Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

Two men got out of the vehicle. One of them was a barrel-chested, very short, totally bald civilian wearing a T-shirt on which was painted in red the legend “Chief Snake Eater.” The second was a small, muscular, ruddy-faced man sporting a flowing red mustache. He wore aviator sunglasses and a camouflage-patterned Battle Dress Uniform.

An Air Force senior master sergeant came quickly out of Base Operations, his mouth open as if to say something—for example, “Can’t you see the sign, stupid?”—and as quickly he closed his mouth and went back in the building.

There was a red plate above the bumper of the SUV with three silver stars on it, indicating that it carried a lieutenant general. Lieutenant generals, like diplomats in any country but their own, can park just about wherever they want to, and this is especially true on an air force base where the commanding general has but one star to dazzle his underlings.

Moreover, the senior master sergeant recognized the man wearing the camo BDUs as Lieutenant General Bruce J. McNab, commanding general, United States Special Operations Command. He recognized the civilian, he had seen him many times before, often in the company of General McNab, but he couldn’t put a name on him. Very few people outside the upper echelons of the Special Operations community could.

The civilian’s name was Victor D’Alessandro. He was a civilian employee of the Department of the Army, a GS-15, which regulations stated entitled him to be considered an “assimilated colonel” when it came to providing quarters and so forth. He had retired from thirty years and three days of Army service as a chief warrant officer, grade V (CWO-5), which had paid him essentially the same pay and allowances as a lieutenant colonel. And before becoming a warrant officer, junior grade (WOJG, pronounced Woe-Jug), Mr. D’Alessandro had been a sergeant major.

The C-37A/Gulfstream V taxied up to the visiting aircraft tarmac a minute or so later. The upper portion of its fuselage was painted in a gleaming white, and the lower portion pale blue. There was no reference to either the U.S. Air Force or the U.S. Army in its markings, although it carried the star-and-bar insignia of a military aircraft on its engine nacelles. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA was lettered on the fuselage above the six windows. There was an American flag painted on the vertical stabilizer.

When the aircraft had stopped, the stair door behind the cockpit windows unfolded even before the whine of its engines died. A tall, erect lieutenant colonel of Cavalry who was in his thirties came nimbly down them, marched up to General McNab, saluted crisply, and announced, “General Naylor’s compliments, General. The general asks that you attend him aboard the aircraft.”

General McNab returned the salute.

“I hear and obey, Colonel Naylor,” McNab said, and walked toward the Gulfstream.

“Hey, Vic,” Lieutenant Colonel Naylor said, and extended his hand.

“How they hanging, Junior?” Vic D’Alessandro replied, and then wrapped his arms around him affectionately.

“One beside the other,” Naylor said, and waved D’Alessandro toward the airplane.

When he entered the Gulfstream, General McNab saw that General Naylor was sitting in what he thought of as “first class,” the foremost section of the passenger compartment, which held two chairs and a table.

He marched down the aisle, came to attention, saluted, and barked, “Lieutenant General McNab, Bruce J., accepting General Naylor’s kind invitation.”

Naylor was aware that McNab was being a wiseass again—what custom dictated that he should have said was “General McNab reporting as ordered”—and that saying what he had was to remind Naylor that he did not have the authority to order McNab to do anything.

He decided to let it ride.

He returned the salute, waved McNab into the other chair at the table, and said, “Thank you for meeting me, General.”

And then when he saw Vic D’Alessandro coming down the aisle toward them, Naylor added, “I was hoping for a private word with you.”

“Well, if you insist, I’ll send Vic away,” McNab said. “But if you’ll let him stay, that’ll save me the trouble of having to tell him later everything that happened here. I tell my executive secretary everything. Otherwise, you’ll understand, he couldn’t do his job.”

Naylor thought: McNab is entirely capable of having D’Alessandro on his organization chart as his executive secretary. He would find that amusing.

Naylor extended his hand.

“How are you, Mr. D’Alessandro?”

“I’m fine, thank you, sir.”

“Getting right to the point,” Naylor said. “I’ve just come from the White House.”

“I know,” McNab interrupted. “Frank Lammelle told me what happened there and said you’d be stopping by. Would it save time if we cut to the chase?”

“Lammelle told you?” Naylor asked coldly.

“He called me on my trusty CaseyBerry,” McNab said. “No. Correction. He called Vic on Vic’s trusty CaseyBerry, and told Vic when he found me to tell me you’d just broken ground at Andrews and were headed here. When I got the message, I called Frank and he told me why you were coming to see me. So can we cut to the chase?”

The “CaseyBerry” to which McNab referred was a cellular telephone resembling the BlackBerry. Officially, its name was Casey XP-13, which stood for Experimental Prototype, Version 13. It had a number of characteristics the BlackBerry did not have.

BlackBerrys communicate with “cell tower” antennae scattered widely across the United States and other places on earth. The CaseyBerrys communicated with satellites scattered twenty-seven thousand miles above the earth. CaseyBerrys automatically encrypted and decrypted whatever they transmitted (voice or images) in a code that even the vast National Security Agency batteries of computers at Fort Meade could not break.