“I’ll get you for that.”
The guards at the gate had been augmented by a dozen soldiers and a full range of high-tech doodads. Told to be ready for someone trying to come into the facility, they were more than accommodating to anyone who wanted to leave. They couldn’t get the gate open fast enough.
We passed through at exactly 0900:15. I like to be punctual; those fifteen seconds really hurt.
We rendezvoused with the rest of the team at a place called Alice’s Diner, which served the thickest blueberry pancakes I’ve ever seen outside of Arkansas. I was surprised to find Doc sitting in the booth when we came in, still dressed in our borrowed BDUs.
“You got back fast,” I told him.
“How’s that?”
“That wasn’t you in the airplane?”
“Last night?”
“This morning, back at the field. A small plane buzzed the truck depot.”
“Wasn’t me,” said Doc.
“Next time I’ll try to screw up just for them.”
“I expect they’ll appreciate it.”
We gave Tell-Me-Dick time to run his men around and work off their excess energy before returning to the scene of the infiltration. When we arrived, Danny and Hulk were sitting on the hood of their rented car across from the front gate, staring at the business end of a 25mm cannon. The gun was mounted on a Bradley Fighting Vehicle—the tank wannabe that replaced the M113 armored troop taxi the Army used over in Vietnam. The Bradley was parked in the middle of the truck depot’s driveway, and definitely had the Toyota overmatched. Fifty feet behind it, a line of trucks snaked back toward the buildings; Tell-Me-Dick had stopped all traffic out, apparently as part of the exercise.
“What the hell are you doing, Marcinko? Give up already?” he squawked when he finally ambled over with his lapdogs a few minutes after we got there.
Tell-Me-Dick lorded it over me for a while, going on and on about how tough his defenses were, how he had the whole place set, and how I was just a washed-up, never-had-been Vietnam vet who had probably lost a few zillion brain cells to Agent Orange and never saw a chain of command I didn’t trip over—that sort of thing. I couldn’t argue with him, though it would have been nice if he could have said it all without spitting. If you’re going to brag, at least be dry about it.
When he finally stopped for a breath, a worried look came over his face, sneaking in from the side of his eyes.
“You’re not saying anything,” he told me.
“You pretty much said it all,” I told him.
He did a screwy thing with his eyes, as if he could shift the focus somehow and look into my skull.
“Well, are your people attacking the place or not?” he said. He glanced at his watch. “It’s half-past ten. The operation was supposed to start at nine.”
“Did we say start at nine?”
“Nine o’clock, yes.”
“Start at nine?”
“Well, it doesn’t have to start exactly at nine. Let’s get going.”
“So it doesn’t have to start at nine?” I asked, as if Tell-Me-Dick had just provided me with the secret recipe for slicing bread. “It doesn’t?”
“No.”
“But it could.”
“Not now, damn it!” His face had begun shading red.
“Tell me, Dick,” I said. “How are we supposed to attack with a Bradley Fighting Vehicle staring us in the face?”
“We do have a Bradley, don’t we?” The haughtiness returned to his voice. “You didn’t expect a Bradley, did you?”
“I can honestly say I didn’t. You’re more the M1A1 type.”
His smile flickered, but only for a second. “You’re not planning anything now, are you?”
“My whole team’s here,” I said, gesturing. “Tell me, Dick, how could I do anything now?”
He turned and glanced around. “Miss Dahlgren, is something up?”
Trace gave him the innocent schoolgirl shrug. “Up?”
Tell-Me-Dick walked back to the phalanx of ass-kissers he had waiting back by the gate and gave the order to let the trucks and trailers through.
“Tell me, Dick!” I yelled to him as the trucks began clearing the gate. “You do read, right?”
I guess he might not have been able to hear what I said, because he walked all the way back over to where I was standing.
“The paper,” I said. “Do you read it?”
“Of course I read the paper.”
“You read it today?”
“Front to back.”
“You might look at page three,” I told him, handing him a copy I’d brought along.
Tell-Me-Dick opened up the paper and stared at the full-page advertisement Trace had ordered the afternoon before, right after our planning session. There wasn’t much to it.
“Today’s Homeland Security Operation will be conducted at or around 9 A.M.,” the ad began.
That was in 72-point type, which is pretty big.
“‘At or around’ doesn’t mean starts,” the ad continued.
That was in 96-point type, which is bigger.
“In fact,” the ad concluded, “it means ends, because that’s when we’re going through the gate.”
That was in 104-point type, which the people at the paper said was the biggest type they’d ever used since V-J Day.
I know Dick was reading the ad because his lips were moving. He seemed confused when he looked up. I might have asked which word he didn’t understand, except that at that moment the first trailer was let through the gate. The firework pack we’d planted on the top ignited, set off by its proximity to the transponder in the Toyota. Bottle rockets and Roman candles began exploding all over the place. Tell-Me-Dick threw himself to the ground as the fireworks began playing a Souza tune composed entirely of sha-bams.
Wonderful what they can do with gunpowder these days.
I probably would have started laughing, but two seconds after the song ended there was a loud explosion behind me. Two things occurred to me as the blast shoved me to the ground.
One was that what had just exploded was not one of our firecracker packages.
The other was that I had just been out-Marcinkoed by somebody. Which made kissing the dirt all the more humiliating.
Chapter
4
Here’s something you can say for bank layoffs: it lessens the number of potential victims when scumbags set off a pile of explosives at the ATM machine outside the building. In this case, if the bank hadn’t been closed, the bomb would have killed the manager, whose office was right behind the machine. Whether that would have been a good thing I guess depends on your opinion of the banking industry.
I ran over to the bank with Danny and Trace to find out if anyone was hurt. We scrambled inside, sidearms drawn, mouths covered against the dust. Taped to the door of the bank manager’s office was an eight-by-ten glossy of yours truly. It wasn’t a bad likeness—a little grainy, maybe. It had been taken just a few days before, back in Iowa at the hospital we’d taken over during the exercise. The person who’d posted it here had even gone to the trouble of touching it up, coloring in my front teeth.
Not that I take that sort of thing personally. The fact that it was suspended by a knife, which went right through my cheekbone and ruined the perspective—that kind of pissed me off a little.
Trace was going to pull the knife out, but I stopped her.
“I doubt there are prints,” I told her. “But let’s give the crime scene people something to do.”
“This,” said Doc, holding up a piece of cloth, “is from a satchel charge. Very similar to what a frogman might have used back in the day.”
“Similar or the same?”
“I doubt it’s really that old,” said Doc. “I don’t know how long that explosive’ll last, but I doubt it would be stable after thirty years. Lab might be able to figure it out. My guess is that it’s the same sort of thing we found on the railroad bridge. Only this one went off.”
&
nbsp; While we poked around the bank area, Sean went with Danny to alert the locals to the lugs we’d trussed in the trailer. Danny, turning on his police-style charm, got in on the “interviews.” Danny has his own personal style of persuasion which the locals could no doubt appreciate, but I doubted they had anything to do with the bomb. The person or people who did were into much more important things than baseball cards. They were playing with my head, or trying to. That part didn’t bother me—I’m too fuckin’ old to be psyched out by some asshole who knows how to use a camera or cook up some old-fashioned explosives. But the fact that they’d gotten close enough to take a picture without me knowing it—the fact that they had obviously piped into my operation and figured out what I was doing—that shit bothered the hell out of me.
The question was: what the fuck was I going to do about it?
The video cameras closest to the ATM couldn’t see across the street to the bank. According to what Danny told me after chatting up the investigators, the police were working on the theory that the bomb had been planted by someone local with a grudge. I dismissed that outright. Someone local wouldn’t have gone to Iowa to take my picture. And, while my presence in Iowa and here hadn’t exactly been code-word secret, my strike on the train had been a surprise. We’d indicated only that we were going to strike in a hundred-mile area of the state. Much as I wanted to blame Tell-Me-Dick for a leak, it seemed more likely that the information had come from someone who worked for me.
It was possible that one of my shooters—my shooters—was the bad guy. I didn’t want to think that. I certainly didn’t think that about Doc or Danny or Trace. The first two had sweated with me through shit—brown, black, and purple; no way they were selling me out. I hadn’t known Trace for as long as the others, but I’d known her in a way I didn’t know the others, so I could rule her out as well. Ditto for Karen, who hadn’t known the operational details, anyway.
Sean and the Hulk, though, had to be considered prime candidates. Both had gone through security checks and screening up the yaya, both had been SEALs, both had come highly vouched for and proven themselves under fire…but relying on them now would be foolish. In my judgment, neither one of them was a traitor or a fuckhead. But could I trust my judgment?
Reader, take note: here I was, Demo Dick, Rogue fucking Warrior, the top SpecWarrior in the world, and I was not only doubting my own team, but I was questioning my judgment. Nobody had seen more shit than I had in the past thirty odd years—not a brag, a fact of life, boys and girls. You’ve seen the resumé. If anybody should have been sure of himself, it was me. But I did have doubts—not enough to run away and hide, not enough to check out the latest designer drugs for head control, but questions about who I could trust and how I was calling the shots. And that is the point of SpecWar. That’s why you don’t just blow up the depot behind the lines; you screw with the enemy’s head. That is the point of the spear.
Whoever was doing this was good. I had to give the cocksuckers that.
Along with everything else I wanted to give them, I had to give them that.
The media’s interpretation of the incident, apparently based on minutes of investigative reporting:
HOMELAND SECURITY EXERCISE FOILS WOULD-BE BANK ROBBERY.
If I thought Tell-Me-Dick could spell, I’d swear he wrote the news stories himself.
The five thugs we’d found inside the truck yard turned out to be exactly that—thugs. Two of them had an arrest record about as thick as this book—and each one had a job at the truck yard. They hadn’t donned uniforms to sneak through security; they were helping provide it. All were minimum wage workers who were supposed to “float” between security and box shuffling. They supplemented their less-than-living wage by requisitioning a few extra loads once a week. One had a real sob story about how his mom needed an operation. Really might’ve pulled the ol’ heartstrings if the orphanage hadn’t called asking when he’d be home for dinner. The mastermind apparently had a brother-in-law in Michigan who sold collectibles at shows across the country. If you added all of their IQs together the number still wouldn’t top the speed limit, but the real genius was the idiot who hired them without background checks.
I’d realized pretty much from the start that they weren’t involved in the bank bomb incident, nor did they play a role in any of the Rogue’s further adventures, but it does tell you what sort of people are safeguarding your rice crispies and shampoo.
Danny stayed behind in hopes he might dig up a little intelligence based on the bank job. The rest of us headed back East as originally scheduled, though we mixed up our travel plans for security purposes. We left the plane reservations at O’Hare in place and rented other cars to drive to Missouri, where Trace had located a feeder airport where we could catch random connections out. Doc and I spent a little time together on the road trying to pry the situation apart.
“Who’d like to fry your ass?” he asked.
“Hell of a long list. Starts in Nam and ends with Tell-Me-Dick. Could be about a zillion people.”
Realistically speaking, the list was considerably shorter. A lot of the people with reason to hate my guts were long gone or didn’t even know who the hell I was, especially those in southeastern Asia. And as much as they might dislike me, very few Navy people harbored true homicidal intentions or the will to carry them out. They may have wanted to kill me, but in most cases their respect for the law would outweigh their wish for revenge. It was the story of their lives. Not mine, but theirs.
Still, if you took out all the people who were gone or lived too far away or liked to clean their fingernails first thing in the morning, there would be well over a thousand people left. I guess that’s the problem with getting old. So many shitheads want to kick your ass you start to lose track.
“IRA might be likely,” suggested Doc. “They like to blow up things. Satchel charges would be right up their alley. And they hold grudges.”
I’d crossed M16s with the IRA in the past—check the details in Detachment Bravo for the whole story—but this didn’t have the Irish ring to it. They would have used better explosives. They also weren’t big on head games. If they wanted revenge, they just killed you.
“We used C-3 in Vietnam,” suggested Doc.
“That’s what they want us to think,” I told him. “That’s too obvious. I think it’s a blind.”
“You’re the guy who lives by the KISS principle.”
“True.”
“You think we got a fink?” said Doc.
You work with people long enough and you start to share their thoughts—or at least their paranoias. But I guess I still wanted to believe that the people close to me weren’t scumbags.
“We may have made a mistake that let whoever’s behind this know what we were up to during the sneak and peaks,” I told him. “I don’t like to admit it, but it’s possible. I’ve been known to fuck up from time to time.”
“What was the story with Sean’s parachute? You think it was sabotaged?”
Honest to God, until that moment I hadn’t thought that it had been sabotaged. It wasn’t likely, but I should have thought about it, if only to dismiss it.
So maybe I did have reason to doubt myself. Maybe I was becoming like Pinky, aka Rear Admiral Pinckney Prescott, whose fat butt I had routinely kicked—figuratively speaking, of course—when the original Red Cell fell under his theoretical command. Sobering fucking thought. If I thought it were true, I’d have to do the honorable thing and find a ship to go down on.
I stared at the road a while, replaying the sequence of events.
“The lines got tangled,” I told Doc. “It happens. If you’re not a very experienced jumper, you can make it worse.”
“Sean’s done night jumps.”
“Not in a while. Wouldn’t they have gotten me?”
“Maybe they want to dangle you in front of the cat for a while.”
We pack our own chutes, but anyone on the team might have had access to them. And there were tim
es during the past week when the gear was unattended. Locks could be gotten around. But if you were going to screw with a parachute, the most logical thing to do would be to really screw with it—scrape the lines so they’d break, or get vicious and muck up the cells. A line tangle by itself won’t guarantee a fatality.
Besides, tangles happen. They shouldn’t, but they do.
Maybe it had been a preemptive play by Sean to take suspicion off himself. If so, it had been very subtle—so subtle it might not have worked. But if he knew about it and he had the backup chute ready, it was better to be subtle, wasn’t it?
“What’s your opinion of Sean?” I asked Doc.
“Good kid. Still a bit of a kid, if you know what I mean. You know him better than I do, Dick. What do you think?”
I thought he was solid. “What about Hulk?” I asked.
“Bigger, a little slower. Otherwise about the same. Younger breed. They think a little longer before they pull the trigger, if you know what I mean. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just different from us.”
I couldn’t disagree. It wasn’t a knock, just a statement of fact.
“I don’t think they’re cocksuckers, if that’s what you mean,” added Doc.
“Yeah.”
I didn’t think they were scumbags, either, and I knew that they didn’t have anything personally against me, certainly not enough to want to frag me. I can be a prick and I’m the first to admit it. I run my team hard; it’s the only way to do it. But on a personal level, I’m not that hard to get along with, as long as you’re not trying to give me orders. I still remember what it’s like to be a grunt, and, to the best of my ability, I attempt to make it easier by stripping away the bullshit.
“What do you think about hanging around and seeing if there’s anything new about the headless horseman we found in the water the other night?” I asked Doc. “Talk to the medical people, the coroner, see what exactly they think. I have some hand-holding back East I have to take care of before we head up to New Jersey and New York for the exercises there.”
We had Red Cell II gigs planned at a container port in Jersey and a nuke plant up the Hudson River north of New York City in a week. I wanted to proceed as if I didn’t think I had someone looking over my shoulder. With luck, this would prompt whoever was trying to fuck with me to keep coming. I’d nail the SOB between the eyes.
RW12 - Vengeance Page 7