Then there’s the countermeasures stuff. Since every bit of message traffic received by the U.S. Navy in the Atlantic or Mediterranean is CC’d here to CINCUSNAVEUR, there are tons of antieavesdropping equipment in play. And since the Pentagon knows all too well that diplomats love to read other people’s mail, the sixth floor is used by DIA as its E-mail hub for Western Europe, with messages coming direct from Arlington, or through the Naval Imaging Command at Anacostia Naval Station for dissemination to France, Germany, and Italy. DIA has its own set of antitheft devices in place.
Now you might think that, given ail of the above, CINCUSNAVEUR is an impregnable, hardened target.
Guess again. I’d done the equivalent of a preliminary recon during my few recent visits to the place—habit, y’know. There is a technical term for the security capabilities I’d noted. That term is clusterfucked.
The entrance is manned by a quartet of Marines, who’re sequestered behind a six-by-eight-foot cage built of seven-eighths-inch bulletproof glass. They look like fish in a barrel, which is exactly what they’d become if I came bursting through the two glass front doors and pulled a sawed-off twelve-gauge filled with six Kevlar-tipped sabot rounds followed up by two CS gas shells. There’s no fallback position for them; no way to seek cover and return fire. There’s also no way they can blockade the front of the building—no defendable chokepoint.
Entry is a turnstile—you insert your ID card in a slot, the gizmo reads the magnetic strip on the back just like a credit card, the turnstile turns, and you’re in. To exit, you do the same thing. Nobody checks the picture, nobody compares your name with a list of approved occupants.
Once you’re inside, you simply clip your ID card to your lapel or your belt, and you’re free to wander the halls as you please. Only on the fifth and sixth floors do they ratchet the security a notch or two—and even so, the ratcheting is really more rat shitting than anything else. On five, there are real locks on the doors. Real locks take more than thirty seconds to get through. And on six, there are Marines who actually glance at your ID card before they let you in the comm center.
Oh, yeah, sure, there are cameras in the hallways—but most of them don’t move. Of course there are cipher locks on the doorways—but there’s always someone coming or going, and all you have to do is wait just out of camera range and slip in just as Lieutenant Blivet Sphincter, USN, heads to the head. “Oh, gee, thanks, Lieutenant …”
Unbelievable, you say. Incredible, you exclaim. You mean to tell us taxpayers that the hub, the locus, the fucking nerve center of all the U.S. Navy’s European operations is lying with its legs wide open and ready for a real case of hurt-me, hurt-me screwing?
Yes, that’s absofuckinglutely what I’m telling you. Moreover, I was the perfect size-twelve Big Dick to do the deed.
But you shouldn’t fuck without foreplay. So first, we’d need two uniforms. One for Nasty, and one for Wonder. I had Nasty’s—the dress blue officer’s uniform Hansie had slipped to me would fit him easily. Wonder’s was another matter. We decided to make him a Marine, since he’d been one as a child.
That’s right—as a seventeen-year-old cannon fodder Force Recon Marine back in the early seventies, he won two Silver Stars for half a dozen classified missions in North Vietnam and Laos. On the second of them—ninety-two days behind enemy lines—he got blown off a mountaintop just outside Hanoi. He still has fragments of his neckbone coming loose from that roguish op. Last year, one of the smaller ones worked its way due west, coming out through the bottom of his left eye. At first, Wonder thought he had another bad hangover. That should give you some idea about his lifestyle.
Anyway, the asshole still speaks fluent Jarhead. So Duck Foot took his measurements, then scaled the drainpipe of the Marine House, which sits on Lees Place, a lightly traveled, narrow street about five hundred feet from CINCUSNAVEUR HQ. He popped through an open second-floor window and walked the halls. It’s amazing-even though the place has two video cameras outside, and Duck Foot made his approach in broad daylight, no one paid him any mind. Once he was inside, no one questioned his being there, even though he talked to half a dozen people.
Inconceivable, you say. No, it’s not. Security is the last thing anybody thinks about, because it interferes with creature comforts. Inspections or security checks are tiresome. Gates and bars make it hard for people to come and go. The last thing most base commanders want is a kick-ass security officer who’s always nagging about OpSec or perimeter control. So they let things slide.
Security details, for example, are most often made up of newcomers who don’t have assignments, or people about to transfer out. They don’t know—or care—what the routines are, or who should (or shouldn’t) be on post. At the Marine House, there may have been two cameras deployed. But they were pointed at the doorway, not the outside gate—so no one saw Duck Foot approach the building and scamper up the drainpipe. There were bars on the ground-floor windows, but the first- and second-floor windows were left wide open.
That sort of thinking used to make it easy for Red Cell—and it made stealing a uniform effortless for Duck Foot. So he walked the halls for three-quarters of an hour, browsing the goods. When he was satisfied, he picked out a 44-regular Alpha uniform—belted green jacket, khaki shirt and tie, thirty-two-inch-waist green pants (inseam thirty-four), black shoes, and barracks cover (size 7⅛, if you please)—from three first sergeants’ lockers.
In one of the double-rack bunks he discovered an ID card under a pillow. From the way things were packed up around the bedside, its owner was apparently on leave. How convenient. In another room, he boosted a pair of crossed-pistols badges—the ones worn by provost-marshal Marines—and pinned them on the lapels of the Alpha blouse. Now, Wonder worked for the judge advocate general.
While Duck Foot was shopping, Wonder betook himself to a barber where his Howdy Doody hair got trimmed down to a top buzz and whitewalls. I can tell you he wasn’t happy about that.
Bright and early the next morning, First Sergeant Stephen Noel Wonder sauntered into CINCUSNAVEUR HQ. The Marines in the fishbowl never gave him a second glance. His card worked the turnstile. He reconned the first-floor hallways, noting the positions of all the security cameras. He noted that my jacket photo from Rogue Warrior: Red Cell was posted at the visitors’ security desk, inside the Marine checkpoint, and over the doorway.
Wonder picked up a copy of the current command newsletter—the NAVEURACTCOMREP (NAVy EURope ACTivities COMmunication REPort), which thoughtfully provided a list of offices and phone extensions, as well as a report on all the command’s current extracurricular activities—trips and excursions, bus schedules to the joint base commissary down in Surrey, and a list of goods for sale. Every terrorist should have one. He took the elevator to the basement. He had a cup of coffee on the first-level cafeteria and read the newsletter.
Then he walked down the fire stairs on the north wing of the building to second level, where Nasty was being held. The subterranean cellar, built of hundred-year-old, painted brickwork, had the low arched ceilings and narrow, tunnel-like passageways common to Victorian architecture. Indeed, the basement was the oldest element of the building, comprising its original foundation. The tunnel between the two wings had been enlarged and reinforced during World War II to provide an air-raid shelter for Ike and his staff.
The holding cell in which Nasty was being held had been added after the war. It was a steel box measuring six by nine, with a sink and toilet built at the far end, and a narrow slab bunk down one side. There wasn’t even a lock—the door was secured by a simple latch arrangement.
The problem was, three Marines were on guard outside, and as a former member of the Corps, Wonder had qualms about killing them. “I don’t do Marines,” he said when he returned to the Guinea to brief me. “Maim, maybe. Kill—no way.”
I told him he was getting soft in his old age.
He told me, “Eat shit and bark at the moon, sir.” I was glad to see that he spelled it c-u-r
. I like consistency.
Wonder ran the probs and stats and we sat around head-shedding them.
Getting in—no problem.
Getting out—problem. Stat? Wonder’s card would get him in the front door. But to get Nasty out of the building, we’d need another card so he could go through the turnstile. Solution? Steal another card.
Marine guards—problem. Stat? Since killing them was not an option, the only thing to do was set up a diversion. Solution? Setting off the fire alarm was the most obvious. In buildings such as CINCUSNAVEUR, everyone has an assignment. You do not sit and twiddle your toes when the bell goes off.
But there might be other things we could do as well. To see what they were, I bundled my hair up inside a po’ boy cap, borrowed a big duffel coat from Eric, took a cab to the Marriott, which backed up against CINCUSNAVEUR, and walked the perimeter of the building to see what I could see. I may have been on Pinky’s 10 Most Wanted list (I may have been his entire 10 Most Wanted List), but the watchers I’d seen a day and a half ago were now gone.
Guess what: it is expensive to maintain full-court-press surveillance. Terrorists know this. That’s why they take their damn time so often. They can afford to wait us out. Anyway, my preliminary target assessment led me to be optimistic. The roof of the building and all its sensitive antennas, cables, and air-purification devices were completely unprotected. Moreover, it could be reached by entering the Marriott next door, taking the elevator to the top floor, breaking onto the hotel roof, and traversing from one building to the other—Infiltration 101 for my Red Cell veterans. There were no sensors or trip wires. There were TV cameras mounted at each corner, but they were pointed down at the street, not up at the roof surface.
I could fuck with the antennas easily—really screw up communications—but that wouldn’t draw the Marines from Nasty’s cell. Still, it would help draw attention away from the basement. The other thing I noted on the roof were the locations of the plumbing vents. I duly tallied them and made a mental note to buy some Saran Wrap.
At ground level, a huge sewer-pipe excavation was next to the northeast wall. The company doing the digging was aptly named the Murphy Co. The excavation itself was unprotected—it was covered with loose timbers and ran right up against the CINCUSNAVEUR foundation. All the better to leave a couple of bricks of Semtex or C-4 plastique. If I tamped it right, I could bring the whole fucking building down on itself using less than fifty pounds of explosive.
The possibilities for screwing with North Audley were endless. But it wasn’t my job to pull a Red Cell exercise—it was my job to get Nasty out of jail. So in the end, we kept it simple, stupid, because we discovered CINCUSNAVEUR’s Achilles’ heel—and we used it.
Behind the excavation, on the north side of the building, was a single, anonymous-looking white wood door. It was never locked. There were no TV cameras covering it. And guess what—it opened onto the main corridor of the HQ building. Walk inside, and you ended up in front of the elevators, safely past all the security turnstiles and checkpoints. And yet no one had checked you out.
What’s going on here? Why does the Navy’s most important facility in Europe have a completely insecure doorway?
Why? Because it’s the smokers’ door, that’s why.
Let me explain. New government health regulations state that all USG—that’s U.S. Government—buildings (with the exception of the houses of Congress and their office buildings) must now be smoke-free environments. So, what do all the newly ostracized smokers do? They find a convenient place to indulge their habit. In Washington, you can see them standing outside the main entrances of their departments, puffing away. Some departments have even installed huge, outdoor ashtrays for them.
In proper olde London, however, the CINC had decreed the main entrance to 7 North Audley off limits to smokers. His reason? He believed they didn’t look genteel standing there, puffing away. Not dignified and all that.
So, at CINCUSNAVEUR, smokers congregated in the alley just behind the HQ building. To accommodate these nicotine addicts, the alley door was always left open. Day and night. Twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week.
You think I’m writing fiction here. You’re sitting there saying, “They can’t be that dumb.”
Well, my friends, they are that dumb. This is for real—as insane and absurd as it may appear to be.
Okay, thanks to CINCUSNAVEUR’s suck-and-puffers, we now had a way to smuggle ourselves inside—Nasty back out—without going through the turnstile. I spent another half hour perusing the target, watching people come and go, noting the traffic flow and the pedestrians on the street. I concluded that our best chance of success lay in staging our op in broad daylight, using the hustle-bustle of rush-hour London to our advantage.
Half an hour later, I was back at the Guinea, drawing diagrams on big sheets of butcher paper and making assignments. Then Wonder slipped into his uniform, and he and Rodent marched up to North Audley Street, lighted up, then slipped inside the smokers’ door. Sixteen minutes later, they brought Nasty Nicky upstairs and walked him outside so he could enjoy the good Cuban cigar they’d brought for him. I watched from across the street, happy to see the relief on Nasty’s face.
Of course, two hours later, as Nasty was chugging his fifth pint of Young’s bitter at the Guinea, he complained that we’d taken too fucking long to come and get him. Wonder shut him up by offering to put him back.
The best med cruise I ever took was as a member of ev Barrett’s Second Platoon (we called it the Second-to-None Platoon) of UDT-22. We sailed aboard the USS Rushmore, a WWII-vintage LSD, or Landing Ship/Dock, that had originally been built for the Royal Navy. We visited Naples, where I’d served as a radioman. We visited Greece. We visited Turkey. And we spent a memorable two weeks on the French Riviera.
Most of the team stayed in Marseilles, eating bouillabaisse and rouille, and playing musical bordellos. I went east—I took the train to Cannes, and Nice, where I saw my first topless French beaches and got my first taste of the Gallic version of la dolce vita, played out at sidewalk cafés set on the wide seaside boulevards—Canne’s Croisette, or the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. I drank café au lait from the big, deep, bowl-like cups sans handles the French used to use and fell in ninety-six-hour lust with someone named Simone—or was it Nicole—who kept me up for all four days. Literally. Ah, youth.
Then, as CO of SEAL Team Two, I got to visit the Riviera once again. It was after Charles de Gaulle had pulled the French out of NATO. The ultranationalistic—some of us might say xenophobic—French were reluctant to share any information about their nuclear capabilities with their former allies. So SEAL Two, whose responsibilities in those days included Western Europe, was tasked with keeping tabs on our former NATO allies. That made perfect sense to me—send Frogs to check up on frogs.
Since I spoke both fluent French and fluent Frog, I volunteered myself to lead the mission. I took six men with me—one squad. We flew to Paris on different airlines, rendezvoused, spent a day getting our bearings, then took the overnight train to Nice. There, we rented two cars and posed as tourists. We ate well, drank well, fucked great, and had a terrific time driving around. We even saved the government money by bivouacking in one of the dozens of campgrounds that lie all along the southern coast.
We spent six days prowling and growling around a sizable nuclear power plant—Installation Number 12 was its formal designation—that sat on a small peninsula just west of Nice, on the far side of the city’s small airport. That sounds simple, but to actually take the pictures we had to penetrate the fence line, the power facility, and—most important—the nuclear-waste storage area.
We had two missions to accomplish: one tactical, one strategic. The tactical mission was the simpler of the two. It was to develop a plan to destroy the installation in the event of a Soviet attack. The contingency planners at NATO, who knew all too well the sorry history of French collaboration with the Nazis in World War II, did not want any French nuclear plant
s falling into Soviet hands.
The strategic mission, which was much more difficult, was to discover whether Number 12 was simply a generating plant—that is, used its fissionable material exclusively to produce electricity—or whether its reactor was actually creating more fissionable material than it used.
If it was, then the frogs had built what is called a breeder reactor. Breeder reactors create materials—such as plutonium and heavy water—that can be used to build nuclear weapons. Since we’d already been committed to sneaking and peeking anyway, Christians in Action had asked the Pentagon to have us answer that question for them while we were on-site.
Now, there are no more Soviets to worry about, but the ultranationalistic French still refuse to share any of their nuclear information with the rest of the world. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose—or, as we Yogi Berra Yankees say, it’s déjà vu all over again.
We’d had an easy exit from Britain. There was a cursory passport check, no customs, and no waiting as we filed through embarkation with the rest of the day-trippers heading for the cheap wines and farmhouse cheeses of the French port towns. Tommy, Duck Foot, Howie, and Wonder took the hovercraft to Calais, the boat train to Paris, and then headed east to Germany, to a POMCUS depot near Marburg where they’d do their shopping. Nasty, Rodent, and I hovercrafted across the Channel to Boulogne, then trained through Paris to Bonn. There, after the wurst lunch we’d had in days, I tried to contact my old comrade-in-arms (I used to call him the hotsy-totsy-fuck-you Nazi when we trained together), Herr General Ricky Wegener, who had led the top German CT unit, GSG-9, when I was CO of SEAL Team Six. But Ricky was nowhere to be found—he was probably consulting for one of the oil-rich sheikhdoms in the Gulf for his customary $2,500 a day plus expenses.
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