Black Ops (Presidential Agent 5)

"And then," DeWitt said, "we said--simultaneously--'Let's pull his chain.' Which we then proceeded to do, with what you'll have to admit was conspicuous success."

"I will now say something I didn't have the courage to say in The Desert," Castillo said. "Go fuck yourself, DeWitt!"

"It's really good to see you, Charley," DeWitt said. He spread his arms wide and a moment later they were embracing, pounding each other's backs.

"Now that the show is over," Delchamps said drily, "may I infer from that obscene display of affection that you have crossed paths on the road of life?"

"You know General McNab?" DeWitt asked.

Delchamps nodded.

"He was then a colonel," DeWitt went on, "running special ops in The Desert. I was his intel sergeant. Right after it started, the colonel came to me and said he had a new chopper driver, a twenty-one-year-old, five-months-out-of-Hudson-High who he wanted to keep alive because he already had the DFC and a Purple Heart and somebody like that would probably be useful somewhere down the pike.

"He was bad enough when he got there, but after he grabbed the Russians--"

" 'Grabbed the Russians'?" Berezovsky parroted.

DeWitt looked at him for a moment before replying. "This is probably still classified Top Secret, Kill Anybody Who Knows, but what the hell. The Scotchman?"

"This Colonel--General--McNab?" Svetlana asked.

"Yes, ma'am. That's what we call him--behind his back, of course. Anyway, the Scotchman mounted an operation to grab a Scud. You know what a Scud is?"

"A Russian missile based on the German V-2," Svetlana said matter-of-factly. "The Iraqis had a number of the R-11/SS-1B Scud-A's, which had a range of about three hundred kilometers."

This earned her a very strange look from Master Sergeant P. B. DeWitt, Special Forces, U.S. Army, Retired, but all he said was, "Yes, ma'am. What we wanted to do was grab one, first to see if it was capable of either being nuclear or to put chemicals or biologicals in the head, and then to send it to the States.

"So we mounted an op to go get one. Two UH-60s--"

He looked at Svetlana, who nodded.

"The Black Hawk," she said.

"--with a reinforced A-Team--"

Svetlana nodded again.

"--with Charley flying the colonel in a Huey."

Svetlana nodded her understanding one more time. Castillo saw that Leverette and Delchamps were having a hard time keeping a straight face.

"So over the berm we go," DeWitt went on. "We reach the Scud site. Everything goes as planned, until somebody notices that among the people lying on the ground with their hands tied behind them there's a lot of heavy brass. First thought, Iraqi brass. Then Hotshot Charley here hears a couple of them whispering to each other in Russian. So he says--in Russian, the first time any of us knew he spoke it--'All Russians please stand up and start singing "The Internationale. ' "

Berezovsky laughed.

"So that was you, Carlos!" Berezovsky said. "When I debriefed them after you sent them home, they said that the Americans had a Russian who sounded as if he was from Saint Petersburg."

"Why do I think I'm not fully briefed on this situation?" DeWitt asked.

"Sergeant DeWitt," Delchamps said. "Permit me to introduce Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky and Lieutenant Colonel Alekseeva, formerly of the SVR."

"No shit?"

"And you thought she was just Charley's latest redheaded lady friend, right, DeWitt?" Leverette asked.

"They didn't tell me about you making them sing 'The Internationale,'" Berezovsky said. "You really made them do that?"

"People tend to do what heavily armed men with black grease all over their faces tell them to do. We even took pictures of the chorus and gave everybody a copy before we put them on the Aeroflot plane to Moscow."