Red Cell

by Richard Marcinko

  “Think of this as a bribe,” I told him.

  He stowed the package in the trunk of his car as lovingly as if he were dealing with an ancestor’s ashes. “Absolutely, Buster Brown, you know it,” he said. “Don’t forget—I was educated in your country. I’m familiar with your customs.”

  Then we sat in a reception room on the third floor of the huge embassy building watching the passing State Department apparatchiki in their pinstriped suits as they twiddled their thumbs and rocked on their heels and jingled their pocket change. We made small talk and read six-month-old issues of People.

  After a two-hour wait I was finally admitted to naval Valhalla. The attaché, a ship driver, wore a starched shirt, an Academy ring, and a bored expression. He didn’t bother taking notes. I was in and out in ten minutes.

  That steamed me. We were talking tactical nuclear weapons parts after all, and all this guy could do was nod. Well, fuck him—I’d call my old friend Tony Mercaldi when I got back to the States. Tony works at DIA doing God’s work. He’d move on the info. Meanwhile, I’d kissed all the necessary signets here in Tokyo, and I was free to go.

  Well, I was almost free to go. Tosho kept me under wraps for twelve hours.

  He explained why during a walk we took in the park just outside the old Imperial Palace, a venue where Tosho said it would be almost impossible to bug the conversation. “This is one of those awkward things, Dick.”

  “Shoot, Tosho.”

  He shrugged. “Look—we’ve got problems here. First of all, when we took the crates apart, we found three passive omnidirectional monitors.”

  “The shipment was bugged?” That blew me away.

  “Yup. And the stuff appears to be American made.”

  Had I strolled upon a scam run by Christians in Action—the SEAL nickname for the CIA—or some other alphabet-soup agency? What the hell was going on here?

  Tosho said he hadn’t the foggiest. “But I do know there’s a former U.S. secretary of defense involved in what appears to be a weapons smuggling operation to North Korea. I’d like to question him—and I’ve let my superiors understand it in no uncertain terms. Trouble is, he has a few friends in very high places here in Japan, and they’ve been able to keep Kunika’s hands tied for the present. The orders were real simple: quote, Do not proceed. Full stop, end quote.”

  “Sounds like the start of a cover-up to me.”

  “That’s the way I look at it, too. Officially, we’ve been told to lay off. But my boss isn’t willing to let go so easy.”

  “Even though I’ve never met him, I like him already.”

  Tosho grinned. “He’s an ornery old bird. Irascible curmudgeon. Independent. Very un-Japanese. But he gave me a shrug, a wink, and a nod—and I know how to read his body language. He was telling me to move ahead, but very, very cautiously.”

  “Are you?” If Tosho was planning to move ahead with an investigation, I’d want to be a part of things.

  In fact, I’d already decided to pursue Grant fucking Griffith on my own when I got back to the States.

  Why? you ask.

  Good question. The answer is simple. Look—the Navy may have fucked me, but it’s still the Navy in which I served for more than thirty years. It’s the same Navy that took me in, educated me, gave me brave men to lead, and the opportunity to hunt and kill my enemy.

  And when some goddamn millionaire lawyer runs a scam that could end up costing Navy lives, I want to plant his ass in the ground.

  I looked at Tosho. “So?”

  “Dick, I need a favor. You still have your old connections and their fancy computers at DIA and Langley. Dig up whatever info you can find on Grant Griffith and what he’s up to, and pass it along to me. In return, I’ll share my stuff with you.”

  I didn’t answer. Instinctively, I didn’t warm to the idea. I didn’t mind a collegial relationship with Tosho. When I ran Red Cell, he and I were each representatives of our governments, and we shared official information on that basis. But now, I had no official status. The bottom line is that he was trying to make an agent out of me. That’s what an agent is—a foreign national who gives information to an intelligence officer. And in Japan, I was a foreign national, and Tosho was an intelligence officer. You think I’m splitting hairs? Well, call it what you will, the bottom line was that I’d be Tosho’s spy.

  Still, the arrangement made a certain amount of sense—if I could shimmy it in certain directions. Certainly, there was no possibility Fd use my connections at DIA or CIA to pass information to a foreign government. There’s a word for that—it’s called treason.

  But Tosho had access to information I didn’t. He represented an official agency and had the use of all its facilities—whether or not he was operating covertly. Me? I was a retired ex-felon. And if my information—what there would be of it—stayed nonclassified, there was nothing wrong about sharing it with him.

  “Deal.” I shook his hand.

  Tosho made sure I was on a plane home by the end of the day. He’d managed to keep the Narita story under wraps and didn’t want me hanging around just in case the press or anyone else got nosy. So he drove me to the Okura, checked me out, ferried me to Narita, walked me through security, got me upgraded to first class, and bowed like a fucking movie samurai at the gate. I watched him through the window—he stayed right there nose pressed against glass until they pulled the ramp away, backed the 747 onto the apron, and wheeled it toward the taxiway.

  Like Ronald Reagan used to say to Gorbie, trust but verify. Sayonara, Tosho. I spent the next fifteen hours alternating between working the three-pound laptop computer O’Bannion had given me, snoozing, and sipping Dom Pérignon as we flew nonstop back to Dulles. As I wrote the first draft of my report to Black Jack Morrison, I mused that, all in all, it had been a successful trip. I’d hit some bad guys, gotten laid, eaten lots of raw fish, and even had a few days of fun and games while sneaking and peeking. Who says life ain’t great?

  The only snake in the woodpile was the former SECDEF whose company was smuggling forbidden fruit to the kimchis. Don’t get me wrong—I’m no Boy Scout. But, like I just said, I spent thirty-plus years in the Navy, and even though I think the system sucks, I believe in the men who do the job.

  I shut off my computer, switched my attention to the bubbles in my flute of champagne, and thought of ways to check this guy out.

  There was a string of messages as long as my cock when I got back to Rogue Manor, my house in the woods about sixty miles from Washington, so I poured a Bombay on the rocks and listened to them both. That is a joke. Mostly, they were nasty calls from creditors, bitchy threats from my ex-wife, pleas for money from the kids, and calls from assorted friends asking where the hell I’d been and when could we get together for some Bombay and gossip.

  Most gratifying, there was a short, sweet “Fuck you very much,” from Nasty Nick Grundle. Nick’s twenty-five-second message told me he was calling from a pay phone somewhere on the road—operational security and all that—but that he and the boys would check in with me, real quietly, the next time they hit D.C. “Life is terrible, the CO’s a piece of shit, and we’re all bored because nobody lets us shoot and loot anymore. Hoist a Bombay for us, Skipper—we need it bad.”

  Damn—there were actually tears in my eyes when I replayed the message the third time. Nicky—and the rest of the Navy’s clandestine Spec War community, which is called Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRP these days—had been ordered not to communicate with me. DEVGRP’s CO, a senior four-striper named Hal Mushnik, known as Captain Mush Mouth to the men, sent a memo to all hands. It said that any sailor who contacted Dick Marcinko would lose his security clearance. For those of you who don’t understand the significance of that, suffice it to say that without a security clearance, a SEAL cannot deal with classified material. And almost everything the SEALs in DEVGRP deal with is classified.

  I’d heard about Mush Mouth’s memo through the SEAL grapevine. There were even whispers that my
home phones were tapped and my mail checked. Whether or not the rumors were true, the warning worked. Until now, I’d been successfully excommunicated from the men I’d led.

  Nasty’s message meant there’d been a change. What was behind it? Who knew. Who cared—so long as it meant I’d be able to see my SEALs again.

  Finally, there were eight separate messages from a secretary at something called Allied National Technologies, asking if I’d call back about a personal protection job for the company’s CEO. After the third message, the secretary’s voice took on a tone of urgency. By the eighth and final call she sounded downright frantic.

  I wasn’t anxious to call back. I’ve tried to stay away from VIP protection. I had to do it in order to pay for a lawyer and two criminal trials, but I vowed that I wouldn’t do it again. Mostly, the work is boring, and the people you’re paid to protect are assholes. You are basically a well-paid nursemaid—I charged $2,500 a day plus expenses and first-class travel—who’s treated like a cross between a servant and a chauffeur. I’ve had CEOs’ wives order me to polish the silver and their daughters try to diddle me while Daddy’s turned the other way. You can’t drink and you don’t get to eat very often, and the hours are long.

  Every once in a while there are thrills and chills. Just before I went to prison I had a terrific assignment in Pakistan, for example, when I played offensive lineman for an oil company exec who’d been targeted by local gangsters. I kept his ass safe, slapped around a couple of bad guys, and got to eat some of the hottest food this side of Jalapeño. But in 99 percent of the cases, you are a mere bump on a log. A well-paid bump, but a bump nonetheless.

  Besides, I’d had my fill of VIP protection in the Navy. During the mid-eighties, I was assigned to protect the CNO, Adm. James Watkins, on a trip to Central America. There had been significant terrorist threats against his life, but he didn’t want a big entourage traveling with him. Besides, he hated the Naval Investigative Service, which was formally responsible for his safety, and I was asked to head a one-man detail to replace the ten no-load, shit-for-brains NIS dip-dunks who normally traveled with the CNO.

  I went in uniform, all beribboned and medaled. I carried a leather briefcase that looked just like the CNO’s. His was made by some fancy luggage maker like Crouch and Fitzgerald. Mine was made by Heckler & Koch, the Kraut gunmakers. It had an MP5 submachine gun inside, and the briefcase handle contained the trigger. The rig wasn’t accurate—if I unloaded, I’d take out friendlies as well as bad guys—but my job was to protect Watkins, not worry about assholes getting in my way.

  The MP5 wasn’t my only option. I was actually a walking, talking arsenal. In my pockets I carried an assortment of minigrenades, each about the size of a Ping-Pong ball, each about as lethal as a cluster bomblet. I had a leather sap, a knife, and a trusty, palm-sized Detonics .45-caliber Combat Master Mark I automatic concealed on my person. Behind my belt was a garrote. The belt buckle hid a dagger. And I never left the CNO’s side. I tucked him in bed at night and I rousted him in the A.M. I slept in the room next to his. We ate, drank, and even peed and shat together. It was the first time I’d ever been overseas that I didn’t get a piece of ass or a drink of wine. I liked CNO Watkins—still do. And the first trip was okay. But not the second, third, fourth, fifth, or sixth. It was then that I decided VIP protection sucks. It’s no way to live. Not for me.

  So I took my time about getting back to Allied. I finished my report for Black Jack Morrison and sent it out Federal Express. I cut, chopped, and split two cords of wood, shredded three cubic yards of chips for the English garden, and finished off about a fifth of Bombay down in the Jacuzzi. I also turned on the computer and ran Grant Griffith’s name through Nexis and a few other databases.

  He’d been profiled not six months before in the Washington Post—one of those fawning Style section blow jobs that made him into a goddamn Boy Scout and his fucking influence peddling sound like public service. There was a more interesting—and valuable—article in Business Week, which covered Griffith’s extensive web of influence. I photocopied it and used it as the basis for an organizational chart.

  I also called Tony Mercaldi at DIA and asked for a meet. We rendezvoused at the Officers’ Club at Boiling Air Force Base, on the eastern bank of the Anacostia River just outside Washington, and spent a two-hour lunch catching up while I briefed him on my trip to Japan, and the official ennui with which my findings had been greeted.

  Tony shook his head. “Assholes,” he said. “They don’t understand how close the North Koreans are to building a bomb. Without getting into classified areas, we estimate they’re less than twenty-two months from having one.”

  “What’s holding them up?”

  “Things like the detonators you ran into. They have capacitors from the Soviets—” Mercaldi rolled his eyes skyward. “Sorry, they’re Russians now. Anyway, capacitor-detonated bombs are iffy—inconsistent. So they need stateof-the-art elements to make modern nukes. Electronic. Transistorized. Miniature.”

  Mercaldi’s information was dovetailing nicely into what I’d seen. So I relayed my suspicions about Grant Griffith. Much to my surprise, Merc told me I was way off base. “He’s one of the good guys, Dick.”

  “Yeah? Well, then why the hell is he back-channeling nuclear detonators?”

  Mercaldi brushed a crumb from the blouse of his Air Force colonel’s uniform. “Don’t know. But if Grant Griffith did it, he had his reasons.”

  He explained that Griffith had helped the Pentagon before in solving cases of high-tech smuggling to the Soviet Union, and it was entirely conceivable that he was doing so again.

  I wasn’t entirely convinced, but what Merc had to say mollified me somewhat. Still, I made him promise that he’d check out the situation and get back to me soon. There was something about Grant Griffith that made me uneasy, and my instincts about things like these have always been good.

  I faxed a bunch of press clips to Tosho along with a note that I’d be in touch soon. Then I climbed back onto the computer and began to research Allied. There wasn’t much. ANT was a small firm that did 90 percent of its business with the Navy. End of story. By then it was the evening and the morning of the sixth day and I returned Allied’s call.

  I was told that the company’s CEO had gotten a death threat. I suggested they go to the police. I was told the threat wasn’t concrete enough for police action, and my name had been dropped by someone in the Navy.

  I was suspicious. Was this what they call in the intelligence field a “dangle,” a Navy-inspired sting to try to get me to commit conspiracy to murder?

  I told Allied in plain English that my protection work was just that—protection. It was defensive, not offensive, in nature.

  That’s what we’re looking for, the man said.

  I suggested an outrageous fee. I was told they’d been quoted much higher prices, and my bid sounded good. I kicked myself and grudgingly suggested that I meet the VIP in question before they commit. Maybe he’d hate me. Maybe I could insult him. Maybe I’d stiff him. Maybe.

  On the one hand, I didn’t want the trouble. On the other hand, I was broke, and in my immigrant family, one worked for a living. What’s his name? I asked.

  Joseph Andrews, I was told. He’s an engineer by trade. Great. A WASP named after a Henry Fielding novel who does his diddling with a slide rule.

  Against my better judgment we set up a meet-and-greet in Old Town Alexandria, at a restaurant on the Potomac called the Chart House. I like the place. It’s like a comfortable living room—the decor’s informal, the food’s good, the drinks are big, and the waiters don’t hover. We’d meet for dinner. He’d pick up the check and, more importantly, the bar tab.

  I knew him the moment he walked in the door. Thin, sixtyish, white haired. But it was the Ross Perot pompadour, generic pinstriped gray suit, white polyester shirt, blue tie, and plastic pen-holder in his breast pocket that gave him away. You see one engineer, you’ve seen ‘em all.

  Michael, t
he manager, led him to my table.

  He looked down at me as if he’d come upon an alien. My hair lay in a single braid that came below my shoulders. My beard was somewhere between Tartar and Visigoth. “Mr. Marcinko?”

  “C’est moi.” I stood up. “Enchanté.”

  “Joe Andrews. Puleezed to meetcha.”

  We shook hands. He had a firm, dry grip. I liked that.

  We sat. He ordered diet Coke. This was not a good omen. I drained my Bombay, ordered another triple, and made small talk. I figured I’d give him a couple of hours, hit him for dinner, and split.

  He stared at me through thick glasses. He was one of those guys who look naked without a pocket computer in their hands. He blinked a lot, too. I thought he resembled a slightly bemused chipmunk. I gave him the mental radio handle of Alvin.

  We sparred for about half an hour, doing the touchie-feelie stuff that you always gotta do. We played Jewish Geography—the game of who do you know—and tried to figure out where we might have crossed paths.

  To my surprise I discovered that we had more in common than I might have imagined. His name hadn’t always been Andrews. He’d been born Josef Amajuk, the eldest son of a Croatian immigrant shoemaker, in a two-story row house in a tenement neighborhood in North Philadelphia. That made us both Pennsylvanians from working-class families—I came from a long line of Slovak coal miners and I was born in my grandmother Justine Pavlik’s tiny frame house in Lansford, Pennsylvania. So we both knew about sweat, heartbreak, and slivovitz—although I was the only one who still drank it.

  Like me, he was a bootstrap guy who’d worked his way up from poverty. He’d put himself through college—Temple University and grad school at MIT. For twenty years, he’d worked as a designer for International Dynamics, helping to build many of the guidance systems that went into the Navy’s stealth underwater systems. Then, abruptly, he’d quit because, as he put it, the system was screwing itself, and he wanted to make waves, not pour oil.