Detachment Bravo

by Richard Marcinko

Big mistake. My heel caught on something, and I went down, the back of my head slapping the floor with a thwock that made my eyes cross.

  “¡Oye! ¡Tu madre!” He was not only calling me a motherfucker, he was on me like stink on shit. This PIQ knew how to take advantage of a guy. He switched his grip now, put the tip of the blade forward, as his knife hand came wide and then sliced down, stabbing toward my face and neck.

  But stabbing left him vulnerable to counterattack. I parried with the muzzle of the PDW, knocked his knife arm aside, and then thrust up, hard, straight into the PIQ’s throat.

  Here is what: my arms were longer than his, and the suppressed muzzle of the machine pistol added eight more inches. Plus, I have world-class hand-eye coordination. So, the fucking suppressor caught him hard in the Adam’s apple.

  He had a surprised look on his face as he absorbed the blow. It may have knocked some of the wind out of him, and I’d bet you it did serious damage to his windpipe. But not enough to stop the little cock-sucker. Oh, no. He shook the pain off and threw himself on top of me, flailing, kicking, and screaming sweet nothings about my parentage while he tried to imitate Mike Tyson and bite my ear off while bringing the knife blade up into my brisket.

  First things first. And in situations like this one, you have to deal with the threat first. So, I tried to use both my hands to grab the arm with the knife.

  That was harder than you might think. Yes, I am a strong motherfucker. But he was, too. And he was wiry, and determined not to be killed. Plus, my right arm was tangled up in the sling of my PDW, which as you’ll recall, was suspended across my chest.

  I knocked his knife arm upward. The blade flashed past my ear—almost close enough to make a Van Gogh wannabe out of me. I tried to roll over, but I couldn’t get my fucking arm out of the sling fast enough.

  Which gave him the opening he’d been waiting for, and he managed to slash me a Z pattern once-twice-thrice on the left arm. Fuck—who the hell did he think he was, Zorro?

  Shit, I was gonna probably need stitches. But there was nothing to be done about it now, except to keep on pressing him.

  He slashed again. This time, I managed to deflect the blow, knock his arm away, and then catch his knife hand with my left paw. I twisted it away from my body, just far enough for me to free my right arm, bring my right hand up, up, up, and grab him by the wrist.

  Big mistake. I’d trapped the blade right beneath my fingers. He twisted his wrist, and the business end of the folder took off about an eighth of an inch of my right index fingertip. I bled like hell.

  But frankly, Scarlett, I didn’t give a damn. By now I was getting angry. I had him with both hands. I rolled to my right and caught the side of his face—Contact!!—with a left elbow blow directly to the zygomatic arch, the thin shell of bone on the outside of his left eye. That stunned him. He gave me another opening, and I hit him again, harder, sending zygomatic bone fragments into his skull. The PIQ screamed. He dropped the knife. It fell past my left ear. Now, all he wanted to do was escape. He panicked. He tried to roll off me, his knees scrambling, his legs pumping.

  Bad decision. Because now, both he knew and I knew that he was mine, and that it was time for him to die. He was bleeding internally. I could see it from the blood seeping from the corner of his left eye. Too bad.

  I rolled out from underneath him and swatted at his face again. He cowered, shrinking away from me. My peripheral vision saw the knife and I grabbed for it.

  He saw what I was doing, and he didn’t like it at all.

  But there was very little he could do. I had the knife in my hand now, held in the same ninja grip he’d had it. I smacked his face with my left forearm, bouncing his head off the tile floor. As his head went back, I punched at his neck with the knife.

  It didn’t take much. I don’t think the blade tip went in more than a half inch. But it was enough to sever both his external jugular vein on the left side, and the big subclavian artery on the right. I don’t have to get technical to tell you that there was a lot of blood in a very short time.

  The life went out of him fast because his heart was probably pumping at a rate of about 180. And with every b-beat, came another gush of blood. Some of it washed back into his lungs, and he began to drown.

  Finish him off, you say? I had finished him off. He was dead. He just didn’t quite know it yet.

  I rolled onto my knees, my lungs burning from the smoke and the physical effort. The fire was getting worse. Time to move. I backed out of the den and ran into Randy Michaels, who emerged through the smoke from the kitchen.

  “Three down in there,” he said matter-of-factly. “I got all the paper they were carrying.”

  Boomerang’s slim form emerged from the bedroom wing of the villa, the only part of the house that was relatively unscathed. “It’s all clear back there, Pibe.”

  “You find any documents?”

  Boomerang’s head shook side to side. “Nothing but a few credit card receipts, Pibe.”

  “How many tangos are down?” I was fucking dizzy now. The smoke was really getting to me, and the fire was burning out of control.

  Rotten Randy thought about it for a few seconds, counting on his fingers. “Eight,” he said. “Nine counting the one you waxed outside the wall.”

  “Any survivors?” It would have been nice to be able to interrogate a pelotudo or two.

  It wasn’t going to happen: Boomerang shook his head. “Negatory, Pibe.”

  In that case it was long past time to move on with our lives. “Boomerang, you and Rotten take the Semtex and blow the fucking FedEx truck—I don’t want anything left of the TOW. I’m gonna make sure we haven’t left any pecker tracks in the house. Then let’s haul our asses the hell out of here before anybody else shows up.”

  15

  WE WERE BACK AT THE SAFE HOUSE BY 0315. MICK GOT on the phone to young Robert Evers and made sure he understood the importance of meeting with us immediately so that we could give him a sit-rep about the evening’s events. I went through the papers that we’d taken from the villa. The most significant of those was a set of diagrams—street maps highlighted with vehicle escape routes, an eight-by-ten photo of the American Embassy with TOW targets circled in marking pencil, and copious notes in Español—all of which convinced me sin sombra de duda—beyond the ol’ shadow of a doubt—that Gwilliam and his Green Hand Defenders pals had no intention of running the op against the American Embassy themselves.

  Just like the ops in Britain and Northern Ireland that had used members of TIRA, the Irish Brotherhood, and the Irish People’s Army as surrogates, Gwilliam and Gerry Kelley had hired a band of narco-terrorist pelotudos to do their dirty work in Buenos Aires. Other diagrams and notes showed the pelotudos where to set the truck, how to set up the TOW, and just where to set the plastique explosive booby trap charges.

  Except, the way the booby traps were diagrammed on the sheet of paper I held in my hands, any poor asshole who slid tab “A” into slot “B” was going to blow himself up. Nice: first you hire a bunch of assholes to kill a lot of Americans, and then you double-cross them and make sure they kill themselves before they can be captured and interrogated.

  The schedule Gwilliam had left behind told me that the pelotudos were to keep the embassy under observation for the next fifteen days by using the dog walker. They were to stage the TOW hit on the sixteenth day. Señor Gwilliam, one scrawled pelotudo note read, would not check in with them again. They were to act without fail or hesitation on Day Sixteen. That sealed it: the damning evidence was finally right in front of my nose. Both Kelley brothers were as guilty as I’d thought they were. And so, Gerry’s and Gwilliam’s names went onto the death penalty list I carry in my head.

  The paperwork also convinced me that even though the clock was ticking, we now had a ballpark guesstimate of when the second shoe would drop: two weeks and two days. That, too, made sense: if Gwilliam was bringing the missiles from the Patricia Desens back on the Kelley yacht, nothing would happen un
til Báltaí reached wherever it was they’d use the missiles against a British/American objective, a target—we knew from the pub conversation intercept I’d discovered early on—that would result in large numbers of Brit and Yankee casualties.

  While I perused the intel and levied punishment, Boomerang, Rotten Randy, Timex, and I cleaned up and dealt with their assorted dings, bumps, and bruises. I dealt with my own only after they’d cleaned up and patched up. I looked at my reflection in the small, steamed-up bathroom mirror when I came out of the shower. Talk about black-and-blue (and purple, and green, and mustard, and red). I resembled a goddamn human punching bag. And felt like one, too, I might add.

  But there was no time to appreciate the pain. There was too much work to do. And, as it turned out, not a lot of time in which to complete it.

  Even before I dealt with my lumps and bumps I hit the phone to check in with Nod. It wasn’t easy: it took more than an hour before his Froggish voice rumbled back at me on the long-distance line. “Yo, Skipper…”

  “WTF, Nodster?”

  “We’re on the move, Skipper—scrambling. Our boy picked up six hours ago and amscrayed.”

  “Got a location for him?”

  “Negatory.”

  That certainly threw a wrench into my neat scenario. “Fuck.”

  “Amen to that, Skipper. Ger—”

  I cut him off. “No names. No names.”

  “Gotcha. Our guy drove himself to the airport at Northolt.”

  “Northolt. Where the hell’s that?”

  “West of the city. Near Uxbridge.”

  That didn’t help me either. Frankly, I didn’t give a rusty F-word where the frigging airport was. “C’mon, Nod. Sit-rep. Fill me in on the important stuff.”

  I heard Nod breathe deeply to focus himself on the mission at hand. Then he gathered his thoughts and continued in simple declarative. “We followed. No trouble. Digger leapfrogged on a bike and beat him there by fifteen minutes. That way he was bracketed. But the sumbitch didn’t have a plane waiting. He jumped a private chopper instead. One of the brigadier’s guys got into the tower. They told him our target was flying to Stansted.”

  Stansted. I knew all about Stansted. It was the third-largest airport in the London region. It was due north of the city, right off the M-11 highway. And it was where Gerry Kelley housed his private Learjet. “And?”

  “We followed, but we played it wrong. I’d put Nigel at Stansted to keep an eye on the plane our guy keeps here. But he didn’t use his own plane. He had a chartered Gulfstream III waiting, engines hot. The flight plan the pilot filed was to Orly—Paris.”

  “And?”

  “He got out before we could do anything. I checked with the French. I called your old friend Jacques Lillis at DST. He told me they never arrived.”

  I relayed Nod’s sit-rep to Mick. He reached for the phone and gave Nod a name and telephone number in Hereford, the home base of 22 SAS Regiment. “You call him. Tell him I told you to make contact. He’ll ask you for single-word substantiation. Say the word, Blackguard, and ask for his response. He will answer, Ferrous. That’s the recognition code. He’ll help you track the bastard down.”

  Mick handed the receiver back to me. Nod said, “There’s more bad news, Skipper.”

  I told Nod I didn’t need any more bad news. Obviously he wasn’t listening: “Admiral Flannery’s office has been trying to reach you for a day and a half.”

  Eamon the fucking Demon. “Do you know what he wants?”

  “Negatory, except he got on the phone himself the third time. Said for me to tell you you’d broken your agreement with him. He told me he knew you were off the reservation and there’d be hell to pay when you got back. Then he reamed me a new asshole for not being able to locate you because he said he was taking heat and it wasn’t his fault.”

  Oh, this was not a good thing. Now, you and I both know that Eamon and MI5 had set moi up for a fall on the Green Hand Defenders issue, because Mick and I worked that scenario out some seven chapters ago. But I’d hoped to be back in London by now, with enough dirt on the Green Hand Defenders and the Kelley brothers to cause Eamon the Demon and Sir Roger Holland a sack full of nasty political problems if they didn’t consent to my going after Gerry and Gwilliam sans any consequences. After all, I could cause both Whitehall and Washington a ton of political embarrassment by going public with what I already knew, and often that makes for enough political leverage to get the job done.

  But because I was indeed off the reservation right now—remember, I was in the Argentine computers as fugitive—Eamon was on the upside of this situation. Which meant that he could spin my behavior any way he wanted to Washington, and Washington would go along.

  Let me give you some political truth here: an O-6 can trump an admiral, an ambassador, or a chief of station if he has political leverage. I know that because I have done it lots of times in the past. Right now, I had neither pry bar nor fulcrum, which left me pretty much out of the picture, leveragewise.

  But all of that was my problem, not Nod’s. And Eamon was an asshole for screaming at Nod. But he was even worse—a no-load, dumb-fuck shithead—for whining about his situation. You think I’m being facetious here. Well, I’m not. What COMMAND is all about is taking charge, and making decisions, and living by those decisions, win or lose. Today’s COs—from the president on down—tend to whine and blame everyone around them when things go wrong, instead of saying, “You’re right: I fucked up.”

  Look at how former Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson dealt with the long string of fuckups at our nuclear labs at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the Chinese ran a series of espionage operations and stole our nuclear secrets and warhead designs, and where the DOE counterterrorist team’s computer disks were misplaced or stolen and copied. Instead of shouldering the responsibility by saying, “This happened on my watch, and I am taking responsibility,” he tried to foist the blame on his subordinates.

  Well, fuck Bill Richardson and all the can’t-cunt commanders like him. We don’t need assholes like them in charge. We need leaders who make decisions and stand by ’em.

  So, I told Nod I’d handle the admiral. I also ordered him to keep the bloody cell phone at hand, because I didn’t want to be operating in a vacuum. Then I rang off.

  “Okay, assholes, listen up: both Kelleys are on the move. Now we know their goddamn op is under way.”

  Mick nodded in agreement. “They have the missiles. And they’ve selected their second target.”

  Boomerang said: “But we still have no idea what the target is, Pibe.”

  The glum look the men gave me told me they thought we were totally fucked.

  It turned out that my guys weren’t quite accurate. We became totally fucked at 0440, when Robert Evers arrived at the safe house, looking uncharacteristically disheveled. “I can tell you, Mr. Marcinko,” he said, playing with the collar of his wrinkled shirt, “that one of the most senior people at your embassy doesn’t like you at all.”

  “You probably mean the CIA station chief, Mel Putz,” I said. “We’ve had our disagreements.”

  “I have no doubts at all you’ve had disagreements. Because he’s convinced the Argentines to arrest you,” Robert Evers reported.

  What horseshit. “On what grounds?”

  “Assault on a diplomat with intent to commit murder,” Evers said. He looked at me. “What the hell did you do to the man?”

  “I stabbed him with a tie tack.”

  The look on Robert Evers’s face told me he had no idea at all whether I was being serious or not. He shook his head, confused, and then continued. “At first, the Argentines were reticent, because the alleged … act had taken place on sovereign American soil—that is to say, inside your embassy compound.”

  “What convinced them otherwise?”

  “I’m sorry to tell you it was our embassy. Because of the strong liaison relationship your ambassador has with my ambassador, my ambassador suggested to the Argentines that they ho
nor his request because you are a part of a rogue operation that both London and Washington believe has gone terribly wrong.”

  Evers looked at Mick Owen. “Mister Marcinko is to be turned over to the American authorities and sent back to the United States under guard.”

  Mick Owen groaned audibly. “Is that all, Robert?”

  “That’s only the half of it. MI5 knows that you are here as well, Mr. Owen,” he added. Evers looked completely helpless. “Mr. Owen has been declared persona non grata by the Argentine government,” he blurted.

  Mick scowled. “That’s pretty hard to do, since I’m not traveling on a diplomatic passport.”

  Robert Evers’s expression told us that it hadn’t been all that hard to do. “Mr. Owen, you have been summoned back to London immediately.”

  “By whom?”

  “By the Ministry of Defense.”

  There was an awkward silence. I decided to be Roguishly direct. “Robert,” I said, “you will have to help us get out of the country without being stopped.”

  “I will what?” The young Brit’s face took on a stony expression. But I didn’t let that stop me. I showed Robert Evers the materials we’d taken from Gwilliam’s villa, and explained how the Kelley brothers had planned to use narcoterrorist surrogates to attack the American Embassy. Then I spent about ten minutes giving him some background on what DET Bravo had discovered about Gwilliam and Gerry Kelley, and told him about the Green Hand Defenders, and their modus operandi. I also explained about the backchannel between Eamon the Demon and MI5, and our contention that MI6 had been shut out of all Green Hand Defender ops because of some idiotic internecine political feud between intelligence agencies.

  Then I connected the dots, explaining the significance of what Mick and I had discovered so far, and what the consequences could be, should we not succeed. And then I told Robert Evers flat out there was no way I was going to fail, whether I received his help or not.

  “There is too much at stake here, Robert. Too many people have already died because of these assholes. And if we let Washington and London determine how this is played out, a lot more people will get killed. Now, that may be a politically acceptable decision for a bunch of cynical politicians. But allowing innocent people to die needlessly makes no fucking sense to me. So, I’m asking for your help.”