There are UGS—Unmanned Ground Sensor—systems, advanced, short-wave pulsing lasers, infrared, and high-frequency monitoring devices to name only a few. And they are supplemented by an energetic staff of competent ex-Green Berets and former CIA security types. I know they are competent, because as a favor to S3’s CEO, I once took Red Cell to Dallas for a surprise security exercise against them. It took us more than a week to break through all their defenses, and in the process, we “lost” our whole crew of ersatz tangos doing so. It’s nice to know some people take corporate security seriously.
When I ran SEAL Team Six, S3 Systems crafted dozens of toys for me. They modified the Motorola radios I bought, making them totally secure against intercepts—even from NSA earwigs. They developed the miniaturized silent drills I used to insert mikes and video cameras through walls and into airplane fuselages. Then they built the tiny mikes and video cameras.
More recently, as intelligence-gathering priorities have evolved, S3 has become increasingly involved in computer-based or generated espionage. It has developed software viruses that hide in massive corporate supercomputer networks, seeking passwords and pulling out the sorts of data that spooks look for. (Just between us, incidentally, it did very well in France a couple of years or so ago until three S3 employees on loan to the CIA and working under embassy cover got careless, got caught, and were expelled for industrial espionage.)
Anyway, in March 1993, the friendly folks at S3 Systems developed a cellular phone tracking system that allows agencies to trace calls without having to know the cellular number of the phone. They sold the system—really it is a computer-based software program—to the FBI, as well as to the folks at No Such Agency, Christians in Action, and DIA. Six months after that, Herman Slotnik was arrested in Raleigh, North Carolina.
There is, however, one tiny flaw in S3’s cellular-tracking computer program. I’ll tell you what it is, too—if you promise never to reveal it to anyone. Okay—the defect is that if you put your cellular phone on call-forwarding, it is the “forward” phone that the program locks onto, not the originating unit.
How do I know this? you ask. I know it because it is my job to know about back doors and hidden entryways and nasty, spooky, downright unfair ways to win. That’s what makes me the unconventional, hirsute, loveable, Bombay-quaffing rogue that I am—that and the fact that I’ll kill you before you kill me.
So—first things first. Wonder pulled the car into the farthest corner of the rest area. No need to sit out in the open and get spotted by some observant civilian who’d like to retire on a cool half-mil stipend from LC Strawhouse.
Then I reviewed my options. To be honest, I didn’t have a lot of options—not obvious ones, anyway. Dawg and LC had set things up pretty fucking well. But I wasn’t without recourse, either.
Let’s go over the situation. You know and I know that I didn’t off Johnny Cool—the dirty Dawg done did da deed, and he dood it with my very own Emerson. But the fact that you know and I know wasn’t going to help me out with the FBI, or any of the hundreds of local cops between here and wherever we were going, who’d see wasting me as one way to get their ugly faces on Top Cops, American Detective, Unsolved Mysteries, or any of those real-life infotainment shows, not to mention land themselves a lucrative book deal out of it.
So where did that leave me? It left me out in the cold. But I’m a goddamn SEAL, bub—and out in the cold is nowhere I haven’t been before.
Besides, I knew exactly what Dawg and LC Strawhouse were doing. LC was pissed—he’d opened the door about his goals to me, asked me to come aboard, and I’d slapped the shit out of him. As he’d said at the time, I was a dead man. Dawg was pissed, too. I knew they’d be willing to go to any length to put my ugly Slovak ass en écharpe—which is a sling, if you’re in Paris. They knew damn well where I was, too—which was tracking their precious semi-trailer full of toys. They were probably waiting for me to make some kind of move. (Which, in point of fact, was why I wasn’t doing anything but watching, right now. Frogs who make precipitious moves get gigged. And I wanted both my grenouilles, for kicking ass and taking names.)
Moreover, Lyman Clyde and Elwood P. had their own set of ESBAM—that’s Eat Shit and Bark At the Moon— problems. Incidentally, do not forget this acronym or these conditions—you will see them all again.
ESBAM One. Sure, they wanted to waste me. But they had to do it themselves. They couldn’t allow the possibility that I’d tell some local sheriff about the precious load of stolen weapons in that semi when he clapped me in cuffs. They also had to assume—I certainly would—that I’d told someone up my own chain of command about what they were doing. Bottom line? They’d probably try to take me down themselves. But they would do it only when they had total advantage. Which in turn told me it wouldn’t happen on the road: interstates are reasonably public places and they wouldn’t want to be interrupted. The fact that they had to hit me themselves gave me beacoup wriggle room.
ESBAM Two. They also had no idea how many people I had working with me—unless, that is, they had access to the documents we’d signed that sat in the Priest’s safe. Which wasn’t out of the question, given what I’d seen in Detroit. But even if they discovered who was in my crew, they’d have a hell of a hard time finding everybody.
ESBAM Three. They had no idea about Mugs Sullivan and his network of retired chiefs. Mugs was my Mick in the hole—the hub of my underground Safety Net.
ESBAM Four. My camp included Stevie Wonder and his durable laptop computer—which meant I had an arthroscopic access to Intelink no one knew about. Wonder’s ability to seek and disseminate information gave me a heads-up about the opposition’s thinking and tactics.
Hell, the more I thought about it, my situation was better than theirs. For sure. Right on. I guar-ron-tee. (Yeah—and have I told you lately that I still believe in Santa Claus, and that Kermit and Miss Piggy will actually get married?)
Go-to-work time. I retrieved our second cellular phone from Gator Shepard and called Mugs. He hadn’t gotten home yet, so I left a message on his machine.
Then I punched the call-forwarding code into my own cellular and dialed the secure line at Rogue Manor—it’s an S3 Systems programmable cellular phone I kept as a souvenir from Green Team. It works all over the world, and it can’t be tapped—at least not easily. The phone rang three times, then a gruff, tough voice said, “Manor.”
That’s Brud’s voice. Brud is an ex-Camp David Marine who works buildings and grounds and security for me three days a week, patroling my two hundred acres of snakes and lakes, and watching over my house with the same flawless attention to detail with which he used to guard the president’s weekend retreat. The other two days, he pulls much the same duty at a secure site called Ground Zero, which sits atop a certain hollowed-out Blue Ridge mountain, codename Ark Waterfall, up on the Virginia-West Virginia border.
“It’s me. Sit-rep?”
“Slicker ’n you-know-what,” said Brud. “Got me a bunch of Revenooers out by the front gate, steaming up their windows, just sittin’.”
“Yeah—I figured you might. Stay cool.”
“No prob. One of them gray phone company vans came by, too, about an hour ago—stopped and talked to the steamy window crowd then drove off. I went out the back door, came up through the wood—y’know, just past where the crooked spring comes up and feeds the creek—and took me a peek. Guess what? They be playing with the phone lines out there, Dick.”
That was to be expected. But they couldn’t play with the line I was on. “Sounds about right.”
“Well?” He waited. I knew what Brud wanted to hear. He was waiting for me to tell him it would be all right to head for the EOD locker, take some C-4, put it up their exhaust pipes where the sun don’t shine, and watch the Feds go boom. Brud comes from a part of West By-God where they don’t have a lot of respect for Revenooers.
But that wouldn’t happen—at least, not today. I told him what I needed. I didn’t have to say it twice,
either. Brud’s a good man that way.
I hung up and gave him fifteen minutes to program the phone. He hadn’t done it before, but it was simple, if you followed the steps carefully. Nine minutes later, my own phone rang.
“Hi—it’s Brud. I got it—you’re set to go.”
“Great.” I rang off. Now I could call the Priest—not on his scrambled phone (which could be tracked), but through the Manor’s lines. But I wasn’t about to talk open-ended. If I did that, he’d know right away I’d breached the tracking program. But I still had to know what the hell was going on, because this was turning into a clusterfuck the proportions of which even I had never seen before.
I punched the Manor’s number into the phone. I waited as the line opened and the S3 cellular began the relay sequence Brud had programmed into it.
The Priest’s line br-ringed. I gave my password, and was connected. The clock was running.
I got the first words in. “It wasn’t me.”
The silence on the other end told me either he wasn’t convinced or there was somebody close by. I kept a close eye on the second hand on my watch. A preliminary trace takes about forty-five seconds—if you’re set up to do it. I took for granted the Priest would be set up. Finally, he spoke. “Where are you?”
Was he crazy? “Someplace safe.” A bulb went off in my head. “Where are you?”
“Office.”
That had to be a lie—unless he’d flown back last night on a military plane. I knew all too well that you can call-forward cellular phones—wasn’t that what I was doing? The absurdity of the situation struck me. Given the technology, we could have been sitting in adjoining cars, lying to each other about where the fuck we actually were. “Sure,” I said. “Sure you are.”
His tone got wary. “Okay, Dick, tell me what happened— what the hell you were doing.”
Nine seconds. “There’s no time right now—it would take an hour to explain it all. You know what I was looking for? Well I found it. Now, you tell me what’s going on back there. I need support.”
“Do you have proof positive?” Suddenly he was all-business. Where the fuck was this guy coming from?
Still, I gave him a straight answer. “No.” I didn’t, either. I had LC Strawhouse making a speech in yet another location where a weapons heist and subsequent distribution took place. I had a dirty Dawg on scene. I had a stolen FBI license plate, a bunch of Zulu Gangsta Princes in lots of pieces, and a dead retired SEAL who’d worked for LC Strawhouse. But take-it-to-the-bank proof that absolutely implicated LC Strawhouse? Nada.
“Then there’s nothing I can do for you right now,” the Priest said tersely. “Look—you haven’t completed your assignment. I need hard evidence. Something I can take to court. When you get it, then we can talk about support. Until then, you’ve been designated a target of opportunity. You’re officially cannon fodder, Dick.”
I was clusterfucked. BOHICA’d. I told him as much.
“If you had something concrete, we could deal.” He paused, and his tone softened just a bit. “Look, you have to understand that my hands have been tied—tied way up the food chain, if you catch what I’m saying.”
Twenty-three seconds. Food chain, as in chain of command. Yeah—I’d caught it. And I didn’t like the sound of it either. “You have any suggestions?”
The tone of his voice told me that he was upset about this nasty turn of developments, too. “I’ll try to do what I can. In the meantime, keep hunting.”
Thirty-one seconds. “And?” I was growing very tired of this crap.
“And—you must not fail, Dick. You will not fail.”
The phone went dead. What he’d said was significant. He’d repeated the very same words to me as Admiral Black Jack Morrison, the day Black Jack, then CNO, ordered me to create and command SEAL Team Six.
“Dick, you will not fail,” Black Jack had said. Now the Priest had said the same thing. I scratched at something that had taken up residence under my beard. He was sending me a message—no doubt about it. I just wished I knew what the fuck it was.
I called Mugs. He picked up the phone and singsonged oh, so sweetly, “I told you so.”
I could have strangled the son of a bitch. But he didn’t give me a chance. No—he had to state the obvious. “Rotten Richard, my boy, are you in a pile of it this time.”
“I never would have guessed. C’mon, what’s the real bad news, Chief?”
That made him laugh. Actually, it was good to hear someone laugh.
There were developments. The FBI license plate had been stolen from (and subsequently replaced on) a car in the FBI motor pool, which was located in an unsecured corner of the underground garage at the Federal office building on Michigan Avenue, which is where the FBI’s Detroit field division headquarters is located. You, like our obtuse editor, are probably wondering what the significance of that fact is.
Well, let me explain. It is common tango practice to do this. In Red Cell, if you will remember, we actually stole a Navy security vehicle to use during our raid on the Washington Navy Yard. That way, if another cop drove by, he’d see nothing untoward—no strange vehicles, no out-of-state plates, no rented Ryder vans with cargoes of fertilizer-and-fuel-oil bombs. Same thing applied in our current situation. Remember, when Mugs had first checked on the car, he’d been told it belonged to the FBI. Who’d ask any further questions? Anyhow, the old chief told me the switch had been pulled by an asshole named Patterson, who worked as a laborer on the contract maintenance crew. Patterson had ties to the Zulu Gangstas.
Does this strike you as strange? Yeah—me, too. But you have to understand that, unlike FBI headquarters, where even the people who clean the building are full-time FBI employees, the bureau’s field offices, which are often located in federal office buildings, use contract labor for cleaning. The FBI is not alone in this lunacy, incidentally. At American embassies and military installations all over the world, building and vehicle repair, food preparation—even secretarial help—are performed by local contract employees. To be honest, we could not run our overseas facilities without local contract labor. Domestically, we use contract services for everything from cleaning our federal office buildings, to auto pool maintenance, to providing security at such sensitive sites as nuclear weapons stowage depots and operational military bases.
And what kinds of security checks are done on the people who go to work for these contract services? If you have answered “few or none,” give yourself an A. Example? Mugs had checked up on the aforementioned Mr. Patterson. Who, it turned out, had spent eight and three-quarters of the last ten years incarcerated at Marquette prison on the beautiful shores of Lake Superior, on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He had done his time for aggravated assault (now that is a charge that puzzles me—I mean, have you ever heard of unaggravated assault?) and armed robbery.
The old chief had some other news, too. The Detroit police were rounding up Zulu Gangstas by the dozens. They’d picked through what was left of the panel truck, seen the automatic weapons fragments, and went bonkers. The downside was that—courtesy of Dawg Dawkins—the cops believed I was the one who’d been selling the Zulu Gangstas their weapons.
I shook my head and added another black mark next to Dawg’s name in my brain. Sooner or later, we’d settle the score.
Meanwhile, Mugs continued, he’d just faxed a retired PO1 named Hinton who’d been in the Teams Vietnam. If the target continued down 1-75, Hinton would help us out—pick us up just south of the state line and convoy with us to Atlanta.
That concerned me. “Is this guy trustworthy?”
“Don’t be an asshole, Richard.”
“Hey, Mugs, no offense, but I am wanted for murder.”
“What’s your point?”
That shut me up.
“Look, Richard,” he snapped, “when you are in a situation with which I am not familiar, then you can worry. For now, S2, okay?”
I know when I’m outranked and outflanked. “Aye-aye, Chief.”
“Good.” From Knoxville south, Mugs continued, he could fax a contact in Birmingham—a Vietnam-era SEAL who’d recently retired from the police department there— if the semi turned west. If it kept moving south, toward Atlanta, he knew another old Frog we could count on. If they went to New Orleans, our butts would be covered by an old Frog from the bayous. If they drove to Tampa, there was an old Frog with a forty-two-foot Grand Banks Mugs Sullivan knew. He had put his list at my disposal. “You just tell me what you need, Richard.”
Would I ever.
Now, you all may be wondering why I wasn’t all that nervous about being spotted, since I was a fugitive with a bunch of Feds looking for me. The answer is that during my time with SEAL Team Six, Red Cell, and Green Team, my men and I had regularly practiced going underground. To play the role of terrorist, you have to learn how to think and act like one. The best way to do that, is to do it.
Remember how in Green Team we were able to make it from Pakistan to London even though we were on the Interpol wanted list? Well, the same principles applied in my current situation. In fact, the United States may be the world’s most receptive and hospitable environment for terrorists. One of the most positive facets of American society is that it is virtually an open one. As a people, we are friendly to a fault. From the very first, these qualities have been a part of the American character—they’ve been chronicled by writers from de Tocqueville to James Fenimore Cooper; from Henry James to Ernest Hemingway. And they are reflected in every aspect of our lives, from the laxity with which our military bases are guarded, to the freedom with which people come and go in the U.S. Capitol. On the downside, that very openness which makes us special, also makes it possible for tangos and other no-goodniks to exploit us. It also made it easy for me to disappear.
We’d rented our cars and bought the phones under false names. We had enough cash for a few weeks—if we maintained budget discipline. The warrant was for me, which meant that my boys could move more or less undisturbed. The one major problem I had to solve was my own well-used, overabused, and currently contused Slovak face, which growls out from the cover of more than two million book jackets these days, as well as being blanketed over TV news shows and newspapers, courtesy of the Federal government.
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