You can"t find Casa di Nero on most maps, at least not those published in the U.S. If you"re interested in seeing where it is, get the best map you can find and spread it flat on the table. Put your right thumb on Monte Etna, and spread out your hand. About where your forefinger is, you should see a little burp of a place called Mareneva. Casa di Nero is half a fingernail to the north, in the rugged mountainside. The village consists of one small church, one slightly smaller barn, and six or seven broken-down houses. There are one and a half roads in the village, the half being a rock-strewn rut that would be considered a drainage ditch in any other town.
The truck pulled up the main street and then around the rut, heading past the church to the barn.
"Move!" said Frankie in the command post. There was no sense waiting for Kohut to wake up now, and c.r.a.pinpants agreed, or at least didn"t object.
One of the a.s.sault team helicopters had run low on fuel and had started back to tank up. After a few seconds of confusion, the pilot figured he had enough gas to join the party anyway, and the full a.s.sault team was able to make it to the dance more or less the way they had planned. The Cobras showed up as well. The teams were down within five minutes or so of getting the order to go.
The tangos were about to hide the vehicle in the barn when the helicopters appeared. Both of the terrorists ran as the choppers and ground vehicles came in; one made the mistake of pulling out a pistol. The only thing that was left of him and his companion when the gunfire stopped were bones, and half of those had been shot away. Even the Marines in the Cobra gunships fired at the suckers. I saw the pictures later on. They"re not pretty.
I know what you"re expecting-the ground ops open up the back of the truck, and it"s empty. Somehow, the slimers have managed to pull a voodoo move and outfox the Americans and Italians following them.
Not quite, though. The truck wasn"t empty-it had the wings, nose, and, most important, the tail section of the device, which was where the numb-nut technical expert had put both tracking devices.
Where was the warhead? At roughly twenty feet long, it"s small for a nuke but won"t fit in the average backpack. It ought to have been easy to find.
But only if you knew where to look.*
The two carloads of tangos who had been part of the operation were stopped immediately, even though they were too small to hold the weapon"s guts. One car was stopped in Foce di Simeto on the Golfo di Catania. The team there also apprehended a helmsman and a small speedboat that landed a few minutes later, obviously for the next leg of their journey.
The men in the second car proved more dedicated to their task-they blew themselves up rather than allowing themselves to be taken in a small town farther south along the coast. It was considerate of them, really: It saved the Italians the expense of a trial. Then again, maybe like me they were annoyed that Italy doesn"t have the death penalty, so they knew they"d never get what they deserved unless they took matters into their own hands.
But back to the bomb. Where was it?
If you said the tangos who struck first left it back at the base, go to the head of the cla.s.s.... Then suck an egg. Because the only way that would make sense would be if the thieves knew where the locator devices had been placed. Under that scenario, the theft would be a diversion, taking our attention away from the base while a second team infiltrated and grabbed the real one. Brilliant theory-but probably a bit too brilliant, at least in this case.
But c.r.a.pinpants got it into his head that that was what had to be going on and went apes.h.i.t. He contacted the security people and gave them orders to shoot anyone they saw on sight-I"m not exaggerating, either. Though he was told that there had been no further intrusions and that the family jewels were intact, he didn"t believe that and began screaming that the stolen weapons had better be found. In layman"s terms, he"d cracked under the pressure (such as it was) of the situation. It happens, but when it happens to someone who"s wearing a birdie on his collar and is attached to a phone, the consequences can spin out of control.
Within ten minutes, someone at the base told c.r.a.pinpants that a suspicious truck had been spotted on a road just outside the perimeter of the Air Force area of Sigonella. Whatever the person actually said, by the time c.r.a.pinpants reached Frankie he was convinced that the truck held not the dummy warhead but a real bomb. Recognizing a runaway train when he saw one, Frankie stepped back and let the Air Farce take care of the vehicle, which of course was soon surrounded by every available airman, sailor, soldier, and marine within a fifty-mile radius of the base.
In fairness, the Air Farce security people on the scene insisted that the truck couldn"t have been involved; the van that the terrorists used had not come down the road in question. But the fact that none of the men held a rank higher than tech sergeant meant their opinions counted for nil. Acting on the possibility that the truck and bomb might be b.o.o.by-trapped-hey, why not?-a robot and dogs were brought out to check the d.a.m.n thing out.
All of this would have been s.h.i.t-a.s.s hilarious if it didn"t divert attention and resources from the effort to look for the dummy bomb itself. Clearly it had been off-loaded somewhere on the hill. The team that had landed got ready to do so, but had to wait while the helicopters went off to refuel. Trace, never one to twiddle her thumbs when she could be sticking them in someone"s eye, gunned her bike back toward the mountain. She went up the steep road, taking the switchbacks as slowly as she could. It was about five in the morning; the night was clear and there was plenty of light to see by on the highway. But here the trees and terrain threw everything into a dark shadow. Finally she decided to stop and put on the night optical gla.s.ses tucked in her tactical vest. As she was pulling it on, someone grabbed her from behind.
Trace"s reflexes took over; the bike flew one way, her a.s.sailant flew another, and she spun in the air, feet kicking out at another a.s.sailant, or at least his shadow. Her foot didn"t hit anything-it"s possible nothing was there-and she landed slightly off-kilter on her haunches. She coiled her five-foot-eight-
inch frame like a cobra, looking to strike something. The man she had thrown lay moaning on the ground a few feet away. When nothing else moved, Trace reached for her Kimber Compact .45, pulling the pistol from its pocket inside her vest.
Her night goggles had fallen to the ground near the bike. As she sidled toward them, something moved about ten yards away. She brought her gun up, poised on her haunches, trying to make out what it was.
The next thing Trace heard was a very loud buzzing in her ears. A half-second later, she felt as if her breath had been s.n.a.t.c.hed from her. Then her body tingled, and not in a good way. It was as if she had put her hands onto the wires coming from a nuclear reactor.
A Taser dart had hit her at the back of the neck. The thin wires that stretched back from the dart to the gun had transmitted upward of fifty thousand volts of electricity, a bit more than you"d need to light your average Christmas tree...and run your refrigerator and the rest of your house while you"re at it. Her body went apocalyptic; she felt as if she were frozen and on fire at the same time.
Tasers work by paralyzing the body; they fry the body"s natural electric system like an E-bomb would, temporarily frying the circuitry. Most normal human beings would have shut down completely at that point, kind of humming to themselves and glowing for a few minutes. But not Trace Dahlgren. She whirled around, grabbed the wires that had spiked her, and tried feeding them to the b.a.s.t.a.r.d with the Taser weapon who was only about twenty feet away.
Of course, the fact that her nervous system had been jolted out of kilter meant she was about as successful as a rag doll. As she lunged at the b.a.s.t.a.r.d, two other men came up behind her and put out her lights the old-fashioned way-with a rifle b.u.t.t to the head.
See what happens when you don"t wear a motorcycle helmet?
Frankie and the others back at the command post heard some of this through Trace"s radio. In short order they had the two available cars blocking off the road. Then they sat tight, waiting for the helicopters to finish refueling and get back in the air. They were doing things by the book, which said the first order of business was to contain the situation, then go in and get their guy (or gal).
If I"d been there, I would have given the book a good heave-in that sort of situation, time is critical, and the more aggressive you are, the better your chances are of grabbing your person alive. You don"t learn that in books, mostly because the majority of the books are written by guys who weren"t there.
The whack sent Trace into an odd state of semiconsciousness. She saw things moving around her, real things and fake things.
For a few moments, the fake things seemed more real. Two reddish-gold coyotes stood over her, speaking in a Chihuahua Apache dialect. Gradually, Trace came to understand that they were debating whether they should intervene. One wanted to, arguing that White Sh.e.l.l Woman would be angry if her children were harmed. The other said that the battle was not their affair and they should stay away.
As I understand it-and being a "white man" Trace says I can"t-Apache legend claims that White Sh.e.l.l Woman is the mother of Europeans. Trace says that her vision represented an argument in the spirit world about whether the powers that protect the Apache should get involved in the fight against terrorism: a war that she, like Saladin, interprets as a war of civilizations. If the coyotes made up their minds, they didn"t hang around to share the decision with her. They slowly faded into the background as the four tangos around her became more distinct.
Trace interpreted this as an important if puzzling message. To her, the fact that she had it means she"s worthy of an important role in her tribe, something she"s questioned. Me, I think she was just whacked on the head. But then again, that can be as religious an experience as anything else.
The tangos were also having a debate. Trace couldn"t tell what language they were speaking, except that it wasn"t English; even so, she somehow understood every word, or at least thinks she did. The men had been in the process of covering their tracks when she stopped nearby. Their attack had been a mistake, as they had been instructed to remain unseen if at all possible. From what they were saying, it seems likely that they mistook her for one of the farmers who lived nearby. For some reason they didn"t explain, they weren"t supposed to hurt the locals.
The fact that they had gone against their orders, argued one of the men, meant that they better dispose of the evidence. Another argued that this would eventually be discovered, and the consequences would be even more severe. At this point, Trace groaned. They trussed her hands with a pair of old handcuffs and put a set of leg irons on her feet. Trace saw that the links were old and corroded, and she thought-knew, she insists today-that she could pull them apart if she had to. But she remained still, deciding to wait until she was sure how many others were around and her head was a bit clearer.
After the chains were on her hands, two of the men took shovels and trudged off a few yards away, where they started to dig. It"s possible that they were going to bury her alive, which technically wouldn"t have violated their orders. ("Hey, she was alive when we threw that last spadeful of dirt on her face. It wasn"t our fault she couldn"t breathe...") At about that point, one of the helicopters got close enough to be heard. The tangos began to panic and decided to make a run for it. They took a long pole and slung it between the chains holding her limbs.
At that moment, Trace would have struggled to free herself, except that one of the coyotes returned. He stood on two legs. She felt his breath, and watched as he lifted his head to howl. And then he was gone.
In retrospect, the vision probably saved her life. She realized two of the tangos had been covering her from a short distance away, guns trained on her. If she"d put up any resistance, they could have easily shot her.
Trace"s head continued to clear as they moved into the brush and down the mountain"s west side. She couldn"t see all that much, but soon realized that she and her porters were at the tail end of the formation, with the two other men scrambling ahead down the rocks. She decided the handcuffs would make a decent enough weapon if wrapped around someone"s neck; this gave her the outlines of a general plan-she"d rock herself to the side, pulling the stick out of the hands of the man closest to her, roll up, and grab him by the throat.
Before she could implement the plan, the helicopter they"d heard earlier buzzed that side of the slope. The crew was using infrared gla.s.ses to look for her. As it happened, they missed her on that pa.s.s, but the tangos didn"t know that-they dropped their prize and began running down the hill.
Trace found herself sliding in the dirt. She levered her body with her elbow, trying to get up; instead she ended up flailing face-first into a pile of rocks. She bounced up and saw one of her captors five or six feet from her. Forgetting that her legs were chained together, she lunged for him. She tripped, falling well short.
Somewhere during this tumble, the helicopter made a second pa.s.s and the crew spotted what was going on. Two flares shot out from the helo, and the night sky turned fluorescent white. The guys on the ground must have finally realized they were truly f.u.c.ked, because they stopped running and tried to hide. (The a.s.sault team later found a Volkswagen parked at the base of the mountain, their apparent destination.) Trace heard gunfire-and, she claims, the howl of a coyote. She saw three tangos running to her left, and pushed herself up to follow them. As she did, someone grabbed her by the back of her tac vest and held a gun to her neck.
Big mistake. She had her elbow in his gut and his body flying over her down the hill in less than a heartbeat.
Trace saw two or three Italian paratroopers running up the hill, and the tangos running toward them.
The coyote stood between them, shaking his head.
"Hit the deck!" Trace yelled, intuitively understanding what the vision meant. "Down! Down!"
She followed her own advice without waiting to see if the paratroopers did-good thing, because just as her lips kissed the dirt, the three terrorists blew themselves up.
*Can"t talk about it. Sorry.
*There were supposed to be two aircraft on duty. The one that didn"t show up was a U-2, which was to have been tasked from Cyprus. That sortie got scrubbed because of more pressing needs in the Middle East. Instead of relying on the transponder, the spy plane would have had a pod beneath its wings that followed the truck with high-tech cameras and computers. The gear can track specific objects on the ground through all sorts of terrain and condition, and there"s no need for other tracking devices. The failure of the U-2 to show is a sore point, especially with Trace; if it had been aloft, what follows never would have happened.
*Which was the point about the U-2. Had the truck, et al., been under optical (or synthetic radar, or infrared) surveillance instead of relying on a locator signal, the warhead could have been spotted. Even if the handoff was somehow missed, the file from the mission could be quickly reviewed.
6.
By the time I got to Sicily, Trace had been shipped to the hospital and released, the latter in response to threats by her to inflict bodily damage on the medical staff if they didn"t let her go. She"d had a series of head X rays, all negative-but what did you expect?
All told, only two terrorists had been taken alive. One was the man who had held the gun on Trace; he"d been hit by shrapnel from his friends and wasn"t expected to make it. The other had gotten into one of the cars after the heist. Unfortunately, the Italian paratroopers had grabbed him. I"ll spare you the jurisdictional bulls.h.i.t; the long and short of it was that he was handed over to the Italian authorities before Frankie or anyone else competent had a chance to "interview" him.
The Italians are great talkers, but their techniques with prisoners leave a lot to be desired. They seem to think that making someone eat their nightly pasta without sauce is the moral equivalent of hanging them upside down by their toenails for thirty-six hours and zapping their gonads with a cattle prod. Not that they would do that either.
The dummy bomb had been hidden just off the road, about thirty yards from where Trace had dropped her bike. Frankie realized that they had hidden it there with the idea that a second team would come and pick it up; hoping against hope that the operation would proceed, he had holes drilled into the device and two tracking devices installed. Then he set up an extensive surveillance net. It was a wasted gesture, but it did give the Eye-talians something to do.
Both our navy and the Italians" began reviewing data from radar and other sources on shipping, the theory being that the bomb was to have been taken out that day. As Trace pointed out when she picked me up at the airport, that made no sense-if the tangos were planning to get the device off the island immediately, the truck would have gone straight to the rendezvous. More likely, the people who had designed the plot believed that the immediate response would be to seal off the island, and that it would be safer and easier to get the bomb out when the "heat" died down.
I suspected that the people who actually took the weapon from the base were to have killed themselves if caught there, as the three with Trace had done; they had probably been chosen for that part of the mission because they could be counted on to follow through. That suggested to me that the ringleader of the mission was around somewhere, maybe not directly observing-if he was, we should have been able to see him-but still close enough to make sure things went right.
At the risk of being called a racist or, gasp, a "racial profiler," let me point out that all of the individuals involved were of apparent Middle Eastern extraction. The dead men were in too many pieces to be identified by photographs, and their DNA didn"t match any of the very small amount on file for known terrorists. Neither prisoner was carrying ID and neither identified himself, but by the time I met with Frankie, the one from the car had been fingered as an a.s.shole named Ali al-Hazmi-not coincidentally related to one of the 9/11 hijackers. That actually hurt rather than helped our operation. For one thing, everybody and his uncle wanted to grab the sc.u.mbag and beat the s.h.i.t out of him...er, engage in meaningful dialogue over a nice cup of tea. For another, it got Pus Face"s attention.
"9/11. On that magnitude. Big. Huge. That"s what we have here, d.i.c.k. Catastrophe. Major. Immense." Pus Face"s sentences shriveled to single words whenever he was excited or under pressure, and he was both when I met with him, Kohut, and the rest of the usual suspects that afternoon. He prowled Kohut"s small office like an elephant looking to gore a tiger. As I was the only tiger present-Trace had feigned a headache-I stayed on my guard.
"This is huge, d.i.c.k. Huge. A coup." Pus Face turned to Kohut and nodded solemnly. He had decided that he had approved the decoy-and-surveillance setup; I suspect that he was well on his way to believing it was his idea.
Kohut kept glancing toward me from the safety of his desk. The arrest of al-Hazmi had set off a hosanna of congratulations from Washington, and I think he was worried that I would derail the accolade train by pointing out he had originally vetoed it. His secret is safe with me, however.
Oh. I guess it"s not. Ooooops.
"Now that we have the ringleader, what"s next?" asked Pus Face.
I explained that we didn"t have the ringleader, the big boss or anything close. The mastermind would probably not have exposed himself on the mission. Al-Hazmi might have been the operational commander-he seemed to be the only one smart enough not to wear an explosive vest-but he was probably no higher than that.
"Which is why you have to pry him from the Italians and let me talk to him," I said. "He"s our connection to the next rung on the ladder."
"Yes," said Pus Face. But it was one of those yeses that clearly means no.
"Why not?"
"I"ll work on it."
"Working on it"s not good enough," I told him.
Pus Face started hemming and hawing about jurisdictions, diplomatic and otherwise.
"I"m sorry. I thought those stars meant something," I said finally.
Ordinarily, questioning a general"s pull leads to immediate results. In this case, though, Pus Face simply continued making excuses, blaming al-Hazmi"s isolation on the Christians In Action. What I didn"t realize at the time was that Pus Face had already been sidelined by the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies. The t.i.tle he"d been given had no real power; he could bark at people like Kohut all day, but in the end they were outside his chain of command and he could do little more than pee on their rugs if they didn"t cooperate.
Had Pus Face been competent, this would have seriously endangered America"s efforts to make its overseas bases secure and protect various interests from terrorism. Since he wasn"t competent, it mainly kept him from doing more harm than most career generals do. In any event, I soon ended our little tetea-tete, saying I had to go check my messages.
"You may have new leads?" he asked.
"One can only hope."
"Great."
"I"ll keep you in the loop," I told him. The last part of the sentence-"when h.e.l.l freezes over"-may have been inaudible; I was out in the hall by then.
I tried pulling some of my own strings with Christians In Action, but there were too few IOUs in my favor jar to swing any concessions from Langley, and I didn"t know any of the local people. I even gave the amba.s.sador to Italy a call, but he was out doing whatever it is amba.s.sadors to Italy do. I fell back to regroup with Trace over an early dinner at her hotel.
With the terrorist angle temporarily shut down, it made sense to pursue the Mafia side of the equation. d.a.m.n good sense-but even so, I didn"t think of it. When I got to the hotel room to freshen up before dinner, the light was blinking with a message. ("Freshen up" is Marcinko-speak for grabbing a cold one from the minibar.) When I figured out the phone system, a gravely voice greeted me with a phone number.
Someone picked up on the second ring. "Is this d.i.c.k Marcinko?" he said.
"It is. Who are you?"
"That"s unimportant. Welcome to our island."
"It"s a nice place," I said. "Why am I talking to you?"
I guessed the man was Italian because of the way he p.r.o.nounced my name-with a hard Italian "c," as if it were spelled "ch." But he was speaking English-Noo Yawk English, like maybe the kind of Noo Yawk you would hear around Bensonhurst. For those of you who don"t know, that"s serious Guido country. And I say it with the greatest affection-and a loaded machine gun in my hands.
"Don Alberti wants to meet you," said the man. "Be at "U Cafone in Catania at 11 p.m. You know it?"
"I can find it."
"One thing, Mr. Marcinko. Don Alberti respects you, because he has heard of your reputation. So you will be treated with respect. But you must remember, respect is a two-way street."
"Sure." I had no f.u.c.king idea what he was talking about. "Can I bring a date?"
"A date? Yes. One date. I would advise against bringing anyone who would have difficulty understanding the situation." He hung up.
The name Alberti means nothing to most Americans, and I"d bet next month"s allowance that few Italians north of Palermo know it either. But in Sicily, the name would be instantly recognized, especially by the police. Gerlando Alberti set up and ran a network of heroin factories for the Sicilian Mafia as a young man. What Henry Ford was to the automobile, Alberti was to smack. Gerlando eventually got caught by the government and put on trial, but his family remained important in the Mafia hierarchy. Don Alberti-don being a term of honor for an important Mafia member, kind of like saying Duke-was a grandson of the man who had set up the factories. (An illegitimate one, actually, whom other family members claimed shouldn"t even have the name. But we"ll let them sort out their private squabbles.) Forget what you"ve seen on The Sopranos and all the other TV shows and movies. Most Mafiosi, especially in Sicily, are brutal, ruthless killers; they tend not to play well with others, and a good portion are so stupid they can"t count past ten. A few are pretty decent businessmen; most couldn"t make money at a bank if they had to play by the rules.
So why go to the meeting?
That was Trace"s question, though she added a few colorful adjectives when she asked it.
"The food in the hotel sucks," I told her. "At least I"ll get a good meal. Besides, maybe the Don wants some books signed."
"It"s probably a f.u.c.king ambush."