RW04 - Task Force Blue

by Richard Marcinko

  Oh, Master Marcinko-san, I fear you have gone off the deep end here.

  Fuuuuck you, Tadpole, get out of my goddamn temple—you’re beyond help.

  But I wasn’t beyond help. Because, I remembered something else significant about Fudo’s haiku: I recalled that Statue technique can form an effective basis for interrogation.

  For those of you who are now totally confused, let me explain. Silence is a great and effective weapon when used during interrogation. Simply put, you stare the asshole down until he feels compelled to speak.

  Yeah, I know you’re dubious, but it works, damn it. As a matter of fact, it’s even been adapted as part of the CIA’s current interrogation doctrine. Christians in Action even printed Fudo’s haiku in their training manual.

  I know it works because I saw it used by Toshiro Okinaga, my old friend from Kunika, the Japanese national police counterterrorism unit, during a joint operation we conducted a few years back. Tosho captured a Japanese Red Army suspect, on whom interrogation seemingly didn’t work. Kunika’s toughest agents tried to break the guy—but he wouldn’t crack.

  Then, Tosho had the tango brought to a tiny cell. There, the two of them sat, face-to-face. Tosho stared intently at the prisoner for forty minutes without moving, without blinking, without seemingly even breathing. The JRA tango found Tosho’s penetrating gaze irresistible—it was as if he suddenly found himself compelled to speak. Ultimately, he confessed his sins willingly.

  It would be interesting to see how long LC Strawhouse could hold back when he was faced with the combination of Musashi and Fudo—channeled through me. I took a sip of my Bombay, then set the glass on the table, and stared at the billionaire, focusing on the Congressional Medal just below his Adam’s apple. I didn’t blink. You couldn’t see me take a breath. Just silence. And patience.

  LC Strawhouse, no inscrutable Oriental, lasted less than a minute and a half. At first, he looked puzzled. Then he set his glass down and fixed me with an ingratiating smile. When I didn’t react, he picked his drink back up, sipped it, and put it down again. Then he drummed his bony fingers on the table brrrrrm, brrrrrm. Then he coughed. Then he looked at me again. He started to stand, sat himself back down, and smiled once more, nervously.

  “Not that they didn’t deserve what they got,” he blurted. “Assholes—they were stupid assholes.”

  Once again, he waited for me to say something. When I didn’t, he began again. This time I got the full, boilerplate campaign speech. “Dick, you’ve gotta see what I see—which is, the world has gone crazy and it needs to be fixed.” He retrieved his drink, took a sip, and replaced it carefully on the coffee table. “We’ve lost our sense of responsibility—the kind of independent, pioneer spirit our grandparents had. Take these damn lawsuits today. You make anything these days, you get sued.

  “The damn gummint’s no better, either. I own a company makes bricks. So last year OSHA—that Occupational Safety and Health Administration—they sued me. Some thirty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year bureaucrat wanted me to put damn warning labels on my bricks because he’d ground ’em up and fed ’em to rats, and the rats died.” He slapped his hand on the arm of his chair. “Hell, boy, you’d die, too, you ate ten pounds of ground brick.

  “And that’s the bidness end of it. Look at what’s happening in the military. You walked the floor at the convention—it’s all simulators and war games now. Damn toys. Nobody wants to hump through the mud anymore down and dirty, the way you and I did. And that’s the least of it. We got no gumption. Got no pride, no esprit—you get that from the top down, and there’s no ‘top’ around. Hell, Dick, we ain’t got but a few man o’ warsmen left—and they’re getting rid of ’em as fast as they can.”

  His well-rehearsed monologue went on for another half hour and two more melonshine-and-Cokes. He talked about downsizing the military and lack of preparedness, the rising crime rates, the proliferation of welfare fraud, coddled criminals, and our overbearing government. I let him babble on. I never changed my expression. I never let him catch me breathing or blinking.

  When he ran out of canned speechifying, he blustered and flustered as he tried to probe this way and that, exploring for some sign that would allow him to get past my implacable presence. Finally, he began talking about me.

  First, he recited my whole curriculum vitae. It was obvious from what he said that he’d been given access to all my fitreps—even the classified ones from SEAL Team Six and Red Cell. He quoted from NIS internal memos, written during the Navy’s $60 million investigation of my activities. He even recounted Pinky Prescott’s memos damning me for operating UNODIR.

  I took his words in stony silence. I knew what he was doing: he was trying to build a case against the Navy. Why? Because he was trying to recruit me.

  It’s an old intelligence officer’s trick. You turn the target against the people for whom he works. You flatter. You cajole. You make nicee-nicee. And then, before he knows it, you’ve set your hook, and he’s dead meat.

  True to formula, his tone and demeanor changed—it went from patriarchal to seductive.

  He insisted that he needed my help. The Navy had screwed me and I owed it nothing. Even if I was out of the Navy, the government could still come after me. After all, they’d done it before. But LC would help me—if I supported him. After all, he said, I still had my network of friends—lots of them—and he wanted me to use my influence in the SpecWar community to help him achieve his goals. It was in my power, he said.

  That had to be the core of it. The real shoot-and-looters weren’t behind him—and he wanted them. Obviously he knew I still had some influence in that quarter, because the s.o.b. was going all out now—little flecks of spittle flicking past my shoulder as he prattled on about if he won the White House, I would be assured of a top administration job. “You’d be the president’s personal shoot-and-looter,” Strawhouse said, a lopsided grin spreading over his face. “Think about it, Dick—think about it.”

  My face was a mask.

  He spread his arms, palms up, as if in supplication. His tone changed again, from coy to conspiratorial. “The truth, Dick, is that you gotta run the country like a bidness. That’s the only efficient way to give the people their money’s worth. But in bidness, there’s room for only one CEO; one chairman of the board.

  “One point of view,” he said again. He waited for me to respond. “One way of life. One set of values—”

  That sounded like totalitarianism to me—Stalinist, in fact. But I remembered Fudo’s haiku, bit my tongue, and didn’t say anything.

  He looked at me for confirmation. “Right? Well—am I right? I’m right. No doubt about it.” You could just see how the silence provoked him.

  Which is exactly what I wanted. And finally, just as the immortal Japanese warrior had predicted, my behavior caused him to act precipitously.

  I watched as his face took on a wild-eyed expression that was abhorrent, malevolent, and indescribably frightening. “Know what’s gonna happen, Dick? I do. The country’s gonna come apart at the damn seams. First they’ll disarm us so all the guns’ll be in the hands of criminals. Drugs? They’ll be everywhere, and nobody stoppin’ ’em. Domestic terrorism. That’s the next step. Oklahoma City was nothing—nothing, compared to what’s gonna happen soon. It’ll be total anarchy—the animals in control and no way to stop ’em. The whole social fabric will come apart at the damn seams.” He paused. Caught his breath.

  “And y’know what? It was you who showed me the way.”

  I fought the impulse to move, to respond. What the hell was he saying? I knew the only way I’d find out was to keep him talking. I remained mute.

  “It was you,” he said. “I read all that stuff about London—that fucking asshole Brookfield. He had it all wrong. Tried to organize the shit out of things.” His face was red now—his eyes fucking crazy. “See, that’s the mistake they all make. They organize—they leave tracks. They make patterns. Patterns are bad, right? They’re fucking conventional
, Dick. You can trace a pattern. But you can’t trace chaos. Chaos just happens. No pattern. Just action.”

  I stared at him, silent. He continued babbling. “There’s nobody to stop the chaos—nobody except me. Me. Do it my way, too—which is the same as your way. You know what to do—hunt ’em, and kill ’em. Kill ’em all—the animals, the dissenters, the damn bureaucrats. Think of it as taking out the garbage.”

  He looked over at me for some sort of endorsement. He got only my blank Zen stare. He responded by taking another sip of melonshine and Coke, gulping his words as he continued. “But you know what that takes, ’cause you been there. Strong fist. Absolute power. Now, you call it what the damn hell you wanna call it, boy—I think of it as dynamic gummint. Them assholes got other words for it—autocratic, fascist, totalitarian—well, screw ’em. Shit, it’s what this country needs. Dose o’ salts. Political enema. Fresh start. Know what I think? I say, to hell with the Congress—all those self-important bastards who take your rights away; to hell with the judicial system—goddam pussy-assed judges who won’t take a hard stand on anything. And to hell with all those damn checks and balances—which haven’t worked in fifty years anyway. We don’t fucking need ’em—any of ’em.”

  He drained his drink and filled it up again. He’d gone glassy-eyed, and I wondered how many he’d actually had. “Know why I’m gonna be president?” he asked rhetorically.

  No response.

  It didn’t matter—he couldn’t wait to tell me. “’Cause I got the balls to do what’s got to be done—to force America to realize how bad it needs me. And it does need me, Dick—it needs us—needs our kind of leadership.”

  He paused long enough to catch his breath and sip his drink. “Y’know, when I look at that weak-kneed, pussy-whipped fella up there in the White House,” he slurred, “I get sick. I wanna throw up. He’s nothing but a draft-dodging, pussy-whipped, pot-smoking womanizer. A coward, Dick—the man’s a coward. You know what that means? It means he’s not my commander in chief, and I’m not beholden to obey his damn orders, follow his damn directives, or respect his damn laws.”

  Well, friends, that’s not true. The president may be a cowardly, pussy-whipped, draft-dodging, pot-smoking womanizer—and if he is, then impeach the sonofabitch, or vote him out of office (or better yet, don’t vote him in in the first place).

  But the president is the commander in chief. Full stop. End of story. And I understood now what LC Strawhouse had in mind for us. All those missing weapons—they’d go to drug gangs, crazies, paranoids. And while the FBI and the rest of ’em looked for structure, for patterns, for some kind of master plan, all those thousands of armed and dangerous asshole crazies would be out there shooting and looting—courtesy of LC Strawhouse.

  LC was right about one thing. It would fucking turn America inside out.

  But LC wanted to do more than that. He was looking to encourage the same kind of bottom-up revolution Charlie Manson hoped to bring about by his random murders back in the late sixties. Manson called it helter-skelter. Of course, Charlie Manson was nutball crazy. Loony. Psycho. Socio-pathic.

  But then, I told myself, so was LC Strawhouse. What he’d do was pass out a lot of guns and explosives to a bunch of dangerous crazies—and innocent people would end up getting killed. Killed so he could make a political point. Just like the tango assholes who bombed the Murrah building in Oklahoma City. They’d wanted to make a political point, too. They did—but not the one they’d intended to.

  He was sweaty now and wheezing, moisture obvious around the edge of his collar, his face flushed from the booze. From the look of it he’d talked himself out. But he’d gone too far. He had left the back door open and I’d snuck in—gotten a glimpse of what he had backstage. Yeah, I knew what he wanted—and the most incredible thing was that he’d thought I might want to be a part of it.

  Don’t be fooled, friends. I may fight the system with every molecule of energy and strength I can summon up. But I struggle not to destroy the system but to make it better. I want admirals who lead, not manage. I want shooters who can kill. I want a fucking Navy that can go to war and win. I want a nation that will always persevere. Fucking LC Strawhouse had made the same mistake Grant Griffith had—he misread my anger. He thought I could be bought.

  Well, he—like Grant Griffith before him—was wrong. I may be a rogue—but I am a patriotic rogue. So now—now it was time to act. I fixed LC in my sights, walked up to him real close, fingered the Congressional Medal of Honor that hung round his neck and let it plop back atop his throat.

  Then I took both his lapels in my hands and put my nose about an inch from his. “Listen, you worthless pencil-dicked sack of shit, you were a member of the armed forces—just like me. And when you’re a member of the armed forces, you take an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the fucking Constitution—just like I did. And you know what that means, cockbreath? It means you don’t have to like the man who is president, or even respect him. You just have to be willing to die for him. That’s your fucking job. That’s what the fucking oath you took is all about.”

  He wasn’t used to being spoken to like this. “I’ll deal with you, talking to me like that,” he slurred. A globule of spittle was caught in the corner of his mouth, giving him a slightly demented appearance.

  He tried to say something else but I flipped the medal back onto his shirt, pushed on his chest, sending him back onto the sofa, and stepped away. “Now you get this straight, asshole. Yes, the fucking Navy has screwed me in the past. And, yes, the fucking Navy would probably try to bend me over and jam the big banana up inside again if it ever got the chance to. But it is my Navy, and my country, and no peckerwood-talking sonofabitch billionaire cockbreath is going to steal it out from under me without a hell of a fight.”

  My friends, it was absolutely clear to me right then that this moonshine-sipping schmuck was nothing more than another tango—no different from the goddamn IRA child killers that Mick Owen chased in Ulster, the Japanese Red Army assassins Toshiro Okinaga tracked in Tokyo, the ADAM assholes I’d waxed in Key West, or the Islamic Jihad fundamentalists I’d hunted in Afghanistan, Libya, and wherever else I could find ’em and kill ’em.

  They deserved to die because they brought violence into the political arena. Simply put, when things weren’t going their way, they hijacked planes, blew up buildings, and left car bombs on busy streets—killing innocent people to make their point.

  Well, LC Strawhouse was a tango, too. But he had set his sights on a bigger target and more hostages than you could find on an aircraft in Key West, the World Trade Center in New York, or downtown Oklahoma City. He wanted to hijack the whole fucking country.

  “Y’know,” I said, “I think you better look for a different kind of bad boy to help you out. Because you’re precisely the kind of asshole I like to go hunting for. And y’know, LC—your fucking head’s gonna look just great stuffed and mounted on my wall.”

  I let myself out past the blue, pinstriped BAW, rang for the elevator and descended in silence as Band-Aid Billy Bob or Bobby Bill or whoever the fuck gave me the cold shoulder. There was a bar in the lobby, and it occurred to me that a Bombay on the rocks might help take the nasty taste of LC Strawhouse away. I started across the sculptured carpet but stopped abruptly—just as if I’d sensed a trip wire and booby trap.

  I have a very good instinctual sixth sense. It has kept me alive. I have stopped, foot poised on jungle trails, and seen land mines right where I was about to tread. In Libya, a tango shot straight at me—the bullet shattered a wall directly behind the spot I stood. I hadn’t heard anything—but I sensed that he was there and I ducked away in time. Last year in London, my instincts kept me from being scooped up by NIS Terminators because, as I approached Grosvenor Square, where they’d set up their ambush, I sensed that all was not right and took evasive action.

  Here, too, something made me pull up short—to not enter the bar. Instead, I stopped and sniffed the air, just the way I do when I am
hunting tangos. The scent of danger was palpable to me.

  I stepped back, out of the light, and observed from the shadow. There, across the room, a cellular phone just like the one he’d given me sitting at his elbow, and engaged in deep conversation with someone whose face I couldn’t see, was the Priest.

  It was, I decided, time to regroup.

  IT WAS SNOWING BY THE TIME I CHANGED INTO JEANS, RUNNING shoes, and a Michigan State Rose Bowl sweatshirt, checked out of the hotel, packed up the car, and hauled balls out to Ypsilanti. The drive was slowed by nasty weather—slippery highway with ice patches, and big, fat, wet snowflakes, the kind that clot on your windshield no matter how hot you run the defroster. Then they catch on your windshield wipers and burn out the motors. I had a lot of time to think about my situation, and I didn’t like what I came up with at all.

  If the Priest and LC Strawhouse were connected, then everything I was doing had been compromised from the very start, and I was dog meat. But—and this means a lot with me—I had liked the Priest. He’d struck me as one of the good guys, and I am not often mistaken about that sort of thing.

  So, perhaps he had good reason to be in Detroit and not to tell me he was here—he was, after all, the guy whose door read NDBBM. Maybe he’d come out to visit the SpecWar convention, and not to see LC Strawhouse. Maybe. And maybe not. I sighed and watched the windshield wipers struggle with the wet snowflakes. Shit—I was fucked.

  There wasn’t a whole lot to do at the armory. Wonder and the rest of the crew had gone to Rent-A-Wreck, leased two cars for a month (and charged them on one of Freddie the Forger’s best pieces of rubber plastic—standard operating procedure when you’re operating undercover), then driven direct from Detroit Metro about two hours before. Mugs had wasted no time in deploying them. When he ascertained from Rodent and Gator that the bad guys hadn’t shown up yet, he had the two animals take everyone on a growly prowl so nobody would get lost in the neighborhood and fuck up. Then he handed out weapons and flashlights. Then he broke the group into two five-man watches—eight hours on, eight hours off.