By the time the people with the machine guns hit the dirt, I had managed to get almost all the way behind them. As dust sprayed everywhere, I hopped back over the wall and ran forward so I could see what I was shooting at. Unfortunately, I ran into an obstacle along the way—a guard from the other road who’d double-timed up to find out what all the commotion was. We rebounded off each other maybe six feet, both stunned by the collision.
Stunned is a condition I’m familiar with. I hopped up and gave him a kick to the head to keep him on the ground. I would certainly have shot him, except that I’d dropped my MP5 in the collision.
By the time I found it, the people from the van were emptying their Minimis at the chopper, which had the pedal to the metal and was disappearing beyond the hill. Their gunfire made it easy to see where they were, and I emptied the MP5 at them.
Inside the warehouse, Sean found di Giovanni cowering behind one of the vehicles, a 9mm Beretta shaking in his hands. Sean batted it out of his hands, gave di Giovanni a swat, and then poked him with the Demerol. He threw him over his shoulder and hustled outside just after the helicopter passed, streaking to my right as I fired at the Minimi amici.
The men in the van had killed the guards on the road they took up to the site. But they’d left the other set intact, figuring to get away before they could respond or call in reinforcements. Those reinforcements were now en route, or so it looked to Karen, who saw four pickups tearing up the highway from a farm two miles away. Worried that the helicopter would be an easy target if it landed nearby, I told her we’d meet her at the parking lot we’d used the night before.
“The last Mercedes,” I yelled to Sean, stuffing a fresh magazine in my MP5 and backing toward it. I stopped at the car in front of it, pried open the gas cover, then took a handkerchief out of my pocket. Two or three of the bozos back by the van began firing in my direction as I lit and pushed the burning rag into the gas opening. The vapor system on the vehicle was in good repair, preventing the car from exploding…
…for about five seconds. Then a thick arm of fire shot out from the vehicle, and the luxury sedan lit up the night.
I barely got our car backed away in time, whipping around only a dozen yards from the flames. As I started down the road I saw the pickup truck that had been guarding the turnoff barreling straight for us from below. Probably unsure whether we were on his side or not, he veered to the left, trying to block the roadway. I veered to the left as well, which got me around him more or less intact, minus a little scraped paint and lost chrome as I glanced off a nearby tree. I continued a little farther, hoping to make it to the Y where the two roads met before the cavalry arrived. I didn’t quite make it, as the quartet of high beams announced.
Quartet, as in four across. The trucks were driving side by side, trying to block the road.
When a certain strategy succeeds, my motto is to keep using it until you beat it to death. So I waited until the last possible moment again, then veered hard left. Not having my headlights on, I didn’t know how close I was to the wall at the side of the road.
The answer was: very.
We rebounded back, smacking the front fender of the first pickup and twisting into a mangled pretzel of a car wreck. The front end of the Mercedes crumpled down like an accordion and the airbags deployed; I found myself sucking formaldehyde-treated plastic, or whatever the hell it is that they make those damn things with.
Airbags fetch a good price on the black market, and the markup was too tempting for the local Mafiosi to resist. As bad as swallowing airbag dust may be, it’s better than going through the windshield, which is what happened to at least two of the people in the pickups. Another four or five of the men who’d been traveling in the rear beds went airborne, splashing on the road behind us.
We weren’t making a commercial for the Traffic Safety Department, so we didn’t bother to count the victims. I helped Sean pull di Giovanni from the car as Trace did a Crouching Tiger/Slashing Mafia routine, demonstrating her martial arts skills on two thugs who had the misfortune to come through the car accident intact. We left them reeling as we retreated down the hill, through the woods and to the van. Ten minutes later, we were in the JetRanger, heading back to the airport. Di Giovanni snored loudly in the backseat. I borrowed the chopper pilot’s phone to call Frankie after we touched down to refuel.
“We’ll have a deposit for you in about two hours,” I told him. “The capo of the car operation.”
“Who?”
“Di Giovanni. The Mafia expert. I don’t know how much he knows about Biondi and what he was up to. I can’t ask him until he wakes up.” I glanced at my watch. If past experience was any guide, he’d be out for three more hours. “After that, we can figure out what to do next.”
“Di Giovanni?”
“Yeah, the Mafia expert. Hopefully he’s important enough to get the big boss involved, whoever that is. I doubt we’ll get any straight answers from di Giovanni, at least not that we can trust.”
“There’s more to this than we thought,” said Frankie. “A lot more.”
Oh, if I’d only known how right he was.
Part Two
Old Friends
Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere.
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN
5
The gunfire at the warehouse site did not attract the local police—surprise, surprise—but within an hour, calls were being made to locate di Giovanni. By the time we arrived in Sicily, Kohut had taken calls from several Italian officials, including what in America would be the attorney general’s office. Our presence as observers on the raid the night before was just a little too coincidental. Apparently di Giovanni’s associates decided they would do better with him in the government’s custody than in ours. This surely meant that they had decided to terminate the association, something I pointed out to di Giovanni when he came to in the hangar we appropriated at Sigonella after landing. We could help him, I said, but only if he helped us.
Still groggy from the drugs, di Giovanni blinked at me but said nothing. I asked a few questions about Biondi, which he answered with more blinks and then a shrug and shake of his head. When I asked about terroriste on the island, he responded with a genuinely puzzled stare.
Trace offered to give him a personal Jeet Kune Do demonstration, but I vetoed it. Frankie was already on his way over with some marines to take charge of the prisoner. Denting his fenders wasn’t going to get us anywhere. There are definitely situations where the application of acute force can yield timely results. In this case, though, it seemed unlikely. The Mafia code of silence, or omertà, may be overrated, but it still takes more than a few dinks and dunks to get someone at di Giovanni’s level to speak freely. The pressure has to build over time, psychologically as well as physically. Besides, he was still fairly doped up; I doubt he would have felt half of the pain Trace inflicted.
Frankie arrived a few minutes later. Kohut was spitting bullets over at his office, convinced that I had created an international incident for the sole purpose of screwing up his retirement. Di Giovanni was to be turned over to the Italian authorities immediately, if not sooner.
“If you do that, you’ll never get anything from him about Biondi or anyone else,” I told him. “I doubt he’ll live twenty-four hours.”
“Agreed,” said Frankie. “But Crapinpants won’t say boo, and I’m low man on the totem pole here. It’s Kohut’s ballgame.”
“Did you point out that the terroriste are still around?” I asked.
“The Italian government apparently worries him more. I checked with the ambassador,” Frankie added. “I thought I ought to give him a heads-up. He said it’s a military matter, and he’ll back whatever the Pentagon wants.”
There was an opening, I thought. Kohut wasn’t the Pentagon; he was just the local Air Farce commander, who could be overru
led if the circumstances warranted. The trick was finding the person with balls enough to overrule him.
Pus Face?
It was worth a try.
The aide who answered the general’s phone must have thought I was a bill collector. The general had left orders that he not be disturbed, and it took the words nuclear catastrophe to get the general to the phone. His first words were, “What blew up?”
“General, this is Dick Marcinko. I have the Mafioso responsible for trying to break into Sigonella, but Kohut wants to give him back to the Italians. We need to hold on to him long enough to flesh out the terrorist network, find out what the connections are, that sort of thing. Forty-eight hours—”
“Marcinko?” He pronounced my name as if he’d never heard it before.
“Yes?”
“Marcinko?”
This time, the tone implied that he had heard my name once too often. I turned the phone over to Frankie, figuring that as a State Department employee he would be better at diplomacy. Frankie spent about ten minutes explaining the situation. His last words were, “but—but—but”—never a good sign.
“He said he’d have to sleep on it,” said Frankie, handing the phone back.
Actually, Pus Face wasn’t going to be sleeping on anything. He was exhibiting typical C2CO behavior. Translation: “Can’t Cunt Commanding Officer,” a species which must test the water, get ducks in a row, run the flag up the pole, etc., etc., before making a controversial decision. For all his vim and vigor a few days before, Pus Face wouldn’t get off the pot or take a shit without making sure the air freshener was in place.
Ah well. It was worth a shot. Besides, I was due in Germany.
I gave di Giovanni another chance to punk out and come over to our side, but he only scowled. Frankie reluctantly turned him over to the two policemen who showed up a little past 11 a.m. the next day—the crack of dawn for an Italian government worker. By that time, I was on my way up to Rome to catch my flight to Germany.
Pretty much my whole life, I’ve gotten in trouble for sticking my nose where other people didn’t want it. I’m so used to people telling me to fuck off that most days I figure it’s part of my name. In this case, I had already gone above and beyond the call of duty. I’d done what I could to head off a theft at the base. We hadn’t apprehended the tangos, but I did think that their operation had been derailed, at least temporarily. And my involvement had not cost the U.S. taxpayers a dime.
“Call me if the government wants to hire me to help flesh this out, check security procedures further, or what have you,” I told Frankie when he made a pitch for me to stay—pro bono, of course. “In the meantime, I have honest work to do.”
“Yeah, all right.”
Maybe I’m a softy, or maybe I’m just a glutton for punishment—I felt bad when I punched the end button on the sat phone, I really did. But I still punched it.
No, I didn’t abandon them completely. I left Trace behind, and on my dime, too. If Pus Face came to his senses or Kohut lost his, she’d be in position to help interrogate di Giovanni. In the meantime, she would work with the Air Farcers to make sure their security was up to snuff in case the tangos returned. She even volunteered to help out with morning physical training. It was a proposition the numb-nut Air Farcers promptly agreed to, no doubt relishing the idea of her in workout togs.
The poor fucks never knew what hit them.
I would not have made a good German: wiener schnitzel and oompah bands have never been my strong points. But I do love the beer. And German society has a certain precision, a kind of correctness to it that makes it easy for a visitor. You can count on the train schedules, and the bartenders always give the correct change.
Our big meeting took place in a city on the Rhine we’ll call Rhineville, just on the off chance that we use it for a meeting again…and to help avoid possible civil suits. The people I employ work hard, and it’s not unusual for them to blow off a little steam during downtime. I’d be a hypocrite if I said I couldn’t understand bar fights or other team-building activities. (It’s not true that we schedule them, however; the best bar fights are always spontaneous, and at Red Cell International, we always strive for the best.) As for the rumor that one of my people rode a motorcycle through the hall of a local hotel, I can categorically deny that the rumor is true.
To the best of my knowledge, at least two motorcycles were involved.
Just kidding. We didn’t stay at any of the local inns. For one thing, security would have been a bitch and a half. Even if we managed to rent the rooms incognito—and I assure you we would have—my friend Mr. Murphy would have undoubtedly had a reservation there as well. Sooner or later the word would have gotten out, tempting all sorts of crazies to try and make their bones by frying ours. I imagine we’d also be a tempting target for some of the European intelligence services. One of these days I’ll kill a few trees talking about how the spying operations are directed at the U.S. by our allies. I’m not exactly a high-priority target for them, but the krauts would have been interested, if only to trade some of the information with Mossad, which likes to keep as up to date as possible on American interests in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.
So instead of hunting down the local Holiday Inn, we went whole hog and rented a castle for our confab. I can’t take the credit for finding the place. Al “Doc” Tremblay, one of the original plank holders of Red Cell and a close friend and business associate, was in charge of making the arrangements. He selected it largely on the basis that it was easy to isolate and available at a reasonable cost; the fourteenth-century battlements were just a bonus. Towers with huge helmetlike domes stood at each corner. (Imagine the Kaiser helmets used by the German army in WWI and you get the picture.) The main building was a six-sided monstrosity that rose from the battlement wallson the river side. It had apparently had its own helmet at one time, though by the time the twenty-first century arrived only a few splinters of the support timbers and the shadow of a razed stairway remained. If you didn’t mind the risk of falling—in other words, if you’d had enough beer to cloud your judgment but not enough to make you lose your sense of balance—you could climb all the way to the top by wedging your fingers against the stones. From there you could see all the way to Austria and France, or at least claim that you could.
At some point in the past fifty or sixty years, the family that owned the castle had tried to operate a small hotel there. They’d built a one-story building against one of the outer walls, setting it up like a no-tell motel with rooms opening directly onto a macadam walkway. The rooms all leaked, but were otherwise serviceable as temporary dorms, with electricity and running water; we spread tarps on the roofs and prayed for clear weather. We brought in two oversized rec vehicles to use primarily as kitchens, but the best cooking by far was done on the large portable grill Doc set up in the courtyard. (I do mean large. It could handle three medium-sized pigs, though Doc preferred to roast those in a homemade pit.) We held our company meetings in a stone chapel built against the northern wall. The relics and artwork had been stripped centuries ago, but the stone altar remained. Before long I was being called Cardinal Dick by one and sundry, to whom I of course returned the favor, sprinkling a few off-color religious epithets into my usual terms of endearment.
Security-wise, the place was a castle. Doc and the four men he chose for the reception committee (he called it the Asshole Patrol) came in a week early and went over the place with a variety of electronic doodads, making sure it was clean and would stay that way. Doc must have bought or borrowed toys from every “skunk works” we know in Europe, along with the goodies my friends at Law Enforcement Technologies in Colorado Springs lend us to field-test. Besides checking for bugs and guarding against intruders, they turned the chapel into a secure conferencing facility. It may not have been as secure as No Such Agency’s “black” operations center in Maryland (they don’t exist; you can’t get any more secure than that), but by the time they were done, eavesdropping was out of the qu
estion.
There were only three ways in and out, each easily closed off and guarded. Small video cameras, as well as posted watchmen, surveyed the countryside and nearby river. We could have withstood a company-sized assault for three or four days, at least.
Our presence was explained in the nearby town with rumors that a secretive American pop band had rented the castle for rehearsals. According to the rumors, the band itself wasn’t supposed to arrive for another month—Doc had taken a three-month lease—so there was no reason for the curious to come out and sneak a peak.
My “vacation” in Italy had left me out of the loop for a few days, and I had a lot of catching up to do on our various projects. Afghanistan was at the top of the list, of course, but our accounts in Iraq, Turkey, and Romania required hand-holding as well. Not that I mean to be so flip: My people had their nuts on the line in each and every instance, and they deserved and got my undivided attention. My name is the one at the top of the letterhead, but let me give credit where credit is due: Red Cell International kicks butt because every single employee is first-rate. Honestly, the men and women who work with me make me better, and there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t realize that.
Not that they don’t point it out constantly…
Some of what we talked about had to do with commonsense security precautions and where to draw the line when taking risks. You can’t get too risk adverse in this field, but on the other hand you have to be able to keep everything in balance. It’s one thing when a country’s survival is on the line; I have no problem fighting for my country or ordering others to do so, even if it means close friends are likely to go home in a plastic baggie. It sucks big time. Believe me when I say I know exactly how much it sucks, but it’s a necessary part of the struggle to remain free.
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