Second, it is common knowledge that mortars and machine guns are not used by National Guard infantry units very often. See, the 81-mike-mike has an effective range of 5,800 meters—that’s just under four miles. The M-60 can reach out 1,100 meters. Neither is used in the Guard’s trimonthly training cycles, when platoons go out to a nearby 200-yard rifle range. In fact, only when the full division trucks down to Georgia, or up to Marquette, or wherever the hell it holds its yearly two-week combat exercises at a base with adequate space and a huge fire-impact zone, would the mortars and machine guns actually be distributed.
This place was about to be plucked clean, and I wanted to be around when the motherpluckers showed up.
It was time to assemble the troops. We drove to a cellular phone store and I used a Visa card I keep under a pseudonym to buy three Motorola digital cellular phones. As soon as they were enabled, I dialed Rogue Manor.
“Yo—” Wonder’s voice came through loud and clear.
Ain’t technology great? “Fuuuck you. Eat shit and bark at the moon, Wonder.”
He laughed. “And the same to you, Mr. Dickhead.”
“Get my message?” I’d faxed him from Mugs’s house with half a dozen short memos to plant in various Intelink compartments.
“Yup—all taken care of.”
“Good.” I told him to get all the merry marauders out here on the double—things, I said, were about to get interesting. I told him what I needed him to do. Wonder gave me an aye-aye, sir, threw me a verbal middle-fingered salute, and rang off.
Next, I called Mugs to give him my new cellular number. He took it down, then started asking questions like the chief he was. He listened to my sit-rep, then growled that he’d be on scene in two hours.
I started to tell him not to come until he interrupted and told me—let me put this in his precise words—“Sometimes, you’re such a perfect fuckin’ asshole that I see why they made you become an officer instead of promoting you to chief. Hasn’t anybody ever fuckin’ told you that you need to learn how to take ‘yes’ for an answer?”
When I spent more than two seconds thinking about it, it was, of course, a great idea. He was a retired cop who knew the turf and many of the players. And, more to the point, he had a huge safe full of firearms and a concealed weapons permit.
Of course, I didn’t have to bring that subject up. “Don’t worry your ugly face about the small stuff, Rotten Richard, I’m bringing the toys.”
From the car I called the northern Virginia number the Priest had given me as a point of contact. A female voice answered. I gave her the code name I’d been assigned. She said nothing, but seconds later I heard the electronic beep of a phone ringing.
The Priest answered after four rings. “Hi, Dick—what’s the score?”
Since I was talking on a nonsecure line, I brought him up to speed in a general way (no pun intended). I told him we were planning to stake out the ORDCOMSOMICH facility in Ypsilanti, and he agreed that was a good idea. From the way he asked questions about what I’d discovered, I could hear him taking mental notes.
When I’d finished, he paused, then asked, “Need anything?”
You bet. I was going to need a bucket of bucks for this operation.
Not a problem, said the Priest, he’d make sure to pass some cash to Wonder at the airport. Was there anything else? Any concrete developments?
You bet there were concrete developments, and they all concerned one LC Strawhouse. But I wasn’t about to say anything—yet. I told him I’d be in touch, then hung up.
By the time I rang off, Gator had just about made it back to Detroit.
I’d left Rodent behind to keep watch—my raton en Ia hierba, or more accurately, en el aparcamiento, which means my rat in de parking lot. Gator’d drop me at the hotel, then flip back to join him. And soon, my two young animals would be joined by an old Frog. What a nasty fucking menagerie.
And me? I had to shower and change my clothes. There were other feral creatures to deal with tonight.
AT 2225—ALMOST HALF AN HOUR LATE—I WENT UP TO THE hotel’s penthouse on a special elevator, which was operated by the same big bad BAW I’d tangled with the day before in the men’s room. He wasn’t so impeccable now—his wrist was splinted, his nose was taped, his lip was split, the skin of his cheek was purple-green, and his fifty-dollar haircut had been ruined when some emergency room doctor had shaved the side away so he could put stitches—ten or so from the size of the bandage—above the poor asshole’s ear.
I threw Mr. BAW a shit-eating grin and a solid right to the shoulder as I came through the doors. “Request permission to come on board, guy.” He didn’t say anything. “Finally got that plumb assignment, I see—moving up in the world. Congratulations.” I popped him again.
He winced, then turned his back so he could punch his buttons (I’ll bet you he was thinking about punching other things), and we rode up the forty-six floors in silence, staring at the ceiling and listening to an elevator-music version of “I’ll Be Watching You.” How appropriate.
The doors whooshed open and I stepped out. “End of the hall to your left, sir,” said Mr. BAW through gritted teeth.
“Watch yourself on the way down, fella. It’s a big first step.” The carpeted hallway curved gently away from the elevator bank. I strode to a pair of huge, double wood doors, in front of which stood yet another BAW in blue pinstripes, radio earpiece, and wrist mike.
This one couldn’t have been nicer. “Good evening, sir,” he said, careful to spell it with an s and an i.
I nodded toward the stratosphere. Where the hell did Dawg find these guys?
He opened the right-hand door and stood to the side. “Please go on in. Mr. Strawhouse is expecting you.”
I’d anticipated a crowd, but he was waiting for me alone in the living room. There was a fireplace and a fire—cherry from the sweet smell of it—and a long, white couch flanked by two pairs of armchairs. The art was litho, but it was good litho. The carpet was impressively sumptuous. The servants had obviously come and gone, because the place was spotless—not a cocktail napkin, discarded hors d’oeuvre, or empty wineglass in sight. On the inch-thick glass coffee table was a bottle of Bombay gin that had been frozen into a block of ice the size of a cinder block. It was wrapped in a linen napkin and sat on a salver.
Next to the Bombay was an ice bucket, in which sat a half-pint Mason jar filled with golden liquid, and an open can of Coke. Next to the bucket was a single cut-crystal double Old-Fashioned glass and a single cocktail napkin. I was expected.
He was standing looking out over the huge terrace at the lights twinkling across the river in Windsor, Ontario. Over those fifty-dollar skivvies he was wearing a well-cut tuxedo. The trousers fell onto a pair of benchmade, black lizard cowboy boots. Above the collar of his ruffled shirt was a blue-and-white ribbon choker, suspended from which was his Congressional Medal of Honor.
He held a highball glass down to dregs and melted ice in his left hand. He must have seen my reflection in the glass because he turned and toasted me with his glass. “Howdy, Dick. Welcome to the spread.”
“Evening.”
“Missed cha at the shindig.”
“I had commitments.”
“Too bad. It was a real lollapalooza. You shoulda seen my table—had me some senators, a passel of active duty generals and admirals, some local bidnessmens—captains of industry and all that horse puckey. It was a real kick-ass group of folks.”
“Sorry I couldn’t make it.”
He nodded. “Me, too—coulda meant some mean bidness for you, now you’re a civilian again.”
I didn’t say anything, so he turned back toward the view and changed the subject with a sweeping gesture. “Nice, huh?”
It was better than nice, and I told him so.
He laughed. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s amazing what six thousand seven hundred and fifty bucks a day exclusive of room service will buy.” He laughed again. “Hey, know what? I need a refill,
and you need a drink.”
“Thanks.” I looked around. “Where’s Dawg?”
“He’s off prowlin’ and growlin’ somewhere,” the Californian said noncommittally. “You know Dawg—he gets so damn restless. Sometimes I think he’s bored with me.” He strode over to the coffee table, picked up the half-pint Mason jar, carefully tilted some of the liquid into his highball glass, added three ice cubes, and filled it to the rim with Coke. “G’wan—he’p yourself.”
“Thanks.” I put a handful of ice in my glass and reached for the Bombay.
Before I got to pour any, LC Strawhouse interrupted. “Smell that.” He passed the Mason jar in front of my nose.
The aroma was definitely moonshine. But different, somehow.
“G’wan, g’wan, taste it—it’s okay—sip it right from the bowl, boy.” He handed it to me. I took a small gulp and handed the jar back to Strawhouse. “Smooth.”
“Damn right it’s smooth. That’s melonshine, boy—melonshine. And you ain’t ever had nothing like it before. Two hundred proof, and smoother than any damn twenty-year-old single-malt scotch in the whole damn world. I got me a good ol’ boy from west Arkansas, makes it up for me twice a year. Five-gallon lots. And ya know the secret? Tomatoes. He adds damn tomatoes to the mash, along with his melons and other shit.”
The thought brought a crooked smile to LC’s face. “Well, go on, son, pour yourself some of that damn expensive Limey gin you like so much, then park your fanny on the divan so’s we can chaw some fat.”
I don’t know how it is for you out there, but so far as I was concerned, his folksy, redneck, sawdust-on-the-floor, sit-around-the-cracker-barrel-and-put-your-feet-up-on-the-pot-belly-stove crapola was getting just a bit too thick for me.
“Hey, fuck you, asshole,” I said by way of a wake-up call. “You’re not standing there wearing goddamn bib overalls and shit kickers. So just cut the phony redneck accent and the “aw-shucks” backwoods crap and deal straight, huh?”
That brought him up short. He looked at me as if I was crazy. Then he took a good-size swallow of melonshine and Coke, slapped the glass back on the table, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and laughed. “I guess there’s no shitting a shitter, eh, Dick?”
That depended on who was shitting whom. “You said it, LC, not me.”
He paused. From the way he looked at me I guessed that few people ever spoke to him the way I just had. “Well,” he said finally, “I like that. I like a man who’s straightforward. My first ten deals were made with spit-on-your-palm handshakes—and they made me rich.” He sipped his drink. “Now I got me two hundred damn lawyers on staff to draw up contracts, got me another hundred at four firms in Los Angeles, New York, London, and Washington—and those sons of bitches bill me five hundred an hour plus expenses to have some damn paralegal look over the heretofores and whereases and forthwiths my staff guys write—and I still get my ass sued all the damn time for breach of this, or lack of that, or failure to whatever. Shit, I’d rather go back to those old-fashioned handshake deals.”
I could relate to that. But I wasn’t here to talk about lawyers or deals—I wanted to know why he thought a bunch of tangos hijacking an airplane in Key West wanted to talk to him so bad. So I asked.
“Hell,” he said, “probably because they knew I’m a straight shooter.” He sipped his drink and watched me react. “I get all kinds of calls like that. Man went crazy last year, took his wife hostage. I was on Larry King—the sonofabitch called me up and I talked him down, right there live on the TV show.”
He shrugged. “Bottom line? I got no idea why those hijackers called for me, other than I’d rather talk to me than the president, because between the two of us, I’m the one with the most honest answers.” He sipped again and gave me a wistful look over the top of his glass. “Y’know, I wish the FBI had called me—I probably coulda done something so you wouldn’t have had to wax them dumbass fellas.”
But the FBI’s assistant director for operations had called LC Strawhouse—and he’d turned the Bureau down flat, complete with deleted expletives. I’d seen the MEMCON.
So much for LC Strawhouse and his honest answers.
I don’t know if you’ve realized this yet, gentle readers, but so far as I was concerned, there was something distinctly unkosher going on here.
Let’s look at the situation from where I stood.
Item. LC Strawhouse, or someone close to him, was reading the files I’d planted in Intelink.
Item. If he could read my bogus files, that meant he could manipulate the whole damn system—just like Wonder was doing.
Item. If he could manipulate the entire system, then he could also move evidence around, pilfer information, change the substance of documents, even “shred” the contents of files. All electronically. All without leaving any fingerprints—unless we knew what we were looking for and set a trap for him, the way we’d done.
No wonder the Priest had wanted me and my men sheep-dipped. No wonder he had insisted that we stay out of the military loop. I had to take for granted that there was nothing in the Intelink system that LC Strawhouse couldn’t lay his hands on if he wanted to.
No wonder Gunny Barrett’s memo to the Priest had been handwritten—if it had been put on the computer, then LC would probably know about it already, and my ample Slovak behind would be incipient grass.
Okay—I know that one of my SpecWar commandments says that Thou shalt never assume (because to assume makes an ASS of yoU and ME). But let’s break that commandment. Let us assume that LC Strawhouse was dirty. The question then becomes, what kind of dirty? Was he skimming inside information in order to get business? Was he selling it—and if so, to whom? Or was he using his access to help him run for president—creating a private intelligence network that could spread chaos, confusion, and disinformation inside the government?
Well, friends, there are several ways of finding out. One way would be to confront him—the old Perry Mason-style straightforward in-your-face accusation.
That, I knew, would never work. LC Strawhouse had spent the past year and a half on TV talk shows. There wasn’t a question he hadn’t been asked—from the ridiculous on MTV (“Have you ever dropped acid?”), to the sublime on Larry King (“LC, some people call you a pseudofascist—how do you feel about Mussolini?”). No—old LC had been to TV school. He knew how to deflect questions with humor, wit, or sarcasm. The direct approach was not going to work. I was going to have to hit him through the back door—that’s my SEAL shorthand for using unconventional warfare.
In this case, however, I wasn’t about to shoot and loot literally. What I wanted was to create a psychological edge for myself. I chose to do it by attacking his sense of self-esteem and sowing confusion.
But I could not accomplish that goal in an overtly intellectual manner—he’d see right through me. Instinctively, I knew I’d have to be damn subtle. In fact, I’d have to be fucking inscrutable. (That was probably the only way I could give him the screwting he deserved.) So I fell back on the fundamentals of unconventional Warriordom—teachings I’d studied as a Tadpole.
It was Roy Boehm’s idea to take young Frogs and inculcate them—us—in the mysteries of Oriental philosophy. We all thought it was a lot of bullshit at the time—and God knows we gave Roy a lot of grief when he made us memorize snippets from Sun Tzu, Chang Yu, Miyamoto Musashi, and a bunch of other ancient warriors. In fact, he had literally to pound the knowledge into us, often with the help of his fists. But guess what—later, in battle, when the merde was hitting the ventillateur and lives were at stake, those words of wisdom and philosophy came back to help us win; to help us kill our enemies in great numbers.
So, now, did Roy’s advice come back to me, once more—this time in the words of the great Chinese tactician Chang Yu, who tells us that the Warrior controls his enemy by causing frustration, aggravation, confusion, and harassment.
But isn’t that advice just a tad obvious, Master Marcinkosan?
Sure it
is, Tadpole—but it’s precisely the kind of Keep-It-Simple-Stupid advice that works.
I accept the wisdom of your experience, Master Marcinkosan. But then, how is such a formidable yet simple goal accomplished?
Well, Tadpole, listen up. I take my lesson today from the well-read precepts of a master swordsman known as Fudo, who was a seventeenth-century disciple of the great Miyamoto Musashi.
Fudo was born in Kyoto in 1627. (He was known as “The Immovable One” for those of you who are interested in such trivia, and like Cher, Roseanne, and Halston he had only one name.) Orphaned at the age of twelve, he became an itinerant Shinto priest. At twenty-one, he had an epiphany and turned all of his energies to learning the art of the blade. By 1652, he had already invented the controversial Bushido fighting method combining Kendo and Fujitsu that has come to be known as Statue technique. It was probably best summed up in Fudo’s famous 1654 haiku on swordsmanship:
Air cut through by steel.
The blade stops: from silent stone,
Death is preordained.
Now, if you have followed the Way of the Warrior, Tadpole, you will know that this Haiku can be interpreted in several ways. The “silent stone” of which Fudo writes, for example, can mean the enemy, or it can mean the Warrior himself.
Come off it, Master Marcinko-san. This is just so much macho psychobabble horse puckey, and I ain’t buying it.
Impudent Tadpole, you have much to learn. Listen and I will impart wisdom.
See, if the enemy has become silent stone, that means he has been robbed of all ability to defend, plan, and resist because the blade, stopped in its deadly path, has reduced him to fear and confusion. But if it is the Warrior who has turned into silent stone, then he becomes as impenetrable as granite. His motives cannot be fathomed, and he will create confusion and disorder.
But that is contradictory. Master Marcinko-san. You can’t have it both ways.
Of course it is contradictory, Tadpole. But you forget, as Master Boehm has taught, that the essential discipline of Mindfulness requires everything to be everything, and in equal degrees of being. The endless interaction that affects the destinies of all creatures and things. Think of it as the balance represented by black and white. Yin and yang. Laurel and Hardy. Abbott and Costello. Clinton and Gore.
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