Designation Gold Read online

  He turned to look me in the eye. The expression on his face was absolutely absolute in its portrayal of aristocratic loathing and repugnance. “You and your men will wait in my anteroom. I will deal with you in half an hour—and you will regret causing me this extensive trouble and embarrassment with our host government,” he snapped.

  Dearest gentle reader, as you can probably imagine I was feeling neither particularly amiable, genial, nor benign right then, so I responded with the sort of established and habitual roguish response favored by most SEALs in similar situations, “Why don’t you go bugger yourself, you numb-nutted, pencil-dicked asshole,” I stage-whispered, smiling all the while just in case there were security cameras rolling.

  Gee whiz and golly, video rangers, for some reason that really set the cocksucker off. He began jumping around like a fucking organ grinder’s monkey, flecks of spittle flying indiscriminately past my ear as he waved a bony index finger under my nose and promised the end of my career and the demise of my unit and all sorts of other dire fulminations.

  Y’know, Bart’s behavior upset me. I am, after all, an O-6, which is a captain, in the United States Navy. I am the commander of a tactical unit. Let’s talk about those factoids for a minute. A commanding officer’s responsibilities are, by Naval custom, tradition, and doctrine, categorical. He is entirely, utterly, wholly, completely answerable for the safety of his ship, and the welfare of his men. And while he may be a part of a chain of command—a Navy or at the least a military chain of command, let me emphasize—his authority (and the utter responsibility thereby attached) as a CO is unequivocally nonetheless absolute. Simple declarative sentence. COs run their units. Period. Full stop. End of story.

  Now, my tactical unit may not have been the largest, or the most influential tactical unit in the U.S. Navy. But it was mine to command, and to field. And, from my perspective, Bart—no matter what his rank, his stature, or his bloated self-image might have been—was not an element within my unit’s chain of command. I answered to Rear Admiral Kenny Ross, back in Washington, and ultimately to the chief of naval operations, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretary of defense, and the president—not to the Department of State or its duly appointed representatives.

  Or, to put it into the sort of fundamental, UDT/SEAL language you probably realize I like to use most of the time, I didn’t have to take this kind of shit from him, nohow.

  And I wasn’t about to make Bart’s tactical error, either—that is, jumping around and spewing invective, not to mention saliva, in front of my men, or his men. You may not know this, but I was once a diplomat myself—I spent a year wearing not pin but tiger stripes (SEALs don’t wear any other kind) as the naval attaché in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. And I learned early in my diplomatic career that when you want to say something to one of your fellow diplomats that might embarrass, chastise, or otherwise unsettle him, you should do it in private, and not in full view of any governmental representatives of your host country. Now, perhaps Bart had forgotten this elemental facet of diplomatic conduct. But I hadn’t. The Russkies were still watching and I didn’t want to give them any more satisfaction than they’d already had this morning. Therefore, whatever I had to say, I’d say it inside—in private.

  I took hold of Bart by his upper arm, spun him around, and began walking him inside the embassy, so that it looked from the rear—that is to say, from beyond the embassy fence—as if we were deep in serious conversation. Have I told you that I press four hundred plus pounds on a regular basis? I have? Good. Have I reminded you that I do thrice-a-week exercises to strengthen my delts, brachs, biceps, triceps, pronators, and palmars? No? Well, I do. Which means, when I want to hold on to something, I can fucking well grip it h-a-r-d.

  The DCM’s eyes went saucerwide; he looked over at me and whimpered, “Wha-wha-wha—” You see, I had Bart by the back of the delts, which are in the back of the arm, halfway between the elbow and shoulder. I’d lifted slightly, so he had to walk on tippy-toes. I can tell you that he didn’t work out at all, because there was no trace of muscle where I was grasping him tightly enough to leave fingerprints. None at all. And from the way he was breathing, I knew it must have been very painful for him as I marched him lockstep and double time through the door, past the security checkpoint, and up to the elevator doors.

  I released him and he stepped away from me, rubbing his arm. “Geezus—what the hell are you trying to—”

  I was in no mood for this. “Look, Bart, give it a rest until we’ve had a chance to—”

  “Dammit”—he started to sputter again—“I told you—I ordered you—”

  “You don’t order me, Bart. Full stop. End of story.” The look I gave him told him I’d break his arm the next time I took hold of it. He stopped babbling long enough to let me get a few more words in. “Additionally, if we’re going to discuss this any further, we’d better do it in the bubble, because what I’ve got here”—I tapped the steel lockbox that Doc and Wonder had carried into the chancery—“is code-word stuff.”

  That brought him up short. I think he actually thought I’d been out there playing fucking games.

  The bubble, as it is commonly known, is on the eighth floor of the old embassy building. Actually, it takes up so much of the seventh, eighth, and ninth floors that if you want to pass from one wing of the eighth floor to the other (the embassy has two wings and the bubble sits more or less equidistant between them), you have to go either up to ten, or down to six to do it. The bubble was built in the late seventies by a joint team from the National Security Agency, the CIA, the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It is probably the only place inside the U.S. Embassy compound in Moscow that is absolutely secure from eavesdropping. The room itself is small, perhaps sixteen or seventeen feet wide and twenty-three or twenty-four feet long. There is an unpretentious, wooden conference table, and two dozen uncomfortable, cheap, molded white plastic porch chairs, which are usually left stacked in three rows against the wall. The reason for using those specific chairs is so that nothing can be concealed inside them. On the table sit a secure fax and a pair of scrambler phones. There is no video monitor. There is no computer. The less equipment in the bubble, the less they have to worry about being compromised or bugged.

  When you are inside the bubble, you always, somehow, feel claustrophobic. The reason that you do so is that you are actually inside a room within a room, within yet another room, which in turn has been suspended inside still another huge, secure, cube-shaped framework.

  Now, what I’m about to tell you is secret, so please don’t pass it along to anybody, okay? In fact, when you’re finished reading this section, you might consider ripping the pages out of the book and shredding them, then burning them. Okay—each of the more than a dozen security layers comprising the bubble has a different type of baffle system to defeat the various forms of surveillance and TECHINT, ELINT, and SIGINT devices that the KGB used (and the Foreign Intelligence Service currently uses) against American diplomats.

  You want specifics? Okay. Against UHF and VHF radio waves, the engineers suspended honeycomb-shaped metallic foil barriers. Against the microwave and X-ray bombardments common in the eighties, they installed a series of lead shields. To block ultrasonic penetration—that’s where you read the sound waves that vibrate off walls, windows, doors, and so on—there are two vapor-locked, hermetically sealed barriers through which separate waves of white sound (each has its own unique vibrating tone) are continually pumped. Moreover, the walls were all constructed so as to absorb, not reflect, any stray morsel of sound. Finally, the interior conference room itself is actually floating inside a bath of thick liquid—much the same way the yolk of an egg is suspended by the white inside the shell. The doors (there are two of them, separated by a dead space into which sound is pumped) are eight inches thick, and they resemble hatches on a nuclear sub more than they do doors at an embassy.

  Bart and I, accompanied by
Gator, Duck Foot, and the lockbox, all took the elevator to the eighth floor, turned left, walked down a short corridor, and went through a set of double doors outside of which stood a single CIA or DipSec security man who either pumped iron thrice a day, or wore an MP5 submachine gun in a shoulder holster under his well-tailored sport coat, or both. From there, we maneuvered the steel chest through the cumbersome, two-step, air lock door system and into the bubble.

  The boys set the chest on the table, saluted me in an offhanded way with a “There you go, Skipper,” and exeunted upstage.

  Bart lifted a molded plastic chair off the pile next to the wall, looked it over, then took a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped its seat off. Satisfied it was now worthy of receiving his SFS—Senior Foreign Service—butt, he positioned the chair at the head of the table (I knew it was the head because it was where the phones were), then plunked himself down, his arms crossed and his expression dubious. He looked at me. “Well?”

  I reached down and extracted the small Gerber blade from the sheath on my belt. Bart saw that the knife had blood on it, started to say something, then thought better of it. I cut through the wire on the lockbox. Then I unlaced my right boot and removed it, pulled my sock off, and retrieved the small, flat key that I’d taped to the sole of my foot with a Band-Aid. I used it to unlock the small but effective padlock that secured the hasp on the lockbox, dropped the lock on the table, opened the box, took Paul’s files and the materials Avi’d given me, and removed them from their folders.

  Bart’s arm extended toward the thick sheaf of papers, notes, and photographs in my hand. “All right, let’s see them.”

  “I think it would be better if I laid it all out to you,” I said.

  He gave me a bemused look but dropped his arm back into its crossed, RIP position, and sat there, Waiting with a capital W.

  For the first time, I examined Bartlett Austin Wyeth closely—I mean real closely. He had, I realized, a certain otherworldly, vampiric quality to him. Which made sense—he was, after all, a diplomatic bloodsucker of the Olde School. But I’m talking deeper than that. I mean that, come to think of it, sitting there with his folded arms, with the slicked hair, the natty, bespoke pinstriped suit, the pristine starched white shirt with its long-pointed, wide-spread English collar, and the burnished bench-made cap-toes, the sallow little motherfucker looked like he’d just climbed out of a box of his native soil. Yeah—all he needed was the cape and the gloves.

  I wondered whether or not one could see his reflection in a mirror. I wondered how he’d react if I suddenly made my index fingers into the sign of the cross. I wondered whether—and then he broke into my reverie. “Okay, Dick, it’s your show,” he said, his thin lips drawing back to reveal pointy little teeth in an ironic half-smile. “I’m all ears.”

  Y’know, there is an affliction common to many high-ranking diplomats and flag-rank military officers. It is called HICS, or head-in-cement syndrome. Its most conspicuous symptom is an unshakable, pig-headed reluctance to change one’s opinion. Once anyone affected with HICS has a preconception, no matter what you say, no matter what facts you can marshal, you cannot overcome it. What I’m getting at is that despite two hours of monologue in the bubble, I was as stymied at the end as I had been at the beginning. Bart’s sardonic expression never changed. Neither did his opinion of what I told him.

  What was that opinion? Why don’t you hear it for yourself directly from him. “I explained this to Paul Mahon, and now I’m telling it to you,” he intoned pedantically. “Yes, there is a problem with smuggling of dual-use materials, former Soviet military equipment and weaponry, and other forms of contraband. And yes, the so-called Russian Mafiya, as well as various entities within the Russian government, may very well be involved in those activities. I don’t dispute either of those assertions. But the embassy is on top of it. Moreover, there is a separation of duties within an embassy, Dick. And at the highest levels, it has been determined that these problems do not fall under the military’s purview. They are political concerns, and we at State are dealing with them on the proper diplomatic level.”

  Do you hear that? The sonofabitch was trying to blow me off. Well, I wasn’t about to let him do that. “Don’t give me any doublespeak, okay. Paul Mahon was killed because he was investigating the connections between the Russian Mafiya and the smuggling of dual-use materials. Andrei Yudin was killed because he was the connection between the crooks in charge, and Paul’s murder.”

  “Perhaps. I will grant that your suppositions are not inconceivable. But even if they were proved beyond a reasonable doubt—which is far from the case—there are a number of your actions that simply cannot be excused.”

  Geezus. “Such as?”

  “Such as trying to investigate matters that are far removed from your purview. Such as creating the sort of diplomatic incident that I have had to deal with this morning. Such as the killing of Russian nationals. You have singlehandedly upset the Russian-American relationship to a degree that I cannot fathom.”

  Whose side was this guy on? “Everything I have done,” I said, “I have done to identify and neutralize the murderers of a U.S. Navy officer who was killed while in the performance of his official duties.”

  “Yes,” Bart snapped,” that is true. But you have done it by acting as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner.” His face grew tight. “Captain, even here we have rules of evidence that have to be followed.”

  Rules of evidence? WTF. We were talking about a situation that had caused the murder of a United States Navy flag rank officer, and this asshole was talking about rules of evidence.

  I rubbed at my beard and my 0820 shadow with the back of my hand. This was like trying to talk to a fucking wall. No, this was more difficult. But I kept going.

  I went down the list: the NATO break-ins, the DITSA memos, and the probes of the Paris embassy, and the Customs intercept in Virginia.

  Unrelated, said the DCM—and by the way, how the hell do you know what’s being discussed in internal, eyes-only, Department of State memoranda?

  I brought up the meeting at the Dynamo—Werner Lantos, Andrei Yudin, and Viktor Grinkov, all at the same table, and all hours before Andrei Yudin was murdered in his bed. The Russian Mafiya, I was told, was vastly overrated—scare tactics from American conservatives. Andrei Yudin might be an enterprising guy—a cut-the-corners entrepreneur. A criminal? Sure, it was very possible—it certainly would help to explain Andrei’s unfortunate demise. But Bart insisted he’d never heard the name Yudin mentioned by any of the embassy staff involved with Russian organized crime.

  And what about the cozy relationship between Werner Lantos and the Russkies, and his current involvement with the shipment of dual-use materials.

  Let me give you that response verbatim from Bartlett Austin Wyeth’s own lips. “Werner Lantos has been a friend of the United States—and of this particular embassy—for more decades than I can remember. Specifically, he has been of invaluable help in furthering American diplomacy, through four administrations and six ambassadors.”

  Yes, I showed him the Air France waybill, as well as the materials I’d received from Avi Ben Gal. The only things I didn’t show him were the papers I’d taken from Andrei’s—simply because I had no idea what significance they might have had, and besides. I didn’t know what was in ’em. They probably wouldn’t have mattered anyway, because Bart explained my evidence away by saying that if there had been anything suspicious about the transaction, the French would have stopped the shipment in the first place. Since there were French Customs stamps on the paperwork, then everything was kosher.

  And why had the waybill been discovered at a dacha owned by a criminal who was known to be smuggling dual-use materials to the Middle East? A criminal who had just been assassinated—an execution most likely carried out by a corrupt police unit.

  The question itself was hypothesis, not fact, insisted the DCM. “There is reasonable doubt about your conclusion.”

&nbs
p; Reasonable doubt? What was this—the fucking OJ trial?

  “I do not appreciate your sarcasm,” Bart said.

  Yes, I felt like reaching across the table and throttling the sonofabitch. But killing him would have done me no good—what I had to do was harder. What I had to do was convince him that the Russians were up to something that jeopardized our national security. I stopped and gathered my thoughts. What about the fact, I argued, that the Israeli embassy’s agricultural attaché, my old friend Avi Ben Gal, had told me that Andrei Yudin was moving dual-use technology to countries cited in the State Department’s yearly publication Patterns of Global Terrorism? And what about the documents Avi had turned over to me?

  And what, the DCM wanted to know, gave an Israeli agricultural attaché named Avi Ben Gal the credentials to know so much about dual-use smuggling, and waybills, and Russian criminal activities?

  I told the DCM what gave Avi Ben Gal those credentials. But nothing I said did anything to change his opinion. In fact, the DCM’s only reaction was to unsheathe the three-hundred-dollar fountain pen that was probably twice the size of his dick and commence making notes on the legal pad that sat directly in front of him on the table. “So what you are telling me,” he said as he scribbled, “is that you met one-on-one with a foreign intelligence official, but you didn’t report the contact through the proper channels here.”

  “Proper channels?”

  “Yes, ’proper channels,’” he said, ice tinging his voice. “You did not clear your meeting through the DISCO.” He looked up at me. “Well, I am correct, am I not, Captain Marcinko?”

  He was getting so formal all of a sudden. I sighed the sigh of the uncomprehending and the innocent. Yes, he was correct, was he not. And what the fuck was a DISCO, anyway.

  “DISCO stands for Diplomatic Intelligence and Security Coordination Officer,” Bart prattled. “And”—he shuffled the paperwork in the black leather binder he habitually carried—“I see no indication here that you observed the regulations.”