Don’t bother breaking out a map. I’d been nowhere near Sicily in the past few days. In fact, I hadn’t been there in roughly a decade. The “suspicions” were either very old or ridiculous, most likely both.
A little bit of background for those of you unfamiliar with my history. After starting and commanding SEAL Team Six, I moved on to other challenges, eventually forming a counterterrorist training/covert action unit known as Red Cell. Our primary task, at least on the books, was to run exercises designed to discover and demonstrate flaws in security procedures at U.S. installations. Most of my victims wore the crisp whites beloved by the U.S. Navy, but occasionally I got a chance to spread my ill will to our brethren services. Among my early assignments was a directive to “visit and test” the Air Force’s nuclear babysitting arrangements at Sigonella.
Sigonella is located on the eastern side of Sicily, about where a soccer player would kick the island if it were really the football it looks like on a map. The bulk of the base is actually a U.S. Navy installation “shared” with the Italian air force. Our Air Farts use it as a transshipment point, moving “items” down the road to supposedly secure magazine areas, separate from the Navy base. (These “items” were weapons that caused mushroom clouds to appear when used. Some of the details—heck, all of the details—about their storage and existence here remains classified.) Red Cell pulled the pants down on the Air Force operation, demonstrating that it would be child’s play to grab a couple of gadgets from under their noses. The general overseeing the radiation counters went fairly apeshit—that’s a medical term—when he got my report. He swore that he would have my head delivered on a silver platter at his earliest opportunity.
That had been somewhere in the vicinity of two decades ago; he’d’ve retired by now, which meant the statute of limitations on my head ought to have expired. Joking aside, Sigonella was barely a footnote in my Red Cell career, a few days of frolic and fun in the sun before getting down to more serious business, and I hadn’t given our escapades there much thought until my arrest. (Red Cell details some of our exploits in greater detail. Just remember it’s all fiction, whatever the government claims.)
Time out for a quick info dump on Sigonella for those of you who haven’t read the earlier books or have never had the pleasure of traveling to Sicily. Besides being the birthplace of the Italian Mafia, a lot of Sicily is owned by Libyans. This includes the olive groves surrounding the airfield at Sigonella. (Qaddafi is our friend now, right? Ha!)
Most of the airfield’s perimeter security is provided by Italian conscripts. (No offense, but there is a reason the shortest book in the world is titled Italian War Heroes.) The deterrent is a low barbed-wire fence that I can go under just as easy as I can get over.
As you’d expect in any joint venture, command and control is an issue. Think of the old Abbott and Costello routine, “Who’s on First.” Now put half of the conversation in Italian and the other half in English, and you’ll see how confusion can run up and down the chain of command. The Italians have a commanding officer and we have a commanding officer (CO). Our guy can make decisions pretty freely or get guidance from CINCUSNAVEUR (the in term for Commander in Chief U.S. Navy Europe). But the Italian CO must—and I do mean must—coordinate most major decisions with Rome. And anything other than whether to use marinara or a meat sauce on the spaghetti is considered a major decision. (That may be one, too, now.)
Our people live in housing outside the base. Most take a bus or car to get to work. Ambushing them and holding them hostage is a piece of cake. When I was running Red Cell, quite a number of our guys were hitchhiking back and forth, which is even worse.
One thing I will say: The locals are friendly. Hell, they ought to be—they make money off us. There is a “communist” party within the government, but it’s more like the Italian version of the Kiwanis Club than the party we saw during the Cold War era. On the other hand, in today’s Italy, even the right-wingers are concerned about being considered a “pawn” of the U.S. What this means is that there’s little pressure on the Italians at Sigonella to work with our guys. And since Sicily in not within a war zone—and let’s face it, it can be a damn nice place to hang out when it’s not raining—there’s a lack of concern for what is going on in the real world.
Squeakynuts insisted that my apprehension had nothing to do with the past. He also insisted that there was no way I was being released from custody. To emphasize his point, his men flashed M4s, complete with grenade launchers. Discretion dictated that I send Karen to the ceremony to sip champagne and collect my medal while I went with Squeakynuts to find out which old friend in the Pentagon I was going to have to call to get my ass unhooked from the donkey cart. I thought he would take me to the embassy to get it straightened out, which would mean the ambassador would be in a position to help me out. Stupid me—going to the nearby embassy would have been the logical thing to do, which of course meant it was the last thing I should have expected. Within a half hour, I found myself in the rear of a C-130 Hercules on my way to Sicily.
This was a real C-130—an ancient “slick” with nothing but tie-downs in the back. I don’t mind sitting on aluminum for a few hours, but the Herky Birds are loud. Take ten of your average motorbikes, multiply the sound by a factor of ten, and put them and your head in a garbage pail for three hours and you get the idea.
Things went from ridiculous to sublime when we reached Sigonella. Major Squeakynuts introduced me to his boss, Colonel Crapinpants, who took me in to see his boss, General Kohut. Kohut told me that there had been two or three probes of security over the past few days by “actors unknown.” Apparently Red Cell’s exploits had been engraved in the local lore to such an extent that when Crapinpants learned I was in Italy, I became Suspect Numero Uno. I was flattered, naturally, but I did wonder what my motive would be. Few people tempt a stretch in a federal hotel just to relive some of their glory days.
“You wanted us to look bad,” suggested Crapinpants.
“Why would I go to that much trouble? You guys make yourselves look bad every time you shave.”
That got a yuk from one of the enlisted Air Force security people, whom I’ve found to be generally decent sorts when their officers aren’t around to lead them astray. Kohut gave him a sour look, and I have no doubt that the man will be old and gray before his next authorized leave.
It didn’t take much more discussion or sarcastic remarks for me to figure out what was really going on here. The flyboys wanted my help figuring out who was probing the base, and had gotten the bright idea of using invented charges as a way of persuading me. The charges were laughable, but there were a lot of them, ranging from unauthorized presence on a military installation to contemplated destruction of U.S. property. They couldn’t make even one of them stick, but they could tangle me in enough red tape and spaghetti sauce to keep me in Italy for the next six months if I didn’t help out. So I decided to play along, at least for a while.
The probes were varied; a fence cutting here, a few firecrackers there. Locals had been seen, always at a distance, watching when patrols responded to alerts. Crapinpants thought someone was trying to test and evaluate his defenses, and he was absolutely right. The question was who, and why.
The why seemed obvious—someone wanted the gadgets the Air Force had there. The who, though, was more difficult to answer. The smallest of the nuclear chestnuts the Air Force stored here were many times more powerful than the weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Terrorists were obvious suspects, but any of two or three dozen nations would pay millions, perhaps billions, for one. And not just countries in the Middle East like Syria, which would view a stolen weapon as an equalizer in a war with Israel. Taiwan could easily view a nuclear device as an equalizer in its perennial conflict with China. South Korea might think one prudent to protect it from North Korea. Even if such nations weren’t directly involved in the snatch, they would certainly be in the market to buy it if an independent party pulled it off.
Two things worried me about what Kohut and his people said. One, the probes had been well organized, spaced out over several days, and very low key—generally signs of a professional. And two, I doubted the Air Force people had picked up on all of the probes. It was the ones they missed that would present the biggest problem.
I took a tour of the facility and pointed out a few problems. I won’t get into specifics for obvious reasons, but in general the facility was vulnerable to hostage-taking, unauthorized entry by (fake or stolen) supply and emergency vehicles, fence-line penetrations, and all manner of diversionary incidents.
Say, Dick, aren’t those the same things it was vulnerable to back in your Red Cell days?
Um, yes.
Oh. Carry on.
Besides general complacency and rigid thinking, one of the biggest problems for security organizations these days is the overreliance on gee-whiz doodads to do the work of mark-one eyeballs. Don’t get me wrong: motion sensors, miniature bugs, infrared video, night glasses, UAVs—these are all useful tools. But they’re just tools, only as useful as the people putting them to use. And if you don’t have enough people, and if you’re rotating people in and out so fast that they hardly have time to find the bathroom before leaving, you’re asking for trouble.
But give credit where credit is due: The high-tech gear had come away with what police call a “partial plate”—several digits from a license plate belonging to a truck parked along the road to the facility. The truck turned out to have been stolen—a true shocker, no?
Kohut had been concerned enough about the case to call for help, and besides the Air Force security people and the DIA slugs, and a misplaced FBI agent, the State Department had assigned an expert on international terrorism named Francis Delano to help with the case. Delano’s real asset was the fact that he spoke Sicilian as well as Italian. (Don’t let the textbooks fool you. They’re two different languages, each with its own set of curse words.) Delano had been tasked to liaise with the local yokels largely because of his language skills, and when I found out about the license plate and truck, it was Delano I went to see. By now it was fairly late—or early, depending on your point of view—but I called over to his hotel anyway and even managed to get him to pick up the phone after twenty or thirty rings. I explained that I was looking into the situation at Sigonella, had only a few hours or so to spare, and wanted to pick his brain as soon as I could.
Now, if possible.
Delano groaned. I took that as a yes, hung up quickly, and had one of the Air Farce security people drive me over.
Delano greeted me at his hotel room with a bottle of wine in his hand—and a loaded Colt.
“I’ll take the drink,” I told him. “You can keep the gun.”
“You’re Marcinko?”
“Dick.”
“You know it’s 4 a.m.?”
“Yeah, but it’s never too early to have a drink in Italy.”
Delano loosened up inside. Contrary to all expectation, he turned out to be an almost competent investigator, possibly because he had come to the State Department after a career in the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. My experience with State Department employees is that they usually don’t know whom they’re working for, us or the countries they’re assigned to. Generally they side with the latter. Frankie not only knew who paid for the butter on his bread but was sparing with it, the first government worker I’ve met in my life who declined to put personal items like his morning coffee on the expense account. If all government workers were as honest as he was, we’d have paid off the federal debt ten years ago.
Frankie poured us some wine and gave me an info dump on the situation from his perspective. He began indirectly, talking not about the probes or the truck, but Sicily itself. He knew a bit about the island, he said, because his grandparents on his father’s side had come from here, although they had left from Palermo, the major port on the west.
Sicily had a long tradition of being at odds with the central government. The craggy coasts made it an easy place to sneak in and out of and the rugged terrain made it easy to hide. On the other hand, Sicilians tended to be clannish and distrustful of outsiders. It wasn’t impossible for foreign terrorists to operate here, Delano said, but they would have a number of handicaps. Physically, Arabs and northern Africans could easily pass as residents, but once they started to speak, their accents and lack of fluency in the difficult Sicilian tongue would give them away. In short, he didn’t think an outside group was responsible for the probes; the police would have heard about them long ago—not necessarily from complaints, but from gossip at the local bars and cafés.
“What about a homegrown group, like the old Red Brigades?” I asked. The Red Brigades were communist cells that operated throughout the country in the 1960s and ’70s.
“They’re old men now, the few who have survived. Besides, they weren’t very active in Sicily,” said Delano.
“Who then?”
Delano shrugged. “I don’t think we’re at the point where we can rule anything out. Or in.”
He had set up a meeting with the local authorities to discuss the matter first thing in the morning, and invited me along. I told him I’d be glad to, then took his yawns as a hint that it was time to let him catch some beauty rest.
Karen shared no anxiety when I caught up with her by phone a few hours later. On the contrary, she was excited—she wanted to hop right down and spend our last two days in Italy basking in the Sicilian sun.
Who was I to stand in her way? Especially since the Air Farce was going to spring for her tickets.
“Dosdière was disappointed that you weren’t at the ceremony,” she told me.
“I’ll bet.”
“He gave me the card of someone who needs help on an open-ended project. It has his cell and business numbers.”
Open-ended projects being my stock-in-trade, I gave the someone a call while waiting for Karen’s plane to arrive that night. His name was Jean Capon, and he was an executive vice president for a company called BetaGo, which provided computer and electronic services in Asia and Europe. He was coy about what the services actually entailed, but his hints made it obvious that they were largely financial transactions involving decent-sized transfers between bank and brokerage accounts in a dozen or more countries. While the bulk of the work was electronic, the firm had to move paperwork and some hard currency around as well. There were regular transport routes in Asia, and this was the part of the operation they wanted checked by someone “impartial and competent.”
Transporting currency and paperwork—the latter being information stored on computer media like disks and tapes, rather than actual paper—is unglamorous but potentially well-paying grunt work. A lot of international concerns need to move records and money around for various reasons, most of which are never revealed to the movers. Watching the shipments is not exactly sweat-breaking work, though it can become bloodletting if things go wrong. The fees take that into consideration. I’ve done it myself in Asia and Europe; one of these days I’ll write about helping provide security when one old-money firm shipped U.S. dollars from Japan to Brussels. They had a way of fiddling with the international dateline to make big bucks off the interest—quite a gig.
The fact that BetaGo needed someone to observe the operation implied that there were questions about what was happening there. Answers to questions yield fees based on recovery commissions: big bucks as well as big risks to go with them. That’s a combination I couldn’t turn down. We firmed up a basic fee structure, then set up a meeting for the following week in Tokyo, immediately after our company conference in Germany. I love Japan, and not just because I enjoy sushi. One of my favorite people in the world, Toshiro Okinaga, makes his living as a policeman in Tokyo. Calling Tosho a policeman is like calling me a sailor—he supervises his own team of Kunika warriors. Kunika is a special unit of the Japanese police that handles counterterrorism tasks; the group is so secret that if you plug the name into a search eng
ine on the Internet you won’t find out anything about them. They shut down the Japanese Red Army in the 1980s, and have played an important role in fighting a variety of terrorists, foreign and homegrown, in the years since. They’re every bit as efficient and relentless as you would expect the descendants of samurai warriors to be.
I’d first met Tosho and friends back in my SEAL days, when Red Cell ran some exercises at a U.S-Japanese base at Yokosuka. Tosho is a hell of a shot and a seventh-degree black belt; he can also put away the Kirin like there’s no tomorrow, a truly important quality for a SpecWarrior. A chance to spend some time and wet the whistle with an old friend would be a definite fringe benefit of the gig.
I checked my watch and called Rogue Manor, where my business affairs were being managed in absentia by Danny Barrett. I’ve known Danny since he was a Marine Corps captain a billion years ago in Vietnam. There he worked the CORDS program as an advisor, helping the Christians In Action gather intelligence from gooks. After graduating from the Marines, he went into police work and became a detective. We hooked up again a few years ago, and since then Danny’s been a vital part of the operation, in effect an executive vice president. He has a good head for numbers and a detective’s knack for ferreting out facts; he can be a little gruff at times, but who am I to complain about that? Most important, he understands that you lead from the front; that’s a prerequisite of being a Marine, and it’s one of my golden commandments of SpecWar.
Even though it was around midnight back home, Danny was up and working, scanning reports from Red Cell International’s far-flung empire. The big meeting in Germany was only three days away, and he was working hard to make sure everything was squared away before heading overseas. He brought me up to date. There had been another attack on one of our convoys in Afghanistan, but otherwise things were quiet. I told him about BetaGo, handing off the job of preparing the contract work and doing the background checks, which are routine before we begin an assignment with a company we haven’t worked with before. Updates finished, he turned me over to Trace Dahlgren, who was burning the midnight oil overseeing the six Red Cell wannabes, fresh-faced recruits for our international security division.
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