RW14 - Dictator's Ransom

by Richard Marcinko

  Fogglebottom curled his lip.

  “Given the fact that your company has extensive contracts with the government,” he said, “I don’t believe you’re in a position to argue.”

  “That’s right,” I told him. “So I’m not going to argue. Get the hell off my property now.”

  I emphasized my desire to see him gone by tossing him in the direction of the limo. Seeing him bounce, the dogs mistook him for one of their rag-doll playthings and bounded after him. He made it to the car with most of his flesh intact, if not his clothes. By the time the dogs answered my whistles, the Lincoln and its escorts had disappeared in a cloud of dust down the driveway.

  Under ordinary circumstances, that would have been the end of my North Korean adventure. But just around dinnertime, the phone rang at Rogue Manor. I picked it up and heard a sweet young thing ask if I was Richard Marcinko.

  “My friends call me Dick,” I told her.

  “Please hold for the director.”

  I was hoping the director in question was a movie director interested in bringing Rogue Warrior® to the screen. Instead, I found myself talking to the DCI—Director, CIA—or as I like to put it, Dunce in Charge of Imbeciles.

  “Dick, this is Ken Jones. How the hell are you?”

  “Admiral. Just fine. What can I do for you?”

  “Can you be at the Riverside Bar in Tysons Corner at nine o’clock?”

  Rear Admiral Kenneth Jones—he’s retired from the navy, but once an admiral always an admiral—and I go back a bit. We’d been in Vietnam around the same time, and put in time on the same river—Bassac, which is one of the tributaries of the Mekong. Our careers took different paths; he was always a lot more political than me, for better and sometimes worse. But there’s always been an unspoken bond between us. You tend to respect a guy who risked his butt to save your people.

  Kenny commanded a PBR—Patrol Boat/River—on the Bassac and Mekong Rivers back in 1967. If memory serves—and it may not—he was an ensign, but he already had the look of weathered command in his face. Kenny may not have been fearless, but he was close, and the guys who served under him thought he was a god.

  The PBRs were fiberglass gunboats about thirty-two feet long, armed with recoilless rifles, mortars, flamethrowers, MK19 grenade launchers, .50 caliber machine guns, smaller M-60 machine guns, and as many rifles as the four-man crew could carry. Among other things, the gunboats worked with SEAL units, covering insertions and various operations.4 PBR commanders were a mixed bag. Having balls was just one requirement; you had to have some sense to go along with them. Kenny had both. He and his boat provided support and taxi service for me several times when I was out with a group of my guys on a “Marchinko”—an extended stay in Charlie country designed to wreak as much havoc as possible. He was always where he was supposed to be, except when we needed him to be somewhere else. He never let me down once.

  After I left Vietnam, Ken got his boat shot to shit rescuing a pair of SEALs who’d been stranded at the tail end of a reconnaissance mission. Everyone on board that boat was hit two, three, four times by VC fire, but they still managed to get the SEALs the hell out of there alive. The bow of the boat looked like splintered glass when they reached home; I think the navy stripped it down and towed it out to sea for proper burial because it was so far gone. Ken got a bronze star with combat V for the operation. The “V” stands for valor and means Ken put his fanny on the line to earn it.

  I don’t put too much store in medals, even though I’ve been granted a few. Real honor to me is when someone recounts a story about a man with awe in his voice. That’s how SEALs talked about Kenny Jones.

  Which isn’t to say that we always got along. After the war, Ken spent a lot of time at the Pentagon. Somehow he wound up in Naval Intelligence, though his war experience prevented him from becoming a true dip-dunk. Our paths crossed several times. At one point, he worked for my most senior sea daddy and mentor, Admiral William Crowe5, who headed the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Kenny was very helpful to me during my early days in Red Cell, but then left the service to start a new career as a high-level bureaucrat at the Defense Intelligence Agency or DIA, also known as the Don’t-know-nothing Intelligence Agency.

  “High-level bureaucrat” is generally a synonym for “guy with head up his ass,” but Kenny defied stereotypes and actually did a bit of good there, mostly by working around the system. From the DIA he’d gone over to the CIA. I lost contact with him there, but from mutual friends had heard he’d retired again after a stint as the agency’s number three man. Then, barely six months before this story takes place, the president found it necessary to appoint a new DCI, one who came from within the agency ranks but could work with the military as well. Ken was an obvious choice.

  We hadn’t spoken in at least three years, and that conversation had been about the weather. It was obvious that something big was up, and I doubted it was a coincidence that he was calling me right after I’d turned down Kim Jong Il’s invitation.

  “I’d like to talk over old times,” added Ken as I hesitated. “When can you make it?”

  “Nine o’clock,” I told him. While I didn’t owe him anything personally—and I owed the CIA even less—Ken Jones is one of the few people in Washington who deserves the respect his office generally affords him, and I decided I had to at least listen to what he had to say.

  I canceled my evening plans—regrettably, since I had a movie date with Karen Fairchild, the lovely proprietress of my heart—threw a steak on the grill for dinner, then got out of my sweats and into my jeans. Depending on the traffic and time of day, Tysons Corner is maybe forty-five minutes away from Rogue Manor. I did it in a half hour, and Kenny still beat me. He was sitting in a corner of the bar, sipping a double Manhattan classic when I came in.

  I suppose I should set the scene. Tysons Corner, Virginia, is a sprawling suburb just down the road from CIA headquarters at Langley. As far as I know, no river has ever flowed through there, so how the Riverside Bar got its name will have to remain an unanswered mystery, at least here. There are a lot of subdivisions in the area, though—miles and miles of them—along with office complexes and shopping malls. The town supposedly has more retail space than just about any city in the U.S., short of New York.

  The Riverside was a small, square building shoehorned into a triangular lot off Route 7. Most of the cars in the lot were Toyotas and Hondas, with an occasional Chevy or Ford family sedan and a smattering of pickups. The outside walls were lined with planks of varnished wood. To get through the lobby I had to fight my way through a forest of ferns and hanging plants; once past them I stepped down into a long, L-shaped room decorated to look like a marina a bit past its prime. Or maybe the bar was past its prime; I wasn’t sure. The place was about a quarter full, and most of the people in the place were watching the television sets tuned to a Bullets playoff game.

  When he was younger, Ken’s hair was bright, flaming red, which accounts for one of his nicknames. (“Indian.” You can work out the etymology yourself.) Now it was mostly gone, with a thin haze around the sides that looked almost blond in the bar’s dim light. His face looked thinner than I remembered, but he still had a boy’s smile that puffed up his cheeks and made him look like a first-year cadet on leave when he saw me.

  “Dick, come on and sit down.” He half rose, gesturing at the chair across from him.

  CIA directors tend to move with an entourage of security people and aides—George Tenet could have passed for a rap star with the size of his posse—but Kenny was here alone. He wore a college sweatshirt and a pair of raggy jeans; he looked like a plumber ducking his wife. I doubt anyone would have recognized who he was, much less guessed his profession. I shook his hand and pulled out the chair across from him.

  “Still drinking Manhattans?” I asked, pointing at his drink.

  “Stronger on the Vermouth as time goes on.” He looked toward the bar, signaling a waitress. “Bombay Sapphire for my friend,” he told her when she came o
ver. “And I’ll take a refill.”

  She gave me a big smile and walked away.

  “Mmmmm,” said Kenny, watching her go. “I wish I was twenty years younger.”

  “Don’t let age stop you,” I told him, laughing.

  “It’s not age. It’s the job. Good thing I’m divorced already.” Ken frowned, and temporarily turned his attention to the basketball game. I slid my chair back, scanning the bar.

  “No, I’m alone. No security detail,” he said. “No aides.”

  “No witnesses.”

  He smiled. “I take precautions. But here you and I are just old war buddies, shooting the shit. Right?”

  I nodded. The waitress appeared with our drinks. She had a green and red dragon tattoo that ran up the side of her right arm; the tail circled above her cleavage.

  “Where does the time go?” said Ken, holding his drink up. “It seems like only yesterday that I was going up the Mekong River, hunting for gooks.”

  I clicked his glass, but my BS detector was now pegged on high alert.

  “Funny thing happened to me the other day,” I said. “Kim Jong Il invited me to dinner.”

  “So I hear,” said Ken, taking a sip of his drink. “You going?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He is a big fan of yours.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “No, on the level. There’s a photo in one of our dossiers, showing him reading one of your books. I’d show it to you, but it’s classified.”

  “You don’t have to butter me up, Ken. What’s the story?”

  “I’d like you to accept Kim’s invitation,” said Ken, returning to point. “As a patriotic gesture.”

  “I’m supposed to be a goodwill ambassador to North Korea?”

  “Not entirely. It would be helpful to us. Very helpful.”

  “Maybe you better explain.”

  Ken leaned back in his seat.

  “What I am going to tell you is classified,” said Ken. “It gets repeated nowhere.”

  “No shit.”

  “I wouldn’t shit you, Dick. You’re my favorite turd.” Ken smiled, then told me what was going on.

  North Korea’s attempt to explode a nuclear warhead the year before—an attempt that did not quite succeed, but that’s a tale for another time—had convinced China that its ally not only could not be trusted, but had become a significant liability. It was now in China’s best interests for North Korea to disarm, and it had begun pressuring the North Koreans by withholding aid and shipments of food and oil. Reluctantly, Kim Jong Il had agreed to meet with China, the U.S., South Korea, and Japan to discuss disarmament.

  Our eavesdropping friends at No Such Agency, also known as the National Security Agency or NSA, had intercepted communications indicating that Kim Jong Il had directed his negotiators to get the best deal they could. Low-level government representatives had approached American counterparts and indicated the country was prepared to agree to terms. In short, North Korea had decided to really get rid of its nukes; it was just a matter of coming up with a plan we could trust and a price they would accept.

  All of this, at least in general detail, had been in the news. The columnists, talking heads, and bloggers all credited China and its naked blackmail for North Korea’s willingness to disarm. Good China, good.

  Of course if we’d threatened North Korea with starvation in the name of world peace, we’d be labeled pricks and worse.

  I’m not one to underestimate the value of blackmail, but Kenny had a theory about what was really going on that made a hell of a lot more sense. According to Ken, North Korea was willing to get rid of its nukes because it wasn’t.

  At least not all of them. It was willing to get rid of the two that scientists had calculated it could produce—and which it had privately admitted to China it possessed—but not the four it didn’t think anyone knew about.

  “They have six nukes?” I asked.

  “Seven and a half. Besides the two they’ve unofficially declared, there’s one at their testing facility, where they’re trying to figure out how to get it to blow up right. The half isn’t a bomb but material for a bomb located at Yongbyon where the reactor is. We know where all of those are. It’s the other four we’re concerned about.”

  “You’re sure there are four other weapons?” I asked.

  “We’re not sure of anything. But the information comes from someone who has been reliable. Obviously, we’re interested in gathering whatever other intelligence we can.”

  “You think Kim has them in his house?”

  “It’s not just a house, Dick. It’s a huge complex. Most of it’s underground.”

  Ken reached into his pocket and took out a satellite photo of a complex. The quality wasn’t fantastic—for security reasons it had come off a commercial satellite, not one of our military birds—but I could easily make out trucks and vehicles in the driveways.

  “This is Kim Jong Il’s new house north of the capital. The buildings that you can see are empty. The real house is underground. Deep underground—ordinary bombs wouldn’t reach it.”

  The U.S. had watched the construction, but the North Koreans had managed to shield much of it from the overhead satellites. The bunker was beyond the reach of normal sensors, even from the ground-penetrating radar generally used to map bunkers.

  “We have new technology coming online in two or three years which should be able to map it,” said Jones, “but we’d really like to know what it looks like before then.”

  “And you want me to take a house tour?”

  “Anything you can tell us would be useful,” said Jones. “How big it is, what the security arrangements are, possible vulnerabilities, that sort of thing.”

  “And check the bathrooms for nukes.”

  “Absolutely.”

  Ken took a sip of his drink. Manhattans are made with Vermouth and whiskey or, in a classic, bourbon. They’re usually topped off with a cherry, but Ken always asks the bartender to leave his out. He used to make a joke about having lost his cherry years before; now that he’s head of the CIA he probably doesn’t use the line anymore.

  “I don’t expect you to find them. I’m more interested in the size of the place, whether it’s possible that they’re there, that sort of thing. Now, if you did happen to find them . . .”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small pill-box.

  “This little doodad will tell us where you are if there’s trouble.”

  He flipped open the lid. Two very small, flesh-colored disks sat on a piece of black foam. I picked up the box and looked at them.

  “They connect together. They send a very long-wave radio signal that can travel through the earth. We can use that to pinpoint the location of the bombs. The first broadcast lasts twelve seconds. From then on, it fires up at random intervals for only a few seconds. It takes about a week and a half for the battery to die, depending on how often it transmits. It’s in that unit on the right.”

  He pointed to it, then described how the pieces were to be slipped together. Until they were connected, there was no power, no signal, and no way for the device to be detected.

  “A doctor I know can implant them behind your ear-lobes tomorrow,” said Jones, taking back the box. “They’ll itch for a few hours, then you’ll forget they’re there.”

  “Why did Kim Jong Il invite me, Ken? Did you guys set it up?”

  “No. We had nothing to do with it. I didn’t even know about the invitation until the morning briefing was being prepared today. State brought it to our attention.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “I’m sure we had information about it somewhere,” said Ken. “But just because we gathered it doesn’t mean the analysts looking at it thought it was significant. And it’s not. Except to me.”

  “Why bring me here? Why not to Langley?”

  Ken laughed. “And have a parade through the halls? Half the staff knows you. This isn’t an agency assignment. No o
ne else knows—not State, and not my operations people.”

  “Completely covert, huh?”

  “Something like that.”

  I’d realized from the start that Ken was working around the CIA’s normal chain of command; otherwise he would have brought me onto the headquarters campus. Meeting in a public place gave him absolute deniability—we were just two old war buddies knocking back drinks. He wouldn’t have had that excuse if he’d come to Rogue Manor. There could have been a dozen reasons why he wanted to do this off the circuit—for one thing, even the DCI had to deal with the company lawyers, who would review everything to death for weeks if not months before giving even the most routine matter their imprimatur.

  I didn’t pry; I’m used to working off the books. And I wasn’t sure whether Ken would give me a straight answer if I did.

  “I can understand why you wouldn’t want to do it,” said Ken. His voice was suddenly philosophical. “You’re famous, right? Getting out toward retirement age. Maybe past it, if truth be told. You’re past the point of taking risks.”

  “Don’t try to get me going with that reverse psychology crap.”

  “No, I’m being serious. Spying, covert action, war fighting—it’s a young man’s game. All us old farts have too much to live for. We can’t afford to be expendable. Too many people depend on us. Right?”

  I shrugged. Even back in the days when Ken and I were running around in Vietnam, people depended on us—he had a crew, I had a platoon. But we were still expendable. It came with the territory.

  “Because if you did this, you’d be expendable,” said Ken. “Absolutely expendable.”

  “What happens to the weapons when you find them?”

  “The president’s call.” Ken shrugged. “I don’t blame you, Dick.”

  “Blame me for what?”

  “For getting old.”

  I laughed.

  “But the thing that keeps pushing me,” he said slowly, “is the thought that Kim will sell one of these nukes down the road to somebody like Bin Laden. If I don’t find them and New York blows up, I’ll never be able to live with myself.”