The shooters

W. E. B. Griffin
I

[ONE]

Airport Highway

Asuncion, Paraguay 1625 25 August 2005

When Byron J. Timmons, Jr., saw what was causing the airport-bound traffic to be stopped and backed up for at least a kilometer, he muttered an obscenity that was absolutely not appropriate for an assistant legal attache of the embassy of the United States of America.

The twenty-nine-year-old-who was six feet one and weighed two hundred five pounds-had a reservation on the Aerolineas Argentinas five-thirty flight to Buenos Aires and it looked to him to be entirely likely that these bastards were going to make him miss it.

Timmons looked at the driver of his embassy vehicle, a lightly armored Chevrolet TrailBlazer.

Franco Julio Cesar-a quiet thirty-nine-year-old Paraguayan national who was employed as a chauffeur by the U.S. embassy-was silently shaking his head in frustration. He, too, knew what was going on.

These bastards were officers of the Paraguayan Highway Police and they were running a roadblock. There was a Highway Police car and a Peugeot van on the shoulder. The van had a sliding side door-now open-so that it could serve as sort of a mobile booking station. Inside was a small desk behind which sat a booking sergeant. He would decide whether the miscreant caught by the roadblock would be simply given a summons or hauled away in handcuffs.

There were three police forces in Paraguay. In addition to the Highway Police, which was run by the Minister of Public Works amp; Communication, the Minister of the Interior had a Capital Police Force, which patrolled Asuncion, and a National Police Force, which patrolled the rest of the country.

The opinion Timmons held of all three was as pejoratively vulgar as the obscenity he uttered when he saw the Highway Police roadblock. His opinion was based on his experiences with the various police forces since arriving in Paraguay, and his criterion for judgment was that he thought of himself as a cop.

He actually had been a police officer, briefly, but the real reason he thought of himself as a cop was that that was what the Timmons family did-be cops.

His paternal grandfather, Francis, used to say that he was one of the only two really honest cops on the job in Chicago. He refused to identify the other one.

Francis and Mary-Margaret Timmons had five children, three boys and two girls. Two of the boys-Aloysius and Byron-went on the force. Francis Junior became a priest. Dorothy became Sister Alexandria. Elizabeth married a cop, Patrick Donnehy. Father Francis, who was assigned to Saint Rose of Lima's, spent most of his time as a police chaplain.

Aloysius and Joanne Timmons had four children, all boys. Three went on the force and one went in the Army. Byron and Helen Timmons had five children, three girls and two boys. Two of the girls married cops, and Matthew went on the force.

Byron Junior skipped the third grade at Saint Rose's, primarily because he was much larger than the other kids but also because the sisters understood that he already knew what they were going to teach him in the third grade-he never seemed to have his nose out of a book.

The sisters also got him a scholarship to Cristo Rey Jesuit High School. His Uncle Francis and his mother were delighted. His grandfather and father were not. They quite irreverently agreed that The Goddamn Jesuits wanted him for the priesthood.

At age sixteen, Junior, as he was known in the family, graduated from Cristo Rey with honors and without having felt the call to Holy Orders. He immediately became a Police Cadet, although you were supposed to be eighteen. Before the summer was over, the Society of Jesus reentered the picture.

Loyola University (Chicago) was prepared to offer Junior, based on his academic record at Cristo Rey, a full scholarship. This time his father and grandfather disagreed. His father offered another quite irreverent opinion: that you had to admire those tenacious bastards; they never give up when they're trying to grab some smart kid for their priesthood.

His grandfather disagreed, and suggested that Junior had two options.

One was to spend the next nearly four years in a gray cadet uniform riding in the backseat of a patrol car, or filing crap in a precinct basement someplace-he couldn't even get into the academy until he was twenty years and six months old-or he could spend that time getting a college education on the Jesuits' dime.

For the next three years, Junior studied during the school year and returned to the police cadet program in the summers. On his graduation, cum laude, he immediately entered the police academy. Three months later, he was graduated from there and-with most of the family watching-became a sworn officer of the Chicago Police Department.

He had been on the job doing what rookies do for six months when Grandfather Francis reentered the picture.

"Go federal," Grandpa advised. "The pay is better. Maybe the U.S. Marshals or even the Secret Service."

To which Byron-no longer universally known as "Junior" after he made good on a promise to knock his sister Ellen's husband, Charley Mullroney, on his ass the next time he called him that-replied that he'd already looked into it, was thinking of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and going down that road, was really thinking of getting a law degree.

He told his grandfather he'd talked to people at Loyola, and they not only were going to let him in the law school but had arranged for him a job as a rent-a-cop on campus. Christ knew he couldn't go to college if he had to change shifts on the job every three months.

Byron graduated, again with honors, and passed the bar examination on his first try. By then he had just turned twenty-eight and had seen enough of the FBI to decide that wasn't for him. The Border Patrol looked interesting, but then he met a guy from the Drug Enforcement Administration whom his brother-in-law Charley Mullroney had been working with in Narcotics.

Stanley Wyskowski said Byron was just the kind of guy the DEA was looking for. He'd been a cop, and he had a law degree, and he spoke passable Spanish.

Actually, he spoke better than passable Spanish. He had the grammar down pat because he'd had Latin his last two years at Saint Rose's and his first two at Cristo Rey, and then he'd had two years of Spanish at Cristo Rey-somebody had tipped him that if you had Latin, Spanish was the easiest language-and four more years of it at Loyola. And he had polished his colloquial Spanish with a young lady named Maria Gonzalez, with whom he'd had an on-and-off carnal relationship for several years when he was at Loyola.

Wyskowski said if Byron wanted, he'd ask his boss.

Byron J. Timmons, Jr., entered the Federal Service two weeks later, as a GS-7. On his graduation from the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center at Glynco, Georgia, he received both his credentials as a Special Agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration and a promotion to GS-9, because of his law degree.

He was initially assigned to Washington, D.C.-the DEA is part of the Department of Homeland Security-where, he understood, they wanted to have a look at him. Two months later, they offered him his choice of the Legal Section (which carried an almost automatic promotion to GS-11 after two years), or The Field.

He had seen what was going on in the Legal Department-pushing papers held absolutely no appeal-so he chose The Field.

That wasn't the answer they wanted.

They reminded him of the automatic promotion that came with the Legal Section, and told him that the only vacancies in The Field were in El Paso, Los Angeles, Miami, Mexico City, and Asuncion, Paraguay. Timmons didn't like the sound of El Paso, Mexico City, or Los Angeles, and had only the vaguest idea of where in hell Asuncion, Paraguay, even was.

So, when he said "Miami," he was not very surprised that they sent him to Asuncion, Paraguay. They were really pissed that he had turned down the Legal Section-twice.

No regrets, though. He wanted to be a cop, not a lawyer preparing cases for prosecution by the Justice Department.

Specifically, he wanted to be a drug cop.

In Byron's mind, there wasn't much difference between a guy who did Murder One-roughly defined as with premeditation, or during the course of a Class One Felony, like armed robbery-and some guy who got a kid started on hard drugs. In both cases, a life was over.

If there was a difference, in Byron's mind it was that the drug bastards were the worse of the two. A murder victim, or some convenience store clerk, died right there. Tough, but it was over quick. It usually took a long time for a drug addict to die, and he almost always hooked a lot of other people before he did. If that wasn't multiple murder, what was?

Not to mention the pain a drug addict caused his family.

Another difference was that dealing in prohibited substances-even for the clowns standing on a street corner peddling nickel bags of crack-paid a lot better than sticking up a bank did.

And that was the problem-money. It was bad in the States, where entirely too many cops went bad because they really couldn't see the harm in looking the other way for fifteen minutes in exchange for a year's pay, and it was even worse here.

Byron knew too much about the job to think that when he came to Paraguay he personally was going to be able to shut off the flow of drugs, or even to slow it down very much. But he thought that he could probably cost the people moving the stuff a lot of money and maybe even send a few of them to the slam.

He'd had some success-nothing that was going to see him named DEA Agent of the Year, or anything like that-but enough to know that he was earning his paycheck and making the bad guys hurt a little. Making them hurt a little was better than not making them hurt at all.

And that was why he was pissed now that it looked like the goddamn Highway Police were going to make him miss his plane.

He was going to Buenos Aires to see an Argentine cop he'd met. Truth being stranger than fiction, an Irish Argentine cop by the name of Liam Duffy. Duffy's family had gone to Argentina at about the same time as Grandfather Francis's parents had gone to the States.

Duffy was a comandante (major) in the Gendarmeria Nacional Argentina. They wore brown uniforms, not blue, and looked more like soldiers than cops. Most of the time they went around carrying 9mm submachine guns. But cops they were. And from what Timmons had seen, far more honest cops than the Policia Federal.

That was part of the good thing he had going with Liam Duffy. The other part was that Duffy didn't like drug people any more than he did.

Even before he had met Duffy, Timmons had pretty well figured out for himself how the drugs were moved, and why. There had been briefings in Washington, of course, before they sent him to Asuncion, but that had been pretty much second-or third-hand information. And he had been briefed when he got to the embassy in Asuncion, although he'd come away from those briefings with the idea that Rule One in the Suppression of the Drug Trade was We're guests in Paraguay, so don't piss off the locals.

It hadn't taken Timmons long to understand what was going on. Paraguay was bordered by Brazil, Bolivia, and Argentina. The drugs came from Bolivia, where the cultivation of the coca plant was as common as the cultivation of corn in Kansas. It was refined into cocaine in Bolivia. Some of the refined product went to Brazil, where some was consumed and some exported. Most of it went to-actually through-Paraguay to Argentina.

Although there was a substantial, and growing, market for cocaine in Argentina-this explained Liam Duffy's interest-most of the cocaine simply changed hands in Argentina. The coke then was exported by its new owners through the port of Buenos Aires, near downtown, and the international airport, Ezeiza, some twenty kilometers to the southwest, the bulk of it going to the United States, but a good deal to Europe, and some even to Australia.

There were some imaginative ways of moving the cocaine, a crystalline powder, across borders. These ranged from packing it in caskets-or body cavities-of the deceased being returned home for burial to putting an ounce or more in a latex condom, which was then tied, swallowed by a human smuggler-or "mule"-and either regurgitated or defecated once across the border. (Unless, of course, one or more of the condoms were to rupture en route-which they often did-causing the mule severe toxicity…then death.) Most of the drug, however, was commonly packed in plastic bags, one kilogram-two point two pounds-of cocaine to a package.

These sometimes were not concealed or disguised at all, if the shippers were confident the customs officials at the border had been adequately bribed. Or the kilo bags were hidden in myriad ways-in the tires of cars or trucks, for example, or packed in a crate with something legitimate-operative word myriad.

The only way to interdict a "worthwhile" shipment was to know when it was to be made and/or the method of shipment. For example, that one hundred kilos of cocaine were to be concealed in the spare tires of a Scandia eighteen-wheeler of the Jorge Manso e Hijos truck line carrying bagged soybeans, which would cross the border at a certain crossing on a certain date.

This information could be obtained most commonly in one of two ways. It could be bought. The trouble here was that the U.S. government was reluctant to come up with enough money for this purpose and did so only rarely. The Paraguayan government came up with no money for such a purpose.

Sometimes, however, there was money as the result of a successful interdiction-any money over a reasonable expectation of a truck driver's expenses was considered to be as much contraband as any cocaine found-and this was used.

The most common source of information, however, was to take someone who had been apprehended moving drugs and turn him into a snitch. The wheels of justice in Paraguay set a world standard for slow grinding. Getting arraigned might take upward of a year. The wait for a trial was usually a period longer than that. But when the sentence finally came down, it was pretty stiff. Paraguay wanted the world to know it was doing its part in the war on the trafficking of illegal drugs.

The people who owned the cocaine-who arranged its transport through Paraguay into Argentina and who profited the most from the business-as a rule never rode in the trucks or in the light aircraft that moved it over the border. Thus, they didn't get arrested. The most they ever lost was the shipment itself and maybe the transport vehicle. So basically not much, considering that the cocaine-worth a fortune in Miami or Buenos Aires or London or Brisbane-was a cheap commodity until it actually got across the Argentine border.

What really burned the bad guys-far better than grabbing a hundred kilos of cocaine every week-was grabbing the cash after the Argentine dealers paid for it in Argentina. Even better: grabbing the cocaine and the money. That really stung the bastards.

Timmons and Duffy were working on this. Step One was to find out how and when a shipment would be made. Snitches gave Timmons this information. Step Two was to pass it to Duffy.

The Gendarmeria Nacional had authority all over Argentina. They could show up at a Policia Federal roadblock and make sure the Federals did their job. Or they could set up their own roadblocks to grab the cocaine and/or turn the couriers into snitches.

With a little bit of luck, Timmons and Duffy believed, they could track the cocaine until it changed hands, then grab both the merchandise and the money the dealers in Argentina were using to pay for it.

The problem Timmons had with this was getting the information from the snitches to Duffy without anyone hearing about it. It wasn't much of a secret that the bad guys had taps on both Timmons's and Duffy's telephones.

The only way for Timmons to get the information to Duffy without its being compromised, and in time for Duffy to be able to use it, was to personally take it to him.

Which, again, explained why Timmons was heartsick when he saw the Highway Police roadblock on the road to the airport.

The information he had gathered with so much effort would be useless unless he could get it to Duffy in Buenos Aires tonight. If he missed his flight, the next wasn't until tomorrow morning. Before that plane left, the Scandia eighteen-wheeler of the Jorge Manso e Hijos truck line, Argentine license plate number DSD 6774, which had two hundred one-kilo bags of cocaine concealed in bags of soybeans on the second pallet from the top, center row, rear, would be lined up to get on the ferry that would carry it across the Rio Paraguay-the border-to Formosa.

And all Timmons's work over the last seventeen days would be down the toilet.

What was particularly grating to Timmons was that he knew the moment a Highway Policeman saw the diplomatic plates on his embassy Chevrolet TrailBlazer, the vehicle would be waved through the roadblock. The Highway Police had no authority to stop a car with CD plates, and no authority of any kind over an accredited diplomat. The problem was to actually get up to the Highway Policemen.

That had taken a long time, almost twenty precious minutes, but the line of vehicles moved so that finally the TrailBlazer had worked its way to where the Peugeot van sat with its door open.

The embassy vehicle with CD plates, however, didn't get waved through.

Instead, two Highway Policemen approached.

"Shit," Timmons said.

Cesar remained silent behind the wheel.

Timmons angrily took both his diplomatic passport and his diplomatic carnet-a driver's license-size plastic sealed card issued by the Paraguayan Foreign Ministry identifying him as an accredited diplomat-and hurriedly held them out the window.

"Diplomat, diplomat," he said impatiently.

"Please step out of the car, Senor," one of the Highway Policemen said.

"Didn't you hear what I said?" Timmons demanded. Waving his diplomatic credentials, he added, "Don't you know what these are?"

"Step out of the car, please, Senor."

One of the Highway Policemen now pointed the muzzle of his submachine gun at Timmons.

Timmons told himself not to lose his temper. He got out of the TrailBlazer.

"Please take me to your officer," he said politely.

The muzzle of the submachine gun now directed him to the open door of the panel van.

He went to it. He ducked his head to get inside, and as he entered the van he suddenly had the sensation of what felt like a bee sting in his buttocks.

Then everything went black.

One of the Highway Policemen pushed his body all the way into the van and the door closed. The other Highway Policeman ordered Timmons's driver out from behind the wheel, handcuffed him, then forced him into the backseat.

Then he got behind the wheel and drove off toward the airport.

The Peugeot panel van followed.

[TWO]

Nuestra Pequena Casa

Mayerling Country Club

Pilar, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina 1645 31 August 2005 "Sergeant Kensington," Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Castillo said, "if you say 'un-fucking-believable' one more time, I'm going to have the sergeant major wash your mouth out with soap."

Sergeant Robert Kensington-a smallish, trim twenty-one-year-old-turned from a huge flat-screen television screen mounted on the wall of the sitting room and looked uneasily at Lieutenant Colonel Castillo, who was thirty-six, blue-eyed, had a nice thick head of hair, and stood a shade over six feet tall and one hundred ninety pounds.

Sergeant Major John K. Davidson, who was thirty-two and a little larger than Lieutenant Colonel Castillo, looked at him, smiled, and said, "With all possible respect, Colonel, sir, the sergeant is right. It is un-fucking-believable."

"He's got you there, Ace," a nondescript man in his late fifties wearing a blue denim shirt and brown corduroy trousers said, chuckling. "'Un-fucking-believable' fits like a glove."

His name was Edgar Delchamps, and though technically subordinate to the lieutenant colonel, he was not particularly awed by Castillo. Men who have spent more than thirty years in the clandestine service of the Central Intelligence Agency tend not to be awed by thirty-six-year-old recently promoted light birds.

"Lester's around here someplace," Castillo said. "I don't want Kensington corrupting him any more than he already has."

Delchamps, Davidson, Colonel Alfredo Munz, and Sandor Tor chuckled.

Munz, a blond-headed stocky man in his forties, until recently had been the head of SIDE, which combines the functions of the Argentine versions of the FBI and the CIA. He was of German heritage and fluent in that language and several others.

Tor, a Hungarian, was director of security for the newspaper Budapester Tages Zeitung. Before that, he had been an Inspector of Police in Budapest, and in his youth had done a hitch in the French Foreign Legion.

"I cannot hear what that woman is saying over all this brilliant repartee," Eric Billy Kocian announced indignantly, in faintly accented English. The managing director and editor-in-chief of the Budapester Tages Zeitung was a tall man with a full head of silver hair who looked to be in his sixties. He was in fact eighty-two years of age.

Delchamps made a megaphone with his hands and called loudly, clearly implying that Kocian was deaf or senile, or both: "Billy, it looks like they've got a little storm in New Orleans."

Everybody laughed.

Kocian threw his hands up in disgust and said something obscene and unflattering in Hungarian.

But then the chuckles subsided and they all returned their attention to the television.

In deference to Kocian, Munz, and Tor, they were watching Deutsche Welle, the German version, more or less, of Fox News. It was covering Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast of the United States and had just reported, with some stunning accompanying video, that eighty percent of New Orleans was flooded, some parts of the port city under twenty feet of water, its entire population forced to flee.

Castillo stared at the images of one of America's major cities in complete chaos, and at the collection onscreen of talking heads representing local, state, and federal government officials-all unequivocally with their thumbs up their collective asses while blaming one another for failure after failure-and heard himself mutter, "Un-fucking-believable…"

Not much in Nuestra Pequena Casa was what it appeared to be. Starting with the fact that Our Little House was in fact a very large house, bordering on a mansion. It was in the upscale Mayerling Country Club in the Buenos Aires suburb of Pilar.

It had been rented, furnished except for lightbulbs and linen, just over three weeks before to a Senor Paul Sieno and his wife, Susanna. The owner believed them to be a nice and affluent young couple from Mendoza. They had signed a year's lease for four thousand U.S. dollars a month, with the first and last month due on signing, plus another two months' up front for a security deposit.

The Sienos had paid the sixteen thousand in cash.

Cash payments of that size are not at all uncommon in Argentina, where the government taxes every transaction paid by check and where almost no one trusts the banks.

Both el Senor y la Senora Sieno were in fact agents of the Central Intelligence Agency, and what they had really been after was a "safe house," which is usually defined within the intelligence community as a place nobody else knows about where one may hide things and people.

Nuestra Pequena Casa-the owner had named it-was ideal for this purpose.

The Mayerling Country Club, which is several kilometers off the Panamericana Highway, about fifty kilometers north of the center of Buenos Aires, held about one hundred houses very similar to Nuestra Pequena Casa. Each sat upon about a hectare (or about two and a half acres). It also held a Jack Nicklaus golf course, five polo fields, stables, tennis courts, and a clubhouse with a dining room that featured a thirty-foot-high ceiling and half a dozen Czechoslovakian crystal chandeliers suspended over a highly polished marble floor.

The entire country club was surrounded by a nine-foot-tall fence, topped with razor wire, and equipped with motion-sensing devices. When triggered, an alarm went off in the Edificio de Seguridad and floodlights came on where the intrusion had been detected. Then members of the Mayerling Security Force, armed with everything from semiautomatic pistols and shotguns to fully automatic Uzis, rushed to the scene on foot, by auto, and in golf carts.

None of this had anything to do with intelligence, espionage, or even the trade in illegal drugs, but rather with kidnapping. The kidnapping of well-to-do men, their wives, offspring, parents-sometimes even their horses and dogs-was Argentina's second-largest cottage industry, so the wags said, larger than all others except the teaching of the English language.

Just about all of the houses within the Mayerling Country Club were individually fenced on three sides, most often by fences concealed in closely packed pine trees. They, too, had motion-sensing devices.

Motion-sensing devices also prevented anyone from approaching the unfenced front of the houses without being detected.

Nuestra Pequena Casa was for Mayerling not an unusually large house. It had six bedrooms, all with bath; three other toilets with bidets; a library, a sitting room, a dining room, a kitchen, servants' quarters (for the housing of four), a swimming pool, and, in the backyard near the pool, a quincho.

A quincho, Paul Sieno explained, was much like an American pool house, except that it was equipped with a parrilla-a wood-fired grill-and was primarily intended as a place to eat, more or less outdoors. It was an extremely sturdy structure, built solidly of masonry, and had a rugged roof of mottled red Spanish tiles. The front of the quincho had a deep verandah, which also was covered by the tile roof, and a wall of sliding glass doors that overlooked the pool and backyard and which served as the entrance from the verandah into the main room of the building.

The group had moved from the big house out to the quincho.

Paul Sieno was kneeled down before the parrilla, which was built into one wall of the cocina, or kitchen. He worked with great effort-and as yet not much success-to get the wood that he had carefully arranged under the heavy black iron grill to catch fire.

Susanna Sieno stood behind him, leaning against the polished marble countertop to the left of the parrilla, handing her husband sheets of newspaper for use as tinder.

On the countertop, beside the stainless steel sink, was an impressively large wooden platter piled high with an even more impressively large stack of a dozen lomos, each filet mignon hand cut from tenderloins of beef to a thickness of two inches. Nearby were the makings for side dishes of seasoned potatoes and tossed salad.

In the adjoining main room of the quincho there was a brand-new flat-screen television mounted on a wall that was identical to the one in Nuestra Pequena Casa.

The DirecTV dish antenna on the quincho's red tile roof was identical to the one mounted on the big house. The television set in the quincho, however, was hooked to a repeater connected to the DirecTV antenna on the big house. This allowed for the antenna on the quincho roof to be aimed at an IntelSat satellite in permanent orbit some 27,000 miles above the earth's surface-and thus to be part of a system that provided the safe house with instant encrypted voice, visual, and data communication. It communicated with similar proprietary devices at the Office of Homeland Security in the Nebraska Avenue Complex in Washington, D.C., and ones in what had at one time been the Post Stockade at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and was now the headquarters of Delta Force and even more clandestine special operations forces.

Most of the group was sitting in teak deck chairs that they had pulled inside from the verandah.

The TV was now tuned to the English-language CNN, not because its nonstop coverage of the disaster that was Hurricane Katrina was any better than that of Deutsche Welle-it arguably was worse-but because DW was repeating ad nauseam the same footage and interviews. The on-air "talent"-both on location and in the various news bureaus-had long ago stopped offering any real reporting and had instead resorted to the basic equivalent of a live camera simply airing the obvious. And, while it was only a matter of time before CNN's so-called in-depth coverage would begin to loop, at least for now the group was seeing and hearing something somewhat different.

This same dynamic happened during the Desert Wars, Lieutenant C. G. Castillo thought with more than a little disgust. Sticking a camera crew out in the middle of a hot zone-with a clueless commentator, someone with no real understanding of what's going on around them-is worse than there being no, quote, reporting, unquote, at all.

Watching RPG rounds and tracers in a firefight-or people looting a flooded food store-without an educated source on screen to put what you're seeing in context of the big picture only serves to drive the hysteria.

It damn sure doesn't help someone sitting in the comfort of their living room better understand what the hell is really going on.

Castillo turned from the TV and glanced around the quincho.

Of the people watching CNN, three could-and in fact often did-pass as Argentines. They were the Sienos (who now had the parrilla wood burning) and a twenty-three-year-old from San Antonio, Texas, named Ricardo Solez, who had come to Argentina as an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration. All had mastered the Porteno accent of a Buenos Aires native.

Anthony J. "Tony" Santini, a special agent of the U.S. Secret Service, a stocky and somewhat swarthy forty-two-year-old, could pass for a Porteno until he had to say something, whereupon his accent usually gave him away.

None of the others watching the TV in the quincho even tried to pass themselves off as Argentines.

Special Agent David W. Yung of the FBI, a thirty-two-year-old of Chinese ancestry-who spoke Spanish and three other languages, none of them Oriental-felt that his race made trying to fob himself off as an Argentine almost a silly exercise.

The language skills of various others were rudimentary.

As Colonel Jacob D. "Jake" Torine, United States Air Force, put it, "It's as if the moment I get out of the States, a neon sign starts flashing over my head-American! Throw rocks!"

Inspector John J. Doherty of the FBI understood what Torine meant. Lieutenant Colonel Castillo had once remarked, "Torine and Doherty look like somebody called Central Casting and said, 'Send us an airline pilot and an Irish cop.'" Neither had taken offense.

One viewer of what Katrina was doing to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast was in a category of his own.

Corporal Lester Bradley, United States Marine Corps, was not quite twenty. He appeared to be about seventeen. He stood five feet five inches tall and weighed a little under one hundred forty pounds. Looking at him now-attired in a knit polo shirt, khaki trousers, and red and gold striped Nike sport shoes-very few people would think of associating him with the military at all, much less with the elite special operations.

The truth here was that Bradley, fresh from Parris Island boot camp, had earned his corporal's stripes as a "designated marksman" with the Marines on the march to Baghdad. On his return to the United States, he had been assigned to the USMC guard detachment at the American embassy in Buenos Aires, where he mostly functioned as a clerk typist until the day he had been detailed-as the man the gunny felt he could most easily spare-to drive a GMC Yukon XL to Uruguay.

Three days after that, Bradley found himself part of a hastily organized special operations mission during which he saved the life of then-Major C. G. Castillo by using a borrowed sniper's rifle to take out two of the bad guys with head shots.

Bradley thus had learned too much about a very secret operation-and the reasons for said operation-for him to be returned to the care of the gunny, who could be counted on to demand a full account of where his young corporal had been and what he had done. So Bradley next had been aboard the aircraft on which Castillo and the body of Sergeant First Class Seymour Kranz-who had been killed during the operation-returned to the United States.

Not knowing what to do with Bradley back in the States, Castillo had "put him on ice" at Camp Mackall, North Carolina, the Special Forces training base, until he could find a solution. Camp Mackall's sergeant major, Jack Davidson, had taken one look at the boyish Marine, concluded that his assignment to Mackall was a practical joke being played on Davidson by a Marine master gunnery sergeant acquaintance, and put him to work pushing the keys on a computer.

The first that Davidson learned of who Bradley really was-and that he had saved the life of Castillo, with whom Davidson had been around the block many times, most recently in Afghanistan-came when Lieutenant General Bruce J. McNab showed up at Mackall to arrange for Bradley to attend Sergeant Kranz's funeral at Arlington National Cemetery.

Davidson had also been around the block several times with General McNab, and several times with McNab and Castillo together. He had not been at all bashful to tell the general (a) that Castillo's idea that Bradley could be hidden at Mackall made about as much sense as suggesting a giraffe could be hidden on the White House lawn, and (b) that if Charley was doing something interesting, it only made sense that Sergeant Major Davidson be assigned to do it with him, as the general well knew how prone Charley, absent the wise counsel of Sergeant Major Davidson, was to do things that made large waves, and got everybody in trouble, and that this was not very likely to be changed just because they'd just made Charley a light bird.

Shortly after the final rites of Sergeant Kranz at Arlington National Cemetery, Sergeant Major Davidson and Corporal Bradley were en route to Buenos Aires.

And shortly after going to Nuestra Pequena Casa, while serving as the driver of a Renault Trafic van, Corporal Bradley found himself participating in an unpleasant firefight in the basement garage of the Pilar Sheraton Hotel and Convention Center, during which he took down one of the bad guys with a Model 1911A1 Colt semiautomatic pistol and contributed to the demise of another with the same.45-caliber weapon.

Following that, it was Castillo's judgment that Corporal Bradley really deserved to be formally assigned to the Office of Organizational Analysis.

He called the director of National Intelligence, who called the secretary of defense, who called the secretary of the Navy, who directed the commandant of the Marine Corps-"Just do it, don't ask questions"-to issue the appropriate orders: