Anyway, after about half an hour of foreplay, Griffith got down to fuck-you business. “I hear you’ve had some interesting adventures recently.”
I was all innocence. “Really?”
“I called Black Jack Morrison. We had a fascinating little chat.”
“How is old cockbreath?”
Griffith’s thin lips turned upward in that crooked, yellow-toothed smile of his. “Just fine. He asked the same about you.”
“Yeah—Black Jack was one of the few admirals I could ever say fuck to—and vice versa.”
The former SECDEF nodded. “He told me about your assignment at Narita—and the incident with the, ah, intruders.”
“Interesting he should bring it up.”
“We’re old friends. We’ve done a lot of business together—I know he’s consulting for Fujoki because I opened the door there for him. He and I talk frankly.” Griffith took a sip of his iced tea. “Besides, he was concerned. Your report worried him—especially the references to me. Fortunately, I was able to explain that events in Japan weren’t exactly as they might have seemed to you at first glance.”
“I don’t quite understand what you’re saying.” Actually, everything was pretty cut-and-dry to me.
Item: Griffith was a director of the Jones-Hamilton Corporation. It paid him $48,000 a year plus expenses to attend four meetings in Los Angeles. Nothing wrong with that. But he was also—on paper at least—a part owner of the nonexistent Acme Air Conditioner company of Redondo Beach, California. That made him dirty.
Item: I knew that included in the inventory of defense-related items currently manufactured by Jones-Hamilton were electronic detonators for such tactical nuclear weapons as Tomahawk missiles. Griffith had access to that information—and had used it. That made him dirty.
Item: I had discovered that despite federal—even international—prohibitions to the contrary, the firm had sold several dozen of these stateof-the-art detonators to front companies in Britain and Germany. That made him dirty.
Item: Somehow, the detonators, mislabeled as air-conditioning parts and shipped by a nonexistent company Griffith “owned,” ended up at Narita, pawed over by the nasty quartet of kimchi-sucking Koreans I’d had the misfortune to run into—including two who worked for a corporation that paid Griffith $5 mil a year. Dirty, hell—that made him a fucking traitor.
My reverie was interrupted by the former defense secretary. “I know you don’t understand,” Griffith was saying, “because if you had understood, you would have kept your nose out of things instead of making a total mess.”
“Huh?” Now I actually was confused.
“You blundered into a sting operation, you idiot,” Griffith growled at me. “We’d set it all up—Jones-Hamilton shipped dummy goods. We were hoping to scoop up the whole goddamn network that’s been smuggling prohibited materials for the past five years.”
“We? Who the hell’s we’?”
“DOD—the Navy—the Japanese authorities, Interpol. All with my encouragement, help, and cooperation. And then you came along—huffing and puffing and blowing our house down.”
I was not impressed. In fact, I was dubious—despite the tidbit from O’Bannion about my screwing up a classified operation in Japan. The Navy does not let civilians run ops. Not even former SECDEFs. I said so to Griffith.
His eyes frosted over. “I am not your everyday former secretary of defense,” he snapped. “I have served administrations since Johnson’s. There are few people I do not know, and few places I cannot go.”
He was right—I’d found that out already. But I wasn’t about to appear impressed. “No shit.”
Griffith’s tongue flicked across his lip. “‘No shit’ indeed. And then to make matters worse you tried to investigate on your own—had that Jap cop of yours trace the shipment back to Acme Air Conditioner in Redondo Beach. And of course you discovered that there is no Acme Air Conditioner company in Redondo, or anywhere else.”
I let him talk.
“And so you set out to check my bona fides, didn’t you, Captain?”
“I guess you could say that.”
“I guess I will say that. And what have you discovered?”
“That you are one powerful fucking juju man, Mr. Griffith.”
“Call me Grant.”
“You are one powerful fucking juju man, Grant.”
“I know I am. And what else did you find, Dick?”
I thought about things for a few minutes while I finished my second Bombay and a third gin was put in front of me. If my newfound friend Grant was trying to loosen my tongue with alcohol, he had a long way to go. Back in 1973,1 spent six months in spy school before I was assigned to Phnom Penh as the naval attaché. We actually had courses in cocktail parties where they taught us how to drink competitively—not that I needed any schooling in that discipline. I decided to take him back over some old ground. “So, Black Jack didn’t know anything about your sting.”
“Of course not—not then. If he had, do you think he’d have given you the Narita assignment?”
I thought about it. That, at least, made some sort of sense. But there were still too many loose ends; too many convenient coincidences. Thirty years of active duty in unconventional warfare had taught me that there are very few convenient coincidences in life, but lots of inconvenient conspiracies. “So, whose operation was this alleged sting?”
“Pinky Prescott. He’s the OP-06 these days—deputy chief of naval operations for plans, policy, and operations. Good man.”
Pinky da Turd. My nemesis from SEAL Team Six. I bit my tongue.
He watched my face closely. “Oh, I know all about your long and bitter relationship with Pinky. You don’t like him, and he doesn’t like you, either. He insists you tried to kill him.”
“He’s a liar. If I’d tried to kill him, he’d be a fucking corpse today. I’ll tell you all I know about Pinky. He’s an asshole and a coward and he has the brainpower of a fresh cowpie.”
Griffith licked his upper lip again. It reminded me of’a lizard. A particle of spittle remained, tucked in the upper left corner of his mouth. “Don’t be wishy-washy, Dick.” The tongue darted and dabbed. The spittle disappeared.
It was time for reveille. “Fuck you, Grant. Cute doesn’t work well for you. Bitchy, maybe. But on you, cute sucks.”
I slammed down my Bombay in a single gulp and returned the glass to the table with a thwack. “Look, you silverhaired, lip-licking schmuck, you may like to do business with fucking companies that build things that kill American servicemen—I’m talking Matsuko here in case I’m being too fucking subtle for you—I don’t. You may have to do business with no-load dip-shit sphincter-sucking pus-nutted assholes like Pinky Prescott on a regular basis. I don’t. I did my fucking time. I did it in the fucking Navy and I did it at Petersburg. I don’t owe anybody a goddamn thing. I gave the fucking country fifty fucking years, and I’ve got the fucking scars to fucking prove it. The next fifty are mine—and I plan to take advantage of ’em. So, if you have something to offer me, then do it. Otherwise, thanks for the Bombay, fuck you very much, and sayonara, asshole.”
You remember those commercials where E.F. Hutton talks and everybody else listens? Well, that’s what happened to us. Griffith and I suddenly realized that the entire restaurant had come to a complete fucking stop.
Tables of men in fifteen-hundred-dollar suits peered disapprovingly over their half-glasses in our direction. The eighty-three-year-old thrice-married grande dame of the Democratic Party looked so pop-eyed outraged I thought she was going to bust her latest face-lift. A quartet of Chanel-clad suburban matrons began to fan themselves with their menus. Waiters, mouths open, stood bearing their trays of food. Vietnamese busboys holding gleaming pots of steaming coffee or armfuls of soiled napery stood transfixed like jacklighted deer. Tommy Jacomo, who had been ringing something up on the register, peered over the top of the cashier’s partition like Kilroy.
Our own waiter—a well-fed Brookly
n boy who called himself Joe but was born Giuseppe—was standing, order pad in hand, pencil poised, just behind Grant Griffith’s shoulder as I did my monologue. He looked down at me and asked, “And just how would you like those fifty fucking years done, sir?”
I wagged my eyebrows at the four ladies with their makeshift fans and made a noise like a horse whinnying in heat. “Extra pussy on the side, please, Joe.”
I let Griffith do most of the talking until we got back to his office. My outburst must have affected him like a laxative because he ran off at the mouth for the next hour. I hardly got a word in edgewise. That was all right with me. I’m leery about chatting in restaurants anyway. I used to teach my guys at Red Cell to listen hard when they went to restaurants and bars. A lot of good intel is picked up when people drink and eat. Somehow, when there’s a good steak on the plate, a bottle of wine at hand, and a couple of good-looking women in the area, the classification stamps just seem to slip away.
I asked Griffith if he had his office swept for bugs. He told me it was done by Buckshot’s people every week.
That didn’t tell me anything one way or the other, but I decided to let it pass. “Okay, Grant, a couple of things,” I said. “First, you’re trying to bullshit me, and I don’t like it.”
He gave me this real concerned-type look. “How, Dick?”
“First, those were no dummy detonators. Come on—I’ve been in and out of nuclear weapons facilities hundreds of times. What I saw at Narita was the real thing.”
Griffith played with his Roman ring in silence.
“Second—what’s this crap about a sting? I ran into four Koreans playing ‘Hijack the Nuclear Material.’ Nobody else was doing diddly. There were no undercovers lurking in the shadows—because I was lurking there all night myself. And the bad guys I shot weren’t any fucking double agents. I knew that by the time I left Tokyo, thanks to Tosho. They were the opposition.”
“Everything you say is literally true,” Griffith said. “Look, Dick, we’re not dealing with amateurs here. We had to use real detonators. But we always knew where they were. We had passive monitors in the crate.”
“That’s a load of crap.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because they’re fucking passive—there was no active surveillance in play, Grant, I was there.”
“We knew where the goods were at all times.”
“And what if they’d been taken to Pyongyang?”
“What’s your point?”
“You had no way to stop things once you’d set the ball rolling.”
He nodded grudgingly. “You have a point.”
“Who built the monitors?”
“NIS had them built.”
“Naval Investigative Service? Are you out of your fucking mind, Grant?”
“That’s who Pinky assigned to the job.”
Pinky again. “When I ran into the bad guys, they were switching crates.”
Griffith nodded. “That concerned me deeply. I would have hated to lose the trail.”
“You would have lost more than the trail, goddammit—you would have lost the fucking detonators.” He sounded so bloodless. He sounded like every other goddamn bureaucrat; the kind of no-load, pencil-pushing, bean-counting supergrade who makes strategic decisions that can cost the lives of thousands of men on the basis of a penny or two saved.
He was talking as if lives didn’t depend on his following the fucking trail. It got me steamed. “That’s why passive monitors and most of that other electronic garbage is such a goatfuck when it’s used by itself,” I explained pedantically. “If you assholes had been thinking, you’d have used operators in addition to the electronic stuff. Guys trained to work in the shadows. Shooters who would have stuck to the trail like glue—no matter where it led.”
“You’re talking about SEALs?”
“That’s what I know best.”
“You’re probably thinking your old unit Red Cell should have been given the assignment.”
“Why do you say that?”
He rubbed his chin. “Well, they do fit the mission profile for the job.”
“Oh?”
“Dick, Dick, Dick—I know all about Red Cell’s two-tier capability. OP Zero Six Delta slash Tango Romeo Alpha Papa was the original designation, I believe, using the code-word designation of Waterfall Weatherman.”
Shit—the guy was plugged in. Very few people knew about that. When I’d created the Cell, Black Jack Morrison had me design it as a unit within a unit. Tier one—OP-06 Delta—was the security-exercise designation. We acted the part of bad guys to test naval installations and teach them how to counter terrorism. The other tier—Tango Romeo Alpha Papa and code-word secret—was to operate as an elite unit under Red Cell cover, performing covert ops worldwide, as dictated by CNO and the National Command Authority. That sounds very broad. It was. We were charged with everything from proactive elimination of terrorist elements (that translates into assassinations), to the destruction of nuclear facilities in unfriendly countries, to the scuttling of unfriendly vessels.
“You may have designed things that way originally,” Griffith said, “but that was ten years ago. Today, both you and Black Jack are retired. And the Cell’s mission requirements have been modified substantially.”
“For the worse, I’ve been told.”
“Some say for the better. These days, Red Cell is a valuable training tool—and that is all. It’s been recast as an integral element of the Navy’s command structure.”
“You’re feeding me a load of horse puckey, Grant. ‘Valuable training tool’? That’s so much crapola. I’ve heard what goes on. The men are ordered to wear goddamn Red Cell uniforms—Tshirts or windbreakers and hats—so they can’t infiltrate the targets in mufti. If they deep-six the outfits, they’re cited for being out of uniform. The exercises are designed to let the good guys win every time. That’s not real life. Worse, it doesn’t teach the base commanders anything.”
“But their morale is better.”
“Fuck morale. We’re talking life and death here. And what about Red Cell’s morale? They’re the shooters who end up going over the rail whenever the shit hits the fan.”
Griffith sighed and shook his head. “You still don’t understand.”
“Understand what?”
“That every unit—especially Red Cell—has to be a part of the chain of command.”
“I disagree. To succeed, the Cell has got to exist outside the system.”
“Why?”
“Because if it’s part of the problem, it can’t be part of the solution.”
“You can’t have a rogue unit, Dick.”
“I agree—most of the time. But when Black Jack let me design Red Cell, he realized that in some circumstances, a unit has to be able to operate outside the chain of command. That’s why Red Cell reported directly through CNO to the secretary of defense and the president, not through some asshole Navy SpecWar commodore, or a thumb-sucking admiral on E Ring.”
“You’re talking about Pinky again, aren’t you?”
“What if I am?” I knew damn well what Red Cell’s problem was. It was Pinky da Turd.
Griffith chose to disregard my protest. “Politically, Red Cell is in the doghouse these days. Frankly, Dick, it’s still recovering from you. Several of the men are being investigated by NIS. It’s considered a déclassé operation. No self-respecting officer wants to lead it anymore.”
“What you mean is that it’s not a ticket-punching slot, so Pinky’s assigning any asshole he can find as CO.”
“Describe it any way you want—the bottom line is the same. Red Cell is in trouble. So, there was no way I was going to use it to perform a delicate mission. There was never any question about that.”
“You were going to use it—give me a fucking break. Civilians don’t pick the units to carry out missions.”
Griffith’s reptilian eyes burned in on me. “In case you forgot, Dick,” he said, a pedantic tone in his voice,
“the military is still under civilian control in this country.”
“But not under your control.”
“Not officially. But there are those who still seek my advice, my counsel, my opinion. And when it was suggested by one of the few officers brought in to work on this smuggling problem that the Navy use Red Cell to keep an eye on the monitors, I vetoed the recommendation.”
Sure he did—the guy was dirty. I knew it. I felt it in every bone. “Why—because they might have succeeded?”
“No, because Red Cell isn’t suited for that kind of work these days. It is a training tool, pure and simple.”
“Maybe that’s because there’s no leadership anymore. Maybe the shooters need a real CO for a change—a guy with balls. Somebody who’s not looking to earn his stars by fucking his enlisted men.”
Griffith looked at me intently in silence for some seconds. “Maybe you’re right, Dick,” he said quietly. “Maybe it does.”
Part Two
TARFU
Chapter 9
DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY OFFICE OF THE CHIEF OF NAVAL OPERATIONS WASHINGTON. DC 2O35O-2OOO
IN REPLY REFER TO SER 07BL/3Q3056191 22 December
FROM: CHIEF OF NAVAL OPERATIONS (OPOO)
TO: COMMANDER RICHARD [NMN] MARCINKO, USN (RET) 156-93-083/1130
SUBJ: INVOLUNTARY RECALL OF RETIRED OFFICERS TO ACTIVE DUTY
REF: (a) SECNAVINST 1811.4D
NMPC-213 (8/1/91)
(b) 10 USC 688
(c) 10 USC 672 (d)
(d) SECNAVINST 1920.7
1. Delivered by hand.
2. In accordance with Ref (a) you are hereby recalled to active duty. You are ordered to report immediately to RADM Pinckney Prescott, III, no later than 1100 hours on December 22. The period of your active duty is at the discretion of this office.
3. Failure to respond immediately will force this office to implement other means available.
4. (Signed): Arleigh L. Secrest
Admiral, U.S. Navy
Chief of Naval Operations
Chapter 10
Red Cell Page 15