Red Cell

by Richard Marcinko

  Talk about information flowing both ways—Tosho hadn’t passed this nugget on to me before. I’d been punching Griffith up in my databases. I should have been investigating Matsuko. I held up my hand. “Whoa. Say what? And he’s in business with a former secretary of defense?”

  Tosho nodded. “Old Japanese saying: There’s more to this than meets eye.’”

  “Roger that.” My mind started to factor the possibilities. Like Griffith and Pinky working the scam to end all scams. I dwelled on that while Tosho rambled on.

  “Ponder the possibilities. Griffith gets you recalled to duty. You tell me he’s got some kind of hold over Pinky—what it is you don’t know. Meanwhile, Griffith is also tied to Matsuko. And he was part of the sting you walked into at Narita—where two of the Koreans you shot worked for Matsuko as janitors.” Tosho shook his head. “Once is happenstance. Twice becomes a pattern so far as I’m concerned.”

  I started to pay attention when I heard the word pattern.

  “Yeah,” Tosho was saying, “and your former SECDEF, Griffith, pops up half a dozen times—that makes it a fucking conspiracy.”

  Yeah, Griffith had been at the center of it all—from siccing NIS on Pinky and his Japanese piece of ass, to his relationship with Hideo Ikigami. “Right. The first time we heard about him was at Narita. He’s been part of it since then—every step of the way.” I scratched where my beard was starting to come in again. “So Narita’s at the center of it—except we don’t know why.”

  “No, but we better damn well find out.”

  I stood up. “Tell you what—you do the detective work. I’ve got to earn my Navy pay. I’ll page you as we clear the outer marker on the way back. Maybe you can ride out on the pilot boat and we can talk then.”

  “Okay. Meanwhile, you watch your hairy Frogman’s ass out there.”

  “I will.” I handed Tosho what looked like a portable phone. “This is for you.”

  “Ah, so—verry interesting, American.” He examined it carefully. “Is this what I think it is?”

  “Yup. Scrambler phone. Cellular. Secure. Rechargeable. My number’s programmed in as Zero One on recall. It’ll find me anywhere in the world.”

  Tosho offered his hand, palm up. I slapped it and reversed my hand. He slapped my palm, too. “Much grass, as we used to say in the fifties.” He waved the phone in my direction. “Don’t forget—let’s be careful out there, Dickster.”

  “Yeah—I’ll do it to them before they do it to me, Tosh.”

  After Tosho left I took a look at the DDS and the three SDVs inside. A cursory inspection didn’t make me a happy camper. The coaming on the clamshell didn’t look right, and some of the backup communications on the three modules looked as if they’d been patched together with chewing gum. But I didn’t have any choice here. I was going to have to dance—or swim—with the one that brung me.

  I left the DDS and went back to talk to the boys. We were bunking together in the forward crew’s quarters. Captain Ross had offered me the XO’s stateroom, but I refused it, saying I preferred to remain with the troops. It made me happier but it was a little unsettling to the rest of the caste-conscious boat. The Navy is like that. Officer country is for officers, the goat locker was for chiefs, and the mess is for the men, and never the opposites shall attract. I think the sub’s master chief, a slim-jim named Bosiljevac, caught on to what I was doing and why, but then he asked me to inscribe his copy of Rogue Warrior.

  I paid a lot of attention to Master Chief Bo because normally the chief of the boat is the key to how things will be. This one—we were on a first-name basis. I called him chief and he called me sir (and he spelled it c-u-r, which I liked)—was one of the new breed, a high-tech wizard who’d made chief because of his brains, not his fists. Still, he could quote Ev Barren’s law from Rogue Warrior, and his language told me he wanted to be a salty old chief, even if he was new breed. I liked his attitude.

  We cleared the dock at 0-Dark Hundred and made our way down the channel with a pilot’s help. He jumped into his tug at 0240, and we were on our own. I went into the forward torpedo room and spent some solo time, meditating on our situation and going over the probs and stats, which were considerable. Pinky was smarter than I gave him credit for being. If he wanted to get rid of me for good, this was the op that just might do it for him.

  Item: he’d made sure I’d have to use the DDS/SDV route, knowing how little I thought of the system in a tactical world.

  Item: I’d have to hope for the CO to be abnormal for a nuclear submariner, meaning that he’d actually want to take chances. The one thing in my favor was that with my four stripes on again I’d be senior to the CO because it was my primary mission, not his.

  Item: there would be no chance to test the equipment Pinky had sent from CONUS. Sure, we’d go over it with fine-tooth combs, but it would still be untested when we risked our lives using it. That made it clusterfuck material, so far as I was concerned.

  Why? Because:

  Item: Pinky had given me bad equipment in the past. The dry-rotted rebreathers we’d deep-sixed in California, for example, had come to us through my beloved boss. Was his other equipment equally FUBARed?

  My reverie was interrupted by a page. “Captain Marcinko to the Conn.” I went forward. Ken Ross and his enlisted naviguesser, a first-class named Hatfield, M.O., told me we were about twenty-six hours from a launch point. We wouldn’t really know anything about the currents, tides, and other specifics until we arrived in the actual op area.

  I thanked them for their info, then headed back to the men. We spent our remaining time prepping our weapons, working over the diving gear, and reviewing our pictures of the minisubs, harbor, and facilities in the immediate area. I gave Nasty the job of plotting an at-sea E&E route, while Cherry worked on inland evasion-and-escape plans. The inland route was a course of absolute last resort. If we had to go ashore, there was no way anybody from the Navy would be coming to get us. We’d be on our own—the expendables.

  At 1845 the water temperature in the op area was forty-eight degrees, just cool enough to be invigorating. The currents flowed parallel to the coastline at approximately two and a half knots. That would present no problem for the SDVs, but plenty for a swimmer. We planned to launch at 2030 to allow all transit in darkness so we could turtle the rigs—that is, surface them for a few minutes and breathe normally—if we had to save air. Nasty, Cherry, Duck Foot, Pick, and I loaded into the hangar at 1900. Half Pint, who was the dive master, had been there for two hours already, working over the equipment. Now, the rest of us began our preflight check. This would be a six-man op, with Wynken, Blynken, and Nod remaining behind to work the comms from the DDS. Why six instead of nine? Because that’s all the rigs we had! Welcome to the New Navy—land of the politically correct clusterfuck.

  I watched as the men began the ritual, praying that the unit’s integrity had gelled sufficiently by now so that we could speak to each other in the “shorthand” that tight, efficient units use on the battlefield. The gritty determination on my men’s faces told me it had.

  We changed into wet suits. We packed our assault vests. We strapped knives and tactical holsters on. The homing beacons we planned to attach to the minisubs were charged and pinging. Our diving rigs all checked out. We loaded weapons: there were six Glock-19s with Trijicon tritium-powered sights. Each man would carry five seventeen-round magazines of Winchester Black Talon hollowpoint ammunition. We assembled the four Russian underwater assault rifles I’d gotten from Doc Tremblay. I kept one and gave the others to Nasty, Cherry, and Half Pint. Duck Foot and Pick would carry the infrared cameras. We had three SDVs. The pairings would be Nasty and me, Duck Foot and Cherry, and Half Pint and Pick.

  We performed our normal communications checks with the OOD—Officer Of the Deck—and received word from Captain Ken that we had permission from CNO to commence with the operation as planned. That was typical. Nothing without a “May I?” these days—even the most clandestine of missions. I had
n’t bothered to check—but Captain Ken had.

  We flooded the hangar on schedule. It’s a strange dichotomy—on the one hand, you have to give submariners credit: they are professional. On the other hand, if it ain’t on the checklist, they flounder like a dying flounder. We had a momentary pause because the shallow water was giving the planing officer trouble trying to maintain a steady depth. It wasn’t a big deal—just one of those things I’d experienced before and he hadn’t. As the Humpback fought to keep level, I remembered another op when the sub sucked in so much water while launching the SDVs that the boat stalled and started sinking at the stern. When we got back, the skipper’s hair had gone completely white.

  We left the main deck in our SDVs by 2042, only minutes off schedule. I’m sure the CO announced our departure with a coded signal on burst cycle from his trailing whip antenna. I wasn’t keen on the trailing antenna. Pinky had demanded that he be kept advised of my progress. But I knew that in these coastal waters there are indigenous vessels that could get tangled in the antenna. It can also foul itself around buoys and nets—it was all just one more opportunity for Mr. Murphy to make his presence known.

  Transit to the target area went smoothly—too smooth for me. We’d launched at one hundred and fifty feet, then come up to one atmosphere—about thirty feet—to conserve air during our twelve-mile run into Chongjin. We kept a loose formation during the run, but were still able to observe each other’s position from the side-looking sonar display on the SDV dashboard. It took us a little less than two hours to penetrate the outer limits of the harbor area. There, we dove deep again. That’s the normal operational profile: deep launch, shallow transit, and deep approach. Besides, we had enough problems with the mixed-gas rigs because we trailed bubbles, and I didn’t want any kimchis catching on that we were in the area.

  Even so, I had Half Pint surface his SDV for a peep just as we passed the outer-marker buoys so Pick could take infrared photos of the activity while we followed subsurface in trail. Half Pint was my waterborne point man—there wasn’t a SEAL alive who could work an SDV better. After about ten minutes on the surface, he flashed back a digital signal that there were four targets in port.

  That was promising. We slowed our approach to barely one knot and stayed at sixty feet depth for our final run, moving up the channel into the center of Chongjin harbor. We finally bottomed at forty-two feet of water, turned on the homing beacons so we could find our transportation home (it was, after all, a big parking lot), then said sayonara to our SDVs.

  We broke surface about five hundred yards from the minisubs. Moored just past them was a small freighter—maybe five hundred feet or so. That was at first glance. As I paid more attention, I realized that the ship wasn’t a container cargo vessel, but a mothership for the minisubs, made up to look like a freighter. I wanted to see more of it up close and personal. But our primary mission was to tag the subs and get our infrared pictures.

  The minisubs looked a lot bigger and more sinister in the flesh than they did in eight-by-ten satellite glossies. These were German in manufacture—eighty-two feet long and about sixteen feet in the beam. It was evident they had a huge cargo bay—space for a lot of electronics equipment for intel work, rockets that could be surface-launched, or even missiles.

  We split up in swim pairs and went to work. Cherry and Duck Foot, and Half Pint and Pick, each had two subs to tag. It was a piece of cake, so while they placed the monitors, Nasty and I dove and swam to the mothership, which was moored at the innermost dock. We approached cautiously. It was floodlit from above—there was enough ambient light to allow us to use hand signals—and the outlines of this big motherfucker were incredible.

  From the number of kicks it took to pass her, she was indeed about five hundred feet long, and as broad in the beam as my ex-wife. We got under her and did a quick hull search.

  Voilà! I knew it—she was equipped with a fucking hull recovery hatch door beneath the waterline. It was open and we snuck a look inside. There was a cargo bay big enough to carry weapons, electronics—our whole DDS would have fit inside with five yards to spare. There was certainly enough room to bring a twenty-meter minisub inside and allow it to offload its cargo.

  Damn—so that’s how the nuclear smuggling took place: the minisubs would bring the goods in underwater. They’d offload inside the mothership, which was camouflaged as a freighter. Once it was safely aboard, the mothership’s crew would containerize the stuff and move it with the rest of the cargo. As usual, Naval Intelligence was an oxymoron—intel weenies relied on TECHINT, not HUMINT. TECHINT had developed the wrong scenario. But HUMINT—in this case, Red Cell—had discovered the truth of the matter. That’s why I believe, no matter what the weenies say, you cannot discard human intelligence gathering. It’s the only way to really find out what’s happening on the ground.

  I ran my hand along the mothership, caressing its steel plates. Shit, what a target—I’d suck a roomful of dick to break this baby’s back.

  Lightbulb. Let’s sink this motherfucker and goatfuck the kimchi nuke program right into FUBAR. Why the hell not? We’d completed our mission—the one Pinky gave us to do—we’d tagged the subs and gotten lots of pictures.

  But I’ve always felt that when God is good to you and offers a target of opportunity, you should take it. This was too good to miss.

  Okay, I know you’re saying that we were ordered to sneak and peek and do no more. And that in blowing up the mothership we’d alert the kimchis to our presence, and they’d take countermeasures—maybe find a new smuggling route. But frankly, hitting a target like this comes only once or twice in a lifetime, and if we hit them right, we could put them months, maybe years, behind their bomb-making schedule. In my estimation, the risk would certainly be worth it.

  But later—not now. Now, we were getting low on air. It was time to get back to the SDVs and hightail it out of town. I circled my forefinger in the water. Nasty nodded in agreement. Together, we swam back the way we’d come, our digital locators homing on the SDV beacons.

  “Absolutely not.” Kenny Ross glared at me as he cleaned his glasses. “The mission profile is precise, and I’m not gonna deviate one iota from it, Dick. That’s that.”

  I’d briefed Ross as soon as we’d cleared the locker and gotten the pictures back to Washington via burst transmitter. While the boys recharged the systems, powered up the SDVs, refilled the compressed tanks, then took long, hot showers and ate a big supper, I went up to the conn and tried to convince the skipper that we needed another go-round in Chongjin harbor. But Captain Ross was having none of it.

  I tried another tack. “Look, Ken, I brought some goodies with me just in case I ran into something like this. So we have the stuff on board.” I paused and sipped my coffee—God, it tasted good. I’d been chilled clear through and was still cold from the water. “Besides, it’ll give us a chance to plant some more sensors.”

  “You mean you didn’t plant them all?”

  I lied. “No. One of the subs was moving.”

  He thought about that. My mission was to tag all the subs. If I hadn’t, then the mission wasn’t complete, and he couldn’t check all the boxes on his list. That made things different.

  “Okay—you can go back. But only to plant the sensor on that last sub.”

  I smiled gratefully. “You got it, Ken.” Then I told him I didn’t think it was a good idea to ask Daddy if it was okay for me to go back. I explained that I’d draft a message to save his ass and he could send it UNODIR after I cleared the decks on the next launch.

  Actually, I was doing Ken Ross a favor. For him to score—really score, like in this case sink a major vessel—in a support mission would demonstrate the need for both this class of boat and the DDS system. Furthermore, he’d be the only submariner in his pay grade with any tactical experience, which would naturally enhance his career.

  I assembled the guys in the torpedo room, and while we were charging bottles, I explained about stage two. I told Pick to rig t
he device. He, Half Pint, Duck Foot, and I would horse the baby into place below the mothership’s keel while Nasty and Cherry did a final hull search, took pictures, and suspended the hanging straps.

  We’d use only two SDVs this time—less chance of getting spotted. I’d ride astride the bomb as we towed it to the target site—nothing like having a big bang between your legs. Besides, if there was a fuckup I wouldn’t have a thing to worry about. I never wanted to be without my nuts and pecker anyway. We loaded everything in the hangar area by 1200, grabbed a quick lunch, and crawled in our racks for a much needed snooze.

  The chief of the boat held reveille at 1800. He was a little surprised that we hadn’t completed our mission the first time. I think we disappointed him. Still, I was glad to know the CO hadn’t told him what I was up to, which meant one of two things: either he was a typical submarine officer and didn’t trust enlisted men, or he was covering his ass and wanted to be able to tell a board of inquiry, “I didn’t know what that crazy Marcinko was doing out there.” Either way, it was going to be my ass on the line.

  We loaded the hangar area 1930 and commenced prep. I gave the XO my UNODIR message for Pinky.

  Capt. Marcinko to RADM Prescott: We are returning on-site to complete attachment of beacons. UNODIR if we find a target of opportunity, we will take appropriate action.

  Whatever the fuck that gibberish meant, the bottom line was, the system would be happy. If I died or there was a goatfuck, Kenny Ross’s ass would be covered. I owed him that much.

  We flooded the hangar at 2015 and opened the clamshell doors at 2100. We were approaching the target by 0012. At a range of about a thousand yards, Nasty went to the surface for a peek, just in case the mothership had shifted anchorage during the day. It had—now it was six hundred meters out in the harbor. I wondered about that until I realized that Chongjin’s wide channel would allow the twenty-meter minisubs ample clearance for underwater docking. A ten-or twelve-meter minisub can sidle up to the dock and still sneak under the mothership. But these big twenty-meter boats needed space. And what looks more innocent than a freighter sitting at anchor in a harbor?