We came full circle. Nothing. I dropped the waterproof bag I’d carried slung over my shoulder and scratched my beard. My instincts are very good. Seldom am I mistaken. But here, just like at Brookfield House in London, we were coming up dry.
“Let’s go round again.”
Stevie’s face showed that he didn’t want to stay here any longer than he had to. But he gritted his teeth, and we worked our way around the concrete one more time.
I spotted it two-thirds of the way around the pool. There was a rectangular box colored so similar to the pool floor that it was almost invisible. You had to really look to see it. The container was five feet long, two feet wide, and about a foot high, with what looked like about twelve separate compartments built into it. It looked like a giant egg carton with handles on each end.
I peered down. The damn thing had Cyrillic writing on it—or that’s how it looked from where I stood. Maybe it was Arabic. Maybe it was French. Who could tell.
I pointed. “Wonder—”
Stevie came over for a look. “Damn. That sure ain’t no heavy water.”
“Or fuel rods either.” I looked around. “Let’s find something to snag it—bring it out of the water and take a look.”
“Sounds good to me.”
We poked around. There were some short timbers, and a broken pallet at the far end of the warehouse. But that was it. “Lemme check outside.”
Wonder slipped through the door. An eternity later—actually, two minutes or so—the door opened, and he came through holding what looked like a twelve-foot length of one-inch water pipe with a ninety-degree joint at the end of it.
“Let’s try this.”
We slid the pipe into the water. By stretching, we were able to reach far enough to snag the handle on the near side of the container. “Great. Okay—”
We pulled gently. The box didn’t budge. We tried harder. Nothing. Then we really put our backs into it. “Heave,” I grunted.
The damn thing moved about an inch. Then the fucking joint separated, and we tumbled ass backward onto the concrete. I landed hard on my tailbone, which didn’t appreciate the wallop.
“So much for plan A.” Stevie brushed himself off. “What’s next, Dickhead?”
I responded by pulling off my shoes, socks, trousers, and shirt. “Time for a little swim.”
“What are you, fucking crazy?”
I ignored Wonder long enough to pull the dive mask out of the waterproof bag and clip the Emerson onto my Skivvies. I know—I know, Frogmen don’t wear Skivvies. But I was working undercover. “What’s your point?”
“That’s goddamn radioactive water. You’ll fucking contaminate. Don’t even think about it.”
Actually, I had thought about it—for years. As a member of UDT-21, I’d been selected as one of the Team’s Alpha Squad divers. ASDs were given advanced cold-water and deep-water dive training and were schooled in nuclear-weapons retrieval. Whenever a B-52 went down over the ocean, or in a swamp, we were rousted and scrambled to retrieve the bomb. It was all very top secret.
As part of our training, we worked out a series of dive tables that gave us a rough idea of how long we could stay alive when exposed to various degrees of radiation. Of course, those were the days when the military exposed thousands of personnel to lethal doses of radiation and didn’t give a rusty fuck. But we were more careful than most, and although the water killed six Alpha divers, we never lost a man to radiation.
Later, as a SEAL officer, I participated in what we called NPUs—Nuke Pack Units. We were given an assignment to land in a hostile area—swim into Petropavlovsk harbor, say—carrying a small tactical nuclear weapon that could be carried by one man. We practiced our infiltrations during NATO exercises, playing the part of Soviet Spetsnaz special-forces naval commandos—and we always planted our suitcase-sized charges exactly where we’d been told. (The brass said we’d have twelve hours after planting a real nuclear device in which to exfiltrate. It was always my private feeling, however, that the fuses had zero-time detonators. What the hell—we were cannon fodder anyway.) As a part of this top-secret unit, I was thoroughly schooled in the rads and REMs of complicated radiation-exposure tables. I knew how much a man could take before he cooked himself.
Finally, as CO of Red Cell, I’d worked with nuclear scientists. It was part of our covert, real-world assignment, designated OP-06 Delta slash Tango Romeo Alpha Papa, code name Waterfall Weatherman. Under the OP-06 Delta designation of Red Cell we roamed the world doing security exercises at naval bases. Under Waterfall Weatherman, we operated in two-man teams, neutralizing targets that had been designated by the National Command Authority of the president and the secretary of defense. As part of the program, we’d had to disable a nuclear power plant in the Middle East. I’d spent three days working at a plant in South Florida, learning about REMs and rads and other nitnoy bullshit that would keep me and my men alive.
So I had a pretty good idea what I was doing, and the risk I was taking. First, I guesstimated I wouldn’t be in the water for more than a couple of minutes. Then, the heavy water—the water closest to where the spent fuel rods were stored—was indeed lethal. But, being heavy water, it stayed at the bottom of the pool. The water where the container lay was not heavily contaminated. So, if I stayed only a few minutes, and if I didn’t stir the pool too much, and if I didn’t swallow anything, and if I hosed myself off thoroughly … well, you get the idea.
“Get one of those decontamination hoses ready,” I ordered Wonder. “And when I come out, wash me off good.”
“You’re fucking out of your fucking gourd.”
“Like I said, what’s your point?”
“Ahh—” He threw his hands up in disgust. “What the hell.”
I knew better than to dive. I sat on the edge of the concrete apron and slid myself down the incline. The water was only about one hundred or so—cooler than I keep the indoor Jacuzzi back at Rogue Manor. Still, the warmth was palpable. I’d look like a lobster if I took too long. Like a glow-in-the-dark lobster, that is. “Don’t worry—this is why they invented Dr. Bombay.” I adjusted my mask and slipped under the surface.
I swam to the container and looked it over quickly, trying to figure the best way to move it. I tried lifting one end. The goddamn thing weighed a ton. I ran a fingernail over the surface. Lead. I tried to open the top. It didn’t move. I reached under the lip with the blade of my Emerson and pried. Nothing—it appeared to be sealed solid. Okay—I’d drag the fucking thing up, no matter how much it weighed. I grabbed the handle, set my feet, and heaved.
It only moved about an inch. But it moved. I dug my heels and tugged again, straining every fucking muscle in my legs and back judging from the series of pops I heard from those regions. It moved another inch.
Now I knew I wanted this motherfucker bad. And it was going to be mine, too. I surfaced long enough to grab a breath, then went back to work. I heard Wonder saying something, but I wasn’t paying attention, so I dove again.
I was real surprised when Wonder joined me underwater.
What’s up? I asked by shrugging.
Enemy seen, Wonder responded by clenching his fist and pointing his thumb toward the bottom of the pool.
How many? I asked.
He held up two fingers.
Direction?
He pointed toward the near end of the building. The fucking security guards were probably making their rounds. Now I tried to remember whether their punch-clock stations were inside or outside. If they punched the clocks inside the radwaste building, we were gonna be dead men—toasted.
We waited. Seconds ticked off in my head. We were fucking cooking in this water. I turtled. I looked around. No security guards. We’d lucked out.
Wonder sputtered to the surface, shook off as much water as he could, and breathed deeply. “Fuck me.” He started moving for the apron.
“C’mon, let’s go to work, asshole—now that you got wet, you might as well stay.”
With
the two of us heaving, we had the crate out of the water in about thirty seconds. Hell—it only weighed 250 pounds or so. I ran for the wall and turned the spigot. I hosed Wonder down good, then stood still while he worked me over, then directed the nozzle at the crate.
We dragged it behind a pile of drums where we couldn’t be seen and examined it. I looked at the writing. It was indeed Cyrillic. Soviet military issue. Banded with steel tape. I worked at the band with my Emerson. Finally, I was able to get some leverage and snap it. Wonder and I pulled the cover off.
There were spaces for twelve “eggs” in this egg container. Six of the spaces were empty. The others contained wet olive-drab cans about the size of a quart of paint—obviously, the crate hadn’t been sealed very well. The cans all bore the BW—Biological Warfare—materials sign.
Well, at least I knew it wasn’t botulism. Botulism has to be refrigerated—and this stuff had been cooked but good in the hundred-degree water. So what we had here could be virulent E. coli, anthrax, salmonella-C, or any of half a dozen other lethal agents that thrive in hot temperatures. I hefted a can. It weighed about two pounds. I took three and handed them to Wonder. “Here—you may need ’em.”
“Yeah—if I ever wanted to cause World War Three.” He put them in his watertight bag. “Do you know how much damage you could do with this shit?”
I knew all too well. And Lord B was a cunning son of a bitch to hide it where he had. Who’d ever think of looking for biological agents in a goddamn nuclear plant. “We could take out the whole east coast of the United States. Or all of Britain or France. Slip it in the Paris water supply tonight and kill two million people tomorrow. Or dump it in a reservoir. You’re the New Yorker. What’s the main one for the New York City water system?”
“Croton.”
“Yeah—Croton. That would make the World Trade Center bombing into child’s play.”
“This is baaad shit, Dickhead.”
I dropped my three cans in my waterproof bag and zipped it closed. “It’s bad news, too—Lord B got here ahead of us. Half the fucking crate’s empty.”
There are times when, despite all the plans you make, and regardless of your mission parameters, something turns you into a killing machine. It happened to me in Vietnam after Clarence Risher, the only SEAL I’ve ever lost in combat, was killed at Chau Doc up on the Cambodian border during the 1968 Tet Offensive. In the months after Risher’s death, I showed Mr. Charlie no mercy. I went hunting nightly. I always brought back scalps. And I learned how to terrify my enemy—truly spook them. I began booby-trapping the bodies of those I’d killed, and the hooches where they lived. I brought back VC ammo, doctored it, and returned it to their caches so that when it was fired, it would explode in the chambers of their weapons. I used the VC’s symbology against them. For example, one night I left a sextet of VC corpses sitting in front of their hooch. They sat in a row, like Buddhist priests, their legs crossed. In their laps, they held their heads. Into each skull, I’d stuck a smoking joss stick. That must have been a sight when mama-san came home.
Brutal, you say? Yup. Unpleasant? True. War is not a meticulous, polite, proper event, played out by gentlemen on a chessboard. War is horrific, chaotic, messy, and nasty. It is frenzied, inhuman, brutal, and terribly violent. There is a lot of death—none of it pretty. There is endless carnage—none of it nice. There is copious blood—none of it neat. There is cruelty and wanton killing. There is death by friend and by foe alike.
War is ferocity and violence of action. A lot of the liberal, pantywaist press got all upset when, as part of the great sweeping motion that flanked the Iraqis, U.S. forces used bulldozers to bury Iraqi troops alive in their trenches. I remember questions in the Pentagon briefing having to do with whether or not our forces were “fair” or not.
What bullshit naïveté. What numb-nutted ignorance of the real world. What the Americans did saved American lives. More Iraqis died than we did. That’s the point of war in the first place—kill more of the enemy than he kills of you. But from the way it was written up, we should have gone in and asked the Iraqis if they’d like to, perhaps, maybe, come on out of their trenches and join us for some milk and cookies, or taken ’em on one by one.
Indeed, sometimes I think we’ve become too conditioned by war as seen on TV in old cowboy movies. You know the kind—where John Wayne tosses aside his six-gun when the bad guy runs out of ammo? The kind where the good guy fights six desperadoes in a bar and his white hat never comes off his head?
Hey, friend, that’s not the way it happens. You get mad at your enemy when you’re in combat. You want to kill him—any way you can. I have always taught my men that the act of killing my enemy is an act of respect toward him. Why? Because by killing him I deem him lethal—which is his duty toward me. I have also discovered over my more than thirty-year career that it is a cleansing act to kill your enemy—to kill him with violence and terror in the Old Testament style.
War, after all, horrific as it is, purifies the Warrior’s soul. It gives him a reason to live.
But sometimes, as I said, the Warrior’s soul turns to blackness and absolute wrath.
It happened after Chau Doc. It happened here and now, too.
The discovery of the BW agents brought me to a white heat of fury. It enraged me because these weapons were intended to be used against civilian targets by tango assholes whose motives could be summed up in two words: wholesale murder. When I formed SEAL Team Six, the Navy wanted me to create a counterterrorism unit—a hostage-rescue team. The goal I set was more ambitious. It was to put together a unit that could go anywhere, could do anything it had to, in order to kill terrorists before they killed innocent civilians. We called it antiterror, a proactive term, as opposed to the more conventional counterterror, which is a reactive way of dealing with the problem after the fact.
To achieve my goal, I did whatever I believed was necessary. Threats, blackmail, intimidation—I used them all against the Navy system because the end was worth the means. The unit’s creation was worth the hits I took. The fact that SEAL Team Six was the most capable and lethal antiterror unit ever created made the scars I wore from combat with the Navy brass my badges of honor. The fact that they trained under combat conditions with the world’s best equipment made it bearable when the Navy pronounced me an unpredictable rogue who couldn’t function as part of the system.
But, ultimately, that system prevailed. I was removed from command. I was replaced with a series of by-the-book commanders who turned one of the greatest shoot-and-loot units ever created into a huge, cumbersome, top-heavy bureaucracy. When I created SEAL Team Six, I chose seventy-two shooters. Repeat: shooters. Now, there are more than five hundred slots—most of them support troops, including women. Training fatalities have been cut to zero. There’s a great SEAL Team Six touch-football team. But the number of real hunters—Warriors who are capable of operating clandestinely anywhere in the world to hunt and seek and destroy no matter what the odds—has, like the days of September, dwindled down to a precious few.
Thanks to CNO, I had been given what few commanders are ever given—a second chance. When he gave me Green Team, it was as if I’d been given my life back again. Once again, I’d been given the chance to lead a lean, mean fighting machine whose job was to kill tangos by any means possible—to do it to them before they did it to us.
But now, with CNO dead and the apparatchiki firmly in command again, I was once again the uncontrollable rogue who had to be stopped—and Pinky intended to stop me by having me arrested for murder. Murder in this case being the death of a tango who was tied into a worldwide, transnational conspiracy. Just as CNO had said, the threat today was greater than it had ever been. The evidence in our waterproof bags also proved that the opposition was planning murder on a scale that hadn’t been achieved before.
Well, I could ratchet things up, too. I took the SAS burst transmitter from the bag and sent Mick Owen a quick message telling him I’d discovered BW materials. I let him know
I’d contact him again in two hours with specifics. I sent the rest of the team a quick message ordering them to clear out. Then Wonder and I set to work.
We rigged an IED with some muscle. I took a golf-ball-sized chunk of C-4 explosive and stuck a detonator set for ten minutes into the middle of the plastic. I rolled a condom over the whole thing to keep it waterproof, then tied the rubber off. While I made my IED, Wonder was making another. Why two IEDs? Because that’s the way Ev Barrett taught me to do it with satchel charges twenty-five years ago. “You stupid blankety blanker,” he’d growl, “what the hell are you gonna do when you’re fifty feet underwater and you’ve only brought one motherblanking igniter? Answer that, you no-load geek asshole.”
We tossed the two explosives into the deepest part of the pool and watched them sink among the drums of spent plutonium. With any luck, we’d have a mini-Nagasaki in less than a quarter hour.
Time to move. We slung the waterproof bags over our shoulders and, after making sure that all was clear, went out the door.
I stayed close to the building. Wonder was tight behind me. I used hand signals. We’d cross the compound, cut around the power block, and exfil by going over the fence due north of the administration, where there was only one chain-link fence. He nodded and gave me a thumbs-up.
I was looking at Wonder, so I didn’t see Marcel Mustache himself coming around the corner of the open storage shed. I actually walked right into the son of a bitch.
“Excusez—” He actually started to apologize, until he realized we hadn’t been properly introduced. Maybe he thought I was one of the night watchmen.
I didn’t hesitate. I said, “Pardonnez-moi,” then I sucker punched him. He went down, the surprised look on his face classic in its Gallic incertitude.
I rolled him over and frisked him quickly, took his wallet and every piece of paper he was carrying as well. I handed my waterproof bag to Wonder and threw Marcel over my shoulder. There were questions I wanted to ask him, but this was neither the time nor the place.
RW03 - Green Team Page 24