“Where did they get it, Roscoe?” Whelan asked.
“From an island off an unnamed South American country.”
“How do you know that, Roscoe?”
“I’m proud to say I was with them, Harry.”
“But you won’t identify that country?”
“I don’t think I’d better at this time, Harry.”
“But you are telling the millions of Wolf News watchers that these two former officers—”
“Retired officers, Harry.”
“All right, Roscoe, old buddy, ‘retired’ officers. These two retired officers invaded an unnamed South American country—”
“‘Invaded,’ Harry, implies boots on the ground. We were on the ground twelve minutes and twenty-two seconds. You really can’t call that an invasion, can you?”
“—and stole this super-secret Russian airplane—”
“I think that they like to think they ‘took possession of it,’ Harry.”
“And now the CIA is going to pay them one hundred and twenty-five million dollars?”
“That’s what Franklin Lammelle told me earlier today.”
“We’ve heard that General Allan Naylor is aboard that airplane. True?”
“As soon as they reached American soil, they turned it over to the military. I don’t really know what happened after that, but I can guess.”
“Please guess, Roscoe, for the millions of Wolf News viewers around the globe watching this exclusively on Wolf News.”
“I would guess that General Naylor decided the Tu-934A belonged in Washington, and that since Colonel Torine and Colonel Castillo were the only ones who knew how to fly it . . .”
“Well, that makes sense,” Whelan said. “Oh, look, here it comes! Get a shot of that!”
The monitor showed the Tu-934A taxiing to where Whelan and Danton were standing. Then the aircraft turned around, the engines died, and the ramp started to slowly open.
A siren was heard, and then an ambulance appeared on the screen.
“An ambulance!” C. Harry Whelan said. “Looks like someone on the T-O—whatever you said . . .”
“Tu-934A, Harry. Yes, I would say that the appearance of an ambulance would suggest there’s someone in need of medical attention.”
/>
Two men in white coats got out of the ambulance and ran up the ramp. Moments later, they came out carrying an unconscious man on a stretcher. Lester Bradley walked beside them.
“Who’s that, Roscoe?” Whelan asked.
“I have no idea,” Danton said. “I don’t speak Russian and he doesn’t speak English.”
“Who the fuck was that on the stretcher?” the President of the United States inquired.
“The guy on the stretcher, Mr. President, was General Yakov Sirinov,” DCI Powell said.
“What happened to him, Roscoe?”