RW16 - Domino Theory

by Richard Marcinko

  That was counterbalanced by another invitation to accompany her to a diplomatic reception planned for the following evening at the British ambassador’s residence. This was a high-level to-do, with all of the government’s big shots and even some Bollywood superstars expected to attend.

  Vina really wanted to attend, and in fact undertook a special shopping mission to obtain just the right dress. Mongoose wasn’t exactly looking forward to it, to be honest, since it was black-tie formal. But as a show of true love, he went down to the hotel tailor and had himself fitted with a rental tux.

  Amazing what nookie can do to a guy.

  * * *

  More from Junior’s after-action report:

  I knew from my recce during the early afternoon that the area where the boxcars were was exposed to observation from all sides. So rather than trying to sneak in unseen, I decided to make it obvious that I was there, creating a pretense that would explain my presence.

  During the morning I’d met some international students at the café. Some of them had mentioned a party that evening in a building on campus. That gave me an idea — why not have a party by the water?

  I started spreading the word immediately after returning from my trip to the water. It was going to be a great party — you name the substance, it would be there.

  My plan worked even better than I had hoped. I got down to the waterfront around 2300. There must have been five dozen kids milling around in the area. There was a very sweet, herbal smell in the air, and a few girls were showing off some yoga poses on the rocks.

  It was hard to tear myself away from that, but I did finally, grabbing a free beer from a cooler someone had brought along and meandering over to the boxcars.

  Remembering our experience in Delhi where the boxcars had been welded shut, I had taken along a battery-powered Sawzall with an extra battery pack and a case of blades. I also had a heavy-duty lock cutter. But the tools turned out to be unnecessary. The door on the first car I checked wasn’t locked. With little difficulty, I pushed it open and went inside.

  It was empty. No helicopter.

  The car smelled like fuel. Something had leaked onto the floor of the car. I thought it was jet fuel — the Ahi runs on JP — but I couldn’t be sure. I dug out a few pieces of saturated wood with my knife and stuck them in my backpack. Then I went and checked the other car. That one also wasn’t locked. The floor was marked with black, as if something had been pushed inside and moved around. Naturally, I was convinced the marks had been made by a helicopter’s tires, but I had no proof.

  I started looking at the walls and noticed that they had been scraped as well. There was black paint in one of the marks. By my calculation, the helicopter had been a tight fit, and when it was pushed in, the tail had scraped along the side.

  I had no proof though. This was all speculation. And I knew I had to be careful with that.

  Junior went back to the first car and found similar scrapes. But that was all he found. If the helicopters had been there — and really, he had no proof of that — they were now gone.

  Junior spent the next few hours trying to figure out where they had gone. At first glance, the plant next door seemed like an obvious choice. And yet, there was no easy way to get there from the train tracks. The razor-wire fence had no opening on that side.

  The property belonged to a small wire factory. There were two smallish buildings and an open-sided shed, along with acres of storage area where spools were collected. There was also a dock area where ships and barges unloaded scrap metal and took on the large spindles.

  A close examination of satellite photos of the yard proved that the helicopters weren’t there when the satellite passed overhead. Junior, thinking they might have been disassembled, looked for large parts as well, but couldn’t find any that looked like they might belong to a helicopter. It was a pretty crowded place, and everything in the yard was exposed to the satellite. A comparison of several days’ worth of images seemed to prove that, except for a half-dozen spindles and scrap metal near the dock, nothing had moved.

  But Junior couldn’t see into the shed, or the buildings for that matter. So he decided he would have to go inside. Since it was already dawn by this time, climbing the fence unseen was no longer an option. Besides, the front door is always the best solution.

  He arrived at seven in the morning on his bicycle. There was a small crowd of workers near the entrance, and for a moment he thought he could just slip in. But as he slowed down, he saw that there were security people at the gate, checking IDs against names on a clipboard. More importantly, all of the workers were dark-skinned and clearly Indian. A white boy would immediately stand out.

  That didn’t rule out the possibility of getting into the factory; it just changed the way he’d have to do things. Junior rode off on his bike, heading toward a shopping district. It turned out to be way too early for him to buy what he wanted there, so he diverted to a large western hotel complex that featured a number of shops on the first and second floor.

  Expensive shops, I should add. Our bookkeeper is still howling about them.

  An hour later he emerged equipped with an overpriced suit and a new briefcase. A quick detour to a stationery shop later, he arrived at the wire factory as an American businessman looking to buy ISO 9001 certified zinc aluminum wire, or “zincal” as they call it in the trade.

  That wasn’t the factory’s specialty, which was just fine as far as Junior was concerned.

  “What’s your best material?” he asked. “I have other clients…”

  He got a full tour, including a walk-through of the shed area. He learned a hell of a lot about wire — but about helicopters, nada.

  If the helos had been brought into the factory, they had gone into a smelting area and been made into steel rods, and were now wrapped around spindles destined to hold slats of wood together when they were bundled and shipped halfway around the world.

  Unlikely.

  Junior left his card with the vice president and went back to work.

  * * *

  Back in Delhi, I’d grabbed my reading glasses and headed over to Special Squadron Zero’s headquarters to continue my review of the intelligence gathered prior to the Pakistan raid. I never got the glasses out of my pocket, however; I found myself barred at the gate by two apologetic but nonetheless burly members of the squadron.

  “Sergeant Phurem gave us explicit orders, Commander Rick,” they apologized. “You are not allowed on the property.”

  “What?”

  “It’s the minister,” said the taller of the two guards. “You are persona non gracious.”

  “Persona non grata?”

  He nodded solemnly. At least it was a title I was very familiar with.

  “Go get the sergeant,” I said. “I want to talk to him.”

  They called him on the radio, but could just as well have held their breaths. I could see by their frowns that he wasn’t coming long before they passed on his excuses.

  “Let me use the restroom, at least,” I said. “Breakfast didn’t agree with me.”

  “Sorry, sorry,” said the taller guard. “But you are not allowed. It is our jobs to not let you in.”

  “The gas station across the road has a clean restroom,” offered the other guard.

  “You’re really not going to let me in?”

  “You are not permitted. There is no way you can come in.”

  It’s not every day you get a challenge like that. After some appropriate gestures of my appreciation, I made a strategic retreat to the gas station, then went to equip for the operation.

  Many are the ways one can break into a military facility. I’d lectured Special Squadron Zero on many, and since they knew me pretty well by sight a number of choices weren’t available to me.

  That still, however, left me a variety of choices. I suppose I could have been flashy and made a HALO jump. But as I said a few pages ago, the front door is always the best.

  About a half hour aft
er I was ceremoniously kicked out, an ambulance drove up to the gate. There were two men in the front seat — a driver with a thick black beard, and the attendant with an even thicker gray one. Both men were wearing long robes and fancy cloth hats, and could be said to bear at least a passing resemblance to Richard Marcinko.

  The vehicle they were driving, though it looked like a legitimate ambulance, was several years old, and in fact its registration indicated it had been put out of official service more than eight months before.

  The guards quickly ordered the ambulance to the side and began a careful search of the men and the vehicles.

  They were in the middle of the search when a garbage truck drove up for its weekly pickup. After a precursory glance, the truck was waved through.

  Fifteen minutes later, having changed out of the protective coveralls and sprayed a bit of eau de parfum around my shoulders, I was in Sergeant Phurem’s office chair, smiling as he came through the door.

  “I should have known,” he said, shaking his head. “Did anyone see you?”

  “Many people saw,” I told him. “They just didn’t realize what they were seeing.”

  He laughed, then closed the door.

  “It is the minister’s orders, not mine,” he said sadly. “If you are found, I am off to a post on the Bangladesh border, for sure.”

  I started to get up to give him his seat, but he insisted I stay where I was.

  He admitted to being in a poor mood. He’d lost his commander and some of his best men, and now faced the likelihood of a reassignment that would end his career. The minister had claimed that the unit would be revitalized after the Games and some of the current controversy died down, but he had been in the army long enough to know that “revitalize” meant “reassign the NCOs,” especially those who were closely identified with the now out of favor commander.

  I commiserated.

  “There is nothing more to be done,” he said sadly. “But, Commander Rick, what can I do for you?”

  “I want to review all of the intelligence relating to the Kashmir raid,” I told him. “I’d started to the other day.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m wondering if we were set up.”

  He didn’t quite understand what that meant, so I spelled it out for him: were we spoon-fed intelligence so that we would conduct that particular raid for some ulterior purpose?

  “What would the sense of that be?” he asked.

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “I’m afraid I cannot help. It can’t be permitted. And besides, you know that we didn’t conduct the intelligence ourselves. We were given only the summaries, and then only what was relevant. So if there is something interesting, it would be with the military intelligence unit. That is where you should conduct your search.”

  “You won’t help me?”

  “I can’t.” He shook his head grimly, and stared at the ground. Puppies that have peed off their papers looked more cheerful. “My hands are bound. I’m afraid I can’t help.”

  I had suspected he might say something along those lines. Which is why I had copied the computer access codes, key words, and encryption keys to the USB memory chip in my pocket while waiting for him to come in.

  * * *

  Yes, I’d taken the precaution of installing a keylogger when our troubles began, as part of the effort to see if we had a traitor in our midst. Not that I didn’t trust anyone.

  * * *

  I know Shunt or Junior would have done it much, much quicker, but a few hours later I found my way back to the intelligence files on India for Islam. I wasn’t so much interested in what they said — I already knew a lot about the group, obviously — but how and where the information had been compiled.

  Most of the information on recent activities had come from a single source labeled F5. He had pinpointed the madrassa, and forwarded information about the group’s intention to strike at the Commonwealth Games.

  Who was F5? The files of course didn’t say. The most logical guess was that he was Pakistani — the group’s connections with the intelligence agencies there were well known. But if so, he wasn’t an official contact, or even a “turned” agent — those exchanges were handled in a different manner, and weren’t coded as sources.

  He also didn’t come up in the cross-reference indexes, meaning that he hadn’t supplied any other intelligence, at least none good enough to make it to any of the files that were used to prepare the pre-Commonwealth Games briefings. There was no record of information from him older than two and a half months.

  In other words, F5 had existed only to pass on information about this group, where it was located, and why it should be attacked.

  There were many possible explanations; the most benign was that the Indian military intelligence agency had compartmentalized their operation, dividing the information from a single course in neat little envelopes depending on who he was ratting on: F5 for India Islam, F7 for Free Kashmir, etc. But that wasn’t the way the agency normally worked.

  I was predisposed to smelling rat, and I certainly smelled one here.

  What else was useful?

  The file on India for Islam contained images that had been made by Indian reconnaissance flights prior to our attack. Yes, I had seen them before our raid; we’d used them to plan the assault. We had good images of the grounds and the tangos going through their exercises, and even working through a mockup raid. Looking at them now, I realized something I hadn’t earlier.

  The mockup appeared to show them doing a simple run-through of an operation, taking down part of a command post. It was clearly part of a much larger plan, a practice run on a difficult segment.

  I’d assumed26 the first time I saw it that it was an attack on the stadium, which would have posts behind concrete barriers similar to the ones in the photo. Looking at it now, I realized it wasn’t the stadium at all. I’d just spent a great deal of time there, and knew that the layout was very different. The mockup had double guard posts, and even what could be interpreted as gun emplacements nearby. There was none of that at the stadium.

  But I had seen something very similar just a few days before: the main gate at the army complex where the nukes were being stored.

  ( V )

  We last left Matthew Loring playing Junior Achievement businessman at the wire plant in Mumbai.

  Having discovered that was a dead end, he checked in with Shunt and began exploring other possibilities. Shunt had broken into the railroad company’s computers and taken a look at its billing system, trying to track down who had ordered or paid for transporting the cars to Mumbai. Unfortunately, the company’s record keeping left a great deal to be desired. It was a jumble of invoices and work orders that had no relation to the transport or traffic files.

  There’s no doubt that the train cars were deliberately switched somewhere, most likely in Delhi, but you could never prove it from the records, and not just because someone had carefully covered their tracks. Even regular train runs showed wide discrepancies between what was billed and what the manifests claimed was transported — discrepancies, I should add, that didn’t necessarily favor the company. Whoever had picked them had chosen carefully.

  The bank it dealt with, however, was a different story. The bank kept good records of deposits made into the company’s accounts. After getting into the system — using a technique Chinese hackers have since been excoriated for — Shunt discovered that most of the rail company’s business came from a dozen large firms. Most moved handcrafted items out of the Punjabi area down to Mumbai or elsewhere along the coast for shipping. They did this at regular intervals, paying with commendable frequency and in very consistent sums.

  This made it easier to find the company that had paid an amount that seemed to correspond with the charges for taking train cars to Delhi, and then from Delhi to Mumbai. (I say “seemed” because the books were so screwed up, and there were no customary costs.)

  The company’s name was Greater Sterl
ing Ltd.

  Nice, English-sounding name, common not only in Great Britain but in places once dominated by Great Britain, where the hint of a link to the former colonial power implied stability and substance. But names are easy to manufacture. Shunt realized the connection was probably spurious, even as he started to trace it back. Sure enough, Greater Sterling had no link to Great Britain.

  It did, however, have a link to a Hong Kong shipping firm known to have been used by the Chinese two years before to ship spare aircraft parts to Iran.

  * * *

  “Hey, Dad.”

  “Junior?”

  “You know they can sew a whole suit down here in three hours?”

  “Down here where?”

  “Mumbai. I didn’t buy the suit though. There was a jacket that was pretty good, so I went with that, right off the shelf. You should check this place out.”

  “Junior — ”

  “I’ll bet you’re wondering what I’m doing.”

  Junior and I didn’t have a lot of father-son bonding time when he was growing up, mostly because I didn’t know he existed. Which means he missed a lot of chances to get on my bad side, and I missed a lot of opportunities to kick his ass.

  Maybe he was trying to make up for it. Let’s put it this way: he was damn lucky he was in Mumbai and I was in Delhi.

  After I reamed him out for not telling me where he was headed, I made him give me an info dump on what he was up to.

  “The train cars arrived two days after the helicopters were stolen,” he told me. “What I figure happened was this: they were taken up north to that rail siding, and packed into the cars there. That night they were picked up and taken down to Delhi, where the IDs were switched. From there they were taken to Mumbai. They came in at night. Either that night, or the next night, the helicopters were taken out of the cars and driven out to the jetty where they were loaded onto a barge. From there, they were taken out to sea.”

  “Why the sea?”

  “I’m getting there. They were loaded into a cargo container. It’s the Han Li.”