RW16 - Domino Theory

by Richard Marcinko

  Back at the base, we were doused with fire hoses before entering the building. A half hour in the shower later, we all smelled … like dog plop. Unfortunately, that was an improvement.

  While we were taking in the smells of India, Junior had supervised a thorough search of the warehouse and its ruins. The cartons contained two dozen AK47s, a few Uzi submachine guns — oldies but goodies — and some Russian grenades so caked with grease and dirt that they must have dated from before World War II.

  In the stacks of assorted clothes, he found two police uniforms, both freshly laundered. He also found a small stash of well-worn rupees, enough to buy everyone on the raid Chinese takeout for a week.

  No papers, though, no computer. No obvious trail to the people who had set these guys up.

  And no escaped prisoners.

  There were, however, two cell phones.

  Hold that thought.

  * * *

  Junior and the others repaired the warehouse as well as they could, setting pieces of the wall back in place so it didn’t look quite as demolished as it really was. Then, with the help of some small, inexpensive video cameras and a Web feed, they set up surveillance on the area. A group of men were posted nearby, well out of sight.

  In the meantime, Captain Birla went about trying to get information from the men we’d grabbed. This time the interrogation procedure was direct and immediate. The prisoners were not allowed to rest, much less sleep.

  The results were mixed. Two of the men were actually cooperative, or at least willing to talk. They claimed to have been recruited for jihad three years before.

  Both were residents of the Punjabi area of India, close to the Pakistan border. Disillusioned with life, they had been recruited at the local mosque by a fellow worshipper who claimed to know how people could make a real difference. Eventually, they made their way to Pakistan, where they were educated at a school similar to the one we had raided. After that, they had gone farther north into the tribal lands bordering Afghanistan, and done time with the al Qaeda–supported Taliban.

  This was an apprenticeship, a testing time to see how loyal they’d be. Once they passed, they were brought to a finishing school — a training camp where they learned somewhat more advanced ways of blowing people up.

  Both men had gone to college; one had an engineering degree, the other had majored in comparative literature. In many cases, a recruit’s specific skills are exploited by terrorist groups, but at least according to their narratives, these weren’t.

  What? You understand how the engineer’s skills could be used — if you can put things together, you can learn how to blow them up. But how does a lit major use his ability?

  Language can be an invaluable skill in a place like India. Being comfortable with English can be a passport not just into the business world, but government as well. Embassies need locals comfortable with the language to function.

  Proficiency in language isn’t just a matter of knowing nouns and verbs, and when to use a participle. A man or woman who can understand idioms is a rare commodity in many places. Take our tango and put him in Kenya, say, where an Indian would be almost above suspicion, and he could practically run the place inside six months.

  Fortunately, whoever was calling the shots in this case didn’t do that. Instead, they sent both men here two weeks before to await further orders.

  Neither man knew who had sent them. To hear them tell it, they had not been part of the operation to free our prisoners. In fact, they seemed to know very little about it. The night of the prison break, they had seen several men they hadn’t seen before at the warehouse. But the men had left the next afternoon.

  So why were they in Delhi?

  They claimed to have no idea.

  Captain Birla was convinced they were holding back.

  “We will use more aggressive tactics, Commander Rick,” he assured me. “We will find the information.”

  I wasn’t so sure. Everything we’d seen indicated that the people we were dealing with were on the extreme side of the organizational scale.

  In fact, they were so tightly organized, it seemed a wonder that any intelligence had been developed on them at all.

  * * *

  The third man refused to even give his name. He was the swift one who’d bolted into the garbage train. I guess if you could stand the strain of the refuse, you could deal with anything Special Squadron Zero threw at you.

  Captain Birla wanted to waterboard him.

  I said we should let him go.

  “This is crazy talk,” said the captain, shaking his head. “Rogue Warrior gone soft? Are you crazy?”

  Crazy, yes. But there was a method to the madness. We had no leads. If we let him go — and followed him — the odds were that he would take us to more members of the cell. That might be back in Pakistan. Or it might be here in Delhi. In either case, we’d have a lot more information than we had now.

  “To follow a man in Delhi, not easy,” said Captain Birla. “If we lose him, a great scandal.”

  “First of all, you’re not going to be in any more of a scandal than you already are,” I told him. “There can’t be more political pressure on you than there is now. Second of all, no one in the government knows you took these guys yet. We turn over two rather than three? Who’s to know? The prisoners have been isolated from each other. They saw this guy run. The don’t know that we grabbed him. And even if they did, who would believe them?”

  Captain Birla was pretty troubled by the idea. Beating the asshole to a pulp, maybe scraping the skin off his scrotum layer by layer with a rusty razor blade — that would have been OK. But letting him go and following him through Delhi?

  Too risky.

  “We’ll plant a bug on him that helps us follow him,” I explained. “He won’t get far.”

  Captain Birla frowned. I hadn’t told him about the bugged prison clothes; that would have been a good argument against my plan. But in that case, the bugs had been planted as a precaution so the men could be tracked through the Indian prison and intelligence system. I was thinking of something much more effective.

  “Where would you put a bug that he could not undo it?” asked Birla. “Or it would not be discovered?”

  “Plenty of places, if we had the time,” I told him. “But since we don’t, we’ll have to improvise.”

  “I do not like improvising.”

  “Trust me.”

  The captain sighed. “I am in your hands,” he said finally. “What do we do?”

  “First thing we do is step on his foot.”

  * * *

  Actually, crush his toes.

  I did the honors. I owed him something for that stroll through the garbage.

  We played it very straight. He was fetched from his cell and walked down to one of the interrogating rooms. He was wearing a hood, mostly so he couldn’t identify anyone later on, but it also added to his general disorientation.

  One of the Special Squadron interrogators started barking at him as soon as he was in the room. The prisoner did his usual silent act. We let that go on for a few minutes, pretty much following the routine already established. He was standing, not allowed to sit — there were no chairs for him to use anyway.

  Tired, he started to slump. I went over to him. The interrogator demanded to know if he was going to answer. When the man didn’t, I planted my boot on his shoeless big toe.

  It hurt. It had to. Hell, it hurt me.

  Give the bastard credit. He didn’t whimper. He started to fall back, but the guard shoved him straight up. He stood, ignoring the pain.

  He was brought back to his cell. A few minutes later, the overhead light that had been on ever since he arrived was turned off. The blaring, hideously obnoxious Indian rap music that had been pounding the cell walls went silent.

  Another half hour passed. A kindly doctor arrived. He removed the hood, examining the prisoner with the sort of gentle hand and easy bedside manner you can only find on obscure reruns of Marcus
Welby, M.D.

  He asked, in English, if the man’s toe hurt.

  The prisoner frowned, but then nodded.

  “For the pain,” said the doctor. “Morphine. See? You’ll sleep.”

  Finally, the man showed fear. I don’t think he was worried about being brain-washed — I think he didn’t like needles.

  That’s fear we all understand.

  He winced, but the shot was easily administered. The doctor positioned him back on the cot, then began to clean the outrageously stubbed toe.

  The bottle was morphine, but what had been in the needle was a double dose of Demerol, and the fatigued prisoner quickly fell asleep. The doctor administered a dose of Novocain, dulling the nerves in the toe, then took out a scalpel.

  I had to turn away from the monitor. Something about toenails sends shivers up my spine.

  It was over in five minutes. Doc came out of the cell and met me at the end of the corridor.

  Yes, our Doc, aka Al Tremblay. One of the last medical people in the world to still make house calls. Or cell calls, as the case may be.

  “Planted it right under the toenail,” he said. “It’s working.”

  “Is it going to last a week?”

  “Not my department. Talk to Shunt. Or Junior.”

  The tracking device was about the thickness of a nickel card and the size of a quarter. It wasn’t exactly something you’d miss if it was implanted in your body, but under the battered nail it just looked as if the entire toe was bruised. Glued back, the only way to get it out would be to operate. As another precaution, Doc had layered the foot with bandages, and applied more local anesthetic.

  Using the body as a kind of antenna, the device transmitted a pulsing signal through a radius of about two kilometers. The bug’s greatest limitation was its battery, which had to be relatively small. According to the specs, it would last fourteen days, but I knew from experience that if we could get a whole week out of it we’d be doing well.

  (The tracking bug wasn’t quite state of the art — I’m told the CIA has better ones — but it was as good as the techie people at Law Enforcement Technologies in Colorado could do, which is damn high praise. Yes, I’m well acquainted with their work. Being on their board has certain advantages.)

  * * *

  The second phase of my plan began a few hours later, when our guest was woken from his slumber by two men in police uniforms and told to come along. He complied groggily. Only his hands were bound, and the police officers even asked if he wanted a wheelchair.

  He declined. By now we had given him a nickname — Igor. Given the way he stiff-legged through the corridor, it seemed pretty appropriate.

  The two other prisoners were also being moved. Their legs were chained, and unlike Igor, they were wearing hoods.

  Two police cars and a van were waiting for them. Igor reached it first. One of the policemen put his hand on his head and started to duck him into the back. As he did, a bomb exploded nearby.

  Shouts, confusion, cursing followed. Then more shouts, more confusion, more curses.

  Gunfire. Lots of it.

  Igor kept his head down. He started to crawl away. One of the policemen saw him, grabbed his legs, and began pulling him back to throw into the van. But before he got very far, a stream of bullets hit his chest. Blood spat everywhere and he tumbled to the ground.

  It was a dramatic death. Sergeant Phurem was a bit of a ham, I’m afraid.

  Two terrorists with AK47s ran up from the side building, spraying the area with lead. Igor managed to squirm to his feet and ran to them. The terrorists, who were wearing Arab-style scarves as masks, pushed him behind themselves and continued their suicide attack.

  Then the van blew up. A giant fireball shot into the sky, flashing red and black in a pyrotechnical display that would have put many small-town Fourth of July celebrations to shame.

  “You really have to cut back on the Semtex,” I told Mongoose as we watched from our truck.

  Igor, seeing no one at the gate, made his break. He ran straight out the front entrance, down the access road, and disappeared into a large field.

  Disappeared from view, I should say. Mongoose and I were watching his progress on a laptop computer screen. Shotgun, in a truck with Doc on the other side of the field, was doing the same.

  He got about fifty yards into the field and then stopped moving. I guessed he was trying to undo the ziplock handcuffs behind his back.

  “Maybe we should have undone his hands for him,” said Mongoose.

  “Then we’d rob him of the great sense of achievement that he’ll feel when he frees himself,” I said.

  * * *

  Surveillance is a mostly boring, generally thankless job. You sit around waiting and watching, hoping something will happen and generally praying that it won’t. So let’s skip the afternoon and evening’s worth of surveillance, during which the boys and I played follow the roaming tango, and skip over to see what Junior was up to.

  When last we’d left Mr. Matthew Loring, he was examining two cell phones found in the terrorists’ lair. Everyone knows that cell phones can be tapped and tracked. The trick is to avoid having that happen to you and, if it does, to minimize the risk that any one single episode will signal your downfall.

  There are a variety of ways to do this. One of the most common is to buy prepaid or so-called pay-as-you-go phones or their sim cards, use them for a bit, then toss them. (Sim cards are the little chips that are like the phone’s brains. They’re tied to a specific phone number, so losing them is the same as losing the number.)

  But prepaid phones are not a panacea. They, too, can give away a lot about the people using them — if you know where to look.

  Junior went back to our private hotel and went to work. The first thing he did was check and see if the phones had been used. Phone A hadn’t. Phone B had been used to place a call to another phone with a Delhi area number. That gave him one lead.

  He then went to work tracking down where the phones had been bought. Over the last few years, many countries have adopted laws that require some form of identification to be given when phones or sim cards are sold — they’re trying to cut down on the phones’ use by criminals and terrorists. That’s met with mixed success. There are plenty of places to get phones without showing any ID or having to pay with a credit card or something else that could be traced.

  These phones, as Junior expected, had been purchased at one of those places. But he was able to track them to a wholesaler who had apparently supplied them.16 Interestingly enough, though I guess not ultimately surprising, it was a legitimate wholesaler in Delhi.

  There were a few ways Junior could have gone at that point to develop further information. He decided on a direct approach. He went to the wholesaler and told him he needed a dozen untraceable phones.

  The operation was a smallish warehouse near the airport. It wasn’t set up for retail, but it did have a receptionist, who gave him a cross-eyed look when he told her what he wanted.

  “We do not do that,” she told him. “We are not a retail store.”

  “You’re very attractive, you know,” he told her.

  The girl furled her eyebrows.

  “I know you can help me,” he said. He bent over the desk, smiled, and gently took the pad from in front of her. “Have someone call me at this number.”

  He wrote his cell number on the pad. Then, after an exchange of significant eye contact, he walked out.

  A half hour later, his phone rang, and he was instructed to return to the warehouse to meet a Mr. Joad. Junior thinks it was his flirting that got the receptionist to prod her boss; more likely it was the hundred-dollar bill he dropped on the counter as he turned around. In any event, he was soon back at the warehouse.

  The girl, to Junior’s disappointment, was gone. In her place was a large, smiling man in a flowered silk shirt. He smiled as Junior came in, nodded, then raised his arm to reveal a Beretta.

  “Your money and your passport for y
our life,” said the man.

  “I must be in the wrong place,” said Junior. He took a step backward, but found his way barred by another man, not quite as big as the first, though his rifle was twice the size as the other’s pistol.

  “You are definitely in the wrong place,” answered the man behind the desk, rising. “That is why you will hand over your wallet and your passport.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  The man in front of him smiled. The one behind him swung his rifle butt first toward Junior’s head.

  * * *

  If Junior were telling this story, I imagine what happened would go something like this:

  I heard a rustle as he swung the gun up. I ducked quick, spinning at the same time. I caught him in the gut, flipped him over my shoulder, and grabbed the gun.

  I could have plugged the prick behind the desk with a few rounds, but I needed them both alive. So instead I just shot the gun out of the asshole’s hand, then gave him a good smack across the mouth to show him who the hell he was dealing with.

  But Junior’s not telling the story, I am. And I like to be somewhat accurate. So here’s what really happened:

  The thug behind him swung and connected, smacking Junior halfway into next week. He somersaulted across the room, crashing into a stack of phones that had just arrived from assembly in Bangladesh. At that point, the two men hauled him to his feet and began wailing on him, taking turns smacking and punching his dazed frame.

  This could have gone on for quite some time, had a shotgun blast over their heads not gotten their attention. The goons turned around to see Trace Dahlgren standing near the door, a shotgun packed with birdshot in her hand.

  “Next round takes your balls off,” she promised.

  Unfortunately, the man on the left didn’t believe her.

  He took a step, then crumbled to the ground as Trace fired point-blank into his midsection. The shotgun had been loaded with rock salt — it wasn’t going to kill him, but it sure didn’t feel good. He whined and whimpered in a very high-pitched voice.

  Junior pulled himself off the floor where he’d been dropped.