RW16 - Domino Theory

by Richard Marcinko

  “Shotgun, up,” I said in a low stage whisper. We had radios, but we were so close we didn’t need them.

  “Skipper?”

  “I’m going to grab the guy pumping gas. You cover me. Anyone comes out of the cab, clobber them.”

  “Got it.”

  “I have to circle around. Watch me.”

  “No problem.”

  I slipped back and trotted around the edge of the fueling area. My breath started to catch in my chest. As I turned the corner to come around the truck, I saw two guards walking in my direction.

  I dropped to my knee. There were some stanchions and a light pole between us, but primarily I was relying on the darkness to keep from being seen. Dressed completely in black, with my face the color of anthracite fresh from a mine, I was just part of the black night.

  Or so I hoped.

  The two men walked forward about five paces, then suddenly stopped. They looked at each other, and began to practically moan.

  “What? That smell,” said one.

  The other answered in what I guess was Punjabi.

  “I don’t understand,” said the first. “Use Hindi or English.”

  “Something died,” said the other. “It must be that truck. It came up from the south.”

  “They’re all farmers there,” said the first, in a way that implied anything but a compliment.

  The two soldiers turned and began walking quickly in the other direction. Proof positive that stepping in shit does have its occasional rewards.

  I waited a full minute, then continued around to the truck, where the driver was just finishing filling it. He returned the nozzle and hose to the machine, then came around the driver’s side to climb back aboard.

  I smacked him on the neck with my trusty blackjack. A whistle brought Shotgun lumbering from the shadow. Together we hoisted him into the back.

  “We better tie and gag him, just in case,” I said. “I don’t want him waking up and screaming while we’re in the middle of something.”

  Shotgun felt bad for the soldier — he figured that he was going to be in trouble for losing his truck.

  “Better that than his life,” said Doc, who by now had joined us.

  I promised Shotgun that if we had a chance later on, we’d cut the soldier’s binds and just stick him in the driver’s seat when we left. That seemed to make him happy; I sensed that there was a dark incident in Shotgun’s past involving a first sergeant and a snooze fest in the back of a truck, but I didn’t probe.

  Clearing the worst of the muck and black off my face with a few splashes of water, I got behind the wheel and started up the truck. It was a Russian-made Ural transport, a six-by-six five-ton combat support vehicle roughly equivalent to our old M44, though its petrol-fired engine couldn’t quite match our six-by-six’s reliability or toughness.

  We weren’t putting it to the test, however. I drove around the service area and through the gate, slowing but not stopping as I neared the guards. One of them put up his hand, as if he was going to wave us over — Shotgun and Doc were poised in the back in that eventuality — but then quickly waved me by.

  He was one of the men who’d reversed course earlier. I had the windows down, and he’d undoubtedly caught a whiff on the wind.

  Like I say, sometimes stepping in shit is the best way to proceed.

  The truck brought us right into the lion’s den. The center of the compound was dominated by a row of three brick buildings, each two stories high. These had been the center of the installation at one time, command post buildings used for various offices. Empty now, they stood at one side of a large open square where several tanks and about a dozen Land Rovers were parked. Some tents were pitched at one end of the square; these were used by guards as rest areas when they took breaks or came on or off duty at the armory building that sat opposite the buildings on the other side of the square.

  The armory was our target. It was essentially a large warehouse, a mustering area whose interior was probably the size of Madison Square Garden. Relatively plain, the only architectural flourish was a narrow second roof that ran down the middle on top of the first. Nestled atop a row of narrow-slit windows, this top layer of the building worked like the cupola in a nineteenth-century barn, drawing hot, stale air out in the summer. Maybe not as effective as the air-conditioning units, but a lot cheaper.

  About a dozen guards circulated in and out of the building, keeping watch.

  I parked in front of the empty administration buildings, then went around the back to get Shotgun and Doc. Rather than staying in the truck as I’d planned, I took them around the side of one of the buildings where I’d seen a fire escape while passing. We climbed up and got on the roof. There were guard towers on the perimeter, but the men inside were watching the fence line, not the middle of the fort.

  “Now what do we do?” asked Shotgun.

  “Now we wait for something to happen,” I told him.

  “How much you figure those bombs would be worth?” he asked.

  “Why? You thinking of buying one?”

  “Just askin’.”

  “If you could find a buyer, one would be worth millions. A hundred million, easy.”

  “Yeah, but you’d never find a buyer,” said Doc. “Who the hell’s going to buy it? For one thing, the people who really want one — North Korea, Iran — they already have programs of their own. The U.S., Russia — they’re not going to buy secondhand weapons. Israel? They’ve got plenty.”

  “You don’t think Saudi Arabia would pay for a nuke?” I asked. “Just to have them in case Iran explodes it?”

  “I guess,” he admitted. “But really — if they did want one, they could buy it themselves. Hell, they could go over to India, cut a deal for oil. Don’t give us a bomb. Just give us technology. Because we don’t want to be pushed around by Iran. And it’s in your interest. If Iran decides to play nuclear chicken, your energy prices are going up, and you’re going to get screwed.”

  It was decent logic. I didn’t make the argument at the time — we had a few other things to concentrate on — but if you really wanted to play devil’s advocate, you could suggest that the most logical technology seller in that kind of calculus was the U.S. We wanted oil, we hated Iran, and if we didn’t do anything about Iran’s nuclear program — which at the point this was all taking place, we hadn’t — we’d have a real incentive to keep things balanced in the Middle East.

  You want to be a real cynic? Think about this: when our antimissile system is perfected, we could make ourselves essentially immune to threats from nations that could “only” launch a few dozen ballistic missiles. In that case, we might even want a war in the Middle East, or between countries like China and India. Let them duke it out while we wait in safety on the sidelines.

  Maybe that’s not even a bad idea.

  Of course, you and I both know that ballistic missiles from Iran are probably the least of our troubles. Put a nuclear warhead on a medium-sized coastal freighter, chug-chug-chug into the harbor of one of our major cities, or one of our less major cities … 9/11 looks like a picnic by comparison.

  Put it in the back of a tractor trailer, drive right into the heart of the city … not a pleasant afternoon.30

  * * *

  We spent about a half hour watching the armory, getting a feel for the sentry assignments. I’m not sure that Shotgun wasn’t fantasizing about what he might do with the money he could get if a weapon ever did fall into his lap.

  Buy a lifetime supply of Twinkies, no doubt. He’d brought along several bags for the mission. They were squished and bruised, and God knows what they tasted like after our trip through the merde, but he ate them merrily, munching away while we watched the armory.

  “I don’t know, Dick,” said Doc finally. He looked at his watch. “It’s past midnight. Nothing’s going on. Maybe Shunt screwed up when he decrypted the message. For all we know, it says something like lick your f’in’ balls.”

  “Shunt’s a better spe
ller than that,” said Shotgun.

  Doc shook his head but said nothing.

  “Easiest way out will be to take the truck and go through the front gate,” said Doc a few minutes later. “We should go at four-thirty or so, before it gets too light.”

  I agreed. It was beginning to look like I’d jumped the gun on the alert.

  Which, frankly, wasn’t all bad. Aside from our stroll through the lagoon.

  But one of the things you learn early on in the special warfare racket — actually, in any warfare — while there are an intense four or five minutes in every day, most of what happens between those four or five minutes is … nothing. Dealing with that nothing may determine how you deal with those four or five minutes of high octane excitement.

  Then again, they may not. Impossible to predict.

  Hanging around on a roof overlooking the third world’s biggest collection of nukes is like hanging around on just about any other roof. You try not to fall asleep.

  “Say, Dick, you think there’s a place in Delhi where I could get a real McDonald’s hamburger?” asked Shotgun. “With real beef, you know?”

  “Vegetables aren’t good enough for you?” asked Doc.

  “I’m not against vegetables. Just not in my food.”

  “God forbid.”

  “Maybe I’ll ask Urdu when he picks us up,” said Shotgun. “You think that would offend him?”

  “No idea,” I said.

  “What’s wrong with eating cows, anyway?” asked Shotgun.

  “It’s against their religion,” said Doc.

  “What the hell,” said Shotgun, “is some god going to like strike them down with lightning or something?”

  At that precise moment, a shell streaked across the sky, arcing down in a flashing blaze of white light, and exploded behind us on the roof.

  8

  ( I )

  Junior was last seen dangling from the wheel of the advanced Indian attack helicopter seconds before it exploded in a fiery ball of incandescence over the Indian Sea.

  Mongoose, the person who had seen him, cursed under his breath as the helicopter augured in. He didn’t have time to do much more than that — the fire on the containers at the forward end of the ship began to expand exponentially, fed by the drums of fuel the Chinese seamen had been readying for the other helicopter.

  Some of the shrapnel from the tank that had exploded broke through one of the nearby containers. The heat and flames ignited cartons of furniture inside the container. Within seconds, a hundred Queen Anne dinettes, carefully packed in foam and lacking the odd screw, were burning. The blaze ate away at the thin metal sides of the container, actually melting the walls on several others. More dinettes caught fire.

  A container of fake Persian rugs went next, the nylon-based threads melting into a liquid inferno of raging flames. At that point, the fire went out of control.

  The sailors hadn’t seen either Mongoose or Junior, and must have believed the explosion had been a malfunction of the equipment. In any event, they were too busy trying to grab fire hoses and muster a defense to worry about intruders.

  Mongoose slid down to the deck area, grabbed the rucks, and ran to the side. A sailor with a fire hose loomed on his right, running forward with the hose.

  Mongoose didn’t see him. They collided. The sailor and hose flew over the rail and into the ocean. Mongoose, slightly dazed, stumbled back, took a deep, smoke-filled breath, then jumped over the side.

  Whatever else you do when you are a SEAL, you swim. You swim in the morning, you swim in the evening, you swim at night. You swim when you’re strong. You swim a lot when you’re tired. You swim in pools. You swim in the ocean. Basically, whatever else you learn, you end up in the water.

  But not even all that can prepare you for a blind dive off a ship in the middle of the night. No matter how calm the sea is, she is a mighty mistress, and she will have her way with you no matter how well prepared or tested you think you are.

  Bitch.

  Mongoose broke water pretty quickly. He dropped one of the rucks right away, then while treading water, tried to grab the blow-up raft package out of the other.

  The sea that night was about as calm as you could want the sea to be. If you were sitting on a beach in San Diego or Miami, you’d probably have said it was smooth as glass.

  But this glass had very sharp edges. They poked and pushed at Mongoose, turning him around as he tried to get the raft out. His fingers, suddenly cold and stiff, fumbled. Finally he got the bag out. He wiggled his fingers against the handle that worked the auto-inflator.

  Murphy chose that moment to pluck Mongoose by the scruff of his neck and tug him back under the waves.

  The raft slipped out of Mongoose’s hand. So did the rest of the ruck.

  Resurfacing, Mongoose shook the salt from his eyes and began cursing. He worked through a long litany of things that were no f-ing good. He started with zippers — the zipper on the ruck had seemed to stick — and worked his way eventually and inexorably outward to gravity and the greater universe.

  Finally, the Mongoose we all know and love.

  In the midst of this catharsis, he started swimming back in the direction of the ship, which was a few yards away.

  Mongoose was not actually thinking of getting back aboard the ship at that moment. He was hoping to find the Tiger boat on the other side somewhere. He figured he would swim around until he found it, then climb aboard and look for Junior.

  It was a plan, give it that.

  We’ll never know whether it would have worked or not, for as he neared the stern he saw a line dragging down into the water. Mongoose is a powerful guy, every bit as strong as anyone you could imagine. I’d never want to arm wrestle with him; he’d make me use all my tricks and I still might not beat him. But it had been a very long day. He was exhausted, and his arm muscles were burning with enough lactic acid to upset a hundred stomachs.

  His first thought was that he would grab the line and rest for a while. Then he wondered if he might not use it to climb back aboard and grab one of the lifeboats.

  When he reached the side of the ship, he saw that the line was actually the fire hose he had knocked over with the crewman a short time before. He tugged at it, worried that it might pull off whatever it was attached to, if it was attached. It would be just like Murphy to pull such a stunt.

  But the master of mayhem was elsewhere employed. The fire had spread on the foredeck, and was now raging in crimson glory against the backdrop of the black sky. Murphy, darting between the containers, pushed flames this way and that, seeking out the most flammable contents. Then he went to the pumps, where a crewman was trying desperately to get some water for the sailors battling the flames. Murphy gummed up the mechanism — though here perhaps the bribes taken by the inspector to insure the parts were in working order played as big a role in their failure as Murphy’s machinations.

  Shortly before the fire broke out, the captain realized the engine room was not responding to his calls, and sent someone to find out what was going on. On discovering the man dead, the baffled sailor took matters into his own hands and increased the engines. Fully engaged, the ship spurted forward. We’re not talking speedboat velocity here, but the resulting jerks were enough to knock the men fighting the fire off their feet. One rolled into the flames. A friend tried to help him and caught fire himself. Both men jumped over the side.

  Somewhere in the ship’s stack of containers were several stuffed with ammunition from Ukraine. It was en route to a port in Africa — illegally but happily accepted by the vessel’s Chinese masters, since the payment of the shipping fee would easily cover most of the transit costs.

  Heated to a temperature that a thick porterhouse steak would envy, the ammo in the crates started cooking off. A series of explosions began rocking the ship. Within minutes, the bow was edging downward.

  A very bad trend, Mongoose realized, starting to climb the hose.

  ( II )

  We’re all
guilty of the occasional mental disconnect, where what we say or do is completely at odds with what should be said or done; it’s just a question of how often that happens. If you’re a politician, the ratio is going to be somewhere close to one hundred percent. If you’re a SEAL, you train and you train and you train to get it down near zero.

  But human nature does win out every so often.

  “Wow. Look at the meteor,” said Shotgun as the white light arced over our heads at the nuke base.

  He will never live that down.

  “Incoming!” yelled Doc as the shell hit. We threw ourselves flat on the roof as a second and then a third shell flew threw the air. These overshot the roof by a few feet, but the air shook with the explosion.

  “Mortar shells,” said Doc, maybe explaining to Shotgun that it was men, not gods, trying to kill him.

  “Maybe they’re trying to blow up the nukes,” said Shotgun.

  “Warheads don’t explode that way,” said Doc. “If they did, you’d never be able to risk launching them on a missile.”

  Doc was right, but the continuing barrage did make it seem as if that was their intention. The flashes grew in intensity and number, just like the finale at a Fourth of July fireworks show.

  No, I did not make that metaphor idly.

  I pushed myself up off the roof and stood, watching the shells as they came in.

  “You nuts?” asked Doc from the roof.

  “Hey, I’m with you, Dick,” said Shotgun, rising.

  “You guys are gonna get killed,” said Doc.

  “I don’t think so.” I folded my arms, staring in the direction the shells were coming from. It was beyond the sewer plant where we’d come in.