W. Griffin: Covert Warriors

“Just you, Al,” McNab said. Then he made a push-back gesture to his secretary and his senior aide, who were now standing behind Walsh. They turned and went away.

“Just got it,” McNab said.

McNab pointed to a chair and pushed the LOUDSPEAKER button on his CaseyBerry. Captain Walsh sat down and took a notebook and ballpoint pen from the pocket of his desert-pattern battle-dress uniform.

General McNab finished reading Ambassador McCann’s message that had been sent to the secretary of State.

“Shit!” he exclaimed, immediately adding, “Sorry.”

“That was my reaction, Bruce,” the secretary of State said.

McNab pushed one of the buttons in the attache case. A printer on the sideboard behind his desk began to whir. McNab pointed to it, and Captain Walsh quickly went to the printer.

“Something about this smells,” McNab said. “Danny Salazar is no novice. For that matter, neither is Ferris.”

“You know everything I do,” she said.

“Has the press got this yet?”

“They will half an hour after it gets to the White House.”

“Can I call Roscoe Danton before that happens, give him a heads-up?”

Roscoe J. Danton was a member of the Washington Times-Post Writers Syndicate.

“Why?”

“Gut feeling we should. He’s almost one of us. We owe him. And we may need him.”

“Does Danton have a Brick?”

“No Brick,” McNab replied. “A CaseyBerry. Aloysius likes him. Number fourteen.”

“I’ll call him and tell him to call Porky. But all he’ll have, Bruce, is ten or fifteen minutes.”

John David “Porky” Parker was President Joshua Ezekiel Clendennen’s spokesman.

“That’s a long time, sometimes.”

“Bruce, I’m really sorry about this.”

“I know,” McNab said.

The LEDs went out.

McNab put down the CaseyBerry, picked up the black telephone, and pushed one of the buttons on its base.

“Terry,” he announced a moment later, “I need you.”

“On my way, sir,” Major General Terry O’Toole, deputy commander of SPECOPSCOM, replied.

He was in McNab’s office forty-five seconds later. He was trim and ruddy-faced.

McNab pointed to the printout. O’Toole picked it up and read it.

“Shit,” he said. “And I gave Jim Ferris to you.”

“What you did, General,” McNab said, “was comply with my request for the name of your best field-grade trainer. What I did was send him to DEA so they could send him to Mexico. And I sent Danny Salazar with him to cover his back.”

O’Toole looked at him.

McNab went on: “And what you’re going to say now is, ‘Yes, sir, General, that’s the way it went down.’ ”

O’Toole met McNab’s eyes, nodded, and repeated, “Yes, sir, General, that’s the way it went down.”

McNab nodded.

O’Toole said: “What happens now?”

“Do you know Colonel Ferris’s religious persuasion?”

“Episcopalian.”

“Al,” General McNab ordered, “get on the horn to the Eighteenth Airborne Corps chaplain. Tell him I want the senior Episcopalian chaplain and the senior Roman Catholic chaplain here in fifteen minutes.”

“Yes, sir,” Captain Walsh said, and went to a telephone on a side table.

“And call my wife,” McNab said. “Same message; here in fifteen.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What about your wife, Terry? Does she know Mrs. Ferris?”

“May I use your telephone, General?” O’Toole replied.

“Don’t tell her who,” McNab said.

“I understand, sir.”

Neither Mrs. McNab nor Mrs. O’Toole would be surprised by the summons. Both had gone more times than they liked to remember to accompany their husbands when they went to inform wives that their husbands were either dead or missing.

McNab picked up the CaseyBerry and punched in a number.

It was answered ten seconds later in what was known as “the Stockade.” Delta Force and Gray Fox were quartered in what had once been the Fort Bragg Stockade. The joke was that all the money spent to make sure no one got out of the Stockade had not been wasted. All of the fences and razor wire and motion sensors were perfectly suited to keep people out of the Stockade.

The CaseyBerry was answered by a civilian employee of the Department of the Army, who were known by the acronym DAC. His name was Victor D’Alessandro, a very short, totally bald man in his late forties who held Civil Service pay grade GS-15. Army regulations provided that a GS-15 held the assimilated rank of colonel. Before Mr. D’Alessandro had retired, he had been a chief warrant officer (5) drawing pay and allowances very close to those of a lieutenant colonel. And before he put on the bars of a warrant officer, junior grade, D’Alessandro had been a sergeant major.

“Go,” Mr. D’Alessandro said by way of answering his CaseyBerry.

“Bad news, Vic,” General McNab said. “Danny Salazar and two DEA guys with him were whacked about noon fifty miles from Acapulco. They were in an embassy SUV with Colonel Ferris. The SUV and Ferris are missing.”

“Shit! What happened?”

“I want you to go down there-black-and find out,” McNab said. “You and no more than two of your people. By the time you get to Pope, the C-38 will be waiting to fly you to Atlanta. By the time you get there, you should have reservations on Aeromexico to either Acapulco or Mexico City. I’ll try to confirm while you’re en route.”

In a closely guarded hangar at Pope Air Force Base, which abutted Fort Bragg, were several aircraft, including a highly modified Boeing 727 and a C-38, the latter the military nomenclature of the Israel Aircraft Industries Ltd./Galaxy Aerospace Corporation Astra SPX business jet. The C-38 had civilian markings.

“I’ll take Nunez and Vargas.”

“Your call.”

“Who’s paying for this?”

McNab, who hadn’t considered that detail, gave it some quick thought.

There were two options, neither of which would cost the U.S. taxpayer a dime. In D’Alessandro’s safe, together with an assortment of passports in different names, were two manila envelopes, one marked “TP” and one “Charley.” Each envelope held two inch-thick stacks of credit cards, American Express Platinum and Citibank Gold Visa cards, the names embossed on them matching the names on the passports, and two business-size envelopes, each holding $10,000 in used hundred-, fifty-, and twenty-dollar bills.

There had been a “TP” envelope in the safe for several years. TP stood for Those People. Those People were an anonymous group of very wealthy businessmen who saw it as their patriotic duty to fund black Special Operations missions when getting official funds to do so would be difficult or impossible.

The “Charley” envelope was a recent addition to D’Alessandro’s safe. Charley stood for Lieutenant Colonel Carlos G. Castillo, Special Forces, U.S. Army, Retired. The Amex Platinum and Citibank Gold Visa cards in the Charley envelope identified their holders as officers of the LCBF Corporation.

During a recent covert operation-which went so far beyond black that McNab had dubbed it Operation March Hare, as in “mad as a March hare”-Castillo and McNab had learned that Those People had concluded that since they were making a financial contribution to an operation, they had the right to throw the special operators under the bus when it seemed to be the logical thing to do, considering the big picture.

One of the results of that was the LCBF Corporation’s decision to provide General McNab with the same sort of stand-by funding as Those People provided. It had not posed any financial problems for the LCBF Corporation to do so. The LCBF Corporation already had negotiable assets of more than $50 million when the director of the Central Intelligence Agency handed Mr. David W. Yung-LCBF’s vice president, finance-a Treasury check for $125 million in settlement of the CIA’s promise to pay that sum, free of any tax liabilities, to whoever delivered to them an intact Russian Tupelov Tu-934A transport aircraft.