Chapter
Two
They hadn’t even taken their seats before
Duggan rounded on Morgan, his face reflecting more anxiety than both of the
other men.
“Dave,” he said. “I’ve been getting some
disturbing news from my military contacts.”
“Come on, Pat,” Larson said. “We should
give him some background before springing it on him like that.”
Dennis Larson had a political officer’s
habit of prefacing every briefing with background information – ‘to provide
nuance,’ he was fond of saying. Morgan personally preferred to get right to the
point, and appreciated the army colonel’s bluntness, but he had to give moral
support to Larson, a man with a somewhat fragile ego, who always seemed to be
intimidated by Duggan, and therefore, overcompensated by correcting him at
every opportunity. Morgan spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to stop
what he thought was counterproductive behavior – so far, to no avail.
“Dennis has a point, Pat,” he finally said,
coming down on the side of backing up his number two. Duggan was, as usual,
unruffled.
“Yeah, I suppose so,” he said. “My old
contacts have finally decided it’s okay to talk to me. In fact, since your
meeting with Dragov, they’ve been downright garrulous. They’ve been telling me
everything, a lot I really don’t want to know. Lately, though, I’ve been
picking up some signs of nervousness among the more senior officers. Last
night, at a reception hosted by the British attaché, a Daggy colonel finally told
me why.”
Morgan didn’t like the use of the term
‘Daggy’ to refer to their hosts, but the local employees in the embassy didn’t
seem offended, so he didn’t make an issue of it. He never, though, used the
term himself.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” he said. “Why are they
nervous? Is Dragov doing another one of his purges?”
“No, nothing like that. He’s pretty much
cleaned the upper ranks of anyone whose loyalty was the least bit doubtful.
Lots of new farmers out in the hinterlands. No, this has to do with their
neighbors, the russkies. Seems they’re
frontier units are reporting a buildup of Soviet forces near the western border
crossing points.”
“What kind of buildup?” Morgan asked.
“Well; his exact words were, Russian
forces massing near the border. Now,
you and I know that Ivan’s always moving units around. Who knows why? Maybe
they just like playing chess with military force. But, it seems a little
far-fetched that they’d be planning a major move on a little back water like
Dagastan. But, the guy was adamant; said he’s sure they’re planning to invade.”
“Did he tell you what they’re doing about
it?”
That, for Morgan was a critical bit of
information. If what Duggan was saying was true – hell, even if not true, the
fact that a senior member of the local military was relating it to a foreigner
– it would have to be reported to Washington, and the numb nut bureaucrats
there, who had nothing better to do than ask endless, mind boggling questions,
would immediately fire off cables asking for reams of supplementary
information. By trying to answer as many of the questions in advance as
possible, he knew he wouldn’t prevent the cables, but at least he would know
he’d given them the best possible information, and wouldn’t feel too bad about ignoring
the inevitable queries.
Duggan was shaking his head. That wasn’t a
good sign.
“Well, Dave,” the colonel said. “I tried
to wheedle that little piece of info out of him, but he just kept shrugging and
saying there was nothing to be done; whatever the fuck that means.”
“It means the Dagastan military couldn’t
whip a gang of unruly girl scouts,” a deep voice said from behind Morgan. He
turned and saw that the station chief, Carlton Raine, had entered the office.
He’d probably breezed past Mary Sung before she could react. “Sorry for busting
in unannounced, but I was on the line to Langley, and just broke free.”
Morgan could almost swear that there was a
faint smile on Raine’s brown face as he dropped his muscular frame into the
empty chair at his left.
“You know anything about what’s going on,
Blood?” Morgan asked. Blood was Raine’s
nickname, but he would never tell anyone what it meant, leaving them to think
it might be a reference to his race. Morgan suspected, though, that it was not.
“Not a whole hell of a lot more than Pat
here,” he said. “My contacts are being cagey, but when I talk to them, they’re
antsy, so I know something’s up. They talk about worrying Soviet troop
movements in the west, but I can’t get anything beyond that – yet.”
Morgan looked at Larson and Jeffers. “You
two have anything to add to that?” he asked.
Larson looked at the young security
officer.
“Tell him what you told me, Pete,” he
said.
“Well, boss,” Jeffers said. “There’s probably
nothing to it, but some of my security guards are telling me that people in
their neighborhoods are stockpiling food.”
“To me,” Larson said. “That’s a pretty
good indicator that something’s brewing.”
“Yeah, but what?” Morgan asked. “Hell, this
place is on edge ninety percent of the time, and has been even antsier since
the coup. Maybe there’s an indication of a poor crop year; you think of that?”
Larson’s cheeks reddened.
“Uh, well, not that hadn’t occurred to me.
I’ll have Joe and his section check it out.”
Joseph Wade was a bean pole of an
economics officer who ran the embassy’s economic reporting section. His
‘section’ consisted of himself, one junior officer, and a secretary he shared
with Larson’s section. To Morgan, he resembled a shaven version of Abraham
Lincoln, and had the work habits of an absent minded Thomas Edison, but the man
was a whiz at crunching numbers and making sense out of arcane events.
“Do that,” he said. “Not, mind you, that I
don’t think your first hunch is right. It’s beginning to fit together into an
ugly picture; but, before we run to Washington with a cable claiming the sky’s
falling, I want a few pieces of sky to show them.”
“You’re right, of course,” Larson said. “I
guess I just got a little ahead of myself. So much has been happening lately, I
didn’t stop to think that there might be other factors that need
consideration.”
Morgan laid a hand softly on the younger
man’s arm.
“No harm, no foul, Dennis,” he said
gently. “We’re all under a little pressure at the moment, myself included.
There’s no doubt we need to report this to Washington, and the sooner probably
the better. But, we have to have our ducks in a row before we put anything in
writing for the record – especially in light of recent events.”
It had never been said, but Morgan knew in
his gut that some in Washington were looking askance at him after
Ellingsworth’s death. Pete Jeffers worried about being an RSO who’d lost an
ambassador, but many in the bureaucracy viewed the DCM as the individual in the
embassy who had the responsibility for the care and feeding of the ambassador.
During all his time in the service, Morgan hadn’t heard of an ambassador being
killed under similar circumstances. All that meant, though, was that the
bureaucrats didn’t have a precedent. Damn,
he thought, what a way to get your
name in the history books. Getting your ambassador assassinated in a country
that American wasn’t at war with. He had little doubt that what lay in
store for him would be anything but pleasant.
“Here’s what we do,” he said, shaking
himself out of the reverie that threatened to become a blue funk. “Pat, throw
lines out to all your contacts, at all levels. See what they have to say.
Blood; I know your sources are close hold, but see if you can get anything from
any of them. Pete, get your guards to snoop around their communities and see if
they can get any details about what’s going on. Get all your reports to Dennis
who’ll coordinate a summary and do the first draft of our cable to Washington.”
Everyone nodded. Larson and Duggan took
notes.
“Let’s meet back here at sixteen hundred
hours,” Morgan continued. He noticed a puzzled look on Larson’s face. “That’s
four pm, Dennis. Sorry, I guess I lapsed back into a military mode of thinking
and speaking. Anyway, we’ll meet then and see where we are on this.”
For Morgan, the rest of the day moved like
a fat man in the supermarket checkout line who has to stop and read all the
tabloid headlines, just when the ice cream you bought has started to melt. He
wasn’t a micromanager by nature, having learned in the army that the sure way
to kill initiative and piss your subordinates off is to look over their
shoulders while they’re trying to get done what you’ve told them to get done.
In this case, though, he had to restrain himself from popping into Dennis
Larson’s office to see what he’d learned. He forced himself to focus his mind
on the other paperwork that seemed to copulate and reproduce in his inbox every
night; initialing reports of vehicle usage, making marginal notes on a dense
report on sorghum crop yields prepared by one of the youngsters in the
economics section, and annotating one of the consular section’s reports with a
‘well done’ in his characteristic script.
With the routine stuff out of the way, he
turned his attention to the items he felt he not only had to read, but
understand. Things like Pete Jeffers’ report of criminal activity, or
information reports from the defense attaché or the station – information
reports, because they didn’t become intelligence until the analysts in
Washington vetted and checked them. Some of the reports were days old – having
gone through other hands for ‘concurrence’ before reaching his desk. None of
them contained anything of real interest. The report that would be interesting
reading hadn’t been written yet, because they didn’t know enough.
He ate his lunch at his desk; not because
he had so much work to do, but because if he ate in the embassy cafeteria, he’d
have to make small talk with members of the staff, and he didn’t feel like
small talk. Mary Sung was kind enough to fetch him a ham sandwich and a coke
from the cafeteria, which he wolfed down without even tasting.
When four came, he was waiting at his office
door. Carlton Raine, followed closely by Dennis Larson, came into the executive
area precisely at four. A couple of minutes later, Duggan and Jeffers arrived.
Morgan ushered them into his office.
Just as they were settling themselves
around the low table in the corner, Sung came in, a frown on her round, brown
face.
“Dave, Laura Pettigrew is here to see
you,” she said. “I told her you were in an important meeting, but she insists
that what she has is more important.”
“A damn sight more important than a
meeting of the good old boys,” the hefty consular chief said as she pushed past
Sung and walked into Morgan’s office.
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