The Outlaws: a Presidential Agent novel Read online

  The operator with the suppressed Uzi—who was the number two—had climbed up into the control tower.

  The sniper—who was the number three—had gone first into the terminal building to make sure that team had missed nothing, and then into the living quarters, where he checked to see that everyone had been rounded up and securely manacled.

  The operations scenario had used that term, but the “manacles” actually used to restrain the locals was a plastic version of the garrote.

  The locals were frightened, of course, but none of them seemed on the edge of hysteria, which was often a problem with women and children.

  Another potential problem, language, didn’t arise. The team leader had been told to expect the locals might speak only the local languages, and the team had been issued hastily printed phrase books in Daza, Maba, Gulay, and Sara.

  The trouble with phrase books was that while they permitted you to ask questions, they were not much help in translating the answers.

  All four of the men the sniper had “manacled” in the living quarters spoke French. And so did most of the thirteen women and children, to judge by their faces and whispered conversations.

  One of the men was a tower operator, and another was in charge of the generator. The former reported that the radios in the tower seemed to be operable, and that the runway lights could be turned on and off from the tower. The latter reported that if he had his hands free, he could have the generator started in three minutes.

  The team leader signaled one of the operators to cut the plastic handcuffs from both. The sniper took the generator man to wherever the generator was, and the team leader took the tower operator to the tower.

  He had just about reached the top of the ladder to the control tower when he heard the rumble of a diesel engine starting, and as he put his shoulders through the hole in the tower floor, the incandescent lightbulbs began to glow and then came on full.

  There was a screeching sound from the roof as the rotating radar antenna began to turn.

  All the avionic equipment in the tower was of American manufacture, and both the team leader and his number two were familiar with it. Nevertheless, the team leader ordered the control tower operator to get it running.

  Dual radar monitors showed a target twenty miles distant at twelve thousand feet altitude. Just the target. No identification from a transponder.

  “Light the runway,” the team leader ordered.

  The tower operator threw a number of switches on a panel under the desk which circled the room. As the sound of the diesel engine showed the addition of a load, the lights on the runway and two taxi strips leading from it glowed and then were fully illuminated.

  Number two dialed in a frequency on one of the radios.

  “Activate transponder,” he said in Russian.

  Thirty seconds later, a triangle appeared next to the target on the radar screen.

  “I have you at twelve thousand, twenty miles. The field is lit. The runway is clear. Land to the south.”

  The target blip on the radar screen began moving toward the center of the screen. The numbers in a little box next to the transponder blip began to move downward quickly from 12000.

  The team leader pointed to something under the desk.

  The tower operator looked confused.

  Impatiently, the team leader pointed again.

  The tower operator dropped to his knees to get a better look at what was under the table that he was supposed to see.

  The team leader put the muzzle of the .22 caliber submachine gun against the tower operator’s neck at the base of his skull and pulled the trigger.

  The short burst of fire made a thump, thump sound, and the tower operator fell slowly forward on his face. Then his legs went limp and his body completely collapsed.

  There was no blood. As often happened, the soft lead .22 bullets did not have enough remaining velocity after penetrating the skull to pass through the other side. They simply ricocheted around the skull cavity, moving through soft brain tissue until they had lost all velocity. There might be some blood leakage around the eyes, the ears, and the nose, but there seldom was much and often not any.

  A team member entered through the tower floor hole. The leader ordered: “Stay until the plane’s on the ground. Then set these to twenty minutes.”

  “These” were four thermite grenades. Each had a radio-activated fuse, and, for redundancy, in case the radio detonation failed, a simple clock firing mechanism.

  The team leader set the thermite grenades in place, two on the communications equipment, one on the radar, and the last on the spine of the tower operator near the entrance wounds made by the .22 rounds.

  He took a last look around, and then spoke to his microphone.

  “Commence cleanup,” he ordered. “Acknowledge.”

  Before the team leader had carefully climbed completely down the ladder, there was about thirty seconds of intense Uzi fire as the site was cleaned of the remaining three men and their women and children.

  The firing made more noise than the team leader would have preferred, but the options would have been to either garrote the locals or cut their throats, and that was time-consuming, often a little more risky, and this way there was less chance of messy arterial blood to worry about.

  As he watched one of his men carry a box of thermite grenades into the living quarters, the team leader heard a rushing noise, and a split second later, when he looked up, he could see two brilliant landing lights come on as the aircraft approached the field.

  A moment later, he could see the aircraft itself.

  It was an unusual-looking airplane, painted a nonreflective gray, ostensibly making it invisible to radar. That was a joke. As soon as they had turned on the radar just now, they had seen it twenty miles distant.

  There were two jet engines mounted close together on top of the fuselage, where the wings joined the fuselage just behind and above the cockpit. This had made it necessary for the vertical fin and the horizontal stabilizers to be raised out of the way of the jet thrust. The tail of the aircraft was extraordinarily thin and tall, with the control surfaces mounted on the top.

  The aircraft, a Tupolev Tu-934A, was not going to win any prizes for aesthetic beauty. But like the USAF A-10 Thunderbolt II—universally known as the Warthog—it did what it was designed to do and did so splendidly.

  The Warthog’s heavy armament busted up tanks and provided other close ground support. The Tupolev Tu-934A was designed to fly great distances at near the speed of sound carrying just about anything that could be loaded inside its rather ugly fuselage, and land and take off in amazingly short distances on very rough airfields—or no airfields at all.

  It was also an amazingly quiet aircraft. The first the team leader had heard its powerful engines was the moment before touchdown when the pilot activated the thrust reversal system.

  And even that died quickly as the aircraft reached braking speed on the landing roll and then stopped and turned around on the runway.

  Number three, now holding illuminated wands, directed it as it taxied up the runway, and then signaled for it to turn.

  Before it had completed that maneuver, a ramp began to lower from the rear of the fuselage.

  “Bring up number one truck,” the team leader ordered.

  The Ford F-150 came across the tarmac and backed up to the opening ramp at the rear of the now-stopped aircraft.

  A small, rubber-tracked front-loader rolled down the ramp. The driver and the four men riding on it were dressed in black coveralls.

  The team leader saluted one of the newcomers, who returned it.

  “Problems?” the operation commander asked in Russian.

  “None so far, sir.”

  “Cleanup?”

  “Completed, sir.”

  “Cargo inspected?”

  “Yes, sir,” the team leader lied. He had forgotten that detail.

  “Well, then, let’s get it aboard.”

  “Yes,
sir.”

  Instead of a bucket, the front-loader had modified pallet arms. To the bottom of each arm had been welded two steel loops. From each loop hung a length of sturdy nylon strapping.

  The other two men who had ridden off the aircraft on the rubber-tracked vehicle climbed into the bed of the F-150, removed the tarpaulin which had concealed its contents—two barrel-like objects of heavy plastic, dark blue in color, and looking not unlike beer kegs. They then removed the chocks and strapping which had been holding the rearmost barrel in place.

  That done, they carefully directed the pallet arms over the bed of the truck until they were in position for the nylon strapping to be passed under the barrel and the fastener at the free end to be inserted into the loop on the bottom of the arm.

  The strapping had lever-activated devices to tighten the strapping—and thus the barrel—against the underside of the pallet arm.

  “Tight!” one of the men called out in Russian when that had been accomplished.

  The front-loader backed away from the F-150, pivoted in its length, and then drove up the ramp into the aircraft.

  The two men in the F-150’s bed now removed the chocks and the strapping from the other barrel, and very carefully rolled it to the end of the bed.

  By then the front-loader had backed off the ramp, turned again in its length, and was prepared to take the second barrel.

  “Bring up truck two,” the team leader ordered.

  Truck two arrived as truck one started to drive off.

  The procedure of taking the barrels from the trucks was repeated, exactly, for the two Toyota pickups. Truck four—the Land Rover—did not hold any of the barrels, but it held the discarded Kalashnikovs. These were carried aboard the aircraft.

  “Set mechanical timers at ten minutes and board the aircraft,” the team leader ordered.

  “Check your memory to see that you have forgotten nothing,” the operation commander ordered.

  Thirty seconds later, the team leader replied, “I can think of nothing, sir.”

  The operation commander gestured for the team leader to get on the airplane. When he had trotted up the ramp, the operation commander almost casually strolled up the ramp, picked up a handset mounted on the bulkhead just inside, and ordered, “Get us out of here.”

  The ramp door immediately began to close.

  When it was nearly closed, the aircraft began to move.

  Thirty seconds later it was airborne.

  The operation commander pulled off his masklike hood and looked at the team leader.

  “Don’t smile,” he said. “Something always is forgotten, or goes wrong at the last minute, or both.”

  The team leader held up the radio transmitter which would detonate the thermite grenades.

  The operation commander nodded. The team leader flicked the protective cover off the toggle switch and threw it.

  [TWO]

  The Oval Office

  The White House

  1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.

  Washington, D.C.

  0930 2 February 2007

  The door opened and a Secret Service agent announced, “Ambassador Montvale, Mr. President.”

  Joshua Ezekiel Clendennen, who had acceded to the presidency of the United States on the sudden death—rupture of an undetected aneurism of the aorta—of the incumbent twelve days before, motioned for Montvale to be admitted.

  President Clendennen was a short, pudgy, pale-skinned fifty-two-year-old Alabaman who kept his tiny ears hidden under a full head of silver hair.

  Charles M. Montvale came through the door. He was a tall, elegantly tailored sixty-two-year-old whose silver mane was every bit as luxurious as the President’s, but did not do much to conceal his ears.

  Montvale’s ears were the delight of the nation’s political cartoonists. They seemed to be so very appropriate for a man who—after a long career of government service in which he had served as a deputy secretary of State, the secretary of the Treasury, and ambassador to the European Union—was now the United States director of National Intelligence.

  The DNI was caricatured at least once a week—and sometimes more often—with his oversize ears pointed in the direction of Moscow or Teheran or Capitol Hill.

  “Good morning, Mr. President,” Montvale said.

  “Can I offer you something, Charles?” the President asked, his Alabama drawl pronounced. “Have you had your breakfast?”

  “Yes, thank you, sir, I have. Hours ago.”

  “Coffee, then?”

  “Please.”

  The President’s foot pressed a button under the desk.

  “Would you bring us some coffee, please?”

  He motioned for Montvale to take a seat on a couch facing a coffee table, and when Montvale had done so, Clendennen rose from behind his desk and walked to an armchair on the other side of the coffee table and sat down.

  The coffee was delivered immediately by a steward under the watchful eye of the President’s secretary.

  “Thank you,” the President said. “We can pour ourselves. And now, please, no calls, no messages, no interruptions.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “From anyone,” the President added.

  Montvale picked up the silver coffeepot, and said, “You take your coffee ... ?”

  “Black, thank you, Charles,” the President said.

  Montvale poured coffee for both.

  The President sipped his, and then said, “You know what I have been thinking lately? When I’ve had time to think of anything?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Harry Truman didn’t know of the atomic bomb—Roosevelt never told him—until the day after Roosevelt died. General Groves walked in here—into this office—ran everybody out, and then told Truman that we had the atomic bomb. That we had two of them.”

  “I’ve heard that story, Mr. President,” Montvale said.

  “We had a somewhat similar circumstance here. The first I heard of the strike in the Congo was after it happened. When we already were at DefConOne.”

  Montvale didn’t reply.

  Clendennen went on: “And he never told me about this secret organization he had running. I heard about that only after he’d died. Secretary of State Natalie Cohen came in here, and said, ‘Mr. President, there’s something I think you should know.’ That was the first I’d ever heard of the Analysis Operations Organization. They almost got us into a war, and I was never even told it existed.”

  Montvale sipped his coffee, then said, “It was called the ‘Office of Organizational Analysis,’ Mr. President. And it no longer exists.”

  “I wonder if I can believe that,” the President said. “I wonder how soon someone else is going to come through that door and say, ‘Mr. President, there’s something you should know. ...’”

  “I think that’s highly unlikely, Mr. President, and I can assure you that the Office of Organizational Analysis is gone. I was there when the President killed it.”

  “Maybe he should have sent a couple of squadrons of fighter-bombers, the way he did to the Congo, to destroy everything in a twenty-square-mile area, and to hell with collateral damage,” the President said.

  “Mr. President, I understand how you feel, even if I would have been inside the area of collateral damage.”

  “Tell me about Operations Analysis, Charles, and about you being there when our late President killed it.”

  “He set up the Office of Organizational Analysis in a Presidential Finding, Mr. President, when the deputy chief of mission in our embassy in Argentina was murdered.”

  “And put a lowly lieutenant colonel in charge?”

  “At the time, Carlos Castillo was a major, Mr. President.”

  “And you and Natalie Cohen went along with this?”

  “The Presidential Finding was issued over our objections, sir. And at the time, Natalie was the national security advisor, not secretary of State.”

  “Where did he find this Major Castillo? What i
s he, an Italian, a Mexican? Cuban? What?”

  “A Texican, sir. His family has been in Texas since before the Alamo. He’s a West Pointer—”

  “I seem to recall that Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who almost got us into a war in Nicaragua, was an Annapolis graduate,” the President interrupted. “What do they do at those service academies, Charles, have a required course, How to Start a War One-Oh-One?”

  Montvale didn’t respond directly. Instead, he said, “Castillo came to the President’s attention over that stolen airliner. You remember that, Mr. President?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Well. An airliner, a Boeing 727, that had been sitting for a year in an airport in Luanda, Angola, suddenly disappeared. We—the intelligence community—were having a hard time finding it. Those things take time, something the President didn’t always understand. And as you know, sir, the President was very close to the then-secretary of Homeland Security, Matt Hall. He talked to him about this, and either he or the secretary thought it would be a good idea to send someone to see which intelligence agency had learned what, and when they had learned it.

  “Hall told the President that he had just the man for the assignment, Major Castillo, who was just back from Afghanistan, and working for him as an interpreter /aide.”

  “And?”

  “To cut a long story short, Mr. President, Major Castillo not only located the missing aircraft but managed to steal it back from those who had stolen it, and flew it to MacDill Air Force Base—Central Command—in Tampa.”

  “I heard a little, very little, about that,” the President said.

  “The President decided, and I think he was right, that the less that came out about that incident, the better.”

  “And make sure to keep Clendennen out of the loop, right?” the President said, more than a little bitterly.

  Montvale didn’t respond directly. Instead, he said, “The people who stole the airplane planned to crash it into the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. We would not have let that happen, but if the story had gotten out, the President believed there would have been panic.”