Which raised all sorts of questions in my soggy Slovak brain. The little arms dealer I’d shanghaied off the Kuz Emeq, Heinz Hochheizer, had bought his ADM from a Georgian Mafiyosi. Segue to the present: I discover a cache containing ADMs. I’m spotted by Franz Ulrich, who tells his boss Lothar Beck, about me—and lo and behold, all of a sudden I’m set upon by the local cops.
When I prove to be kosher (and, incidentally, my identity is confirmed, not to mention the fact that I’m a prowling-and-growling SEAL), a bunch of Ivans mysteriously appears at precisely the same spot I’d been visiting. The Ivans break into the POMCUS cache and attempt to make off with the ADMs.
It’s like, duh. I mean, how obvious can it get?
The problem is, there was nothing to tie these dead Ivans to Franz Ulrich or Lothar Beck. The evidence was purely circumstantial. I had no notes in their pockets written on BeckIndustrie notepaper. There were no maps of Düsseldorf with a circle around the headquarters of BeckIndustrie in the glove compartment of either Mercedes. No receipts for gasoline from Düsseldorf-area gas stations, either.
Now, I can tell you that I found this lack of evidence hard to take. I mean, I’ve been doing this kind of work for years, and I can tell you, so far as I am concerned, there is always evidence at the scene of the crime. You just have to know what to look for—and be patient.
And since there was no place to go until John Suter and his team showed up, we started at ground zero once again, and went back over everything one more time. We checked the linings of their suit coats. We turned the corpses’ pockets inside out. We checked for false shoe soles and hollow heels. We ripped out the carpets in the cars, checked the seat-back linings, examined the trunk space in minute detail. And we came up empty one more time.
Until Baby Huey, God bless him, blundered into something.
Since he was the junior-most kid, I’d assigned him the choice task of stripping the corpses and going over them, top to bottom. Yes, that included the always-fun-to-do body cavity search. Nothing like a little blood and gore, not to mention shit and piss, to get a SEAL pup accustomed to life in the real world.
Baby Huey’d tossed his cookies twice in the first half hour. But then he’d either run out of things to puke, or he got used to the smell, and the feel. An aside here. I don’t have to tell you about human excrement. But human blood, in the quantities we’re talking about here, is not a pleasant substance to be around, either. It has this oily, metallic, sweetish odor that makes most folks gag. It certainly worked that way on BH. But I had to hand it to the kid—he kept at it, pulling the Ivans’ clothes off, handing ’em off to Nod to search, and then examining their bodies with the thoroughness of a good pathologist.
He’d just rolled one of the drivers over for the third time. The Russkie was a fat little guy, completely bald and hairless. It was like trying to work on a butchered hog—even more so because Nod had cut the asshole’s throat, and he was a fucking slippery, bloody mess, and you have to remember that BH was working without the niceties here, e.g., no rubber gloves, sphincter forceps, or other operating room goodies.
Anyhow, BH’d worked his way north from the Ivan’s toes. He was wiping the blood off the guy’s arms, looking for tattoos, or any other identifying marks, when he called me over, his voice an octave higher in excitement.
“Skipper, look! There’s writing on his fuckin’ hand,” he shouted.
I quieted the kid down, then checked. Indeed, there was writing on the Russkie’s fuckin’ palm. It had been partially obliterated by mud, blood, and combat, but I could make out a series of numbers. They’d been written in marking pen.
Oh, it’s a trick I’ve used before. Write a memo on your hand. If you’re about to be captured, you wipe it off and no one’s the wiser.
But we’d waxed this Ivan before he’d had the chance to destroy any evidence. I wrote the number down. I certainly had no idea whose number it was—but the area code was 02-11.
You probably know as well as I do that 02-11 is the area code for Düsseldorf. And as for the number—well, I wasn’t about to go bush league and call it. But I did want to check it out.
I even had a way to do just that. But not now. Because right now, I saw headlights approaching down the long, straight single-lane blacktop from the north. A fucking convoy from the look of things. Either we were about to be in even deeper shit than we already were, or the cavalry had arrived, or both.
You had to hand it to John Suter. He showed up with five real extralarge German Army trucks. Perfect camouflage, given the venue—and the mission.
“Der Adler ist gelandet,” he said as he jumped out of the convoy’s lead vehicle. He was wearing a green Nomex flight suit without any markings, and matching Nomex gloves, so he wouldn’t leave any fingerprints. At a distance—or a speed of forty kilometers an hour—it could be mistaken for German Army issue. Two dozen men dressed similarly, all armed with locked and loaded CAR-15s, descended from the truck beds.
I jogged over and took his gloved hand in my gloved hand. “Good to see you, John. Thanks for coming.”
“I wish I could say the same about you.”
“What’s the prob?”
“Problem?” he said. “You mean the rocket of a message I got not six hours ago? The one I won’t go into right now, but the gist is that you are shit-hot?” He cracked his knuckles. “Whatever gave you the idea I had a problem?”
I checked my watch because it was obviously Doom-on-Dickie time. “How bad is it?”
“Bad enough. Some admiral wants your ass in London. Right Now. Forthwith. Pronto. Chop-chop. In manacles if necessary.”
Eamon the Demon. “And what did you answer?”
He gave me an even look. “I E-mailed the sonofabitch I had no idea where the blankety-blank you were, but that if I ever found out, I’d let ’em know right away.”
“I owe you one.”
He surveyed the devastation I’d just wrought with a bemused smile. “Y’know, you have a hell of a way of showing your gratitude,” he said. He looked me over once more, then wrinkled his nose critically. “And did you know you have cow shit in your beard?”
“What’s your point?”
He shook his head. “I guess I didn’t have one.” He paused. “Okay, how do you want to proceed?”
I flicked my French braid in the direction of the farmhouse. “I guess we have to pack it all up and get it the fuck outta here before it gets almost light and one of farmer Schmidt’s roosters wakes up the whole fuckin’ neighborhood.”
“Sounds about right to me.” He called one of his people over and gave a series of commands. Eight men split off to set up a defensive perimeter. Another two ran a bypass to the electric fence, snipped it in two places, then dropped a rubber mat over the wires. The rest of Suter’s shooters set off toward the pump house. John looked over at me. “Well?”
I grabbed an armful of body bags and gave the “up and at ’em” sign to my men. “Hey, guys—let’s get to it.” And, get to it was right. The sooner we had this site loaded out, packed in, and cleaned up, the sooner I could begin working on developing the information I needed to deal with my growing list of Roguish problems—to wit: stolen ADMs, Russian bandity, and a nasty double portion of soured Krauts, e.g., Franz Ulrich and Lothar Beck.
9
WE HAD THE SITE CLEARED BY 0350, AND JOHN SUTER and his convoy were on their way back to Rhine Main by 0355, the ADMs safely stowed in a triple-locked safe, and the Russkies’ two Mercedes added to John’s convoy. He said he’d lose the Russkie corpses somewhere between here and Patch Barracks, after he’d pulled fingerprints, and he’d dump the cars, too—after he’d checked the registrations and VIN numbers for me. No way he could show up with either in Stuttgart: too many questions from the C2s, and too few answers from Colonel Suter and his shooters.
Well, all the above was his problem now. And since John seemed to be a resourceful asshole, I knew he’d come up with a fitting solution.
After he pulled out, my
guys and I stayed around long enough to do a quick site policing. We couldn’t hide all the signs of what had gone on, but we did enough to make things hard for anyone but the most determined professionals.
Before he left, John reminded me it had been General Crocker’s wish that I accompany any goods I’d found back to Rhine Main. And he also reminded me that Eamon the Demon had demanded my immediate presence in London, at CINCUSNAVEUR.
I gave him a double-negatory response. You already know what I think of Eamon: he’s a fucking C2CO. So, you know there was no way I was going to give him a window on what I was doing and let him begin meddling in my affairs, or worse.
No—I had to get to Düsseldorf. I had things to do, not to mention beer to drink and people to kill. So, just as the dark void of night metamorphosed into that wonderful, pastoral, predawn black-purple you can see only if you’re nowhere near a city and all its ambient sodium-slash-halogen-slash-fluorescent light, it was back on the road for me.
And just as Baby Huey turned the ignition key and our Mercedes diesel ge-chugged into life, I heard that pussy-crazed neighborhood rooster suck-my-doodle-dooing for all he was worth, and saw a single light switch on in the farmhouse across the pasture and down the road so quickly in response it was fucking Pavlovian. Sometimes, dear friends, Mister Murphy stays away long enough for you and yours—or me and mine—to get the job done.
By 0930 we were showered and cleaned up (God but it was good to get the cow shit out of my beard). By 1000 we’d had breakfast, checked out of our pension, and were back on the road again. We took some evasive maneuvers, just because I had that nagging sensation once again that somewhere, somehow, we were being spied upon. And then, finding nothing amiss, our little convoy headed north.
Not to belabor the point, but yes, I realize that the Chairman had told me to keep things stealth—and I hadn’t. And yes, he’d been adamant that he didn’t want my big Slovak snout poking around Düsseldorf—and here I was heading Düsseldorfward. And yes, I knew that he’d forbidden me to go UNODIR—and that’s what I was doing.
But I also knew that was then, and this was now. And since Eamon the Demon had decided to stick his pug Irish nose into my business, I’d been given no choice. Besides, the only way I was going to get to the bottom of this thorny problem of stolen ADMs was to confront it head-on: i.e., up in Düsseldorf.
Now, you should understand that Düsseldorf’s nickname is “The longest bar in the world.” That’s because the city is known worldwide for its dozens of Altbier breweries and their delicious output. (It is also famous for its unique, spicy saft, or mustard, but thank God it’s not known as the longest hot dog in the world.) Drink and food, however, weren’t why we were headed there. We were going to the village on the Düssel because that’s where the Ivans had bought all those expensive clothes at a certain department store in the Schadow Arcade. We were going because there was a certain telephone number from the Mafiyosi’s palm I wanted to check out. We were going there because Düsseldorf was where the headquarters of BeckIndustrie was located. And we were going there because there was a disco called die Silbermieze where der winzig42 former Stasi agent, Heinz Hochheizer, had told me I’d find a coke freak named Franz, who claimed he could sell pocket nukes. But before I did any of that, I had a telephone call to make, and somebody to see.
I had BH pull over at the Weilerswist interchange rest stop, halfway between Bonn and Köln, so I could make the call from an anonymous pay phone. The guys topped off the vehicles, then went to drain lizards and scarf up sausage and cheese sandwiches (are they ever not hungry?). While they did, I slipped away, found a pay phone, played with myself until I came up with a palmful of pocket change, and extracted a shard of cocktail napkin from my wallet. I memorized the number scrawled thereon, dropped the requisite coins into the slot, and waited as the phone bring-bringged.
It did so eins, zwei, drei, vier times. And then a basso profundo Teutonic voice growled, “Hallo—Ja?”
“Achtung! Du ScheiBkerl! Yo—Fuck you, cockbreath! Bist du der hotsy-totsy ersatz Nazi motherfucking cock-sucking pus-nuts Kraut mit whom Ich bin spreching?”
A volcanic explosion of laughter erupted in my ear. “Screw you and all that horse piss you call beer in that godforsaken homeland of yours, you big asshole of an Amerikaner.” I heard him clap a hand over the receiver and bark something in machine gun German. Then: “Long time no hear from you, Rotten Richard. What the hell’s the matter? Is it that you’re so famous now you don’t bother staying in touch with your old friends anymore, eh?”
He was right, of course, about my not calling. We haven’t spoken in years, and it was my fault. But I’ve known Frederic Kohler since I was a tadpole ensign at SEAL Team Two, and he was a junior Leutnant in the Bundeswehr, who’d signed on for a two-year exchange stint with the Kampfschwimmers, the Kraut Navy’s combat-swimmer unit. We rose through the ranks at approximately the same rate, which was fast, I might add. And since Fred always had a keen interest in killing his enemies before they killed him, promoting unit integrity in an age of “moi, myself, and I come first” officers, consuming beer, downing schnapps, and chasing pussy (and not always in that order, either), we cross-trained the men in our units to make WAR and eat snakes, even though he was Army and I was Navy, and despite what the powers-that-be might have liked.
Once—I was a mere lieutenant commander in those days—we even managed to ship thirty of his para-troop shooters from their base of ops in central Germany to my base of ops on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands for a month of joint exercises. We probably expended more ammo and C-4 in those four weeks than the Army does in a year. We blew up enough coral reef to give the local tree-huggers terminal strokes. We practiced covert attacks on the sub base. And we also spear fished grouper and snared langouste and grilled them all on the beach, accompanied by copious amounts of Red Stripe beer, and shots of the local white lightning, a 150-proof raw-as-80-grit-sandpaper rum known as screech.
By the end of the month, we’d learned how to work as a joint unit, something that would come in handy if ever we had to go up against the Soviet bear together. Of course, we also managed to carve out a lot of downtime for the usual unlimited rounds of rough-and-tumble male bonding and marathon sessions of pussy chasing in the local clubs and discos.
And just to make sure things were kept interesting, there were fights with the can’t cunts in the bureaucracy. Indeed, when somebody at the Pentagon discovered what I’d done (I’d engineered things so that the U.S. Navy paid the freight for Fred and his men), some pencil-dicked bean counter in Washington tried to get me court-martialed. When the Ministry of Defense in Bonn found out that Fred shifted thirty shooters to der tropics without asking “Bitter” they tried the same thing with him. But being slippery sons-ofbitches, we slithered away and emerged unscathed. Yeah, he was a maverick. Just like me.
But Fred, unlike moi, had managed to live and to thrive within the system. After his stint with the Kampfschwimmers he’d gone back to his real home: the Bundeswehr’s paratroop command, where as a colonel, he’d led a brigade. Currently, Frederic Kohler was a one-star general, in charge of what was billed as Germany’s newest counterterrorism unit, the Kommando Spezialkräfte, or KSK. I’d first heard about KSK shortly after it had been commissioned last year. It was lean: only 120 shooters. And it was mean: KSK’s mission was proactive, not reactive. They trained incessantly. They were hunter-killers who were tasked with neutralizing the opposition, not taking prisoners.
According to the supergrade Christian In Action who filled me in on some of KSK’s secrets (I’ll pseudonym him Jim Wink, so make sure they used an asterisk next to that name in the Index, because whatever his real name is, it ain’t Jim Wink), Fred’s unit had been patterned after 14 Intelligence Company, the top secret British unit devoted to counterterrorist activities in Ireland. How so, I asked. Well, Wink said, first of all, KSK was made up of both covert operators and SAS-type commandos, just like 14 Intel Co. Second, they had been given carte bl
anche to use all the German government’s facilities “in support.”
I hate apparatchik-speak. “Put that in English, will you, Jimbo?”
“They can skim almost anything they want from any of the ministries. Intel, comms, you name it. And they’ve been allowed to use buildings in Berlin and Bonn to hone their mission profiles.” Wink paused long enough to take a long pull on a bottle of Corona. “You know what that tells me? It tells me they’ve been breaking into government offices to take what they need. I mean, that’s what I’d do.”
He was right, of course. He’s an operator, and he knows about these kinds of things because he’s done ’em all himself. I’d done the same thing when I ran Red Cell, too. I took a shitload of files from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service one night when I’d been tasked to test the Washington Navy Yard’s security. I’d taken a lot more goodies from other installations—everything from weapons and ordnance to equipment, intelligence files, and other operational materials. Don’t think of it as theft. Think of it as creative augmentation of your operational capabilities.
When I’d first learned about KSK’s creation, I’d heard rumors that the unit had a counterterrorism mission and was based near Bonn, in some sort of big, isolated complex. I was wrong on the first count and right on the second, according to Wink.
Wink, who I’ve dealt with ever since he ran a black program out of the White House a few years back, had just returned from a six-week TDY with Fred and his people. He’d shared the latest on COMINT and ELINT tactics with them. For their part, KSK’s CO, Fred, had given Wink a peek at the unit’s operational capabilities. And during the evenings, Fred had also provided a few pointers about beer consumption (not that Wink needed any).
Option Delta Page 15
