The look in my eyes must have convinced him I was serious, because his Adam’s apple went up and down like a fucking bobber, and he gulped, “Y-y-y-yes, sir,” at me. He even spelled it s-i-r, not c-u-r.
I released him and he squirmed out of reach. “I’m glad we understand each other, Randy. Now get the fuck out of my sight, you worthless cockbreath, and get me checked in—I have real work to do.”
I hustled my ass around the corner to North Audley Street. I flashed my ID at the plainclothes Marine behind his bulletproof glass, received a visitor’s ID, slid it through the electronic turnstile, and marched inside. I took the elevator to the second floor, where CINCUSNAVEUR’s command master chief had his goat locker.
The name on the door plate read
MMCM H. WEBER. I knocked thrice and waited.
An impatient growl emanated from inside. “Come.”
I stuck my head through the doorway. “I’d come if I could, but I’m not breathing hard yet, Hansie, you no-load dipshit motherfucker blackshoe fucking Nazi.”
A yard of smile spread across the ugly face behind the desk on the far side of the office. “Captain Dickhead—sir.”
It was nice to be treated with such respect. He came around his desk and grabbed me—lifted me clear off the deck, waltzed me around again, Willy, hugged the hell out of me, then put me back on the ground.
Hans Weber is one of the chiefs in the informal network of old Navy fleet sailors I refer to as my Safety Net. He’s a master chief machinist’s mate now, but when I served with him on the DD-1030—the USS Joseph K. Taussig—he was a shy, gangly twerp E-3 fireman. And that, friends, is one step up from being a smudge of soot.
The Taussig, a small destroyer escort, was my first assignment after Organized Chicken Shit, which is how I refer to Officer Candidate School. As an ensign, the lowest shape of officer life, I was assigned to the fireroom, where I worked as a snipe, or engineering officer, overseeing the ship’s boilers. Unlike most of the ensigns before me, I did my own boiler and hull inspections. After all, I’d gone to OCS as an enlisted Frogman. That meant I could dive as well as brawl and drink beer. And I knew how machinery worked because instead of just reading textbooks about what makes a boat work—like the assholes from Annapolis—I’d actually had to tear things apart and put them back together again in the Teams. And unlike most ensigns, I didn’t mind getting dirty. So instead of a neat tan uniform I wore green Team fatigues and climbed all the hell over my boilers and swam under the keel before signing off on any work I’d ordered to be completed.
Hansy was maybe eighteen or nineteen then, a first-generation American—a New Yorker from Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood. For a New Yorker, he was a rarity: an introverted, quiet kid who did only what was demanded of him. He showed no initiative. He kept to himself. His self-imposed isolation caused friction in the fireroom because the other men believed Hans thought himself superior to them.
Then, over coffee in the mess one day, I discovered why Hans was remote: as a kid he’d been harassed in school because of his German ancestry. See, in New York City, lots of Irish, Polish, and Hungarian kids from Yorkville who’d lost their fathers, uncles, brothers, or cousins in World War II didn’t have much empathy for a large, awkward, blond kid who spoke English mit a Cherman eggscent because his parents shtill spoke nussing but Deutsche at home.
I encouraged Hans to come out of his shell. He’d dropped out of school and enlisted in the Navy because he wanted to show he was a “good” American. “Hey, asshole,” I told him, “I’m a high-school dropout, too—and look at me. So cut the shit. If you really want to be a ‘good’ American, don’t just fucking talk about it—prove it.”
By the time I left the Taussig to report to SEAL Team Two, Hans had signed up to get his GED. After he’d gotten his high-school diploma, he’d enrolled in every correspondence course he could find. We stayed in touch. I kept track of him as he progressed through the fleet, and through the ranks.
Now he was an E-9, which is as high as any enlisted man can go. He’d been posted to London as CINCUSNAVEUR’s command master chief. The CINC’s quarters down the hall may have been more luxurious, but it was Hans who occupied the corner of the building where Ike’s actual office had been. He ran the admiral’s HQ and the admiral’s staff—there were those who said that Hans Weber was CINCUSNAVEUR. Whenever I passed through London, we’d catch up on gossip at the Goat, a smoky little pub on Stafford Street where they didn’t seem to mind Hansie’s ten-for-a-dollar cigars, and the bratwurst was as good as anything in Yorkville.
He ran a hand over his graying flattop. “It’s been a fucked-up day so far. That’s why it’s good to see you, Dick. I was hoping you’d show.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of a pint-size fridge under a table. “Brew?”
“Thought you’d never ask.” I retrieved a can of Coors, popped it, and sucked deeply. “Damn, that’s good.”
I dropped myself in an armchair facing Hans’s desk. “Gimme a dump, Chief—I’ve spent the last hour with Randy Rayman and I don’t know any more than when I climbed off the fucking plane.”
It didn’t take him long to fill me in. Basically, the situation was FUBAR—Fucked Up Beyond All Repair. CNO’s deputy, the vice chief of naval operations, had taken temporary command back in Washington. The first thing he’d done was send Pinky Prescott here—to keep him out of the way, Hans surmised. VCNO probably forgot that Pinky did a three-year tour in London in the late seventies and still thought he had friends in high places over here, because when he arrived, he installed himself in the CINC’s cabin and started “running” the investigation. “Just like fucking Prince John in Robin Hood,” Hans said bitterly. “The king is dead. Long live the king.”
Things were clusterfucked. So, on his own, Hansie’d started working the phones. He’d ascertained that the hit hadn’t been IRA. From the way the explosion went, he said—at least the way a Royal Navy chief gunner’s mate he knew explained it—it had to be a limpet mine of some kind, set off by radio control. “According to him, the fuckin’ thing put a thirty-foot hole in the aircraft carrier’s hull, but it was tamped or shaped to explode up as well as in. Had to be set by a diver, right, Skipper?”
“Or divers, Chief. That’s one of the things I want to see for myself.” I explained I was planning a solo trip to Portsmouth to eyeball the scene of the crime and gather some intel firsthand.
“Sounds good to me.” Hans took a pull of coffee from a huge white mug on his desk and continued his brief. Pinky and the assholes from NIS were running amuck. Pinky had insisted on being briefed by the Brits without either an intel liaison or CINCUSNAVEUR’s POLAD—POLitical ADviser—present. He wasn’t sharing the information he’d received, either. Currently, said Hans, there was no plan. There was no action. “We’re sitting with our thumbs up our asses, waiting for someone to tell us what to do. Fuck it all, Dick, we lost one of the best goddamn sailors we’ve ever had. And what are we doing about it? We’re fucking talking about it.” He looked at me. “What can I do to help?”
I told him what I’d asked Randy Rayman to do. Hans shook his head. “Won’t happen—not him. He’ll just go running to Admiral Prescott.”
Well, I still had a crew of six coming within the next thirty-six hours and I’d need accommodations and supplies for them. Hans made a note on his pad and murmured, “Done and done.”
“Tougher request, Chief: I’ll need you to scrounge me a diving rig and wet suit, size forty-six long, by morning—without anybody knowing about it.”
Hans’s stick scratched paper again. “No prob, sir, can do.”
I told him I’d be sending for the rest of my Green Team shooters—two platoons total. They’d probably be flying into the joint Spec Ops air base at Mendenhall. They’d need bunks, too. Hansy made another notation on his pad.
Most important, I said, I’d need real tactical intelligence—information from outside the normal loop—so we could find the tangos who’d killed CNO and kick some ass. I’d alr
eady considered calling around to my friends in the British SpecWar community and had rejected the idea. It was too high-profile. I wanted to operate on my own.
“Aren’t you gonna coordinate this with the Brits?”
Frankly, I hadn’t thought about coordination. Admiral Secrest was my CNO, so I saw this as a unilateral action until otherwise ordered and told Hansie so.
“I’m not sure that’s wise, Dick.” He flipped me another Coors. “The Brits don’t like rogue ops on their turf—it offends their innate sense of order.”
“I thought ‘innate sense of order’ was one of your Kraut characteristics.”
He smiled. “Yeah—but they have it, too.” Then he got serious. “And watch your step. Admiral Prescott is pissed that you’re even here—and he doesn’t mind who knows it.”
So, the knives were already out. Well, I was used to it. “I’ll kiss him on the lips when I see him. Randy said something about his being out for dinner.”
Hans made a face. “With Sir Aubrey Davis, the twit who carries the spook portfolio.”
“Twit? I thought he was supposed to be pretty hot shit.”
“Maybe twit’s the wrong word, but he sure looks like an asshole with that stupid monocle wedged in his face. Still, he’s a fuckin’ deadly political animal, no doubt about it. Don’t underestimate him, either, Captain, he’s a regular goddamn Machiavelli, and he gets everything he wants from the prime minister—everything. He’s the most cold-blooded son of a bitch I’ve ever run into. He’s not afraid to take casualties, believe me—rumor has it he’s turned dozens of poor assholes into cannon fodder just to prove some political point or other.”
“For example?” I was dubious.
“For example, the SAS guys who killed the IRA tangos on Gibraltar. Sir Aubrey sent ’em out with orders to kill the T’s on sight. But to keep things kosher on the political front, he had the SAS censured and the four shooters demoted.”
I remembered the incident. If Hans was right—and there was little chance he wasn’t—Sir Aubrey was a proper viper.
Hansie was still waxing eloquent. “And he has no use whatsoever for enlisted pukes like me. CINC introduced us once—at last year’s Christmas party—and I thought he was gonna order me to shine his shoes or wipe his ass or both.”
I laughed. “Sounds about right. Isn’t that what chiefs do?”
“Fuck you. If it wasn’t for a chief, you’d still be a know-nothing Team asshole.”
He was right of course. The size-10 boot of my platoon chief at UDT-21, the legendary Everett E. Barrett, was the only reason I’d received my GED high-school certificate. He’d booted my ass until I did the work and got it. Ev Barrett was my first sea daddy. I still hear his Froggish growl in my mind providing advice during times of great stress. He and his wife, Del, took me in when I was but a tadpole. Ev battered me. He hammered me. And he tempered me, until he’d made me over into the kind of Frog he was himself. And when he’d done that, he sent me out into the world with a kick in the ass, a hearty “Fuck you very much,” and the exhortation to do unto others as I’d had done unto me.
The principle was simple. “What you learn,” Ev said, “you gotta pass on to others. It doesn’t matter whether you work with a guy once or you serve with him for years—you gotta treat him the same. You gotta help him do his job.” He called it Barrett’s First Law of the Sea. I simply call it Barrett’s Law.
It was Barrett’s Law that had caused me to try to turn Hans’s life around back on the USS Taussig. And it was chiefs that ran the Navy. But I wasn’t about to give Hansie any satisfaction about those truths now. “Listen, if I were still in the Teams, you’d still be a goddamn third-class no-load dip-dunk shit-for-brains fucking Nazi fleet sailor.”
“Touche.” Hans laughed, too. He jotted something more on his desk pad. “Tell you what, Dick—you let me deal with AVCNO. You just go about your business. I’ll handle paper flow.”
“Aye, aye, Chief.” I liked that. The chiefs who control the paper flow can manipulate the system just about any way they want. Admirals can order anything they fucking want to—but all the paperwork would still have to be routed through a master chief like Hans. And by the time Master Chief Weber allowed his exalted highness Pinckney Prescott III to see even a single sheet of paper concerning me, I’d have sneaked and peeked in Portsmouth, my men would be in place and ready to go, my equipment would be in order, and I’d have figured out a plan.
Hans looked me over critically stem to stern. “You bring a uniform with you?”
“Nope. Just the clothes on my back.” I explained that I’d been on assignment. Hans knew better than to ask where.
“Okay—I’ll send something over to you. They wear dress blues here at CINCUSNAVEUR. And go to Marks and Spencer tomorrow at oh nine hundred and buy yourself a suit, a few shirts, a couple of ties”—he looked at my thong sandals and bare feet—“and a decent pair of shoes and some black socks might not hurt, either.” Hans looked at my shoulder-length hair and threw up his hands in surrender. “I’m not gonna even start on the military acceptability of your hair.”
“What are you, Chief, my fucking mother or my fucking butler?”
“I’m your fucking MACPOC, Mister Marcinko,” said Hans, using the Navy’s verbal acronym for command master chief. “This is London, Dick, not Virginia Beach. They put a lot of weight on style here.”
That’s one reason I wasn’t particularly fond of London. Despite the pink-Mohawked punks on the underground, and the tangerine-tressed lasses on Oxford Street, official London tends toward chalk-striped suits and chalk-striped minds. Old Etonian ties (both the literal and the figurative kinds) can mean more here than how good you are at what you do. The formula for success is the same whether you’re a conservative right-wing Tory or a left-wing Labourite: attend a public school like Eton or Harrow (in Britain, their exclusive private schools are called “public”), followed by Balliol College, Oxford, for a PPE, which is what they call a degree heavy in politics, philosophy, and economics.
The current prime minister had graduated from Balliol. So had the leader of the opposition. The head of MI6, Britain’s intelligence service, was an Eton/Balliol product, too. I guess it made it easier for them all to talk to one another, because they’d all shared the same cold showers and bad food. But their traditions also held them back. Most of the Brits I’d ever met who’d followed the public school/Oxford route were bad warriors—just like Naval Academy “ring-knockers.”
Oh, like Annapolis-trained officers, a few broke through. But the vast majority were pompous and closed-minded. They were class conscious. They’d been taught to debate, and they had sharp minds. But they lacked killer instinct. Equally important, these overeducated, by-the-book types lacked individuality, the character trait most necessary for unconventional warfare. These were not wolves or eagles. They were herd animals, slow moving and deliberate.
I waved Hansie off. “Okay, okay. I’ll buy a suit. Right now Fm going to check into the Marriott and grab a combat nap.”
He gave me a thumbs-up. “Hold on—I’ve got something for you to take with you.” He produced a huge bunch of keys on a long chain attached to his belt, selected one of them, unlocked a closet, reached inside, and handed me a fifth of Bombay. “Sleeping potion.”
I rolled the bottle in a newspaper and gave Hans an offhanded salute. “Thank you, Chief. You still know how to take care of your men, don’t you?”
“God knows I try, Captain.” He threw a salute back in my direction. “See you at oh six hundred. I’ll have some results for you then.”
By 0430 I was up and feeling almost human. At 0500 a bellman rapped on my door, interrupting my sit-ups. He was carrying a heavy wood hanger, on which sat a set of 46 long dress blues—inseam 32, cuff 35—regulation white uniform shirt and tie, and a plastic bag containing a pair of 11EE dress black shoes, and one pair of USG Issue Socks, Stretch Nylon, Black. The hat in his other hand fit perfectly, too.
God bless all chi
efs.
I showered, shaved, trimmed my beard, braided my hair into a neat, single French braid, and presented myself at CINCUSNAVEUR at 0600, headed for Hans’s office. But it wasn’t the MACPOC office I went to. A Marine in dress blues met me at the security booth, escorted me to the second floor, marched me down a long, carpeted hallway, and opened a pair of paneled oak doors that revealed a sumptuous office suite. We walked past secretaries and aides’ offices, to a single, intricately carved doorway flanked on one side by an American flag, and on the other by a blue pennant on which floated three huge gold stars.
Randy Rayman was standing outside the door. The smirk on his face vanished when he saw I was in proper uniform. It didn’t disappear from his voice, however. “A/VCNO wants to see you now,” he said, and opened the door for me.
The office was cavernous. There were nautical oil paintings on the walls. On one side of the room, a camel-backed sofa in striped chintz and an inlaid coffee table were flanked by a pair of Empire side chairs. On the other, an antique sideboard that must have been three yards long held a display of miniature sailing vessels and Victorian silver.
Straight ahead, Vice Admiral Pinckney Prescott III was waiting, his scrawny ass parked behind CINCUSNAVEUR’s ornate Victorian partner’s desk in a well-worn tufted leather judge’s chair. Behind him, through gossamer curtains, bulletproof glass, and anti-grenade-screened windows, I could see Grosvenor Square.
I’m happy to report that he looked terrible. His pallor, normally the sickly, whiter shade of pale common to bean counters who spend their entire existences under fluorescent lights, was so tallowy this particular morning as to look almost jaundiced. His gray hair hadn’t been combed, giving him a definite wild-man Dagwood Bumstead appearance. His lined face either drooped or sagged—I couldn’t make up my mind. An untrimmed tuft of nose hair protruding from his left nostril completed the picture.
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