W. E. B. Griffin - Presidential Agent 07 by Covert Warriors Read Free Book Online Page B

had risen in rank in their subsequent service had exacerbated that relationship.
    General Naylor didn’t reply. Instead, with a smile, he motioned for McNab to board the Gulfstream. McNab, in turn, motioned for his aides-de-camp to get aboard. When they had done so, he followed them, and when he had done so, General Naylor followed him.
    The stair door started to close as the engines started.
    When the Gulfstream started to move, the Air Force general called his formation to attention and saluted. When the Gulfstream was on the taxiway, he turned to the brigadier general and softly commented, “That should be an interesting flight.”
    The friction between Generals McNab and Naylor was well known to senior officers of all the armed forces, and it went beyond “Isn’t that interesting?” or “What a shame.”
    The United States Special Operations Command was subordinate to the United States Central Command, and when, at about the same time, Naylor was about to be named Commander in Chief of CENTCOM and McNab to be commanding general of SPECOPSCOM, it was almost universally recognized as one of those rare situations that would see the best possible man assigned to both jobs.
    It was also just about unanimously agreed that making “Scotty” McNab subordinate to Allan Naylor was going to be like throwing lighted matches into a barrel of gasoline.
     
     
    General McNab took an aisle seat in the luxuriously furnished cabin. As General Naylor walked past him en route to the VIP section—two extra-large seats and a table behind the door to the cockpit, which could be curtained off from the rest of the passenger compartment—McNab held up his hand.
    Naylor looked down at him.
    McNab said: “General, before they start the in-flight movie, there’s something I’d like to show you.”
    “You don’t need an invitation to ride in front, Bruce, and you know it,” Naylor said.
    He gestured for McNab to follow him.
    McNab rose, and gestured for Captain Walsh to follow him.
    Reaching his seat, Naylor took it and then, when McNab had taken the opposing chair, asked, “What have you got?”
    Captain Walsh extended a pair of rubber gloves to General Naylor.
    Naylor looked questioningly at McNab.
    “Gloves?”
    “I don’t think they’ll be able to get fingerprints off that, General,” McNab said, indicating the FedEx Overnight envelope. “But they may.”
    Naylor took the gloves and pulled them on.
    Walsh handed him the envelope, and Naylor took from it a sheet of paper and an eight-by-ten-inch color photograph.
    The photograph showed a man dressed in a T-shirt and khaki trousers. He was sitting in a folding chair, holding up a copy of Mexico City’s El Heraldo de Mexico . On each side of him stood a man wearing a black balaclava mask over his head and holding the muzzle of a Kalashnikov six inches from the victim’s head.
    “That’s yesterday’s newspaper,” McNab said.
    The sheet of paper, obviously printed on a cheap ink-jet printer, carried a simple message:
    So Far He’s Alive.
     
     
    There will be further communication.
    “Who is he?” Naylor asked calmly. “He looks familiar.”
    “Lieutenant Colonel James D. Ferris,” McNab said. “The officer whom—with great reluctance, you will recall—I detailed to DEA, from which he was further detailed to be—overtly—one of the assistant military attachés at our embassy in Mexico City. Covertly, I have been led to believe, he was ordered to advise the ambassador in his relentless and never-ending attempt to reason with the drug cartels.”
    “I can do without the sarcasm, General,” Naylor said.
    “Ferris marches in the Long Gray Line beside his classmates Lieutenant Colonel Randolph Richardson, Jr., and our own Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Castillo, Retired. He has a wife at Fort Bragg and three children. Small world, isn’t it?”
    “Where did you get this?” Naylor asked.
    “A FedEx delivery man handed it to me just now when I walked out of my