Designation Gold

by Richard Marcinko

  Suitably attired in a long, black nylon raincoat buttoned up to my throat, a visored Greek fishing cap hiding my French braid, and a pair of black nylon and Gore-Tex boots with thick rubber soles, I presented myself and my black-covered, gold-sealed, diplomatic passport at the embassy gate at 0646. First thing in the morning—just as Bart’s message had instructed me. By 0656, in the company of a DSS agent whose expression told me he’d rather be doing other things, I’d deposited an UNODIR—that’s UNless Otherwise DIRected—message in a plain white sealed envelope on the secretary’s desk that sat directly outside the DCM’s office suite.

  The message, which I’d written on a piece of scrap paper, told Dear Bart (he detested to be called Bart, so Bart, of course, is how I always addressed him) that since I had shown up as ordered, but he wasn’t around when I’d come to call, I was not going to waste my time by sitting and waiting until he showed up. Instead, I was going to go out and do a series of security site surveys of a few locations throughout the city where U.S. military personnel might, at one point or another, find themselves, and that I’d check in with him later. Maybe.

  It didn’t really matter to me what he thought or did. To be perfectly honest, he had no chain-of-command authority over me (although he could make my life miserable in the bureaucratic sense so long as I remained in Moscow). Besides, I had a comfortable margin of time in which to operate this ay-em. I knew, you see, that my message would be read only after Bart’s early-morning pile of urgent cables and other message traffic from State had been dealt with.

  An explanation for those of you who haven’t spent much time in American embassies: the United States is eight hours behind Moscow. The time difference means that a steady stream of comms—communications—had been arriving here throughout the night. Those messages would have to be handed out to each of the embassy’s offices—political section, commercial section, LEGAT (that’s the LEGal ATtaché, remember?), economic specialist, and so on, to deal with. Only after that had happened would Bart get to the extraneous material, which most certainly included the message from moi.

  Even the location I left my missive—outside the DCM’s suite—would delay his receiving it. You see, when the ambassador is away, the DCM moves from his own office into the ambassador’s suite, so he can assume the ceremonial trappings of acting ambassador. The folks at State are big on protocol, and Bart was fond of the ambassador’s huge office and all the panjandrumcy it represented. So by the time he got my little notandum I’d probably have finished my day’s work and be heading out to visit the Dynamo.

  Oops—that meant I wouldn’t see dear Bart for a whole day. C’est dommage. You don’t know what that phrase means? Well, look it up in the Glossary

  My dour DSS escort rode down the elevator in silence and walked me back to the outer gate without a word. I returned my visitor’s pass to the saturnine Russian security guard with a friendly “thank you,” eased around the metal detector so that the HK P7 pistol in us holster nestled against the small of my back didn’t set the bells and whistles off, pushed open the bulletproof glass door, and hit the bricks.

  Well, let’s be honest. I hit the concrete. I scrunched northward toward the metro stop about three blocks away, ostensibly paying rapt attention to the ice on the sidewalk as I trudged.

  It took all of half a minute to pick out the gumshoes on my tail. There were three of them—all lookalike males. That was a mistake. Women actually make great surveillants because they can change their outward appearance more easily than men can. You want to know why? Okay—it is because it’s not unusual for a woman to carry a big handbag or tote that can hide a number of disguises. A man with a big knapsack or tote bag is more easily picked out of the crowd, and being picked out is a no-no when you are working surveillance. Thus endeth the lesson.

  Meanwhile, the trio following me could have been in uniform. They wore matching black leather three-quarter-length coats. Russian fur hats—extra large, and size fourteen galoshes. There were bulges—radios, cellular phones, or pistols, perhaps—in their pockets. I dubbed my retinue Vynkenski, Blynkenski, and Nodyev. Were they Russians or Americans? if Russkies, were they official or mafiosi? Who cared? Not me, certainly.

  We convoyed through slush to the Krasnopresnenskaya metro stop. I slalomed my way through the small army of grandmothers, pensioners, and other poor souls gathered at the mouth of the subway station, shopping bags filled with pencils, hair bands, old teakettles, worn sneakers, and old clothes to sell. I galumphed down the stairs to the Koltsevaya line, flashed my monthly pass at the barrier, and continued onto the crowded platform. Three minutes later the train arrived, and we all climbed on together—one watcher elbowed his way onto the far end of my car, the other pair caught flanking cars. At the Belorusskaya stop, I waited until the heavy metal doors were hissing closed, then used my hips and thighs to squeeze through them and out onto the platform at the very last instant.

  Vynkenski, the man in my car, was left behind, trapped helpless in a clump of unyielding rush-hour Russkies. I resisted the temptation to give him a smile and a friendly finger as the train pulled out. Besides, I wasn’t in the clear yet. My peripheral vision told me that my other traveling companions had made it onto the platform. I caught a glimpse of one of them as he radioed his stranded comrade. Oops, I guess I shouldn’t be using that term anymore, huh?

  One down, two to go. I made my way through the correspondence to the Zamoskvoretskaya line and caught the first southbound train, squeezed aboard, and rode, sardined, two stops to Puskinskaya station. I detrained, got my bearings, and headed for the correspondence that led toward the Chekhovskaya—it was a long walk down an ornately tiled tunnel crowded with bustling rush-hour commuters, panhandlers, and guitar-strumming buskers. Yeah, there were panhandlers and buskers—it’s amazing what kapitalizm will do for a country, huh?

  I was about two-thirds of the way there when I saw a familiar face approaching me. Doom on Dickie (which is the Vietnamese way of telling you I was in the process of being fuckee-fuckeed). The asshole I’d left behind at Belorusskaya station was coming straight in my damn direction, the hint of a shit-eating grin on his huffy-puffy Vynkenski puss. He’d gone one stop and caught a southbound train on a parallel line.

  Have I mentioned that the Moscow subway is as good or better than any subway in the world? Well it is—and there are lots of trains, too. Vynkenski’s easy progress was ample evidence of that. His pals had no doubt kept him apprised of my movement, and here he was—coming back just like a bad kopeck.

  Now I had the full contingent on me again. Well, what’s life without a little challenge every now and then, right? Besides, in a situation like this one, it is the quarry—that’s me—not the surveillance team—that’s them—who has the advantage. But there are more of them, you say. And they have radios. Phones. And maybe they have friends in cars shadowing us all on the streets above.

  True, all true. But since I know where I am going, and I can take my own sweet time about getting there, I can run my pursuers ragged. They’re the ones who have to stay alert. They’re the ones who have to react—and despite the fact that we all know that we all know about one another, they still have to do their jobs without being obvious. And all of that, friends, is tiring. Tiring—shit, it is absofuckinglutely exhausting. I know, because I’ve been on the pursuing end of things often enough.

  Still, as the quarry, there is certain tradecraft to be followed. All that movie fluff—the checking in store windows to keep an eye on your pursuers, or peeking around corners, or the quick reverse of direction on a crowded street—is just Hollywood horse puckey. It doesn’t happen in the real world. Out here, there are three or four techniques that you can use to shake your shadows loose. Since I am currently, ah, engaged, I will elucidate, indoctrinate, and inculcate you about only one of them.

  In fact, since the most effective way of teaching is by demonstration, I am now going to display the most effective ploy for shaking surveillance, so you can see for yo
urselves how well it works. The maneuver in question is known to the trade as “cleaning.” To clean yourself, you enter a large and busy location that has many entrances and exits. Railroad stations are perfect for this exercise. So are department stores. Hotels are good, too—but not in totalitarian countries where the exits are all watched closely by the secret police. I prefer stores. When I commanded SEAL Team Six and Red Cell, we played “Take Me to the Cleaners Tag” all over the world: at Bloomies, Saks, and Macy’s; at Harrods in London; Au Printemps, and Galeries Lafayette in Paris; and La Rinascente in Rome. It was the best way of teaching my men how to shadow—and how to lose their shadows.

  Here’s the principle: you go into the location—the more crowded, the more better. You ride the elevators and escalators up and down and all around. You climb stairs. You wander through the jam-packed aisles, moving indiscriminately. You take an unexpected turn down a fire stairwell. And then, suddenly, you perform a well-executed, two-legged absquatulation, exiting directly into a crowded pedestrian route, or descending into a subway with multiple entrances.

  Such behavior can stretch a surveillance team past its tactical limits. Especially if the opposition doesn’t have unlimited resources. You can make things even harder for them by altering your appearance as you move through the store or the station. See, surveillant teams keep you in sight, not by staying on your butt and looking straight at you. If they did that, they’d be unmasked in no time and their usefulness would be over. So they don’t look at you directly, but instead, they watch your silhouette. By that, I mean, they keep their eyes on your hat, jacket, coat, and other distinctive features that they can spot from a distance. It also means that if you have the wherewithal by which to change your shape and your silhouette, you can screw ’em up.

  Okay, now that you have a general idea about methodology and process, let’s take Vynkenski, Blynkenski, and Nodyev to the Rogue Cleaners.

  First, I ran them ragged through the subway system. I switched lines four times in the crowded rush-hour underground, making my transfers very abrupt. That kept them guessing. It may, incidentally, occur to you to ask how the F-word I knew where I was going, since I don’t speak Russian and I don’t read Cyrillic.

  The answer is: I’d done my homework. This type of op is not a seat-of-the-pants kind of thing, although you might think that it is. You have to memorize a primary route, as well as a number of secondary and alternative routes, and be able to act instantaneously. That takes the three “shun” qualities all Warriors need to strive for constantly: organization, preparation, and concentration. (And if, incidentally, the Warrior does not practice that trio of “shun” attributes in preparing for his mission, there is a fourth “shun” he will achieve: masturbation.)

  Moreover, I had written out the Cyrillic subway stops I’d be using (as well as a couple of spares in case Mr. Murphy rode along) in waterproof marker on the palms of my hands. So all I had to do was glance down at my hairy-palmed cheat sheet, and I was good to go.

  Okay—first we ride to a stop where there was no transfer available. So I climbed back onto a crowded train at the Lenin Library stop, rode northeast until I got to Sokol’niki, got off, and reversed direction by going up the exit stairs, crossing over to the opposite platform, and jumping on the first available train. I jumped off again just as the doors began to shut—and then squeezed back on the train as it started moving. That left Vynkenski on the platform. One down. That cut their efficiency by a third.

  I changed lines two stops later, sprinting down the correspondence and playing the old “on/off” game again (nobody bit—so I still had two shadows on my tail), then changed lines once again and rode to the metro stop closest to Red Square. There, I got off and sprinted up to the street. I threaded my way through another huge crowd of babushka mamas and papas selling military trinkets, toilet paper, cigarettes by the piece, drugs, and whatever else they could, to try to make ends meet. Lemme tell ya, folks, ruble inflation is tough.

  Anyway, I shouldered my way through, crossed to the eastern side of Red Square, darted around the corner, and went directly into the 1 ya liniya—Line Number One—entrance of the huge, three-story GUM (they pronounce it “Goom,” which rhymes with tomb, gloom, and doom) department store.

  I pushed past the Benetton stall, declined the offer of aftershave from the Estée Lauder demonstrator, and headed for the stairs, my pursuers hard at work about thirty yards behind me. I slowed down to let them get a good look at me as I started up the stairs.

  Then I bolted—three steps at a time. Blynkenski also took off at a gallop. But he was too far behind me to keep an eye on me all the time. There were turns in the stairwell, and as I made the first of them, I began unbuttoning my raincoat. As I reached the first-floor landing (don’t forget that in Europe the first floor is what we in America call the second floor), my coat and hat came off, and my French braid came tumbling down. Without pausing, both the coat and the hat were stuffed into the small Reebok carry bag I was wearing underneath, slung over a lightweight waterproof parka of royal blue.

  I cleared the first-floor door and started down an aisle displaying heavy winter coats and piles of Russian-style hats in rabbit, squirrel, lynx, and bear. I turned right, picked up a big, bear-fur hat, size humongous, and stuck it atop my head. I hunched slightly to lose three or four inches of height, pulled a thick wad of five-spots from my pocket and walked toward the kiosk, waving my fistful of dollars like your typical Americanski tourist.

  You should have seen the smile on the kiosk lady’s face when she saw me holding my big, hard … currency in my paw. She welcomed me like a long-lost uncleski. I even tried a smattering of Slovak on her (to no avail). As I paid up, I caught Blynkenski’s arrival out of the corner of my eye. He’d come bursting through the door and was looking wildly around. Within seconds, his koresh—that’s his pal in Russkie—Nodyev made a Kramer-entrance through the door (that is to say he twirled twice and performed a 7.3 Richterscale triple-take). He was doing nicely, too, until he caught his galosh on something and tumbled ass over teakettle into a rack of coats. That’s right, boys—break Rule One of surveillance: the one that goes, don’t attract undue attention.

  Nodyev picked himself up and started scrambling in ever-widening circles. But he didn’t see me even though he looked right at me. Of course not. Why? Because he was looking for a big fella in a Greek cap and a long black nylon raincoat. Not some long-haired tourist in a bright blue parka and a bearskin hat.

  I was still finishing my transaction as the two of ’em headed back toward the stairwell, confused and panicked expressions on their faces. Smiling the dumbass smile of the blessed and the lucky, I walked down an aisle of badly made, imported Chinese winter coats, looked for the closest fire exit sign, and took the indicated stairwell down to street level, where I shimmied the big steel door open and slipped into the crowded street. Schastlivovo puti—sayonara, assholes—and it was nice having you visit the Rogue Cleaners.

  I cut back to Red Square and, carefully checking my six, walked south, past St. Basil’s Cathedral. I circled the huge Rossiya hotel. No, I didn’t go inside, because the police stake out all the first-class hotels, ostensibly to keep hookers and mafiyosi away. In reality, it is to make sure they get their piece of the action. It didn’t take long for me to make sure I was in fact, traveling alone.

  Good. I cut south again, strode across the Bolshoy Moskaretsky Most bridge spanning the Moscow River, a small island and the drainage canal beyond it, onto the narrow, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century road known as the Ulitsa Bolshaya Ordynka. Two blocks on, I passed a gilttopped church on my right. Straight ahead was a metro stop. I dug in my trouser pocket and came up with two zhetony—Russia’s ubiquitous brown, plastic tokens—found a public phone, dropped both zhetony in the zhlot, and dialed a sevendigit number I’d committed to memory.

  A woman’s voice said something I took to be “Good morning, embassy of Israel.” in rapid Russian.

  “Extension seven two
four, please.”

  Rapid language transition. “Yes. of course. Good morning to you,”

  The phone bring-bringed twice. Then: “Pree-vyet—hello?”

  “Y’know if they hadn’t lopped off so much of your big Jew dick when you were eight days old, you could actually go fuck yourself these days, you worthless pus-nutted Hebe asshole.”

  There was a pause, then the sound of laughter erupted in my ear. “Good morning, Duma Deputy Zhirinovsky, you loudmouthed, fascist sonofabitch. I was wondering when you’d finally unscramble your brains long enough to make this call.”

  Chapter 4

  WE MET AT OUR PREARRANGED RENDEZVOUS—AN ANONYMOUS little konditorei around the corner from the Novokuznetskaya metro stop. I got there first and claimed a small, round-topped marble pedestal table against the rear wall of the narrow, wood-paneled shop. First, however, I pointed at a slab of thick, sticky, honey-drenched cake filled with prune puree, and asked—pazhalstuh (please) for a koffe bez sakhara s’molokum—coffee with milk, no sugar. It was one of the first Russian phrases I’d memorized on the flight over and I was happy to see that I’d gotten the sullen pronunciation down well enough so that despite the parka and gym bag I raised no tourist flicker from the thick-framed, brooding babushka behind the counter until I paid with two one-dollar bills that bypassed the cash register and disappeared into deep cleavage. Hey—maybe I didn’t stick out like such a sore khuy anymore.