in intelligence operations and report back firsthand.
That was why Friday left Baker. Originally he tried to get transferred to Pakistan, but was moved to India by special request of the Indian government. He had spent time here for Mara Oil, helping them evaluate future productivity in this region as well as on the border between the Great Indian Desert in India's Rajasthan Province and the Thar Desert in Pakistan. He knew the land, the Kashmir) language, and the people.
The irony, of course, was that his first assignment was to help a unit from Op-Center execute a mission of vital importance to peace in the region. Op-Center, the group that had stopped the Undertaking from succeeding.
If politics made strange bedfellows then covert actions made even stranger ones. There was one difference between the two groups, however. Diplomacy demanded that politicians bury their differences when they had to. Field agents did not. They nursed their grudges.
Forever.
CHAPTER THREE.
Washington, D. C.
Wednesday, 6:32 a. m.
Mike Rodgers strode down the corridor to the office of Paul Hood. His briefcase was packed and he was still humming
'Witch Doctor.' He felt energized by the impending challenge, by the change of routine, and just by getting out of the windowless office.
Hood's assistant, Stephen 'Bugs' Benet, had not yet arrived.
Rodgers walked through the small reception area to Hood's office. He knocked on the door and opened it. Op Center director was pacing and wearing headphones. He was just finishing up his phone conversation with Senator Fox. Hood motioned the general in. Rodgers made his way to a couch on the far end of the room. He set his briefcase down but did not sit. He would be sitting enough over the next day.
Though Hood was forty-five, nearly the same age as Rodgers, there was something much younger-looking about the man. Maybe it only seemed that way because he smiled a lot and was an optimist. Rodgers was a realist, a term he preferred to pessimist. And realists always seemed older, more mature. As an old friend of Rodgers's. South Carolina Representative Layne Maly, once put it, 'No one's blowin' sunshine up my ass so it ain't showin' up between my lips.'
As far as Rodgers was concerned that pretty much said it all.
Not that Hood himself had a lot to smile about. His marriage had fallen apart and his daughter, Harleigh, was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, a result of having been taken hostage at the United Nations. Hood had also taken a bashing in the world press and in the liberal American media for his guns-blazing solution to the UN crisis. It would not surprise Rodgers lo learn that Senator Fox was giving Hood an earful for that. The goddamn thing of it was nothing helped our rivals more than when we fought among ourselves.
Rodgers could almost hear the cheering from the Japanese, from the Islamic Fundamentalists, and from the Germans, the French, and the rest of the Eurocentric bloc.
And we were arguing after saving the lives of their ambassadors.
It was a twisted world. Which was probably why we needed a man like Paul Hood running Op-Center. If it were up to Rodgers he would have taken down a few of the ambassadors on his way out of the UN.
Hood slipped off the headphones and looked at Rodgers.
There was a flat look of frustration in his dark hazel eyes.
His wavy black hair was uncharacteristically unkempt. He was not smiling.
'How are you doing?' Hood asked Rodgers.
'Everything set?'
Rodgers nodded.
'Good,' Hood said.
'How are things here?' Rodgers asked.
'Not so good,' Hood said.
'Senator Fox thinks we've gotten too visible. She wants to do something about that.'
'What?' Rodgers asked.
'She wants to scale us back,' Hood said.
'She's going to propose to the other members of the COIC that they recharter Op-Center as a smaller, more covert organization.'
'I smell Kirk Pike's hand in this,' Rodgers said.
Pike was the newly appointed head of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The ambitious former chief of navy intelligence was extremely well liked on the Hill and had accepted the position with a self-prescribed goal: to consolidate as many of the nation's intelligence needs as possible under one roof.
'I agree that Pike is probably involved, but I think it's more than just him,' Hood said.
'Pox said that Secretary General Chatterjee is still grumbling about bringing us before the International Court of Justice. Have us tried for murder and trespassing.' 'Smart,' Rodgers said.
'She'll never get the one but the jurists may give her the other.' 'Exactly,' Hood said.
