“Thank you, sir.” Jackson wasn’t bad for a young officer, Chavez thought. Green, of course, but he tried pretty hard and learned fast. He saluted the younger man snappily.
“You take care of yourself, Sergeant.” Jackson rose to return it properly.
“We own the night, sir!” Chavez replied in the manner of the Ninjas, 3rd Battalion, 17th Infantry. Twenty-five minutes later he climbed aboard a Sikorsky UH-60A Blackhawk helicopter for the fifty-minute ride back to Ord. The battalion sergeant-major handed him a message as he got aboard. Chavez had an hour to get cleaned up before appearing at the divisional G-1 or personnel office. It took a long shower to erase the salt and “war paint,” but he managed to arrive early in his best set of BDU camouflage fatigues.
“Hey, Ding,” said another staff sergeant, who was working in G-1 while his broken leg healed. “The man’s waiting for you in the conference room, end of the hall on the second floor.”
“What’s it all about, Charlie?”
“Damned if I know. Some colonel asked to see you is all.”
“Damn – I need a haircut, too,” Chavez muttered as he trotted up the wooden stairs. His boots could have used a little more work also. Hell of a way to appear before some friggin’ colonel, but then Chavez was entitled to a little more warning than he’d been given. That was one of the nice things about the Army, the sergeant thought. The rules applied to everyone. He knocked on the proper door, too tired to be worried. He wouldn’t be around much longer, after all. His orders for Fort Benning were already cut, and he was wondering what the loose womenfolk in Georgia were like. He’d just broken up with a steady girlfriend. Maybe the more stable life-style that went with a drill sergeant would allow him to-
“Come!” a voice boomed in reply to his knock.
The colonel was sitting behind a cheap wooden desk. He was dressed in a black sweater over a lime-green shirt, and had a name tag that said SMITH. Ding came to attention.
“Staff Sergeant Domingo Chavez reporting as ordered, sir.”
“Okay, relax and sit down, Sergeant. I know you’ve been on the go for a while. There’s coffee in the corner if you want.”
“No, thank you, sir.” Chavez sat down and almost relaxed a bit until he saw his personnel jacket lying on the desk. Colonel Smith picked it up and flipped it open. Having someone rip through your personnel file was usually worrisome, but the colonel looked up with a relaxed smile. Chavez noticed that Colonel Smith had no unit crest above his name tag, not even the hourglass-bayonet symbol of the 7th LID. Where did he come from? Who was this guy?
“This looks pretty damned good, Sergeant. I’d say you’re a good bet for E-7 in two or three years. You’ve been down south, too, I see. Three times, is it?”
“Yes, sir. We been to Honduras twice and Panama once.”
“Did well all three times. It says here your Spanish is excellent.”
“It’s what I was raised with, sir.” As his accent told everyone he met. He wanted to know what this was all about, but staff sergeants do not ask such questions of bird-colonels. He got his wish in any case.
“Sergeant, we’re putting a special group together, and we want you to be part of it.”
“Sir, I got new orders, and -”
“I know that. We’re looking for people with a combination of good language skills and – hell, we’re looking for the best light-fighters we can find. Everything I see about you says you’re one of the best in the division.” There were other criteria that “Colonel Smith” did not go into. Chavez was unmarried. His parents were both dead. He had no close family members, or at least was not known to write or call anyone with great frequency. He didn’t fit the profile perfectly – there were some other things that they wished he had – but everything they saw looked good. “It’s a special job. It might be a little dangerous, but probably not. We’re not sure yet. It’ll last a couple of months, six at the most. At the end, you make E-7 and have your choice of assignments.”
“What’s this special job all about, sir?” Chavez asked brightly. The chance of making E-7 a year or two early got his full and immediate attention.
“That I can’t say, Sergeant. I don’t like recruiting people blind,” “Colonel Smith” lied, “but I have my orders, too. I can say that you’ll be sent somewhere east of here for intensive training. Maybe it’ll stop there, maybe not. If it does stop there, the deal holds on the promotion and the assignment. If it goes farther, you will probably be sent somewhere to exercise your special kind of skills. Okay, I can say that we’re talking some covert intelligence-gathering. We’re not sending you to Nicaragua or anything like that. You’re not being sent off to fight a secret war.” That statement was technically not a lie. “Smith” didn’t know exactly what the job was all about, and he wasn’t being encouraged to speculate. He’d been given the mission requirements, and his nearly completed job was to find people who could do it – whatever the hell it was.
“Anyway, that’s all I can say. What we have discussed to this point does not leave the room – meaning that you do not discuss it with anybody without my authorization, understood?” the man said forcefully.
“Understood, sir!”
“Sergeant, we’ve invested a lot of time and money in you. It’s payback time. The country needs you. We need what you know. We need what you know how to do.”
Put that way, Chavez knew he had little choice. “Smith” knew that, too. The young man waited about five seconds before answering, which was less than expected.
“When do I leave, sir?”
Smith was all business now. He pulled a large manila envelope from the desk’s center drawer. CHAVEZ was scrawled on it in Magic Marker. “Sergeant, I’ve taken the liberty of doing a few things for you. In here are your medical and finance records. I’ve already arranged to clear you through most of the post agencies. I’ve also scratched in a limited power of attorney form so that you can have somebody ship your personal effects – where ‘to’ shows on the form.”
Chavez nodded, though his head swam slightly. Whoever this Colonel Smith was, he had some serious horsepower to run paperwork through the Army’s legendary bureaucracy so quickly. Clearing post ordinarily took five days of sitting and waiting. He took the envelope from the colonel’s hand.
“Pack your gear and be back here at eighteen hundred. Don’t bother getting a haircut or anything. You’re going to let it grow for a while. I’ll handle things with the people downstairs. And remember: you do not discuss this with anybody. If someone asks, you got orders to report to Fort Benning a little early. That’s your story, and I expect you to stick to it.” “Colonel Smith” stood and extended his hand while he told another lie, mixed with some truth. “You did the right thing. I knew we could count on you, Chavez.”
“We own the night, sir!”
“Dismissed.”
“Colonel Smith” replaced the personnel folder in his briefcase. That was that. Most of the men were already on their way to Colorado. Chavez was one of the last. “Smith” wondered how things would work out. His real name was Edgar Jeffries, and he had once been an Army officer, long since seconded to, then hired by, the Central Intelligence Agency. He found himself hoping that things would go as planned, but he’d been with the Agency too long to place much store in that train of thought. This wasn’t his first recruiting job. Not all of them had gone well, and fewer still had gone as planned. On the other hand, Chavez and all the rest had volunteered to join the country’s military service, had voluntarily re-enlisted, and had voluntarily decided to accept his invitation to do something new and different. The world was a dangerous place, and these forty men had made an informed decision to join one of its more dangerous professions. It was some consolation to him, and because Edgar Jeffries still had a conscience, he needed the consolation.
“Good luck, Sarge,” he said quietly to himself.
Chavez had a busy day. First changing into civilian clothes, he washed his field uniform and gear, then assembled all of the equipment which he’d be leaving behind. He had to clean the equipment also, because you were supposed to give it back better than you got it, as Sergeant First Class Mitchell expected. By the time the rest of the platoon arrived from Hunter-Liggett at 1300, his tasks were well underway. The activity was noted by the returning NCOs, and soon the platoon sergeant appeared.