'Jesus, Admiral, why do you think we've been fighting there so long? Why do you think nobody helps pilots who get shot down? They're not like us over there. That's something we've never understood. Anyway, if you put Marines on the beach, nobody's going to welcome them. Forget racing up this road, sir. I've been there. It ain't much of a road, not even as good as it looks on these pictures. Drop a few trees and it's closed.' Kelly looked up. 'Has to be choppers.'
He could see the news was not welcome, and it wasn't hard to understand why. This part of the country was dotted with antiaircraft batteries. Getting a strike force in wasn't going to be easy. At least two of these men were pilots, and if a ground assault had looked promising to them, then the triple-A problem must have been worse than Kelly appreciated.
'We can suppress the flak,' Maxwell thought.
'You're not talking about -52s again, are you?' Greer asked.
'Newport News goes back on the gunline in a few weeks. John, ever see her shoot?'
Kelly nodded. 'Sure did. She supported us twice when we were working close to the coast. It's impressive what those eight-inchers can do. Sir, the problem is, how many things do you need to go right for the mission to succeed? The more complicated things get, the easier it is for things to go wrong, and even one thing can be real complicated.' Kelly leaned back on the couch, and reminded himself that what he had just said wasn't only for the admirals to consider.
'Dutch, we have a meeting in five minutes,' Podulski said reluctantly. This meeting had not been a successful one, he thought. Greer and Maxwell weren't so sure of that. They had learned a few things. That counted for something.
'Can I ask why you're keeping this so tight?' Kelly asked.
'You guessed it before.' Maxwell looked over at the junior flag officer and nodded.
'The Song Tay job was compromised,' Greer said. 'We don't know how, but we found out later through one of our sources that they knew - at least suspected - something was coming. They expected it later, and we ended up hitting the place right after they evacuated the prisoners, but before they had their ambush set up. Good luck, bad luck. They didn't expect Operation kingpin for another month.'
'Dear God,' Kelly breathed. 'Somebody over here deliberately betrayed them?'
'Welcome to the real world of intelligence operations, Chief,' Greer said with a grim smile.
'But why?'
'If I ever meet the gentleman, I will be sure to ask.' Greer looked at the others. 'That's a good hook for us to use. Check the records of the operation, real low-key like?'
'Where are they?'
'Eglin Air Force base, where the kingpin people trained.'
'Whom do we send?' Podulski asked.
Kelly could feel the eyes turn in his direction. 'Gentlemen, I was just a chief, remember?'
'Mr Kelly, where's your car parked?'
'In the city, sir. I took the bus over here.'
'Come with me. There's a shuttle bus you can take back later.'
They walked out of the building in silence. Greer's car, a Mercury, was parked in a visitor slot by the river entrance. He waved for Kelly to get in and headed towards the George Washington Parkway.
'Dutch pulled your package. I got to read it. I'm impressed, son.' What Greer didn't say was that on his battery of enlistment tests, Kelly had scored an average of 147 on three separately formatted IQ tests. 'Every commander you had sang your praises.'
'I worked for some good ones, sir.'
'So it appears, and three of them tried to get you into OCS, but Dutch asked you about that. I also want to know why you didn't take the college scholarship.'
'I was tired of schools... And the scholarship was for swimming. Admiral.'
'That's a big deal at Indiana, I know, but your marks were plenty good enough to get an academic scholarship. You attended a pretty nice prep school -'
'That was a scholarship, too.' Kelly shrugged. 'Nobody in my family ever went to college. Dad served a hitch in the Navy during the war. I guess it just seemed like something to do.' That it had been a major disappointment to his father was something he'd never told anyone.
Greer pondered that. It still didn't answer things. 'The last ship I commanded was a submarine, Daniel Webster. My chief of the boat, senior chief sonarman, the guy had a doctorate in physics. Good man, knew his job better then I knew mine, but not a leader, shied away from it some. You didn't, Kelly. You tried to, but you didn't.'
'Look, sir, when you're out there and things happen, somebody has to get it done.'
'Not everybody sees things that way. Kelly, there's two kinds of people in the world, the ones who need to be told and the ones who figure it out all by themselves,' Greer pronounced.
The highway sign said something that Kelly didn't catch, but it wasn't anything about CIA. He didn't tumble to it until he saw the oversized guardhouse.
'Did you ever interact with Agency people while you were over there?'
Kelly nodded. 'Some. We were - well, you know about it, Project phoenix, right? We were part of that, a small part.'
'What did you think of them?'
'Two or three of them were pretty good. The rest - you want it straight?'
'That's exactly what I want,' Greer assured him.
'The rest are probably real good mixing martinis, shaken not stirred,' Kelly said evenly. That earned him a rueful laugh.
'Yeah, people here do like to watch the movies!' Greer found his parking place and popped his door open. 'Come with me, Chief.' The out-of-uniform admiral led Kelly in the front door and got him a special visitor's pass, the kind that required an escort.
For his part, Kelly felt like a tourist in a strange and foreign land. The very normality of the building gave it a sinister edge. Though an ordinary, and rather new, government office building, CIA headquarters had some sort of aura. It wasn't like the real world somehow. Greer caught the look and chuckled, leading Kelly to an elevator, then to his sixth-floor office. Only when they were behind the closed wooden door did he speak.
'How's your schedule for the next week?'
'Flexible. I don't have anything tying me down,' Kelly answered cautiously.
James Greer nodded soberly. 'Dutch told me about that, too. I'm very sorry, Chief, but my job right now concerns twenty good men who probably won't see their families again unless we do something.' He reached into his desk drawer.
'Sir, I'm real confused right now.'
'Well, we can do it hard or easy. The hard way is that Dutch makes a phone call and you get recalled to active duty,' Greer said sternly. The easy way is, you come to work for me as a civilian consultant. We pay you a per-diem that's a whole lot more than chief's pay.'
'Doing what?'
'You fly down to Eglin Air Force Base, via New Orleans and Avis, I suppose. This' - Greer tossed a billfold-like ID in Kelly's lap - 'gives you access to their records. I want you to go over the operations plans as a model for what we want to do.' Kelly looked at the photo-?. It even had his old Navy photograph, which showed only his head, as in a passport.
'Wait a minute, sir. I am not qualified -'
'As a matter of fact I think you are, but from the outside it will look like you're not. No, you're just a very junior consultant gathering information for a low-level report that nobody important will ever read. Half the money we spend in this damned agency goes out the door that way, in case nobody ever told you,' Greer said, his irritation with the Agency giving flight to mild exaggeration. That's how routine and pointless we want it to look.'
'Are you really serious about this?'
'Chief, Dutch Maxwell is willing to sacrifice his career for those men. So am I. If there's a way to get them out-'
'What about the peace talks?'
How do I explain that to this kid? Greer asked himself. 'Colonel Zacharias is officially dead. The other side said so, even published a photo of a body. Somebody went to visit his wife, along with the base chaplain and another Air Force wife to make things easier. Then they gave her a week to vacate the official quarters, just to make things official,' Greer added. 'He's officially dead. I've had some very careful talks with some people, and we' - this part came very hard - 'our country will not screw up the peace talks over something like this. The photo we have, enhancement and all, isn't good enough for a court of law, and that's the standard that is being used. That's a standard of proof that we can't possibly meet, and the people who made the decision know it. They don't want the peace talks sidetracked, and if the lives of twenty more men are necessary to end the goddamned war, then that's what it takes. Those men are being written off.'