RW03 - Green Team

by Richard Marcinko

  I used to charge fees like that and travel first-class, too. I got recalled—Ricky didn’t. Now, I’m a fugitive, and he’s still eating caviar. Well, more power to Herr General Ricky.

  After twelve hours and meager results, we took the train to Karlsruhe. Rodent rented a car and flew down the autobahn to Stuttgart, where he pried a few goodies loose from Patch Barracks. Meanwhile, since Azziz’s cash was burning a hole in my pocket, I bought us three old but fast BMW bikes, three sets of leathers, and the biggest saddlebags I could lay my hands on. Then, like the cast of The Wild Ones, we vroom-vroomed south, carefree tourists in search of regional cuisine. We hit Strasbourg (white wine, bread, sausage, and pâté), Dijon (red wine, bread, sausage, mustard, and pâté), Lyon (rose wine, bread, sausage, and pâté—do you sense a certain culinary repetition here?), then shot straight down the Rhône River, turned left at Châteauneuf-du-Pape (red wine, bread, sausage), and sped southeast onto the Riviera (topless bathers, topless bathers, topless bathers).

  The team linked up in Nice sixty hours later in a park facing the Promenade des Anglais, just across from the old Negresco Hotel. I was pleased to see that Wonder was driving a huge Mercedes sedan. Yes, they hide cars in some of the POMCUS caches, too. Thoughtful, isn’t it?

  We HQ’d at a no-star hotel just off the beach road, a klick and a half east of Beaulieu. The place was bare essentials—two racks per room, one sink, one bidet, a single ladder-back chair, and a dresser. But we didn’t mind, because Maman Soleil, who ran it, cooked herself silly in the postage-stamp-sized kitchen. The dining room was narrow and reeked of Gauloises and garlic, old cooking oil, and onions. The wine was stored in barrels. It all made my mouth water.

  I grew up on food like this, eating at Old Man Gussi’s kitchen table above the Italian restaurant where I worked. Big plates of family-style food—and don’t hold anything back. So we checked in, I peeled off six of Azziz’s fifty-pound notes, pressed them into Maman’s mains, and told her, “Nous avons les faims des loups, Maman—we gotta eat, Mama.”

  It didn’t take us long to discover where he was, because Beaulieu is a very small town, and Lord B had obviously established a routine. In the mornings he swam on his private beach—which told me that he had discipline, because the water was cold. In the afternoons he sunned, lying next to his heated pool, and in the evenings he and Todd drove to Monte Carlo in a bright red Ferrari, and he spent the night gamboling at one of the discos.

  The game was to remain low-profile. So we didn’t infiltrate and plant monitoring devices or passive audio sensors—Lord B had guard dogs, and taking a guard dog out tends to attract attention. Instead, we did things the old-fashioned way: we staked out his villa using three-man, radio-equipped teams that worked six-hour shifts, and the trio of BMWs I’d bought in Germany. One man watched from across the road, one from the east, and the last from the west. We discovered almost immediately that Lord B had houseguests. I drove over in the Mercedes, wandered onto the beach, and peered through binoculars. Guess what? I’d seen the guests before: Major Haji and Major Yusef, the Peter Piper proper pair of pickled Paks from the SF Club who’d met with Brookfield at his house in Hampstead. Two and two was adding up to four.

  It was easy surveillance. Thanks to Rodent and the POMCUS caches, we had night-vision devices and long-range glasses. Thanks to Mahmoud Azziz’s fat envelope of fifty-pound notes, we had Beemers. Even the location worked in our favor. Lord B’s place sat right on the beach. It had a long, narrow driveway of crushed stone, and an electronic gate. We discovered four closed-circuit cameras sweeping the grounds, Those posed no problem so far as we were concerned. The real security system was composed of three massive rottweilers, who roamed the grounds at will. The perimeter of l’Oasis bleue was a ten-foot wall whose top was encrusted with jagged shards of broken glass. There was a vacant lot to his east, and a villa full of Eurotrash to his west.

  We also kept a low social profile—although that was rough on my normally exuberant and perpetually pussy-crazed boychiks. But we managed. We did the majority of our eating and drinking at Chez Soleil—no hardship duty, believe me. We stayed away from cherchering les femmes at the discos and clubs. We paid attention to the job.

  And we even came across the unexpected. The second night, Duck Foot came back from tracking Lord B to Monte Carlo all excited. “Skipper—”

  I hoisted myself halfway out of my threadbare blanket. “This better be good, asshole—I was in the middle of a very erotic dream.”

  “The guy from Cairo—the Nubian.”

  “Huh?”

  “Remember I told you I saw an African guy with Azziz—a big asshole in robes? I trailed him to the Meridien, then he changed clothes and left for the airport?”

  If I didn’t remember, I did now.

  “Well, he’s Brookfield’s bodyguard. It’s gotta be the same guy.”

  That sat me straight up. Over my thirty or so years of shooting, looting, hopping, popping, prowling, growling, and other miscellaneous lethal activities, I have concluded that there are few coincidences in my professional life. The fact that Lord B and Mahmoud Azziz abu Yasin were connected only served to reinforce that judgment. I was glad the son of a bitch was dead.

  And now that I knew for sure Lord B was dirty, I wrote out his death warrant in my mind, too.

  On the fourth day of surveillance, Lord B deviated from his routine. Just after noon, he and one of his Pak houseguests drove into Nice with Todd at the wheel of a huge Jaguar saloon. They parked near the Negresco, then ambled down to the seaside, where they wandered aimlessly for half an hour along the Quai des Etats-Unis, and up into the shopping district. Except they weren’t wandering aimlessly. They were engaging in tradecraft to make sure they weren’t being shadowed. They doubled back on themselves, they hooked around corners, they peered in store windows to check reflections. They did all the things that experienced gumshoes do to make sure that they aren’t being followed.

  Then, after they’d checked, double-checked, and triple-checked, they walked up into the old section of the city, behind the Avenue Marshal Foch, and into a obscure couscous restaurant on a bustling side street.

  Inside, they were met by a tall, mustachioed man in a brown suede jacket worn over a loud-print sport shirt, impeccably pressed tan slacks, and woven Gucci loafers. He put his arm around Lord B’s shoulder and led him to a table. The trio ordered lunch, talking animatedly, as Todd stood in the doorway playing watchdog.

  I know all of this because Tommy and Howie had shadowed them into town, and Tommy, whose French was fluent, followed them into the restaurant. Lunch took an hour and a half. Tommy said that the couscous was as good as he’d ever eaten, and the carafe of vin du Provence was probably Châteauneuf-du-Pape. I didn’t give a shit about the food—what were they talking about, goddammit? That, said Tommy, he didn’t know. They all spoke in Arabic. But there was news: after lunch, Howie tracked Lord B back to his villa. Tommy stayed with the new guy. And guess where he went? He took the airport road and drove through the gate of the same goddamn Installation Nucléaire Numéro Douze where I’d played hide-and-seek when I was but a Froglet.

  That opened up a lot of possibilities—none of them very agreeable. For example, I knew from my SEAL Two foray on behalf of the CIA that Number 12 was indeed a breeder reactor that made weapons-grade plutonium.

  Oops. That’s probably still highly classified information. Please write a statement in the margin of this page that you won’t divulge Christians in Action’s little secret, sign your name at the bottom, then tear it out and sent it direct to: CIA, Post Office Box 12627, Rosslyn Station, Arlington, VA 22209.

  Okay, okay. I know that—just like my literate and proverbially skeptical editor—you’re asking why was I so suspicious. After all, all Lord B had actually done was have lunch with some Arab at a great couscous restaurant, after which, said Arab went back to work at the neighborhood breeder reactor.

  Well, gentle reader and skeptical editor, my suspicions were founded
on a number of confluent elements. First, no one engages in the kind of antisurveillance tradecraft Lord B had just engaged in without good reason. Second, he was traveling with a pair of Paks. Well, Pakistan is one of those Islamic nations currently in the final stages of developing a nuclear-weapons program. Third, all of the current crop of terrorist experts agree that the two major areas of concern when it comes to weapons proliferation amongst terrorist groups are (1) nuclear, and (2) chemical/biological.

  So a number of scenarios began to play in my head. None of them was very pleasant. For example, was Lord B about to bootleg a small but deadly amount of enriched uranium or plutonium so he could make his own nuke using Pakistan’s facilities? Perhaps he was planning to facilitate a transfer of verboten plutonium to the Paks and collect a tidy finder’s fee. Or maybe, being a tango at heart, he was about to plant enough explosives in Numéro Douze’s reactor to vaporize the coastline from Nice to Monte Carlo. The only way to find out what he was up to was to slip inside the plant, see what they had there, and then come up with a plan to neutralize whatever it was.

  I racked my mind to remember details about the reactor from SEAL Two’s mission, but to be honest, specifics were pretty fuzzy. All I remembered was that we’d approached from the water by swimming around the airport and infiltrated through a poorly protected fence line. No other details came to mind. Time does that, I guess—or Bombay. Maybe when I saw it again, I’d start remembering.

  What worked in my favor was the fact that no matter what part of the world they’re in, nuclear plants are all laid out with basically the same physical arrangement. There’s a perimeter fence. There’s an access facility—a gatehouse. There’s an administration building. There’s a storage facility. There’s a tank farm, where they keep fuel for the emergency cooling system and auxiliary power units. There’s a shielded waste facility, and there is the reactor building—a huge power block consisting of the containment building, where the reactor is located, the turbine building, where the turbines transform nuclear energy into electricity, an auxiliary building, where many of the backup cooling systems are located, and a huge cooling tower, where the superheated water is cooled down before it’s recirculated back through the reactor core’s steam generator.

  Moreover, since I’d been penetrating these types of military facilities around the world since I was an E-5 and Ev Barrett was putting his size-10 boondocker up my ass on a daily basis just to keep my mind sharp, I knew all about the security measures we’d be going up against—and they didn’t worry me in the least. Security—what there was of it—would be concentrated around the power block, the storage facility, and other operational areas. The rest of the grounds would basically be mine.

  In fact, the security around nuclear power plants—whether they’re in France, the U.S., or anywhere else—is not so very different from the security around most Fortune 500 corporate complexes, or government installations. Whether it’s General Motors, Texaco, Coca-Cola, Three Mile Island—or the White House—security concerns can be broken down into nine universal primary spheres of vulnerability.

  They are the perimeter, the communications system, the security detail, the command-and-control structure, the daily patterns of activity, the access and egress, the system of nomenclature (do you call the main entrance the Main Entrance or the Jones Street Gate—that’s important when you’re responding to an emergency), the amount of integration (or lack thereof) with the local authorities, and the mind-set of the CEO.

  All other vulnerability factors revolve around such variables as geography, the local laws, and the products involved, and these can be custom-tailored to exploit the situation in your favor.

  You’re asking what the hell I’m talking about. Okay, here’s a specific example—the nuclear power plant we wanted to infiltrate. I know about the nine universal areas of concern—and how to overcome them. So let’s now look at the attribute that makes this particular plant most vulnerable, and how to exploit it.

  The unique feature I’m talking about is the fact that this installation makes electricity using nuclear energy.

  What does that mean? It means that nuclear power facilities such as this one tend to design their security measures around a response-oriented defensive security strategy whose single objective is to deter radiological sabotage. The components include tall fences and locked gates, electronic sensors to guard against intrusion, cameras to observe the compound, and roving patrols.

  Defensive security is commonly fashioned around a five-part tactical plan:

  Detect and assess a penetration of the compound.

  Delay the attack.

  Respond with a counterattack.

  Clear the site of infiltrators.

  Secure operations.

  That may all look good on paper, but I can tell you from experience that in real life, the security master plan generally turns into a clusterfuck when it gets put to the test. Why? First, because the folks who run nuclear power plants don’t train their security details in proactive forms of response often enough. It’s expensive to do so. A truly thorough security op means securing the power block areas. Let me put that in English: shutting down the reactor becomes a real possibility. Just ask any power-company vice president if losing half a million bucks in revenue is something he likes to do on a regular basis.

  Moreover, because of what managers like to call safety considerations, they almost never allow their security teams to engage in live-fire exercises against moving targets. Somebody might get hurt and slap a lawsuit on the facility. Indeed, most security employees are never trained in aggressive tactics because of the possibility that if they were, say, to shoot some tango dead, the tango’s family would sue—and probably win.

  Last, most of the folks who walk the beat at nuclear plants make minimum wage or damn close to it. Why? Because aggressive, effective security of the human kind is labor intensive—and expensive. It demands that you manage well, motivate successfully, and bestow rewards for keeping your environment safe. Those things cost money—which often does not sit well with bureaucrats, managers, and boards of directors.

  So you end up with an absurd situation in which industry pays millions for sophisticated sensor devices, television monitors, electrified fences, and computer-operated gates, but only pennies to the rent-a-cops, high-school dropouts, and other assorted idiots hired to run those million-dollar goodies.

  (Airports are the same, incidentally—remember the fun I had at Narita in Rogue Warrior: Red Cell? The people who throw your baggage into the hold make two or three times as much as the folks who scan that luggage for explosives. You figure it out.)

  I satcommed back to Mick Owen, letting him know where I was, and giving him a brief dump on what I’d found. I requested a status report on my condition.

  Mick’s answer came back six hours later. It wasn’t optimistic. He had been told to shut down whatever was left of our joint tango-searching operation. The chain of command had informed him there was no immediate problem, and he was ordered to return to Hereford posthaste. He had no reason not to comply, so he was heading back. The SEALs I’d left behind in Britain were being sent back stateside. Nothing, however, would dim his commitment to me. He’d stay in touch and try to help as much as he could.

  As for my situation, the search had been widened now—Interpol had been asked to join the manhunt. So had the immigration authorities of all NATO countries. The name Marcinko was now enough to cause immediate arrest and detention in any of the NATO countries when it came up on a passport-control computer screen.

  The entire text could be summed up in three words: doom on me.

  Well, it wasn’t the first time that had happened. And I knew all too well there was only one answer to the problem: go on the offensive. Kick ass and take names.

  We sat down at maman’s long table. While we head-shedded, on a bu nos bouillabaisses à grand bruit and ate our baguettes and quaffed our vin du table comme les tous. The problem was to change our MO with
out altering the efficiency. Under normal circumstances, we would have hit Number 12 the same way Red Call had gone into all the other installations we’d ever attacked—creating a diversion (or diversions) and then infiltrating the areas where we wanted to leave our improvised explosive devices. But in this case, we had to get in and out without attracting any attention.

  We had to distract the security force’s attention, but do it in a way that wouldn’t let them know they were being hit. We had to get in, see what we had to see, and slip away leaving no evidence behind.

  That made for headaches. Believe it or not, it’s easier to shoot and loot than it is to sneak and peek. Just ask Duck Foot Dewey. During Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm, Duck Foot made twenty-nine one-man forays into Kuwait City to deliver communications supplies, explosives, and other lethal goodies to the Kuwaiti resistance, and to plant listening devices close enough to Iraqi headquarters so that allied intelligence was able to monitor many important conversations. He holds the Exalted Order of the Eastern Star, the highest honor the Kuwaitis can bestow. It was, in fact, pinned on his chest by Emir al-Sabah himself. Duck Foot’s mission was to get in and out without the Iraqis knowing he was ever there. That meant no killing the sentry who discovered him by accident, because he wasn’t supposed to be discovered at all. It meant leaving no evidence of any kind—physical, electronic, whatever. It was tough work, believe me. It takes longer to accomplish. And it puts a lot more pressure on the operator.

  Here, too, the job was going to be made more difficult because we couldn’t do any damage or leave any tracks. Frankly, that ain’t my style. See, I think of myself as a reverse engineer. You look at a nuclear plant, and you see a nuclear plant. Me, I look at a nuclear plant and I see the hundreds of ways I can destroy it. Turbines, condensate pumps, the radwaste system, the cooling network—they all exist solely so they can be demolished, annihilated, decimated, pulverized, by yours truly, Demo Dick Marcinko, Shark Man of the Delta.