RW04 - Task Force Blue

by Richard Marcinko

  He’d brought extra batteries for the flashlights, AAA maps, and two two-gallon thermos jugs of hot coffee with him. There was a portable digital police scanner on the dashboard of his car, and a CB radio in the glove compartment. God bless all chiefs. (Yes, friends, you have seen this material before, and you will see it again. And again.)

  Wonder had packed a few supplies, too. He brought a pair of Night Enforcers—range-finding, three-power night-vision binoculars he’d managed to liberate from the United Nations during one of his four covert trips to Iraq as a bogus nuclear weapons inspector. He’d remembered my favorite—not to mention well-worn—leather sap, as well as a handful of nylon restraints, a couple of rolls of duct tape, and the wallet of false IDs I keep in the secret compartment beneath the Rogue Manor kitchen floor next to Pinky’s NIS file. Ever conscious of my need to dress well, he’d also packed a set of black BDUs. (I wished he’d remembered my boots, though. My toes were getting real cold in nylon running shoes and cotton socks.) Still, in his suitcase there were eight scrambler radios with four sets of spare batteries and chargers, and a battery-powered direction-finding beacon/receiver that we’d stolen from NIS’s Technical Security Division, located in Building 22 at the Washington Navy Yard, when Red Cell had performed a proctoscopy—that is to say, a security exercise—about two years ago.

  And Christmas came early for Dickie this year. I forgot all about my cold feet when Wonder handed over a Heckler & Koch P7 9mm pistol with Trijicon night sights, two magazines, and an SOB—I know what you’re probably thinking, but the acronym stands for Small-Of-the-Back—holster that he’d all brought especially for me. I didn’t want to know where he’d gotten the P7, but Wonder volunteered the fact that no felony had been committed while obtaining it. (Knowing him, I checked to make sure he wasn’t crossing his fingers behind his back.)

  Actually, I wasn’t worried about firearms and ammo—there was a damn building full of lethal goodies sitting right in front of us, ready for a mean motherplucker like me to do some plucking. I turned to Wonder. “Okay, so you brought me a gun—but if you really loved me you’d have brought your lockpicks.” He swiveled his neck left-right-left, right-left-right, smiled behind the yellow wraparound shooting glasses, reached inside his parka and retrieved a small leather case. He unfolded it and proudly showed me his American Express card—and his precious burglar tools. “Don’t even think about telling me what you won’t leave home without,” I told him. “Just take some of your brothers and go to work.”

  Nine minutes later, he, Doc, Nasty, and Duck Foot returned with enough firepower to violate most if not all of the weapons laws in the United States. They brought out six Beretta M-92 pistols—old ones that were made in Italy in the late eighties and pawned off on National Guard units about five years ago—and 1,000 rounds of 9mm ball ammo. They also retrieved a pair of M-16 assault rifles—real assault rifles: the kind that are fully automatic, not the wanna-be semiautos they argue about in Congress—thirty 20-round magazines, two 840-round cans of 5.56 ball, and one can of 5.56 tracer.

  Duck Foot and Wonder had filled their ample pockets with grenades—ten riot control grenades that spread CS tear gas, a dozen concussion grenades—these are grenades, friends, not stun devices. They are lethal—and eight white smokers.

  Doc Tremblay carried out two Remington 870 riot shot-guns, a hundred rounds of double-0 buckshot, and four shot-shell bandoleers—shit, he’d look like Pancho fucking Villa with his big droopy mustache if he wore ’em crossed over his chest. And for some unfathomable reason he appropriated a couple of hundred 5.56 training blanks—the kind of ammo National Guard units use for demonstration purposes. When I asked why the hell he’d bothered, he told me that he was going to pull the plugs out, dump the powder, and use the virgin, primed cases for some of his handmade hot sniper loads. Brass, he explained in his broad Rhode Island accent, was getting “mo-ah and mo-ah expensive these days.”

  And Nasty? He had found one LAW, and somehow also discovered a one-kilo block of C-4 plastic explosive, half a dozen pencil detonators, three M-1 spring-loaded firing devices, and fifty yards of OD tripwire. Where the hell does he come up with this stuff? I tell you, if the asshole ever retires, he can find work as a bomb-sniffing dog.

  We had four rental cars, so we broke the equipment down between them and returned Mugs’s goodies to him—under protest.

  The snow was still coming down. That was a catch-22 problem. See, if you sit in a warm car with your engine idling and your wipers slapping, you’re gonna look like you’re on a stakeout. But if you turn the engine off, then your windshield freezes over, your side windows coat up with snow, and you can’t see fuck-all.

  Moreover, it’s much easier to spot car tracks in the snow—and if the armory was going to be cased, I wanted it to look as if no one was in the area—which precluded any cars close at hand.

  So, I made an executive decision. A quarter mile from the armory I rented two rooms for us at a Motel 6 where they’d kept the lights on for us. One watch would hole up. They’d be on call but free to grab combat naps, hot showers, and food. The other watch would set up in positions on the armory perimeter and keep their eyes open.

  The first night we froze our behinds without any tangible results except frozen behinds. It snowed right on into the morning—six and a half inches by daybreak—which did wonders for my nylon running shoes. Well, at least I wasn’t wearing sandals. It stopped snowing by midafternoon, and the roads were plowed before rush hour. (It actually works like that in the Midwest.) Since we’d had eight hours rest, Wonder, Nasty, Duck Foot, Cherry, Mugs, and I took the night watch—1800 to 0200. We set Nasty in an observation post behind a convenient trash Dumpster. He protested, but it didn’t matter. He was the youngest and besides he couldn’t smell much because his nose had been smashed almost flat when he’d taken a bad—read seventy-foot—fall at the end of a HALO exercise some years ago.

  Nasty was positioned at green eight on the armory’s left side.

  Green eight? Yes, that means he was sitting on the armory’s left side, in the fore-quarter.

  Let me explain. In CT—counterrorism—operations, you generally have teams coming from all sides when they stage the assault. In the heat of battle, when things get confused—the nineteenth-century philosopher Karl von Clausewitz called it “la friction—the fog of war”—what is on the right to me, may be on the left to someone else. If I say, “Take the guy on the right out,” and we are talking about opposite sides, the clusterfuck quotient progresses upward geometrically all the way to FUBAR.

  To prevent such situations, I have adapted what the SAS calls the Colour Clock Code. (Yeah—in this instance I even spell colour with a u just like my Brit pal Captain Mick Owen, who runs SAS’s Special Missions detachment of tango hunters, does.)

  Looking at any target from the front, the colour clock goes like this: front side is white, left side is green, back side is black, and right side is red. The middle of the white zone is six o’clock; the middle of the black zone is twelve. Nasty’s Dumpster was at eight o’clock green. See—now everybody including you knows exactly where he was positioned.

  Duck Foot scaled a drainpipe and sat on the roof with the night-vision glasses—out of the wind, I might add—roving between white five and seven. Cherry and I hid out in a couple of tractor-trailers in the adjacent lot to make sure we could close the back door if necessary, and Wonder played CTC—that’s chauffeur to the chief—cruising the neighborhood in Mug’s Buick. How does Wonder always manage to get the plum assignments?

  At 2010—that’s just past 8 P.M. civilian time—Duck Foot’s voice came over the radio. “Big Ford Crown Victoria with four assholes inside just stopped at white six.”

  I poked my nose out of the trailer. “Copy that.”

  “They’re moving off now, passing green eight.”

  Mugs’s voice broke in. “Get a license number?”

  There was a pause. “Juliet Foxtrot Whiskey eight-nine-nine,” Duck Foot’s voi
ce came back at us.

  “I’ll run it,” said Mugs’s voice. “I still got friends in low places and I’ve never used one of these here cellular phones.”

  God bless all chiefs. See—I told you you’d see it again.

  Duck Foot’s voice came on-line. “They turned around and came back. They’re sitting on the other side of the street, opposite white six.”

  Wonder said, “I got ’em. Lemme take a look.”

  Damn him—“Shit, Wonder—hold off.” It was too late. I saw the car cruise by. That meant the Buick was no further use. If he came by again, he was blown. Wonder’s voice came through loud and clear. “Yup—four assholes. Two salt-and-pepper teams.”

  “Thanks for nothing.” We didn’t have the resources to play around like that. “Damn it, Wonder, wait until I tell you to fucking act, okay?”

  He actually sounded chastened. “Sorry, Skipper.”

  After five minutes, Mugs’s voice came back to me, “You’re not gonna believe this.”

  Frankly, I was cold enough to believe almost anything. “Go on.”

  “It’s registered to the fucking FBI Detroit field office.”

  Feds? That gave me pause. Who knew I was here? Well, LC Strawhouse knew I was in Detroit. But only the Priest—who had snuck into town—knew I’d been snooping around Ypsilanti. Well, maybe it was coincidence—the Bureau was just checking up on armories because there had been a lot of thefts lately.

  Friends, you know as well as I do that coincidence doesn’t happen in my line of work. It even occurred to me that they weren’t interested in stolen weapons at all, but in armed and dangerous ex-felons like me who might be lurking in the vicinity.

  But I had the edge here. “Mugs—”

  “Yo.”

  “Can you check on them with the scanner—see what the hell they’re doing here?”

  “You got it.”

  The wind picked up. I hunkered down just inside the trailer while I waited.

  Twelve minutes later, Mugs called back. “We’re fucked. They’ve gotta be on some kind of scrambled tactical frequency, because I can’t get a handle on ’em worth a damn—and I’ve been wearing the fuckin’ keys offen the scanner.”

  So much for technology.

  “Skipper—” It was Duck Foot again.

  “Yo.”

  “Second car—station wagon—just pulled into the top of the red alley just below me, facing one o’clock. I think it was four guys inside, too.”

  I started to say something when Duck Foot interrupted in a hoarse whisper. “Third vehicle. Van. Two visibles. They’re working their way toward the black eleven, coming up past you.”

  It was a fucking stakeout. Had to be. “Keep me posted.” I dropped back deep inside the trailer just in case the assholes in the van were also carrying night vision.

  Damn—it was going to be a long, cold night. Let me clarify that. It was going to be a long, cold night—for us. For the FBI, it was going to be a long, warm night.

  Why do I say that? Because they sat in their goddamn cars with the engines idling and the heaters on and the windows up, which of course made them stick out like the sore Dicks—as in Dick Tracy—that they are.

  Now frankly, friends, this is not how you conduct a stakeout. Not, that is, if you actually want to catch the bad guys. Why? Because Mr. Perp, if he has an IQ of more than 10, is gonna drive by and case the joint. When he does, he’s gonna see a bunch of assholes sitting in idling vehicles with lots of antennas in strange places—vehicles which, as I’ve already explained, are real easy to spot in the wintertime—and he’s gonna take the well-known powder.

  I checked my watch. 2035. It was still early—there was steady traffic moving on the four-lane avenue in front of the armory. The 7-Eleven down the street was doing a brisk business. If I was a bad guy, I wouldn’t hit this place until after midnight, when things quieted down. That gave me some wriggle room.

  Something else occurred to me, too. “Mugs?”

  His voice came right back. “Yo, Richard, you rotten asshole.”

  Ah, he still loved me. “Anything else playing on the scanner, Chief?”

  “Not really. The usual traffic. A state copper grabbed himself a stolen car down near Milan. There was a fistfight at a pizzeria in Ann Arbor.”

  “What about our pals here in Ypsilanti?”

  “There’s a lot of Code-6 activity over by the KFC on Route Twenty-three”—Mugs was using cop-talk to tell me a bunch of blue shirts were grabbing their dinners at the Kentucky Fried Chicken stand—“and some idiot drove his car over a patch of ice onto somebody’s front lawn—they’ve got a wrecker on the scene. But other than that, nada. It’s all quiet.”

  “How does that strike you?” I asked Mugs.

  He paused and thought it over before replying. “Now that you mention it, it strikes me as strange, Richard. Very strange.”

  It had struck me exactly the same way. Let me explain why. See, the FBI usually coordinates all of its moves with local law enforcement. That is because in the past there have been some nasty testicular confrontations between local cops and Special Agents, when the left ball didn’t know where the right ball was swinging. These days, Bureau SOP was to advise local law enforcement of all activity, and to request backup—except in those few cases in which the locals are thought to be part of the problem.

  Then there’s the secondary fact that most cops are notoriously talkative sons of bitches. During stakeouts, they’re always on the radio—ragging one another, gossiping, telling their corny cop jokes, and making small talk. It’s like listening to a damn party line. Even if Bureau cars maintain radio silence on their secure tactical channels, locals tend to chatter.

  But there were no gabby cops tonight. I changed frequencies and rousted Doc Tremblay back at the Motel 6. From the tone of his voice he must have been having his bimonthly erotic dream.

  He grumbled. He groused. He griped. He called me behayiem—Cairo street slang for so fucking stupid you can’t even move—but he got himself out of bed—and woke up the rest of my merry marauders, too.

  I wanted to take no chances. Wonder and Mugs had cruised past the Ford. A second drive-by might give them away. But we had four rental cars. I wanted my guys to pack up quick—no use taking chances just in case the motel manager thought we were suspicious-looking assholes—and scour the neighborhood for local cops. If there were backup teams, that would tell me one thing. If there weren’t, then maybe these agents were acting on their own.

  Was this a black op? Was this a rogue maneuver? Or were these guys just security conscious and shutting out the locals because the locals would give ’em away?

  I had one answer in seventeen minutes. There were no locals on scene. If anybody could spot a police officer, it was Gator Shepard, because he are one—and Gator declared the square mile around the armory 100 percent cop free.

  That meant it was time to get a sit-rep on the current condition—in technical SEAL language, a what-the-fuck.

  “Duck Foot—”

  “Skipper …”

  “I’m gonna recon these assholes. Check the black eleven van.”

  “Roger that.”

  I waited.

  “Still sitting at black eleven, about fifty feet from the back door.”

  They’d moved way past me. “Facing?”

  “Facing the back door, Skipper. Dead on. Perpendicular.”

  “What about the station wagon?” I couldn’t see the damn station wagon either.

  There was a momentary pause. “Red four,” Duck Foot whispered. “Parallel to the red wall, facing the rear fence line.”

  That was no good—if the sight lines were right, they’d see me as I made my move.

  Except if I was real careful. I crawled to the trailer doorway, which faced the rear fence. Although I couldn’t see it, I knew the van was behind me and to my left, about twenty-five yards away. The station wagon was thirty-five, maybe forty yards across the parking lot.

  I checked t
he starboard side of the trailer. A second semi—a huge reefer—was parked parallel to my semi, six yards away. I poked my nose around the sidewall and saw nothing wrong.

  “I’m moving. You guys watch my six.” I gave thanks for small blessings, because a third semi—this one was a flatbed steel hauler—blocked the station wagon’s direct view. Well, at least the first few yards of this little jaunt were going to be easy.

  I checked my watch. It was 2115. I patted myself down to make sure the Emerson CQC6 was securely clipped to my waistband and that I didn’t have any miscellaneous junk rattling around to make noise when I moved. Then I slid the radio into my BDU thigh pocket, and oh so carefully I rolled, dropped to the ground, and waited in the shadow next to the right-side tandem wheels to see if there was any reaction from the station wagon. I perceived none.

  Good. Cautiously, I crabbed my way across the aforementioned six yards of frozen slush to the adjacent reefer, slamming my knee on a melon-size chunk of ice as I went. So much for easy. I rolled underneath the starboard mud flap in considerable pain, crawled between the double axles on elbows and knees—uttering silent oaths and curses all the way—and, using the deck of the semitrailer as cover, progressed another ten yards. I lay under the deck, just aforeships of the support leg crank and aft of the front wall, listening to my knee throb and my heartbeat race, thinking, Ain’t life grand.

  There was a two-yard space between the nose end of the flatbed and the next semi, a platform steel hauler, which sat on a diagonal angle, directly opposite the station wagon but thirty yards away. If I kept to the far side and moved v-e-r-y slowly, I might be able to crawl unnoticed.

  I slithered across the six feet of space using my elbows, slid under the tail, and holed up between the huge tandem axles. That’s when the interior lights in the station wagon went on—because somebody was opening the front passenger-side door.