Designation Gold

by Richard Marcinko

  0614. We worked our way into the basement proper. The illumination was minimal—one overhead in six was lighted. I signaled for Wonder to relieve me on point—I needed a break and it looked as if this was going to be as uneventful as our first leg.

  Gentle reader, have I ever explained the Rogue’s First Rule of Life to you? It goes like this: that phone call you’ve been waiting for all morning won’t happen unless you’re sitting on the pot and unable to answer. Here, too, shit happened: Wonder hadn’t gone six yards when he silent-signaled me to stop dead in my tracks and motioned that there was “enemy ahead.” I didn’t see a thing, but I know Wonder well enough to follow his lead in situations like this one, so I stopped as instructed. Behind me, Koby froze, too. Obviously, he knew when to take “yes” for an answer.

  I watched as Wonder q-u-i-e-t-l-y shifted his weapons—it’s amazing how he can do it without making any noise whatsoever—unsheathed the knife that hung on his belt, and then, stealthy as a goddamn hungry lion, he began to move forward. Wonder wasn’t greedy about it either. His progress was inch by inch as he moved up toward a huge, wooden shipping container—it must have been eight by eight by six—and slowly, surreptitiously, furtively turned the corner, moving out of sight.

  I stopped. Behind me, Koby also halted. We waited, our breathing shallow. I could hear my own heartbeat and wondered if Koby could hear it, too.

  Ahead, I heard a slight rasping sound, as if someone’s feet had shifted position on the dusty floor. I waited, my AK ready to cover Wonder if he had to make a fast retreat.

  There was only silence. Then Wonder’s face reappeared around the corner of the shipping container. He silent-signaled us to move up quietly.

  We did. When we turned the corner, I saw what had caused the shifting sounds. An inert figure lay on his stomach, a pool of blood widening on the concrete floor below his neck. Next to him on the cement lay an Uzi submachine pistol.

  Wonder’s hands told us that he was going to do some more hunting, and he moved off into the fluorescent half-light of the basement. Koby silently rolled the corpse onto its side and began to go through its pockets. Next to the body lay a sheaf of papers. The Israeli handed them to me. I examined them. They were waybills—and from the look of them they’d been stapled to the crates.

  I saw that Koby had retrieved a wallet. From the front pocket he pulled a blue handkerchief, and a set of keys that were soundlessly rolled in the handkerchief to keep them from making ambient noise. The keys stowed, he opened the wallet and examined the inside.

  His eyes went wide. He showed me what had grabbed his attention—it was a blue plastic identity card, with Hebrew writing on it. I shrugged as if to ask WTF.

  Koby put his lips next to my ear. “Meluim card,” he whispered. “Tzahal. Reserve ID.”

  0618. Wonder pronounced the basement clear. Of people, that is. Equipmentwise, as many apparatchiks are fond of saying, it was jam-packed. There were scores of huge, wooden shipping crates down there—they’d been brought in down a huge, newly constructed concrete ramp. Inside those crates was the Syrians’ dual-use equipment.

  It hadn’t even been unpacked yet. I examined the cases until I discovered the ones containing the hot freon tanks I’d first learned about in Andrei Yudin’s dacha. I patted the rough wood—things were finally coming full circle. And yet … and yet, something bothered me. Bothered me deeply. There was a blip, a snag, a glitch, a flaw in this situation.

  Can you guess what it was, dear reader? No? Well, let me elucidate for a few seconds. Remember back a couple of hundred pages when Avi told me Mossad was absolutely certain that the Syrians were building a nuke with the help of the Russian Mafiya?

  Well, what if that information was actually what the KGB used to call “disinformation”? In other words, Mossad wanted everyone to believe that the Syrians were building a bomb.

  You say it doesn’t make sense. You’re right. Except, that is, unless the scenario being followed was the one I’d come up with a short time ago and passed onto Kenny Ross and Chairman Crocker: i.e., certain forces within the Israeli intelligence community, with the complicity of some Americans, probably at Langley, were conspiring to allow the Israelis to take the Syrians out of the peace process by way of a preemptive attack.

  If you believe that scenario, then this empty plant and the unpacked crates make a lot of sense. It is called baiting the trap.

  I silent-signaled Wonder to start rigging the crates with explosives. He gave me a thumbs-up and went to work with Koby. Yes, I know that Chairman Crocker had told me to be stealthy and not to make any waves. But goddammit, I wasn’t about to let this stuff fall into the hands of terrorists. We already have enough problems. We don’t need some fundamentalist assholes, or any other tangos for that matter, creating powerful, portable nukes.

  0624. Avi snuck downstairs and interrupted Wonder’s work. He pointed his index finger toward the ceiling and jabbed it rapidly. “I heard something,” he whispered. “On the roof.”

  We made tracks. The ground floor was quiet. I took point again, and cleared the stairwell slowly and deliberately, until I reached the first floor landing. I went round the corner. There was movement—I heard it, too.

  The hair on the back of my neck stood up. My breathing slowed. My whole body became a sensory device—every follicle was an antenna, seeking the source of the hint of sound I’d perceived.

  Up the steps, one by one. I paused. Waited. The same sound again. As if something were being dragged across a floor, a few inches at a time.

  Another two steps. Landing ahead. I signaled everyone to dead stop. I handed my AK off to Koby, who handed it back to Avi. Then I dropped as low as I could and crept ahead, using the stair rail to pull myself along. The ornate metal would camouflage my silhouette until I could see clearly what was going on.

  Dear readers, do you remember that back in Paris I had a bad experience with a nasty section of wrought iron railing? You’d assume I’d have learned my lesson, wouldn’t you.

  Yeah, well, remember the old Rogue Warrior’s Eighth Commandment of Spec War—“Thou shalt never assume.” It was doom-on-Dickie time. As I pulled myself along, the sixfoot segment of railing on which I was pulling separated from its anchors and came crashing. Down. Onto my beautiful, perfect, Slovak puss.

  Fuck me. I tossed it aside. Koby and Avi dodged just in time—it would have slammed into them—as it went careening past Wonder, shattering somewhere near the first landing.

  Well, when you lose surprise there’s nothing to do but ATTACK. God bless Koby—the man was a Warrior. He knew WTF to do. Never paused a millisecond but came charging up past my position, his M-16 ready to give covering fire.

  At the top of the stairs he flung himself down, his rifle pointed toward an unseen target. I scrambled to my feet, grabbed my weapon from Avi, charged up the stairs to Koby’s position, and dropped alongside him.

  His M-16 was up and sighted—his finger was on the trigger. I looked down the sights of my own weapon and saw what he saw.

  Werner Lantos and Ehud Golan were staring at us in obvious surprise. Lantos had his omnipresent cell phone. A small aluminum suitcase stood at his feet. Ehud had a similar suitcase in one hand. In the other was a semiautomatic pistol. It was pointed toward the floor, its muzzle vaguely in our direction. Behind them, two goons with Uzis slung across their chests—certainly weren’t doing ’em much good hanging there, huh?—were in the process of moving what appeared to be a small, portable something—it looked like a generator?—bolted to a wood frame. They’d gotten it halfway through the open doorway that led out onto the plant’s flat rooftop before we’d interrupted them. I guess what we’d heard was the frame being dragged across the roof.

  Avi Ben Gal came up the stairs. He stopped just behind where Koby and I lay. “Bokker-tov—good morning, Ehud,” Avi said. “Manneh-sh’ma—how’s it goin’?”

  “Not so bad, Boy Scout,” Ehud said in English. The pistol in his hand moved slightly. Next to me, Koby’s
finger began to exert pressure on the trigger of the M-16.

  Avi stepped past us. Bad move. You don’t want to put yourself in front of your covering fire.

  Except now that he’d done it I was able to see the Beretta in his hand. And he had the presence of mind to move to his right—giving both Koby and me a clear field of fire.

  The muzzle of Ehud’s pistol rose another few centimeters. Avi didn’t say a thing—he simply shot the Mossad man directly in the left kneecap. Then he put another bullet in Ehud’s right kneecap. Then he put a third bullet four inches below the gold Gucci buckle on Ehud’s trousers.

  Ehud collapsed. That’s an understatement. The sonofabitch went down screaming. The pair of Uzi-toters reacted—badly for them, as it turned out. They swiveled, grabbed for their weapons and tried to swing them up. They weren’t going to bother aiming—this, they realized, was gonna be a spray-and-pray situation.

  As you probably know, the M-16 has a sharp report—a whiplike whaappaack, as opposed to the AK’s duller, chunkier, thwack. That’s because the M-16 is basically a .22 on steroids, while the AK has chunky, much more conventional—even old-fashioned—bullet load, which puts it well within the .30-caliber area.

  Koby fired twice. Whapp-ppak—I know that because both of his red hot spent casings found their way down the back of my shirt. I fired once—a remarkable shot, given the fact that I was wriggling like crazy to keep the fucking hot brass moving so they wouldn’t burn me any worse than they were already. But I managed to hit the asshole square in the chest and send him butt over teakettle. At thirty feet, the AK kicks ass like the proverbial mule.

  Koby’s eyes were still focused downrange to seek out any more threats. His cheek mold on the stock was still firm. But his finger had moved off the trigger. “Mine went down first, mister officer.”

  I really liked this guy—except for where he put his used brass. “Fuck you, mister sergeant. Your muzzle speed’s faster than mine. Besides it took you two shots. In my Navy we learn not to waste ammo.”

  Meanwhile, Ehud didn’t look much like a hood anymore. He was rolled up into a ball, moaning like the cocksucking coward he was. Coward? Yeah—people who get their kicks by torturing other people are basically cowards. People who set bombs that kill innocent people are basically cowards. And people who sell their countries out are cocksuckers. Ehud was both.

  And Werner? He was just a cocksucker—a cocksucker who was jumping around like a fucking organ-grinder’s monkey, waving his cell phone and screaming “Don’t shoot” in five or six languages.

  “C’mon—” I was on my feet and charging forward. I kicked the pistol from where Ehud had dropped it so it was out of everybody’s reach. Then I slapped Werner onto the deck—he went down without too much protest—stomped his phone just in case he had an autolocator in it, and frisked him, thoroughly, top to bottom.

  Wonder dealt with the two corpses while Avi and Koby worked over Ehud. They did a pretty job of hog-tying the cocksucker with their kosher duct tape, too. He looked like a fucking bleeding mummy when they finished with him.

  Meanwhile, I grabbed Werner by the collar of his four-grand suit and dragged him over to the generator. Except, when I took a look at it, it wasn’t a generator. It was a small insulated container with a pressurized, gasketed cap held in place by a series of wing nuts.

  I nudged the device with my foot and looked at Werner. “What is it?”

  He shrugged, as if to say he didn’t know.

  I backhanded him. He went down hard. “C’mon, Werner …”

  He crawled onto his hands and knees, then struggled to his feet. The artery in his neck was throbbing more than it had in Paris.

  I took him by the lapels with my left hand, squeezed tightly, lifted his feet just off the ground, then swatted him across the face half a dozen times with my right hand. “Werner …”

  I released him. He wiped blood from his nose. “It’s a chemical residue device.”

  A what? I’d never heard of anything called a chemical residue device. So I asked Werner to explain what it was in language that I could understand. I didn’t say please, either.

  But he told me anyway, in words of two syllables or less, just like I’d asked. Werner stopped speaking. I looked at him and he cringed, as if I was going to slap him around again. Oh, I thought about it, but why waste the effort.

  Besides, I had other things on my mind right now. You see, dear reader, things had just become very, very clear.

  What we’d discovered here, friends, was a form of hunting lure.

  You see, when some people hunt deer, they use chemical agents to attract their prey. They spray themselves with doe scent—and hope that some very big and horny buck (sorry about that) will smell it, get all excited, and come charging blindly through the woods in search of doe pussy.

  Well, same principle applies here. We all know that the dual-use equipment the Syrians bought is still in its crates in the basement, which means there’s nothing that would attract a FORTE satellite. So Werner set a lure—this chemical quim—which FORTE, flying overhead, sniffed out. The satellite data would be fed through Langley to the Israelis, who’d come and flatten the building. No wonder the CIA had caved on the FORTE so fast.

  Now he was packing it up—absquatulating with the evidence just the way I absquatulated when I was taking Vynkenski, Blynkenski, and Nodyev to the cleaners back in Moscow. Why bother? No sense leaving anything that might be discovered later in the rubble.

  But there was more. I opened the aluminum suitcases. Inside each was a battery-operated laser targeting device. They were the same sort of devices SpecWar operators had used during the Gulf War. A squad of SAS or Delta shooters would infiltrate Iraq, plant a couple of these gizmos close by a strategic target and turn them on, then skedaddle out of Dodge. Some hours later, an air strike would flatten the place with laser-guided weapons. Fire and forget, is what the pilots call it.

  In fact, the Israelis had used the same technique when they bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Ossirak back in 1981. The only problem back then was that the Mossad agent who was responsible for setting the laser device didn’t make it out of the plant and was killed during the raid.

  But that was then and this was now, and it was crystal-clear obvious what was going on. Werner and Ehud had come to remove the lure, plant the targeting devices, then pull out before the Israelis hit the place.

  Gentle reader, you know as well as I do what the obvious question is. Let’s all say it together: So, when will the Israelis hit the place?

  I posed the question to Werner—who had to know, since he was one of the folks placing the targeting devices. When he didn’t answer I broke a finger—his, not mine—and asked him once more. This time he decided to tell me.

  “Fourteen-thirty,” he gulped, tears streaming down his face. “When the sun will make it more difficult for the Syrians to chase the raiders west.”

  I examined Werner’s sorry puss closely. My own expression made it very clear to him that if he’d lied, he was a dead man. But the information he’d given me was tactically practical—it made the kind of KISS-sense Israelis are known for. It also gave us some time. But not a lot.

  By now, my friends, you must be wondering WTF. I mean, this situation is very much like one of those Russkie matryoshka dolls you buy at the Izmaylovo art market in Moscow—the dolls that open up and there’s a smaller one inside, and you open that one up, and there’s another, and another, and another.

  Well, what we have here is a sting within a sting. You say you don’t quite understand? Okay—let me give you some gist.

  Item: Mossad constructs a sting, i.e., selling Russkie dual-use equipment to the Syrians, so that the new government can use the situation to trash the Syrians and take them out of the peace process. To accomplish this they use Werner Lantos, who keeps CIA informed—to a degree. But Werner is his own man. He’s greedy and he’s corrupt. And maybe he’s a double agent as well.

  So he convinces the Russk
ies to play. Well, that’s to be expected: for them it’s a win-win situation. They get hard currency for their dual-use material, and their people get a foothold back in Syria. I’d be willing to bet a buck or two there’d be some intelligence operatives along with the technicians.

  So the sting is set up. But there’s a glitch: Paul Mahon senses there’s something awry. So Werner has Andrei Yudin the vor waste Paul and his family. That would have been the end of the story—except for the fact that Paul was my friend and my shipmate.

  Okay. Segue to the present. Syria is hit by an Israeli air strike that levels this building and destroys all the dual-use equipment. What happens?

  Well, first and foremost, as the news commentators are fond of saying, the peace process is stopped cold—with the Golan Heights still in Israeli hands. That makes the current Israeli government very happy.

  But what about the bigger picture?

  Item: the world learns that the intelligence that Israel used to base its attack—the FORTE information—was provided by the United States.

  Item: the Arab world’s negative opinion of the United States is increased.

  And now here is the kicker.

  Item: Russia now steps in and offers its services to the Arab world as mediators, a move that will help to reposition it as a global power broker.

  I see you waving your paw. You say you don’t think the Israelis would bomb the site unless they had independent confirmation about the nuclear materials.

  But they did have it—from Ehud the Hood. Which is why he and his fellow no-goodnik Werner Lantos were here up close and personal to place the targeting devices.

  Well, it was time to toss a fucking SEAL wrench into the plot. “Wonder—finish planting the goddamn explosives. I wanna blow the hell out of this place.”

  “Aye, aye, Skipper.” Wonder punched Koby’s arm hard enough to make the tough Israeli wince. “C’mon, mister sergeant—let’s go make the earth move.”