RW04 - Task Force Blue

by Richard Marcinko

  “With the fucking two-wire extension cord in the case.”

  I hadn’t seen a two-wire cord. I checked the case. There was no fucking extension cord. I checked the case again. Still no cord. I went through every pocket and crevice of the laptop case, the SATCOM suitcase, and my pockets. Nada.

  Wonder and I stared at the gap between splitter box and SATCOM transmitter for a few seconds of the sort of baleful, speechless agony that only Mr. Murphy can bring on.

  I turned the SATCOM off. No need to waste battery power. “Okay—let’s go to Plan B.”

  That intrigued Wonder, who hadn’t, until now, known that we had a Plan B. So he asked the only proper technical question: “What the fuck?”

  I replied, “Is there any way we can hotwire the SATCOM directly into the signal splitter?”

  Wonder disengaged the cable from the laptop’s serial port and examined it. “Maybe.”

  “Get to it.” I took my light and played it across the diagrams on the suitcase’s inside cover. Then I retrieved the flat antenna from its retainer, switched the power back on, and held the antenna out toward the southeastern horizon, where the diagram told me a WestCom satellite sat in orbit, twenty-two thousand miles up. I plugged the SATCOM headset into the board and played with the frequency dials.

  My head was suddenly filled with signal traffic. Of course it was—I was eavesdropping on whatever was moving across the satellite. Now I refocused the antenna to the north. That was where I’d find the signals from No Such Agency’s communications satellite, code-named RSQ-121. RSQ-121 relays some of the agency’s most secure message traffic from a listening post eleven and a half miles southwest of Alice Springs in South Australia’s wild outback that is known as Pine Gap. It is operated in conjunction with the Australian Defense Signals Directorate, and its encrypted signals are beamed to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, thirty miles from Washington.

  I see you all out there. You’re dubious. You’re wondering how I know about all this shit. You think I’m making it up. Well, friends, just check your reference sources. You’ll find an accurate although somewhat generalized description of the Pine Gap facility in James Bamford’s seminal work on the National Security Agency, The Puzzle Palace. And you will find a reference to the RSQ-121 satellite buried deep within the Defense Department’s fiscal year 1989 budget request, if you can still find a copy thereof. You have to look hard—but it is there, I promise. Besides—I’ve been to Pine Gap, and I’ve sent transmissions over RSQ-121. So there.

  Now, the SATCOM receiver I had couldn’t decipher the signals from Pine Gap. But it could receive them—which is all I’d need it to do to overload the hacienda’s phone system.

  Wonder labored on the cable. It took him about half an hour of sweat and ingenuity, but he finally made it work. He plugged his jury-rigged cable into the back of the SATCOM. I held the antenna steady. I listened. The welcome sound of electronic mishmash filled my headset. I gave Wonder a double thumbs-up and turned the switch to transfer the signals into the cable.

  Wonder gauged his success with a meter he’d brought. It didn’t take long—we figured that after fifteen seconds of massive message traffic the lines were totally fucked. Wonder removed the probe pins, and ran a line check.

  “Issi-doombu,” he said, telling me the line was dead in pidgin Zulu.

  “Awuyelelemama, cockbreath,” I answered playfully in the same pseudolanguage—you guys out there can make up your own translation to that.

  Hour 109. They must have used one of their cellular phones to call out. Shit, somehow, we’d overlooked the fact that they’d probably have cellulars. Mr. Murphy, who is a fucking scene stealer, will always find a way to make an appearance—because at 0850 we saw a Southwestern Bell van turn off Varner Road and begin the climb toward the hacienda gate. We had the road blocked with our own truck about halfway up. The hood was raised, and Doc was leaning over the fender, working away on the motor.

  The van eased to a halt ten yards from the truck. I watched as the driver leaned out and asked, “What’s the trouble? Can I help?”

  I am a highly trained individual. I have a master’s degree. And I could see that Duck Foot was gonna have a problem impersonating this phone company employee. The driver, you see, was female. An EEO hire, no doubt.

  Well, I have my own Equal Employment Opportunity theory: I treat everyone alike—just like shit. So I reached in and pulled said repair person out of the vehicle, backed her up against the van, and explained the situation in words of one syllable or less.

  “That’s kidnaping,” she said.

  So, nu?

  We taped her wrists and ankles, rigged a comfortable gag that would still keep her quiet, and stashed her in our truck after we’d relieved her of her hard hat, her phone-repair belt, her ID badge, and her official issue size-large shirt. The name—embroidered thereupon—was Sean. Well, Duck Foot could pass for a Sean if he had to.

  “You know your hair is longer than hers?” I asked.

  “So’s my mustache.” He gave me the finger. He has no respect for his elders.

  I glanced at the repair order that sat on the front seat of the van. They’d complained that five phones had gone dead, and two fax machines and a modem line weren’t working. Sounded like a job well done to me.

  Doc punched me full of Atropine, then did the same to himself. I checked my watch. 1012. We’d need a second helping of antidote just after 1400.1 was hoping it wouldn’t be necessary. He inserted the two backup doses—labels removed and switched—in a pair of morphine Syrette carriers. “Camouflage,” he explained.

  The Syrettes, safely packed, were stored in the belt-pack first aid kit Doc always carries. Then he handed me my Tabun capsule. I took it gingerly and stuck it upside the left part of my cheek the same way you’d tuck snuff or chewing tobacco.

  Except this was one goddamn lethal chaw.

  Doc and I clambered inside the phone company van and moved piles of stuff around until we’d created a pair of burrows into which we and our equipment could crawl. Duck Foot and Wonder covered us with miscellaneous supplies, cable reels, and other crap. “Careful with that shit—” I didn’t want them piling stuff on so it would collapse noisily when we made our exit.

  Hour 107.5. Up the hill. Duck Foot stopped at the pole where we’d been, got out, and once-covered the box. “It’s all cool,” he said as he threw the van into gear. He gave us a running commentary as he drove, and a final warning not to sneeze or cough when he was thirty yards from the gate. I hadn’t thought about doing either until he brought it up.

  The van stopped.

  “Howdy.” That was Duck Foot’s voice. “You fellas called about your phones being down?”

  “Yup.”

  “Well, just tell me where to go—I checked the junction box on the way up here, and the lines are good right up to there, so it’s gotta be somewhere between the box and the house.”

  “Right,” said a voice. “Come on in—but we gotta check the van.”

  “No problem.”

  The van moved about three yards. Then I heard Duck Foot’s voice again. “What’s the mirror for?”

  “Makes it a lot easier to look underneath.”

  “Cool.” Duck Foot sounded impressed. The back doors opened. “Want to look inside?” He paused. “Sorry about the mess. Someday I’m gonna clean this sucker out.”

  A pause, and minor scraping. The sound of doors slamming. The van rocked slightly as Duck Foot climbed aboard. “Thanks, guys.”

  “No prob—that’s what we get paid for.”

  “Okay—which way to the house?”

  “Follow the road straight about a half mile. At the fork go left, it’ll be another quarter mile or so. Then swing past the driveway left again, and you’ll be right at the service entrance. We’ll phone ahead and somebody’ll meet you there.”

  “Okay.”

  Another pause. The engine turned over and the van started to accelerate slowly. Duck Foot stage-whispered,
“We’re in.”

  He was right, too. We were in—in deep shit.

  I COULD MAKE OUT SHARDS OF VARIEGATED, COLORED LIGHT AS Duck Foot, bantering easily with the security guard, threw open the phone company van’s battered twin rear doors. There was ambient scratching and rasping as he poked around to remove his equipment and his phone belt. He even bitched loud and long that he could never find anything in this goddamn van after the relief night man drove it. Then he eased the doors closed, his voice trailed off into the distance, and the darkness returned.

  I waited under my mound of cardboard, Masonite, canvas, and plastic-foam camouflage. Yes, it was uncomfortable, hunkering there, bent and twisted almost in two, frozen in an unnatural position with all the joints in my arms and legs held in weird positions. Yes, it was difficult to control my breathing so that it was imperceptible. Yes, I was sweaty—the morning sun was beating down on the van, and it was rapidly getting real hot in there. And just to make things interesting, a huge, fat brown spider had lowered itself from one of the van’s roof struts, eyed me malevolently in the half light, then—taking advantage of the darkness when it came again—dropped another five inches, slipped under my collar, and established itself in the hollow between my neck and my shoulder.

  But uncomfortable is a fact of life when you arc a SEAL. It starts at BUD/S—Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training. You train so hard, and under such inhumane conditions, that from then on, nothing bothers you.

  Cold? You’re impervious. Heat? WTF. Creepie-crawlies, snakes, and other nasties? What’s your point? My point, gentle reader, is that for a SEAL, just arriving on scene for his mission is a life-threatening experience. HALO parachuting. Dropping off a MK-V Special Operations Craft at thirty knots into four-foot seas. Emerging from a DDS—that’s a Dry Dock Shelter like the one we used in Red Cell, remember? It’s a clamshell apparatus that sticks out like a sore deck atop those retrofitted Boomer submarines. Anyway, think about emerging out of one of those with your crix (that’s what we call the current Combat Rubber Raiding Craft) at a depth of sixty feet, popping to the surface without infusing your system with nitrogen, then paddling six miles to shore through hostile water. The actual shoot-and-loot becomes a form of release, because your sonofa-bitching SEAL is just happy he’s survived the infiltration.

  Likewise, you learn to lie (or crouch, or sit, or hunker) motionless for hours—sometimes even days—when you are waiting in ambush, or observing things in the same way Stevie Wonder used to do on his lonely patrols in Vietnam.

  Something I have always taught my SEAL pups is that, no matter how well trained you are, there’s probably someone out there just as well trained, and just as devoted to his cause as you are to yours, who would like to kill you. So you must be even better than he—and that calls for discipline. Discipline is the difference between life and death on a battlefield. I’m not talking about the kind of Salute It Because It’s Got Stars on Its Collar discipline here. I’m talking about other kinds. There is fire-control discipline—knowing where to shoot, and how to control your automatic weapons bursts. There is vision discipline—keeping your-self from tunneling and missing a threat.

  The discipline I’m talking about here, is body discipline. It enables you to lie in a fetid shithole of a canal waiting for your enemy until he shows up. Sans eating—no munchie-munchie because your enemy will smell food coming through your pores. Sans talking, or smoking, or just about anything else. You piss and shit on yourself—the water’s so dirty no one can tell the difference. You’re devoured by ants and other insects. And I’m not talking about a 0500 arrival and an 0600 ambush either. I’m talking about getting to your site one, two, even three days early if necessary, so that you, not your enemy, holds the advantage—just as General Sam taught his Special Forces troops.

  Those, friends, are the sorts of disciplines I preach. But in the end, they all come down to two important words in the Warrior’s Code: mental discipline. You think, therefore you win.

  And so the fact that I was cramped, sore, and had a large, itchy spider bite welt on my neck was really unimportant. The significant thing was that, straining as hard as I could to listen for unfriendlies out there, I couldn’t hear a fucking thing.

  It had been nine minutes since Duck Foot left—I’d been counting seconds—and it was time to move. First, however, I mashed the fucking spider. Then, slowly and deliberately, I eased the boxes and cartons aside and emerged, a joint at a time, from my burrow, careful not to make a whit of noise. I’d made it about halfway when I heard voices approaching. To be precise, I picked out Duck Foot’s voice. He was speaking loudly and distinctly—a quick-thinking SEAL early-warning system in action. I muttered, “Shit” and went scrambling back toward my lair, trying to be fucking stealth itself as I replaced the cartons, boards, tarp, insulation, and reels.

  I was almost there when the van door was opened. My head and torso were covered. My legs were semiconcealed. But my size eleven, double-E black nylon running shoe was out in plain sight for all to see.

  Luckily for me, Duck Foot saw it first. He never stopped his monologue as he rooted around noisily, tossing miscellaneous ratshits, batshits, and widgets thither and yon—yon being the twenty-pound reel of four-line, shielded cable he dropped over my ankle and directly on my big toe, the better to disguise it.

  Shit, that smarted. The few minutes after he’d closed the doors and gone off I spent designing Duck Foot’s damn denouement. Trust me—the boy was gonna suffer.

  Another six minutes passed. I heard vehicles moving in the distance—two of them coming up the drive from the sound of it. Indistinct voices in the distance. I counted off another 180 seconds. Then it was time to move. This time, however, I let Doc go first.

  106.5 hours—1048 on the big-watch-little-pecker Timex on my left wrist. I poked my nose between the seats and peered out the windshield. Duck Foot had parked the van next to what must have been the service entrance. There was a small loading dock that led to double gray steel doors. Next to the double doors was a single door. The house itself was built of stone. Manicured bushes bordered the loading dock, and on the far side, a lush, green lawn rolled toward the east.

  I peeked upward. A lone television camera was mounted at a forty-five-degree angle in the elbow of the wall, so it could take in the loading dock and single doorway in one shot. Duck Foot—bless him—had parked the van so that, if we left via the rear door of the van, we’d be out of range.

  Doc and I loaded up then moved quickly away from the van, working our way to our right on hands and knees, using the low clumps of bushes to conceal ourselves. I gave Doc a silent signal to wait while I took point. Carefully, I edged around the periphery of the house to the far corner, and peered through a minioasis of mature date palms. From there, I could see the main entrance and circular driveway. A Lincoln Town Car sat unattended. Under the stone portico, a pair of cameras looked lazily left and right, covering a 180-degree angle.

  So far, so good. I was unobserved. But all of this sneaking and peeking wasn’t getting me inside—which is where I wanted us to be. I reversed course and cut back through the trees. At the side of the house were three windows. I ducked under them and crawled back the way I’d come. Doc silently asked if we had a possible route. I shook my head and mouthed, “Negatory.”

  So we worked our way around the rear, wriggled under the rear of the phone truck, and edged behind the loading dock. At the far side, behind a low bush, was a single, narrow casement window. It was partially open. I snuck a look inside. It was a bathroom. And guess what: the lights were on but no one was home.

  I took the ATAC folder from my pocket, flipped it open, and pried the screen loose. I caught it as it fell and handed it to Doc. Then I squeezed my arm through the window and cranked until it opened, sesame. I pulled myself up and through, slid face first down the wall, over the sink, and onto the tile floor. I stood up, took the screen from Doc, and then helped him clamber inside. Then we replaced the screen and closed the w
indow.

  Doc ran a quick inventory while I stood guard. Then we reversed roles. I adjusted the telephone headset over the top of my head until it sat squarely on my left ear. Then I adjusted the wire lip mike, plugged the jury-rigged apparatus into the radio’s send/receive jack, and switched the damn thing on. I tsk-tsked twice, and whispered, “Yo—”

  In my ear, I heard Wonder’s voice. “Read you five by five.” I nodded toward Doc and gave him a vigorous middle-fingered salute—we were on-line. He threw me a raised thumb, then dropped the ready stance and adjusted his own gear.

  Three minutes later we were ready to roll. The question, of course, was where we’d be rolling.

  I cracked the bathroom door. We were in a long corridor—part of the back of the house, where the servants and other minions worked. I nodded once and out we went. Sneaked to the left. Skulked past the kitchen. Slinked around the butler’s pantry, and slipped through a swinging door.

  We crept into the darkened dining room. It was impressive, even in the dim light. The table was a triple pedestal that was set atop a huge, antique silk Qum. Atop its polished surface, three silver candelabras that looked almost a yard tall stood silent sentry duty. Around the table, two dozen antique Chippendale chairs, covered in tapestry, sat in perfect order. To our right as we came through the door hung a thick, ornate gilt frame containing a mirror. The whole package must have run eight feet by ten feet. On the opposing wall was a huge Gauguin oil depicting two Tahitian women dressed in intricately patterned sarongs. They were carrying breadfruit, and they’d been caught walking between a perfect beach and half a dozen rustic South Pacific hootches. Above the humongous sideboard, a wide Canaletto from the artist’s London period depicted the Canal and beyond it, Whitehall.

  A soaring archway to my right opened on a marble-floored hallway. Beyond it, I could see part of what had to be the living room. Moving quietly, we patrolled across the dining room as warily as if it were mined, cutting between the sideboard and the port side of the table.