Red Cell

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Red Cell Page 19

by Richard Marcinko


  Afterward, as long as we were across the river, we stopped by the gym at the Anacostia Naval Station and stole three more ID cards. I lucked out—I became a two-star without Senate approval. In the parking lot behind the gym, two unlocked cars had their Military District of Washington gate passes mounted on placards instead of inside the windshields. We stole them, too.

  We gathered at Shooter McGee’s for dinner Sunday, and I made the assignments. I’d wanted to include Stevie Wonder in this little escapade, but he was out of town on business—masquerading as a U.N. weapons inspector while he planted No Such Agency listening devices in a Middle Eastern country whose identity must remain classified, but looks very much like Iraq on a map. His loss.

  Nasty and I assigned ourselves NIS headquarters. I gave Duck Foot and Cherry the TSD building, with permission to take all the equipment they could. Half Pint and Pick would raid the CNO’s office—I’d visit them there as soon as I finished at NIS. Wynken, Blynken, et al., got the Navy Yard police station and the power plant. They would also maintain surveillance while Nasty and I broke into NIS, sitting outside dressed like security personnel in a stolen Navy Yard police van.

  Costumes were easy. We’d all be joggers. We’d wear Navy blue sweats emblazoned with Annapolis logos. We’d carry the base ID cards stolen from the gym.

  The hit would begin at 2130 hours and end at 0100 hours. We’d stash our equipment and the goods from TSD in the van. Some of what we stole we’d transfer to a car parked on the GSA side of the fence—we’d simply walk through the gate that Pick and Half Pint had doctored, load up, and drive away. The rest of the loot would be driven off in the base police van.

  Does that all sound too simple? Too logical? Too easy? Of course it does—which is why it worked so well.

  On Monday, as directed, I filed my daily mash note to Pinky. It was chatty and innocuous. It said that we were proceeding as planned, and that I was going to visit the Navy Yard. I also wrote that I planned to talk to the security officers at the Yard. I did not say, however, that I would see them in person. After all, if I paid them a courtesy call, they’d realize that I’d shaved my beard—and my little surprise might be compromised.

  Still, I was as good as my word. I dialed un coup de téléphone to the captain in charge of the Yard security detail. I introduced myself as the new CO of Red Cell and explained that we’d been tasked with a security exercise and survey.

  Capt. Worthingham Washington Lewis told me he was absatively, posolutely ready for us: “We’ve got the scenario, and my men are raring to go, Captain.”

  I wondered aloud what the scenario was.

  He actually read it to me. “You guys come through the Main Gate at ten thirty hours Friday and head for Building Two Hundred, the Navy Yard’s HQ. You take the guard at Main Gate hostage. But he calls an alert before you grab him, and our rapid-response team is ready. We set up a roadblock, and you can’t reach HQ building so you hole up in the garage with your hostage. We seal the place off, cut the power, and negotiate. In three hours, you surrender. It’s a pretty cut-and-dry situation if you ask me.”

  I bit my tongue. “Sounds that way to me, too, Captain.”

  “We can do the survey afterwards. I’ve cleared the whole day for you, but I don’t think it’ll take more than half an hour. We’re battened down pretty tight here, y’know.”

  “Really?”

  “That’s a roger. This base is as secure as any installation in the world. I’ve seen to it.”

  I believed him completely when he said that. “Okay, Captain. Seems to me you’ve got things under control over there. See you Friday.”

  Chapter 12

  TUESDAY MORNING I DROVE TO ANNAPOLIS, WHERE I BOUGHT seven sets of Academy sweats and three varsity jackets. I bought myself a baseball cap that said NAVY in gold on a blue background and had lots of scrambled eggs on the visor. It hid my hair nicely. Then I went to a Laundromat and put the hooded sweatshirts and thick pants through two wash-and-dry cycles. While I waited, I dropped by the Academy bookstore and autographed their stock of Rogue Warrior hardcovers, delighted to see that they’d almost sold out. When the book came out, the Naval Academy’s administration had refused to allow me to hold a book-signing on campus. The fact that middies were buying my book by the hundreds gave me a great sense of satisfaction. Maybe they’d even learn something from it.

  At 1655 I stopped by the Pentagon long enough to deposit an envelope on the anal-retentive-clean desk occupied by Pinky Prescott’s administrative assistant. He’d already left, as had Pinky. Only the OP-06 chief of staff, a bookish squirrel of a man named Myer, remained, shuffling papers. He looked up as I was heading toward the door.

  “Anything I can do to help, Dick?”

  “Nah—I left my daily report for Pinky on the AA’s desk.”

  He waved absentmindedly and went back to his papers. “I’ll let him know.”

  The message was, as I’d been ordered to do, addressed to His Royal Highness the deputy chief of naval operations for plans, policy, and operations. The gist of the message was: “Dear Pinky, unless otherwise directed, my unit and I are going to probe the Navy Yard’s readiness tonight, in preparation for the upcoming security exercise. Love and kisses, Richard (NMN) Marcinko, Captain, USN.”

  I was grinning as I left the building to grab the metro. Probe, hell. I was about to perform a fucking proctosigmoidoscopy.

  I met the guys at the Cave—the studio apartment I keep in Old Town Alexandria—and passed out their uniforms. We cabbed over to National Airport, where we rented a Lincoln Continental and a Ford Escort using false IDs and driver’s licenses, just like real terrorists would do. Then we drove the cars to the Shooter McGee parking lot. There, we scraped the Hertz decals off the rear windows and placed the MDW placards on the dashboards. We stowed our equipment, which was contained in ballistic nylon bags, in the trunks, then drove over to Bullfeathers, a bar on King Street in Old Town, where we chowed down on Bullburgers and Coors Light and went over last-minute details.

  By 2030 we were on our way. Wynken, Blynken, and Nod sque-e-e-zed into the back of the Escort and drove with Pick and Half Pint into the GSA compound. They were scheduled to park a hundred feet from the doctored fence. While the trio of newcomers stole a police van and set up shop outside NIS headquarters, Pick and Half Pint would break into Building 200 and use the keys I’d taken to open up the CNO’s office. Their instructions were to neutralize any Marines outside the door. Nasty drove the Lincoln, with Cherry riding shotgun. I was tucked on the floor in the back, with Duck Foot’s size nines on top of me. Sure, I’d shaved my beard. Sure, I was certain no one would recognize me. But why take chances?

  Nasty slowed at the gatehouse, waved at the guard, and cruised through at fifteen miles an hour. We swung right at the light, then slowed as we took the curve around the Navy Museum. We parked just outside the First Lieutenant’s Division, a Civil War-era warehouse directly behind TSD, two blocks from NIS headquarters. Nasty popped the trunk. We drew our gear and got to work.

  Cherry took out the two streetlights in the area with two ball bearings from his Wham-O slingshot, which he then dropped back into the Lincoln. We waited to see if anyone had heard the smack of glass, but things remained all quiet. So Duck Foot used a pick on the TSD warehouse door—a single panel steel rig with a pressure bar on the inside. It popped open before we’d even cleared the scene. The kid was everything he was quacked up to be. I waved as they disappeared inside.

  Nasty and I carried two black nylon rucksacks. We jogged slowly around the TSD building, toward Admirals’ Row. As we came past the park, we overtook a short, squat middle-aged woman in running gear huffing and puffing behind a huge rottweiler. The sucker must have been 160 pounds of dog, and you wouldn’t want to get on its bad side.

  I waved at her. “Evening, ma’am.”

  She smiled back. “Evening. Out for a jog?”

  “Yup.” I nodded toward Nasty in his varsity jacket. “Gets the old heart pumping so I
can keep up with the younger men like Junior here.”

  “I know what you mean. I run whenever I have the chance—especially on nights like this when my husband’s working late. But I tell you, it gets tougher and tougher. I have a heck of a hard time keeping up with old Murphy here.”

  I slowed down. She made terrific camouflage. “Murphy? What a great name for a dog.”

  “My husband named him after Murphy’s Law. He says that’s the one rule by which the entire Navy operates.”

  How right she was. I laughed. “I hope Murphy doesn’t live up to his name.”

  “Well, he’s always along for the ride.” She stopped and ruffled the dog behind the ears. “No—he’s a good fellow. Getting old, like me.” She peered over at Nasty in his Annapolis letter jacket. “What year?”

  “’Eighty-nine,” Nasty said with a straight face.

  “Ah—then you wouldn’t have known our son. He was class of ’eighty-three.”

  “What’s his name?” Nasty asked.

  She told us. I almost lost my cookies. We were jogging alongside CNO’s wife. Talk about timing. I should have been named Murphy—Murphy the dog, meet Murphy the Frog.

  We’d passed NIS Headquarters by now and were headed toward the waterfront, where the USS Barry was moored. I nudged Nasty’s arm, and we veered off to the right. “Nice talking to you, ma’am.”

  She waved in our direction and kept going toward the dock. “You, too. Take care, now.”

  We picked up our pace and moved off. “Shit,” I said after she was out of earshot, “talk about timing.”

  “Like the Polish comedian says, Skipper, ‘timing is everything.’”

  We ran around the block twice. It was all quiet. No security. No cops. No CNO’s wife. No Murphy. We circled back to the Forge Building from the south side, looking inside the glass doors to where the security guards were sitting behind their console. There were cameras and monitors, of course—but the pair of watchdogs were more interested in the card game they had going than the bank of screens behind them.

  Headlights from the east. We slowed to a walk to see who it was. Wynken, in a police windbreaker and visored cap, sat in the shotgun seat of a Dodge panel truck with a bubblegum light bar. He wriggled his eyebrows in our direction. Nod, serious face and all, was behind the wheel.

  It was time to move. At the northeast corner of the building, an iron drainpipe about the thickness of a good-size sapling ran from the ground right up to the roof four stories above. I pointed at it. “Nasty, would you like to lead the way?”

  Shinnying up a drainpipe is harder than it looks—but if you can press more than 300 pounds, it just takes practice, because your upper-body strength will get you through the ordeal. Nasty presses 475. He went up the damn pipe like a Tahitian going after a coconut. By the time I wheezed my way over the rooftop, he’d pulled on his surgical gloves and was already hard at work breaking and entering.

  I slipped my gloves on and joined him in crime. First, we eased the TV cameras out of position very slowly. No need to alert the guards below. Once the lenses were turned six inches to the right, they’d miss us as we worked. Then we jimmied open one of the building’s three roof vents, propped it with a collapsible tent stake, attached nylon climbing line to a stanchion, and dropped into the main electrical shaft.

  From there it was only a couple of wiggles and a shimmy or two into a fourth-floor hallway. There, we’d split up. Nasty would take the top two floors, searching for souvenirs and leaving IEDs. He would then make his escape the way we’d come, link up with the bogus police van, and head for the hills. I’d take the bottom two floors and cut my way out through one of the first-floor offices that backed up on an alleyway. Incredibly, the street-level offices, which were used by junior officers, had single panes of glass in their windows. Breaking out would be as easy as using a glass cutter and a suction cup, both of which I happened to have in my backpack.

  I ambled down the fire stairs to two, eased the door open, and walked into the linoleum-tile hallway. I knew a fair amount about the layout of NIS headquarters because I’d been interrogated there for weeks, during my own inquisition back in the late eighties. I knew, for example, that there are three SCIFs on the second floor and two on the third. SCIFs are Special Classified Intelligence Facilities, or in plain English, bug-proof rooms.

  The SCIFs on three are used for taking depositions and doing interrogations of people like me whose operations are code-word-level secret. Two SCIFs on the second floor are where NIS keeps its sensitive files, current investigations, and other goodies.

  The third bubble room on two is used by SLUDJ—the special investigation task force that concentrates on prosecuting flag-rank officers. SLUDJ, pronounced sludge, stands for Sensitive Legal (Upper Deck) Jurisdiction. It maintains a suite of eight offices on the second floor.

  I guess the idea was okay. It was similar to the concept of the special prosecutor—an office of professional, apolitical investigators whose job would be to go after those who ran the Navy. An internal affairs unit similar to those on most police forces. The only trouble was that it got corrupted early on and was used almost exclusively for political revenge.

  It was SLUDJ that was turned loose on my sea daddy Admiral Ace Lyons back in the late eighties when he offended too many of his Annapolis classmates by his inna-you-face attitude. Using intimidation, harassment, and direct threats during a two-year investigation codenamed Iron Eagle, SLUDJ forced Ace into premature retirement from his post as CINCPACFLT—Commander-IN-Chief, PACific FLeeT.

  The week after Ace retired, his greatest rival—a three-star named Mike Dyne whom Ace had displaced as the starting quarterback of the 1946 Navy football team four decades earlier—was promoted to full admiral and given Ace’s job. It was Dyne—acting with the blessing of the then-CNO—who had loosed NIS on Ace. Not because Ace had done anything wrong, but because Mike Dyne wanted to settle a grudge he’d held since Annapolis. He used SLUDJ to do it.

  I know—you’re saying that using an investigative service for political goals is immoral and wrong. So what’s your point? That’s the real world. NIS is commonly known as the Admirals’ Gestapo—indeed, that is precisely what it’s called on the Pentagon’s fourth-floor E Ring, where all the three-and four-stars have their offices. They use NIS against each other all the time.

  Anyway, if NIS is the Gestapo, then the legal terrorists at SLUDJ are the Gestapo’s Death’s Head SS unit. They’re known as Terminators.

  I began checking SLUDJ’s doors. The cypher locks on the first three were tight as virgin pussy. I heard voices behind door number four. I was about to diddle with the punch keys anyway when I heard the voices getting closer. I looked around for someplace to hide.

  Shit—I’d passed the point of no return. There was no way I could make it back to the stairwell without their seeing me. Wild-eyed, I hauled ass down the hall until I saw a men’s room sign, wheelied through the door, took refuge in a stall, and dropped my sweatpants.

  I wasn’t an instant too soon. Twenty seconds later the door pushed open and two pairs of black shoes headed toward the urinals. I heard zippers unzip, and two ahs in unison. They peed in silence. Then, one of the Terminators suggested they grab a quick pizza at the O Club across the street before they finished their work. That sounded good to Terminator Two. They shook off, then left without washing up. Typical.

  I gave them three minutes, then slipped out of the head, went back to their door, and turned the cypher-lock handle to the left. It moved—the assholes had actually left the room open. I could have picked the lock—they take four or five minutes to bypass—but now I didn’t have to.

  I went inside.

  This was too good to be true. Like so many offices at so many allegedly secure locations, from Capitol Hill to the Pentagon to the CIA, the series of cypher-locked doors were a sham. All the offices were interconnected—a row of eight, sans any interior doorways. Only the SCIF at the end of the hall was sealed.

  Th
e Terminators who’d gone for pizza had observed security procedures. They’d locked their files and their desks, although they’d left some notes on a worktable and the Xerox machine was still turned on. Others, however, had been less conscientious. Two offices down, someone had left the safe open. In the very last office I discovered a bunch of files spread out on a pair of long tables in the center of the room.

  It was time to go to work. I checked the tables first, searching for anything that contained Grant Griffith’s name. I found nothing, although there were quite a few that dealt with operations he’d mentioned to me. I took a dozen or so files, ran down to the Xerox machine, copied them, and slipped them in my rucksack.

  Then I opened the safe and rifled through the file jackets inside. Each jacket contained one investigation. Two code names caught my eye. One was labeled FOXHUNTER—that was probably about pussy-chasing. My kind of investigation. I pulled the file. The other one to get my attention had HUCKLEBERRY HOUND in one-inch capital letters written across the front. What came to mind immediately was the jowly, basset-hound face of the retired four-star admiral named—well, I’ll just call him Huck.

  I opened the Huckleberry jacket first. Inside was a six-inch-thick sheaf of papers. There were photographs and there were transcripts. There were reports, memos, copies of letters, and telephone logs. There were interviews, depositions, and sworn statements.

  The subject of the investigation was indeed Admiral Huck, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had become actively dovish in his retirement. He’d endorsed sanctions against Iraq instead of action during his televised Senate testimony. He’d campaigned for the current president, whom many in the Navy detested.

  Now, it seemed, the Terminators were out to get Huck for influence peddling during his term as chairman, and from the look of the file in my hands, they were going to do it. They’d put together a damning bunch of evidence. The problem was, none of it was true. It was a tapestry of lies, innuendo, and hearsay, all woven together with circumstantial evidence and unnamed sources into a convincing tapestry. Still, if the story was leaked to the press—which was one of the ways SLUDJ operated—it could ruin Huck’s civilian career. Because currently, Admiral Huckleberry Hound, USN (Ret.), had just been nominated by the White House as our new ambassador to Russia.

 

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