RW03 - Green Team

by Richard Marcinko

There wasn’t much we could do. “Wait and pray,” I said. I was halfway back to the station wagon when my beeper went off.

  I pulled it from my waistband and checked the digital readout. The number I saw was attached to the phone on Pinky Prescott’s desk.

  He had no authority over me, so screw him—let him wait. I hit the cancel button. Ten seconds later, the fucking thing went off again.

  Six calls and three minutes later, I decided to let him have his way with me. Shit—our fucking car wasn’t going anywhere.

  I pointed toward the bus station. “I’m going to use the phone before this asshole gets us all caught.”

  Why not just turn the goddamn thing off? you ask. Good question. The answer is because I can’t turn it off. CNO had it designed specifically for me. He knows that I like to operate UNODIR, which means I take my shooters and go off after leaving a message behind that says, more or less, “Dear Officer in Charge: UNODIR [UNless Otherwise DIRected], I’m gonna kill a few bad guys today.”

  Well, this little Motorola on my hip is the leash that keeps me chained to CNO. If he doesn’t like my UNODIR, he can get hold of me—anytime, anyplace in the world—and shut me down.

  It doesn’t always beep. If I’m in the middle of something delicate, I can change the fucking thing from a beeper to a vibrator. But I can’t turn it off. I tried losing it about six months ago, but CNO had an answer for that, too. He said that if I lost the goddamn thing, I’d lose my captaincy and my men would be scattered to other units. That made me sit up and take notice. See, I don’t give a shit about rank or the salary attached to it. Hell, Rogue Warrior made me a dump-truck-load of cash, and the sequel, Rogue Warrior: Red Cell, did even better. So, I’m not doing this for money.

  I’m doing it because Pinky, whose vocabulary is filled with words like downsizing and phrases like doing more with less was only too happy to follow the secretary of defense’s directive. Hence, he decommissioned Red Cell six months ago as part of what he called a cost-cutting measure at Naval Special Warfare. I believe he was dead wrong to do so. The only way to prove it was to stay active, work for CNO, and fight for my point of view.

  Counterterror—CT in Navyspeak—so far as Pinky is concerned, is a nonstarter. His view—shared, incidentally, by many of today’s Navy hierarchy, and Pentagon bosses—is that CT is not cost-effective, so it can be jettisoned without losing efficiency. CT is expensive and disruptive. It requires expensive, intensive, dangerous training. People die. And you spend a lot of money without seeing tangible results. What Pinky doesn’t seem to understand is that a “tangible result” is when some fucking tango doesn’t blow up an aircraft carrier at Norfolk or passes on assassinating some four-star asshole in Naples or decides against hijacking a plane from Point Mugu Naval Air Station.

  Anyway, when Red Cell was disbanded, the Navy’s capability to train base commanders to defend against terror was—for all intents and purposes—lost. It was lost because Pinky had ensured that there would be no counterterror “institutional memory” left. No one to tell base commanders, “Well, we ate you alive in 1990, came back and chewed you up in 1994, and now we’re back to show you the latest in tango infiltration techniques and how to counter them.”

  CNO, bless him, saw merit in my argument that we still needed a CT capability. That’s why I was able to take my Red Cell shooters out of Dam Neck limbo and form the nucleus of Green Team. He knows I don’t work for money or glory. He knows I’m not interested in making admiral or guaranteeing my pension. He knew I was doing this because I believed in the mission, and I believed in my men, and if I had to swallow a little shit to keep my mission on track and my unit integrity integral, I’d close my eyes and chew. CNO knows me well enough to know that I adhere to the same commandment I make my men obey. The one that says, “Thou hast not to like it, thou hast just to do it.”

  I shouldered my way inside the station and found the Téléphone et Télégraphe Centrale desk. There were two hundred people in line. I charged back outside. Off to my left I saw a hotel marquee. I dashed inside and went straight to the desk. A corpulent clerk, cigarette in an onyx holder, looked up at me. The bored face of the petit bourgeois staring at a television set on the counter behind him.

  “Min fadlaak. Fee telefoon?—Please, do you have a telephone?”

  He turned toward me. “Are you a guest?”

  “No.”

  He shook his head. “Asif—I’m sorry. The telephones are for guests only.”

  “It’s an emergency.”

  He shrugged. “I am sorry.”

  The picture on the screen caught my eye because it contained a Navy vessel. It looked familiar—an aircraft carrier I’d seen before. I pointed. “What’s that?”

  “CNN.” Carefully, the clerk flicked the end of his cigarette into a brass ashtray. “An incident somewhere in England.” He shook his head. “Bad.”

  “Could you turn it up, please?”

  He shrugged. “Of course.” He waddled the six feet to the set and slowly, slowly rotated the volume knob. The camera reverse-zoomed, and I realized that I was looking at the main dock at the Royal Navy base at Portsmouth. CNO was there this week as a guest of his old friend Sir Norman Elliott, Britain’s Admiral of the Fleet, to participate in the decommissioning of the aircraft carrier HMS Mountbatten, aboard which CNO had served during an exchange tour with the Royal Navy in the early seventies. A lot of smoke was still evident. It must have been a hell of an explosion.

  “… extent of the damage. The bomb exploded under the Mountbatten’s gangway just as the American chief of naval operations and the Admiral of the Fleet made their way aboard. In all, thirty-six were killed, sixty-eight wounded …”

  I realized why Pinky’d been beeping me.

  I guess I looked pretty bad when I told the guys what had happened, because Doc suggested I might need something to calm me down. I waved him off and called for a rapid head-shed right in the middle of the fucking traffic jam. Despite my orders to complete this mission, we’d split up. Nothing was going to keep me from going after CNO’s assassins. So—Tommy would handle the rendezvous and tango transfer. I’d haul balls for London and find out who’d done CNO. Then we’d assemble and kill the assholes, soonest. The list of suspects wasn’t all that long—the IRA was topmost, followed closely by the same fundamentalist sort of Muslim stashed in Doc’s car.

  It didn’t matter. Whoever they were, they were going to die.

  We made arrangements to link up in London within seventy-two hours. “Call Command Master Chief Weber at CINCUSNAVEUR,” I told Tommy. Hans Weber, an old friend and a master scrounger, was the senior enlisted man working for the Commander-IN-Chief, U.S. NAVal Forces, EURope. He’d be able to get them on a flight from Sigonella once they’d dropped Azziz off. And he’d always know where I was.

  I grabbed a change of clothes and a nylon rucksack and jogged away from the traffic jam to find a cab to Alexandria’s small airport. If I could grab a flight to Cairo by 1100, I knew I’d be able to catch the 1400 Egyptair to London and be there by nightfall. The goddamn beeper went off again. Well, there’d be plenty of time to call Pinky from Cairo International. Frankly, I didn’t give a flying F-word about what he wanted.

  The plane banked and descended over windsor castle through sheeting rain and bounced three times before it finally settled down on the runway at Heathrow, reversed its thrusters, and taxied to the gate. I came up the bridge to find the impeccably turned-out, even-featured, perfect 38-short frame of Lieutenant Commander Randy Rayman waiting for me, holding a black-covered diplomatic passport with my picture in it. He proffered it between the first two fingers of his right hand, probably so he wouldn’t have to touch me. Well, I was pretty ripe.

  Randy is another of those pretty-boy Annapolis staff puke SEALs who’s never been blooded in battle, but loves to talk tough, swagger, and flaunt his Budweiser when he’s prowling and growling outside the SpecWar community. He’s also a legend in his own mind where women are concerned. I say in
his own mind because just about a year ago, his wife of eight months up and left him for an enlisted man at SEAL Team Four.

  When I formed SEAL Team Six, Randy’d been a young pup lieutenant who’d come to Papa and begged to be included—as an administrative officer. I turned him down—after all, I had no admin slots, only shooter positions. Besides, he wasn’t my type. He was a weak-chinned, five-o’clock-shadowed whiner who always had an excuse for not getting something done. He thought he was better than his men, when it was his men who’d always made him look good. Most significantly, he wanted to be part of Six not because he wanted to kill bad guys, but because he thought the assignment would look good on his record. I gave him a no-shitter that more or less went, “So solly, sailor, we don’t have any tickee-punchee billets,” and booted his ass out the door.

  I may have rejected him. But a subsequent CO didn’t. Currently, he’s the duty DEVGRP SEAL at CINCUSNAVEUR—in English, that means that Randy’s the SEAL Team Six detailee to the office of the Commander-IN-Chief, U.S. NAVal Forces, EURope. CINCUSNAVEUR is located across Grosvenor Square from the U.S. embassy, in General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s World War II headquarters building on North Audley Street. His detail, or assignment, is to advise the CINC on SpecWar and counterterror options, to interface with his corresponding numbers, encourage tactical and strategic cooperation, maintain active liaison in the field, and report fully on all activities.

  That’s what it says on the books. As for advising the CINC about unconventional warfare and terrorism, Randy couldn’t design the scenario for a picnic. And according to the gossip back at Dam Neck, his self-described “duties” included lunching at clubs with foreign service and Foreign Ministry types, making small talk at embassy cocktail parties, and serving as a charming partner for unaccompanied females at the ambassador’s twice-a-week diplomatic dinners.

  Instead of looking on his assignment as a challenge, he’d taken it as a vacation. So, once every four weeks or so he had a formal meeting with his SpecWar counterparts at the British MOD, or Ministry of Defense. Every six months he spent three hours with SAS 22 Regiment at Hereford and scheduled three hours with the Royal Marines’ Special Boat Squadron unit at Poole.

  When he finishes his assignment here, he’s slotted to be given command of a SEAL team. Maybe he’ll be able to teach his men how to waltz and eat hors d’oeuvres.

  I’m familiar with the type. When I was the naval attaché in Phnom Penh back in the seventies, I spent thirteen months in Cambodia and logged 287 days of combat. One of my successors, a socially minded chap I’ll call Lieutenant Lounge Lizard, logged zero days in combat. On the other hand, he spent 314 consecutive afternoons at the cercle sportif, the city’s most exclusive swim club, chatting up the local gentry and posting MEMCONs—those are MEMoranda of CONversations for you nondiplomatic types out there—filled with his version of intelligence factoids and info-bits back to Washington. Guess which one of us made admiral and which one they spent $60 million to investigate.

  “Thanks.” I slid the passport into the breast pocket of my leather jacket and clapped Randy on the shoulder by way of greeting since he didn’t appear to want to shake my hand. We headed down the long passageway leading to Immigration and Customs. “What’s up? I need a real no-shitter.”

  “Bad juju, Dick. The Admiralty’s batshit—they don’t know what the hell happened. No one’s even claimed responsibility. Our office is going crazy, too—CINC’s back at Bethesda. Gallbladder surgery. He’s out of commission for a month. But things’ll sort themselves out: A/VCNO arrived by Concorde this afternoon with a dozen of NIS’s top-grade security investigators. They’re gathering intel, writing reports, and trying to make sense out of what’s happened.”

  Sense? They’d screw it all up. Pinky’d wasted $2,500 a ticket to bring in a bunch of no-loads from the Naval Investigative Services Command, when he should have brought worker bees—DIA analysts and SEAL shooters. Naval Investigative Services? The name is a fucking oxymoron. This is the very same NIS, gentle reader, that has managed to clusterfuck every investigation in which it’s been involved, from the Johnny Walker/Jerry Whitworth spy ring, to the Moscow embassy fiasco, to the Jonathan Pollard case, to spending $60 million—yeah, you heard me, 60 million—of your tax dollars to witch-hunt yours truly.

  This is the very same Naval Investigative Service that is called the Admirals’ Gestapo, because admirals use NIS to settle political scores and turf wars by tapping each other’s phones, reading each other’s mail, and launching investigations of each other, the way Mafia capos use hit men to settle la Cosa Nostra’s internecine power struggles.

  I shook my head. “Where is Pinky?”

  “He’s using the CINC’s office. When I left, he was on his way to dinner with Sir Aubrey Hanscomb Davis.”

  “The monocle man from MOD?”

  Randy’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “You know Sir Aubrey? I can’t even get an appointment with him.”

  Knowing Randy, that figured. “We’ve met.” Sir Aubrey Hanscomb Davis was the supergrade spook from the Ministry of Defense who carried the SpecWar portfolio. I’d been introduced to him at former secretary of defense Grant Griffith’s house just about a year ago. He had all the warmth of a kipper and a personality to match. He and Pinky must be getting along like long-lost brothers.

  I gave the British immigration officer a hard time. Well, I didn’t—my picture did. The diplomatic passport Randy’d given me had an ancient photo—whitewall haircut and dress uniform. I guess that’s what they had on file at CINCUSNAVEUR. The immigration lady looking over the narrow countertop didn’t see much spit and polish. What she got instead was shit and Polish: a maniacal-looking wild man, with a golf-ball-sized black-and-blue knot on his forehead, foot-long pigtail, and certain ripeness of body.

  I grinned and pointed at the passport. “That’s not the real me,” I said, leaning closer. “This is the real me.”

  She retreated as much as her stool allowed. “Hmmm.” She wasn’t convinced. She waved a supervisor over. They conferred. They checked the computer. Finally, she stamped my passport and waved me on.

  I met Randy, who was obviously smirking in a no-smirking zone on the far side of the gate, and we headed out toward the taxi stand, where an embassy car sat, creating a small logjam in the light evening traffic. He gave me his version of events during the forty-minute ride, although in point of fact he knew precious little. CNO had arrived three days ago. He’d traveled light—three aides and two security men. They all checked into the Marriott on Grosvenor Square, so they could be close to the embassy and right next door to CINCUSNAVEUR.

  The night he’d arrived, CNO hosted a cocktail reception in his suite for his friends in HM’s armed forces and a select number of resident U.S. military personnel. He’d seemed to be enjoying himself immensely. The second day, he’d met for three hours with his British counterparts at the Admiralty on Whitehall, then had a lunch of poached Scottish salmon, haricots verts, buttered boiled new potatoes, and Pouilly-Fuissé with the former prime minister in the Grill Room at the Connaught Hotel. He’d met privately with Sir Aubrey Davis for three hours in the afternoon at the Ministry of Defense, then been guest of honor at a formal Royal Navy reception that lasted late into the evening at the huge Naval and Military Club on Piccadilly.

  He’d been in a sunny mood at 0600 this morning when Randy’d escorted him to his car. CNO was driven into Hyde Park, where Admiral Sir Norman Elliott, the Admiral of the Fleet, sat in a Royal Navy chopper that had landed on a two-acre plot of greensward cordoned off by Special Branch. The two old friends flew off together, and that was the last Randy saw of him.

  That was all very good if I’d been a social columnist. What about some intel I could use? Who were the pusnutted motherfuckers who’d killed him? What were the Brits really doing? What were we doing? “What the hell’s going on, Randy?”

  Randy didn’t know. Nothing was certain. On the one hand, the IRA hadn’t taken credit for the bombing, so it was un
likely they’d done it. On the other hand, no one else had claimed responsibility either.

  “What do your friends at MI5 say? What about Special Branch?” MI5 was Britain’s domestic intelligence-gathering and law-enforcement agency. Special Branch was responsible for Scotland Yard’s antiterror activities.

  The look Randy gave me told me that he had no “friends” at MI5—or anywhere else. What the fuck this no-load shit-for-brains can’t cunt had been doing here besides sipping sherry, I couldn’t imagine.

  “Hereford?” That was headquarters for the 22 SAS Regiment. The Special Projects team at SAS, a forty-eight-man unit devoted to fighting terrorism, had to be working full-time on this.

  “I called down there this afternoon—talked to the duty officer. He said they didn’t have anything for me right now—they were still developing information.”

  That made sense—why share intelligence with an asshole. “What about Poole?” That was where the Royal Marines Special Boat Squadron units were headquartered.

  “I called down there, too. The CO’s a friend of mine. Geoff Lyondale.”

  “And?” I was getting fucking impatient.

  “He hasn’t gotten back to me yet.”

  I made up my mind to do my own intel gathering. Obviously, young Randy Rayman wasn’t going to be any help. In fact, he’d probably muddied the waters already. That didn’t make me very happy. We pulled up on Grosvenor Square. We extricated ourselves from the limo. I took a gander at the huge American embassy building, then wheeled toward the CINCUSNAVEUR entrance on North Audley. “I want a suite at the Marriott,” I told Randy. “I want an office, a secure fax and phone, three cars, and six Heckler & Koch USP nine-millimeter pistols. I’ve got half a dozen men on their way already.”

  “Suite? Cars? Guns? Dick, that’s impossible.”

  I wasn’t in the mood for “impossible.” I took him by the lapels of his impeccably pressed uniform blouse, jammed him up against the decorative eight-foot wrought-iron spikes that bordered Ike’s old HQ building on the Square, and pulled his face close until we were touching noses. “Hey, shit-for-brains, I don’t think you heard me. I want a suite at the Marriott, a secure phone and fax, three cars, and six USP nines, or I’m going to fucking break you into little fucking pieces and stuff you into the fucking storm drain right now—do I make myself fucking loud and fucking clear?”