Red Cell

by Richard Marcinko

  “Hey, Skipper, fuck you!” That froggy growl came from Half Pint Harris, a Coors Light in his size-six fist, down at the end. Half Pint, a pug-nosed, curly red-haired squidge of a SEAL, real name Mike, stands five foot five. He’d weigh about one hundred and fifty pounds—if you soaked him in mud for a couple of days and it all stuck to him. But the surly little squirt can bench-press three hundred pounds, and he’s a fast little motherfucker with his fists. He’s probably part turtle because he can snap out at you in any number of ways. He loves to drink and brawl (his most recent claim to fame in the teams is that about a year ago he bit off an Airedale lieutenant’s ear in a bar fight at the Ready Room, a saloon just outside the back gate of Oceana Naval Air Station). The son of a bitch also swims like a fish—he moves like he’s turbine driven—and he is the man if you’re doing sub ops. There’s nothing he doesn’t know about getting in and out of underwater situations.

  For the last thirteen years, Half Pint’s played Mutt to Piccolo Mead’s Jeff. The Pick, as he’s known in the teams, is the tall, thin drink of water who was assigned as Half Pint’s swim buddy at BUD/S by a master chief with no sense of humor. Well, doom on the chief, because they’ve been inseparable ever since. They graduated from BUD/S tied in ranking. Both made CPO the same day. They went to Six together, where Half Pint was the dive ops boss, and Pick was put in charge of EOD—Explosive Ordnance Disposal. Question: how good an explosives man is he? Answer: after five thousand demolition jobs he can still count to twenty on his fingers and toes. Which is good, because Pick’s hobby—flying—demands both hands and feet. He’s instrument-qualified on multiengine aircraft, which means he can fly everything from a P-3 Orion sub-hunter to a C-130 Hercules, should the need arise.

  I liked that. When I’d commanded Six, I’d encouraged my enlisted men to take flying lessons. I wanted the unit to be self-contained, so that if the need arose, we could handle our own tactical demands without calling on the Air Farce. After I left, flying was put back in the hands of officers. The Navy considers it improper for enlisted men to fly because they are not gentlemen, and flying is a gentlemen’s art.

  Anyway, Mutt and Jeff had played at Dam Neck almost six years. They got there just after I left and managed to survive the assholes who thought that discipline was the way to tame SEAL Six, not to mention the hell-raising duo. Finally, after Six was taken over last year by an ass-kissing intel weenie four-striper named Don Pitch, to whom all forms of bodaciousness are a sin, things came to a head. The ear-biting incident was too much for him, and Half Pint was asked to leave or spend some time in the brig. When he went, so did the Pick. And, much to my current delight, they had both volunteered for Red Cell purgatory.

  The other three I didn’t know—so they were immediately yclept Wynken, Blynken, and Nod. Wynken was Dale, a chunky twenty-six-year-old with a round baby face, hair the color of butterscotch toffee, and size fifteen shoes, who wasted no time telling me he loved shooting and looting. Okay, I said, I’d give him an opportunity to prove it. Blynken was Carl—an olive-skinned, mustachioed Black Irishman whose dark, liquid eyes probably made him successful with women. I didn’t mind my men being slaves to their dicks and told him so, which brought a big, wide smile to his face. And then there was Nod—Eddie DiCarlo was one of those strong silent types who are more common to Special Forces than SEALs. A brooder, from the look of him, he’s the kind that usually makes a good point man. I asked why he’d joined the Cell. He said he’d kicked the crap out of the master chief at Team Five when the guy told him he couldn’t go to Iraq because he looked Jewish.

  “Hell, Skipper, I am Jewish—half-Jew anyway. So I kicked his ass.” He drained his beer and tilted his jaw toward me like a sinister bulldog. “Any problem with that, sir?”

  “You look kosher enough to me, asshole. You’ll do.”

  In fact, they all appeared okay, except they were sort of clean-cut for my taste. But that was a problem with all young SEALs these days. Besides, they managed to suck down the Coors like real men, and they didn’t mind when I used the F-word. They were, I guessed, suitable cannon fodder.

  A word about that. You’re probably groaning now and saying why the hell is he talking about cannon fodder again. God, what an insensitive, politically incorrect schmuck this Marcinko chap is.

  Well, gentle reader, cannon fodder is a reality of warfare. There are times when, as a commander, you make a decision that will probably send some of your men to their deaths. Period. Full stop.

  When I created SEAL Team Six, I chose several of the younger shooters knowing that if I had to make that call, they’d be the first ones to go into the jaws of death. I did it without remorse or guilt.

  I did not feel remiss about this because, as a SEAL, I am the Navy’s cannon fodder. SEALs are expendable. In fact, all Spec War units are expendable. That’s the way it’s always been. Indeed, the UDT teams at Omaha Beach in June 1944 lost more than 50 percent of their men. The planners on Ike’s staff had known how bad it would be, and still they assigned those naked warriors their mission. The Frogs at Omaha Beach were cannon fodder. So were the brave Canadian commandos who lost 80 percent of their men at Dieppe.

  But the generals who created those missions weren’t villains. Nor were they callous. Sometimes, war calls for men to sacrifice themselves for a greater good. And when the order comes through, you don’t have to like it—you just have to do it. No matter what the consequences may be.

  So, the fact that I can and will send men to their deaths does not mean I do not love them, or that their deaths will not affect me. During my thirty-three-year Navy career I lost only one man in combat—Clarence Risher, who was killed at Chau Doc during the Tet Offensive of 1968. His death still tears me apart. I believe that all the men who work for me also know that I will never ask them to do anything I will not do—that I am as much cannon fodder as they are. That we are all in this together.

  So please, no more touchie-feelie bullshit or pantywaist complaints about “using” my men as cannon fodder. It is part of the job. You volunteer to become a SEAL or a Green Beret or a Ranger or a Force Recon Marine, knowing that you are expendable. I did. I still do.

  Thus endeth the lesson.

  It didn’t take long for me to give them all the customary no-shitter about our situation. I explained the relationship between Grant Griffith, CNO, Pinky, and me. The way I saw it, Grant had some kind of hold over Pinky. Maybe it was a J. Edgar Hoover—that’s my way of saying blackmail of one kind or another—maybe it was something else, like the promise of a quarter mil a year when Pinky put his papers in. But whatever the case, the bottom line was the same—I was the designated fall guy.

  I was interested to see that the men were also quick to pick up that something about Griffith didn’t quite fit. It takes a dirtbag to know a dirtbag, I guess. But the boys had lots of questions about my week in Japan, and where Griffith and his security company fit into the scheme of things. To an operator, very little is coincidence. The fact that Griffith was working with the Navy on the North Korean nuclear problem made all their antennae as erect as dicks.

  I told them about the war game, and how Griffith was a Spec War wannabe, complete with a museum of war toys and a mouthful of Asian martial-philosophy buzzwords. And I gave them a readout on Buckshot’s operation, and especially on Manny Tanto.

  I added that the way I saw it, everything was tied together—I just didn’t know how or where.

  For example, it was conceivable, I said, that Buckshot had been sneak-and-peeking in Tokyo when I was there. Had I been under surveillance? Who knew. Was I part of a bigger scheme? It was altogether possible. Had Griffith engineered the bodyguarding job with Joe Andrews to make sure I ended up at The Hustings in Upperville for the war game—and Manny Tanto’s live-grenade booby trap? It wasn’t inconceivable.

  Who the hell knew. It was all a clusterfuck, and the only thing to do was call for another round.

  The waitress, a buxom Scottish lass whose name was Tammi, leaned up agai
nst my back. She had a firm, firm chest. “What’s the order, Dick?”

  I loved it when she talked dirty to me. “Hay for my horses, wine for my men, and mud for my turtle, sweetcakes.”

  When I told the Cell we’d be operating under UNODIR, my words brought a smile to everybody’s face. And there were actually grins when I dropped the news about the security exercise at the Navy Yard. Duck Foot said it was a chance to screw with the system. I liked the fact that the nasty boy in each of my shooters was never far from the surface.

  A Navy Yard hit had advantages, too: NIS headquarters was ripe for the plucking—and they probably had something in the files on Grant Griffith. CNO’s files could be burgled—he and Griffith were tight. Bottom line: I’d come away knowing more than I did now.

  Half Pint was ready to go—now! “The only thing to do is clusterfuck ‘em back, Skipper. And we do it before they realize what’s happening. That way, while everybody’s pissing and moaning, we can get some real work done.”

  I liked that sort of thinking. When SEAL Team Six had been tasked for the second hostage-rescue mission in Iran, one of the planners, an Air Force two-star with all the imagination of a pet rock asked what I’d do if we got caught behind the lines. I explained gently that he might want to call NRO.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “So you can read the satellite photos and watch the trail of fires I leave behind on our way to the Turkish border, sir,” I said, spelling it with a c and a u.

  The way I look at it, Pinky had given me the perfect excuse to run through the system like merde through an oie. The only question was how and when we’d begin. So, I was delighted to discover that my men were thinking the same way I was.

  Duck Foot drained his beer. “When’s the exercise scheduled—next Friday, right?”

  I nodded.

  “So let’s hit ‘em on Tuesday. Quick and dirty.”

  Pick snapped his fingers. “Yeah—when security is normal. Which is to say fucked-up.”

  Nasty grinned. “Take apart CNO’s office.” The chief of naval operations had a huge office suite at the Navy Yard.

  Duck Foot nodded. “Visit NIS headquarters. And maybe borrow some equipment from Building Twenty-two.”

  That was a good idea. Building 22 was a huge warehouse in which NIS’s Technical Security Division built and stored its eavesdropping and surveillance equipment—the monitors for Grant Griffith’s sting operation at Narita, for example, were the products of Building 22.

  Cherry chimed in, “Not to mention kick officer ass and take officer names.” Cherry Enders hated officers. He’d made the embarrassing of officers his full-time avocation. The Navy Yard gave him scores—nay, hundreds—of possibilities.

  It all made perfect sense to me. Like Red Cell’s two-tier mission, I had a number of reasons for wanting to stage an assault on the Navy Yard, and I wasn’t about to explain all of them. On the overt level, I wanted to get some sense of how my men performed under stress. On the covert level, I wanted to target areas in which I was likely to come up with information about Grant Griffith and Pinky Prescott.

  I sketched out an agenda to the men. The schedule was tight—but doable. We had the weekend to sneak and peek—do the recon necessary to see what objectives were the most vulnerable and start figuring out how to get inside them. We’d formulate our mission plan on Monday, do the dirty deed Tuesday, and have the results on the CNO’s desk before close of business Wednesday.

  That way, Pinky would learn what we’d done from the CNO—and there’d be nothing he could do about it. Marcinko’s first rule of nature is that it is easier to drop turds from above than have them bubble up from below. Pinky could screw with me—but he was powerless when it came to the CNO.

  Something else as well had to be done over the weekend. I needed a secure location for us to discuss the covert side of Red Cell’s assignment. Shooter’s was not the place for it. I finished the Bombay, slapped the glass back on the bar, and wriggled my mustache playfully. “Okay, cockbreaths, here’s the plan.”

  The Washington Navy Yard is a sixty-six-acre site that has been in operation since the early nineteenth century. Most of the buildings on the “old” side of the Yard—that is, the westernmost portion—are humongous, six-story, red-brick warehouses that were built around the time of the Civil War. The Yard is home to NIS, as well as the Navy Museum. Behind its fifteen-foot walls, the senior admirals have their quarters, up on Admirals’ Row. CNO lives there. So does Pinky Prescott and twenty-five other of the Navy’s top brass. On spring evenings, you can see the wives walking their dogs around Admiral Leutze Park, or wandering down Dahlgren Avenue to the Anacostia River, where an old destroyer escort, the USS Barry, is moored.

  Of course, the Yard sits between Sixth and Tenth streets, on the southern side of M Street, Southeast, plunk in the middle of what’s become one of Washington’s worst and toughest neighborhoods, so all the dog-walking and jogging takes place on the grounds. One admiral’s wife strayed off the Yard a few years back. She was found a couple of days later cut up into serving-size pieces and stowed in a Dumpster.

  So, to keep the flags from getting nervous (or mugged), the base is patrolled by its own police force, as well as government rent-a-cops, on a twenty-four-hour basis. It is, however, wide open. As I’d discovered, it didn’t take much to get onto the Yard clandestinely, and it would take even less to get off. Indeed, if any of the brothers from Southeast actually put their minds to it, they could pick Admirals’ Row clean before anyone ever noticed. Because of that, it occurred to me that maybe we should boost a couple of the flag homes just to show what could be done by enterprising minds and willing bodies.

  But the admirals’ quarters would have been too easy. Instead, we targeted the headquarters of the Naval Investigative Service, which was in the four-story Forge Building, the CNO’s office, the security-detail HQ, and the Yard’s power plant. Those were all legitimate “terrorist” targets so far as I was concerned. And they’d also cause the most embarrassment.

  I did my first recon on Saturday at noon. I tucked my hair up into a green corduroy baseball cap, climbed into a pair of black trousers, a Polo shirt, and a brown leather jacket, and huff-puffed right through the gate onto the Yard. I waved at the guard, who had my picture up on the gatehouse wall—a publicity picture for Rogue Warrior that featured me with shoulder-length hair and a Charles Manson beard. Doom on you, asshole. I had a camera in my pocket and malice in my heart. “Have a nice day, sailor.”

  I snapped pictures of NIS headquarters, accenting the routes we’d take to break inside. I asked a nice admiral’s wife who was walking her dog to take my picture outside NIS, and she obliged. That would make a nice addition to my scrapbook. I peered through the doors at Building 22 and made notes about the security situation. It was nonexistent. I went over to the power plant and checked the locks on the doors. They could easily be picked.

  I ate a leisurely lunch in the cafeteria, then went to the base gym, where I worked out for an hour, pumping iron, taking advantage of the sauna and steam room, and stealing three ID cards from a trio of officers who were taking showers and had conveniently left their lockers open.

  Feeling both fulfilled and well-conditioned, I sauntered past Building 200, where the CNO had his office. I walked inside and took the stairs to the second floor, wandered down the hall, and checked the doors to his suite.

  A Marine was posted outside. He was carrying a holstered sidearm—a .45-caliber pistol—which I noticed lacked a magazine. That made sense. If he’d carried a loaded gun, he might be capable of shooting intruders. Like me, for example. But not in the new kinder, gentler armed forces. No—he’d die holding his dick in his hand.

  He challenged me. “Sir?”

  I flashed a quick smile and one of the stolen ID cards—my thumb conveniently across the picture—which identified me as a captain named Cook. I patted my pocket, laughed nervously, and shrugged helplessly. “I left my keys at home, Lance Corporal. But I’ve got
a report to write—and if I don’t finish it, CNO’s gonna have my butt for lunch on Monday.”

  “No problem, sir.” He opened the door to the suite. I went inside, slipped on a pair of surgical gloves, and rifled the desks and file cabinets until I found a set of keys. I pocketed them. Then I checked to make sure everything was replaced the way I found it, borrowed an empty file folder, which I stuffed with Xerox paper, and made my exit, stage right, smiling.

  “Thanks, Marine.”

  He saluted. “Pleasure, sir. Have a good weekend.”

  “I’m planning on it.” Outside, I deposited the folder in a convenient trash can. Then I jogged back through the main gate, waving at the guard and calling out, “Have a nice day,” as I left.

  On Sunday, I took the guys to the Yard for our preliminary sortie. The Pick and Half Pint went through the General Services Administration forty-five-acre supply facility on the Navy Yard’s westernmost border. The GSA main gate is always unmanned. They wandered over to the chain-link fence that separates the GSA and Navy Yards, cut the chain on the personnel gate, and replaced it with the lock and chain they carried with them. Cherry, whose new ID card identified him as a lieutenant commander, sauntered into the officers’ club and ransacked the coat-check area. He came away with three wallets, two briefcases containing classified materials, and a new bridge coat.

  Half Pint, Pick, and I took Wynken, Blynken, and Nod for a ride in a rented car. We drove the perimeter of the Yard, noting the gates and the fences. Then I took a drive on Interstate 395, which passed not fifteen yards from the CNO’s second-floor office suite. When I pointed out the target and explained how they’d hit it, the men couldn’t keep from laughing.

  I took the guys to lunch at the Boiling Air Force Base officers’ club, where I maintain a membership. For $7.95 it’s an all-you-can-eat affair, with free wine and beer offered. They lost money on us, I guar-on-tee.