RW16 - Domino Theory

by Richard Marcinko

  “That ought to be pretty easy to check.”

  “Thanks, Dick.”

  “Whoa! Whoa!” I yelled into the phone, but he’d already hung up.

  You gotta beat them when they’re young, or they never learn.

  I found out what he had in mind a few minutes later, but only because Mongoose had the good sense to ask me if I had approved Junior’s plan.

  Which I had not. Although on review, it did meet certain requirements for audacity and gumption. So after a number of minor adjustments, I raised my hand and gave it the one finger blessing.

  * * *

  Among the minor adjustments was my contacting the Indian navy to let them know about the container ship, which was now sailing south in international waters.

  One of the advantages of getting a few hash marks on your sleeve is that you accumulate contacts in high places. I’d first met Admiral Inay Yamuna when he was a young buck lieutenant trying to make a name for himself in the Indian navy. His political strategy was somewhat flawed at the time: he believed that the quickest way to the top was to take on a contingent of Indian soldiers single-handedly.

  This was in a bar in Portugal. I can’t entirely remember why we were there; it was during my early SEAL days, so I was probably ordered to forget it anyway.

  I do remember why I got involved — a chair came crashing over my shoulder, knocking not only my drink but an entire bottle of gin to the floor. Somebody had to pay for that gin, and it wasn’t going to be me.

  Like most barroom disputes, the actual outcome that night was murky, though I can assure you that I did not pay for that drink or any drink. The lieutenant and I eventually found our way to a different bar, where we discussed important naval matters such as how to find the best bar in port, and whether blondes really are more fun.

  I’d spoken to him occasionally over the years as he made the climb to admiral. He stopped pressing his luck in the barroom and distinguished himself on the bridge. Now he happened to be commander of the naval detachment in Goa, the Indian state whose shore the cargo vessel currently was steaming off of.

  One thing about friendships forged in battle, they endure. He came right on the line when I called, and after an exchange of the usual terms of endearment — I believe he used the words “shit-faced,” “green balled,” “angstrom dick motherfucker” — I filled him in on the situation.

  Admiral Yamuna would have loved nothing better than to take credit for getting the helicopters back, and the fact that he didn’t particularly like the Chinese made him all the more anxious to cooperate.

  But the Chinese ship was in international waters, and the Indian navy couldn’t intercept it without quite a bit of proof, and even then he’d need an order from the prime minister that, the admiral predicted, would take weeks if not months to arrive.

  “I thought that would be the case, dung brain,” I told him. “So I have another idea. Or rather, one of my men does.”

  “I’m all ears, donkey face.”

  Actually the plan that Junior came up with wasn’t nearly as good as what the admiral suggested. Junior wanted to lease a speedboat, go out, sneak aboard the Han Li, find the helos, then return with evidence.

  “A speedboat would be expensive to lease,” said the admiral. “And getting it back in one piece might be difficult. What you need is something more dependable. I cannot give you a navy warship, but I know where you could steal one.”

  ( VI )

  The vessel Junior and Mongoose ended up using — my lawyers dislike the word “steal” — was not an Indian navy ship.

  First of all, it was more like a boat, especially if one considers the traditional definition of a boat being a vessel that can be lifted onto a larger vessel.

  And second of all, it actually belonged to the Tamil Tigers, although they were in no position to reclaim it, having had it confiscated in a raid by the Indian navy some months before.

  The Tamil Tigers — who the hell are they?

  Another entry in the Terrorist Hall of Fame, Indian division:

  Full name — Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.27

  Aspiration — the liberation of northern Sri Lanka.

  Occupation — Depending on your point of view, either full-time freedom fighters or unconscionable terrorists. Or both.

  The Tamil Tigers were founded in 1976, I believe, in hopes of establishing a Tamil state in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is the big island off the coast of southern India, formerly known to us in the West as Ceylon. If you look at a map, it’s the football about to be punted toward Malaysia. Like India, Ceylon/Sri Lanka was once ruled by the British. And like India, there are many Hindus and Muslims there. But even taken together, they’re a minority; something in the area of seventy percent of the population is Sinhalese. A sizable portion of the remainder are Tamil. As you might imagine, there are frictions.

  I’m not going to get into the ethnic back and forth. Take it for granted that I’m oversimplifying here.

  Basically, after independence the majority Sinhalese declared their language the official language, and then passed laws limiting the rights and government job opportunities for people of other backgrounds. The Tamils, who are mostly concentrated in the northern provinces of the island, didn’t particularly like that and eventually rebelled. Hence the Tamil Tigers.

  The actual civil war is usually dated from July 23, 1983, when the Tamil Tigers launched an attack on a Sri Lankan military base. But the conflict had been simmering for years, and was always running hot and cold during good times and bad. At their height, the Tamil Tigers controlled a large portion of the northwestern corner of the island. They had armored vehicles, airplanes — and yes, attack boats.

  Small attack boats, but sometimes that’s all you need.

  India’s attitude toward the civil war gradually changed. At first, and for quite a while, the government secretly helped many Sri Lankan rebel movements and dissidents, including the Tamil Tigers. But the Tigers weren’t particularly easy to love. They had a well-earned reputation for terrorist acts, and their goals weren’t necessary those of the Indian government’s.

  In 1987, the Indians came to terms with the Sri Lankan government. Part of the agreement saw India sending peacekeeping forces to Sri Lanka. That helped Sri Lanka escalate its war against the Tamil rebels in the north, since they no longer needed their own troops to protect the south.

  Things got real complicated after that. The Indian troops were so unpopular at one point that the Sri Lankan government armed rebels to fight them.

  Eventually, India pulled out. But the Tamil Tigers were still pissed, and so they decided to make their own strike against the Indians, sending a suicide bomber to kill Rajiv Gandhi (the former prime minister) in 1991.

  What? You thought suicide bombers were only in the Middle East? And that Osama bin Goat-turd created terrorism?

  Read up on your history, grasshopper!

  But I digress.

  Almost twenty years of civil war followed, with so many different phases that you could spend months sorting through them all. The Tamil Tigers had their own public relations teams, and quite a number of people came to admire their spirit and their audacity. Their tactics were, at times, relatively inspired. If you’re interested in asymmetric warfare, they’re not a bad group to study.

  However, they weren’t exactly model citizens. One of the features of the Tamil Tigers armies were children soldiers, recruited at the point of a gun. Then there was the fact that Tamil Tigers would rather shoot civilians than allow them to flee to government-controlled areas. More than a few times the Tigers used civilians as human shields. And they weren’t shy about using terrorism as a weapon of choice.

  The war ended in 2009, a little more than a year before I got to India. At that point, the Tamil Tigers had been crushed militarily, their main leaders mostly killed. How long peace will last is anyone’s guess. Perhaps more ominous for the rest of the world, there have been consistent rumors that “soldiers” trained by th
e Tamil Tigers have gone elsewhere to share their training. Terrorism is a lot like VD — it keeps spreading, and keeps getting you in the privates.

  Info dump over. Back to our regularly scheduled mayhem.

  * * *

  The Indian navy had, at times, done battle with the Tamil Tigers’ sea branch, the Sea Tigers. That campaign had resulted, among other things, in the capture of several of the Sea Tigers’ vessels.

  Much of the Tamil Tigers’ success depended on their audacity and courage — SEAL traits, to be sure. But they were also very clever not only about leveraging their equipment, but adapting seemingly innocuous gear to deadly purposes.

  The Tiger boats were a case in point. They were commercial boats adapted to military use with the addition of cannons and other weapons. Among the most potent — or at least coolest — were small speedboats outfitted with gun mounts for RPGs and heavy machine guns. Painted in a sharp camo, the speedboats were the Tamil equivalent of SEAL insertion craft.

  Two of them were sitting at a dock in Goa, where they had been taken for evaluation after being captured by the Indians during the conflict. Rumor had it that said evaluation included several sorties of water skiing, but I have no hard information on that.

  (Just in case you’re not using Google Earth to follow along — Goa is quite a distance and on the other coast from Sri Lanka. So there was very little chance of these vessels making their way back there if some former members decided to mount a raid for old times’ sake.)

  Ordinarily, the docks where the boats were kept was guarded by members of Marcos. But for some odd reason, the watch was ordered to stand down that evening and attend to other duties.

  What a shocking coincidence.

  Junior picked up Mongoose at the local airport and they drove over to the dock, stopping to fill a few jerry cans with high-test boat juice. That turned out not to be necessary — both boats had been topped off at some point earlier that day.

  The coincidences just keep multiplying, don’t they?

  They took both boats out, slipping past the shore lookouts, which were curiously quiet. The cargo vessel was fifty miles out to sea and a little south of the Indian naval base at Mormugao. The speedboats ate up the distance, and the dark hulk of the cargo carrier came into view a little more than an hour after they set off. The boys headed south about fifteen miles, roughly the distance they calculated the cargo carrier would cover in two hours. They left one of the boats there, engine idling, then headed back to pay the Han Li a visit.

  I’ve written several times about the tactics SEAL teams employ to board ships, a rich variety of possibilities that include everything from lightweight aluminum ladders to suction cups that turn you into Spiderman.

  My personal favorite? Being invited aboard, of course.

  In this case, the boys planned on using a harpoon gun. Rather than a harpoon, the warhead was a grappling hook attached to a line. The plan was simple: they’d draw up alongside the cargo area where it was unlikely anyone was posted. The line would be fired. When it stopped playing out, they would pull it back, secure it against the rail or whatever obstruction it caught on, then scramble aboard.

  Simple to explain, much harder to do. You’re moving, they’re moving, the line is wet, and it’s an awful long way up.

  Surprisingly, though, detection is generally not much of a problem. Today’s cargo carriers are very big ships mostly run by automation. They don’t have many crew members, and those who are aboard have plenty to do that doesn’t involve examining the rails for odd-looking pieces of metal. The ship has its own peculiar sounds, and the clunk of a twelve- or eighteen-inch grappling iron rarely registers above the engines and general loud shush of the ocean.

  Once you’re on the vessel, it’s not hard to get into the cabin or the container area without being seen. There are plenty of shadows and unlit areas to hide in. And few if any watchmen think it’s possible for anyone to come aboard outside of port. Their eyes may see something, but their brains quickly explain it away.

  The big problem in this case would be identifying which of the 160 or so cargo containers aboard might have the helicopters. But Junior had considered that problem already, and with Shunt’s help, had narrowed down the possibilities to four containers that had not been on the ship in the last satellite image they had before Mumbai.

  In their waterproof, rubberized rucks — similar to standard SEAL issue, though ours are a little fancier and I’d guess less expensive, since I do the buying myself — they had acetylene cutting torches and small digital cameras. They’d cut the locks, take a peek, photograph what they saw, then get off the ship.

  I keep saying “they.”

  Ideally, one of them would have stayed aboard the speedboat while the other did the onboard recce. Makes a lot of sense, right? You want the boat there when you’re done.

  The problem was one of youthful ego. Junior wanted to go onboard himself. Mongoose, who after all was a former SEAL, figured that he should be the one to do it.

  I would have chosen Mongoose myself. But I wasn’t there. And rather than argue about it, they decided they would tie the boat to the line so they’d be sure it would be with them when they were done. And if it wasn’t — well, they had that other craft waiting farther south. They could bail out, inflate the little survival life rafts they had with them, then drift and/or paddle over to it.

  Way too macho, frankly. But there’s no use second-guessing them now.

  They caught a big break as they took the boat in toward their target. Circling in from the stern, Mongoose spotted two lines trailing from the quarterdeck. That’s a sign of very poor seamanship — but it’s also very typical, and was something he’d been trained to look for in this situation.

  They cut their motor, cruised in, and tied up. Then, like a pair of rats in search of booty aboard a fat ocean cruiser, scurried up the lines.

  * * *

  I missed out on the fun and games because I had other things to do in Delhi:

  Namely, take Mongoose’s place at the black-tie reception.

  Not that I was moving in on Vina. She was an extremely attractive young woman, but as I’ve said several times now, my thoughts may roam and my eyes may wander, but my heart and carcass belong to Karen.

  Right, hon?

  If Vina was disappointed by the substitution, she didn’t let on. Mongoose had already explained the situation, and while I suspect that she may have thought he’d been a little too eager to accept the assignment, she never mentioned it.

  I know the women want me to explain exactly what it was she wore. I’m afraid that’s not my best department. It was a kind of beige white, it came all the way to the floor, and it made her look like an angel floating above the ground. It had straps and a daring yet tasteful décolletage, which is French for ooo la la. Her hair had been pinned back with a pair of silver combs. With the exception of Karen and Trace, I can’t recall taking a prettier girl on my arm.

  We arrived at the ambassador’s residence about an hour and a half after the soiree was officially scheduled to start, which made us among the earliest guests. I escorted her in, then gave a fatherly glance toward the row of young swains who were looking her over from the edge of the dance floor.

  You could hear the shriveling loud and clear.

  The band struck up and I escorted her to the battle zone. My dancing may have been a little stiff — it had been a while since I’d danced the light fantastic in the name of duty — but Vina was so light on her feet that I could have worn leaded diving boots and still looked good swirling her around. I did my manly duty as a sturdy partner, then left her to greet some of her friends while I went in search of some refreshments — and the people I’d come to see.

  First up on the list was Madam Secretary of State, who was supposed to be here taking a break from the intense round of peace talks trying to stave off the latest escalation of good feelings between the neighboring enemies. Alas, Madam Secretary was in the middle of a group eight or ni
ne deep, and as things worked out I never got a chance to ask if she’d care to dance. But east of the scrum was an old acquaintance of mine who worked in State intelligence.

  I was surprised to see Jerry D.28 there, but now I realized why the secretary of State had deigned to call me for my impressions in the first place. Before joining the State Department, Jerry had been a SEAL. He retired and, either through boredom or temporary insanity, defected to the National Security Council as a weapons analyst. Now instead of blowing things up he was trying to stop other people from doing so.

  There’s nothing like seeing two men in monkey suits cheerfully cursing each other out as they make their way toward the booze.

  “Let me buy you a drink,” he said, following our lively exchange of the usual terms of endearment. “Bombay Sapphire?”

  “Is there a drink more appropriate to India?”

  “If there was, you wouldn’t drink it.” He raised his glass. (Scotch, neat.) “Thank you for your help.”

  “Are things going well?”

  He moved his head back and forth, a little like a speed bag when it’s being given a sturdy workout. “They could be better. They could be worse.”

  “How long have you have been working on this?” I asked.

  “Oh. Well, in a serious way — six months. We realized that things were getting closer about three months ago.”

  “That’s when you started moving the chess pieces around?”

  The comment, an obvious reference to the warheads, took him by surprise.

  “Same old Dick,” he said, recovering. “Always with the ear to the ground.”

  “It makes it easier for people to step on me that way.”

  Jerry laughed.

  “Is that an important question?” he asked, sipping his drink.

  “The answer might be. I need a ballpark.”

  He looked down at his glass.

  “And if something were to happen that made it very important,” he said, “the secretary would find out?”

  “You’d be the first to know. Where it goes from there, I have no idea.”