It was my hope that we’d come and go with such efficiency that Rodent wouldn’t need to hit the jammer’s ON switch. Still, there was no taking too many precautions. If the folks in the control room decided to call 911, I wanted to be able to squelch them. And, I rationalized, even if the jug-ears at NSA read our jamming signals, we might convince them and everyone else that we weren’t a bunch of rogue SEALs, but your friendly, everyday animal-loving Greenpeacers, who’d stolen USG equipment and tried to blow up a nuclear power plant with it.
Such thefts have happened in the past. In fact—let me digress here for just a minute—trading in military goods (everything from automatic rifles to top-secret radio equipment) is a burgeoning industry back in the U.S. National Guard armories are being pilfered regularly these days. Even active-duty bases are being ripped off. Not six months ago, some asshole stole six Colt 633HB submachine guns from SEAL Team One in Coronado. And at the most recent administrative inspection over at NAVSPECWARGRU 2—an admin inspection is when a team goes over every nut and bolt in the inventory—it was discovered that a Mark VII MOD 2 SDV, or Swimmer Delivery Vehicle, was missing.
Of course, things started to go wrong almost immediately. (The nasty little voice in my head said to me, “Of course you’re being goatfucked, you asshole—that’s how you know this is for real.”)
GF Factor One: both the air and water were colder than I’d anticipated, and it got colder still as we swam farther out. By the time we lined up with the seaward point of the peninsula, the water was no more than sixty or sixty-one degrees. The air was fifteen degrees cooler, and there was a wind as well. We were going to fucking freeze out there.
GF Factor Two: there was a wicked undertow, and the current—which I estimated at about a knot and a half—was running against us. No matter how hard we swam, we were basically doing little more than treading water.
GF Factor Three: Stevie Wonder is not a Frogman. Which means that swimming more than a mile is a real chore, so far as he’s concerned.
How cold were we? Well, at BUD/S—Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training—they figure that the stinking trainees, as they’re called, can last in sixty-five- to seventy-degree water for about twenty minutes, sitting down or dead-man floating. If the water is between sixty and sixty-five, the instructors are allowed to keep the class immersed for only fifteen minutes. Even so, you get so cold, the shivering drives you almost insane. You clench your fists. You bite through your lips. You piss on yourself—or your swim buddy—in futile efforts to stop the cold.
As I just said, tonight the water was probably somewhere around sixty-one. That is c-o-l-d, which is spelled a-b-s-o-f-u-c-k-i-n-g-l-u-t-e-l-y f-r-e-e-z-i-n-g. B-b-believe me. And were we miserable? I was so goddamn cold I thought I was back in hell week.
The only way to stay warm was to swim my heart out—a steady side-stroke rhythm that kept the muscles burning, the heart pumping, and the cold almost manageable.
That was fine until we’d been in the water about thirty-nine minutes and Wonder’s Achilles tendon seized up like an engine whose oil has just drained out. He went dead in the water and started to sink.
I heard his bitching cut off by a mouthful of Mediterranean.
Simultaneously, the twelve-foot swim-buddy line attached to my waist tugged. I swam back to him, brought him to the surface just in time to get hit in the face by another wave, slapped the water out of his mouth, spat water myself, and asked, “What’s up?”
His lips were whitewashed. In fact, there wasn’t a whole lot of color left in his face. But he put on his usual brave front. “Goddamn cramp.”
“Where?”
He told me. “It’s nothing. Don’t worry ’bout me—I’ll make it just fine.”
“Sure you will, asshole. Now fuck you—just relax. Float, breathe, and let me try to massage it out.”
“Don’t waste your time.” But he did as he was told. I worked his lower leg. “How’s that?”
“It hurts like a motherfucker.”
“How would you know?”
He wasn’t in the mood for banter. “Cut me loose, Dick—you go ahead. I’ll catch up.”
“No way, asshole.” I knew that to abandon him meant death by hypothermia. Without moving, or with reduced motion, Wonder had only half an hour or so until his body temperature started to drop precipitously. Normal body temperature is 98.6 degrees. Lose six of those degrees, and your speech starts to slur. Lose seven, and you start forgetting things. Lose eight, and you don’t give a shit what’s happening to you. Lose nine, and your eyes start to glaze over. Lose more than ten, and you begin a long, often irreversible slide to coma and brain death.
Of course, in Wonder’s case, he’d been dead from the neck up for so many years, it would be hard to tell when he actually became comatose. But I knew I’d miss the son of a bitch if he kicked off on me. Who would I pick on? Where would I ever find another Ted Koppel/Howdy Doody look-alike? Besides, Wonder had killed more people in and out of combat than anyone except me, and I liked the thought of keeping him around as an example to others. So I told him to lie back and enjoy the ride.
So I huffed and I puffed, and we were both more dead than alive when we finally struggled ashore after an hour and thirty-eight minutes in the water. I grabbed the radio from the bag and signaled to let everybody know we hadn’t drowned and that we’d go on “hold” until I was ready. Then I dragged him up the shoreline well back into the dunes, where the strong seaward wind would be broken by thick sea grass and thistle. Damn—he didn’t look good.
I checked his eyes. They’d rolled back into his head. I slapped his face until he came to, sort of. I dried him off as best I could, rolled him onto his stomach, smacked the water out of him, got him into dry clothes, then lay on top of him to warm him up.
After fifteen minutes he started to come around. He groaned, moaned, coughed up another pint of seawater, then passed out again. We lay there for another quarter hour. I could begin to feel the warmth coming back to his body. Finally, he began to move.
“Stay where the fuck you are,” I told him, snuggling closer. “This feels good. In fact, if you had tits on your back, I’d marry you tomorrow.”
“Eat shit and bark at the moon.”
It was good to know he was recovering. I rolled him over, rubbed him down, and we began to unpack the waterproof bags. Shit—time was a-wasting, and there was work to be done.
0419. We were now more than an hour behind schedule. But we were all back in business. Wonder and I crawled up to the perimeter fence line. We went up and over, sans problems. Now it was on to barrier number two. We began lobbing rocks into the sensor field. Right on cue, the sleepy security man stumbled out of his shed and began searching the path between the two fence lines. Obviously, he found nothing. We made him repeat his performance three more times. When he didn’t show on our last effort, we began to move slowly, deliberately, to the fence line.
I went over first, moving inch by inch up the chain links, over the three strands of barbed wire, and down the other side, until I was positioned six inches off the ground in a spread-eagle stance that made me look like Spider Man. Then it was Wonder’s turn. He made the same deliberate moves up and over.
0432. I began moving toward the second fence, erasing my tracks with a branch as I walked backward. Slowly, deliberately, I crossed the sensor field inches at a time. Despite the temperature—it was in the low fifties—I was sweating heavily. Now, up the opposing fence. Wonder followed me, a step at a time, twenty-five yards away.
0436. We were both up and over. I radioed that we were inside and got a signal from my two other teams that they, too, had made it without incident.
Wonder and I cut behind the tank farm and headed toward the cooling tower and the back of the BURT, pausing to slap three or four
FOUTEZ LES NUKES stickers on the sides of the white, round one-hundred-thousand-liter fuel tanks. The perimeter fence line at Number 12 encircled more than six hundred acres. We were concerned, h
owever, with no more than fifteen of them—the part of the facility with controlled access, where Marcel Mustache could do Lord Brookfield some good.
Just behind the tank farm was the huge, poured-concrete cooling tower, where the spent steam was chilled back into water, so it could be pumped back into the system and recirculated. We hopped a ledge and peered at the ass end of the power-block control facility.
Wonder’s right hand went to nine o’clock. I followed his gesture. There were two cameras at the block-house/cooling-tower juncture. I gave him a thumbs-up. We could circle to the right and they’d never see us.
I moved down the ledge. Wonder shadowed me. As we came up on the BURT, I saw a shadow move amongst the shadows. I came to a full stop and silent-signaled Wonder to do the same. He’d already done so. That was another reason for not letting the asshole drown. We’d been operating together for so long now that we virtually never had to talk, or even signal. We read each other’s body language—every nuance, every twitch, blink, and heartbeat.
Today, every FNG—that’s Fucking New Guy—lieutenant coming into SEAL Team Six is so pumped up and full of himself he thinks he’s got to teach his squad how to do everything all over again. Well, they’re usually full of something, believe me. Fact is, most of the chiefs at Six have been on the job for more than a decade. A couple have been there since the beginning.
What new lieutenants should be doing is S2—Shutting the fuck up and Sitting the fuck down, and hoping their platoon chief takes pity on them and teaches them a thing or two. That way, they won’t break right when they should be breaking left; they won’t angle into the wrong field of fire and kill their own men; and they won’t wreck the unit integrity that the platoon chief has spent all his fucking time building.
Maybe, after two or so years of operating with the same eight or sixteen men, the FNG officer will get the picture and actually become part of the team. Now here’s the rub—the chances of that actually happening run from slim to none.
Why? Because in these days of downsizing and reduced budgets, Naval Special Warfare has become a primo place to serve. There are lines of Annapolis grads waiting to get into BUD/S. In fact, there’s such a glut of SEAL officers these days (there are more than one hundred-and-ten men for every one hundred slots), that FNG lieutenants don’t spend more than fourteen months with a platoon. Then they’re rotated out so a new FNG officer can come aboard. Bottom line? No-shitter truth? The platoon may achieve unit integrity, but most of its young officers won’t ever do the same, because they simply aren’t around long enough to learn how to operate at the same level as the men they are allegedly supposed to command.
And the men know it. So, do you think they listen to what FNG lieutenants say? Fuck, no. They know the officers are cannon fodder anyway, because their operational skills are nowhere near the level of the enlisted men’s.
When I commanded SIX, I stole my FNG ensigns and lieutenants right from Organized Chicken Shit—which is how I refer to Officer Candidate School. I told ’em they were FNGs—bottom of the fucking barrel cannon fodder. I told ’em they were lower than whale shit, that they didn’t deserve to lick the sweat off a Team master chief’s balls.
“But here’s the fucking deal,” I told them. “If you don’t flunk fucking lunch, and if you learn how to lead from the front, and if you never ask your men to do anything you don’t fucking do first, and if you’re fucking committed to the goddamn Team before anything else, then welcome aboard—you’re gonna be an integral part of a unit with unit fucking integrity. If you don’t want to play by those rules, then fuck you very much, and good-bye.”
And guess what—when I commanded SEAL Team Six, the FNG ensigns and lieutenants were part of the solution, not part of the problem. Today, those FNGs have gone on to command SEAL Teams of their own. And—doom on you, Navy—they’re my own fifth column of guerrilla SpecWarriors, teaching their men the way I taught them, fighting the system, preaching unit integrity, allowing their junior officers to learn, learn, learn the ways of killing and of making war. Endeth the lesson.
A roving patrol came around the corner of the BURT. Two rent-a-cops from the look of ’em, although since this was France, they were probably fucking government bureaucrats, because these plants were all RDF—République de France—property. They didn’t even have radios. Over their shoulders hung the six-inch-in-diameter, leather-cased punch clocks that bargain-basement watchmen all over the world seem to carry. You’ve seen ’em—you make your rounds, and at each post there’s a key, which you insert in the bottom of your punch clock and turn. It imprints the station number on a circular disk, so your supervisor knows you hit station X at X o’clock. Whether or not you saw anything amiss is not part of the equation. You were there, that’s the important thing. The check has been made on the list. One of the rent-a-cops carried an ANPDR-56 rad meter—a basic indicator for alpha radiation.
My instinct was to TTS—Tap ’em, Tie ’em, and Stash ’em. I slid the sap out of my sock and silently edged forward. Wonder caught my eye. He shook his head and gave me a vigorous thumbs-down.
What the fuck. Why was he denying me my fun? I shook my head at him as if to say, “Negatory.” Then, all of a sudden, I realized what he’d gestured. Four more security types strolled round the corner. He’d seen them coming from his vantage point.
Okay—we’d wait ’em out. I dropped flat on top of my waterproof bag. Stevie was already pancaked. We waited while the frogs passed out cigarettes—Gitanes, from the horse-manure smell of them—and lighted up.
They smoked and gossiped, field-stripped their cigarettes, then moved on. Wonder and I moved on, too. We circled the BURT. No way we could get in there. The place is sealed tight from the inside—no doors, no vents, no nothing. It’s built out of six feet of solid concrete, lined with five inches of solid steel. To get inside the reactor compartment, you first have to slip into specially made protective coveralls, which you pull on inside a secure “mud room” that sits next to the control room. Then you pin a dosimeter on, to make sure you won’t get too many REMs. A REM, for those of you who never took Nuclear Physics 101, is an acronym for Roentgen Equivalent in Man—the quantity of ionizing radiation whose biological effect is equal to that produced by one roentgen of X rays.
Anyway, once you’ve been checked out, you pass through three separate remote-controlled, airtight steel doors to the reactor. You can carry nothing larger than a fountain pen inside, and you can bring nothing out. Not even Marcel Mustache could hide something in there without twenty-five people watching him do it.
Which left the radwaste facility as the most likely spot. We made our way behind the BURT, skirting the floodlit back side of the power block, and crossed under a series of huge pipes to the long waste storage area.
The building was built in two sections. The first was a huge, open-fronted shedlike affair that held the detritus common to all industrial sites. There were empty tanks that had held nitrogen, oxygen, and acetylene. There were pyramids of rusting fifty-five-gallon drums that had once contained solvents, cleaning agents, and lubricants. There was old machinery and scrapped equipment.
The other section was a secure warehouse that held all the radioactive waste generated by the plant. Inside would be fifty-five-gallon drums of heavy water, as well as shielded containers holding the reactor’s spent fuel rods. These would all be stored under water, in a fifty-yard-by-twenty-five-yard pool.
It occurred to me that the radwaste facility would be the perfect spot to cache something you didn’t want found and still have it in plain sight. People tend to stay away from radiation waste facilities because the chance of contamination is so much higher there than in any other portion of the installation. In fact, to make sure that radioactivity is not seeping out through the ground or the air, the installation is ringed by ARMS—an Area Radiation Monitoring System of active gamma-ray detectors that trigger 135-decibel Klaxon horns if they sense a dangerous level of radiation.
Wonder and I prob
ed the shed. We discovered nothing out of the ordinary—in fact, judging from the dust and cobwebs, no one had been around for quite a while. So we moved on. The radwaste building beckoned.
Wonder reached in his back pocket for his trusty lockpicks. “Damn, Holmes, this makes me nervous. I don’t wanna glow in the dark.”
“We won’t be inside more than a few minutes. We’ll be perfectly all right.”
“I’d feel a lot better if we had coveralls and booties.”
Well, I would have, too. But we didn’t have any, and I wasn’t about to go looking for some right now. “Listen—if you’re lucky, you’ll grow a third ball in about a month.”
“Maybe I’ll grow a second cock, too.”
“Sure you will—right in the middle of your fucking forehead. Just think, Wonder—you’ll be able to provide a whole new definition to the phrase giving head.”
“Fuck you.” It didn’t take him more than twenty seconds to open the door. We slid inside.
It was like walking into a tropical climate. The place was dimly lit with greenish fluorescent lights that hung high above the storage pool. The walls were bare, except for a series of freshwater hoses set fifteen yards apart, provided so that if workers got drenched with radioactive material or water from the storage area, the hoses could be used to wash them off until they could be more thoroughly decontaminated. From the water, heated to over a hundred degrees by the canisters of spent fuel rods, steam rose. It was as if we’d walked into a hothouse.
I took one side, Wonder took the other. We explored the drums and containers on the concrete skirt. All were marked with the bright yellow nuclear-materials symbol. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. As we moved to the center of the warehouse, I could see the lethal radioactive containers at the bottom of the pool. The luminescence of the water made it shimmer, giving it an ethereal, other-worldly quality.
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