Free RW11 - Violence of Action by Richard Marcinko Page A

rocket-powered career at the State Department. We’d occasionally “seen” each other since I’d been hired by State and transferred over to OISA, which Karen headed up for the president himself. Coffee in hand, she turned and smiled. That smile reminded me how many moons had passed since we’d last screwed each other silly. Down, boy, I told myself. We’re here on business.
    “Dick, there was another shooting…?”
    I gratefully took the cup and gulped down the rich, hot brew. “Yes, an innocent bystander,” I said. “We’ve got the shooter upstairs. He’s definitely connected to Beckstein’s murder. He was keeping the house under surveillance and won’t say shit to explain himself. Danny Barrett is handling the paperwork.”
    Karen nodded. Her hair fell across her face and she brushed it back with a practiced hand. She was an incredibly sexy piece of work. “Please have a seat. I’m afraid we’ve got very little time and a lot of ground to cover. The situation we’re facing right now is exactly the kind of worst-case scenario that caused the president to establish the Office of Internal Security Affairs. This is going to be OISA’s first real test. And therefore, mine.
    “I’ll cut to the chase. Samuel Beckstein was one of the president’s most senior legal advisors and an internationally famous civil rights advocate. Whoever murdered him last night left a cassette tape next to his body with a message for the president, and by extension the entire nation and the world. On the tape, this person announces his intention to detonate a tactical nuclear device somewhere within our borders. Before you got here, it was confirmed a NEST team transporting such a device from Los Alamos to Southern California has been ambushed. No survivors. The device is missing.”
    I took a long pull of coffee then set the cup down on the conference table. “Whoever can take out a NEST team and bag a nuke is a serious motherfucker.”
    Karen was sitting directly across from me. Our eyes locked. When she spoke her voice was low, its tone unmistakably grave. “In about five minutes this room is going to fill up with some very important people, Dick. They all have their own agendas and will do everything possible to promote these, even in the face of a potential catastrophe like this one. How much do you know about suitcase nukes, Dick?”
    “Long or short story?” I asked.
    “I’m listening to whatever you have to say, Captain.”
    I stood and walked to the far end of the table. If I played my cards right and Karen came out of this bullshit meeting looking good, I just might get laid (and save a couple hundred thousand innocent lives as a bonus). I’d make this good. “First off, suitcase nukes—technically, special atomic demolition munitions—or SADMs—aren’t anything new. We’ve had ’em since the late 50s. During the Cold War both the Russians and us used man-packed nukes as tactical rather than strategic weapons. A SADM can be precisely placed on the battlefield or behind the enemy’s front lines to do specific damage to a selected target or targets. The big rocket-launched cocksuckers that everybody thinks of as nuclear weapons do too much damage and turn the world to shit. No one wants to hold ground that glows in the dark!
    “Given the huge advantage in conventional forces the Soviets had over NATO at the time, they were a major part of our war-fighting plan. We, meaning the good old U.S. of A., deployed SADMs courtesy of our Special Forces people. The nukies were placed at key points along the axis of advance that our intelligence geeks figured the Russians would most likely take if and when they decided to storm Western Europe. We knew we were too few and too weak to stop them on a conventional basis. However, we realized we could temporarily shut down their forces by detonating tactical nuclear weapons along their front, giving NATO a fighting chance to reinforce, regroup, and mount a