0909. My vision was clearing up by the time the cops arrived. I saw Boomerang on the periphery of the crowd, but waved him off with a glance. I didn’t want to attract any more attention to myself than I already had. Since I was wearing running shoes, I explained that I’d simply been out for a morning jog when Maria cut through the intersection sans waiting for her turn.
On the plus side, there were witnesses who backed me up. It was Maria Andretti who received the citation, not me. On the minus side, the cops took down my name. Why was that mala suerte?35 Fact is, they have computer databases in Argentina, too, and sooner or later, one of ’em would spit out just who Richard (NMN) Marcinko was, and the Argentine authorities would come looking for me to see just why I was visiting. Lemme tell ya: it’s not easy being Richard Marcinko, Rogue Warrior®. I sometimes think I was happier as an anonymous Dick in the teams.
But that’s neither here nor there. What’s here and now is that I knew the clock would be ticking once the cops filed their report. Was it guaranteed I’d be identified? The answer is no, because Mister Murphy is an equal-opportunity asshole, and he affects Argentines just as much as he screws with yanquis like me. But I’d have to operate as if I’d been ID’d. Which meant ratcheting up the speed of our ops. Which would, of course, be more difficult, now that I’d managed to lose track of the pasaperro’s van.
1012. We went back to the Étoile and regrouped. At least Mick had news, even though it wasn’t positive. Bob Evers had called one of his agents—no doubt a cop, although he hadn’t elaborated to Mick—to check on the license plate. Bottom line: it had been reported stolen eight months ago. That made sense. If I were a tango and reconnoitering a target, I’d change my license plates at least once a day—maybe more. And how do you get those plates? You steal ’em and cache ’em until you need ’em. That’s easier in places like Europe and South America, where license plates do not have expiration stickers on ’em.
All my instincts told me that the embassy was being staked out so it could be hit sometime in the near future. And so, as much as I didn’t want to, I felt it was my duty to talk to the RSO—that’s the State Department’s Regional Security Officer—and let him know what I was thinking. I picked up the phone and called Gunny Jarriel, told him I was in town, said I’d like to meet with the RSO or any of the embassy’s security officers, and that I’d be at the embassy at noon.
I was fifteen minutes early. The gunny was not on duty. I could see that because he was wearing a pair of dark suit trousers held up by fashionable silk braces, a white button-down shirt, and a diplomatic blue patterned tie, standing behind the spit-and-polish E-5 (sergeant) who checked my ID and issued me a GO ANYWHERE UNESCORTED laminated badge, which I clipped to my lapel under his unrelenting gaze. When he’d ascertained that I was PROPERLY IDENTIFIED, the sergeant buzzed me through the Class-III bulletproof door. Gunny Jarriel was waiting in the narrow vestibule.
“Rotten Richard, you hairy-palmed sumbitch. Welcome to BA.” He wrapped me up in a big abrazo.
I returned the abrazo, then held him at arm’s length and looked at him critically. He’d matured in the half dozen years since I’d seen him last—a tinge of gray meandered around the temples of his flattop. But he was still a lean, mean fighting machine. He wasn’t big, but he was wiry, and strong, and he knew how to use his strength. I’d seen it: when we’d met, he was an E-6 (staff sergeant) teaching Close Quarters Combat and hostage rescue at the U.S. Marine Corps school for embassy security guards down at Quantico. I’d brought a squad of my Red Cell shooters down to give a demonstration, and we’d all bonded over copious amounts of Coors’ Light after we’d done our demonstrating. Now he was an E-9 master gunnery sergeant, which in the Marine Corps hierarchy, put him at the Right Hand of God. Buenos Aires was his last tour. The Gunny was going to retire after BA, after twenty-five years in the Corps—eighteen of those years overseas.
He led me down a narrow corridor lined with lockers containing BDUs, gas masks, shields, Monadnock batons, bulletproof vests, and helmets toward the Marine security office, propelled me through the steel door ahead of him, then shut it securely behind us.
His face was serious. “So, what’s up, Dick? Is my post in trouble?”
I raised my hands in mock protest. “What, no preliminaries? No makee nice-nice before fuckee-fuckee? No… foreplay, Gunny?”
The Gunny’s eyes crinkled in a smile. “Hey, it’s not me. First, you send me an off-the-books query about that asshole Irishman named something or other Kelley. Next thing I know you turn up here in BA and call. You tell me you want to see the RSO and you want to see him like, right now. So, I figure you know something we don’t, and it has to do with the Irish fella you were asking about.”
“Got some coffee?”
“Sure.” The Gunny’s thumb hooked toward an industrial strength BrewMaster sitting on a file cabinet. “But be careful. That stuff’ll put hair on your tongue.”
“Hell, you know how much I like official-issue Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children coffee.” I strode over, found a reasonably clean mug, and poured eight or so ounces of the black stuff—and “stuff” it most certainly was—then gulped. Shit—I almost spat it back through my nose. That fucking batch of coffee was strong enough to wake up someone from under fucking heart-transplant anesthesia. I blinked as the burnt caffeine taste hit my palate. “Interesting… beverage,” I wheezed as the Gunny grinned. “You going to have any of this?”
“Not on your life,” he said. “Shit, Dick, I’m the guy that made it.”
Mug in hand, I leaned my butt on a desk across from where the Gunny stood and gave him a Roguish noshitter. I told him about the Mrs. Kelley’s franchise, and who was running it. I didn’t have anything definite—no schedule, no method, except that any attack would probably be using explosives, or RPGs. I told him about the bogus dog walker and—double-checking my notes—that the pasaperro had been on scene through the whole scuffle outside the visa section.
Gunny immediately realized the significance of that. “He knows exactly what the cops’ response time is,” he said.
“Right on.”
“So, how’s it gonna go down, Dick?”
I was honest with him. I couldn’t be sure how they’d play things. But I told the Gunny what I’d seen, and I told him what I thought. My bottom line: there was going to be an attack.
Gunny Jarriel perched on the edge of his desk, occasionally scratching at his cheek while I spoke. But he didn’t interrupt. When I’d done, he remained silent.
“So, what do you think, Gunny?”
His lean face hardened. “I think we have some serious work to do, and not a lot of time to get it done.”
“Look—what I just gave you is the result of less than four days of work. I certainly saw things I didn’t like, Gunny. But you know as well as I do, these things aren’t always done deals.”
The concern in Gunny Jarriel’s face was apparent. “If it was just you, Dick, I might agree. But what you came up with is all part of a bigger pattern of probes,” he said. He paused. “A fucking dog walker,” he said, as if to himself. “I should have picked that one up.”
In the next fifteen minutes, the situation became a lot clearer, both to the Gunny, and to me. Because Gunny was a gunny, he’d been working overtime. And he’d noticed things over the past few weeks that he hadn’t liked. The same cars sitting across from the embassy compound day after day. After spending long hours poring over the surveillance videos, he’d seen them. And there had been a couple of break-in attempts on the staff cars parked outside the fence line. Even worse, three suspicious packages had been delivered in the past four weeks. Before that, there hadn’t been three suspicious packages delivered in a year’s time.
“Someone out there is probing us,” the Gunny said. “I don’t like it when somebody tries to stick his finger up my asshole without any KY.”
“Agreed.” I took another swallow of coffee and winced. “So, why not take your opinions to the RSO and work with
him to harden the target?”
“I’ve already hardened the target as much as I can. But we don’t have an RSO.”
“How come?”
“Embassy politics, Dick, embassy fuckin’ politics.” He swiveled off the desk and began to pace. “We had a good RSO here until three and a half weeks ago. Guy named Olshaker.”
I remembered the name. “Tall drink of water. Prematurely gray. A real pussy-hound. I met him in Rome a few years back when I escorted Chairman Crocker to a NATO conference.”
“That’s him—same guy. Same M.O. with the women, too. We got him the tour after Rome.”
“So?”
“Olshaker was too aggressive for the ambassador. In case you didn’t already know, our ambassador here is a professional diplomat. Which means he doesn’t like aggressive RSOs like Olshaker. Kept telling him he was offending the Argentines because he was being ‘provocative,’ as he kept calling it. You know the routine. ‘They are our hosts and we cannot offend them by telling them how to do their jobs.’ Or, ‘We cannot offend our hosts by trying to keep tabs on foreign nationals who happen to live here, or by requesting that our Argentine hosts do it for us.’ Well, Olshaker didn’t give a shit. He knew what his job was, and his job was to protect this place—even protect assholes like the friggin’ ambassador. And so he just kept on keepin’ on.”
“What happened?”
“Ambassador had him shit-canned. Sent him home early. No replacement on the horizon, either.”
That was too bad. When we’d operated together in Rome, I’d liked Olshaker’s moves. He understood the security beez-i-ness. I suffered through another swallow of the Gunny’s coffee. “So, who’s taken over the security duty until Olshaker’s replaced?”
“That’s the real bad news. The ambassador decided to turn all matters of embassy security policy over to the Christians In Action station chief.”
Now I was shocked. “Isn’t that impossible?”
Gunny Jarriel’s body language told me it wasn’t impossible at all.
I’d heard of clusterfucks but this was unprecedented. “WTF, Gunny? We both know embassy security isn’t anywhere in the Agency’s portfolio. And the ambassador—”
The Gunny cut me off. “That may all be true enough in most embassies, Dick. But we have sort of a special case here.” He glanced over at the door to the office to make sure it was closed securely. “Lemme give you the no-shitter. What we’ve got here is a power-hungry chief of station who has, from the day he arrived, described himself as a world-renowned expert in counterterrorism, manipulating an ambassador whose brain-activity level is about equal to a block of wood. I’m telling you, Dick, our ambassador’s complete understanding of what the Central Intelligence Agency can and cannot do is so off base, it has got to come entirely from reading Tom Clancy novels.”
There is a Naval Special Warfare technical term for situations like this one. It is, “Holy shit.”
Gunny Jarriel paused. “And that’s the good news.”
If that was the good news I could hardly wait for the other zapata36 to drop. “Okay, so now give me the rest of it.”
Gunny Jarriel’s face took on an I-just-sucked-a-lemon expression. “Mel Potts is the station chief here, Dick. Melvin fucking Potts.”
Oh shit, oh fuck, oh Doom on Dickie.
Let me explain. Melvin Potts was a lieutenant (j.g.), when he went through BUD/S. I never knew how he made it. He was one of those short, plumpish, four-eyed officer types who never appeared to be comfortable doing anything physical. But somehow Lieutenant (j.g.) Melvin finished, and he was ultimately assigned to a platoon at SEAL Team Two. That’s when I first met him. I was commuting to Little Creek in those days, selecting the crème de la crème of Naval SpecWar roguery for the original seventy-two billets at SEAL Team Six.
Mel elbowed his way into the office I was working out of and offered me his services as a self-proclaimed expert in counterterrorist tactics and theory. Offered doesn’t quite do his performance justice. He told me he was a world-class expert in CT, and that without his help, SEAL Team Six would never get off the ground. It didn’t take more than five minutes for me to understand he had no idea what he was talking about. I told the lieutenant I’d give him a call if I ever needed his unique capabilities, eased his fat ass out the door, and made sure that the entire command knew it.
Which infuriated Mel so much that he tried to go behind my back and get appointed to a slot without my having chopped37 his name. When I learned what he’d done, I took the sumbitch out behind the obstacle course, where I gave him a Roguish attitude adjustment during which I broke his nose. I lost track of Mel for a while, although I heard he’d somehow lateraled to the CIA, where he disappeared into the Wilderness of Mirrors, mercifully never to be heard of again.
That “never to be heard of again” stuff isn’t quite true. For years now the SpecWar community has heard horror stories about the former Lieutenant Putz that proved once and for all that the Peter Principle was alive, well, and flourishing at the Central Intelligence Agency. In the 1990s, working the Somalia desk, he botched the tactical intel about the location of a notorious Somali warlord in Mogadishu, resulting in the deaths of eighteen American Army Rangers and Delta Force shooters.
There’s more: during the 1998 Kosovo bombing campaign, Mel Potts was the man ultimately responsible for intelligence regarding Belgrade’s targeting assessments. That’s right: he was the guy who misplaced the Chinese Embassy, which we then bombed by mistake. But did Mel get fired for screwing up? The answer is that he did not: the Teflon Putz managed to slip away unscratched while another less fortunate officer was fired and six others disciplined for his screwup. In fact, every time he fucked up, he’d been promoted. Three years in Buenos Aires was his reward for Belgrade. And if that’s not enough to make you puke, listen to this: currently Mel was an SIS (Senior Intelligence Service) officer with the equivalent rank of a two-star general, which, incredible as it may seem, made him the number-two-ranking diplomat at AMEMBASSY Buenos Aires. Doesn’t that give you a shitload of confidence about the alleged “leaders” running our intelligence-gathering apparatus?
Gunny Jarriel’s sour expression told me the whole story. “Dick, I can’t even get cleared into his office. He treats my men like dirt. From the way he looks at us, he probably thinks we should be swabbing out the embassy’s heads. There’s no way I can take you up there.”
“Hey, if it has to be done, it has to be done.” I drained the Gunny’s coffee. “You and I can backchannel on this one. I’ll keep you sit-repped; you do the same for me.”
Gunny Jarriel snapped to attention. “Aye-aye, sir.” And he wasn’t spelling it with a c and a u, either.
I cracked a smile. “Hell, Gunny, there’s one good thing about all this crap.”
“What’s that, Dick?”
I tapped the empty mug. “That shitty coffee of yours put me in the perfect fucking frame of mind to see the former Lieutenant Putz.”
11
THE FORMER LIEUTENANT PUTZ KEPT ME WAITING FOR an hour and fifteen minutes, no doubt just to demonstrate how important he was. He finally buzzed his executive secretary, who buzzed her assistant—I heard the whole process—who came out into the corridor where I’d been provided with a hard steel chair, and beckoned me forward, allowing me to finally enter sanctified ground.
I had to admit that his office was, well, palatial. It was as big as most ambassadors’ offices. On one wall, Mel displayed several dozen awards and citations. The credenza, an antique job, held framed photographs, some of them inscribed, of Mel with three American presidents, the president of France, the German chancellor, the king of Jordan, and four directors of central intelligence.
Mel was nowhere near as palatial as his office. He’d put on a fair amount of weight over the years. The red blotches on his face were evidence of a bad skin problem. His hair, thick when I’d known him, was now styled in one of the most incredible combovers I’d ever seen. Under the right atmospheric cond
itions, it probably caught the wind, standing straight up like the fucking flying jib on a thirty-meter boat. His nose, which I’d broken so many years ago, hadn’t ever healed properly, giving him the look of a fat, bald, four-eyed English bulldog. He wore an ill-fitting suit of diplomatic blue pinstripes, a white shirt, and a red, white, and blue tie, held in place by a gold SEAL Budweiser tie tack. He stood safely behind his desk and waited until I approached him, then reached his hand tentatively across the tooled leather surface. “Long time no see, Dick.”
There was no reason at all to be nice. I kept my hands where they were. I looked him up and down in the contemptuous manner the old Team chiefs had taught me. “Hey, Putz-man, still working out every day, I see.”
My greeting was followed by a fifteen-second interval of what the radio talk-show hosts describe as “dead air.” Then the Putz withdrew his hand. The expression on his chubby face grew cold. “You called and asked to see me,” he said. His eyes narrowed. “And by the way, how’d you get that pass? I usually approve those personally.”
That sounded like Mel’s idea of a coherent embassy security policy, i.e., personally approving the visitors’ passes. But I’d already committed myself and so there was no reason to beat around the bush. “Look, Mel, I understand that you’re the guy in charge of making the embassy’s security decisions these days,” I said.
Mel’s chest puffed up like a little bird’s. “I am.”
“Well, I have good reason to think your embassy is going to be attacked in the near future by a splinter group from the IRA hoping to shatter what’s left of the Northern Irish peace agreement we helped work out. They will probably use some kind of explosive device—maybe an RPG or an antitank missile.”
Mel remained standing. “That’s preposterous,” he said flatly.
Detachment Bravo Page 15
