She smiled again.
“And you got it. The clearance.”
“Uh huh,” he said, not quite sure where this was going.
“And so they just authorized a printout. I just got it from the printing room.”
She handed him a thick sheaf of computer-printed paper.
It was marked TOP SECRET/SENIOR SUPERVISORY PERSONNEL ONLY.
Nick looked at it.
It was the RamDyne file.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Shreck, alone in his office now, was surprised how little elation he felt. It reminded him of the way it was when he came off a hill in Korea in 1953, when he was seventeen years old. Not relief, not guilt, just simple numbness. He knew it was classic postcombat stress syndrome; depletion, emotional and physical, and as you recharged you went into a kind of torpid state.
But it had only happened to him that one time in Korea, because he was so new to it. In all his other operations, as they wound into the triumph or bitterness but always survival, he’d felt incredibly lightened, charged, made whole again. This fucker Swagger had really gotten under his skin; a tough guy, a dangerous guy, just the sort of guy who could bring it all down.
When the phone call finally came, it was something of an anticlimax. Dobbler had managed to meet the Bureau contact without difficulty and was handed the actual forensic lab report, complete with X rays. From then on, Dobbler just babbled to Shreck, couldn’t control himself, spoke too plainly, dithered and yammered too much. But the gist got through. The X rays checked. Everything was fine. Bob was dead. It was over.
Shreck felt some lightening of feeling, but not much. He was not a man of many pleasures; only duty and mission were pleasures. But this really was his finest triumph. He thought maybe he’d go shoot sporting clays this weekend. Maybe he’d buy a new car. But mainly he wanted to—
The secure phone rang.
He looked at it for a long second, before picking it up.
“Shreck.”
It was Hugh Meachum.
“Colonel, we have a problem.”
LANCER CLEARANCE NECESSARY
IF YOU ARE NOT LANCER CLEARED, IMMEDIATELY RETURN THIS FILE TO ITS JACKET, SECURE IT, AND RETURN IT TO ITS POINT OF ORIGIN. YOU MUST NOTIFY THE LANCER COMMITTEE IF YOU HAVE ENCOUNTERED THIS FILE IN AN UNAUTHORIZED METHOD.
Nick looked at it dumbly. In his years in the Bureau he’d bumped into a few strange commands, but he’d never hit this one before. He blinked, but the warning would not go away; there it was, big as life, all caps, booming out at him. He felt extremely guilty. Practically from birth, Nick had obeyed rules, signs, orders, directions, speed limits, legal technicalities, everything. Yet at the same time the illicit thrill of what he was about to do was giddy and sweet, even if it brought his breath from his lungs and made his head ache where he’d smashed it against the truck door.
He sat in his basement. It was well past nine, and after waiting all afternoon he’d at last come down the stairs, turned on the overhead light and settled into an old lawn chair. The air smelled of moisture and wood and oil. The bare bulb wobbled slightly. There was no other sound.
Lancer, he thought, taking one more deep breath.
Lancer? He knew that in their many years of uneasy operational coexistence, the Bureau and the Agency had many times bumbled into each other. And sometimes, under strict control (at least in theory) the Agency would do something that was technically in violation of the law; thus the Lancer Committee had to be that elite group in high Bureau quarters that was kept informed of these transgressions and made certain that no Bureau operatives moved forward aggressively to apprehend the perpetrator, thereby blowing an Agency scam or endangering Agency personnel.
That’s what he guessed the Lancer Committee to be.
And as he looked at the early documents before him, he could see that the Lancer Committee had quite early on declared its power.
LANCER ADVISES NO FURTHER ACTION IN THIS MATTER. NATIONAL SECURITY INTERESTS ARE AT STAKE (REFER TO ANNEX B) was one of the first such decrees, dating from 1964, when agents in Los Angeles had uncovered a warehouse full of fifteen hundred Armalite rifles headed for the presidential guard of the then obscure country of South Vietnam. Perusing the material, Nick saw that the warehouse was owned by something called RamDyne Security, with an address in Miami. He whistled. He knew the Armalite was the early name for the rifle that was later called the M-16 when it was adopted by the United States Army and Marine Corps. Whoever could get Armalites in such numbers before they were officially adopted a) knew they were going to be adopted and b) put some big money up front. Who would that be? Only one answer.
So that meant RamDyne was CIA.
Or did it?
As he paged through the documents, LANCER ADVISES NO FURTHER ACTION IN THIS MATTER. NATIONAL SECURITY IS AT STAKE (REFER TO ANNEX B) suddenly began happening all over the place. RamDyne Security and Lancer Committee had a very busy time of it in the late sixties and early seventies; the imprimatur was showing up on Air America shipments from Bangkok to Manila—and not for envelopes, Nick guessed. RamDyne Security had a contract to import Swedish K’s to something called the Special Operations Group—SOG—up near the Laotian border. RamDyne Security bought ten thousand surplus M-1 carbines from the Republic of Taiwan and shipped them to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, for unspecified use. RamDyne Security imported two thousand pairs of Hiatt’s handcuffs to the Saigon police force. RamDyne Security shipped fifty obsolete T-28 trainers to the Cambodian Air Force. RamDyne grew and grew and prospered as the war expanded.
But by the mid to late seventies, the action had moved elsewhere. Riffling through the material, Nick was fascinated to see that RamDyne had connections in the Middle East. For example it served as a conduit for the shorty M-16’s that showed up in the hands of Israeli commandos at Entebbe and for much of the sophisticated electronics that was the specialty of the Israeli air force.
Who are they? Nick wondered. Because he saw at a glance that although just about everything that RamDyne did was conceived in such a way as to advance American interests, it also involved large sums of money for equipment, training or expertise in …
… in war?
Well, not exactly. What RamDyne sold was something that, although it was the essence of war, wasn’t war itself, and it certainly wasn’t standard military doctrine. No, it was something different, a purer distillation of a government’s role on earth.
RamDyne sold force.
That was it: guns, torture, interrogation, police methods, financial transfers, avionics, whatever … always, force. The way in which an unpopular government stays in power or a shaky one consolidates its power or an isolated one fights off enemies several times its size. RamDyne had no neurosis about the use of force.
But who was RamDyne? It couldn’t quite be the Agency. Too much money, too shady. Nick could see how RamDyne could help the Agency in its aims, without ever truly becoming the Agency; there would be a strange relationship between them. One would feed on the other. But who was RamDyne?
The only clue Lancer ever offered was tantalizing:
RAMDYNE INFO CONTAINED IN ANNEX B, Lancer told one Bureau request, WHICH IS MOST TOP SECRET AND FOR DISPERSAL ON A NEEDTOKNOW BASIS ONLY.
Annex B again, thought Nick. Damn, would I like to get my hands on Annex B.
RamDyne began to move into Central America in the early eighties.
LANCER ADVISES NO FURTHER ACTION IN THIS MATTER. NATIONAL SECURITY IS AT STAKE (REFER TO ANNEX B). It appeared on a shipment of fléchette munitions on the way to Guatemala City, presumably for use by Contras in the war against the Sandinistas. A crate full of fléchette bombs had accidentally broken open at Kennedy Airport in New York. It was at that time illegal to export fléchette munitions, as they were one of the best-kept secrets of the war: the plastic darts didn’t show up on X rays, so doctors couldn’t operate to remove the shrapnel, so the wounded didn’t heal, so the Sandinista medical infrastructure was theoretically stressed
out. The box, under the guise of Medical Shipments, was being exported by RamDyne Security.
Next was a shipment of interrogation electrodes, cattle prods, whips, truncheons, and PR-24 batons for Pakistan; but Customs had intercepted the material in New York and alerted the Bureau.
LANCER ADVISES NO FURTHER ACTION IN THIS MATTER. NATIONAL SECURITY IS AT STAKE (REFER TO ANNEX B).
The shipment was being sent by RamDyne Security of St. Paul, Minnesota.
Nick Memphis turned the page. And then he came up against RamDyne at its classic and at last he understood.
It was RamDyne’s involvement with the elite hunter battalion of the Salvadoran airborne rangers nicknamed Los Gatos Negros.
And so it was that Nick Memphis saw what RamDyne was selling. It was, he realized, something more than force; or if it had just been force in the beginning, it had transmuted into something else.
He read about Panther Battalion, and he began to cry.
It was a fine, gay day. Dobbler hadn’t been out in ages, in decades. He’d been a hermit, a vampire living only on artificial light and information.
But now he was outside for the first time since the events in New Orleans, and the sky was filled with woolly clouds and an orange smear of sun settled toward the horizon. It was the magic hour, just before full twilight, when perfect clarity washes the world clean of its blemishes.
The doctor breathed deeply, enjoying the sweetness in the air. He let the sun caress him. He was walking along the lip of bank that flanks the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.; around him, like soldiers at parade rest, a thousand Japanese cherry trees stood heavy with leaf. The water was deep gray and calm; in the distance he could see the Lincoln Memorial, another temple to a dead president; and in another direction, the Washington Monument, that blank white spire.
But Dobbler was not thinking of dead presidents and their Roman temples or obelisks, nor of cherry trees. He was not thinking of the setting sun, or the pulsating traffic, or anything at all like that, though he enjoyed them all. He was thinking of teeth.
Glorious, glorious teeth. Teeth that never lie. That cannot lie. That are incapable of deceit.
For he had them now in his briefcase and would not let them go. He had survived.
The teeth were not actually in the briefcase, of course; what lay inside were Bob Swagger’s dental X rays, taken from his dentist in Blue Eye, Arkansas, and forensic X rays of the blackened jaws found in the ashes of the Aurora Baptist Church, as taken by the sublimely gifted technicians of the Federal Bureau of Investigation crime lab in Washington, D.C., not a mile as the crow flew from where Dobbler now trod.
But neither the doctor nor Colonel Shreck had trusted the technicians. They had waited patiently until the right time and then the colonel made one of his magic phone calls to someone—Dobbler didn’t even want to know who—and Dobbler went to Washington. He’d just gotten the two sets of X rays, and a more formal examination awaited them back at RamDyne. But he couldn’t wait; he’d stolen into a public men’s room, and pressed the two plastic membranes against the fluorescent lights. One by one he had chalked off the similarities. Yes, yes, there were three fillings on the left-hand side, in the second molar, the canine and the incisor. Yes, the first took the rough configuration of a star; the second was smaller, shaped roughly like an hourglass; and the third looked like the map of Sicily. Then there was the same slightly collapsed left lower jaw, where three teeth, for some unknown architectural reason, had sadly collapsed inward just a bit, with the middle one slightly twisted.
Those were the major parallels and he could see about a thousand minor ones. In fact, you could lay one X ray over the other, and though the scale was slightly off, it was obvious that the same mouth had been photographed.
That was it. A man may lie to his psychiatrist, his doctor, his wife, his employer, to God and to Mom, but his teeth tell all; they cannot lie. They yield all secrets. They confess. They are unambiguous.
So Dobbler had called Colonel Shreck, and then wandered across the mall and over to the tidal basin; it was time to enjoy life, which suddenly seemed mud-luscious with possibility. The whole world beckoned, offering its pleasures to Dr. Dobbler. He was purely, sheerly happy.
“Dr. Dobbler!”
Dobbler turned at his name, stunned that anyone knew him, and saw only a gray sedan, unremarkable, and in it a man who was also unremarkable but tough and coplike, whom he recognized from RamDyne.
“Dr. Dobbler. Colonel Shreck sent us. They need you.”
“But—” Dobbler raised his briefcase as if to protest and ward them off. See, it’s in here, he wanted to say, it’s over, the evidence that it’s over, finally, is in here.
“We got some big problems,” said the man, and Dobbler read fear in his eyes.
It was technically the Fourth Battalion (Air-Ranger) of the First Brigade (Air-Ranger) of the elite Acatad Division—but everybody called it Panther Battalion.
Nick read on. In April of 1991, the unit, some 250 men, a tough, blooded, jungle-warfare-center-trained elite of the Salvadoran Armed Forces, had been pulled from front-line antiguerrilla duty in the mountains for an intensive course in psychological warfare techniques. Because at the time the press was especially suspicious of the president’s wild popularity in the wake of the Persian Gulf War, it was being extremely vigilant and cynical about American military aid to foreign countries; so the contract couldn’t be taken on by certified American military or CIA special operations people. Through an elaborate scheme of diverted funds, this RamDyne outfit had gotten the contract. And for a month in an isolated jungle area, RamDyne operatives, veterans of some of the gaudiest special operations in history, had schooled the young Latinos in interrogation techniques, population control, intelligence gathering, ambush and counterambush, sniping and countersniping, a whole crash course in the dirty nitty-gritty of low-intensity warfare.
But there was a weird chemistry loose in that encampment.
“Unconfirmed reports insist,” read the FBI investigation, which was forwarded to the Senate Intelligence Committee but never put on the record as being too sensitive, “that American trainers exhorted these young soldiers with voodoo rituals, thought-control processes and animal sacrifices that went well beyond the range of normal professional military training.”
The file identified several of the trainers, and as Nick gazed at the abstracted dossiers, he saw nothing that surprised him. The trainers were drawn from the various American elite units that had fought secret battles all around the world since the war in Vietnam. The honcho appeared to be an ex-Green Beret lieutenant colonel named Raymond Shreck, of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, a heavily decorated veteran of Korea, where he had been the youngest master sergeant in the United States Army at nineteen, an early Green Beret who’d helped train the Bay of Pigs volunteers in the early sixties when he was a young major, and a heavy-action three-tour ’Nam vet until, in 1968, he’d been court-martialed for torturing suspected Viet Cong agents. Somehow the Agency had taken care of him; he joined RamDyne the next year. His number-one man was Master Sergeant John D. (“Jack”) (“Payne-O”) Payne, of New York, New York, a former special forces noncommissioned officer, also with an extraordinary combat record in Vietnam. After the war, however, he had trouble readjusting to duties, was nabbed in an elaborate scheme to defraud the PX out of several thousand dollars, and, in lieu of a jail sentence and a dishonorable discharge, took an early retirement in 1978.
I’ll bet you’re a couple of tough pricks, thought Nick.
So maybe Payne and Shreck, pissed off the way their careers had gone belly-up, with their extraordinary records in combat and their flat-out willingness to go all the way were the true authors of what happened next. But there were other authors, as well. There was the increasingly hysterical right-wing fervor of the government of El Salvador; there was a stunning leftist victory, where a battalion of government troops had gone to sleep without putting out perimeter security and got badly shot up the nex
t morning, losing twenty-eight men, all of them in front of American network news cameras; there was the pressure from Washington for results, results, results, something to show that American policy was working; and there was the anger, the fear, the bravado of Panther Battalion itself.
On June 8, 1991, Panther Battalion was airlifted from its secret mountain training camp into Ocalupo Valley, three hundred miles away, to conduct operations against a well-established guerrilla infrastructure. As the Panthers—so called because of their black and green striped jungle fatigues and their black berets—moved into the village of Cuembo, they came under sporadic sniper fire from a tree line flanking the village. The commander, Brigadier General Esteban Garcia de Rujijo, sent a reconnaissance squad into the village. Moving through the village square, the recon squad was caught in a clever crossfire. Two automatic weapons killed every single man. The guerrillas then mutilated the corpses and moved out.
It was the village of Cuembo that felt the full rage of Panther Battalion. Later (but unconfirmed) reports insisted that American training officers accompanied Panther Battalion into Cuembo but this was never proved. What is beyond dispute is that within the space of two hours on the afternoon of June 9, 1991, Panther Battalion killed over two hundred men, women and children. They were herded to the banks of the Sampul River, and there machine-gunned by the Panthers’ automatic weapons. Dead children floated in the Sampul for days.
He made a face, and blinked, realizing that either out of rage or horror he’d begun to weep.
Shaking, he turned to the last page. No, it wasn’t the famous Annex B, which was presumably locked up somewhere in the National Security Office or the Pentagon or FBI headquarters or out at Langley. But it was something quite interesting nevertheless.
It was an export order for an Electrotek AMSAT LC-L5400 series Directional Electronic Intercept Vehicle, on consignment to Salvadoran Military Intelligence, cleared by Customs, as delivered by RamDyne.