RW16 - Domino Theory

by Richard Marcinko

  “I don’t know that they bribed anyone.”

  “Oh, come on, Marcinko. How the hell did they get out? You think they’re clever?”

  “Some of them are.”

  “I’ll tell you what the problem is, Marcinko. You’re getting old. Soft around the middle.”

  I prayed he’d test just how soft the middle was, but he kept walking and pontificating.

  “They’re probably halfway back to Pakistan by now,” he added. “Laughing the whole way.”

  “I thought Pakistan was an agency project,” I told him.

  “Oh, yeah, right. Half the damn Pakis are part of the Taliban. They’re in Osama’s back pocket. The other half are so damned afraid of him they pee in their beds at night. I thought you knew this, Marcinko.”

  Another thing that I didn’t like about him — he pronounced my name “Mar-chink-o,” like an ethnic slur.

  It’s “Mar-sink-o,” thank you very much.

  “So how come the agency knows so much about these guys, but can’t find them?” I asked.

  “Who said we’re looking for them? This isn’t our fight, Marcinko. We have bigger fish to fry. You know how many Chinese spies there are in Delhi?”

  “I wouldn’t hazard a guess.”

  “I didn’t think you could.”

  “Did your boss tell you to give me a hard time, or was there an actual reason you wanted to talk to me?”

  “I didn’t want to talk to you,” he said coldly. “The agency is worried about the Commonwealth Games. We don’t want them screwed up.”

  “I hear the girls’ badminton team from Sri Lanka is looking for a sub.”

  “Har-har. I’m offering you agency assistance.”

  “That’s nice. But I don’t need any.”

  “Your minister does.”

  “Have you seen her? I’d say she does pretty well for herself.”

  “You’ve probably gone a few rounds with her already, huh?”

  No use denying something like that, I decided.

  “I’ll pass it along.”

  “There is something else,” he said, his voice practically dripping with reluctance. “We’re working on something, and I’m supposed to give you a heads-up.”

  “What’s that?”

  Big frown. Maybe I should have asked for a drumroll.

  “Your Gurkha goons — they’re modeled after your navy Red Cell thing.”

  “Somewhat.”

  “Where you went around embarrassing the brass by sneaking into Air Force One and stealing a submarine and stuff like that?”

  “More or less.”

  There was almost a hint of admiration in Omar’s smile — grudging and crooked as it was.

  “These guys are planning to do the same, huh?” he said.

  “They do what they do.”

  “There’s one thing they shouldn’t do. And that’s hit the Banshee Armory.”

  “I’ll make sure it’s their first target.”

  Smoke just about poured from his ears. Curses followed from his mouth. He sputtered a bit, then ordered me not to strike the armory.

  It was comical, actually. He managed to squeeze the words “treason” and “court-martial” between a dozen four-letter words. I admired him for that.

  “I have no intention of hitting the armory,” I admitted. “But I’m not in charge of them.”

  “Bullshit. From what I hear, you practically tell them when to burp.”

  I shrugged.

  “You screw this up, Marcinko, and the agency will cut you off forever. You’ll be dead to us. Deader than dead.”

  * * *

  It was an enticing offer, though I couldn’t in good faith accept it, at least not without knowing what the hell it was that I was screwing up. The Banshee Armory was not on the list of facilities that Special Squad Zero was supposed to test, and in fact I hadn’t heard of it at all.

  A few minutes on the Internet in the hotel business center fixed that. The Banshee Armory was the nickname of a former Indian army base about thirty miles northeast of town. Abandoned in 2005, at least according to the stories.

  I was considering whether the place was too old to have a MySpace page when the phone rang. The number that came up was from Washington, D.C., though I didn’t recognize it.

  “Marcinko,” I said, thumbing it on.

  “Richard Marcinko?”

  “The same.”

  “Please hold for Madam Secretary.”

  Hold what, I wondered.

  “Richard, is that you?”

  “Yes, Ms. Secretary.”

  “How are you?”

  “Holding my own.”

  “I hope not.” She laughed. “That’s never been a problem for you.”

  You have to love a secretary of State with a sense of humor. Then again, considering her home situation, she’d have to have one.

  “You make me blush,” I said.

  “I’ll bet. Listen, Richard, I understand you’re in India helping the government there out.”

  “More or less.”

  “I hope more. The Commonwealth Games are very important to us. And to the nonproliferation efforts on the subcontinent.”

  “I see.”

  “As it happens, I’m going to attend the Games myself. Maybe we can have lunch. I’ll be in town in a few days.”

  “I’d love to have lunch.”

  All right, so I lied. But it’s the sort of thing you have to say and anyway, she wasn’t really going to invite me to lunch.

  But our conversation was extremely important. Because it connected a lot of the dots Omar had scattered in the wind. Or should I say bindi.

  * * *

  The administration had been working over the past year on plans to reduce the number of nukes out and about in the world. Efforts to restart the START treaty — sorry, couldn’t resist — with Russia had garnered most of the headlines, and everyone knew about Iran and their now-we-build-it, now-we-pretend-you’re-blind charade. But the U.S. was trying to reduce the number of nuclear weapons everywhere. And frankly if there was one place in the world where cutting the number of A bombs would be a positive achievement, it was on the Indian subcontinent.

  India has somewhere more than seventy nuclear warheads. Pakistan’s actual number is the subject of many a barroom debate, or would be if the analysts who debate such things ever stepped out of their bunkers for beer. They’re thought to have between a dozen and twenty, but you can find arguments to support just about any number you pick short of fifty.

  Yes, beautifully stable Pakistan, the country whose army has regularly had its ass kicked by guys in rags and sandals.

  Apparently, Madam Secretary was nearing some sort of agreement with the Indians and Pakistanis. The negotiations were secret, which was why she was coming to Delhi for the Games. Though probably as many people saw her as a rugby fan as believed she loved to bake cookies.

  Actually, she makes very good cookies, but I digress.

  And Banshee Armory?

  Well, at first I thought it was going to be the meeting place for high-level delegations from Pakistan and India, a good isolated spot where the two sides could hash out their differences.

  Come to find out, the only thing that was meeting there were nuclear warheads.

  Seventy of them in fact. Supposedly all that India admitted it had.8

  * * *

  I hadn’t put two and two together when I swung out to the armory that afternoon. In fact, it was Doc who really figured it out. Or at least first noticed the clues that made it obvious what was going on.

  Longtime readers — and shouldn’t you all be? — remember that Doc was one of the original plank owners of the first Red Cell. “Plank owners” is an affectionate navy term for the SOBs who bust their asses and risk their necks getting the kinks worked out of a vessel or a unit when it launches.

  That first crew owns the ship. In a very real way, their experiences haunt the vessel for the rest of its days.

  Doc cer
tainly had that effect on Red Cell. One of the things I liked best about the unit was the fact that everybody involved could handle every job, and then some. You can guess that with a nickname like “Doc,” his specialty, at least at one point in his career, involved medicine. And as I always say, Doc could sew you up just as fast as he could cut you up. I’m not sure there aren’t a number of guys walking around with empty chests — Doc was so good he could slit open the skin, pull out your heart, then have you sewn up in a blink of an eye.

  But like the rest of the crew, he was a real Renaissance man. He could handle coms, cook, blow up anything smaller than a baseball stadium, and put a bullet into a muskrat’s tail at five hundred yards.

  Maybe I exaggerate. His roast beef could stand a little improvement, truth be told.

  I’m buttering him up now because I was buttering him up then, singing his praises as we drove out in our rented Suzuki knockoff to take a look at the armory. Because Doc had brought up the R word.

  “Retirement.”

  Of course, he didn’t come at it straight on.

  “I’m thinking of taking off for a bit, Dick, after this op,” he said. “Maybe put a few miles on the RV.”

  “RV? Since when do you have a camper?”

  “We bought it a while back. Just thinking we’ll take things a little easy, me and the wife.9 See the world while we’re still young.”

  “You joined the navy to see the world. And look how that turned out.”

  “Ha!”

  Doc’s got a good laugh. The car was pretty flimsy. We shook so hard I nearly went off the road.

  “I’m thinking maybe I’ll slow down permanently,” he added.

  “You can do whatever you want. You’ve earned it.”

  “Thanks. We got a lot of young bucks on board now. The company’s in good hands.”

  “Can’t argue with that.”

  “You oughta think about stepping back a bit yourself,” he said.

  I gave him a sidelong glance.

  “You know, take it easier. Let Danny take up some of the slack. Trace. Junior, maybe.”

  “Danny and Trace, I can see. But Junior’s still very wet behind the ears.”

  “I don’t know. He’s got a lot of gumption. And he’s smart. There’s no doubt about that.”

  “He’s just smart enough to get himself in trouble.”

  “Reminds me of a young officer I knew once upon a time.”

  Yeah, you can see where that went. It would have generated into a virtual ass-kissing contest had we not arrived at the turnoff to the Banshee Armory.

  Or rather, had we not been waved away from the Banshee Armory by a very serious policeman.

  How serious?

  Well, he didn’t smile, and neither did the assault gun he pointed at the car when he told us the road was closed.

  But the true measure of his determination would have been the two T-90 Bishma tanks behind him.

  We moved on, driving almost two miles before we were sure that we were completely out of sight. I took a crossroad south, then swung back to an older road we’d seen paralleling the highway south of the armory. There were rice fields on the right, and a trio of small buildings that were propped between the road and highway. One of them looked like a grocery store.

  “Hungry?” I asked Doc, pulling off.

  “You’ve been hanging with Shotgun too long,” he said, getting out of the car.

  Even so, he was the one who bought the pastries; I had a Coke. We sat on the hood of the car, leaning back and relaxing as if exhausted by a long day of driving. About a half hour after we stopped, a white police jeep with its red bulb light flashing passed along the highway. A few seconds later, a pair of army Mahindra MM550XDs tore up the road, canvas tops flapping with the wind.

  The MM550XD is your basic jeep CJ in Indian trim, an old school throwback to the vehicle that won World War II. The pair drew a long wolf whistle from Doc, who has always been an admirer of rugged utility transportation.

  While he was waxing poetic about the synchromesh gearbox, I was looking at the Stallion five-ton truck that followed, not so much because of its size but the fact that there were heavily armed soldiers perched on the running boards at the cab.

  Even more interesting was the vehicle behind it — a flatbed with something tarped at the back.

  Two more troop trucks and another jeep took up the rear.

  “What, no helicopter?” asked Doc.

  Almost on a cue, a helicopter swept up from the rear.

  “Special delivery for the fort?” Doc asked.

  “Let’s find out.”

  The car complained as I cleared a small culvert, scraping its tailpipe and part of its bumper before hopping across the highway. The cars coming in the other direction weren’t too happy about it either.

  “We ain’t in NASCAR,” said Doc. “Don’t get us killed.”

  Even Jimmie Johnson would have been proud of the way our rental accelerated. The procession had too much of a lead for us to catch it, but the helo hovering over Banshee Armory made it obvious where it had gone. I kept going just in case, trekking another ten miles before deciding the convoy had definitely gone into the armory.

  “Big package,” said Doc. “Think they’re playing show and tell for the negotiations?”

  “Has to be,” I said. “Be nice to get a look around.”

  “You’re not thinking of going in there, are you?” asked Doc as I hunted for a place to turn. “It’s too much trouble for too little return.”

  “There’s no such thing as too much trouble.”

  “Ah, sure there is. Remember the time in Taiwan?”

  “The place you thought was a bar but turned out to be a whorehouse?”

  “The other time.”

  “I do want to have a look around,” I told him. “Let’s see what our State Department is up to.”

  “All right,” said Doc. “I have an idea.”

  “What’s that?”

  He pulled out his Apple 3G.

  “I’ll tell you as soon as I find a toy store,” he said, pulling up a mapping application.

  3

  ( I )

  The story of Doc’s conversion from a near technophobe to poster child for the connected generation is so scintillating that I reserve it for bedtime reading only — you’re sure to fall asleep if I tell it. Suffice it to say that Doc, who until a short time ago thought e-mail was a creation of the devil himself, was able to use his phone and locate a toy store fifteen miles from us. When we got there, the store turned out to be a hobby shop, which was even better.

  What did two grown men want with a place that sold Chinese knockoffs of Lionel trains and a hundred plastic soldiers for ten rupees?

  One of the unsung heroes of the Afghanistan war — or whatever we’re classifying our fun and games there nowadays — is an army weapon called Raven. Raven has seen a variety of tasks, working with the 82nd Airborne and 173rd Airborne Brigade on the front line, and even providing target intelligence for Apache gunships.

  Raven is a small UAV — officially, an unmanned aerial vehicle. You’ve heard of the Predator and its armed brother, the Reaper. They’re pickup-truck-sized aircraft that can fly for hours and hours, picking off tangos while their Air Farce pilots lounge in air-conditioned comfort halfway around the globe.10

  The Predator family members are admirable and game-changing weapons. But like all Air Farce assets, they can’t be everywhere, and getting them to where the guys on the front line actually need them can involve almost as much work as trying to get a real person on the telephone when you’re calling to straighten out your local cable bill.

  The Raven, on the other hand, is all about the guys on the front line. It can literally be carried in a rucksack.

  The Predator has a forty-eight-and-a-half-foot wingspan. The Raven’s is a touch over four feet. It weighs a little more than four pounds. It has a motor about the size of a D-cell battery or two. But it’s a powerful little thing; revved
to max, it can hit sixty miles an hour.

  The Raven looks like a kid’s toy. And it’s not all that far from one, to be honest.

  Now do you understand?

  * * *

  We bought a basic three-channel RC (for Radio Controller) battery-powered high-winged monoplane. Doc was tempted by the Sabre and Focke-Wulf models, but ultimately we went with the easier-to-control model, upgrading the engine to add flying time. The plane looked like your average Cessna, assuming your average Cessna had a forty-inch wingspan.

  We did a little reengineering — gray paint to make it hard to see against the clouds — and added a small, tourist-preferred Flip video camera to the interior. And then we launched it.

  There were some control issues, along with a couple of kids who came by after the plane landed who wanted to have a turn. But otherwise it was as easy as fiddling with a few joysticks and cursing when the wind gusted a little heavier than anticipated.

  I took a look at the video after it landed, then gave the plane and its controller to the kids. In case anyone from the armory had seen the plane and set out to investigate, all they’d find were a bunch of ragamuffins having fun.

  The video showed us everything we needed. The guard pattern inside the complex made it obvious which building was being used — a large, warehouselike armory building that would have been an obvious guess anyway. Six flatbeds were parked in a line in front. One was being unloaded with the help of an ATV and a forklift; two more were pulling in from the road.

  The Indians were moving their nukes in for the negotiations.

  * * *

  On the way back to Delhi, I had Shunt go online and see if the proceedings were being timed according to U.S. satellite sweeps. It may surprise you to know that the track of nearly every spy satellite we have is posted somewhere on the Internet. Amateur astronomers make sport of spotting them and posting the orbits on Web pages. They’ve even followed some, if not all, satellites specifically designed to avoid radar and optical detection — oops.

  In any event, Shunt quickly discovered that India’s movements were blatantly obvious to the boys over at the National Reconnaissance Office. I’m guessing that was intentional — the Indians wanted us to know what they were doing because they were doing it at least partly at our behest.