Red Cell Read online

  BEFORE THE TERMINATOR … BEFORE RAMBO … THERE WAS MARCINKO. THE REAL THING.

  DON’T MISS MARCINKO’S EXPLOSIVE FIRST BOOK—THE AWESOME #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

  ROGUE WARRIOR

  By RICHARD MARCINKO and JOHN WEISMAN

  Available from Pocket Books

  AND HE’LL BE BACK FOR MORE IN

  ROGUE WARRIOR III: GREEN TEAM

  Coming Soon from Pocket Books Hardcover

  ACCLAIM FOR ROGUE WARRIOR II: RED CELL

  “ROGUE WARRIOR II: RED CELL is a chilling, blood and guts, no-nonsense look into clandestine military operations told like it should be told. It doesn’t come more powerful than this.”

  —Clive Cussler

  “Bull’s-eye! Right on target. It makes Tom Clancy’s stuff read like Bambi. It’s rude and crude, gutty and U.S.-Navy-SEAL bad…. Rogue Warrior was a hard act to follow. ROGUE WARRIOR II beats it in bloody spades.”

  —Colonel David H. Hackworth, USA (Ret.), author of About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior

  “Weisman has the voice of the manic professional warrior down cold, and he uses it to tell a terrific tale. ROGUE WARRIOR II skillfully captures the insider’s familiarity with sophisticated weaponry and rapid-fire action.”

  —William J. Caunitz, author of One Police Plaza and Cleopatra Gold

  “ROGUE WARRIOR II: RED CELL is a fine addition to the series. In their ROGUE WARRIOR books, Marcinko and Weisman achieve a gripping blend of action and suspense.”

  —W.E.B. Griffin, author of the bestselling series Brotherhood of War, The Corps, and Badge of Honor

  A Military Book Club Main Selection

  A Literary Guild Selection

  ACCLAIM FOR ROGUE WARRIOR

  “For sheer readability, Rogue Warrior leave[s] Tom Clancy waxed and booby-trapped.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Blistering honesty…. Marcinko is one tough Navy Commando.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Riveting, suspenseful and tragic, Rogue Warrior explodes like a hand grenade … a must read. Dick Marcinko is the last of a breed of salty, bigger-than-life characters, and his story is filled with special people who have special courage and spirit. Rogue Warrior is a fascinating book—holds the reader like a vise.”

  —Colonel David H. Hackworth, USA (Ret.), author of About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior

  “Marcinko makes the Terminator look like Tiny Tim….”

  —Virginian Pilot and Ledger Star

  “Rogue Warrior [moves at] breakneck speed with the punch of a thriller…. you’ll learn more about SEAL TEAM SIX than you’ll get from any top-secret Pentagon briefing….”

  —Richard Perle, former Assistant Secretary of Defense

  “Richard Marcinko’s bestselling autobiography reads like the plots for about six Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone movies.”

  —Sacramento Bee

  “Marcinko’s ornery and joyous agression … brought him to grief and to brilliance in war…. Here, his accounts of riverine warfare … are galvanic, detailed, and told with a rare craftsman’s love…. profane and asking no quarter: the real nitty-gritty, bloody and authentic.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Marcinko recounts his life story with a two-fisted in-your-face style, liberally sprinkled with profanity, rough humor, braggadocio, and violence both on and off the battlefield…. Despite, or perhaps because of, a personality that could abrade the paint off a battleship, he’s a fascinating man with a compelling tale to tell.”

  —Booklist

  “One of the first real peeks inside SEAL TEAM SIX.”

  —San Diego Union

  “Special-warfare devotees will find Rogue Warrior to their liking…. Marcinko’s anti-authoritarian behavior, as he improvises his own doctrine of unconventional warfare, makes for entertaining reading.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Marcinko was too loose a cannon for the U.S. Navy…. Rogue Warrior is not a book for the faint of heart.”

  —People

  Books by Richard Marcinko and John Weisman

  Rogue Warrior

  Rogue Warrior II: Red Cell

  Published by POCKET BOOKS

  The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this “stripped book.”

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 1994 by Richard Marcinko and John Weisman

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN: 0-671-79957-6

  eISBN: 978-1-451-60291-3

  First Pocket Books paperback printing December 1994

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Cover photo by Kelly Campbell

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  Once again, to the shooters

  And to Everett E. Barrett and Roy H. Boehm, two old Frogs who have always showed by example what leading from the front and creating unit integrity are all about

  —Richard Marcinko

  —John Weisman

  What is the Way of the Warrior? The Way of the Warrior is Death.

  —seventeenth-century Japanese proverb

  THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF SPECWAR

  According to Richard Marcinko

  I am the War Lord and the wrathful God of Combat and I will always lead you from the front, not the rear.

  I will treat you all alike—just like shit.

  Thou shalt do nothing I will not do first, and thus will you be created Warriors in My deadly image.

  I shall punish thy bodies because the more thou sweatest in training, the less thou bleedest in combat.

  Indeed, if thou hurteth in thy efforts and thou suffer painful dings, then thou art Doing It Right.

  Thou hast not to like it—thou hast just to do it.

  Thou shalt Keep It Simple, Stupid.

  Thou shalt never assume.

  Verily, thou art not paid for thy methods, but for thy results, by which meaneth thou shalt kill thine enemy before he killeth you by any means available.

  Thou shalt, in thy Warrior’s Mind and Soul, always remember My ultimate and final Commandment: There Are No Rules—Thou Shalt Win at All Cost.

  Contents

  Part One: SNAFU

  Part Two: TARFU

  Part Three: FUBAR

  Glossary

  Index

  ROGUE WARRIOR II

  RED CELL

  Part One

  SNAFU

  Chapter 1

  THE BIG SILVER, RED, AND BLACK JET-FUEL TANK TRUCK SLOWED to about five for the speed bump sixty yards from where I crouched, clutched down, and hump-humped painstakingly, axle by axle by axle by axle by axle, over the obstacle. Then it proceeded at a crawl along the five-meter electrified fence to the unmanned gatehouse, where it stopped long enough for the driver to reach out, insert a pass card, and punch an access code into the electronically controlled, meter-high, ten-ton-defeating ram barrier that barred the way to the ramp closest to Runway 33-W.

  That was my cue. I rol
led from the culvert like a proper ninja and crabbed my way under the left side of the truck, using the shadows to stay invisible to the surveillance cameras. I slipped between the twin rear axles, pulled myself along the sharp, greasy frame past the trailer hitch, and wedged myself just behind the tractor cab.

  Bingo. This was child’s play. Hunkered, I checked my watch. It was 0140. I was right on schedule. Then I ran a quick check. The cargo pockets of my black ripstop BDU held wire snips for cutting through fences and surgical tape and nylon restraints for muzzling hostages. In my jacket were a dozen picklocks, two boxes of waterproof matches, fifty feet of slow-burning fuse, and five timer/detonators, dry inside knotted prophylactics. In a small knapsack, I carried half a dozen IED—Improvised Explosive Device—bombs that would attract attention without doing any permanent damage, and a change of clothes, so I could look like any other civilian whenever I decided to.

  Inside my left black Gore-Tex and leather boot, a small dagger sat in its scabbard. Knives are like American Express cards. I never leave home without one. Inside my right boot was a leather sap, just in case I had to reach out and crush someone. My face was blacked out with nighttime camouflage grease. My shoulder-length hair was tied back. Over it I wore a watch cap that could be rolled down into a balaclava.

  I was wet and I was cold and my joints were as stiff as a horny nineteen-year-old’s cock. I’d hunkered in the goddamn culvert for three hours, monitoring the traffic, watching as the pair of television cameras atop six-meter poles swept the gate and barrier area, noting the regular rhythm of the blue-and-white security cars as they passed by. I looked down to see that I’d caught my wrist on something sharp between the culvert and the truck and opened a two-inch gash. I wrapped the wound with one of the three dark blue handkerchiefs in my cargo pocket. Goddammit. This was no way to make a living.

  But that’s what you get when you’re old, you’re strapped for cash, and the only way you can make a dollar is terrorism.

  Or, as my old friend—I’ll call him Tom O’Bannion—put it not seventy-two hours ago, “You may have been a hell of a brain surgeon, Marcinko, but you flunked bedside manner.”

  I promptly told him, “Doom on you, Tom.” That meant he should go fuck himself in Vietnamese. Then I proceeded to explain myself in my usual gentle style: “I’ll give you a fucking dose of bedside fucking manner. I’ll make you eat the fucking bed.”

  Like me, O’Bannion has a natural way with words. He’s a retarded mick O-6 Orion driver—that’s a retired Navy captain of Irish ancestry who used to pilot P-3 antisubmarine aircraft to you cake-eating civilians—who works these days as an aide-de-camp to an admiral I’ll call Black Jack Morrison in Black Jack’s multimillion-dollar security-consulting business. It was Black Jack who, as the chief of naval operations in 1980, ordered me to design, build, equip, train, and lead the most effective and highly secret counterterror force in the world, SEAL Team Six. He’s the one who’d told me, “Dick, you will not fail.”

  Back in the late seventies, O’Bannion was a Sweat Hog—one of the small group of staff pukes working long hours in the Navy Command Center. They’re the Navy’s answer men—they develop an incredible network of sources from E-5 grunts at DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, who know how to get answers fast, to master chiefs who can slip-slide the paperwork and get results now.

  The vice chief of naval operations needs to know how long that goddamn Russkie trawler from Petropavlovsk’s been trailing a PACFLT (PACific FLeeT) exercise. Call the Sweat Hogs. The secretary of the navy wants to find out how long it’ll take to scramble a platoon of SEALs to take down an oil rig in the Persian Gulf. Call the Sweat Hogs. CINCLANT wants to know—well, you get the idea.

  Anyway, O’Bannion, who was a real pig for punishment, spent three years hogging sweat. Then Black Jack plucked him from obscurity, gave him a fourth stripe, the title of deputy executive assistant to the CNO, and ordered him to protect my hairy Frogman’s ass, since he knew so many people and they all liked him, while I, the knuckle dragger with the Neanderthal eyebrows and temperament to match, was persona non grata at most Navy installations.

  It didn’t take much ordering either. While O’Bannion’s not a mustang—a former white hat like me who came up through the ranks—he still drinks and swears like a chief and chases pussy like a priapic adolescent. As I built Six, O’Bannion ran interference for me—a Sweat Hog turned offensive lineman. He protected me from the assholes who tried to scuttle me with paperwork or chain-of-command bullshit; he made sure I got all the equipment and the money I needed. He kept them off my tail.

  But in doing so, he earned the everlasting enmity of the Annapolis mafiosi who really control the Navy system. Then the bottom fell out for Tom. Black Jack Morrison retired in 1983 and O’Bannion lost not only his one rabbi, but his future, too. Admirals, after all, have long memories. And when it came time to give out the stars, O’Bannion somehow didn’t rate a promotion to flag grade in the post-Morrison Navy.

  He didn’t go up, so he got out. Now Tom’s retired, living with his third—or is it fourth?—wife in Hawaii, and working as a factotum, troubleshooter, and cutout for Black Jack Morrison. That is, when he’s not out on his thirty-six-foot Grand Banks humping six-foot swells, trying to catch something bigger and meaner than he is.

  A cutout? Yeah. Four-star admirals do not meet with ex-felons, and I am an ex-felon.

  Let me explain. Despite O’Bannion’s help, I managed to tread on a shoe store full of toes when I commanded SEAL Team Six. I made more enemies than I could count when I created another unit, Red Cell, at the request of my sea daddy, Admiral James “Ace” Lyons. Ace was then the OP-06, which is Navyspeak for deputy chief of naval operations for plans, policy, and operations. Ace wanted the biggest, baddest wolf he could find to test the Navy’s antiterrorist capabilities.

  Enter Canis lupus Marcinko, huffing and puffing and blowing Navy bases down, stage right.

  It didn’t take but six weeks for me to prove that the Navy had no antiterrorist capabilities. But I kept demonstrating that happy fact for two years, rubbing their noses in merde time after time and enjoying the hell out of it.

  Then, in 1985 I lost my rabbi, too. Ace Lyons was promoted from OP-06 to CINCPACFLT—Commander-IN-Chief PACific FLeeT. He and his beautiful, tough-as-nails wife, Renee, were posted to Pearl Harbor. Thereafter, my ass became grass, with the Navy establishment playing the part of lawn mower.

  Because once Ace was gone, all the old farts with scrambled eggs on their hats—not to mention their faces—got even. They called in the best headhunters in the Naval Investigative Service—the Admirals’ Gestapo—and turned ’em loose on me. They codenamed the investigation Iron Eagle. In all, the Navy spent five years and $60 million trying to prove I stole $118,000. They failed.

  But after I’d been forced into retirement, NIS, which holds grudges, took its case to the feds. And after some prompting, the feds went after me.

  A couple of years, a couple of hundred thousand dollars in attorney’s fees, and two trials later, I was finally convicted on one count of conspiracy to defraud the government—despite the fact that there was no concrete evidence against me. And three months after the judge’s gavel slammed down, I was serving a year at the Petersburg, Virginia, Federal Correctional Institution.

  Petersburg wasn’t so bad. I’ve been quartered in worse places. There was CNN and HBO on the cable TV, I worked out three times a day on the weight pile, and I even had time to author a bestseller, Rogue Warrior, that spent eight months on the New York Times bestseller list—a month at the No. 1 slot, much to the Navy’s horror. But it was jail. My phone calls were all tapped. There was no beer, no Bombay gin (and worst of all, no pussy), and the money I got for the book all went to pay my lawyer’s fees.

  Now I was out, and, like I said, I was strapped. So Black Jack, God bless him, found some work for me.

  That was like Black Jack. When he was CNO, we’d been on a first-name basis. He called me Dick and I called
him Admiral, and we’d gotten along real well. I admired the former CNO. Unlike most of your Navy four-stars, who majored in diplo-speak or bean-counting and think that war is a dirty word, Black Jack Morrison was a tall, gaunt aviator who’d flown 188 combat missions over Vietnam and been shot down twice.

  According to O’Bannion, the admiral had kept track of me from the huge, wood-paneled office in Honolulu with the bird’s-eye view of Pearl Harbor that serves as the hub of his international consulting business. And just a few short days after I said bye-bye to my cellmates at Petersburg, he had Tom O’Bannion call and offer me this here job—a thousand bucks a day plus expenses to play terrorist in the Land of the Rising Sun.

  Black Jack, it seemed, had been hired by Fujoki, the Japanese corporation that ran Tokyo’s Narita Airport, to upgrade their security apparatus. Fujoki wanted somebody to makee-makee everything stateof-the-art, and they were paying Black Jack Morrison seven figures to do the job.

  As part of his “show-and-tell” security-enhancement package, Black Jack told Fujoki he’d contracted with someone to infiltrate the airport—hired a certified Peck’s Bad Boy who would roam the place at will, leaving calling cards wherever he went, and even plant “explosives” in the most secure areas, to show the Narita folks where, and how, they’d screwed up in the security department. Then Black Jack would explain how he could fixee-fixee makee all better, and in the process he’d charge them another few million, to “harden” the airport properly.

  To play the role of chief Pecker, he needed someone who could think and act like the Japanese Red Army or Abu Nidal; someone who didn’t mind getting dirt under his fingernails, or a few bruises if necessary. For some reason, he thought of me.

  Which is why Dickie was now wet, cold, dressed in basic black without the benefit of pearls, bleeding, and breaking into Narita to place the IEDs, which I carried in my waterproof ballistic nylon knapsack, where they’d do the most “harm” to the airport, and the most good for me.

  The truck turned right, moving southwest onto a well-lit roadway that paralleled the taxiway, heading toward the Number Four Satellite building, which protruded off the south wing of the main terminal. As it slowed past the terminal and rolled through a huge shadow created by a pair of docked, darkened 747s, I let myself slide back through the frame, lowered myself between the wheels, and let the truck run over me.