The Outlaws (Presidential Agent 6)

“I make it unanimously opposed,” Yung said. “OOA lives!”

“OOA’s dead,” Castillo said. “The question now is, what do we do with the corpse?”

Delchamps said, “Sweaty, Dmitri—excuse me, Tom—and Alfredo didn’t vote.”

“I didn’t think I had the right,” Alfredo Munz, a stocky blond man in his forties, said.

Munz, at the time of Masterson’s kidnapping, had been an Argentine Army colonel in command of SIDE, an organization combining the Argentine versions of the FBI and CIA. Embarrassed by the incident and needing a scapegoat, the interior ministry had, as a disgusted Charley Castillo had put it, “thrown Munz under the bus.” Munz had been relieved of his command of SIDE and forced to retire. Castillo had immediately put him on the OOA payroll.

“Don’t be silly,” Castillo said. “You took a bullet for us. You’re as much a part of us as anyone else.”

Munz had been wounded during the Estancia Shangri-La operation.

“Hear, hear,” Yung said.

“I didn’t say the Argentine Kraut didn’t have every right to vote,” Delchamps said. “I simply stated that he, Sweaty, and Tom didn’t vote.”

“If I have a vote,” Sweaty said, “I will vote however my Carlos votes.”

“Sweaty,” also in tennis whites, sat next to Castillo. She was a tall, dark-red-haired, stunningly beautiful woman, who had been christened Svetlana. Once associated with this group of Americans, “Svetlana” had quickly morphed to “Svet” then to “Sweaty.”

Susanna’s eyebrows rose in contempt, or perhaps contemptuous disbelief. In her long professional career, she had known many intelligence officers, and just about the best one she had ever encountered was Castillo.

The most incredibly stupid thing any spook had ever done was become genuinely emotionally involved with an enemy intelligence officer. Within twenty-four hours of Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Castillo having laid eyes on Lieutenant Colonel Svetlana Alekseeva of the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki—the SVR, the Russian Service for the Protection of the Constitutional System, renamed from “KGB”—on a Vienna-bound railroad train in Germany, she had walked out of his bedroom in a safe house outside Buenos Aires wearing his bathrobe and a smug smile, and calling him “my Carlos.”

Dr. Britton smiled fondly at Sweaty when she referred to Castillo now as “my Carlos.” She thought it was sweet. Sandra Britton knew there really was such a thing as Love at First Sight. She had married her husband two weeks after she had met him and now could not imagine life without him.

Their meeting had occurred shortly after midnight eight years before on North Broad Street in Philly when Jack had appeared out of nowhere to foil a miscreant bent on relieving her of her purse, watch, jewelry—and very possibly her virtue. In the process, the miscreant had suffered a broken arm, a dislocated shoulder, testicular trauma, and three lost teeth.

Britton had then firmly attached the miscreant to a fire hydrant with plastic handcuffs, loaded the nearly hysterical Dr. Britton in her car, and set off to find a pay telephone.

There were not many working pay telephones in that section of Philadelphia at that hour, and to call the police it had been necessary to go to Dr. Britton’s apartment.

After Britton had called Police Emergency to report that the victim of an assault by unknown parties could be found at North Broad and Cecil B. Moore Avenue hugging a fire hydrant, one

thing had led to another. Sandra made Jack breakfast the next morning, and they were married two weeks later.

“I don’t think I have a vote,” Tom Barlow said. “But if I do, I’ll go along with however Sweaty’s Carlos votes.”

Barlow, a trim man of about Castillo’s age and build, whose hair was nearly blond, and who bore a familial resemblance to Sweaty—he was in fact her brother—until very recently had been Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky, the SVR rezident in Berlin.

Castillo and Sweaty gave Barlow the finger.

“I would say the motion has been defeated,” Yung said. “I didn’t see any hands. And I have the proxies of Jake, Peg-Leg, the Gunnery Sergeant, Sparky, and Miller. They all like the idea of keeping OOA going.”

Jake and Sparky were, respectively, Colonel Jacob S. Torine, USAF (Retired), and former Captain Richard Sparkman, USAF. Torine had been in on OOA since the beginning, when he had flown a Globemaster to Argentina to bring home the body of Jack the Stack Masterson, and his family. Torine had been quietly retired with all the other military members of OOA who had more than twenty years’ service when OOA had shut down.

Sparkman, who on active duty had served under Torine on a number of black missions of the Air Force Special Operations Command, had been flying Washington political VIPs around in a Gulfstream and hating it when he heard (a) of OOA and (b) that Colonel Torine was involved. He made his way through the maze designed to keep OOA hidden in the bushes, found Torine, and volunteered to do whatever was asked, in whatever Torine was involved.

He had been accepted as much for having gotten through the maze as for being able to fill the near-desperate need OOA had for another pilot who (a) knew how to keep his mouth shut and (b) had a lot of Gulfstream time as pilot in command.

When OOA was shut down, Sparky didn’t have the option of retiring, because he didn’t have enough time in the service. He also realized that he really couldn’t go back to the Air Force after having been tainted by his association with OOA. He knew the rest of his career in the Air Force would have been something along the lines of Assistant Procurement Officer, Hand-Held Fire-Extinguishing Devices.

He had resigned. There was an unspoken agreement that Sparky would go on the payroll as a Gulfstream pilot, details to be worked out later, presuming everybody was still out of jail.

Gunnery Sergeant Lester Bradley was in a similar situation. Another gunny, one in charge of the Marine guard detachment at the American embassy in Buenos Aires, had sent then-corporal Lester Bradley—a slight, five-foot-three, twenty-year-old Marine who could be spared most easily from more important duties—to drive an embassy GMC Yukon XL carrying two barrels of aviation fuel across the border to Uruguay.

Thirty-six hours later, the Yukon had been torched with a thermite grenade. Bradley, who had been left to “watch” the Yukon, had taken out—with head-shots firing offhand from a hundred meters—two mercenaries who had just killed Jean-Paul Lorimer, Ph.D., and then started shooting their Kalashnikovs at Castillo.