Red Cell

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by Richard Marcinko


  I’d served as Huckleberry’s SpecWar liaison officer during a six-month period just after I left command of SEAL Team Six. He wasn’t my kind of chairman. A ship driver who’d left the fleet two decades before and become a systems analyst and a Ph.D. in education, he’d been inclined against using force.

  But he’d always been a square shooter with me. He’d never lied or tried to screw me or, more to the point, screw SpecWar. And there was no way he was an influence peddler. This was a man who never took anything from the hundreds of lobbyists who tried to buy his favors with lavish dinners or offers of free trips. He always paid his own way. He picked up his own dinner checks. He turned down golfing weekends in Palm Springs and Boca Raton. He once threw—threw—a lobbyist out of his office after the man hinted about a six-figure consulting fee after retirement if Admiral Huck would simply lean in favor of a certain weapons target-acquisitioning system under consideration.

  I took the cover sheets to the file, the list of hostile witnesses and sources, the phone logs, and several of the shorter deposition transcripts and ran them through the Xerox. Then I slid everything back in the file jacket and replaced it in the safe. Old Admiral Huck was about to receive a plain brown envelope in the mail.

  Next came Foxhunter. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the pussy-crazed flag officer under investigation was none other than my own dear new boss, Pinckney Prescott III. It seems that Pinky’d been turned in by a high-placed civilian source who, the report said, chanced upon him and his sweetie as they came out of an apartment house at Twenty-first and N streets, Northwest, at three in the P.M., or 1500 hours by the military clock.

  Said source, the report continued, became suspicious because Pinky gave said sweetie a big wet one, then climbed into a Pentagon staff car driven by a naval enlisted man. Said source had obtained the license plate and motor pool number of the aforementioned vehicle and given it to NIS, which determined that the staff car in question was assigned to my old nemesis Pinky da Turd.

  According to the file, said civilian source had gone directly to the head of NIS, who had deemed the threat serious enough to commence an investigation of the deputy CNO for plans, policy, and operations. Obviously, said CS had beaucoup clout. It’s not everybody who can call up the head of NIS and get him scrambling on an investigation in—according to what the report said—a mere three days.

  Indeed, a surveillance had been set up by NIS because the civilian source suspected that Miko Takahashi, the BIQ, or Bimbo In Question, was a foreign intelligence agent. Miko was a Japanese national who had in the past worked for her embassy’s military liaison office. She lived in the Twenty-first and N Street apartment and currently worked as a freelance translator and business consultant to the Matsuko Corporation. Spell that B-I-M-B-O.

  It was determined that Pinky had his assignations thrice a week at precisely 1400. He arrived, he came, and he left, all on a meticulous schedule. That sounded just like him—nothing spontaneous.

  There were phone transcripts—obviously they had the place bugged—and pictures. Great pictures. She was a real brunette. She had small tits, but nice ones, especially when aroused. Pinky was not well-endowed. I ran copies of a dozen of the photos, then photocopied the file.

  I made a mental note to Fax Miko’s photo to Tosho and see what he could come up with. Then I dropped everything into my knapsack, put the file back where it belonged, and slipped out of the room. The elevator doors were just opening. I ran like hell for the stairwell and got there unobserved.

  Shit—I’d hit the fucking jackpot. My instinct was to take off—Nasty was under orders to leave enough IEDs to show we’d been visiting—but I held back. I left the stairwell and worked my way around the atrium, keeping low so the guards couldn’t see me. I went into the first office that had an open door, popped the lock on a file cabinet with my screwdriver, and placed an IED smoke bomb inside. I left the drawer open, with a Naval Security Coordination Team sticker—a Globe, with the letters RC (for Red Cell) superimposed on it—prominently displayed.

  I stuck another decal on the office door as I left. Then I went back to the stairwell and ambled down to the first floor, jimmied one of the street-level offices, eased the curtains back, and peered out the window. The alley was quiet. I licked the suction cup and placed it on the window, took my glass cutter, and worked it around the perimeter of the pane, then tapped. The glass came free. I put a Red Cell decal on the glass before laying it on the floor. Then I eased myself outside.

  Shouldering my rucksack, I jogged around the front of the Forge Building, heading northeast. The panel truck was still parked near Admiral Willard Park. I gave the thumbs-up sign to my two bogus cops as I chugga-huffed past them. Nod nodded in my direction and switched on the ignition. Their next assignment was the TSD building. There, they’d pick up the goodies Cherry and Duck Foot were purloining, stow them, and drive them out of the Yard, down M Street, and into the GSA lot, where they’d be transferred into the trunk of the Escort. Duck Foot and Cherry would make their own way back through the gate. They’d change the locks again, then head for the Escort, and haul ass for the Cave.

  I wandered over to Building 200, where Half Pint and Pick were wiring the CNO’s office with half a dozen IEDs. I slipped into the dress bluejacket and white hat that the chief of naval operations had obligingly left hanging on his coatrack, sat behind his desk, and smiled into the camera while Pick snapped a Kodachrome with his Stylus. Then we booby-trapped the Marine guard and split. After all, there were still fifty-five minutes before the bars in Old Town closed, and I thought that the boys deserved a few cold ones after a productive night’s work.

  Chapter 13

  PINKY WAS GLUED TO THE CEILING WHEN I PAID MY MORNING call. He descended long enough to jump up and down like one of those cartoon organ-grinder monkeys, screaming his head off about the fact that NIS was going crazy because their sanctuary had been violated, and that I was in deep shit and about to spend the rest of my natural life at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, breaking big stones into little stones.

  I’d disobeyed my direct, written orders by not taking a JAG officer with me to the Navy Yard. I’d broken the rules by not alerting the Public Affairs Division of my moves in advance. Worst of all, I’d violated the Navy’s most sacrosanct rule: thou shalt not fuck with your fellow officers.

  Do you realize, Pinky bawled, that CNO is currently reaming the Navy Yard commandant, a one-star admiral named Moosley, a new asshole? CNO was furious. It seemed he’d walked into his office at 0645 and found the door wide open, the files rifled, and the armed Marine guard tied to his chair and booby-trapped with a smoke grenade. For some reason Pinky couldn’t comprehend, CNO wasn’t mad at Red Cell, but blamed the Navy Yard CO for the fact that the Yard had such lax security.

  “Teddy Moosley,” Pinky said bitterly, “was my roommate at the Academy.” Now, he continued, his former roomie was dead meat. “He was up for promotion this year—until you had to go and blow him out of the water with your asinine games.”

  CNO might think it was Teddy’s fault. Pinky, however, knew who’d really fucked up—and the culprit’s name was spelled M-A-R-C-I-N-K-O. He insisted he was going to see that I paid full price for my inappropriate, thoughtless, and ill-considered actions, too.

  Doom on you, Pinky. I could prove my innocence. I pointed to the love note I’d dropped off the previous afternoon, which lay opened on Pinky’s desk. “I spelled out everything I was going to do right there. It was delivered before close of business. We waited until twenty-one hundred hours to hear from you, Pinky. You didn’t oppose the operation. I took your silence to mean that the preliminary probe was okay with you.”

  “But I wasn’t even here,” Pinky whined.

  “Your chief of staff was. He was at his desk when I dropped it off. He didn’t say anything either, and when you didn’t call, we believed we’d been given a green light.”

  He sputtered some more. But, being the bureaucrat that he was, he knew I’d left a
proper paper trail and there was nothing he could do.

  It was time to make him jump through another hoop or two. I took an envelope from my briefcase and laid it on his desk. “Anyway, I thought you might like a look at this souvenir from last night’s exercise.” I said it with a smile.

  Pinky slid the ten-by-thirteen envelope toward him as if it might be contaminated. He slit it open and pulled a single photograph from inside. His eyes went wide in horror.

  “What the—” I thought he was going to choke. “You rotten son of a bitch! How did you ever—” He laid the photograph on his desk, still sputtering. It was my face that was smiling up at him—a color print of me in CNO’s blouse and hat I’d had done at an hour-photo lab before coming to work.

  “Keep it as a souvenir, Pinky. I’ve already sent one to CNO.”

  I know, I know—you’re asking why I didn’t give Pinky one of the better shots—the ones I’d found in the SLUDJ offices. Well, there’s a time for everything, and this wasn’t the time.

  After all, I’d secured a treasure trove of information in SLUDJ’s suite, and I didn’t think they knew I’d been there. Pinky and his ilk see me as a knuckle dragger and nothing more. But I know how to use intelligence—and how to exploit it. I knew Pinky was after my ass. So were a dozen other flag officers—men I’d screwed when I had command of Six or the Red Cell back in the eighties. Base commanders whose careers were blotted by my escapades. Staff officers I’d bullied and terrorized. SEAL competitors whose toes I’d stomped.

  Now that I was back, they all wanted a piece of me. So I had to protect myself. The SLUDJ papers were just the life preserver I needed. They were currently stored beneath the floorboards of the kitchen at Rogue Manor, where Stevie Wonder had built me a little hideaway. It’s a neat job and so well carpentered that the CIA’s top black-bag man, who’s an old friend of Stevie’s, came over and spent nine hours looking for it one day. He came up dry.

  So this was no time to tell anyone what I had. Besides, with Pinky under NIS surveillance, things were taking a nasty turn. I wanted to learn who’d turned Pinky in—discover the identity of that highly placed civilian source. I wanted to see if Pinky was indeed involved with a foreign agent—because if he was, his ass was going to be mine, or if he’d been set up, in which case his ass was also going to be mine.

  I wanted the time to think of a way to use the Foxhunter file and Pinky’s provocative, passionate pecker-and-pussy pictures to my best advantage. It was better to let him spit nails about a photo of me trying to impersonate an officer and bide my time.

  So, I made myself scarce. I bought the boys a celebratory dinner at the Chart House. I began working the phones, setting up the old network of chiefs and junior officers I’d used to get round the system in the past—I call it my Safety Net because it allows me to operate outside the system. I checked in with Tosho and slipped him Miko Takahashi’s name. I even gave Joe Andrews a call to see how his minisub business was going. And all the while, I added a snippet here and a snippet there to my Grant Griffith file.

  I’m a very instinctual person. In combat, instinct has saved my life—like the time in Vietnam when a voice in my head said “Duck!” and I threw myself onto the ground just as an AK-47 blasted at me from five yards away. There were hundreds of times during my career when life-and-death decisions had to be made. I made many of them “from the gut” and regretted very few. Now, my gut was telling me that no matter what Grant Griffith said, no matter who he knew, no matter how important he was to our national security, the guy was dirty. I just couldn’t prove it—yet.

  Meanwhile, my plate was full. I hung out at the Cave, checking over the TSD gadgets my nasty little devils had purloined. We probably had half a million dollars’ worth of goodies—everything from a pair of fiber-optic TV cameras smaller than pipe cleaners, to a voice-stress analyzer, to a set of portable voice scramblers that were small enough to fit in your pocket. I had no intention of giving them back, figuring that somewhere, sometime, somehow, they’d come in handy. Toys like that always do.

  I was summoned to OP-06 forty-eight hours later. Pinky was his usual abrupt and charming self. “Come,” he said by way of greeting, grabbing his jacket and heading out the door.

  I followed him like a dog, trailing behind as he strode admiralty down the E Ring hallway, galumphed down two flights of stairs, and marched back up the D Ring to the hallway outside the Joint Chiefs of Staff situation room. He stopped in front of an unmarked door and punched a combination into the cypher-button lock. We entered a room directly across the hall from the JCS facility, a SCIF I’d used during the Tehran rescue mission.

  Inside, an easel had been set up. Files were spread out on a long table. And a one-starred, four-eyed intelligence squirrel named Howard Rosenberg was pacing nervously. Two of Rosenberg’s aides—weenies wearing captain’s stripes and thick glasses—sat on folding chairs biting their nails. Pinky made perfunctory introductions, then we got down to the nitty-gritty. And there was a lot more grit than nit, believe me.

  In essence, I was being given the unenviable task of volunteering to take my men into North Korean waters, where we would infiltrate the minisub pens at Chongjin, the site of the country’s most secret naval installation, and place underwater “tracer” monitors on all the North Korean minisubs we could find, so their activity could be tracked by satellite. Chongjin was where DIA had pinpointed fresh nuclear weapons smuggling activity, by using, as one weenie put it, “several various clandestine monitoring devices that were built internally.” Simultaneous translation: NIS monitors from the Navy Yard had been placed in the containers. Shades of Narita. This was déjà vu all over again. I wondered who was really pulling Rosenberg’s strings. Was this another Grant Griffith goatfuck?

  I asked whether the incident at Narita had any connection to the current mission. “Only in the most ephemeral way,” Pinky said.

  And what was that? I asked.

  “It caused us to improve the manner in which the devices report location,” Rosenberg sniffed. “All our internal monitors now have directional and signal-strength capability.”

  In English, that meant the bugs I’d stolen could tell you where they were, and how close you were to them. At least TSD had learned something from its mistake.

  Rosenberg’s nerds continued with the briefing. The mission was to be a sneak-and-peek, with visual evidence to be gathered by digital infrared cameras that would, after we returned to the sub, burst-satellite the information back to DIA. Yes, we knew that the North Koreans didn’t have their nuclear program based at Chongjin. The reactor that made their weapons-grade plutonium and the labs working on detonators and other elements of the bombs were all located at Yongbyon, about a hundred miles up the Chongchon River from Chongjin harbor. But they were using Chongjin as a transfer point. Our intel came up with the following scenario: Stolen materials were smuggled aboard cargo ships or tankers, which sailed to the North Korean port. There, it was suspected—although not confirmed—that minisubs were used to ferry the goods from dockside to the military base, where hard-topped concrete sub pens had been built to conceal activity from satellite observation. Inside the pens, the nuclear materials would be unloaded, and from there the stuff would be trucked to Yongbyon concealed in other cargo.

  It was, Admiral Rosenberg said, our mission impossible to determine what the North Koreans were actually smuggling, and to bring back substantive evidence about precisely how they were doing it.

  Once the intel weenies had left, Pinky explained how the mission would work. We’d travel in mufti to Hawaii, then go on to Tokyo by civilian carrier, traveling separately. We’d form up at Yokosuka, the joint U.S./Japanese navy base closest to Tokyo, grab a plane, and head out to the Sea of Japan, where we’d HALO, drop into the water, get picked up by a nuclear sub that had been outfitted for special operations with a DDS, or Dry Dock Shelter clamshell housing to protect our SDVs, or Swimmer Delivery Vehicles. Then it would be on to North Korea, where we’d complete
our mission, be picked up by the sub, then taken back to Japan, from where we’d come home on civilian transport.

  Why us? Because, as Pinky explained, this was a real black-bag job. The Joint Chiefs didn’t even know about it. This was a Navy operation. Its background lay in the fact that the CIA and the State Department had determined—and more ominously, the administration had accepted—that the North Koreans weren’t in the nuclear weapons development business anymore and were striving for normalization. But we Navy types knew better. My mission would provide evidence that the Navy was right.

  Pinky didn’t say it, but I realized there was more of a political element to the mission than there was a tactical need. Proof that the kimchis were building a bomb would help the Navy keep its budget, which was being slashed by almost 25 percent in this new administration. More than thirty Boomer-class subs had already been dry-docked. Another twenty were scheduled to be scrapped. The fleet was being cut to less than three hundred ships—down 50 percent from a decade ago. If the North Koreans were nuclear capable, then the Navy would have a strategic mission once again, and we’d be able to keep our subs and our ships.

  Pinky kept repeating that the Cell’s mission was no more than a simple in-and-out. I didn’t like the sound of that. In/out, in/out reminded me of fucking—except I was the fuckee.

  Sure, it sounded simple—except we didn’t have intelligence worth a fuck anymore (if we ever did), and today’s naval commanders are extra cautious in all operational activity, let alone those that have serious political implications. And I knew something Pinky didn’t: nothing is simple. Special operations succeed because of good intelligence, meticulous planning, and the ability to go balls-tothe-wall without being second-guessed by some asshole behind an E-Ring desk.

 

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