Covert Warriors (Presidential Agent 7)

Charley’s status changed from that of a poor German bastard who had been shamefully treated by a U.S. Army officer—whose ass Naylor intended to burn—into the son of an officer who had been awarded the nation’s highest award for valor on the battlefield.

The first thing Naylor had done was set in motion the legal wheels which would keep Charley’s substantial inheritance from being squandered by his newfound family. When that hadn’t proved to be necessary—Charley’s father’s family turned out to be as well off—stinking rich, to put a point on it—as his mother’s, “Uncle Allan,” as Naylor had quickly become, now turned his efforts into getting Charley into the Long Gray Line. His father’s Medal of Honor gave him a pass into West Point, and at West Point he would be imbued with the duty, honor, country philosophy which had guided Naylor all of his life.

A. Franklin Lammelle knew that that had almost—but not quite—turned out the way Naylor had planned.

Charley had graduated from the Military Academy toward the top of his class and been commissioned into Armor. Five generations of generals named Naylor had been Cavalry and then Armored officers.

The Naylor plan for Carlos G. Castillo was working. Most of Naylor’s plans for anything worked; he was by then already a three-star general, and serving as General “Stormin’” Norman Schwarzkopf’s operations officer for Desert Storm.

But then the plan went off the tracks.

Some publicity conscious brass hats had decided it would be good public relations if the son of a MOH helicopter pilot also flew as a helicopter pilot in the upcoming Desert War I. A training slot at Fort Rucker “was found” for him, and Castillo was sent there to learn how to fly the Bell HU-1 helicopter. On his second day at the aviation school, it was learned that not only did Castillo already know how to fly but had more than 230 hours as pilot-in-command of the twin-engine version Huey. One of the subsidiaries of Castillo Enterprises was Castillo Aviation, which serviced oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico. Castillo had begun flying for C

astillo Aviation as soon as he acquired his commercial rotary wing pilot’s license, which he had done when he was sixteen and a high school junior.

The brass had regarded this as a fortuitous circumstance. The hero pilot’s son could go into Operation Desert Storm, once he finished transition training, flying the Army’s glamour machine, the Apache AH-64 attack helicopter.

Once he got to Arabia, and realizing the twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant was not qualified to fly the Apache, the brass did the best thing they could think of to keep him alive. He was assigned as co-pilot to the most skilled and experienced Apache pilot in the unit.

That plan went awry, too.

Two hours into Desert Storm, the Apache, on a mission to take out Iraqi antiaircraft weapons, was struck, the pilot blinded, and Castillo wounded. Castillo was faced with the choice of landing the shot-up helicopter and waiting for help, or trying to get the pilot medical attention. He flew the smoking and shuddering Apache, at fifty feet above the desert, back two hundred miles.

General Naylor learned for the first time that Second Lieutenant Castillo was not where he was supposed to be—at Fort Knox, undergoing Basic Officer’s Course training—when Castillo was marched into Desert Storm headquarters so that he could receive the “impact awards”—in other words, get the medals immediately—of the Distinguished Flying Cross and Purple Heart medals from the hands of General Schwarzkopf himself.

Appropriate counseling was given to the officers who had put Castillo in the cockpit of an Apache he was clearly unqualified to fly, but that left the problem of what to do with Second Lieutenant Castillo. Loading him on the next airplane for Fort Knox would suggest that Castillo had done something wrong, and that was clearly not the case. And so would taking him off flight status.

Checking the roster of units assigned to Desert Storm, Naylor thought he had found just what he needed: the 2303rd Civil Government Detachment. It was commanded by Colonel Bruce J. McNab, a classmate of Naylor’s. He hadn’t liked McNab at West Point, thought him to be an inferior officer, and was not surprised that he was still a colonel commanding an insignificant civil government unit. But the roster showed that the 2303rd had half a dozen Hueys assigned to it.

Naylor called McNab and told him the story and said he was sending Castillo to him, and McNab was expected to keep the young officer out of harm’s way.

“Just have him fly you around, McNab. Nothing more.”

McNab had said, “Yes, sir.”

The next time Naylor saw Castillo was just after the Iraqi surrender, when Colonel McNab showed up at Desert Storm headquarters with Castillo at the controls of McNab’s heavily armed Huey.

They were there to personally receive from the hands of General Schwarzkopf impact awards of the Distinguished Service Cross (McNab), Silver Star (Castillo), and Purple Heart (both) medals. McNab also had the star of brigadier general and Castillo the Combat Infantry Badge pinned to their tunics by General Schwarzkopf.

Naylor had learned only then that the “Civil Government Detachment” part of the 2303rd’s unit designation was disinformation. Its actual role in Desert Storm had been the direction, under the Central Intelligence Agency, of covert Special Operations.

Naylor had been quietly furious that he had been kept in the dark, even more furious that Castillo had not been kept out of the line of fire, and had almost—but not quite—lost control when McNab told him he was taking Castillo, whom he described as a “natural warrior,” with him to Fort Bragg as his aide-de-camp.

As far as A. Franklin Lammelle was concerned, what McNab “had done” to Castillo—turned him over the years into a legendary special operator—was the real source of the friction between McNab and Naylor. There was something in Naylor’s makeup that made him hate unconventional warfare and its practitioners.

And, in Lammelle’s judgment, it was Naylor’s close personal relationship with Castillo that made Charley unwilling on two significant occasions to accept that his Uncle Allan had been perfectly willing to throw him under the bus when ordered to do so.

The first instance had been when Castillo, by then an Army lieutenant colonel heading up the President’s secretive Office of Organizational Analysis, had embarrassed the CIA by flying two senior SVR defectors out of Vienna to Argentina under the noses of Vladimir Putin and the CIA station chief in Vienna.

Charles W. Montvale, then the director of National Intelligence, was not interested in Castillo’s explanation that he had done so because the Russian defectors had good reason to believe the SVR was waiting to grab them in Vienna’s Westbahnhof station, and that he had been unaware the CIA station chief in Vienna had been trying to set up their defection for some time.

What concerned Montvale was that the CIA station chief had gone to syndicated columnist C. Harry Whelan, Jr., with the story that the President was illegally operating his own private CIA headed by Castillo, and that Presidential Agent Castillo had snatched the defectors.

Montvale’s solution to that potential embarrassment to the President and the CIA was simple: Castillo would be retired from the Army for psychological reasons—that would explain his erratic behavior—and then turn the defectors over to the CIA.

General Naylor, seeing the protection of the President as his primary duty, had gone along with Montvale. Castillo, the unconventional warrior molded by Bruce McNab, had to be shut down, and he sent one of his Adjutant General Corps colonels to Buenos Aires with Montvale to order Castillo: “Sign here. You’re now retired. Don’t let the doorknob hit you in the ass on your way out.”

Castillo refused. The Russian defectors had told him that the SVR and others were operating a biological weapons laboratory and factory in the Congo—what the CIA had dismissed as being only a “fish farm.” Castillo saw it as his duty to prove, or disprove, what the Russian defectors said, and managed to convince McNab, by then a lieutenant general commanding SPECOPSCOM, that the allegations deserved to be investigated.