Black Ops

now, as I go to take my morning shower, you’ll have to be satisfied with me pointing them out to you.”

He pointed.

“Oh, my!” Dona Alicia said.

“One of them is not only a Russian spy, but steals people’s personal robes.”

“I’ll go find Estella and get some breakfast started,” Dona Alicia said.

[FOUR]

0840 8 January 2006

“Actually, Carlos,” Dona Alicia said as she poured tea into Svetlana’s cup, “General Naylor got quite emotional toward the end. He said he felt responsible for so much that’s happened to you in the Army.”

“I would love to have seen that,” Castillo said. “ ‘Old Stone Face’ emotional?”

“He said that he should have known the Army would do something—because of your father and the Medal of Honor—like send you to the Desert War before you were prepared, and done something to stop it.”

Castillo shook his head. “Fernando was over there, and he was even less prepared for that war than I was. I knew more about flying helicopters than he did about commanding a platoon of tanks.”

“And then he said—and this surprised me, because I always thought they were great friends—that his greatest regret was in sending you to General McNab after you were shot down and they gave you the medal. He said that once you were ‘corrupted’ by General McNab, everything followed. I thought ‘corrupted’ was a very strong term.”

“Just to keep the record straight, Abuela, they gave me the medal for not getting shot down. And Naylor sent me to McNab to keep them from putting me in another Apache, which he correctly suspected they would do. I really wasn’t qualified to fly Apaches, and if I had kept it up, which I would have been stupid enough to do, I probably would have killed myself. General Naylor’s conscience should be clear on that score.”

She looked at him but didn’t say anything.

Castillo went on: “And General McNab didn’t corrupt me, Jack Davidson corrupted me—”

“Go to hell, Charley,” Davidson said, laughing.

“—because every second lieutenant is taught to find a good senior NCO, then do what he says and follow his example. And what this corrupter of young officers did was teach me how to blow safes and steal whiskey.”

Davidson laughed again.

Dona Alicia shook her head. “Carlos, I’m being serious here.”

“So am I, Abuela. Go on, Jack, fess up. Tell Dona Alicia that you talked me into sling-loading a dune buggy under McNab’s Huey so we could ‘reconnoiter the American embassy in Kuwait by air and land before the Marines could get there.’ And that when we got to the embassy, you blew the safe and stole all the diplomats’ whiskey.”

“Really?” Svetlana said. She did not seem disapproving.

“He’s an evil man, Sweaty,” Castillo said. “Rotten to the core.”

“Sweaty?” Dona Alicia repeated.

“Was that before or after you made the Russian colonels sing ‘The Internationale’?” Dmitri Berezovsky asked.

“What?” Dona Alicia asked.

“A couple of days after, Colonel,” Davidson said. “We needed a little something to drink to celebrate the Well Done message we got from Bush One.”

“What Russian colonels singing?” Dona Alicia asked.

Berezovsky and Davidson related the Russian and American versions of the story.

“I should be ashamed of myself,” Dona Alicia then said. “My curiosity always seems to get out of control. We were talking about how bad General Naylor feels about your . . . retirement.”

“He shouldn’t,” Castillo said seriously. “He went along with Montvale because that’s what he thought his duty called for him to do. I did the same thing; I did what I thought was my duty. I’m not angry with Naylor, Abuela. Really. He’s always been one of the good guys.”

“What are you going to do when this is over and . . .”

“When I am ‘Lieutenant Colonel Castillo (Retired)’? Right now what I’m thinking is that I’ll move into Sweaty’s new house in the Pilar Golf and Polo Country Club and maybe even learn how to play golf. Or polo. Or both.”

My post-retirement plans are a little vague, probably because I don’t want to even think about them.

What the hell am I going to do?

I can’t imagine playing golf or polo. . . .

“What about coming back here?” Dona Alicia asked.

Lester came into the kitchen, saving him from having to answer the question.

“Mr. D’Allessando’s got Colonel Hamilton on the AFC for you, Colonel.”

And what happens to you, Lester, when this merry little band folds its tent and steals off into the night?

“Thanks, Lester.”

He motioned for everybody to follow him into the library, where Bradley had the AFC set up.

[FIVE]

0855 8 January 2006

When Castillo walked into the library, he saw that the first steps to convert it into the Command Post for what he was now thinking of as Operation Fish Farm had been taken by Corporal Bradley. The AFC had been set up on a table near a window. A bed for the 24/7 posting had been dragged in from somewhere and there was a coffeemaker on another table against the wall.

Chairs had been arranged around the table, and there were lined pads and several ballpoint pens on each pad. Aside from that, there was nothing on the table but Castillo’s and Davidson’s notebook computers and the AFC handset. The rest of what they were going to need was going to have to wait until Lester or Jack went shopping.

Castillo took the seat at the head of the table, with his back to the fireplace, which held a crackling fire. Dmitri Berezovsky took the seat on the left side of the table. Davidson slipped into the seat across from him. Svetlana and Dona Alicia sat together on the left at the other end of the table, and Bradley sat across from them.

A Winchester lever-action .44-40 rifle was mounted on pegs above the fireplace. Large, accurate-scale models of a U.S. Army AH-64 Apache attack helicopter and an M1A1 Abrams tank sat on the mantelpiece under it. Castillo had bought the Apache model in the bookstore at Fort Rucker shortly after having been rated in that aircraft and had it shipped home. Fernando had done about the same thing with the Abrams model: bought it at the Fort Knox bookstore and sent it home just before shipping out for the Desert War.

The Winchester was a family treasure, having been used on many dozen occasions to protect the Double- Bar-C and its cattle from marauding Apache Indians.

The M1A1 Abrams was named for one of the Army’s most distinguished Armor generals, Creighton W. Abrams. Among his great achievements, Abrams, as a lieutenant colonel, had broken through the German ring surrounding Bastogne to rescue the 101st Airborne.

The AH-64, an instructor at Rucker had told Castillo before he’d even been allowed to get close to one of them, was named after the Apache Indians in tribute to their characteristics as warriors. Castillo had had trouble believing his ears—and even more keeping his mouth shut.

He had thought of that instructor every time he had climbed into an AH- 64 Apache thereafter, wondering again and again if the Pentagon chair-warmer—or chair-warmers, plural—who had given it that name because of the warrior characteristics of the Apache Indians had done enough research. For example, to learn, as Castillo well knew, that the Apaches had expressed their contempt for settlers against whom they waged war by capturing settlers and hanging them alive upside-down over a small fire and slowly roasting their brains. Or, for example, leaving their captors spread-eagle in the desert sun with eyelids hacked off and enough small bloodletting incisions