We, too, were going to disappear from the Navy. We’d be run the same way DIA runs its network of deep-cover agents all over the world—no link to the government at all. Our code-word designation would be Task Force Blue. We would all be covert operators.
Task Force Blue. I’d seen the name before. That was the TFB mentioned in the FBI’s electronically shredded memos. Which meant the project had been in the works for a while.
I pored over the papers in front of me. The fact that we were being sheep-dipped was good—and it was bad. Why the yin-yang? Well, first of all, there are laws that prevent the military from engaging in anything that might resemble actions taken against Americans, unless nuclear weapons, or CW/BW weapons are involved. Yeah—I know that in those Hollywood thrillers you often see Delta Force or SEALs doing the dirty dance against domestic bad guys. But that’s so much bullshit. Fact: the Posse Comitatus laws make it illegal for me to dismember dirty dudes domestically. So by removing us from the books, the Priest was, in effect, giving me a hunting license.
Second, a thorough sheep-dipping would prevent the kind of security leaks the FBI was currently experiencing, and the kind of corridor gossip that always eventually finds its way into the public media. DIA has run covert networks and programs for years without any embarrassing disclosures. It has been successful because it keeps its secrets. One way to do that is to make sure there is absolute deniability.
The Priest was emphatic about security: there would be no ties to the military. None. No calls to old friends at the Pentagon asking for favors. No master chiefs slipping their old pal Mr. Rick any goodies. No playing with switches and dials at satellite receiving stations.
Our single, authorized POC (Point Of Contact) would be with the Priest. Communication would be handled through a special cellular phone, on a special number, with code words. Contact would be only when necessary, or appropriate. In essence we would be on our own: jumping blind with no backup.
His decision was just fine with me—in fact, I prefer to operate on my own. Solo flight is perhaps the most effective way to control leaks and assure the safety of me and my men.
That was on the up side. The down side was that cutting my DOD umbilical cord removed us from the SEAL world—and the support networks within it. I was uneasy about that. There’d be no assistance from old friends at the Pentagon; no quiet help from my Fifth Column of Spec-Warriors scattered all over the world; no support from the Safety Net of chiefs I’ve spent so many years building up. It also meant that, unless we begged, borrowed, or stole, we’d be forced to make do with whatever we could buy off the shelf in terms of equipment, weapons, and other supplies. No problem there—I’d done much the same when I first equipped SEAL Team Six, and when Green Team took off on its transcontinental odyssey from London to Afghanistan and back, we stole what we needed from POMCUS (Prepositioned Outside Military Custody of the United States) caches in Germany, and bought the rest.
But covert has its risks, too. Let me list just a few:
Item. I am a convicted felon. As a Navy captain, that fact doesn’t matter. Overseas, who gives a rusty you-know-what. But as a civilian, I cannot possess a firearm. And what if I had to carry one whilst on this merry assignment? The answer: I would be goat-fucked if I was caught, because there was no one to whom I could run and cry, “Daddy, daddy, come save my ass.”
Item. In the military, I am allowed to do the things I like to do best—e.g., kill, maim, loot, pillage, and burn with no (or few) repercussions. As a civilian, these activities are generally frowned upon by the populace in general, and law enforcement in particular. In my current assignment, the Priest said, I could do whatever I could get away with—just so long as I didn’t get caught.
That, too, was troublesome. At SEAL Team Six, we’d had paperwork that allowed us to train—although not to operate—in-country. When the local sheriff showed up hot and bothered because there was a bunch of armed and dangerous dirtbags in his jurisdiction, I had a walletful of proper credentials. If he still wasn’t satisfied, there was a toll-free number in Washington he could call and be told by someone wearing stars that I was as kosher as an Essex Street, New Yawk, dill pickle.
My current status allowed me nothing like that. If caught, it was my ass that would get pickled. That’s the way things are when you’re covert. Just ask any NOC—Non-Official Cover—CIA operator how it feels to be dangling out there all alone. It don’t feel good, believe me.
Item. As CO of SEAL Team Six, Red Cell, and Green Team, I had access to your taxpayer dollars—as many as I needed to get the job done. That meant buying the best equipment I could find, obtaining the latest communications devices, weapons, and other goodies. Task Force Blue was for all intents on its own. Oh, the Priest promised I’d have access to a small cache of cash—but I knew it would be nothing close to what I’d need to mount any kind of meaningful operation. What the hell did he want me to do—rob a bank? I asked and he gave me the kind of look that told me such acts might not go beyond the realm of possibility.
And, there was the usual, niggling doubt that tickled the skeptical meter that hangs in the back end of my brain. What if this was all one big hurnongous clusterfuck and I was being—yet again—set up by the powers that be, so that they could put me and my guys behind bars, and be rid of us once and for all.
It was a possibility. Face it—so far as the Priest knew, he was holding all the cards. He could cast me out into the big, bad world, then cut the line and watch me disappear for good.
That was all on the one hand, and it made a lot of sense, too. But, on the other hand, I’d seen the Chairman’s note. And the Chairman had slammed Pinky nice and hard, and the Priest certainly seemed to have the clout at Justice to get the putative indictments quashed. Moreover, the problem was real, the threat was unmistakable—and besides, what’s life sans challenge?
So I signed, and initialed, and pecker-tracked my life away while the Priest looked on, happy as Torquemada in his nasty basement, while his newest converts joined a new, blue brotherhood.
I called a head-shed at Germaine’s, a pan-Asian restaurant in upper Georgetown, run by a former Marvin (that’s what we used to call our ARVN, or Army of the Republic of Vietnam, allies) parachute nurse named (appropriately enough) Germaine. I needed a good plate of tom ram Nha Trang—Nha Trang-style shrimp—to clear my brain. Besides, Germaine knows me well enough to give me and my guys a lot of elbow room when we need a quiet place to collude, conspire, and cogitate. The way she runs her restaurant—and the way she slaps me around—reminds me of all my favorite bistro owners, from Mama Mascalzone out in Huntington Beach, California, right back to Old Man Gussy, who ran a lunch counter just around the corner from the Rutger’s campus when I was a hairy-palmed kid in New Brunswick, New Joyzey.
We left the Priest’s sanctum singly and made our way to upper Georgetown. I parked back on Thirty-seventh Street, checked my six a couple of times, then sneaked up the steel back stairs, picked the fire door lock, and skulked through the storeroom, threading my way between stacks of five-gallon cans of cooking oil and hundred-pound bags of rice. I hung a left and slipped through the steamy, bustling kitchen (plucking a bottle of Hue Vietnamese beer from the cooler behind the permanently simmering kettles of beef and chicken stock that form the basis for so much of Germaine’s wonderful cooking). Then I came through the swinging service door using a waiter named Huong as cover, and jumped Germaine from behind, sweeping her up off the floor in a big bear hug as she worked unsuspectingly on the big, chock-full reservation book.
It is impossible to surprise a parachute nurse. She knew exactly who it was. “Still coming through the back door, huh, Dick—just like when you surprised Mr. Charlie on IloIlo Island and give him big headache.”
She dug an elbow expertly into my ribs—for a woman just over five feet tall she packs a hell of a punch—then swiveled neatly, caught my left wrist, and turned it inward into an effective come-along.
She gave me a wonderful, warm smile,
patted my cheek, and applied just enough pressure to make me wince. “Now, please, Dick, follow me to the bar. I have several of your friends here waiting for you and they’re beginning to cause a disturbance.”
We took a big table in the back room. Germaine kept the other customers far enough away so that we could get our talking done in private.
We finished off big bowls of pho—Hanoi beef soup laced with the Vietnamese fermented fish sauce called nuoc mam, hot peppers, spicy basil leaves, and fresh lime wedges. Then we moved on to tom—shrimp. We had it Nha Trang style, and also nuong voi bun—grilled Saigon-style with noodles. To clear our palates, there were huge plates of shredded green papaya with beef and hot Thai pepper, and mango salad made of shrimp, mangoes, lime and—you guessed it—vast quantities of Thai red peppers. Face it, gentle reader, if you’re not sweating, you’re not eating, and Germaine’s is the best place in Washington to do both.
I watched paternally as my nine shoot-and-looters worked their chopsticks and drained their brewskis. If you read their fitreps, you’d think they were unruly, tumultuous scum who had no respect for officers—or anyone else. Well, they were unruly—if they didn’t respect the officers they worked for. They did look like unkempt dirtbags—but in the field, the dirtbag look is the sort of camouflage that helps keep a man alive. No—these irreverent, playful, and dangerous Frogs were exactly the kinds of sailors I always look for when I put my units together.
Doc Tremblay and I have known each other since Christ was a mess cook. We’ve hopped and popped, shooted and looted, maimed, raped, pillaged, and burned together all over the globe. Doc was about six months short of finishing up a two-year, government-sponsored tour in Egypt when someone from the ambassador’s office leaked the fact that he might have been a part of the extraction and subsequent death of a tango named Mahmoud Azziz abu Yasin—yeah, the one from Green Team—to the Egyptian Foreign Ministry. Anyway, the Egyptians declared him persona non grata, he lacked an assignment, and I snatched him up just in time for our little Key West fiasco. Ain’t life grand?
I don’t have to tell you about Stevie Wonder—not, that is, if you’ve read Red Cell and Green Team. In case you haven’t, he’s known as Stevie Wonder (his real name is neither Stevie nor Wonder) because he wears opaque, wraparound shooting glasses, and he swivels his head left-right-left, right-left-right, in a passable imitation of—you guessed it—Stevie Wonder. He’s not a SEAL—he’s a former member of Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children (that’s USMC), who enlisted in the Navy a few years back. But he is as tough and resilient as any SEAL in the world—and smarter than 99 percent of ’em. There are lots of operators who can jump and dive and patrol when ordered. There are fewer and fewer these days who live to kill. Wonder is one of them—a true hunter. Indeed, Stevie’d killed more Japs than anyone in the room except Doc and me.
The senior chief I call Nasty Nicky Grundle is about the size of an NFL linebacker, and twice as mean. I selected Nasty for SEAL Team Six when he was a young, energetic pussy-chaser at SEAL Team Four. He and I lost touch for a while, but I got him back when we reconstituted the Naval Security Coordination Team to hunt for the stolen nuclear Tomahawk missiles we wrote about in Red Cell.
Sitting next to Nasty was Duck Foot Dewey. Alien Dewey is a short, barrel-chested farmboy from the waterfowl marshes of Maryland’s Eastern Shore. He won his spurs in Iraq, where he’d been attached to SEAL Team Five. His assignment was to infiltrate Kuwait City and bring communications equipment like cellular phones and video cameras, intelligence materials, and ordnance for booby traps to the Kuwaiti resistance. In fact, Duck Foot is the only petty officer third class who holds the Exalted Order of the Eastern Star, the highest military decoration the Amir of Kuwait can bestow.
Next to Duck Foot, Cherry Enders worked his chopsticks on a big bowl of muc xao ha-long—that’s Vietnamese for spicy calamari cooked with leeks and tomatoes. He’d added three tablespoons of Germaine’s best chopped fresh green chilis to the plate because he, like I, believes that if you’re not sweating, you’re not eating. Cherry (nicknamed for the tattoo on his left tit) was the youngest sailor who’d ever been selected for SEAL Team Six—he was six weeks past nineteen at the time. Cherry had been out of action for about a year. He’d taken a round during our sneak-and-peek of Grant Griffith’s office in Beverly Hills and the damn wound had taken a long time to heal. In the meanwhile, he’d gone to mountaineering school—he could scamper up sheer rock walls or apartment houses better than Duck Foot, Half Pint, or Nasty these days.
Across from Cherry sat Half Pint Harris, his concussion just a dim memory in that hard little head of his. Half Pint’s one of those five-foot-four squidges who believes he can slam-dunk a basketball—and does, out of sheer will to succeed. Aside from making us money on the court, he also speaks fluent German, passable French, and a smattering of Spanish, he can fix just about anything mechanical he ever comes across, and there’s not a building anywhere he can’t break into, being (as he is) a graduate of the Eddie the Burglar School of Lockpicking and Alarm Silencing.
For the last fifteen years, Half Pint’s played Mutt to “Piccolo” Mead’s Jeff. The Pick is the tall, thin drink of water who was assigned as Half Pint’s swim buddy at BUD/S—that’s Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training—by a master chief with no sense of humor. Well, doom on the chief, because they’ve been inseparable ever since.
Rodent is another squidge of a SEAL. He’s served with SEAL Teams One and Two, SDV—for Swimmer Delivery Vehicle—Unit One, and a Special Boat Unit during the Gulf War. Rodent is a master scrounger—a real pack rat—whose commanding officers never seemed to appreciate his … irreverence. Well, irreverence is a quality I look for in my men, so since Green Team, he’s been with me. In fact, let me digress for a minute or two so I can tell you why I choose the men I choose.
The godfather of SEALs, Roy Boehm, used to tell me that he’d rather get his men from the brig than from anywhere else. “Look, asshole,” he used to growl at me affectionately, “if you can motivate a man others call a loser, he’ll follow you to hell and back if you ask him to. Isn’t that the kind of man o’ warsman you want with you?”
I took Roy’s tutelage to heart. I have by and large lived by that philosophy and it has served me well. When I form units—something I’ve done three times over my career, with SEAL Team Six, Red Cell, and Green Team—I don’t look for men who live by the book. I look for men with a little larceny in their hearts; men who think for themselves, who are willing to take risks—and will suffer the consequences in silence if they, or I, fuck up.
What, after all, is the job of a SEAL? It is—when you come down to it—to annihilate, destroy, obliterate, kill, maim, and terminate. Sure, we sneak and peek. Sure, we chart harbors and clear the way for amphibious landings. Yes, we spot targets, gather intelligence, and check tankers for contraband. But that’s not why we exist. We were created by Roy Boehm as guerrilla warriors who could hit from the sea, land, or air in order to counter the Communist-inspired insurgencies that President John Kennedy faced in the early sixties. He created us to be warriors—killers—and that is how we will stand or fall.
These days, SEALs don’t get to be warriors very often. In fact, they are most often used as an extension of the State Department, where they teach Haitian cops to be polite, show Salvadorans how to conduct road blocks without killing anybody, run after cocaine smugglers in Peru and Bolivia, or train a professional presidential bodyguard corps in Turkey or Indonesia. Shit, in Turkey they were pulled off bodyguard training so they could go help locate earthquake victims.
Well, so far as I’m concerned, if you want to train cops in San Salvador, join the Agency for International Development. If you want to chase cocaine smugglers in the Andes, apply to the DEA. And if you want to deploy as a rescue worker, become a goddamn Boy Scout.
When I created SEAL Team Six and brought Naval Special Warfare (kicking and screaming, I might add) into the world of counterterrorism, I followed the Roy Boehm d
ictum again. I looked for men who could shoot to kill without saying “May I?” So, instead of recruiting the able but by-the-book Sailors of the Year who were offered to me, I hunted through stacks of officer fitness reports and enlisted evaluation sheets until I found the rogues—evil-minded, nasty-boy, loot-pillage-rape-and-burn shooters who I knew would get the job done no matter what the consequences, and follow me into hell if that’s where I led them. And guess what—we went to several places that made hell sound pretty good. But we got the job done. And we came back safely. Endeth the sermon.
Gator Shepard was one of the few exceptions to my dirtbag recruiting habit. But then, Gator came to the Teams through the back door. He’s a former Special Weapons Teamer from the Broward County, Florida, sheriff’s office who was bored with drug busts and barricades. So he enlisted in the Navy at the age of twenty-five and went through BUD/S at the age of thirty—that’s Methuselah old, in case you were wondering—and made it by the graying hair on his balls. He’s a buzz-topped, lean, mean mother-fucker—one of those assholes who doesn’t have more than about one percent body fat—and he loves his HK MP5K-PDW (that’s his Heckler & Koch MP5K caliber 9mm submachine gun Personal Defense Weapon for you nonweapons aficionados out there) more than he loves anything else except his Miller GDB—that’s his Genuine Draft Beer—and all the ladies he can fondle. He’s good with it, too—no, that’s his HK I’m talking about. God, you readers all have dirty minds.
Anyhow, Gator can shoot a quarter-size pattern at thirty yards, day or night, hung over, or hung out. He’s a little clean-cut for my taste, and he hasn’t had the kind of military combat experience folks like Rodent or Wonder have had. But hell, a clean-cut guerrilla can infiltrate places a dirtbag can’t go. And, if serving high-risk warrants to Colombian drug dealers and outlaw bikers, or hop-and-popping escaped killers isn’t the same as going over the rail, I don’t know what the hell is.
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