Covert Warriors

II
ONE

Yadkin and Reilly Road Fort Bragg, North Carolina 0845 12 April 2007

The Federal Express truck pulled to the curb before a two-story brick house, and the driver, after first taking a FedEx Overnight envelope from where he had stuck it on the dashboard, got out.

He took a quick look at the envelope as he walked around the front of the truck.

The Overnight envelope, sent by the Mexican-American News Service of San Antonio, Texas, was addressed to: LTC BRUCE J. MCNAB, YADKIN AND REILLY ROAD, FORT BRAGG, NC 28307.

The FedEx driver had served in the Army, and knew that LTC meant “lieutenant colonel.” And he had served long enough to know that lieutenant colonels do not live in large brick homes on what was known locally as “Generals’ Row.”

After a moment, he decided it was a simple typo; LTC was supposed to be LTG, the abbreviation for “lieutenant general.” A small wooden sign on the lawn of the house confirmed this analysis. It showed three silver stars, the rank insignia of a lieutenant general, and below that was neatly painted B. J. MCNAB.

The driver, now convinced he was in the right place, continued up a walkway through the immaculately manicured lawn toward the house.

He was almost at the door when a black Chevrolet Suburban came-considerably over the posted 25 mph speed limit-down Reilly Road, stopped and quickly backed up the driveway of the house. Doors opened. The driver, a young Green Beret sergeant in a camouflage-pattern battle-dress uniform, and a young Green Beret captain in dress uniform got out of the front seat. The sergeant quickly removed a cover from a red plate bearing three stars mounted on the bumper and then rushed to open the passenger door. He was too late. The door was opened by a Green Beret colonel in a dress uniform who marched purposefully toward the house with the captain trailing him.

The driver stood beside the passenger door.

The front door of the house opened and General McNab came through. He was in dress uniform and wearing a green beret. Both breasts of his tunic carried more ribbons and qualification badges than the driver had ever seen on one man during his military service.

Colonel Max Caruthers, who was six foot three and weighed 225 pounds, and Captain Albert H. Walsh, who was almost as large, saluted crisply and more or less simultaneously barked, “Good morning, General.”

General McNab returned the salute and then turned his attention to the FedEx deliveryman.

“Far be it from me to stay a FedEx courier from the swift completion of his appointed rounds, but curiosity overwhelms me,” he announced. “Dare I hope that envelope you are clutching to your breast is intended for me?”

“It is, if you’re Bruce J. McNab,” the courier said.

“Guilty,” General McNab said.

The courier extended the clipboard for the addressee’s signature.

Captain Walsh snatched the Overnight envelope from the driver, handed it to the general, and then signed the receipt on the clipboard.

General McNab ripped open the strip at the top of the envelope and took from it an eight-by-ten-inch photograph.

“Oh, my!” he said, in a tone similar to what a grandmother would use when her cake batter slipped from her hands and splattered over her kitchen floor. “Oh, my!”

He handed the Overnight envelope to Captain Walsh.

“Hold that by its edges, Al,” he ordered. “Gloves would be better. It will probably be futile, but we will have tried.”

“Something wrong, General?” the FedEx courier asked.

“Nothing for which you could possibly be held responsible,” General McNab said. “And now, although I would rather face a thousand deaths, I must go treat with General Naylor.”

The courier looked confused.

Colonel Caruthers, who recognized the remark as a paraphrase of what Confederate general Robert E. Lee had said immediately before leaving his headquarters to surrender the Army of Northern Virginia to Union general Ulysses S. Grant, failed to keep a smile off his face.

The courier started back to his delivery truck as General McNab walked toward Staff Sergeant Robert Nellis, who was standing by the open front passenger door.

“Bobby,” he said, “can you find Pope Air Force Base by yourself, or would you rather that I drive?”

“I’ll drive, General,” Sergeant Nellis said, smiling.

“It’s easy to recognize,” General McNab said as he slid onto the seat. “Just look for lots of airplanes and fat people in blue uniforms.”

Colonel Caruthers and Captain Walsh quickly got into the Suburban, and they drove down the driveway and turned right onto Reilly Road.

As the Suburban carrying General McNab pulled into one of the RESERVED FOR GENERAL OFFICERS parking spaces beside the Pope Air Force Base Operations building, the glass doors fronting on the tarmac opened and a half dozen Air Force officers, the senior among them a major general, came out and formed a three-line formation.

The major general stood in front. A major, wearing the silver cords of an aide-de-camp, took up a position two steps behind and one step to the left of him. The other four officers formed a line behind the aide-de-camp, according to rank, with a brigadier general to the left, then three full colonels. All stood with their hands folded in the small of their backs, in the position of parade rest.

“Seeing all that martial precision,” Lieutenant General McNab announced, “I am sorely tempted to go out there and give them a little close-order drill.”

His sergeant driver smiled. His aides-de-camp did not. They knew he was entirely capable of doing just that. Both were visibly relieved when McNab got out of the Suburban, walked to the corner of the building, and called, “Good morning, gentlemen. Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

The major general turned toward him and saluted.

“Good morning, General,” he said, and then broke ranks to go to McNab and offer his hand.

“Would you care to bet if El Supremo will be on schedule?” McNab asked.

For an answer, the major general pointed down the runway, where a C-37A-the military version of the Gulfstream V-was about to touch down.

As the sleek twin-engine jet completed its landing roll, the Air Force major general trotted back to resume his position in front of his officers.

General McNab folded his arms on his chest.

The Gulfstream V was painted in gleaming white on top, and pale blue beneath. There was no reference to the U.S. Air Force in its markings, although it carried the star-and-bar insignia of a military aircraft on its engine nacelles. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA was lettered on the fuselage above the six windows. An American flag was painted on the vertical stabilizer.

The plane stopped on the tarmac, the whine of its engines died, and the stair door behind the cockpit windows unfolded. A tall, erect officer with four stars gleaming on the epaulets of his dress uniform nimbly came down them.

He was General Allan B. Naylor, whom-to his embarrassment-C. Harry Whelan had accurately described to Andy McClarren of Wolf News as the “most important general in the world.”

Whelan’s argument was that since the Chief of Staff of the Army no longer actually commands the Army-but rather administers it-and that since Naylor, as Commander in Chief of the United States Central Command directly commanded more Army and Marine troops, more Air Force airplanes, more Navy ships and aircraft, and more military assets in more places all around the world than any other officer, that made him the most important general in not only the Army, but the most important officer in uniform.

Even Andy McClarren, who had been the most watched news personality on television for ten years and counting-in large part because of his skill in being able to argue the opposite position of whatever position his guests took-couldn’t disagree with that.

General Naylor exchanged salutes with the Air Force major general, and then shook hands with him and all of the officers, and finally turned to General McNab, who saluted.

“Good morning, Bruce,” General Naylor said.

“Good morning, General,” McNab said. “And how are things on beautiful Tampa Bay?”

The United States Central Command headquarters was on MacDill Air Force Base, Tampa, Florida.

Generals Naylor and McNab had been classmates at the United States Military Academy at West Point. They hadn’t liked each other as cadets, and a number of encounters between them as they had risen in rank in their subsequent service had exacerbated that relationship.

General Naylor didn’t reply. Instead, with a smile, he motioned for McNab to board the Gulfstream. McNab, in turn, motioned for his aides-de-camp to get aboard. When they had done so, he followed them, and when he had done so, General Naylor followed him.

The stair door started to close as the engines started.

When the Gulfstream started to move, the Air Force general called his formation to attention and saluted. When the Gulfstream was on the taxiway, he turned to the brigadier general and softly commented, “That should be an interesting flight.”

The friction between Generals McNab and Naylor was well known to senior officers of all the armed forces, and it went beyond “Isn’t that interesting?” or “What a shame.”

The United States Special Operations Command was subordinate to the United States Central Command, and when, at about the same time, Naylor was about to be named Commander in Chief of CENTCOM and McNab to be commanding general of SPECOPSCOM, it was almost universally recognized as one of those rare situations that would see the best possible man assigned to both jobs.

It was also just about unanimously agreed that making “Scotty” McNab subordinate to Allan Naylor was going to be like throwing lighted matches into a barrel of gasoline.

General McNab took an aisle seat in the luxuriously furnished cabin. As General Naylor walked past him en route to the VIP section-two extra-large seats and a table behind the door to the cockpit, which could be curtained off from the rest of the passenger compartment-McNab held up his hand.

Naylor looked down at him.

McNab said: “General, before they start the in-flight movie, there’s something I’d like to show you.”

“You don’t need an invitation to ride in front, Bruce, and you know it,” Naylor said.

He gestured for McNab to follow him.

McNab rose, and gestured for Captain Walsh to follow him.

Reaching his seat, Naylor took it and then, when McNab had taken the opposing chair, asked, “What have you got?”

Captain Walsh extended a pair of rubber gloves to General Naylor.

Naylor looked questioningly at McNab.

“Gloves?”

“I don’t think they’ll be able to get fingerprints off that, General,” McNab said, indicating the FedEx Overnight envelope. “But they may.”

Naylor took the gloves and pulled them on.

Walsh handed him the envelope, and Naylor took from it a sheet of paper and an eight-by-ten-inch color photograph.

The photograph showed a man dressed in a T-shirt and khaki trousers. He was sitting in a folding chair, holding up a copy of Mexico City’s El Heraldo de Mexico. On each side of him stood a man wearing a black balaclava mask over his head and holding the muzzle of a Kalashnikov six inches from the victim’s head.

“That’s yesterday’s newspaper,” McNab said.

The sheet of paper, obviously printed on a cheap ink-jet printer, carried a simple message:

So Far He’s Alive.

There will be further communication.

“Who is he?” Naylor asked calmly. “He looks familiar.”

“Lieutenant Colonel James D. Ferris,” McNab said. “The officer whom-with great reluctance, you will recall-I detailed to DEA, from which he was further detailed to be-overtly-one of the assistant military attaches at our embassy in Mexico City. Covertly, I have been led to believe, he was ordered to advise the ambassador in his relentless and never-ending attempt to reason with the drug cartels.”

“I can do without the sarcasm, General,” Naylor said.

“Ferris marches in the Long Gray Line beside his classmates Lieutenant Colonel Randolph Richardson, Jr., and our own Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Castillo, Retired. He has a wife at Fort Bragg and three children. Small world, isn’t it?”

“Where did you get this?” Naylor asked.

“A FedEx delivery man handed it to me just now when I walked out of my quarters to come here.”

“It’s addressed to LTC McNab.”

“I noticed. It may be a typo, or it could be on purpose. My gut feeling is that it’s on purpose.”

“To attract less attention?” Naylor asked.

McNab nodded.

“I’ve been wondering if another. .”

“Was sent to me?” Naylor finished for him.

McNab nodded again.

“Captain,” Naylor said politely, “would you ask Colonel Brewer to come up here, please?”

Colonel J. D. Brewer was Naylor’s senior aide-de-camp.

“We have been cleared for takeoff,” the public-address system announced. “Please fasten your seat belts.”

“No FedEx Overnight envelope or other communication relative to this at MacDill, General,” Colonel Brewer reported five minutes later, as the Gulfstream reached cruising altitude.

Naylor looked at McNab.

“What’s the plan at Andrews?” McNab asked.

“A Black Hawk will take us to Langley; we meet the others there.”

“Including Natalie?”

“I have been led to believe the secretary of State will be there.”

His tone made it clear that he thought General McNab should not refer to the secretary of State by her first name.

“I call her Natalie because I like her, General,” McNab said. “She’s my kind of gal.” And then he quoted the secretary of State: “ ‘You miserable goddamn shameless hypocritical sonofabitch!’ ”

It was what Secretary of State Natalie Cohen had said to President Clendennen in the Situation Room of the White House on February 12, immediately after the President had announced that “for the good of the country, for the good of the office of the President, I am inclined to accept Ambassador Montvale’s offer to become my Vice President.”

It was the first time anyone in the room had ever heard her say anything stronger than “darn.”

“My God!” Naylor said.

“She calls a spade a spade,” McNab said. “There aren’t many other people in Foggy Bottom-offhand, I can’t think of one-who do that.”

Naylor looked at McNab as if he were forming his words. When finally he said nothing, McNab went on:

“We can ask her at the agency if she’s been contacted, and I’m sure that among Lammelle’s gnomes is someone who can lift any fingerprints there might be on the envelope.”

Franklin Lammelle was DCI, director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

“All right,” Naylor said. “And the CIA would be the most logical choice to deal with this situation, right?”

McNab didn’t reply.

“McNab, you’re not thinking of going down there to rescue Colonel Ferris, are you?”

“General, I would say that none of us has enough information to make any decisions on how to deal with this,” McNab said. “But we can think about it while we’re at Langley doing our bit to help the President get reelected.”

“Is that how you think of it?”

McNab didn’t reply directly, instead saying, “Having complied with Action One of the SOP by notifying my superior headquarters of the situation, with your permission, General, I will now take Action Two.”

General Naylor nodded his permission.

“Al,” McNab said to Captain Walsh, “would you please bring the Brick up here?”

Sixty seconds later, Walsh laid the Brick on the table. It had been provided to General McNab by the AFC Corporation free of charge. The chairman of the board of the AFC Corporation, Dr. Aloysius Francis Casey, had, during the Vietnam war, been the communications sergeant on a Special Forces A Team.

He credited that service for giving him the confidence to do such things as apply for admission to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology without having a high school diploma, and then shortly after being awarded his Ph.D. by that institution, starting the AFC Corporation, which quickly became the world leader in data processing and encryption.

“Like the jarheads say, General,” he had told then-newly promoted Brigadier General McNab when he flew, uninvited, in one of AFC’s Learjets to Fort Bragg, “once a Green Beanie, always a Green Beanie. And now it’s payback time.”

The translation was that he was willing to provide the Special Operations community with the very latest in communication and encryption equipment free of charge. When he left Fort Bragg that day, he had taken with him Brigadier General McNab’s aide-de-camp-“You can call me Aloysius, hotshot,” Casey had told then-Second Lieutenant C. G. Castillo-so that Castillo could not only select from AFC’s existing stocks of electronic equipment but could also tell what communications abilities Delta Force and Gray Fox wished it had.

General McNab now opened the attache case. A green LED told him the system was in STANDBY mode. He flipped a few switches and other green LEDs illuminated. One was ENCRYPTED VOICE COMMUNICATION, one ENCRYPTED DATA COMMUNICATION, and one ENCRYPTED SCAN.

General McNab removed a device about the size of a cigarette lighter from the attache case, put it to his eye, aimed it at the FedEx Overnight envelope, and then at the photograph and message it contained.

A red LED illuminated briefly over the legend ENCRYPTED DATA TRANSMISSION IN PROGRESS, and then went out.

General McNab then picked up a telephone handset and pushed a button.

“Yes, sir?” the voice of Major General Terry O’Toole, deputy commander of SPECOPSCOM, came over the Brick’s speakers after bouncing off a satellite 27,000 miles over the earth.

“Terry, I just sent you what was handed to me as I walked out of my quarters this morning,” McNab said.

“I’m looking at it, General,” O’Toole said.

“Load up your wife and get over to Colonel Ferris’s quarters. Show her this, tell her we’re working on it, and to keep her mouth shut about it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell her as soon as I learn anything, I’ll let her know.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll be in touch.”

“Yes, sir.”

McNab replaced the handset and closed the attache case.