RW04 - Task Force Blue

by Richard Marcinko

  They bought just about everything that was published. Then they packed it all off to Moscow, where they analyzed it, word by word by word.

  What did they learn? Well, from publications such as the Biographical Register of the U.S. Department of State, they could pretty much discover who was a career diplomat, and who was using State as his (or her) CIA cover. By tracking telephone listings and office assignments from one phone directory to another, they could follow government workers’ careers. They simply checked the room numbers against the building schematics they’d been able to buy from the General Services Administration.

  By looking up home addresses in the Congressional Staff Directory, KGB or GRU agents could find out where staffers from the Select Committee on Intelligence lived—and maybe burgle a house or two to see if classified materials were being brought home on the sly. Unlisted home telephone numbers of senators, congressmen, and other prominent Washingtonians (including many top spook WASPs) are often available in The Green Book, Washington’s annually published social list.

  I used the same technique. From my collection of Congressional Staff Directory books, I discovered that a Stonewall Jackson Harrington, Lieutenant Colonel, USA, had been assigned to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee just over a decade ago. His listing was starred—which meant his biography was included in the back of the book.

  I flipped to the biography section and perused the listing.

  Harrington, LTC Stonewall Jackson, professional staff member, Senate Select Com. on Intelligence. Born Feb. 25, 1944, in Rice, Virginia. Married 12 June, 1968, to Pamela Lynn Elliott. Children: Jebediah, Jennifer. Georgetown Univ., 1962-1966, B.A. (magna cum laude), Phi Beta Kappa; Yale Univ., 1966-1969, J.D. Career record: entered active duty as 2LT, US Army in 1969. Assignments include: 82d Airborne Division, 173d Airborne Division, 5th Special Forces Group. Decorations include: Silver Star, Legion of Merit, Bronze Star with Combat V (3), Purple Heart, Vietnam Campaign Ribbon, National Defense Medal.

  So he’d been a shooter in Vietnam. I wondered where he’d served—he’d probably gotten there just after I’d left—and if we knew some of the same people.

  The bio sent me scrambling to a dozen other books. I checked my Special Forces files and came up dry. Then I got out my old intel contact files—a dog-eared looseleaf notebook filled with names and numbers. Sure enough: there was a Harrington, MAJ. SJ, attached to the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command at Fort Belvoir at the same time I was pigging out as a Sweat Hog at the Pentagon. Had I ever called him back then? Nope.

  Sweat Hogs are the small group of staff pukes who work eighteen-hour days in the Navy Command Center dealing in factoids and info bits. They’re the Navy’s answer men. Some admiral needs to know how long it’ll take a carrier task force to go from Diego Garcia to Oman. He asks his aide, who asks his aide, who picks up the phone and calls the NCC, where a Sweat Hog gives him the right answer.

  Well, just prior to the clusterfucked Iranian rescue attempt, I was the NavSpecWar Sweat Hog, or more precisely the Sweat Frog. As such, I compiled a thick contact book of sources who’d help me get the answers I needed. My network ran the gamut from E-6 grunts at NRO—the National Reconnaissance Office—who slid me satellite recon photos or SIGINT—SIGnals INTelligence—target assessments at a moment’s notice, to LANTFLT (AtLANTic FLeeT) master chiefs who knew how to body-english the system in my favor. I learned as a Sweat Hog that most often, it wasn’t officers who helped. They were too interested in keeping their information close to the vest, just in case it might help their career tracks. So instead, I developed lots of friends in low places—the enlisted folks who actually got the work done—who were more than willing to help out when a four-star was scorching my back and the answer better be the right one—NOW!

  Enough about me. Back to the case at hand. I’d discovered that my man Harrington had been on the intel side back as far as the late seventies. Which meant he was probably running some pretty heavy stuff these days.

  Okay—now let’s see if I could find his address. I called the main numbers at Fort Leslie McNair, and Fort Myer, asked for Major General Harrington’s residence, and was told that the general did not live on base.

  Next, I pulled the last five editions of the Washington, suburban Maryland, and Northern Virginia phone books down from their shelves, blew the dust off, and thumbed through them. Nada. I dialed 411, and received a recorded reply that “At the customer’s request, the listing you have requested is nonlisted.”

  Next, I retrieved the current edition of the Green Book. There were two Harringtons on page 202, but not a Stonewall Jackson Harrington. I pulled the previous edition from the shelf, thumbed through it, and drew another blank. I tried a three-year-old book. There, the home address and telephone number of the current Director of Central Intelligence was listed (back then he’d been a socially prominent think-tanker). The address and phone number for the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was listed, too. Three years ago, he’d been the Marine Corps’ three-star deputy chief of staff for plans, policy, and operations. And guess what. On page 204, there was a listing for one Harrington, Brigadier General and Mrs. Stonewall Jackson, with an Alexandria, Virginia, address and phone number attached, along with the notation that their daughter, Jennifer, was a student at Harvard University.

  By now, it was after six: late enough for him to have left the office, and for me to have a Bombay. So I poured myself a drink, put my feet up, and dialed his home number.

  The phone was picked up on the first ring. “Harrington.”

  I like a general who answers his own phone so promptly. “General, this is Dick Marcinko,” I said. “You called.”

  There was a momentary pause as he shifted mental gears. Then: “Good to hear from you, Dick.” His voice was even, strong, and no-nonsense brisk—what I like to think of as a good radio voice. “I’m glad to see we’re starting off on a first-name basis.”

  I laughed for the first time in a week because I had, in fact, called him by his first name—General. I sipped on my Bombay. “What can I do for you, sir?”

  “Since you’ve discovered where I live, you can come over here for a drink—Bombay, isn’t it?—and a talk. I have a proposition that will probably interest you.”

  I was about to hang up, when he added: “Do me a favor—don’t park in front of the house.”

  Since it was well past rush hour, it took me only slightly longer than an hour to shower, throw on jeans and a polo shirt, and drive the fifty-eight miles from the Manor driveway to the general’s Old Town, Alexandria, town house. I parked my car three blocks away and—as ordered—strolled aimlessly up, down, around, and through the narrow streets for about fifteen minutes just to make sure I wasn’t under some kind of surveillance.

  When I’d determined that it was all-clear, I circled back on my trail one more once, just like Major Robert Roger, the first American SpecWarrior and founder of Roger’s Rangers, had told his men to do more than two centuries ago, to make sure they weren’t being followed by the French or the Indians.

  So I slipped through the narrow, trash-filled alleyways between Pitt, Fairfax, and Lee streets, made a wide loop, checked my six (and nine, and twelve, and three), and when I was satisfied that it was all clear I found my way to the intersection of Duke and Royal.

  Fifty feet off the corner I paused in front of a narrow doorway and checked the brass numbers on the dark green Chinese lacquer. Then I stepped back and admired the house. From the look of it, it was one of the newer ones—which meant it had been built in the late eighteenth century—a three-story, step-gabled red brick structure that sat on Duke Street’s uneven brick pavement, three short blocks from the river, next to an old church.

  The general greeted me at the door. He was shorter than I, and athletically trim. His handshake told me he worked out. He’d slipped out of his kind of uniform and into mine—a pair of jeans, work boots, and a black polo shirt that bore the embroidered logo of GSG-9, Germany’
s top counterterrorism unit.

  I followed him inside. The long hallway floor was made of random-width, golden-colored pegged pine that was probably as old as the house itself. We turned right into a small sitting room. There was a comfortable velvet couch up against the window wall. On a butler’s table in front of the couch, an elegant Georgian silver tray held a bottle of Bombay Sapphire, an insulated bucket of perfect ice cubes, a pair of delicate silver tongs, and a cut-crystal double Old-Fashioned glass. Flanking the fireplace were two eighteenth-century gaming tables. On each was an antique chess set. Both were in play.

  I went to examine the games in progress. One that looked as if it was in its final stages must have been a Spanish set, because its well-used ivory pieces depicted El Cid fighting the Moors at Valencia. White seemed to be winning—at least white had more pieces on the board than black. The other was a Victorian English set; the magnificently carved chessmen represented warring Scottish clans. There, it appeared that black had the upper hand. I caught the general watching me examine the boards and turned toward him. “Nice sets.”

  “Thank you.” General Harrington nodded. “Do you play?”

  I shook my head. “Nope.” I indicated the Spanish set. “Who’s winning?”

  “Black wins—in seven moves.”

  “And the other game?”

  “White—nine moves.”

  I stared at the boards. I couldn’t see it. “How do you know?”

  He shrugged. “Because I know—same way you look at a building or a bridge and you know just how to bring it down. Same thing goes for me—except I work on a chessboard.”

  “What happens if nobody wins?”

  “That’s called a stalemate,” S. J. Harrington explained. “Except I don’t believe in them. I always play to win—even if I have to force the game one way or another.”

  I liked that thought and said so. The general grinned, and indicated for me to sit on the couch, which I did. He plucked up the tongs, dropped four perfectly clear ice cubes into the tumbler, filled it to the top with Bombay, set the glass atop a linen cocktail napkin, then handed it over to me.

  I tasted. “Thanks.”

  “No problem.” General Harrington turned toward the fireplace. He took a brass poker from the fireplace set, jabbed at the burning logs, added a cleanly split length of red oak to the fire, then set the poker back precisely where it belonged. He sat opposite me in a richly upholstered Queen Anne wing chair with matching ottoman, took a monogrammed crystal mug of amber beer from the English wine table that sat next to the chair, lifted it in my direction in an informal toast, then swallowed it down. “Ah, that’s good.”

  He wiped a small mustache of foam from his upper lip with the back of his index finger. He picked up an inch-thick file that sat on the ottoman. When he turned it over I saw that it had the distinctive orange tab that proclaims the contents inside to be top secret. He shook the file in my general direction, then gently laid it on the table in front of me. “Well, Dick, as a professional intelligence officer, my assessment of this material is that you’re in deep doo-doo again—and this time it may actually stick to you. What’s your opinion?”

  THERE IS AN OLD CHINESE PROVERB THAT GOES, “STEAL NOT A single link more of chain than you can swim with.” From the number of links contained in the thick file General Harrington laid in front of me, I was well into the drowning phase of chain-theft.

  I guess my problem is that I never give Pinky enough credit. He is, after all, primarily a bureaucrat. Thus, I tend to pigeonhole him that way, when I know from bitter experience not to, because he is more than a mere paperpusher. This character flaw of mine is something I should know better than to indulge. After all, I’m always bitching that others look at my thirty-five-inch arms and my thirtyinch inseam and think of me only as the archetypal, shootfrom-the-hip knuckle dragger, when in fact I have a master’s degree from Auburn, speak a trio of languages fluently (and another half-dozen passably), and have three New York Times best-sellers under my belt.

  Well, I should keep that sort of thing in mind when I deal with Pinky, too. Why? Because he is a smart and cunning son of a bitch—you don’t get to be an admiral without a healthy dose of smart and cunning—not to mention the fact that he knows how to wage political war better than most.

  I now understoood that the whole UT/RUS assignment—in fact the unit itself—had been his doing—even though he hadn’t left even a single faint fingerprint. I’d half-believed that my orders had come down the chain of command from the White House, perhaps as payback for the job I did in London, and no one tried to disabuse me of that notion. In point of fact, all I knew for sure was that the mission profile for UT/RUS had come from CNO’s cabin, passed to me by Rear Admiral Don Layton—Pinky’s Annapolis classmate.

  From behind the scenes, Pinky had dangled the bait in front of me, and I’d snapped it up faster than a great white shark goes after chum. I thought I’d keep him at bay with the pussy-licting picture I’d, ah, laid on him. Well, doom on me—he’d been more subtle and effective than I ever expected him to be.

  Worse, he’d predicted my subsequent actions pretty well, too. He knew me well enough to know that sooner or later I’d stage a UNODIR—UNless Otherwise DIRected—operation, which is my standard, Rogue Warrior modus operandi when I think the system is getting in my way and the can’t cunts are asking me to say, “May I.”

  Damn it. For an unconventional warrior, I’d acted pretty damn conventionally—predictably, that is. So, I’d stormed the fucking plane in Key West without signing any of the rules of engagement sheets, and, more significantly, without obtaining a written—that is faxed—“go” order from the National Command Authority in Washington. You will remember that I’d been given a verbal okay. But now, I discovered from reading the file I’d been given, that despite what SECDEF had said on the phone, nothing had subsequently been put in writing.

  Why is that significant? The answer, friends, is because, just as I’d explained to SECNAV, unlike a police SWAT unit, my shooters are not trained to take prisoners. We are trained to kill our targets. But before that can happen legally, the chain of command has to formally unlock our cages, and let me and my other SEALs of war out to prowl and to growl.

  To put it simply, once we get a “go” from Washington, we do not have to provide Miranda warnings, announce ourselves, or worry about the consequences of shooting bad guys who’ve raised their hands in surrender. If, however, there is no record of that uncaging sequence—no written order from the president or the SECDEF—then, friends, it turns out that we can (and it appears that we had) become subject to the same laws that you are.

  So, guess what? Even though all the hostages had been rescued, and all the bad guys subdued, I was now about to be fucking indicted for depriving SECNAV’s stupid, pistolwaving NIS bodyguard of his goddamn civil rights, by depriving him of his goddamn life.

  And that was the good news. The bad news was that the nine enlisted men who’d stormed the plane with me were to be charged under the goddamn RICO laws (those are the Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations statutes), the same ones designed to be used against organized crime. How, you ask? Well, because they were about to be charged with conspiracy. They’d conspired against the dead NIS agent because they didn’t stop me from killing the son of a bitch. They were, I read, to be indicted as accessories to murder.

  The Navy was not going to protect them, either. Because they were being charged by the same government they served, they’d have to hire their own defense attorneys, at $500 an hour. Fat fucking chance of that. So they’d be defended by a bunch of overworked public defender types, which means they’d go down. And if that happened, they’d lose their rank, their retirements—not to mention their freedom. Their whole lives were about to be forfeited, because of me.

  Let me explain what was going on here. These sorts of charges—most of ’em anyway—were bullshit. But they were exactly the blood-and-guts stuff that makes great reading in the newspape
rs. And what happens in cases such as this one is that the prosecution—in this case, NIS—leaks one nasty allegation after another, in a series of drip-dripdrips. And by the end of two months, my men and I would be seen as a bunch of child-molesting, mad-dog serial killers. The facts would have nothing to do with the case. Neither would truth. And meanwhile, my investigation into the root causes behind the Key West fiasco would be sidetracked.

  No—better to attack than parry. So, instead of trying to explain myself, I looked evenly over at General Harrington, drained my Bombay, set the glass down on its coaster with an appropriate, roguish thwock, and said, “Okay, now that you’ve got my attention, what is it you want?”

  He looked at me over the top of his glasses. “Just your help, Dick.”

  That struck me as odd.

  “It’s complicated,” he said. “But the bottom line is that I’ve been waiting for someone just like you to come along. Come with me.”

  I followed him out of the living room, down a narrow passageway past a galley kitchen, past the dining-room doors, to a small office that looked out on a tiny brick patio and English garden. General Harrington opened a small document safe that had a DIA inventory control number engraved on its front, placed my file inside, and retrieved another orange-tabbed folder.

  “Read this,” he said.

  He handed me a thin, blue-tabbed confidential monograph from the Army inspector general concerning a huge discrepancy between the number of weapons and ordnance in the military’s current inventory, and the number it could actually lay its hands on. More than ten thousand fully automatic M-16, CAR-15s, and 633HB assault rifles were missing. So were twenty-five thousand grenades of various types, three million rounds of .223, 9mm, and .308 ammunition, and several hundred sniper rifles. Claymores, detonators, and C-4 plastic explosive had also been stolen.

  I already knew that ADAM had been using stolen USG weapons. But the numbers I saw here were surprising. I went back and read them again. The news was still bad.