Designation Gold

by Richard Marcinko

  He turned to face me. The dogs, panting from their exercise, dropped at his feet. “So much for your Bible studies.” He stopped and ruffled Bilbo behind the ears. Cleo scrunched closer to Avi’s leg. He reached over and scratched her, too. “Okay—now you know why you won’t be left on your own. But since I’ve just come clean, maybe you should, too.”

  “Should what?”

  “Explain why this mission has become so important to you. I understand America’s concern about what the Russians are doing. But you’ve gone way beyond that, Dick.”

  I stopped and looked out at the ocean, way out, to where the clear, star-filled sky met the sea. I listened to the sounds of the waves lapping up onto the sand. Watched the Mediterranean’s ebb and the flow, felt the perpetual motion that is absolute in its absoluteness. There is truly something mystical about the ocean. It is transcendental, metaphysical—magic. Those oceanic qualities, in fact, are a large part of why I joined the Navy in the first place. They were also a factor in my choice to become a SEAL.

  The sea is a place of solitude, seclusion, and introspection. At night a man can stand at the rail, or on the beach, and as he watches the water and the waves he can, if he wants, learn a lot about himself.

  “You’re right,” I said. “The truth for me is that this goes way beyond politics or national interest. Now, don’t get me wrong, Avi—I’m committed to act, no matter what they decide in Washington. I’m committed because tactical nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists is something we can’t react to—we have to prevent it. The politicians don’t always understand that—and they end up getting innocent people killed because of their inaction. But there’s more here, so far as I am concerned. It’s become personal. These sons of bitches killed my friend, my shipmate.” I paused to collect my thoughts. “Okay—Paul was an officer. His life was at risk, just like mine is at risk. That’s the job. You understand that—you’re the same way. But they killed his family, too. His wife. His kids. My godson.” I scratched at the damp sand with my big toe. “If Adam had lived—who knows. Maybe he’d have gone to Annapolis, like his father—gone on to nuclear submarining. But just maybe he’d have decided to become a SEAL, like his godfather, me. A SpecWarrior—like his godfather.” I turned away from Avi so he couldn’t see the moisture beginning to form in the corners of my eyes, and did a passable Marion Brando Vito Corleone. “I’d have helped him decide, y’know—made the kid an offer he couldn’t refuse.”

  I walked out into the water a few yards. Felt its reassuring coolness; drew strength from its surging, kinetic power. Took a very deep breath. Faced the horizon. “But Adam didn’t get the chance. Didn’t get the chance to grow up. Didn’t get the chance to go to Annapolis. Didn’t get the chance to make his own choice to become a submariner or a SpecWarrior.”

  I turned back toward Avi. “So I don’t give much of a rusty fuck whether it’s gonna be hard, or it’s gonna be easy. All I know is that I am planning to go balls to the wall until I bring these cocksuckers down. Down hard. Like I said before, this goes way beyond global politics—or anything else, Avi—this one’s personal.”

  Chapter 20

  “HOW MUCH HELP DO YOU THINK WE CAN REALLY GET?” IT WAS just past 0700, Mikki had gone off to her job running the Herzlyia Medical Center. Wonder and I sipped mugs of steaming coffee as we sat at an oval table in the huge kitchen, poring over a pilotage map that Avi had pulled from his files. Avi was standing at the counter, chopping tomatoes. He diced them finely and tossed them into a Duroc glass bowl, added a sprinkle of salt and pepper, a dollop of olive oil, the juice of half a lemon, and topped them with fresh oregano and thyme that he’d just pulled from the herb garden outside his living room.

  “Good question.” He picked up the bowl and set it down in front of us, careful to miss the map, then went to the oven, where he plucked half a dozen loaves of fresh pita bread out, juggled them to keep his hands from being burned, and dropped them, too, onto the table. Finally, he reached inside the fridge and brought out a smaller Duroc bowl of what looked like sour cream. “Labbane,” he explained. “Arab-styled yogurt cheese.”

  “Watch,” he told Wonder. The Israeli took one of the pilot, and gingerly broke it in quarters. He used one of the quarters like a spoon, scooping some of the labbane onto the surface of the bread. Then he quickly dipped the labbane-coated bread into the tomatoes, twisted his wrist to catch a few, then popped the whole dripping thing into his mouth. “Metsuyan,” Avi proclaimed. “Excellent.”

  Wonder, whose idea of breakfast generally starts and ends with a supersize 7-Eleven coffee and powdered nondairy creamer, looked skeptically at the bowls in front of him. But he is a trooper when it comes to food. Like me, there is nothing he will not eat. And so, he mimicked Avi’s moves, chewed, swallowed, and was delighted with the results. “That’s good,” he exclaimed. “Beats the shit outta bran flakes.”

  Avi straddled a chair and joined us. He sipped at his coffee, nodding in my direction. “I haven’t forgotten your question,” he said.

  “So?”

  “So, the answer is: none. I’m sure the powers that be are going to do everything they can to actively discourage us.”

  “Active? How active?” I didn’t need a bunch of Shin Bet, the Israeli domestic secret service, watching my butt’s every move. “Is Shin Bet gonna get into the act?”

  Avi frowned. “Doubtful. Frankly, they have more important things to do—like keeping track of Islamic Jihad or Hizballah cells that are operating in the territories.”

  “So what’s Úactive?Û ”

  “Well, first of all, you’ve already been denied permission to use Israel as a base of operations. So that cuts out all official contact. You can’t check in at the Kyria”—Avi used Israeli slang for the huge IDF headquarters complex in the middle of Tel Aviv—“to get intelligence briefings, or receive technical help, like secure radios, global positioning devices, or weapons. And no tactical support—which means no transportation. It also means you can’t go to the Boys—either officially, or under the table, for help.”

  Too bad. Frankly, the Israelis are first-rate SpecWarriors, and it would have been nice to have been able to operate with a squad from the Boys, officially designated as Saye’eret Matkal, which translates as the General Staff’s Special Reconnaissance and Intelligence Unit. Saye’eret Matkal, which used to be known as Unit 269 (much the same as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRP, used to be known as SEAL Team Six), has carried out scores of black ops. They have their own specialized transportation—stealth-equipped choppers and other aircraft, as well as spec ops-capable ships. They have good weapons, secure comms, and a complete array of the sorts of goodies that make operations less prone to untimely intrusions by Mr. Murphy.

  My friends, I’ve been denied official help before, and while it makes my life difficult, it doesn’t make it impossible. “What else?”

  “Who knows. If the government puts pressure on your embassy, they could do anything—even help us deport you.”

  I’ve heard that song before, too. “So we move fast.”

  “Not as simple as it sounds,” Avi said. “We still need equipment.”

  “Fuck—we improvise. We can buy almost everything we need commercially. The only problems will be weapons, explosives, and transportation.”

  Avi rapped the table with his knuckles. “I have weapons,” he said. “Two AKs and an M-16.”

  “What about ammo?” asked Wonder.

  “I’ve got about a thousand rounds I guess. I keep it all in the bomb shelter.”

  “Bomb shelter?” Wonder dipped a chunk of bread into the labbane.“You have a bomb shelter in the house?”

  “Everybody has one,” Avi explained. “They were built that way.” He saw that Wonder didn’t understand. “The 1949 armistice line,” he explained.

  “So—”

  “From here to the border is only nine miles. I grew up in Herzlyia proper, which is three miles east of here. The Jordanians used t
o shell us. So every house was built with a bomb shelter. They still are, too, although these days most people use ’em for storage. I keep my weapons and ammo there—it’s cool, and it’s dry.”

  “Explosives,” Wonder said. “We’re gonna need explosives.”

  “That might be a problem. They tend to be careful about handing out C-4.”

  I thought for a while. “What about those units of yours?”

  “Which ones?”

  “The modem and flash memory cards.”

  “So?”

  “Still have the one from Paris?”

  “It’s in my briefcase.”

  “Let’s look at it.”

  Avi brought the modem card upstairs and laid it on the table. Wonder and I examined it closely. It had possibilities. “Yo, Avi, you got a magnifying glass, a pair of nonmagnetic tweezers, and a plastic knife?” Wonder asked.

  Fifteen minutes later, Boy Wonder looked up from his labor, a wicked grin on his face. “Oh, I can make this work real good,” he said. “All I need is three or four more like it.”

  Just before noon, Avi slipped out to his office so he could get in and out while most of the folks he worked with were at lunch. Meanwhile, Wonder and I hit the bank to change dollars into shekels, then took the bus into Tel Aviv and went shopping. At a sporting goods store on a big, wide avenue called Ibn Gevirol we bought lightweight boots, two dark blue rucksacks large enough to be used as assault packs, and three two-liter Camelbak units—flexible, plastic water containers that attach to a rucksack or can be carried on your back. We found an army surplus store near Allen by Street, where we bought two one-piece jumpsuits, wrist compasses, a hundred feet of soft nylon climbing rope, two sets of well-used but strong “Y” combat suspenders, pistol belts, and belt pads. Then we found an assortment of Velcro-equipped sheaths that would attach to the belts—they’d hold everything from wire cutters to electrical crimpers—and finally selected two stout hunting knives.

  I walked down the street to an electronics store and bought a cheap autofocus camera, five rolls of ASA 200 color print film, and two Magellan Trailblazer MGRS—Military Grid Reference System—direction-finding devices. They’re made for hikers who don’t want to get lost in the vast stretches of the Negev desert or down in Sinai. Trailblazers are accurate within fifteen meters—they take their reading from a dozen GPS—global positioning satellites—and work day or night, in rain, fog, or snow. And best of all, they have backlit LCD screens, which would allow me to read the dial in midair. They’re operated off a pair of double-A batteries (I bought ten of those—no use waiting for Mr. Murphy to show up and lose one or two). While I paid, Wonder walked two blocks farther, found a hardware store, and bought two heavy-duty wire cutters, three rolls of the Israeli equivalent of duct tape, plus another hundred dollars’ worth of miscellaneous goodies.

  The total came to less than fifteen hundred bucks. What? What?Sorry about the interruption, friends, it’s the editor. He’s asking why I’m not tapping into the $50 million slush fund we stole from the Russkies. He tells me that $50 mil buys a lot of equipment, and that using it would make this book a lot more exciting.

  Well, it might make it exciting, but it wouldn’t make it real. See, the best thing about SpecWar is that you can do it on the cheap. You don’t need a lot of technogoodies to wage SpecWar. All you need is a small, dedicated, lethal group of men who are willing to go balls to the wall and kill the enemy by any means possible. So, we didn’t have to go out and buy a plane, or a ship. As a matter of fact, buying stuff like that tends to attract a lot of attention. And attention is something I didn’t want to attract right now.

  So we bought low-tech (except for the Magellans) and we remained nicely anonymous. And the best news was that everything we bought fit in the rucksacks—with room to spare.

  We were back at Avi’s before he was. We laid everything out on the cool marble floor of his basement office.

  “Something’s bothering me,” Wonder said as we sorted equipment.

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t understand why the Israelis are acting like they are.”

  It bothered me, too. I’d been chewing on it all night. “It’s almost as if they want the fucking nuclear site completed.”

  Wonder finished coiling his thirty meters of rope and stuffed it in the rucksack. “That makes no sense at all. Why the hell would the Israeli government want the Russkies and the Syrians to build a nuclear site right in their backyard?”

  When he said it like that, the answer became so fucking obvious that I wondered why I hadn’t seen it before. You get it, don’t you?

  You say you’re a little hazy.

  Okay, gentle reader, allow me to lay things out for you.

  Item: the Russkies, with the help of Werner Lantos and Ehud Golan, have been slipping equipment into Syria, to help the Syrians build a bomb.

  Item: Werner works for CIA and Ehud for Mossad.

  Item: the Israeli government has recently changed—it’s become a lot more hard-line when it comes to the peace process and dealing with its Arab neighbors.

  Item: the Syrians are the biggest stumbling block in the current peace process.

  Item: the current Israeli government does not necessarily want to trade land for peace when it comes to giving up the Golan Heights, because the Golan is a very important strategic piece of real estate.

  Have you caught on yet?

  No? Okay. Let us deal with all of the above items as a part of a single problem. The problem: how to make peace with Syria but not give up the Golan Heights.

  The answer was crystal clear, at least so far as I was concerned: it was to make the Golan Heights irrelevant. And the best way to make the Golan irrelevant was by attacking Syria directly—beating the shit out of the Syrians so that when peace was negotiated, it would be a peace firmly in the favor of the Israelis.

  And how to do that without being condemned by the rest of the world?

  Israel has always claimed the right of preemptive attack if it discovers nuclear weapons in a neighboring state. Remember how Menachem Begin used the Israeli Air Force to strike at the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Ossirak, just outside Baghdad, in 1981.

  Same principle here. Wait until the Syrians have almost completed the project, then hit ’em—hard. Destroy the site with smart bombs—and maybe hit a few other targets as well.

  I see you out there—the asshole with your hand in the air. You want to know why the United States would condone an attack against Syria; an attack that would almost certainly result in a regionwide war, when they could solve this same problem quietly. By quietly, gentle reader, I mean by using yours truly.

  Good question. I believe the answer is because there are those near and dear to the White House these days who think that quick-fix schemes are better than long-term solutions. Of precisely which near-and-dear ones am I thinking? The current national security adviser comes to mind. Our NSC chairman, Matt Thompson, is a former journalist and Harvard professor who fancies himself the world’s new Metternich. Matt’s college roommate at Yale (after the requisite Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, the MIT economics Piled higher and Deeper degree, and the slint at a slightly oozed to right-of-center Washington think tank) was recently confirmed as the new DCI—the Director of Central Intelligence. These two self-proclaimed solons have money, position, and as you can well imagine, lots of friends in high places—including one old pal for whom “Ruffles and Flourishes” and “Hail to the Chief” is played every time he enters a room on ceremonial occasions. The only thing these two sphincterbrained schlemiels don’t have is smarts.

  So one—i.e.. moi—can just see ’em, sitting with their tasselled loafers up on their big walnut desks, coming up with this harebrained scheme of how to teach a lesson in realpolitik to the Syrians, reshuffle the balance of power in the Middle East, and catapult the United States into the dominant and pivotal role of power broker/peacemaker. Except for one little problem: neither of these two J. Pressed assholes have
the guts or the backbone to do it using American resources—after all, if they did, they’d have to go up to Capitol Hill, salute the flag—or at least the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence—and stand behind what they were doing.

  Now let’s add another ingredient to this Metternichian mélange. Remember how Werner Lantos talked about surrogates back at Fouquet’s? Remember how he hinted that all sorts of things were taking place at the highest levels of government?

  Well, I think Werner had it partially right. What he didn’t realize is that he was the one being used. How, you ask? Simple: let me postulate, gentle reader, that the CIA and Mossad have concocted this whole charade as a sting operation that will ultimately allow Israel to go to war against Syria.

  How? By using the same principle as any martial arts sensei teaches his students on the very first day: always use your enemy’s momentum to help you defeat him.

  The Russians want to re-emerge as a superpower. They were using their mafiya, as well as their agents of influence—like Werner Lantos—to help them do that. But Werner’s also a double agent for Langley. So, somewhere along the line, CIA and Mossad decided to use Werner, Ehud, the Russkies, and the Russian Mafiya to sell nuclear weapons materials to Syria—there’s the sting part of it. And Haffez el-Assad, like the big-mouth basshole he is, swallowed the lure. But all along, CIA and Mossad knew exactly what was going on.

  Now, what the hell does that have to do with me? I will tell you what it has to do with me. Remember the files I took from Paul Mahon’s office in Moscow? Remember that there were one or two elements I couldn’t figure out at the time? Like the Post-It note on which Paul had written that cryptic list of words. Sting, Mafiya—cover, Agcy/Mos, and Call KR.

  Now, that scrap of paper made perfect sense. Sting was what Paul had discovered. It was an Agcy/Mos (Central Intelligence Agency/Mossad) sting. They’d used their agents of influence, used the Russian Mafiya as cover, and piggybacked it all on a Russian op to climb back on the world stage as a superpower. We’d always believed that Paul had been killed because he was unraveling the relationship between Russian military/intelligence ops and the mafiya. Now, it occurred to me that maybe he started to put the big picture together—and he’d been killed to keep him quiet before he could get hold of KR—Rear Admiral Kenneth Ross—and blow the op. Killed by whom? Fact is, whether Werner had pushed the buttons that set Paul’s murder in motion, or Ehud had, it didn’t matter. They were both condemned men, so far as I was concerned.