RW04 - Task Force Blue

by Richard Marcinko

  Anyway, roughly three months back, Paul began an accelerated two-year stint as the CDA—that’s Chief Defense Attache, the top-ranking U.S. military officer—Moscow. The job can be largely ceremonial: you can fulfill your mission requirements simply by going to large numbers of diplomatic receptions, giving cocktail parties, doing lunch, taking meetings, and writing lots of empty-calorie memos detailing what you’ve seen and heard and noshed upon.

  Not Paul. He took the job seriously. He actually went out into the field and collected information— the kind of stuff the folks at the Defense Intelligence Agency call Level One Grade-A HUMINT, or HUMan INTelligence. From what I was told, he was doing a terrific job, too.

  Obviously, his success rubbed some local no-goodniks the wrong way, and they rubbed back. Three weeks ago, Paul, his wife Becky, their two kids—my godson Adam, and the two-year-old Louise—and an enlisted female Navy driver were coming back from a weekend at a rented dacha in the lake district near Odentsovo, the same region northwest of Moscow where I was currently hurting. Their car was intercepted by a “group of persons identities unknown,” as the diplomatic cable I saw so cooly put it, and all five were murdered.

  According to the report, the car was rammed from behind—the Navy driver hadn’t taken any tactical driving courses and evidently panicked—then pushed off the road. Once it had been stopped, Paul, his family, and the driver were machine-gunned. Then the car was set on fire, no doubt to make such things as identification of the passengers harder for the authorities.

  Now, you probably know me well enough by now to realize that I would have found some way to get here on my own to exact revenge for my friend’s death— not to mention my godson’s. But fortunately, Paul’s boss, a submariner named Kenny Ross, opened my cage and turned me loose with a trunk full of small arms, and a diplomatic USG—that’s U.S. Government—passport. It’s a lot more complicated than that, of course, but there’s really very little time to explain it all right now. Anyway, I arrived here in Moscow—lemme check my watch—four days ago and began making inquiries. At nine yesterday morning, Boris, who is a captain in the Moscow Police Department’s organized crime squad to whom I’d been clandestinely introduced, walked me up to a holding cell at the aging, puke-yellow brick departmental headquarters on Petrovka Street, pointed at a huge, ugly, tattooed, white-walled buzz-topped goon in le Coq Sportif sweats, who was manacled uncomfortably to a length of galvanized steel pipe almost as thick and long as my dick, and asked, “Is he wearing anything you recognize?”

  I looked. The haircut was UM—that is, universally military. I peered at the bruised, bloated face. Yeah, sure it had been worked over by the cops, but it could still be defined as U2—that is, Ugly and Unfamiliar. The size-fifteen shoes were $200 Nike Air cross trainers. The currently grimy extra-extra-large threads were the real thing—the kind of country-club athletic gear that seldom sees sweat. The fingernails were dirty and raggedly bitten. Then I saw what Boris had been getting at. There was a chunk of gold and semiprecious stone jammed onto the thug’s goon-sized pinky.

  I knew all too well what it was, too—an Annapolis class ring. I asked Boris WTF.

  “He tried to sell it to an American tourist outside the Metropol Hotel,” the Russian explained. “As luck would have it, the tourist, a retired Navy officer, complained loud and long to his tour guide about Russians selling U.S. Navy artifacts. The tour guide—he was very reticent, I might add, and if it hadn’t been for the American tourist making such a stink he would have let it all go—finally called the police.”

  “So why is he still wearing it?”

  Boris shrugged. “Look, it’s not against the law to own such a thing. But if you can prove it was your friend’s, then we can start to make a case.”

  I pointed at the ring and stuck my hand, palm up, in Vassily’s face, making the universal sign for “hand it over.”

  The goon spat neatly in the center.

  “Boris,” I said, “would you give me a set of handcuff keys, then leave us alone for a few minutes?”

  He grinned. “No problem, Dicky.”

  When I finally pried the ring off (unfortunately, I broke a couple of fingers in the process), I looked inside and saw Paul’s initials, and his graduation date: 1973.

  Now, despite the obviously spirited interrogation that followed (they don’t have the same rules about cop-prisoner physical contact in Moscow police stations that we have in the United States. In Moscow, Rodeniy Kingski is the rule, not the exception), the GIQ—that’s Goon-In-Question, and pronounced geek—whose name was Vassily Chichkov, had, Boris said, stuck with the story that he’d found the ring on the street, and wanted to make a quick pile of hard currency selling it to the first American he’d come across.

  Yeah. Right. And if you believe that, I have some beachfront property to sell you in New Mexico. According to Boris, this GIQ worked as an enforcer for a Georgian vor v zakonye—that’s Russian for a mafia godfather—named Andrei Yudin. According to Misha, the cops had been trying to get their hands on Andrei for months.

  But they’d been unsuccessful, Boris interjected, because, first, Andrei lived in the Yasir Arafat style— which is to say he moved from secret residence to secret residence on a weekly, sometimes daily basis, and second, because Andrei always managed to procure enough tactical intelligence about police activities to keep his Georgian butt from being busted.

  Yudin. Andrei Yudin. Lightbulb. I recognized the name because Andrei the vor was one of a dozen Russian mafiyosi mentioned in the sheaf of notes, memos, reports, and other documents I’d taken from the Navy-Only safe in Paul’s office two days ago.

  According to those notes, Andrei was one of the more dangerous and enterprising local mafiosi—tied into a wide range of activities that ranged from protection scams, to the smuggling of weapons, to drug dealing. There was a star next to his name—and it wasn’t because he was a nice guy.

  Then Boris walked me back to his office, pulled a yard-square sheet of posterboard out of his closet-sized safe, and showed me Yudin’s pug face on a well worn, often-revised organizational chart of Russian Mafiya (which as you can probably guess is Ivan for Mafia) crime families—a chart that looked very much like the ones up in the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the high-ceilinged room in the Russell Office Building where a mob hitman-turned-stoolie named Joe Valachi once gave Bobby Kennedy enough inside information about American organized crime to put two hundred soldiers and capos from La Cosa Nostra behind bars.

  Double lightbulb. I’d seen Andrei’s face before— Paul had taken a covert snapshot of the guy. He was celebrating something or other, wine glass raised, mouth open and laughing, at a sardine-packed table in a bustling restaurant or club. Except, Paul hadn’t labeled the picture. Of course he hadn’t—he knew who the fuck he’d photographed. Now, in Boris’s office, I put the face and the name together.

  I inquired as to whether I might spend some quality time with the prisoner, so I’d be more able to appreciate his lifestyle and his weltanschauung—that’s his worldview, for those of you whose Deutsch ain’t decent. Boris chuckled, gave me the key to the handcuffs, and I returned to the cell and had a few choice words with Vassily—a reflective, thoughtful, philosophical interlocution about the sorts of commitments and responsibilities one owes to one’s friends and one’s godchildren. Shortly before Vassily departed for the prison hospital, he saw things my way—they generally do, y’know—and I gave Boris the location where Andrei Yudin was currently holed up—the selfsame dacha that was, right now, so near yet so far.

  Now, it may sound somewhat strange to you at first (it certainly did to me), but I learned by going through Paul’s papers that from the day he’d arrived, Paul had spent much of his time collecting information on Russian (and Georgian and Armenian and Chechen) organized crime.

  Bizarre work for a defense attache, you say. You’re right. Until you learn, as I had, that Russian organized crime deals with everything from money-launderi
ng and drugs to the marketing of purloined nuclear warheads and the sale of chemical and biological warfare components.

  In fact, even though Ken Ross had not said anything about it to me, I believed that the mafia—or mafiya, as they call it here, was the reason Paul’s assignment here had been stepped up. He was a Russian speaker—fluent and sans accent. Equally important, he was an operator—a guy who could change his clothes, slip out of the embassy compound, and work the streets without attracting undue attention to himself. That ability is rare. It is even more remarkable in one-star admirals. So Paul had been put into play early because the Navy was concerned enough about Russian organized crime activities to allow a one-star to stand in harm’s way. And Paul and his family had paid the ultimate price.

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  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  RICHARD MARCINKO retired from the Navy as a full commander after more than thirty years of service. He currently lives in the Washington, B.C. area, where he is CEO of SOS Temps Inc., his private security consulting and special investigations firm whose clients include governments and corporations, and Richard Marcinko Inc., a motivational training and team-building company. He continues to provide his expertise on matters of special operations and terrorism on live network television.

  JOHN WEISMAN is a writer specializing in espionage and military themes. His recent books include the critically acclaimed novel Blood Cries, and the bestseller Shadow Warrior, the biography of CIA agent Felix Rodriguez. His acclaimed short story, “There are Monsterim,” appeared in the 1996 collection Unusual Suspects. He divides his time between homes in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. John Weisman can be reached via the Internet at jweisman@ix.netcom.com.