Detachment Bravo

by Richard Marcinko

  I rolled toward him, grabbing at the combat folder as I went, heedless of the holes I was tearing in my trouser legs. He backpedaled. I just kept coming at him. Finally, he was able to scramble to his feet, which was more than I could do, and he headed, his broken wing flapping, for the van. His pals dropped the rug and exeunted, stage right, to join him. They pulled him inside, jumped in themselves, and yanked the rear doors slam shut. Mr. Shit Brown Suit floored the vehicle and peeled away from the curb, leaving an ugly set of rubber tracks behind. And moi? Moi was left kneeling on the sidewalk, panting, with the knife, the stun gun, Greasy Leather Boy’s inert body, and the fucking rolled-up rug.

  Well, I didn’t want the goddamn rug. But I wasn’t about to leave the stun gun, the knife, or the real evidence—Greasy Leather Boy—behind.

  I scooped up the stun gun, gave GLB another 300,000-volt shot for good measure, found the on/off switch, rendered the thing safe, and slipped it into my pocket. Ditto the knife. Then I pulled myself to my feet, got my arm around Greasy Leather Boy’s waist, leveraged him to his feet, took him by the collar of his black leather jacket, and dragged him the 150 feet to the corner of Brook Street, where three taxicabs were sitting, engines idling, outside Claridge’s front doors.

  I managed to open a cab door and tossed Greasy Leather Boy inside, climbed in myself, shut the door behind me, and wiped the trickle of blood coming from my nose onto the ruined cuff of my ruined custom-made shirt. The driver looked back and said, with amazing, British stiff-upper-lip insouciance, “And where to for you and your… friend, sir?”

  “Curzon Street House, please. And quickly.”

  The driver mumbled to himself, then swiveled, hunched himself behind the wheel, and we pulled away from the curb.

  “What was that you said, driver?”

  He peered into the rearview mirror as he steered a right-hand turn on New Bond Street. “ ‘I should ’ave known,’ is what I said, sir. I should ’ave known that it was Curzon Street House you’d be going to. I should ’ave bloody known.”

  Greasy Leather Boy’s name was actually Sean Maloney, he was twenty years old, he was a self-professed corporal in the Irish People’s Army, and his passport number was JH-214266. That’s all he gave us: the old NRS28 bit. He was still giving us the NRS bit (actually, he was just asking us to “póg mo thón,” which translates somewhere in the area of “kiss my arse” in Gaelic) when a pair of ragged-at-the-fringes counterintelligence minions from MI5 showed up unannounced, displayed a sheaf of papers stamped MOST SECRET, and took the poor sod away to give him a proper interrogation.

  GLB gave us a lot more, of course, except he just didn’t know it—and we certainly didn’t pass anything on to MI5. First of all, the kid was carrying both a cell phone and a pager, neither of which Mick handed over or even mentioned. I thought that a bit strange on his part, but then Mick has his own way of operating.

  And operate is what he did. After GLB had been taken away, it didn’t take Mick Owen more than six minutes to come up with a printout of all the calls and messages young Sean Maloney had made and/or received in the last seventy-two hours. It took another sixty-eight minutes to put names to the numbers. As I pored over the list I found two to be significant. I noted that young Sean had called the number of a pager that had been leased to the Mrs. Kelley’s Kitchen Irish Pub headquarters. That call had been made at 0652 this morning. Three minutes later—0655—he had received a one-minute phone call from a cellular phone owned by the Globex Corporation, Ltd.

  I put a pair of pencil ticks by the pertinent phone numbers, looked across Mick’s desk at him, and slapped my palm on the gray metal surface. “That’s enough for me,” I said.

  “What is?”

  I turned the readout so he could see the numbers I’d checked. “This. See these phone numbers?”

  He gave them a once-over. “I do.”

  I gave him an SAS (Short And Sweet) version of my face-to-face with Gerry Kelley. Then I explained the significance of the telephone and pager numbers I’d put pencil ticks next to.

  Then I told him I believed that Gerry had hired the IPA—and maybe other splinter groups of tangos, too—to take the credit for his own dirty work. “I want Gerry Kelley’s ass, and I want it now, Mick.”

  I’d never seen it happen before, but every bit of colour actually drained out of Mick’s face. “Hold it, Dick,” he said. “Don’t you say another bloody word.”

  “I—”

  His expression revealed absolute fury. “Not another bleedin’ word, I said.” He stood up, and grabbed the readout in his meaty hand.

  I started to protest, but the look on Mick’s face cut me off in midbreath. Silent and brooding, he stalked to the office door and curtly beckoned me to follow.

  We made our way down the long, dingy corridor to a fire door, climbed one flight, pushed open a thick steel door, and exited into a carpeted hallway. Mick opened the second door on the left-hand side and indicated that I was to follow him. I closed the door behind me and found myself in a small chamber that resembled an air lock. Mick was working the cipher key on a heavy, insulated door.

  When it opened, he pointed me inside. I went through the foot-thick opening into a room that was about ten by sixteen feet, with fabric-covered walls, no windows, and a drop ceiling. There were ten plastic chairs placed around a simple wood table. Mick eased the door closed behind us, waited until it sealed and the lock had clicked securely.

  We were now obviously inside a bug-proof room; a bubble; a SCIF.29 Mick tossed the readout onto the table. Then he turned to face me. “Gerry fuckin’ Kelley,” he said, his voice betraying shock and disbelief. “What the hell do you know about Gerry fuckin’ Kelley?”

  8

  I TOLD HIM, OF COURSE. JUST AS I’D PLANNED TO. HE sat there, his expression somewhere just past shell-shocked. When I’d finished my recitation, he shook his head and said, simply, “The Bastards.”

  “Who?”

  Mick’s big, scarred, calloused palms went up. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Not to you, at least.”

  “I think it does.”

  “Gerry Kelley is my problem, Dick, not yours.”

  He was talking to himself, and I didn’t much like it. And Gerry certainly wasn’t just his problem. The on-again, off-again peace process, of which we Americans had been an integral part for more than half a decade now, was unraveling as if by the hour. Five American executives were already dead. Half a dozen others had been injured, some of them seriously.

  An Echelon intercept of a conversation between two unknown people from Ballynahinch, the same Northern Irish town in which Gerry’s company was headquartered, dealt with the killing, sometime in the near future, of hundreds of innocent American and British victims in one deadly blow. My gut, which is seldom wrong, was telling me loud and clear that Gerry was involved right up to his nasty eyeballs. And now Mick was looking at me and saying it was none of my business.

  Well, it was my business. It was the business of the United States, which I represented. I do not believe that we Americans should send our troops off to places like Haiti, Kosovo, or Somalia. That is a waste of our resources. More important, it diminishes our military readiness, overextends our shrinking military’s capabilities, and employs Soldiers as cops and social workers, instead of Warriors. I’ve always said that if you want to be a Warrior and kill the enemy, become a SEAL. If you want to help poor countries recover from disasters, join the Boy Scouts or the Peace Corps.

  But there are two areas in which the United States can use its position as the world’s one remaining superpower. First, when American lives are taken, we can strike back quickly, effectively, and ruthlessly against those who have committed murder. Second, we can be an honest broker and negotiate differences between enemies. Not by buying their cooperation, as we have historically done in the Middle East, but through sheer force of will, our own commitment to democracy, and (given a decent administration) some vigorous, persuasive diplomatic skill.

&
nbsp; The United States was currently an integral part of the Irish peace process. We had a stake not because of any president or secretary of state’s ego, but because innocent American blood had been spilled in the cause of peace. I’d said that to Gerry Kelley and now I told the same thing to Mick Owen. The difference between ’em (you already know there are a lot of differences) was that Mick understood what I was saying.

  And so we sat in that SCIF for three hours and talked. I don’t want to recount the whole conversation, but here’s some of the gist. During the first hour, I told Mick what I’d been up to for the past week. It was then we discovered that Mick had been assigned the same problem as I had. Except he had been told that some of the supergrades in the Home Office—I interpreted that as MI5—believed the Americans were holding back intelligence about the Green Hand Defenders. It had been further explained to him that because of MI6’s close and continuing liaison relationship with the CIA, it would be impossible for the British secret intelligence service to work the GHD problem without the Americans knowing what was going on.

  And so, the GHD “problem” had been turned over to Mick Owen by the Home Office. Mick had been ordered to target the Green Hand Defenders, then report whatever he discovered to Sir Roger Holland, MI5’s director general, through an MI5 cutout, an anonymous civil-servant type whom he’d meet once a week at White’s, one of the venerable gentlemen’s clubs on St. James’s Street.

  “Shit,” I said. “Mick, they were mirror-imaging us.”

  “Precisely.” His face was grim. Both of us had been ordered to target the GHD. The only difference was that Mick had been forbidden from taking any action at all. At least Eamon had promised that my men and I would be allowed to go after the scumbags at some point in the future.

  I have to tell you, the whole mess gave me pause. Outwardly, there was no obvious connection between Eamon and MI5. I mean, what does the fucking CINCUSNAVEUR have to do with the British domestic-security agency. But stowed in the back of my mind was the factoid Digger O’Toole had humped and pumped so hard to obtain. Digger’s punch had whispered that one reason for the CIA London COS taking his abrupt powder was that he was sick and tired of being backchanneled in the CT (for Counter-Terrorism) area.

  It hadn’t made sense at the time. It had been a piece of the puzzle that just did not fit. But now it made perfect sense. Perfect, that is, if you like convoluted, intricate, labyrinthine, Machiavellian politics.

  What the fuck is all that noise? Hold on a minute, will you? There’s a huge commotion outside the locked door of this here SCIF. Let me go and take a look. Holy shit. It’s a fucking APE.30 He just showed up waving his blue pencil and whining that I’ve committed an editorial faux pas; the logical jump here is just too big, and you readers out there will never accept it.

  No, you dweeb, it’s not too big a jump. Not at all. And here is why.

  • Item. The CIA station chief complained about being cut out of the CT loop because of a backchannel relationship an American had with the Brits.

  • Item. Eamon had received his GHD information from a backchannel.

  • Item. Then there was the info about the alleged humongous MI5 goatfuck op in Northern Ireland five months ago—except no one’s head had rolled.

  • Item. Remember what Eamon the Demon had told me? Eamon knew about the Echelon intercept. Eamon knew that the pair of GHDs caught on tape in Randallstown had been talking about targeting Americans. No, he hadn’t mentioned Randallstown itself, but he’d known about the intercept.

  • Item. The subject of the intercept in question was a huge terrorist operation in which hundreds of Americans and Brits would be killed at once.

  • Item. Remember Pepperman’s whispered warning? He’d told me that the ZU-Messages about that very Green Hand Defenders operation had been passed straight from the White House to Downing Street.

  On the one hand, that info-pass now made sense, because Gerry Kelley was about to be knighted, something that would not do the PM a lot of good if Gerry turned out to be a murdering tango.

  On the other hand, if I were the prime minister, I’d deal with Gerry very, very quietly and efficiently, but leave no trail that led to Ten Downing Street. First, I’d cut MI5 out of the DET Bravo loop, which would create resentment in the domestic spy agency. Then I’d let MI5’s director backchannel his information flow through an ambitious American—Admiral Eamon the Demon—and take MI6 out of the picture.

  Then, I’d subcontract someone like Mick and let him do the dirty work. Or better still, if I were the current prime minister, I’d use MI5 as a cutout and Mick Owen as a decoy, and use Sir Roger Holland’s cozy relationship with Eamon the Demon to drop the Gerry Kelley/Green Hand Defender problem on the Americans and let them take all the heat. In fact, if I were the prime minister I could think of one American—that Roguish SEAL fellow, i.e., moi—who’d already taken a lot of heat.

  And if the ol’ Rogue Warrior® got singed to a crisp by the Green Hand Defenders problem, well, then, hard cheese for the ol’ Rogue Warrior®.

  So, you big APE, if you take all that information, and you shuffle it, and you deal it out, no matter how many times you cut the cards, or how many times you shuffle the deck, the hand you’re going to have in front of you will be the same.

  And that hand reads like this: Eamon and MI5’s director general were doing business together. Why they had originally joined in cahoots, as they used to say in the old Roy Rogers westerns, I had no fucking idea. Maybe Eamon was trying his hand at power politics—and given his sorry history, he was being eaten alive. Whatever had caused him to toss in with MI5 and be used by the prime minister didn’t matter to me. All that mattered to me was that Eamon had sold out his American troops. Moreover, it was also obvious that he and MI5’s director general were up to no good.

  No good? That’s right. They were planning to set me on the GHD. But I’d been forbidden from taking action against the tangos without permission. And yet, the GHD was about to set in motion a dual-pronged attack that would cause the deaths of hundreds of innocent victims.

  Now, if I were cynical, I’d tell you that Eamon the Demon and Sir Roger Holland didn’t give a shit about victims. Eamon’s kind never does. To Eamon, who missed the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and every “police action” in between, spending his entire career as a paper-pushing bureaucrat, they’re simply numbers on a page. And at least twice in the 1990s, MI5 had stood by and allowed IRA bombers to hit targets in London, because the agency was engaged in an internal, bureaucratic turf war over its counter-terrorism programs with Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, and the London Metropolitan Police’s Spec-Ops counterterrorist center. While the MI5 bureaucrats wrote their memos defining their turf, and stabbed one another in the back over CT budget allocations, five people had died; more than sixty had been injured.

  That’s what I’d say if I were cynical. But then, you already know I’m no cynic. I’m simply a SEAL. A SEAL who hates to see innocent blood spilled so admirals or directors general can play “gotcha” politics, or wage turf wars.

  And Mick? Despite the star on his collar, Mick’s a simple shooter who thinks like me. Mick doesn’t give a shit about anything but getting the job done. Like me, Mick detests the paper warriors, office politicians, and apparatchik managers who run today’s military. Like me, he thinks that Warriors should break things and kill people.

  And so, we sat there in that bug-proof room, and we plotted and we schemed and we played out scenarios, and after another couple of hours, we came up with something so nasty it was virtually guaranteed to piss off both Washington and Ten Downing Street. Which sounded pretty fucking good to us.

  I wanted to mount an op against Gerry Kelley right away. We were up against a ticking clock here. The Echelon intercepts were almost six months old. They’d caught a conversation that dealt with an operation that was to take place within half a year. Half a year was now. My goal therefore was to shake Gerry up and make him do something impulsive and stupid. Aft
er all, that tactic has worked for me in the past. But Mick convinced me to take a more wait-and-see approach. I’d already shaken Gerry up, he argued. The abortive snatch op against me was evidence of that. For the moment, he suggested, we’d be better off gathering more intelligence. There was nothing we could do, after all, unless we knew exactly what Gerry and the GHD had planned. This guy was a SUC—Smart, Unpredictable, and Cunning. It made no sense to take him on unless we were absolutely confident we’d be able to prevent his operation from succeeding. So until our ducks were in a row, Mick counseled against any premature hopping & popping.

  Despite the ticking clock factor, Mick made a lot of sense. We had no idea what the GHD was planning, except that it was a huge, complicated op and that the Echelon intercept led me, for one, toward the belief that the explosives were coming from somewhere in the Middle East. Well, we could start there. Mick got on the horn to his contacts in the Gulf. I called Avi Ben Gal in Tel Aviv and asked him to check his sources in Israel, Lebanon, and Jordan. Avi called back in less than an hour. He’d run my info through “Springs,” the supercomputer used by AMAN, Israel’s military intelligence organization, but said he couldn’t detect a single ripple about arms from his neck of the woods being moved to any Irish tango splinter group. Mick’s Mukhabarat contact in Qatar wasn’t any help either.

  But it didn’t take long for something else to turn up. I’d passed Gunny Jarriel’s sit-rep that Gwilliam Kelley was conjugating one of his VERBs in Buenos Aires to Mick. Mick said that the son of one of his old Army mates—a guy who was now a successful investment banker based in Paris—had a kid named Robert who was working for MI6 under embassy cover in BA. He called Argentina in the hope that his former mate’s kid would be happy to repay dad’s two-hundred-quid bar chit at the Ritz Hotel in Paris on an off-the-record basis. Twenty-nine hours after Mick’s query, we received GNBN from young Robert of MI6. The GN was that he’d been willing to do some spade work on our behalf. The bad news was that the Mrs. Kelley’s franchisee in Buenos Aires was a fellow named Brendan O’Donnell.