I did a quick inventory—and came up empty. Oh, sure, I could go over the top. The fence was only about six feet high. But I’d make a hell of a silhouette if I clambered athwart it. It would be like advertising. I rolled onto my back. Something hard prodded my kidneys as I did. I reached behind me—and felt the Gerber Multi-Plier that I habitually wore on my belt. I was so used to having it there that I’d forgotten about it. The Multi-Plier is a handy little gizmo. It’s got three screwdriver bits, a knife, a small file—even a can opener. Best of all, there are all-purpose pliers—with a tiny wire cutter placed just below the jaws.
I pulled the tool out and quietly extended the plier head, slipped the cutters over the first strand of wire, and squeezed.
One of the facts you should understand about the Multiplier is that while it is a handy all-purpose tool, it was not designed as a wire cutter. Its handles are small and narrow and hollow—the better to accommodate all those tools. And hence, they leave little room for error, especially if you have size ten hands with size twelve fingers, a genetic legacy from my thick-fingered, coal-mining forbears in Lansford, Pennsylvania. What I’m trying to tell you, my friends, is that every time I applied pressure to the jaws, the handles bit nastily into my hands.
Yes, I was carrying gloves. No, I wasn’t wearing them. Why? Because they were leather gloves. Thick-as-your-tongue, regulation, by-the-book Russian Army leather gloves. There is a Naval Special Warfare technical term to describe such gloves. Get out your pencils so you can write it down. The term is: “useless.”
Have I told you about my special relationship with pain? Then you must realize that I was feeling very much alive by the time I cut a hole large enough for me to squeeze myself through. I was now twelve minutes behind schedule. But I was making progress.
Now, you folks out there are probably asking WTF right now, right? Like what the hell is Dickie Marcinko, the old Rogue Warrior®, radio handle Silver Bullet, doing outside a dacha forty-seven kliks west of Moscow in the first place. And how come he’s so friendly with a couple of Russkies named Boris Makarov and Misha Stroyev.
Okay, before I head across the road to sneak & peek, snoop & poop, and then (I hope I hope I hope) commit the sort of murder & mayhem that gives me both professional satisfaction and emotional release, lemme give you a quick sit-rep.
Our story begins three weeks ago, when my old friend and shipmate Paul Mahon was assassinated. Paul is—was—a one-star—that’s rear admiral (lower half)—submariner, an Annapolis grad (one of the few I’ve ever really liked and respected) who’d been assigned to Moscow as the defense attaché. Now, I just told you that Paul was my shipmate. That is not literally true. By which I mean, Paul and I never served together in a ship of the line. But shipmatedom is a metaphysical state as well as a physical condition—it speaks of sharing risks, working together as a team, and achieving goals. In this particular case, our shipmate relationship goes back to the days when we were a couple of anonymous 0-4s—lieutenant commanders—working in the bowels of the Pentagon.
That was when Paul and I were charged by our respective bosses, a pair of E-ring admirals (those are admirals with offices on the Pentagon’s E-ring, where the chief of naval operations, among others, has his 4 rms riv vu office suite) with one of the most difficult, sensitive, hazardous, and covert missions the U.S. Navy has ever devised. To wit: stealing the U.S. Army mascot, a mannequin dressed as a Special Forces master sergeant, from the grand foyer of the Pentagon’s Mall entrance the week before the Army-Navy football game.
Anyhow, that escapade (which succeeded, I must add) made us friends, and we’ve stayed in touch over the years. Paul was one of the few officers who wrote me during my year in prison. In fact, not three weeks after my release from Petersburg Federal, when I was as depressed as I’ve ever been, Paul called to ask if I’d be willing to be his newborn son’s godfather. He didn’t have to do that—there were more than enough Mahon relatives around for the job. But he gave it to me because he thought I needed somebody to love and dote upon—which was absolutely correct. Not so very long ago he gave me a timely heads-up when the secretary of the navy tried to get me indicted for murder.
Anyway, roughly three months back, Paul began an accelerated, two-year stint as the CDA—that’s Chief Defense Attaché, the top-ranking U.S. military officer—Moscow. The job can be largely ceremonial: you can fulfill your mission requirements simply by going to large numbers of diplomatic receptions, giving cocktail parties, doing lunch, taking meetings, and writing lots of empty-calorie memos detailing what you’ve seen and heard and noshed upon.
Not Paul. He took the job seriously. He actually went out into the field and collected information—the kind of stuff the folks at the Defense Intelligence Agency call Level One Grade-A HUMINT, or HUMan INTelligence. From what I was told, he was doing a terrific job, too.
Obviously, his success rubbed some local no-goodniks the wrong way, and they rubbed back. Three weeks ago, Paul, his wife Becky, their two kids—my godson, Adam, and the two-year-old Louise—and an enlisted female Navy driver were coming back from a weekend at a rented dacha in the lake district near Odentsovo, the same region northwest of Moscow where I was currently hurting. Their car was intercepted by a “group of persons identities unknown,” as the diplomatic cable I saw so coolly put it, and all five were murdered.
According to the report, the car was rammed from behind—the Navy driver hadn’t taken any tactical driving courses and evidently panicked—then pushed off the road. Once it had been stopped, Paul, his family, and the driver were machine-gunned. Then the car was set on fire, no doubt to make such things as identification of the passengers harder for the authorities.
Now, you probably know me well enough by now to realize that I would have found some way to get here on my own to exact revenge for my friend’s death—not to mention my godson’s. But fortunately, Paul’s boss, a submariner named Kenny Ross, opened my cage and turned me loose with a trunkful of small arms, and a diplomatic USG—that’s U.S. government—passport. It’s a lot more complicated than that, of course, but there’s really very little time to explain it all right now. Anyway, I arrived here in Moscow—lemme check my watch—four days ago and began making inquiries. At nine yesterday morning, Boris, who is a captain in the Moscow Police Department’s organized crime squad to whom I’d been clandestinely introduced, walked me up to a holding cell at the aging, puke yellow brick departmental headquarters on Petrovka Street, pointed at a huge, ugly, tattooed, white-walled, buzz-topped goon in Le Coq Sportif sweats, who was manacled uncomfortably to a length of galvanized steel pipe almost as thick and long as my dick, and asked, “Is he wearing anything you recognize?”
I looked. The haircut was UM—that is, universally military. I peered at the bruised, bloated face. Yeah, sure it had been worked over by the cops, but it could still be defined as U2—that is, Ugly and Unfamiliar. The size fifteen shoes were $200 Nike Air cross-trainers. The currently grimy extra-extra-large threads were the real thing—the kind of country-club athletic gear that seldom sees sweat. The fingernails were dirty and raggedly bitten. Then I saw what Boris had been getting at. There was a chunk of gold and semiprecious stone jammed onto the thug’s goon-size pinky.
I knew all too well what it was, too—an Annapolis class ring. I asked Boris WTF.
“He tried to sell it to an American tourist outside the Metropol Hotel,” the Russian explained. “As luck would have it, the tourist, a retired Navy officer, complained loud and long to his tour guide about Russians selling U.S. Navy artifacts. The tour guide—he was very reticent, I might add, and if it hadn’t been for the American tourist making such a stink he would have let it all go—finally called the police.”
“So why is he still wearing it?”
Boris shrugged. “Look, it’s not against the law to own such a thing. But if you can prove it was your friend’s, then we can start to make a case.”
I pointed at the ring and stuck my hand, palm up, in Vassily’s fac
e, making the universal sign for “hand it over.”
The goon spat neatly in the center.
“Boris,” I said, “would you give me a set of handcuff keys, then leave us alone for a few minutes?”
He grinned. “No problem, Dicky.”
When I finally pried the ring off (unfortunately, I broke a couple of fingers in the process), I looked inside and saw Paul’s initials, and his graduation date: 1973.
Now, despite the obviously spirited interrogation that followed (they don’t have the same rules about cop-prisoner physical contact in Moscow police stations that we have in the United States. In Moscow, Rodeniy Kingski is the rule, not the exception), the GIQ—that’s Goon-In-Question, and pronounced geek—whose name was Vassily Chichkov, had, Boris said, stuck with the story that he’d found the ring on the street, and wanted to make a quick pile of hard currency selling it to the first American he’d come across.
Yeah. Right. And if you believe that, I have some beach-front property to sell you in New Mexico. According to Boris, this GIQ worked as an enforcer for a Georgian vor v zakonye—that’s Russian for a mafia Godfather—named Andrei Yudin. According to Misha, the cops had been trying to get their hands on Andrei for months.
But they’d been unsuccessful, Boris interjected, because, first, Andrei lived in the Yasser Arafat style—which is to say he moved from secret residence to secret residence on a weekly, sometimes daily basis, and second, because Andrei always managed to procure enough tactical intelligence about police activities to keep his Georgian butt from being busted.
Yudin. Andrei Yudin, Lightbulb. I recognized the name because Andrei the vor was one of a dozen Russian mafiyosi mentioned in the sheaf of notes, memos, reports, and other documents I’d taken from the Navy Only safe in Paul’s office two days ago.
According to those notes, Andrei was one of the more dangerous and enterprising local mafiosi—tied into a wide range of activities that ranged from protection scams, to smuggling weapons, to drug dealing. There was a star next to his name—and it wasn’t because he was a nice guy.
Then Boris walked me back to his office, pulled a yard-square sheet of posterboard out of his closet-size safe, and showed me Yudin’s pug face on a well-worn, often-revised organizational chart of Russian Mafiya (which as you can probably guess is Ivan for Mafia) crime families—a chart that looked very much like the ones up in the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the high-ceilinged room in the Russell Office Building where a mob hitman-turned-stoolie named Joe Valachi once gave Bobby Kennedy enough inside information about American organized crime to put two hundred soldiers and capos from La Cosa Nostra behind bars.
Double lightbulb. I’d seen Andrei’s face before—Paul had taken a covert snapshot of the guy. He was celebrating something or other, wineglass raised, mouth open and laughing, at a sardine-packed table in a bustling restaurant or club. Except, Paul hadn’t labeled the picture. Of course he hadn’t—he knew who the fuck he’d photographed. Now, in Boris’s office, I put the face and the name together.
I inquired as to whether I might spend some quality time with the prisoner, so I’d be more able to appreciate his lifestyle and his weltanschauung—that’s his worldview, for those of you whose Deutsche ain’t decent. Boris chuckled, gave me the key to the handcuffs, and I returned to the cell and had a few choice words with Vassily—a reflective, thoughtful, philosophical interlocution about the sorts of commitments and responsibilities one owes to one’s friends and one’s godchildren. Shortly before Vassily departed for the prison hospital, he saw things my way—they generally do, y’know—and I gave Boris the location where Andrei Yudin was currently holed up—the selfsame dacha that was right now so near yet so far.
Now, it may sound somewhat strange to you at first (it certainly did to me), but I learned by going through Paul’s papers that from the day he’d arrived, Paul had spent much of his time collecting information on Russian (and Georgian and Armenian and Chechen) organized crime.
Bizarre work for a defense attaché, you say. You’re right. Until you learn, as I had, that Russian organized crime deals with everything from money laundering and drugs, to the marketing of purloined nuclear warheads and the sale of chemical and biological warfare components.
In fact, even though Ken Ross had not said anything about it to me, I believed that the mafia—or mafiya, as they call it here—was the reason Paul’s assignment here had been stepped up. He was a Russian speaker—fluent and sans accent. Equally important, he was an operator—a guy who could change his clothes, slip out of the embassy compound, and work the streets without attracting undue attention to himself. That ability is rare. It is even more remarkable in one-star admirals. So Paul had been sent here early because the Navy was concerned enough about Russian organized crime activities to place a one-star in harm’s way. And Paul and his family had paid the ultimate price.
Now you know why I had Georgia—that’s the country I’m talking about, not the lady—on my mind tonight. I’d come to pay a polite social call (I’m using literary understatement and stylistic irony here, in case you didn’t catch on right away) on dear Andrei the Georgian Godfather. He, judging from our evaluation of Misha’s afternoon surveillance photos—the Mercedes limo and two Volvo security cars in the front driveway, the Volga trucks going in and out, and the dozen bodyguards in the woods were all pretty convincing clues—was, just as Vassily had told me, holed up in the dacha across the road.
I wanted to ask Andrei a couple of questions before I put my foot across his throat and stepped down hard. Starting with, “How come your ugly goon happened to be wearing my friend’s Annapolis class ring?” Yeah—I tend to ask direct questions. And God help you if I don’t get direct answers—especially when people I love and respect have been killed.
Lest you think I’ve taken leave of my senses, I wasn’t doing this all by myself. The cavalry was out front. As usual, I’d volunteered for the back-door entrance—the sneak-and-peek assignment. Boris had been only too happy to let me handle this part of the mission solo.
To be honest, it would get me out of his hair. You look surprised. You’re about to ask what the hell I’m talking about. After all, aren’t I Demo Dick Marcinko, Shark Man of the Delta, the old Rogue Warrior, and shouldn’t I be able to do my hunting under any conditions and in any company?
Well, the answer is yes and no. Yes, I can pursue my lethal trade under most any circumstances. But I have never seen the sense of fucking up someone else’s op just so I can say “I vas dere, Cholly.” Yeah, in Red Cell, I elbowed my way into Grant Griffith’s war game. But that was different: I had an objective to achieve, and I couldn’t achieve it from the outside. And yes, I once beat the shit out of an incipient faggot named Major Geoff Lyondale, Royal Marines, when he managed to kill a bunch of his own men through a degree of tactical stupidity I haven’t seen since the planning of the Tehran hostage rescue back under Jimmy Carter. But that was different, too—because when Major “Cawl me Geoff, old man” put his men in jeopardy, he also put my men in jeopardy, since we were operating jointly. And that sort of irresponsibility is something I will not allow.
However, in most circumstances, when I’m a visitor, I’ll stand aside and let the home team take the field. I’m content to watch and learn. Warriordom, after all, is not a static art. The Warrior is constantly searching for ways to make himself better, more capable, and more deadly. That’s what cross-training is all about—it’s why I sent my SEAL Team Six shooters all over the world to see how the other guys did it.
So, in cases like this one, I’m happy to play backup. It was Boris’s game, after all, and he knew the rules, the players, and had a sense of the whole operational gestalt far better than I.
As the ancient Ch’i master General Sun wrote in Way of the Warrior more than two thousand years ago, “Since the key to victory can often be found in that instant when the Warrior commits his troops, it is important to be neither early nor late. The Warrior uses timing
as his fulcrum to victory.”
Right on. I’ve always found that knowing when to commit—which can also be interpreted as when to play—is just as important as understanding the game itself.
Therefore, I was happy with my lonesome end role tonight. Moreover, I can’t speak Russian and I’ve never operated with any Russians (only against them during the Cold War). Hence, I don’t really know how they work, and I’d probably get myself shot. ’Nuff said.
Anyway, while I did my covert entry, Boris would charge the front door, accompanied by a squad of black-bereted OMON shooters. OMON, which is an acronym for Otdel Militsii Osobovo Naznacheniya, or Special Purpose Militia Detachment, is the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ special reaction team—the Russian equivalent of a police or sheriffs department SWAT unit. OMON is made up of volunteers who regularly train in unconventional warfare tactics. It is one of the few police units that, according to Boris, hasn’t been penetrated by organized crime—yet.
Cradling the MP5, I crawled forward. The ground was soft—it was covered with a thick coating of pine needles, which helped me maintain silence discipline as I moved. I progressed eight, nine, ten yards and stopped to check out the landscape and the bad guys. Even in darkness, there were no major differences from what we’d seen in the surveillance pictures eight hours ago. The dacha itself was nestled atop a slight knoll, the thick grove of pine trees running up to within a few yards of its roof. The rear of the house had a narrow wooden door and a rustic, railed porch and a wooden deck that led down to a smaller structure with a single metal chimney—Misha’d said it was probably the sauna. From the dacha itself, the land, thick with evergreens, white birch, and poplar, sloped gently down toward the road. The slope was roughly bisected by a small, spring-fed stream that ran north/south.
So much for topography. Now let’s talk about the opposition. The sentries were spread out in a rough crescent between me and the dacha. If you’re looking at the same clock I am, you’ll see what I see: that one was at 0930, another at 1100, a pair at noon, and one at 1330.
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