Red Cell

by Richard Marcinko

  Nasty Nick took point as we rolled through the first deckhouse hatchway. Inside, it was clean and white. Good lights. The Japs liked their ships neat. The passageway forked. I took the port side as Grundle moved starboard. There were six compartments, three to port, three to starboard. I tried the first. The knob turned. I eased the hatch open. No lights inside.

  I went through the hatch, my back to the wall, closed it behind me, and flipped on the light.

  The cabin was empty.

  I turned the light out and slipped back outside, locking the door before closing it and moving to the second doorway. I repeated my actions. Clear.

  Now for number three. There was a light behind this door. Slowly, slowly, I tested the handle. It worked. I turned the knob and pushed.

  The hatch was locked from the inside.

  HK ready, I applied a liberal helping of shoulder. The lock snapped and I moved inside.

  A round oriental face looked at me quizzically from the bunk across the cabin. The expression turned to pure horror when he saw who it was and what I had in my paw.

  “I-ie—” He raised his hands in surrender.

  I knew enough Japanese to take yes for an answer. Before he could react, I was on top of him. I flipped him, slapped him with my sap, wrapped his hands, feet, and mouth with surgical tape, and left him trussed to the bunk, facedown and blindfolded, while I searched his cabin. His face was familiar. It took me a while to realize that I’d seen him twice before. Once at Grant Griffith’s war game, the second time on videotape at Seal Beach.

  That meant there were five of them. Okay—next.

  Four and five were empty. Six had a light.

  Another Jap—and he’d left his hatch unlocked, the sorry asshole.

  Deep breath. Focus on the job. Don’t take chances. Now, go—

  Into the cabin. Sally Stallone’s eyes met mine. He had a Playboy in his big hands. There was a Sig Sauer 9mm lying on his chest, and his arm moved toward it.

  I stitched him up the side with the HK, knocking him into the back of his bunk. The loudest sound my weapon made was the soft whoomp of rounds impacting in Sally’s rib cage.

  He may have been down, but the son of a bitch wasn’t out. He roared like a fucking wounded grizzly, rolled off the bunk, gun in hand, and came charging at me. With six feet between us I wasn’t taking chances. I shot him with two more three-round bursts in the chest, and he went to his knees, falling toward me.

  I sidestepped, kicked the gun away, and put another three-round burst in the back of his head for good measure. Now I knew the cockbreath was down for good.

  I changed mags. I was covered with sweat. Had anybody heard the commotion? If they had, Nasty was out there working the opposite passageway.

  I rolled Sally over and went through his pockets. I took the son of a bitch’s straight razor and his wallet. There were no papers in the room.

  Now back into the passageway. Nasty waited aft. I told him with hand signals that I’d killed one and taken one prisoner. He signaled that he’d taken three prisoners.

  Americans?

  No, he signaled, stretching the skin around his eyes. Japs.

  We moved up one deck. There was no one in the laundry or the storeroom area. We secured each one and locked them up for the night. We slipped into the galley. The stove had been turned off—that was a good sign.

  Carefully, we bolted the door behind us and moved along a short passageway toward the mess, where we heard voices speaking Japanese. I looked at Nasty. He looked back at me and gave me an “OK” with thumb and forefinger.

  I was on my way to the bridge when I heard the first shots. Nasty’d stayed below to secure the six card-playing coffee-drinkers. I was halfway up the superstructure when I heard them. Slam-slam, slam-slam. Two double taps. Then a burst of automatic-weapons fire. Now they had to know they’d been attacked. I changed course. To play it safe I went up the outside of the deckhouse, mountain-climbing the white-painted superstructure, bolt by bolt and cleat by cleat. By the time I pulled myself over the top rail, I was huffing and puffing like an old fart.

  I heaved myself into the wheelhouse. Pick stood there, his HK pointed at the body on the deck. A Walther PPK/S lay in the corner where he’d kicked it. “Pilot—a Jap. Sumbitch went for a gun, Skipper—got four rounds off.”

  “I heard. Where’s Pint?”

  “He’s securing the radio shack.”

  “They didn’t get a message off—” That would have made me very nervous.

  “Nah—we prevented that. We got their codes—everything. They didn’t stand a chance. They had fucking NSA ciphers, Skipper.”

  “No shit.”

  Pick nodded. “The real thing.”

  I free-associated. Four words came to mind. Pinky and Prescott, and Grant and Griffith.

  “Shiiiit—” Pick jumped my bones. Just as he hit me, I heard an explosion from my six o’clock and felt the burn of his HK as he loosed a full mag over my shoulder.

  “What the—” I rolled just in time to see Manny Tanto’s big, ugly form disappear past the wheelhouse window. He was carrying a Benelli assault shotgun—nine rounds in the long tubular magazine.

  “Pick.” I rolled him off onto the deck. He’d saved my life, but he’d caught some of the blast. His ear was half-gone and he was bleeding all over me. Quickly, I sat him up, found his medical kit, jabbed him with morphine, wrapped his head, and tapped him on the shoulder. “You’ll be okay, kid—gotta go.” I slapped a fresh mag into Pick’s HK, locked and loaded it for him, and put it in his hands. “Tell Nasty to hold the fort. Anybody comes through the door, kill ’em.”

  Outside. Where the hell had he gone? I checked the wing area, then circled the wheelhouse. Nothing. Then I saw it—blood by a hatchway. One drop. One of Pick’s shots had nicked the son of a bitch.

  I moved inside. There was more blood—the asshole had dropped down a scuttle from the looks of it. Now he was in the bowels of the ship and it would take me forever to find him.

  It was time to link up with Cherry. I moved toward the engine room, sweeping each passageway with my HK as I went. I yelled down as I cleared the hatch and heard Cherry’s voice come back at me: “All clear, Skipper.” Good. That gave us control of the ship for all practical purposes—except there were still a bunch of bad guys prowling and growling.

  I dropped down a metal ladder onto a long catwalk that ran above the main engine room. I whistled, and Cherry looked up. He and Nod were shackling three Japanese crewmen to a bulkhead. I pointed forward. Cherry gave me a thumbs-up. He and Nod clambered up the ladder to where I waited, and the three of us made our way forward, working our way through a maze of passageways, until we reached the tank hatches that sat just about amidships.

  There were eight hatches in all. Six were bolted tight and hadn’t been played with recently. Two others showed signs of use. In fact, one hatch was so loose we removed the cover without a wrench. Now, the three of us dropped into the darkness, climbing down the rungs welded to the side of the two-foot, cylindrical hatchway.

  We went down five or six yards, ending up on a narrow catwalk that ran around the circumference of one of the ship’s main tanks. I looked at the cargo tanks and prayed it was crude down there. Nod took point, leading the way around the cofferdams and into a series of short passageways punctuated by ninety-degree turns that ran athwartships between the tanks. It seemed to me that if the weapons were on board, they would be riding amidships in one of these passageways that ran port to starboard instead of bow to stern, where they’d take the least abuse from the seas and would be the most protected.

  There were six of these mazelike athwartships passages, all of them dimly lit from above with sealed, low-voltage lamps that gave the passages a flickering, oil-lamp look. Above, the ship was spotless. Here, a perpetual veneer of grime had attached itself to every possible surface. The sickly sweet odor of raw petroleum permeated the atmosphere, making breathing hard. We moved slowly, deliberately. I studied closely for any
sign of blood on the deck but discovered none. We pressed on. After fifteen minutes I exchanged positions with Nod and took the point to give him a break. Cherry patrolled ten yards behind us, providing cover.

  I hadn’t gone more than halfway down the third athwartships passageway when I turned a corner and saw what we’d come to find: a pile of wooden crates were secured against the tank bulkheads, and extra dunnage was used to brace them in place. The lettering on the crates read U.S. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY.

  Buckshot Brannigan and Biker Jordan were there, too. Biker was holding a grenade in his hand—the pin had been pulled and only the pressure of his fingers kept the spoon from popping. Buckshot had a suppressed HK cradled in his arms. His finger was on the trigger. I saw that the fire-selector switch was in three-shot-burst mode.

  “Yo, Dick, long time no see—not since Century City.”

  I drew up. My HK hung from my right shoulder by its sling, the muzzle level with his chest. “Buckshot.”

  He moved alongside one of the missile crates, about five yards from me. I swiveled my HK as he moved. “Seems we have a problem here.”

  “Oh?” I didn’t see it that way.

  “Look, this’ll have to be worked out between us. We can’t have a Mexican standoff for the next six days.”

  “Sure, Buckshot—put the fucking gun down, have Biker put the pin back in the grenade, and we’ll work it all out.”

  He shook his head. “No can do, old buddy. There’s too much at stake. Far too much.”

  He was right. There was far too much at stake here—but the stakes weren’t the ones Buckshot was thinking of. His mind was focused solely on money. What made me homicidal was the fact that Buckshot had killed two of my men. But while avenging Wynken’s and Blynken’s deaths was one major element of my rage, there were other factors, too.

  Buckshot betrayed his country when he stole the Tomahawks. Even worse, he betrayed all the other men who’d worn the same uniform he had, just as surely as if he’d knowingly led them into an ambush.

  When you fight, you don’t fight for abstract values like The Flag, or The Nation, or Democracy. You fight for your buddy. You fight to keep him alive and he fights to keep you alive, and you go on that way, day after day, battle after battle. And when one of your buddies dies, something inside you dies as well. But you go on. You fight, so that his death isn’t meaningless, his sacrifice isn’t for nothing.

  That is the real essence, the nucleus, the core, of unit integrity.

  But Buckshot had betrayed all that for money. There was no way I was going to let his perfidy stand unchallenged.

  I saw Cherry coming up behind Biker Jordan, and I wasn’t in much of a mood to waste Buckshot’s time—or mine. So I shot him in the head. Once. Between the eyes. Not bad for instinct shooting. But then, Buckshot had killed two of my men—and the bitter memory of those assassinations made my shot go true. He dropped like a stone before he could say anything more.

  Biker was still reacting when Cherry’s hands closed around the grenade and twisted savagely. I heard Biker’s wrist snap before the ex-Green Beret screamed like the proverbial stuck pig. In a millisecond, Nod was on the son of a bitch, his Field Fighter up Biker’s solar plexus to the hilt. Nod was halfway to eviscerating the poor asshole before I pulled him off.

  Cherry stepped out of the spreading blood puddle and held the grenade tightly. “Let’s put a pin in this, Skipper—the fucking thing makes me nervous.”

  He wasn’t the only one.

  Now we had the goods. We had the ship secured. The only thing we didn’t have was Manny Tanto. I knew he was wounded, but I didn’t have any idea how bad Pick had dinged him. I had Nod, Duck Foot, and Cherry booby-trap the athwart ship passages so that if Manny tried to break into the area, we’d know about it. Then we cleared the bodies out and went back to the bridge.

  I sent Nasty down to find Buckshot’s cabin and bring back any paperwork he could lay his hands on. He returned in ten minutes carrying a locked leather attaché case. Half Pint checked it for booby traps, then we pried it open.

  Inside there were ciphers and fax messages and a lot of cash. I went down to the mess deck and read the faxes. They were very interesting indeed.

  Once everything had been secured, we went over the ship again, searching for Manny Tanto. Working in three pairs, we started in the forecastle and worked our way aft, locker by locker, tank by tank, passageway by passageway. I discovered compartments I’d never known existed. But there was no sign of Manny. It was like he’d vanished.

  But of course he hadn’t vanished. He was out there, somewhere, waiting. Well, we were prepared for him—armed and dangerous. In the meanwhile, we had a tanker to bring in. I assigned each of my SEALs a four-hour watch on the bridge. The ship was on autopilot, the logs gave us our course, and the cipher books allowed us to fax the right coded messages back to Japan. So the only thing to do was sit back and enjoy the ride. The hard part would come in six days, when we made landfall.

  In the meanwhile, I made a few quick satellite phone calls. I called Stevie Wonder, who chortled that Pinky was having a cow because we’d dropped off the face of the earth. “Fuckin’ feds are going crazy, Dickhead.”

  That made me feel great. I told him I’d be in touch soon, and to stand by for action.

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  Then I touched base with Tosho, just to make sure we’d have a proper welcoming committee when we docked at Yokohama. When he heard where I was and what I had with me, there was an audible gasp on the line. Then he asked me to call him back in fifteen minutes. When I did, Tosho said he’d briefed his boss and received permission to chopper a crew out to us thirty-six hours before landing. “We’re gonna rock and roll, Dick—and have this all wrapped up before the fucking politicians know what’s happened. No way they’ll interfere now.”

  That sounded good to me. I also checked in with Mike Regan’s answering machine to let him know we were all still alive. Then it was time to strip to Skivvies and lead PT on the Akita Maru’s huge flat deck. The air was clear, the sun was hot, we worked ourselves into a sweat, and life was absofuckinglutely perfect.

  That is, it was perfect—until Manny Tanto paid me a social call the third night. It was just past 0200. We’d settled into our schedule comfortably. Too comfortably, it turned out—which is no doubt what he’d been waiting for. I had the conn, and Duck Foot was keeping me company. We didn’t hear him so much as sense him—as if a ghost had passed through the bridge.

  And then all of a sudden Duck Foot’s hand was pinned to the map table by a stiletto. He screamed and yanked—which didn’t do him any good. By the time I looked around and saw there was no way I was going to reach the HK that sat useless ten feet away on the other side of the bridge, Manny had opened him up like a chicken and was coming for me—a big, bloody knife in his hand.

  The nasty thing about knife fighting is that no matter what you do, you’re going to get cut. Make no mistake about it. All those movies in which guys go at each other with blades and slash and slash and manage to keep out of the way of the blade—they’re so much bullshit.

  The bottom line is that if you fight with knives, you will be cut. That’s why I prefer guns. It’s more effective to shoot someone at five yards than have him slamming into your face carrying a big, ugly sharp blade to do you bodily harm.

  But I wasn’t being given any choice here. The half-breed had chosen the time and the place—and all I could do was make sure he didn’t completely control the venue.

  He was out of control. He had his war face on—he’d striped his skin with camouflage cream and tied his hair back in samurai style, a black band knotted around his forehead. His eyes were like coals, reflecting the red, blue, and green instrumentation lights. His bare chest, painted in the same black and green tiger stripes as his face, rippled.

  He nicked me good before I put a steel-frame chair between us—a long slash that cut me along the bone side of my left arm and drew a lot of blood. Th
en, smiling the same savage leer he’d had on his face all those years ago in Tri Ton, he stepped back to gauge his best attack.

  He lunged. I dodged. He feinted. I parried. He slashed. I sidestepped.

  All the while, wild-eyed, I searched for improvised weapons as Manny hacked away. I had a pocket knife on my belt. It’s one of those Maritime lockback jobs—a big fat blade for cutting rope, and a marlinespike for making splices. I fumbled for it, holding Manny off with the chair.

  One-handed, I opened the marlinespike and set the knife inside my right fist, the spike jutting out two inches. I used the chair like a lion tamer—jabbing to keep him away from me.

  It was like some fucking scene from a deranged gladiator movie—a crazy half-breed and a bearded Visigoth going at it to the death.

  “Come on, you son of a bitch,” I taunted him.

  The only sounds he made were his breathing and the scuff of his bare feet on the deck. He lunged at me, sinking the knife through the fiber seat bottom and soft cushion. I twisted away and popped him a quick one with my right hand.

  He looked surprised as the marlinespike punctured his chest, just above the right nipple. “Uh—”

  I gave him another. A trickle of blood began to run down his chest, dark liquid against the camouflage.

  He roared and came at me; the knife cut through the chair seat again and clipped me in the side, drawing blood. But the son of a bitch had made a bad tactical error.

  His right hand was stuck in the chair seat. He tried to wrestle the chair from me, but I pushed him back against the ship’s wheel, put both of my hands on the steel frame, and went left—hard. I heard his right shoulder separate as he got tangled up in the wheel. Still, he wouldn’t let go of the fucking knife. I pushed the chair as hard as I could and kneed him in the groin. He grunted. Now I hit him again with the marlinespike—once, twice, three times in the chest. I could feel the cartilage pop with each penetration.

  He started to gargle blood—bright red blood. I’d hit his fucking lungs.