Getting killed so some corporate suit can report a five percent increase in annual profits is another matter entirely. I see absolutely no reason someone like Doc Tremblay should endanger his personal retirement plans to fatten Ken Lay’s 401k.
The first three days of our five-day conference were a blast. Day One began before the sun rose with group PT in the castle yard, under Tiffany Alexander’s grueling, sadistic leadership. Tiffany learned from the best—Trace Dahlgren—and she was every bit as evil as the master that first morning, jacking the bp of every male in the courtyard simply by rolling up the sleeves on her tight-fitting Lycra sweats and warming the group up with a few bends and stretches. By the time she moved onto fart-jacks, groans were echoing off the stones. Workouts with Trace are always motivational. She knows how to goose the male ego and make you feel like an absolute wimp-shit if you can’t keep up. And you can’t keep up, unless she wants you to. Tiffany is slightly more subtle. You look at her and you just know you can’t let her down by failing to give her that one, last, impossible repetition…and the next and the next and the next. Because if you didn’t, you would break her heart. And you’d never want to do that.
Meanwhile, she’s hopping up and down like the Energizer Bunny, not even breaking a sweat. (“Women don’t sweat, Dick. They perspire. But they don’t even do that. Now, can I have ten more push-ups, please? Just your left arm this time.”)
My butt hung close to the ground by the time PT ended after ninety minutes. If we’d been back at Rogue Manor, I would have been able to escape by claiming there was paperwork to catch up on, but there was no rest for the wicked in Germany. Sean had organized a five-mile predawn run. In theory, it was a strictly voluntary affair, but of course it was mandatory, especially for yours truly. Being older than everyone else, or nearly everyone else, on my team brings with it a certain responsibility to keep up with the Joneses. If I can’t quite beat their asses like I used to—I have to try harder.
I don’t mind running, and even at my allegedly advanced age, eight-minute miles aren’t too taxing. But good old Sean decided that things would be much more interesting if we ran with full packs. He loaded the packs with metal barbell weights and paper to keep them from shifting while we were running. Supposedly the packs were simulating combat kits. A “normal” (if there is such a thing) rucksack load for a special operator might weigh forty pounds or so, with as much of that as possible being ammunition. (You’d also carry as much as you could in a tactical vest, as well as in your pockets, on your belt, your head, clipped to your nose—you cannot have too many bullets.) But these packs were definitely heavier than forty pounds. One or two of my shooters questioned him about that. Sean just shrugged and said Danny had loaded them, and to take up the matter with him.
I’ve noticed that Marine officers have a little bit of the sadist in them, and even though he’s retired from the Corps, Danny’s no exception. Maybe it’s learned behavior from basic, where Marine drill instructors are reputed to remain the most seriously ill fuckers in the business. Maybe that camo they apply to their faces does something to their brains. All I know is, complaining is the very worst thing you can do; it only encourages them. So I took my pack and carried it without a word.
Whatever the pack weighed when I started, it felt five times heavier by the end of the first mile. My chest heaved and I was having the damnedest time keeping up. I’m built more like a linebacker than a receiver, and I accept that I can’t keep up with the rabbits on my team, but ordinarily I can keep them relatively close, especially on a five-mile course where endurance is a little more important than sheer speed. But that morning it seemed like everyone was kicking my butt, even young Shit-in-
Ass. (If he has a name other than that, no one has used it at Red Cell International since he came aboard. It’s printed on all his paychecks.)
Now first let me say that Shit-in-Ass is a very fine shooter and an excellent all-around SpecWarrior. Allegedly, one of the youngest soldiers to get Ranger-qualified—he enlisted with the help of some bogus documents, a fact the Army did not particularly appreciate when they found out several years later—Shit-in-Ass found his real calling as a demolitions expert. I’m not talking about garden-variety demolition either. Shit-in-Ass is a true artist, creative and knowledgeable. The young man can blow up a bridge with the stuff you have under your kitchen sink. He’s the only person I know who can open a door with C4 and not only leave the door intact but leave it standing on its hinges. (I, by contrast, would turn it into a toothpick. But then no one has ever accused me of being cheap with explosives.)
But Shit-in-Ass got his nickname on his very first day of boot camp because of the way he ran, and the name stuck. A big Louisiana lad, his butt hangs down so far, the seat of his sweats are in danger of scraping the ground. Plop-plop-plop he runs, and with every step his backend gets lower and lower. He always manages to finish somehow; it must have something to do with the law of gravity. But he is always at the end of the line. Back home, I’m sure he’s a “card carrying” coon-ass!
Except for that morning. When we hit the mile mark that morning, I was staring at his low-riding butt, not a pretty sight. I’m not ashamed to say that this pissed me off, and I sprinted to catch up, cursing at myself for missing several days of road work and obviously falling out of shape. This was the wrong thing to do—I caught and passed him about two hundred yards later, but we had a long way to go, and the sprint drained my reserves. By the end of the second mile, Shit-in-Ass was huffin’ and puffin’ in my ear. I held on through the third mile, telling myself that I wasn’t getting old. Even if I was getting old, I wasn’t letting these young bastards kick my ass in public. By the fourth mile, I was conceding that I was getting old, but that I was not going to be the last one back at the castle. The pack had started to bunch up a bit and I was able to draw within ten yards or so, husbanding my strength for the last half-mile.
Anyone can run a half-mile. A half-mile is nothing. Eight hundred and eighty measly stinking yards. I’ve pissed farther than that.
I had about ten yards on Shit-in-Ass and was about twenty behind everyone else when the castle ramparts came into view. The sun was just coming up over the horizon and one of the vans we’d taken out to keep an eye on the runners had pulled across the road ahead. Eighteen huffing and puffing shooters spread out in front of me, each runner a marker on my way to respectability. If I passed nine, I’d have a respectable, middle-of-the pack showing.
I leaned forward and humped into high gear. My side stitched up and I got a cramp the size of Colorado in my left calf. Now I’ve been through a hell of a lot worse on runs like this. I had diarrhea during UDT Hell Week (Underwater Demolition Training, roughly the equivalent of today’s BUDS school for SEALs). I ran just fast enough to escape the stench of the shit dripping down my leg and complete the required laps. This was nothing compared to that.
But it wasn’t kicking back on the couch with a beer and a bowl of chips, either. The people I was running with were every bit as competitive as I was. They might not have been used to beating my furry little ass into the ground on a morning run, but now that they had me in their rearview mirrors they wanted to keep me there. I could hear the growls and curses as I picked up speed and passed runner number seventeen. (I forget who was where in the line.) Sixteen started to sprint a half-second before I caught her. Fifteen was already fading but fourteen matched my pace and started to pull ahead. He didn’t wear down until we hit the entrance to the castle; by then, we had pulled into the lead of our little section, finishing exactly at the midpoint of the group.
I shed my pack, flopped to the ground, then rolled back up to my feet, sensing that if I didn’t wind my muscles down gradually I’d seize up into a statue and end up a lawn ornament. A big cooler of Gatorade had been set up near the north wall; I figured I’d hydrate and then hit the showers before breakfast. I was just about at the cooler when I realized that Sean, Danny, and Tiffany were laughing their asses off a few yards away. It wa
s only then that I realized I had been seriously had. My pack had been weighed down to simulate a combat load, but everyone else ran with paper packed into their rucks. The whining had been a ruse to make me think everyone was being treated the same: like shit.
Slimebags.
Of course, the fact that even so I had managed a decent finish meant the joke was on them, even if they were laughing.
I didn’t mention it, and neither did they. They still don’t know that I know what they did—or at least they didn’t, until they read this.
The run earned everybody a hearty breakfast, postshower. Then we moved on to the entertainment portion of the program. We’d imported a Krav Maga specialist for an early-morning self-defense demonstration. For most of my people, this was just a brushup; the Israeli martial arts have been integrated into special-ops training over the past few years. But others were learning about the skill for the first time, and were impressed by the ability of the instructor to take down two armed assailants before they had a chance to shoot him.
The assailants were armed, and not with blanks. As part of the show, the instructor fired their weapons after the men were subdued. Theatrical, but effective.
The afternoon consisted of two weapons seminars, with a demonstration of new nonlethal grenades and a Taser that could shock a bear at one hundred yards, a good distance farther than standard weapons. One of the grenades carried a net and tear gas combination to snare and disable a subject. We had some fun with a few of the grenades that lacked the tear gas. Tiffany found that the key to dealing with the net was to take a Zen-like approach, calmly slipping it off rather than going at the sticky material willy-nilly. This would be harder with tear gas in your eyes, of course, but still possible. Nonlethal weapons are very much in vogue these days, both with police departments and military units tasked to dealing with civilian populations in urban environments, either as occupation troops or peacekeepers. But they’ve got a way to go before they’re going to be a reliable answer to old-fashioned lead. Frankly, if somebody pulls a gun on me, I want my answer to be as lethal as possible. Let somebody else take a chance on fancy nets or sonic-wave machines, another crowd-control device being tested by the Army.
Cocktail hour, dinner, and then civilian-style entertainment capped the night. Nothing’s too good for my employees, and while I bust their buns in the field, I do try to find ways to make it all worthwhile. Toward this end I had arranged to deploy several big-name entertainers to Europe, including a rap star and a comedian so funny and so foul-mouthed that he had us all in stitches before he even opened his mouth. For security reasons, the entertainers weren’t told in advance exactly where they were going, and the rap star was a little touchy because the ground rules called for no “bling bling.” But I’d had personal dealings with each person before, and they welcomed the chance to do the shows, provided their regular fees were paid. We met them at a nearby airport, blindfolded ’em, choppered them in and choppered them out.
During the day, Danny, Doc, and I went through a regular series of debriefings, pulling guys out from sessions and basically getting them to brain dump on their situations. I asked as few questions as possible, trying not to get in the way as they regurgitated what they’d been through over the past ten to twelve months. Nearly as important for getting a true snap of the world situation were the evening “mixers,” a genteel term for keg parties, itself a euphemism for the open-ended festivities following the entertainment portion of the program. Alcohol may not improve the memory, but it certainly loosens the tongue.
Before heading over to Europe, I’d studied the after-action reports, incident briefings, and situationers, so I had a context to fit the gossip into. We don’t do much paperwork at Red Cell Inc. but we do pay attention to the institutional memory that can help other members and future operations. For the last two or three years, we’ve used digital camcorders for more reports, dumping everything into a computer system that uses a language translator to form an index. (It’s good, but not perfect; I’d say there’s a fifty-fifty chance that “cock breath” will show up as “cocktail bread,” a whole other thing.) The reports were pretty good, but the face-to-face sessions and lubricated debriefs gave me details that didn’t seem important to the people in the field. Afghan tribesmen wearing boots instead of sneakers cut from tires, for example. M16s with grenade launchers replacing AK-47s in the field. Modern line-of-sight and satellite radios instead of tin cans for communications—all developments of the past three to four months in Afghanistan, and all signs that an outside source was shoveling funds to the local yokels.
This coincided with the noticeable uptick in attacks on our company personnel. Coincidence? I think not.
The main actor in these attacks was a mujahideen group under the leadership of Ali Goatfuck, a doctor who’d failed his licensing exam in Libya (which tells you how smart he was) before finding his true calling as a butcher for Allah in the borderland southwest of Islamabad, Pakistan. Our various sources said Goatfuck called the shots from the safety of Pakistan, leaving his mostly teenage followers to take the risks in Afghanistan. After two days and nights of gathering information, Doc, Danny, and I had a board meeting to discuss what we had found. We took all of five seconds to a reach a consensus: Ali Goatfuck had to be caught and strung up by the short hairs, assuming he had any, the sooner the better. It would have to be done on the company dime—the U.S. wouldn’t be interested because it was in Pakistan, and asking the Pakis to do anything would be about as useful and rewarding as pissing into the wind.
I tasked Danny to come up with a plan by the end of the week.
“Slicing Goatfuck’s neck will take care of half the problem,” I told the boys. “Next we have to find out who’s got the bankroll and hang him up by the short hairs.”
“Follow the money,” said Danny. He spent a good number of years living off the taxpayers as a detective with the D.C. police department, picking up investigative skills as well as an affection for doughnuts. The cash that was funding the guerillas would be a direct line back to the real slimebags we wanted—and very likely one of the people angling for Osama’s spot as top raghead.
Saladin, perhaps?
The idea certainly occurred to me. Saladin had singled me out obviously; that’s why I was getting the faxes. It wasn’t unreasonable that he had given money to Ali Goatfuck (and presumably others) with the expectation that my people would be targeted, quid pro quo. From what I could see, the idea wasn’t necessarily to get me, or at least that wasn’t a main goal. Saladin wanted attention: publicity, fame, anything that would lift him in the eyes of the maniacs he wanted to follow him in the Great War of Civilizations, as he called it. Taking on Demo Dick was a means to that larger end.
Of course, it could be someone with a grudge; there were plenty of those. The one thing I knew for sure was that this wasn’t going to end with us taking out Goatfuck; we had to terminate his sugar daddy as well.
First we had to find him. Danny suggested that the trail of bank transfers would lay out the framework of the organization, showing where all of its nooks and crannies were. That sounded good in theory, but in real life it was going to be harder to do than finding a speck of flour in a snowstorm. We might be able to do it when we got Ali Goatfuck—but only if he got his money from a bank, and only then if he kept some sort of paper record of his transactions that we could use to find the account. Call me cynical, but I’m guessing Goatfuck would be a cash-and-carry kind of guy.
“I say, follow the shoes,” suggested Doc. “These guys are all wearing new boots. A lot of people have mentioned them. Made by Bota, or something like that. Mountain boots, not combat boots and certainly not the rubber tires they were wearing a few months back.” He dug into his pocket for the small memo pad he’d used to take notes. The boots were high quality, light, with a rigid sole. One of our guys who did technical climbs said they were on par with mountaineering boots made by Scarpa or Kayland, shoes used by professionals that would go for more th
an $300 a pair. “They’re not Nikes,” added Doc. “Who paid for them? Where did they come from? There’s where the money is.”
“Probably stole them,” said Danny. “Or smuggled them over the border.”
“Maybe,” said Doc. “But maybe not. They’re not banned for importation or anything, and they’re not obviously dangerous. Why go through the hassle of hiding them?”
“Couple of pair of shoes, shit, who’s going to notice or remember, one way or another,” said Danny.
“There’ve been more than a couple,” said Doc. “Everybody has mentioned the shoes. They had to come in the same shipment at the same time—you figure Ali Goatfuck has a couple of hundred guys? Unless he gives out these boots as a door prize for going after our guys, I’ll bet he outfitted his whole army with them. Two hundred boots—that’s enough to remember. Serious dough, too.”
Danny didn’t concede exactly, but he grunted in a way that made it clear he thought it was worth checking. We decided to zero in on the shoes, asking our guys specific questions about them to try and nail down as many details as we could. Then we’d feed the information to a private investigator I knew back home who specialized in tracking down overseas assets. His most lucrative work was for divorce lawyers and plaintiffs’ attorneys suing the pants off foreign companies.
I went to bed feeling as if we’d made some good progress on the problem. Even more important, I was looking forward to hurting Ali Goatfuck where it would hurt for generations.
Yes, I intended on doing more than just looking over the plan. You lead from the front, remember? Besides, I hadn’t been to Pakistan since the days of the Afghanistan operations against the Russians.* I was anxious to go back. The part of the country where the mujahideen were operating is so wickedly rugged that just walking through reminds you how awesomely adaptable the human species is. I fell asleep with visions of ass-kicking dancing in my head, and my stomach fluttering from an adrenaline rush.
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