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  He bounded agilely up the steps to the veranda and said, “Good morning, Mr. Ambassador.”

  “Damon,” Ambassador Philippe Lorimer, Retired — a seventy-four-year-old very black-skinned man of African heritage who stood five feet four inches tall and weighed 135 pounds — replied. “It’s always a pleasure to welcome you to Shangri-La.”

  Mr. Damon walked to Lieutenant Colonel Allan B. Naylor, Junior, said, “You must be Naylor. I know these other three clowns,” and handed him a manila envelope.

  The three clowns to whom he referred were Chief Warrant Officer Five Colin Leverette, USA, Retired, a forty-five-year-old, very black-skinned man of African heritage who stood six feet two inches tall and weighed 210 pounds; Major H. Richard Miller, Junior, USA, Retired, a thirty-six-year-old, six-foot-two, 220-pound, very dark-skinned man of African heritage; and Lieutenant Colonel Carlos G. Castillo, USA, Retired, who was not only not of African heritage but whose fair skin didn’t even suggest he might be of Spanish heritage.

  Colonel Naylor took the envelope, extracted a single sheet of paper from it, read it, and handed it to Colonel Castillo.

  TOP SECRET

  WASH DC 0010 9 JUN 2007

  FROM SEC STATE

  LT COL A.B. NAYLOR, JR

  US EMBASSY MONTEVIDEO

  REFERENCE YOUR SITREP #2

  INFORM CGC POTUS AGREEABLE TO TERMS WITH FOLLOWING CAVEATS:

  — 1- REPORTS TO POTUS WILL BE ON A TWO-DAY REPEAT TWO-DAY BASIS NOT REPEAT NOT TWO-WEEK SCHEDULE

  — 2- DO NOT BEGIN ANY TRAVEL UNTIL MR. ROSCOE J. DANTON JOINS YOUR PARTY; HE WILL GO WHEREVER YOU GO

  COHEN, SEC STATE

  TOP SECRET

  Castillo read the message and handed it to Mr. Leverette.

  “Well, Uncle Remus, now we know what she told us on the CaseyBerry last night,” he said. “But not what this business about Roscoe is all about.”

  “I’m sure he will tell us when he gets here,” Leverette said.

  “And I’m sure someone is going to tell me what this Southern Cone meeting of the NAACP is all about,” C. Gregory Damon said.

  “We really don’t want that word to get out in the State Department, Greg,” Castillo said. “And since you’ve put on those striped pants and thus abandoned your friends in the special ops community…”

  “With all possible respect, Colonel, sir,” Mr. Damon said, and gave Castillo the finger.

  “We have returned to where it all began to start again,” Castillo said, “for a period not to exceed ninety days. I’m on a recruiting mission. Are you interested?”

  “Hell no, I’m not interested. You’ve recruited me before, and every time I went along, people tried to kill me. And what do you mean, ‘where it all began’?”

  “If I told you, Greg, I’d have to kill you,” Castillo said. “You know about the rule.”

  Leverette shook his head.

  “Remember,” he said, “when Jack the Stack Masterson got kidnapped and then whacked?”

  Damon nodded. “You and I were in Afghanistan.”

  “And Charley and Dick here had just left Afghanistan, Dick on a medical evacuation flight — he’d dumped his bird — and Charley under something of a cloud for stealing a bird and going to pick him up where he’d dumped the bird and after he’d been given a direct order not to try it.”

  “I heard about that,” Damon said.

  “McNab saved his ass by getting him assigned to the head of Homeland Security in Washington as an interpreter and canapé passer.”

  “I hadn’t heard that.”

  “Did you know that Jack the Stack was Ambassador Lorimer’s son-in-law?” Leverette asked.

  “Secretary Cohen told me,” Damon said. “Just before I came down here, when she called me in and told me that anything the ambassador wanted—”

  “When the President — the last President, not the current loony-tune — heard that Masterson had been snatched,” Leverette went on, “and didn’t like what he heard the embassy in Buenos Aires was doing about it, he had an idea. Send somebody down here to find out what was going on, somebody who would…”

  “Charley, you mean?” Damon asked, but it was a statement, not a question.

  “… know what to look for, and report to him.”

  “So this current idea of our Commander in Chief is not only nutty, but not original,” Castillo said. “He stole it from his predecessor.”

  “You want to tell this story, or should I?” Leverette asked.

  Castillo answered by continuing.

  “So I was taken off the canapé circuit and sent down here. The day after they arrived, they found Mrs. Masterson…”

  “My daughter,” the ambassador said softly.

  “… drugged, sitting in a car down by the river, beside her husband, who had been assassinated in front of her. When the President heard this, he went ballistic. He got on the horn and told the ambassador he was putting me in charge of getting Mrs. Masterson and the kids safely out of Argentina and to the States, and that he was sending a Globemaster to do that.

  “So, a couple of days later, I loaded everybody on the Globemaster and took off for Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi. En route, Mrs. Masterson told me that the people who had kidnapped her and killed her husband wanted her to tell them how to find her brother. They told her that unless she told them, they would kill her children, and proved their sincerity by killing her husband while she watched.”

  “Who was her brother?”

  “My son, Dr. Jean-Paul Lorimer, at the time was an official of the United Nations stationed in Paris,” Ambassador Lorimer said.

  “Where he was the bagman for that Iraqi Oil-for-Food scandal,” Castillo amplified, “but I didn’t know that until later. Mrs. Masterson said so far as she knew he was in Paris.

  “Air Force One, the President, and Natalie Cohen were waiting at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi.”

  “As I was,” Ambassador Lorimer added.

  “Natalie Cohen handed me this even before I had a chance to tell her what Mrs. Masterson had told me,” Castillo said.

  Castillo appeared to be opening his laptop, from which he extracted and handed Damon two sheets of paper.

  TOP SECRET — PRESIDENTIAL

  THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  DUPLICATION FORBIDDEN

  COPY 2 OF 3 (SECRETARY COHEN)

  JULY 25, 2005.

  PRESIDENTIAL FINDING.

  IT HAS BEEN FOUND THAT THE ASSASSINATION OF J. WINSLOW MASTERSON, DEPUTY CHIEF OF MISSION OF THE UNITED STATES EMBASSY IN BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA; THE ABDUCTION OF MR. MASTERSON’S WIFE, MRS. ELIZABETH LORIMER MASTERSON; THE ASSASSINATION OF SERGEANT ROGER MARKHAM, USMC; AND THE ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF SECRET SERVICE SPECIAL AGENT ELIZABETH T. SCHNEIDER INDICATES BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT THE EXISTENCE OF A CONTINUING PLOT OR PLOTS BY TERRORISTS, OR TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS, TO CAUSE SERIOUS DAMAGE TO THE INTERESTS OF THE UNITED STATES, ITS DIPLOMATIC OFFICERS, AND ITS CITIZENS, AND THAT THIS SITUATION CANNOT BE TOLERATED.

  IT IS FURTHER FOUND THAT THE EFFORTS AND ACTIONS TAKEN AND TO BE TAKEN BY THE SEVERAL BRANCHES OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT TO DETECT AND APPREHEND THOSE INDIVIDUALS WHO COMMITTED THE TERRORIST ACTS PREVIOUSLY DESCRIBED, AND TO PREVENT SIMILAR SUCH ACTS IN THE FUTURE, ARE BEING AND WILL BE HAMPERED AND RENDERED LESS EFFECTIVE BY STRICT ADHERENCE TO APPLICABLE LAWS AND REGULATIONS.

  IT IS THEREFORE FOUND THAT CLANDESTINE AND COVERT ACTION UNDER THE SOLE SUPERVISION OF THE PRESIDENT IS NECESSARY.

  IT IS DIRECTED AND ORDERED THAT THERE IMMEDIATELY BE ESTABLISHED A CLANDESTINE AND COVERT ORGANIZATION WITH THE MISSION OF DETERMINING THE IDENTITY OF THE TERRORISTS INVOLVED IN THE ASSASSINATIONS, ABDUCTION, AND ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION PREVIOUSLY DESCRIBED AND TO RENDER THEM HARMLESS. AND TO PERFORM SUCH OTHER COVERT AND CLANDESTINE ACTIVITIES AS THE PRESIDENT MAY ELECT TO ASSIGN.

  FOR PURPOSES OF CONCEALMENT, THE AFOREMENTIONED CLANDESTINE AND COVERT ORGANIZATION WILL BE KNOWN AS THE OFFICE OF ORGANIZATIONAL ANALYSIS, WIT
HIN THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY. FUNDING WILL INITIALLY BE FROM DISCRETIONAL FUNDS OF THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT. THE MANNING OF THE ORGANIZATION WILL BE DECIDED BY THE PRESIDENT ACTING ON THE ADVICE OF THE CHIEF, OFFICE OF ORGANIZATIONAL ANALYSIS.

  MAJOR CARLOS G. CASTILLO, SPECIAL FORCES, U.S. ARMY, IS HEREWITH APPOINTED CHIEF, OFFICE OF ORGANIZATIONAL ANALYSIS, WITH IMMEDIATE EFFECT.

  PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  SECRETARY OF STATE

  TOP SECRET — PRESIDENTIAL

  “You carry this around, Charley, in case the cops stop you for speeding, right?” Damon asked, as he handed it back.

  “I’ve been carrying it around in the false cover of my laptop until I decide what to do with it,” Castillo said, and then continued, “When I told the President what Mrs. Masterson had told me, he told me to find the brother and find out what was going on.

  “Mrs. Masterson had told me he was living in Paris, so I went there. The CIA station chief was a guy named Edgar Delchamps, a dinosaur who knew so many embarrassing things about the Agency they were happy he was happy with the Paris assignment.

  “He told me that it wouldn’t surprise him if Dr. Lorimer had been cut in little pieces and tossed in the Seine River. He said the word he had was that Jean-Paul had been the bagman for the Oil-for-Food people, had gotten greedy and walked off with sixteen million dollars and was either in the Seine or somewhere in South America.

  “So I went back to South America, specifically here. And got lucky. I asked one of the so-called ‘legal attachés’ in the embassy if he had ever heard of Jean-Paul, and showed him his picture. He said he knew who it was, an antiquities — not antiques—dealer named Jean-Paul Bertrand; he had been watching him launder money.

  “The simplest way to have him properly interrogated, I decided, was to get him to the States and let the FBI or IRS have at him. It wouldn’t be a problem, I thought. He was living here in the middle of nowhere. So I set up a quick, simple op to snatch him and get him on a C-37 I had waiting at Jorge Newbery.

  “I stupidly decided I didn’t need Delta or Gray Fox, since I had a team consisting of myself, a very good sergeant named Jack Kensington—”

  “This is the quick, simple op in which Jack got blown away?” Damon asked.

  “Unfortunately, and my fault. I really fucked up. I really thought I could do it with just Jack and me, and some amateurs.

  “Like Alfredo Munz, the former head of SIDE; Alex Darby, the CIA guy in Buenos Aires; Tony Santini and Jack Britton, of the Secret Service in Buenos Aires; Dave Yung, the FBI money-laundering guy from the Montevideo embassy; and last and least, I thought, nineteen-year-old Corporal Lester Bradley of the Marine guard at the Buenos Aires embassy.

  “In addition to the C-37, I borrowed a chopper—”

  “‘Borrowed,’ Charley? Or stole?”

  “Aleksandr Pevsner owed me a favor. He loaned me a Bell.”

  “Aleksandr Pevsner as in ‘notorious arms dealer’? That Aleksandr Pevsner?”

  “That one. Don’t be so judgmental, Greg,” Castillo said. “Remember what it says in the Good Book: ‘Judge not…’”

  “So, what the hell went wrong?”

  “I flew the chopper here, and refueled it. Corporal Bradley had driven over with two fifty-five-gallon barrels in the back of a Yukon. Then I left Bradley with the bird and Jack Kensington’s rifle, telling him to guard the bird.

  “All Jack and I had to do then was get in the house under a simple pretense, bag Jean-Paul, and convince him to come home with us. The worst scenario was that he would be reluctant to do so, which would mean that Jack would have had to stick him with a needle. Then we would load him into the Bell, fly back across the River Plate to Jorge Newbery, and get wheels up in the C-37. A piece of cake.

  “We got as far as introducing ourselves to Dr. Lorimer when there came — what did MacArthur call it? — ‘the rattle of musketry.’ Some of it came from Corporal Bradley’s musket but most of it came from the fully automatic weapons of eight guys in black coveralls aimed at us.”

  “Who were they?”

  “At the time we didn’t know, so we called them the Ninjas; they looked like characters in a comic book. Later we found out they were ex—Államvédelmi Hatóság being run by a major from the Cuban Dirección General de Inteligencia named Alejandro Vincenzo.”

  “And the kid from the Marines actually got in the firefight?”

  “The kid from the Marines took out two of them with head shots fired offhand from at least a hundred yards. What the Ninjas were after was Dr. Lorimer dead and the sixteen million he’d stolen back. They got him, but we got the money. When we got back to the States, and I told the President about the money — actually, it was in bearer bonds — he told me I hadn’t mentioned bearer bonds, but apropos of nothing at all, if I happened to find some, they would make a nice source of funding for OOA.

  “He also gave me permission to keep Lester the Marine and Yung, the FBI’s money-laundering expert — actually permission to recruit, draft, anybody I wanted.”

  “At this point the ambassador and I got in the picture,” Leverette put in. “I was running Camp McCall, and all of a sudden this teenaged Marine showed up. Superb judge of military men that I am, I immediately decided that he was wholly unfit to be a Special Operator and put him to work on a computer ordering laundry supplies, and that sort of thing.

  “Then McNab choppers into McCall with the announcement he’s there to take Lester to Arlington for Jack Kensington’s funeral, and that, since Jack and I had been around the block together on several occasions, I was welcome to come along if I wanted to.

  “I was so shocked by this that I momentarily forgot my military courtesy and asked the general what the hell the boy Marine had to do with Jack and his funeral.

  “‘I can’t imagine why nobody told you,’ the general replied, ‘that Corporal Bradley put a 7.62-millimeter slug in the ear of the bad guy who put Jack down and another in the back of the head of the bad guy who was shooting at Charley.’

  “He went on to explain that Lester now worked for Charley, and that Charley had sent him to McCall — to me — so he could get a quick run-through of the Qualification Course. Just the highlights. None of the psychological harassment to give us an idea how he’d behave when someone was shooting at him. We already knew that.

  “By the time we came back from Washington, I knew all about the OOA and by prostrating myself before McNab and weeping piteously, got him to let me go work for Charley.”

  “I put Dave Yung in charge of the money,” Castillo said, “reasoning that if he was so good in finding out who was laundering money, he’d probably be just as good at hiding our sixteen million from prying eyes. And thus was born the Lorimer Charitable and Benevolent Fund.”

  “That’s when I met Mr. Yung and Mr. Leverette,” Ambassador Lorimer said. “They came to Louisiana, where Jack’s father and mother had graciously taken me in after Hurricane Katrina had destroyed my home in New Orleans.

  “Secretary Cohen knew what had happened here at Shangri-La, and of my son’s shameful behavior. And she knew Mr. Yung, who had been working for her, sub rosa, in his money-laundering investigations in Uruguay before he had met Charley.

  “She knew that Mr. Yung would be familiar with the Uruguayan inheritance laws, as indeed he was. I was now the owner of Estancia Shangri-La. Charley sent Mr. Leverette with him because he’s a fellow New Orleanian, and also to tell me that he felt I was also entitled to the bearer bonds from my son’s safe.”

  “The ambassador wanted neither,” Leverette picked up the story. “It was only after Yung told him that he either took Shangri-La or it would wind up in the possession of some highly deserving Uruguayan politician that he agreed to take it. And he said he could think of no better use for the sixteen million than where it was, funding the OOA.”

  “Turning ill-gotten gains into something constructive, so to speak,” Ambassador Lorimer clarified. “And I frankly had a second mo
tive. If I came here to examine my inheritance, I would have an excuse to leave the Mastersons’ home, where I strongly suspected my extended stay was beginning to strain even their extraordinarily gracious hospitality.

  “So I came down here accompanied by Mr. Yung and the man I had by then become close enough to so as to have the privilege of addressing him as ‘Uncle Remus’ without, in his charming phraseology, ‘being handed my ass on a pitchfork.’”

  “Natalie Cohen is one of the ambassador’s many admirers, Greg,” Castillo said. “And as I am one of hers, when she said she was a little worried about his coming down here alone, I told Uncle Remus and Two-Gun to pack their bags.”

  “For me, it was love at first sight,” Uncle Remus said.

  “You’ve got a crush on Secretary Cohen?” Damon asked.

  “Greg,” Leverette said patiently, “try turning on your brain before you open your mouth. How many times have you heard one of us with a few belts aboard say, ‘I’ve had enough of this Special Operations bullshit. What I’m going to do is retire and buy a chicken farm’?”

  “Not more than two or three hundred times, now that you mention it,” Damon said.

  “I took one look at this place,” Uncle Remus said, gesturing at the verdant pasturelands of Estancia Shangri-La and the cattle roaming them, “and said, ‘Fuck the chickens; this is what I want when I retire.’

  “So I struck a partner deal with the ambassador right then, Two-Gun drew it up, and got the LCBF to make me a little loan for my ante. And then when the President — the sane one, not Clendennen — pulled the plug on OOA, I retired and came down here.”

  “Good story, Uncle Remus,” Damon said. “It almost, but not quite, makes me yearn for the good old days. But it doesn’t answer my question, ‘What’s the reason for this Southern Cone meeting of the NAACP — plus two honkies, no offense, Colonels — all about?’”