DESTROYER #35: LAST CALL

Copyright (c) 1978 by Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy.

CHAPTER ONE

It would have seemed like a crime against nature if Admiral Wingate Stantington (USN Retired) had not risen to a position of great prominence in the United States. The new head of the Central Intelligence Agency was the sturdy, clean-faced epitome of the best of all his schools. He had gotten his character from Annapolis, his computer efficiency from Harvard Business School, his culture from Oxford. He had been a Rhodes scholar and a second-string ail-American halfback for the Navy.

His ice blue eyes twinkled with wit and strength, exuding a certain happy courage that had shown America over its television screens that brains and pluck and a new broom were now sweeping our intelligence agencies into a lean, clean top-flight group that not only America but the whole world could be proud of.

Sixty minutes before he was to make an offhand decision that could trigger World War III, Admiral Stantington was arguing with a man who obviously had not read the New York Times Sunday magazine article about Stantington's ir-

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resistible "he gets what he wants but always with a smile" charm.

"Shove it, Stantington," the man said. He was sitting in a hard-backed wooden chair in the middle of a bare room in a federal detention center outside Washington, D.C. The man wore light, plastic-framed, round eyeglasses that were too small for his face, the big sturdy round open face of an Iowa farmer.

Stantington walked in circles around the man, his tall, trim athletic body moving as briskly as if he were on a parade ground. He wore a light blue shadow-striped suit that accentuated his height and whose color went well with his eyes and his impeccably styled sandy hair with the faint touch of gray distinction over each temple.

"That's not really the tack to take," Stantington said in his soft Southern accent. "A little cooperation now might help you in the future."