The new headquarters building for the guerrilla warfare school at Fort Bragg was a miniature Pentagon, a six-sided doughnut with a corridor running along the outside. The offices and conference rooms looked out on an atrium in the center. Shrubs and grass flourished there in the wet and moderate climate of North Carolina.
In the building's small theater the only light came from the exit signs and the reading lamp on the podium, where Mark Stone stood.
Seated before Stone, in the last row, was Terrance Loughlin, and two rows closer sat Hog Wiley. Carol Jenner sat in the first row on the right, next to the emergency exit.
Stone was a big man with the muscular coordination of a hungry tiger. He had been a master sergeant in a Green Beret Special Forces unit stationed out of Da Nang during the Vietnam War. His specialty had been covert actions of all kinds, usually involving hit-and-run, cross-border operations into Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam. He had undergone extensive stateside training in all of the classic infiltration techniques, including weapons, demolition, hand-to-hand combat, survival, paratroop training, and camouflage. He had played a vital part in some of the most sensitive operations of that war, and had the distinction of having served more tours of duty in Indochina than any other Special Forces soldier.
In the years since that dirty war, Stone had begun returning periodically to Southeast Asia in search of living American missing in action prisoners of war on behalf of the families of such men. It was a matter of honor and nothing else.
Stone and his team had on numerous occasions isolated and penetrated P.O.W. slave camps, neutralizing resistance to rescue American prisoners. The catch had been that, until very recently, the more Stone had proved that there were living M.I.A.s over there, the more intense had become the pressures to cease his unsanctioned activities.
The official U.S. government line was that there were no living M.I.A.s in Southeast Asia, and Stone had first been branded a nuisance, then a maverick, and finally a criminal as he had moved increasingly outside the law. The C.I.A. had actually sent a team out after his head, and he and his men had become fugitives from federal indictments involving their M.I.A. work.
Until, yes, very recently.
Until a friendly senator had begun pushing for the powers that be to see the light. After much finagling, this had eventually resulted in no less than a presidential pardon for Stone, and an offer to broaden his scope of activities, operating decidedly off the record but with government sanction, utilizing the unique hard-punch capabilities honed to a fine edge by Stone and his men during their M.I.A. missions.
Based out of Fort Bragg, Stone's team would be brought into action whenever and wherever American military, government, or civilian personnel were declared "Missing in Action," around the world, when standard diplomatic or military response was inappropriate.
The way the world was going these days, it was thought such a team could and would be kept more than a little busy in global hotspots.
This was the first mission for Stone and company since the presidential pardons. Stone sensed the edginess of his teammates.
Loughlin and Wiley sat sideways in their seats, their hands subtly on the butts of their concealed weapons. They could gun down anyone entering the unlit auditorium.
Wiley's selection of a seat two rows closer to the front was not a random choice. Seated in the same back row, he and his teammate might kill each other if they opened fire on someone entering through the double doors in the rear wall.
Carol Jenner had the emergency exit covered.
This maverick team did not take chances. They had spent too many missions "in the cold," functioning on their own, treated as outlaws by their own government as much as any Communist country.
Terrance Loughlin was a former commando of the Special Air Services. He was big, rugged, and unflappable.
Hog Wiley was a huge, hairy, powerful asskicker from east Texas, unpolished and wholly without couth but a magnificent fighting man.
An attractive, sensitive woman in spite of her association with Stone's violent team, Carol Jenner had never touched a knitting needle in her life. Given her way, she would have been out in the field on every mission, but she was stuck stateside. Someone had to run the team's headquarters, and she was it.
There was one other woman in Stone's life: Rosalyn James, an army nurse who Stone had been in love with in Vietnam. One of Stone's last "outlaw" M.I.A. missions had been to return to Southeast Asia to rescue Rosalyn, who he'd long thought dead. During the war Stone and Rosalyn had talked of marrying when it was over, but anything like that was now on hold. Readjustment after so many years of captivity was a long, painful process. Stone knew enough to give Rosalyn all of the time and space she needed to heal. He was fully supportive of her and saw her regularly, but he understood and accepted her need to take whatever time necessary to get her head and her life back in working order after her long, terrible ordeal.
On the screen of the darkened theater were the enlarged file photos of two men, a front and side shot of each.
"Don Shepard and Jack Harris," Stone informed his team from behind the podium. "Company contract operatives and our mission objectives."
"Are those their real names?" Carol asked.
"Probably not. Twenty-four hours ago they left Honduras and were choppered into Nicaragua."
"Their mission?" Loughlin asked.
"To connect with Contra leaders in the countryside and assess their effectiveness."
"Sounds like fallout from the Iran-Contra arms fandango," Hog grunted.
Stone nodded. "The drop should've gone off without a hitch. It didn't, which is where we come in." He flicked on the theater lights and turned to a large map of Nicaragua tacked to the wall. "The chopper went down somewhere in this small area." He drew a circle in white chalk on the map, then a line and another circle. "This is where they were headed, only a few minutes away when the Sandinistas caught up with them."
"How y'all know that's where they went down?" Hog asked.
"Wreckage," Mark said. He tossed the chalk into a box. "Intelligence says the two C.I.A. men have been turned over to Soviet interrogators at a secret mountain camp."
"Where's the camp?" Hog said.
"We don't know. That's a big chunk of the problem. The Reds keep secrets pretty good." He looked at Carol Jenner. "Carol is going to monitor the mission for us."
Loughlin said, "OK, they're in a secret camp, probably well-guarded, and all we have to do is get them out in the next three days, right?"
"Something like that."
Carol asked, "Why did the Sandinistas turn them over to the Soviets?"
"Possibly because the Communists don't trust the peasant government in Managua." Mark turned to the map. "As I see it, our best bet is to hit Managua and see if we can shake loose any info about where the Russians are holding our agents. The latest off-the-griddle info is that the two agents are in Managua or were. They may have already been taken to the secret camp. One man in Managua will know."
"El Presidente?" Loughlin guessed.
"Close," Stone said. "General Romero Perez, a big wheel in the military."
"Any scoop on where we can find Perez?"
Stone smiled. "The guy is flamboyant. Everyone in Managua knows where he lives. It's a big estate."
"Won't we need a letter of introduction?" Hog groused.
"We may need a bit more than that," Stone said dryly.
The media, and much of the American intelligence community, had not been told that a U.S. helicopter had been shot down in Nicaragua. U.S. aircraft were not supposed to overfly that country. The chopper had been on a secret mission and had run into bad luck or an ambush or . . . And only a handful of people knew about it.
The Oval Office did not want any hint of scandal linking the C.I.A. with the Contra rebels. So, unfortunately, the longer the American agents were in enemy hands, the worse it was—the more likely the story would get out. The newspapers and the television news-hawks loved that sort of thing. And, of course, the Russians were using the silence to their advantage.
Just how much the two captive C.I.A. men knew about covert Central American operations, Stone had no idea. But, with all the hullabaloo about the capture, it was likely they knew enough to severely damage the U.S. Intelligence posture if they were made to talk. Years of work could go sliding down the drain.
Carol said, "Sounds like this first official M.I.A. mission for Uncle Sam is going to be a real beaut."
"And me not even knowing Spanish," said Loughlin. "Hell, I don't even know the word for 'women.'"
"You won't have time for women," Stone assured him.
"Sounds like we ain't even gonna have time to take a crap," Hog grumbled. "Uh, sorry, Carol, honey."
"Time is of the absolute essence," Stone told them. "From here on out, it's one big countdown. Our gear is packed and a C-130 will be lifting us off in fifteen minutes. "
"Just enough time to make out my will," Loughlin said grimly.