Black Ops Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  ALSO BY W. E. B. GRIFFIN

  HONOR BOUND

  HONOR BOUND

  BLOOD AND HONOR

  SECRET HONOR

  DEATH AND HONOR

  (with William E. Butterworth IV)

  BROTHERHOOD OF WAR

  BOOK I: THE LIEUTENANTS

  BOOK II: THE CAPTAINS

  BOOK III: THE MAJORS

  BOOK IV: THE COLONELS

  BOOK V: THE BERETS

  BOOK VI: THE GENERALS

  BOOK VII: THE NEW BREED

  BOOK VIII: THE AVIATORS

  BOOK IX: SPECIAL OPS

  THE CORPS

  BOOK I: SEMPER FI

  BOOK II: CALL TO ARMS

  BOOK III: COUNTERATTACK

  BOOK IV: BATTLEGROUND

  BOOK V: LINE OF FIRE

  BOOK VI: CLOSE COMBAT

  BOOK VII: BEHIND THE LINES

  BOOK VIII: IN DANGER’S PATH

  BOOK IX: UNDER FIRE

  BOOK X: RETREAT, HELL!

  BADGE OF HONOR

  BOOK I: MEN IN BLUE

  BOOK II: SPECIAL OPERATIONS

  BOOK III: THE VICTIM

  BOOK IV: THE WITNESS

  BOOK V: THE ASSASSIN

  BOOK VI: THE MURDERERS

  BOOK VII: THE INVESTIGATORS

  BOOK VIII: FINAL JUSTICE

  MEN AT WAR

  BOOK I: THE LAST HEROES

  BOOK II: THE SECRET WARRIORS

  BOOK III: THE SOLDIER SPIES

  BOOK IV: THE FIGHTING AGENTS

  BOOK V: THE SABOTEURS

  (with William E. Butterworth IV)

  BOOK VI: THE DOUBLE AGENTS

  (with William E. Butterworth IV)

  PRESIDENTIAL AGENT

  BOOK I: BY ORDER OF THE PRESIDENT

  BOOK II: THE HOSTAGE

  BOOK III: THE HUNTERS

  BOOK IV: THE SHOOTERS

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group

  (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson

  Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland,

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  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2008 by W. E. B. Griffin

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic

  form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of

  the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Griffin, W.E. B.

  Black ops / W. E. B. Griffin.

  p. cm.—(The presidential agent bk. 5)

  eISBN : 978-1-440-65839-6

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  26 July 1777

  The necessity of procuring good intelligence is apparent and need not be further urged.

  George Washington

  General and Commander in Chief

  The Continental Army

  FOR THE LATE

  WILLIAM E. COLBY

  An OSS Jedburgh First Lieutenant

  who became director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  AARON BANK

  An OSS Jedburgh First Lieutenant

  who became a colonel and the father of Special Forces.

  WILLIAM R. CORSON

  A legendary Marine intelligence officer

  whom the KGB hated more than any other U.S. intelligence officer—

  and not only because he wrote the definitive work on them.

  FOR THE LIVING

  BILLY WAUGH

  A legendary Special Forces Command Sergeant Major

  who retired and then went on to hunt down the infamous Carlos the Jackal.

  Billy could have terminated Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s

  but could not get permission to do so. After fifty years in

  the business, Billy is still going after the bad guys.

  RENÉ J. DÉFOURNEAUX

  A U.S. Army OSS Second Lieutenant attached to the British SOE

  who jumped into Occupied France alone and later

  became a legendary U.S. Army counterintelligence officer.

  JOHNNY REITZEL

  An Army Special Operations officer

  who could have terminated the head terrorist of the seized cruise ship

  Achille Lauro but could not get permission to do so.

  RALPH PETERS

  An Army intelligence officer

  who has written the best analysis of our war against terrorists

  and of our enemy that I have ever seen.

  AND FOR THE NEW BREED

  MARC L

  A senior intelligence officer, despite his youth,

  who reminds me of Bill Colby more and more each day.

  FRANK L

  A legendary Defense Intelligence Agency officer

  who retired and now follows in Billy Waugh’s footsteps.

  OUR NATION OWES ALL OF THESE PATRIOTS

  A DEBT BEYOND REPAYMENT.

  I

  [ONE]

  Marburg an der Lahn

  Hesse, Germany

  1905 24 December 2005

  It was a picture-postcard Christmas Eve.

  Snow covered the ground. It had been snowing on and off all day, and it was gently falling now.

  The stained-glass windows of the ancient Church of St. Elisabeth glowed faintly from the forest of candles burning inside, and the church itself seemed to glow from the light of the candles in the hands of the faithful who had arrived to worship too late to find room inside and now stood outside.

  A black Mercedes-Benz 600SL was stopped in traffic by the crowds on Elisabethstrasse, its wipers throwing snow off its windshield.

  The front passenger door opened and a tall, heavyset, ruddy-faced man in
his sixties got out. He looked at the crowds of the faithful, then up at the twin steeples of the church, then shook his head in disgust and impatience, and got back in the car.

  “Seven hundred and sixty-nine fucking years, and they’re still waiting for a fucking virgin,” Otto Görner said, as much in disgust as awe.

  “Excuse me, Herr Görner?” the driver asked, more than a little nervously.

  Johan Schmidt, the large forty-year-old behind the wheel, was wearing a police-type uniform; he was a supervisor in the security firm that protected the personnel and property of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H. Otto Görner was managing director of the holding company, among whose many corporate assets was the security firm.

  Schmidt’s supervisor was in charge of security for what in America would be called the corporate headquarters of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., in Fulda, another small Hessian city about one hundred kilometers from Marburg an der Lahn. The supervisor had arrived at Schmidt’s home an hour and a half before, and had come right to the point.

  “Herr Görner wants to go to Marburg,” he’d announced at Schmidt’s door. “And you’re going to drive him.”

  He had then made two gestures, one toward the street, where a security car was parked behind the SL600, and one by putting his thumb to his lips.

  Schmidt immediately understood both gestures. He was to drive Herr Görner to Marburg in the SL600, and the reason he was going to do so was that Herr Görner—who usually drove himself in a 6.0-liter V12-engined Jaguar XJ Vanden Plas—had been imbibing spirits. Görner was fond of saying he never got behind the wheel of a car if at any time in the preceding eight hours he had so much as sniffed a cork. The Mercedes was Frau Görner’s car; no one drove Otto Görner’s Jag but Otto Görner.

  Görner’s physical appearance was that of a stereotypical Bavarian; he visually seemed to radiate gemütlichkeit. He was in fact a Hessian, and what he really radiated—even when he had not been drinking—was the antithesis of gemütlichkeit. It was said behind his back that only three people in the world were not afraid of him. One was his wife, Helena, who was paradoxically a Bavarian but looked and dressed like a Berlinerin or maybe a New Yorker. It was hard to imagine Helena Görner in a dirndl, her hair in pigtails, munching on a würstchen.

  Frau Gertrud Schröeder, Görner’s secretary, had been known to tell him no and to shout back at him when that was necessary in the performance of her duties.

  The third person who didn’t hold Görner in fearful awe didn’t have to. Herr Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger was by far the principal stockholder of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H. Görner worked for him, at least theoretically. Gossinger lived in the United States under the polite fiction that he was the Washington, D.C., correspondent of the Tages Zeitung newspaper chain—there were seven scattered over Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary—which constituted another holding of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H.

  It was commonly believed that the heir to the Gossinger fortune seldom wrote anything but his signature on a corporate check drawn to his credit and instead spent most of his time chasing movie stars, models, and other female prey in the beachside bars of Florida and California and in the après-ski lounges of Colorado and elsewhere.

  “I said it’s been seven hundred and sixty-nine fucking years, and they’re still waiting for a fucking virgin,” Görner repeated.

  “Yes, sir,” Schmidt said, now sorry he had asked.

  “You do know the legend?” Görner challenged.

  Schmidt resisted the temptation to say “of course” in the hope that would end the conversation. Instead, afraid that Görner would demand to hear what the legend was, he said, “I’m not sure, Herr Görner.”

  “Not sure?” Görner replied scornfully. “You either do or you don’t.”

  “The crooked steeples?” Schmidt asked, taking a chance.

  “Steeple, singular,” Görner corrected him, and then went on: “The church was built to honor Elisabeth of Hungary, twelve hundred seven to twelve hundred thirty-one. She was a daughter of King Andrew II of Hungary. He married her off at age fourteen to Ludwig IV, one of whose descendants was Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, who lost his throne because he became involved with an American actress whose name I can’t at the moment recall, possibly because, before this came up, I got into the wassail cup.

  “Anyway, Ludwig IV, the presumably sane one, went off somewhere for God and Emperor Frederick II of the Holy Roman Empire. While so nobly employed, he caught a bug of some sort and died.

  “Elisabeth, now a widow, interpreted this as a sign from God and thereafter devoted her life and fortune to good works and Holy Mother Church. For reasons I have never had satisfactorily explained, she came here and founded a hospital for the poor, right here behind the church—our destination, you understand?”

  “I know where we’re going, Herr Görner.”

  To see a dead man, he thought. A murdered man.

  So why am I getting this Gottverdammt history lesson—because he’s feeling no pain?

  Or because he doesn’t want to think about the real reason we’re here?

  “That was before the church was built, you understand,” Görner had gone on. “The church came after she died in 1231. By then she had become a Franciscan nun and given all her money and property to the church.

  “So, they decided to canonize her. Pope Gregory IX did so in 1235, and in the fall of that year, they laid the cornerstone of the church. It took them a couple of years to finish it, and nobody was so impolite as to mention that one of the steeples was crooked.

  “But everybody saw it, of course, and a legend sprang up—possibly with a little help from the Vatican—that the steeple would be straightened by God himself just as soon as Saint Elisabeth’s bones were reburied under the altar. That happened in 1249. The steeple didn’t move.

  “The legend changed to be that the steeple would be fixed when the first virgin was married in the church.” He paused, then drily added, “Your choice, Schmidt—either there was a shortage of virgins getting married, or the legend was baloney.”

  Schmidt raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

  “The steeple was still crooked three hundred years later,” Görner continued, “when Landgrave Phillip of Hesse threw the Romans out of the church and turned it over to the Protestants. That was in 1527, if memory serves, and it usually does.

  “He threw the Dominicans out of their monastery on the top of the hill”—Görner turned and pointed over his shoulder—“at about the same time and turned it into a university, which he modestly named after himself. That’s where I went to school.”

  “So I have heard, Herr Görner.”

  “Enough is enough,” Görner said.

  “Sir?”

  “It could be argued that inasmuch as poor Günther is dead, there is no reason for us to hurry,” Görner said. “But an equally heavy argument is there is no reason we should wait while they stand there with their fucking candles waiting for a fucking virgin. Sound the horn, Schmidt, and drive through them.”

  “Herr Görner, are you sure you—”

  Görner reached for the steering wheel and pressed hard on the horn for what seemed to Schmidt an interminable time.

  This earned them looks of shock and indignation from the candle-bearing worshippers, but after a moment the crowd began to make room and the big Mercedes moved through the gap.

  In the block behind the church, at Görner’s direction, Schmidt illegally parked the car before a PARKEN VERBOTEN! sign at the main entrance to the hospital, between a somewhat battered silver-and-white Opel Astra police car and an apparently brand-new, unmarked Astra that bore a magnet-based police blue light on its roof.

  [TWO]

  There were two men sitting on a bench in the corridor of the hospital. One was a stout, totally bald, decently dressed man in his fifties, the other a weasel-faced thirty-something-year-old in a well-worn blue suit that had not rec
eived the attention of a dry cleaner in a very long time.

  When they saw Görner, they both rose, the older one first.

  “Herr Görner?” he said.

  Görner nodded and perfunctorily shook their hands.

  “Where is he?” Görner said.

  “You wish to see the victim, Herr Görner?”

  Görner shut off the reply that sprang to his lips, and instead said, “If I may.”

  “The ‘mortuary,’ using the term loosely, is down that way,” the older man said. “But I was ordered to have the body moved here from the coroner’s morgue.”

  Görner nodded. He had been responsible for the order.

  When the security duty officer at the office had called Herr Otto Görner to tell him he had just been informed that Herr Günther Friedler had been found dead “under disturbing circumstances” in his room in the Europäischer Hof in Marburg, the first thing Görner had done was to order that his wife’s car be brought to the house with a driver to take him to Marburg. Next, he had called an acquaintance—not a friend—in the Ministry of the Interior. The Interior Ministry controlled both the Federal Police and the Bundeskriminalamt, the Federal Investigation Bureau, known by its acronym, BKA. The acquaintance owed Otto Görner several large favors.

  Görner had given him—“And yes, Stutmann, I know it’s Christmas Eve”—two “requests”:

  One, that Görner wanted a senior officer of the BKA immediately dispatched to Marburg an der Lahn to “assist” the Hessian police in their investigation of the death of Günther Friedler, and, two, that while that official was on his way, Görner wanted the Hessian police to be told to move the body out of the coroner’s morgue; Saint Elisabeth’s Hospital would be a good place.