Austen was a legend across all branches of the service. He had the record everyone aspired to. He was the hellraiser gone straight. Or, to use his own language, the Fallen Angel resurrected to stand at the right hand of the Lord; the Lord in this case being the president of the United States.
An honor graduate from the Air Force Academy class of 1967, Austen was trained as a jet pilot and sent to Vietnam, where he flew over 120 missions at the controls of an F-4 Phantom and shot down nine North Vietnamese MiGs. He came out of the war an ace, and a major before the age of thirty.
But there were chinks in his armor. When he wasn’t flying, he was carousing. Night after night, he led his band of merry fliers through Saigon’s depraved fleshpots, drinking to abandon and screwing everything in sight. They called themselves Austen’s Rangers, in honor of the marauding World War II force of similar name. There were rumors of drug use, too, of rape, and on one occasion, of murder. But the rumors were hushed up. No one wanted to dent, tarnish, or in any way damage the halo of a bona fide hero.
Then came 1979 and the Iranian hostage crisis. Austen was a natural for the team put together by Colonel Charlie Beckwith. An instructor and test pilot after the war, he transitioned to the massive Hercules C-130 transports that would ferry the commandos into the Iranian desert. For once, his luck didn’t hold. Horrifically burned in the accident that took eight servicemen’s lives, he came out of the desert a changed man. He denied retirement and fought himself back to health and a position as director of the newly created Special Operations Command situated at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. He attributed his survival to a miracle and gave over his life to Jesus Christ.
Instead of carousing, Austen ran Bible study and prayer meetings out of his home. Every Tuesday and Friday night, the Austen house on Orange Lane was filled with sinners, soldiers, and any officer seeking a more rapid path to promotion and glory. Austen quickly built a loyal-some said slavish-cadre of officers who spread out through the four branches of the service. They, too, called themselves Austen’s Rangers, but this time they preached the word of Christ and the ultra-hawkish political views of their founder and namesake. America was the city on the hill, the beacon of democracy for the entire world. And Israel was its closest ally, to be defended at all costs.
Austen’s rise was nothing short of meteoric. Full colonel at forty, brigadier general at forty-three, a second star coming before his forty-sixth birthday. He appeared alongside the nation’s most famous Evangelicals on Sunday morning television programs. He was called God’s warrior and Jesus’s pilot. He became the face of the religious right.
And then, his career seemed to stall. He never received a third star, or the divisional command that came with it. He stopped appearing on television. He took up residence in the Pentagon as head of a career morgue called the Defense Human Intelligence Agency, and all but fell off the face of the earth. But inside the armed forces, his presence was still felt. Hundreds of Austen’s Rangers had reached flag rank and were generals in the army and admirals in the navy. All were still devoted to John Austen.
It was then, Palumbo realized, that Austen must have started Division. He hadn’t fallen off the earth. To the contrary. He’d ascended to a more glorified place.
Palumbo drove another one hundred meters past the consulate. When he found an empty parking space, he told himself that fortune was smiling upon him. His fevered mind was anxious for any signs that he hadn’t risked his career and dismissed the needs of his wife and family for nothing. He grabbed the spot, then pulled his workbag onto his lap. In it were two cell phones, a Taser gun, and a cellular GSM intercept device disguised as a laptop computer. He activated the intercept device and tuned it to search frequencies for numbers beginning with a 455 prefix-the prefix assigned to phones issued by the United States embassy to its staff, both permanent and visiting. Fitting the earpiece, he jumped from conversation to conversation.
It hadn’t been difficult to track John Austen down. Like all good spies, Austen lived his cover. A major general and director of the Defense Human Intelligence Agency, his whereabouts were a matter of record at all times. A call from Palumbo’s office at the CIA to Austen’s office at the Pentagon had revealed that Austen was on a tour of Western European capitals in order to liaise with the military attachés under his supervision. Earlier in the week, he’d visited the embassy in Bern and made day trips to Paris and Rome. At two p.m. Friday afternoon, he was scheduled to visit the American consulate in Zurich. The fact that military attachés were not assigned to consulates seemed to have been overlooked by everyone other than Palumbo. He knew that Austen had come to Zurich for a specific reason, and that reason was the drone. He also knew that Austen was scheduled to fly back to the States early the next morning. It was what he planned to do with the intervening hours that terrified Palumbo.
He listened in on a half-dozen conversations before picking up a snatch of English.
“We’re just leaving. Everything ready?”
He recognized Austen’s smoke-cured Texan twang in an instant.
“Good to go, sir,” came the reply. “We’re sitting tight and waiting.”
“I’ll be there in half an hour.”
The call ended. Palumbo mapped the GPS coordinates of the intercepted transmission. A red dot superimposed on a street map of Zurich showed the location of the primary, or initiating, call to be Dufourstrasse 47, the address of the U.S. consulate. The secondary, or receiving, party was sited in Glattbrugg, a town contiguous to Zurich. More interesting than the address was its location. The dot sat one hundred meters from the southernmost boundary of Zurich Airport. Bingo.
He looked in the rearview mirror as a column of men filed out of the building and climbed into the waiting Mercedes. The visit from the director of the Defense Human Intelligence Agency had concluded. The cars pulled onto the street and sped past Palumbo. He knew better than to try to follow them through the congested traffic and one-way streets of an unfamiliar European city. Either he’d lose them or he’d be spotted. Setting the laptop on the passenger seat, he started the engine. He knew exactly where Austen was going. The problem wasn’t strategy, but execution. Palumbo had to get there first.
He drove aggressively, dodging trams, beating yellow lights, taking the car up to a hundred and eighty kilometers an hour on the autobahn. All the while, he listened in on a constant stream of calls made from Austen’s phone. Most were official and dealt with problems experienced by the attachés under his supervision. But several were more cryptic in nature. No names were spoken. The conversations ran to abbreviated bursts with mentions of “locking down the command center,” “moving to the main house,” and most frightening, “the guest’s right on time.”
Palumbo reached Glattbrugg in eighteen minutes. The address was located in a quiet residential district with plenty of trees and homes spaced twenty meters apart. He parked behind a line of modest automobiles. He’d hardly turned off the engine when he saw the black Mercedes with diplomatic plates approach in his rearview. As expected, it was alone. Austen had abandoned his cover. He was acting in his capacity as director of Division.
As the Mercedes passed, Palumbo got a glimpse of the man in the front seat. A wisp of graying hair, a noble profile, the skin of his face too tight, oddly shiny and furrowed.
The burn. Austen’s badge of honor.
Palumbo started the car and pulled in behind the Mercedes. It turned into a driveway a hundred meters up the street. Palumbo brought his car to a halt behind it, blocking Austen’s retreat. He was out in a flash, storming the driver’s door, pressing his badge against the window. The badge was a fake, but it bought him a few seconds.