess I didn’t get around to mentioning that,” Miller said.

  Castillo looked at him.

  Miller explained: “Aloysius is going to replace the avionics in the G-Three. The communications and global positioning portions thereof. Plus, of course, a secure phone and data link.”

  “You told him about the Gulfstream?”

  “Hey, he’s one of us.”

  He’s right. He just told Casey we have the Gulfstream, not how we use it.

  And Casey really is one of us, and knows we’re not using it to fly to the Bahamas for a little time on the beach.

  “Point taken,” Castillo said.

  “Signature Flight Support’s got an operation at McCarran,” Torine said. “I called them—in Baltimore—this morning, and got them to agree to tell the people in Vegas to do the hundred-hour in the AFC hangar. Somehow I suspected we were going to need the airplane sooner than anyone thought. Wrong move?”

  “No. Just something else that comes as a surprise,” Castillo said. “Okay, how about this? We go to Chicago and ‘assure the family,’ and then we go to Midland and either leave Alfredo there or—why not?—pick up Munz’s wife and daughters and take everybody to Las Vegas. We get the avionics installed and the hundred-hour done. How long is that service going to take?”

  “Twenty-four hours, maybe forty-eight. It depends on (a) what they turn up in the hundred-hour and (b) how long it takes Casey’s people to install the avionics.”

  “Not long, I would think,” Miller said, “as I suspect we can count on Aloysius either putting it in himself or standing over whoever else does.”

  “If it takes more than forty-eight hours, I’ll just go to New Orleans commercial to try to talk the ambassador out of going to Shangri-La.”

  “Where the hell have you been, Charley?” Torine asked. “Louis Armstrong is closed to all but emergency traffic—they’re picking people off the roofs of their houses with choppers, using Louis Armstrong as the base. And Lakefront is under fifteen feet of water.”

  “Keesler?” Castillo asked.

  “Wiped out.”

  “Okay. Moving right along, if they can’t do the airplane in forty-eight hours, I’ll go to Atlanta commercial and then Fort Rucker and borrow something with revolving wings and fly that to Masterson’s plantation.”

  “That may not work, either,” Miller said.

  “Hey, I’m drunk with the power I’ve been given. You were awake, weren’t you, when I said the President said he was going to tell the secretary of Defense to give me whatever I think I need.”

  “That presupposes Rucker has a chopper to loan you,” Miller said. “I suspect that their birds are among those picking people off rooftops in New Orleans.”

  “Then I’ll rent one in Atlanta.”

  “Same reply,” Miller said.

  “I think they’d loan you a helicopter at Rucker, Charley,” Torine said, “even if they had to bring it back from picking people off roofs in New Orleans.” He paused. “You sure you want to do that?”

  “No, of course I don’t. Okay. So scaling down my grandiose ambitions to conform with reality, I’ll fly to Atlanta, take a taxi to Fulton County, and rent a twin Cessna or something. That’s probably a better solution anyway.”

  “It probably is,” Torine agreed. “I just had another unpleasant thought. Even if Masterson’s airstrip is not under water and long enough for us to get the Gulfstream in there, it’s probably being used by a lot of other airplanes.”

  �
��Yeah,” Castillo agreed. “Okay. Correct me where I’m wrong. The priority is to get to Chicago and, quote, assure the mayor, unquote. I suppose I could do that commercial. But we are going to need the Gulfstream, and with the hundred-hour out of the way.”

  “And, better yet, with the new avionics,” Miller said.

  “Right. We have enough time left to go to Chicago, then, with a stop in Midland, to Las Vegas, right?”

  “Probably with a couple of hours left over,” Torine said.

  “So that’s what we’ll do. And wing it from there, so to speak,” Castillo said. “Where’s Lorimer? Does he have a uniform?”

  “Upstairs and yes,” Miller said.

  “Okay. Everybody but Jake and Miller go play with the dogs or something while we deal with Lieutenant Lorimer,” Castillo said.

  Miller started to get up.

  “Keep your seat, Dick,” Special Agent David W. Yung said. “I’ll get him.”

  “This is where I’m supposed to say, ‘I’m perfectly able to climb a flight of stairs,’” Miller said. “But what I am going to say is ‘You will be rewarded in heaven, David, for your charity to this poor cripple.’”

  Tom McGuire came into the living room first.

  “Agnes told me,” he said. “Jesus!”

  “I only took the job because I knew how you hungered to see the natural beauty and other wonders of Paraguay,” Castillo said. “You okay to leave right away for three, four days?”

  McGuire nodded and asked, “Where we going? Paraguay?”

  “First to Chicago, then to Las Vegas. It’s kind of iffy after Vegas.”

  “I am always ready to go to Las Vegas on a moment’s notice, but what’s going on in Chicago?”

  Castillo told him of the President’s call.

  “…And,” Castillo finished, “I think a distinguished Supervisory Secret Service agent such as yourself can help reassure this guy’s family, who are all cops.”

  McGuire nodded his understanding but said, “I think I should fess up right away, Charley. I have been successfully avoiding the drug business since I joined the service, and the only thing I know about it is what I read in the papers.”

  “I think, then, that this is what they call the blind leading the blind,” Castillo said.

  The door opened and a uniformed First Lieutenant Edmund Lorimer, Intelligence, U.S. Army, stepped in the room, came almost to attention, and waited.

  Castillo thought he looked like a Special Forces recruiting poster, and remembered what the President had said about the First Lady saying that about him.

  He’s even wearing jump boots, Castillo thought, which triggered a mental image of a highly polished, laced-up Corcoran boot from the top of which extended a titanium pole topped by a fully articulated titanium knee.

  “Good morning, Lorimer,” Castillo said. “Come on in and sit down. We don’t do much standing at attention or saluting around here.”

  “Good morning, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  “Colonel Torine you know, and Major Miller. This is Supervisory Special Agent Tom McGuire of the Secret Service.”

  McGuire wordlessly offered Lorimer his hand.

  “Before these witnesses, Lorimer,” Castillo said formally, “I am going to tell you—again—that anything you see, hear, or surmise here, or at any place at any time about what we’re doing or have done, or plan to do, is classified Top Secret Presidential. Is that clear in your mind?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Any questions about that?”

  “No, sir.”

  “The President of the United States has tasked the Office of Organizational Analysis, under the authority of an existing Presidential Finding, with freeing Special Agent Timmons from his kidnappers,” Castillo said.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” Lorimer exclaimed. “Wonderful! Colonel, I don’t know how to thank you!”

  Castillo looked at him coldly until Lorimer’s face showed that he understood that his response had not been welcomed.

  “If you have your emotions under control, Lieutenant, I will continue with the admonition that any further emotional outbreaks will not be tolerated.”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. It won’t happen again.”

  “Lorimer, to clear the air, have you ever been given an order that you were sure you were not equipped to carry out?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And what did you do when you were given an order you knew you were not equipped to carry out?”

  “Sir, I told him I didn’t know how to do what he was ordering me to do.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I tried to do it.”

  “Were you successful in carrying out the order?”

  “No, sir. I wasn’t. But I tried.”

  “That’s the situation here, Lorimer. We have been given an order that is in our judgment beyond our ability to carry out. But we are going to try very hard to obey that order. You have absolutely no reason, therefore, to thank me. Clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So long as you remain useful—and, more important, cause me and OOA no trouble of any kind—I am going to permit you to participate in this operation.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  “To say this is probationary would be an understatement. There will be no second chances. Phrased another way, Lieutenant, you fuck up once and you’re dead meat. Clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We are going to Chicago just as soon as I can change into uniform. Our mission, at the personal order of the President, is to assure Timmons’s family that everything possible is being done to get him back. Since I don’t have a clue about how to get him back, that’s probably going to be difficult. One thing we can do, however, is produce you.”

  “Sir?”

  “With a little bit of luck, they’ll know who you are, that you were Timmons’s buddy.”

  “Timmons’s family knows who I am, sir.”

  “Then they’ll probably believe you when you tell them what happened down there.”

  “I think they will, sir.”

  “On the other hand, they may suspect we’re blowing smoke. ‘What’s this guy doing up here when he should be in Asunción looking for…’”

  “Byron, sir,” Lorimer furnished. “His name is Byron Timmons, same as his father.”

  “In any event, while you are delivering the after-action report, you will look at me every two seconds. If I shake my head slightly, or if you think I’m shaking my head, you will stop in midsentence and change subjects. Clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Timmons’s family will certainly have questions. Before you answer any question, you will look at me to see if I shake my head or nod. If I shake my head, your answer to that question will be something intended to assure them. It doesn’t have to be true. You understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If you cannot carry out this instruction satisfactorily, Lorimer, I will conclude that you will not be of any value to this operation and we’ll drop you off at Fort Bragg on our way back here. Clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are you packed?”

  “No, sir. I sort of thought I’d be staying here.”

  “Go pack. You may well not be coming back here. When you’re packed, put your bag in my Denali and wait there.”

  “Yes, sir,” Lorimer said. He stood up and walked—with a just-noticeable limp—out of the living room, closing the door after himself.

  As soon as it had closed, Miller said, “I’d forgotten what a starchy prick you can be, Charley.”

  “My sentiments exactly,” Torine said. “What were you trying to do, Charley, make that kid hate you? Couldn’t you have cut him some slack?”

  “I was actually paying him a compliment, Jake,” Castillo said. “And thank you for that vote of confidence.”

  “Compliment?”

  “Pegleg is obviously as bright as they come; at least as smart as I am. Before I called him in here,
I gave a lot of thought to how I should treat someone I admire, and who is probably as dangerous as you say I am. If that offended you two…”

  “Okay,” Torine said. “You’re right. He reminds me of a lot of fighter pilots I’ve known.”

  “I would agree with that, Jake, except I’m pretty sure Lorimer can read and write.”

  Torine gave Castillo the finger.

  Castillo took a small sheet of notebook paper from his pocket.

  “Call that number, please, Jake, and tell them when we’re going to be in Chicago, and how we can get from which airport to where we’re going.”

  “They used to have a nice little airport downtown, right beside the lake,” Torine said. “Meigs Field. Supposed to be one of the busiest private aviation fields in the world. But the mayor wanted a park there, so one night he sent in bulldozers and they cut big Xs on the runways.”

  “Really?” Miller asked.

  “Yeah. There were a dozen, maybe more, light planes stranded there. They were finally allowed to take off from the taxiways. And the mayor got his park. He’s…”

  “Formidable?” Miller suggested.

  “In spades,” Torine said.

  [THREE]

  Atlantic Aviation Services Operations

  Midway International Airport

  Chicago, Illinois

  1425 2 September 2005

  “There’s a guy walking toward us, Tom,” Castillo said, as he tripped the stair-door lever in the Gulfstream III.

  “I saw him.”

  “Looks like an Irish cop. You want to deal with him?”

  McGuire gave Castillo the finger, then pushed himself off the couch on which he’d ridden—slept—from Baltimore, and walked to the door.

  The man, a stocky six-footer with a full head of red hair, came up the stair as soon as it was in place.

  “I’m Captain O’Day,” he announced, as if supremely confident that no one could possibly mistake him for, say, an airline captain or anything but what he was, a Chicago cop. “I’m looking for a Colonel Costello.”

  Castillo came back into the cabin from the cockpit, and was putting on his green beret.

  “Well, you weren’t hard to find,” O’Day said. “God, you’ve got more medals than Patton!”

  Castillo shook his hand.

  “It’s Castillo, Captain.”