Red Cell

by Richard Marcinko

  I sent Half Pint and Pick to meet him and cruise the waterways. I sent Wynken and Nod to infiltrate the base itself and draw me a map of the nuclear weapons stowage facility to see if anything had been altered during my absence. Blynken and Duck Foot were dispatched to the marshland on the southern side of the base. And Nasty and I began to play with some of the monitoring devices that had been liberated from TSD. There was a pair of fiber-optic TV cameras I liked. I planned to drop them into the weapons locker so I could play the tape for CNO to show him how well NIS was doing at protecting his beloved nuclear Tomahawk missiles. We also had tracking devices—improved versions of what Grant Griffith and Pinky had used at Narita. And we’d also taken scramblers, which allowed us secure communications on our walkie-talkies, as well as a pair of secure cellular telephones.

  We spent the rest of Friday and Saturday morning building our IEDs, gathering intelligence, and planning each step of the assault. After the first twenty-four hours on the ground, I was convinced that Pinky hadn’t tried to set a trap. The base was operating at its normal—which is to say unprepared—pace. I shuttled between the Malevolent Frog and the motel, with an occasional side trip to Casa Italia so Mama could slap me silly between bites of lasagna. By early afternoon Saturday, we were ready. I let the guys grab rays, while Mike and I did some catching up.

  I planned to start the strikes at dusk Saturday. I figured we’d do Saturday-night probes to check out the frequency of the roving patrols, monitor the fence line at the nuclear stowage facility, and place the first dozen IEDs on base. Then, bright and early Sunday morning we’d begin phoned threats to find out which one had priority—church services or the base’s security.

  I hoped to penetrate the stowage facility between dusk Sunday and sunrise Monday. That way, if they hadn’t declared me missing in Washington by Monday noon, I’d still have time to fill out a report, sneak our P-3 back to the East Coast, and show my face in Pinky’s office by 0800 Tuesday, complete with the videotapes.

  At about 1800, Half Pint, Pick, Wynken, Blynken, and Nod and I repaired to Mike’s boat, carried our gear aboard, and started a preflight checkout, while Mike maneuvered us out into the channel. There was no operational requirement to use diving gear on this exercise, but I wanted to find out what worked in a real-world environment. The boys’ mission was an operational cakewalk: they would infiltrate the restricted cove where the ammo barges were moored and place limpet training devices on the hulls and screws of each craft they encountered.

  Mike watched as I examined the Draegers.

  “They look like hell, Rick.”

  He was right. I was leery about letting the men do even the most perfunctory admin dive, let alone allow them to precheck the equipment for a real-life combat situation, because the Draegers were in terrible shape. I fingered one of the rebreather bags. “It’s probably been six months since this has been in the water.”

  “Then there’s probably dry rot inside,” Mike said. “Let me see.” He fingered the harnesses and checked the gauges. “This is shit.”

  I had to agree. The gauges looked as if they hadn’t been pressure-tested or recalibrated in years.

  “What’s the problem with this?” he asked.

  I knew only too well what the problem was. I’d bought all the equipment we were currently using when I formed the Cell back in 1985. I kept it in top-notch shape back then, not to mention pushing it beyond its limits. The Draeger, for example, has an administrative limit of thirty-three feet—that means you’re not supposed to go any deeper than that when the units are used. I took Draegers to sixty feet. But ever since the Cell had been authorized to do nothing but normal administrative requalification dives, the equipment hadn’t been pushed. Hell—it had hardly been used. It also hadn’t been maintained. Why should it be? It was only used every six months in the goddamn swimming pool.

  Mike opened up his dive locker. Inside were six brand-new mixed-gas rigs. “My gift to you,” he said. “Have fun.”

  We checked the gear out, then the divers slipped over the side, took their sacks of IEDs, and disappeared into the channel. They had three hours to accomplish their mission. While they did their jobs, Mike and I cruised the channel, then moored the Malevolent Frog just off the wildlife preserve. We changed into wet suits, grabbed our haversack of IEDs, and slipped into the water. The perimeter of the base was about three hundred yards away. We slithered through mud and sea grass, pulling ourselves along foot by foot. Beyond the fence was the stowage area, complete with razor wire and a guard tower. There was a watch posted in the tower, but when we looked through the glasses we’d brought, we saw it was a rent-a-cop. The truck parked alongside told me he did double duty as a roving patrol. That meant Screw magazine up in the tower and snoozing and boozing in the vehicle.

  Well, why pay attention in the first place? There are no more Soviets, the Japs are our friends, the Germans are busy with their own problems, and the Arab world is an East Coast problem. That’s the Navy way of thinking.

  I had digital timers attached to the IEDs. We set them for 2200 hours the following night, planted one close to the tower, one on the truck, and one in the grass close to where Mike and I had cut through the fence. The idea was to leave a noticeable trail—so we made lots of marks in the soft ground and tore up the sea grass as we made our escape. The only real problem we faced was the current. Swimming the last hundred yards back to the MF was a real chore because the tide was running against us, and we had to work like SOBs to make it.

  At 0900 Sunday we called in a threat to the base Command Duty Officer (CDO) and told him we had already commenced activity.

  I sent Half Pint and the Pick to check on our plane, just in case someone had noticed it. The rest of us packed for the homeward trip and prepared equipment for the night’s assault. Cherry, Duck Foot, and I made a two-hour circuit to see how the base response was progressing.

  The situation was normal—in other words, all fucked up. There were no increased patrols, no intrusive gate checks, no disruption of the creature features such as the PX, commissary, or bowling alley. I called the base CDO to complain and was basically told to go fuck myself.

  I hung up. Doom on them.

  Pick reported back by phone that he was able to file a return flight plan. “And I sort of refueled, Skipper.”

  That meant he didn’t have proper squadron billing data, so he took the P-3 on a checkout flight over to Long Beach Airport, where he refueled it using his personal credit card. Fuck—I didn’t know who was going to be more pissed off, Pick’s wife, or Pinky, when he got the bill.

  I’d asked Pinky for an operational credit card like I used to have in the old days.

  He sat there in his goddamn judge’s chair and gave me his giggly faggot imitation. “Fuck you, Dick, tee-hee!” Of course he put it on paper, too.

  I got a memo—Pinky cc’d CNO, the head of Naval Logistics, and the base commanders of the Washington Military District:

  If you cannot manage to operate within the system and in a timely manner, your operational needs will not be fulfilled. You have always been a second-rate planner and a slipshod leader, and the system will operate as it is supposed to, not the way you believe it should. Just to be sure you understand things, fiscal flexibility is no longer a term or capability within my glossary of acceptable terms.

  By 1600 we were packed, the chariot was fueled and facing in the right direction, the base was wide-open, and I wanted to flay it, butterfly it, and char it. The master plan was to create mass havoc to cover the entry of Half Pint, Cherry, Nasty, and Duck Foot into the nuclear stowage facility. While they made their way through three sets of wire and two sets of doors into the warehouse within a warehouse where the nuclear Tomahawk missiles were stored, the rest of us would create diversions by racing around like Keystone Kops. We’d set off detonators, start fires, steal vehicles, crash fences, cut off communications to the outside world, and generally make nuisances of ourselves. It was the kind of thing you hate to g
et paid for.

  I’d picked my two best pairs to go against the stowage facility. That way one team would get in if—by some unlikely event—the invaders got pinned down by the security response force. Half Pint and Cherry were ordnance experts, Duck Foot was a climbing specialist, and Nasty was a lock-and-cipher man. My instructions were simple: go for it.

  At 1800 we checked out of the motel and headed toward the last rendezvous. We stashed our cars and started dispersing to do our separate missions. I started the clock with a phone call from a pay phone across from the main gate.

  When the CDO answered, I growled, “This is the Movement for the Free Ejaculation of Palestine,” in my best Yassir Arafat imitation. “We are going to kill you all. We are going to loot your women and rape your camels—or is that the other way around?”

  He started to reply, but I hung up. It was show time. I gave the primary pairs time to get in position then started the hits, coordinating everything through the three-watt, scrambler-equipped walkie-talkies we all wore courtesy of TSD back at the Navy Yard. First, I activated a firing device down by the piers. That brought the base fire department and EOD unit on the run. Just as they arrived, I detonated the limpets Half Pint, Wynken, and Blynken had attached to the landing craft anchored just off the docks.

  That commotion brought the base divers and the duty security patrol to the scene. As they arrived, I was busy cutting the phone lines, while Nod put a small charge on the base microwave tower—just enough to screw up the calibrated signals and scramble the load. Then, while everyone was focusing on the waterfront, Wynken and Blynken ran a stolen car through the main gate. They tossed smoke grenades right into the booth and—oops—set it on fire.

  Chased by the rent-a-cops, they left the car—booby-trapped, of course—as a roadblock beneath the Highway 1 overpass, while they made their getaway by climbing up onto the highway and onto a cycle they’d borrowed from the BOQ and prepositioned. I listened to their progress and smiled. The kids were learning.

  While Robin Hood and his band were creating havoc, Duck Foot was busy climbing the stowage-facility guard tower to immobilize the sailor on duty. Later, Duck Foot told me he could have had a cup of coffee and a cigarette before the kid knew he was there. Then, with an “All go” loud and clear on my earpiece, I knew we were right on schedule. I looked at my watch. Nasty would be sprinkling graphite powder on the cipher locks—that was the best way to see which numbers were used the most. Then he’d punch them into a pocket computer for the most likely combination variables. While he did that, Cherry and Half Pint were scheduled to break through the exterior vent screens and crawl down the air shafts.

  I listened to their progress. They were making great time.

  “Skipper—” It was Nasty’s voice.

  I pressed my transmit button. “Yo.”

  “You better get down here in a big hurry.”

  Nasty was not the sort to cry wolf, so I left my observation point just north of Highway 1, crossed the marsh, wriggled through the fence, evaded the IED minefield I’d put down, and went through the wire where the boys had cut it. I waved at Duck Foot, who was perched in the tower, dressed in a sailor suit, and went inside the stowage facility.

  The place is smaller than you’d expect—perhaps one hundred feet by one hundred and fifty. The missiles are either crated or placed on racks for preflight inspection. The racks allow them to be forklifted onto dollies for transportation down to the barges that will carry them to the battleships, frigates, or submarines from which they’re launched.

  Nasty waved me over. There were three Tomahawks on the inspection bench for their preloading check, and half a dozen others in crates, with stamps showing that they were ready to go. Nasty—crazy asshole that he is—had one of the crates open.

  “Look, Skipper.”

  I looked. Tomahawks are twenty feet long. They comprise four basic components. In the rear section, there’s the engine—turbojet, with a seven-hundred-mile range—the aviation electronics systems, and the fuel tank. Just in front of the fuel tank is the payload, which can be either conventional high explosive or tactical nuclear. These were tacticalnuke Tomahawks. In front of the warhead is the navigation and guidance system, a computer-driven arrangement about the size of a PC that has target assessments programmed into it, and an infrared radar system to help contour-fly the Tomahawk a hundred feet above the ground, thus defeating defensive radar systems.

  “Look, Skipper.” Nasty had unscrewed the inspection compartment. I peered inside. There was empty space where the nuclear payload should have been. There is a technical term for my reaction: holy shit.

  “I was gonna put a smoke bomb inside,” he explained. “But damn, Captain—somebody got here before us and stole the fucking nuke.”

  Paranoia being what it is, the first thing I thought was that Pinky had set us up and NIS was about to bust through the door and arrest us for breaking into a top-secret facility. But there was no way he could have done it—not that he wasn’t cunning enough, but the timing wasn’t right. Besides, I’d perceived no signs of an ambush during our thirty-six hours of sneaking and peeking—and if I was good at anything, it was sensing danger.

  So—this had to be for real. Somebody was stealing missile parts. My first reaction was anger. Goddammit, talk about your goddamn security being lax at the fucking Weapons Station—if this wasn’t proof, I didn’t know what was.

  Then I flashed on Narita—was this another Grant Griffith sting, set up to catch Dickie and make him look bad? Or was Grant as dirty as I’d always thought, and he’d managed to pull an inside job.

  An inside job? It wasn’t impossible. The Russkies were selling their weapons—you could buy anything from an AK-47 to a SCUD missile if you had dollars, marks, or pounds. Some Polish asshole had recently been caught with an MRV—Multiple Reentry Vehicle—warhead from an old Soviet SS20 missile.

  Was a similar enterprise going on here? If it was, I wanted to catch the dirty sons of bitches responsible and kill them.

  Taking care not to disturb the seals, dimple the wood, or bend the nails, we opened all the crates. There were two warheads and three guidance systems missing. Given the fact that these missiles were slated to be shipped all over the world according to the destinations stenciled on the crates, it would have been weeks until they were uncrated and the missing parts discovered. It was a clusterfuck of the first order.

  “Cherry—”

  “Skipper?”

  “You bring the TSD stuff?”

  “Aye, aye, sir.” He opened his rucksack. Inside were five passive monitors—the kind that transmit a locator signal once they’ve been turned on. They transmit for six weeks. And there were two fiber-optic TV cameras with lithium battery and microwave transmitters, giving them—I hoped—a thousand-yard range, and a two-week life span.

  I had Half Pint place the cameras, concealing one above an exposed beam so that the crated missiles could be clearly seen on the mini-monitor, and the other behind an electrical outlet, so we’d have a floor-level shot that would hopefully capture the faces of the perpetrators. The extra-slow-moving tapes in the recording modules would last only 240 hours each—so I hoped the bad guys would visit again soon. Doom on you—you’re on Candid Fucking Camera.

  There were more crates than monitoring devices. My hunch was that if the place was going to be ripped off again, they’d come for the missiles that had been inspected. So we put monitors inside the navigation-system modules of the three Tomahawks on the inspection bench, replaced the dated seals, and then took the remaining pair of locators and concealed them inside the guidance systems of two inspected, ready-to-go, but untampered-with missiles.

  Then we resealed all the crates, careful to use the same nail holes as before. We policed the area, removing all evidence of our presence, and departed. To create confusion, I had Nasty and Cherry place some IEDs around the stowage facility, to create the impression that we’d been playing in the area but hadn’t violated sacred ground.
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  Originally, I’d planned to use Seal Beach as training for our black-bag jaunt to Korea. Then, the exercise over, we’d been scheduled to fly back to D.C., where I’d make my report to Pinky, try to gather as much equipment as I could scrounge, then leave from Dulles International for Tokyo.

  But that would be impossible now. Until we were wheels up on our way to Japan, I wanted to stay close to our TV surveillance cameras and see who the hell was stealing tactical nukes and top-secret guidance systems. One thing was certain: until I found out, everybody except the Red Cell and my old friend Mike Regan was a suspect. And that included the president, the vice president, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and CNO. Improbable? Sure. Impossible? Remember Rule One: never assume.

  Two of the more likely suspects were closer to home: my favorite former SECDEF, Grant Griffith, and the deputy chief of naval operations for plans, policy, and operations, Pinky Prescott III. The one thing that made me feel good was the fact that, according to Navy regulations, the use of deadly force was justified for the protection of nuclear weapons. If Pinky and Grant were guilty, I’d be able to kill them legally. And there was no doubt I’d do it.

  Part Three

  FUBAR

  Chapter 15

  RED CELL WENT TO GROUND FOR THE NEXT FIVE DAYS. I CALLED the Pentagon once every twenty-four hours, just to let Pinky know I was alive—I didn’t want him to know what we were up to, but at the same time I didn’t want him calling out the Marines either. To keep him off-balance I filed an unclassified report on our security exercise and sent it back via FedEx, addressed to his administrative assistant. My evaluation was not going to do the base commander’s fitreps any good, and just to make sure that Pinky couldn’t bury my report, I sent CNO a copy, addressed to his residence at the Navy Yard.