Finally, General Crocker’s gaze settled on Terry. “You’re the newbie,” he said. “How’s it going, Terry?”
“There’s so much to freakin’ learn, General,” Baby Huey burbled in SEALspeak. “But I’m gonna freakin’ do it. All I freakin’ know is that I wanna be the best freakin’ SEAL who ever freakin’ lived, and I’m gonna keep freakin’ trying until I freakin’ get there.”
“Hoo-ya, BH,” Boomerang said, lifting his glass. “And fuck you very much—that’s the kind of attitude we like in this here unit.”
Me, too. When I recruit, I don’t look for gazelles, the sorts of sailors who do everything effortlessly. I want the grunts. The guy who came in dead last in his BUD/S class but kept on going no matter how bad it got. I look for the little engines that can, the tadpoles who thwam and thwam right over the dam. My goal is to mold Warriors in my own image—with a Warrior’s fucking heart and a Warrior’s fucking soul. I believe that General Crocker thinks the same way I do, which is why he keeps me around—and is why I stay.
A silence came over the table. General Crocker rose, lifted his glass, and toasted fallen comrades. We stood and did the same. Then he continued in the serious vein. He reminisced about his days as a company commander during Vietnam, and how three tours in the field had taught him something he’d never learned at West Point. “I discovered the value of loyalty down the chain of command,” General Crocker said. “Because it was something I never received when I was young. The generals I served under didn’t give a shit about me—all they wanted was numbers; to be able to check things off their lists and report them as ‘done’ to Washington.”
He drained his wine and poured himself another full glass. “My men and I got no backup, no support,” he said bitterly. “I remember one time when I sent an after-action report up the chain of command. One of my recon platoons had spotted two dozen North Vietnamese tanks, and I thought that was pretty damn significant. Well, the day after I sent it up the line, I got a rocket back from division. I was ordered to change my report—delete all references to tanks.” The Chairman set his glass back on the table. “I did a little recon of my own, and discovered the reason behind the order was that the damn one-star J-2 staff intel idiot in charge in Saigon had already guaranteed to General Westmoreland that the NVA had no tanks within fifty miles of my AO, and Westmoreland had already passed that info on to President Johnson as solid. Officially, therefore, no tanks existed, and my report had to reflect the official position.”
The general rapped the table with his knuckles. “But y’know what the problem with that situation was? The problem was that, since there weren’t any tanks, I couldn’t receive antitank weapons.” He grimaced. “The damn bureaucrats. They wouldn’t even let me draw LAWs or bazookas,” he said. “The only thing I could do was scavenge what I could—RPGs off NVA corpses—and try to cumshaw as many LAWs and other weapons as I could lay my hands on.” His face grew grim. “I lost soldiers, Dick—lost good men, because the officers above me were too busy trying to save their own careers to give us grunts in the field any support, even though those sons of bitches demanded my total loyalty to them.”
He looked us over in a paternal way. “You and your men have been loyal to me,” he said. “You’ve come through. Delivered the goods. And so, it’s the least I can do for you.”
Indeed, the Chairman was imbued with the sort of old-fashioned command loyalty we used to have in the Teams. Which is precisely why he’d come over in mufti to waylay us. The Cabinet, he said, was in disarray. The president was up to his ears (well, the precise anatomical point was somewhat lower) with a scandal involving a female political appointee who the tabloid press had labeled “SAP/BJ,” which as you can probably guess stands for Special Assistant to the President for Blow Jobs.
The vice president was busy trying to raise enough money to blow all his potential political adversaries out of the water while fending off a special prosecutor. And so, things were pretty much being run by the White House chief of staff these days. Which meant that nothing was getting done—except for a lot of political infighting among the Cabinet members.
The FBI director, it seemed, wanted my head on a fucking pike. So he’d gone to the attorney general, who’d gone to her old law-school classmate, the chief of staff, to demand it. The national security adviser, who doesn’t particularly like me at all (and that is a goddamn understatement), had jumped into the pot, too. He’d been more than willing to put my head—not to mention the rest of my svelte Slovak body—on the old chopping block. The current chief of naval operations is a fucking bureaucrat who does what he’s told. No support for Dickie there. And his assistant, a three-star named G. Edward Emu, is probably the only man to have made it through BUD/S and wear a trident who faints at the sight of blood.
So, only SECDEF and the Chairman had been around to speak on my behalf. And they realized that the best thing they could do was keep me away from Washington until things blew over.
Well, I’ve always believed in turning adversity to my own favor. If eight bogeys are coming at me, my only question is, which one of ’em do I kill first. And so, I told the Chairman that staying here in Germany fit into my plans just fine. In fact, I said, I wanted to head straight for Düsseldorf. That’s where my little Kraut had started nosing after the ADM for Khaled—and it was where I wanted to start schniffing around, too. There were traitors afoot—somebody was selling ADMs—and I told the Chairman we’d be ready to go and start kicking some ass at zero dark hundred.
General Crocker had other ideas. “Every time you go off and start one of these—what is it you call ’em, snooping-and-pooping exercises?—we seem to have an international incident,” he said. “The Saudis threatened to kick all American military forces out of the Kingdom because of what happened on the Kuz Emeq. You know the Saudis—they don’t mind what we do if we keep everything quiet. But they walk a fragile line in the Arab world—and they can’t allow themselves to be seen as dependent on us, even though they know, and we know, that without American military power backing ’em up, that Kingdom would collapse like a house of cards. But the politics of the situation is touchy. And I have to tell you straight: killing Khaled didn’t do us a lot of good in the political arena.” He laughed bitterly. “Hell, Dick, the State Department doesn’t like you any more than the FBI does right now.”
Well, I don’t give a shit what the frigging State Department does or doesn’t like, which is precisely what I told Chairman Crocker, in what can be called RUT—Roguishly Unvarnished Terms.
My RUT response brought a bemused grin to his face. But he was adamant nevertheless. “I want you invisible, Dick. Totally stealth. And running up to Düsseldorf and scamming to buy pocket nukes doesn’t come under the stealth category.”
Instead, the Chairman said, my men and I were to do a little hunting right here in the Rhine Valley. There was a small logistical problem that needed some work, and we were the perfect ones to help him—and SECDEF—solve it.
Uh-oh. When officers start talking about small logistical problems, I am transported back to my days as an enlisted man. Because back then, when someone who wore gold braid on his sleeve started talking about my helping him with a small logistical problem, it meant I was about to draw a nasty dose of KP, swab out the latrines, or pump the bilges.
Actually, once the Chairman explained things, this particular logistical problem turned out to be slightly more interesting than latrine swabbing. It even related to my current ADM problem.
To put the best spin on things, it seemed that the precise locations of several of the POMCUS caches containing ADMs had been, in the Chairman’s words, unfortunately misplaced. A total of six ADMs were unaccounted for, and he wanted me and my unit to find two of them.
Now I see you out there, the dweeb editor at the front of the pack, all jumping up and down like FMs (look it up in the Glossary) and telling me that what I’ve just written is impossible; that the frigging government just don’t go and misplace half a
dozen tactical suitcase nukes.
Well, friends, here is a lesson from real life. The world we actually live in is a lot more strange and much more bizarre, illogical, absurd, and just plain loony than any fiction—even fiction with my name on it—could ever be.
And here is the unhappy truth of the matter. We already know that, with the exception of SECDEF, the current administration doesn’t give a shit about the military. Well, one of the peripheral developments resulting from this attitude of nonbenign neglect, animosity, and just plain vindictiveness, has been a series of personnel cutbacks at the Department of Defense. As a part of those drawdowns, most of the folks who’d been assigned to keep track of our POMCUS caches had been early-retired and/or RIFed. That move made sense to the bean-counting Schedule C31 deputy assistant secretaries in charge of fucking our men in uniform. After all, why keep a GS-14, step 8, around at eighty grand a year plus benefits, when you can hire a part-timer from a consulting firm to do the same job for fifty grand—and no benefits.
The problem is that by firing your professional staff and replacing them with part-timers, you lose what’s known in the bureaucratic trade as institutional memory. Now, as you know, I’m not big on bureaucrats. But they do serve a purpose—and so long as they don’t get in my way, I tolerate ’em. Chairman Crocker explained that over the past decade the Pentagon had managed to lose track of half a dozen POMCUS locations. The paperwork had disappeared. Maybe it had been lost when hard copy had been input on DOD’s computer network. Maybe they’d sold off the safes containing the relevant files and hadn’t bothered to check beforehand.
Oh, shit. There’s the fucking dweeb editor again, waving his blue pencil in circles, saying things like that don’t happen and even fiction has its limits and I’m stretching the suspension-of-disbelief thing too fucking far. Hey, Ed, first, don’t interrupt me when I’m on a roll. And second, yes they do happen. I’ve actually seen that precise situation with my very own eyes. Back when I was serving my one-year sentence at the Petersburg, Virginia, federal penal colony and mayoral blow-job facility, we’d had a bunch of Executive Grade One file cabinets from the State Department dropped off at the prison’s UNICOR facility for refurbishing. Inside one of ’em, one of our more enterprising cons—read burglar—found a bunch of MEMCONS32 dealing with our START nuclear treaty negotiations with the Soviet Union. All top secret stuff. So the fact we’d misplaced six POMCUS caches was not something I found improbable.
Now, my little task force wasn’t the only one assigned to this ADM retrieval mission. The Chairman said he’d given the bulk of the job to John Suter’s Special Forces security group out of Stuttgart—and when (I found it significant that he didn’t say, “if”) I retrieved my ADMs, I was to get hold of John chop-chop and hand the goods over to him.
That made sense. No reason for me to travel around schlepping any pocket nukes. Besides, I liked John Suter and knew I’d be able to work with him. What the Chairman said next, however, I liked a lot less.
What he told me was that if I came upon anything of political significance during this exercise, I was to go through the normal chain of command, which meant reporting what I’d discovered through CINCUSNAVEUR, the acronymed title for the Commander-IN-Chief, US NAVal forces, EURope.
I objected. I have a hard time dealing with the Navy, and the Chairman knew it. More to the point, I have a hard time dealing with the current CINC in London. His name is—well, since he’s an Irish sonofabitch, let’s just call him Eamon the Demon. He’s one of those apparatchik Annapolis ring-knockers whose BA degree was in engineering and whose MA was in systems management. Assholes like Eamon detest war and abhor warriors. In fact, Eamon has been a staff puke for his entire career, with one or two minor sea-tour exceptions.33
But the general was adamant. “Goddammit, Dick, I have no choice in the matter. I’m not the God damn emperor. I’m a part of a damn chain of command—and so are you, whether you like it or not. I have to keep peace among the services, and let me tell you that the chief of naval operations and his deputy are steamed over the fact that you and your men work for my office.” He paused, finished his wine, and rapped his knuckles on the table. “You don’t have to like it, Dick—you just have to do it. Case closed.”
I wanted to mention a few of the things I know about Eamon the Demon, but I bit my tongue and kept silent. The Chairman has taken a number of shots directed at me—and if he wanted things to move this way, well, then so be it, although I knew his decision was going to complicate my life.
The politics dispensed with, General Crocker continued talking about our new assignment. It boiled down to this: since he didn’t want my big Slovak snout poking where it shouldn’t be right now, and I couldn’t return to CONUS, he’d assigned us a piece of the ADM action. We would search the area that lies between Mainz and Koblenz, bordered by the Rhine River on the east, and the Mosel River valley on the north—an L-shaped area roughly a hundred miles on each side.
Hey, piece of strudel, right?
You bet. So far as I was concerned, this was an urgent “go” for a number of reasons. Most obvious was that the recently demised Heinz had bought the USG ADM he’d tried to sell to Prince Khaled—and it had probably come from one of the missing caches. That meant there were bad guys out there prowling and growling, not to mention pawing through our POMCUS caches. Not good news.
I told the Chairman we’d brought some of our own supplies—weapons, ammo, and other tactical goodies—with us from Italy. But we’d need other equipment.
Done, said the Chairman—give me a list, and you can pick it up at Rhine Main within twenty-four hours. Then there was the matter of funding. That was no problem at all. Remember, I had buried-at-sea Heinz Hochheizer’s suitcase filled with all those hundred-dollar bills. General Crocker’s eyes actually went wide when I told him how much cash I had on hand. The good news was that Heinz’s money would fund our operation—and then some. That left only one piece of equipment: a state-of-the-art radiation detector.
To which General Crocker, who obviously thinks of everything, replied, “I brought you two of them, Dick. They’re stowed in my hotel room, along with a bunch of maps and charts and other papers you’ll be need-ing—so let’s have a nightcap there.”
5
BY 1300 THE NEXT DAY WE’D CAMOUFLAGED OURSELVES in the style befitting clandestine ADM hunters. While Boomerang, Half Pint, and I bought supplies in Mainz, I dispatched Nod and BH to Rhine Main Air Base, where they purchased enough camping equipment to qualify for the Outward Bound discount. Meanwhile, Rodent, Duck Foot, and Gator hit the used car lots on the southern outskirts of the city. Three hours and six greasy hands later, they chugged up the Mainz Hilton’s driveway in a well-used RV, a Mercedes sedan that was older than Baby Huey, and a pair of sleek, well-worn BMW five-hundred-cc bikes.
I gave the RV an approving once-over. It wasn’t going to attract any fucking attention at all. What they’d bought was a beat-up Fiat Gran Turismo, which bunks five—although we’d all somehow manage to find ourselves some space if we had to. It was precisely the same kind of vehicle that tens of thousands of Germans own so that they can go touring with their families and friends, complete with a huge red-and-white sticker on the rear bumper that told the world we loved Oktoberfest in Munich. Like I said, cosmetically, the RV wasn’t much to look at. But under the hood, where it counts, it was perfect. They’d even installed davits, so we could hang the motorcycles off the back of the camper.
The Mercedes was a fifteen-year-old diesel, and it may not have been the fastest car on the autobahn, but it, too, was in terrific mechanical shape. Our radiation detectors could be concealed in the vehicles. Hell, they were almost small enough to be carried in our pockets. I really like miniaturization. It makes my life as a sneak-and-peeker a lot easier—and our presence a lot less obvious.
Now, let me say a few words here about what searching techniques would and would not work in our current situation. We SEALs do most of our search work underwater
. There are three basic techniques for underwater searches. The first is called the running jackstay search. The running jackstay search requires four buoys placed in a rectangle 250 meters long and 50 meters wide, with grid lines attached on the long sides. The divers—up to five of them—then run a 50-meter running jackstay between the grid lines, and then work their way down the grid, searching the bottom below meter by meter. This technique is generally done in clear, shallow water, with currents under one knot. Well, the running jackstay wasn’t going to be worth a running jack shit, because the Rhine current flows at an average of six knots between Mainz and Koblenz.
Then there is what’s known as the checkerboard jack-stay search. Guess what—same problem because of the current. Which brings us to technique number three, the circle line search. Circle line is a keep-it-simple-stupid search. You take a buoy, drop a weighted line from it, then attach a search line to the weighted line. You simply swim in ever-shorter circles, checking the bottom as you go, until you recover what you are looking for. If you come up holding nothing but your dick, the technique is known as a circle jerk search.
All of these techniques are commonly used for recovering lost objects, such as missiles, or other ordnance, that you don’t want falling into your enemy’s hands. Our situation was somewhat different. We had to locate the ADM in a cache that might (or might not!) be underwater. Caching material underwater is an old SEAL procedure. But I wasn’t so sure that the folks who’d built the POMCUS caches knew about it. Indeed, all of the POMCUS caches I’ve ever seen have been dry sites.
And so, I made an executive decision. Just as General Crocker ordered, we’d work the riverbank—but we’d concentrate on the shoreline, not the river itself. Why? Because it made sense. When these devices were hidden they were supposed to be retrieved by blanket-heads, not SEALs. And they were then to be used to decimate the Russkie supply lines.
Option Delta Page 10
