The front-loader backed away from the F-150, pivoted in its length, and then drove up the ramp into the aircraft.
The two men in the F-150’s bed now removed the chocks and the strapping from the other barrel, and very carefully rolled it to the end of the bed.
By then the front-loader had backed off the ramp, turned again in its length, and was prepared to take the second barrel.
“Bring up truck two,” the team leader ordered.
Truck two arrived as truck one started to drive off.
The procedure of taking the barrels from the trucks was repeated, exactly, for the two Toyota pickups. Truck four—the Land Rover—did not hold any of the barrels, but it held the discarded Kalashnikovs. These were carried aboard the aircraft.
“Set mechanical timers at ten minutes and board the aircraft,” the team leader ordered.
“Check your memory to see that you have forgotten nothing,” the operation commander ordered.
Thirty seconds later, the team leader replied, “I can think of nothing, sir.”
The operation commander gestured for the team leader to get on the airplane. When he had trotted up the ramp, the operation commander almost casually strolled up the ramp, picked up a handset mounted on the bulkhead just inside, and ordered, “Get us out of here.”
The ramp door immediately began to close.
When it was nearly closed, the aircraft began to move.
Thirty seconds later it was airborne.
The operation commander pulled off his masklike hood and looked at the team leader.
“Don’t smile,” he said. “Something always is forgotten, or goes wrong at the last minute, or both.”
The team leader held up the radio transmitter which would detonate the thermite grenades.
The operation commander nodded. The team leader flicked the protective cover off the toggle switch and threw it.
[TWO]
The Oval Office
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C.
0930 2 February 2007
The door opened and a Secret Service agent announced, “Ambassador Montvale, Mr. President.”
Joshua Ezekiel Clendennen, who had acceded to the presidency of the United States on the sudden death—rupture of an undetected aneurism of the aorta—of the incumbent twelve days before, motioned for Montvale to be admitted.
President Clendennen was a short, pudgy, pale-skinned fifty-two-year-old Alabaman who kept his tiny ears hidden under a full head of silver hair.
Charles M. Montvale came through the door. He was a tall, elegantly tailored sixty-two-year-old whose silver mane was every bit as luxurious as the President’s, but did not do much to conceal his ears.
Montvale’s ears were the delight of the nation’s political cartoonists. They seemed to be so very appropriate for a man who—after a long career of government service in which he had served as a deputy secretary of State, the secretary of the Treasury, and ambassador to the European Union—was now the United States director of National Intelligence.
The DNI was caricatured at least once a week—and sometimes more often—with his oversize ears pointed in the direction of Moscow or Teheran or Capitol Hill.
“Good morning, Mr. President,” Montvale said.