RW04 - Task Force Blue

by Richard Marcinko

  Voices from the right. I looked around for a place to hide. Doc had already found one—under the table. I followed him and lay flat, wrapped around a pedestal and the claw-and-ball table legs.

  I knew one of those voices—it was LC Strawhouse’s nasal twang. The other was female. From the sound of the conversation, it was Mrs. Lyman Clyde, and she was on her way to Rodeo Drive for a day of shopping, via the Pajar private jet.

  They came into view. He was in well-worn jeans, faded denim shirt, and prole cowboy boots. She was a demure, perfectly coiffed blonde woman in her midsixties. She wore Chanel. I could smell her perfume from where I lay. The pair of them walked hand in hand, their arms swinging like sitcom lovers or newlyweds.

  They stopped almost directly in front of us and put on quite a show. “Don’t worry, kitten,” LC drawled, taking both her paws in one of his long, bony hands and patting them delicately with the other. “I got myself a full day’s work right here—that’s f-u-l-l day. Won’t even get the chance to miss ya none—unless you’re not here come dinnertime. Then I’d be all lonely and bereft.”

  Lonely and bereft? C’mon, LC, give us all a break. He dropped her hands and kissed her on the forehead. She giggled, and they moved on, sailing starboard to port. As their voices faded I heard LC’s wife laugh again.

  Well, that conversation told me he’d be right where I wanted him. Moreover, from their direction, I now knew the front door was to my left, and the family quarters to my right. I turned to look at Doc’s face. He was receiving the same messages as me.

  We remained motionless for several more minutes, until LC strode past us again, heading back toward the family quarters. We could hear his boot heels toc-toc-toc in a purposeful diminuendo on the marble parquet.

  I turned to Doc and signed that it was probably okay to move. His hands suggested that we wait a couple of minutes more—just to play it safe. I tossed him a thumbs-up. Prudence was indeed, dictated.

  Now as we lie here, you are probably wondering why the Strawhouses hadn’t seen us. The answer is that they weren’t looking. Normally, people aren’t alert inside their own homes—especially if they’re surrounded by TV cameras, electrified fences, and huge security forces. Problem is, all those things are outward looking—and once you manage to get inside, it’s all wide open.

  “Yo—” Wonder’s voice in my brain caused me to start. I flinched, and hit my head on the tabletop. Doc gave me a dirty look.

  I dropped back on the rug in a defensive posture and waited for the enemy to arrive. When it became clear that no one had heard me except for Doc, I responded—quietly—to let Wonder know I was listening.

  “Sit-rep,” he said. “Mugs is in business—lots of tangos neutralized.” A pause. “Hey—the phone van’s on its way out,” he reported. “I can see it coming through the gate, rolling this way.”

  “Copy that.” At least a few things were going right. I rolled over to tell Doc in sign language that Mugs was working and Duck Foot was clear. In doing so, I wrapped the line from the earpiece around my elbow, and pulled the soldered connection apart. Oh, the jack itself was still firmly in place, but I’d snapped the fucking wire neatly. If I’d brought some electrical tape I might have been able to fix the fucking thing. But I had no electrical tape—or anything else. I stared at the popped copper wires in disbelief.

  Doc did, too. “Szeb,” he mouthed, calling me a dick (but certainly not a Richard) in Arabic. “Enta mak foul mok.” You have fartbeans for brains.

  I tossed him a dirty look for stating the scatologically obvious and tried to adjust to the situation. Oh, I could still communicate with Wonder. All I had to do was yank the jack out, which would activate the radio’s internal mike and speaker, making it into a walkie-talkie. But if I did that, the entire goddamn compound would be able to listen in on our conversations.

  Okay, so Mr. Murphy was playing doom on Dickie. But WTF—I’m an optimist, so I chose to think of this development as enforced radio silence.

  I pulled the headset and lip mike off and stuffed them into a pocket, turned the radio off, and stuffed it, too. Well, at least one thing had gone right lately—Duck Foot was clear. Now it was up to Doc and me. I windmilled my index finger in the old cavalry-charge sign. Time to move.

  The house was much more impressive on the inside than it was on the outside, I had to give LC that much. He must have had fifty million dollars’ worth of Impressionist art on the walls. I snuck a look inside the living room as we passed by. A five-by-five Renoir canvas of children at play in a garden hung above the stone mantel. It was flanked by Monets and Manets. We worked our way down the hallway. On our right was a series of Degas pastels that chronicled life in a nineteenth-century ballet studio. On our left, a pair of Van Gogh oils depicted the harvesting of olives somewhere in Provence.

  I looked back at Doc and wondered if he’d sensed the same thing as I had—which is, that despite the huge amount of space, there weren’t a whole lot of rooms in this place. The kitchen wing was large—with storage space, pantries, and prep areas that made old man Gussy’s luncheonette back in New Brunswick seem small. And what I’d seen of the living room told me he had more square footage in that one area than I had in three floors at Rogue Manor. But judging from the layout, we were inside a two, maybe three-bedroom house at most.

  We worked our way carefully through the living room and passed along a short corridor. There was a doorway. I put my ear to it and heard nothing. I peered underneath and saw only darkness. I eased the door open and discovered a powder room.

  We backtracked and worked our way to the main hall. At the end of the passageway were two doors, one at each side. To the right was an antique door of heavy, ornately carved distressed wood, more than eight feet in height. It was heavy and old enough to remind me of the front doors of Notre Dame in Paris. To the left was a padded, leather-covered door.

  I stuck my chin to starboard. Doc nodded in agreement. He had his pistol drawn and ready in his right hand. His left, he rested on my shoulder. I slipped my hand onto the ornate door handle. Doc’s hand squeezed my shoulder, telling me that he was set.

  Slowly and evenly, I turned the handle until it stopped. Then I cracked the door open. There was no reaction from inside. I drew my pistol, then pushed the door another six inches. Nothing. Now I was able to see inside. We’d come upon the hacienda’s master bedroom suite.

  I edged inside, Doc at my shoulder. We followed textbook procedure for a two-man room clearance. I moved left, my back roughly a foot from the wall, my pistol sweeping from the wall across a hundred degrees. Doc went right, mirroring my movements. His field of fire intersected my own over the huge canopy bed.

  I moved along the wall, working my way around the dresser and silent butler, searching for threats. He went over the settee. We met at the bed. I peered underneath. Nothing. The room was perfect—nothing out of place. I checked the top of the inlaid dresser. Two silver jewelry boxes held cuff links, collar stays, and other miscellaneous items. Doc slid open the drawers on the pair of Empire-style night tables. He wriggled his index finger in my direction and I went over to Mrs. Strawhouse’s side of the bed. Doc pointed at the night-sighted Glock 19 in the drawer. Not bad. I picked it up, dropped the magazine, and racked the slide back. A single round of Winchester Black Talon fell from the chamber. I sharpened my left index finger on my right, making the old public-school sign for naughty-naughty, then emptied the magazine and pocketed the shells.

  I checked LC’s side. His drawer was empty—not so much as a box of Kleenex. We searched the big, well-designed his and hers walk-in closets. We examined the pair of master baths. The masculine one had a huge Japanese-style soaking tub, double stall shower, heated mirrors, electric towel racks, sauna, and steam room. The other featured a Jacuzzi. I looked at Doc. He shrugged and hooked his thumb back toward the doorway.

  1149. Silently, we retreated back the way we’d come. I pulled the big door closed. Then we turned our attention to the opposite doorway.
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br />   If the bedroom door had been taken from a cathedral, then this one looked as if it had been removed from a London club room. It was coated in plush, worn brown leather, studded with dimpled brass tacks that formed LC’s sheaf-of-straw design. There was a big, mirror-polished brass handle that was straight out of Gilbert and Sullivan.

  We assumed the stack position. Doc squeezed my shoulder. Pistol at the ready, I pushed down on the elongated lever. The door eased open—it was built to such close tolerances that you couldn’t see any light between the stile and the jamb—dangerous because you can’t see the shadow of anybody hiding behind it.

  Well, what’s life without challenge? As it swung wide I stepped up so I could “cut the pie—” which is to say work my way inside and move left, just as I’d done in the bedroom.

  “Hey, c’mon in, fellas,” LC Strawhouse drawled. “It’s like we been waitin’ on y’all forever. Just finished brewin’ a fresh pot o’ Java, too. So pull up a chair and let’s chaw the fat some.”

  YOU HAD TO HAND IT TO HIM—HE WAS SMOOTH. AS I SLID through the doorway, the muzzle of a small pistol had been jammed roughly, tightly, into my right ear, its front sight breaking skin. From the way it felt I knew it was probably a .22 or .25-caliber pocket gun with a narrow blade front sight—either a Beretta, a Walther, or maybe a Budischow-sky. I also knew it would be cocked, and the trigger would be staged—that is, it would need only a very slight amount of finger pressure to fire it.

  The small-caliber pistol in the ear is an OSS technique that dates from World War II—and it works, because it’s so KISS-simple. See, there’s no way to dislodge that pistol without getting shot first. Forget all the Rambo-jambo judo-Ninja-karate bullshit you see in movies. Believe me, when a pistol’s jammed into your concha just right, right between the intertragic notch, the tragus, and the antitragus—that’s the $150 way of saying right up your fucking ear—the barrel is held firmly in place.

  Go ahead: try it. Plug your own index finger into your ear tightly. C’mon, c’mon—do it. Okay. Now, try to wiggle your finger. See? It doesn’t wiggle very easily. Well, when the muzzle of a pistol’s as tightly jammed into an ear canal as your finger just was in yours, more than 90 percent of the people it’s done to simply can’t react fast enough to knock it aside before the trigger gets pulled. Result? As Wonder might say, “Issi-doombu.”

  On the one hand, I am not part of that 90-plus percent. On the other hand, this was not the time to demonstrate the playful yet lethal technique I have developed to counteract it. Besides, when Sun Tzu wrote, “Sow confusion: when well armed, appear disarmed,” in The Art of War, he made good sense.

  So, I looked across the room at LC. “Win some, lose some,” I lied, removing my finger from the triggerguard of my own Beretta and raising it so that its muzzle pointed at the ceiling.

  A voice from behind me said, “You got that right.” The door shut behind us. Dawg Dawkins leaned on it. Then he reached around the man holding the pistol to my ear, took the gun out of my hand, plucked Doc’s weapon, and stuffed both of them in his waistband. Then he ran his hands rapidly over us to make sure we weren’t carrying any other weapons. He retrieved the Black Talon shells from my pocket and dropped them in his own. Then, satisfied, he stepped away.

  Dawg placed our pistols on the thick pad in front of LC Strawhouse, who opened the bottom drawer of his nicely inlaid wood desk and deposited them inside. The pistol was removed from my ear, and the blue-blazered BAW who’d held it there retreated, standing silent sentry duty against the wall.

  LC Strawhouse beamed across the room at me. I’d seen that smoldering look, that wild-eyed maniacal glow before—on Grant Griffith’s face, and Call Me Ishmael, Lord Brookfield’s, too. It was the smile of self-proclaimed visionaries—and sociopathic killers. He said, “Have a seat, fellas.”

  When we didn’t do anything, he looked back at us, somewhat annoyed. “I said to park it.”

  Actually, I hadn’t thought he was being serious. “Sure.” I took the corner of the tapestry couch against the wall. Doc dropped into a nicely worn green leather wing chair off to the side.

  “Think nothin’ of it,” said LC Strawhouse, to no one in particular. He looked us all over as if we were kids in a homeroom class. “Now, gents,” he said, “we can get down to bidness.”

  There was something about the way he said it that just pissed me off. “Fuck you, LC.”

  Dawg growled, “None of that,” and moved in my direction.

  LC waved him off. He looked at me. “We gotta talk, Dick—you don’t understand the game plan.”

  I didn’t give a shit about LC’s game plan, and I’d just started to tell him that in piquant language when I was interrupted by the insistent tone of the phone on his desk. That meant they’d fixed the lines somehow.

  He punched a button and plucked up the receiver. “Yes?” He paused. “Sure, sure—let him in.”

  Strawhouse looked at me. “Friend of yours at the front gate,” he said. “Let’s wait till he gets here—no need to repeat myself.”

  He? Who he? We sat in silence for three minutes, until the question was answered and Major General Stonewall Jackson Harrington was shown into the office by a BAW. The fact that he was here didn’t exactly surprise me, although it made me goddamn mad.

  I saluted him with my middle finger. He chose to ignore it, turned his back on me, and took a seat in the armchair that faced LC’s ornate desk.

  LC waved the BAWs out of the room. Then he turned to the Priest and said, “Stonewall, we’re about to have ourselves a nasty situation here.”

  “Nothing that can’t be remedied,” the Priest said, obliquely.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Trust me.”

  The billionaire paused momentarily. “What did they say in Washington?” he finally asked.

  The Priest examined the nails on his left hand, then looked across the desk. “They said that if you hold up your side of the bargain, you’re not to worry. Everything’s been taken care of.”

  “I don’t have any problem with that,” LC Strawhouse said. “Deal.” He reached his long arm clear across his desk. The Priest took his hand. They shook up-and-down once. It made me sick to watch.

  “Good.” The Priest’s head also shook once in assent. Then he stood and turned toward me. “Dick,” he said, solemnly, “you’re off the case. You’ve done good work—and we all appreciate it. But now we in charge have to deal with the situation—and we have to do it politically, if you catch my drift.”

  Drift, shmift. I don’t know about you, friends, but I was sick and tired of all this fucking obliqueness and evasive talk and political insinuation.

  I knew why I was here, and I knew what had to be done. I was here to take an Old Testament revenge for the death of one of my men. I was here because there was a madman loose—and he had to be stopped.

  I looked at S. J. Harrington, major general, and saw him for what he was: at best, a political opportunist; at worst, a traitor. Oh, I was here because the Priest and those running him—Gunny Barrett and the president were the ones who came to mind right now, but maybe there were others, too—had cut me loose not so long ago to do what I do best: hunt men. Yes, they’d told me they wanted the weapons hemorrhage stopped. Well, I’d found it for them—and staunched it, too.

  But I realized now that these politicians and paper warriors had a second, hidden agenda, as well: they’d wanted LC flushed out. But more important, they wanted him politically neutralized. Gunny Barrett’s handwritten, secret code-word note to the Priest had been oblique, too. And only now did I fully understand its significance.

  “Read enclosed pages,” it had said. And what had the Priest shown me? He had shown me one page. The FBI fax about hijacked weapons. Not the second, or third, or fourth, or however many pages—the ones about removing LC Strawhouse from the political arena without leaving any telltale fingerprints.

  Well, they’d picked the right man—and the wrong one—when they chose me. I am n
ot a political animal. I am a carnivore. I am a warrior. And I’d recently lost one of the best warriors ever to draw breath. Cherry Enders was dead because political opportunists like the Priest and LC Strawhouse were playing chess games, with real people as the pawns.

  That’s the way it all too often is, friends. Every time some fucking politician in Washington gets a wild idea up his ass, some young SEAL pup, Marine grunt, or Army sergeant gets wasted in a godforsaken place like Beirut or Mogadishu. The politicians sent troops to Lebanon as peacekeepers—but tied their hands with moronic, politically correct rules of engagement that got our men killed. In Somalia, diplomats kept the shoot-and-looters from doing their jobs—and guess who died. They habitually use brave young men as pawns. Use them with reckless disregard. I’d already lost one man in their game—and that was one too many.

  I saw what had happened: LC had felt the heat of the chase, so he’d cut a deal in Washington. Maybe he’d promised he wouldn’t run for president. Maybe he’d told the Priest he’d turn over his list of tangos to the Feds. Frankly, I didn’t care, because things had gone way beyond politics, so far as I was concerned.

  The Priest looked at me smugly. He thought he’d won. He thought the game was done. Maybe it was—for him.

  But my hunting season was far from over. I walked past the Priest to the desk and looked down at LC. “You are a piece of shit,” I said. “You are a traitor. You deserve to die.”

  The Priest tried to come between us. I swatted him away. LC pushed his chair back, swiveled, and turned toward the big computer screen that was sitting, its screen saver making lines of toy soldiers march from left to right, on his antique French walnut credenza. “Traitor? We’ll see who’s a traitor. You watch—see what I can do. Learn how many people out there support the same things I do. Know what kind of an army I can summon up.”

  “Now, LC—” The Priest was getting real agitated now. “That’s not part of any understanding.”

  “I don’t give a shit about that, Stonewall. He has to see what I can do—what I could have done.” LC slid his hand onto the mouse. The screen saver immediately disappeared, replaced by his Windows program screen. LC looked up at me, the crazy grin still on his face.