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“For openers, my aide-de-camp,” McNab said. “While I’m writing up what we did right here, I’ll run him through Special Forces training.”
“I thought you had to have five years of service to even apply for Special Forces training.”
“That’s right,” McNab said. “And you need three years and I don’t know how many hundred hours of pilot time before you can apply for the Apache program. Oz told me about that, too.”
“This will probably piss you off, Scotty, but I don’t like the idea of him being in Special Forces.”
“Because like just about everybody else in the Army, you don’t like Special Forces? We don’t play by the rules? God only knows what those crazy bastards will do next?”
“I didn’t say that,” Naylor said.
“But that’s what you meant,” McNab said. “Allan, you’re just going to have to get used to the idea that Special Operations is where the Army is going. Can I say something that will piss you off?”
“I’m surprised that you asked first. Shoot.”
“You are, old buddy, behaving like the Cavalry types who told I. D. White that he was making a terrible mistake, pissing his assured career in Cavalry away when he left his horses at Fort Riley in 1941 and went to Fort Knox to play with tanks.”
“Possibly,” Naylor said, aware that he was annoyed.
“And like the paratroop types who said the same thing to Alan Burdette, Jack Tolson, and the others when they stopped jumping out of airplanes at Benning and Bragg and went to Camp Rucker in the early fifties to learn how to fly. That was supposed to have ended their chances to get a star.”
“Okay.”
“White wound up with four stars, Burdette and Tolson with three. They did not throw their careers away because they could see the future. I’m not asking this kid to do what I did ...”
“What do you mean?”
“When I took the Special Forces route, Bull Simon himself told me he wanted to be sure I understood that I would be lucky to make light bird in Special Forces and that my chances of getting a star were right up there with my chances of being taken bodily into heaven.”
“Point taken.”
“Charley Castillo is a natural for Special Forces,” McNab said.
“Because he slings your dune buggy under a Huey?”
“No. I mean he has a feel for it.”
“I don’t think I follow you,” Naylor said. “What makes you think that?”
“I don’t know how much you got to hear about the Russians we grabbed?”
“Not very much,” Naylor admitted. The incident had been talked about, but not much, because it had been classi fied top secret, and he hadn’t had any bona fide need to know.
“Okay. Quick after-action. After the air war started, when Chuck Horner had given us air superiority, that gave us more freedom of action with our choppers. The Air Force really wanted a Scud and I was asked if I thought I could get them one. I checked and there was one about eighty klicks into the desert. They were getting ready to shoot it at this place. Anyway, I staged a mission, two Apaches and four Black Hawks. Forty, forty-five minutes in, five minutes to take out the crew, fifteen minutes on the ground to figure out how to pick the sonofabitch up . . .”
“You didn’t know you were going to move it?”
“We figured we would improvise,” McNab said, a little sarcastically. “And forty-five minutes out. It should have gone according to schedule, but when my guys got on the ground they found that all the guys with their hands up weren’t Iraqis. We had two Iraqi generals, one Russian general, one Russian colonel, and half a dozen other non-Iraqis. The generals were visiting the site; the others were there to make sure the Scud shot straight. They would really have liked to hit this place. We weren’t on the ground long enough to really find out for sure, but Charley . . .”
“You’re talking about Castillo? He was on this operation? ”
“I tried very hard, Allan, to keep him alive. He wasn’t in on the operation. We were sitting in my Huey thirty klicks from the Scud site, in the middle of nowhere. We had to get that close so we could talk to the choppers and I could relay the word that we were coming out to our air defense people. Okay?”
Naylor nodded he understood.
“So they give us a yell, tell us about the Russians and what are we supposed to do with them? Then I had to go to the site, of course. So we went to the site. It took us no more than ten minutes or so, but that added ten minutes to the operation time. The Iraqis were about to figure out that all was not well. And I had to decide what to do with the Russians, which depended on who the Russians were, and do that in a hell of a hurry.
“When I got out of the Huey, I muttered something like, ‘I wish I spoke better Russian,’ or words to that effect, and Charley says, ‘Sir, I speak Russian.’ So I took him with me. And found out he speaks Russian like a native. And German.
