Call to Duty (17 page)

“Affirmative,” the NCO answered, putting all the confidence he could into that single word.

“Good,” Kamigami continued. “Select four men who are virgins and tell them they’re on in fifteen minutes. Live ammunition, hostage seated, terrorists standing but location in the room unknown. I’ll place the dummies.” The NCO nodded, thinking that it would be a walk-through, even for four men who had never been in combat. The telephone rang and interrupted them with a message for Kamigami; a delivery truck was outside with the goods he had ordered. “I’ll fix the room and take care of the delivery. Start without me if I’m not back in time,” the CSM said as he disappeared into the exercise room.

The four men the NCO had selected for the exercise were relaxed and confident, ready to enter the corridor that led to the room and with the dummy hostage and terrorists. They were hatless and dressed in the old-style jungle fatigues and boots. Each was wearing a lightweight flak jacket and carrying a Heckler and Koch MP5, nine-millimeter submachine gun with a silencer and thirty-round clip. They valued the MP5 because of its incredibly smooth roller-locking bolt system and equally efficient silencer. The NCO glanced at his watch. “No CSM,” he said.

“He said to start without him,” Trimler said. The two stepped into an observation booth and peered out the small bulletproof window. The NCO dimmed the hall lights and gave the four men the high sign. They entered the hall and moved down the corridor, not making a sound. The fourth man in moved backward, covering their rear and relying on the third man to warn him of obstacles. He stopped so he could cover the entrance and discourage any unwanted visitors while keeping their escape route open. The first three men moved to the closed door. One crossed in front to the other side while one crouched and readied a stun grenade they called a flash-bang. With his free hand he tested the doorknob and, finding it unlocked, cracked the door open, tossed in the grenade, and closed the door. A bright light flashed through the cracks around the door outlining it and a loud bang echoed from inside.

The crouched man threw the door open and the man on the other side rushed in at an angle. The third man followed the
first shooter through the door at a cross angle. Both were firing as they went, aiming high to hit the standing dummies but to miss the dummy tied to the chair. There was no deafening clatter of submachine-gun fire but only the sound of popping, bolt actions, and spent cartridges clattering to the floor. The flash-bang had blown out the light bulbs so they were firing in almost total darkness. Then it was silent and the man crouched at the door directed the beam of his flashlight into the room, making sure he was not in the line of any fire that a wounded terrorist might send his way.

In the observation booth, the NCO and Trimler heard a loud “Goddamn!” followed by total silence. They rushed out of the booth and into the hall. Both men felt an empty void in their guts and a coppery-bitter taste flooded Trimler’s mouth. Something had gone terribly wrong. The NCO turned up the lights and stood in the open doorway, staring into the room.

Trimler pushed his way past the NCO, fully expecting to see one of the shooters lying on the floor in a pool of blood, ripped apart by his partner’s gunfire. The MP5 was horribly efficient at close quarters. But only three dummies were lying on the floor, their upper torsos shattered by gunfire.

But instead of the dummy in the chair, Kamigami was sitting there, a rope looped around his body, making him look like the hostage. He glanced at the stunned men. “Good shooting,” he allowed. His voice unchanged from its usual soft and gentle tone.

“Goddamn it, Sergeant Major!” the NCO roared. “You could’ve been killed. This was a live-fire exercise.”

“You told me they were good,” Kamigami said.

“Yeah, but Jesus Christ,” the NCO sputtered, “we don’t take chances like that.”

The first shooter who had charged into the room sank to the floor on one knee, shaking slightly, staring at his weapon. “I didn’t expect to find a real person in there,” he muttered.

“What did you expect to find in here?” Kamigami asked. There was no immediate answer.

Finally the second shooter blurted an answer, the standard answer expected from Delta: “We expected to find three terrorists who we were to service.”

“You mean kill them?” Kamigami’s words were barely audible.

The first shooter stood up, now fully in control of his emotions and ashamed of the momentary show of weakness. “That’s the idea,” he said, his words much stronger. “Two bullets in each head.”

“Have any of you ever killed anyone? Personally?” Kamigami asked. Only Trimler did not shake his head. “Okay,” Kamigami continued, “let’s end this. How would you get out of here now?” The four men were galvanized into action and they cleared the hall and moved Kamigami, now the freed hostage, out of the Shooting House. “What would you do if you stumbled onto a terrorist who was blocking your escape route but didn’t see you?” the CSM asked.

The first shooter pulled out his Gerber survival knife. He was anxious to prove that what they had seen in the Shooting House was not a sign of weakness. “I’d proceed to debilitate my opponent.”

“Does that mean kill him?” Kamigami asked. The shooter jerked his head yes.

Kamigami pointed to the corner of the building. “Good. Do it.”

It was a command and the four men responded to it. The first shooter worked his way to the corner of the building and bobbed his head around the edge in the approved fashion. “Shitfuckhate,” he groaned and stepped around the corner. The other three men looked around the building and followed him.

“Going around the corner like that could get a dumb shit wasted,” the Shooting House NCO grumbled. He followed the team around the corner.

Trimler and Kamigami were right behind and found the men clustered around four spring lambs frisking at the end of their tethers. “Goats,” Kamigami groaned. “I’d ordered goats, not lambs.” One of the lambs was full of life and jumping straight up and down, its legs little springs.

“Well?” Trimler asked.

The team looked at their CSM. “There’s the opponent you’re going to debilitate,” Kamigami told them.

“Oh shitski,” the first shooter moaned. He rolled his knife in his hand and took a half step toward the lamb closest to
him, the one jumping up and down and bleating lustily. He hesitated. With a blinding speed Trimler could not credit, Kamigami disarmed the shooter, threw him to the ground, scooped up his knife, and grabbed the back of the lamb’s head. With a quick motion he cut the lamb’s throat and dropped the lifeless carcass to the ground.

“That’s what debilitating your opponent means,” Kamigami told them. “Now finish it.”

Trimler watched as the three lambs were dispatched, none as efficiently as the first. “What now, Sergeant Major?”

Kamigami shrugged his shoulders. “Barbecue tonight. I’ll probably have to show them how to gut and skin ’em,” he said.

“You’ve made your point,” Trimler said, walking back to his office, deep in thought.

The Executive Office Building, Washington, D.C.

Mazie Kamigami picked up the phone on the first ring. The message was a crisp “He’s out and about.” She hung up and surveyed the wreckage in her office. It looked no more cluttered than normal and she knew where everything was. Besides, the President had seen it before. She chuckled to herself, not worried about impressing Zack Pontowski during one of his so-called walkabouts.

“Klutzes,” she mumbled to herself. “They haven’t figured it out.” She found it a never-ending source of amusement that so many of the White House staffers would screw themselves into the ceiling whenever Pontowski chose to go on one of his unscheduled visits through the White House executive offices. It was obvious to her that the President used these informal visits to boost morale and keep people on their toes. Nothing focused the mind like knowing the most powerful man in the world might drop in unexpectedly and ask a simple question like “What are you working on?” and then sit and listen to your answer. It gave him a source of unfiltered information totally free of the spins and twists that bureaucrats put on information and intelligence as it passed through their clutches. Mazie understood how the man worked.

She glanced at her desk, not bothering to sit down, picked up the letter from her father, and stuffed it into one of the
cavernous pockets of her skirt. Every skirt, dress, or pair of pants she owned had pockets that served as part of her filing system. She didn’t care that a full pocket only made her look more rotund and dumpy. A typical letter from Pop, she thought, clearly recalling every word:

She pulled out the letter and glanced at its postmark: Fort Bragg, North Carolina. You must have gotten Delta Force, she decided. Why else would you turn down Command Sergeant Major of the Army? Mazie also understood her father. She was still standing in the middle of her office and holding the letter when the President of the United States walked through the door with her boss, National Security Adviser Cagliari.

Cagliari came right to the point. “What’s the latest on the hostages?”

“Perhaps,” Mazie said, “we had better go down to the vault and talk with Colonel Mackay.”

Pontowski listened without comment while Mackay went over their latest information. “So, you’re telling me,” he finally said, “that Miss Anderson has been separated from the other three hostages, who, we assume, are now in Chiang’s compound, and that we need a much larger force than Delta to neutralize Chiang’s defenses.” He paused, thinking. “Do we know where Miss Anderson is?” Mackay shot a questioning look at Mazie and did not answer. He knew when he was in over his head.

“Officially, sir,” Mazie began, choosing her words carefully, “we don’t know.”

“And unofficially?” Pontowski replied.

“She’s with the three guards who killed Troy Spencer. They got worried about what Chiang would do to them for killing Spencer and took off with their own hostage—Nikki
Anderson. They’re hiding in a village in Thailand just south of the Burma border, Ban Muang Dok.”

Pontowski chewed on this latest intelligence.

“When and where did this information come from?” Cagliari asked. He was upset because this was news to him.

“I received it over the weekend,” Mazie answered.

“Why wasn’t it included in the PDB?” Cagliari asked. The PDB, President’s Daily Brief, was a glossy, slickly printed intelligence summary that appeared every morning on the President’s desk. It was assembled by a committee of bureaucrats in the CIA and given limited distribution. Supposedly, it contained the best intelligence available in the United States.

“It was backdoored to me.”

Silence. Mackay studied them, trying to fathom what was going on. To him it was a simple matter of command and there should be no reason for all this pussyfooting around. Either they had good intelligence or they didn’t.

“I see,” Cagliari finally said. “Your source has an informant that he doesn’t want to pass over to the CIA.” Mazie only nodded in reply. She gave a silent prayer that he would not upset the apple cart and tell the CIA. “Which,” Cagliari continued, “makes sense considering the recent leak about Troy Spencer.” Mazie gave a very visible sigh of relief, which contrasted with the perplexed look on Mackay’s face. He hadn’t heard of any leaks.

“Who is your source?” Pontowski asked.

Mazie did not hesitate. “An Air Force general, William Carroll. He recruited a Buddhist monk who has set up a network of monks throughout Thailand and Burma. The village monk at Ban Muang Dok saw Anderson and the three guards.”

“I know Bill,” Pontowski said. “I thought he was a Middle East expert. How did he get involved in the Far East?”

“He’s in command of the Special Activities Center now, handling HUMINT for the Air Force.”

“We need to get this into the system…officially,” Pontowski said. “Let Carroll keep his source.”

“It can be passed through Mossad to the CIA,” Mazie suggested.

“The Israeli connection is always helpful to a Middle East specialist like Carroll,” Pontowski said. He looked over his
glasses at Mackay. “Welcome to the wonderful world of the bureaucracy.” Then he rose and was out the door.

“What was that all about?” Mackay asked.

“Turf battles,” Mazie told him. “Every intelligence agency wants to control its own sources. But it’s more efficient if a single office manages it all. In this case, the CIA.”

“I thought that was the way the system was set up.”

“It is,” Mazie explained. “But what happened to Troy Spencer was leaked to the press. With the CIA resembling a sieve, the smart players are running for cover until the leak is plugged.” Without thinking, Mazie pulled her father’s letter out of her pocket and stroked it. Oh, Pop, she thought, I may have put you back into it.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” Mackay said.

The three men who made up Pontowski’s inner core of advisers relaxed into the couches and comfortable chairs clustered in front of the President’s big desk in the Oval Office. Leo Cox, his chief of staff, sat farthest from the desk at one end of a couch sipping coffee. Michael Cagliari, his national security adviser, thumbed through the notes carefully arranged in the folder on the couch beside him. Bobby Burke, the director of central intelligence, fidgeted in the big overstuffed chair, his restless hands darting from the arm of the chair to the folder in his lap. They were an unlikely trio who would never have struck up a friendship on their own. But they had been individually captured by the magnetism of Matthew Zachary Pontowski and had been pulled into his orbit, becoming a powerful constellation that guided United States policy.

The tall and skinny, cadaverous Cox had reached the rank of brigadier general in the Air Force by kicking the intelligence structure until it became responsive to operations and plans. It had been a painful but productive experience for many intel officers. Like most professional officers in the military, Cox had an innate distrust of intellectuals like Michael Cagliari, a former Princeton professor who specialized in national security and foreign affairs. Cagliari, a former student of Henry Kissinger, looked like an Ivy League professor, always wearing a rumpled Harris tweed sport coat with leather elbow patches and sporting a well-developed beard.
Behind his bland brown eyes and hidden somewhere in his flabby body beat the heart of a tiger and one of the most devious souls in the United States. Bobby Burke, the director of central intelligence, and consequently in charge of all intelligence agencies in the United States government, was a professional bureaucrat who had worked his way up from the lowest ranks of the CIA. When asked by strangers what he did, he would fidget, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, and tell them that he was a bureaucrat. And like many bureaucrats, he spoke in a pompous voice, obviously impressed with his power and position. Most people instantaneously dubbed him an “asshole,” and never suspected that the chunky and slightly balding fifty-two-year-old man was in tip-top physical condition, had a record as an outstanding agent in the field, spoke six foreign languages, and had personally killed four people in the line of work. He was a bureaucrat whose specialty was intelligence and covert operations. And like most high-ranking bureaucrats in the government, he was very good in his field of expertise.