RW04 - Task Force Blue

by Richard Marcinko

  * * *

  I heard the first rumblings within minutes after SECNAV’s mash note was delivered. The news came from a guy I’ll call Paul Mahon. I’m going to give you a bit of history about Paul and me here. In the literary world, it’s known as backstory. But don’t skip it, because as the old chiefs at Organized Chicken Shit (which is how I referred to Officer Candidate School) used to say, “You will see this material again.”

  Okay, here goes. Paul and I first met as a couple of O-4s (those are lieutenant commanders) during a tour in the Pentagon when I worked for Rear Admiral Ace Lyons as one of Secretary of the Navy John Lehmann’s briefing officers, and Paul, a former Annapolis linebacker (not to mention promising young submariner) from a prominent New Orleans family, ran interference for a two-star named Black Jack Morrison. You remember Black Jack—he’s the pilot who went on to become CNO and as such asked me to devise, create, equip, train, and command SEAL Team Six.

  In any case, Paul and I were once assigned by our respective bosses to steal the U.S. Army mascot from the grand foyer of the Pentagon’s Mall entrance the week before the annual Army-Navy football game. We succeeded—even though we were chased all over the effing building by a whole platoon of MPs. We finally huffed and puffed our way to the fourth-floor E-ring, where we managed to stash ourselves and our booty safely behind the shiny, mahogany double doors of the Vice CNO’s office suite—doors which, as you know, are always protected by a couple of hulkster-size Marine guards.

  Since our snatch-and-grab days, we’ve stayed in touch in a peripatetic way. Paul’s now a one-star, with a prime assignment in the intelligence liaison office that should guar-on-tee him enough stars for a subfleet command before too long. But first, he has to spend another year here, followed by a two-year assignment in Moscow as the defense attaché. The Navy is extremely interested in Russian submarine capabilities, especially since, because of stolen Western technology, today’s Russkie subs are as quiet—or even quieter—than ours. More to the point, the Navy doesn’t trust CIA military estimates and has insisted on having its own man in Moscow.

  But that’s another story for another book. Back to the story at hand: Paul currently resides in a small but impressive office on fourth-floor E-ring, the same general location where the SECNAV and chief of naval operations’ office suites are both located. That made us virtual neighbors.

  How did we become neighbors? Well, shortly after I got back from London, orders were depth-charged from the stratosphere (rumor had it they came from the White House, but I was never able to confirm that part of it). All I know is that I received paperwork on CNO letterhead, cutting my Green Team from three platoons to ten men, and temporarily detailing we happy few, we band of brothers, to the acting CNO’s office as a new Naval Special Warfare Development Group unit, for Unconventional Taskings/Risks: United States. The idea behind UT/RUS, I was given to understand, was to put an operational naval counterterrorism unit in the Pentagon itself. I read it as the Navy’s belated reaction to Oklahoma City.

  Reaction or not, frankly, I’d been ecstatic about the prospect. A Pentagon-based operational unit was something that hadn’t been attempted since Red Cell’s heyday. I immediately jumped at the opportunity, even though it meant losing most of Green Team. My reasoning was simple. Operating out of the Pentagon gives you flexibility and mobility because you become system-wide instead of being attached or detailed to a specific command or theater. Moreover, it was a small, clandestine unit—two elements that I deem critical for success. Small means no middle management—UT/RUS was me and nine enlisted men. And clandestine meant that my chain of command was simplified: there was the acting CNO, and there was me, and there weren’t fifteen administrative four-stripers, as well as the entire Naval Special Warfare hierarchy coming between us.

  The setup was almost perfect, so far as I was concerned. UT/RUS’s responsibilities were to be twofold. First, we would become the Pentagon’s reaction team for hostage rescue and counterterrorism activities concerning all high-ranking Navy personnel, anywhere in the United States. That gave me both the counterterrorism portfolio, and the hostage-rescue portfolio. Both were subjects of concern these days, which would ensure that we would remain busy little boys.

  Second, whenever we weren’t chasing bad guys, we would implement security assessments that would allow local base commanders to prevent the loss of weapons and ordnance—a growing problem that had been addressed by the Department of Defense’s IG—inspector general—in a number of classified reports. That assignment was similar to the old Red Cell mission. Except that here, our role paralleled the new growth of “jointness” in the armed forces. Let me explain that word in plain English. We may have been Navy—but our assignment cut through all the service branches. Now, because there was the possibility of offending the Army, the Air Force, and the Marine Corps during our role playing, we’d been ordered not to actually penetrate the bases playing the role of terrorists. We would, it had been told to me, simply conduct administrative inspections and give the base commanders a written eval.

  Yeah, right—sure we would. I knew it would be impossible to restrain my irrepressible, playful leprechauns once a target of opportunity presented itself—but I crossed my fingers behind my back, said, “Yes, sir” (spelling it c-u-r), and went away ebullient.

  When I think about it now, the whole thing sounded almost too good to be true. Even at the time, I had some trifling, picayune doubts—they were stuck back by my skeptical meter, which is located in the right rearmost quadrant of my nasty Slovak brain, just behind the pussy radar. After all, when something is too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true.

  I can say that now. The day the paperwork came down, all I thought was, Fuckin’ A. After all, I was being handed a great assignment, I commanded the nine best shooters in the Navy, and the goddamn chain of command was going to leave me alone.

  If I’d taken more time to reflect, I’d probably have been more suspicious. Why, for example, would the acting CNO, a man known for his caution, sanction a unit so proactive, especially with me running the show?

  But, since I’ve never tended to regarde la bride de cheval donne—that’s looking too closely at zee mouth of zee geeft ’orse—my nine shooters and I moved happily into the new UT/RUS command post, five floors below Paul’s river view. That proximity meant he and I could now grab an occasional burger and beer together at the Union Street Tavern, Bullfeathers, or any of the others in the long list of Old Town hash-and-brew houses, to catch up on gossip and talk trash.

  Okay, now that you’re up to speed, let’s pick up where we left off.

  I drove down to the Pentagon at 0500 Monday, dodged the camera stakeouts, opened the office, caught up on paperwork, and waited to get my copies of the after action reports, which had been completed by the FBI on Sunday. There were no tango survivors—the one we’d stashed had been tagged by the frag Doc Tremblay tossed out the rear door and bled to death.

  But there had to be other information about these guys from the FBI’s huge counterintelligence database—a series of files that take up six floors of the goddamn J. Edgar Hoover Building in downtown Washington, D.C. No matter what La Muchacha had told me, I knew that the FBI plays things very close. And I wanted to know a lot more about these ADAM assholes than I currently did. They’d had good intel about SECNAV’s schedule. Where had it come from? Who was slipping it to them? They’d had good weapons. How had they gotten ’em? Who’d been responsible?

  And there was more. I wanted to know who they were, what their organization was all about, where they came from, when they’d first formed up, and why they’d wanted so damn much to talk to LC Strawhouse, the California billionaire. I also wanted to learn about Pajar of La Quinta, California—the company whose ad our deceased tango had clipped.

  My motivation was KISS-simple.

  Item. These tangos had run a good op.

  Item. It was UT/RUS’s mission to stop groups like ADAM.

  When no paper
arrived by ten hundred, I called the FBI liaison office, was told there was a delay, and that as soon as they had something, they’d call, so please stay by the phone. At 1400, I was still twiddling my scarred thumbs. At 1405, the phone on my desk finally rang.

  I picked up on the first ring. “Marcinko.”

  The familiar voice said, “Do you know who this is—don’t use names.”

  Of course I knew, and I told him so. “Yeah—you’re the other shit-for-brains asshole who’s stupid enough to steal U.S. government equipment from the Mall foyer.”

  Paul gave me an urgent, whispered, watch-your-butt heads up. He ran down SECNAV’s behind-the-scenes action. He added that the MIQ (that’s the memo in question) had been shredded by ACNO’s confidential assistant so as not to leave any nasty evidence behind. But Paul had somehow managed to get a glimpse. The note had been handwritten by SECNAV herself. Its message was simple, precise, and unequivocal: get rid of Marcinko. Now. Permanently.

  He rang off, leaving me to wonder how they’d try to dispose of me this time. My unhappy conclusion was that it wouldn’t be very hard to do. I was currently without a four-star protector. My man o’ warsman sea-daddy, Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Secrest, had been assassinated not four months ago, and the acting CNO, a ship driver named Wendell Whitehead, was the sort of prudent bureaucrat who stayed away from rogues like me.

  Windy, as he was known, was a caretaker less than six months from retirement, who would run the Navy until a long-term CNO could be found. He was a good choice, in that he was politically and socially correct (he’s a Naval Academy graduate, who has worked at the National Security Council for three presidents. As a young lieutenant commander, he was once assigned as the White House military aide in charge of making small talk with unattached women at state dinners, so he knows what fork to use, and seldom if ever uses the dreaded F-word). But congeniality wasn’t why he was appointed.

  Windy was chosen because he was a nonthreatening, administrative-oriented officer (his doctorate from the University of Maryland was in systems management) whose very personna—from the round, rimless glasses to the slight build and tonsure of sandy hair—gave him a benign, professorial countenance. He was the ideal organization man, whose inoffensive demeanor allowed him to interface easily with the nonmilitary and antimilitary types who peopled the current administration.

  He was actually an inspired choice. Indeed, Windy Whitehead was the perfect officer to smooth over the recent scandals—outrages that ran the gamut from spies like Johnny Walker and Jonathan Pollard, to the Tailhook fiasco, to all those EEO suits filed by malcontents and whiners—that had plagued the Navy over the past decade. They loved him on Capitol Hill, tolerated him at the White House, and ignored him on E-ring.

  Acting CNO Whitehead was, therefore, not about to make, or take, any unnecessary waves. And I was the tsunami that could swamp his barge.

  If there was no support coming out of ACNO’s cabin, there was even less from next door, where his chief of staff, a four-eyed, balding, dip-dunk one-star named Don Layton, worked. First, Rear Admiral (Lower Half) Layton, who had spent his entire career as a nuclear submariner, openly despised all Naval Special Warfare. He probably considers us manual laborers because we tend to work with our hands. That alone would have been enough. But there was a second element as well that caused the little red light to start blinking in my brain: Don Layton was an Annapolis classmate of my perpetual, persistent, and relentless nemesis, Pinky Prescott.

  Pinky has been the bane of my existence since I commanded SEAL Team Six, and he was the grand panjandrum of NAVSPECWARGRU TWO—that’s the commodore of Naval Special Warfare Group Two to the uninitiated among you. A paint-by-the-numbers officer whose forte lies in memo writing, Pinky has tried everything in his power to get me court-martialed.

  So far, he’s failed. So far. But it’s not for lack of effort. The Doom on Dickie bottom line, which means I was fucked in Vietnamese (and any other language you care to think of), was there’d be no support for me anywhere. Not from ACNO’s office, or anywhere else on fourth-floor E-ring.

  Worse, Pinky had returned to Washington to be appointed the acting Assistant Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Plans, Policy and Operations—the number two position in OP-06. Yes—I know the job slot is for a two-star, and the last time we all saw Pinky he’d been frocked to vice admiral. But guess what? Shit happens, and in this case, it happened to Pinky. No third star. Not this go-round, anyway. So he sulked. And he plotted. And he blamed it all on me. So, I knew Pinky would quietly pull every string he could to make sure that my ass was properly bawled, mauled, and keelhauled—without leaving any telltale fingerprints, of course. He’s that kind of guy.

  Anyway, I have never been accused of being un timide. So at 1500 hours I walked up seven flights of stairs, marched halfway around the building, and presented myself in front of the Grade One Executive Secretarial desk of the executive secretary to the Honorable S. Lynn Crawford.

  “Captain Marcinko to see the Secretary.”

  She blanched. Have you ever seen someone blanch? All the color drains from their face. Anyway, it took her a few seconds to regain her composure. When she did, she said, “The Secretary is not available for you.”

  I hate taking “no” for an answer. But I wasn’t about to argue. I said, “Thank you,” and took a hike. She was already picking up the phone to tell SECNAV what had happened before the hydraulic door closer had hissed the thick wood suite door shut.

  Lest you think that I was giving up, I wasn’t. But since I am an unconventional warrior, I chose to make an unconventional entrance—through SECNAV’s back door. I walked fifteen paces down the hall until I came to an unmarked door that was guarded by a push-button cipher lock. It is the door to SECNAV’s hideaway office. I know this because when I was John Lehman’s briefer, it was the door I used to come and go by, so I didn’t have to be logged in by his secretary.

  There’s something you should know about cipher locks at the Pentagon: they tend not to change the combinations with every new administration. That way, the career civil servants who really run the place don’t have to memorize a whole set of new numeric combinations every four or so years.

  When SECNAV Lehman occupied this suite during the eighties, the cipher combination was 3-4-3-5-1. Guess what happened when I punched those numbers in. Yup—the door lock clicked open.

  Most cabinet and subcabinet officers have huge, ceremonial offices with great views and lots of antique furniture, where they greet official visitors, hold their photo opportunities, and meet the press.

  But they don’t work there. No—they tend to work in small—even cramped—comfortable cubbyholes where they don’t have to walk half a mile to retrieve a file or a memo from the safe.

  SECNAV’s hideaway is like that. It is wood paneled and cozy, with one small window that looks out on the Potomac, a small fireplace with gas logs, and a lot of built-in bookshelves. There’s a small desk made from the planks of Endurance, a British man o’ war run aground off Spanish Wells during the War of 1812, a leather-covered wing chair, matching ottoman, and reading lamp that look as if they all came from a London club, and a small sofa with a butler’s table sitting on a remarkable antique Persian carpet.

  SECNAV looked up as I came through the door. She was sitting in the wing chair, her feet in soft terry-cloth slippers, an afghan on her lap, a pair of half-glasses perched two-thirds of the way down her nose, reading a thick report. She didn’t look too surprised, either.

  “I’ve read your file—I had an inkling you’d show up uninvited sooner or later, Captain.”

  “Madam Secretary, I think we have to talk.”

  She took her feet from the ottoman, laid the report on her lap, stuck the glasses in her thick red hair, and pursed her lips. “I’m not sure there’s very much to say, Captain Marcinko.”

  “Look, Madam Secretary—”

  “No, you look—and for once, please try to listen.” She stood up. “This is
not personal. It has nothing to do with you and me. It is simply that you are a political liability, Captain Marcinko, and this administration cannot be saddled with political liabilities.”

  I had to smile. It was the old story. More of the same. I said as much.

  Even in her stocking feet she was almost as tall as I. She walked to the desk and put the file down, kicked off the slippers, slid her feet into her shoes, and took her rightful place. “You wear my accusation as if it were a badge of honor. But let me tell you the truth, Captain: it is nothing to be proud of. The Navy has had its share of problems of late. It has had to face downsizing—learning to live with a reduced capability. Then there were the embarrassments. Tailhook. The avalanche of sexual harassment and EEO cases. The stolen Tomahawks. The assassination of CNO Secrest—” She saw me standing opposite her, my arms crossed. She pointed toward the chair she’d just vacated. “Take a seat.”

  “Thank you, but I’ll stand.”

  “Have it your way.” She paused, then rose, so that she looked me in the eye.

  I sighed. Fucking power politics.

  She continued. “I was put in this job to make things right. My orders are to put the Navy back on course.” She picked up a pen and tapped it on the desktop while she chose her words. “Captain, you are preventing me from doing my job. You are a dangerous man.”

  “That’s why they hired me.”