RW04 - Task Force Blue

by Richard Marcinko

  SECNAV shook her head. “No—they ‘hired’ you, Captain Marcinko, because you are a lethal man; because you are a deadly man—or at least one with deadly talents. But I happen to believe that you are also a dangerous man. You’re a loose cannon—a rogue.”

  I started to say something but she cut me off. “I have seen you in action, twice, Captain, and I do not like what I see. Admiral Prescott sent me a CNN videotape of your assault on a British officer just a few months ago. Just last week I was an eyewitness to your wanton violence. Acts like those are the reason I am seeking to have you discharged.”

  Pinky again. He’s such a help in times of need. I thought of several ways in which to make his body hurt. “I did what I had to do to get the job done, Madam Secretary.”

  She nodded and tapped the file on her desk with her pen. “I knew you’d argue that the ends justify the means, Captain. That is how you habitually operate—UNODIR. I am told it stands for UNless Otherwise DIRected, and that you use it as a way to evade the chain of command. Well, once again, you succeeded—in your fashion. That is to say, the terrorists are dead. The hostages—myself included—are free. But your work was not flawless: one of my staff is dead, the result of your wanton brutality. According to the debrief, and my own recollection, your man”—she opened the file and turned its pages until she came to a sheet of paper that had several of its typed lines highlighted in bright yellow marker—“Petty Officer Shepard, called out a warning for Special Agent Flynn to drop his pistol. But you didn’t give Special Agent Flynn a chance to react—you killed him in cold blood.”

  It was time to give her a dose of the real world. “Calling on Flynn to surrender was a mistake on Petty Officer Shepard’s part.”

  She looked at me, incredulous. “What?”

  “Gator acted in error, and I’ve chewed his ass out for it. Let me be blunt, Madam Secretary—giving warnings isn’t my job. Killing terrorists is.”

  “That’s brutal.”

  I nodded. “Maybe it is—but, like you just said, that’s why I was hired. I’m no cop—I don’t have to tell suspects, ‘You have the right to remain silent’—or anything else. When SECDEF says ‘Go’ I go. Because when SECDEF gives me the green light, it means I’m sanctioned. It means I don’t have to worry about taking prisoners.”

  “I don’t agree with that way of doing business, Captain.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said. “You’re not an element in my chain of command.”

  “Perhaps not,” she said. “But as secretary of the navy you are an element within mine—and I can deal with you.”

  She was right about that—she couldn’t order me on a mission, but she could end my career. “I’ll fight your decision to remove me.”

  “I assumed you might. But it’s gone above both our heads now,” SECNAV said. “The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has asked to see all the paperwork on this incident. It will be his call, now.”

  She tapped the report with her pen again. “And when he makes his ruling, I think you’ll be history, Captain Marcinko—and I believe that the Navy will be the better for it.”

  I went to SECNAV’s cabin Monday afternoon. The boondocker in the ass came on Tuesday morning at 0600, when I was denied entry to the UT/RUS operations center, a small cluster of rooms buried behind bug-proof walls in the Pentagon basement, and dispatched forthwith, at once, and toute de suite, to a windowless, six-by-six-foot office in a huge, mazelike, dusty warehouse that backed up against the rear perimeter fence of the Washington Navy Yard. I was put on restricted duty and told to S2. (That’s shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down and make no fucking waves whatsoever.)

  What was going on—déjà vu all over again? The last time I was sent in disgrace from the Pentagon to the Navy Yard, the Navy spent more than $60 million trying to prove that I acted improperly. Despite all the expense, and six hundred man years of effort, the investigators from NIS failed to find even one iota of evidence against me back then.

  Now they were about to try and haul me out of town on the proverbial keel one more once, even though I knew I’d acted within my mission parameters. Incredible.

  My cell—that’s how I thought of it—came with a dented gray steel desk, a metal chair with uneven legs, and an empty file cabinet. There was no phone. There was no lock on the door. Obviously, there was no Bigelow on the floor either.

  Now, at my current stage of life, I won’t accept treatment like this. First of all, I don’t need the money the Navy pays me. I do the work because I believe in it—and in my men. Financially, I’m secure. I made a dump truck of cash on my autobiography, Rogue Warrior, and its two fictional sequels, Red Cell and Green Team. Besides, I’ve got Rogue Manor, 6,500 square feet of house and 200 acres of heaven, which backs up pretty close to Quantico, about an hour southwest of Washington. With that kind of real estate at my disposal, who needs a six-by-six at the Navy Yard and two hours of commuting?

  So I drove back to the Manor, and went to work.

  Work? You out there all look dubious. You’re saying, “Dickie’s just been shitcanned, and yet he’s keepin’ on keepin’ on. What goes?”

  The answer, friends, is that there were too many wheels spinning, and too many targets in the air, and when there are too many targets in the air, my only question is which one do I shoot at first.

  See, I knew I had acted according to correct procedure. I’d received verbal permission to act from the National Command Authority. The problem I faced was that nothing was on paper. Well, that was nothing new. The president had ordered me and Green Team to snatch a fundamentalist tango from Cairo sans benefit of written orders. And somewhere in the Pentagon, someone recorded all the calls in and out of SECDEF’s command center—so I knew that sooner or later, I’d come up with the right evidence and be vindicated. It was only a matter of time—and effort.

  Still, there was no doubt that SECNAV wanted to remove me from the scene—fast. That made sense: it was the politically expedient thing for her to do.

  But SECNAV and I had different priorities. Her job is political—keeping the lid on. Mine is tactical—blowing the lid off. And I consider my mission more important than hers. After all, there were bad guys out there who had been given access to Navy secrets, and I was determined to find them and bring them to justice.

  So I DIDN’T JUST SIT AROUND AND WATCH THE SOAPS. THERE were things to do. Like check up on Alpha Detachment/Armed Militia. Like check up on LC Strawhouse. My efforts would be aided by one facet of my personality that I probably haven’t talked much about before: my predilection toward pack-ratness. Simply put, I almost never throw anything away. My ex-wife, COMWRINKLANT, used to call me the last Collier brother.

  The godfather of all SEALs, Roy Boehm, was the one who first encouraged me to keep every scrap of U.S. Navy paper that ever crossed my bow. “Never throw a fucking thing away,” Roy growled at me when I was but a tadpole and he was a grizzled old frog. “Because someday, the paper warrior sons of bitches are going to come after you, and you’ll have to defend yourself. Because you’re a fucking man o’ warsman, they’ll think you’re a knuckle dragger who don’t keep good records. Well, fuck the fucking fuckers. You keep every fucking scrap of paper ever crosses your desk. You keep meticulous fucking records of who the fuck, what the fuck, where the fuck, when the fuck, why the fuck, and how the fuck.” (Yes, friends, Roy Henry Boehm, Lieutenant Commander, U.S. Navy, Retired, actually does talk like this. You have to remember that he, like me, is a mustang—an enlisted puke-turned-officer—who’s never forgotten that he was once a boatswain’s mate, and a fuckin’ good one, too.)

  Okay, back to Roy’s advice about saving paper. Quoth he, “Save everything. That way, when they come after you, you’ll blow ’em out of the fucking water by sheer weight of evidence.”

  Ever since, I have followed—and even augmented— Roy’s shall we say piquantly phrased but solid-as-gold advice. So I went to the files. Sure, I get all the trade publications—ten gun magazines, half a dozen S
WAT guides, police catalogs, security-organization bulletins, and military magazines. But there’s also a decade of Time and Newsweek, US Snooze, Forbes, and Money in my basement, as well as bulging files of The Economist. Rolling Stone. The Mid-East Report. Not to mention American Survival Guide and The Liddy Letter—yeah, I get ’em all. And I keep ’em all, too. While there was no information about ADAM, within six hours I’d assembled a pile of magazine articles and news clips on LC—for Lyman Clyde—Strawhouse.

  He had quite a history. According to a hugely favorable profile in Forbes, he was the eldest of thirteen children born during the Great Depression to Odessa and Vernon Strawhouse—“redneck sharecroppers from the northeast corner of Texas, Bonnie and Clyde country, close up to where the Oklahoma and Arkansas state lines meet,” is how the Washington Post Style section had folksily described them back in the mideighties. The article went on to say LC’s folks had lost their $125 Sears & Roebuck kit house because they couldn’t pay the $8 monthly mortgage. (It also mentioned that his Washington lawyers included one Grant Griffith. That made me put a small black mark next to LC’s name. Griffith was the influence-peddling former secretary of defense I’d shot when I discovered he’d been behind the smuggling of nuclear Tomahawk missiles to a Japanese Ultranationalist group.)

  Well, black mark or no, LC, as Lyman Clyde preferred to be known, was that authentic American original, a selfmade man. The David Burnett portraits I found in Forbes showed him to be an elongated—six-foot-plus—coyote-faced, knock-kneed, jug-eared, sinewy country boy whose Desi Arnaz pompadour haircut was pure fifties. He dressed well but not flamboyantly in London suits, and favored cowboy boots to lace-up shoes.

  He came by the country-boy angle honestly: he’d picked cotton and rice as a six-year-old, worked in a slaughterhouse as a teenager, and carried hundred-pound blocks of ice for twenty-five cents a day instead of going to high school. At eighteen he was drafted—and volunteered for Airborne training. Three years later, as a sergeant, he won the Congressional Medal of Honor when he saved his Eighth Army Ranger Company platoon from decimation by the Chinese Communists on Ipsac Hill, North Korea. They’d been overrun when the Chicoms crossed the Yalu River to intervene on behalf of their North Korean allies. Still on crutches six months later, he was decorated by Truman at a White House ceremony.

  After the Army he’d drifted back to Texas and found himself a job in the oil fields. According to a six-month-old profile in Time, “he was happiest when he worked with his hands and sweat till he stunk.”

  He was also, it turned out, enterprising. According to Business Week, by the late fifties he was a small-time wildcatter. By the time Kennedy was elected, he’d made his first five million and moved lock, stock options, and fifty-gallon barrel to California. The day Nixon took the oath of office, he was worth half a billion. And if I believed what I read in the newspaper clips I was holding—and I had no reason not to—LC Strawhouse, now in his midsixties and the chairman and CEO of LCI, International, was worth somewhere between twenty and twenty-five billion dollars.

  Let me put that in perspective for you folks out there. It is more than the GNP—gross national product—of Peru, Chile, or Syria. It is twice the GNP of Malaysia. Let me use a financially technical description: LC Strawhouse was one rich son of a bitch.

  But it wasn’t his money that made him famous these days. It was his politics. It seemed that whenever you turned on the TV these days, there was LC Strawhouse, telling us how ineffectual, bloated, and useless “gummint,” as he called it, had become. “If the gummint was in bidness,” he told Larry, and Phil, and Oprah, and Geraldo, and whoever else would have him on their shows, “it would have gone belly-up long ago.” LC’s solution was for the American people to put him in charge and let him fix things—singlehandedly. He had been registered as an independent presidential candidate in all fifty states—and his organization was bringing in millions of dollars in contributions— not that he needed a penny of it.

  Now, I’m not a political animal. I have spent most of my life in the military, working for a series of politically motivated commanders in chief and Congresses who hadn’t the foggiest idea how to use me and my deadly talents. But they were my commanders in chief and my Congresses— that’s what the Constitution’s all about, and I took an oath to defend that very same Constitution.

  Anyway, it seemed apparent (even to me) that old LC Strawhouse wanted to make major changes in the Constitutional area. News clips chronicled his appearances and presentations at such venues as Soldier of Fortune conventions, weapons trade shows, and political gatherings over the past year and a half. Let me put his political philosophy succinctly for you.

  LC believed we needed a chief of state who was less the poll-driven, touchie-feelie-I-will-never-lie-to-y’all politician, and more like one of those Latin American caudillos—paternalistic, tough dictators like Trujillo or Batista. There was a part of me that agreed with him. I want a head of state who is decisive—a man who leads from the front. LC certainly did that—he ran his businesses. He didn’t leave ’em to others to run. And in many areas, our philosophies were similar. He argued that we didn’t need a Department of Defense that ran rescue missions in the Third World instead of staying ready for war. I thought so, too. He thought we should lead, not follow, in world affairs. No argument there, either. He was tough on crime, and believed in education. Right on.

  Where I got uneasy with LC was in the constitutional area. He never came out and said it in so many words, but it was kind of like he hinted that we didn’t really need the Constitution. I found that downright scary.

  But guess what? Current polls showed that many Americans agreed with him—felt that we needed a strong man running the gummint, and to hell with the Constitution. One poll—from a USA Today not three weeks old—showed that 22 percent of Americans would be willing to give up some or all of the Bill of Rights if that meant cutting down on crime, drugs, and welfare fraud. That fact alone should tell you something about the mood of the Nation these days. Frankly, it made me very nervous.

  It made me even more nervous to know that a group of well-armed, well-informed tangos had wanted to talk to him more than they wanted to talk to the vice president of the United States.

  At 0530 Wednesday morning, knowing he’d be awake, I called Stevie Wonder. “Busy these days?” I asked.

  “Sure.” He chortled. I hate him when he chortles. “Since I don’t have an office to go to, I’ve been sitting at home playing with myself. What about you?”

  I told him about my meeting with SECNAV, and my suspicions. I could just see his head swiveling left-right-left, right-left-right. “Sounds righteous to me.”

  “Has anybody seen anything from the FBI?”

  “Nah.” Wonder paused. I heard him slurp his ever present 7-Eleven coffee. “Once they shut us down, nobody bothered to pass any poop.”

  “Well, I’d like to see it—”

  “Me, too.” He laughed. “Let’s call La Muchacha and see if she’ll fax it out to the Manor.”

  “Fat fucking chance of that.” I paused. “How do you feel about a little breaking and entering on Federal property?”

  “Any property in particular?”

  “I was kind of thinking about the J. Edgar Hoover Building.”

  “Gee,” said Wonder, “it’s been about five, maybe six years since we’ve done that. Probably about time.”

  It was raining when Wonder drove my car into an underground garage on Tenth Street just north of E Street, less than a hundred yards from the two-and-a-half-million-square-foot J. Edgar Hoover building. We parked and watched as hundreds of FBI employees streamed into the headquarters building at the start of the morning shift. Neither Wonder nor I had been inside this huge, ugly concrete fortress in a while, and my preliminary evaluation as I watched and noted was not especially promising.

  Some background here. The Hoover Building covers the square block between Ninth and Tenth Streets, and Pennsylvania Avenue and E Street, directl
y across Penn from the Department of Justice. There are seven stories on the Pennsylvania Avenue side, and ten on the E Street side. More than seven thousand FBI employees work there. They are divided into three shifts that cover twenty-four hours.

  The place was designed in the heyday of the disturbances—read antiwar demonstrations and civil rights riots—of the sixties, and built in the late sixties and early seventies. Hence, its castlelike architecture—incorporating such elements as a huge dry moat, a small number of chokepoint entrances, and a mazelike interior—didn’t encourage the sort of B and E I was used to performing at loosely guarded military installations.

  Worse, from my point of view, was the fact that the FBI had obviously buttoned things up considerably since the Oklahoma City bombing.

  Used to be you could just park your car next to the building, stick a quarter in the meter, and wander in simply by waving a generic Federal ID in the general direction of a bored rent-a-cop. That’s how I’d gained entrance when I commanded SEAL Team Six. These days, you couldn’t park within a block and a half of the building itself. And I realized after half an hour of standing in the rain that all FBI employees now wore photo identification cards that had magnetic identifier strips. They showed their cards to a guard—a hard-working guard wearing an FBI badge—who actually compared the picture on the card with their faces. Then they inserted their cards in a reader, which in turn allowed them to go through a security turnstile. The fact that they’d punched in was also recorded on a computer somewhere.

  It took me another hour to comprehend a further refinement: the cards were entry-specific. I discovered that because I saw repeated instances of people sauntering up the street together, but walking into different entrances. At, say, the State Department or the Pentagon, it doesn’t matter what office you work in—you can go into any entrance and get there. Not, I discovered, at FBI Headquarters.

  If, for example, you’re a researcher in the forensics lab on the third floor, you can enter the building on the Tenth Street side, but not through the Pennsylvania Avenue door. Why? Because the Pennsylvania Avenue door does not lead to the forensics lab. I saw only males in good suits and females dressed for success wandering through that particular door. Assessment: the Pennsylvania entrance was probably one of the “executive” doors, which led to the elevator bank specifically assigned to the Bureau’s top-level offices on the sixth and seventh floors.