The answer you’re looking for would be: just about all of it.
Now think of what would happen if, instead of Demo Dick and his band of Red Cell II warriors planting smoke bombs on the tops of the trailers, a group of thoroughly whacked individuals were lacing the trucks with food-borne viruses or bacteria? What if we went to the trailer that contained three hundred and twenty cases of aspirin and replaced those cases with ones of our own that included three random strychnine pills mixed in with the acetylsalicylic acid? Or injected the chickens in the refrigerated truck with botulism? Or replaced the Walkmen with ones rigged to explode in exactly one hundred forty-three hours?
I’m not Stephen King, so I’ll stop with the horror stories. But the vulnerability of America’s trucking industry—our lifeblood—is immense. It’s not just the trucks you’d expect, the hazardous waste shipments or the chemical tankers. Sure, those things are vulnerable. But they’re just icing on the cake. There were one hundred and thirty-three trailers with loads in that yard. Imagine each one with a time bomb rigged to explode three hours after the truck pulled out of the yard. Not a big bomb—just enough to blow up the trailer and the tanker and maybe the cars next to it. Imagine the traffic jams on the interstate? Image the downtown area at rush hour? Although airport security efforts get all the headlines, securing the nation’s ports, waterways, coastline, and land assets are an important part of the Department of Transportation’s mission. Some statistics to illustrate the areas of responsibility in the United States: we have 3.9 million miles of public roads, 122,000 miles of major railroads, and 2.1 million miles of pipelines, which carry combustible materials like crude oil, gasoline, and natural gas. There are 26,000 miles of commercial, navigable waters. Public transit systems account for 9.1 billion commuter trips each year. A total of 11.2 million trucks and 2.2 million railcars enter the country each year, while 7,500 foreign-flagged ships make 51,000 ports of call each year at the nation’s 361 ports. There are 104 nuclear power plants, of which 63 are accessible by water. All these targets of opportunity make any SEAL giggle, especially a Red Cell–tasked SEAL.
Several of the trailers were equipped with interior electronic locks, and a couple even had fancy GPS reporting gear that could send a signal to a home base if they were tampered with. I hate electronics; they take the fun out of everything. In the past, you actually might have had a chance to get your hands dirty. Now, breaking into these trailers was a simple two-step process. First, Sean turned on a signal emulator, which could communicate with the satellite tracking system or block another GPS unit from communicating with it, depending on which way he flipped the switch. (Some locator units use cellular systems instead, but we didn’t find any that night. Sean had another doodad for those.) Trace then set a pair of magnetic clips onto the wires coming from the electronic lock’s keypad and attached the wires to a master unit, which sent the unlock code to the doors and brakes. The procedure took a grand total of thirty-five seconds on all but the first trailer, where Trace stopped to pet the sleeping dog. We packed little “gotcha boxes”—I’d wanted to do exploding jack-in-the-boxes but hadn’t thought of it in time—into the trucks and resealed them. I suppose if we’d wanted to we could have moved the trailers around the yard for a bit of fun. Even better would have been coming across one of those new systems from an outfit called Vehicle Enhancement Systems over in South Carolina, which hooks the inside of the trailer up with an infrared camera. The idea of mooning the boss is kind of hard to resist.
Thank God there were still a few old-fashioned padlocks holding some of the trailer doors closed. Not that they presented much more of a challenge. It just warmed the tradition-alist in me to see locks I learned to pick back in junior high still in use. By the time we had everything set my watch was just notching 0530. We took a break between a pair of diesel tractors that had been set out to pasture. Trace had brought a thermos of coffee and some cups, and we shared a jolt before moving on to phase two.
The video monitors were observed at a small security shack adjacent to a metal warehouse building toward the front of the facility. There was one guard in the shack and no outside security except for the snoozing dogs. The Guardsmen were across town at a vacant college dorm. Not that I can blame the Guardsmen for preferring mattresses to macadam; if you’re going to have a wet dream, best to have one on something soft. But it would have been a sneeze or two tougher to spray-paint “Gotcha” on the side of the trailer had there been a few soldiers mumbling in their sleep nearby, especially since the cans of the so-called “invisible” paint—visible only under black light once it dried—had small metal balls inside that made a hell of a racket when you shook them.
Then again, a company or two of soldiers milling around would have provoked the vandal in me, leading to all sorts of juvenile behavior. Here I was content to leave the message on the door and retreat to the parking area, waiting for the morning patrol to arrive. It was now 0600, and as our battle plan called for us to remain in place until 0900, I had a notion of finding a little hooch-away and taking a nap for a few hours. But before I could find a spot, Sean came back from his walk-around and told me there was something going on near the warehouse that I had to see. We made our way toward it just in time to see three human gorillas making their way from the back of one of the trailers, each carrying large boxes in their arms. They walked with the boxes around the side of another trailer. Unlike the first trailer, this one wasn’t hooked to a tractor.
“Shrinkage?” asked Trace.
“I say we stop it,” said Sean. It was the law enforcement officer in him.
I waited a minute or so, watching as they came back to the trailer. They were wearing dark clothes and working without lights, but it was at least theoretically possible that they were warehouse workers simply moving a load from one truck to another.
I’m not a big theorist myself, but it was possible.
Nah.
“Dickie says let’s do it,” I whispered finally, getting out of my crouch and trotting up to the trailer after the last of the trio disappeared around the corner. I peered in from the side, not sure if they had a companion in the back.
They didn’t. They had two.
The one nearest me didn’t see a thing. The other one may have, because he started to react as I grabbed the ankle of his comrade and jerked him to the left. Stooge Number One fell backward into Stooge Number Two. I leapt up and put my heel into the face of the man I’d tripped. The second guy played dead and I went along with his game, giving him a gentle love tap in the ribs with the front of my foot before collapsing his cheekbone with the instep of my right foot.
They say the instep is the hardest part of the foot. Someday I’ll have to conduct some experiments and find out. I can say that I got good loft on the kick. Stooge Number Two rose a good sixteen inches off the floor of the trailer.
“You should have saved one of them for me,” said Sean, pulling himself up into the back of the truck as I dragged the men back.
I put my finger to my lips, not sure whether the others would have heard the commotion. We off-loaded the two goons, dragging them around to the front of the truck, where Trace lashed their arms together and tore gags from their pants. Interestingly enough, they shared the same tailor. Their clothes weren’t black but dark blue, with little pocket emblems bearing the name of the establishment.
Sean and I slipped back to the trailer just as the lead gorilla got there. I’m calling these guys gorillas for a reason—they were. Sean’s a big boy, and I’m no shrimp, but the shortest of the trio had at least an inch on my sidekick. Not that that would have stopped Sean; he was aching to feel the smack of flesh against his knuckles. I held him back, hoping to hear the jokers talk.
But they didn’t. Instead, they continued to work as before, ignoring the fact that the two men who’d been helping them before were missing. Maybe they thought the pair went to take a leak or something. Maybe simians aren’t as smart as scientists say. Anyway, I waited until the trio
had strung out, then sprung on the man at the end of the line. Between my chokehold and as sharp a punch to the kidneys as I’d landed in a while, he folded instantly.
Instantly wasn’t quite fast enough. His two companions threw down their boxes and raced back. I looked up as they were turning the corner ten feet away.
Two on two would have been a fair enough fight. They had a weight and height advantage, but we had them on IQs at least four to one.
The MAC-10 the thug on the right held threw the odds somewhat.
Sean apparently spotted the gun before I did. Ever the gun lover, he jumped at the opportunity to take a close look at it, launching himself toward the weapon. The submachine gun went flying in the dust along with the gorilla.
Which left me and Goon Number Three to waltz together.
He must’ve studied Tae Kwon Do or a similar Oriental art, because he made the most god-awful yelp as he ran toward me. He made an even worse sound as I sidestepped him and gave him a nut adjuster, courtesy of my knee. Give his gonads credit, though. He didn’t go down right away. He puked first. Two good thumps on the temple laid him flat. When I looked up, Sean stood triumphantly over Gorilla Number Two, holding the MAC-10 in his hands.
“This gun’s illegal,” he said. “We can charge him with a federal offense.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Clinton. Haven’t you heard of the Second Amendment?”
In the back of my mind, I’d been wondering if these scumbags were terrorists rather than thieves. They were all wearing uniforms that indicated they worked at the depot. If I were a terrorist worried about being caught, I might don just such a disguise before clearing out a truck and loading it with goodies. Or if I were truly diligent, I might infiltrate the organization, chill there a few months, then do my dirty work.
Yes, there are diligent terrorists.
I was thinking about the railroad incident, where I and my merry band of warriors had foiled an attack through no fault of our own. Not that that kind of coincidence doesn’t happen, and not that I’m not damn glad to take the bow for Lady Luck’s handiwork, but to say the coincidence bothered me is to say the Grand Canyon’s a ditch.
And now here was coincidink number two. Unfortunately, there was no way to find out who the men were. The quintet might have been terrorists; they might also have been a jazz band moonlighting for extra cash. More likely they were just run-of-the-mill asshole thieves. Interrogation would have to wait until they returned to a wakeful state and regained whatever limited use of their brains they had been blessed with. We trussed ’em and then moved them to the trailer where they had been hauling the boxes earlier. They were heavy mothers; fortunately, the fight had limbered me up or I might have pulled something.
And in the boxes?
“Baseball cards,” announced Sean.
“Oh, bullshit on that,” said Trace, jumping up to look for herself.
But that’s what they were. Cases of baseball cards. We’d broken up a ring of desperate sports nuts.
“Bit of a switch from nuclear detonators,” I told them. Sometimes all you have is your sense of humor.
We looked over the boxes and made sure that they weren’t hiding anything else. They weren’t. It was now nearly 0700, so we secured the truck and the twerps, then went back to our regularly scheduled operation. We scouted around the area, making sure our commotion hadn’t caught anyone’s attention, and then worked our way back to the clutch of older trailers across from the two Hummers.
A few minutes later, all three of us dove under one of the older trailers as a Humvee and a pair of M-809 five-ton 6x6 cargo trucks drove up and parked nearby. A dozen soldiers piled out of the back, shambling around as they took up posts and began walking in what I guess were supposed to be sentry patrols at the front of the area, about five or ten yards away.
Now came the hardest part of our mission: doing nothing for close to an hour. SpecWar is filled with long pauses, and dealing with them is the one thing that you really can’t learn in training. The instructors can teach you to tread water in the ocean and count flies in the jungle, but the really hard job of sitting next to a truck tire for hours while your knee cramps, your nose fills up with snot and dust, and two armed guards are telling very bad blonde jokes a few feet away—that’s something you have to learn by doing.
It would have been different if the jokes were funny.
Just when I was thinking I’d have to practice my silent takedown technique, a major came up and chewed them out for a uniform deficiency, jawboning about how the VIPs were due any minute and how the unit had better look damn good, because Washington was interested and the colonel has his eye on you, son—yes, you! You never heard such bullshit in your life, and I wish I could say the same for myself. But this is the kind of shit the modern fighting man has to put up with—bullshit about whether his shirt is tucked into his pants right, how important PR is to the big picture, and on and on. Meanwhile, the powers that be can’t even get the right stinking oil for a soldier to clean his weapon with.
But those slobs’ loss was our gain. The major ordered them into better positions fifty yards away—probably so the light would glint off their eyes just right when the TV cameras showed up—and Sean, Trace, and I got a chance to stretch our legs.
“Better make sure all your buttons are squared away,” said Trace. “That major’ll write us up.”
We didn’t have much time to laugh. The major’s full-of-himself strut once more filled the air as he scraped his boots in our direction. We rolled flat against the ground just as he marched up with an entire detail in tow. I don’t know what they looked like above the knee, but I can tell you they sounded impressive. The feet slapped down hard and exactly in step, and there was a double snap and a brisk “Hoo-rah!” at the end.
“Great. We got it. Thanks,” yapped someone at the far end. The voice sounded suspiciously like the sort of thing that would come from the mouth of a director or a news videographer.
Tell-Me-Dick was protecting a truck depot with a set of parade ground soldiers. Nothing against the men ordered to do the marching, you understand. An order is a fucking order, asinine or not. But what was the purpose of this drill? Security? Or looking good on the six o’clock news?
Stupid question. But I had to ask.
As the squad began to leave, Sean gave me a light tap in the kidney to let me know it was time to move on to phase three. After I got my breath back—the kid’s knuckles are made out of brass—I crawled out to the far end and got up, heading immediately for the Humvee near the security shack. Trace and Sean circled around.
Two Guardsmen were standing near the Hummer. Both men had rifles. It appeared that they had been belatedly posted to guard the security shack. Better late than never, I guess.
“This’ll do,” I said loudly. I made sure I had eye contact with one of the soldiers, then spun on my heel. My uniform had come equipped with the leafy things majors wear, but the growl in my throat was all the rank I needed. “Where the hell are you two, damn it? Jeee-zuz-H-Cripe-shit!”
With that, Trace and Sean double-timed forward. I hope my cursing sounded Army-like enough. Standards are different among the services, but I like to think we can all get together on four-letter words.
“Why the hell is it that evvv-errry time I’m ready to go somewhere, my people are somewhere else?”
“Sir, sorry, sir,” said Sean, hamming it up in the fawning tone of a private with maybe six days of experience. I don’t think even the Army has such smarmy soldiers, but once Sean gets into character it’s hard to get him out. As he snapped to attention, he nearly popped a button. The uniform Danny had procured for him was just a tad tight around the chest.
“You, Dahlgren, you drive. Mako—in the fucking Hummer. Now, soldier!”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
Fucker thought he was Brad Pitt.
I turned slowly to give the two nearby guards a stay-in-place glower. If either of them had any thought of challenging me, it died right there
. I strutted around to the passenger side and pulled open the door, sliding into my seat.
“Why the fuck isn’t the engine started, Trace?” I whispered, staring again at the guards.
“Something’s screwed up. I can’t get it to work.”
“I thought you checked it earlier.”
“I did.” She started kicking something under the dashboard. “It should work.”
We had reached the stage of the operation that warms all warrior’s hearts: SNAFU, or Situation Normal—All Fucked Up.
The door to the trailer opened. Two suits and the major we’d seen earlier came out, followed by six more suits—all of them packing, if the bulges beneath their sport coats were to be believed. Three more military uniforms passed through the door, sergeants and specialists, then a full-bird colonel and two lieutenants. I can’t imagine that the trailer possibly held all of those people; it must’ve been some sort of circus trick.
I studied the colonel’s profile, but it was clear at first glance that it wasn’t Telly; the man was walking and talking at the same time.
“Patrol at three o’clock,” hissed Sean from the backseat. “Checking IDs against a clipboard list.”
“Maybe we can borrow their car,” I said.
No sooner were the words out of my mouth than the Hummer roared to life. Trace threw it into reverse so quickly it stalled.
Ah, the next stage of the operation: TARFU—Things Are Really Fucked Up. I was starting to feel right at home.
Just then, the drone of a small airplane overhead turned everyone’s head. Trace got the Hummer going again and wheeled us around toward the entrance.
“Doc’s got a way with timing,” she said.
“Too bad,” I said. “I was considering taking the colonel out for breakfast.”
“He looks like he oughta lay off the donuts,” said Trace.
“Good point.”
“Did I tell you that you look good in an Army uniform?”
RW12 - Vengeance Page 6