RW12 - Vengeance

by Richard Marcinko

  I thought about Capel’s question for most of the afternoon and evening. I didn’t think this was being done by any of the guys I’d served with in Vietnam, certainly none of the SEALs. You live with people in that sort of situation and you end up knowing a hell of a lot about them. Even the guys I hadn’t kept in touch with weren’t going to be screwing with me like this. Hell, they had a lot easier chances to gun me down thirty years ago.

  Ruling out a gook who nursed a grudge wasn’t quite as easy. But it seemed unlikely. Even supposing one of them had sufficient reason to remember me and information about who I was, an awful lot of bicycles had rolled down the Ho Chi Minh Trail since I’d been in Southeast Asia. As dedicated as Charlie was, I just couldn’t see a fifty-year-old former guerilla coming to America to mess with my head. Kill me outright, maybe. But then why didn’t they try to get me when I went back to South Vietnam with a group of Vietnam vets and wives years ago with a film crew to visit old ambush sites and get the lay of the land for future investment potential for clients? I had no warriors with me other than Jim “Patches” Watson, my old point man.

  No. It seemed to me the best theory was that someone wanted me to think I was being screwed by someone close to me. They were using that as a misdirection play, with their actual goal as yet unknown.

  Which basically left the entire world under suspicion. Nothing like being too fucking paranoid.

  Doc’s call that night backed up my theory. With a little help from French intelligence—yes, a contradiction in terms no matter what language you speak—he had backtracked the French phone number to a small apartment in a residential area on the outskirts of Paris, near the end of the number 4 métro line. The landlord had turned out to be an eighty-year-old Frenchman with an appreciation for fine legs. He volunteered to Tiffany that his tenant hadn’t been in the apartment for several weeks. The tenant was an Asian male in his thirties, which would have been about the right age to be our Topless Tango.

  “His apartment frig-fuckin’ wall was covered with your pictures,” said Doc after he told me how they’d charmed their way inside.

  “What do you mean, my pictures?”

  “You. Eight by ten glossies, magazine shit, author pictures from your books, little diddly out-of-focus things that ran in the newspapers, even that National Enquirer piece on you last year.”

  Doc has a habit of speaking loudly over the phone. I think he doesn’t trust the wires and electronic gadgets and figures his voice has to carry all that way on its own. (You know the picture: two tin cans and a long wire.) I had to hold the phone away from my ear so my eardrum wouldn’t shatter.

  “The National Enquirer? Well, that was a good picture, at least,” I said.

  “Of your hairy tush,” smirked Trace, sitting nearby on the bed.

  Her usual exaggeration. Said photo had been of yours truly sunbathing while on vacation. No tush was involved.

  “He had all your books,” Doc told me. “And a bunch of things on SEALs, all sorts of material. A lot of it. Very weird.”

  “Hero worship,” said Trace.

  “Studying the enemy,” I said.

  “The enemy’s enemy,” answered Doc. “The guy at the DGSE who helped me figure out the phone number was a little too cooperative. I have a meeting with his boss tomorrow, which I take as absolute confirmation that the headless horseman was one of theirs,” said Doc. “And his landlord gave us a tip about where he thought the kid worked in the city. Happens to be on the same block as one of the DGSE offices. In fact, that’s all that’s there, except for the bakery on the corner. Which has great cookies, but never heard of him.”

  DGSE stands for “Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure.” Imagine the CIA with croissants and half of the FBI’s responsibilities as well as its own and you have the general translation. Doc’s acquaintances among the Christians In Action had given him an entrée among the French.

  “Landlord give you anything else?”

  “Got some sort of a girlfriend or maybe a sister, hasn’t seen her since the tenant went on a trip. My guess from the description is she’s a girlfriend who has her own place. We’re trying to run her down. Otherwise, quiet, not too many friends. Low profile. Stuff you’d expect if he were a spy.”

  “So he infiltrates the operation somehow, then gets his head taken off as a reward,” I said, figuring out how it must’ve gone down. “They killed him because they figured out he was an agent.”

  “Poor dumb fuck probably tried to stop them,” agreed Doc. “And he got himself nailed for it. Didn’t watch his back.”

  “Didn’t retain what he read,” I told him.

  I played target that night, trying to be obvious about my movements while different members of the team and Capel’s unit watched for Shadow. But even doing all the obviously predictable things didn’t draw Shadow out. I even went down to Asbury Park and walked along the boardwalk.

  No Shadow. Maybe he observed the Sabbath.

  While I was making myself easy prey, Danny Barrett was humping out in the Midwest, trying to pick up information on possible terrorist cells in the heartland. Danny had managed to gather and sift enough rumors to decide that there were at least two cells of Muslim terrorists operating in the area where we had been. The FBI, in fact, had information on one, which had an alleged Bosnian connection. The connection was tenuous—an M16 that had been stolen from an American peacekeeper there some years before had been found in a raid of an apartment rented by a former resident of Yugoslavia, who had not been heard from since some light-headed judge granted him bail at a hearing after the raid. (The man had become a nationalized citizen two years before and could not be held on any immigration charges.) The local Bureau rats were still trying to track the seller, who’d had a table at a gun show; they thought maybe he’d sold the box of grenades that had been found in the Yugo’s place as well.

  Tenuous as that all was, it intersected in an interesting way with what the French DGSE told Doc when he met with them: the dead man, whose name was Pierre Diem D’luc, had been assigned to penetrate a smuggling operation with ties to an organization with roots in Bosnia—part of the former Yugoslavia, remember.

  The group’s name was Shitheads for Allah. Something may have been lost in translation. In any event, Pierre’s investigation had led him to America and possibly a terrorist group there, though the DGSE briefer had been “artfully vague”—Doc has a way with words—when it came to describing what he was up to. The Christians In Action supplied a few tantalizing hints: in France, the group Pierre had snuck into specialized in smuggling humans in from the Middle East. They also turned a quick profit on cheap handguns and possibly—only “possibly,” a big word in the CIA’s vocabulary—had ties with former Yugo military people, who were now auctioning off old weapons as quickly as they could rub the dust and cobwebs off them.

  Doc thought he could get more information on the French operation, specifically why the Frenchies would let their agent go to America. Clearly that was something we wanted to pursue. He also wanted to find out more about Pierre’s background. The obsession with me certainly would have made him a candidate for the role of Shadow, and if he hadn’t been killed, he’d certainly be the number one suspect.

  Just my luck. The prime suspect turns up dead. Where’s fucking Sherlock Holmes when you need him?

  “We’re only assuming that was him under the bridge,” I told Doc. “That’s one thing we have to clear up.”

  “True. Weight and height are right, though.”

  “We still can’t be definitive.”

  “Right, Dick.” Doc gave me one of his walrus sighs. It’s a bit like a subdued bark. “I think if we could put some pressure on, I might be able to get to his case officer here, or someone who was familiar with his mission. They were pretty grateful that we came to them, because they had no clue what was going on. Just a little push from the top.”

  We decided that Cox at Homeland Insecurity Intelligence could help us—the French te
nd to be overly impressed by official credentials and long titles—and I told Doc I’d have Cox call him. I also told Doc that I would help Danny Barrett get hold of him and offer to help the French with the ID of the body, maybe through DNA or some other means.

  Trace and I took a breather with a light workout—light by her standards, that is. She warmed us up with a nice little five-mile run—“trot,” she called it, though by my watch those were seven-minute miles. Then we started doing calisthenics from the SEAL handbook. My big mistake was letting her count them off; I swear she missed every other rep. She grinned the whole time, daring me to mention it.

  Her cell phone rang about two-thirds of the way through and she stopped to answer it. No way I was breaking; I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction, even if my piles were dragging on the floor.

  She glanced at the number before she answered and greeted the caller with the words, “Hon dah.” It wasn’t about her car; the words were Apache for “hello,” and they meant that she was talking to one of the “old people,” relatives of her mother’s. I didn’t listen to what she was saying—not enough blood in my ears as I grunted through sit-ups—but when she clicked off and resumed the workout her smile was gone. We finished up in silence, found our respective ways to the shower, and recouped. Trace seemed damn contemplative as we sipped a little mineral water.

  “Something up?” I asked her.

  “How so?”

  “Well, either something’s bothering you or that bottle of aqua vita has some great significance I can’t fathom. You’ve been staring at it for a good five minutes.”

  “Very pure water,” she said, taking a sip. She smiled kind of wryly, then added, “They want me to be a godmother.”

  “Great. Who had a kid?”

  “That’s not exactly it. Not exactly.”

  Trace explained that traditional Apache girls go through a ritual called, in English, “The Sunrise Ceremony.” It’s a coming of age deal that’s spiritually more like a bar mitzvah or confirmation than a baptism, and physically closer to the qualification course you take to join special operations. A pubescent girl proceeds through a long ceremony assisted by a godmother or sponsor, as well as a medicine man. Proper preparation takes months and involves a wide range of tasks, including quite a bit of physical training and deprivation. To be chosen as the godmother was a great honor, but also an awesome responsibility; the woman became the girl’s role model, defender, and spiritual guide. Trace had not yet been formally asked; that in itself involved an elaborate ceremony. The girl’s mother did not want to risk being rejected—it could be interpreted as a great shame—and so Trace had to give her informal yea or nay within a week or so.

  “Sounds pretty cool,” I told her.

  “I don’t know if I want to do it.”

  Her remark floored me. Trace doesn’t hit people over the head with her Apache heritage, but if you hang around her at all you understand it’s pretty important to her. And from what I know of the Apaches, she truly has their genes. These were tough people, used to scratching a living out of the desert. Trace’s family line goes back to a line of great chiefs named Chihuahua who struck fear into the hearts of Mexicans and Americans, as well as rival Indian groups. One of the chiefs was the next-to-last holdout against the whites in the Southwest, surpassed only by Geronimo, a great medicine man and also a distant relative of Trace’s. Women played an important role in Apache culture. The society was matrilineal. When a couple married, they lived with the girl’s mother, and women had an important say in all community matters. Most of the truly great and powerful healers or shamans in the tribe were women.

  For Trace, deciding to act as godmother in the ceremony would mean tapping into something more than just her personal history.

  “You can’t tell them no?” I asked.

  You’d’ve thought that was the dumbest question in the world from the way she rolled her eyes.

  I’d been planning to call the king of Tadpoles, but he beat me to the punch Sunday around noon.

  “I, um, uh, need to talk to you in a secure manner,” said Cox. “The sooner the better. Face-to-face. Tonight, if possible.”

  Cox suggested we meet halfway, which by his calculation was Baltimore. I countered with a McDonald’s in Delaware, just south of the Jersey line.

  “Be there at eight P.M.,” I told him.

  He was, but I wasn’t. Instead, I stopped at a gas station the next exit off the interstate and called the McDonald’s. I had the staff call him to the phone—probably a first for McDonald’s—then told him to get back on the highway and meet me at a Burger King in a mall two exits away.

  Which gave me plenty of time to make sure Cox wasn’t followed. I watched him from a pizza parlor across the road, then had Trace call over. Burger King employees don’t pick up their phone as quickly as they do at Mickey D’s; I almost had to have Sean retrieve him.

  “You don’t fuck around,” Cox said when he finally walked into the pizza parlor.

  “I fuck around as much as I possibly can. What’s up?”

  “That NSA contact you gave me—that Boreland fellow? We struck pay dirt.”

  Pay dirt being a series of encrypted messages that were being transmitted to parties unknown from parties unknown, though later said parties were believed to be located in the former Yugoslavia, more specifically in the region of Bosnia.

  Which, of course, got my attention. Not that I let on.

  “You and I define pay dirt differently,” I told him. “Pay dirt means something useful. This is just—I don’t know what it is. Nothing.”

  “No, no, it’s something. It’s definitely something.”

  I’d seen the funny look Cox had on his face before. For lack of anything better, I’ll call it the “gung-ho vice admiral look,” after the place where I saw it most memorably.

  This was back a few years, when I was in the service. A vice admiral I knew fairly well wanted a package delivered to a city in the Middle East. The city happened to be on the water, and the admiral had come up with a plan all by himself to get it there. A very daring plan. He came to me with it, because he knew me well and knew I did that sort of thing. We were on a first-name basis at the time: he called me Dick, I called him Admiral.

  “Dick, here’s what you do. C-5A out of Stewart gets you there around 0400. You execute a HALO jump off the front deck of the aircraft and parachute onto the beach, where a CIA op will be waiting. I have the code words and authentification all worked out for you.”

  He said all that without taking a breath. Then he gave me that look Cox had just given me.

  Where do you start? With the fact that no one jumps off the “front deck” of a C-5A? That a C-5A would not be the best choice for that mission? That even if it were, what would the point be? The usual means of delivering a package—which for all I knew was a ham sandwich—involved carrying said sandwich in a diplomatic pouch and whisking it over to the embassy. It almost surely would have sufficed in this case—and in fact it did, because that’s what I did. But I digress.

  “This is going to be big, Dick,” said Cox. “We’re not there yet. But we will be. Which is where you come in. I hope.” His face changed. Now his expression wasn’t gung ho vice admiral. It was more wide-eyed, as if he were practicing to become a golden retriever.

  “How am I involved?” I asked.

  “You know what a server is?”

  He wasn’t referring to our waitress, who couldn’t manage to get the drink order right. He meant a computer used in a network, in this case as a host for the site where the encrypted messages were being passed along. The NSA had managed to partially trace the route the messages took but could not get all the way back. They believed, however, that if they could plant a mole in the server they had identified, they’d be able to.

  “A mole?” I asked.

  “A worm, I mean,” said the Tadpole King. “Whatever. They have some technical geek name. It’s something that will let them trace the information route back
and find the source. I can get one of the computer guys to explain it to you if you think it’s important. I don’t really know it that well.”

  “What does this have to do with me?”

  “Someone has to plant the mole. I mean worm. Which is one thing you’re good at, right?”

  “Why don’t we just ask them to put it on their computer?”

  “Because we don’t know if they know. They might. Or maybe they’ll do something to tip them off inadvertently.”

  “Like?”

  “Maybe you better ask the tech guys. I’m over my head on the technical end of this stuff.” He shifted around in his seat, eyes as big as ever. “There’s a hard drive ready to go, you slip in, take out the old one, put in the new one—bing-bang-boing, it’s done.”

  “You think it’s going to be that easy, huh?”

  “Well not for anyone else. For anyone else, it would be hard. But for you, it’ll be easy.”

  If I had been in a better mood, I would have opened my shirt to show him that I don’t wear a Superman uniform. I had to do it, of course, because it represented a potential connection with Shadow, even if Cox didn’t realize it. But I wasn’t going to make a commitment to him without getting a lot more information and control over the operation. I had leverage and I was going to use it.