I was especially happy to have Tommy with me now because he’d served with SBS during a two-year exchange posting. He’d even kept in touch with some of the Royal Marine NCOs who’d sea-daddied him during the hazing process that SBS puts all newcomers through. I knew that with Tommy on the scene, we’d be able to circumvent Geoff Lyondale’s restrictions.
Nasty Nicky Grundle downed his second pint and bellied up to the bar for another round. I’d selected Grundle for SEAL Team Six when he was but a 220-pound, twenty-year-old tadpole. A decade later, I’d discover what a deadly Frog he’d become when I was recalled to command Red Cell at CNO’s behest. By then, Nicky Grundle had been blooded in battle. He was one of the swim pair who blew up General Manuel Noriega’s personal gunboat, the Presidente Porras, during Operation Just Cause. Nasty’d designed the C-4 explosive charges he and another SEAL carried half a mile. The recipe called for half a pound of C-4. Nicky, following my SpecWar dictums, had used two pounds of explosive—and blown the Porras’s two three-ton diesel engines 150 yards down the harbor.
Howie Kaluha’s broad shoulders blocked the view across the table from me. Howie’s a master chief these days. I remember him as a boatswain’s mate third class in Vietnam. He was a hunter who preferred two-man patrols that lasted five or six days in the boonies to the usual one-night, six-man shoot-and-loots. The day I met him he was wearing black pajamas, walking barefoot, and carried only a knife, and as many claymores, grenades, and M-60 detonators as he could pack in an oversize haversack. SEAL legend says that Howie had more hand-to-hand KIAs than any other single Frog in Vietnam. He himself takes credit for a mere one hundred Victor Charlies. His Navy Cross and three Silver Stars tell me he’s a modest man.
Doc Tremblay having been left behind in Cairo, Duck Foot Dewey filled out the current detachment. Allen Dewey is a short, barrel-chested shooter from Maryland’s flat-as-a-pancake Eastern Shore whose avocation is, obviously, mountain climbing. A veteran of SEAL Team Six and Red Cell, Duck Foot is the son of a WWII NCDU boatswain’s mate—that’s Naval Combat Demolition Unit, the precursors of all UDTs and SEALs—who landed on Omaha Beach on D day, and the older brother of a SEAL who’s currently a PO2—that’s Petty Officer Second Class—at SEAL Team Four. He’s seen action in Grenada, Panama, and Somalia.
In Grenada, Duck Foot—a PO1 in those days—lost his temper when the operation turned into a total clusterfuck. Intel was nonexistent. Four of his platoon drowned when the senior SEAL commander—who led from behind, in this case from aboard a ship several miles away—had ordered Duck Foot’s platoon to jump into eight-foot seas even though they carried more than one hundred pounds of equipment. Despite the losses, Duck Foot led the exhausted survivors to their objective—the Governor’s Mansion. And when he ran into roughly 120 heavily armed Cubans up there, he stacked them like cordwood—he must have shot thirty single-handedly.
The Army would have rewarded Duck Foot’s achievements with a Medal of Honor. I would have put him in for a Silver Star. But the CO of SEAL Team Six in those days was a guy I’ll call Art Harris. Art, who never really wanted his men to kill anybody, made sure that Duck Foot’s accomplishments got lost in the paperwork avalanche that customarily follows combat. None of the Barn Dance Cards—the after-action reports filed by unit commanders—mentioned Duck Foot’s extraordinary achievements under fire.
We sat there for an hour or so, pondering the possibilities. None of them seemed very promising. Between Pinky da Turd and Sir Aubrey, I’d been boxed in quite neatly. Pinky was giving me no wriggle room, and Sir Aubrey had assigned me to work with a fucking fop. Quite a setup.
Well, I have always believed that when caught in an ambush, the only thing to do is to attack. Okay—Pinky Prescott, Sir Aubrey Davis, and Major Geoff Lyondale had fucking ambushed me. Good for them. Now it was going to be my turn.
I finished my third pint and set the glass down. “Listen up, assholes.”
Tommy T took the first available train to Poole, the small port city on England’s southeast coast where SBS had its headquarters. He still had friends down there, and I wanted an intel dump on Geoff Lyondale. Dump, hell—I wanted to know exactly how this asshole ran his unit.
Stevie Wonder wandered over to the Marine House, where the embassy’s USMC guard contingent lived, to pump Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children for information. Marines stay current when it comes to scuttlebutt. Nasty and Duck Foot worked the corridors at CINCUSNAVEUR. They oogled the secretaries, flexed their pecs, talked their way inside as many offices as they could, and gathered intelligence under the watchful eye of Hansie. The single place they couldn’t infiltrate was CINCUSNAVEUR’s sixth-floor comm center. There, behind barred windows, reinforced walls and ceilings, and safe-tight doors, eight rooms of state-of-the-art equipment gathered intel, sorted SIGINT reports, and sent encoded messages worldwide. Not even Hans could get up there without someone knowing.
Meanwhile, Howie Kaluha took the underground to London’s East End where the city’s largest Army & Navy store, Silverman’s, is located. Howie was armed with all the petty cash I could lay my hands on, and a two-page handwritten shopping list.
And me? I paid a visit to an old girlfriend on the third floor of the American embassy over on the square. That’s where our compatriots at Christians in Action maintain London station. My old flame’s name is Nancy, and she still remembered me fondle-ly enough to let me borrow her secure computer terminal for a couple of hours and do some database searching about my new acquaintance, Call Me Ishmael, Lord Brookfield. While I typed and read, she massaged my neck and shoulders. When I’d printed up an armload of documents, we repaired to her flat in South Kensington where she massaged other parts of me.
He was, according to the printout, an only child, the son of Lord Louis Brookfield and a woman named Hagar, eldest daughter of a bedouin sheikh of the Awafi tribe. Lord Louis was a respected Arabist scholar from Oxford who’d volunteered—as had many of Britain’s elite—as a commando during World War II. After training, Louis was assigned to Libya, where he served with the Polish brigade known as the Desert Rats. When the North African campaign ended, he’d been posted to Palestine, where he ran an intelligence network of bedouins against Axis agents.
Just after the war, so the story went, he’d had a mystical experience while climbing Mount Sinai to watch the sunrise from the Santa Katarina Monastery. A voice had told him to wander in the desert. He did so—for six months he forged himself on Sinai’s cruel anvil, living an itinerant, mostly solitary existence. During his pilgrimage, he spent three weeks in an Awafi bedouin camp near Wadi Gebel. It was there he fell in love with the sheikh’s daughter, Hagar. The two were married in a bedouin ceremony.
After the war, Lord Louis and his new wife returned to Laocoon’s Gate, the five-hundred-acre Brookfield ancestral estate in Surrey. It was there that Hagar bore him the son they called (appropriately enough) Ishmael.
The youngster enjoyed all the advantages of his upper-class birthright. He’d excelled at everything in which he’d ever participated. He was a competition-grade skier and nationally ranked amateur tennis player. He’d been a member of Britain’s 1992 Olympic shooting team. His income—estimated at more than £340 million annually—was derived from more than four and a half square miles of property he owned in the Mayfair, Knightsbridge, and Hampstead sections of London. He kept a thirteenth-century palazzo in Siena, a modernistic villa in Beaulieusur-Mer on the French Riviera, a chalet in Les Amants, high above Lac Léman, and a rustic beach house on the fashionable Caribbean island of Mustique (where a few other notable Brits, including Princess Margaret and Mick Jagger, also maintained million-pound getaways).
I read press clips from the 1992 Olympics and pored over a National Geographic that showed a young Lord Brookfield diving to recover Philistine artifacts off the Lebanese coast. The society pages of the London newspapers gave me a portrait of a self-assured but certainly not complacent young man. He was as obsessive about everything he did as I was—an overachiever
who wouldn’t ever quit or abandon a project half-finished.
Rested and massaged, we went back to the embassy, where I called my old friend Tony Mercaldi back at DIA on one of the CIA’s secure lines. Tony said he’d wash Lord B’s name through a Defense Intelligence Agency database, although he’d never heard the name before so he doubted there was anything of substance on file. Half an hour later he called back apologetically to report that Call Me Ishmael had his own dossier at DIA—and it was pretty thick, too.
What’s in it? I asked.
Tony started with the biographical material, which jived with the CIA’s notes so closely that the two agencies had probably used the same sources. Then he got to the current stuff. He said DIA believed Brookfield had been used by Whitehall as a diplomatic backchannel to several Arab leaders in the Gulf during Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm. He had also been used to pass messages to two of the Iranian regimes that followed the Ayatollah Khomeini. He had what was described as “close personal relationships” with the Syrian president, the leader of Pakistan, and the Saudi royal family.
Because he’d been used to pass sensitive information, DIA had assigned its gumshoes to take a closer look at Lord B. Tony had scanned asset reports that chronicled Brookfield’s activities on behalf of British intelligence, his detention in Lebanon, his friendship with Geoff Lyondale, even his personal security detail, which was headed by a former SBS first sergeant named Todd Stewart. He’d also been programmed into NSA’s computers, which meant that overseas calls were scanned. The most recent notation in NSA’s Brookfield file was a SIGINT report of a call last week from Cairo—no identification of the caller—to Lord B’s Hampstead town house.
Merc’s information dovetailed nicely with what the CIA databases had spit out. The most recent report from Langley—a psychological profile done less than three months ago—opined that the young Lord Brookfield might have suffered long-term Stockholm syndrome—that is, empathy for his captors—stemming from his three-month incarceration in Baalbek. The reason was that his political views—at least those expressed in the frequent newspaper op-ed articles he wrote for the Times and the London Observer—had become more sharply pro-Muslim after he’d suffered his hostage experience.
Four and a half hours later, my research completed, I walked back to the hotel. There, in the lobby, Lord Brookfield was waiting for me. He was sitting on an upholstered bench, perfectly creased trouser legs crossed at the ankles, reading the London Times through tortoiseshell half-glasses. Standing just in back of him, arms crossed, was six feet six or so of the most muscular, dangerous-looking black man I’d ever seen.
Brookfield saw me come through the revolving doors, slid the glasses into the breast pocket of his shooting jacket, and rose to greet me. His shadow moved as he did, watching me the way Schutzhund rottweilers watch their potential targets. “Captain,” Brookfield said, extending his hand in greeting. “I was hoping I’d catch you.”
I shook his. “Nice to see you, Lord B.”
“I was thinking we’d go across the street to my club and chat a bit—perhaps you’d like to try the sherry. It’s imported especially for us.”
It sounded good to me. I looked up at the dark specter blocking all the light. “Who’s Frankenstein’s monster?”
“Ah—my companion and bodyguard, Todd Stewart, late of the Isle of Skye. Huge, isn’t he?”
There was no denying it. Stewart was probably just shy of 250 pounds, although his body fat couldn’t have been more than 1 percent. His round face, accented by a thin mustache, was expressionless. He had the cold cobra’s eyes of a professional shooter. He was dressed in a fashionable double-breasted suit of muted plaid, but instead of shoes, he wore black cowboy boots made of—I took a second look to make sure—sharkskin. His hairstyle was almost a carbon copy of my own—pulled back into a single braid that ran down his back. Except that his was tied with several strands of Dress Stewart tartan, while mine was restrained by plebeian elastic.
“I’ve heard of black Irish, but you’re the first black Scotsman I’ve ever met.” I put out my hand. It was ignored.
“Please excuse Todd—he has an aversion to touching people, unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
“When does it become absolutely necessary?”
“When he kills them,” Brookfield said matter-of-factly. “In the Falklands campaign, he was cited for extraordinary performance. He’s a hand-to-hand specialist. A knife man. He’d penetrate the Argentine lines—and then, he’d penetrate the Argentines.” A wry smile came over Brookfield’s face. “You see, after I was kidnapped in Lebanon, I realized that I might present a more inviting target than I had imagined. So, Geoffrey found me Todd. He’d just left SBS after twenty years and was seeking employment. That was eighteen months ago—and we’ve been together ever since. He’s managed to keep me safe and sound. It’s a good arrangement, don’t you think?
“Whatever works, Lord B.”
We exited the hotel and walked back up Duke Street to Grosvenor Square, turned left, crossed Brook Street, and ambled half a block to an anonymous ivory doorway at Number 69. Brookfield opened the heavy door and motioned for me to precede him inside.
It wasn’t fancy. In fact, it was shabby in the genteel way most of London’s clubs are worn: threadbare, hundred-year-old Persian carpets on the floors, tattered leather chairs, and well-used tables. But the marble foyer was impressive, and there were Old Masters on the walls. Brookfield led me back through a reading room to a long bar that looked out on a disused courtyard.
An octogenarian bartender in a striped waistcoat brightened as we came into the room. “Afternoon, m’lord,” he said, a wide smile on his face.
We sat facing each other in ancient leather wing chairs, a half-bottle of Saville Club Fino and a liter of San Pellegrino on a silver salver between us. Todd remained standing in the doorway.
Brookfield, who was drinking the bottled water, toasted me. “Cheers.”
I lifted my sherry glass in his direction. We sipped. His green eyes never left me. “You’re deceptive, Captain.”
“How so?”
“You play the part of knuckle-dragger quite well. And yet, you’re quite sophisticated, aren’t you?”
“You tell me.”
“I know you came up through the ranks—a mustang, isn’t that what the Americans call enlisted men who become officers?”
I nodded.
“And I know that you have advanced degrees, despite your propensity toward vulgarity, violence, and shock tactics.”
“Unpredictability is an important—even crucial—element of special warfare. I find it useful.” I watched him as he sipped. “So, Lord B—Ishmael—what the fuck? Why the invitation to this little tête-à-tête?”
He smiled at me. “I believe that you are underestimating the opposition. I want to make sure you don’t.”
“You mean your pal Geoff?”
The look on his face told me he hadn’t liked my little joke. “Of course not—I’m talking about the forces who killed your CNO.”
“They’re terrorists. They’ll die.”
“It’s not as simple as that.”
“Why not?”
“Because those ‘terrorists’ you paint with such a broad brush are really decent souls, despite their actions. It’s just that they’ve been pushed beyond the limit by your society. They are tired of the West’s historic anti-Islamic racism—based on caricature, prejudice, and ignorance. They’re tired of being poor and ill-educated and taken advantage of. They’re tired of being killed by others while you—we—in the West just stand by.”
“So they react by killing innocent people.”
“You may not like their methods, but those methods are understandable, after so many hundreds of years of humiliation. It’s their way of getting attention for their plight—of making the rest of the world wake up. But that’s not the point. The point is that—”
“That’s exactly the point. Don’t ask me to empathize with a b
unch of assholes who believe their ticket to heaven is a magic-carpet ride that begins when they detonate a car bomb or blow up an aircraft carrier. Don’t ask me to feel sorry for scumbags who murder innocent people.”
“Your view is parochial. It is the view of a typical, uneducated, Western military assassin. I give you more credit than that, Captain. So, just for a minute, look at things from another perspective. Take the Gulf War for example. In the West it was seen as a great alliance. To the disenfranchised Muslim it was seen as a modern Crusade—Christendom and its corrupt Arab allies versus the purity of Islam. That is the lesson preached in mosques from Fez to Kabul.”
“But that view is wrong.”
“Perhaps to a Westerner, to a non-Muslim. You must, Captain, walk the proverbial mile in our shoes. Look at recent events as they are seen from the Muslim point of view. The bombings all across the United States, for example—”
“You can’t deny they were terrorist acts, can you?”
“I certainly can deny it—if, from my perspective, I am waging war against the West. In that case, I can define it as a series of small but significant battles won by my side.”
“And the perpetrators?”
“Islam’s soldiers in the great war against nonbelievers.”
“If they are soldiers, then I will hunt them down and kill them.”
“Hunting them will be impossible for you. You are an outsider. They have support and infrastructure. Did you know, Captain Marcinko, that the men you perceive as terrorists can go to virtually any Muslim neighborhood in England and receive help, because most of the Muslims who live here feel discriminated against by the West? So, they tend to see these, ah, lethal activists much the same way the peasants living around Nottingham once saw Robin Hood.”
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