The Shooters (Presidential Agent 4)

The Mayerling Country Club, which is several kilometers off the Panamericana Highway, about fifty kilometers north of the center of Buenos Aires, held about one hundred houses very similar to Nuestra Pequena Casa. Each sat upon about a hectare (or about two and a half acres). It also held a Jack Nicklaus golf course, five polo fields, stables, tennis courts, and a clubhouse with a dining room that featured a thirty-foot-high ceiling and half a dozen Czechoslovakian crystal chandeliers suspended over a highly polished marble floor.

The entire country club was surrounded by a nine-foot-tall fence, topped with razor wire, and equipped with motion-sensing devices. When triggered, an alarm went off in the Edificio de Seguridad and floodlights came on where the intrusion had been detected. Then members of the Mayerling Security Force, armed with everything from semiautomatic pistols and shotguns to fully automatic Uzis, rushed to the scene on foot, by auto, and in golf carts.

None of this had anything to do with intelligence, espionage, or even the trade in illegal drugs, but rather with kidnapping. The kidnapping of well-to-do men, their wives, offspring, parents-sometimes even their horses and dogs-was Argentina's second-largest cottage industry, so the wags said, larger than all others except the teaching of the English language.

Just about all of the houses within the Mayerling Country Club were individually fenced on three sides, most often by fences concealed in closely packed pine trees. They, too, had motion-sensing devices.

Motion-sensing devices also prevented anyone from approaching the unfenced front of the houses without being detected.

Nuestra Pequena Casa was for Mayerling not an unusually large house. It had six bedrooms, all with bath; three other toilets with bidets; a library, a sitting room, a dining room, a kitchen, servants' quarters (for the housing of four), a swimming pool, and, in the backyard near the pool, a quincho.

A quincho, Paul Sieno explained, was much like an American pool house, except that it was equipped with a parrilla-a wood-fired grill-and was primarily intended as a place to eat, more or less outdoors. It was an extremely sturdy structure, built solidly of masonry, and had a rugged roof of mottled red Spanish tiles. The front of the quincho had a deep verandah, which also was covered by the tile roof, and a wall of sliding glass doors that overlooked the pool and backyard and which served as the entrance from the verandah into the main room of the building.

The group had moved from the big house out to the quincho.

Paul Sieno was kneeled down before the parrilla, which was built into one wall of the cocina, or kitchen. He worked with great effort-and as yet not much success-to get the wood that he had carefully arranged under the heavy black iron grill to catch fire.

Susanna Sieno stood behind him, lea

ning against the polished marble countertop to the left of the parrilla, handing her husband sheets of newspaper for use as tinder.

On the countertop, beside the stainless steel sink, was an impressively large wooden platter piled high with an even more impressively large stack of a dozen lomos, each filet mignon hand cut from tenderloins of beef to a thickness of two inches. Nearby were the makings for side dishes of seasoned potatoes and tossed salad.

In the adjoining main room of the quincho there was a brand-new flat-screen television mounted on a wall that was identical to the one in Nuestra Pequena Casa.

The DirecTV dish antenna on the quincho's red tile roof was identical to the one mounted on the big house. The television set in the quincho, however, was hooked to a repeater connected to the DirecTV antenna on the big house. This allowed for the antenna on the quincho roof to be aimed at an IntelSat satellite in permanent orbit some 27,000 miles above the earth's surface-and thus to be part of a system that provided the safe house with instant encrypted voice, visual, and data communication. It communicated with similar proprietary devices at the Office of Homeland Security in the Nebraska Avenue Complex in Washington, D.C., and ones in what had at one time been the Post Stockade at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and was now the headquarters of Delta Force and even more clandestine special operations forces.

Most of the group was sitting in teak deck chairs that they had pulled inside from the verandah.

The TV was now tuned to the English-language CNN, not because its nonstop coverage of the disaster that was Hurricane Katrina was any better than that of Deutsche Welle-it arguably was worse-but because DW was repeating ad nauseam the same footage and interviews. The on-air "talent"-both on location and in the various news bureaus-had long ago stopped offering any real reporting and had instead resorted to the basic equivalent of a live camera simply airing the obvious. And, while it was only a matter of time before CNN's so-called in-depth coverage would begin to loop, at least for now the group was seeing and hearing something somewhat different.

This same dynamic happened during the Desert Wars, Lieutenant C. G. Castillo thought with more than a little disgust. Sticking a camera crew out in the middle of a hot zone-with a clueless commentator, someone with no real understanding of what's going on around them-is worse than there being no, quote, reporting, unquote, at all.

Watching RPG rounds and tracers in a firefight-or people looting a flooded food store-without an educated source on screen to put what you're seeing in context of the big picture only serves to drive the hysteria.

It damn sure doesn't help someone sitting in the comfort of their living room better understand what the hell is really going on.

Castillo turned from the TV and glanced around the quincho.

Of the people watching CNN, three could-and in fact often did-pass as Argentines. They were the Sienos (who now had the parrilla wood burning) and a twenty-three-year-old from San Antonio, Texas, named Ricardo Solez, who had come to Argentina as an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration. All had mastered the Porteno accent of a Buenos Aires native.

Anthony J. "Tony" Santini, a special agent of the U.S. Secret Service, a stocky and somewhat swarthy forty-two-year-old, could pass for a Porteno until he had to say something, whereupon his accent usually gave him away.

None of the others watching the TV in the quincho even tried to pass themselves off as Argentines.

Special Agent David W. Yung of the FBI, a thirty-two-year-old of Chinese ancestry-who spoke Spanish and three other languages, none of them Oriental-felt that his race made trying to fob himself off as an Argentine almost a silly exercise.

The language skills of various others were rudimentary.

As Colonel Jacob D. "Jake" Torine, United States Air Force, put it, "It's as if the moment I get out of the States, a neon sign starts flashing over my head-American! Throw rocks!"

Inspector John J. Doherty of the FBI understood what Torine meant. Lieutenant Colonel Castillo had once remarked, "Torine and Doherty look like somebody called Central Casting and said, 'Send us an airline pilot and an Irish cop.'" Neither had taken offense.

One viewer of what Katrina was doing to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast was in a category of his own.

Corporal Lester Bradley, United States Marine Corps, was not quite twenty. He appeared to be about seventeen. He stood five feet five inches tall and weighed a little under one hundred forty pounds. Looking at him now-attired in a knit polo shirt, khaki trousers, and red and gold striped Nike sport shoes-very few people would think of associating him with the military at all, much less with the elite special operations.

The truth here was that Bradley, fresh from Parris Island boot camp, had earned his corporal's stripes as a "designated marksman" with the Marines on the march to Baghdad. On his return to the United States, he had been assigned to the USMC guard detachment at the American embassy in Buenos Aires, where he mostly functioned as a clerk typist until the day he had been detailed-as the man the gunny felt he could most easily spare-to drive a GMC Yukon XL to Uruguay.