The portly black man who had come around the corner of the house holding the CAR-4 when they had arrived now walked into the interior patio as the ambassador was slicing an entire tenderloin of beef. He laid the weapon on the table, sat down, and reached for a silver cocktail shaker.
“Colin,” he said, “this better be what I think it is.”
“Have I ever failed you, DeWitt?” Leverette replied.
“Yes,” the man said. “I shudder recalling how many times, where, and how.” He picked up the cocktail shaker, poured himself a Sazerac, sipped it appreciatively, then announced, “This will do.”
Castillo chuckled.
The black man looked at Castillo and smiled. “You don’t remember me, do you, Colonel?”
“No,” Castillo confessed.
“All we black folk look alike, DeWitt,” Leverette said. “You know that.”
“Fuck you, Uncle Remus!” Castillo flared.
“Easy, Charley,” Dick Miller said. “He didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
“Yeah, I did,” Leverette said.
“Well, then fuck you, too!” Miller said angrily. “You know better than that, Colin. Goddammit!”
Castillo glanced at the ambassador and saw concern on his face; his wife’s face looked even worse.
“Goddamn you, Colin!” Castillo flared. “How many of those Sazeracs have you had?”
“Just this one, Boss Man,” Leverette said in a thick accent, then raised the glass to Castillo.
Castillo, literally speechless, looked at him in shock. His eye caught the fat old man, who was holding his hands in the form of a T, signaling
“We got him, Colin,” the black man said. “Enough’s enough.”
“DeWitt, we got
Castillo glanced at Dewitt.
“When I saw Colin,” the fat man was saying, “I said, ‘I just saw Hotshot Charley and he looked right through me.’”
“To which I replied,” Leverette picked up, “ ‘DeWitt, I hate to tell you this, but you are no longer the Green Beanie poster boy you were in The Desert.’ ”
“Master Sergeant DeWitt!” Castillo said, suddenly remembering.
“And then,” DeWitt said, “we said—simultaneously—‘Let’s pull his chain.’ Which we then proceeded to do, with what you’ll have to admit was conspicuous success.”
“I will now say something I didn’t have the courage to say in The Desert,” Castillo said. “Go fuck yourself, DeWitt!”
“It’s really good to see you, Charley,” DeWitt said. He spread his arms wide and a moment later they were embracing, pounding each other’s backs.
“Now that the show is over,” Delchamps said drily, “may I infer from that obscene display of affection that you have crossed paths on the road of life?”
“You know General McNab?” DeWitt asked.
Delchamps nodded.
“He was then a colonel,” DeWitt went on, “running special ops in The Desert. I was his intel sergeant. Right after it started, the colonel came to me and said he had a new chopper driver, a twenty-one-year-old, five-months- out-of-Hudson-High who he wanted to keep alive because he already had the DFC and a Purple Heart and somebody like that would probably be useful somewhere down the pike.
“He was bad enough when he got there, but after he grabbed the Russians—”
“ ‘Grabbed the Russians’?” Berezovsky parroted.
DeWitt looked at him for a moment before replying. “This is probably still classified Top Secret, Kill Anybody Who Knows, but what the hell. The Scotchman?”
“This Colonel—General—McNab?” Svetlana asked.
“Yes, ma’am. That’s what we call him—behind his back, of course. Anyway, the Scotchman mounted an operation to grab a Scud. You know what a Scud is?”
“A Russian missile based on the German V-2,” Svetlana said matter-of-factly. “The Iraqis had a number of the R-11/SS-1B Scud-A’s, which had a range of about three hundred kilometers.”
This earned her a very strange look from Master Sergeant P. B. DeWitt, Special Forces, U.S. Army, Retired, but all he said was, “Yes, ma’am. What we wanted to do was grab one, first to see if it was capable of either being nuclear or to put chemicals or biologicals in the head, and then to send it to the States.
“So we mounted an op to go get one. Two UH-60s—”
He looked at Svetlana, who nodded.
“The Black Hawk,” she said.
“—with a reinforced A-Team—”
Svetlana nodded again.
“—with Charley flying the colonel in a Huey.”
Svetlana nodded her understanding one more time. Castillo saw that Leverette and Delchamps were having a hard time keeping a straight face.
“So over the berm we go,” DeWitt went on. “We reach the Scud site. Everything goes as planned, until somebody notices that among the people lying on the ground with their hands tied behind them there’s a lot of heavy brass. First thought, Iraqi brass. Then Hotshot Charley here hears a couple of them whispering to each other in Russian. So he says—in Russian, the first time any of us knew he spoke it—‘All Russians please stand up and start singing “The Internationale. ’ ”
Berezovsky laughed.
“So that was you, Carlos!” Berezovsky said. “When I debriefed them after you sent them home, they said that the Americans had a Russian who sounded as if he was from Saint Petersburg.”
“Why do I think I’m not fully briefed on this situation?” DeWitt asked.
“Sergeant DeWitt,” Delchamps said. “Permit me to introduce Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky and Lieutenant Colonel Alekseeva, formerly of the SVR.”
“No shit?”
“And you thought she was just Charley’s latest redheaded lady friend, right, DeWitt?” Leverette asked.
“They didn’t tell me about you making them sing ‘The Internationale,’” Berezovsky said. “You really made them do that?”
“People tend to do what heavily armed men with black grease all over their faces tell them to do. We even took pictures of the chorus and gave everybody a copy before we put them on the Aeroflot plane to Moscow.”
“I guess the pictures somehow got lost,” Berezovsky said, chuckling.
“Is somebody going to tell me what’s going on around here?” DeWitt asked.
“I want to hear the rest of the story,” Svetlana said. “Including all about Carlos’s previous redheaded girlfriend.”
“The Green-Eyed Monster just raised its ugly head. Actually, it’s ‘rather attractive redheads,’ plural,” Delchamps said.
Svetlana, in Russian, raised questions about the marital and social disease status of Delchamps’s
