So, I had to change my appearance. Next to my dick, my face is my strongest feature—and my eyes are my face’s strongest element. So what I had to do was draw attention away from them. Sure, I could start by shaving my beard, trimming my eyebrows, and keeping my hair under a hat. But those alone wouldn’t be enough to make me invisible. People would look at me—and recognize me by my eyes.
I know what I am telling you is true because of an incident that took place a few years back, when elements of the PKK—the Kurdish Workers’ Party, a small, Marxist terrorist group of ultranationalists supported by Iraq and Syria—attacked an NSA listening post masquerading as a NATO radar installation in Mardin, Turkey, which is close to the Syrian border. Two of No Such Agency’s earwigs were killed by an RPG—a rocket-propelled grenade. In those days, we had a president who allowed us to retaliate when our people were murdered, and Red Cell, which was conducting a security exercise at the NATO base in Sigonella, Sicily, was uncaged to neutralize the perps.
So much for background. I left six men behind to continue the exercise, packed my cut-down, suppressed Ruger Mark-II .22-caliber pistol and fifty rounds of Eley’s best subsonic hollowpoint ammunition, took Doc Tremblay along for moral support (he brought his lightweight, mini-sniper rifle in case I needed anything more), and went hunting.
Well, I didn’t go hunting right away. This, after all, was the Middle East, which operates within the parameters of its own particular traditions and customs—not to mention a certain, shall we say leisurely, ma’lesh, or mañana, way of doing business. So it took six long weeks for our own intelligence organizations to nudge the Turks in the right direction (convincing them every inch of the way that everything was their idea), and finally track the PKK’s Lord High Executioner, a cretin named Cetin Abbas, to a small Syrian border town (populated mostly by Kurds), called Ayn Diwar.
We finally got to climb aboard a NATO C-9 and flew to Diyarbakir, where we were picked up by two carloads of MIT grads. (No, not computer dweebs from Cambridge, Massachusetts. The acronym stands for Milli Istihbarat Teskilati, which, as anyone in Anatolia can tell ya, means “Turkish Intelligence Organization.”) During the drive, they handed us their files. Their thin files. Their painfully thin files. Cetin the cretin may have been on Turkish intelligence’s most wanted list for a long time, but MIT didn’t know a lot about him. And they hadn’t actually seen him in almost a decade—ergo the only photos they had for me were a grainy, eight-year-old surveillance picture, and a passport portrait taken when he was seventeen—more than thirteen years before.
The lead MIT case officer told us that they’d sent agents familiar with the photo across the border into Ayn Diwar—a fact that made me very nervous, because it meant that our quarry was already on guard—but Cetin was nowhere to be found. Doc and I, he said apologetically, had probably come on a wild tango chase.
Not according to my information. But to play the game according to the local rules, I threw up my hands and commiserated. Of course, I added, we’d infiltrate anyway, and Inshallah—whatever happened would be Allah’s will. That made the MIT men happy. We drove south to the small city of Midyat, where we sat over tiny cups of sweet Turkish coffee followed by huge tumblers of arak—which is high-test, anise-flavored liquor. After six hours of arak and coffee, and coffee and arak, and arak and arak, we convinced MIT to let us drop out so we could infiltrate anonymously. Somehow, two Mercedes 500 sedans and eight guys wearing matching brown suits in a region where the average yearly wage is less than $988 tend to attract unwanted attention.
Doc and I checked into a no-star hotel for the night. The next morning we bought ourselves local attire at a convenient old-clothes kiosk. Then, after a breakfast of sweet tea, yoghurt, garlic, and cucumber, we caught an ancient bus on which we ruined our kidneys as it jounced, bounced, and bumped down the pot-holed road to Cizre, a town of two thousand or so, 250 yards across the border from Ayn Diwar.
The first night, photos in hand—well, okay, not in hand, but safely folded in the waistband of my rough Kurdish clothes next to my Ruger—I slipped under the razor wire-topped fence that ran along the border and went to work. Ayn Diwar was your archetypal north Syrian one-camel town. There was a single main street and three side streets. The flat-front, balconied, two-story houses (shops below, living quarters above) had the sort of TV antennas that are fashioned out of wrought iron and look like the Eiffel Tower. The main drag was unpaved. Half a dozen soldiers, their arms folded over AK-47 assault rifles, lounged on the street or in doorways in the same stoop-shouldered, angular slouch they achieve in every Third and Fourth World country from Paraguay to Pakistan. Where the hell do they give the goddamn posture lessons for this kind of thing, anyway?
There were three grill shops, featuring goat and lamb on the spit. Nearby, were two shabby cafés filled with men sipping tea, reading week-old newspapers, smoking nargilah in water pipes, and gossiping. In the second of them, sitting on a low, square stool and playing mahbouz, a local variation of shesh besh, or backgammon, I saw my target.
He looked almost nothing like the man whose pictures sat in my coat. Almost. He’d cut his long hair short, in the style of the Iranian Shi’ites. He had removed his long beard, trimming it back to Yassir Arafat stubble. He had lost weight—the round, cherubic face in the photograph had been replaced by an angular, ascetic countenance.
All of that had changed. But he couldn’t camouflage his eyes—his bright, burning, mesmerizing eyes. The eyes of a leader, a visionary, a fanatic. Cetin Abbas’s eyes may have been the windows to his soul—but they were also his undoing.
By the time I rolled under the fence back to the safety of Turkey three hours later, Cetin was dead. And I had learned a lesson about hiding in plain sight that I’d carry for the rest of my life.
The bad guys sailed around Atlanta, blew through Valdosta, and stopped long enough to buy microwave hot dogs, drain their lizards, and refuel in Lake City Florida, forty miles south of the Georgia border. Then they put the well-worn pedal to the well-worn metal and shot around Gainesville, through Ocala, and by Trilby, coasting into Tampa’s northern suburbs after three hours of hard driving enlivened by patches of thick, opaque fog and slippery highway. We kept a quarter to a half mile or so behind them, jockeying for position among ourselves, keeping our eyes on the passive beacon, and watching to make sure that we weren’t being followed ourselves. The God of War does not look kindly on SEALs who allow themselves to be ambushed.
I was now beardless. I’d trimmed my eyebrows back so that I’d lost the beetle-browed, patriarchal sociopath Joe Stalin (or is it the matriarchal grandfather Joe Pavlik) look. And I’d dressed for the occasion in gear the guys had acquired piece by piece over the past eleven hours: a green John Deere ball cap, baggy jeans, a lime golf shirt with pocket, and—remember what I learned from Cetin the cretin—some fresh liver.
Don’t laugh. Like my sainted mother, Emilie, says, liver is good for you.
She cooks it with onions and bacon. My recipe—slightly more exotic—goes like this. You take a piece of fresh beef liver about the size of a silver dollar, slap it up on the cheekbone next to your eye, wrap it neatly in gauze bandage—being careful to partially cover your eye, too— tape it securely, then let it alone.
The blood in the liver will seep through the bandage, then it will coagulate. You will look like you’ve been through some nasty surgery—the kind of surgery that tends to make people avert their eyes from your face. Which is, of course, exactly what I wanted them to do.
Especially in Tampa, where I probably knew five hundred people. I’ve always liked Tampa. It probably has more kinds of ethnic—real ethnic—food than any other city in the state, a holdover from the days before freeways and interstates when the place was a glorious, chaotic, melting pot of immigrants. There are still Cuban cafés in Ybor City, site of the old cigar industry. There’s Greek, up north in Tarpon City. Downtown—if you can find anyplace to park—you can eat Salvadorean chorizo, Mexican fajitas, Puerto Ri
can cuchifritos, or Dominican mafongo.
There’s a steak house called Bern’s that boasts the best wine list on the East Coast. Over by Hooker’s point, just south of Ybor City, Florida’s largest fleet of shrimp boats—not to mention some of the area’s best cheap eats sea food—can be found.
But the reason I know so many people is because, just south of the city itself and due east across the bay from St. Petersburg, is a peninsula shaped somewhat like a horse’s hoof, measuring roughly three miles high and five miles wide. On that huge plot sits MacDill Air Force Base, headquarters to both the U.S. Army’s CENTCOM—Central Command—and SOCOM—the nation’s Special Operations Command.
It’s not a bad place to serve. If, that is, you’re the kind of nonwarrior professional staff puke who, like my favorite three-star admiral—G. Edward Emu, deputy chief of staff at SOCOM—likes your cammo BDUs starched, your jungle boots spit shined, and your day to end at 1630 sharp. Quality of life is great. If you’re a senior officer like Eddie you get waterfront housing on Bayshore Boulevard between Catfish Point and Gadsden Point—the kinds of villas that civilian snowbird retirees pay three grand a month to rent. If you’re an O-4 or O-5 (that’s a major or a lieutenant colonel), there are town houses with water views and nice backyards for the weekly barbecue.
There’s a big O-Club over by Catfish Point on the base’s easternmost coast—a sprawling, one-story World War II—era building—where the hot hors d’oeuvres are free during the 1600-to-1900 Happy Hour hours, and the O’s feed like locusts until the food runs out. There’s bingo and golf for the huge retarded community, a humongous commissary and post exchange. The visitors’ BOQ is walking distance from the O-Club, and across the boulevard from the beach. All very convenient.
And where are the warriors, you ask? Ah, friends, that is a good question, and if I had a good answer I would give it to you. There are few warriors actually at MacDill. Warriors can’t take the quiet pace, the golf, and the 0800-to-1630 hours. In fact, it has been my experience that when real shooters come to town, the folks at SOCOM, who have access to the base’s 137 visiting officers, and 136 visiting enlisted units, actually house them up north in Tampa proper, as far away from the spit and polish, the manicured lawns, and the O-Club Happy Hour activities as possible, so said shooters’ roguish activities will not cause discomfort to the base personnel.
You think I’m putting you on, don’t you. Well, I’m not.
I may not be putting you on, gentle reader, but I am digressing. To get back to my point, the bottom line was that between retirees, hangers-on, wanna-be’s, and active-duty staff pukes, I knew enough people in the area to make me nervous, liver or no liver. So I felt a lot better when the semi and its station wagon escort took the left-hand fork just north of the city and continued south on 1-75.
Better, that is, until they turned off onto Interstate 4, drove west—the 0620 sun coming from the horizon directly at their backs—took a left at the university, then headed due south. I knew all too well where that road leads—it dead-ends at the MacDill main gate. Which was where the station wagon turned right onto Chisholm Avenue, and drove off in a westerly direction toward the port. Incredibly, the semi drove straight to the main gate. The driver reached down and handed the white-gloved, fourragèred, blue-bereted female Air Force cop at the gatehouse a sheaf of papers, which were once-overed and handed back. She saluted, and the truck was waved through as if it belonged there.
Yes, I was a wanted man. Yes, it was a reckless thing to do, but there was no way that the goddamn truck was going to get away from me. Not now. “Follow the fucking truck,” I said.
Wonder shrugged. “Aye, aye, sir,” he grumbled, spelling it with a c and a u. He floored the accelerator. We burned rubber, careened through a yellow light, sped across four lanes of honking traffic, and drove through the MacDill main gate with a wave and a hearty “Hi-Ho, Silver.”
We’d left our shipmates in the other two cars behind. But that was okay—they could chase the station wagon. Nasty peered through the rear window. The gatekeeper didn’t seem especially perturbed by our behavior—at least she hadn’t picked up the phone. We slowed way below the twenty-five miles per hour posted limit, let a couple of cars get between us and our quarry, and continued. The semi took the main base road south for about a quarter mile, past warehouses and storage facilities. Before it got to the CENTCOM headquarters building where it might have attracted some attention, it turned left onto an access road that led past a series of double-wide trailers that sprouted UHF and VHF antennas, as well as eighteen-inch SATCOM receiving dishes.
From there, it crawled over a wide concrete apron that sat in front of a hangar I knew housed C-5 aircraft. Then it turned south again, and drove past a narrow perimeter road lined with warehouses and equipment sheds. There, it cut a wide left, tacking onto a two-lane asphalt artery that had OFFICIAL VEHICLES ONLY stenciled on its surface every hundred yards.
I knew that road, too. It dead-ended right on one of MacDill’s two huge concrete aprons—the base’s aircraft loading areas—which were directly behind the two-story SOCOM headquarters building. There was no place to hide anything there—but you could see people coming your way from any direction.
These guys were checking their six, not stashing the goods, and I wasn’t about to get us caught.
There was a one-way street just ahead. “Turn left here,” I told Wonder.
“It’s the wrong way.”
“What’s your point?”
He groaned. But he turned. “Now what?”
“Follow this until we get to a half-moon drive. Cross it— there’ll be a stop sign. Go straight on, then take your first right after the flagpole.”
Wonder wheeled the Chevy as directed. We cut through a narrow passageway between two hangars, rolled past half a dozen comm trailers, turned right at a stop sign, and emerged next to the policed-thrice-a-day-and-mowed-twice-a-week lawn in front of SOCOM headquarters. The half-moon drive was directly ahead of us—and it was fucking blocked by orange fucking rubber cones.
They were resurfacing the goddamn driveway.
SNAFU. I pointed left. “Go around there—”
Wonder shot me a dirty look. He reversed, K-turned, and went back the way we’d come. We raced to the stop sign, turned right, turned right once more, and hit a dead end.
TARFU. He backed up, reversed direction, and came nose to nose with a base security vehicle.
FUBAR. Wonder stuck his head out the window, smiled graciously, and did what no real man ever does—he asked for directions to the road that ran in front of SOCOM HQ. He even said, “Thank you, and have a nice day,” when he’d received them. He wasn’t so polite to me.
Finding your way is simple if you know where you are going. Two left turns and a right turn later, we cruised past the neat palm tree groves that sit directly outside SOCOM’s main entrance.
I glanced over and was happy to see they’d actually made an improvement or two since I’d been here last. The wide, covered portico—it’s the kind of structure you drive an explosive-laden truck under and detonate, thus bringing down the whole building—was now blocked by two dozen concrete antiterrorist pylons that had been deposited between the driveway and the front doors. They were painted white and looked like two platoons of Munchkin swabbies in dress whites standing at parade rest.
I gestured with my thumb, and Wonder—skeptical but willing—turned right again at the far end of SOCOM. We drove down a narrow alley that ran parallel to the building, turned left, and wound up atop the neat, gravel pathway that ran from SOCOM’s back door to the planetarium parking lot.
Planetarium, you ask? Yeah—planetarium. That’s where the stars park.
We pulled to a stop at the back corner of the building. In front of us, the wide concrete apron stretched for a quarter of a mile. Beyond it were the hangars and beyond them, in the distance, MacDill’s 3,900-meter main runway and its adjacent network of taxiways, ramps, and aprons.
I smiled the
smile of the lucky and the dumb. The semi crawled down the middle of the apron, approaching from our right. It turned a wide, lazy circle, then went back the way it had come.
I was reaching for the radio to let Gator, Half Pint and Doc know what they were up to when Mr. Murphy got my attention by pounding on the roof of our car.
No—I mean literally. Pound-pound-pound. Wham-wham-wham.
I dropped what I was doing, stared out the open window, saw the crotch of summer white trousers topped by a brightly shined brass buckle, kept going north and saw staff badge, jump wings, service ribbons, and a fucking Budweiser, all topped by three stars set onto open-necked collar points. I gasped, then looked up directly into the scrawny, indignant face of G. Edward Emu, vice admiral and deputy chief of staff, United States Special Operations Command.
“Do you people know where you are? Do you realize that this is a pedestrians-only area. What in heaven’s name is this car doing in—geeeezus!” He stopped in midcaterwaul and stared intently at my bandaged face.
I was dead meat. There are only a few active duty people who remember me as a clean-shaven, geeky, enlisted team puke of a sailor, and Eddie Emu is one of them. He was a snot-nosed ensign at UDT 22 when I was a radioman second class working for Everett Emerson Barrett, chief gunner’s mate/guns, in the Second-to-None platoon. Eddie didn’t like me then, he don’t like me now, and the feeling is absofuckingposilutely mutual.
But Eddie wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at my liver. Which brought to mind one of the reasons I dislike G. Edward Emu so much: the good admiral has never been able to stand the sight of blood. The first time he saw a dead Viet Cong he fainted, which made him a bona fide SEAL legend (but not the sort anybody’d ever want to be). Anyway, Eddie sucked wind. He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple j-j-juggling g-gulp, g-gulp. His bug eyes swelled into an expression that combined revulsion, loathing, and nausea. He actually brought his right hand up to his forehead to block the view.
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