Black Ops (Presidential Agent 5)

"I choppered him out to Camp Mackall. I thought maybe seeing what the guys in the last stages of training have to go through might discourage him. I'm not holding my breath, Charley."

"Get him back. Get him on the horn. How long will that take?"

"An hour, give or take."

"Do it. Anything else?"

"Air Tanzania is all painted and ready to go. Uncle Remus is in the process of picking shooters; he's almost finished, he said. The maps we got from the Air Force at Hurlburt have been digitalized and sent to you. Lester didn't tell you?"

"Not yet. I'm going to have to go buy printers--"

"And/or some external drives. Those things do eat up the bytes."

"I remember. That it?"

"I'll call you when I get Hamilton back to civilization. D'Allessando off."

"Russian spies?" Dona Alicia asked. "General Naylor said something about that."

"General Naylor said something?"

"He came to see me. Very upset."

"Well, Abuela, I'm as anxious to hear about that as you are to hear about the Russian spies. But for right now, as I go to take my morning shower, you'll have to be satisfied with me pointing them out to you."

He pointed.

"Oh, my!" Dona Alicia said.

"One of them is not only a Russian spy, but steals people's personal robes."

"I'll go find Estella and get some breakfast started," Dona Alicia said.

[FOUR]

0840 8 January 2006

"Actually, Carlos," Dona Alicia said as she poured tea into Svetlana's cup, "General Naylor got quite emotional toward the end. He said he felt responsible for so much that's happened to you in the Army."

"I would love to have seen that," Castillo said. " 'Old Stone Face' emotional?"

"He said that he should have known the Army would do something--because of your father and the Medal of Honor--like send you to the Desert War before you were prepared, and done something to stop it."

Castillo shook his head. "Fernando was over there, and he was even less prepared for that war than I was. I knew more about flying helicopters than he did about commanding a platoon of tanks."

"And then he said--and this surprised me, because I always thought they were great friends--that his greatest regret was in sending you to General McNab after you were shot down and they gave you the medal. He said that once you were 'corrupted' by General McNab, everything followed. I thought 'corrupted' was a very strong term."

"Just to keep the record straight, Abuela, they gave me the medal for not getting shot down. And Naylor sent me to McNab to keep them from putting me in another Apache, which he correctly suspected they would do. I really wasn't qualified to fly Apaches, and if I had kept it up, which I would have been stupid enough to do, I probably would have killed myself. General Naylor's conscience should be clear on that score."

She looked at him but didn't say anything.

Castillo went on: "And General McNab didn't corrupt me, Jack Davidson corrupted me--"

"Go to hell, Charley," Davidson said, laughing.

"--because every second lieutenant is taught to find a good senior NCO, then do what he says and follow his example. And what this corrupter of young officers did was teach me how to blow safes and steal whiskey."

Davidson laughed again.