“Thanks,” Mike added. “That works. I think we’re done until I see what’s up. But I’ve got the feeling they need, or want, more than me. Make sure the teams are up and ready to go.”
“Am I going?” Vanner asked. “I mean on the op?”
“Don’t know until we know what it is,” Mike said.
“Well, if I do,” Vanner added. “Can I get a gun this time?”
“Mike, one more thing,” Nielson said after the others had left the dinner table.
“Yah?” Mike asked, contemplating how much he was not looking forward to this trip.
“I finally tracked down a HUMINT guy,” the colonel said. “Sorry it took so long.”
Mike pulled his mind back from DC for a second and considered that. Earlier in the year, as it became obvious that he had to think about more than just the Chechen threat, he’d asked Nielson to start looking around for a “human intelligence” — HUMINT — operator. Right now, other than picking a few things up in the village and using Katya for insertions, they really didn’t have a HUMINT side at all. And they needed one. They should have built a network among the Chechens long before this; the fact that they didn’t have one had been eating at him. And, frankly, he’d been willing to think “big” on the HUMINT side, depending on money. So far he, personally, had been in ops ranging from the US to Siberia and most places in between. He wasn’t sure he could create an “intelligence agency”, but he was willing to give it a very serious shot.
“Go,” Mike replied.
“Well, I thought it would be easy,” Nielson said, grimacing. “Did you know that during the Clinton Administration the HUMINT side in the Agency got cut by right on the order of 90%?”
“No,” Mike said with a grimace. “But it doesn’t surprise me. Al Gore’s ‘reinventing government.’ They cut a bunch of government employees, but they all seemed to come out of DOD and intel. I swear, every damned day I find another reason to lay 9/11 at Clinton and his ilk’s feet.”
“Anyway, with that many people on the street I figured I could find somebody good pretty quick,” Nielson said. “Until recently, though, no such luck. Most of them have put up the cloak and dagger and weren’t willing to go out in the cold again for any money. And some that were… well let’s just say that some of the people that got cut needed to be.”
“Nature of any bureaucracy,” Mike replied with a grin. “Let’s not get big enough to be called a bureaucracy.”
“But I finally found one guy,” Nielson said. “Or, rather, he found me. Only name I’ve got is Jay. At least, that’s the name that anybody knows. First I got sent an encryption code for e-mail then an e-mail out of the blue. He had heard I was looking, is sort of interested and had checked us out before calling.”
“Wonder what he found out?” Mike asked.
“I dunno,” the colonel said with a grimace. “He’s… pretty close to the vest.”
“Go figure.”
“I checked him out, though, as well,” Nielson continued. “As well as I could. As I said, maybe somewhere in Langley there’s a file that has his real name on it. But he’s a known player under ‘Jay.’ Very well known.”
“That could be bad,” Mike said with a frown.
“If he ever used the same name twice, except with higher, it might be,” Nielson admitted. “But the guys I contacted that knew him, or knew of him… Well, among other things, I couldn’t get a fixed description. He was, variously, blonde to black hair, every eye color you could name, pudgy to skinny as a rail, no chin, big chin… You get the picture. And these are people who have met him in person. Ever heard about the CIA switching around the men’s rooms and women’s rooms sign in the KGB headquarters?”
“No, but it sounds like a pretty good laugh,” Mike said, smiling.
“Yeah, well, he had a piece of that,” the colonel said, shaking his head. “In the intel community, he’s what spec-ops would think of as a Son-Tay Raider.”
The Son-Tay raid was one of the most magnificent failures in history. It was a large-scale raid, very late in the Vietnam War, intended to recapture a large number of prisoners of war from the North Vietnamese. It had been meticulously planned, expertly personneled and perfectly performed. The only problem being that when the raiders reached the objective, the prisoners had already been moved. They, nonetheless, slaughtered the guards with precision and “stacked them up like cord-wood.”
Son-Tay Raiders were legends in the spec-ops community. The failure had been at a much higher pay-grade than anyone on the op. They had performed a difficult mission flawlessly.
“That good,” Mike said. “Okay, if the mountain’s not going to come to Mohammed… ”
“He said he can meet anywhere in the DC area with at least a day’s notice,” Nielson said, raising an eyebrow.
“Get ahold of him,” Mike replied. “Arrange a meet.”
“Will do,” Nielson said, standing up. “If that is all, Kildar? I have a previously scheduled meeting with Flopsy.”
“Get out of here you old goat,” Mike replied with a grin. “But keep me updated.”
“Will do.”
“Captain Hardesty,” Mike said, walking up to the door of the Gulfstream.
“Mr. Jenkins,” the pilot said. “I swore the last trip was going to be the last, you know.”
Mike regularly chartered with Chatham Aviation, a small but select group out of England. And about half the time there were… issues. The first time he’d flown with Hardesty, a former RAF Tornado pilot, he had had to change names, twice, turned up with quite a bit of blood on him at one point and casually instructed the pilot, during a trip to Paris, France, that he might want to “deploy the plane a bit away from Paris, probably southeast given the winds… ” a day before it was revealed a nuclear weapon had almost gone off in the city.
But the last trip had really beat all. That time “Mr. Jenkins” had requested a “somewhat larger jet… about enough to handle a company of infantry… ” and had turned up with forty heavily armed retainers and a string of what could only be described as “ladies of the evening” in tow. The armaments, ranging from pistols to rocket launchers, had been casually but rapidly stowed in the cargo compartment and the group boarded somewhat hastily. As if, for example, they were being chased. And on take-off Hardesty had been pretty sure he’d caught a tracer flying by his windscreen. He’d seen a few in his time. But whoever was, possibly, shooting was pretty bad because they’d managed to miss an entire 737.
However, things had gone from bad to worse during a petrol stop in England. The English government had grounded his aircraft pending “inspection”, an inspection he was not looking forward to given the contents of the cargo hold, then several very senior members of the British government had boarded. Whatever was going on, however, had been resolved and they eventually got on their way. He’d sweated American customs but, as it turned out, the “inspection” on arrival in the US had been less than cursory. Given that he had a hold full of weapons and ammunition, what was a clearly a tactical team, a bunch of hookers and none of them had proper visas… Obviously the BCIS was slipping.