happy to have Mr. DeWitt’s company. It’ll give us a chance to get to know one another, so to speak, before our trip.”
“Sir, with respect, this is my area of expertise.”
Hamilton was silent a moment, and apparently remembered his offer to listen to suggestions. “Go on, Colonel.”
“I will have Major Miller meet you, sir. We have a house in Alexandria—for that matter, we keep a suite at the Mayflower Hotel—where I’m sure you would be comfortable. It’s central—”
“I know where it is, Colonel,” Hamilton interrupted. “In some circles, it’s known as the Motel Monica Lewinsky.”
“Yes, sir, I’d heard that. Major Miller can take you to the various embassies, and then out to Fort Dietrich for your equipment.”
“How are we going to get that back here to Fort Bragg, Castillo? Have you given that any thought?”
“If you’ll bear with me a moment, sir?”
“Go ahead.”
“Major Miller will then take the equipment to Baltimore, where a plane will be waiting to bring you and Mr. DeWitt—and, of course, your equipment—back to Bragg.”
“Is there some reason that I don’t know why Mr. DeWitt and I should come back to Fort Bragg?”
“No, sir. I didn’t think that through.”
“Obviously.” He paused dramatically. “Now, once we have our visas, we can be on our way.”
“Yes, sir. Major Miller will also arrange your transportation to Africa.”
“That would be helpful.”
“Mr. D’Allessando will inform Miller of your ETA at Reagan,” Castillo said.
There was a long pause as both men thought. Finally, Colonel Hamilton broke it: “That would seem to be it, wouldn’t you say, Castillo?”
“I can’t think of anything else, sir.”
“We’ll be in touch, of course.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How does one hang this thing up, Mr. D’Allessando?”
[SIX]
0940 8 January 2006
“I know what you’re thinking, Carlos,” Dmitri Berezovsky said after Castillo had set things up with Miller. “But that could have gone wrong and it didn’t.”
“I thought you done good, Charley,” Davidson said, then added admiringly: “He
“Starch melts in hot water. Like in a cannibal’s pot?”
Berezovsky chuckled but said: “I have the feeling the colonel knows how to handle the cannibals.”
Castillo looked at him and shook his head. “Well, now that your boundless optimism has removed that weight from my shoulders, we can turn to Bradley’s shopping list.” He looked at him. “What did you come up with, Les?”
“Sir, while I know what we should have in terms of equipment capability, I’m afraid I haven’t been able to convert that into what we need in terms of specific equipment that might—or might not—be available in an Office Depot or Radio Shack store.”
“Which, off the top of my head, Les, means that you don’t get to go to bed until after you’ve gone shopping. Sorry about that. Let me see what you have.”
Bradley handed him a sheet of paper. Castillo looked at it a moment, then tossed it onto the table.
“I don’t know what I’m looking at, and it just occurred to me—some of you may have noticed that I am not functioning too well in the I’m-on-top-of-everything department—that when you don’t know something it usually helps to ask somebody who does.”
He leaned forward and touched a button on the AFC handset.
“C. G. Castillo. Dr. Casey. Encryption Level One.”
“One moment, please, Colonel,” a sultry, electronically generated voice replied. “I will attempt to connect you.”
The voice of Aloysius Francis Casey, Ph.D.—in an interesting mixture of the accents of a Boston Irish “Southie” and a Southwesterner—came over the speaker ten seconds later.
“Hey, Charley. What the hell are you doing twenty-two-point-five miles outside of Midland, Texas?”
“Good morning, Dr. Casey.”
“You call me that one more time, and I’ll not only hang up but will make the handset blow up in your ear.”
“Sorry.”
“You’re forgiven. I know you can’t handle the booze. I can’t detonate the handset—but that’s a thought; I may work on that—but that GPS function works all right, doesn’t it? Providing you are twenty-two-point-five miles from Midland, Texas.”
“That’s where I am.”
“I can whittle down that tenth-of-a-mile indicator some—probably to within a couple of meters—when I have more time to fiddle with it. What can I do for you, Charley?”
“I’m about to send Lester shopping in Radio Shack or someplace—”
“The Boy Jarhead is there?
“Good morning, Dr. Casey,” Bradley said.
“You can call me that. You Gyrenes should always show a little respect for people like me.”
Bradley grinned at the term Marines normally took some offense at. “Yes, sir.”
“Charley, you’re sending Les shopping for what?”
“We need storage devices to receive a lot of data from a long way away from one AFC to another—maybe multiple more AFCs. So they’ll have to be high speed.”
“And portable? Self-powered and/or uninterruptible battery powered for at least a couple of hours?”
“All of the above.”
“And what else?”
“High-speed printers with lots of resolution for photos and maps. And a similar scanner or three, ditto. I need to keep in contact with one—or two—teams of shooters and a couple of people maybe running around by themselves.”
“Charley, the limiting factor is the speed of the relay in the satellites. I have to run them a lot slower than their capacity because of the equipment on the ground—equipment I didn’t make. I’m getting the idea you’re about to run an op?”
“Yes, we are. Operation Fish Farm.”
“I think I know what you need, Charley. No problem.”
There was a long silence. Then Castillo said, “You are going to tell me what it is, right,
“You’ll see what it is when I get there. If it doesn’t work, we’ll work on it until we get it right.”
“I called to ask you to tell me what we need, not with my hand out.”
“Is there an airport any closer to where you are than Midland? Where do I tell the pilot to go?”
“Home. You go home after you tell me what we need. Then Les will go buy it.”
“Like hell he will. Now, where do I tell the pilot to go?”
Castillo shook his head, but he was smiling. “You have my coordinates?”
“Yeah. Like I told you, within a tenth of a mile and maybe five hundred feet altitude.”
“There’s a strip three-tenths of a mile to the south.”
“Will it take a Gulfstream V, or should I bring something smaller?”
“It’ll take a G-Five, but I can’t get something that big in my hangar, and if you park it here, people might get
