By Order of the President

WORKING ON IT. I'LL GET BACK TO YOU. REGARDS, NAYLOR.

When he looked up, he saw that General Potter was standing just inside the door.

Potter was a tall, thin, ascetic-looking man who didn't look much like what comes to mind when "Special Forces" is said. Naylor knew that he had been, in his day, one hell of a Green Beanie, a contemporary of the legendary Scotty McNab. And that he was anything but ascetic. He was a gourmet cook, especially seafood.

"You have something?" Naylor asked.

"Yes, sir. General, I know who the CIA guy is in Angola. He's one of us," Potter said.

"One of us what?"

"He's a special operator, General," Potter said, smiling again. "He took a pretty bad hit in Afghanistan with the 160th, and when he got out of the hospital on limited duty we loaned him to the agency. I thought he was going to help run their basic training program at the Farm, but apparently they sent him to Angola."

The 160th was the Special Operations Aviation Regiment.

"You have his name?"

"Miller. H. Richard Miller, Jr. Major."

"Good man," Naylor said.

"You know him?"

"Him and his father and grandfather," Naylor said. "I didn't get to meet his great-grandfather, or maybe it was his great-great-grandfather. But in the Spanish-American War, he was first sergeant of Baker Troop, 10th Cavalry, when Teddy Roosevelt led the Rough Riders through their lines and up San Juan Hill. I heard he was hit:" Charley told me. ": in Afghanistan. They shot down his helicopter: a Loach, I think."

"Yeah. It was a Loach. A piece of something got his knee."

"Have we got a back channel to him, George?"

"It's up and running, sir. We got a back channel from Miller about this missing airplane before you heard about it."

"And my notification was out of channels," Naylor said, just a little bitterly. "But I suppose, in good time, CentCom will hear about this officially. I'm really sick and tired of Langley taking their goddamned sweet time before they bring me in the loop." He heard what he had said and added: "You didn't hear that."

Potter smiled and made an "I don't know what you're talking about" gesture.

"Let me see whatever he sends," Naylor ordered.

"Yes, sir."

[THREE]

What was at first euphemistically described as "establishing some really first-rate liaison" between the CIA and the FBI and CentCom was a direct result of the events of what had universally become known as "9/11," the crashing of skyjacked airliners into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon and, short of its target in the capital, into the Pennsylvania countryside.

No one said it out loud but Central Command was the most important headquarters in the Army. According to its mission statement, it was responsible "for those areas of the world not otherwise assigned."

Army forces in the continental United States were assigned to one of the five armies in the United States, except those engaged in training, which were assigned to the Training amp; Doctrine Command with its headquarters within the thick stone walls of Fortress Monroe, Virginia.

Southern Command, which had had its headquarters in Panama for many years, now listed its address as 3511 NW 91st Avenue, Miami, Florida 33172-1217. It was responsible for Central and South America. No one feared immediate war with, say, Uruguay, Chile, or Argentina, or even Venezuela or Colombia, although a close eye was kept on the latter two, and, of course, on Cuba.

The Far East Command had responsibility for the Pacific. There were no longer very many soldiers in the Pacific because no one expected war to break out there tomorrow afternoon. The European Command, as the name implied, had the responsibility for Europe. For nearly half a century, there had been genuine concern that the Red Army would one day crash through the Fulda Gap bent on sweeping all of Europe under the Communist rug. That threat no longer existed.

Some people wondered what sort of a role was now left for the North American Treaty Organization, whose military force was headed by an American general, now that the Soviet threat was minimal to nonexistent, and NATO was taking into its ranks many countries it had once been prepared to fight.

The Alaskan Command had the responsibility for Alaska. There was very little of a threat that the now Russian Army would launch an amphibious attack across the Bering Strait from Siberia with the intention of occupying Fairbanks or Nome.

That left Central Command with the rest of the world, and most of the wars being fought and/or expected to start tonight or tomorrow morning. Iraq is in CentCom's area of responsibility, and CentCom had already fought one war there and was presently fighting another.

But the reason General Allan Naylor believed that he commanded the most important headquarters in the Army was that it wasn't just an Army headquarters but rather a truly unified command, which meant that Naylor more often than not had Air Force, Navy, and Marine units, as well as Army, under his command.

The operative word was "command." He had the authority to issue orders, not make requests or offer suggestions of the other services.

And for this he was grateful to one of his personal heroes, General Donn A. Starry, USA, now retired. Starry, like Naylor, was Armor. As a young colonel in Vietnam, while leading the Cambodian Incursion from the turret of the first tank, Starry had been painfully wounded in the face, had the wound bandaged, and then got back in his tank and resumed the incursion. One of his majors, who had jumped from his tank to go to the aid of his injured commander, was himself badly wounded and lost a leg.

Many people in the Army had been pleasantly surprised when Starry had been given his first star. Officers who say what they think often find this a bar to promotion, and Starry not only said what he thought but was famous for not letting tact get in the way of making his points clear. People were thus even more surprised when he was given a second star and command of Fort Knox, then a third star and command of the V Corps in Frankfurt, Germany, charged with keeping the Red Army from coming through the Fulda Gap, and then a fourth star.

The Army thought four-star General Starry would be just the man to assume command of what was then called "Readiness Command" at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. General Starry, however, said, "No, thank you. I think I'll retire. I don't want to go out of the Army remembered as a paper tiger."

Starry's refusal to take the command came to the attention of President Reagan, who called him to the White House to explain why.

Starry told Reagan that so far as he was concerned, Readiness Command was useless as presently constituted. It was supposed to be ready to instantly respond to any threat when ordered.

But when ordered to move, Starry told the president that the way things were, the general in command had to ask the Air Force for airplanes-for which they certainly would have a better use elsewhere-and ask the Navy for ships-for which the Navy would have a better use elsewhere-and then ask, for example, the European Commander for a couple of divisions-for which EUCOM, again, would nave a far better use elsewhere.

It was rumored that Starry had used the words "joke" and "dog and pony show" to describe Readiness Command to the president. No one knows for sure, for their meeting was private. What is known is that Starry walked out of the Oval Office as commanding general of Readiness Command and the word of the commander in chief that just as soon as he could sign the orders, the CG of Readiness Command would have the authority Starry said he absolutely had to have.

The president was as good as his word. Starry reorganized what was to become Central Command so that it would function when needed and then retired. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and the first President Bush ordered CentCom to respond, its then commander, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, went to war using the authorities Starry had demanded of Reagan and Reagan had given to CentCom.

Schwarzkopf's ground commander in the first desert war was General Fred Franks. Franks was the U.S. Army's first one-legged general since the Civil War. He'd lost his leg as a result of Vietnam wounds incurred as he rushed to help his wounded colonel, Donn Starry.

CentCom's command structure had worked in the first desert war, and it had worked in the new one. And General Allan Naylor was determined that it would remain in force. Sometimes, he thought that was just about as hard a battle to fight as were the shooting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One of the ways he had done this after 9/11, when the FBI and the CIA-and some other agencies-had sent him "liaison officers," was to tell them, politely and privately, that unless they considered themselves as part of the CentCom command team, and behaved themselves accordingly, he was going to send them back where they came from as "unsatisfactory" and keep sending whoever was sent to replace them back until he was either relieved himself or CentCom had liaison officers who regarded themselves as members of the team.

That had not, of course, endeared him to the directors of the FBI and the CIA, but, in the end, he had prevailed.

"I don't have them running five miles before breakfast, honey," he told Mrs. Naylor. "Not yet. But neither do they think they were sent down here to write reports on what I'm doing wrong when they're not soaking up the sun on the beach."

There was no question in Naylor's mind that both the FBI and the CIA had dropped the ball big-time in not knowing what was going to happen on 9/11. So had the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department intelligence people. He didn't know the details, and made no effort to get them. But he heard things without asking that told him he was right.

He also understood that the president had been in a tight spot. He couldn't fire the heads of the CIA and the FBI in the days immediately after something like 9/11 happened no matter how justified that would have been. Legitimately frightened people need reassurance and not to hear that the heads of the country's domestic and foreign intelligence had been incompetent and had been canned.

Another direct result of 9/11 was the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security and the president's naming of Governor Matt Hall as its secretary. Naylor thought that making it a cabinet-level department was a fine idea, and not only because it meant he would have an ear at cabinet meetings.

The Department of Homeland Security did not have a "liaison officer"-at least, not a senior one; there were half a dozen or more DHS employees around MacDill. One wasn't needed. The secretary of homeland security and the commanding general of CentCom talked just about daily on a secure phone line.

And, of course, Charley's up there with Matt in Sodom on the Potomac.

General Naylor looked again at Charley's e-mail message, and, in particular, at the "we just got this from Langley" opening.

Jesus Christ, Charley! We? You're just a lousy major!

But he was smiling fondly, not frowning.

"General?"

Naylor looked at the door to the conference room. Sergeant Major Suggins was standing there.

"Sir, General Potter's waiting outside your office."

It was an unspoken question-"What do I do with him?"-as much as a statement.

"Be right there," General Naylor said, closed the lid of the Infernal Black Box, disconnected the ethernet cable, and then carried it into his office, set it on his desk, and connected it to the ethernet cable there.

[FOUR]

General George Potter was pouring himself and General Naylor another cup of coffee when Mr. Lawrence P. Fremont, the CIA liaison officer to CentCom, appeared in the door to General Naylor's office.

"Ears burning, Larry?" Naylor said, waving him in and then motioning to the coffee service.

"No, thank you," Fremont said, then: "I'm the subject of discussion?"

"The agency is," Naylor said. "George tells me your guy in Luanda is one of his. And we were idly wondering why they'd send a special operator to Angola."

"And your sure to be less than flattering conjecture, George?"

"Well, he's black; he probably speaks Portuguese; and he's a special operator. Langley probably decided he'd be less dangerous there."

" 'Less dangerous,' George?"

"In the sense he wouldn't have much of an opportunity to make embarrassing waves," Potter said, unrepentant. "I also said it was probably because he's black and speaks Portuguese."

"I respectfully disagree with premise one," Fremont said, smiling, "and agree with the rest. White people have trouble not standing out in crowds in Africa. But, to judge from this, your/my/our guy seems to know what he's doing."

He handed two printouts to Naylor.

"The first was on my desk," Fremont said. "That's what you had, I suppose. The second came in just now."

"Yeah," Naylor said, glancing at the first. "That's what I had."

He handed it to Potter and then read the second message and handed that to Potter.