The Outlaws Read online

  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.

  Inasmuch as Castillo thought it would be unwise to return Corporal Bradley to his embassy duties—where his gunnery sergeant would naturally be curious to learn under what circumstances the Yukon had been torched—he was impressed into the OOA on the spot.

  The day that OOA ceased to exist, the President of the United States had asked Castillo, “Is there anything else I can do for you before you and your people start vanishing from the face of the earth?”

  Castillo told him there were three things. First was that Corporal Bradley be promoted to gunnery sergeant before being honorably discharged “for the good of the service.”

  The second thing Castillo had asked of the President was that Colonel Berezovsky and Lieutenant Colonel Alekseeva be taken off the Interpol warrants outstanding for them. When they had disappeared from their posts in Berlin and Copenhagen with the obvious intention of defecting, the Russian government had said their motive had been to escape arrest and punishment for embezzlement.

  The third thing Castillo asked was that he and everybody connected with him and OOA be taken off the FBI’s “locate but do not detain” list.

  The President had granted all three requests: “You have my word.”

  The first thing Castillo thought when he heard that the President had dropped dead was that his word had died with him. The chances that President Clendennen—especially with Director of National Intelligence Montvale whispering in his ear—would honor his predecessor’s promises ranged from zero to zilch.

  The retirements of Major H. Richard Miller, Jr., Avn, USA, who had been the OOA’s chief of staff, and First Lieutenant Edmund “Peg-Leg” Lorimer, MI, USA, had posed no problem, although neither had twenty years of service.

  Miller, a United States Military Academy classmate of Castillo’s, had suffered grievous damage to his leg when his helicopter had been shot down in Afghanistan. Lorimer had lost a leg to an improvised explosive device in the same country. They would receive pensions for the rest of their lives.

  As Castillo & Co. had begun to fulfill their part of the agreement with POTUS—disappearing from the face of the earth—they had made their way to Las Vegas, where they were the guests of Aloysius Francis Casey—president, chief executive officer, and chairman of the board of the AFC Corporation.

  Castillo had first met Casey when Castillo had been a second lieutenant, freshly returned from the First Desert War working as aide-de-camp to just-promoted Brigadier General Bruce J. McNab at Fort Bragg when Casey showed up there. Casey announced that he had been the communications sergeant on a Special Forces A-Team in the Vietnam War and, further, told McNab and his aide-de-camp that he had done well after being discharged. Not only had Casey earned a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but he had started up—and still owned more than ninety percent of—the AFC Corporation, which had become the world’s leading developer and manufacturer of data transmission and encryption systems.

  Aloysius Casey, Second Lieutenant Castillo had immediately seen, was not troubled with excessive modesty.

  Casey said that he attributed his great success to Special Forces—specifically what he had learned about self-reliance and that there was no such thing as impossible.

  And he said he had decided it was payback time. He was prepared to furnish Delta Force, free of charge, with his state-of-the-art communications and encryption equipment.

  “It’s three, four years ahead of anything anybody else has,” Casey had announced. McNab had sent Castillo with Casey to Las Vegas—on AFC’s Learjet—that same day to select what AFC equipment Delta Force could use immediately, and to brainstorm with Casey and his senior engineers on what advanced commo equipment Delta could use if somebody waved a magic wand and created it for them.

  The latter devices had begun to arrive at Delta Force’s stockade at Fort Bragg about two months later.

  When OOA had been set up, Castillo had naturally turned to Casey—who now called him “Charley” rather than, as he had at first, “The Boy Wonder”—for communications and cryptographic equipment, and Casey had happily produced it.

  When Charley had bought the Gulfstream, Casey had seemed a little annoyed that Charley had asked if Casey would equip it with the same equipment. Charley at the time had thought that maybe he had squeezed the golden goose a little too hard and vowed he would not be so greedy the next time.

  When they got the Gulfstream back from the AFC hangar at Las Vegas’s McCarran International Airport, it had not only the latest communications and encryption equipment installed, but an entirely new avionics configuration.

  “I figured you needed it more than Boeing,” Casey said.

  His annoyance with Charley was because Castillo had been reluctant to ask for his support.

  “For Christ’s sake, Charley, you should have known better,” Casey said.

  The Gulfstream was again in Las Vegas, not for the installation of equipment, but to get it out of sight until a decision could be made about what to do with it.

  Charley had flown the Gulfstream to Las Vegas the same day he had received his last order from the President: “You will go someplace where no one can find you, and you will not surface until your retirement parade. And after your retirement, I hope that you will fall off the face of the earth and no one will ever see you or hear from you again. Understood?”

  Charley had said, “Yes, sir,” and walked out of the room. After a quick stop at Baltimore/Washington International to pick up Major Dick Miller, he had flown to Las Vegas with newly promoted (verbal order, POTUS) and about to be discharged Gunnery Sergeant Lester Bradley and Mr. and Mrs. Jack Britton.

  Immediately on arrival, Castillo had learned that providing equipment to Special Operations people free of charge had not been Aloysius Casey’s only contribution to the national security of the nation.

  Limousines met them at McCarran, and drove them to the Venetian Hotel and Casino, where they were shown to a private elevator which carried them to a duplex penthouse.

  At the foot of a curving glass-stepped staircase which led to the lower floor, Castillo saw Dmitri Berezovsky—now equipped with a bona fide Uruguayan passport in the name of Tom Barlow—Sergeant Major Jack Davidson, Aloysius Francis Casey, and about a half-dozen men Castillo could not remember having seen before sitting on a circular couch that appeared to be upholstered with gold lamé.

  Casey waved him down. Max, Castillo’s hundred-plus-pound Bouvier des Flandres, immediately accepted the invitation, flew down the stairs four at a time, barked hello
at the people he knew, and then began to help himself from one of the trays of hors d’oeuvres.

  Not understanding what was going on, Castillo had gone down the stairs slowly. As he did, he realized that he did in fact recognize a few of the men. One of them was a legendary character who owned four—Maybe five?—of the more glitzy Las Vegas hotels.

  But not this one, came a flash from Castillo’s memory bank.

  Another was a well-known, perhaps even famous, investment banker. And another had made an enormous fortune in data processing. Castillo had remembered him because he was a Naval Academy graduate.

  “Everybody pay attention,” Casey had said, laughing. “You don’t often get a chance to see Charley with a baffled look on his face.”

  “Okay, Aloysius, you have pulled my chain. What the hell is going on around here?”

  “Colonel,” the Naval Academy graduate said with a distinctive Southern accent, “what we are is a group of people who realize there are a number of things that the intelligence community doesn’t do well, doesn’t want to do, or for one reason or another can’t do. We try to help, and we’ve got the assets—not only cash—to do so. We’ve been doing this for some time. And we’re all agreed that now that you and your OOA associates are—how do I put this?—no longer gainfully employed—”

  “How did you hear about that?” Castillo interrupted.

  The Naval Academy graduate ignored the question.

  “—you might want to come work for us.”

  “You’ve got the wrong guy,” Castillo said simply. “The intel community hates me, and that’s a nice way of describing it.”

  “Well, telling the DCI that his agency ‘is a few very good people trying to stay afloat in a sea of left-wing bureaucrats’ may not have been the best way to charm the director, even if I happen to know he agrees with you.”

  “Colonel,” the man who owned the glitzy hotels said, “this is our proposal, in a few words: You keep your people together, keep them doing what they do so well, and on our side we’ll decide how to get the information to where it will do the most good, and in a manner that will not rub the nose of the intelligence community in their own incompetence.” He paused. “And the pay’s pretty good.”

  “Right off the top of my head, no,” Castillo said. “My orders from the President are—”

  “To go someplace where no one can find you,” the investment banker interrupted him, “until your retirement parade. And after that fall off the face of the earth. Something like that?”

  How could he—they—possibly know about that?

  Nobody had been in that room except the secretaries of State and Defense and the director of the CIA—the President had told Montvale to take a walk until he got his temper under control.

  Does that mean these people have an in with any of them?

  Or with all of them?

  Of course it does.

  Jesus H. Christ!

  “I think we would have all been disappointed, Colonel,” the Naval Academy graduate said, “if, right off the top of your head, you had jumped at the proposition. So how about this? Think it over. Talk to the others. In the meantime, stay here—no one can find you here, I can personally guarantee that—until your retirement parade. And then, after you fall off the face of the earth, call Aloysius from wherever that finds you, and tell him what you’ve all decided.”

  In compliance with his orders, Castillo had stayed out of sight at the Venetian—it could not be called a hardship; Sweaty had been with him, and there is no finer room service in the world than that offered by the Venetian—until very early in the morning of his retirement parade.

  Then he and Dick Miller had flown Sergeant Major Jack Davidson and CWO5 Colin Leverette in the Gulfstream to Fort Rucker. After some initial difficulty, they had been given permission to land. They had changed into Class A uniforms in the plane.

  There was some discussion among them about the wisdom under the circumstances of removing from their uniforms those items of insignia and qualification which suggested they had some connection with Special Operations. But that had been resolved by Mr. Leverette.

  “Fuck ’em,” Uncle Remus said. “This is the last time we’re going to wear the suit. Let’s wear it all!”

  There was a sea of red general officers’ personal flags on the reviewing stand. The four-star flag of General Allan Naylor, the Central Command commander, stood in the center of them, beside the three-star flag of Lieutenant General Bruce J. McNab, who commanded the Special Operations Command. There were too many two- and one-star flags to be counted.

  Among the two-star flags were those of Dick’s father, Major General Richard H. Miller, Sr. (Retired), and Major General Harold F. Wilson (Retired). General Wilson, as a young officer during the Vietnam War, had been the co-pilot of WOJG Jorge Alejandro Castillo—right up until Castillo, Charley’s father, had booted Wilson out of the Huey that would be shot down by enemy fire, ending Castillo’s life and finding him posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

  The band played as it marched onto the parade ground before post headquarters, and those persons to be decorated marched front and center and were decorated and the retirement orders were read and the band played again and the troops passed in review.

  And that was it.

  They had been retired from the Army.

  The four of them got into a waiting Dodge Caravan and were driven back to Cairns Field.

  Then, as Castillo was doing the walk-around and as Miller was returning from filing their flight plan, two Army Chevrolet sedans and two Army Dodge Caravans drove onto the tarmac in front of Base Operations.

  General Allan Naylor got out of one of the sedans and Lieutenant General McNab got out of the other. Major General (Retired) Miller got out of one of the Caravans, and Major General (Retired) Wilson, and his grandson, Randolph Richardson III, got out of the other.

  It was an awkward moment all around.

  “I wanted to say goodbye and good luck,” General Naylor said.

  There was a chorus of “Thank you, sir.”

  “Well, I suppose if you castrate too many bulls,” General McNab said, “you’re going to get gored, sooner or later. Don’t let the doorknob hit you in the ass on your way out.”

  General Naylor looked askance at General McNab.

  General Miller took his son to one side for a private word.

  General Wilson took his grandson and Castillo to one side for a private word. General Wilson had known all along that Castillo was the natural father of his grandson. The boy and Castillo had learned of their real relationship only recently.

  “Sir,” Randolph Richardson III asked, “where are you going?”

  “Randy, I just don’t know.”

  “Am I ever going to see you again?”

  It took Castillo a moment to get rid of the lump in his throat.

  “Absolutely, positively, and soon,” he managed to say.

  Randy put out his hand.

  Castillo shook it.

  Fuck it!

  He embraced his son, felt his son hug him back, and then let him go.

  He wanted to say something else but this time the lump in his throat wouldn’t go away.

  “Your mother’s waiting lunch for us, Randy,” General Wilson said, and led the boy back toward the Caravan.

  Gulfstream 379 broke ground about four minutes later. It flew to Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans, where it took on fuel and went through Customs and Immigration procedures, and then flew to the seaside resort city of Cancún on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.

  Colonel Jake Torine and Captain Dick Sparkman, who had been retired that day from the USAF with considerably less panoply—each had received a FedEx package containing their retirement orders and their Distinguished Service Medals—were already there. Gunnery Sergeant Lester Bradley, USMC, had received a similar package from the Department of the Navy.

  The Gulfstream refueled, Torine and Sparkman took off for Las Vegas,
where the plane came to be parked in one of the AFC hangars until a decision about its future could be reached.

  At the moment, Gulfstream 379 was leased “dry” from Gossinger Consultants, a wholly owned subsidiary of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., of Fulda, Germany, which had bought the aircraft from Lopez Fruit and Vegetables Mexico, a wholly owned subsidiary of Castillo Agriculture, Inc., of San Antonio, Texas, whose president and chief executive officer was Fernando Lopez, and whose corporate officers included one Carlos Castillo.

  That status would have to be changed, Two-Gun Yung had announced, no matter what decision was reached about the offer of “those people” in Las Vegas.

  At Cancún Airport International several hours later, CWO5 Leverette (Retired) and Sergeant Major Davidson (Retired) boarded a Mexicana flight to Mexico City. There, Leverette, now traveling on a Honduran passport under another name, would board a Varig flight to São Paulo, Brazil, and Davidson, traveling under his own name on an Israeli passport, would board a Mexicana flight bound for Lima, Peru.

  Castillo had watched the takeoff of the Mexicana flight to Mexico City from the tarmac on the cargo side of the Cancún airfield. Then he had climbed into a Peruaire 767 cargo plane.

  The 767 had flown up that morning from Santiago, Chile, with a mixed cargo of Chilean seafood and Argentine beef, citrus fruits and vegetables. The food was destined for Cancún Provisions, Ltda., and would ultimately end in the kitchen of The Grand Cozumel Beach and Golf Resort, and in the galleys of cruise ships which called at Cancún.

  PeruaireCargo, Cancún Provisions, Ltda., The Grand Cozumel Beach and Golf Resort, and at least four of the cruise ships were owned—through a maze of dummy corporations, genuine corporations, and other entities at least twice as obfuscatory as the ownership of Gulfstream 379—by a man named Aleksandr Pevsner.

  In the late Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Pevsner had been simultaneously a colonel in the Soviet Air Force and a colonel in the KGB, responsible for the security of Aeroflot worldwide.