"We don't know."
"Didn't you count it?"
"We were, er, forcibly ejected before we could take inventory."
"What the hell's the matter with you! No one throws out IRS agents!"
"A man attacked us. When we woke up, we had ended up on the roof. Koldstad was with us. It seems someone performed a partial frontal lobotomy on him, Mr. Brull. He's a basket case."
"Christ! You know what this means? Long-term rehab. That screwup will be a burden to the service to the day they dump his worthless ass into the cold ground, and there's fuck-all we can do about it."
"I know, sir."
"You secure that gold?"
"No, sir, we're afraid to go back in."
"Afraid of what?"
"Well, there's the guy with the thick wrists and the, um, giant butterfly."
"What giant butterfly?"
"The one Mr. Koldstad claimed lobotomized him." Agent Phelps cleared his throat quickly. "Sir, I know how this sounds-"
"It sounds," Big Dick Brull said in a grinding voice, "as if you had better seal off that basement until I get there and have your resumes in order for your next careers. Because it won't be with the Internal Fucking Revenue Service."
Big Dick Brull slammed down the telephone. It was time to blow the Folcroft file wide open, and there was only one way to do that. Take charge personally.
Chapter 18
It was mission creep at its worst.
Winston Smith had no problem with the primary mission. He just wondered what took the Pentagon so long to get around to authorizing it.
Warlord Mahout Feroze Anin was a penny-ante clan leader and arms merchant in the divided Horn of Africa nation of Stomique until the UN relief mission blew into North Nog-as the Stomique regional capital of Nogongog was called-to set up what started as a people-feeding operation and mission-crept its way to a nation-building debacle.
When the UN tanks rolled ashore, Warlord Anin dug out his one Western suit and welcomed them with open arms. It was good PR. It got his beaming face on CNN and made him instantly the most recognizable Stomique citizen in human history.
But when the UN command didn't annoint Warlord Anin as the natural unifier of Stomique, he ordered hit-and-run attacks on UN peacekeeping forces. Anin made the mistake of not keeping the chain of deniability intact, and the next thing Anin knew he was wanted by UNOSOM for ambushing a French UN contingent.
That was when the US. Rangers rolled in. And speedily got their tails shot up.
Navy SEAL Winston Smith had a ringside seat to it all. SEAL Team Six had been sent in, disguised as Army grunts to reconnoiter the situation. In the rabbit warren of North Nog, there was no finding Warlord Anin.
Smith personally witnessed the multimillion-dollar Blackhawk helicopter brought down by a two-hundred-dollar Soviet-remaindered RPG while riding shotgun on a Humvee down Mission Support Road Tiger. His team was among the first on the scene. They got their tails shot up, too. But they fought their way through the sea of Stomique civilians and pulled the dead and wounded to safety, except for the one guy they missed.
When his face hit the covers of Time and Newsweek, the ball game changed. The public gasped. The President choked. And the Pentagon went into severe reverse mission creep.
Even a year later Winston Smith had a hard time believing how chicken-shit Washington had turned.
Anin was small potatoes. A grinning thug. One lucky shot, and he was dubbed The Strongman Who Made The US. Back Down.
The US. had never backed down. Just the wusses in Washington. Word came down from on high. A deal was struck, and the hostage was freed. The wanted posters on Anin came down, too. Within months the relief-mission-turned-nation-building operation fizzled out, and Mahout Feroze Anin, labeled victorious over the rest of civilization, became de facto ruler of Stomique, which promptly reverted to anarchy.
Winston Smith's blood boiled every day for a month as it all played out.
After that he suggested the UN motto become You Lose Some And You Don't Win Others.
His XO told him to shut up. "Six's time will come."
A year later it did.
"Winner, you're the man for this job."
He didn't know the job. But he was twenty and full of confidence so he said, "I'm the man for every job."
"Maybe. But you're really the man for this job. Word from on high is to take out Anin. "
"I'm definitely the man for this job. How many men involved?"
"Just one. You."
"Hey, Six is a team. You can't send me on a lonewolf mission."
"Those are the orders. As far as the team goes, you're on leave. And they'd better not hear different."
Even when they airlifted him aboard the USS Darter, contrary to any mission logic, he was pumped. SEAL Team Six was set up to take out the bad guys. They trained and trained and trained, and never got used except for training missions or to run war-game scenarios.
This time it was different.
The Fucking Ugly Gun shouldn't have been part of the bargain, but Smith had no choice. In his cubicle, he ditched his gear and strapped it on. It hung off his shoulder rig like a water main.
After he'd spent five minutes breathing pure oxygen, they shot him out of the blow tube under pressure. He exhaled all the way up to the surface so his lungs didn't rupture and his bloodstream carbonate from excess nitrogen.
His Draeger bubbleless underwater breathing apparatus got him to shore undetected.
After that things got hairy. His plastic foldout map didn't exactly jibe with the terrain. And then there was the manual that came with the gun. It wasn't as thick as the Yellow Pages, but it came damn close. Since the pages were waterproof plastic, it weighed more than the BEM itself.
After a futile twenty minutes of wandering, Smith growled, "Where the fuck am I?"
A very near voice said, "Thirty klicks southsoutheast of North Nogongog. "
Smith dragged his gun out of its nylon holster and hissed, "Who's there?"
The thing in his hand hissed, "Who's there?"