Red Cell

by Richard Marcinko

  This intel was for shit. I pored over the stuff on the table. All the data in this squirrel locker had been picked up by satellites and analyzed by the new breed of young kids that didn’t know fuck-all about war or what an enemy was. They may have been well schooled and have punched all the right tickets, but they didn’t have the corporate knowledge to tell me anything I wanted to know.

  All their data could tell me—if the weather was good—was how many of their SpecWar minisubs were in port. They couldn’t say where they were going, what they were doing, or where they’d been. In fact, I’d be damn lucky to get sequential data so I could determine presence/absence, thus allowing me to estimate their mission range.

  And as for planning, Pinky couldn’t design a SpecWar op if his life depended on it. And his life didn’t—it was my ass on the line and in the water. I told him as much, too.

  He pouted and said that was too bad—nothing could be changed. I explained a few of the facts of life to him, and he actually gave in here and there.

  But overall, I was being asked to do the impossible, by somebody who would have loved to see me and my men fail, or die. When I’d taken over the Cell less than a week before, Nasty had said that we were in a TARFU situation, because Things Are Really Fucked Up.

  He’d underestimated things. As I mentally listed the clusterfuck factors, I realized we were almost all the way to FUBAR—Fucked Up Beyond All Repair. I explained things to Pinky in simple declarative sentences.

  CF One: The Navy’s intelligence—an oxymoron if ever there was one—was sketchy at best.

  CF Two: Red Cell hadn’t done a clandestine/covert lock-out/lock-in submarine operation since before the death of the Soviet Bear. Which put the Murphy probability at 100 percent.

  CF Three: The relevant equipment had been used for administrative requalification dives only and hadn’t been pushed to the limits in years. Why? Because, said the current crop of SEAL COs, we wouldn’t want to authorize a potential safety violation—that might hurt our careers. Over more than thirty years of active duty, I could never convince my peers, seniors, or subordinates that the reason SEALs get hazardous-duty pay is because the assignment is inherently dangerous. Fact of life: people die on the job.

  CF Four: With the Soviet Bear dead, SUBFORCE hadn’t done any real snooping and pooping like in the good old days. (To be honest, their hands had often been tied for reasons of safety and/or political concern for potential risk or embarrassment, so I wasn’t blaming them.)

  But it was going to be a real mess. In effect, I was about to lead a kamikaze attack against some North Korean minisubs based on shitty-to-none intelligence, with old, tired diving equipment, and SEALs with more balls than brains, and do it all from a submarine that was smart but manned by an unchallenged, untested crew.

  Then the negotiations began in earnest. For example, because of all the possibilities of turning the operation into a monumental clusterfuck, I wanted a dedicated sixty-day training period to get the guys up to speed; design some new beacons; work with the assigned submarine and her crew and turn loose some of my old contacts and find out what was really happening at Chongjin. Moreover, I wanted to scrounge up some trusty munitions that would get us out of a tight jam if we got compromised.

  I didn’t consider sixty days too long. In fact, it would be a squeeze if I planned to follow Everett E. Barrett’s dictum of the Seven Ps: “Proper Previous Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance, you geek dickhead,” is what the old Frog would growl at me back when I was but a Tadpole.

  But sixty days was not acceptable to Pinky, who wanted the mission done—now. Tomorrow.

  He pressed me. How come I wanted to stall? Wasn’t I the go-get-’em hard charger? He hinted that perhaps I was getting soft in my old age.

  I had visions of murder.

  Besides, Pinky’s plan sucked. I had one top priority: bringing all my men home alive. I know I talk about cannon fodder and SEALs being expendable assets and all of that. But there is no reason to die needlessly. And if I did things Pinky’s way, there’d be casualties. There were too many elements. All that flying and dropping and moving around made me nervous. I wanted to keep things KISS-simple. In my cantankerous old heart I felt we’d be better off heading for the North Korean coast in some shitty old indigenous fishing trawler, dropping off into the drink, swimming in and doing our dirty deed, then either heading to sea for a pickup by one of our subs, or—more to my liking—going balls-to-the-wall and heading inland, stealing an airplane, and heading for Japan or Hawaii, depending on what we stole.

  Pinky, however, vetoed my loot, pillage, and burn scenario, reminding me that we had been assigned to accomplish our mission without alerting anybody we were in the neighborhood. On the other hand, we finally agreed that choppering out to the sub was less hazardous than jumping. Tally one for the good guys.

  But if you’re keeping a box score on this, Pinky was the big winner. I lost out on everything from the basic mission profile to the sixty days for training and rehearsing the men.

  Pinky gave me a choice. I could go to Japan and commence the mission in forty-eight hours, or I could conduct six days of diving and equipment checkout in California.

  I asked him what the catch was.

  “No catch, Dick. Except, while you are in California, you’ll be required to perform a three-day security exercise at the U.S. Naval Weapons Station, Seal Beach.”

  “Seal Beach?”

  “Must I repeat myself? Seal Beach. And this exercise had better be done by the book. Letter by fucking letter. None of this UNODIR crap. No surprises, or your men all become yeomen. Do you comprehend, Captain?”

  Am I repeating myself when I say I had visions of murder? Mentally, I crossed my fingers and gave Pinky an “Aye, aye, sir,” spelling it with a c and a u.

  I went back to the Cave and spent the next twenty-four hours in solitary, thinking about the problems I had to solve. And God, were there ever problems to solve. Why, for example, had Pinky assigned us to hit Seal Beach? The last time I’d been there, the Navy had been sued by one of the civilian security employees because of alleged roughness by Red Cell “terrorists.” The trial had taken months and cost millions, and its outcome was unsatisfactory to everyone—the Navy settled, but for less than the civilian wanted. I was persona non grata in Seal Beach, and everyone, including Pinky, knew it.

  Maybe it was a trap—catch Dickie with his hand in the nuclear cookie jar and send him to Leaven worth. After all, Seal Beach was a sensitive installation what with the strategic nuclear drawdown and the increased reliance on tactical nuclear missiles—Tomahawks—many of which were tested, maintained, and stored there.

  Maybe Pinky really was concerned about the security at Seal Beach. Nah—that was too obvious. Maybe he was smarter than I gave him credit for being, and this was all part of some greater scheme that only he knew about. Fat fucking chance of that.

  I pondered those questions for a while, but gave up trying to second-guess Pinky Prescott da Turd. There were more important real-life challenges to face.

  The DDS I was going to use in North Korean waters was one. The DDS allows SEALs to launch and recover their SDVs, Swimmer Delivery Vehicles, from a submarine that is submerged. But there are often snags. The rules mandate that a DDS be installed on a sub just prior to a mission and removed immediately after.

  The problem is that by doing so you let the opposition know that you’re up to something. It’s inconceivable to the people who made the rules that bad guys ever look for a U.S. Navy submarine coming into port to have a DDS installed or watch for its return to have it removed.

  This was one of the reasons I’d never been a big supporter of our SDV program. You had to be transported by people who never gave a shit about you, the DDS itself was as obvious as a fifteen-year-old’s boner, and everyone knew when you’d finished your work and therefore could guess what you’d been up to.

  Dry dock shelters are also complicated, Rube Goldberg affairs. The step-by-step
outline of a DDS operation in the current NAVSEA—that’s the NAVal SEA Systems Command—manual takes twenty pages of convoluted Navy speak prose.

  Evidence? You want evidence, gentle reader? Okay. Let’s get technical for a few minutes.

  In general, and—very important to my well-being these days—wholly unclassified terms, the dry dock shelter, or DDS, consists of a hangar where up to four SDVs are stowed (think of it as the garage), the access sphere (the passageway we use to get to the garage from the sub), and a hyperbaric chamber for decompression and recompression of the divers.

  The hangar is a cylinder nine feet in diameter, which is flooded during SDV launch and recovery operations, and drained when recovery operations are completed. Diver air-breathing manifolds, located on the hangar’s port and starboard sides, supply breathing and scuba-charging air to the hangar.

  While the SDVs are in the hangar, they are supported by a wheeled cradle on a fixed track. The cradle is rolled along the fixed track out of the hangar and onto an extended portable track during SDV launch and recovery operations. The hangar’s outer door (the clamshell) is controlled by a hydraulic system in the hangar. The rate of movement of the outer door can be controlled by varying the stroke of a valve lever. The faster you hump and pump, the faster the door opens and closes.

  The access sphere, which is seven feet in diameter, serves as a lock between the hangar, the hyperbaric chamber, and the submarine. The access sphere is also flooded to operational level during SDV launch and recovery. It has two watertight doors: one leading to the hyperbaric chamber, the other leading to the hangar. Each can be operated from either side by turning the hand wheel, which, through a system of gears, operates a locking ring. In emergencies, the access sphere can be used for decompression of divers if the number of personnel to be treated exceeds the space limitations in the hyperbaric chamber.

  The hyperbaric chamber is a sphere seven feet in diameter that provides a sealed atmosphere for decompression of divers. The chamber remains dry at all times. Decompression operations are normally controlled by the divers using control valves located inside the chamber for pressurizing and venting. A Built-in Breathing System (BBS) provides pure oxygen for decompression treatment. A CO2 scrubber/ heater unit in the hyperbaric chamber prevents carbon dioxide buildup in the chamber and provides a warm environment for personnel during decompression.

  Think of a DDS as a big, long cylinder that is fastened to the submarine’s deck and is reached by going through a deck hatch that opens into the access sphere.

  What happens is that with the sub hovering (nuclear subs cannot just lie still in the water, or bottom. They must, like sharks, keep moving because they must force water through their cooling systems), you move through the weapons shipping trunk (that’s the place where they load weapons on a submarine), undog the access hatch, and enter the DDS access sphere. After you’ve done a check, you dog the weapons shipping hatch, enter the hangar, dog the inner door, get into the scuba gear or Draeger bubbleless lungs, flood the hangar, open the clamshell, assemble the track, unstrap the SDV, and roll it out. Then you attach a Zulu Victor Delta, or ZVD, homing-device buoy to the outside of the sub’s hull, so your SDV chauffeur can find his way home in the dark. The whole process takes about half an hour, start to finish, complete with “May I?” ’s and “By your leave, sir” ’s and the requisite Murphy’s Law screwups.

  That’s why I’m a believer in the indigenous trawler technique, or the airborne boat drop. There are fewer steps to worry about, hence less chance of your operation’s becoming a major goatfuck.

  But I had other, more immediate concerns than ruminating about the tactical problems of DDS operations. For example, I had to lay my hands on some HUMINT about our target area. (HUMINT is HUMan INTelligence in mil-speak. In civilian, it’s the information you get from two-legged spies.) HUMINT would tell us something tangible about Chongjin harbor—news we could use when we went in.

  It was time to activate the Safety Net. So I called my old classmate Irish Kernan. Irish and I went to the Air Force Command and Staff College in Montgomery, Alabama, together in 1976, and we’ve stayed fast friends ever since, collecting interest on the wages of sin, no doubt. He’s a retarded Marine colonel who’s double-dipping at DIA these days, and there’s very little that goes on in this world of ours that he doesn’t know about.

  Irish, a feisty guy wid a tick Noo Yawk accent, was part of my early-warning system when I CO’d Six. He could assemble tactical intel that was fast and accurate. And, despite written instructions from half a dozen panjandrums at Langley, the Pentagon, and the Joint Intel HQ at 1776 G Street to the contrary, he never stopped acquiring human assets.

  He didn’t want to be seen with me at any of his regular haunts, so we met at Hanecks, a little bar about five miles from Fort Meade where they make great sandwiches and serve ice-cold beer. We sat in a vintage red Naugahyde booth with a fifties Formica table, and with Billy Ray Cyrus providing audio cover, I told Irish what I was doing and what I thought I’d need.

  Irish, a chunky welterweight if ever there was one, drained his Michelob Dry, shifted his knees under the table, and nodded. “Youse got it, pal.”

  He added that he’d be happy to set up secure comms with us anywhere in the world and wasn’t surprised when I told him I had a secure satellite dish in my possession.

  “I heard TSD lost one last week from the Navy Yard.” He toasted me. “Nice work, Dick.”

  I tried to look innocent. Belay that. I tried to look not guilty. “Moi?”

  We had to assemble equipment. That was going to be a problem. Pinky was still the same ball-busting pain in the ass he always was. He’d made it impossible to upgrade the OBE—standing for Overtaken By Events and spelled o-b-s-o-l-e-t-e—equipment that was left in the Red Cell inventory, and it hadn’t been fully operational in so long that I doubted it would last through a full mission profile exercise let alone an actual mission that had human lives on the line—mine included. I brought that up to my two-starred boss.

  His response was, “So what’s your point?”

  Then Pinky started playing dirty. He got the SPECWARGRU Two commodore to conduct an administrative inspection on Red Cell’s gear to validate/certify its acceptability or operational ability. That process, which involves doing a complete inventory, wasted 72 hours of my men’s precious time. The inspection was carried out by the COMSPECWARGRU Two’s staff, who knew as much about what worked and what didn’t as they knew about brain surgery. Besides, the inspectors—three lieutenants and a lieutenant commander—hadn’t done any operating other than the “Nada Regatta” Parade in Coronado. They were too busy dedicating themselves to the winning of the Admiral’s Cup for Small Command Participation in athletic events, or working themselves into a lather over EDREs—Emergency Directed Response Exercises—the no-notice exercises run by SOCOM, the Special Operations COMmand based in Tampa.

  Well, I’d been stuck with this shit, and before I’d think of deploying it on a real-life black op, I had to wring it out. I wanted to know what was salvageable and/or what I really had to beg, borrow, and steal to get the job done.

  Some things have never changed in my life. It seems I’ve been scrambling, lying, and cheating for better equipment since I was a seaman in UDT-21. I can still see the happy glint in Chief Petty Officer (Gunner’s Mate Guns) Everett E. Barrett’s eyes as I drove the first half-ton truckload of cumshaw gear—parachutes, parachute rigging tables, and a portable field kitchen, as I recall—into the UDT area at Little Creek. It had found its way onto my truck at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Virginia. (To be perfectly honest it wasn’t my truck. It was an Air Force truck, but we fixed that with a little paint soon after it arrived.)

  Soon after that, Ev promoted me to SFC—Scrounger First Class—and I earned my keep by liberating such necessities as vehicle parts from the Army Quartermaster Depot in Richmond, paint from LANTFLT headquarters in Norfolk, and pallet loads of ammunition from the St. Julian Navy Depot in
Portsmouth.

  Plus ça change, plus la même chose, as we used to say in Cambodia—the more things change the more they stay the same. Twenty years later, when I was forming SEAL Team Six, I had all the money I needed. But I still had to jump-start assembly lines, requisition items previously destined for other parties who had what I considered a far lesser need than mine, and in a few cases revert back to my SFC ways and just plain steal what I needed.

  This exercise was closest to the early, impoverished days of UDT—when you had to make do with what you had or do without completely. I had absolutely no intention of doing without.

  We had to get some “sanitary” weapons—lethal and untraceable. Pinky had wanted us to carry regulation arms and equipment. But you don’t do that on covert operations. Because if something gets left behind, you don’t want the opposition looking at it and saying, “Ah—American Navy SEALs.”

  So I called my old SEAL Team Six weapons maven, Doc Tremblay, for advice. Doc, a master chief corpsman by rating and a sniper by avocation, was currently in Cairo, serving a two-year sentence in Egypt courtesy of the U.S. government. Don’t even think about asking what he was doing there. All I can tell you is that it combined both of his specialties.

  As he pondered my request, I could almost see him scratching his big chin. He was a New Englander, and New Englanders like to scratch their chins. Anyway, he told me in his flat Rhode Island drawl about a couple of new Russian Spec War weapons that sounded promising. He’d read about ’em. There was a 4.5mm pistol called the SPP-1, which fired long, dartlike projectiles underwater. The downside of the SPP-1, Al said, was that it carried only four rounds, and it was hell to reload at thirty meters down.

  On the other hand, he continued, there was this new 5.66mm assault rifle—slightly bigger than the M16’s 5.56mm bore—that had a twenty-six-round magazine and fired its projectiles up to eleven meters underwater at a depth of forty meters. Used as an out-of-the-water assault weapon, it allegedly had an accurate range of a hundred meters. “And shit, Skipper, I wouldn’t use an AK-47 to shoot that far.”