Red Cell

by Richard Marcinko

  “No way, bro.”

  I shook my head. “What you say?”

  “If you be gone and I leave him hang, then I be dead two minutes after I cut him down. He is one mean motherfucker. He keeps fucking VC scalps in his hootch. Nobody gets in his way.”

  “The major let him do this kind of thing?”

  “The major, he figure Manny’s a kind of one-man psy ops. Manny do his thing. Word spreads. VC stay beaucoup far away up north where you come from. Leave this fucking region alone. The major, he thought it was effective fucking tactics.”

  Fucking tactics was right. Well, each to his own. “We’re gonna stay the night. You let him hang there. Tomorrow, when we’re gone, do what you have to.”

  “Manny’s fucking crazy, you know that?”

  “Sure I know.” Buckshot grinned. “But sometimes, you need crazy. Look—he’s manageable. He follows orders.”

  I wasn’t convinced. There were too many stories. After Vietnam, Manny’d gone freelance. It was said he’d been promised a million bucks to teach interrogation techniques to the Iranian secret police, SAVAK, then lost it all when the shah and his family fled Tehran. He’d been sighted in Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. He’d reportedly advised Pres. Ferdinand Marcos on counterterror and worked with the Indonesian government against Tamil rebels.

  In the eighties, the SpecWar rumor mill put him in the Falklands, laying booby traps that killed British soldiers, then Guatemala, then Salvador. Then he’d disappeared. Now he was part of Buckshot’s staff. It gave one pause. “Who else is on your crew?”

  “Biker Jordan, Sally Stallion, and Weasel Walker.”

  The man had taste. It was in his ass, but he had taste. He’d recruited four of the biggest dirtbags in the history of Special Warfare. Four stone killers, all combat tested, all combat proven.

  Biker Jordan was one of those fad-crazy, California-cool dudes who always seemed to ride bright red rice rockets, wear French sunglasses with ice blue lenses, and attract big-titted women. He’d lost his cherry in Laos working on covert assassination ops. Later, he worked for Charlie Beckwith and Buckshot at Delta Force, where his specialty was room-clearing with a silenced HK MP5 submachine gun. Charlie and Buckshot liked him, although I always thought he’d eaten too much tofu as a child and turned his brain to soy.

  Salvatore Stallone—aka Sally Stallion—was from Brooklyn. Suo padre was a made guy—a button man for the Gambinos. Sally’d thought about the family business, which was hijacking, but instead he’d decided to become the best that he could be. He joined the Army and went to Ranger school. The son of a bitch won a Silver Star in Vietnam when he surprised a company of NVA regulars and killed twenty of them single-handed. His specialty was booby traps, and he knew how to use a straight razor better than any Harlem pimp. I’d played against him during war-game exercises in Panama and at Eglin Air Force Base. He was good—for a guinea who always reeked of garlic. Sally loved garlic. He ate it raw—by the clove—to improve his circulation. You could smell him ten yards before you’d see him.

  Weasel Walker was a red-haired, freckled, skinny merink, as my Slovak mother Emilie Pavlik Marcinko would say, from somewhere up north like Minnesota or Wisconsin. He weighed about 140 pounds soaking wet and had a face like a buck-toothed rat, set off by big, jug-handle ears. In Vietnam he’d been a sniper, killing VC cadres at ranges up to a thousand yards with a specially modified Remington 700 bolt-action rifle in .308 caliber.

  In the late seventies he’d spent a year with the British Special Air Service, drinking best bitter in Herefordshire with SAS’s Twenty-second Regiment and shooting IRA tangos in Ireland, where his coloring allowed him to blend in with the locals. His hobby was running—he ran marathons as warm-ups. His serious events were one-hundred-to-two-hundred-mile endurance runs in such hospitable places as Death Valley or Fairbanks, Alaska. It didn’t matter to Weasel how hot or how cold it was. He was like that rabbit in the battery commercial—just kept going and going and going.

  Buckshot looked past me. “Gotta go, Dick. Duty calls.” I turned. The Japs, only four of them now, dressed in woodland camouflage, were on their way back into the room. They were followed by Manny Tanto. He was older and wider, and there was gray around his temples. But he was still the big, ugly, dangerous behemoth I remembered from Vietnam.

  His black eyes played range finder as we drew closer. His face expressionless, he guided his charges into their seats, muttering to them in Japanese. Our eyes locked as we drew abreast.

  In a split second, his arm shot out, his elbow catching me in the back of the neck. I staggered, catching myself on the back of a chair.

  “I slipped.” Manny smiled malevolently, revealing white, even teeth.

  I glanced at the ceiling. His eyes followed mine. Without looking, I kneed him in the groin as hard as I could. He sank to the floor. “I guess I fuckin’ slipped, too.” I continued to my chair, sat down, folded my arms, and waited for Buckshot to begin.

  Chapter 7

  THE GAME WAS BOTH SIMPLE AND DIABOLICAL. IT COMBINED THE best features of Red Force/Blue Force and Capture the Flag. It worked like this: pairs of teams set out from different points on the estate at the same time. Both teams were assigned an identical series of five objectives, which had to be achieved within thirty-six hours—by noon on Sunday. Some objectives served as targets for more than one pair of teams; others were exclusive to a single pair.

  At each objective, the team would retrieve a card, as evidence that it had reached its target. It would also discover the location of the next target. As an afterthought, Buckshot mentioned that some of the sites contained prepositioned booby traps.

  The competition had been well thought out. You worked against the clock, but also against the other teams. The winning team would have the best time, most cards, and least casualties.

  Buckshot explained that we could “kill” our opponents by shooting them with Simunition, a Canadian-made training ammo made of wax bullets filled with fluorescent pink indelible paint. Simunition, with which I was familiar, has a range of fifty feet, is reasonably accurate, and administers a nice welt wherever it hits. It feeds through submachine guns and most 9mm pistols. Squibs made of the same paint material were available for booby traps and IEDs. And, Buckshot said, it was also permissible to take an opposition soldier out with your bare hands—you had to attach an unremovable nylon and Kevlar bracelet to their wrists or ankles without having the same done to you.

  Certain types of foul play, he emphasized, were forbidden. Destroying another team’s cards, for example, would cause immediate disqualification. So would removing the directions to the next site. Buckshot assured the assembled players that cheating would cause severe repercussions.

  But, he added, there was nothing wrong with laying additional booby traps at the sites if you got there first. Or lying in ambush and waiting for your competition to show up. 1 caught a glimpse of Grant Griffith’s expression when Buckshot said that. The former SECDEF looked like he was getting a Manila whorehouse blow job. Then Griffith saw me peering at him and the look on his face changed. He smiled, showing his teeth. There was incredible cruelty in that atavistic, reptilian grin.

  I shifted my attention back to the lectern. Buckshot was explaining that the bottom line of this game was simple: there were no friendlies. All forces were to be considered hostile. He pointed in my direction. “Dick understands that, don’t you, Dick?”

  The few people in the room who knew me laughed.

  I did, too. Well, why not? Let him have some entertainment at my expense. I’d have my fun later—in the field.

  Overall, I was impressed. It was an ingenious exercise because you weren’t just being pitted against one team but everyone. And, since all fifty players were going to be out in the woods at the same time, there was bound to be a lot of bumping and humping along with the prowling and growling, which suggested adequate quantities of bruising and contusing during the thirty-six hours of cruising. I liked that part. I am all in fa
vor of full-contact sports.

  Of course, we were paired with Manny Tanto and his Japs. Buckshot saw to that. He always did have a nasty sense of humor.

  We were timed out at 0025 from the log-cabin slave quarters that sat five hundred feet west of the main house’s west wing. Manny’s crew left from the old mill half a mile to the east. The first objective was in his favor—it was in quadrant Delta, at coordinates 11 and 27. That meant we’d be doing a diagonal traverse of the property, covering just over a mile and a half as the crow flies—and about three times that on the ground. Once we were well away from the cabin, I handed each man a map of Griffith’s estate marked with the coordinates Wonder and I had agreed on, and a radio with earpiece and lip mike.

  “Put these on.”

  The dweebs set their equipment. While they did, I called Wonder on the digitized transmitter I carried in my pocket to give him the location of our first objective. He reminded me there was a cache at 13/28 Delta, and I’d want what it held. Then I checked the team’s weapons. We’d been given Glocks with specially modified barrels, and three fifteen-round magazines of Simunition per man. That was sufficient. I didn’t think we’d be needing more.

  I took point. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Crabcakes, but with Manny out and about, I didn’t want to take any chances.

  The moon provided ample light. We moved north across a plowed field that had once held corn. It had rained recently and the furrows contained enough water and mud to make me thankful for our Gore-Tex equipment. Using the cover provided by the natural contour of the land, we crossed a hilly field on which rye had grown, then slid into the wooded area bordering the pasture, turned east, forded a stream, and humped along a low ridge, down a slope thick with honeysuckle and thistle bush, to the bank of the small river that I knew ran northwest to southeast, cutting The Hustings more or less in half diagonally. So far, we’d seen or heard no one else.

  The river was about thirty feet wide and too deep to wade. There was a bridge about a half mile to the east, but that was too obvious a route. We’d ford here. To get across we’d need a fording bridge.

  I had seventy-five feet of nylon coiled around my waist. I looped one end around a sapling, then went into the chilly water. I hate cold. But you can’t be a Frogman and not be cold. So in I went. Thank God for the quick-drying underwear. The current was worse than expected, and I had to fight my way across. I hauled myself up the bank, then tied the nylon off.

  I waved the team on. Man by man, they pulled themselves across. We rechecked our equipment. The sound of gunshots came from the south. At least one of the teams had engaged.

  “How far away was that?” Dagwood asked.

  “Maybe half a mile—maybe more. Sound carries out here.”

  Joe took a pull of water from his canteen. “I wonder which team it was.”

  “Do you really care?”

  He grinned. “Nah. Just so long as it wasn’t us.”

  “Right.” I took point again, heading on a northeasterly tack. I tried to guess how Manny would think. Knowing him, he’d probably cheat—he’d use the road on the eastern border of the property, even though it was marked out of play. Then he’d set up an ambush on the western approach to the target. That’s what I’d have done if I’d started from the mill.

  So we stayed away from the road, moving parallel to it but six-tenths of a click in, then fishhooking at the last minute, to the split-rail fence line where my cache of goodies was hidden in the hollow, deformed trunk of a hundred-year-old white ash that sat twenty-five feet from the roadside.

  There were three old, reliable M-1 pull-firing devices, two spools of trip wire, a pressure-switch device, two Wham-O slingshots, a handful of cherry bombs, a dozen M-80 smoke grenades, and three IEDs of various potencies.

  “What’s up?” Joe watched as I dropped the toys into my rucksack.

  “Insurance.”

  “How—”

  “Joe, were you a Boy Scout?”

  “Sure—Eagle Scout.”

  “What’s the Scout motto?”

  “Be prepar—” His round face broke into a smile. “Why, you cunning son of a bitch.”

  Now it was my turn to smile.

  By 0340 we’d snaked and slithered our way south, coming up on the target from behind, paralleling about eighty yards west of the obvious course. We’d moved pretty well. The boys stayed quiet, even though we’d heard a dozen bursts of gunfire during our three-hour crawl. Still, I hoped that by giving Manny a wide berth—although I saw a few signs that suggested he, or someone who knew his business, had been prowling—we’d avoid contact and hit the target clean. That, not shooting up the other team, was the real goal of the exercise.

  After about thirty minutes of slow but steady movement we’d pulled within two hundred yards of our goal. I called a halt. It gave the men a chance to relax their muscles and pay attention to the night sounds.

  While the dweebs looked and listened, I backtracked about fifty yards and rigged an M-1 pull-fire device with an M-80 smoke grenade just in case Manny had circled his own trail and was sneaking up from behind, just like Robert Roger’s Ranger rule number seventeen says you’re supposed to do.

  The eight-inch-long M-1 cylinder is simple to use. You attach your explosives and a detonation cord to the bottom end and a trip wire to the pull ring at the top. Then you rig your trip wire. Finally, you remove all the safety pins, and the M-1 is armed and dangerous. When someone hits the trip wire, it allows a spring-loaded striker to hit an old-fashioned percussion primer, which in turn fires a flash that ignites the det cord, and the bomb goes boom.

  I rejoined the men and indicated for Crabcakes to take the point. Just as I gave the silent signal to move out, Crabcakes tensed. He pointed east and silent-signaled that he’d heard something. I listened. I nodded.

  Something was moving out there—maybe thirty to forty yards away. It could be deer—the place was crawling with fox and deer, and with all the teams in the woods the herds would be disturbed, churning up from the thickets where they normally stayed.

  But it could also be Manny, or another team. I decided to play safe. We rerouted to the west again, circled 360 degrees, then back-angled on an azimuth that brought us up on the target from the northern back door—shades of Ilo-Ilo Island allo-allo over again.

  After about half an hour of slow patrol, Crabcakes called a halt and conferred with Normal, who was the team’s pace man—he was the guy who counted the steps between compass points to give us our location. Normal scratched his head. He was just about to say something when Crabcakes’ arm went out and his thumb pointed straight down at the ground.

  It was the silent signal for “enemy seen.” He followed it with the signal for “get down.”

  The men deployed, scattering into the underbrush on each side of the narrow track we’d been following in a textbook example of rapid offensive deployment. Who says engineers can’t learn? Twenty seconds later, the point man of another team came around a horseshoe bend in the trail. From my position I could see him wander blindly as he took the outside track of the curve. Asshole. The outside track gets you killed.

  He stood out like a dickhead. He’d rubbed camouflage all over his face—but he’d left his neck, ears, and hands bare. The moonlight, filtering through the bare trees, made him glow like neon.

  Dagwood lay three feet away. I gave him a silent signal to let the point man pass, but keep him in sight, then kill him. A big smile crossed Dagwood’s well-camouflaged face.

  The rest of the team followed hard on their point man’s tail—not more than three or four yards behind, and not even a yard apart. Assholes. Thus, in war, are casualties caused. The rear guard could be heard thrashing and splashing five or six yards behind them.

  At my signal, whispered into the lip mike of my radio, we sprang.

  I grabbed the patrol leader—he was an overweight asshole wearing hunting coveralls in wetlands camouflage—from behind, cupped my hand over his mouth, slapped him with my sa
p, and watched him collapse on the ground. I turned to see Joe and Normal struggling with another big man in an L.L. Bean ski jacket. I reached out and touched him with the sap, too. Two down. Crabcakes was already sitting astride a third man, running surgical tape around his mouth from the rolls we all carried. Hot damn—the boy’d learned fast.

  That left Point Man and Rear Guard.

  Two shots rang out from the front of the skirmish line. Shit—I’d forgotten to tell Dagwood that I wanted everyone to kill their targets silently. Now the rear guard knew something was amiss. I got my ass in gear, cutting back, parallel to the trail, moving as quickly as I could without making noise.

  I saw him before he saw me. It was No-Load Nacklin, the asshole SEAL from Team Three.

  He’d dropped into the approved defensive position and was scanning the trail with his eagle eyes. I let him scan. He may have been looking, but he wasn’t seeing anything. Shit—he was like so many of the young ones today. They loved maneuvers and war games. They spent all their time jumping out of planes and diving. But they’d never killed anyone, never knew what it was like to get their asses shot at.

  So they did everything by the book because that’s how their worthless no-load shit-for-brains pencil-dicked pus-nutted sphincter-sucking tight-assed officers, who’d never been to war either, told them to do it.

  Remember Rule Four? There are no rules.

  I tossed a twig behind him. He rotated 180 degrees. Just like all those Jap sentries in John Wayne movies or Arab assholes in Delta Force Part XXI. Before he could swing back, I was on top of him. I applied a helping of leather sap and trussed him like a heifer. I used the tape liberally, binding his arms and legs and gagging him. Then I grabbed him by the collar of his Official U.S. Navy Issue BDUs and dragged him back to the ambush site.

  We sat them all in a row like captured VC, propped up against trees, linked one to another by the nylon and Kevlar bracelets.

  “What do we do with Team General Dectonics?” Joe asked.