NIS wanted to play in Washington—they like to wage war on a nine-to-five schedule at NIS. I preferred cities like London, Lisbon, Rome, and Naples for a couple of reasons. First, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia were where the game would be played for real, anyway. And second, because each of those overseas locations has the kind of environment that makes shadowing bad guys a real nightmare: a lot of traffic and confusing traffic patterns, ongoing construction, crowded squares, gridlock, and beaucoup one-way thoroughfares, dead-end streets, and anonymous culde-sacs—the sorts of places you can easily lose, confuse, and abuse your baby-sitters.
My men and I played the nasty boys. (Type casting, right?) And we always decimated the good guys because we took the time to learn the city and use it to our advantage when we played. That’s true guerrilla warfare, folks. Remember Mao Zedong’s famous exhortation: “The revolutionary soldier should move through the masses like a fish through water.”
Tonight I’d be moving through those masses like a fish through molasses. Oh, I had secure comms. But you will note, gentle readers, that both of the surveillance techniques I’ve just described above demand multiple vehicles. Tonight, I had two targets, and a mere five cars to run against them, while the bad guys had two countersurveillance vehicles. Most significantly, tonight, I was the one who was driving blind.
They knew what they were doing, too. The Ford let the panel truck go first. Then it fell in behind, driving slowly eastward on a four-lane county road that had almost no traffic. The station wagon paired off with the tractor-trailer, and headed south on Route 23.
I called in the cavalry as soon as they pulled out, and made quick assignments. Wonder checked the armory and came out white-faced. “They picked the motherfucker clean,” he reported. So much for my ideas about the genteel pruning of weapons. These guys had gang-banged the place.
Now, we really did have to keep up with ’em. Two cars of my lethal leprechauns took off after the tractor-trailer. Nasty and Wonder took one of the remaining rental cars, Cherry and Duck Foot the other. I retrieved the night-vision glasses from Duck Foot and rode with Mugs.
As the ex-chief pulled out of the armory lot I could see that Dawg and his SEAL pup had come to—they were struggling in the van, smashing themselves against their duct-tape bonds to break free.
Mugs hooked a thumb in their direction. “In my day we didn’t leave witnesses,” he said. “Loose ends, y’know. Messy.”
It actually had occurred to me that I should have killed the sons of bitches when I’d had the opportunity—except I’d wanted to interrogate ’em. But as usual, Mr. Murphy had interrupted me before I’d had the chance.
“Yeah, well, if we weren’t otherwise engaged right now …” Mugs was right. And if we weren’t in such a hurry, I’d have pulled over and waxed ’em now. But there was no time. There were vehicles to follow. We headed out after the Ford.
They took their time getting back into the city. Which made problems for us. Because they were on Route 12—a four-lane state highway that turns into Michigan Avenue once it passes the city limit—there were a series of traffic lights. The damn Ford would drop back and let the panel truck get a quarter mile or so ahead—after all, they knew where the fuck they were going.
Just outside Greenfield Village the panel truck turned south onto the Southfield Freeway access road while the Ford kept moving east on Michigan. It stopped suddenly on the freeway overpass.
Mugs slipped into the right-hand lane as I hit the SEND button on the radio. “I got the truck—Wonder stays with the Ford. Cherry—you drop way back—pull over and wait till we see what the fuck, over.”
“Yo, roger that,” Wonder’s and Cherry’s voices overlapped back at me.
I peered at the truck, which was accelerating now. “C’mon—move,” I told Mugs. “Keep up with ’em.”
He shot me a dirty look. “Patience, Rotten Richard, don’t be so blankety-blanicing impetuous.” He steered gently into the access road curve. “What lane are they in? My eyes ain’t what they used to be.”
I peered at the truck a quarter-mile ahead knowing that Mugs could still spot a dime at a hundred yards. “Curb.”
“Thought so.” He smiled knowingly. “They’re checking their six. Curb lane don’t go to the freeway.”
He kept us moving slowly. “The guys in the Ford are probably eyeballing us to see what we do.”
They were running Robert Roger’s Rule Nineteen on us. Instinctively, I turned around in the seat and looked through the rear window. Of course, I couldn’t see anything.
Right on cue, Wonder’s voice came through the radio. “Guy’s jumped out of the Ford—looking at where you are.”
Dammit—were we blown? “Go past ’em and get the fuck out of sight,” I radioed back tersely.
“I know, Dick—I know.” Wonder’s voice had a taut edge to it and I was sorry I’d snapped at him. He was as good at this game as I and didn’t need to be told what to do.
Now, the panel truck turned right at the first intersection. Mugs kept rolling. “Duck,” he said.
I ducked. I know when to take yes for an answer. It is when a chief tells you to do something.
Mugs drove steadily past the intersection, checking the rearview mirror. I sat back up. We came to an intersection. I expected he’d turn right. Instead, he drove through it.
“Mugs—”
“They can still see us from the overpass, you asshole,” he explained, his exasperated tone sounding much like Ev Barrett on a good day. We rounded a right-hand curve. “Now—” he said, and floored the accelerator. He hit sixty on the straightaway, then braked sharply as we came to a second intersection, and veered the car in a tight, controlled skid right-hand turn, one-handing the steering wheel with the confidence of an old patrol-car driver.
Just after we made the turn he shut down the headlights. “We’re taking the long way around the Ford proving grounds,” he said by way of explanation. “We’ll pick ’em up on the back side—they have a fifteen-miles-an-hour limit going through the village so we’ll be there before ’em.”
And we were, too—by forty-five seconds or so. They came out of the Greenfield Village road, turned right, drove three-quarters of a mile back to Michigan Avenue, and turned right again. Mugs and I shadowed them to the intersection. I jumped out of the car, ran to the corner, peeked around and watched through my night-vision glasses as the truck chugged slowly past the Ford and continued eastward.
0220. They worked their way around downtown, moving east, circling Lafayette Park, and working their way onto a wide avenue called Gratiot. The truck and the Ford both pulled off the main road onto a narrow street into a huge, crowded open square, chockablock full of trucks and hundreds of stalls, all lit by floodlights.
“What the hell?” I asked Mugs.
“Eastern Market,” he explained. “The city’s main wholesale food center.”
“How many exits does it have?”
“Half a dozen, maybe,” said Mugs. “Not counting the alleys.”
Shit. The traffic conditions reminded me of Cairo on a bad day or a Rubik’s Cube—continually confusing permutations of vehicles, pedestrians,and hand trucks, all moving in a flow that had no seeming logic. Our target was six vehicles ahead of us—at the moment. But yet another van was now backing up, blocking our way, and keeping us from the quarry.
“Wonder—”
“Yo.”
“Let’s check ’em on foot.”
“Roger.”
I swiveled in the seat and saw Nasty slip out of Wonder’s car, which was hung up three or four cars in back of us, and make his way through the chaos past Mugs and me. He stopped long enough to toss some money at a food vendor and grab a shwarma, dump hot sauce on it, snatch a handful of paper napkins, and continue onward.
Now, you may think he was wasting time. I knew better— what he did, was camouflage himself. You use what’s at hand. And in a market, that’s food.
Another van cut in front of us, bumped
the car in front of it, and everything stopped while the fucking drivers got out to examine the damage.
“Cherry—”
“Yo.”
“Where are you?”
“Back at the turnoff, Skipper. Sitting on”—he paused while he looked—“Gratiot Avenue.”
“Hold where you are. It’s impossible to move in here.” I turned to Mugs. “Can he get around the perimeter of the market?”
“It’s possible,” Mugs said. “There’s an access road back there—it leads to 1-94, or 1-75. But I’d keep him where he is—more choices from Gratiot than around the back.”
“Where does 1-94 go?”
“West to Chicago, north to Huron.”
“And 1-75?”
“North to me, and south to”—he thought about it— “Florida.”
I threw my thumb in the panel truck’s direction. “And what if they’re headed for Florida?”
Mugs shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense,” he said.
Sense? What the hell was he talking about sense for? Nothing made sense. I chewed on my mustache. There is an accepted military technical term for my present tactical condition: clusterfucked.
Well, if that was going to be the case, I needed some good news. I dialed Gator Shepard on the cellular. He answered on the third ring.
“Fuuuck you—”
He laughed. “You, too, Skipper.”
I asked for a sit-rep. And I got one—with good news for a change. They were in a truck stop on Route 23 right near Dundee, on the way to Toledo, Ohio. The semi and the station wagon had pulled in, parked, and the crew had gone to breakfast. One man had remained on board the semi.
“Keep me advised.”
“Aye-aye.”
“And slip your DF beacon on that semi first time you get a chance.” They had the passive direction-finding beacon Wonder had brought from Rogue Manor.
“Will do.” The phone bleeped and he was off-line.
“Skipper—” Nasty’s voice on the radio.
“Yo-”
“Moving north. They’re heading for the aft port side of the square.”
I looked at Mugs blankly. “So?”
“The interstate,” he said morosely. “The fuckin’ interstate.”
And here we sat, gridlocked. We’d been bottled up as neatly as I’d ever managed to screw with the NIS security teams in Europe. It was déjà screw all over again—except here, I was the déjà screwee.
These assholes were good.
Mugs grabbed the radio from me. “Cherry,” he said, “It’s Mugs.”
“Go, Mugs.”
“Where are you?”
Cherry told him.
Mugs thought for a minute. “Make a U-ee, hang your first right, go until the street dead-ends, turn left, go half a block, it’ll dead-end again. Then go right again.”
“Come again?” Cherry was confused.
Mugs hit the radio’s SEND button. “Don’t worry, asshole—I’ll talk you through it.”
Cherry and Duck Foot watched the panel truck move past them on the 1-75 access road. The Ford was rear security. Once it moved past them, they swung out, sans lights, and followed. It was risky, but necessary.
They were moving blind, too—Mugs had to talk them through a maze of one-way streets, because the panel truck turned off the access road and made its way through a warren of decrepit crack houses, onto a two-lane street of boarded-up storefronts.
0255. Mugs pushed through the market as best he could. Then, playing catch-up, we made our way to Cherry’s location. Mugs wrinkled his nose as we drove past stripped cars and burnt-out tenement shells, on streets whose lighting had long since been shot away. “We gave up on this whole part of town twenty years ago,” Mugs said. “Look—” He pointed to a series of crude white crowns spray-painted on the doors and walls of the charred frame houses that lined the street. “That’s how the Zulu Gangsta Princes mark their turf. It used to be, you’d see the goddamn things over a twenty-square-block area on the East Side. Now, you see ’em all over the city—even the fuckin’ city hall is covered with graffiti.” He dropped his window, spat, and raised it again. “They’re in charge, I guess—because we sure ain’t.”
I looked at the crown. It was the same design I’d seen spray-painted on the back door of the armory.
I have told you before that I don’t believe in coincidence.
There was no traffic. Mugs drove without lights. Wonder followed close behind. We came on Cherry’s position after half a dozen blocks. He’d parked on a side street behind the shell of a burned-out car that sat perched on cinder blocks.
We talked by radio. The panel truck, he told me, was in an alley that backed up to the rear of a dilapidated Alabama pit barbecue storefront. The Ford, he said, had pulled abreast of it.
We came up on Cherry’s car quietly. Wonder dropped back half a block, then cut round the front onto Mack Avenue. Mugs gently slipped the nose of his car into the head of the alley. The target vehicles were about a hundred yards away—dark shadows in darkness.
I peered through my night-vision glasses. There was somebody kneeling at the rear of the Ford, working on the license plate. He unscrewed it, put it on the ground, then replaced it with another plate.
The man—a tall, black guy in a suit—picked up the discarded plate, opened the Ford’s front driver-side door, and tossed the plate inside. Then he opened the trunk, removed a set of coveralls and a sweatshirt, discarded his suit jacket and his tie, pulled on the sweatshirt and coveralls, then slid into the driver’s seat and turned the ignition over.
Mugs set his jaw. “You take a hike, Richard. I want to see where the hell that son of a bitch goes with those plates, now I know they’re stolen.”
It sounded good to me. I wanted to move, too. The Zulu Gangsta Princes were a minor problem that I could solve quickly and efficiently. The huge semi, which contained tons of weapons and ammo, was more significant.
“Call me on the cellular when you learn something.” I grabbed my bundle of goodies and started to move.
“Whoa, shit for brains.” Mugs reached up and turned the dome light switch off. “No need to broadcast our position—” He tapped me on the shoulder. “Now go, Rotten Richard.”
I rolled out of his car and, staying out of sight, worked my way to Wonder’s rented Chevy, which he’d pulled up behind Cherry’s car.
By the time I slipped into the backseat and turned around to look, the old Frog had disappeared.
DUCK FOOT TOOK MY NIGHT VISION AND CREPT INTO THE ALLEY to set up a one-man OP (that, you’ll recall, is an Observation Post). Meanwhile, working very q-u-i-e-t-l-y, Nasty, Wonder, Cherry, and I removed the backseats of the rental cars, wormed our way into the trunks, and retrieved some of the lethal goodies we’d taken from the armory.
The Zulu Gangstas weren’t off-loading, which told me they were going to truck their booty elsewhere for distribution and/or sale. No they weren’t—not if I did my job right tonight.
To make doing my job right more difficult, they had posted two sentries in the alley—a pair of urban hip-hops wearing bulky padded cotton jackets, poor-boy caps turned backward, sweatpants, and the brightly colored, high-top cross-training athletic footwear that has come to be known as felony shoes. The pair fondled a couple of the stolen CAR-15s with 40-round magazines. Telltale bulges told me they were carrying pistols, too.
Let’s stop here while I explain to you about sentry duty. And don’t skip this part because you’re going to see it again. First, sentry duty is like PT—you don’t have to like it, you just have to do it. Moreover, it is tough work. It demands concentration, attention to detail, and unfailing vigilance. In the field, a good pair of sentries can mean the difference between life and death. Yes, I said a pair of sentries. Unlike all those war movies you’ve seen, in real life you almost never allow a sentry work alone—especially at night.
Most people, however, consider sentry duty the tactical equivalent of KP. They use it to do everythin
g but keep watch. They don’t realize that war is 99 percent waiting, and one percent fighting. Sentries like that are inviting targets for people like me. It would have been easy to eliminate the hip-hops. But tonight, that wasn’t my job. I had to get in and get out without being spotted. So we’d simply wait ’em out.
The situation was tilted in my favor because the Zulu Gangsta sentries were unwilling participants—they didn’t like it, and they weren’t gonna do it. It was cold, it was damp, and it was boring. So, after just four or five minutes, they began shifting their feet. A few minutes later, the shifting turned to stomping. Then they began talking—losing their concentration. Soon they lit cigarettes—thus ruining their night vision. And after three-quarters of an hour in the cold, the pair decided they could watch things just as well from inside the building.
That, as they say, was our cue. You remember all those wonderful Warner Brothers cartoons where Zeke the Wolf or Wiley Coyote sneaks and peeks? Y’know—the character sneaks up behind a tree on tippy-toe, then suddenly peeks his nose out from behind an adjacent tree—which is twenty feet away across the field. Well that, friends, is how SEALs move, too. Except we don’t do it on our tiptoes like Wiley or Zeke, because our feets are too big and we have opposable fingers, and besides we have a harder time than they do breaking the laws of physics.
On a more serious note, part of becoming a SEAL is learning how to move stealthily. From the early days in Vietnam, when SEALs conducted silent, nighttime snatch ops against Mr. Charlie, to the clandestine forays I ran against tangos all over the world, the goal was the same: to come, to do our jobs, and to leave, all without anybody knowing we’d been there.
Accomplishing this goal has always been easier in the countryside than in the city. In the country, you can infiltrate by using the terrain to your advantage—rivers and streams allow you to slip up on your enemy undetected. Foliage affords great cover, aiding in your covert movements. In the city, access is generally confined to streets, alleys, rooftops, or sewers. There is less natural camouflage available—and a much higher probability of being spotted by a random civilian as you’re making your way to your objective.
RW04 - Task Force Blue Page 20