“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 ancestors.
He laughed delightedly.
“There were no women in the desert,” DeWitt said. “Colin was just talking. Anyway, we brought two Scuds back, sling-loaded under the Black Hawks, and the Russians. We took their identification and mug-shotted them, and then the agency sent a plane in and flew them to Vienna. Charley went along with them and saw them take off for home.”
“You know,” Delchamps said conversationally, “I’ve noticed that Vienna has a lot of women, many of them Hungarian, with red hair. Did you go right back to the desert, Carlos, or take a little vacation first?”
“Carlos taught me how to do this, Mr. Edgar Delchamps,” Svetlana said, and gave him the finger. Then she turned to DeWitt. “Why do you call him ‘Hotshot Charley’?”
“There was a character in the comics, a fighter pilot, they called ‘Hotshot Charley,’ ” DeWitt said. “And it fit him like a glove. Here he was, a twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant, and he already had the DFC, and now there was a DP TWX from the President—”
“A what?” Berezovsky asked.
“A message from the President. DP means Direction of the President. It has the highest priority. Former DCI Bush was the President then, and he was so excited that he forgot he wasn’t a sailor anymore. The message read: ‘Pass to all hands Operation SNATCH’—that’s what we called the op—‘Well done. George H. W. Bush, Commander in Chief.’ That’s pretty heady stuff, especially for a second lieutenant. And it went right to his head.”
“Untrue. I have always been the epitome of modesty and self-effacement,” Castillo said.
Leverette laughed out loud.
“I can see him now,” he said, “strutting around in his desert suit, a CAR-4 in one hand, a .45 in a shoulder holster, frag grenades in his shirt pockets, a KA-BAR knife stuck in his boot top, and peering through his aviator sunglasses as master of all he surveyed.”
DeWitt chuckled.
“The cold, honest-to-God truth, ma’am,” DeWitt said, “was that Hotshot Charley here thought he was God’s gift to the Army and that it was necessary for me to sit on him pretty hard from time to time. As a general rule of thumb, second lieutenants don’t like sergeants telling them what to do. And then making them do it.”
He looked at Castillo.
“But it worked, didn’t it? Here you are, two wars later—three if you count the one we’re in with the Muslims—a light colonel doing interesting things for the President himself.”
“Raining on your parade, DeWitt, what I am is a light colonel who is not only in the deep stuff up to my ears, but is getting booted out of the Army at the end of this month.”
DeWitt looked at him for a long moment, then at Leverette, who nodded.
“Are you going to tell me what happened?” DeWitt asked. “Not to mention what the hell is going on around here?”
“It’s liable to cast a pall on our lunch,” Castillo said. “Let’s let fate decide. You ever been to Sub-Saharan Africa, DeWitt?”
“Yeah, and I didn’t like it much.”
“The Congo?”
“Both of ’em. There’s two, you know. And Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, places like that. I was bodyguarding a candy-ass from the agency who was ‘observing’ the UN. He didn’t speak any of the languages—”
“And you do?”
DeWitt nodded.
“Uncle Remus and I spent a wonderful year at the Language School in the Presidio. Just before we went to The Desert.”
“Why don’t we talk about this situation over lunch?” Lorimer said.
“Mr. Ambassador,” Castillo said when he had finished what in effect was a briefing about the chemical factory, “we were hoping you could tell us something of the Congo. We’re really in the dark, and only you and DeWitt have ever been there.”
Ambassador Lorimer looked at him coldly.
Oh, shit, I called him “Mr. Ambassador.”
What he’s doing now is considering how to point out to me how unforgivable that blunder is.
“It’s been some time, of course, since I have been there,” Lorimer finally said. “But on the other hand, I spent a long time in that part of the world, and I have since—akin to someone not being able to stop looking at a run-over dog—kept myself as up to date on it as possible.”
“Please, whatever you could tell us, Philippe,” Castillo said.