“Well, has it?” Sweaty demanded.
Castillo looked at her for a long moment, then at Lammelle, and then back at Sweaty.
What choice do I have?
“The answer to that is we don’t really know,” he said. “What Master Sergeant Dennis told me . . .”
“So, what do you want to do?” General Naylor asked, when Castillo had related what had happened just before he’d come to the war room.
“In two hours, I want to put Sergeant Dennis and the beer keg that’s thawing in the sun in Aloysius’s G-Five and fly it to Fort Detrick. We have to know if the helium has really killed it and the only way to do that is in Colonel Hamilton’s lab.”
“Fly it to Baltimore/Washington, right?” Lammelle asked.
Eyes jumped to Castillo to see how he was going to react to Lammelle having asked a question.
Castillo nodded.
“In for a penny, in for a pound, Charley,” Lammelle said. “If I went with it, I could have an agency vehicle ... It’ll fit in a Yukon, right?”
Castillo nodded again, but didn’t speak.
“. . . meet the airplane and personally make sure it gets to Fort Detrick. The only one who could interfere with that, or ask me questions I don’t want to answer, would be Jack Powell, and I don’t think Jack would actually go out to the airport even if he heard I was coming. Worst scenario there, I think, would be Powell sending Stan Waters—”
“Who?”
“J. Stanley Waters, deputy director for operations. Who wants my job, and therefore does everything Jack tells him to. I trust him a little less than you trust me.”
“Okay. We get the stuff to the lab at Detrick. Sergeant Dennis tells me Hamilton can find out in half an hour whether the Congo-X is really dead. And what would you do after you dropped off the Congo-X? Wait for Hamilton to run his tests?”
“That would be information I’d like to have.”
“And with which you could head straight for the White House, right?”
“Yeah, Charley, if I were so inclined, I could head straight for the White House. But what I plan to do is head straight for Langley to see what I can learn there.”
“And if Jack Powell does go out to the airport? Or sends your buddy Waters?”
“Can I have my dart gun back?”
After a perceptible pause, during which he wondered again, What choice do I have? Castillo said, “You know what they say, Frank: ‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’ Lester, give Mr. Lammelle his dart gun.”
“There will be room for me on that plane, right?” Roscoe J. Danton said. And then he quickly added: “Colonel, I’ve got pictures of that stuff on the Tu-934A on the island. And what you and Uncle Remus and the Sergeant did to it here. I’d like to follow it all the way to the lab at Fort Detrick.”
Castillo didn’t immediately reply.
“And before I go, I’d like to get pictures of you and Jake getting on that airplane,” Roscoe went on.
“Which raises the question, Charley,” McNab said, “of flying that airplane across the border and to Washington without getting it shot down.”
“What General McNab and I talked about, Colonel,” Naylor said, “and what we recommend, is that he and I go on the Russian aircraft to Washington. I can call MacDill, inform them that we’re coming, and get us an Air Force escort.”
“Which means the White House will know,” Castillo thought aloud.
“But not the circumstances,” McNab said.
“And I’ll have time to get from Baltimore/Washington so that I can get pictures of the Tu-934A landing at Andrews,” Roscoe J. Danton said.
“And that raises the question of Roscoe J. Danton,” Castillo said. “What captions will he put under all those pictures he’s been taking?”