The Outlaws: a Presidential Agent novel Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  ALSO BY W. E. B. GRIFFIN

  HONOR BOUND

  HONOR BOUND

  BLOOD AND HONOR

  SECRET HONOR

  DEATH AND HONOR

  (with William E. Butterworth IV)

  THE HONOR OF SPIES

  (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

  BOOK IX: THE TRAFFICKERS

  (with William E. Butterworth IV)

  BOOK X: THE VIGILANTES

  (with William E. Butterworth IV)

  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

  BOOK V: BLACK OPS

  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

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

  Copyright © 2010 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

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  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Griffin, W. E. B.

  The outlaws / by W.E.B. Griffin and William E. Butterworth IV.

  p. cm.—(The presidential agent ; 6)

  eISBN : 978-1-101-44603-4

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

  While the authors have made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the authors 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.

  When René Défourneaux was twenty, the odds against his living to be old enough to vote were probably 100-1.

  As I was writing this book, Colonel David Bennett, USA, notified me that his uncle and my old friend René had passed after long service to our country’s intelligence community, both before and after his retirement.

  He died in bed. He was eighty-nine.

  Among the many attending his interment at Arlington National Cemetery on 10 May 2010 were the sons of his friend Bill Colby.

  René had a thousand stories to tell. My favorite was the one of being decorated in the Pentagon with the Silver Star from the hands of the U.S. Army Chief of Staff.

  The citation described his extraordinary skill and great valor in blowing up a bridge in France. René said he had never been anywhere near that bridge, but had taken the medal because he had learned as a second lieutenant never to argue with a four-star general.

  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

 
A U.S. 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 THESE PATRIOTS A DEBT BEYOND REPAYMENT.

  [ONE]

  El Obeid Airport

  North Kurdufan, Sudan

  2130 31 January 2007

  The small convoy—two battered Toyota pickups, a Ford F-150 pickup, and a Land Rover—had attracted little attention as it passed through Al-Ubayyid (estimated population around 310,000).

  Al-Ubayyid was the nearest (seven kilometers) town to the El Obeid Airport, which was sometimes known as the Al-Ubayyid Airport. The town of Al-Ubayyid was sometimes known as El Obeid. In this remote corner of the world, what a village or an airport—or just about anything else—was called depended on who was talking.

  The men were all armed with Kalashnikov rifles, and all bearded, and all were dressed in the long pastel-colored robes known as jalabiya, and wearing both tagia skullcaps and a length of cloth, called an imma, covering their heads.

  The beds of the trucks each held one or two armed men. It was impossible to tell—even guess—what the cargo might be, as it was covered with a tarpaulin.

  The convoy looked, in other words, very much like any other convoy passing through—or originating in—Al-Ubayyid on any given day. By whatever name, the town had been a transportation hub for nearly two centuries. First, there had been camel caravans. Then a rail line. Then roads—it’s a nine-hour, five-hundred-kilometer trip from Khartoum—and finally, six kilometers south of town, the airport with a runway nearly a thousand meters long.

  As it approached the airport, the convoy slowed and the headlights were turned off. It moved near to the end of the chainlink fence surrounding the airport and stopped, remaining on the road.

  A dozen men—everyone but the drivers—quickly got out of the vehicles.

  The man who had been in the front seat of the Land Rover went to the floodlight—not much of a floodlight, just a single fluorescent tube—on a pole at the end of the fencing and quickly shot it out with a burst from a .22 caliber submachine gun. The weapon was “suppressed,” which meant that perhaps eighty percent of the noise a .22-long rifle cartridge would normally make was silenced.

  He then quickly joined the others, who were in the process of quickly removing the immas and skullcaps from their heads and finally their long jalabiya robes. The discarded garments were then tossed into the Land Rover.

  Under the jalabiya robes they had been wearing black form-fitting garments, something like underwear except these had attached hoods which, when they had been pulled in place, covered the head and most of the face.

  Night-vision goggles and radio headsets were quickly put in place.

  Next, they took from the Land Rover and the pickups black nylon versions of what was known in the U.S. and many other armies as “web equipment” and strapped it in place on their bodies.

  The man with the .22 caliber submachine gun—the team leader—was joined by two other men equipped with special weapons. One was armed with a high-powered, suppressed sniper’s rifle that was equipped with both night vision and laser sights. The other had a suppressed Uzi 9mm submachine gun.

  The laws of physics are such that no high-powered weapon can ever be really suppressed, much less silenced. The best that could be said for the suppressed sniper’s rifle was that when fired, it didn’t make very much noise. The best that could be said for the Uzi was that when fired, it sounded like a suppressed Uzi submachine gun, which meant that it wasn’t quite as noisy as an unsuppressed Uzi.

  The sights on the sniper’s rifle, which was a highly modified version of the Russian Dragunov SVD-S caliber 7.62 x 54R sniper’s rifle, were state-of-the-art. When looking through the night-vision scope—which had replaced the standard glass optical scope—the marksman was able to see on the darkest of nights just about anything he needed to.

  And by sliding a switch near the trigger, a small computer was turned on. A laser beam was activated. The computer determined how distant was the object on which sat the little red spot, and sent that message to the crosshairs on the sight. The result was that the shooter could be about ninety percent sure that—presuming he did everything else required of a marksman since the rifle was invented, such as having a good sight picture, firing from a stable position, taking a breath and letting half of it out before ever so carefully squeezing the trigger—the 147-grain bullet would strike his target within an inch or so of where the little red dot pinpointed.

  The team leader made a somewhat imperious gesture, which caused another man—who had been standing by awaiting the order—to apply an enormous set of bolt cutters to the chainlink fence.

  Within a minute, he had cut a gate in the fencing through which everyone could—and quickly did—easily pass.

  The runway was about fifty meters wide. An inspection, which the team leader considered the most dangerous activity of this part of the operation, was required. A good leader, he had assumed this responsibility himself; he walked quickly in a crouch down the dotted line marking the center of the runway toward the small terminal building.

  The man with the suppressed Uzi walked down the runway halfway between the dotted line and the left side, and the man with the sniper’s rifle did the same thing on the right.

  All the others made their way toward the terminal off the runway, about half on one side and half on the other. Most of them were now armed with the Mini Uzi, which is smaller than the Uzi and much larger than the Micro Uzi. The Kalashnikovs, as much a part of their try-to-pass-as-the-locals disguises as anything else, had joined the jalabiya robes and skullcaps in the Land Rover.

  They had gone about halfway down the runway when a dog—a large dog, from the sound of him—began to bark. Or maybe it was the sound of two large dogs.

  Everyone dropped flat.

  The man with the Dragunov assumed the firing position, turned on the night sights, and peered down the runway.

  He took his hand off the fore end and raised it with two fingers extended.

  The team leader nodded.

  The two shots didn’t make very much noise, and there was no more barking.

  The team leader considered his options.

  It was possible that the shots had been heard, and equally possible that someone had come out of the terminal to see why the dogs were barking on the runway, or that they had come out—or were about to—to see why the barking dogs had stopped barking.

  That meant the sooner they got to the terminal, the better.

  But the problem of having to inspect the runway remained—that was the priority.

  The team leader activated his microphone.

  He spoke in Hungarian: “Trucks, lights out—repeat, lights out—to one hundred meters of the terminal. Hold for orders.”

  There was no need to give orders to the others; they would follow his example.

  He got to his feet and resumed his inspection, this time at a fast trot, still crouched over.

  The sniper and the man with the suppressed Uzi followed his example. The men off the runway, after a moment, followed their example.

  They came to the dogs, lying in pools of blood where the animals had fallen, about a hundred meters from the terminal building.

  The team leader could now see the flicker of fluorescent lights in the terminal building itself, and in the building beside it, which he knew housed the men—four to six—and their families—probably twice that many people—who both worked and lived at the airport.

  And he could hear the exhaust of a small generator.

  That was powerful e
nough to power the lights he saw now, and the two dozen or so fluorescent “floodlights” around the perimeter fence, but it wasn’t powerful enough to power the runway lights.

  He looked up at the control tower. There was no sign of lights, flickering fluorescent or otherwise.

  Runway lighting would logically be on the same power as the control tower.

  That meant he was going to have to find the much larger generator, see if he could start it, and see if there was enough diesel fuel to run it.

  If he couldn’t get the runway lights on, the whole operation would fail.

  He spoke Hungarian into his microphone again: “Change of plans. Cleanup will have to wait until we get some of these people to show us the runway lights generator and get it started for us. Commence operations in sixty seconds from ...” He waited until the sweep second hand on his wristwatch touched the luminescent spot at the top “... time.”

  The next stage of the operation went well. Not perfectly. No operation ever goes perfectly, and that is even more true, as the case was here, when the intelligence is dated or inadequate, and there has been no time for thorough rehearsals.

  There had been several rehearsals, but there had been no time to build a replica of the airport and its buildings. And if there had been time, they had had only satellite photography, old satellite photography and thus not to be trusted, to provide the needed information.

  They had improvised, using sticks and tape to represent the fence and the buildings, and guessing where the doors on the buildings would be.

  But despite this, the team leader thought the operation had gone off—so far, at least—very well.

  The man with the bolt cutters had opened the gates to the terminal area and to the tarmac. Then one two-man team had entered the terminal to make sure there were to be no surprises from there, and two teams of three men each had stormed and secured the building where the workers and their families lived.