There was also the matter of Lord B. If we made a lot of noise, we’d let him know we were on the scent, which would make it harder to catch him red-handed. And, boy, did I ever want to catch this motherfucking cocksucking pus-nutted pencil-dicked tango red-handed.
And, as if all of the above weren’t enough, I was operating under a severe manpower constraint. We were seven men. I couldn’t keep an eye on Lord B and still get inside the nuclear plant. So I made an executive decision: it was more important to see what was there than it was to surveil Call Me Ishmael. We’d check up on him—but irregularly.
We did a quick inventory. Rodent had picked up a few toys at Patch Barracks that would help us out immeasurably by blanking out the plant’s communications network. The only problem is that as soon as they were activated, they’d leave a signature that No Such Agency would immediately identify.
Why is that? It is because every piece of secure communications equipment, every frequency jammer, every burst transmitter, every sensor and monitor that is purchased by the government, has to be vetted by NSA. The reason is that NSA doesn’t want anybody using scramblers that they can’t unscramble, jammers they can’t override, or burst transmitters they can’t decipher. So every single piece of comm gear, from the CIA’s SATCOM transceivers to DIA’s secure cellular phones, to the field radios used by USAF FACs—that’s Air Farce Forward Air Controllers in SEALspeak—has been outfitted with an NSA-designed computer chip known as DREC—Digitally Reconnoiterable Electronic Component. DREC allows No Such Agency to unscramble signals, tell where it’s coming from.
The reasoning behind this lunacy, so the head of NSA testified during a closed session of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence some years back, is that if the Soviets captured a bunch of U.S. equipment and started to send bad information, we’d know it because we could see that they were sending from a position that wasn’t on any of our maps.
In reality, it was done because NSA wants to be able to open everybody’s mail. It gives them political clout within the intelligence community. It guarantees their budget.
Fuck the politics—all that concerned me was that the minute we started jamming, NSA would read our signals. A little light would pop up on a map out at Ft. Meade, and the intel squirrels would start deciphering pigeon entrails, and after a few minutes of hocus-pocus, they’d begin jumping up and down like organ-grinder monkeys because they’d see there was a jamming unit operating where no jamming unit was supposed to be operating. At which point they’d send out the cavalry, and the ass of yours truly would turn to grass.
So when we switched our jamming toy on, we’d better be ready to haul balls out of France. Because there’d be a posse coming after us toot sweet. To jimmy the odds in our favor, both on the scene and at NSA, I decided to set the time of attack for 0300 Sunday—107 hours hence. Reason? Given the six-hour time difference, it would be 2100 at Ft. Meade, and as everybody knows, unless there’s a war going on, nobody pays much attention to switches and dials on Saturday night. And the French? The crew at Number 12 basically shut things down as much as they could on Friday evenings. Personnel was at just over 50 percent until Monday morning. That meant we’d have them at a numerical disadvantage. Quel dommage—what a pity.
We did a preliminary target acquisition. Things had changed since I’d led SEAL Team Two’s mission. Number 12 still sat on a mile-and-a-half-long, half-mile-wide peninsula, its back to the sea, its eastern flank adjacent to the airport. But the tiny, one-runway airport I remembered had been replaced by a two-runway, huge, international facility that took up almost three square miles. The mouth of the Var River had been moved a full kilometer to the east, and the old waterway had been drained and land-filled to provide land for the jumbo jets that brought the millions of tourists to Nice every year. As CO of SEAL Team Two, I’d had an easy fifteen-minute swim to Number 12. This time, we’d be forced to swim for just over an hour through rough current and undertow.
What hadn’t changed was the basic layout. Number 12’s main gate was still on the west, with a five-hundred-yard-long macadam road parallel to the water, running from the triple-gate ACF, or Access Control Facility, to the two-lane highway that meandered along the coast from Cannes to Menton, on the Italian border. Directly east of the plant—the airport side—lay one hundred yards of sparsely vegetated sand dunes. The seaward end of the peninsula behind the plant was mostly marshland that looked like a wildlife refuge.
I tend to be either biblical or evolutionary when it comes to ops. Sometimes I am both—the better to confound my enemies.
In the beginning, for example, was the word. And in my book, the word is that man must evolve. He must learn to crawl before he can walk. And thus, on the evening and the morning of the first day, we began by crawling on our bellies like snakes, making slow and thorough progress through the brambles and thorns of the sand dunes in order to discover the weaknesses of the target that lay before us.
Then came the evening and the morning of the second day—which in actuality took place at the exact same time as the evening and the morning of the first day. And yea, Duck Foot and Howie swam around the point and came in from the sea—amphibians who made the transition from water to land and thus were able to explore the half mile of salt flat between the shoreline and the plant itself.
And night followed day, and day followed night (I’m not being literal here, gentle reader. Remember—we had a mere 107 hours to do all of this), and we tracked the employees as they came and they went, and we walked among them and lifted their wallets, and verily we stole their ID cards and driver’s licenses, the better to assume their identities should it become necessary. We shadowed Lord B’s mole, André Marcel Dall’au, known to us as Marcel Mustache. He was the superintendent of the power-block control room, a position that gave him access to the entire facility. He lived well—far above the standard a man of his position should enjoy. His colleagues drove old Renaults and Peugeots. André careened around Nice in an Alfa-Romeo roadster. They brown-bagged their lunches. He ate at fashionable restaurants. They lived lives of quiet desperation. He maintained two mistresses. Marcel Mustache, we learned, explained his opulence by hinting that his wife’s family had money. We knew better.
Why did we know better? Because Tommy T and Stevie Wonder tossed André’s two-bedroom flat when the wife and kid were out for a stroll. It was there we discovered that old André wasn’t a frog—he was a Arab. Tunisian, in fact, according to his passport. And when Tommy broke into the IBM computer sitting in the living room, he discovered by reading the Quicken for Windows program that André had been salting money away for the past nine months. Lots of money.
On Thursday at 0400 we tested Number 12’s perimeter defenses. Wonder and I swam across two hundred yards of water to the east of the plant, crawled through the brambles, went over the periphery fence, and camouflaged ourselves twenty-five yards from the pair of chain-link, ten-foot-high, barbed-wire-topped fences that sat directly behind the BURT.
What’s a BURT? you ask. It’s a Big Ugly Round Thing, asshole. You know—the huge concrete structure common to all nuclear power stations? Okay—if you’re a dip-dunk nuclear dweeb no-load engineer who uses only proper nomenclature, you refer to the BURT as a “containment building.” Everybody else calls them BURTs or CANs, as in “I’m going to the can.” (If you get caught in the CAN during a nuclear “incident,” you get … crapped up!) Anyway, the fences—there were two of them, ten yards apart, were separated by a series of microwave sensors.
I thought we were shivering enough to set the sensors off—you get goddamn cold when you come out of the water and lie completely still for fifteen minutes or so. But obviously, our vibes weren’t carrying that far. So we tossed a few rocks at the sensors. There was no response. We tossed a few more. After a quarter hour or so, a lone ranger appeared, carrying a flashlight. He wandered along the inside fence, checking the cordon sanitaire between the fence lines for fresh tracks. When he discovered none, he turned his fl
ashlight off and wandered back to his guard post to get himself a fresh cup of coffee.
We waited another quarter hour, then resumed tossing rocks. The sequence repeated itself: our security man trudged back again to see what was making the system go off. He discovered nothing. He went back to his shed.
We threw more rocks. He came out again. Wonder and I repeated the routine half a dozen more times. Finally, we got no response. Obviously, our security man had finally realized that his million-franc system was on the blink, and there was no need to inspect the fence line every time it went off.
That left the TV monitors to defeat. Guess what—an aggressor can float right through a fence line if he knows how to do it—even though there are TV monitors trained on him. How is it done? Well, in most cases—like this one, the security planners sell the powers that be on a double strand of chain-link fences. It sounds good, right? Then they sell them cameras, which are aimed at the fences, so that anyone coming over will be picked up.
But guess what? Unless chain-link fences are aligned absolutely exactly, the basket-weave pattern they create on a TV screen looks like tweed. A perpetrator who moves very slowly will not show up on the screen, unless the guard assigned to watch the monitors is paying very, very strict attention. And, just in case you didn’t know it, most guards don’t pay strict attention to the screens in front of them. Because if they did, they’d experience retinal burnout in less than a week.
By 0540 we’d exfiltrated and were warming up with a couple of cafés au lait. I was happy because it hadn’t taken long to come up with an effective assault plan. I was unhappy (life is like that, y’know) because I would have liked to recon the target once or twice more before we hit. The more information you collect, the more intelligence you can gather, the less chance Mr. Murphy has of sneaking up behind you, holding you by the shoulders, and whispering “BOHICA” in your ear. BOHICA? Yeah—Bend Over, Here It Comes Again.
I would have liked a lot of things, but as is almost always the case, my desires were overtaken by real-life events. Rodent returned from SOG duty to report that Lord B had driven the Ferrari to Nice International, where he’d rented a Gulfstream III. Rodent, God bless him, had wheedled and deedled the jeune fille behind the desk and gotten a peek at the flight plan. Today was Friday. Lord B was leaving Sunday at zero nine hundred. That’s nine
A.M. to you civilians out there. Destination—Karachi. That gave us tonight and only tonight to take a peek inside Number 12 and see whatever there was to see.
Ready or not, here we come. At least I’d preselected an escape route. We’d go east, across the border just north of Ventimiglia, and autostrada south to La Spezia, where I still had a hairy-assed Incursari Frogman friend or two I could count on not to turn us in. Ah, La Spezia—the fresh fish was incredible. The linguine and razor-clam sauce was world-class.
Even if the whole world was on our tails, we’d eat well while we figured out what to do next. And to be honest, I was running out of options. It was only a matter of time before one of Pinky’s rockets would score a hit and we’d be snapped up by some bureaucrat/cop. You can’t hide in Europe the way you used to be able to. There are too many databases, too many computer terminals. Too much shared information.
Then there was Lord B, on his way to Pakistan, gateway to Afghanistan and the terrorist training camps. Fortunately, I knew the territory. I’d been there a few years back, on assignment for GlobalTec International, a Fortune 500 oil-drilling company. Three of their top-level people had been kidnapped in a series of Katzenjammer Kidz hijackings. GTI had hired me to Katrina fix. I was broke in those days, between alimony, child support, and the cost of a defense attorney for the two trials the Navy put me through. So I signed on, got the judge’s permission to leave the country for three weeks, and played Shark Man of the Delta in backstreets and alleys from Karachi to Peshawar.
I got GTI’s boys back, too. And it didn’t cost ’em an arm and a leg, either—at least not any of GTI’s arms or legs. As for the bad guys—a group of no-goodnik desperadoes under the command of a wild-haired, bearded asshole (doesn’t that sound familiar?) who called himself Commando Sheikh—well, there are nine less of them around these days than there were before my visit. It was a very, very satisfying trip, all things considered. I got to—let me find a polite way of saying this—vent my frustrations in a physical manner, GTI was happy, and my lawyer got paid his pound of flesh.
I thumbed through the pocket-size address book I always carry in my wallet. Yeah—Iqbal’s phone number was there. Iqbal Shah was a retired inspector of police in Karachi. As a government official, he’d made $30 a month in salary, and $500 in bribes. Now he made $25,000 a year bribing his old colleagues on behalf of GTI. He’d been my initial POC—Point of Contact—when I’d arrived in Karachi.
We went back to Chez Soleil and began our load-out. Once we left the hotel tonight, it was au revoir, Maman—although we wouldn’t bother saying good-bye formally. No need to let her (or anyone else) know we were about to hit and run. No matter—we’d paid for another week three days ago.
Even though the checklist was five by five, I had a nagging sensation that I’d omitted something, and that if I didn’t remember what the hell it was, this op was going to turn FUBAR on us.
I decided that perhaps a good meal would jar my mind and said as much to the troops.
“Cooool.” Nasty Nicky Grundle made the sign of the cross. “What are we about to eat, Skipper—the last supper?”
We left Chez Soleil at about 1600 and drove into Juan-les-Pins, parked across from the Palais des Congrès, and wandered through the tiny pinède—the pine grove for which the town is named—to La Petite Source, a bifteck/frites restaurant, commandeered a table, and ordered.
Tommy T’s eagle eyes spotted it first. He looked up from his steak. “Hey—Skipper, look across the street.”
I peered through the window. Two long-haired, guitar-carrying, ragged-jeans-sporting teenagers were opening the door to a storefront. The banner above the doorway proclaimed
FOUTEZ LES NUKES!
Now, I realized all of a sudden what I’d forgotten: camouflage. I broke into a wide grin.
0100. It was time to go hunting. The op was traditional Marcinko—Keep It Simple, Stupid. We six SEALs in the assault team would go into the water at a point roughly 1,800 yards from the peninsula on which the plant was located. We’d swim as a group. That way there was less chance of someone getting lost. Besides, if you’ve ever had to swim at night across a mile or so of open, rough, choppy water, you understand that it’s easier to lose your bearings swimming alone than roped to a swim buddy. Anyway, we’d go together, then split up just off the shoreline.
Tommy, Nasty, Duck Foot, and Howie would come up the ass end by swimming around the point and make their way through the wildlife preserve. The fence line at the rear was the least protected, and their access would be relatively easy. Tommy and Nasty would work their way around to the administration building and go through it with the proverbial fine-tooth comb. Duck Foot and Howie would prowl and growl through the storage facility.
Wonder and I assigned ourselves a repeat performance at the sensor field. No problems there. We’d play havoc with the microwaves, then “float” across the fence, moving slowly, and wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, we’d be inside the compound. Our targets were the power-block building and the radwaste facility. After all, Wonder was always bragging that he knew all about nuclear reactors since he’d served on Boomer-class subs. This would give him the opportunity to prove it.
The swim would be problematic, but not an insurmountable problem. It was uncharacteristically warm on the Riviera this winter. Temperatures were in the low sixties during the day, falling to just over forty degrees at night. The water temperature was about sixty-three. That’s chilly for most folks, but even though we weren’t wearing wet suits, it was still warm enough for us SEALs—if we kept moving.
From my long experience in cold-water operations, I know that on
ce you’re swimming in water that’s colder than sixty-three degrees, the energy you expend and the muscle “burn” keep you all right for about an hour and a half. After that, you start to lose both energy and body heat. After two hours or so, things get uncomfortable. Uncomfortable, in this case, means hypothermia, followed shortly by unconsciousness, followed promptly by death.
I also knew that it would be bad if we crawled ashore and had to lie around all wet for more than a few minutes, especially after an hour-long swim. So I followed Ev Barrett’s law of the seven P’s—Proper Previous Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance—and distributed a pair of waterproof bags to each swim-buddy team. Towed behind, the bags would contain dry, warm clothes and footwear, a radio for each swim team, as well as a bunch of antinuke bumper decals we’d bought at the “Fuck the Nuke” store.
That was our camouflage. We’d leave copious evidence that the plant had been infiltrated by a bunch of “Save the Whales” activists. I hoped to further convince the authorities of my deceit by leaving behind a few small booby traps. Nasty and Rodent had spent the afternoon building half a dozen IEDs—Improvised Explosive Devices. They were real KISS explosives, the kind of basic bang-bang that amateur tangos tend to use. Oh, damage would be real—but very, very limited.
Finally, there was Rodent—my rat in the grass. Since I pronounced him too small to swim and too mean to drown, we positioned him in the Mercedes across the highway, opposite the plant access road. The car was hidden behind a thicket, facing east, ready for the getaway. Rodent was in perfect position to keep us posted on what was, or wasn’t, coming in our direction. He was also in charge of the jamming equipment, which he’d powered up by jury-rigging a power line to the Mercedes’s generator.
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