I dragged Gerry Kelley along the deck by his legs. “You paid to have one of my men killed,” I said as I pulled him up a ladderway toward the wheelhouse. His head kept bumping on the treads. Too bad for him. I wanted him to learn from this experience, and you know what they say: “No pain, no gain.”
We’d gotten about halfway to the bridge when Gerry wriggled and kicked out of my grasp. He was woozy, but he struggled to his feet and came at me again. I guess it was desperation because he knew I was going to kill him.
Here is a basic rule of survival, friends: always frisk a suspect. I say that because Gerry obviously had a folding knife in his pocket, but I didn’t see it until he had retrieved it, opened it with a flourish, brought it up and across his chest in a whiplike motion, and was slicing at me.
I jumped away. But not soon enough. The very tip of the blade caught my shirt and cut through it, through the shortie wet suit underneath, and through about an eighth of an inch into my chest. That fucking wound was gonna need stitches.
But not right now. Right now, what I had to do was get the fucking weapon away from him. He waved the tip of the blade at me. I put distance between us, put my spine against the bulkhead, and waited.
He had probably been taught blade work by the same assholes who’d taught him martial arts, because he didn’t know shit. He backed off, went into the approved stance, and then came at me, feet spread apart, his knife arm low, the blade headed for my belly.
It was a textbook attack. I countered his thrust with my left arm, sweeping the knife away from me. As I did, I stepped toward him, using the bulkhead to give me support, and used my legs, thighs, and hips to power a single blow that caught him right in the throat.
If he hadn’t lowered his jaw I would have broken his windpipe. As it was, I probably broke his fucking jaw. He dropped where he was, the knife skittering off onto the deck. I picked it up. It was an Emerson CQC-7—that’s top of the line when it comes to combat folders. I know, because I own the seventh CQC-7 Ernie Emerson ever made. I slipped the clip of Gerry’s knife over the seam of my right-hand trouser pocket and settled it in place. Now I owned two.
Gerry started crawling toward me. Oh, fuck. I picked him up by the belt and the collar of his shirt, slammed him into the metal bulkhead to quiet him down, and then, exhausted and bleeding, resumed my trek to the bridge, dragging the now-unconscious cockbreath behind me.
22
1822. WE SECURED GERRY AND GWILLIAM TO A PAIR OF captain’s chairs on the bridge. Since they were native English speakers, Hugo and Nigel stood guard and traded insults with the two assholes. Then the rest of us set about our work.
Nod and Randy dragged Mick and me down to the galley, where they found the first aid equipment, and stitched us up. Mick’s face looked as if he’d been shaving with a big straight razor and had sneezed just as he began the downstroke on his left cheek. There’d been a lot of blood, but the wound wasn’t deep. Nod closed it with tape. Fucking Gerry’s blade had cut clean across my chest. It was superficial, too, but I was gonna look like fucking Frankenstein’s monster when the scar healed. I looked down approvingly as Rotten covered Nod’s rough stitching with bandages and surgical tape. At least the wound wasn’t gonna get infected before I could get some more medical attention. Hell—I probably needed a healthy dose of Dr. Bombay Sapphire more than I needed to see some sawbones.
I sent Nod back to the bridge with a bottle of painkillers for Gerry, who was caterwauling as best he could with his broken jaw, and Gwilliam, who had trouble breathing through his much-abused honker. Hey—I may be tough, but I’m not gratuitously cruel. I leave that quality to tangos like Gerry and Gwilliam.
Next, we disabled the missiles, ripping their electronics apart, smashing the internal computer boards into the well-known smithereens and dumping them overboard. Working very, very carefully, Boomerang cumshawed some of the high explosive out of the warheads, and with the help of Rotten Randy Michaels, he made a quartet of small IEDs—Improvised Explosive Devices—which they set strategically. I wanted a backup system in place in case the sea cocks didn’t work and the ship didn’t scuttle properly.
Then we rigged a block and tackle off the rear of the upper deck and dumped what was left of the Exocets over the side. I didn’t want ’em anywhere near Báltaí when it went down. Goober, Digger, Mick, and Timex destroyed all the sensitive elements of the missile guidance system and threw the pieces over the rail. Then they unbolted the launch package and, after suitable heaving and huffing, jettisoned that, too, into twelve thousand feet of water. The plastic dome cover was cut up and stowed below. The white plastic would have floated—providing easily seen evidence of Báltaí’s final position.
As the men were disassembling the missile package, I pondered from the bridge about whether the Exocets would actually have been launchable from Báltaí. From what I could see, the unit had been professionally installed (the Iranians no doubt). The wiring was correct. The guidance units were assembled by the book. The fuses on the warheads were preset accurately.
My conclusion: the system would have worked. And its target? Just as Nod had predicted, the Kelleys were going after the QE2. At least, that’s the way I read the charts and notes in the captain’s cabin, as well as the Cunard Lines schedule the Iranians had tacked up in their crew quarters below decks. The verdict: guilty as charged. You already know what the sentence is.
2030. I sent Timex and Nod back to bring the Zodiac up to the accommodation ladder. They did, and tied it off. Then I throttled Báltaí back to two and a half knots, set a course that would take the vessel due north, and lashed the wheel. I am, of course, being facetious here. On yachts that cost more than thirty million pounds, you don’t have to lash the wheel to keep the fucking ship on course. All I really had to do was set the ship’s autopilot.
Gerry and Gwilliam were getting a little nervous by now. They were writhing in their chairs, because they understood that Báltaí was about to go down—and they’d go down with it. Gwilliam actually got so nervous he pissed on himself.
“Hey,” I said disapprovingly, “that’s expensive fabric in them there trousers.”
He looked up at me with a psychopathic glare.
I put my War Face on, put it close to his, and mimed tweaking his broken nose. “Problem with you, Gwilliam, is you got no sense of humor.”
2045. I checked the ship’s charts. We were way outside the shipping lanes, heading north, into the five-mile-deep deep waters of the Iberian Basin. That’s how the Kelleys had planned it. Báltaí’s port of destination had officially been listed as Rabat. That was good: anyone looking for the ship would focus their search eight hundred-plus miles southeast of our current location.
I took a look at the big GPS screen in the wheel-house to double-check our position. I’d taken another Magellan—a brand-new one still in its box—from the captain’s cabin. It was le bec fin,72 as they say in Paris: a third-generation, waterproof, shockproof, Murphy-resistant, long-life battery unit, with a spare battery. It hadn’t been on the market for more than a month. But that’s Krauts for you: only the best. From what the color readout told me, we had a nine-hour sail back to the Azores.
Hugo and Digger filled the jerry cans with gas from the tank used to supply Báltaí’s launch. There were a pair of five-gallon containers in the launch itself, and I took those, too. That gave us forty gallons over what was in the Zodiac’s topped-off tanks—enough to get us back to Señor Pereira’s warehouse on Pico even if Mister Murphy stowed away. Then I used the weather radio to check on climatic conditions over the next day or so.
The good news was that the front we’d obviously come through on our way out had passed. That meant the winds were dying down, and we’d have an easy transit back to the Azores.
Easy? In an open boat filled with gasoline and two more passengers than it was rated for? Well, let me put that differently. We’d get back without killing ourselves.
2200. I shut down Báltaí’s engines. Digger, Timex, a
nd Goober went below and opened her sea cocks. Boomerang set the explosive charges. We had about eighteen minutes to get off Báltaí before she went down. If she didn’t scuttle properly, the explosives would do the job. And because of the way they’d been rigged and the way we’d stowed what was aboard, there wouldn’t be a lot of flotsam. The fuses were set for twenty-five minutes. We’d stick around long enough to make sure she sank.
“Okay—let’s saddle up.” I looked at Gerry and Gwilliam. “Untie ’em, stow ’em in the RIB, and secure ’em.”
You should have seen the looks on their faces. It was like I was a god—a merciful and compassionate and beneficent god. Yeah—right.
2212. We loaded out. Báltaí was already so low in the water that the accommodation ladder was almost level with the deck. Aboard the Zodiac, the fuel was lashed down and so were the Kelleys. We trimmed the little craft with our own weight, I made sure that everything was shipshape, and then we cast off. I looked up. The skies were finally clearing out. I could see a few first-magnitude stars through gaps in the cloud cover. By 0300 hours we’d be sailing under a canopy of constellations.
2217. Báltaí slipped under the surface. She was a big vessel, but she died in silence, easing slowly out of sight with the majestic, wounded vulnerability that only a sinking ship can muster. She settled into the swells, then rolled slightly to the starboard, and then … she … was … gone, leaving nothing behind but a slight foam that dissipated quickly in the wintry chop.
I eased the throttle forward, leaned into the steering wheel, and the RIB moved away from the yacht’s gravesite, cutting through the swells, heading south and west, toward the Azores. We hadn’t even gone eight hundred yards when we sensed the shock from the explosions. Báltaí had blown apart underwater. The pieces would be scattered five miles below the surface. The ship would never be found. I felt as if a huge weight had been lifted off my body.
2330. The skies had cleared out some more. I could see clusters of stars now. It was cold, but we could handle the cold, because we had completed our mission. Well, almost. I eased the throttle back. The Zodiac slowed down, then stopped. We sat in silence, the only sounds were the sea and the idling Yamaha. I reveled in this moment, bobbing in the swells, becoming a part of the sea, and the sea becoming a part of me.
I looked over at Gerry and Gwilliam, hunkered down, miserable and cold. How many people had they killed? The answer was none, if you are speaking literally. They never pulled the trigger. They never, as I have, stared into the eyes of their enemy, and then snuffed out a life. They did it the new-fangled way. They paid others to do it for them: the tangos from TIRA; the narcoterrorist pelotudos. They bought can’tcunts like Greasy Leather Boy from the Irish People’s Army, or dumbshits from the Irish Brotherhood. The Green Hand Defenders was nothing more than a front. It was Kelley money at work. Well, it was time for the check-writing to stop.
I flipped out Gerry’s former Emerson CQC-7 folder and cut through their bonds.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” I said. “I’m going to let you go.”
“Huh?” Gwilliam was confused. “What do you mean,” he mumbled through his broken nose.
I looked at him the way you look at a disbelieving child. “I mean you can go. I’m letting you off.”
“You’re going to set us free?”
Mick Owen nodded. “Precisely.”
Gerry frowned. He was having a hard time talking, so I think he said, “Thank you.” It was either that, or “Fuck you.” With his broken jaw I really couldn’t tell.
But since I am an optimist, I lifted my hands like a traffic cop. “No need to thank us. Just be on your way.”
Gwilliam looked at me. He looked at the boat. “I don’t understand.”
Sometimes, people are really dense. Like he didn’t know what I was saying? So I gave it to them one more time. “You’re free to go. Skedaddle. Vamoose. Get lost. Beat it. Amscray. Sod off. I don’t give a shit how you say it, just leave.”
That’s when Gerry—I guess he was the bright one—Got It. I think he Got It, at least, because he hunkered down and held on to the safety line with both of his hands, whimpering nonsense syllables and whining, “No-no-no-no.”
I pried his fingers off, one by one. Yes, I admit to breaking a couple of them as I did so. But it couldn’t be helped—really. And once I’d gotten his hands off the safety line, I took him by the seat of his pants and the scruff of his neck, and I threw him overboard. He splashed around, spitting water. Mick grabbed Gwilliam and tossed Kelley the younger after Kelley the elder. The two of ’em thrashed around in the cold water like shark bait.
“Yo, chum,” I said, pointing toward the east. “Spain’s over there.” I thought about it. “No it’s not. But Portugal is. You can reach it in a couple of weeks if the currents are friendly.”
Mick started to say something. Maybe he was going to remind them about not exerting themselves. The water temperature was about forty-five degrees, and if they conserved their energies, they might survive as long as three hours before they succumbed to hypothermia. Then Mick shook his head. There are times to give advice, and Mick, quite correctly, realized that now wasn’t one of ’em. Besides, this whole episode had not been a time for words. It had been a time for action. And Mick and I had acted. We had—independently of each other—made what is known in the trade as a command decision about the Kelleys’ fate. And I was pretty fucking happy with it, too.
Now, I know that a few of the more panty-waisted readers among you are thinking that what I’ve done is wrong. That I’ve just caused cruel and unusual punishment, and that I am morally misguided for acting the way I have.
You are grossly mistaken. My job is to kill people and break things. That’s why SEALs were created by Roy Boehm. Not as cops, or social workers. Not as dogooders, or Boy Scouts. And certainly, not to spend time pondering the moral consequences of their actions. No: Roy created SEALs to shoot and to loot. He created us to wage fucking war without mercy or compassion. He created us to kill as many of the enemy as we could, any way we could. Just like the Ninth Commandment of SpecWar instructs: we will kill our enemies by any means available. And that is precisely what we had just done.
And therefore, dear readers, my conscience was clear. So was Mick’s. And frankly, we’d solved a hell of a political problem for the folks back in London and Washington, whether they’d ever realize it or not (and believe me we weren’t about to tell ’em). I mean, whenever you take assholes like Gwilliam and Gerry and put ’em on trial, a couple of things can happen. First, folks like the Kelleys can afford the very best of legal assistance. So it was altogether possible that they’d pull an O. J. Simpson on us and get off scot-free. Second, even if they didn’t—if the evidence was airtight and the case was unassailable—they would still be heroes and martyrs to other tangos, who’d go out and kill more innocent victims in order to emulate their “heroes.”
Moreover, I knew that this particular op would never come back to bite us on the ass. Mick and I had used false IDs to rent the Zodiac. My men had what’s known in the intel trade as complete deniability. Certainly, Mick and I weren’t going to own up to what had gone down. In fact, in my mind’s eye I could right this minute see myself reporting to Eamon the Demon (whenever we got back to London). “Admiral, as soon as I hear anything about the Kelley brothers and the Green Hand Defenders, you’ll be the first to know. I promise.” I’d say it with a perfectly straight face, too.
No, it would be better for everyone if Gwilliam and Gerry Kelley simply… disappeared. Vanished. Evaporated. Without a trace. Which is why I thrust the Zodiac’s throttle to the limit, spun the wheel, and we charged off toward the southwest, and the Azores. Within a minute, the Kelleys had disappeared, vanished, and evaporated. Without a trace.
0022. We were heading west-southwest now. According to the brand-new waterproof series three Magellan GPS, we were right on course. I signaled for the guys to dump all the weapons, ammo, and mags overboard. Then I throttl
ed back to thirty knots and stowed the GPS unit securely. After another five minutes or so I eased up on the throttle, slowing us until the Zodiac rocked gently in the swells. Above us, the skies had cleared out. There was a new moon, and so the stars were especially bright. I lay back and looked for some of the constellations the ancient mariners used to guide themselves across these vast, trackless oceans. I saw Pegasus, and Aries. I picked out Taurus, and the Pleiades, and, low in the sky, Orion’s belt. I followed the line from the front edge of the Big Dipper to the very end of the tail of Ursa Minor—the end of the Little Dipper’s handle. That was the North Star. It was the key to all navigation.
My eyes shifted back to the Big Dipper. Free association: there was gonna be one Big Dipperful of trouble to handle when we got back. Mick’s star was gonna be on the line. So were my stripes. But if that’s the way it would go, well, so be it. Frankly, neither of us gave a shit about our careers. All that mattered to Mick and to me—all that has ever mattered to Warriors like Mick and me—were our men, and their welfare, and getting the job done, no matter what.
I dropped my gaze, and surreptitiously looked upon my magnificent Warriors. They were Warriors in my own image; Warriors with whom I’d willingly go to the ends of the earth. Men I would not hesitate to die for. I snuck a look at Mick. He was also looking skyward, and then his gaze, too, fell, and he slyly peeked at the men in the boat. The expression on his face told me he’d been thinking the exact same thoughts I’d been thinking. That’s why we were—and always would be—closer than mere fraternal brothers. We were brothers-in-blood. We were brothers-in-arms.
Mick shifted his eyes, focusing on me, a craggy, satisfied smile unfolding across his face. “Dick, me lad,” he said in his thick Welsh accent, “soomehow, I feel like dancin’. So let’s go home and face the fookin’ music.”
Detachment Bravo Page 31
