RW12 - Vengeance

by Richard Marcinko

  “They think Shitheads for Allah was trying to buy M16s to be used in a variety of places,” continued Doc. “They trotted out al Qaeda as a possibility, like these guys are trying to step up into the big time by becoming Guns “R” Us. They have a number of company names that do at least some legitimate business. The pipeline is what it’s all about. Once they have a system set up, they can use it to transport anything, from guns to flowers to people. But I think the deal Pierre was involved in had something to do with mustard gas.”

  “Gulden’s?”

  “No, the shit they used in World War I. There was a stock of it in Yugoslavia before the breakup of the country, and it’s gone now. The Frenchies swear Pierre had nothing to do with that, but it makes sense that they might be lying. The gas is missing and may be over in the States. They told the CIA about it a month or two ago.”

  And what did the CIA do? Filed the information under “F” for “forget about it.” When we tried tracking the information down later, we got nowhere.

  The gas had been stored in shell-like containers designed to be launched by artillery. As near as Doc could figure out, the shells dated to World War II or just afterward, which meant there was some question about how potent the gas would be. It had been found by NATO and stockpiled at an old prison waiting for disposal by a French company. When the company got there they found half the containers were missing. If the records could be trusted, there were something like ten to twelve full tractor trailer loads gone.

  “It gets better,” said Doc.

  I couldn’t imagine how.

  “The reason I think it’s related to Pierre’s deal is that right around the time that this stuff had to have been taken—there’s like a six- or seven-day window—the French tracked a shipment of M16s into their country. That was the deal Pierre tried to abort. The guns, by the way, got lost, even though the French were tracking them. But they got the names of the shipping companies they think carried them. They’re still watching them. They split the load, see, over a couple of different firms. The companies may have taken turns, and there’s a shell game covering the ownership arrangements, which leads back to radical, money-grubbing Islamic ragheads.”

  “Can we get the names of the companies?”

  “FBI’s had them for a month,” said Doc. “A copy was hand-delivered to the New York office as well as Washington.”

  What was the FBI’s nickname again? Fucked-up Bureau of Incompetents?

  I played nice and put on a smile when I walked into the head of the FBI counterterrorism office in New York. I laid out the information we had obtained about the French operation. I explained that I believed it possibly tied in to an active terrorist cell or cells that were targeting me as well as different sites across the country. I admitted that I didn’t know everything, but I put the dots together for the local FBI boss man so he couldn’t miss the significance of the situation. I wanted to make it obvious why he ought to share whatever intel they had gotten in the weeks since they’d been investigating the companies.

  Presumably investigating.

  We already had the list, but as a gesture of humility I didn’t include that piece of information up front.

  “I’m not sure why I’m the target,” I told the FBI boss. His experience in terrorism before coming to the job consisted of reading Danny O. Coulson’s book No Heroes, about the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team or HRT (among other things). Great unit, great book, but reading it is not the same thing as living it. “It may be something personal. But more likely they’re trying to get me out of the way of something. I don’t know what.”

  “With an ego like that, I’m surprised your head fit through the door,” he told me.

  All right, I’m not ego-challenged, but that was a fairly inappropriate remark completely beside the point. Whatever he thought of me, I was at the intersection of serious shit and nasty assholes. If he truly didn’t like me, he should have helped me and hoped Shitheads for Allah blew my head off.

  “So can we get an info dump from someone?” I asked, still playing Mr. Sunshine. “We may be in a position to help you as well.”

  “We can’t share details of an ongoing investigation.”

  The conversation degenerated rapidly from there. I’ll spare you the blow by blow. The bottom line is that my puffed-up head and I somehow managed to squeeze out the door and head back uptown to the hotel, where I got a message from Sean that our prisoner had been IDed as an illegal immigrant. This gave Homeland Security more muscle, and Cox used it to remove him from NYPD custody. He was being held at a specially constructed unit at the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, about an hour and a half away.

  Twenty minutes by helicopter, which is what we took.

  Danbury has a reputation as something of a country club, though no prison is really that. The special facilities they had built there were not luxurious at all—a single set of cement cell blocks down the hill from the main buildings, with three rows of razor wire and a full cordon of guards, augmented by electronic sensors. Two vehicles with men in full riot gear patrolled the perimeter. Credentials were checked at a post just outside of the perimeter, where a full search was mandatory for all. If you weren’t a bad guy, the search didn’t include the rubber glove routine—but that was only because they used a special magnetic resonance imaging machine to do the work for them. They also had a retina ID machine and a tracking system that kept tabs on the inmates and the guards at all times, with a double backup. The guards were armed with a variety of lethal and nonlethal weapons. They practiced on animatronics dummies every other day. If you failed to qualify you had one chance to redeem yourself before being rotated to another assignment. I’m sure I could have figured out a way in, but it would have taken more than a few minutes of diddling around and wasn’t worth the effort.

  There were twelve prisoners in the block, including His Swarthiness. He’d been tentatively IDed as a Bosnian—ah, very inter-est-tink—who’d entered the country on a student visa three months earlier.

  Looked a bit old for kindergarten, if you asked me.

  There was a serious downside to all this security: advanced interrogation techniques, such as those Trace and Danny had employed on earlier operations (see Violence of Action), were not possible. Shame, that. Each prisoner had an interrogation officer assigned to him, who, despite the title, functioned as a commander and stayed aloof from the interviews. Homeland Insecurity had studied the operation at Guantanamo, figuring out its downsides as well as its successes, and tried to improve the system. One of the biggest problems at Gitmo was the tendency of a few people who dealt with the prisoners regularly to begin to identify with them, or at least feel sorry for their families. It’s hard for the average American to understand it—it’s hard for me to understand it—but under stress and over time people start identifying with those around them, even when the people are killers and their sworn enemies. That’s what the Stockholm Syndrome is all about—victims starting to see themselves as friends of their kidnappers. While the phenomenon can be overplayed to excuse things that shouldn’t be excused, it does exist, and steps were taken here to prevent it. The bad guys’ backgrounds were emphasized every day, translators and interrogators were constantly monitored and rotated, and all contact was carefully regulated.

  As far as the inmates went, a conscious program of building relations and “managing the interrogation script” was followed, with personnel assigned very specific roles. The unit used a variety of techniques—the simplest being sleep deprivation—to encourage cooperation. In my opinion, knuckle persuasion would have been much faster, but they hadn’t put me in charge of the cell block.

  The man who was in charge greeted us inside with a suspicious glare. I liked that. He stood about six feet and had been a Marine. He didn’t volunteer this, but few people get their arm tattooed Semper Fi unless they’re jarheads. He also looked like a Marine, with a squat haircut, crisp khaki pants, and a white short-sleeved shirt that showed off his thick b
iceps as well as his tattoo.

  “Marcinko?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Don’t fuck around with my people.”

  “Gotcha, Gunny.”

  He frowned at me. “I went out as a master sergeant,” he snapped, before handing me off to his assistant. This man was a less-muscled, even grouchier version of his boss, and if he was supposed to play Mr. Friendly to Master Sergeant’s Gruff, he hadn’t gotten the memo. Mr. Friendly in turn handed us off to a person I’ll call Twenty Questions, who headed the interrogation team. Twenty Questions was much closer to being a member of the human race.

  “Uncooperative. It’s early days,” he told Trace and me, leading us to the interrogation area. We watched from an observation room while His Swarthiness was put through the paces by a pair of interrogators, who spoke to him in both Serbian and English. He grunted a few times and said something nice about New York.

  “Wow, what a bullshit artist,” said Trace.

  Twenty Questions smiled. “He’s different from our usual guests,” said the interrogation supervisor.

  “Because he’s Bosnian?” I asked.

  “Yes, but that’s not the whole thing,” said Twenty Questions. “He’s not obviously religious, unlike most if not all of the other guests we’ve had. He also hasn’t tried to send a message to his family or anything like that.”

  Twenty Questions explained that most of the prisoners would typically protest their innocence and give a list of people who could vouch for them, at least if they had been apprehended in circumstances such as His Swarthiness. Or, alternatively, they attempted to establish a rapport with their captors, convinced that they would win them over or influence them somehow. Al Qaeda leaders were like that; for the most part, they wanted to talk, because they wanted everyone to understand how righteous they were. Some also had an agenda to mislead their interrogators by giving them false information. His Swarthiness simply kept his mouth shut.

  “You think he’s just some numbskull off the street?” I asked. It was a dumb question, but the answer needed to be on the record.

  “No way,” said Twenty Questions. “He’d act completely differently. Even if he were a common criminal. Say he was involved in the bank robbery that went bad when you picked him up. Well, again, in that case, he’d be acting very differently. He’s hooked into something; we just don’t quite know what yet. We’ll wear him down after a few weeks. But it’s also possible he doesn’t know much.”

  “It’s also possible he’s been in worse places,” I said.

  “That, too.”

  I gave Twenty Questions as much background on what I thought was going on as I could. Then Trace and I waited a bit, watching and reviewing a briefing log, before Twenty Questions decided it was a good time for us to go in.

  His Swarthiness jerked back when he saw Trace enter. I came in a half-minute afterward and didn’t get any sort of reaction.

  “Why were you so interested in me?” I asked.

  Blank look.

  “Your name is George, right? You’re in big trouble, George. We may be able to help.”

  Blank look.

  “Do you believe in God, George?”

  Blank look.

  The pros took over, asking him to describe why he had been in Queens yesterday. But George, who hadn’t exactly been loquacious before, was positively mum now. Finally, Trace got up and left the room while I stayed behind. He watched her go, then turned back to us.

  “She’s a bit of a bitch, huh, George?” I said.

  A faint—very faint—smile came to his lips. “A real devil. I’d like to get her alone.”

  “Maybe I can arrange that.”

  He frowned. Clearly that was something he did not want to happen. The negotiators tried a few more questions, then they announced that they had nothing more to ask.

  “I do,” I said.

  “Fine with us. We’ll be outside.” Both men got up and left, following the script Twenty Questions had given them before they started.

  I waited until they were gone, then leaned across the table. His Swarthiness had cuffs on his hands locked to the table; the chains on his feet were bolted to the floor. He couldn’t have blown his nose if he sneezed.

  “We can work out a deal,” I told him, my voice barely over a whisper. “But you have to answer my questions. Or you’ll rot here.”

  He scowled. I sat back upright.

  “Who are you working with?” I asked.

  Back to the blank look. I slammed my hand on the table—not an act—and told him I wasn’t fucking around. Either he helped and we were friends or there would be consequences.

  Another frown, another scowl, and then words:

  “I don’t know.”

  We boxed, we danced, we sang—verbally, unfortunately, because my anger was growing and it would have felt damn good to release it. I couldn’t, of course. I’d promised not to get physical, and besides, the response team in the hallway would have been inside with their pepper spray and billy clubs in the tick of a clock. But I was frustrated, and I laid it out for him:

  “I can be your best friend or your worst enemy. Somebody is trying to fuck with me, and I’m going to get them. You can help, or you can be fucked along with them.”

  If he knew something, he was very good at concealing it. After twenty minutes, the two interrogators returned and resumed their questioning, following up on the very scant information he had given them earlier. I listened for a while, then got up.

  “If you want to save your butt, you ask for Dick. They’ll know how to get me.”

  Trace grumbled that it had been a waste of time as we headed for the airport where the helo had landed, a small burp of a place located near a shopping center a few miles away.

  “It wasn’t a waste at all,” I told her. “We know that he’s working in a very small cell with very specific instructions. He’s on the low end of the food chain, just keeping tabs on us. And he was chosen for this sort of job because he does well under interrogation.”

  “Those are all guesses,” said Trace.

  “Educated guesses.”

  “So who does he work for?”

  “Ten-million-dollar question,” I told her. “Though right now I’d like to know how the hell he figured out where we were.”

  Shunt supplied a possible answer to that question.

  “Dude, who’s been using their cell phone?”

  “No one,” I told him. We were having a quick reassessment in Manhattan before breaking camp and heading home. “We switched to the beepers and pay phones.”

  “Could they have tracked the beepers?” asked Trace.

  “Harder,” Shunt said. “Like, you’re sure there was no GPS mode?”

  On cell phones, GPS—the abbreviation stands for “global positioningsystem” but it’s become a generic term for any positioning system, in this case one using cell towers—allows 911 operators to locate you. Shunt explained that the cell phones were essentially small computers and could be hacked.

  “I called a cell phone that morning,” said Trace. “Danny Barrett. He’d called Rogue Manor and wanted an update. Would that count?”

  “Well, like, if they had hacked into his phone and could figure out the number, they could backtrack and find out where it was.”

  “How can we find out?” I asked. “Without them knowing that we know?”

  “I don’t know, Dude. I’ll have to talk to some of my gear-head friends at Verizon. Maybe we could, like, program a Trojan horse to go after their virus or whatever it is they got in there, if they got it in. We’d have to, uh, figure it out at the company level maybe. Might have to hack into their system.”

  “Could you?”

  “Dude.”

  I got hold of Danny on a landline and had him go to a pay phone and call a number at a randomly selected restaurant (their cooperation was assured by a hundred-dollar bill and a promise of a signed copy of the next book—hope you’re enjoying it, Max!). Danny nearly bro
ke the telephone when I told him Shunt’s theory.

  “We want to look at the program in the phone. But we don’t want them to know we know, if that’s what’s going on. Make another call later, then power it down and bring it back with you.”

  “Call who?”

  “The weather. Nobody important.”

  “I’m sorry, Dick.”

  “It’s not your fault, Danny, and it may not even be your phone. I think this is a wild goose chase. But we need to find out.”

  “I’m done here, anyway,” Danny said. He gave me a quick update. It didn’t come to much—except for the name of a company that some of the locals on a combined Homeland Security-state police-FBI task force believed might be connected with the three cells they’d been trying to track down in the Midwest.

  Brod Prevoz.

  Roughly translated, “Ship Transport,” in Serbo-Croatian. And, more important, one of the firms connected to the Shitheads for Allah.

  “Why are they interested?” I asked.

  “The explanation is very convoluted. Remember the gun dealer I was telling you about? Well, at some point one of the suspects in the cell that bought weapons from him used their address on an immigration paper. Computer kicked it for some other reason, and one of the new Homeland Security overseas investigators actually went to check. They listed it as a phony address, but then someone on the task force recognized the company as a shipper that transports in and out of Europe. The Bosnia connection was what interested them.”

  Was this the Department of Insecurity we were talking about? The same people who had placed Tell-Me-Dick in a position of mistaken authority? There is hope for this government organization yet.

  “So what was the upshot?” I asked.