When he entered the Gulfstream, General McNab saw that General Naylor was sitting in what he thought of as “first class,” the foremost section of the passenger compartment, which held two chairs and a table.
He marched down the aisle, came to attention, saluted, and barked, “Lieutenant General McNab, Bruce J., accepting General Naylor’s kind invitation.”
Naylor was aware that McNab was being a wiseass again — what custom dictated that he should have said was “General McNab reporting as ordered”—and that saying what he had was to remind Naylor that he did not have the authority to order McNab to do anything.
He decided to let it ride.
He returned the salute, waved McNab into the other chair at the table, and said, “Thank you for meeting me, General.”
And then when he saw Vic D’Alessandro coming down the aisle toward them, Naylor added, “I was hoping for a private word with you.”
“Well, if you insist, I’ll send Vic away,” McNab said. “But if you’ll let him stay, that’ll save me the trouble of having to tell him later everything that happened here. I tell my executive secretary everything. Otherwise, you’ll understand, he couldn’t do his job.”
Naylor thought: McNab is entirely capable of having D’Alessandro on his organization chart as his executive secretary. He would find that amusing.
Naylor extended his hand.
“How are you, Mr. D’Alessandro?”
“I’m fine, thank you, sir.”
“Getting right to the point,” Naylor said. “I’ve just come from the White House.”
“I know,” McNab interrupted. “Frank Lammelle told me what happened there and said you’d be stopping by. Would it save time if we cut to the chase?”
“Lammelle told you?” Naylor asked coldly.
“He called me on my trusty CaseyBerry,” McNab said. “No. Correction. He called Vic on Vic’s trusty CaseyBerry, and told Vic when he found me to tell me you’d just broken ground at Andrews and were headed here. When I got the message, I called Frank and he told me why you were coming to see me. So can we cut to the chase?”
The “CaseyBerry” to which McNab referred was a cellular telephone resembling the BlackBerry. Officially, its name was Casey XP-13, which stood for Experimental Prototype, Version 13. It had a number of characteristics the BlackBerry did not have.
BlackBerrys communicate with “cell tower” antennae scattered widely across the United States and other places on earth. The CaseyBerrys communicated with satellites scattered twenty-seven thousand miles above the earth. CaseyBerrys automatically encrypted and decrypted whatever they transmitted (voice or images) in a code that even the vast National Security Agency batteries of computers at Fort Meade could not break.
This was because the designer and builder of the NSA code-breaking systems, Aloysius F. Casey, Ph.D., also designed the CaseyBerry XP-series communication devices.
Shortly after the First Desert War, Dr. Casey, the chairman of the board of the AFC Corporation, flew to Fort Bragg, N.C., in one of the firm’s Learjets. He had an appointment arranged by his U.S. Senator with the then newly appointed deputy commander of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center, Brigadier General Bruce J. McNab. McNab had returned from the war with his third Distinguished Service Cross, a Brigadier General’s Star, and the young second lieutenant who had been his personal pilot and whom he had named to be his first aide-de-camp.
McNab, suspecting that Dr. Casey was trying to sell the Army something, ordered his young aide-de-camp, whose name was C. G. Castillo, to get rid of Casey.
“I don’t care how, Charley, just keep that politically well-connected salesman away from me.”
Thirty minutes after meeting Dr. Casey, and after taking him on a helicopter tour of Smoke Bomb Hill, Blood Alley, and other Fort Bragg — area tourist attractions in which he thought Casey might be interested, Lieutenant Castillo telephoned General McNab and told him he thought the general really ought to talk to Dr. Casey.
“You better be right about this, Charley,” McNab replied. “Okay, bring him to lunch.”
Castillo was right about Dr. Casey. At lunch, Casey told them that during the Vietnam War he had been the commo sergeant on a Special Forces “A” Team. He told them that when he came home to Boston, instead of going to work for the post office or getting a job as a bus driver, as “somebody like me” was expected to do, he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and applied for admittance.
“I told them I didn’t have a high school diploma, but I’d been in the American Amateur Relay League since I was ten, and that I hadn’t met anybody in the Army who knew as much about the propagation of radio waves as I did, and I wanted to learn more. So they asked me a couple of questions… Correction, they questioned me for a couple of hours, and decided to give me a chance.
“I wouldn’t have had the balls to ask MIT to take a chance on a poor Irish kid from South Boston if I hadn’t been a Green Beanie, so now it’s payback time.”
“I gather you made it at MIT?” General McNab asked, much more cordially now that he recognized Dr. Casey as a fellow Green Beanie.
“I got my bachelor’s and my high school diploma the first year, my master’s the next, and my Ph.D. in my third. I spent another year there teaching — that was payback I figured I owed — and while I was doing that, I started the company.”
“What do you mean, Dr. Casey, that it’s ‘payback time’?” Lieutenant Castillo asked.
“I told you once, Hotshot, to call me Aloysius,” Dr. Casey replied. “Don’t piss me off by making me tell you again.”
At this point, Dr. Casey, as was his wont, went off on a tangent.
“General, Hotshot here, who doesn’t look like he’s old enough to vote, is sporting wings and a Combat Infantry Badge. He’s got both?”
“And a Silver Star, two Purple Hearts, and a Distinguished Flying Cross,” General McNab replied.
“I’ll be goddamned,” Casey said, and then came back on course.
“What I mean is that I’m going to pay back what I got from Special Forces by giving you the best commo going.”
“That’s very kind of you,” McNab said. “But I’m sure you remember Special Forces gets its commo gear from the Signal Corps. Even if we had any money, and we don’t, we couldn’t buy—”
“You’re not listening. I didn’t say I wanted to sell you commo gear. I said I was going to give you commo gear. Payback is what I said.”
“That kind of equipment would entail a great deal of money,” McNab said.
“Yeah, well, my tax people tell me I can write it off as research and development. I’ll call what I give you prototypes or something.”
“And how soon were you planning to start doing something like this, Dr. Casey?”
“You can call me Aloysius, too,” Casey replied. “What I’d like to do is take Hotshot here out to Vegas this afternoon. I’ll show him what I have that I think Special Forces could use, and he could tell me what Special Forces needs and I’ll start working on that.”
“Why don’t you call me Bruce, Aloysius?” General McNab said.
“I couldn’t do that, for Christ’s sake, you’re a fucking general.”
“You have a point there, Aloysius,” General McNab said, and then turned to Lieutenant Castillo. “Go pack your bag, Charley, you’re going to Las Vegas.”
“And what did the director of Central Intelligence tell you, General, on your trusty CaseyBerry?” General Naylor asked.
General Naylor had seen CaseyBerrys function often enough to be familiar with their capabilities. He knew, too, that while Mr. Lammelle and General McNab, and McNab’s executive secretary, and Secretary Cohen — and others — had one, he didn’t.