Option Delta

by Richard Marcinko

  And so, Gabliani had said, since he’d cut himself such a good deal, he’d pass some of the savings on to Heinz—more profit for them both. A price had been agreed on, half the money had been transferred, and three weeks later, a messenger with the ADM had appeared one night at Heinz’s apartment in Frankfurt.

  And indeed, money had been no object. Not for Khaled, anyway: there were two and a half million dollars, all in used hundreds—that’s twenty-five thousand $100 bills—in the suitcase. It weighed more than the fucking SADM.

  Now, my long conversation with Heinz had left me perplexed, aggravated, and apprehensive. First of all, there was the Chairman. One missing ADM had already given Chairman Crocker a fierce case of WHUTA (which, of course, stands for Wild Hair Up The Ass). Once I told him that I suspected more were gone—something I hadn’t been able to do thus far because I lacked the secure communications to do so—he’d probably develop the worst fucking case of hemorrhoids ever known to man.

  And then there was me. I don’t like the prospect of going up against nuclear weapons in the hands of nogoodniks, scumbags, and other assorted assholes. And these sorts of tactical weapons can be employed quickly, effectively, and with deadly consequences. Just imagine, friends, what would have happened if the bomb that went off in the garage of New York’s World Trade Center had been a SADM. Or if Timothy McVeigh had been able to find the financial resources to obtain a Russkie suitcase nuke to use on the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

  The nasty possibilities are endless. And so, while I’d get my Roguish butt to Rhine Main and deal with Lieutenant Colonel Smith, just as the Chairman ordered, what I really planned to do was to slip away from Smith and get my behind up to Düsseldorf, find Heinz’s ex-agent, Peter Grüner (aka Rottweiler). Maybe we’d go together to that disco called the Silver Pussycat. But I wasn’t interested is shaking my booty—or anybody else’s. No, I planned to spend some time sneaking and peeking to see who the fuck this Franz was. It was he, after all, who claimed he could sell the kinds of lethal nuclear devices that would put my country in jeopardy.

  I don’t like that. Yes, I am a Rogue-type Warrior (in fact, I am THE fucking trademarked Rogue Warrior®). But I am also an unabashed patriot. Full stop. I love this country, no matter how much I bitch about the military system in which I exist, the C2C0 assholes with whom I am too often forced to work, and the current lame-dick administration, which is ruining our armed forces.

  Now, when the nation’s in jeopardy, I am not a happy Rogue. In fact, when the nation’s in jeopardy, I become a very extremely dangerous Rogue. And therefore, when I discover who the guilty party is—and believe me, friends, I will find out—I will put my Roguish hands around his, her, or its cocksucking throat (I am an equal-opportunity executioner after all) and s-q-u-e-e-z-e until there is no more life within.

  3

  JOHN SUTER AND I GOSSIPED ALL THE WAY TO SIGONELLA. His life had been miserable lately: a series of probes—skinheads, or neo-Nazis, or both—had compromised security at half a dozen Army installations between Stuttgart and Frankfurt, and he’d been tasked with finding out who/what/where/how/why.

  Over at Patch Barracks, for example, the goddamn sensor system kept crapping out, and the fucking general in charge—the same asshole who’d almost denied John his ammo—was in denial. He insisted that the fucking foxes and rabbits and other varmints had gone crazy of late, when John Suter and the rest of the shooters knew damn well they were being probed by varmints of the human kind. Worse, some local crackers20 had hacked into the computer system used by Army Intelligence at Nuremberg and made off with several hundred crown jewels, and the idiots down there didn’t have the sense to repair their fucking firewalls, so the system was just as vulnerable as it ever was.

  And now there was this fucking ADM thing. “I tell ya, Dick,” he said, “I don’t mind a full plate, but this one’s overfucking flowing—and it all smells suspiciously like shit on a shingle to me.”

  I had to laugh—because misery really does like company. But I did more than laugh. John and I struck a deal—we’d cooperate. Because what we’d discussed was troubling.

  See, Germany is going through a transition period right now. The absorption of what used to be East Germany has caused the Krauts some hardship—high unemployment, for example. But unification also has its pluses. Germany wields more power in Europe than it has in more than half a century. Berlin is a key player in European economics and politics. Meanwhile, America, which used to be the big kid on the block during the Cold War, has got other strategic fish to fry these days. We’re more concerned with the Far East, for example, than we are in Europe’s internal affairs. Which means, Germany and America are drifting apart—not necessarily a Good Thing, in my estimation. Why is that, you ask?

  Because it allows ample opportunity for a few no-goodniks—Germany’s growing ultraright factions for example—to start making trouble. And from what John Suter said, that was exactly the case in his AO.

  So John and I would stay in touch. And if the circumstances warranted, we’d share information.

  I’m a big believer in that sort of thing. There are folks who close-hold info and intel because they treat it as their property. So far as I’m concerned, any intelligence, or tactical info that can save a shooter’s life, should be shared. John Suter had been handed a tough assignment. If I could be of help to him, I would be. And I’d expect the same in return.

  We set down on the tarmac at Sigonella fifty-three minutes after we’d lifted off the quay. And John Suter had been right: about half an hour later, we cadged eight spots on a grungy C-130 making its thrice-weekly garbage-and-beer run to Rhine Main. John waved as his Pave Low lifted off. He shared more than gossip, and the promise of sharing info. Inside one of the Conex boxes he’d given us sat his two-pound block of C-4 plastic explosive, six pencil detonators, two yards of det cord, and three electronic timers. Someday, I hoped to be able to pay the debt back.

  I spent much of the time on the just-over-three-and-a-half-hour flight up to Frankfurt stretched out on a greasy canvas tarp, my head resting on the big bag of cash, thinking about the ADM we’d taken off little Heinz. I’d never worked with portable nukes. Three of the grizzled chiefs from UDT 21 and UDT 22—my old platoon chief, Everett Emerson Barrett was one of ’em; the tough old goats known as Grose and Mugs Sullivan were the others—had trained with early versions of SADMs (Small ADMs) and MADMs (Medium Atomic Demolition Munitions) in the 1950s and 1960s. They jumped out of planes and locked out of subs with them, no mean feat, because the earliest of the MADM devices weighed in at about 135 pounds.

  They were also as cumbersome as hell. Grose said it was like jumping out of a plane tied to a fucking washing machine on full spin cycle. He said that it was almost impossible to throw a hump and get stable, which meant you had a real good chance of your chute collapsing on you if you weren’t real careful. And cutting away a collapsed chute and riding in on the reserve was almost impossible, given the weight and bulk of the MADM.

  According to Mugs Sullivan, more than a dozen Frogs burned in and croaked during MADM jumps. But worst of all, the earliest ADMs—both the M and S versions—were capacitor-driven. And let me tell you, capacitors can be devilishly unstable, especially if they come in contact with moisture or cold.

  But—at least Ev, Grose, and Mugs hinted so—the tactical possibilities were endless. I asked Mugs Sullivan once why the fuck he’d volunteer to jump out of a plane with something that could vaporize him in a millisecond.

  “You worthless pencil-dicked shit-for-brains pussy ass wet-behind-the-scrote dumbshit,” Grose growled affectionately by way of response. “Let’s just for argument say that we’re working with a nuclear device that has a power of point one zero megaton. Think about it. That’s the friggin’ equivalent of two hundred thousand pounds of TNT. Two hundred fuckin’ tons of explosive, in a package that I can carry on my friggin’ back if I have to. Okay, let’s say we have a dam we want to blow up. Take your choice,
asshole—two hundred tons of TNT, or a hundred pounds of ADM. You’d have to put two fucking thousand five-hundred-pound bombs on the fucking target at once to do the same job I can do with less than a platoon of Frogs. How many sorties do you think it would take to drop two thousand five-hundred-pound bombs?”

  When he put it in terms like that, it made perfect sense—even to me. Still does, in fact. Then, in the early 1970s, so the story goes, half a dozen SEALs from SEAL Team Two had been S3d, which as you can probably guess stands for selected, shanghaied, and sheep-dipped. They went to work for some supersecret alphabet soup entity created, it was whispered, by direct order of the president, our late and much-lamented Richard Milhous Nixon, his own roguish self.

  One day, they’d been drinking beer on Team Two’s quarterdeck with their shipmates. The next, their names had been expunged from the Team roster, their families had been moved who-knew-where, and we never saw any of ’em again at Little Creek—or anywhere else, for that matter. The RUMINT was that they’d volunteered to work on some program that involved covert stay-behind tactics in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. The whispered scuttlebutt was that they’d volunteered to hit Warsaw, Prague, Sofia, Moscow, Leningrad, and other assorted Soviet and Warsaw Pact targets with man-portable atomic weapons, knowing that the projected mission mortality rate was 100 percent.

  But in the 1970s, dying for your country was something men volunteered for. Back then, patriotism wasn’t a dirty word, or an idle concept. Back then, the military wasn’t touchy or feely, or built around the idiotic concept of giving recruits better self-esteem.

  Back then, recruits were expected to ACHIEVE. Full stop. End of story. And if they didn’t have the drive to do it on their own, there were a lot of size eleven, double-E boondockers that drill sergeants, gunnies, and chiefs would employ in that old-fashioned, highly effective motivational technique known as “a swift boot in the ass.”

  But I’m getting away from the point here. The point is that back then, the folks running the military realized that the only reason to have an army is to kill our enemies, not to make people feel good about themselves. And since our biggest enemy was the Soviet Union, it made perfect sense to me that these six SEALs had volunteered to kill as many Sovs as possible, even if it meant their own deaths.

  During the Cold War, the Major Land-War Scenario, as it was known back then, ran like this: Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops, buttressed by air support and medium-range missiles, would sweep from the Baltics, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, directly through Germany. Like the ripples in a pond, the Soviets would move across Western Europe to the Atlantic in the west, and the Mediterranean in the south.

  One of the major elements of NATO’s defensive strategy was that in the case of that massive Soviet invasion, Special Operations forces—Green Berets, SEALs, and others—would infiltrate the Russkie lines to attack the Sovs from behind, destroying their supply lines, their command-and-control centers, and their communications. To aid this plan, the United States clandestinely cached tons and tons of military equipment all across Europe. Most of these stay-behind stockpiles, which included weapons and ammunition, vehicles, food, spare parts, ordnance, civilian clothes, and huge numbers of bogus IDs, were hidden in Germany and Austria. But there were also caches in France, Norway, Italy, Greece, and Turkey. These clandestine nest eggs were known as POMCUS—for Positioned Outside the Military Authority of the United States—caches. Coordination for POMCUS was run from Patch Barracks, the Army’s red brick SpecWar headquarters, located just outside Stuttgart, Germany.

  Obviously, the precise sites of the POMCUS repositories was a close-hold, need-to-know kind of thing. I am privy to a dozen or so locations—most of ’em in close proximity to a maritime environment, in Norway, Italy, France, and Greece. But there are hundreds of POMCUS sites. Did any of them contain ADMs? It is probable that they did. But I cannot say for sure, because I just don’t know. None of the caches I’d ever been to held any. That was on the one hand. On the other hand, I knew from the Chairman’s rocket to John Suter that the SADM der winzig21 Heinz sold to Khaled had been delivered to Patch Barracks in the early 1980s. Then at some point it disappeared from everyone’s radar screens. Ultimately, it had been snatched. Not a good situation.

  We arrived at Rhine Main just after 1200 hours. I left the guys and all our gear in the cafeteria, and headed toward the low red brick building on the far side of the field, which housed the Intelligence staff. Inside, I checked the building directory for a lieutenant colonel named Smith. No one by that name was listed. I found the admin office, stuck my head inside, and discovered a perky, young E-5 who peered at me over the screen of her desktop computer. The sign atop her desk told me I was talking to First Sergeant M. Walsh.

  “Hi, First Sergeant Walsh, I’m Dick Marcinko—looking for a Lieutenant Colonel Smith. He doesn’t seem to be listed on the directory.”

  “You are looking for Lieutenant Colonel Smith,” she repeated. She gave me a TVE—a Thorough Visual Exam—and I could see that I came up heavily in the debit column. “And your name, again, is . . .”

  “Marcinko—Richard. Captain. Navy.”

  I received another TVE. She didn’t say a word, but her body language was FLFC—Fucking Loud and Fucking Clear. It said, Oh, sure you are a U.S. Navy captain—and I am the fucking queen of Bavaria.

  I unfolded the Chairman’s faxed message, smoothed it out on the corner of her desk, and proffered it in her direction.

  She accepted the sheet, slid it under her button nose, and examined it, her lips moving as she read. She checked a large Post-it note attached to her computer screen, and as I leaned forward to try to read it, she removed the sheet of yellow paper, folded it once, and put it in her skirt pocket. To further keep me from prying, she hit a series of keys, which blanked her CRT (if you don’t know, go to the Glossary and look it up). Then she rose, walked across the office to a four-drawer document safe that sat under a bad photograph of a one-star Air Farce general, and standing with her back to me to block the view, she spun the dial, opened the combination lock, flipped the red-letters-on-white-background magnetic sign that read CLOSED over, so its white letters on red background read OPEN, opened the top file drawer, and retrieved a sealed red-tabbed folder. She removed a letter opener from atop the document safe and slit the seal, opened the file, peered inside, then looked closely at me, as if she was comparing my face with a photograph.

  Obviously satisfied, she pulled a thick brown manila envelope from the file, slit it open, replaced the letter opener on the safe, then handed me my very own wallet, complete with my Don’t Leave Home Without It.22 That was a neat fucking trick, and I told her so. She smiled wryly in return and continued extracting goodies from the big envelope. First came a proper military ID card with my hair-rich face and my real name on it, noting that I was a NILO23 attached to the Rhine Main Intel unit. There were similar cards for each of my men, and a thick wad of German marks wrapped in a rubber band. She laid a sheet of paper attesting to the inventory atop her desk.

  “Sign in the highlighted area alongside the little red tab, please, Captain Marcinko.”

  I retrieved a big Spyderco folder from my waistband and flicked it open. “Do you have a pen—or should I just stick myself and sign in blood?”

  Sergeant Walsh actually thought about it for ten seconds or so, then looked at me and with a perfectly straight face said, “A pen will do, I guess.” She gave me one from her desk drawer.

  She retrieved the signed form from me and held an upraised palm out until I laid the pen atop it. The pen was Put In Its Proper Place. Then the signed form was replaced in the red-tabbed folder, the folder was snapped shut and slipped back into the file drawer. First Sergeant Walsh closed the drawer with a satisfying thwup, twirled the combination lock, and reversed the magnetic sign all in one fluid motion. It was all so well choreographed that it was more satisfying than watching the Rockettes do their Christmas routine—and let me tell you, First Sergeant M. W
alsh had better legs than most Rockettes.

  She caught me staring, betrayed the merest hint of a smile in my direction, and said: “Lieutenant Colonel Smith has left the base, Captain Marcinko. He requests that you and your men meet him in Mainz.”

  “Mainz.”

  She nodded. “Do you know where Mainz is, Captain?”

  Of course I know—and I told her so in a playfully Roguish way that brought a flush of embarrassed color to her cheeks. For those of you not familiar with der layout of Deutschland, Mainz is about twenty-five miles west of Rhine Main Air Base, at the confluence of the Rhine and Main Rivers. It’s a small city located in the middle of one of the Rhine Valley’s best wine-making districts. But make no mistake: it may be small when compared to, say, Frankfurt, or Düsseldorf, or Berlin. But it’s good-sized—not some one-street Rhine River, Main River, or Mosel Valley town, and the fact that Lieutenant Colonel Smith, whoever-the-fuck-he-was, said he’d meet us in Mainz didn’t help much at all in re a treff.24 It’s like saying, “I’ll meet you in Santa Fe.”

  I scratched at my beard. “He didn’t happen to say just where he’d like to link up, did he?”

  She reached into her pocket, retrieved the Post-it note and scanned it again. “Go to Mainz and check in to the Mainz Hilton—the one on the riverbank,” Sergeant Walsh said. “There are rooms reserved for you and your men.” She waved the yellow rectangle in my direction. “According to this, Lieutenant Colonel Smith will find you.”

  Now that we had IDs, we hit the Rhine Main commissary and picked up a few basics—like jeans, T-shirts, sweats and jackets, boondockers, socks, toothbrushes, razors. Then, freshly outfitted, we searched for transportation. Much to Duck Foot’s annoyance, we did not boost any of the Mercedes sedans in the BOQ parking lot. Nor did we borrow—read steal—an Official U.S. Air Farce vehicle. Instead, we caught one of the base minibuses that run the circuit, dropping pilots off in the commuter suburbs that surround Rhine Main. And thus we meandered through Florsheim (now I know where all those frigging shoes come from), Weilbach, Biebach, Erbenheim, and Wiesbaden, then crossed the Rhine at Schierstein and turned east, paralleling the river, driving through an industrial zone that slowly metamorphosed into the city proper, until the big Hilton loomed in front of the windshield. We unloaded and watched as the little diesel bus chugged off in the direction of Bodenheim, with two very tired pilots still aboard. It took two luggage carts to hold all our equipment. Then I gave the desk clerk my name, and he gave me the key to a suite on the fourth floor.