Designation Gold

by Richard Marcinko

  I didn’t ask Avi WTF until we were a full klik up the mountain.

  “He gave me the salad test,” Avi said.

  “What?”

  “He asked me what I put in my salad. I told him.”

  “And? So?”

  He looked at me with the same incredulous expression that instructors back at Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) training look at stinking trainees when they ask a dumber than dogshit question. “Dick, if you’re a Maronite, you pronounce the word tomato one way—benadura. If you’re a Druze, you most likely pronounce it another way—bendura. If you’re a Palestinian it’s a third pronunciation—bandura.

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So, say it the wrong way in these parts and you’re whatchamacallit—dead meat.” He downshifted as we bounced rudely into a huge pothole. “From the way young master UCLA with the AK talked, those kids were obviously Palestinians from south Lebanon—Tyre, maybe, or Rashediye. So I spoke with a Nabetiyeh accent.”

  You could have fooled me. But I know when to take “yes” for an answer—and so, from then on I kept my big Slovak mouth shut and let Avi do all the palavering as we bluffed our way through the unexpected roadblocks that we occasionally came across on our travels.

  For his part, while he’s deadly with an Uzi submachine gun when absolutely necessary, Avi is not an in-your-face kind of guy. So when it came to the up-close-and-personal rough-and-tumbling—and there were a couple of times it did—he let me take the lead.

  We made a good team. Belay that. We made a terrific team. And six weeks after I’d slipped into Beirut, I exfiltrated south, courtesy of an AMAN chopper, to Sde Dov, a small airfield on the Mediterranean just north of Tel Aviv that is frequented by Mossad and military intelligence flights. My canvas briefcase was full of sketches, pictures, and notes that would be used to design the heavy METL campaign for destroying the Soviet CommNet.

  Avi told me “B’bye, b’bye” and stayed on. Seven months later, when he returned to the deceptively fortified complex in central Tel Aviv that is AMAN’s main headquarters, not only had he obtained the Syrian order of battle, but he also had managed to identify, by proper name, and down to the rank of captain, every Soviet officer attached to every Syrian unit in the quadrant lying between the oil pipeline just south of Homs, Beirut, and Highway 7. His accomplishment earned him his third Tzalash Shel Ha’Ramat’kal, or Chief of Staff citation—the tiny, crossed daggers that are Israel’s second highest military decoration.

  So, nu, you ask, what was this Arab-speaking Soviet Army specialist doing in Moscow, since the self-same Soviet Bear was extinct these days? The answer was that more than a million and a half Russians had made their way to Israel in the past six years alone—Russian immigrants comprised almost one-third of the Israeli population these days. El Al, the Israeli airline, flew eight nonstop round-trips a week between Moscow and Tel Aviv—and they flew ’em at 100 percent capacity on the southbound leg.

  And you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that some of those Russians who emigrate to Israel aren’t really all that kosher. Some of them aren’t even Jewish—they travel on forged documents. So Avi, the Russkie expert, had been assigned to keep an eye on developments in Moscow. Reluctantly, he had accepted a six-month assignment. That had been a year and a half ago. You get the picture.

  Avi listened as I told him about Paul’s file, nodding silently, his fingers intertwined and clasped together as if in prayer. “Seems as if we’re on the same track once again, old friend,” he finally said. “I wish I’d met Rear Admiral Mahon—there was a lot of information we could have shared.”

  “Shared?”

  “It seems we are interested in keeping track of the same people.”

  “That doesn’t stop us, Avi.”

  The Israeli’s knuckles rapped the table. “You’re right,” he said. He tapped the copy of the Air France waybill remnant I’d given him with an index finger, his expression exhibiting considerable frustration. “And right here’s the key,” he said. “Lantos. Werner Lantos.”

  “As in ’Lantos et Compagnie’ of Paris?”

  “The very same.”

  “But what about Andrei Yudin?” It was Andrei, I was pretty certain, who’d had Paul killed.

  “Yudin is smart, and dangerous. But he’s a vor—a gangster. One of the new ’expediters’ in this society. That gives him muscle, and it gives him clout. But he doesn’t wield any power, or real influence, at least not much beyond the Ring Road. Werner Lantos does.”

  So, who was Werner Lantos, anyway? “’Splain me, Avi.”

  “My people—the ones I work with—have been following his activities for years now. When Mossad isn’t getting in the way, that is. In fact, every time I turn around, I seem to bump into the ben zona—the sonofabitch,” Avi said, the irritation in his voice evident. “He calls himself an ’investment banker.’ Whatever the hell that means. Been going in and out of Moscow since the sixties. He pulled off a bunch of joint projects with the old Kremlin bosses, and got rich in the process. Then he got a contract to build half a dozen new hotels for the 1980 Moscow Olympics. The project went belly up—and somehow everybody but Lantos lost money. Even so, he stayed real tight with Brezhnev and that crowd. Then, when Brezhnev died, he cozied up to Andropov. You’d have thought he was KGB he was so hard-line. But when Andropov croaked and Gorbachev came into power, suddenly Werner Lantos was all for glasnost and perestroika.”

  “An opportunist.” I detest opportunists. Today’s Navy is filled with them.

  “Yup. So, these days, of course, he’s a big proponent of democracy and capitalism. Promotes joint ventures. Sets up lots of deals. Finances a lot of projects.”

  I wondered aloud why I hadn’t heard about Werner Lantos before.

  “You wouldn’t have—unless you’re an Israeli intelligence officer, a Soviet expert, or an economist. He’s one of those run silent, run deep guys with lots of protekzia—juice, I think you call it—and no profile. Came out of the Second World War as a hungry teenage orphan from somewhere in Eastern Europe.”

  “Somewhere? C’mon, Avi.”

  Avi wagged his head negatively. “That’s as specific as it gets, Dick. Look—millions of documents were destroyed during the war. Birth certificates, marriage licenses, deeds, loan papers—the whole fabric of society was expunged. Turned to ashes. Face it, between the Germans and the Allies, most of the records everywhere between Moscow and Paris were wiped out by one side or the other. So there’s no way to tell precisely who Werner Lantos is, or where he’s from.”

  “What’s your interest in him?”

  “Like I said—he has a lot of protekzia.”

  “There has to be more than that.”

  Avi shrugged. “Look—he carries an Israeli passport—when, that is, it helps him to do so. He’s got a Senegalese passport, too—a gift from the president there for moving a couple of billion dollars out of the country. He has friends in high places in our government as well as here in Moscow. Nobody’s told me, but I’d guess he was used by Mossad as a diplomatic backchannel during the Cold War.”

  “So, he rubs a lot of shoulders.”

  “Yes he does—and some of them may not be such nice shoulders. Mossad doesn’t like us to nose around his business—but my bosses still like to keep track of people like Werner, just like yours do.”

  I looked over at my old friend. It wasn’t enough. Not enough to justify one of Israel’s top military intelligence officers being detailed to track one man. Believe me, friends, that just doesn’t happen. It wasn’t the whole story. Avi knew it and I knew it and now you know it—and don’t you forget it. because like the old chiefs say, you will see this material again.

  But Avi’s expression told me it was as far as he was going to take things right now.

  Since it was time to shift gears, I pulled half a dozen photographs I’d taken from Paul’s files out of my pocket and laid them on the table facing Avi. If I’d had the use of a secure fax I would
have transmitted them back to my old friend Tony Mercaldi at DIA. But the only secure faxes in Moscow were those in the embassy. And if I used one, I could be sure that the DCM would hear about it. And I didn’t want to have to deal with any more of Bart’s meddling than I absolutely had to.

  “How many of these guys do you know?” I asked.

  Avi stared down at a magazine picture of a bunch of tuxedo-sporting notables at some kind of opening or art exhibition. One figure—it was partially hidden at the very edge of the fashionable crowd—had been circled by Paul.

  He pointed at the circled face. “That’s Werner Lantos,” he said. “Look—” Avi extracted a pocket calendar wrapped in a rubber band from beneath his sweater. He unwrapped the rubber, sorted through a wad of perhaps a dozen passport-size color photographs, and selected one. “Here’s a better shot.”

  I looked down at the passport picture; at the tanned, creased face and the wavy, slicked-back, gray-turning-white hair. “Can I keep this?”

  “Sure.” He concentrated on the other pictures I’d brought. “This one’s nice—”

  I peered at the upside-down photograph. It was a grainy surveillance photograph of Andrei Yudin, taken at a boisterous party. One of Yudin’s arms was clasped around the shoulder of a large man holding a champagne glass. The other hugged a very uncomfortable-looking Werner Lantos. “That’s the deputy defense minister,” Avi said. “Probably taken at the Dynamo.”

  The Dynamo. Oh, really?

  “A Georgian nightclub near the Ulitsa 1905 Goda metro stop. I’d be willing to bet Andrei’s organizatsiya has a controlling interest in the place—the owner never charges any of Andrei’s byki sonofabitches, no matter how much they eat or drink. And the drinks—ouuah! A bottle of champagne costs more than I make in a month.”

  “He’s a regular.”

  “Andrei? Of course. He does most of his entertaining there. It’s dead in the middle of Georgian turf—the cops won’t go near it. Not even Boris and his crew.” Avi saw the expression on my face. “What’s up?”

  I told him about the matchbook I’d found, and the Dynamo receipt in Paul’s files.

  “Makes sense to me,” the Israeli said. “You’re going to pay a visit, right?”

  “What do you think? Want to come along?”

  He shook his head. “Nah—my face is too well known in those parts. I’d spoil your fun. But listen—you watch your back there.”

  “That’s a roger.” I finished the last of my coffee and waved off the babushka, who picked up the pot and started to head in my direction. “So—finish the sit-rep on our pal Lantos.”

  “We really don’t know as much as we’d like. The name Lantos is Hungarian. But he could have simply assumed it. He’s never been specific about where he came from—makes him more the man of mystery, I guess.”

  I was incredulous, “C’mon, Avi—you and the ’Ministry of Agriculture—you’ve got lots of sources …”

  He interrupted me, his voice tinged with irritation. “Yeah, maybe we do, but to tell you the truth, even I haven’t been able to fit a complete true legend to this one. He’s a real piece of work. The best I’ve been able to do is track some of his business dealings, I know he’s into everything from arms smuggling, to art dealing, to venture capitalism. These days he lives mainly in Paris. In fact, he’s there now. I know that because he flew out of Ben Gurion airport two days ago—he was visiting his office in Tel Aviv. Like I said, I’m watching him.”

  Noted for the record. “So he shuttles between Moscow, Tel Aviv, and Paris.”

  “And Britain, and Italy—he has offices in London and Rome, too.”

  “Nothing in America?”

  Avi shook his head. “Negatory—he doesn’t do business in your country because your banking laws are more stringent than most.”

  I tapped the copy of the waybill before sliding it over to Avi, who slid it into his pocket. “So now this guy’s bank is financing dual-use equipment—stuff that’s critical to the final stages of nuclear weapons manufacturing—which is ostensibly being shipped to some company, probably a front, on a five-square-mile island in the Caribbean—an island that has no industry.”

  “There’s something else,” Avi said.

  “Yeah?”

  “The company name.”

  “Limon—lemon.”

  “Lemon in Spanish or Italian,” he said. “But here in Moscow, limon is mafiya slang for a million bucks—isn’t that a remarkable coincidence, Dickie?”

  I wriggled my eyebrows at him because as you all know by now, in our trade there is no such thing as remarkable coincidence.

  “And,” Avi continued, “there’s another remarkable coincidence that scares the hell out of me, too.” He pulled a thin envelope out of his jacket pocket and slid it across the table to me. “These are for you.”

  “What are they?”

  “A gift. A few souvenirs. Waybills, receipts, customs documents. A picture or two. A fragment of a map. All parts of some damn jigsaw puzzle that neither of us have all the pieces to. When you told me about Paul Mahon’s files I went back to my own. Found this stuff—things I’ve collected over the past six months or so. I made copies. Maybe they’ll help you convince your people more than they helped me convince mine. It’s like I’m beating my head against a damn wall. I haven’t been able to persuade my bosses to do anything. It’s like they’ve been paralyzed, politically. They make a move, and Mossad stymies it. I try to act, Mossad screams, ’Sources and methods will be revealed.’ You know the drill.”

  I do know the drill. “What crap!”

  “Biduke—exactly. And the worst of it is that every scrap of Mossad paper I see—and it’s hard to wring anything out from those sons of bitches, believe me—but I’ve seen some notes, and a few maps, and one or two memos. And that, when you add everything else I’ve been able to get my hands on, convinces me that Mossad is absolutely positive a lot of the dual-use stuff Lantos has been financing and Andrei Yudin has been skimming from the Ministry of the Interior is ending up in the same region you and I once spent some unpleasant time together.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “I know—that’s the part of the equation I can’t figure out.”

  “I mean, Avi, why the hell would the Russkies want the Syrians to build a bomb—unless they want to destroy the peace process.”

  “But that’s exactly what Mossad has to be thinking, Dick,” Avi said. “That the Russians are allowing the bad guys to build a fucking bomb out there. Moreover, I know in my bones the damn thing is almost completed. Like your man Wonder said, hot freon is part of the final stage of assembly, not one of the preliminaries. But it makes no sense. I try to talk about it, and Mossad tells my bosses, ’He’s wrong. There is no problem—everything’s under control.’ I can’t seem to be able to convince anybody but you there’s a problem.”

  The analysts at AMAN, just like their colleagues at DIA, turned out to be right. In 1991, a highly secret internal investigation in Israel uncovered a KGB penetration of Mossad that would make the Aldrich Ames case look tame by comparison if it were ever to be made public. Luckily for Mossad, the Israeli prime minister at the time, Yitzhak Shamir, was Mossad’s former deputy director of operations. He officially rejected the conclusions and had the damning report sealed.

  Chapter 5

  GATOR, BEING THE FNG—OUR PIQUANTLY SEAL WAY OF saying he was the newest and most junior member of the team—pulled the evening’s guard duty assignment. After last night, I wasn’t about to leave the lockbox and its contents unguarded, even though I’d bound it with wire fastened with a small, imprinted lead seal, which told people it was official U.S. government property. In the box, Paul’s files were now augmented by the materials Avi had given me. We’d agreed to meet in twenty-four hours and pool information once again.

  While Gator played watchdog, the rest of the boys and I grabbed a quick dinner of lamb shashlik, rice pilaf, a couple of deceptively strong, fifty-dollar bottles of Mukuzani
red, and inexplicably bad coffee at the Crazy Horse, a boisterous café attached to an expensive (and formal, judging from the number of Armani suits, patterned silk shirts, and Ermenegildo Zegna ties going through the door) Georgian restaurant. Crazy Horse was about a fifteen-minute walk from what the Russkies call their World Trade Center, but Wonder had selected the place because of its proximity to the Dynamo—about seven blocks away—and he wanted to walk us through the neighborhood he had so painstakingly researched.

  We finished at about ten. I paid up, then we all strolled south, walking toward the Moscow River, through a neighborhood that was once working class but now was filled with big, expensive blocks of flats—which is what they call apartments almost everywhere but the United States—that housed many in the city’s growing expatriate population. Moscow is a city defined by its colors—the color of soot, the color of mud, and the color of unwashed brick all come to mind.

  In this neighborhood, however, the usual monochromatic landscape had been replaced by vibrant swipes of primary colors in the storefront windows. There were, in fact, a totally unexpected number of small, exclusive bars, cozy restaurants, and designer shops that catered to the well-heeled residents. Invariably, outside each of these new establishments, one or two hoods who (judging from the whitewalls and the buzz tops) were probably ex-Spetsnaz shooters or former KGB border guards, stood sentry duty in the cold. As the hard currency customers came and went, they performed the unique foot-shifting, arm-folding, head-swiveling choreography that is common to loitering cops all over the world.

  With Wonder the ex-recon Marine leading the way, we made a slow, seemingly aimless tour of the district. It was not aimless: by eleven, we had seen every alley and passageway, walked every street and checked every building in the six-square-block area around the Dynamo. By then, judging from the amount of grousing I was hearing, We Were Getting Thirsty Already, Daddy.