Designation Gold

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by Richard Marcinko


  Taking them out was going to be a problem. I had to hit ’em so that they’d go down—silently, without warning each other. Or, make ’em clump up and eliminate them all at once.

  It is at times like this that I would have liked to have Stevie Wonder, or Doc Tremblay, or Gator Shepard—any of the five-man band of shoot-and-looters I’d brought to Moscow with me to help out. But that was impossible. Oh, my merry marauders were here—in the Russian capital. But they were doing their own thing tonight—which is, they were covering for me. They were setting up a little diversion back in the city so that nobody back at the embassy, particularly the DCM, or Deputy Chief of Mission, would know I was out here with Georgian (and murder) on my mind.

  Oh. You mean I haven’t mentioned before that tonight’s little excursion in the country is off the books? Unauthorized? A rogue operation? Silly me.

  Yeah, despite the fact that I am a duly constituted representative of the United States Navy and do not fall under his purview, the DCM has nevertheless specifically forbidden me on his thick, watermarked. Department of State letterhead (let me quote directly from the memo here, friends, so that you can experience the true flavor of his writing style and ability) to

  generate, occasion, induce, provoke, elicit, or activate any sort of incident, event, or action whatsoever during your temporary assignment to this diplomatic post, without having notified the undersigned party in writing, at least twenty-four hours before such planned occurrence or episode is to take place. Further, you may not interact with any FN [Foreign National] without the specific permission of this office in general, and the undersigned in specific.

  In the sort of simple, declarative English I understand, that means I’m not allowed to do fuck-all. According to the DCM, I can’t operate with any Russian unit, either military or police, without his prior authorization. According to his official memorandum (CC: To the File; CC: Rear Admiral Kenneth Ross, USN; CC: Bureau of European and Canadian Affairs, U.S. Department of State, Washington, D.C.), I’m not allowed to prowl and growl on my own.

  Now, friends, that’s ludicrous. You know as well as I do that I don’t have to answer to any deputy chief of mission or any other change-jingling, heel-rocking diplomat for that matter. After all, I’m anything but diplomatic. I’m a shoot-and-looting, hop-and-popping, hairy-assed SEAL. And I report to admirals—specifically to Rear Admiral Kenny Ross.

  Of course, even though I was clear about my chain of command, it seemed that the DCM held an opposing view. That view was that I was not to be allowed to do squat, unless I’d appeared before himself, himself being a slick-haired, cold-blooded, pinstriped professional change jingler heel rocker cookie pusher named—well, let’s just call him Bart Wyeth, just in case he ever wants to sue for libel—with my wood begging bowl in my calloused hand and received his (this is his word) “endorsement,” something he has told me point-blank will never be given.

  Bart, incidentally, is short form for Bartlett Austin Wyeth Jr. His initials form the acronym BAW, which as you all know means Big Asshole Windbag in SEALspeak. He certainly manages to live up to it, too.

  And y’know come to think of it, from the way he’s acting, you’d think that he was being paid by the Russkies instead of by our American tax dollars. I mean, it was our fucking defense attaché who got waxed. It pisses me off, friends, to see those charged with flying Old Glory overseas posturing as if they were officials of the place they’ve been posted to, while acting as if the United States is some third-world country not worth defending. Or worse, instinctively sticking up for the other guy instead of safeguarding Americans.

  Moreover, since we are the only remaining superpower, I’d like to think that we’d act like one every now and then. But that wasn’t the case here in Moscow, where timidity was the order of the day. I mean, you’d think that Paul’s death was his fault, at least from the way the people at the embassy had dealt with it.

  There was no outrage. There was not even any real indignation at what had happened. Only a bunch of diplomatic (yes, friends, I know I’m repeating the word—it is used here ironically) Diplomatic Demarches from the State Department deploring and decrying, and a similar set of replies from the Russian Foreign Ministry, regretting and lamenting. It’s just a game to them—a fucking game of untruths and no consequences.

  It was almost the same as when Freddie Woodward, one of the CIA’s gumshoes, was assassinated in the Georgian Republic a few years back. Remember that incident? If not, here’s a nutshell: an American official—Freddie was traveling under diplomatic cover—was murdered in cold blood. Repercussions? Hardly a ripple. Why? Because somewhere, a deal had been made. Between whom? Nobody knows.

  It struck me that this was a remarkably similar case. My friend and his family had been murdered, and no one is doing anything about it. Makes me think that somebody is covering up. Was I being paranoid? I didn’t think so—because Paul’s murder had struck Ken Ross in the same way. After all, Ken had opened my cage so I could prowl and growl.

  I decided to take the sentries out separately. They were spaced far enough apart so I knew I could drop them quietly. I crawled south, to come up on the man at 0930, from his blind side. It took me three and a half minutes to crab my way into position. Then I settled in, got myself a good cheek and shoulder mold, aligned his head with the neon green “finger” the MP5’s Trijicon front sight blade, and squeezed the trigger. The only sound I heard was a knuckle-crack-loud click as the hammer fell, and the muffled thump of his body collapsing onto the thick bed of pine needles. Damn, the MP5 is an effective weapon.

  I crawled to where he lay. There was a clean, dime-size hole in one side of his head. When I lifted it off the ground, I saw the silver dollar-size hole opposite, and brain matter on the ground. Even so, I reached down and checked his carotid artery. Yeah—he was dead meat. I ran a quick body search. He carried a semi-auto pistol, which was stuck in a cheap nylon waist band holster clipped to his warm-up suit trousers. In his jacket pocket was a portable radio, which was switched off, and a pristine matchbook. I looked at the cover. It bore an embossed, cartoon drawing of a raffish, fifties-styled Harley Davidson chopper, below which were the English words DYNAMO CLUB. I’d seen that logo before—on something I’d surmised was a receipt—in Paul’s files. On the bottom of the page he’d written the word Yudin. The matchbook cover bore no phone number, and no address. I looked inside. The number 2130 had been written there and underlined. I slipped the matchbook into the breast pocket of my combat jacket, and finished patting the corpse down. There was no other ID. That told me this place was his turf. You don’t have to carry a wallet around your own home.

  The next two were equally easy. I think I’ve already told you that standing sentry duty is harder than it seems. You don’t remember? Let me give you a quick refresher. Personally, I hate standing watch. It is monotonous. It is tedious. It is boring work, which demands a lot of concentration. Yet, despite all the temptations to smoke, day (or night) dream, or succumb to boredom, you must remain alert and on guard.

  Why? Because if you don’t pay attention and remain alert, you get dead when fatal folks like me show up to play pernicious. Which is exactly what happened here. These guys were so lackadaisical you’d have thought the dacha was empty.

  I was on my way to deal with the final pair of watchdogs when all hell broke loose out front. I heard a heavy vehicle approaching, its engine grinding as it approached from my left to my right, beyond the dacha. Then came the sound of ripping metal followed quickly by explosions. Judging from the concussion, there was nothing subtle about the way OMON did its business. I guess they didn’t care about prisoners.

  Huge yellow-orange flashes from the front of the dacha ruined my night vision—but not before I saw my two targets go into defensive posture. One of them, an Ivan in a terrible suit, called out to his friends—and when he didn’t get an answer he pulled something out of his pocket. I snapped a three-round burst in his direction.

  Ivan dropped, but
it wasn’t because he was hit—in fact, he returned fire vaguely in my direction and screamed at his buddy to get the leadski out. I could see his arms move and I knew what the hell he was saying even though I can’t speak the language. He was saying something to the effect of, “It looks like there’s only one of ’em out there, so get the fuck around to your right and flank the sonofabitch—we’ll catch him in a crossfire.”

  I, of course, was the AS—that is, the aforementioned sonofabitch.

  “When weak,” says Sun Tzu, “appear strong.” Or, to put it in the Frogspeak bellowed by Roy Boehm, the godfather of all SEALs, the instant you’re attacked you counterattack. “You go and fuck the fucking fuckers,” is how he piquantly puts it. So I slammed a fresh mag into the MP5, put my best War Face on, and went straight for the belly of the beast, screaming, “Yaaaaaahhhhh!” like a goddamn Marine.

  Ivan-in-the-terrible-suit hadn’t expected that. It brought him to his feet. He was silhouetted against the dacha for an instant as a flashbang went off somewhere behind him, and I tagged him—a ragged burst that caught him in the leg, thigh, groin, belly, and chest of his bad threads. Okay—so it wasn’t pretty shooting, but it did the job. Four down.

  Except I didn’t have time to admire my handiwork, because the tree trunk adjacent to my head splintered, something nasty slashed my cheek, and I dropped for cover. Yeah—there was that other Ivan out there, and from the blood on my cheek I gathered he was probably mad by now.

  He’d fired from my left. So I’d go around him and take him from the side. The best way to get there was the stream. So I slipped the MP5’s sling over my head, slung it on my back, scrambled forward, shoulder-rolled (unmindful of ankles, knees, and other sore body parts), and pitched myself headlong into the black water.

  Geezus. Talk about your fundamental scrotum-shriveling cold. I lay there for a few seconds, letting the water course over me, waiting for my nuts to redescend from my throat. The stream was six feet wide, and roughly three and a half, maybe four feet deep in the center. The bottom was a lot firmer than I’d thought it would be. It was covered in large, flat, water-smoothed rocks. I made my way three meters left, moving toward where I thought Ivan might be lurking, and came upon what seemed to be a subsurface breakwater or dam, built of what felt like worn concrete. I eased myself over it. Now my feet sank into soft muck, decaying leaves, and other crud. Okay—that told me I’d just been in the sauna’s dipping pool and now I was in the stream proper. It was slippery here—and much deeper, too.

  I would have gone back to admire the work, but there was no time. Three quick shots caromed past my right ear and slammed into the bank, two feet behind my exposed head. I dove and bulled my way underwater for a few meters, fighting the current every inch of the way. I surfaced. A bullet smacked the water much too close for comfort, driving me back under. I moved forward again. This was definitely getting to be a drag.

  Now a beam of light flicked over the water’s rippled surface, searching for me. I pulled myself as close as I could to the bank where it had come from and stayed put. The light swung back again, passing directly over my body. After it moved on, I surfaced as quietly as I could, grabbed a lungful of air, and waited. Then I sensed it coming back in my direction. As the beam arced toward me, I slipped underwater again, holding on to a tree root about as thick as my wrist for support. The light sliced past me without wavering.

  Looking up through the coursing water I could make out where it was coming from—off to my left. It slid past me again, moving right to left, playing on the opposite, empty bank. I bided time, then slid surfaceward and stole another helping of oxygen. (No oxy moron I. I know you gotta breathe to live, even if you’re an amphibian—read Frog—like me.)

  I sat there, freezing my yaytsa off, waiting the sonofabitch out until he came closer. He’d have to come closer if he wanted to check the near bank. And I’d be waiting. I lay there, the memory of my murdered godson Adam keeping my body white-hot, even though it was Arctic cold.

  Finally he showed, Yeah—it was Ivan. He was silhouetted against the bank, learning over, trying to peer down into the opaque water. He’d obviously been taught by a pro. His pistol was in his right hand, the flashlight in his left. The backs of his hands touched, so that his left wrist provided support for his firing hand, and the sight picture of his gun paralleled the beam of his light.

  It is an effective technique. But it only works if you light up your target. He couldn’t see me hunkered next to the bank. So I waited until his flashlight beam passed two feet beyond my right shoulder, and he stepped smack up to the edge of the water so that he could check the bank itself. The light began to move from horizontal toward vertically perpendicular.

  Right then, like a big, angry croc. I smashed through the surface with a roar reached up, grabbed him by his belt and his crotch, and brought him smack headfirst down into the water.

  He struggled, but he was too surprised to react with any effectiveness He lost his pistol and his light, and I was on him like the fucking hungry gator I am, my hands on his throat, my legs wrapped around him, holding him under in a death roll, squeezing all the breath out of him while he struggled as if his life depended on getting loose from me.

  He had no chance to survive. Even so, it took a lifetime to kill him—maybe forty-five, fifty, even fifty-five seconds. If that doesn’t sound like a long time to you, then you try wrestling with a big, strong Ivan who don’t wanna die, for almost a minute, underwater, without losing any of your own air or drowning yourself in the process.

  I struggled up onto the bank and collapsed on my back, exhausted. That was a double-ouch, because the goddamn submachine gun’s bolt caught me right in the fucking kidneys. So I lurched onto my knees, retching water. If there are easier ways to earn money, please tell me about them, okay? And guess what, friends—this was only the beginning of my evening’s fun. I still had to hit the fucking dacha.

  But first, there was the sauna house. I unslung the MP5, drained it, slapped a fresh mag into the breech, then moved cautiously up the bank, edging to my right, using the trees for cover. The sauna had a three-by-three-foot window, which I slid underneath, and a narrow, cedar-sheathed door. I tried the knob. It turned. I pushed the door inward. It opened slightly. I nudged it all the way with the MP5’s suppressor, kept real low, and “cut the pie.” Cautiously, I peered inside. I could make out two rustic benches in the ambient light, and a half-dozen pegs on which hung huge towels, as well as a small, neat pile of hardwood and a brass bucket filled with kindling. But the dressing room was empty.

  Immediately to my right was a second doorway. I repeated my sequence. The sauna, too, was empty except for the square steel sauna stove atop which sat a pile of stones. From the stove, a single, four-inch exhaust pipe went straight up into the ceiling. Opposite the stove was an L-shaped bench the width of a double bed. It was big enough for two people to lie on. Atop its smooth surface sat a wooden bucket of water. In the corner, someone had tossed a small bunch of birch branches bound together with rough cord.

  I opened the stove. There were cobwebs inside the door, which told me it hadn’t been used recently. The floor was coated with a thin layer of dust. I closed the stove door and ran my fingers underneath the metal box on its squat legs. Nothing. I dipped a finger inside the bucket. The water felt as cold as I did and there was an opaque film on top of the surface. Another sign the place hadn’t been used in a while.

  Time to leave. There were lights moving all through the dacha now. Explosions, too. And shots—magazine-long bursts of automatic weapons fire. Didn’t these guys have any fire discipline at all? Then I heard guttural shouting. The words themselves I couldn’t understand—but the meaning was plain: they were screaming the Russian equivalent of “Police search warrant—get the fuckski down, get your fucking armskis out, put your fucking palmskis up, and don’t fucking move!”

  I lumbered up the deck toward the back door, my MP5 in low ready as the door shattered outward. My muzzle came up and my
finger moved from index to trigger.

  So did Boris’s. We locked eyes. We both breathed deeply. Then we lowered our weapons.

  I managed the first word tumble. “Where the fuck’s our target? Andrei what’s-his-face—the Godfather?”

  “Yudin?” Boris’s wide shoulders hunched and he extended his arms, palms out. “Gone. Nothing but byki. Bodyguards. Cannon fodder—left behind to confuse us and maybe kill a few cops.” He shook his head in disgust. “We have no fucking operational security anymore, Dicky. He was here when Misha taking surveillances this afternoon. I just know it. But now—gone. Somebody has to tell him we were coming.”

  While the OMON shooters pulled the bodies outside and pawed them over for evidence, Boris, Misha, and I went through the dacha with your proverbial fine-tooth combski. Not that we expected to find anything. First, OMON had done a pretty good job of wrecking the place when they’d come barreling through the door. Moreover, despite my short time in Moscow I’d already determined that these mafiya types were SUCs—Smart, Unpredictable, and Cunning. They acted as if they owned the streets—which, in effect, they did. You couldn’t walk into a store, restaurant, or first-class hotel without running a gauntlet of sweat suit-clad hoodlums flexing their muscles outside. The mobs controlled everything from garbage collection to caviar distribution. Their enforcers ranged from goons like the one wearing Paul’s ring, to former officers—SpecWarriors like me. Except they hadn’t authored a bunch of best-sellers and had no pensions.

  So a number of things occurred to me, none of them very encouraging, as I stood in the dacha and pondered the possibilities. First, the bad guys had known we were going to stage a hit. I wondered how they had gotten the word—that is, until I took a close look at the Ministry of the Interior colonel in charge of the OMON unit. He was very self-consciously rubbing his left wrist. On that wrist was a gold Rolex President watch. I sidled up, said hello—he spoke a leetle beet engleesh—and took a closer look. It was obviously brand-new—not a scratch on the crystal or crown. Those watches go for between seven and eight grand each. Now I knew how the bad guys had managed to get away clean.

 

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