Belay that. We were already scathed. We just had to get there alive.
I smacked Wonder’s shoulder. “Après vous, Alphonse.”
“Fuuuck you, Gaston.” He rolled his eyes, then rolled out on knees and elbows across the grate. I followed, trying to make myself invisible as sub-gun bursts Clicked, dinged, ricocheted, and caromed by me.
Progress was also slowed by the surface upon which we were traveling. The goddamn grate was sharp—it cut into your hands and knees as you crawled. Hey, pain is my middle name, so I just kept scurrying as fast as I could. Which turned out to be too fast. I came up directly behind Wonder—a burst of 9mm spurring me on—just as his right leg spasmed.
Motherfucker. The fucking sole of his coral boot slammed smack into my face, smashed my nose flat, then moved on and down, stomping my thumb.
For an instant, I saw stars. I mean, he’d really tagged me.
It didn’t take him long to realize what he’d done. He reached back, grabbed the collar of my BDU shirt in a fist, and dragged me along with him.
It was not a smooth ride. But we got there anyway. Wonder released me, and rolled around the corner just in case somebody was there, waiting for us.
It was all-clear. I struggled on my own, made it to the protected area and lay there, arms akimbo and legs sprawled, doing a passable Gregor Samsa imitation, and tried to catch my breath.
There was, as I lay there, the proverbial good news and the proverbial bad news. Let’s do that first. The bad news was that there wasn’t a single part of me that didn’t hurt. The good news was that the firing from the monkey board had stopped—which meant that Duck Foot was now up there, backstopping us all.
I rolled back onto my hands and knees, groaned, and tried to focus my eyes—which were slightly fuzzy, courtesy of Wonder’s size ten foot. “C’mon. Let’s go to work.”
I pulled myself up and we stacked outside. Stack—hell, it was just the two of us. He took the bottom handle of the control module hatchway and tested it. It swiveled easily. Now he flipped the top one. It, too, pivoted opened without difficulty.
The door opened outward. We were well positioned, on the side opposite the hinges. I was crouched low. My CAR was in what’s called the low ready position. That means its muzzle is slightly lower than horizontal, so I can look over the barrel, acquire all threats quickly, bring the muzzle up, and wax the bad guys brrrp.
Wonder reached above me, took the top handle, and swung the hatch open. “Go—”
I broke the plane of the doorway. The one thing that is perhaps the most difficult to learn about making these sorts of entries, is not to have tunnel vision as you go through the door. If you tunnel, you will see only one thing. You will fixate on it, and go toward it, and kill it. Which is good. Except, of course, if there is a second or third or fourth threat in the room, in which case, it will be Doom on You time, because your ass will be dead by the time you realize you’ve screwed up.
I went through into the room. No matter how many times you’ve done it for real, the whole sequence is always like a dance—a deadly series of choreographed moves—filmed in slow motion. Space. Low light. Don’t tunnel. Use peripheral vision. Move into room to allow Wonder entry. Eyes left-right. Keep moving, moving. Breathe. Angle left. Motion at nine o’clock. Sight-acquire-fire. Breathe. Look left-right-left. Breathe. Motion—two o’clock. Sight-acquire-fire. Breathe. Keep moving. Roll left. Use wall as protection. Peripheral vision. Wonder rolling right. His CAR bursting rrrip-rrrip. No words. Not necessary. Breathe. Target at eleven-thirty. Pistol coming up in his right hand. Target’s weak arm wrapped around a sack of something chest high. Shoot through the bag—no. Could be explosives. Neutralize perceived threat. Shoot low. Groin shot takes him down. Bag falls away. Breathe. Second burst in asshole’s chest takes him out for good. Peripheral vision. Breathe. Wonder’s across room now. I move to rear wall, too. Breathe.
“Clear,” Wonder was shouting at me. The whole sequence had taken less than six seconds of real time. We’d killed four bad guys in that time.
I echoed “Clear” to let him know I was okay, too.
Then I raced to see what was in the bag. Grenades? Timer? Detonator? Radio we hadn’t silenced?
The asshole I’d shot was gone—well, fuck him. He’d dropped the bag when I’d hit him in the groin, but its strap was still wrapped tightly around his wrist, the end clutched in his dead hand.
I put a foot on his wrist, which released his hand, kicked the bag across the deck, bent over, and picked it up. It was OD canvas, and about the size of a soft attaché case.
I opened the snaps and peered inside. “Holy shit!”
Wonder came up and stared over my shoulder. “What the fuck?”
Still clutching the case I sat down on the deck. Wonder gently removed the case from my grip, examined it, and whistled in amazement. The son of a bitch I’d shot had been holding a DCWO bag. The DCWO is a Divisional Chemical Warfare Officer. He’s the medic in charge of making sure that you’ve received all the protection against chemical agents—mustard gas, as well as nerve agents like Sarin, Tabun, and SRQ-44. The way that is done, is to shoot you full of atropine, then give you a small dose of each nerve agent, as a way of making you resistant. The process works much the same as cholera, yellow fever, typhus, and typhoid shots—you get a small and controlled dose of the disease along with the protection, and you are immunized.
So what’s my point? The point is this: I’d almost shot through the fucking bag of goodies, which would have broken some of the three dozen small glass vials containing Tabun. That would have released the odorless, colorless liquid into the control module atmosphere, and I’d have been dead within, oh, two or three seconds. So would Wonder. There was enough Tabun here to do the Tokyo subway five times over. It doesn’t take much. One drop’s enough to kill scores, maybe hundreds of people.
Now, if there was a good side to this, it was that, being a DCWO kit, the nerve agent therein had been diluted. After all, you don’t want to kill your own soldiers. So, all Tabun used by DCW officers is watered down. It was still lethal—if I’d spilled any on me I’d have croaked. But it could be safely carried around—so long as you don’t shoot through it.
“You keep the fucking thing,” I told Wonder. “Maybe we’ll find somebody to use it on—like good old LC Strawhouse.”
Wonder grinned wickedly and slung the bag over his shoulder. His expression told me he’d been thinking the very same thing.
0134. We secured. There’d been a crew of twenty-two. Of those, sixteen were DOAs. The survivors—not an oil driller among ’em—was made up of the sorts of disaffected wanna-bes you’re seeing on TV talk shows these days, dressed in camouflage fatigues, complaining about everything, but doing nothing positive to solve the country’s problems. I don’t have much patience with that kind of asshole under normal circumstances. I have even less when one of the best shooters I’ve ever worked with has just been killed. Nasty, Duck Foot, Gator, and Rodent handled the interrogations with the help of a twelve-volt battery and a bucket of saltwater. Hey, don’t you be shocked, friends, just because they were. My men had just lost a shipmate, and they weren’t feeling very compassionate. Frankly, neither was I. But I needed a couple of live bodies for evidence, so I finally intervened in time to keep the last two bad guys alive.
Wonder had wanted to be the chief interrogator—he and Cherry had bunked together after Cherry’d been wounded in the attack on Grant Griffith’s office in Red Cell. But I needed him to diddle the laptop computer he discovered in the control module. It took him about an hour to break its password code, then extract what we needed: telephone numbers, messages, codes, and deleted files.
While he diddled, I searched. And guess what? The oil platform was being used as a goddamn Ordnance “R” Us. The container that had been brought aboard held enough toys to keep small underground groups like ADAM in business for years. There were hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition, more than a thousand firearms, hund
reds of grenades, and dozens of Claymore mines, and other explosives. Elsewhere on the rig there were five Redeye missiles, two Stingers, and two Tows—late model wire-guided antitank missiles.
There were hundreds of field medical kits, MREs—Meals, Ready to Eat—wrapped in plastic, with expiration dates well into the next century. There were field radios, direction finders, even a pair of encrypted SATCOM suitcase transmitters. The SATCOMs were third-generation stuff—larger and heavier than the ones SpecWarriors carry into the field today, but still current enough so they had to have been stolen from a SpecWar unit somewhere. And there were three more DCWO kits. I turned those over to Doc Tremblay—who was the only one of us qualified to handle the fucking things.
PP-22 was, just as I’d suspected, a warehouse—a distribution point. It made perfect sense, too: weapons from all over the country were shipped here, then disbursed. Remember the list of goodies that ADAM had carried? They were from all over the country. No ostensible pattern to how they obtained ’em. Sow confusion, said Sun Tzu—and that’s just what LC was doing by using PP-22 as a distribution point.
Sure, it was isolated. Yes, it was hard to get to. But that was precisely its strong point. You try to buy equipment like this at gun shows, or from underground contacts, and sooner or later you’re gonna get burned by the FBI or the ATF. By employing the platform, LC had guaranteed himself anonymity. And what if an undercover agent showed up? Well, friends, there was a lot of water out there.
Wonder printed up what he’d found. Skimming the pages, I learned that the weapons and supplies we’d tracked was one of a dozen shipments that had been brought out over the past year. Those supplies had been given away piecemeal. A small boat would arrive, and weapons, ammo, explosives, and other supplies would be unloaded—he’d discovered computer records that confirmed the transfers. But there was no way to tell precisely who’d received the goods. That was to be expected: when you deal with tangos you don’t ask for drivers’ licenses or purchase orders.
But there were enough tracks so that we knew when, and where, the shipments had gone. They’d been scattered all over the map—there were thousands of weapons out there, and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammo, tons of explosives and who-knows-what else.
I could have called the Priest, but I thought better of it. I needed someone I could trust, and the signals General Harrington was sending were definitely mixed. Instead, I got Mugs on the line. I gave him the facts and the figures. He said he’d query his Frog network and see if any bells of hell went ting-a-ling-a-ling out there.
I said I’d get back to him soon. Right now I had other things on my mind. First was Cherry. We weighted his body and buried him at sea—another Frogman to guard the gates of heaven. I looked at the resolution on the faces of my men as Cherry slipped into the dark water and knew they’d never give up until they’d avenged his death.
While they policed the rig, I took some time to do some thinking. More often than not, you end up acting on pure instinct. Most of the time, that’s all right. But once in a while—and this was one of those times—you have to ponder all the possibilities, then act.
It took me a bit of time, but I finally realized that our current situation can be traced back to what happened in Key West. The problem is, I’ve been looking at Key West in one light, when I should have been using another, brighter beam.
Follow along with me, please. Fact: Virtually all of the fringe militias—crazies like ADAM—had gone underground in the wake of Oklahoma City.
Fact: To track them, the FBI’d had to resort to illegal means. That was why the chain of command at Key West had been so screwed up. The right hand had no idea what the left hand had been doing. I’d focused on those screwups, because the screwups directly affected the performance of me and my men.
That had been wrong to do. Aren’t I the guy who’s always talking about Mr. Murphy? Aren’t screwups a normal part of my life? Sure they are. But at Key West, I had allowed myself to be distracted.
Well, doom on me. Instead of worrying about who screwed up and why, I should have been asking about the three principles upon which all crimes are based: motive, means, and opportunity.
Okay, let’s go to the videotape and replay things in slo-mo.
First, motive. LC’s motives and ADAM’s motives were intertwined. Except I hadn’t seen it. The thing that had been bothering me since Key West was why the hell ADAM had acted when it had. That had always been what those famous Washington columnists, Errors and No Facts, used to call “The Big Question” on their TV show.
Now, I realized the answer had been told to me by LC Strawhouse himself. But it was so KISS-simple I’d overlooked it. When Wonder cracked the FBI’s Intelink files, we’d come upon a MEMCON recounting LC Strawhouse’s reaction to ADAM’s request for a face-to-face.
LC had told the FBI’s assistant director for operations absofuckinglutely no way he’d go to Key West—told him ADAM was a “damn expletive deleted bunch of fly-off-the-handle Michigan crazies acting on their own down there.” I know that’s what he said because I have the damn MEMCON.
The ADO obviously hadn’t perceived any significance in LC’s outburst. Neither had I—until now. How the fuck did LC know ADAM was Michigan-based? And why did he say they were acting on their own?
He knew they were from Michigan because he knew exactly who and what the Alpha Detachment/Armed Militia was. And he’d said they were fly-off-the-handle crazies acting on their own because ADAM had somehow gone rogue on him. Translation: They were operating UNODIR—just like me.
It all made perfect sense: the hijacking of SECNAV had been an unsanctioned operation. It hadn’t been on anybody’s schedule—except ADAM’s.
They’d been out in the Gulf to pick up their weapons. They’d been told to go home and wait for some sort of signal. But they hadn’t—instead, they’d gone to Puerto Rico and hijacked SECNAV’s plane.
Maybe it had started out as an exercise. A bunch of West Coast SEALs once actually stalked “Hanoi Jane” Fonda as part of a security exercise that went awry. And when I ran Red Cell, we always made a habit of shadowing our targets before we actually staged a hit. So the precedent was there. Whatever ADAM’s original motive, however, the situation had gotten out of hand. It had become real. Real bad. And when it had turned sour, LC Strawhouse decided he wanted nothing to do with it.
And why had he been so vehement about not meeting with ADAM? It was, I now deduced, because he’d been the one providing ADAM with support, and if they’d met face-to-face (and we were all listening in) there might have been some disturbing revelations or recriminations.
So he’d taken a pass. Luckily, the ADO to whom he’d spoken wrote a MEMCON to the files. That document had somehow gotten erased. But as you have already learned, it is harder to destroy computerized evidence than one might imagine. The “delete” command is not absolute. And so, the shredded MEMCON, reconstructed by Wonder, ended up in my hands. (It had also ended up in the Priest’s hands—and I found it significant that the Priest had done nothing.)
Okay—back to the issue at hand. There was also incontrovertible evidence that underground groups were getting support and equipment. In other words, the instruments by which to operate, or crime principle number two—means.
You want that proof? Let’s go back to Key West again. That is where I saw firsthand that ADAM employed current-issue weapons, stolen from dozens of separate locations. The question was how underground groups such as ADAM were getting their toys.
Well, when Wonder and I played with the computer back at Rogue Manor, we’d discovered a remarkable coincidence: virtually every time LC Strawhouse spoke or appeared in a major city where there were USG weapons stored nearby, some of those weapons were stolen. Final proof? The Dawg had been on scene in Ypsilanti—he’d even killed Johnny Cool to cover his trail. Now we’d discovered their distribution method—mix and match—out here in the Gulf of Mexico.
Finally, there was crime principle number three—o
pportunity. This was the one that didn’t fit the pattern. But don’t exceptions make the rule? Sure they do.
ADAM had received first-rate tactical intelligence. They’d known about SECNAV’s schedule. And how had they obtained that closely held information? I’d assumed they’d received it from LC Strawhouse. But I was wrong. At least one of the ADAM group, T. D. Capel, had access to the military police’s nationwide computer network. That net was tied in with a bunch of others—NIS’s among them. SECNAV’s schedule wasn’t classified. But it hadn’t been made public, either. It was, however, on the NIS computer. I knew that because Wonder had obtained a copy for me.
Now, having just laid out all of the above, let’s add a couple of other factors. The first was LC Strawhouse’s vision of America. That vision—as paranoid a perspective as I’ve heard in some time—began with what sounded like a civil war, waged against the government by fringe groups that ran the tango gamut from ADAM to Zulu Gangstas—and everything in between.
That, too, made sense. See, among the more paranoid and sociopathic crazies, there exists a conspiracy scenario that goes as follows: the government will secretly arm youth gangs and domestic terrorists and use them as shock troops and cannon fodder, so that they can wage war against “real” Americans.
LC was running a fucking false-flag operation. What’s that you ask? It is an old intelligence term for making your agent think that you are, say, a KGB guy, when in fact you are a CIA guy. So he, a dedicated Commie, thinks he’s stealing secrets from his government to help the Soviet Bear, and all the while he’s feeding the American Eagle.
Well, LC was doing much the same. He was selling his bogus patriotism to the masses, and at the same time he was stealing USG property and slipping it to ADAM, on the one hand, and the Zulu Gangstas on the other hand. The son of a bitch was playing both ends against the middle. That made him a real PUS(NUT) so far as I was concerned—that is, a Paranoid Ugly Shithead (Nefariously Unforgivable Tango).
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