RW12 - Vengeance

by Richard Marcinko

  Somewhere around there, I realized there was a train coming. And it was coming—the Metroliner plugs through here at about ninety miles an hour. Huffing, I crossed over to the left, figuring that the motorcyclist would do the same. He started to—but then he spotted me and tried to go back.

  Bad move.

  The nose of the train hit him dead on, tossing him straight up in the air. He came down right behind the engine, and seemed to disappear. From where I was standing, it looked as if he had gone right through the roof. What he had done was somehow manage to fall into the narrow slot behind the engine and the lead passenger car. He was flicked to the side, batted toward the back of the locomotive, and then pushed down to the track. Then he slipped downward. The first wheel that hit him took off his arm.

  The second got his neck, decapitating him.

  Part Two

  Stand By Me

  “It is bad to lack good fortune, but it is a misfortune to lack talent…. The fortune of war is on the side of the soldier of talent.”

  —FIELD MARSHAL ALEKSANDR V. SUVOROV (1729–1800), QUOTED IN

  OSSIPOV, SUVOROV, 1945

  Chapter

  6

  Maybe it happened a little differently. Maybe the motorcyclist took a weird bounce in there somewhere and rebounded crazily, had his head chopped off first and then his arm. All I saw was the blood splashing from the underside of the train, already more than a quarter of a mile away. By the time I got there, the torso lay on the ground; the right leg had been chopped up and a few fingers were missing from the other hand. The head lay upside down at the foot of the ballast pile a few yards away.

  Capel pried the shield off the helmet and held out the decapitated head toward me.

  “Know him?”

  The eyes stared at me, the lid on the right eye drooping slightly. He looked European, on the darker side. He had brown eyes. His face had a sleek and empty look to it—but maybe we all would if we’d left the rest of our body somewhere else.

  “Never saw him before,” I said.

  Topless Tango number two. I was beginning to discern a pattern. There was bound to be another down the road; good things come in threes. I thought seriously of bringing the dead son of a bitch’s head back home and putting it on a fence post the way they used to do during the Middle Ages. Think of it as the ultimate DO NOT DISTURB sign. (As many of you know, the signs posted around the compound at Rogue Manor read: “Trespassers shot; survivors shot again.” And I mean the neighbors know it!)

  Capel pried the head out of the helmet, then set down the skull. He pulled out a digital camera and snapped some pictures we could use to try to ID the dead man. No, it didn’t seem gruesome at the time. Even now, telling you about it in retrospect, it doesn’t seem gruesome. It was a nasty part of the job (which is why we call Capel Nasty Nicky Grundle in the novels), but the job is nasty—the whole job, that is. I don’t want to sugarcoat it for you. The people we’re up against—and you’re up against them, too, whether or not you want to admit it—want to kill you, and they want it to be nasty. They want the people left behind to breathe it in their lungs for weeks. They want it playing over and over on TV. I don’t say you should get used to it; it should turn your stomach. But when it does, use it to do something about it. Someone punches you in the gut, nail him in the balls. Someone chops off your hand, take off his head. Be ten times the bastard he is. As my sea daddy Roy Boehm said: “Don’t get even. Get ahead.”

  If you don’t, it may be your head lying by the side of the track next time, frowning for the camera.

  “No ID, chief,” said one of Capel’s men back by the body.

  “Didn’t think there would be. Anything?”

  “Got a cell phone.”

  The cell phone was something, at least. Capel’s boys began scouring the path the now-headless motorcyclist had taken to arrive at his rendezvous with the Amtrak, checking to see if he’d dumped an ID or radio or even a weapon, anything that could be used to get information about him.

  I walked back and took a look at the bike. Undoubtedly it would turn out to be stolen or its ownership disguised somehow, but I made sure to copy the license plate, anyway. We left before the police arrived. Hanging around wasn’t going to help them any and—with due respect to my friends in the crime-stomping profession—only waste our time.

  Capel didn’t take any chances. We resumed our surveillance pattern and headed to Rogue Manor. By the time we were there, the fingerprints had been checked against the FBI registry and the plate had been run. There was no hit in either the FBI registry or with motor vehicles—the license plate supposedly was unissued.

  “He was working alone,” Capel said. “He had to report wherever you went would be my guess, but not get too close.”

  “Was he a pro?”

  “He had some connections if he could get a blank plate, but I wouldn’t make any call on his expertise level yet. We did catch him.”

  “You think a pro would have escaped?”

  “A pro would have made it a little harder.”

  Frankly, I thought he’d done a decent job; if the train hadn’t picked that moment to blow through, we might still be eating his dust.

  “He knew I was meeting with Junior at Homeland Security,” I said. “Unless he followed me from here.”

  “He didn’t follow you from here,” said Capel. “Who knew where you were going?”

  No one on my team. I hadn’t told Sean or Hulk—or Trace, for that matter. Danny, who had emailed some advice on who else might approach Boreland—that was it. Except for Karen. And the people at Homeland Security. Junior. Anyone who had access to his schedule. Tell-Me-Dick.

  It would please me no end to find out that either scumbag was a traitor, but I just didn’t think they were smart enough.

  “Plenty of people could have guessed that I’d go there,” I told Capel. We discussed a few theories and ideas on what to do with the cell phone. Capel has extensive contacts and promised that he’d have a full list of the calls made on the cell phone—as well as all the information that had been used to set up the account—by the next morning. He would also have the phone dusted for prints and scanned for any organic material that would yield DNA. He already had samples of both from the dead man; he was hoping to ID an accomplice or superior.

  “About one chance in a zillion we’ll find anything useful,” Capel admitted. “Unless he loaned the phone to someone with greasy fingers who spit into it.”

  As unlikely as that was, I understood that Capel was pulling out all the stops on my behalf. I told him I appreciated that, along with the fact that he had dropped everything to come down and watch my butt.

  “As hairy as ever,” he pointed out.

  “You can shave it any time you want.”

  “That’s where I draw the line,” said Capel. “Even friendship has its limits. Besides, this is going to cost you next week in New York. I expect a smile on your face and calluses on your fingers.”

  I’d agreed to do a meet and greet with him at a business conference. Capel is based in the city and runs a lot of seminars on executive security there. When I agreed, I figured I’d be up near the city anyway. The container port facility was across the Hudson in New Jersey, and the nuke plant was about forty miles upriver.

  Great place for a nuke plant, by the way.

  I reached Rogue Manor no happier and certainly no wiser. For all the excitement, I was still no closer to figuring out who was dogging me than I had been earlier. Taking the scumbag had been the right move. If it hadn’t been for the damn train, we’d be squeezing him for information by now. But that’s life: sometimes you can do everything right and still get screwed.

  Among the first phone calls I made was one to the people up at Wappino* nuclear plant in New York, telling them that the exercise was off.

  “Shit,” said the security administrator, an amiable fellow named Jack Furness.

  I explained the situation, promising that we would make it up to him in a f
ew months. Furness fretted that that would be too late and went on to explain that he’d been hoping to use the exercise to his advantage. A new corporation had recently taken over management of the power plant. The people who ran the corporation knew what they were doing, but as in any corporation, there was always competition for resources. Furness had hoped the exercise would help him politically at corporate headquarters.

  “I have to be honest with you, we’ll kick your butts,” I told him. I haven’t seen a nuclear power plant in this country that couldn’t be compromised by a determined group of Boy Scouts with an attitude, let alone the Rogue Warrior’s band of committed mayhem doers.

  “That’s not a problem,” said Furness, and he explained where he was coming from. During the review of security arrangements at the plant, he’d come up with a plan A, plan B, and plan C for improving security. Think of the plans as a Chevy, Buick, and Cadillac—or, if you’re into foreign cars, a Mercedes C, E, and S class. Plan A took security to the standard maintained by the company. This was better than the security levels at national facilities, though I won’t call that a ringing endorsement. Plan B was even better, making Wappino more secure than any plant in the world—again, not a ringing endorsement. Plan C, the Cadillac version, would make it more secure than any nuclear missile facility in the country. At this level, the Boy Scouts would probably opt to earn their Environmental Catastrophe merit badges elsewhere.

  The company execs knew that the location of the power plant near New York City meant a massive population would be exposed to a potential threat if anything went wrong. Just as important, they knew that they were exposed to the biggest collection of obnoxious and clueless reporters in the world. Even seeming to fuck up could send their stock price tumbling and mess up their options bonanza. So they referred the matter to their PR department, which decided that press releases and advertisements dubbing Wappino as “the most secure plant in the world” would double their own stock options. The bean counters in accounting, who didn’t have quite as many of their own stock options at stake, argued for A and a half, but in the end, corporate sided with the PR boys. Expecting Furness to be out-of-his-mind overjoyed—his name would be featured in all the press releases, and even spelled correctly—they flew up to New York to tell him, between private tours of the Statue of Liberty and a night out at Yankee Stadium in George Steinbrenner’s private box. They couldn’t understand why Furness wouldn’t go along. Didn’t he have stock options, too?

  Furness did the worst thing a corporate geek could do in that situation: he told them the truth. He’d spent the past few weeks reviewing the situation and decided he had been far too optimistic in his original assessment. If anything, even plan C was too basic. Fortunately, he told them this during a big rally in the bottom of the ninth inning at the baseball game, and none of the execs heard a word. They patted him on the back, clapped and cheered, and ordered another round of George’s champagne.

  Being a particularly masochistic sort, Furness had not yet given up. He had decided that he would get corporate backing for plan C by using a political ploy even Machiavelli would have been proud of: the politics of embarrassment. If we kicked butt during the exercise, he’d go to his bosses and use it as an argument for what could happen in the future. He was even working on a chart showing the effect on stock options.

  His story made me like him—but then I like many naive young idealists before they have stuck their pointy heads into the real world’s meat grinder.

  “You sure you want us to make you look bad?” I asked.

  “I don’t want you to make us look bad. But if it happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, hell, then I’ll go along with corporate.”

  “You’re not thinking of making your guys take a fall, are you?”

  “They’re too good for that,” he said. “They’d call me out on it right away. Just the opposite: we’ll get ready for you like it’s the Super Bowl. If you kick our butts fair and square, that’s fine. If we kick yours—well, then I have serious bragging rights and probably get a promotion. I win either way.”

  “You won’t kick our butts,” I told him. “But we’ll have to wait until we’re back on the payroll. Taking the team north involves a lot of expenses.”

  “I have a training budget,” said Furness. “How much money do you need?”

  Ah, an idealist with an expense account. Nothing is more dangerous in the world.

  We talked about it a bit, and I ended up holding him off. I needed to go over the situation with my people first, but more important, I was concerned about the asshole who had been tailing my operations. I didn’t want to take a chance that I’d be showing these jerks how to irradiate half the New York metro area.

  “Let me think about it and get back to you,” I told Furness. “I’ll call no later than tomorrow night.”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  I held an impromptu meeting of the Red Cell II team out back after the sun went down, setting the mood with a monster spread. I had everything going: T-bones and chickens on two large Weber grills, along with a pot of lobsters and clams, all the vegetables Trace could find at the local vegetable stand, and enough beer to fill three large coolers. It was a little like some of the barbecues we used to have back in my SEAL days; the big difference now is that I pay for my eats rather than scrounging them. Scrounging does add a bit of spice to the meal, I admit—an admiral’s steak always tastes better than what you find in the supermarket, no matter how it’s marinated. Around 2200, I brought out one of the speaker phones and got Doc and Danny on the line for an impromptu conference call. With the gang all here, I laid out the situation: at least for the moment, Red Cell II had been furloughed. I told them flat out they were out of jobs and free to go, get rich, get laid, get bent, get off, whatever particular definition they wished to attach to that four-letter word: F-R-E-E.

  Free.

  “And you’re free to fuck yourself,” they told me. No one wanted to abandon me, especially not while some psycho loony had me at the top of his shopping list. Which made for a real touchy-feely moment, them cursing and bragging about how no whacko asshole was going to deprive them of the pleasure of plugging yours truly themselves. They mustered all the four-letter terms of endearment I’d ever used and then some. I just stood there smiling to myself, thinking of the hangovers they were going to have in the morning.

  With that out of the way, I outlined an agenda for the next two weeks that included an operation at the nuke cooker. By my timetable, we’d arrive in New York on Wednesday morning, set up a temporary command post and initiate an intel operation. From there, I’d work the actual game plan, but most likely we’d give them their money’s worth starting Thursday and running through Saturday. The meet and greet I owed Capel was set for the following Monday, and I’d decided I’d throw in a seminar for the security folks at the nuke plant on Tuesday. That would justify keeping my people in New York over the weekend with two free days to kill beers and seduce tourists—a little well-earned R&R for the Rogue Warrior’s favorite slimeballs—just a traditional work hard-play hard evolution from days gone by, before the world was forced to be politically correct.

  “Pack your swimmies,” I told them. “And the live ammo. We’ll work out a special plan to deal with Shadow if we flush him.”

  “I think he was the creep that got run over by the train,” said Hulk.

  “Probably not,” I told him. “But it’s possible.”

  “We’re going to visit the Big Apple?” asked Sean. His eyes were about the size of silver dollars.

  That or he was trying to take in Tiffany’s many assets.

  “We’ll see how it plays,” I told him. “But that would be the general idea.”

  “I hope it does,” said Tiffany. “I’d like to see my sister.”

  “I’m afraid you’re not on the Event Team,” I told her.

  You’d’ve thought I kicked her in the stomach. Sean didn’t look all that happy, either.

  “Paris is n
icer than New York this time of year, Tiffany,” said Doc over the speaker phone. “Besides, not knowing what half the people are saying when they’re cursing you to hell can be a real bonus.”

  Tiffany looked at me. “Paris?”

  I felt like a dirty old sugar daddy at Christmas. I could get used to that.

  “Doc needs somebody to change his diapers for him,” I told her. “Nappies, or whatever the French call them.”

  Tiffany just about jumped up and down, rattling off something in French about diapers. Trace gave Tiffany dagger eyes from the corner. Sean—poor Sean looked like he’d just lost his best friend.

  “Your flight to Boston leaves at five A.M.,” I told Tiffany. “Doc’ll meet you up there.”

  “Five?”

  “Gives you just enough time for your mandatory morning PT,” said Trace.

  “Sure, if I get up at midnight,” Tiffany shot back. “It’ll take at least an hour to clear security at the airport, and between packing and getting ready—”

  “You weren’t planning on sleeping, were you?” said Trace.

  I heard Karen’s car coming up the driveway and slipped away. Knowing what I did about Trace and Tiffany, I expected that bit of back and forth would go on for quite a while. Besides, as much as I love female mud wrestling, there’d be plenty of other opportunities to watch catfights in the future.

  I spent the next day and a half seeing to some business and working my way down the various honey-do lists. Trace worked the new recruits, making them sweat from places where they didn’t know they had pores. Trace’s ancestors were Chiricahua Apaches and she counts one of the last great chiefs of the tribe, Chihuahua, as her direct ancestor. Chihuahua’s clan saw great hardship and were tough mothers. They lived in the desert and were practicing guerilla tactics on their enemies long before whites came to America. Trace would have fit right in. The old chief must be smiling in the afterlife.