It was gratifying to come eye-to-eye with at least one of the folks who were grazing in forbidden territory. But I didn’t move a muscle. I just looked at him evenly. “I don’t give a shit what your friends at the Pentagon say. Besides, your friends are wrong. I’m out of the Navy—I was separated three days ago.”
From the look on Dawg’s ugly face, I had just surprised him.
From the look on LC Strawhouse’s face, I’d surprised him, too. But he wasn’t the type to stay surprised for long. “Need any work to keep the wheelbarrow filled, Dick? Now, I don’t usually hire nobody who ain’t got at least one star. In fact, I got so many stars around me it’s like living in a goddamn planetarium. Got me”—he toted the number on his bony fingers—“a total of twenty-two stars on the payroll right now, including two former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs. Got another half dozen in the pipeline, too—soon as they retire.”
Then he looked at me with an expression that was so absolutely sociopathic that it made the hair on my neck stand straight up. “But in your case, I might just make an exception.” He gave Dawg the sort of ruthless smile villains in spaghetti westerns reserve for peasants just before they loot, pillage, rape, and burn their village down. “Elwood, you give Dick a business card—the one with the private number, so he can get in touch with me anytime he wants.”
The Dawg reached inside his coat and withdrew an embossed card. He put the card between two fingers and extended it in my direction.
My mama, Emilie, raised me to be polite. So, I told Dawg, “Fuck you very much,” took the card from him, and gave it a quick glance. It read, PAJAR INDUSTRIES, LA QUINTA, CALIFORNIA.
Oh, how I love it when pieces of puzzles come together. I slipped the card into my shirt pocket.
“Havin’ him around’d sure keep things interesting around the bunkhouse, huh, Elwood?” LC Strawhouse grinned and stuck me in the chest with his thumb. “See ya tomorra, Dickie.”
I made a call from a pay phone on my way back to the Woodward Plaza. I’d given my word to the Priest that I’d stay away from the Safety Net of chiefs I’ve established over my career. Priest’s request that I do made sense—security had been breached. If Dawg Dawkins was able to read secret code-word messages, then I didn’t want to risk the slightest chance of being compromised.
But I hadn’t promised Priest anything about retired sailors. You see, my friends, there exists a small, tight, nationwide network of old UDT/SEAL shipmates who stay in touch via fax and phone. They are veterans of World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War—quiet, unassuming heroes, most of them, whose highly classified missions, thank God, have not been uncovered by prying writers. They’re still closemouthed, too—except amongst themselves.
These are the same tough Frogmen who mined North Korean harbors and assassinated Chicom generals in the fifties, salvaged code books from sunken Soviet nuclear subs and retrieved live atomic weapons from downed B-52 bombers in the sixties. Some of them disappeared from the Teams to work with Admiral Hyman Rickover’s secret projects. Others were sheep-dipped by the CIA or other, more covert agencies. They don’t see one another in person very often. But they stay in touch.
A few—very, very few—ex-officers have been invited to become a part of the network. But the majority of this informal, irreverent, national society of former Frogs are “retarded”—that’s Frog slang for retired—East Coast fleet sailors—former UDT platoon chiefs much like my old UDT-22 platoon chief, Ev Barrett; gunner’s mates, snipes, and boatswains who kept their boat crews in order by using what was known in the old Navy as “rocks and shoals” discipline. “Rocks and shoals” meant miscreants were treated to a swift boondocker or a sucker punch, instead of a written memo of demerit. Believe me, it worked better than any bureaucratic form of punishment—and it made better sailors, too. I know, because that’s how I was trained.
Anyway, I pulled a thin address book from my wallet, dropped the requisite number of quarters in the slot, and dialed a number. The phone rang once, twice, thrice, and then a Froggish growl answered, “Hello?”
“Mugs, you are a worthless asshole—nothing but a pencil-dicked pus-nuts crap-eating turd-faced shit-for-brains motherfucking little cocksucker.”
There was an immediate roar of laughter at the other end of the line. Then: “Oh, hi, Rotten Richard—long time no hear. Still up to your ugly puss in horse manure?”
I left a note in the hotel room that I’d be gone overnight, rented a car, and drove northwest on 1-75 through the fashionable Detroit suburbs—Royal Oak, Birmingham, and Pontiac—then on to Flint, where the big interstate turned just about due north. If Michigan is shaped like the human right hand held palm up, then Saginaw is just below the point where your thumb gets meaty. A few miles north of Saginaw, I veered off the interstate onto a two-lane state road, followed it for twelve miles as it cut northwest. At an intersection marked by a stop sign I turned left onto a black asphalt county road that meandered due west across creeks, between huge fields which, during the growing season, must have held alfalfa, wheat, corn, and soybeans.
Right now, they were probably barren, with remnants of crops poking up from the plowed, furrowed soil. But I couldn’t see anything anyway—it was too dark. I drove on, under black night sky, following the directions I’d been given. I checked my six. The road was empty behind me. If anyone was following, they were doing it with their lights off.
Just to be sure, as soon as the road took a bend to the left, I pulled over, shut off my own lights, and waited for fifteen minutes, listening to the radio. Nothing passed by.
I resumed my journey, coming to a tiny town with an unpronounceable Indian name and a single main street of shabby, shuttered stores, crumbling sidewalk, and no traffic light. I drove through it slowly. Two miles on the far side, I turned onto another black asphalt road and drove five miles north until I came to a town named after a woman named Charity.
The greater metropolitan Charity area was comprised of a closed-down gas station, bare, water-pocked concrete slabs where the pumps had once stood, and an empty storefront that had in the past displayed farm equipment. The few houses, set back from the road, showed evidence of their age and the region’s harsh winters.
The speed limit was still posted at twenty-five miles per hour when my headlights caught the huge white anchor set in concrete, his battleship gray wood mailbox bolted atop the shank. Just past the anchor I swung left and eased off the road and onto a gravel driveway that ran straight up alongside the small, white frame house that I knew had once belonged to his parents. At the head of it sat a recently washed and waxed, gray four-door Buick of indeterminate age.
He was waiting for me—behind a front door impatiently cracked open—with a fridge full of ice cold beer and a warm bear hug. He’d been known as “Mugs” in the Teams. “Mugs,” because his big, Mick ears stuck out ninety degrees from the side of his head, not to mention the fact that Aloysius Sean Sullivan was not the sort of moniker you kept in the Underwater Demolition Teams, circa 1950. Not if you wanted to make it through UDT Replacement Training—which was what they had before they invented BUD/S—alive.
He was all alone now—his wife, Alice, had passed away; his kids and their families had moved west and south, doing well in Texas and California. Why not go and be with them—live in the sunshine; play golf? The answer was that this place was his roots, and he’d be damned if he’d leave it again. He’d gone to sea more than half a century ago. After twenty-one years of deployments, he’d retired, moved back to Michigan, and worked as a Detroit cop. Fifteen years after that, he’d pulled the pin, which is what cops call retirement, and come back here—and here he was going to stay.
I noted the shipshape living room, the neat, well-policed galley, beyond which was a small guest room he’d turned into an office—his phone, computer, and fax machine sat on a desk he’d made himself.
Just for fun, I bounced a quarter off the tightly tucked bed cover and watched Mugs’s grin as I caught it a foot in the air.
Once a fleet sailor, always a fleet sailor.
Even in his mid-sixties, he still had the rolling gait and bowed legs of a cartoon sailor man (in fact, Mugs had always kind of reminded me of Popeye in size and shape). He had the sort of face that God must have had in mind when He invented the Dixie cup hat. Mugs dropped into his well-used armchair and ran a hand through his thick, red-turned-white hair. I took the corner of the sofa. He’d chunked a bunch of Swiss cheese and spiked each piece with a toothpick, surrounded them with Ritz crackers, then set the cut-glass serving plate on the coffee table in front of me. I plucked a cube, set it on a Ritz, ate the whole thing at once, and washed it all down with a swallow of beer.
It was good—read reassuring—to see him. Mugs represented the Navy I had joined as a seventeen-year-old: the tradition-bound fraternity of wooden ships and iron men—not the opposite, which is what it’s become. And, like many chiefs of his era, Mugs Sullivan followed the precept I have come to call Ev Barrett’s First Law of the Sea—which comes down to the idea that we all have a responsibility to pass our knowledge and traditions down to each succeeding generation of sailors. Finding chiefs who practice Barrett’s Law is getting harder and harder these days. But when Chief Mugs Sullivan served, living by it was the Navy way.
He let me sit and decompress for two beers worth of time. When he couldn’t take the silence any longer, he leaned forward in the chair and tilted his bullfrog jaw somewhat petulantly in my direction.
“Okay, Rotten Richard,” he said, “what’s the fuckin’ problem? You didn’t drive all this way just to eat my damn Wisconsin cheese and drink my damn supermarket beer.”
I was back in Detroit just before noon. Rodent and Gator were waiting with news. Well, actually, they were waiting with a huge, smelly bag of Coney Islands. The Coney Island is generic Detroit food. It is a pork-and-beef-and-who-knows-what-else hot dog on which is piled chili, mustard, relish, and onions, all served up on a soft, chewy-cum-gooey frankfurter bun. Two of them will provide you with enough natural methane gas to heat your home for a week. As I am a true environmentalist, I ate three. Then, since the boys wanted to show me, not tell me, what they’d discovered, I hauled my butt (not to mention my exhaust pipe) into the backseat of the rental car and we headed for Ypsilanti—with all the windows rolled down.
The date on the Ypsilanti National Guard facility cornerstone read 1958. It was a truly ugly huge, two-story building built in a style that might be called faux castle—not the nautical term, either. The place had been constructed of cheap red bricks punctuated by blocks of unidentifiable gray stone and accented by battlements on the roofline, and four turret towers complete with crenels and merlons. Of course, the facility’s medieval appearance was somewhat reduced by the amount of graffiti on the walls. The ungainly structure sat inside an unlocked, three-to-four-acre chain-link fence compound. In the front, a pair of Korea-vintage 20mm antitank cannons stood mute sentry duty, flanking a nicked, dented steel flagpole.
As we drove up, I saw a dozen two-ton, canvas-topped trucks parked haphazardly in a potholed, macadam parking lot in the rear. We left the car a block away so as not to draw attention to ourselves, and walked up to the front door. There, a glassed-in bulletin board listed the post’s officers and monthly schedule. Although the place had been originally built as a National Guard armory, it was now, I read, a dual-purpose facility. It served as the regional headquarters for the Sixth Michigan National Guards Infantry Division. (From the artwork, I discerned that they called themselves the Wolverines.) It was also a secondary-level storage depot for U.S. Army ORDCOMSOMICH—ORDnance COMmand, SOutheastern MICHigan.
I rattled the front doors. They were locked. I pressed my nose against the glass. No lights were on inside.
Gator and Rodent walked me around the rear. We cut between the trucks and wandered toward the back fence, which was an eight-foot-high chain-link affair, lacking even the most rudimentary barbed-wire top. I checked the view on the other side. The parking lot backed up on what appeared to be a mammoth fenced truck park, where scores of huge tractor-trailers sat, unattended.
Rodent pointed at the ground. I looked. “So?”
He shook his head. “Ya gotta look carefully, Skipper.”
Now I saw what he was getting at. There were faint but distinct double-tire tracks that backed up to the fence line—tracks that seemed to go under the fence itself.
I stepped back, turned, and inspected the landscape. Then I looked closely at the chain-link fence. Taking my time, I wandered back to the building, moving like a point man—which is to say, paying attention to everything around me.
I peered up at the roofline. When I saw what I’d wanted to see, I turned my gaze to the ground and examined the macadam carefully. I paced slowly along the facility’s rear wall, looking at the uneven seam between macadam and brick.
This wasn’t working. I walked to the center of the building, where the heavy steel rolling rear door (which had been thoughtfully decorated by a bunch of spray-painted, stylized white crown graffiti) was secured by a hasp and a heavy padlock, and began all over again, methodically executing what in the water would have been a pattern search.
I went inch by inch, moving right, until I’d covered the entire area from the doorway to the starboard corner. Then I did the same thing on the port side, stepping carefully over small shards of glass and other detritus, gazing intently at the ground, missing nothing.
After half an hour of concentrated effort I walked back to the fence, checked the angles, then went back to my pattern searching. It took me another forty minutes to find all the elements and piece them together.
The story was all there: you just had to know what to look for.
Someone who wasn’t a very good shot had used a slingshot to take out the two high-pressure sodium security lights that illuminated the parking lot. I had evidence of the sloppy marksmanship in my hand—nine ball bearings. It had been done recently, because the bearings showed no sign at all of rust or encrustation.
Someone who was talented at camouflage had very cunningly parked the facility’s two-tonners in what seemed to be a haphazard pattern in the lot. But actually, what had happened, was that the trucks formed an effective screen, preventing anyone casually driving by in the street from observing what was going on at the rear door of the place.
Someone had very carefully removed the bolted straps that held a ten-foot-wide section of chain-link fence in position and replaced them with nylon ties, which could be stripped off and replaced in a matter of seconds.
A double-rear-axled truck had been backed between the fence posts, just far enough to make sure that it cleared.
All of the above improvements to the real estate had been done while LC Strawhouse resided in nearby Detroit. What a coincidence, huh?
I told Gator and Rodent what I thought. They nodded their heads in agreement. I pawed at the surface of the parking lot with my shoe, rolling a pebble under my sole. “What’s inside?” I took it for granted that they’d broken in to find out.
“Well, the National Guard’s got its own weapons and ammunition in lockers,” Rodent said. “But the big stuff belongs to ORDCOMSOMICH. They’ve got maybe three dozen lightweight 81-mike-mike mortars and fifty M-60 bipod rigs in storage crates, plus fifteen, maybe sixteen hundred M-16s, five hundred of the old M-92 Beretta pistols, and lots of ammunition—a hundred-and-fifty thousand rounds of 7.65 on links, a hundred thou 9mm, a hundred boxes each of frag grenades, CS, and Willy Peter, a few hundred mortar rounds, and five hundred cans of 5.56.”
“And no one around to watch, right?”
Gator shook his head. “The hatches to all the weapons stowage lockers were disabled—good job, too. Unless you look close, you don’t see the locks have been opened.”
“It’s all set to be moved,” Rodent said. If anybody knew about load-outs, it was Rodent. He could pack anything from a semi to a C-5.
“And no sign of any security, right?”
Gator turned his palms
up and shrugged. Of course not.
Hey, don’t be surprised. Let me give you a little background here. As of late 1995:
The goddamn Department of Energy can’t seem to lay its hands on twenty-two kilos of misplaced weapons-grade plutonium. Oops.
The Department of Defense seems to have lost track of eleven Alpha Units—you know about those, don’t you? They are man-portable nuclear weapons, which were designed to be carried by SEALs and Blanketheads on infiltrations behind enemy lines. Sorry about that, folks.
The folks in charge of destroying all of our chemical/ biological/nerve warfare supplies have misplaced 276 containers of assorted nerve agents, including Sarin, an odorless, colorless, deadly nerve gas (which you should remember from the Tokyo subway incident a couple of years ago), its more powerful cousin, Tabun, as well as two new and highly classified agents, TSB-12, and SRQ-44. Well, nobody’s perfect.
So, given the above facts, why the fuck would the Army bother to secure a paltry few thousand weapons and half a million rounds of ammunition?
That information makes you feel real secure, doesn’t it?
Yeah—me, too. Anyway, I knew exactly how the assholes who were about to rip off this place were thinking: they could take a hundred, maybe even two hundred of the M-16s, eighty or ninety pistols, five mortars and half a dozen M-60 machine guns, and it would be months—perhaps even years—before the losses were discovered.
Why? Two reasons. First, because they knew that nobody ever does administrative inspection—the kind that requires a CO to check out every nut and bolt, count every round of ammunition, and fieldstrip and check each weapon under his command. That process takes time. It also takes effort. And there’s all sorts of nasty paperwork that has to be filed when you come up missing something. So the simple answer is that admin inspections are seldom performed—even though the Army’s inspector general knows that weapons are being stolen.
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