RW12 - Vengeance

by Richard Marcinko

  “Sure, I’ll do it, Dick.”

  “You sure you’re up for this, Doc?” I asked. “Donna’ll never forgive me if you break a toenail or something.”

  “Fuck you, Cock Breath.”

  “Your terms of endearment go right to my heart.”

  “And the horse you rode in on, asshole.”

  “What the hell is going on?”

  Those were the first words out of Karen’s mouth when she met me in the terminal of Ronald Reagan Airport back home.

  “Lovely to see you, too,” I told her.

  Karen started to say something else, but I demonstrated that her tongue could be put to much better use. Realizing I was right but refusing to surrender on my unconditional terms, she frisked me for weapons.

  “I missed you,” she said after a thorough search. She slipped out of my arms and went back to work for the government. “Now, what the hell is going on?”

  I got her to agree that an airport terminal was hardly the place to discuss security operations, past or present, and she agreed to head over to Rogue Manor for an executive session. I had Sean and Hulk ride with Karen in her car and took Trace with me in a rental. Somehow, when the time came to present the credit card, Tell-Me-Dick’s plastic popped out of my wallet.

  There was a time when Rogue Manor was located in the bucolic countryside. The house hasn’t moved, but the countryside sure has. There are nine new traffic lights since I bought the place, and if I had a dollar for every bulldozer on a flatbed I’ve spotted going down the road I’d be a rich man. The worst thing about the traffic is that every eighth or ninth driver has his head up his ass and wants the world to know it. We nearly got sideswiped by a Honda Accord about a mile from the house. It was so close that Trace jumped up in the seat, Beretta ready.

  “You can’t shoot him,” I told her. “Unsafe lane changes are only a two-point violation in this state.”

  “Just getting paranoid, I guess.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  I’d already contacted a few old friends and had them en route to beef up security arrangements at Rogue Manor. I’d also asked a friend at DIA (the Defense Intelligence Agency, aka Dirtbags, Idiots & Assholes) to backtrack my two new shooters and make sure their shit didn’t stink. We had planned to work out a few new recruits before heading north, and Trace wanted to know whether to proceed with those plans in light of the present situation.

  “Definitely, if you’re comfortable with it,” I told her.

  “I’d prefer working off campus,” she suggested. “In case something fucks up. Can we rent that tent at Quantico?”

  Quantico is a big Marine base that kinda sorta backs up to Rogue Manor, if you ignore the wilderness and housing developments in the way. The base commandant and I are acquainted—a good sod for a jarhead—and Rogue Warrior Inc. had made use of some of the facilities there before. I agreed that it was a good idea and left it with her to handle the arrangements. Trace may be young but she’s old school. Give her an assignment and you don’t hear about it until it’s done, and even then it’s a bullet summary that rarely goes beyond came-saw-conquered.

  The resident canine security patrol gave us an enthusiastic welcome as we pulled up at Rogue Manor. The dogs, being dogs—and male—gave the women a good sniffing and the men wary barks. Can’t say as I blame them, though I finally did have to order them away from the ladies or we’d never have gotten into the house.

  A hearty glass of Bombay Sapphire later, I had filled Karen in on all that had happened in the Midwest. She, in turn, briefed me on the still-evolving situation inside the Beltway. Colonel Dickless Telly had been telling anyone and everyone that Fucking Dick Marcinko and the Red Cell II project were a serious threat to life and limb. We had almost poisoned an entire Midwest town and blown up a bank, and if we weren’t stopped soon, who knows what further horrors we would wreak.

  A group of terrorists had managed to get close to two operations in two different states under his jurisdiction, but I was the problem.

  “What’s the latest on my Topless Tango?” I asked, pouring myself a refresher.

  “FBI thinks it was a local dispute,” she said.

  “They have an ID?”

  “No.”

  “Doc thought he might be Asian.” He’d left a message to that effect on my cell phone, adding that he still had a posse of people to talk to and planned on getting more definitive information. “If that’s true, then the local-dispute theory doesn’t make much sense. Not that it makes much sense, anyway.”

  “There are Asian-Americans in Middle America, Dick.” She was using her PC tone. “It could be some sort of Chinese gang.”

  “If it were California, New York, even D.C., I might be inclined to agree. But how many Asian gangs are operating in Flyover Land?” I hate stating the obvious, but somebody has to. “What about the bridge and the explosives? Anything new on that?”

  “The FBI claims they’re bringing people in for interrogations. They’ve sent out a team of experts to consult.”

  Bureauspeak for: we have no fucking clue what the hell is going on.

  “Dinner is served,” announced Trace, who had made herself useful in the interim, sizzling some sirloins.

  Sean and Hulk were as frisky as the dogs outside and twice as hungry. The food made them positively loquacious. Sean regaled us with stories about his days on SEAL Team Two, which happens to be one of my alma maters. Even Hulk managed more than his usual grunts. Trace threw in a few stories about “the funny unit”—the sole Army Delta team that includes women (it doesn’t officially exist, but then, neither does Delta). It was a regular bacchanalia of bullshit, well lubricated by meat and spirits.

  Karen had expressed a proper amount of professional concern when I detailed the personal nature of my find at the bank on the last job. She expressed her concern in a less professional manner a few hours later when we held an executive session in the hot tub. There’s nothing like hot water and a hotter woman to ease the aches and pains of a deployment. We did our own version of the SEAL workout to further unwind. Afterward, I had the best rest I’d had in weeks. By the time I woke in the morning, Karen was already dressed for work. She had an early breakfast meeting at the Capitol, and even my powers of persuasion couldn’t get her to delay her plans in favor of some early-morning maneuvers.

  After she left, I checked the email and my website, looking to see if any of the intel feelers I’d sent out the night before had brought anything back. The long and the short of it was: no. It was too early to use the phone, so after doing my reps on the weight bench outside I grabbed my H&K P7M8 and went to pop a few caps on the range out back. The pistol has been with me a while, and although I truly believe a gun is just a gun and there’s nothing metaphysical or romantic about it, the pistol’s familiar snap as I squeezed off caps had a reassuring feel to it. There’s nothing like the smell of cordite and black coffee in your nose to get the day off to a good start.

  Even the dogs seemed to appreciate the company as I jogged with them around the perimeter, inspecting the premises even more carefully than normal. I have other security arrangements—I’m not going to detail them here for obvious reasons—but I think the canines are the most dependable part of the system. They’ve been trained not to fall for the poisoned-meat routine, and the only way an intruder would get the better of them would be to shoot them. Even then, I’m not sure they’d give up.

  Back in the house, I got the blender to work on a fresh juice combination (pineapple, pulpy orange, apple, strawberries, and banana for the ape in me), getting it all pretty in my glass before wolfing it down. Thing sounds like a New Age concoction channeled in from an Indian Yogi, but I actually learned how to make it from some of the young turks on SEAL Team Six. They’ve learned a few things about nutrition since my day, and I have to give them credit there. Besides being good for you, the thick juice blend sticks to your ribs.

  Around eight, Trace wandered in for a little light workout action before g
rinding down the nuggets. “Well you’re not dead,” she said as she barged into the kitchen. As always, lovely in the morning.

  Being away from Rogue Manor and my various business situations for more than a week left me with a lot of catching up to do. After PT and a little weight-pile moving to keep my muscles honest, I left Trace to her own devices and retired to my office, where I began working my safety net: the informal intelligence connections that not only told me what the hell was going on but kept my ass from being fried too badly by the bozos with the flamethrowers inside the Beltway.

  Irish Kernan began life in Noo Yawk. Then, to show the world how tough he really was, he became a Marine. He retired as a colonel but couldn’t break the government habit and found a job at the DIA, where his specialty was gathering tactical intelligence and drinking beer, not necessarily in that order. I’d met him at the Air Force Air Command and Staff College back in 1978, and we’d been friends ever since.

  “Hey, Dirtbag,” I told him when I finally got past the phone menu and found him not only in his office but answering the phone. Maybe he mistook it for his watch. “How about some lunch?”

  “Can’t stop for lunch. We’ll have dinner,” he said. “Prelim word on your guys is that they’re clean. I’m getting you a list of people who’ve worked alongside them. Some of your Christian friends say Sean saved one of their PMs in Afghanistan by running through a minefield.”

  “I already know my people are dumb,” I told him. “I just want to make sure they’re as dumb as I think.”

  “The proof is that they’re working for you. We’re going over the nugget list Trace sent, too. So what’s this all about?”

  I gave him some details on our operations and the fun we’d had in Missouri and Illinois, then asked if he could reciprocate. Neither state played very high in the various alerts, estimates, and briefings on threats that floated across his desk. The states didn’t hit the radar with any of my other sources, either. Most of the action and attention was focused on the two coasts.

  Al Qaeda came up in a lot of the conversations. It always does. Al Qaeda is the big bad wolf that you talk about when you can’t come up with anything else.

  “Possibly funded by al Qaeda.”

  “A link to a suspected al Qaeda member.”

  “A pattern that suggests al Qaeda.”

  Don’t get me wrong. The raghead slimebuckets have one of the most successful terrorist organizations in the world—well-funded, well-led, extremely disciplined. Bin Laden, aka Been Ladding, is a psychopath, but he’s a brilliant psychopath. And rich, which doesn’t hurt. Still, it’s become almost SOP to stamp the group’s name on every rumor and memo that goes into the system. Maybe it helps the case officers get their vouchers approved, I don’t know. But it sure doesn’t provide any real intelligence.

  The long and the short of the briefing: there were more than a thousand files corresponding to suspected terrorist cells in the areas where we’d staged our drills, and not one of them represented anything tangible. I found pretty much the same thing from the other sources I probed.

  I was just about ready to come up for air when Doc checked in with the latest.

  “Who do you know in Belgium?” he asked.

  “Couple of people with Eurocorps and NATO,” I told him.

  You’re probably familiar with NATO. Eurocorps is kind of a mini-NATO designed by the French and Germans originally to bury the hatchet over World War II thirty years after the fact, and it’s evolved into a kind of rapid response force, Europe’s pale version of the 101st Airborne, without parachutes. Eurocorps personnel look good in parades. The Belgians have a couple of mechanized brigades that are part of a rapid response force, and the last time I checked, the head of Eurocorps’ Navy representation at headquarters was a Belgian. History hasn’t been particularly kind to the Belgians, whose country was perfectly positioned to play doormat in World War I and World War II. They were ferocious fighters, but they still got the shit kicked out of them by the Krauts.

  “Anybody with the Belgian customs office?” asked Doc.

  “I can work on that. What’s up?”

  Doc explained that the body was believed to be that of a Belgian businessman—not from any positive ID, as the head and hands were still missing, but because an intrepid police officer checking area motels found that a Belgian businessman had skipped town without paying his bill or collecting his clothes. Doc had managed to talk his way into the motel room, and by his estimate, the dead body and the missing Belgian could have shared the same size 36 short sport coat. He’d convinced the motel manager to let us see the phone records—the manager was a Navy man who’d gone out as a chief petty officer some years before—and was on his way over to the local phone company to look at them.

  I mentioned that he had told me earlier that he thought the man in the water was Asian.

  “I’m trying to keep an open mind,” Doc replied. “The motel manager said he looked a little Asian, but he showed him a Belgian passport.”

  “A little Asian?” I asked.

  “I’m working on it,” Doc said. “The manager said the guy was in his mid-thirties—maybe—but could have been younger.”

  Danny checked in shortly after Doc. He’d spent the last twenty-four hours talking up police task forces and investigators. The battle cry was familiar—not enough communication, no resources, little direction from Washington. We laughed over the last point: there was no such thing as too little direction from Washington.

  More relevant to our situation, the crime lab had determined that the explosive was indeed C-3. It appeared to have been homemade—though how the lab techies could know that I haven’t a clue. I guess it had something to do with the impurities in the chemicals. Whoever had mixed the stuff hadn’t filtered it as finely or mixed the ingredients together as well as a factory would have. It still went boom, so how bad a job could they have done? But I would have guessed a home job anyway, given the fact that C-3 was no longer in general circulation.

  The police had all sorts of fingerprints. In fact, they were able to match one set to a bank customer who hadn’t paid child support in a year. Doom on you, asshole. But none of the prints had shed any light on who made or planted the bomb.

  Danny gave me some ideas about the Belgian connection. Between playing with some weights and reviewing Rogue Manor’s security arrangements, I used Danny’s intel to work the strings of my information network, like a spider testing his web. This was needle-in-the-haystack territory, but by dinnertime, I had arrived at the conclusion that a) the headless man was about as Belgian as I was, and b) America’s borders are as porous as ever—in every direction.

  Neither point being exactly a revelation.

  However, after quite a bit of how-ya-beens with old Navy friends who now worked for a living, I managed to run down someone in Immigration who was part of a team tasked with keeping track of Belgians. I wouldn’t have thought you’d need an entire team for that—hell, the damn country’s smaller than Philadelphia—but it turns out that Belgium is the go-to place for passport forgery these days. Not that you actually have to go there to get one of their passports. In fact, they prefer it if you didn’t. The little brown documents are readily available on half the streets of Cairo and in a third of the bars in Athens. European passports are especially valuable these days, since they arouse much less suspicion than documents from anywhere else in the world outside of the U.S., and they don’t rouse half the snotty comments that American passports get. The Belgians know about this problem and promise to do something about it by the end of the twenty-second century.

  The Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Belgian section was headed by a sweet-sounding woman named Julie Barr. She said it would be possible to supply us with a list of people who had come to the U.S. from Belgium over the past few months, but we’d have to do our own legwork checking them out. I told her I’d take the list. She promised that printing it out would require several reams of paper.

&
nbsp; I’d just put the phone down when it started to ring again. The caller ID told me it was Karen using her cell.

  “And how are you this fine afternoon?” I asked, picking up the phone.

  “Not so good, Dick. But better than you.”

  I laughed, then listened to Karen explain that Rich Armstead was rumored to be heading for a new slot in the Defense Department. This might have been good news for Rich (that’s debatable), but it was definitely bad news for just about everyone else. To make matters worse, the rumors had popped up on the day Rich was leaving for a trip to Central and South America. He was already in the air and unavailable to address them.

  The rumors had thrown the place into disarray, though admittedly that’s not saying much. In the meantime, the recently appointed Deputy for Security Matters and Training had finally taken office after several weeks of “transition”—read: paid vacation from his old job—and was in the process of reviewing his realm. Apparently, the squire had decided that I was one of his vassals.

  “He wants to meet you,” said Karen. “At your earliest convenience.”

  “That’s easy. It’s not convenient.”

  “It’d be better for you to meet him, Dick. Play nice for once.”

  “You’re the cutout,” I told her. “You meet him.”

  “I could cut his throat,” she said. “But he still wants to meet you. Technically, you work for him, not me. Your activities are paid out of a line in his budget.”

  Karen had a tone in her voice that women get that tells you it’s senseless to argue with them.

  “Set it up,” I told her.

  “Already have. Tomorrow afternoon, two P.M.”

  Rogue Manor’s new computer setup includes a computer system designed by a tech-head wop dweeb named Paul Guido Falcone, a wise-ass wop who henceforth and forever shall be known as “Shunt.” Shunt has shunts in his head. They’re some sort of metal inserts placed into his skull because he was born with water in his skull; I think of them as brain gutters. He’s barrels of laughs at airports, unless you happen to be stuck behind him with a plane to catch. Shunt tried to lie about the fact that he had metal in his head and join the Navy; somehow they figured it out, so he tried the Army instead. He had all the papers filled out and was just about to swear himself to God and country when the recruiting sergeant noticed the compass on his desk was acting very strangely. The Army ended up bouncing Shunt so far that he went to college instead. I told him one time that the Marines would have been glad to have him because they would have saved money on a helmet. The look on his face told me he thought he’d wasted the last ten years of his life. Unlike a lot of wannabe’s, Shunt’s basically a good goatfucker who keeps himself in decent shape and might—might—have completed BUD/S if the Navy had overlooked the permanent antennas in his skull and the dazed look in his eyes. Their loss was my gain; kid knows everything there is to know about computers.