The Rendition (7 page)

We had some close calls. One time I had to exit the Workers' Paradise by way of the Baltic Sea, on a small boat that someone had thoughtfully stashed for me on a beach called Warnemünde and which I only found after a three-hour search. On that occasion, I reasoned that drowning was preferable to five years in an East German slammer, both of which I figured for total career killers. Fortunately, I encountered a Danish trawler before meeting up with a Communist patrol boat.

Another time Buck and I were bringing out a Russian general, a guy who'd given us more information about Warsaw Pact battle plans than even we wanted to know, but who was close to a nervous breakdown and who'd outlived his value as a source. It was a Sunday night in the dead of winter, and we were supposed to rendezvous with a Black Hawk helicopter on a farm northeast of Berlin. First, we got lost. Then someone
caught wise to the helicopter parked on the field and alerted the
Volkspolizei
, who normally weren't the world's most efficient police force but who, this time, arrived in short order. As things turned out, I was bringing up the rear and, after taking a header, was a hundred yards behind Buck and the general as they scrambled onto the chopper.

I didn't know how far the Vopos were behind me, but the shots and the barking dogs sounded awfully close.

As I zigzagged back and forth across the field, I expected to see the chopper go sailing off into the sky. But that's not what happened. I later learned why they waited. With his weapon trained on the impatient pilots, Buck was shouting over the engine noise, shaking his head and pointing out to the field where I was stumbling and dodging with a platoon of East German soldiers in hot pursuit. Somehow I made it, with lots of hands hauling me up into the chopper with nothing to spare. With the three of us sprawled on the deck of the Black Hawk and holding on for dear life, we made it out of East German air space by flying under the radar at a speed upward of 140 knots.

Buck and I still laugh when we recall that wild chopper ride, careening around and over smokestacks, communications towers and apartment buildings, and the deathly pale expression on the face of the Russian general. “Welcome to life in the West, Yuri!”

We got the “Gold Dust Twins” moniker because we worked so well together and chalked up a few successes along the way.

Looking around at one point, I paused and said, “There are times when I pinch myself just to make sure I'm not imagining things. That I'm still here to take this all in.”

Buck didn't answer but he knew what I meant.

After leaving the cemetery, we rode out on I-95 in the direction of Alexandria, and Buck suggested a restaurant he knew not far from Fort Belvoir, a place with dark paneled walls, subdued lighting, and what appeared to be a largely government and military clientele, men and women who kept their voices low and hardly ever smiled. Just observing these people was enough to remind me of how happy I was not to be a part of their world anymore.

It wasn't until after we'd knocked off a couple of steaks and were on our third or fourth beer that we began to kick around what happened in Kosovo. From talking with Angel and Larry, Buck knew the story up until the time Nadaj and his gang grabbed me.

I gave him the rest of the story.

“Who's this Vickie?” Buck asked when I'd finished.

“We should be able to find out,” I said. “She said she had a green card.”

Buck nodded. “Anything else?”

“I did my best to listen in, but they were talking Albanian all the time, so I couldn't pick up that much.” I paused, trying to recall the events of those two days, most of which I'd repressed, or tried to. “One thing: Nadaj got very excited about Afghanistan. They kept asking if I knew what happened in Afghanistan.”

Buck looked thoughtful. “So we can assume something happened in Afghanistan that has a lot of people very jumpy, including people on the National Security Council and in the DOD. Something else I know is that Nadaj was the leader of a KLA outfit that went out to Afghanistan. They were in the mountains and fighting with the Taliban. According to what I could pick up, Nadaj's people were well disciplined and well armed, and they caused our guys lots of problems.”

I said, “How did you get involved?”

Buck shrugged. “I don't know much more than you do. It began when I got a call to meet a guy out at Rock Creek Park.”

“Anyone I know?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact. Jerry Shenlee. You remember Jerry?”

“Of course. Berlin, way back when.”

Both Buck and I had worked for a time with Jerry Shenlee, who was then attached to the 766th Military Intelligence Detachment, helping out with security investigations and whatever else needed to be done. But the big investigation was the one that followed the 1986 bomb blast in the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin. In fact it was Jerry who, in a frantic telephone call that afternoon, first alerted me to the fact that British intelligence had intercepted a message to Tripoli in which the Libyan embassy in East Berlin was predicting a “joyous event.”

“‘Joyous' for them means anything but joyous for us, Klear,” Jerry had shouted into the phone, and I knew immediately what he meant. When Jerry said we needed to find out what was going down, I told him I'd do my best.

I spent the twelve hectic hours that followed Jerry's call racing around the city, checking out bars for suspicious characters, talking to people, and trying to figure out what was likely to happen. It was agonizing having prior notice of some kind of attack but not knowing anything beyond that. Because the intercepted message said something about “maximum victims,” we figured it would be in some public place and was going to be bad—and as we later learned, two MPs were on their way to warn the La Belle patrons and were just three hundred yards away from the disco when the blast went off. The bomb, which had been in a suitcase in the club's washroom, killed two American GIs, a Turkish woman, and with flying nails doing tremendous damage, injured over two hundred others.

Almost immediately, we zeroed in on the employees of the Libyan Embassy in East Berlin. Because the bomb had been put together with plastic explosive mixed with nails, we were quickly able to ID it as the handiwork of Yasir Shraydi, a Palestinian who we already suspected of terrorist activities. I remember a case officer, one of the first people on the scene, later telling me he could have strangled Shraydi with his bare hands and enjoyed every minute of it.

Moammar Kadafi badly miscalculated when, a few days later, he praised the bomb blast and described its perpetrators as “glorious revolutionaries.” President Reagan ordered Kadafi's personal compound in Tripoli to be bombed, an action that showed the world that Colonel Kadafi's enthusiasm for bomb blasts rapidly diminished the closer they came to his home and person. The American government has a long memory, and whether Colonel Kadafi knows it yet or not, his name is on a short list of dictators to be toppled.

I asked, “What's Jerry up to?”

“Jerry is a National Security Coucil staffer, and I get the impression some important people have a lot of confidence in him, one of
them being the deputy secretary of defense. Jerry said they needed to run a rendition, and the person they wanted was this Nadaj. He said the chief of station in Skopje had a reliable informant, who knew Nadaj's precise location. But he also said the source would only talk to someone on the ground, and only after he got paid.”

Remembering a sullen looking character with tousled hair and a slight limp, I said, “That was the guy we met in the hotel.”

“Shenlee insisted we act fast. The other thing, there couldn't be any way to trace this operation back to the DOD or to any government agency. You know how persistent some of these reporters can be.”

“And Jerry was just dumping all this into your lap?”

“He was also dumping a great deal of money into my lap—which was when I knew this had to be a high-priority operation. There couldn't be any signed contracts—which meant it had to be freelance and totally black. I had to see that you guys got weapons, and I had to arrange to run the operation. Something else was there couldn't be any screw-ups.”

I winced when Buck said that. By getting myself captured, I'd screwed things up very badly.

“My only contacts turned out to be you, Angel, and Larry. I couldn't get anyone else on such short notice. Under other circumstances, we would have had five people, and I could have run it out of Camp Bond-steel. Since it was freelance, absolutely and totally black, I had to run you guys out of a tiny apartment in Pristina, with the electricity going on and off and the lights not working half the time. I had a couple of cell phones, a secure laptop, a flashlight, and a bunch of telephone numbers, but not much else. Now and then, I'd try for a catnap. You can imagine how it was, sitting there day after day with earphones and a couple of monitors, wondering what was going on, and feeling pretty helpless.” When I nodded, Buck said, “I was able to keep track of you guys off the satellite. When Angel called and told me you were a prisoner, I got over there as quick as I could. You know the rest.”

Recalling my debriefing in the military hospital, I asked Buck about Colonel Sylvia Frost.

“Colonel Frost works for the deputy secretary of defense. In fact she's the deputy secretary's special emissary, and when she's involved in something you can bet that he's also involved in a significant way.”

I said, “That's more evidence that this Ramush Nadaj rendition was a high-priority operation.”

“Very high, Alex.” Buck looked at me over the top of his beer mug. “You should also know that it was Colonel Frost who pulled the strings to get you onto Camp Bondsteel. When the Force Protection people wouldn't let us on the base, I had them phone Shenlee back in D.C. for me. I got through, but he didn't have any answers. He gave me Colonel Frost's number. She came up with the Captain Sanchez identity on the spot. Then she personally called Colonel Brooks.”

“He's the CO of Bondsteel?”

“Yes, and one very tough hombre. But like everyone else, he knows better than to mix it up with Colonel Frost. That was how you got admitted to the military hospital so fast. If it was anyone else on the phone, it wouldn't have happened.”

Buck didn't say it, but we both knew it was the medical people on Camp Bondsteel who pulled me through. I wouldn't have survived twenty-four hours in a Kosovo hospital, assuming that Kosovo has hospitals. Maybe I'd been obnoxious during the debriefing, but considering what I went through in Kosovo, I didn't see where I owed anybody anything.

“By the way, Colonel Frost graduated numero uno in her class at West Point. I thought you should know.”

“That's very impressive. She's also very attractive, if I'm allowed to say that.”

“I'm glad to see you still notice those things.”

“Ha ha.”

“Here's a nugget of gossip. When she was out in Afghanistan, she supposedly got the hots for another officer. The word is they spent a lot of time in each other's room in the Ariana Hotel in Kabul.”

“Boys will be boys, and girls will be girls.”

Buck lowered his voice. “People often find her difficult. Around
the office she's known as Colonel BOW.” When I frowned, Buck said. “Colonel Bitch-on-Wheels.”

“So she's a tough boss. What do her people think they're getting paid for?”

As the waiter set down two more mugs of beer, I watched Buck smear some Stilton cheese on a slab of dark bread. “You're not suggesting I owe Colonel Frost an apology.”

Between bites, he said, “Like I say, Alex, Colonel Frost has forgotten you and your obnoxious behavior.”

Recalling the debriefing, I said, “I did an awful lot of kvetching.” Courtesy of my mother, I command an extensive vocabulary of Yiddish expressions, spoken with a Bavarian lilt.

Buck nodded. “I heard. She definitely showed superhuman restraint. As have many of your friends and colleagues on occasion.”

After a minute, I said, “If the Nadaj rendition goes back to Colonel Frost, then—”

“Then it goes back to the deputy secretary of defense.”

I said, “And from him to the secretary of defense.”

“We're both thinking the same thing, Alex. The government is eager to get its mitts on Nadaj.”

“What the hell did he do?”

Buck shook his head. “No idea.”

“My friends would hate me if they knew some of the things I've done to make a living,” I said.

Eight months had elapsed since my meeting with Buck at Arlington Cemetery.

Jerry Shenlee touched a finger to his rimless glasses and gazed at me across the table with a noncommittal expression. “I'm surprised you still have friends. Most of us don't.”

Shenlee is clean shaven, has a square, mildly flushed face, and wears his red-blond hair cut short, in the military style. He retains a kind of flinty look, a characteristic he acquired growing up on the plains of North Dakota and that he's never quite been able to shake. But the important thing is, he fits in at the Pentagon, which is where I understand he now spends a good deal of his time.

It was just after eight, and Jerry and I were having breakfast in AP Smith's Restaurant on Main Street in Saranac, a town in the northern foothills of the Adirondack Mountains—and a place in which I've come to feel very much at home.

As Jerry and I spoke, I began to feel a growing sense of alarm. “What's up?”

“When you hear what it is, you'll know what's up.”

When I first met Jerry, he was a newly minted Annapolis grad, a spiffy-looking young guy attached to the 766th MI Detachment, with a windowless basement office located in one of the detachment's sections at Tempelhof in West Berlin. Like a lot of us, Jerry Shenlee's come a long way since the days of the Cold War.