The first black man to hold the top job in the military, General Hayden Land was reputed to be as sharp as they come, an extraordinarily fast study on the intricacies of military policy. He was also, rumor said, very politically astute. He had come to his current post from the National Security Council where he had personally witnessed the meshing of politics and national security issues and the resultant effects on the military.
As he walked out of the Joint Staff spaces just ten minutes after he had entered, Jake was again hailed by name by Mr. James, the portly door attendant who had been greeting members of the Joint Staff for over twenty years. He seemed to know everyone’s name — quite a feat considering that there were 1,600 officers on the Joint Staff — and shook hands right and left when they streamed past him into the secure spaces in the morning. “Short day, eh, Captain Grafton?”
“Some people have all the luck,” Jake told him.
The foyer of General Land’s E-Ring office was decorated with original paintings that depicted black American servicemen in action. As the aide informed the general that he was there, Grafton examined them again. One was of union soldiers in the crater at Petersburg, another was of cavalrymen fighting Indians on the western plains, and a third was of Army Air Corps pilots manning fighters during World War II.
“He’ll see you now,” the aide said, and walked for the door. That was when Jake’s eye was captured by the painting of a black sailor defiantly firing a machine gun at attacking Japanese planes. Dorrie Miller aboard U.S.S. West Virginia at Pearl Harbor.
“I like the general’s taste in art,” he muttered to the aide as he passed into the chairman’s office.
“Captain Grafton, sir,” the aide said to the general behind the desk, then stood to one side. The general carried his fifty or so years well, Jake thought as he scanned the square figure, the short hair, the immaculate uniform with four silver stars on each shoulder strap.
“Come in, Captain, and find a chair. I called down to your office this morning to suggest you go see Aldana, and they said you had already left.”
“Yessir, I went over there.” Jake sank into a chair with the general’s gaze upon him. “Just curious, I guess,” Jake added. “The prosecution asked for a gag order and got it. That might help keep the lid on, at least for a little while.”
General Land turned his gaze toward the window, which looked out across the Pentagon parking lots at the skyline of Arlington. “You really think it’ll come out?”
“If only American soldiers knew, sir, I’d be more hopeful. They know what classified information is. But with all those Colombian cops and Justice Department lawyers in on it, there’s just no way. The press is going to get this and probably pretty soon. Who knows? Aldana’s lawyer, Liarakos, may want to make a motion to have the court consider the legality of the arrest. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know any to ask, but Liarakos looks like the type of guy who will throw every stone he can lay hands on.”
“Oh, but surely it’s got to be legal,” the general said. “The attorney general is the one who requested our help.”
“All I’m saying, sir, is that Liarakos may raise the issue with the court. In fact, the press may have already caught the rumblings of this. This past weekend a reporter, one of my wife’s language students, was at a party at my house. He saw me today in court and buttonholed me afterward.”
“Reporter for whom?”
“The Washington Post, sir.”
Land grinned. “God,” he said, “I feel like Dick Nixon. Think Deep Throat’s been whispering?”
Jake laughed. “I don’t think Gideon Cohen is going to have a heart attack if he reads in the newspapers that American Special Forces troops captured Aldana with the cooperation of Colombian police. I told him that it would come out eventually and he shrugged it off. He knows.”
“What about this Aldana?”
“A psychopath.”
“Umm. When he was captured he told the major leading the raid he was going to see them all dead.” General Land showed his teeth. It was not a nice smile. “I was against us getting into this mess. The military has no business in law enforcement. Won’t work, can’t work, isn’t good for the military or the country. But when I heard that scum threatened our men, my doubts got smaller. Maybe Cohen’s right. Maybe we need to go in there and kick some ass.”
“General, if you want my opinion, you were right the first time. These cartel criminals have bribed, threatened, bullied, and occasionally subverted the Colombian authorities. They haven’t gotten to our men yet, but now they’re going to try. We’re not set up to investigate our own people. We take any eighteen-year-olds who can pass the written test and the physical and turn them into soldiers, sailors, and marines. Background checks and loyalty investigations are messes we shouldn’t get ourselves into.”
“We may have to,” General Land said. “The world’s changing and we may have to change with it.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
When the attorney general walked into William C. Dorfman’s White House office, the morning paper was on the desk, open and folded, displaying Mergenthaler’s column. Gideon Cohen sighed and sat while he waited for the chief of staff to finish a telephone call.
“No, we are not going to release a text of the indictment. It’s sealed. And no, we are not going to ask Mexico to hand over any of its citizens. We have no extradition treaty with Mexico.”
He listened for several seconds, then spat into the phone, “Fuck no!” and slammed it down.
“That bubble-brain wants to know if we are really offering rewards for these guys”—Dorfman stabbed the newspaper with a rigid finger—“and paying bounty hunters to bring them to the U.S. for trial.”
Cohen pursed his lips and crossed his legs. Ottmar Mergenthaler’s column in the Post this morning had revealed, for the first time, that a federal grand jury in Los Angeles had handed down a secret indictment several weeks ago bringing charges against nineteen former and present members of the Mexican government for drug smuggling and complicity in the kidnapping and murder of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration undercover agent Enrique Camarena, whose body had been discovered near Guadalajara in March 1985, over five years ago. One of those indicted was the former director of the Mexican Federal Judicial Police — the Mexican equivalent of the FBI — and another was his brother, the former head of the Mexican government’s antidrug unit. And one of those indicted was a medical doctor who had been arrested just yesterday in El Paso. It seemed that several unknown men had accompanied the good doctor on a plane trip from Mexico, turned him over to waiting federal agents, then immediately reboarded the plane for the flight back to Mexico.
“Are you going to pay bounties?”
“Why not? It’s perfectly legal to pay rewards to people who deliver fugitives to lawful authority. That principle has been firmly embedded in the common law for hundreds of years.”
“Oh, spare me the lecture. What in hell are you trying to do, anyway?”
Two years ago Cohen would have bristled. Not anymore. “Enforce the law,” he said mildly. “That’s still one of the goals of this administration, isn’t it?”
Dorfman sat back in his chair and stared at Gideon Cohen. Dorfman’s eyes looked owlish when magnified by his hornrim glasses. “It won’t be news to you that I don’t like you.”
“Do you mean that personally or professionally?” Cohen asked, and tried to look interested.