Doom on you, Crabcakes. I fired another burst, this time catching him splat in the face with my red paint. I fired the rest of my IEDs, then slammed a fresh mag into my gun, whooped and charged out from the hootch. A good offense being the best defense, I’d scare them off with an in-your-face frontal attack.
Shiiiit. I was machine-gunned in a rainbow of colors as I came out from under the hootch. The paint snapped as it hit, too—I’d have welts tomorrow.
Now they were shouting and charging, their “war faces” primordial and fierce, water dripping from their mud-soaked BDUs.
Goddamn—they were coming from both sides, too. Terrific—the fuckers had used Crabcakes as a diversion. He was cannon fodder—expendable. Meanwhile, while I diddled with their dangle, they’d snuckered and puckered around the back, flanked me from the water, and hosed my ass.
I rolled onto my back and lay there like a movie corpse. Somebody shot me behind the ear, administering a coup de grâce in visibility orange.
“Die, scumbag.” It was Normal’s voice. The little dweeb had turned into a stone killer.
Another smaaaack in the back of the head bounced me on the ground. “Fuuuck you, cockbreath.” From the triple-knotted boots standing by my face, I realized I’d just received a bouquet from Joe.
“Doom on you, Dickhead.” Dagwood shot me in the testes with turquoise paint, giving the phrase “blue balls” new and painful meaning. I tucked my knees, curled my toes, and vowed silently to return the favor someday.
“Okay, okay—I give up,” I wheezed. “Now which one of you assholes is going to carry my corpse back to the Manor so we can have a proper wake?”
“Shit,” said Crabcakes, who stood watching from afar, “we’re not schlepping you anywhere. We’re gonna skin you and frame you. You’ve got so much paint on you, you look like a fucking Jackson Pollock.”
“You mean Jackson Polack? Puck you, cockbreath—I’m a Slovak, and proud of it.”
They all laughed. Joe looked down at my Technicolor BDUs. “Say whatever you will about being Slovak, Dick, but you look more like a fucking canceled Czech than anything else right now.”
Chapter 5
THE FIRST RULE OF SPEC WAR IS: NEVER ASSUME. NEVER ASSUME your enemy isn’t waiting to blow your ass away. If the CO of SEAL Team Four—the team that had assaulted Hato Airport during Operation Just Cause—had followed Rule One, his men probably wouldn’t have been chopped into hamburger by the Panamanians. SEAL Team Two’s commanding officer, Norm Carley, followed Rule One during Just Cause, and his ops went more or less as planned. He didn’t assume anything—he anticipated every possible fucking contingency, and his planning paid off—he fulfilled his mission without losing a man.
It didn’t matter whether I was in command of a six-man squad or a hundred-and-fifty-man unit. I never assumed anything. I always planned my tactics as if everything would go wrong. Why? Because things always go wrong. Mr. Murphy is always going to come along for the ride.
Rule One: Never assume. You will see this material again.
The second rule of SpecWar is: Never give a sucker an even break. That translates to keeping your opponents off guard, never allowing them to get ahead of you, either physically, mentally, or tactically. As the CO of SEAL Team Two, and later as CO of SEAL Team Six, I used whatever it took to get my way: threats, intimidation, booze, blackmail—whatever. I took Rule Two to heart. I used it against my enemies in the field, and against the Navy system, when it got in my way.
I have often been accused of not playing fair. I plead guilty. What’s your point? I always thought the saying went, “All’s fair in love and war.”
Which leads me to the most important rule of Spec War: Win. Do whatever it takes, but win. When Roy Boehm, the true godfather of all SEALs, conceived, designed, and selected the original unit back in the sixties, the crusty, froggish ex-boatswain’s mate begged, borrowed, and stole whatever he had to, to make sure his men were properly equipped and ready for war. The system worked against Roy—so he went around it. On occasion, he went directly through it—leaving shattered bodies when he thought it necessary.
Black Jack Morrison told me, “Dick, you will not fail,” when he ordered me to create SEAL Team Six.
The only possible correct response was the one I gave him: “Aye, aye, sir.” And I did not fail. Like Roy—who was one of my sea daddies—I found ways to go around the system or through it.
There is, incidentally, one final rule of unconventional warfare. It is that there are no rules.
Now, applying all these maxims to the situation at hand, i.e., Grant Griffith’s war game five days down the pike, I realized that I was in trouble.
Rule One applied. Did it ever. After all, I was working with Joe’s greenhorn dweebs, guys who meant well but lacked the finesse and field experience of real-world SpecWarriors. I liked Joe, Dagwood, Normal, and Crabcakes, but I couldn’t assume that they’d perform under pressure. As previously noted, I couldn’t assume anything.
That meant Rule Three was out the window. Certainly, a win was virtually impossible given the current personnel.
That left Rules Two and Four. To apply them, I got on the horn to a thirtysomething machinist’s mate first class I’ll call Stevie Wonder.
I call him Stevie Wonder because he always wears wraparound shooting glasses in amber, rose, or smoke, depending on his mood. He also has a permanently stiff neck, out of which he works the kinks by rotating his head right/left/ right, left/right/left, doing a passable imitation of … you got it … Stevie Wonder.
Stevie’s an ex-Marine staff sergeant who joined the Navy because he was bored with civilian life and tired of teaching assholes karate. His neck is permanently stiff because he got blown off a mountain in North Vietnam or Laos or Cambodia during one of those ninety-day behind-the-lines classified missions you volunteer for when you’re a seventeen-year-old Force Recon lance corporal and don’t know any better than to offer to become cannon fodder. Anyway, Wonder had so much fun killing Japs that he never took time to let the bone chips and fragments heal properly.
Three weeks ago, one of the smaller frags detached itself from the muscle surrounding his neck and worked its way due west, coming out through the bottom of his left eye socket. Boy Wonder thought it was a bad hangover at first. That should tell you something about his lifestyle.
Wonder first worked for me at Red Cell. When I discovered him he was an MM2—machinist’s mate second class—detailed to security at the Pentagon. I wore four stripes thin those days, but he treated me as if I were a chief, with all the appropriate F-words and compound-complex profanity. My kind of guy. So I shanghaied him out of his detail and found a slot for him at the Cell, where he fit right in amongst the other dirtbags.
SEALs are normally suspicious of anybody who hasn’t earned a Bud weiser—the trident all Frogmen wear on the left breast of their uniforms. It took my shooters about a week to get used to Boy Wonder. His acid wit—some say it’s only half-acid—helped. So did his capacity for Coors Light. So did the fact that he’d killed more people both in and out of combat than anybody at the Cell except moi.
He turned out to be a valuable asset, too. After his career as a Marine, Wonder’d served on nuclear subs, so he spoke the right language when we infiltrated the sub base at Groton, Connecticut. He’d had other extracurricular experience as well, playing back-room dirty tricks for the invisible men at the NSA Annex, and spending some time with the black-bag communications boys out at Vint Hill Station, west of Manassas, Virginia.
He’s a shooter and a looter and a red-hot root-toot-tooter, and whether it’s a bar brawl outside Subic or some Hezbollah nasty boys shooting at you in Beirut, you wouldn’t want your back up against anyone else’s except Boy Wonder’s well-broken-in forty-two long.
Yeah, Wonder is rock steady, and as competent as they come. It’s not his fault he looks like a cross between Ted Koppel and Howdy Doody.
He’s still pulling active duty down at the Navy Yard, so it took
him about two hours to shitcan his work detail, get ten days of approved leave, and hustle his butt out to the Manor. We sat on the deck, working on a six-pack of canned pork chops—that’s Marine slang for beer—while Wonder plinked away at the empties with his trusty Browning High Power.
I explained my problem.
Wonder scratched his chin, drained his beer, and emptied another magazine downrange. “Shit, man, the solution to that one’s simple. Cheat.”
See why I like him so much? I toasted him with Stroh’s. “My sentiments exactly.”
He leaned back, lifting the front two legs of his chair six inches off the ground, and pondered my dilemma for half a minute or so. Then he let the chair fall back onto the deck with a thwock. “What you need to do is stash a bunch of goodies so’s you can deal with any contingency.”
“I was planning on that.”
“I keep forgetting you’re not as dumb as you look.” He smiled behind the rose lenses that told me he’d gotten laid last night. “Then, you’ll need a Mr. Outside, with the right comms, and a bunch of proper black-bag toys. That way, when you get into trouble—and knowing you, you will get into trouble—there’s somebody to bail your sorry Dickhead ass out.”
“Can you think of anybody who fits the bill?”
Wonder’s head swiveled in its trademark slow half-circle. He didn’t say anything. He just giggled.
*
We went shopping that afternoon at Vint Hill Station. Vint Hill’s just over the ridge across the river and up the road from Rogue Manor, which kind of backs up to Quantico. So far as any casual observer is concerned, it’s just another Army post. But if you look carefully past the third set of razor-wire barricades that lie behind the commissary, to the left of the medical unit, and diagonal to the cafeteria and the other miscellaneous creature features, you’ll discover more spooks than you’d ever find on Halloween.
Because, behind Barrier No. 3, Vint Hill is actually a clandestine intelligence-gathering facility run by NRO—the National Reconnaissance Office. NRO is the unit that flies all our Keyhole, Lacrosse, and VELA spy satellites. Does that sound like intelbabble? Let me translate. Keyholes—the KH series, combine LASP (Low-Altitude Surveillance Platform) technology with computer imaging and infrared capabilities. Lacrosses can penetrate thick cloud cover and use thermal imaging. VELA satellites are targeted at nuclear facilities. The unit’s commanding officer—actually he’s a supergrade named Ulysses Robinson who’s on a three-year TAD (Temporary Additional Duty) from No Such Agency at Ft. Meade—sits behind a triple set of locked doors on the Pentagon’s fourth-floor C-ring. But Useless, as he’s known to everyone, also runs three operational commands in the National Capital region: one at Bolling Air Force Base, another at Dahlgren, Virginia, and a third at Vint Hill Station.
NRO somehow manages to spend just over $5 billion a year—and that figure, in case you weren’t aware, is the largest single intelligence expenditure in the federal budget. Larger than CIA’s cut of the $29 billion we spend on intelligence gathering every year. More than the Defense Intelligence Agency—DIA—gets. More, even than—well, you get the idea, and the place I was about to mention is still classified.
Useless Robinson runs what’s known in the trade as a hardware outfit. That means NRO oversees the design, building, and launching of satellites. It also tracks ‘em, through the Satellite Control Facility, or SCF, in Sunnyvale, California, and eight other tracking stations worldwide. Using such networks as SDS, or the Satellite Data System, NRO retrieves the information, which it then channels to NSA, the National Security Agency, DIA, CIA, or a half dozen other alphabet-soup organizations that can’t be found in any telephone books.
The information NRO gathers can be in the form of COMINT and SIGINT, or COMmunications and SIGnals INTelligence, which is a fancy way of saying electronic eavesdropping, ELINT, the acronym for ELectronic INTelligence, or the scooping up of noncommunication electromagnetic radiations, or it can be visual—infrared, pictures, analog telescopic photographs, computer-enhanced laser readouts, or radar images.
Its satellites can pierce cloud cover and ground fog; they can differentiate between cloth-dummy trucks and real ones; they can provide clear pictures of a license plate from more than 22,000 miles. When I led SEAL Team Six on a covert raid to Libya early in 1982, for example, NRO’s Lacrosse-IIa/3fl satellite, serial number 153296/Zulu, provided CIA director William Casey with a real-time picture of me and my eleven shooters on the ground as we waxed six people sleeping in three tents, and thirty Libyan soldiers guarding them. The primary targets—two Irish nationals, a West German woman, an Israeli, and two Italians—had been rehearsing an assassination scenario to be carried out against Pres. Ronald Reagan.
The people we killed were all professional hitters, recruited by Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi and paid more than a million dollars each for their services. Casey was able to see us administer the coups de grâce, watch as we fingerprinted the corpses and took Polaroid portraits for the intel files, and observe our extraction by STOL—Short TakeOff and Landing—aircraft flown by our support group from Task Force 160, the Special Ops squadron out of Ft. Campbell, Kentucky.
What’s my point? Point is, if you want stateof-the-art communications goodies, NRO is a great place to start looking for them. Unfortunately, I am persona non grata at Vint Hill. Sure, I drive over there once a month to buy groceries or show up to visit the occasional sawbones or tooth-yanker, but I never get beyond the Army-base portion of the place.
Luckily for me, Wonder, whose job at the Navy Yard is classified (he won’t tell me what he does, either. “I could,” he once said, “but then I’d have to kill you”), is friendly with a bunch of the Vint Hill spooks beyond Barrier No. 3. He got on the horn, half an hour later the walls of Jericho came tumbling down, and we went shopping.
By the end of the day, we’d trucked about three hundred pounds of equipment back to the Manor. We borrowed a half-meter satellite communications system with burst transmitter and digitized scrambling capabilities, with two pocket-size transceivers that could pass as cellular phones. We also took a multifrequency scanner and several other pieces of electronic wizardry, an assortment of night-vision devices, and—thanks to a Special Forces master sergeant I’d known during the planning stages for the Tehran hostage rescue back in 1979—six cartons of assorted explosive devices, ranging from cherry-bomb squibs to C-4, from M80 smoke grenades to MI pull-fire devices, artillery simulators, and Claymores. I took pressure pads, trip wire, fuses, timers, and detonators.
The war game commenced on Friday at 1800 hours. This was 1735 Monday afternoon. That gave us just over ninety-six hours to work our magic. Within the next forty-eight hours, Wonder and I would set up a base of operations for him a few miles from Grant Griffith’s estate. After we’d gotten him settled, we’d infiltrate the property and cache a selection of war toys.
I’d have liked to run a penetration or two of Griffith’s house—there was probably valuable intelligence to be gained there. But there wouldn’t be time. A proper B&E, which is breaking and entering without the subject’s knowing that you’ve come and gone, takes time—it’s not a spur-of-the-moment thing. So a visit to Griffith’s house was out of the question.
I had no idea what the rules of the war game would be. Basically, there are two ways to go. The first is Red Force/Blue Force. That’s the way Eighth Platoon played in Panama before my second Vietnam tour. In RF/BF, teams are run against aggressor forces. The second format is Capture the Flag, in which teams run a set course and compete against the clock. A lot was at stake here—both for Joe and for me. So, I wanted to take no chances—whatever form the games took, I’d be ready.
The topographic survey maps I pulled from my files told me that The Hustings, Griffith’s 2,500-acre estate, lay three miles north of Route 50, which runs approximately due west all the way from Washington, D.C., to Winchester, Virginia, through the middle of some of the most beautiful (and expensive) real estate on the East Coast. G
riffith’s place was about two-thirds of the way between the small town of Upperville and the smaller town of Paris, dead in the middle of Virginia’s exclusive hunt country. Two miles down the highway was Pamela Harriman’s huge estate where the president was rumored to spend occasional private weekends when his wife was back in Little Rock visiting her mother. A fifteen-minute drive down Route 50 and up a side road brought you to the pseudo-plantation house and six hundred acres once owned by CIA renegade Edwin Wilson. Closer to Middleburg sat a twenty-five-acre estate the CIA still used as a safe house. One recent DCI felt safe enough to use it whenever he needed to “relieve the pressure” with his secretary.
Next, I pulled a 1:25,000 Loudon County survey map from my files and scoped out the area. From Route 50, you turned north toward the Blue Ridge Mountains on a numbered blacktop county road and meandered through foothills interspersed with pasture and an occasional stream. Three miles later, you bore right onto a narrower, brown-top road, swung left at a fork, pulled hard right onto two-track paved asphalt, and drove another six-tenths of a mile. Then it was hard left onto a macadam country road and across a hundred-year-old wooden bridge—the map showed a historical marker at each end—that spanned what looked like an old millstream. At that point, you intersected a quarter-mile driveway that led, we gathered, to the main house.
Steve and I packed his Ram Tough truck, tarped it, and headed north toward Middleburg. As his command post, I’d selected the 1763 Inn, which sat on Route 50, just about due south of Griffith’s estate. The Inn, which was once owned by George Washington, sits on fifty gorgeous acres. More to the point, it has a restaurant that features some of the best German cooking in the state.
The 1763’s owners, a gregarious couple named Kirchner, are also fans of the U.S. military. On the wall, as you head from the main entrance down a narrow hall to the dining room, are a series of framed oil portraits of America’s great World War II generals—Ike, Patton, Marshall, MacArthur, and Bradley—and a brand-new picture of “Bear” Schwarzkopf, the hero of Desert Storm.
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