RW04 - Task Force Blue

by Richard Marcinko

  But attention was exactly what we’d attract. There was no way to spike the line without using the van. And there was no way to use the van without attracting … l’attention, as the French say. Oh, sure, we could simply eliminate the guards at the gatehouse. But we weren’t here to play—we were here to work.

  We square-one’d over Tex-Mex and pitchers of Coors Light. I looked at the watch on my left wrist. One hundred and twenty five hours to go—just over five days until Armageddon.

  HOUR 124. THE DAMN SOLUTION HAD BEEN SITTING IN FRONT OF my thrice-broken nose all the time—I just hadn’t seen it. “It” was a suitcase that measured twenty-six inches wide, nineteen inches deep, and seven inches high. It weighed forty-eight-and-a-half pounds. It was the SATCOM transmitter-receiver we’d brought with us from PP-22.

  You’re asking what the hell am I talking about, right? Well, friends, it goes like this: Remember when I told you that newfangled phones are subject to power surges? You do? Good. Then you should also know that one of the most dynamic power surges one can produce is the pulsating, throbbing, undulating, oscillating signal flood that accompanies encrypted material through a phone line.

  Have you ever faxed to, or tried to receive a fax from, a secure—that is, encryption-capable—fax machine, on a machine that is not built for secure message traffic? If you have, and you’ve seen your machine react, you know what I am talking about.

  If you haven’t, suffice it to say that the fax just plain goes crazy—all the goddamn lights and indicators and error messages go flashing on and off simultaneously like a bunch of goddamn Christmas lights. And that’s when the material being sent is unencrypted. If you send encrypted material to an unencrypted station, then it’s instant overload.

  Well, we could do that here. All we needed to do (!) was attach the transmitter to the hacienda’s phone lines and launch a long burst of encrypted high-speed message traffic into the compound. The result? As Grose would say, “Kablooey!”

  When the modems, faxes, and phones blew, LC’s people would call the repair man. We’d intercept the van and borrow it. Duck Foot would borrow the driver’s uniform and ID badge, impersonate Señor Repair, and drive the van inside the complex, where he would “fix” the phones— adding a couple of goodies in the process to allow Wonder access.

  Doc and I would secrete ourselves inside the van (doesn’t that sound like the sort of fun the priests used to tell me would give me hairy palms?) and slip through the hacienda’s security net. We’d sneak out during the service call and find cover.

  As soon as the lines were up, Wonder and his faithful laptop computer, Big Byte, would do their own sneak and peeking. They’d break into the hacienda’s system electronically and purloin its files. Then Wonder would leave a lovely and deadly computer virus behind. Once he’d siphoned off all the relevant information, he’d radio me, and Doc and I would go hunting. We’d find LC and take him down, then slip away without leaving any evidence behind. The odds Doc and I would face were, oh, twenty-five to thirty to one. But after all, we’re SEALs, and those sorts of odds make the playing field just about even.

  Besides, this scheme was so keep-it-simple-stupid it had to work.

  I dispatched Wonder to find the local Radio Shack, where he arrived breathless six minutes before they closed for the evening. He bought three transistorized telephones (guinea pigs for us to blow up), every book of telephone junction-box schematics they had, a dozen alligator clips, two reels of telephone wire, two spools of shielded cable, two dozen pin probes, and a pair of one-to-twelve telephone signal splitters. Best of all, he pulled a hands-free telephone headset and a series of connectors from the bottom of the plastic bag. These, he transformed into an earpiece-and-lip mike for my radio with the help of a five-dollar Radio Shack soldering iron, a pair of needle-nose pliers, and a screw-hold tabletop vise. Bless the boy.

  While Wonder assembled the components, Duck Foot charged the batteries for the transmitter and laptop, ran a weapons check, and studied the schematics books and wiring diagrams for the telephones. He’d have to be able to “talk” telephone, because he’d be playing the part of the phone repairman.

  And me? I drove to Palm Desert, found a pay phone, punched the Priest’s number into it, and entered the codes.

  He came on the line quickly, his voice edgy and anxious. “Dick—”

  I was very cool. “General …”

  “Can you sit-rep me?”

  Yes I could—after a fashion. But there were other things to discuss first, I explained. Like the bogus murder charge. I wanted it to disappear.

  “I told you I couldn’t do anything about that until you came up with hard evidence about the weapons smuggling,” he said.

  “Bullshit.”

  “What?” That rocked him back on his heels.

  “I said bullshit. You already have all the fucking evidence about weapons smuggling you need. You know it and I know it, so cut the shit and let’s deal.”

  He tried to bluster like generals do—full of outrage and indignation. I was having none of it.

  “Look, you son of a bitch, I lost a man doing your dirty work. Now I have a fucking warehouse full of weapons, and a bunch of tangos, and if you’d like ’em, I’d be happy to make a deal. If not, there are half a dozen local police agencies who’d be more than willing to take receipt.”

  He didn’t like the sound of that at all. “No locals, Dick— we have to keep this operation under wraps, and locals can’t guarantee security.”

  That was a laugh. The fucking Federal system was a goddamn sieve, and he was complaining about local leaks.

  “What about the murder charge?”

  He sighed. “I can get the indictment quashed.”

  I needed better than that. “Quashed, smoshed. You make the whole fucking thing disappear or I’m gonna go public on this.”

  Silence. Then: “Okay—deal.”

  “When?”

  “A couple of days.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Goddammit, Dick—”

  “Don’t screw with me, General. I’m not in the mood for BOHICA right now. I want results.”

  Another pause on the line. “Okay, okay—I can get things fixed up in a couple of hours.”

  He was being too easy about it. Generals don’t give in like that to four-stripers. So he was playing me. Was he tracing the call? Probably. But I didn’t give a shit. In fact, I wanted him to know where I was—wanted him to know how serious I was about dealing with this fucking traitor.

  I hung up on him.

  Now, early on I’d made a command decision: the assault team would be two men only—Doc and me. Wonder had his own work to do. First, he’d be responsible for knocking the phone lines out. As soon as Duck Foot had fixed ’em, he’d tap into LC’s computer files. Duck Foot would drive the phone company van Doc and I would use as our Trojan horse. He’d play with the phones, then make up some excuse about not having all the right parts, and split. Once he was clear, he’d pick up Wonder, drive back to the hacienda, pick up Doc and me, and we’d extract, leaving no signs of having come and gone.

  LC would be, ah, neutralized. And Mugs would have the last of the information needed to set local cops all over the country loose on whatever tangos still needed taking down. In other words, by the time we completed our mission, God would be in His heaven, all would be right with the world—and a big Kodacolor rainbow would stretch from sea to shining sea. Right. Sure. Absolument.

  To be perfectly honest with you, I wasn’t ecstatic about this upcoming foray despite the KISSness of its scenario. But LC’s death warrant had been signed. First of all, the son of a bitch was plotting treason, sedition, or whatever the fuck you want to call it. Second, he’d caused the death of one of the best warriors ever to draw breath. So we’d go balls to the wall. Either I’d be victorious, or I’d be dead.

  To improve the odds, while I was playing with the Priest’s titillations Doc Tremblay visited the local drugstore. There, he sweet-talked th
e pharmacist out of the specialized medical equipment we’d be taking with us to Rancho Mucho Macho.

  Specialized medical equipment, you ask? Yeah, bub. I was planning to use a gimmick that was developed by my friends at Christians in Action in the late seventies. See, after the Church Committee hearings in 1975—you all remember the late and unlamented Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, the liberal’s liberal, who made the lives of spies working against us so much easier by making it impossible for the CIA to do its job effectively—all rude and ungentlemanly action (such as assassination) was verboten. No more sniping at Castro, no cyanide in Markus Wolf’s breakfast cereal, no snake venom jobs against double agents—even when they’d killed one of our own. You did things like that—and you went to jail.

  But there were still a lot of bad guys out there who needed to be disposed of. So a few insiders at the CIA’s DO, or Directorate of Operations, built themselves an organization. They used front companies and cutouts—a veritable maze within a maze within a maze. And they also developed a series of lethal goodies that killed but left no trace if they were used correctly. Then they sheep-dipped a select few guys like me to hop and pop and pull the op. Get in, slip a mickey to the target, and get out. No fingerprints. No trails. Nothing. We’re talking about ops so fucking covert they never even talked about ’em at Langley—or anywhere else. But I know about them because I was one of the dipees. Between 1979 and 1985, I pulled off three assassination operations. The first was in Argentina, the second in Lebanon, and the third in El Salvador. Each of these hit-and-runs neutralized someone who had killed Americans and thought himself beyond our reach.

  Now, let me tell you how we did it. We used chemical agents. And the most effective of them was Tabun, the very same nerve agent we’d discovered in the CWO kits. I talked to Doc and had him do some calculations. The dosage in the kits wasn’t as powerful as I might have wanted, but it was certainly capable of doing what I needed it to do.

  Doc pulled on a pair of tight-fitting rubber surgical gloves. Then, carefully, he used a sterile insulin syringe he’d bought, removed a quarter of a cubic centimeter of Tabun, and injected it into a soft gelatin cap. Then he enclosed the gel-cap inside a two-part, coated, nonsoluble plastic capsule that I could carry in my mouth.

  My mouth? Absolutely, Tadpole. When you’re searched, people may be perfectly willing to stick their fingers up your ass. But they seldom want to run them around inside your mouth. Mouths—Yeech.

  Despite my objections, Doc built a second cap for himself. “Fuck you, sir, but since I’m going along, I get to kill somebody, too,” he said.

  Who was I to deny him his fun? I shrugged. “Be my guest.”

  Now, I know you’re wondering what would happen if we chomped our capsules by accident—like if we were stressed and the caps slipped? Then it would be doom on Doc and Dickie time. Except—as I knew from previous experience in the field—just prior to insertion, we’d inject ourselves with Atropine. That would make us impervious to the Tabun for four hours—enough to get us safely inside and wait for Wonder’s message. And to factor Mr. Murphy in, Doc would bring two additional doses of anti-Tabun antidote, just in case Wonder ran into problems and we had to delay our nefarious activities inside. That gave us eight hours—a margin of safety hefty enough to keep even the omnipresent Señor Murphy out of my thick, Slovak nose hair.

  Hour 113. Up betimes, as olde Sam Pepys used to write. I called Mugs on the cellular, told him we were a “go,” and that the roll-ups should start right away. He rogered the message—there were two dozen local police departments primed and ready to move. The rest would follow as soon as he had the info from Wonder. “One thing you should know, Rotten Richard,” he said. “Last night you told me the murder indictment was being lifted.” “Yeah?”

  “Bullshit,” he said. “I checked with the Detroit cops. You’re still in the computer.”

  That told me everything I had to know about whose side the Priest was on—he was on his own side. “Thanks, Chief.”

  “No prob. Keep your head down.”

  “Will do.”

  I rang off. I gave Doc, Wonder, and Duck Foot a sit-rep.

  Wonder’s face wrinkled. “Gimme two hours,” he said, and opened his laptop. I looked at my watch. I’d built a three-hour Murphy cushion into the schedule. I answered him with a raised thumb.

  While Wonder worked, we checked our gear yet one more time and loaded the truck. In 135 minutes he looked up, a wide grin on his face.

  “What’s up?”

  “Fucking LC Strawhouse, for one thing.” He showed me what he’d done, then explained how it worked.

  Let me put it in plain English for you. Wonder had just engaged in the latest form of unconventional warfare: cyberwar. He’d written a nasty little computer program called a one-time trap door. Trap doors surreptitiously work inside other programs and cause them, and their host computers, to crash. Disintegrate. Dissolve. Fry. One-time trap doors are the byte-time version of the Tabun assassination capsule I’d be carrying. They act—then disappear into the cyber ether, leaving absolutely no trace.

  Wonder had slipped it in LC’s computer by using his Trojan Horse program. Through it, he’d managed to backtrack from the alt.politics.parker.lc Internet news group and key on the correspondent who called himself jparker@lc.com—LC Strawhouse. Then he worked his way inside LC’s computer. He stole as many pertinent files as he thought prudent—no need to rouse any suspicions—and then he planted the trap door. It would activate when LC tried to access the Internet.

  Now, you’re probably skeptical. You ask how Wonder could accomplish all of that so easily. The answer is twofold. First, Wonder knows how to do this kind of shit. He did it in Iraq when we went there masquerading as a UN nuclear-weapons monitor. But there is a second, more basic point to be discussed here. It is that most people don’t install any security protection on their personal computers at all. Remember when we broke into Grant Griffith’s office in Red Cell? Remember what we found? That’s right—all his incriminating files. With no security or encryption.

  There’s more, too. If you leave your PC turned on, and there’s an internal modem attached, your PC can be cracked just like an egg—with one hand.

  Our guerrilla cyberwarfare completed for the moment, we hauled balls for the hills. Wonder carried his improvised commo gear in a musette bag. We left the truck below the crest of the plateau and worked our way about a mile and a half on foot in the dark, moving single file along the shoulder of the road.

  The compound lights were still on as we approached the fence line. Duck Foot and Doc dropped back. Wonder and I crept forward, moving as slowly and deliberately as possible from telephone pole to telephone pole while lugging the SATCOM suitcase, the laptop computer, and Wonder’s bag of goodies. Suffice it to say that the trip was not a pleasant one. The suitcase was bulky—and it got heavier and heavier as we moved slowly, using the scrub brush and roadside rocks to help break up our silhouettes. Finally, after half an hour of humping, lumping, and bumping, we reached the pole from which the phone lines disappeared into the ground.

  We crawled to it and lay on our sides, panting. Let me tell you, this is much easier to describe than it was to perform. Anyhow, just above ground level there was a gray plastic junction box. The phone cables, encased in a conduit, ran from the top of the pole down to this box. Working quickly, Wonder retrieved a Gerber Multi-Plier from the ballistic cloth sheath on his belt, flipped it open to reveal a Phillips head screwdriver, and unscrewed the box cover.

  He cursed under his breath. “Gimme some light, will ya?”

  I rolled over on my side, careful not to crush the laptop in its padded carrying case, turned on the red-lensed minilight I carried, and handed it over his shoulder. Wonder clamped it between his teeth like a stogy and went back to work. I could see that the outer cover of the junction box, which Wonder had unscrewed, revealed a second box within. It was sealed with the kind of screws that cannot be removed without leavin
g telltale signs.

  He shook his head. “Dammit.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  He shrugged, flipped out the pry blade on the Multi-Plier, and grinned. “What the fuck, Dickhead—I say we go for it.”

  That made sense. If we put the cover back neatly, maybe no one would notice. I gave him a thumbs-up, and he went to work.

  He pried the cover off the inside junction box. Inside, the beam from the flashlight revealed ten pairs of wires. Wonder pulled the signal splitter from his bag. He’d rigged it with twelve pairs of probe pins attached to four-foot lengths of shielded cable. The splitter’s backside had been wired to accommodate a telephone jumper cable, which would in turn attach to the transmit port of the SATCOM scrambler.

  “Okay—I’ll set the pins.” Wonder chomped the light between his teeth and stretched out. He took the probe pins, pair by pair, and sank them into the eight lines. Then he crawled back to where I hunkered.

  “Computer.”

  I unzipped the case and handed the laptop to him. He attached a serial cable to the connector, ran it to the SATCOM’s serial port, and fastened it securely, then booted the laptop. Then he worked his way into the communications program.

  The laptop data would move through the SATCOM, where it would scramble. Then, having picked up the right amount of energy, it would go down the line through the probe pins, into the hacienda’s phone lines, and we’d have instant overload, resulting in fried phones. It was early enough now so that we’d be able to exfiltrate, and no one would notice anything awry until later—when they’d discover that their phones were phucked.

  Wonder played with the keyboard, “Okay—heat up the scrambler—

  I opened the suitcase, turned on the main power switch, and set the key to TRANSMIT. “Roger-roger.”

  “Okay—now connect the splitter to the SATCOM’s phone jack.”

  “With what?”