Oh, that was gratifying. But Pinky didn’t give me a chance to be ironic. “In fact, as of this morning,” he continued, “you have been named deputy assistant to the assistant coordinator of security for the acting chief of naval operations’ office at the Navy Yard.” He paused. “It is a position with no staff, no travel, and very little budget. It is—obviously—based here in Washington, at the Navy Yard. You will report to the acting chief’s assistant, Rear Admiral Layton, at precisely thirteen hundred.” The Turd ostentatiously checked the heavy gold Rolex, a watch that had once belonged to his father. Pinky Two, and now hung on his own scrawny wrist. “That’s two hours and twenty-seven minutes from now.”
He flicked the back of his hand vaguely in my direction. “That is all. You may go.”
I just stood there. My friends, for once in my life I have to admit I was absofuckinglutely speechless.
Which you could see just pleased the hell out of Pinky the Turd. He grinned up at me with those bad teeth of his showing. “Dismissed,” he said, looking as happy as I’ve ever seen him. “Oh, yes, you are indeed dismissed, Dick.” I could hear him chortling as the door closed behind me.
Significantly, under orders from the Clinton administration in the midnineties, the Army introduced what it called “Stress Cards.” These pocket-size, yellow, laminated plastic cards are distributed to recruits just after they arrive for their basic training and indoctrination. If the training becomes too much to bear, or if the trainee believes he is being unfairly singled out by his drill sergeant for punishment, he can hold up his stress card and declare, “Time out.” The sergeant must then back off, and leave the trainee alone for half an hour, so the soldier can compose himself. It is the kind of touchie-feelie, feel-good, pointy-headed liberal pseudothinking that will get men killed in battle. Are things too tough in Bosnia, Somalia, or elsewhere? Just hold up a yellow (yellow for coward—just like the cowardly president who instituted it) fucking card and the enemy sniper will let you alone for half an hour. Right. Sure.
Chapter 10
I DOUBLE-TIMED BACK TO KEN ROSS’S OFFICE, SNATCHED THE first phone I came to, and called down to my Naval Security Mobile Training Team office on the third-floor B-ring. There was no answer at NSMTT—not even the voice mail message I’d recorded. I called the Pentagon locator and asked for myself. The operator told me I didn’t exist. I dialed the apartment Gator Shepard shared with the Rodent and Duck Foot Dewey. No answer. I tried Duck Foot’s pager. The pager number didn’t respond. I tried Gator’s pager, then Rodent. Ditto. I called Doc Tremblay’s bungalow off Route 1 near Fort Belvoir and let the phone ring two dozen times. Nada. I tried his pager. It, too, had been disconnected. Now I was really unnerved. I punched the number for Wonder’s rented English basement in Old Town and got a message that the phone had been disconnected and there was no new number. This was fucking crazy.
Ken Ross stuck his head through his office door. “Yo, Dick—what’d he say? How’d it go?”
I guess the expression on my face told him how it had gone. He waved me toward his office, his own expression grim but determined. “C’mon in. Let’s see what we can do.”
For a submariner—for most submariners, I remind you, if it’s not on the checklist, it doesn’t exist—Ken Ross had a wonderfully independent and aggressive attitude toward my situation, something I appreciated a lot right then.
Because the fact is, friends, I was not about to accept Pinky’s verdict—or the system’s. First, there was Paul’s death. That ship’s cruise log was still open and would remain so until I exacted vengeance on all his killers. Second, there was something big and dangerous afoot—and I wasn’t going to stop until I’d discovered what it was. And last, even though you may think it unimportant. I believe there are serious problems with the concept of a zero-incident, zero-defect, or ZD, Navy. I believe the concept must be challenged if the Navy is to survive.
Oh, ZD is the politically correct solution to a series of convoluted, complex, and often knotty problems. Politicians love ZD because it takes care of all those nasty media-whipped events like Tailhook. Everything is neat. Tidy. Shipshape. I’ll give you all that.
But my friends, the military is not a social club, or a university, or a corporation. It is a huge and sometimes unwieldy structure that exists for one reason only: to fight wars. Many politicians forget this basic mandate and try to use the military for other objectives. Now, so far as I am concerned, the instant you give the military other missions—being cops, or social workers, the way they were in places like Haiti or Somalia, for example—you are going to see failure. And the instant that you try to make the military into just another civilian-type organization with zero-defect social rules and regulations and mores, you will doom it to failure as well.
Even at the most basic levels, the military is different. You civilians out there have a president. I don’t. I have a commander in chief. You have civil rights. I don’t. I fall under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which denies me many of the Constitutional rights that I am willing to die to protect.
So we are different. Moreover, the minute you try to make everyone in the military equal in every way, you are going to fail, too. Sure, all soldiers are OD—olive drab. Yes, all Marines are green, and all sailors are blue. Race, religion, social background, should not and do not count diddly-squat so far as I am concerned. Like I say, I am an EEO kind of guy. Which means—as the Roguish SpecWar Commandment says—I treat everyone alike. Which is (let’s all repeat this together, shall we): just … like … shit. I will not tolerate any less.
Now, having said that, there are certain jobs—being a SEAL or a Ranger are two of ’em that come to mind—that are not conducive to EEOdom. In fact, they are not jobs conducive to 99.9 percent of any kind of “dom.”
Since I’m a Navy fella, let’s examine the personality type who becomes a SEAL. He must tolerate pain and discomfort well. He must become part of a team but know how to think for himself. He must be willing to look an enemy in the face and pull the trigger without hesitation—whether that enemy be man, woman, or child. Yes, child. An eleven-year-old girl with an AK-47 is just as potentially lethal as a twenty-five-year-old man with an AK-47. You have to be willing to shoot her. Does that shock you? Well, let me remind you that SEALs were created by Roy Boehm as killers first and foremost. In fact, Roy used to tell me that he preferred his men straight from the brig—because that way he knew they had a little felony and larceny (ofttimes it was a lot of felony and larceny) in ’em. He was being serious, too.
Roy also used to tell me that if he had to choose between his family and his SEAL team shipmates, he would unhesitatingly choose his teammates. “You can always get yourself another family,” Roy growled. “But you can’t get another team.”
Fact: when you combine the personalities, the edge-of-the-envelope missions and the closeness of a group of testosterone-prone males who have been forged on an anvil of pain, steel, and blood, you are going to get sparks every now and then in units like SEAL boat crews, Green Beret A-Teams, and Marine Recon platoons. And that is a Good Thing. As a SEAL CO, you shouldn’t want to lead a bunch of men whose idea of a good time is an evening of tiddlywinks and cocoa. You should prefer a beer-drinking, pussy-chasing, bar-brawling group of shooters.
But guess what? In today’s Navy, a SEAL who receives a DUI from a Virginia Beach cop loses his security clearance. No security clearance means he’s booted from the Teams. Brawling? One strike and you’re O-U-T. Even a speeding ticket can get you cut from the Teams. Pussy chasing? Forget about it. As a matter of fact, if you’re socked with a sexual harassment charge even though you can prove you haven’t done anything wrong, it can mean the end of your career. That’s what happened to Captain Ev Greene—he was found innocent of sexual harassment charges by a court-martial board, and yet the politically correct SECNAV still dented Ev his rightful promotion to rear admiral.
My friends, that is wrong. You cannot take a man, teach him how to jump out of planes
at thirty-five thousand feet, swim miles in cold water lugging sixty pounds of combat gear, clamber up ice-coated oil rigs, egg-fry hot steel bridges, and humongous dams: inculcate him in the deadly arts of flattening buildings with explosives, rigging lethal ambushes, and silent take-downs—and not expect him to blow off some steam every now and then.
Fact, bub: you cannot take a man and train him to kill efficiently, and then expect him to act like a wimp when it’s Miller time. Train hard, work hard, play hard, is my credo. But that principle is DOA in today’s Navy.
In today’s Navy the most talented SEALs—the real shoot-and-looters—are retiring early. Why? Because they have too many demerits next to their names—and their officers, afraid of not receiving the next promotion, won’t back ’em up. Back ’em up, hell—the officers are the ones writing out the charges, because in today’s politically correct, wimp-driven Navy, it is the C2CO—that’s can’t cunt commanding officer for anyone who’s forgotten—who’s gonna make flag rank. And so. the Navy is losing its best men o’ warsmen. The danger exists that there may never be another generation of real killers—SpecWarriors in Roy Boehm’s image—or mine.
Well, friends, that also is just plain wrong. The nasty but nevertheless irrefutable fact is that this nation needs killers. Not often—at least not as often as I’d like to see it. But when the time comes, we’ve got to have ’em—men willing to do any nasty, hostile thing they have to do to accomplish their missions. Men who’ll win at all costs. Roy Boehm, the godfather of all SEALs, calls ’em men o’ warsmen.
And that, friends, is why I fight so fucking hard to stay around as long as I can. I don’t need money—these books have made a fucking dump truckful of cash, believe me. And I don’t want glory—I have all the medals t can use. And I know I’ll never make admiral—they don’t promote brawlers like me to flag rank. Well, friends, guess what? None of the above matters to me. Not a whit. My reason for staying where I am and fighting the Pinky Prescotts and the rest of the C2COs is a very elemental component of my character. Simply put, I will use every particle of my energy, every atom of my being, to fight the status quo in order to continue to train and lead warriors in my image, so that when the SEALs of war are unleashed, we will not fail.
Despite those sentiments, there was nothing we could do about reassembling my unit. Not, at least, at the present time. I phoned Karen, my kuddly kontact at BUPERS, and engaged in a little aural sex. Ten minutes later she called back to give me the bad news. Duck Foot Dewey had been assigned to BUD/S as an instructor. He was due in Coronado twenty-two hours from now. My pair of animals, Gator and Rodent, had been transferred henceforth and forthwith to the Special Boat Unit at SPECWARGRU Two, down at Virginia Beach. I called the amphibious base at Little Creek, talked to a lieutenant commander who didn’t mind helping an untouchable, and found out they were due in by COB—close of business.
Doc Tremblay was impossible to track. Until, that is, I called Rogue Manor and cleared my answering machine. Message number one was Doc’s depressed voice, growling that he was calling from an Amtrack train phone, already on his way to the submarine medical unit at Groton, Connecticut, and WTF could I do to get him the hell out of there ASAP. Messages two, three, and four were from the rest of my guys—with similar gist. Do? I hung up the receiver knowing that there was nothing I could do.
The only survivor was Wonder, who wasn’t a SEAL, and who had never officially been transferred out of his classified job at the Navy Yard into my NSMTT. Kenny Ross did some quick checking and discovered that, so far as he could tell, Pinky’d never even discovered that Wonder existed. Count that as a small but significant victory for the good guys. But what about the message I’d gotten—the one that said his phone had been disconnected? I dialed Wonder’s home number again, punching each keypad distinctly. This time, I got his growly message that the lights were on but no one was home. I’d simply misdialed the fucking number in my crazed state. I left a short sit-rep and warned him to keep his head down and his pecker up.
But the fact that Wonder was all right didn’t solve my own dilemma. Pinky had boxed me in very neatly. I couldn’t go around him—because there was no one to go around to. My entire fucking chain of command, from CNO down, was in Pinky’s camp.
Ken Ross settled back in his chair and dropped his shoes atop the desk pad. “We’re overlooking something,” he said. “Oh, and by the way. I got your papers back.” He pointed at an envelope under the heel of his right shoe.
I retrieved them, opened the envelope, and stared at a list of gibberish. A list, detailing such items as vacuum furnaces, centrifuges, pumps, gas purification equipment—they made no sense to me.
Ken Ross held his hand out. “Let me see what you have there.”
He looked. He read. He said, “Holy shit.”
“WTF, Admiral?”
“Dick, this is basically a list of the equipment you need to take uranium and enrich it into weapons-grade plutonium.”
I didn’t quite understand. But Ken Ross did. “You take uranium and heat it in a vacuum furnace until it becomes a gas. Then you spin it in a centrifuge. The U-238 atoms are spun off because they’re heavier. The U-235 atoms—that’s the stuff we make weapons out of—falls to the bottom. It is collected, then centrifuged again and again—hundreds or even thousands of times—until you get pure U-235.”
“It sounds like making moonshine.”
“Basically it’s the same kind of principle. You take your mash—the uranium—and ’distil’ it down until you come up with a two-hundred proof, head-splitting atomic cocktail. The major difference is that there’s no real distillation involved in the atomic version. You superheat, then you supercool, then you centrifuge and purify. Once you complete that process, you have your weapons-grade plutonium.”
“Do you need a big plant to do this?”
“It depends on how big a device you want to build. Iraq tried to construct a series of atomic weapons—nuclear warheads and artillery shells. But if you wanted a portable device, you wouldn’t need more than a few ounces of enriched plutonium.” He thought about it. “Conceivably, it could be produced on a reasonably small scale.”
“Admiral,” I said, feeling comfortable enough to use his first name, “I realize what the reaction was in Moscow, but with what you just said—the list I found at Andrei’s, I believe this material is absolute dynamite. So do the Israelis—they assigned one of their top people to Moscow to work a course that was just about parallel with what Paul was doing. And I believe we’re looking at a potential disaster—not to mention the fact that Paul died collecting this stuff—if we don’t act on it. And I can’t act on it if I’m the fucking assistant to the assistant asshole over at the Navy Yard.” I paused. “Look—if I got an opportunity to show my materials to somebody with half a fucking brain, I know I could convince them I was on to something.”
Kenny Ross pulled his glasses off, put his arms behind his head, and frowned in my direction. “Convince me, Dick,” he said. “I’m listening.”
So I opened up the case, piled all the papers on his desk where I could get to them in the proper order, and gave the admiral the same briefing I’d given Bart Wyeth two days previously.
My monologue was complex, but not convoluted. Let me give you a few of the most basic elements.
Paul’s basic research indicated that the Russian government, or an element within it, was using the mafiya to steal everything from nuclear weapons to dual-use equipment. Why? First, because by using the mafiya, the Russian government had absolute deniability. Second, because, by using the mafiya, the operation paid for itself. It was organized crime that bore the costs—and skimmed the profits afterward.
Many of those weapons and much of the nuclear-manufacturing equipment were being sent overseas to former Soviet client states that were still strongly anti-Western in their outlook. Why? The answer was obvious to me: to help them destabilize the West.
The financing for doing all of this was being run through La
ntos & Cie in Paris. As the enterprise’s banker, Werner Lantos got a cut of the action. And he also served as the banker for those Russian government officials who were covertly running the scheme.
The papers from Andrei’s seemed to confirm that his mafiya organization had been able to supply Werner Lantos with a lot of the dual-use equipment necessary to set up a nuclear weapons-manufacturing facility. How many other mafiya vors had sold Lantos the remaining pieces of the puzzle?
• Today’s revelation tied right to Mossad’s claim—that a small thermonuclear device, manufactured with plutonium purified by dual-use equipment smuggled from Russia, was close to being completed at a location in Syria. If the bomb was built, it would devastate the Middle East peace process and throw the region into another cycle of war.
Ken Ross interrupted. “Mossad claims there’s a bomb being built in Syria?”
I thought about it. “No—they don’t claim it as a fact. So far as I can tell, they’ve only been hinting at it, because CIA doesn’t have any definite information.”
“Let’s start from the top again. Go slow, Dick, and try to be as accurate as you can.” With that premonition, he pulled a yellow legal pad from his desk drawer and nodded for me to begin. This time, he made notes as I spoke. By the time I’d finished speaking, a dozen pages of his compact, penmanshipshape handwriting were stacked in front of him.
Then he asked to see Paul’s materials, as well as Avi’s and mine too. I moved the piles around to where he could see them. He went over each sheet of notes, looked at every photograph, and examined every one of the documents I’d brought back.
Designation Gold Page 19