RW11 - Violence of Action (5 page)

Coughing slightly from the smoke inside the van, the breacher retraced his slippery path to where a metal-clad, medium-sized suitcase was now exposed. Reaching inside the reinforced compartment he grasped its handle and tugged the 30-pound case up and out onto the floor of the van. “GOT IT!” he yelled.

“Let’s move!” shouted the masked assault team leader. “We’re on the fucking numbers here!”

The breacher exited the van with his newly acquired trophy and the group turned and ran for the SUVs. Once inside they pulled past the destroyed van and drove at a high speed toward the north end of the kill zone. As they approached, the sniper worked his way down to the highway, Barrett .50 in hand. Rocket Man, too, was standing by and ready for extraction. Minutes later the team was heading northbound at a law-abiding sixty-five miles per hour.

“Call the Colonel and tell him we’ve got it,” ordered the commander. “And let’s get out of these costumes. Halloween is officially over!”

As the call was made using a secure cell phone issued to them by the ever-trusting folks at Fort Bragg, the men pulled their tight black masks from their heads and stripped down to the khaki shorts and obnoxious t-shirts they wore underneath. Laughing and back-slapping each other as the SUVs roared past the first civilian vehicle they’d seen on the highway since the hit, they looked like a typical band of off-duty servicemen heading for a few days’ leave in Las Vegas, nothing more dangerous on their minds than gambling, drinking, and screwing. Within two hours they’d reach a small private airstrip and board a waiting private plane. From there they would take their just-acquired treasure to its new (though short-lived) home.

It was an odd sort of prize they’d killed so many men to obtain, one whose true power could only be released in the course of its own destruction.

Our chopper flight was fast, furious, and with little conversation. The LZ turned out to be the fairway of the eighteenth hole of a very posh country club near the dead lawyer’s house. A police squad car was standing by to take us to the crime scene and our driver, like the NSA flight crew, was a somber, serious bastard. I liked that. It meant they weren’t fucking around wasting my precious time.

I’d dressed as inconspicuously as possible—a pair of stonewashed blue jeans, black turtleneck, a pair of lightweight clutter boots, and a dark blue sports coat. Trace and Paul were likewise casually dressed. Less typical was the hardware we carried under our clothes. All of us were toting our favorite shooters. Mine was a Glock 26, an Austrian made 9-mm compact pistol with night sights. It’s small, lightweight, extremely accurate, and damn near impervious to the elements. I’d further outfitted my little bastard with a titanium drive rod and enhanced recoil spring plus an extended slide release. These simple accessory modifications made an already super-reliable close quarters battle pistol even better. I’d thrown a spare magazine for the pistol in my coat pocket and clipped my freshly issued Bureau of Diplomatic Security badge onto my belt, left side front. If I was going to be tromping around a crime scene, I figured I’d best look like part of the investigating team, not one of the criminals.

Trace favors a Kimber Compact .45 auto. Where she hides such a cannon on her trim figure I’ll never know…and don’t want to. Kossens leans toward the tried and true H&K USP .45 compact. I’ve seen the kid shoot. He’s Rogue class with the German auto and carries it in a Galco shoulder rig with two spare mags. It was a ten-minute drive from the makeshift helipad to the spot where the dirty deed had been done. Even though he was famous for his civil rights work, Beckstein must have charged somebody some seriously hefty fees for keeping their ass out of jail, judging from the neighborhood we were driving through. To the northwest of D.C., almost in Maryland, this was seriously expensive real estate. When we got near the crime scene, I was impressed to see whoever was in charge had shut down the entire vicinity. Police cars, their overhead emergency lights flashing, had been parked to form barricades at each end of the wide street. Uniformed officers, some carrying black AR-15 carbines on assault slings, were checking and identifying anyone trying to enter or leave the area. For the moment, this community had been sealed off from the rest of the city. As we were allowed to drive through the barricade, I noticed a few pairs of hard-nosed cops knocking on doors up and down the street. They were going house-to-house, notebooks in hand and scowls on their faces. Because my international security company, SOS TEMPS, trains cops, I’ve gotten to work with quite a number of them over the years. Trust me, these guys were not happy campers. House-to-house interviewing sucks anytime, but in this zip code it was probably torture. Most people in D.C. who can afford to live in digs like these don’t expect to be asked a bunch of seemingly pointless questions by some cop on the beat. Instead of wanting to help find their neighbor’s killer, they’d probably just be pissed that Beckstein’s murder was making them late to their fucking tennis match. A black Lexus parked at the curb was being carefully photographed inside and out by a crime scene team. A little farther down the street, our cop driver turned through an open black iron gate and came to a stop in the middle of a semicircular driveway.

“Here you go, sir. Ask for Captain Barrett, Homicide. He’s expecting you.”

“Captain Barrett? Not Danny Barrett… Big tall motherfucker?”

“Yep, that’s Captain Barrett. You can’t miss him, sir. Big as a fucking house.”

The patrol car slid away from the curb leaving us standing outside one impressive son-of-a-bitch mansion. “
Be it ever so humble….
” I heard Paul half-singing under his breath.

Sure as shit I knew Captain Danny “Big-As-A-Fucking-House” Barrett. We’d first met many moons ago when he was a young Marine captain in Vietnam working the CORDS program as an advisor. Like me, Barrett was a mustang officer who’d come out of the enlisted ranks with a full head of steam and a burning desire to kill as many Communists as possible before the war ended. His work with CORDS was impressive enough to catch the attention of the spooks at the CIA. They’d convinced the Corps to second him to their organization as a
summa cum laude
counterinsurgency expert. Danny Barrett played hard and fast in Vietnam. The Viet Cong put an impressive bounty on his head that they were never able to collect. Barrett finished the war as a highly seasoned and decorated major. I’d heard through the grapevine he’d retired a Lieutenant Colonel after twenty-five years of honorable service. What the fuck he was doing as a D.C. homicide detective I couldn’t imagine. But if Danny Barrett was in the AO it meant I wasn’t going to get jacked off by some no-nuts gumshoe that didn’t know nookie from a nukee.

With the kids on my six I headed toward the mansion’s front door.

“If it isn’t Richard-Motherfucking-Marcinko!”

And there was Danny Barrett, towering above me, just like I remembered him. At 6’8” and 310 pounds he remained the largest man I’d ever laid eyes on. The retired Marine officer was massive, and every ounce of his bulk was well-tuned muscle and sinew. He came down the front steps two at a time, his big paw outstretched. “Dan,” I replied as we shook hands, “How the fuck are you?”

“Good, Dick. Damn fine, actually. Unhappy as hell about what we’ve got here, though. Take a walk?”

I turned to Trace and Paul. “You guys start hunting. Check the backyards between here and the end of the block. I’ll catch up to you,” I told them. They nodded and went on their way.

Barrett draped a big arm around my shoulders and steered me across the wet grass. “Yours?”

“Yeah, new team,” I replied. “They were with me when I did the Salvadoran a few months ago. First trip together. They’re shit hot.”

“I’d heard it was you who pulled our ambassador’s daughter out. Nice work. Been a while since I’ve been to El Sal. Anything changed?”

“Yeah,” I chuckled as we reached a quiet spot around the side of the house, “there’s about twenty fewer guerrillas alive to disturb the peace!”

Danny lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and blew a long funnel of smoke past me. Then, shaking his big head back and forth like a hound that’s temporarily lost the scent, he said, “I heard the bullshit about the problem you had in Ireland. Also heard you leaned hard on some folks recently to get back in the game. You’re a real cocksucker with the Beltway crowd.” Barrett eyed me carefully. I noticed he still held his cigarette low, a life-saving habit picked up in Vietnam.

“Fuck ’em,” I replied. “What about you? I’d heard you’d retired. Is the Marine Corps retirement program so bad these days that you hadda go get another job?”

The homicide detective laughed, the sound coming from deep within his thick chest and erupting in sharp bursts. “The Crotch treated me good, Dick. But I wasn’t hardly out the door before some fella called me from the P.D. and said they were
creating
a spot just for me as a captain in Homicide. When I asked why they thought I’d be interested, the guy mentioned the Agency. You know how they work. I suppose they figured it would be nice having me on-call and wearing a badge, given our long and prosperous association over the years.”

I nodded. The Agency likes to keep its operators close by, retired or otherwise. “Dan, OISA sent an NSA bird out to the Manor to haul our asses here. They mentioned something about nukes. What the fuck is going on?”

Barrett sighed then took another long drag from his cigarette before answering. “This lawyer—Beckstein—took two rounds in the face from an arm’s length away sometime last night. We’ve recovered one of the slugs. Custom round. A man-killer.

“Door was unlocked, security system off. The shooter just walked in and blew Beckstein away without missing a beat. This is no random killing or a home burglary gone sour. We got no witnesses and Beckstein’s bodyguard has an airtight alibi. He was across town screwing the drawers off of the victim’s seventeen-year-old daughter. Politically this thing is hot. Beckstein was well connected on the Hill. My boss is screaming for results yesterday.”

“What about nukes?”

Barrett’s eyebrows arched hard and his face went cold. “I’m getting to that. Let’s go inside,” he growled.

The lawyer’s corpse was lying on the floor where he’d fallen. I looked the dead man over. I’ve seen plenty of dead bodies and, percentage wise, Beckstein’s looked better than most. Yeah, he’d sucked up two rounds to the pumpkin and half his skull was gone, but other than that he was whole and could be identified by his next of kin. Better treatment than some of my SEALs had gotten.

“Captain Barrett?”

I turned and saw a thin Hispanic man, bald as a billiard ball. Barrett introduced us. “Leo, meet Dick Marcinko. Dick’s with me.”

He stuck out his hand and said, “Pleased to meet you, sir.” His attention immediately shifted back to Dan. “Captain, I found a partial shoe print on the living room carpet not far from where there’s a door to the backyard that’s unlocked. We’ve got an unsecured servants’ gate going from the yard to an alley in the back that runs parallel to the street here. Looks like the perp walked in the front door, shot Beckstein twice, then went out the back.”

“Get the lab working on that shoe print. Anything else?”

“Yeah. Beyond the gun shots to his head, Beckstein also took a helluva blow to his chest—his sternum was shattered. I’m guessing bone splinters punctured the heart. Whoever did him was
not
fucking around.”

“Thanks, Leo. Stay with it.” Barrett gestured for me to follow him up the beautifully carved teak stairway to the second floor. At the top of the stairs he turned right into a handsomely furnished but very messy private library. “Grab a seat, Dick. We need to powwow.”

I sank into a luxurious leather club chair. Every available surface in the room was piled high with books. Legal texts, novels, history, biography, philosophy, science—a crazy jumble of subjects and authors. And I sensed these books weren’t for show—from their well-worn condition, they’d obviously been Beckstein’s close companions. Looking around his office I couldn’t help but be impressed. His “I Love Me” wall was studded with pictures of him posing with some of America’s most notable celebrities and power brokers. This guy had definitely gotten around. No wonder Danny was feeling heat from on high. Still, all of Beckstein’s powerful connections weren’t worth a rat’s ass when it came to keeping his brain inside his skull. Everybody’s the same in front of a loaded gun. “So what’s up, Danny Boy?”

“We found a microcassette next to the body. The message was short and not so sweet.”

“So what does this asshole want from us?”

“Sounds like it’s not one guy, but a whole team, Dick,” replied Barrett. “And it’s not what they want, it’s what they’re going to do to us, to this country, if you don’t get to them first.”

“I take it this is where the nukes comes in.” Bad images were running through my mind. Whoever hit Beckstein was using him as an attention getter. “When can I hear the fucking tape?”

Barrett fixed me with a stare as warm as a glacier. “It’s already gone to Karen at OISA. These bastards may have gotten their hands on at least one suitcase nuke. Word is a NEST team was hit this morning in New Mexico. All KIA. No sign of the nuke they were carrying, from what my source is telling me.”

The big cop shook the last remaining cigarette out of a pack and crumpled the plastic wrapper in his fist. Fuck me! This was a worst-case scenario from my days at Red Cell. We’d proven to the Navy that our nuclear program and its weapons were vulnerable to terrorist attack. Hell, we’d not only proven we could infiltrate the sites where nuclear weapons were stored or pre-deployed, we’d proved we could actually steal the goddamn bombs. Apparently someone else had balls as big as my Red Cell operators. The thought made my gut go sour. Rogues are one thing, renegades are another.

I damn sure wanted to hear the fucking tape.

“Soon as I played it and realized what was on the damn thing I called one of my contacts at the Agency. They sent a courier to secure it and get it to Karen. Then I heard you were inbound.”

“Where do we go from here?” “Not we, Dick. You.” Barrett snubbed his half-smoked cigarette out. “I’m to run you and your crew back to the helo. As soon as you’ve seen this kill zone, Karen wants your undivided attention. You’ll get your marching orders from her.”

“Well fuck, let’s roll. But I charge extra for recovering stolen nukes!”

“Same old Marcinko,” the retired Marine laughed. “You’ll be a fucking pirate ‘til the day we bury your hairy ass.”

“Don’t count me out even then, buddy!”

With my brain running various unpleasant scenarios involving mushroom clouds and killer radiation, I went downstairs again and started looking for Trace and Paul. I headed out the back gate into the alley that Leo had mentioned, figuring that was where the kids would probably be snooping around. Sure enough, I saw them, or rather heard them, but they weren’t exactly snooping. They were sprinting a fucking hundred-yard dash! Both went flying right past me down the alley and then I realized they were in hot pursuit of somebody making tracks about half a block farther down. Trace hollered, “Dick! On us! On us!” She was about a half-step behind Kossens who was burning up the asphalt with his long-legged stride. Fuck! They must’ve spooked somebody worth talking to. I saw the distant figure they were chasing dart left, disappearing into somebody’s back garden. I figured he had to be heading for the street and a better escape route than this narrow alley.