Nasty pulled into a humongous mall just north of Colorado Springs so I could make the phone call. It was 1740 in Washington. I rang Stevie Wonder’s number. No answer. We grabbed some chow from a pizza stand and wandered around, window-shopping and ogling the women. After half an hour I tried again.
“Yo.” The familiar voice came through loud and clear.
“It’s me.”
“Remember this morning I tole you you was in a world of shit?”
“What’s your point?”
“Fuck you—I underestimated the situation.” Wonder snorted. “Here’s the dump. You are persona non grata. The Navy wants your ass. The Pentagon wants you shot. The FBI has been alerted. Probably, so has ATF, Customs, Immigration, the Coast Guard—even the U.S. Mail.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah.”
“What?”
“Don’t try to call any of your alleged pals at DIA. They’ve got digital tracers on all their phones and they’ll find you in about thirty seconds.”
“Like Irish?”
“Yeah—Irish and his shop have gone over to the enemy. A call to them is the same as a call to Pinky.”
That was real bad news. The one thing I’d always been able to count on was the informal network of sources and contacts I’d built up over the years. That network was the reason I could run roughshod over the system. It was the reason I could say “fuck” to admirals and operate with impunity. Now, Wonder was telling me I didn’t have my Safety Net anymore. “Is there anybody I can trust?”
His voice was even. “Besides me? I’m not sure, Dick. They want you pretty damn bad.”
“Do you have any good news at all?”
He paused. “Well … I know where your monitors are and you don’t.”
Geezus—the asshole really knew how to keep a secret. “Wonder …”
He laughed. I could just see his head swiveling. “Okay, Dickhead. They’re in southern California.”
I knew that already and told him so.
“Yeah—but you don’t know they’ve been moved.”
That was news. “Where?”
“Not sure. I’m trying to get some friends to do me a real big favor. Call me back in two hours and I may have some news for you.”
“Roger that.”
We climbed back into the car and continued south. I had Nasty pull over at a Phillips 66 station just off the interstate and tried Wonder’s number. There was no answer. We waited fifteen minutes, trying not to attract any attention, then I called again.
“Yo.”
“It’s me. Any news?”
“Yeah—you’re in deep shit.” He laughed. He loved to see me in pain. “Don’t worry, I got a fix. The monitors are sitting in Long Beach Harbor.”
“You sure?”
“Yup.”
“Is it on a ship?”
“Don’t know. There are a lot of ships in Long Beach Harbor. There are also a lot of docks.”
He had a point. “So?”
“So, we wait, Dickhead. If the monitor starts to move west, then it’s on a ship.”
“If it is, we can track it, right?” I knew that all ships have navigation satellite transponders for position fixes, and that by matching the position of the monitor with the ship’s transponder, we could identify the CIQ, or Craft In Question.
“Right—but there’s been no movement yet.” Wonder paused. I could hear him sip his omnipresent coffee.
“I’m on the move here. Lemme try you back in an hour.”
“Roger.”
He got me a fix at 2055. “The CIQ is a twin-hulled tanker named Akita Maru. Left at nineteen hundred today for Yokohama, says the harbormaster.”
“Right on.” A plan started to formulate. The first problem to solve was tracking the tanker. There was no way we could get to it if we couldn’t find it. “Can you keep your eyes on the ship?” I asked Wonder.
“Maybe. If I can convince some people to look the other way while I play with switches and dials.”
“Try.”
“Wilco. Call me later and I’ll have an update for you.”
“Bless you, my son.” I told the boy I’d buy him his own brewery when I got back to D.C. Wonder said he’d hold me to the promise.
He hung up. I wanted the ship and the missiles—bad. It wasn’t that I lacked my own ammunition. I had videotape of Buckshot and the Japs from Matsuko Machine in my shoulder bag. I had Grant Griffith’s computer disk in my pocket. Back in Washington, I had the NIS files on Pinky. Taken together, they became compelling evidence of a massive conspiracy reaching into the heart of the Navy establishment. But the evidence wasn’t airtight. To make it so, I needed the stolen nuclear missiles on the Akita Maru. Then I’d have it all, and I could make my own fucking presentation to CNO.
We had a half-hour drive to rendezvous with the rest of the guys. While Nasty put pedal to metal, I sitrepped, trying to figure out why the fuck Grant Griffith would put the stolen missiles on a tanker when it would be just as easy to put them on a plane and fly them out.
The answer, I realized, had to do with technology. In this so-called New World Order, government agencies have become a lot more capable when it comes to sniffing out the smuggling of forbidden materials, such as explosives or nukes. Like Narita, where sophisticated sensors had been installed, all the major airports on the West Coast had installed the latest generation of explosive and nuclear-sensing baggage and cargo-handling protection devices.
Grant Griffith was not a man to take chances. He’d read my report on Narita, which had spotlighted the single bright side of the airport’s security—its stateof-the-art detection devices. So there was no way he was going to risk a bunch of hijacked Tomahawk missiles by allowing them anywhere near an airport.
He’d move them by ship. It was slower, but it was also prudent.
We pulled into the rest area at about 2130. The boys were already sitting on the dew-covered picnic benches drinking cold Coors and working on deli sandwiches. I’d had plenty of time to think during the drive and gave the troops the benefit of my musings—a real no-shitter.
I told them it was my opinion we’d been set up from the very start. That every operation we’d been assigned—from the Navy Yard to Seal Beach to North Korea—had been a deception, a ruse, a psy op. We were the diversionary assholes—the force sent out to catch the enemy’s attention, while the big flanking movement took place miles and miles away. Like Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf did with Desert
Storm. And the real goal? KISS-simple. Grant Griffith and his friends were stealing nuclear weapons from the United States and selling them.
To the North Koreans? asked Duck Foot.
I’d thought about that. The kimchis, I told him, were a diversion, too. Griffith was using their nuclear program as cover. That way, while our entire military intelligence community was focusing on the Pyongyang putzes, he was shipping goods into Japan.
Japan?
Yeah—Japan. Probably to that fascist Jap asshole who ran Matsuko, what’s-his-name. The guy Tosho told me about—Hideo Ikigami.
And guess what? Their plan had worked. I’d played right into their hands. Why? Because, I said, sometimes I am an egocentric asshole who cannot see the forest for the fucking trees. Because I often have this “stop me or I’ll kill again” attitude when it comes to the system—which means I’ll try to screw that system whenever I can—even if it is not in my best interests to do so.
Damn—Griffith and Pinky knew how I felt about the Navy. They knew how I’d react to taking over Red Cell. And I’d done exactly what they’d predicted I’d do: run a bunch of UNODIR operations that showed the world—the Navy world—that I was still a knuckle-dragging mustang, an uncontrollable rogue who habitually thumbed his nose at the chain of command.
I drained my beer and crushed the can in my hand. This was not a happy epiphany. “Shit,” I said, “that’s exactly what they fucking wanted me to do.”
And what, I asked rhetorically, were t
he consequences of my playing into their hands? The most significant one was that I’d lost two good men, I said. Wynken and Blynken died because of me, and their wasted deaths were something I was going to have to live with for the rest of my life. Then there was our current situation. Here we were, renegades without friends. Fugitives on the run. Candidates for courts-martial. Meanwhile, Grant Griffith and his pals had loaded their nukes onto a ship and were sailing into the sunset—or in this case, toward the Land of the Rising Sun.
The Navy is unique when it comes to conferring command. When you assume command in the Navy, you assume it totally. You are responsible for your men. In every way. From their safety and well-being to making sure that their equipment works, to their morale, to protecting them from undue harassment from the system. I had let my men down. I’d been blind to the plot that now was obvious to me. That made me unworthy of them.
Now, I said, it was time for them to save themselves. I would take the fall because this situation was all my fault. My responsibility.
“I’m not ordering you to go back to Washington,” I said, “but I’m suggesting it strongly.”
“Shit, Skipper.” Nod slapped his beer down on the table. “I’m only a fuckin’ new guy, but it still seems to me that if we’re gonna burn, we should burn together.”
“Ditto,” said Duck Foot.
“Look, Skipper,” said Pick, “we’re a unit. Units stay together.”
“Okay,” Half Pint chimed in, “so you got rolled by these assholes. But the point is, you were thinking of us. Fuck, Captain, nobody’s been willing to cover our asses in years—not until you got back.”
“That’s the truth,” said Cherry. “Goddamn officers—they all use us.”
“Use you?”
“To get their fucking stars. When you were CO of SEAL Team Six, Skipper, that was all you wanted—to be CO of a kick-ass-take-names unit. Now, it seems like all officers want to be admirals. Command of a unit like Six is just another step toward flag rank. What’re the consequences of that? Consequences are, we get screwed. They don’t take chances. They don’t protect us. They just cover their asses and do nothing. Well, Skipper, I didn’t become a SEAL to do nothing. I’m tired of touch football and marathons and full-mission profiles. I want to go out and go fuckin’ hunting.”
“Me, too,” said Nasty. “Shit, Skipper—it’s time to avenge Wynken and Blynken. Let’s take these fucking assholes down—no survivors.”
There were tears in my eyes when Nasty finished. These were SEALs I loved to command—hunters in the tradition of crusty old Frogs like my sea daddy Roy Boehm, the first CO of SEAL Team Two—men who’d do anything to get the job done.
I examined their faces. The determination to triumph was palpable. The energy they radiated was incredible. Their resolve to win was absolute.
We had no weapons. We had no equipment. We had nothing but raw energy, guts, determination, and the will to succeed.
We would not fail.
I woke Mike Regan out of a sound sleep on the secure cellular phone just as the sun started to peek over the Dos Cabezas Mountains east of Willcox, Arizona. We’d been driving all night.
“I had the FBI here yesterday,” was what he told me.
“No shit. What did they want?”
“Your scalp.”
“What did you tell them?”
“That you’d left for Washington.”
That was good. “And the stuff I left with you to post to me?”
“Still here.”
That was as good a piece of news as I’d heard in a long time. It meant we had weapons and ammo. Now all we needed was an aircraft, a bunch of chutes, and an assault boat. All we needed—shit.
I explained to Mike what I needed. He grumbled, but said he’d take care of business for me.
“Great.”
“One piece of coincidental news.”
Coincidental? I didn’t believe in coincidence anymore. “Yeah?”
“The movie set you used to infiltrate the offices?”
“Yeah?”
“One of the people working on the movie was killed yesterday. A woman. I don’t recall her name offhand. She went off the road near Malibu in her Jeep and died. I only realized it when the obit said she’d been working in Century City the same night we were there.”
I told you—there are no coincidences. I swallowed hard and added another score to settle with Manny Tanto. “Her name was Gold, Mike—Melissa Gold. She did me a favor. Save the obit.”
“Roger that. When do I see you?”
“Hopefully within seventy-two hours. It’s gonna be a tough trip. We need to move quick, but we also need to move quietly.”
“Amen, bro.”
“Stay close to the phone. I’ll give you a call when I’m ready.”
We’d been up for almost two days now. It was time to grab a combat nap and a hot shower. We checked into two motels so as not to attract attention. While the guys rested, I plotted. Obviously, we had to get to the tanker, hit it, bring the goodies back, and dump them—along with a couple of traitors named Pinky and Grant—right in the Navy’s lap.
The top requirement was transportation. I needed a plane with three thousand miles or more of range. My first choice was a C-130 Hercules. They are stable platforms, and they are easy to fly. Pick could handle one by himself. Fortunately, there were a bunch of assets in the area. Near Tucson was Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, where the government graveyard for military aircraft is located. Thirty miles north of Davis-Monthan is a little town called Maraña. That is where Christians in Action—the CIA—keeps some of its covert air force. I knew both bases because SEAL Team Six had trained there—we’d jumped near Davis-Monthan many times and had used the CIA’s Marana planes during our deep-cover operations.
We recce’d Davis-Monthan first. There were a dozen C-130 birds in the graveyard. No good. Three other Hercules—they were EC-130 special-operations aircraft—were sitting on the tarmac waiting to be upgraded. But checking them out to find which were flyable and which weren’t would have taken a week and I didn’t have a week. Besides, EC-13Os are crammed full of electronic goodies that weigh a ton, and we needed a bare plane that we could fill to the brim with gas—we’d carry only our combat gear and the IBS rubber ducky we’d need to make the jump.
Jump? Jump. My plan was KISS-simple. We’d fly out into the Pacific, locate the tanker using coordinates from Stevie Wonder, drop into the water, hit the ship from behind, and stage a classic takedown. Then we’d commandeer the tanker and bring it home. A piece of fucking cake, right?
So we moved up the path of least resistance, where they were more trusting, less bureaucratic—and the security sucked. We arrived at Marana just at sunset. There were a pair of commercial C-13Os sitting on the tarmac outside a huge hangar. They were painted in U.N. colors—probably used somewhere in Africa, or one of the Balkan states that used to be Yugoslavia. Now they’d come home to be scraped and repainted. Maybe they’d become Red Cross mercy planes. Or camouflaged as military aircraft from France, Germany, Israel, or Egypt, depending on the mission. Frankly, I liked the way they looked right now.
Pick went through the fence. He was back in less than ten minutes. “I found one—it’s perfect,” he said. “It’s been used for resupply—configured to make drops. Probably covert weapons to Bosnian Muslims, Kurds, or Azerbaijanis. Best of all, it looks like it’s ready to go. All we’d need is fuel—and the fuel farm isn’t even guarded. I saw it from the cockpit—it’s right at the western edge of the field.”
It all sounded good to me. I made a note of the number on the C-130’s tail. We’d keep track of that particular bird. Okay—transportation was the easy part. It would be more difficult to assemble the goods we’d need to stage the takedown.
We couldn’t grab the C-130 and fly to San Diego because it would be impossible to refuel there. Besides, we were the subjects of an intensive manhunt. So, everything had to come to us. What I wanted was to assemble everything I nee
ded here in the Arizona desert, then in one big, sweeping operation we’d grab the bird, fuel her, and get under way before anybody knew what was happening.
Mike Regan would be arriving with our weapons within twenty-four hours. While I waited for him, Cherry and Duck Foot—who had been instructors at the BUD/S school at Coronado—would visit some of their old haunts at SEAL Team Five and “borrow” (read steal) parachutes, an IBS (that’s Inflatable Boat, Small, for you civilians), and a couple of rubber fuel bladders to increase the IBS’s range.
Nasty, who’d survived his HALO accident not ten miles from where we were sitting, still had a key to the rigger loft at Marana on his key chain. I asked him to break in and see what was available for rigging the C-130 for the drop. Two hours later he came back with good news: there were pallets and cargo chutes. With luck—and some skill—no one would miss anything until it was too late.
We brainstormed all night. I figured that the maximum range we’d get out of the C-130 would be 3,200-3,300 miles. If it had been outfitted with additional tanks, it could go almost 5,000 miles. But the plane Pick had chosen didn’t have ’em.
I checked in with Stevie Wonder. He told us the tanker was steaming at a steady 16.5 knots. That meant, after the thirty-six hours she’d been at sea, the tanker had gone about 680 miles. It was roughly 400 miles as the crow flies from Maraña to the Pacific. If we could squeeze 3,200 miles out of the Hercules, we’d have 2,825 miles of range left before we went into the drink. A speed of sixteen and a half knots gave the tanker a daily run of 450 miles.
Allowing for Murphy’s Law and all the other unknowns, I figured we had to do the rendezvous and takedown within six days after the ship had sailed, otherwise the Akita Maru would be out of range and we’d be fucked. That meant we had to be airborne within ninety hours.
Mike arrived on time. He was followed within hours by Cherry and Duck Foot, who’d not only brought the chutes, rubber ducky, and three fuel bladders, but also a trunkful of swim gear. Pick made five trips to the aircraft to check out its instrumentation and make sure there was enough fuel aboard to taxi us across the field to the tank farm. The only security he saw was jackalopes.
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