W. Griffin - The shooters

"Actually, I'm with the Fish and Wildlife Service," Delchamps said.

Mitchell chuckled.

The other customs officer handed Mitchell several passports.

"Take a look at these, Inspector," he said. "When was the last time you saw a handwritten, non-expiring, multivisit visa signed by an ambassador?"

"It's been a while," Mitchell said. He looked at the passports and added, "An Argentine, a German, and two Hungarians. All issued the same day in Buenos Aires. Interesting. I'd love to know what's going on here."

"But you were told not to ask, right?" Doherty said. "Sorry, Bob."

"We also serve who look but do not see or ask questions," Mitchell said. "Well, I think I had better run these through the computer myself. I'm sure all kinds of warning bells and whistles are going to go off."

"Thank you, Mr. Mitchell," Castillo said.

"I always try to be nice to people I feel sorry for, Colonel," Mitchell said.

"Excuse me?"

"I bear a message from our boss, Colonel. The ambassador said, quote, Ask Colonel Castillo to please call me the minute he gets off the airplane, unquote."

"Oh. I see what you mean."

"That's the first time I can remember the ambassador saying 'please.'"

"That's probably because he's not my boss," Castillo replied. "He just thinks he is."

"That's probably even worse, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is," Castillo agreed.

Mitchell smiled and nodded.

"Okay, this'll take ten or fifteen minutes. You can start unloading whatever you have to unload."

"Thank you," Castillo said.

"Consider it your hearty meal for the condemned man," Mitchell said, shook his hand, and went to the stair door.

Castillo turned to Miller.

"So where do I find a secure phone?"

"There's one in your Yukon."

"I said a secure phone."

"And I said, Colonel, sir, 'In your Yukon,'" Miller said, and made a grand gesture toward the stair door.

Miller motioned for Castillo to precede him into the backseat of one of the dark blue Yukons. Then, not without difficulty, he stowed his crutch, got in beside him, and closed the door.

There was a telephone handset mounted on the rear of the driver's seat in the Yukon. Except for an extraordinarily thick cord, it looked like a perfectly normal handset.

"That's secure?" Castillo asked.

"Secure and brand-new," Miller replied. "A present from your pal Aloysius."

"Really?"

"He called up three or four days ago, asked of your general health and welfare, then asked if there was anything he could do for us. I told him I couldn't think of a thing. He said he had a new toy he thought you might like to play with, one in its developmental phase."

Miller pointed at the telephone.

"So yesterday, I was not surprised when the Secret Service guy said there were some people from AFC seeking access to your throne room in the complex. I was surprised when they came up to see that one of them was Aloysius in the flesh."

Aloysius Francis Casey (Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, MIT) was a small, pale-faced man who customarily dressed in baggy black suits. He also was the founder, chairman of the board, and principal stockholder of the AFC Corporation. AFC had a vast laboratory and three manufacturing facilities that provided a substantial portion of worldwide encrypted communications to industry in the form of leased technology.

During the Vietnam War, then-Sergeant Casey had served with distinction as the commo man on several Special Forces A-Teams. He had decided, immediately after the First Desert War, that it was payback time. Preceded by a telephone call from the senior U.S. senator from Nevada, he had arrived at Fort Bragg in one of AFC's smaller jets and explained to then-Major General Bruce J. McNab that, save for the confidence that being a Green Beanie had given him, he would almost certainly have become either a Boston cop-or maybe a postman-after his Vietnam service.

Not that Casey found either occupation wanting.

Instead, he said, his Green Beanie service had given him the confidence to attempt the impossible. In his case, he explained, that meant getting into MIT without a high school diploma on the strength of his self-taught comprehension of both radio wave propagation and cryptographic algorithms.

"A professor," Casey had said, "took a chance on a scrawny little Irishman with the balls to ask for something like getting into MIT and arranged for me to audit classes. By the end of my freshman year, I got my high school diploma. By the end of my second year, I had my BS. The next year, I got my master's and started AFC. By the time I got my doctorate two years later, AFC was up and running. The professor who gave me my chance-Heinz Walle-is now AFC's vice president of research and development. I now have more money than I can spend, so it's payback time."

General McNab had asked him exactly what he had in mind. Dr. Casey replied that he knew the Army's equipment was two, three years obsolete before the first piece of it was delivered.

"What I'm going to do is see that Special Forces has state-of-the-art stuff."

General McNab said that was a great idea, but as Sergeant/Dr. Casey must know, procurement of signal equipment was handled by Signal Corps procurement officials, over whom Special Forces had absolutely no control.

"I'm not about to get involved trying to sell anything to those paper-pushing bastards," Dr. Casey had said. "What I'm going to do is give you the stuff and charge it off to R amp;D."

General McNab was never one to pass up an opportunity, and asked, "It sounds like a great idea. How would you suggest we get started?"

Dr. Casey had then jerked his thumb at General McNab's aide-de-camp, Second Lieutenant C. G. Castillo, who had met Dr. Casey's Lear at Pope AFB.

Because General McNab had better things to do with his time than entertain some [expletive deleted] civilian with friends in the [expletive deleted] U.S. Senate any further than buying the [expletive deleted] lunch, Lieutenant Castillo had taken Dr. Casey on a helicopter tour of Fort Bragg and Fayetteville, North Carolina, until lunchtime.

By the time they landed on the Officers' Club lawn, Dr. Casey had learned the young officer had earned both the pilot's wings and Combat Infantry Badge sewn to his BDU jacket and decided he was one tough and smart little sonofabitch.

"What about me taking the boy wonder here back to Vegas with me after lunch? He can see what we have and what you need, and we can wing it from there."

"Charley," General McNab had ordered Lieutenant Castillo, "go pack a bag. And try to stay out of trouble in Las Vegas."

"Aloysius had this put in?" Castillo asked, picking up the handset.

"You're not listening, Colonel, sir," Dick Miller said. "Aloysius put it in with his own freckled fingers."

"White House," the handset announced.

"Jesus!" Castillo said.

"I'm afraid he's not on the circuit," the White House operator said. "Anyone else you'd like to speak to?"

"This line is secure?" Castillo asked, doubtfully.

"This line is secure."

"I'll be damned!"

"If you keep up the profanity, you probably will be, Colonel."

"How do you know I'm a Colonel?" Castillo said.

"Because this link is listed as Colonel Castillo's Mobile One," the operator said, "and because the voice identification circuit just identified you as Colonel Castillo himself."

"I will be damned."

"It's amazing, isn't it?" the operator said. "And aside from Major Miller, you're the first call we've handled. Even my boss is amazed. Can I put you through to someone, Colonel? Or are you just seeing how it works?"

"Ambassador Montvale on a secure line, please."

"Montvale."

"Good evening, sir. Castillo."

"Didn't take you long to find a secure line, did it, Charley? You've been on the ground only twelve minutes."