Red Cell

by Richard Marcinko

  Doc, God bless him, said he’d try to lay his hands on two or three of the rifles, and a couple of hundred mags of dart ammo. He told me he was heading to the Defendory arms trade show in Athens in less than a week and said he’d see what he could find there.

  Since he was going shopping, I asked him to buy three or four HK-93 assault rifles, and fifty thousand rounds of .223 ammo for them.

  “How come, Skipper?”

  “Because, as you know, the HK’s probably the most ubiquitous combat rifle after the M16 and the AK, and since we can’t carry U.S. weapons and I don’t want to carry AKs, I’d like to have a few around just in case I need ’em on short notice.”

  “Aye, aye, Cap. That means you’ll be wanting Euroammo, right?”

  “Portuguese or Yugo surplus, Doc.”

  “That’s a roger.”

  Doc said I’d find the goods on my doorstep in about ten days. I gave him a doorstep in California because that’s where I’d be, told him to drop the invoices into the system in a month or so, then rang off.

  It gratified me to have Doc on the case. But to be honest, another hurdle was even more important than operational intelligence or special weapons.

  Red Cell had to learn to work together as a team. Remember all that preaching about unit integrity I did to Joe and the dweebs? Well, this was no war game, and these were no dweebs. But even seasoned professionals like Nasty, Duck Foot, Half Pint, and Pick would take time to gel into the kind of seamless unit I was used to commanding.

  That was one reason that, despite all the bitching, I was actually glad to be doing the security exercise at Seal Beach. It would give us a chance to play touchie-feelie with each other under pressure. We’d be able to eat and drink and brawl together during a concentrated work period, a combination that had always worked in the past to build unit integrity quickly.

  Indeed, we’d need all the unit integrity we could muster because none of us had done something like this “for real” in years. As I explained above, an underwater lock-out/lockin is a complicated, dangerous operation that takes splitsecond timing and substantial concentration. To do it in hostile waters, where you are also concerned about protecting your butt because there are people out there who want to kill you, becomes even more hairy.

  And I’d been ordered to do everything I’ve just talked about with a JAG legal officer and an NIS rep—neither of whom would be clued in to our real mission—hanging off our shoulders while we performed our scheduled security check at Seal Beach. Talk about potential for disaster—this was absolutely casebook stuff.

  I knew I’d need some kind of diversion. So I called Mike Regan. Mike’s the SEAL with whom I did that walk in the woods from Chompa Mountain to Tri Ton—when I first had the pleasure of meeting Manny Tanto. He’s been retired for about twenty years now, but we stay in touch. He’s a successful businessman these days, but in his heart he misses pushing the edge of the envelope. Sure, he’s a sky diver and a spelunker and a bungee jumper, and he flies ultralights. But as he puts it, “Hell, Rick, it’s not the same as when they’re shooting at you.” He’s right, too.

  In fact, Mike even went over to what used to be Yugoslavia back in the early nineties. He spent a month there, serving as a visiting and unofficial military adviser to the Croatian forces, so he could pop a few rounds at the Serbian Army through an Armalon BGR .300 Winchester magnum sniper’s rifle he’d picked up in London. He claims he made a head shot at nine hundred yards.

  Did I say he’s making money as if he were printing it himself? Well, he is. Mike owns a boatyard, a hundred-slip marina, a three-hundred-unit waterfront apartment house, and two restaurants in Newport Beach, a chic waterfront community on the coast about a third of the way from L.A. to San Diego. He resides aboard the Malevolent Frog, an eighty-five-foot, twin-diesel Matthews, which dates to the mid-sixties, with his second wife, Nancy, a former Pan Am stew who’s seven years younger than the Matthews and a hell of a lot sleeker.

  Even so, the MF is a hell of a boat—it’s all done in teak, with lots of leather and burled French walnut inside. There are four staterooms—two with private baths, as well as crew’s quarters for six. The galley is stateof-the-art. So is the bar—which features Coors Light and Michelob Dry on tap. He’s even got a sauna, a steam room, and a gym aboard. Of course he has a dive locker, too—as well as an escape hatch below the waterline for clandestine insertions. Once an operator, always an operator. The boat may have been built when Lyndon Johnson was president, but it’s totally nineties electronically—right down to the same kind of radar used by U.S. Customs.

  When I’d commanded the Cell back in 1985, Mike had been kind enough to let us use the MF as our seagoing base of operations when we tested the security at Seal Beach. He’d cruised onshore while we surveilled the installation through long lenses. He let Red Cell divers use his escape hatch for their penetrations. And we used the marina, where many Seal Beach personnel lived, ate, and drank, as our own on-site HQ.

  He picked up on the first ring. “Regan.”

  “Doom on you, bro.”

  There was a slight pause, then a hearty laugh rumbled from 2,800 miles away. “Long time no hear, Dickhead.”

  “I’ve been busy. Cooped up.”

  “So rumor has it. I read your book—nice piece of work, for fiction.”

  “That’s what the Navy spokesman said, too.”

  “It figures. Say, how come you didn’t write about our little walk in the woods? I would have liked my fifteen minutes in the spotlight.”

  “I did—but the fucking editor cut it. He said it contained too much violence.”

  Mike laughed again. “Okay, Rick, so what’s the story? You didn’t call just to tell me to go fuck myself.”

  I gave him a nutshell dump—at least as much as I could tell him on an open line.

  He was silent for a few seconds. Then he whistled long and low. “Tell you what. You bring the boys out here toot sweet and we’ll get you straight. I still have some friends around—unlike one asshole I can think of who managed to burn all his bridges.”

  “What’s life without conflict? Fuck you, Mike. We’ll see you at the bar at Casa Italia—you know, the place in Huntington Beach we used as our HQ?”

  I liked Casa Italia. It was run by an Old World mama-san named Mama Mascalzone. She cooked family-style meals for us that reminded me of the Sicilian food on Old Man Gussi’s table back when I was a bare-balled kid in New Brunswick hustling for quarters after school. She gave us the run of the place and didn’t mind a broken plate (or two or three) if the boys got a little frisky after an overload of tequila shooters.

  Mike interrupted my reverie. “Sure. How will I know when you’ve arrived?”

  “Same as always—just listen for the sound of breaking glass.”

  I made a couple of command decisions. Pinky would like neither of them, but then again, who cares. First, I fired off a UNODIR to the CO of the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station, with info copies to the normal batch of admin pukes who wouldn’t pay attention to the message for at least six or seven business days. That, of course, was allowing for their coffee breaks, stock market reports, lunches, and happy hours, all the patterns of bureaucratic, desk-bound Navy life that had not changed in the years I’d been gone. Anyway, the message let him know the Red Cell would be paying an unannounced visit shortly, and that instead of letting him decide who did what to whom, we’d play the same nasty-boy scenarios we did years ago, when we wiped the floor with the Seal Beach security force.

  Since it was sunny California and near the weekend, I didn’t expect a timely reply, although I could almost guarantee that Seal Beach’s C2CO—that’s a Can’t Cunt CO—would list a litany of why-it-was-impossibles to do anything just now, starting with the fact that I was gonna screw up his days off and ending with a nasal whine about not playing fair. Well, too fucking bad.

  Besides, our transportation was ready and waiting for us. Pick and Half Pint had staked out a Naval Reserve P-3 Orion that
had been sitting on the apron at Andrews Air Farce Base for the past three days. That’s the normal parking place for Naval Reserve air crews from across the U.S. who fly your tax dollars into Washington so they can lobby their sea daddies for their next job or slip up to their detailers and lick bootstraps, so the assignment officers will extend their tours in Hawaii or Bermuda.

  The latest phenomenon, what with yuppie-scum, two-income families being fashionable and all that, is the long line of married-couple officers showing up at BUPERS—Navyspeak for the BUreau of PERSonnel—to explain that little Johnny and baby Mary were doing so well in school that a move at this time would be traumatic to the domestic tranquility of these two kiddies. Translation: if you move us around like Gypsies, you’re going to turn the kids into antisocial psychopaths ten years down the line, and we’ll sue.

  Another ploy is to say that since it’s Mommy’s turn for first choice of assignment locations, and she’s happy doing whatever the fuck she’s doing shuffling papers at NAVSEA, there’s no reason to uproot Lt. Comdr. Rufus Throckmorton Ballscratch and his wife, Lt. Comdr. Henrietta Bigsnatch Ballscratch from their Springfield, Virginia, Eden and transplant the happy family to NAVAIR Station Keflavik, where they’d enjoy a ten-month winter and all the Icelandic reindeer they could eat for three happy, isolated, alcohol-filled years.

  Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I always figured that if the Navy wanted you to have a wife and family, they would have issued you one. Anyway, the process is called orders. It’s not a fucking invitation. End of sermon.

  Okay, back to the P-3. We needed a plane because, courtesy of Pinky’s bean-counting machinations, we were not going to be supported by Navy logistics. He insisted that detailing a C-9 transport plane for us was too expensive and memoed me to that effect, cc’ing the head of NAVAIR. So I took matters into my own hands. Besides, I decided that borrowing the empty P-3, which was gathering dust on the apron, was a true cost-cutting measure in these days of RIFs and downsizings.

  To my way of thinking, by using the vacant plane, we could travel to Seal Beach without wasting another dime of the national deficit on nine full-fare, coach-class tickets, and half a ton of excess baggage. Then an air crew from L.A. could fly it back to D.C., thus getting their flight time for the month.

  So, while the rest of the Navy was at happy hour, or busy bagging it for the weekend (it was, after all, Thursday), we talked our way onto the Andrews tarmac, fueled up using a bogus account, and headed for the West Coast, toward more fun and games. We were over Missouri when we discovered we’d somehow left our Legal Eagle and NIS officers back at their desks, and our radio wasn’t working.

  Quel dommage—what a pity!

  Chapter 14

  WE LANDED AT LOS ALAMITOS NAVAL AIR STATION AS THE SUN slipped beyond the horizon, putting everybody in the dark—both literally and figuratively. Nasty, Duck Foot, and Cherry slipped into a cab and headed for Long Beach Airport to rent three cars with their false IDs and driver’s licenses. By 2000, we were unlocked, unloaded, and on our way to Huntington Beach to check into a motel and—more importantly—to hit the bar at Casa Italia.

  I’d already decided to wait until morning before calling the NCC (that’s the Navy Command Center to you civilians out there) back at the Pentagon to inform them where I was and what I was doing. Between the weekend, the UNODIR, and Murphy’s Law, I figured I’d be able to string my little game out for somewhere between three to five days. That, incidentally, is about the same length of time it took a War Department telex to make its way from a yeoman’s outbox to the telegraph operator back in December 1941. The telex in question was to alert the fleet at Pearl Harbor that a Japanese attack was imminent. That should make you all feel real confident about the Navy’s ability to react to a crisis, right?

  Mike Regan was sitting at the bar when we walked in at about 2100. He grinned and started to get up as I came through the door. But, happy as I was to see him, I waved him off. There was something more important to do first than say hello to an ex-SEAL—there was a woman to kiss. So, I strode behind the bar, swept Mama Mascalzone off her feet, and planted a big wet one on her lips.

  Mama cuffed my ears. Whaaap! “So, Meesta Dick Marcinko—you back in town, huh?” Whaaap! She hit me again and laughed with joy. “Finally you come to pay your respects to Mama, huh?” Whaaap-whaaap! “Nice to see you after so long.”

  Tears in my eyes—she packs a real wallop for someone sixty-five years old who must weigh all of eighty-five pounds soaking wet—I set all four feet ten of her down and formally kissed the back of her hand. “Mille grazie, Mama. I always like to come back here.” I rubbed my face. “It feels like home when you hit me like that.”

  Whaaap! “I know.” She reached up and chinned herself on my cheeks. “You still a good-looking boy, Richard.” She grinned slyly. “It was probably all that jail time. You meet any Sicilians in there?”

  “You bet—a capo named Paulie. He looked like your son Anthony.”

  “Like Anthony? Then he must have had an organo a foot long.” Mama laughed. I loved the way she laughed. None of your tee-hee’s or polite ha-ha’s for Mama. Inside her tiny frame were Ethel Merman’s lungs. Mama guffawed—she’d throw her head back, open her mouth, and roar unselfconsciously. She wiped her eyes, adjusted her black dress, and looked over the kids from Red Cell.

  “New batch of sailors, huh?”

  “You know me—I wear ’em out. Like women.”

  “Well, if you still see Meesta Poosta Roost, you tell him I still got his nugget ring and he’s gonna have to come and get it back personal.” Her eyes flashed. “I tell you, Meesta Richard, if you was a couple of years younger … I give you the workout of your life, believe me.”

  The thought brought tears to my eyes again.

  Then she nodded toward Mike. “Friend of yours?”

  “Nah—asshole buddy.”

  “Good—because I’ve been insulting him like I insult you.”

  “And he’s still here?” I swung around, hugged Mike, and introduced him to the troops. He looked great—tanned, fit, and expensively dressed, with thick black hair that was turning gray at the temples, giving him a distinguished appearance that I knew was just that—appearance.

  It didn’t take long to explain the situation to him. I outlined what we were doing in California, told him about my recommissioning, and explained about Pinky.

  He listened, then he spoke. What he had to say made sense, too. Then, after an hour and a half of conversation, roughly ten pounds of Mama’s lasagna, two loaves of garlic bread, and half a case of Coors, Cherry and Nasty took off in two of the cars for a preliminary sneak-and-peek, Duck Foot took the rest of the boys back to the motel, and Mike and I got off for a little quiet talk where we couldn’t be overheard. I had favors to ask.

  I returned to the motel just after midnight, unpacked, and waited for my two scouts to return and tell me about the walls of Jericho. It wasn’t very complicated. The Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station is bordered by four major thoroughfares. Interstate 405—the San Diego Freeway—runs along the base’s northern border. To its west, Seal Beach Boulevard, six lanes of constantly moving traffic, runs in a north-south direction. Parallel to it is Bolsa Chica Street, the eastern edge of the station. Highway 1—the Pacific Coast Highway—is the base’s south border. It doesn’t take any effort to cruise around the perimeter and observe activity because there are no fences, vegetation, or other obstacles to get in the way. Moreover, most of the base is contained behind the most elementary eight-foot chain-link fences—easy to climb over. In other words, this was going to be the archetypal piece of cake.

  By the time they got back, at 0245, their brief told me I was right. In fact, Nasty, who had been here before, concluded that access would be easier than ever, since the USMC security detachment had been disbanded. Why? Because Jarheads cost too much. Now, only sailors and rent-a-cops under the management of NIS were in charge of security.

  *

  I decided that we s
hould start probing immediately, before someone back in Washington realized I was gone—and even more important, to make sure I wasn’t being set up by Pinky. So at 0400—0700 Eastern time—I called Washington with my code word, a prearranged signal that told OP-06 I was now in play mode. I made the message brief and failed to give the sleepy four-striper duty captain a number where to reach me.

  Then it was off to work. Cherry Enders donned his tights and climbed aboard a European cross-country bike he’d discovered unlocked somewhere nearby (I didn’t want to know) and headed for the Pacific Coast Highway. At the Weapons Station’s southernmost edge, there’s an overpass where the Coastal Highway crosses an access road that is the only land-side access to the water ops section of Seal Beach. From the overpass, one can monitor barge and tugboat activity, as well as watch all the ammo trucks as they deliver ordnance to the barges.

  On a previous visit we’d stopped all pursuit by the base security force by blowing up a stolen police car on the single-lane access road while we made our escape by water. I wanted Cherry to see whether history could repeat itself.

  I preferred to hit the base from the south, east, or west. The northern border was the best-patrolled. Not by the Navy, of course, but by the old-timers who lived across Westminster Avenue at Leisure World. The retirees there were basically a little bored with life, and due to that and medication, they kept nonstandard hours of existence, making them unpredictable. They also wanted a little excitement in their lives. I discovered that they’d call the police or the base security at a moment’s notice—I even got burnt once by them back in 1985. So I’ve learned to give them a wide berth.

  It took Cherry half an hour to make his circuit. He reported that, due to the weekend, there was a lot of leisure-boat activity up the channel. Did I say that there is a civilian channel that skirts the barge anchorage? Well, there is—a channel that runs from the Pacific to the high-rent marina that sits to the southeast of the Station. That was where Mike would tie up the MF in about an hour.