“So you are the infamous Rogue Warrior,” said Cordella, welcoming me into her office.
I gave her the glad-handing routine and the shit-eating grin people have come to expect. Everything’s show business these days, even SpecWar. “You say that like you have a chip on your shoulder,” I told her.
“Let’s just say that your reputation precedes you,” she said, folding her arms. “So you’re here to make us look bad, huh?”
“No, ma’am. I’m here to kick you in the butt so you get serious about security,” I told her. “I’m here to make it easier for you to get what you need from the powers that be, because you’re going to be able to point to a list of things that need to be improved, and that can only be improved with a serious commitment. Some of that will involve money; more of it will take elbow grease and attitude.”
“I have plenty of elbow grease. Attitude…” Cordella frowned and stood up from behind her desk. Five-six, five-seven, she weighed maybe one-sixty, and a lot of it was in her shoulders and arms. She had the look of one of those pioneer women who spent the day bustin’ the sod and whuppin’ the cattle before tying on her apron at night to cook dinner for the family. Hearty stock, not to be messed with. “Unfortunately, there are a lot of folk around who don’t take things seriously. The World Trade Center and the Pentagon are a long way from Iowa.”
“They’re not as far as you think.”
“You don’t have to tell me that, Mr. Marcinko.”
“Call me Dick. Or worse, if you feel the need.”
Cordella finally smiled. “I appreciate what you’re up to. But I have to say, I don’t like the idea of getting my butt kicked.”
“Good. Then it’ll be more fun.”
She held out her hand. “Luke Cox says you’re all right.”
Cox—the puns are too easy, so we’ll give him a pass—was another Homeland Security honcho. He coordinated domestic intelligence for the agency. As a blind to Congress and maybe the terrorists, his office was titled Threat Data, Polling and Logging: “Tadpole.” Whether this confused terrorists, I don’t know; it sure as hell confused people his office dealt with, like those in the CIA, who wanted to know why pollsters were asking for code-word-level information.
As for Congress, hell, Congress people are always confused.
“You know Luke?” I said, as if Cox and I were old buddies. Our acquaintanceship amounted to a few waves in the hallway. He didn’t get in my way; that was all I really knew about him.
“Eons ago, I was in the Coast Guard,” she said. “Then I wised up. I talk to Luke from time to time, usually when he thinks Tadpole has something worth looking at. Most of what he sends me isn’t worth much, but he’s trying.”
We set out the ground rules, which basically were that there were no ground rules. Our Red Cell II team would, however, limit its activities to a particular geographic area, to be named by Cordella herself. This was fine by us. Having people know more or less where we were going to strike didn’t hamper us at all and took away much of the grounds for griping.
In the interest of not embarrassing the locals there too much, we’ll call the place she chose “Hometown, USA.” It’s a nice, smallish city of roughly twenty-five thousand people with a pleasant downtown, a lot of green grass, and more “good mornings” and “how do you do’s” per square mile than anyplace else on earth. About the last spot in the world a terrorist would think of attacking.
Which of course made it an extremely likely target.
We chatted for a bit longer, fencing really, as Cordella tried to get me to be a little more specific about what we do. Finally I started smiling and nodding and not saying anything. She realized what was going on and conceded by getting up and sticking out that shovel of a hand she had.
“Fuck you very much, Demo Dick,” she told me.
“And fuck you, too, Cordella.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Something about a woman in uniform gets my blood going, even if the uniform in question was just a simple denim shirt and crisp khaki pants. But maybe it was the spit in her eye that was so damn attractive.
“Tell you what, after my people kick your people’s butts, we’ll get together for dinner and whatever to discuss the need for improvements informally,” I told her.
“Skip dinner,” she said. “I’ll take the whatever—after my people kick your people’s butts.”
We shook hands on it, and I’m not lying when I say I had to count my fingers to make sure I had them all on the way out.
Hometown, USA, straddled a river, and you could easily put the whole town in a frenzy by destroying one of the three bridges that crossed it. The supports on the oldest had been admirably overengineered, which meant that you’d have to use a lot of explosives to take it out. But a U-Haul filled with fertilizer would have probably buckled the roadway sufficiently to close it. I doubt either of the other two bridges would have survived a concussion grenade, let alone a serious bomb or fertilizer-laden truck. Three trucks, three bridges—would a more or less simultaneous attack like that get national headlines, you think?
Okay, let’s say you don’t like bridges. Same explosives, same number of trucks—just put them in the center of town. The explosion would create more than enough chaos to get the national media parachuting in. Fertilizer is not exactly difficult to obtain in Iowa, and while there certainly has been more awareness of its potential uses following Timmy McVeigh’s Oklahoma nightmare, it’s still relatively easy for it to end up in the wrong hands.
As tempting as it was to close down all arteries into and out of the city at what passes for rush hour in the Buckeye State, we decided that play was too easy. I definitely believe in the old KISS principle—“Keep It Simple Stupid”—but my troops are creative types and need to be pushed. We spent the morning of our arrival playing tourist, scoping out the municipal building and other government installations in town. Two dozen state troopers and members of the National Guard arrived in the meantime, their presence duly noted by the local newspaper, which reported that Homeland Defense and something called the Antiterrorist Awareness Task Force would be conducting a readiness test that week. I think we were supposed to be the ATATF, though personally I preferred the name Red Cell II.
Technically, the news story was a serious breech of the ground rules—the test was not supposed to be made public—but having the good citizens of Hometown, USA, suspicious of outsiders worked in our favor. This is because—unlike the extra troopers, policemen, assorted Homeland Security folks, and Guardsmen—we didn’t look like outsiders. We wore jeans and faded shirts and scuffed up sneakers you can find in any Wal-Mart. And our token nonconformist, Trace, found the perfect cover in the news story: she was a reporter from back East in town to cover the exercise. Reporters need photographers, so Sean was pressed into service. Dummying up credentials involved a quick visit to the local library, which had a color Xerox machine, and then a trip to the mall where she found a U-Laminate-It booth. Anyone who had bothered to check the number on the business card would have gotten a machine at Rogue Manor set up to sound as if it were part of the National News Desk of the Washington Times. No one bothered.
I suppose you can give Trace’s legs some of the credit. Those aren’t the legs of a terrorist, though they do strike terror in the heart of many a man.
Her cover allowed Trace to get a behind-the-scenes peek at the city’s defenses. Within a few hours she had toured every post in the city, and we had digital photos of every conceivable bastion of insecurity in the berg. The operation kicked off at precisely 2200 hours that night, when a pair of suspicious types bought themselves a pair of beers at a watering hole across from the police station and retired to the corner near the shuffleboard table. Their conversation was mostly unintelligible, but at some point the word “school” was heard by at least one of those nearby. By happenstance, the person with the sharp ears was a National Guard captain enjoying a little downtime with his men. Shortly after the suspicious types
left the bar, the captain sprang into action, and before dawn the high school was surrounded by a company’s worth of Guardsmen and police officers. When the district buses went out to pick up the kiddies, each had two members of the task force aboard and was shadowed by a car with two plainclothes policemen inside. Snipers were posted on the roof of the building. Two helicopters provided constant surveillance overhead.
It was great fun for the kids.
At 0555—for variety’s sake we decided on a late start—a call came in to the local police station that a middle-aged man was having a seizure outside the library. By the time an ambulance responded, a mustachioed passerby had stopped to render assistance. As luck would have it, the good Samaritan turned out to be a doctor, who quickly diagnosed the ailment not as a seizure but a full-blown heart attack. A second call was sent for the ambulance, though by now it was already on its way. The truck arrived a few minutes later, siren wailing and tires squealing. Like so many other emergency squads in small cities, this one lacked the cutting-edge equipment to deal with a coronary at the scene. Therefore, the man was packed into the ambulance under the watchful eye of the doctor, who jumped in with his briefcase to help the attendants care for their stricken patient.
Thirty seconds after the doors shut, the patient rose from the stretcher. Not only had he regained his vim and vigor, but he had somehow obtained a weapon—a haughty looking H&K P7M8, as a matter of fact.
I wish we’d had a camera aboard. Doc thought he’d be dealing with a real heart attack any second, so he quickly explained to the two attendants that this was just part of the drill. The attendants looked at each other and then started laughing. Nervously, but laughing just the same. We didn’t let the driver in on it; the compartment was closed off from the cab, and it was easier and more realistic to carry on as we were. Within a few minutes, we were backing toward the doors at Good Samaritan Hospital, exactly as if it were a bona fide emergency. Sean was just coming up toward the door with a limp, having called in his bum knee a few minutes before. Had the security officers given us any problem, he would have pasted little stickers on their heads telling them they were dead. He didn’t have the chance, however, as the security people were too busy admiring the new nurse who had just reported for ER duty—Trace, who fills a nurse’s uniform in a way that the Surgeon General advises is seriously dangerous to your health. Poor girl couldn’t seem to get the ladies’ restroom key to work. Considering how far she had to bend over to get the key into the lock, helping her was definitely a job for both officers.
We had the emergency room taken over within two minutes. The only holdout was the clerk assigned to take down the insurance information from people on their last legs before admitting them for treatment. It took three stickers across his fat mouth to get him to shut up and stop asking for our provider cards.
Sean lost his limp and rendezvoused with Hulk out front at the main entrance, where the two security officers were stickered and trussed before they could even look up from their coffee cups. (They thought the cuffs were a joke until they tried to get out of them.) The last officer on duty was up in the security office, where he was supposed to be watching the surveillance cameras, but was found involved in a very hot game of computer solitaire instead. He was easily surprised by Trace, who had brought a gun with the donuts she took him. Being in a generous mood, she let him handcuff himself—and keep the donuts.
We could have made the whole exercise more interesting by cutting off the phone lines and electricity, but that might have put real people at risk. We also let the doctors and nurses go on with their everyday business, though I have serious doubts that Tangos would have.
But we did have some fun. Even though they were only handcuffed, the security people took a while before realizing that they could use their phones and call out for help. When they finally did, it took the National Guard and police a good ten minutes to respond. A small blue smoke bomb exploded as the first troop truck went up the drive. A red bomb went off under the second, and—you guessed it—a white one under the third. Iowa had put Dickie in a patriotic mood.
The smoke really came to the fore as the laser lights whipped through it from the simulated .50-caliber machine gun we’d set up on the knoll near the parking lot. Hulk and Sean had spotted the laser at a club the previous evening, and we decided to borrow it for our own purposes. This involved borrowing a generator as well. Fortunately, the local police department had volunteered one, along with a trailer and vehicle to tow it. Whether they realized they volunteered these items was not recorded in the official report.
While the responding troops danced the tango, we exited stage right down the hill and away from the hospital, having demonstrated that we could take and hold it long enough to blow it up, or, if we were feeling truly perverse and destructive, merge it with HealthSouth.
We had a plan to sneak away if necessary: Danny had “borrowed” an ambulance earlier and left it in the driveway. But there was no need for stealth. We simply walked down the hill opposite the laundry entrance, scattering eight and a half minutes before the first trooper car came up to close off the area.
Damn straight I timed it. Got it on video, too.
Cordella was a good sport about the whole thing. To be honest, the security lapses here were no worse than those anywhere else in the country, and if we really had decided to hit the school instead of the hospital—well, I’d have to say that they might have held us off for almost five minutes, if not six. I gave her an informal report on some of her organization’s shortfalls, then collected on our bet.
*See Violence of Action for the entire story.
Chapter
3
Five o’clock in the morning, you’re having the wet dream of your life, and the phone on the bed stand rings. You know absolutely that you should not answer it, but your lifelong military training makes you roll the fuck over and reach for the handset. Even as you pick it up you know it’s a mistake. But you tell yourself…maybe…maybe it is Karen…or someone…really…important.
Ha!
“This will not happen again!” shouted Colonel Tell-Me-Dick Telly through the phone. He shouted some other things, but my subconscious was back in the middle of the dream and I had a hard time getting focused on the meat of the conversation.
“What time is it, Dick?” I asked, trying to get my eyes to focus on my watch.
“Who the hell cares what time it is? This will not happen, Marcinko. I will not be embarrassed by you. I don’t fucking care if you are in bed with Armstead. It will not happen again!”
“Well, it’s dark in here, but I do believe I’m in bed all alone,” I told him. “What won’t happen again?”
Telly repeated for the third time that it wouldn’t happen again and then proceeded to read me the riot act about no longer embarrassing the locals. I say read, but in his case you have to understand that’s a figure of speech. If Telly can read anything more challenging than a toothpaste label, I’m dropping dead tomorrow.
Now, I’ve had my ear chewed by some world-class chewers, starting way back in basic about a million years ago. Admirals have beat their swords into ploughshares on my skull. Far worse, I’ve had the hairy soles of a Navy chief walk up and down my backside getting my shit squared away. Compared to any of those ass chewings, Tell-Me-Dick’s hysterical squawks registered somewhere below mosquito bites on a rhino’s rump.
But fuck-all, the thing is—he was an A1 serious dickhead, and if I have to get woken up at two bells, as the old sailor dogs say, then at least make it something fucking important. Unless your personal attributes measure 36-24-36 or thereabouts, and you’re doing it in person.
“I know you’re in Illinois, Marcinko. I know that’s where you are. Don’t screw with me. This will not happen again.”
“So tell me, Dick,” I said finally. “You figure out who put those charges on the bridge yet?”
“Don’t change the subject, Marcinko.”
“What about our Topless Tango? Y
ou figure out who he is?”
“I said, don’t change the subject on me.”
“Next time these guys plan an operation, we may not be there to stop it,” I told him.
“You go ahead with your little fucking operation. Just don’t screw with me.”
“Gee, thanks, Colonel Telly,” I said.
“Don’t thank me, you asshole. You don’t embarrass the local forces, you understand? You don’t embarrass this department. This is the United States Government we’re talking about here.”
And on and on he sputtered. It made me feel a little nostalgic, as if I were back in the Navy. I waited until the asshole paused for breath, and then I said:
Nothing.
Not a word. I didn’t yell or scream or use any of those naughty words he had. I didn’t kick the wall or throw the phone across the room. I didn’t threaten to punch him out or even wrap the cord around his neck like a noose.
I just breathed. Softly. Very softly.
“Fuck you, Marcinko,” he finally yelled over the phone. “Fuck you.”
Imagine if I had a dollar every time someone said that to me?
I thought Tell-Me-Dick had set his alarm clock especially so he could wake me up, but further intelligence proved that this had not been the case. Apparently the alleged Homeland Insecurity meister had been woken himself an hour earlier by some yahoo at Good Morning America, who wanted him to rush over to a studio. There, he would appear live nationwide, explaining why Homeland Security’s Red Cell II team was exposing security lapses all across Middle America. Any Washington player with a pound of smarts—a small group, I know—would have grabbed the opportunity and turned the appearance into a lobbying effort for more of whatever it was he wanted more of. But Tell-Me-Dick had only a quarter-pound of smarts, which led him to bark “no comment,” stew for a half hour or so, then track me down. This wasn’t particularly difficult, as I had called his office the afternoon before, explaining that we had found our way to Springfield, Illinois, and would incite the citizens to terror at our earliest scheduled opportunity.
RW12 - Vengeance Page 4