Designation Gold

by Richard Marcinko

  “Well, technically not, I guess. But—”

  “ ’Technically not, you guess.’ ” He looked up at me with that triumphant sort of bitchy expression bureaucrats have when they realize that they have launched a successful ambush in the Paper Wars. “And you know that such a meeting, when unreported, is a security violation, Captain Marcinko?”

  Well, actually, I knew it—but hadn’t given the matter a flying F-word. So far as I was concerned, I’d been meeting with an old friend and comrade in arms. A man with whom I’d operated on the battlefield. A man who’d saved my life, and whose life I’d saved. So far as I am concerned, Avi Ben Gal is my shipmate—with all the touchie-feelie shit that word connotes. And that, friends, is exactly what I told the deputy chief of mission.

  Of course, my explanation didn’t matter. In fact, I could almost see my words entering his left ear, shooting straight through his skull, exiting the right ear, and being sucked up by the soundproof baffles of the wall six feet away. Because Bart wasn’t listening to me. That was obvious. No—he was already drafting his cable back to Washington.

  As he wrote, I packed—I slid the papers back inside their folders, then tucked the folder inside the steel box. Maybe I’d find somebody back in Washington who’d listen to reason.

  Bart’s eyebrows flicked to attention. “Hold on, Captain,” he said. “You can’t do that. Those documents have to stay with me. They are embassy property now.”

  I locked the box securely and peered across the table at him. “Listen up, Bart, because I’m only going to say it once. This box and everything in it is the property of the United States Navy,” I said. “Moreover, this box contains explosive devices and weaponry. And by Naval regulation, I am allowed to protect explosive devices and weaponry by using lethal force.” I picked the box up by its handles. It was goddamn heavy, but I was angry enough to carry it. In fact, I wanted the DCM to see that I could carry it—unaided.

  I fixed him in my sights malevolently. “Pretty please, Bart, old man,” I said. “Pretty please—give me an excuse to use lethal force.”

  Chapter 9

  WASHINGTON WAS UNSEASONABLY WARM BUT SEASONABLY WET the afternoon we arrived. So, between the sweat and the thundershower I was soaked to the skin by the time I found my van in the satellite lot. I toweled off with a greasy shop rag then drove back to the arrivals area. The guys stowed the lockbox, and, after a long detour through Old Town Alexandria, I headed west and south through Prince William county to Rogue Manor, my two hundred acres of lakes and snakes that kind of but not quite backs up onto the Marine base at Quantico.

  It had not been an easy or a pleasant flight home. We’d been flown to Paris in steerage class on an Air France A-340300. You ask why that is significant. It is significant because A-340-300s have 47 rows of steerage seats, 208 in all, instead of the 139 economy-class seats in an A-300 or an A-310. It is significant because if you are a 46 extralong slash extramuscular like I am, you get a case of terminal leg cramping if you spend more than an hour in the tiny steerage-class seats, which are only eighteen inches apart, seatback-to-seatback, and which do not tilt. Let me add that the flight from Moscow to Paris lasts roughly four hours. No, let me phrase it differently. The flight from Moscow to Paris lasts four rough hours.

  You’re asking why we didn’t take Northwest, or Delta. It is because PNGs from the Russian Federation don’t have the luxury of waiting for their own flag carriers. They get bused to Sheremetevo ASAP and shipped out on the first available aircraft. Frankly, I didn’t know who wanted us out of the country more—the Ivans, or Bart Wyeth.

  Our problems didn’t stop with cramped seating. Once on the ground, we played games with the French douaniers (those are the kepi-sporting customs agents) at De Gaulle Two over our lockbox of lethal goodies. See, because we’d flown Air France out of Moscow, we had to switch terminals, and I insisted that we hand-carry the box with us. Now, French Customs may not have blinked an oeil at Werner Lantos’s hot-freon tanks transshipping through Paris to the Middle East via Mustique, but they busted an intestin when they heard about our fully declared and POGUS (Property of the Government of the United States) MP5 submachine guns and pistols.

  Three obscene phone calls to the defense attaché’s office at the American Embassy later, we had solved everyone’s problems and we transited (yeah—that’s how they call it) the mile and a half to De Gaulle One. Then we cleared security. (That act, incidentally, took two and a half hours of wrangling and another phone call to the embassy, since the customs agents at De Gaulle One obviously do not speak to the customs agents at De Gaulle Two.)

  Exhausted and palavered out, we finally made our way to the concourse, found the only open restaurant, and ate an expensive lunch of sandwich jambon avec la moutarde sur pain Poilane. That’s a ham sandwich with mustard on brown country bread that is crusty, for those of you whose French has gone rusty, accompanied by two dozen or so eighth-liter, twist-top bottles of cheap, generic red wine. We six accomplished this lunch, incidentally, while crammed in a booth built for four, whose previous occupants had managed to spill mayonnaise all over the Naugahyde banquette.

  After our repast and the antacid cocktails that followed, I paid my respects at the duty-free shop, where I bought a liter of Bombay gin that turned out to be twice as expensive as what I pay at Fort Belvoir’s Class IV package store. I also dumped two kilos of French coins into a pay phone and called Avi Ben Gal to tell him I wasn’t going to make our rendezvous. No luck. I gave my name, got switched to his office, and was told he was out of the building for a few minutes. Then the line went dead. Nothing devious or furtive, friends—only the vagaries of international telecommunications at work.

  Then, my duties completed, we space-availabled on the first available U.S. carrier back to Dulles, and things began to look up. First, we got upgraded to business class. Then, by the time we were over Greenland, Wonder and Gator had wangled assignations with two of the flight attendants, and Doc, Duck Foot, and Rodent were huddled together like Wobblies, plotting an anarchic recon of Old Town in search of cold beer and warm pussy.

  Ah, the eternal optimism of youth. Oh—you want to know about me? Well, I’d considered heading straight to the Pentagon to see Ken Ross and tell him what I’d found in Moscow. But that was when we were clearing Nova Scotia and I could see the water thirty-nine thousand feet below. Then the headwinds increased and the weather changed. By the time we hit our second nasty front of squalls over New Jersey, we were already half an hour behind schedule. Then we circled over western Maryland (or was it southern Pennsylvania?) for just over sixty-five minutes. By the time we wheels-downed at Dulles, it was already just past 1800, and the lockbox and I didn’t clear customs until 1946. That’s almost eight o’clock at night in cake-eating, civilian time.

  Almost no one in the Pentagon works late anymore. If you work late you don’t have the time to sell real estate on the side, or manage your portfolio of mutual funds, or engage in any of the other money-making schemes in which officers and gentlemen (not to mention enlisted pukes) are engaged these days, instead of spending their time figuring how to make war. Now, Ken Ross didn’t strike me as a nine-to-fiver. But I doubted that even he’d still be on the job at 2200 or so. Therefore, I dropped the guys in Old Town, then worked my way south on I-95 toward Quantico, turned west, then took back roads to the Manor. Yeah, I’d have preferred an evening of beer and pussy, and not necessarily in that order. But I had the box to look after, and some planning to do.

  And so, instead of soaking my aching muscle between warm thighs, I did an hour on Rogue Manor’s outdoor weight pile, followed by a hot sauna and a cold whirlpool. And the only red meat I got to see was nineteen ounces of USDA choice sirloin, cooked Pittsburgh—that’s black-and-blue for the uninitiated among you.

  Then I laid out every piece of paper, every record, every photograph, clipping, and memo from Paul’s file, and each sheet of Avi’s paperwork, as well as my own sparse notes, like the pieces of the puzzle that th
ey were, on the tile floor of my basement rec room.

  I arranged them. I rearranged them. I stacked, piled, aligned, sorted, and catalogued. I itemized and tallied. I positioned and prioritized. Then, like a deck of cards, I shuffled the fucking pile and began all over again to see if the results came up the same.

  When they did come up exactly the way they had, I started making notes.

  Oh—you want to know what I’d discovered.

  Okay, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you, because a good epiphany—an event as full of ecstasy, rapture, and bliss as any orgasm—is, just like orgasm, an experience that should be shared with a friend, not performed alone.

  The signs, as I read them, pointed toward a broad conspiracy. Russian bears were prowling and growling: probing Western facilities; making off with Western technology; recruiting Western assets. But this time, they’d added a new wrinkle. The Russkies were using their mafiya as part of the intelligence-gathering equation.

  How did I know this? I knew it because there was no other reason for Paul Mahon to have spent so much time taking pictures of Russian mafiyosi, and tracking their organizations and movements. I knew it because the Israelis, who still run a lean, mean intel machine, had detailed one of their best military intelligence officers—a man, I will remind you, who was an expert on the Soviet military and its procedures—to Moscow, to do precisely the same thing I’d discovered Paul had been doing: track Werner Lantos, the Russian Mafiya, and the connections between them and the Russian military.

  But most of all, I knew it because it made keep-it-simple-stupid sense. Who better to sluice supplies from East to West than a criminal culture that had been stealing goods for decades under the noses of the Commies? Who better to smuggle weapons and dual-use technologies than the same people who’d been bringing everything from Scotch to drugs into the old Soviet Union? Who better to recruit new agents—remember when I told you how the old KGB used honey-traps to snare Western businessmen and diplomats—than the same pimps and other no-goodniks who’d been running whores for years? In fact, as Avi had said, every Russian hooker, whether she worked in Moscow, Paris, Tel Aviv, or New York, worked for a mafiya vor.

  What was in it for the mafiya? That was easy. Money—lots of money. Billions, even tens of billions of dollars. And access—tacit government support for their illicit activities.

  What was in it for the Russkies? That was easy, too. Powerful political elements within the Russian government—Viktor Grinkov was a prime example—were trying to move the country back toward communism. One of communism’s goals was the destabilization of the West—specifically the United States. By creating new intelligence networks to harass the West, and by slipping weapons of mass destruction to some of the old Soviet client states, these hard-liners hoped to foster rapid destabilization. Their goal was to keep the United States off-balance while Russia reconstituted itself as a superpower.

  Now, where did Werner Lantos fit in this equation? He was the linchpin of the whole plan.

  I see you out there, including Mr. Editor. You’re all yelling, “Whoa, Dickie—that’s too big a step right now.”

  No, it is not. Let me explain. When I ran black programs out of the Pentagon—and I ran a lot of ’em, believe me—the one thing that I needed most of all was a banker. See, finding the men to staff a covert unit is easy. Equipping it, keeping it supplied, and moving it around is hard. Hard, hell—it’s almost impossible.

  Why? Because despite all those stones about six-hundred-dollar toilet seats and eight-hundred-dollar wrenches, the government actually likes to know where its money goes. It does not hand a suitcase of greenbacks to a unit commander and say. “Go forth and spend ye the cash.” There is paperwork. There are requisition forms. There are purchase orders.

  Now, when the unit you command is covert, your problems are increased geometrically. Every penny you spend has to come from somewhere legitimate and accountable, then those pennies have to get lost, and—mirabile dictu—reappear again, freshly laundered and completely untraceable Depending on the size of the unit, you sometimes have to move huge—and I’m talking tens of millions, friends—even humongous sums of money all over the world, without stuffing hundred-dollar bills into a suitcase and schlepping it from capital to capital. The answer is: you need a bank, and a friendly banker who can bend the rules to launder your funds, and get ’em where you need ’em, and do it all without attracting, a lot of unwelcome attention from the banking authorities, foreign governments (not to mention your own), the press, and those other nasty folks known as The Opposition.

  How did I do that when I ran black units? I found a small. shady investment banker in Italy I’ll call Schultz, because he looked like the chubby Cherman guard in the old Hogan’s Heroes TV series. Schultz had connections all over the world—the kind of juice that allowed him to play the shell game called international finance. He also had a rep as a quick-and-dirty money man who handled a lot of money for a dozen Saudi princes as well as a bunch of less pleasant types based in various South American countries. In other words, he handled a lot of cash-intensive transactions for dictators, thugs, and probably worse, and he didn’t ask a whole lot of questions about where the bucks came from. Was he a nice guy? No. Was he ultimately indicted for bank fraud, and is he currently serving twenty-five years in a European prison? Yes. But when he worked for me, he got my funds precisely where I had to have ’em, exactly when they had to be there—and no one was ever the wiser.

  Item: Lantos & Cie were investment bankers. Werner Lantos knew all the shell-game techniques of moving money around.

  Item: Werner Lantos had been doing business in Moscow for more than two decades. He knew how to move, who to pay off, and most of all, he kept his mouth shut.

  Ah, but Master Marcinko-san, there are a lot of other banks doing business in Moscow.

  True, tadpole. But Werner Lantos was the only banker in Paul Mahon’s notes. He was the only banker Paul had a photograph of. His name was on the waybill that I discovered in Andrei Yudin’s dacha, and I met him in the company of Andrei Yudin and Viktor Grinkov. And the Israelis had been on the scent for years—in fact, the Israelis had assigned one of their top intel officers to keep track of him. One plus one plus one plus one equals four.

  Ah, Master Marcinko-san, you are guilty of chop-logic. You give only one side of the equation. Your own diplomat in Moscow, Bart Wyeth, deputy chief of mission, told you in no uncertain terms that Werner Lantos was a Good Guy.

  You are correct, tadpole. But guess what? I’ve decided to discount Bart Wyeth’s input.

  Why, Master Marcinko-san?

  Because, tadpole, I have decided that Bart is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

  Now you have completely lost me, Master Marcinko-san. You have just made a huge jump—and I cannot follow.

  Listen and learn, tadpole. In his second-century treatise on strategy, the master Wu Ch’i talks of defeat through contempt. “Falsely convince the enemy to despise you,” he writes, “and you will overcome him.”

  That is precisely what Bart had done with me. From the very first day we’d set foot in Moscow, he had worked—hard, I might add—to make my life difficult. My reaction was, I am sorry to say, not unconventional at all. I’d spent a lot of time and energy thinking of ways to get around Bart’s strictures. Mostly what I did was stay away from the embassy—which I realized now was exactly what Bart had wanted to achieve in the first place.

  There was another thing, too: I instinctually disliked Bart Wyeth in an active, visceral way that doesn’t happen too often. Over the years, I have learned to trust my instincts. They have kept me alive. Now, deep in the marrow of my bones, I had the hunch that Bart was part of the problem. Could I prove it? No, not yet. But right now, just feeling that he was hinky was enough for me.

  At 0835 the next morning I showed up in proper uniform and French braid outside Rear Admiral (Lower Half) Kenneth Patrick Ross’s office on the fourth-floor E-ring lugging a huge black leather
satchel—the suitcase-size kind pilots use to carry their charts and books. The senior chief yeoman behind the desk pointed her thumb vaguely toward the doorway, and hit the electronic lock release. I turned the polished handle downward and pushed the heavy paneled wood door inward. The director of operations, plans, and politico-military affairs was sitting scrunched in his high-backed leather judge’s chair, a pair of half-glasses perched just above his eyebrows, concentrating on whatever was on the huge Sony computer screen that sat on the port side of his Executive Group One desktop.

  He waved me inside but kept me standing while he punched keys and did all those wonky, computer geek kinds of things that byte-size dipdunks do to save their documents and close their programs and mash their modems or WTF. As you know, computers and I are not friends.

  Then, finished with his wonk-work, he pushed the drawer that held keyboard and mouse pad under his desk until we both heard a satisfying thwock that told him it was STOWED. That’s when he pointed toward the well-worn wood-framed leather armchair that faced his desk and indicated that the satchel and I were to Park It There. No, he wasn’t smiling, either.

  Nor was his greeting very friendly. “Dick, has anybody ever told you that you have a world-class talent for pissing people off?”

  Oh, yeah—I’ve heard all hundred-plus choruses of that song before. It goes on longer than “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” “Fuck, Admiral, I may not have the best bedside manner in the world, but I’m a hell of a brain surgeon.”

  Now, there are admirals to whom you can say the dreaded F-word, and there are admirals to whom you cannot say the dreaded F-word. Ken Ross, whose own supply of profanities seldom progresses beyond “darn,” surprisingly falls into the first category. Even so, he looked over his desk at me in the understated, I Am Not Amused expression with which nuclear submariners discipline their troops. “You may call yourself a brain surgeon, Dick, but I’m beginning to think you work with a jackhammer instead of a scalpel.” He rapped a thick file on his desk with the back of his knuckles. “This stuff is serious. What the heck did you and your guys do over there—gang-bang the ambassador’s wife?”