Red Cell

by Richard Marcinko

  “Security company. We call it Centurions International.” He laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “We call it ‘international,’ but I still haven’t gotten overseas.”

  “Who’s the ‘we’?”

  Buckshot’s head tilted toward the house. “Secretary Griffith and me.” He sipped his champagne. “I did just over three million last year.”

  “Impressive.” I finished my drink.

  So did Buckshot. “Thanks. What’s up besides the book?”

  “Not much. Scratching to fill the wheelbarrow.” I nodded toward Joe Andrews, who was deep in conversation with a small Japanese man. “Working for Allied National for a while.”

  “Making money?”

  “A little.”

  “We could always use another body at Centurions, Dick—keep it in mind.”

  “I will.” Fuck him, I thought. I’m not just another body.

  I looked out toward the woods. “What’s the deal here?”

  “A weekend of fun and games. Nothing more than we used to do at Bragg.”

  “How rough can it get?”

  “That depends,” said Buckshot.

  “On what?”

  “On who’s playing.” He looked at me through his cobra’s eyes. “I get the feeling that this year’s game is going to set a new record for nasty.”

  Chapter 6

  WE KNEW WE’D GET OUR FIRST REAL LOOK AT THE COMPETITION just before 2300, when Buckshot Brannigan was scheduled to conduct the briefing. So right after dinner, we met in my room for a quick head-shed and discussed how to act around the other teams. Then we got dressed, met up, and headed back downstairs at 2250.

  The atrium had been cleared out, the round dining tables replaced by a rostrum and lectern, map display, and a phalanx of neatly arranged chairs. Except for the museum-quality armor display and the weapons on the walls, it looked like a think-tank presentation, right down to the Centurions International pennant hung on the lectern.

  I waved at Buckshot and received a friendly smile, then parked Joe, Dagwood, Crabcakes, and Normal, just as planned, in the back row. That way, we’d be in a dominant position. We could eyeball everybody as they came in without shifting and squirming in our seats like some nervous-Nellie assholes. Anybody wanting to take a look at us, however, would have to turn around.

  Buckshot, still in his suit, lounged near the lectern, scanning a thick, loose-leaf briefing book. His hooded eyes took quiet but professional notice of each corporate team as it wandered in, making silent evals, checking probs and stats.

  I perused, too, making mental notes as they wandered by. They were dressed in an assortment of camouflage BDUs, fatigues, hunting gear, yuppie-scum, down-filled, high-fashion weekend gear, and blue jeans, and wearing accoutrements that ranged from Eddie Bauer backpacks to assault vests. Most of them looked monumentally underprepared.

  We, however, were ready. It being November, and Virginia, and because I’d been crawling all over Griffith’s property, I’d called Joe on Tuesday and told him to special-order five sets of Super Slam Dry-Plus BDUs from Cabela’s hunting supplies in Nebraska, then run them through the washer twice to get the sizing out. I wanted our team to wear an exclusive camouflage pattern called Brush, which matched about 70 percent of the denuded forest and scrubby underbrush on The Hustings, and even worked well in Griffith’s open pastures. Instead of long Johns, I’d bought four sets of active-sports underwear for the dweebs to wear under their cammies. The polypropylene would wick dampness from their bodies, so if they got wet, they’d dry out quicker.

  I had other equipment for them, too—but there was no way I was going to let them carry it where the other teams could see. All in all, I was vaguely optimistic. I’d watched my own men with a critical eye as they fell to. I hated to admit it, but the dweebs looked good in their cammo gear. They wore it with authority—not like the others, who tended to look selfconscious in their BDUs. It turned out that this quartet of engineers had done more than play at snakes and lakes out at Rogue Manor. They’d learned something. Moreover, they’d even adopted some of the virile gestalt of the warrior—the physical and mental bearing that differentiates the warrior from the rest of humanity.

  Okay, okay, I can see you shaking your head. What’s this bullshit psychobabble? you’re asking.

  It is like this. Warriors are different. Whether you are a master of the ancient Chinese martial art of tai chi chuan, a sniping instructor at the Marine sniping school at Quantico, or a master chief at BUD/S out at Coronado Island, you have the same goal: to teach your students to neutralize the enemy by any and all means at their disposal, as quickly as they can. To instill this principle so that each man can carry it out takes time and effort.

  First, they must be willing to work hard. To learn the craft of killing. Then they must learn to work as a group—remember all that preaching about unit integrity? I told you you’d see it again. Then they must learn to be flexible, both in body and mind. In Eastern martial arts, for example, you learn how to turn your enemy’s energy against him. The same doctrine can be applied in running a Marine platoon, a SEAL squad, or an Army Ranger battalion.

  Finally, you must inculcate in your men a warrior’s soul. The soul of a true warrior is always prepared for death. What that means in plain English is, give your mission everything you’ve got—because in the end, you’re gonna die anyway. So the warrior gives everything he does 110 percent. This, then, is the core of the warrior. The resolve that allows him to kill, face-to-face. The determination that keeps him going despite any adversity.

  The warrior sees things through to the end, because in the end, there can only be death. I could lead my SEAL Team Six shooters, for example, out of planes at thirty-five thousand feet because of this principle. They followed me because they had true warrior’s souls. They were ready to die. Not anxious to do so. But prepared nonetheless.

  Now, sitting in Grant Griffith’s atrium, watching the teams as they sauntered in, chatting amongst themselves, making jokes and wisecracks, or laughing nervously, I realized that Joe and his three engineers had it all over the others. They’d caught on—just a little bit. They realized that this game was more than a game. It was a microcosm of life. It had to be played all-out—110 percent. The determined looks on their faces told me they were ready to do so. That made me very happy.

  We’d be competing against nine other teams—fifty men total. And despite the fact that I don’t know a lot of executives from Fortune 500 companies, I still saw my share of familiar faces. It appeared that Joe wasn’t the only businessman to hire a ringer or two for the weekend. I recognized a couple of Special Forces veterans, a guy who was in my class at the Air Force Staff and Command College in Montgomery, Alabama, even a SEAL I’d turned down for Six, a petty petty officer named Nacklin (his handle was No-Load), who’d finally been up-or-outed from Team Three on the West Coast. I nodded at him in the vague way you nod at somebody you don’t know very well and whose sorry ass you are about to kick.

  The sixth group to arrive was made up of five Japanese look-alikes who wore nylon jackets that read MATSUKO TOOL & DIE on the back. They were also wearing white shirts, ties, the same blue pinstripe suits that they had been wearing at dinner, and wing-tip shoes.

  Buckshot looked up, concerned, as the quintet of Nipponese nitnoys slid into a row looking like the five Marx Blothers. He shook his head and ambled over to where they sat. There was a quick conference, with a fair amount of gesticulating on Buckshot’s part, and then the Japs departed.

  A fucking lightbulb went off in my shit-for-brains Slovak head. Two of the kimchis I’d shot at Narita had been carrying Matsuko ID. Now there was another Matsuko-Griffith connection. And guess whose dummy company had shipped the detonators in the first place. And guess whose friends in high places got Tosho’s investigation quashed. My mind was moving at warp speed. What the hell was going on?

  I ambled over to Buckshot. “What’s up?”

  “Fuckin
g Japs didn’t bring any equipment.”

  “You gonna disqualify ’em?”

  Buckshot shook his head. “No can do. They’re worth about five million bucks of billable time to Secretary Griffith. They’All be allowed to play. I sent ’em down to the office to get outfitted. And they’ll get some TAC help from one of my people. I got a guy who can speak some Japanese.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Manny Tanto. You know him, don’t you?”

  The hair on the back of my neck stood up. It always did when I heard that name. “Manny Tanto? He works for you?”

  “I ran into him in Saudi. He was under personal contract to one of the princes—the one who runs the intelligence service. I made him a better offer.”

  Manny Tanto. He was the meanest thing I’d ever come across. I’d first met him in Vietnam, back in 1968. Six feet seven inches of uncontrollable mayhem. Back then, he was a Special Forces master sergeant who’d already spent almost six years in the boonies, most of it on his own, waging a one-man war against the VC, the North Vietnamese, the Khmer Rouge, Pathet Lao, and anyone else who got in his way. Manny was part Japanese, part American Indian—a malevolent, treacherous, demonic half-breed who combined the worst qualities of both his ancestries.

  His mother, a full-blooded Apache, had met his father when papa-san, a nisei from Los Angeles, was interned at Manzanar during World War II. They’d made the beast with two backs on a cot in the California desert. Their offspring turned into Rosemary’s Baby.

  I knew about Manny Tanto because on Valentine’s Day, 1968, I and a Black Irishman SEAL I’ll call Mike Regan went out on a five-day, two-man patrol in the Seven Mountains region of Vietnam, up near the Cambodian border.

  I always felt comfortable with Mike Regan. Like me, he was a New Jersey boy. Except he’d grown up with money to burn, in a big, stone house near Princeton, while I was the product of the New Brunswick public housing projects, and empty pockets. Still, he was my kind of guy—a big, hair-trigger lad who liked to use his fists in bars and didn’t mind if someone tried to rearrange his face.

  In Vietnam, he turned out to be the kind of man you want up against your back when the going gets rough. We’d done five two-man hunts in the past three months, killing a total of thirty-six VC between us. Of those three dozen, Mike had bagged twenty-two.

  We began our excursion at a Special Forces A-Team camp near Chompa Mountain, ferried in by a chopper we’d caught in Chau Doc. The next morning, we volunteered to carry some mail to a Special Forces major named DeVine, who was the regional military adviser based in Tri Ton, about thirty miles to the southwest.

  When the captain, a gung ho kid named Jackson, asked me how I planned to get to Tri Ton, I told him Mike and I would walk.

  “You’re shitting me.”

  I shifted the Swedish K submachine gun to my left shoulder. “Would I shit you, Jackson? Look at it this way—we’re dressed in black pajamas. We look like a pair of fucking Russkie advisers.” I extracted the letters from Jackson’s hand and gave them to Mike.

  “You’re a fucking crazy SEAL asshole, Marcinko. You’re supposed to be operating in a maritime environment—this is the mountains. We’re up two thousand feet and nowhere near water.”

  “Water?” I slapped the canteens on my belt. “Cap,” I growled in my best Ev Barrett imitation, “I have fucking water in my fucking canteen—and that’s fucking close enough for me.”

  We ambled into Tri Ton twenty-two hours later, to find a crotch-scratching, straight-legged, home-boy sergeant—regular Army, not Special Forces—waiting for us in the middle of the dusty single street that ran past a series of ramshackle, tin-roofed hootches.

  His shirt was half-buttoned, his fly at half-mast, and his ’fro was flecked with lint. I guess we’d busted up his siesta—or his nooner.

  He gave us a noncommittal once-over. “They said round-eyes was coming.”

  “That’s us, Sarge.”

  Mike set the butt plate of his AK down in the dust and leaned the weapon against his leg. He extracted half a dozen envelopes wrapped with a red rubber band from his shabby pajama blouse and waved them in the sergeant’s direction. “We brought your major some mail.”

  “Major?”

  “Ain’t there a Major DeVine here? Special Forces Regional guy?”

  “Used to be. But he moved on last week. Set up new RHQ at Kien Giang near Rach Gia—they got a airstrip there.” Home Boy’s right hand dropped into the deep pocket of his fatigues and worked his groin area. “Ahhh.” Then he retrieved the envelopes from Mike’s hand. “I’ll make sure they get passed on.” He scratched again. “Where you guys come from?”

  “Special Forces A camp above That Son,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Evil neighborhood, bro.” He looked around. “Where’s the chopper? I didn’t hear nothin’.”

  “We didn’t come by chopper.”

  “No chopper.” He began to look perplexed.

  He worked his balls again. The son of a bitch must have had a hell of a case of the crabs. “Then how you get here, bro?”

  “We came by foot.”

  “You come by what? Through all those damn VC? What kinda crazy muthafuckers you be, bro?”

  “We be SEALs, bro—Navy SEALs.”

  “SEALs? Navy SEALs?” He just stood there, pickin’ and grinnin’. “Okay, bro—so you say you be SEALs. So you say you walk from That Son.” He scratched and scratched and scratched while he mastered the possibilities. “Well, if you be Navy SEALs and all, how come you didn’t fuckin’ swim?”

  Home Boy roared with laughter. “Come on up to the compound.” He turned to trudge point, shoulders hunched against the sun. “You crazy muthafuckers want some cold beer?”

  “Fuck you like a mule, bro,” Mike said. “I been waiting all day to hear somebody ask that question.”

  We marched into the village behind Home Boy, thirsty as hell. But we forgot about beer when we got to the compound.

  We forgot because Manny Tanto was there. Right outside the wood-and-razor-wire gate. Big as life. Stripped to the waist, sweating in the heat, but nonetheless working his ass off in the way men of great dedication pursue their craft.

  He was impressive. Big. Big, hell—he was huge. And he was muscular in the way great football wide receivers are muscular—probably less than 1 percent body fat on him. His thick, black hair was shoulder length and worn in Comanche-style braids. His hatchet face was set off by Cro-Magnon-sunken, almond-shaped eyes the color of coal. Strung around his neck on a double-thick piece of rawhide was a turquoise and silver medallion about the size of a scallop shell. He wore ripstop, olive BDU pants tucked into knee-high, beaded moccasins that he’d soled with tire rubber. A huge bowie knife hung off one side of his garrison belt; a Smith & Wesson “hush puppy”—one of the silenced, 9mm automatic pistols carried by Special Forces—rode the other side.

  He’d built a ten-foot-high tripod out of thick bamboo. Hanging upside down from it, just like you’d suspend a field-dressed deer, was a naked North Vietnamese soldier.

  Manny was skinning him. He’d finished about a third—he was somewhere between the genitalia and the lungs at the moment, working downward, toward the head.

  The NVA was still alive, too. He was beyond screaming, but I could see him breathing.

  Manny looked up from his endeavors as we trudged up. “Hey, bros, welcome to Tri Ton.”

  His arms were bloody to the elbows. He was using a short-bladed deer-skinning knife with an ivory handle. He wiped the blade on his fatigues, slid it into its sheath, walked up to us and extended his wet hand. “Manny Tanto. Fifth Special Forces. Where you palefaces from?”

  “What the hell is this?” I was outraged. Upset. Angry. This was no way to win hearts and minds. Don’t get me wrong—I have no qualms about roughing up prisoners. Occasionally, I’d been known to use electrodes on VC testicles to encourage them to answer my questions. But my strong-arm tactics always had an objective—saving the lives of my men.
Everything you do has to have a purpose.

  This was torture just for the fun of it.

  “Cut that son of a bitch down.”

  Manny went back to the tripod, deliberately retrieved the skinning knife from his pocket, unsheathed it, and took six inches of skin from his victim. Then he turned and looked me up and down with distaste. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Marcinko. Lieutenant, U.S. Navy.”

  He turned back to his work. “I don’t take orders from fucking pussy sailors.”

  Before he could make another slice, I slung the Swedish K across my shoulder and pumped two bullets into the NVA’s head, putting him out of his misery.

  Manny Tanto swung around, skinning knife pointed in my direction. I put a bullet in the ground six inches in front of his right foot. “Don’t even think about it, cockbreath.”

  His eyes told me he wasn’t going to follow orders. I put another round in the ground. “Believe me, asshole—”

  He charged. God, he was fast—he was more than ten yards away, but he covered the distance in less than a second.

  I didn’t have time to think—all I could do was react. I sidestepped, brought the Swedish K up, and backslapped him across the face with the muzzle of the gun as he careened past me. That slowed him, momentarily. As he staggered, I reached in my pajama pocket for a spare magazine, took it like a club, and whapped him upside the head, drawing blood.

  The straight magazine bent into a banana clip, but it did its job—Manny went down like the sack of shit he was. Just to make sure he wasn’t going anywhere, I hit him a couple of times more for good measure.

  Mike and I cut the NVA corpse down and threw a tarp over it. Then we dragged Manny Tanto over to the tripod and strung him up by his feet. We weren’t gentle.

  Finally, we finished. “Hey, Home,” I shouted.

  Home Boy sergeant ambled up.

  “Leave this sack of turd hanging where it is for a day or so.”