Red Cell

by Richard Marcinko

  Nasty, Duck Foot, Nod, and Half Pint hit the Maraña rigger’s loft. They brought back one pallet, one packed cargo chute, and one set of rigging cables. Repack the chute? Yeah—if this weren’t being done clandestinely. But there was no place to lay it out without being seen. So we decided to chance it. Backup? Who needs one? If this didn’t work the first time, we’d all be dead anyway.

  I examined the boat. It was one of the older ones, a rubber-ducky-configured IBS raiding craft with 125-horse-power outboard motor. It came sans radio. Well, that didn’t matter—there’d be no one to call.

  We had the boat. We had the plane. We had the guns and the bullets. What we lacked was some means to get from our IBS to the tanker. At SEAL Team Six, I’d designed titanium-hooked boarding ladders. But there were none of those around. We’d have to improvise.

  Nasty and Duck Foot were the best climbers we had. I assigned the problem to them. Three hours later they came back to the motel carrying two expandable poles—the kind painters used to reach high ceilings. One was aluminum, the other was steel. We wrapped the components in electrical tape to make them sticky, designed hooks, and with the help of a local welder, fixed them to the top, then that night we assaulted a convenient water tower about eight miles down the road. The aluminum pole gave out, causing Duck Foot a nasty bruise. But the steel one worked fine—Nasty’d be able to set the hook, pull himself aboard the tanker, and then lower a knotted rope for the rest of us to climb.

  There were air charts in the plane. Pick liberated the appropriate ones and began planning navigational routes. I decided—security be damned—that we were going to repack the chutes Cherry and Duck Foot brought back from Coronado. We’d all lost good friends on the Grenada operation doing this same kind of air-sea rendezvous, and I wanted no screwups. We laid the chutes out in the motel parking lot at 0300, had everything repacked in less than an hour, and no one was the wiser.

  The way things looked, I guesstimated a 10-hour flight, plus three hours for a circle search (I hoped it wouldn’t turn into a circle jerk!). If we launched at 0545, we’d be over the target in the late afternoon. We’d jump, assemble, track, chase, and take the tanker down at night. It sounded perfect. But I knew that Mr. Murphy would come along for the ride—and the best way to avoid him was preparation. Lots of preparation.

  So, we put it all on paper and went over the details again and again.

  Aircraft launch at approximately 134 hours of ship steaming time.

  Overhead for a look-see at 144 hours (six days).

  Rubber ducky drop at 147 hours.

  Assault—at our first opportunity.

  My preference would have been to track the tanker and make the assault at 0-Dark Hundred, when the opposition is always at its least dangerous. But with only a single boat I couldn’t take a chance on the outboard engine’s being flooded out by a following sea, the tanks giving way from dry rot, or any of the hundred other “normal” things Señor Murphy does during these types of events.

  Indeed, I’ve had perfectly good engines die because they got flooded on impact. I’ve had my boats flip over when they hit the water. I’ve seen the wave action tear the engine mount right off. I’ve been there when the winds carry the boat a mile from the jumpers.

  There are more ways for these ops to go wrong than right—which meant that along with our skill, our determination, and all our planning, we’d need a shitload of luck.

  Still, I tried to leave as little to chance as possible. For example, I decided we’d hit the ship on the port side amidships, where the main deck is lowest to the waterline. The reason for going to port, versus starboard, is that more people are right-handed, and if smoking, will throw their butts away with their right hand—ergo they’ll use the starboard side, and if you use it, too, they’ll see you. Details, details, details.

  At 2200 we assembled all our gear and set it up backward, so we could carry it onto the plane in reverse. The IBS—which was to be launched first off the ramp—was the last item loaded. I went over the stowage probs and stats carefully, then walked the men through—five dry runs on the ground.

  Why? Because stowage can make or break an op. For example, if everything is not stowed just right, Mr. Murphy will find room to come along. If that happens, he might be able to loosen a strap or two so that when you go off the tail ramp (at between one hundred and two hundred knots), you lose your gear. You can wave good-bye as it disappears into the slipstream during the initial seconds of the drop or watch it sink on impact when you hit the water (which is damn hard). Or, he’ll repack your combat vest so that when you reach for bullets, you come up with MREs.

  Well, we didn’t need those problems. We didn’t have any spare gear, extra weapons, surplus bullets, or auxiliary boats—not to mention people. Talk about your bottom-line planning, bare-bones execution, and zero-based support. I had to laugh. So far as I was concerned, it was situation normal—all FUBAR.

  Chapter 20

  AT UNDER WAY PLUS 111 HOURS I TOSSED MIKE REGAN BACK into his car and pointed him west. We had no idea where Buckshot and his band of merry marauders were, and I wanted Mike to take Nancy and head to Hawaii or someplace else—anyplace else—for about a week. No need for him to wind up dead. He objected. He protested. He insisted he could take care of himself. I told him that wasn’t the point—it was one against four, and the odds were in the bad guys’ favor. Believe me, I said, there are ways of making you talk. Like causing Nancy a lot of pain—so why take chances with your wife’s life? “Just get the hell out of Dodge for a while, pilgrim.”

  Besides, I needed my old Vietnam SEAL compadre alive. I entrusted him with the tapes, the computer disk, and my Minox and told him to take them with him when he disappeared. “Keep checking your answering machines,” I said, adding that if he didn’t hear from me within a week, he was to call “60 Minutes” and turn all the material over to Charlie Thompson, the producer who’d put together the Mike Wallace segment about Rogue Warrior.

  I was certain that with the information I’d gathered, the Wallace-Thompson team would be able to ream Grant Griffith a new asshole from the inside out. They’re both maverick Navy veterans, you know. And even in his mid-seventies (he turned seventy-five in 1993), Mike Wallace—who served in World War II—is as tough as they come. He would have made a hell of a Frogman.

  Charlie Thompson, who served in Vietnam, is that wonderful combination of ornery and adamant. Once he gets his teeth into something he doesn’t let go. He also hates crooks and traitors. That’s my kind of guy (even though he can’t get a decent table at the Palm).

  Mike Regan finally saw the wisdom of my suggestions and departed—grumbling. He’d be waiting for my call, he said.

  Now we were in it for real. I called Stevie to see what the Akita Maru was up to. He told me she was running a parallel course to normal shipping channels, maintaining a consistent 16.5 knots twelve miles south of the normal lane. The pattern had been consistent for twenty hours, which meant the ship was on autopilot. If there was a major change, Wonder said he’d be able to reach me on the satellite link inside the C-130. All I had to do was contact him and give the plane’s call sign.

  Then I asked him for a weather pic.

  “Geez, is there anything ya don’t want?”

  “Not really.”

  He bitched, but told me he’d move quickly.

  While I waited for his call, we ran another two dry-run loadins. We had it down to under twelve minutes from cutting the fence to starting engines. Damn, these guys were good.

  Under way plus 132 hours. This was the worst time. Nothing to do but sit in the motel room and wait, praying that we hadn’t attracted any undue attention. Hoping that no one had called the feds or the sheriff or the state police. I didn’t want a Waco-style standoff on my hands, but my guys were in no mood for surrendering and, more to the point, neither was I.

  No one said much. Each man concentrated on his job. Nasty was working over the climbing pole he’d built. Cherry loaded maga
zines. Nod sat on the floor, honing the blade of his Field Fighter knife. It was big and mean and he wanted to use it bad. I understood why. There are times when killing is the only way to satisfy the revenge god. This was one of them.

  At 133 hours we went through the fence. Duck Foot went straight to the fuel farm to pick the locks on the pumps so we wouldn’t waste a lot of time fueling. We hadn’t moved more than fifteen yards toward the flight line when I realized something had changed. There were security patrols out and about. We pulled back behind the fence line and hunkered in a gully, feeling exposed and vulnerable.

  What the hell was going on? Had we blundered into one of the CIA’s occasional security exercises, or were they piling on because they were looking for us?

  Either way, we were screwed. I scrambled back through the fence and did a fast recon. The bad news was that I saw two separate patrols meandering up and down the tarmac, shining flashlights into dark places. The good news was they were rent-a-cops, not Marines, and they had no dogs or automatic weapons—just flashlights and nightsticks.

  The situation was similar to the exercise I’d run at Narita. That thought brought a smile to my face. I wished I had a couple of the Fujoki Corporation stickers to leave behind. Remember them? They’re the ones that read “Dead hostage—have a nice day” in Japanese and English. They would have been a real mind-fuck for any Agency asshole who tried to figure out what had happened.

  Cherry tapped me on the shoulder, bringing me crashing back to reality. Silently, I explained the situation and the solution. There was one three-man patrol to our right, and another to our left, and they had to be silenced. I gave another sequence of hand signals and we split up to do the dirty deeds. Nasty and I took the port side. Pick and Nod had starboard. Six minutes later, we’d bound and gagged the rent-a-cops with tape and left them in a culvert like half a dozen mummies with sore heads.

  But now we were also behind schedule. And we had to get the 130 to the gas pump without attracting attention. That meant we couldn’t start the engines now. I sent Nasty to locate a mule—one of the small tractors used to tow aircraft—while we stowed the gear. It took him longer than it took us.

  Finally, he drove up in the electric-powered tractor.

  “What the fuck took you so long?”

  “This was the only one I could find that was charged.”

  We hooked up the C-130 and started toward the fuel farm, praying for no more security patrols. I walked alongside the nosewheel as we inched across the flight line, sweating although the temperature was in the forties.

  Under way plus 133 hours 42 minutes. We crossed the field at a crawl. By the time we made it to the fuel farm, Duck Foot had the pumps running and was ready to start filling the wing tanks.

  While Cherry and Duck Foot played gas jockeys, and Pick did a final walkabout, I had Nod locate an APU—that’s one of those Auxiliary Power Units used to jump-start aircraft. That way we’d be able to wait until the last minute before we started making real noise—and revving engines make beaucoup noise.

  It was a good thing we’d gotten an early start. Between the rent-a-cops, the crawl to the pump, and the pumping itself, we were almost forty-five minutes late before we closed the hatches. Damn. It looked as if the ever-popular Mr. Murphy had stowed away with us.

  Well, there was nothing that we could do about that. Pick completed his preflight check and settled into the left-hand seat. I played copilot. Nod engaged the APU and we lit the big bird up. No problems. He disengaged, pushed it clear, then clambered aboard as Nasty raised the cargo ramp. Now we began the taxi. It suddenly hit me just how vulnerable we were as we made our way down three thousand feet of taxiway, seemingly crawling inch by painful inch. I stared down at the tarmac through the windshield. I thought about how I’d gotten here—and how I’d get out; what I’d do and to whom.

  Pick’s voice brought me out of my dawndream. “C’mon, Skipper—get with the program.”

  “Sorry, Pick.”

  “It’s okay, boss, but I need you here, with me. Not a thousand miles away.” He talked me through the throttle controls while he played with the flaps, and then we were rolling ka-bump ka-bump down the runway, sans lights, sans tower chatter, sans everything, and we growled into the purple sky at 134:18:22, loaded for bear, and wanted by lots of people who carried badges, guns, and federal warrants.

  We cleared and climbed and the mission was going perfectly. At least the first six minutes of it went perfectly. Just as we climbed through seven thousand feet, the outboard port engine caught fire.

  How did it happen? Don’t ask. How does anything happen? It just happens. Faulty oil pressure? A mechanic’s rag left behind? A ruptured line? Who knew—who cared. It was too late to do anything other than solve the problem and keep going.

  The cockpit alarm sounded, and cool as a cuke, Pick steadied the aircraft and hit five of the hundred switches in front of him. A big plume of white smoke exploded from the outboard port nacelle as the dry fire extinguishers went to work, and the engine closed down.

  “Can we fly on three?”

  “Sure, Skipper. But we’ll be moving much lower and slower.”

  “Which means …”

  “We’ll use more gas. You’ll have to refigure the intercept point.”

  Great. I had no computer. In fact, I had no way of contacting Stevie Wonder—not without drawing attention to us.

  Why? Because I’d assumed that, like most of the 130s I’d ever used, the one we stole would be outfitted with up-to-date communications gear. Where was my old UDT chief, Ev Barrett, when I really needed him to plant his size 10-D boondocker firmly up my butt. “Never assume, Marcinko, you worthless no-load shit-for-brains pus-nutted geek,” is how Ev would have put it in his genteel, paternal manner.

  After all, this was no military airplane. It was one of the CIA’s covert-action craft, and it was outfitted with your basic 1970s communication gear—the sort of equipment you find in Third World aircraft. Bells and whistles? If they needed it, Christians in Action would bring portable SATCOM gear, burst transmitters, and all the other technogoodies they love to travel with.

  I climbed out of the copilot’s seat and headed toward the naviguesser’s rack. The phrase dead reckoning suddenly took on a whole new significance. I reckoned we could all be dead soon. I sat down, pulled out the charts, and tried to remember the basics of flight time/fuel consumption/range capabilities that I’d studied at the Air Force Command College in Montgomery, Alabama, almost two decades before. Nada. Zippo. My mind had turned to Jell-O.

  Even with the possibility looming large that we’d all go down somewhere in the Pacific, I think we all felt relieved when Pick passed the word that we’d just passed the California coastline and we were now “feet wet,” as the Airedales say, over the Pacific. Pick was going to fly manually for another hour then switch to autopilot so he could relax a little and double-check our newly revised and improvised flight plan. I sat in the radioman’s seat and played with the dials and switches, scanning the airwaves for chatter. Radioman was my first Navy rating, and despite the fact that it had been three decades since I’d played with a radio seriously, the techniques came back to me easily. I spent fifteen minutes listening to traffic. Nothing mentioned us. At least we’d gotten away clean—thanks to Pick’s flying us low and slow and threading the needle between flight controllers. At least that part of it hadn’t been a total fuckup.

  The troops in the cargo were in their normal long-flight mode—already asleep on top of anything that offered some comfort. I climbed down from the cockpit and looked at them sprawled out. It brought back memories of flying all the way to Vietnam from the East Coast in that same manner more than a quarter century ago.

  God—had I been that young once? Idealistic? Believing that the Navy was a place of wooden ships and iron men, not the other way around?

  Yeah—that was me all right. And it still was.

  Why? Because I had iron men with me now—which was what kept me go
ing.

  I wish I could tell you I was a happy camper, but I wasn’t. There were just too many loose ends to give me much confidence in anything but the ability of my men to respond to virtually any situation they’d have to face. So, giving myself over to the fates, I found a pile of canvas and lay down, forcing myself to rest. I’d need every bit of it.

  139:52:15. I held a modified reveille. And after the requisite grunting and groaning, and after the guys lined up at the port and starboard piss tubes so they could drain their lizards at sixteen thousand feet, we began rehearsing our individual responsibilities for the ship takedown.

  A tanker is both easier and harder to take down than your passenger liners, trawlers, or battleships. Easier because all the superstructure is aft, so it’s like fighting inside a three-to-four-story apartment building instead of the maze of decks and passageways you find in passenger ships, Navy vessels, or freighters. On the downside, the decks and bulkheads are all made of steel, so ricochets can ruin your day just as easily as a well-aimed shot. Bullets tend to carom off steel bulkheads like balls on a pool table—except their paths are absolutely unpredictable.

  Our goal would be to swarm the ship and take control as fast as possible. The hard part was that we’d be boarding right below the watchful eyes of the helmsman—who has an unrestricted view of the amidships area—plus whomever he had on the bridge with him. Still, we’d planned the assault for dusk, which was close to dinnertime, when things might be lax—meaning only one man on the bridge, maybe two.

  I drew a rough diagram, pointing out the other complications we’d face, and the areas we’d have to secure.

  The first problem was directly below the bridge, where the mess decks and crew quarters are located. That’s where off-duty personnel relax. Because of the potential hazards of the cargo—combustible petroleum—they normally lounge around fully clothed, ready to respond to an emergency. On this particular voyage they’d probably be armed as well.