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Torine tapped the balls of his fingers together for perhaps fifteen seconds, then shrugged and punched buttons on a telephone.
"Got a minute, boss?"
"Sure," a voice came from a speaker Sparkman could not see.
"Put your shoes on and restrain the beast. I'm on my way."
Torine led Sparkman through an inner corridor to a closed door. He knocked, but went through it without waiting for a reply.
Sparkman found himself in an even more impressive office. It was occupied by a very large--six-foot-two, two-twenty--very black man, a slightly smaller white man, and a very large dog that held a soccer ball in his mouth with no more difficulty than a lesser dog would have with a tennis ball.
When the dog saw Sparkman, he dropped the soccer ball, walked to Sparkman, and showed him what looked like five pounds of sharp white teeth.
The white man said something to the dog in a foreign language Sparkman could not identify, whereupon the dog sat on his haunches, closed his mouth, and offered Sparkman his paw.
"Shake Max's hand, Sparkman," Torine ordered.
Sparkman did so.
Pointing first at the black man, then at the white man, Torine said, "Major Miller, Colonel Castillo, this is Captain Dick Sparkman, whom, I believe, the good Lord has just dropped in our lap."
Sparkman saw the nameplate on the desk: LT. COL. C. G. CASTILLO.
A light bird, he thought, and Torine, a full bull colonel, calls him "boss"?
And his office is fancier than Torine's. . . .
"I have this unfortunate tendency to look your gift horses in the mouth, Jake," Castillo had said as he took a long, thin black cigar from a humidor and started to clip the end.
"Do you remember Captain Sparkman?"
"I just did. You were driving a Gulfstream that gave me a ride to Fort Rucker, right?"
"Yes, sir."
"Captain Sparkman has nearly six hundred hours in the right seat of a G-III," Torine explained.
"Ah!" Lieutenant Colonel Castillo said.
"Before that, he was flying an AC-130H gunship out of Hurlburt," Torine went on. "We once very quietly toured Central America together."
"Ah ha!" Lieutenant Colonel Castillo said.
"And he saw me doing a walkaround of our bird at Andrews."
"And, Captain, who did you tell about that?" Major Miller asked.
"No one, sir," Sparkman said.
"And how did you find Colonel Torine, Captain?" Lieutenant Colonel Castillo asked.
"I asked around, sir."
"And how did you get past the receptionist downstairs?" Major Miller asked. "He's supposed to tell people he has never heard of Colonel Jake Torine."
"The receptionist did," Torine said. "The captain here then told him, forcefully, to get on the phone and tell me that he had to see me on a matter of great importance."
"Ah ha!" Lieutenant Colonel Castillo said.
