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Marcus knew it was a long shot, but if no one was there, there should still be a contact number on the door for emergencies. He knew several of the men personally, including the commander and the senior NCO. Some of them had been his students at the Quantico sniper school or the Force Recon school. They may not be able to help him directly, but they could at least lend him some credibility and help get things rolling.

As he pulled up, Marcus saw in the yellow glow of an overhead lamp a Marine, in a digital camouflage uniform, step out from the door of the building. The man stopped in his tracks and watched as the Jeep pulled up and came to a stop next to him. The Marine was in his late twenties. He wore staff sergeant stripes pinned on his collar. The edge of a thick scar protruded above the neckline of the wool sweater he wore underneath his camouflage blouse.

Marcus got out of the Jeep and said, “Hey, Devil Dog. Who’s in charge here?”

“Who wants to know?” the Marine answered bluntly.

“Master Sergeant Marcus Johnson, 2nd Force Recon.”

“You got some ID?”

He showed the Marine staff sergeant his ID card. In the light of the lamp, the man looked at Marcus for a moment.

“I know you. You taught some classes I took at the SEAL school in Coronado a couple years ago.” He returned the ID and held out his hand to greet his superior. Marcus took the hand and shook it. “I’m Staff Sergeant Beckwith. I’m the S-3 here. Right now, everyone is deployed to parts unknown. That leaves me in charge. What do you need?”

“There’s live threat in action at the moment on Eielson, and I need to get the info to someone who can act on it.”

“Sir, if there’s a threat on Eielson, you need to contact their base security. I can’t do anything out there. Besides, I have no manpower.”

“I did contact Eielson security—they blew me off. I don’t have any standing there. I figure you may be able to hook me into the right contacts, Marine.”

The Marine eyed him cautiously for several seconds, weighing what he was being asked. Then he exhaled a cloud of steam that billowed from his mouth. “Let’s go back inside, Top.”

Marcus followed the Marine inside the building. Staff Sergeant Beckwith led him down a short hallway. Beckwith’s boots clopped heavily on the pale green linoleum floor. The thump echoed off the standard military eggshell-white walls. In the entire twenty years of Marcus’s career, he had witnessed only two other shades of paint used on military office walls: gray and one other shade of white. It was Spartan frugality in the extreme.

Beckwith turned to the right, opened a gray metal office door labeled “S-3”, and flipped on a light switch as they went in. He continued to a nineteen sixties-era metal office chair behind the sole desk in the room and sat down, motioning to another ancient chair for Marcus.

“What’s the threat, Top?” Beckwith referred to Marcus by this familiar term related to his rank of E-8 Master Sergeant, the second highest enlisted rank in the military.

Marcus went over the details of what he had witnessed on the trail. He ended the narrative with the encounter with the tobacco-chewing Air Force security policeman. “Of course, I can’t really blame him. Some guy showing up in the dark and claiming to see North Koreans lurking in the woods would throw me off, too.”

“Well, Top, it does seem somewhat far out there.” Beckwith adjusted in his seat. “But I know you, and your reputation, and will take your word for it. Like I said, though, there’s not much I can do myself. But … I do know some guys who might be able to look into it a bit further.”

He reached over to a black plastic telephone on the corner of his desk, pressed the speakerphone button, and dialed a six-digit extension. After a short pause, the line rang twice, then a voice answered in a typical rote military phone greeting.

“Ft. Wainright Naval Reserve Squadron. Good evening sir or ma’am, this is an unsecured line. How may I direct your call?”

“Let me speak to Chief Wasner. This is Staff Sergeant Beckwith.”

“Wait one.”

There was a pause, and then a different voice came on the line. “Wasner.”

“Hey Chief, hate to bother you after hours and what-not, but there is a situation your boys may like to be part of. You got time to meet with me and another Marine at your place?”

“What about?”

“Can’t say over the air, but it’s important. The Marine with me is Master Sergeant Marcus Johnson.”

“Johnson? From 2nd Recon?”

Marcus’s face lit up at the sound of a familiar voice. “Hey! Wazzup, Wazzy? Thought you were rid of me forever, didn’t you?”

“Holy high-protein cow turds! Is that you, Mojo?” Wasner exclaimed.

“Yep, it’s me, Wazzy,” Marcus answered.

“Hell, yeah! Get your butts over here. If Johnson’s in it, there’s got to be some fun ahead.”

“We’re on the way, Chief. Give us ten minutes.” The staff sergeant pressed the speakerphone button a second time, and the phone call disconnected. He rose from his desk and started for the door, Marcus right behind.

“You know Chief Wasner?”

“Absolutely,” Marcus replied. “We did about half a dozen missions together and shared a couple of training groups at Coronado. He’s one of the best SEALS in the teams. And he makes a killer home-brewed stout, to boot.”

“He called you Mojo.”

“My middle name is Orlando—Marcus Orlando Johnson. Mojo to my closest friends.” Marcus paused for effect, then added, “You may continue to call me Top.”

“Aye, aye, Top,” Beckwith responded.

“I’ll follow you over to Wasner’s office in my Jeep,” Marcus said as they headed out the door.

Ten minutes later, they pulled up to another building that looked almost identical to the one they had just left on the other side of the Army base. The large, white sign in front of the non-descript building was emblazoned with the emblem of the US Navy Reserve Arctic Inland Training Command.

Master Chief Warrant Officer Harley Wasner stood outside the front door waiting for them when they pulled up. As the men parked their vehicles, Wasner approached Marcus’s Jeep.

“Well, I’ll be dipped in camel dung! It is you! I thought they’d shelved you in some old federal warehouse back east, with a ‘do not disturb under penalty of unimaginably violent death’ sign tacked to it.” He threw his arms out and gave Marcus a bear hug, eliciting a deep grunt as he slapped his friend loudly on the back.

“Yeah, well, so did I. At least, I was hoping to retire, that is. I don’t know about living in a box in a warehouse, though.” Marcus replied. “Fate, as it turns out, has decided otherwise. Let’s step inside and talk.”

As they moved in, Marcus asked, “So, what are you doing up here, anyway?”

Wasner replied, “My boys and I are here for a month of arctic training while between deployments.”

“Naval training in the interior of Alaska?” Marcus asked. “Don’t they know there’s no ocean for five hundred miles from here? For that matter, all the rivers are harder than concrete for another five months. Leave it to the staff wonks to come up with a plan like that.”

“Hey now, Marine! Easy does it. This was my idea,” Wasner replied.

“Well, I never took you for a wonk, but I guess people do get goofy in their old age.” Marcus smiled as he jibed his friend.

“I may be two years older than you, but you’ll still never be able to catch up with me, you grubby little leatherneck turd.”

Staff Sergeant Beckwith walked behind the two older men, watching and listening to the display of banter as they moved down the hall toward Wasner’s temporary office.

Marcus continued as they entered the office. “As much as I’d like to sit back and yuck it up for a while, there’s some business going on that needs our immediate attention.” He turned to Beckwith. “Shut the door, Staff Sergeant.”

The younger man did as told and then joined the other two sitting at a gray metal desk in the center of the room.

Marcus retold the story of the North Koreans on the back of the Air Force base. He also added the account of what happened the night before at Linus’s store with the two Albanians. Wasner listened attentively to the whole thing without speaking.

When Marcus finished, the Navy Chief Warrant Officer leaned back in his chair. “Well, that Air Force sergeant was right in one respect. You certainly are crazy. But not in the way he was thinking.”

He sat upright and continued, “If there’s one thing I know and trust, it’s Mojo’s mojo. If you saw these baddies back there, they are there. And if the Air Force doesn’t want to do anything about it, then I believe that grants us imminent domain rights to the subject in question. We are, after all, federal employees, just like them.”

Staff Sergeant Beckwith asked, “Why not take it to Homeland Security? It seems to me that there’s probably a link between those Albanians and the North Korean guys. If this is domestic terrorism, that’s up their alley, don’t you think?”

“One thing you will soon learn, young man,” Wasner said, “is that Homeland Security, the FBI and all those guys, are in this whole war bureaucracy way over their head. If you want instant action, they are not the way to go. Their highly capable agents, many of whom come from our own ranks, are up to their eyeballs in paperwork and require the permission of their bureaucratic civilian bosses before they can take a crap. They may not even be able to take a cursory look into the situation until the tangos are long gone with whatever they came for, or worse, have killed a lot of innocent people in their beds.”

The younger man nodded in his understanding and said, “Well, if you don’t mind a tagalong, I haven’t had a good adrenaline rush since Iraq.”

Marcus looked at him. “You sure? This is an unauthorized mission.”

“That’s easy to fix. I’m the acting CO up here until the major gets back next month. It can quickly become an authorized mission as needed.”

Wasner stood up and let his face spread in a broad smile. “I knew there was something I liked about you, Beckwith.” With that, Wasner picked up the receiver from the black telephone on the desktop and dialed an extension. “Moore, get the gang into my office ASAP. We’ve got a party to go to.”

Wasner turned to a file cabinet behind his desk and pulled out a topographic map of Eielson Air Force Base. He spread it out on the flat surface of the desk. He and Marcus worked out the details of where they were going.

1. Chapter 11
   

Flashback

Wednesday, May 13th, 1998

Stonehouse Barracks

43 Commando

Her Majesty’s Royal Marine Corps

Plymouth Naval Base, England

Marcus’s first PT session with the men of 43 Commando was brutal. The pain wasn’t due to the headache and tiredness from the previous night’s drinking—the British Royal Marine officers seemed to want to show up the American. After a brief introduction to the captain and the three lieutenants of Mike Company, there was a flurry of end-to-end exercises that quickly had the whole unit sweating.

The session started off with pyramid push-ups—press-ups, in British terminology—which involved varying distances between the hands and alternately increasing numbers of repetitions until they finally ended after a total of two hundred and fifty presses. Then came a cluster of abdominal exercises, including a hundred each of crunches, flutter kicks, leg lifts, and the infamous “Hello Dolly” exercise that requires the exerciser to hold their feet six inches off the ground while he opens and closes the legs for the prescribed number of reps.

After completing the gut-wrenchingly painful repetitions, the instructor, an athletic-looking sergeant in his mid-twenties, subjected the troop to a series of mountain climbers and squat thrusts, followed by a ten-minute high-step in-place run.

This had all only been a warm up. Following everything they had already done, the captain sent the men back to the barracks to change into their marching kit. They came out fifteen minutes later with full battle uniform, thirty-two pound rucksack, web gear, and rifle. As soon as they assembled, they were led in formation out of the PT field and onto a dirt road where they enjoyed a leisurely twelve-mile forced march. The pace never got below 4.5 miles per hour, but never increased enough to break into a jog.

Barclay told Marcus the officers tried to push the men as far as they could before a weekend off in an effort to keep their frivolity to a minimum. It seldom worked, although judging by the looks on the faces of these men, this Friday session was more than they had been accustomed to. By the time they reached home again, every one of them was utterly exhausted.

It was just before 10:00 when they were released and told to go enjoy a delicious breakfast. There was more than a hint of cruelty in such a dismissal. The mess facility had closed at 09:00 and wouldn’t open again until 11:30.

After lunch, Marcus was formally introduced to the officers of the company. Colonel Sean Farris, commanding officer of 43 Commando, welcomed him and mentioned with some degree of respect that Marcus’s reputation in Special Operations had preceded his arrival at the base. The commander assured Marcus that he would fit in quite nicely and that they were looking forward to his instruction in sniping and small team deep reconnaissance as the year went on. Colonel Farris then turned Johnson over to Regimental Sergeant Major Charles Smythe, a short, thick man whose five-foot six-inch height accentuated the dimensions of his chest, arms, and neck. The man looked as though he were crafted from the stump of giant oak tree.

RSM Smythe took Marcus on a tour of the base, introducing him to the other Royal Marines and Naval units stationed there before dropping him off back at the barracks. The weekend was relatively uneventful. Marcus spent most of it taking in the local color of Plymouth with Barclay and Smoot.

The following Monday brought with it a real schedule. It was the beginning of a new training cycle. The men of 43 Commando spent all of Monday and Tuesday and most of Wednesday encamped on a stretch of soggy coastal marsh across the water from Plymouth, dubbed “The Sound”. They endlessly practiced tracking and stalking skills at all hours of the day and night.