Covert Warriors (Presidential Agent 7)

As Roscoe pulled on his shorts in his bedroom, he said: “Guys, I really don’t want to go out there. Why? Wolf News will carry the President’s press conference from the first line of bullshit to the last.”

“You’re going, Roscoe,” Yung said. “Charley wants you to go.”

“When you get down to it, guys, I’m really not one of you.”

“Charley thinks you are,” Yung said. “That’s good enough for the executive combat pay committee.”

“For the what?”

“The executive combat pay committee,” Delchamps replied. “Two-Gun, Alex Darby, and me. We’re the ones who pass out the combat pay.”

Yung added, “The committee asked Charley, ‘What about Roscoe?’ And Charley replied, ‘He was on the island, wasn’t he?’ ”

“I was on the island as a journalist,” Roscoe replied. “A neutral, non-combatant observer.”

But Danton thought, Shit, I don’t believe that.

I was rooting for the good guys.

And I took the Uzi that Castillo said I might need.

“If that was the case,” Delchamps said, “we’d have to kill you. You know too much.”

There he goes with that “we’d have to kill you” bullshit again.

The trouble with that being I’m not sure it’s bullshit.

I do know too much.

“And if we killed you, then you wouldn’t get the million,” Yung said.

“What fucking million?”

“I could set up a trust fund for your kids, I suppose,” Yung said thoughtfully.

“What fucking million?” Roscoe demanded as he rummaged through his tie rack.

“Shooters,” Delchamps said, “roughly defined as everybody who went to the island, get a million. Plus, of course, everybody who went into the Congo. Charley, Sweaty, and Dmitri opted out.”

My God, they’re serious! I’m being offered a million dollars!

How much would that be when the IRS was through with me?

Why am I asking?

Pure and noble journalist that I am, I’m of course going to have to refuse it.

What is this “pure and noble journalist” bullshit?

What’s the difference between me taking free meals and booze from any lobbyist with a credit card and taking a million from the Merry Outlaws?

I write what I want, period.

And I was on that island, and I could have been killed.

Roscoe had a sudden, very clear flashback to what had happened several years before at the National Press Club.

Somebody had jumped on Frank Cesno, then high up in CNN’s Washington Bureau—and a hell of a journalist—about the recent tendency of TV journalists to paint themselves as absolutely neutral when covering a war.