Lethal activists—quite a designation for people who killed innocents indiscriminately. How genteel. How politically correct. Obviously, the man had a way with words. I let it pass. “Robin Hood?”
“Yes. And not only in England. Algerians and Tunisians in France; Turks in Germany, Libyans in Italy, Palestinians and Lebanese in the United States—they, too, will give refuge to any who stand for Islam against the slanders, misrepresentations, and prejudices of the West. Moreover, it is my belief that all of them—no matter what country they come from—are just like the peasants of Sherwood—waiting for their Richard to return.”
The argument didn’t impress me. “They’re going to have a long, long wait.”
“Time is of no concern, Captain. Muslims, you see, have faith—unshakable faith. We have faith in the Koran; we have faith in ourselves; we have faith that we will persevere. We have to.”
“Have to?”
“History and religion are the two great cornerstones of Islam. Each teaches us to have faith. So, Muslims are great students of history. Indeed, I have come to see Muslims as history’s orphans—cast out, ridiculed, persecuted, and poor.”
“What about all that oil money in the Gulf?”
“I meant poor in the spiritual sense. Riches mean nothing. They are but a means to an end—the restoration of multinational Islam. Our decline began, one might argue, when Boabdil, the last Muslim ruler of Spain, gave up the keys to the city of Granada in 1492—the same year, incidentally, Christopher Columbus sailed for the New World. That decline continues even today—the West’s abandonment of the Muslims in what used to be Yugoslavia is evidence of it. If we truly mattered, if we were a power to be reckoned with, that genocide would not have been allowed.”
He sipped his water. “You see us as caricatures, Captain Marcinko. We are not. You see us as ‘fundamentalists,’ who martyr ourselves on what you call ‘a magic-carpet ride.’ We are more than that.”
I found it interesting that he was including himself and said as much.
“Yes, we.” He looked at me in the same crazily beatific way that newly reborn religious zealots tend to look. “I converted to Islam during my time in Baalbek. It was my destiny.”
That was news. That hadn’t appeared in DIA’s files. Still, it was also absolute confirmation of what had been hinted at in the CIA profiles I’d read back at the embassy. Stockholm syndrome, hell—the guy had gone all the way. “Destiny?”
“Yes,” he said emphatically. “But it is also my destiny to use all of my knowledge, my power, and my resources to help the West understand Islam, and to help Islam deal with the West. I am unique, Captain. I am a man of both worlds—your Western world, and my Eastern one. You may find this hard to comprehend, but there is a whole society that believes the West is immoral, decadent, and corrupt. To those who follow Islam, which means ‘submission,’ there is but one way—the way of jihad.”
“The Muslim word for holy war.”
“That is one definition—and the most common one. It is apt that you, a Navy officer, would define jihad that way,” Brookfield said, his eyes boring into my own. “But there is another translation. Jihad also means a total, supreme, unlimited, immeasurable, all-out effort.”
“I can relate to that. It’s what SEALs have to summon up during BUD/S.”
“BUD/S?”
“Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training. Think of it as a six-month kick in the balls.”
He looked at me as if I’d offered him something distasteful to eat. “The kind of effort the Afghanistanis summoned up to turn back the Soviet invasion and defeat the Red Army cannot be compared with any so-called basic training,” he said derisively. “You must change your basis of reasoning, Captain.”
“Must I?”
“Yes. To our way of thinking, in Afghanistan one of the world’s two superpowers was defeated by intense faith.”
I wasn’t about to let him get away with that. “Not to mention seven billion dollars in aid from the United States.”
His eyes shone with white-hot anger. “The money didn’t matter. The most important statistic, Captain, was that there were three million martyrs in our holy war—and if jihad demands it, we are willing to provide three, four, five million more—any number to achieve the goal our jihad requires.”
“Jihad again.”
“Yes—jihad again. Total effort. It is that definition which leads me to warn you again: do not underestimate these people. It could be dangerous for you. After all, we defeated a superpower.”
There it was again—“we,” not “they.” I studied him intently. The expression on his face was frightening. He was clearly over the edge.
Well, it was time to bring him back to reality. I finished my drink and slapped the glass back on the table with a loud thwock. “Lord Brookfield, there was a big difference between the Soviets and the United States. Believe me—I spent more than thirty years working that particular battlefield, so I know what I’m talking about.”
“But your goal was always to preserve your country—strategically, you and the Soviets relied on the theory of mutually assured destruction to ensure that neither of you fired first. Those who wage jihad are different. They, Captain, are willing to pay any price. Death means nothing. You nonbelievers cannot fathom the depths of our passion. Besides, your military is bound by too many rules and political decisions to make it an effective opponent these days. Your society is too big, too open, too naive, to win against a society willing to martyr itself in order to win.”
I grinned at him. “Maybe. But then there’s me.”
“Ah, yes. You—America’s Rogue Warrior.” He looked at me in a way that was indescribable except to say that even I found it frightening. “You, Captain, are a challenge.” His green eyes bore into my own. Suddenly, I understood where this was all going. This was to be between him and me—up close and personal. I liked that.
Now it was my turn. I stared him down until he looked away. “If you’ve ever read my books, Lord Brookfield, you’ll know that SEALs are dangerous when we’re provoked. In fact, we get absofuckinglutely lethal.”
“Yes, I gathered that.”
“Well, ‘gather’ this, cockbreath—because, like the old master chief says, you’ll see the material again: when I wage jihad, I don’t take prisoners.”
BRAVO
We were summoned down to poole at 0600 for an operational briefing. My eight shooters from Rogue Manor had arrived at Heathrow the previous morning—oops, I just clean forgot to tell P-P-P-Pinky about them—and so we left London at 0100 in a convoy of three battleship gray CINCUSNAVEUR Land Rovers. We lumbered our way through the lush green Surrey countryside past Woking, Farnham, and Alton just after midnight, worked our way around Winchester in the chill darkness, and lost our way at the Romsey crossroads at about 0410. We got back on track, passed through Ringwood at dawn’s early light, and came up on Poole from Bournemouth, to the east, at 0440.
As we worked our way through the ancient streets, I realized I’d forgotten just how depressing the town was. Poole is a dreary, coastal working-class town to which had been added, during the Second World War, a Royal Marine barracks. Once a major port, Poole had been overshadowed by its newer neighbor Bournemouth, which gained prominence in the late nineteenth century as a Victorian seaside resort. Gradually, the smaller, poorer stepchild, Poole, had gone to seed.
Indeed, in many ways it reminded me of my own childhood home. Lansford, Pennsylvania, like Poole, was a meager, confining sort of place where you lived, you worked, and you died. In Lansford, you lived in housing owned by the coal mine and got your groceries at Kanuch’s, where Old Man Kanuch kept a ledger with how much you owed tallied up in thick pencil strokes. The only solace was offered by the Slovak bars where they served shots, beers, and pickled pigs’ feet to generations of labor-toughened, rough-handed men who trudged in covered with coal dust, men like my grandfather Joe Pavlik.
Poole had its family grocery stores and neighborhood pubs
, too—and its slums. But it also suffered the kind of distasteful, unplanned urban sprawl that includes mini-malls, bowling alleys, and multiscreen cinemas, all done in plastic pseudo-Tudor.
It was raining steadily now, the kind of bone-soaking, arthritis-nurturing rain you get in Western Europe. I could feel it working on my hips and elbows. We worked our way through the town toward the Royal Marine barracks, which sat on the water, just opposite Brownsea Island. As Tommy T drove the narrow streets, I peered through the windscreen, half-mesmerized by the irregular, flamaque syncopation of the wipers. Things were much the same as I remembered from my SEAL Team Six days.
We identified ourselves and proceeded through the gate. The officers’ mess was the same squat, morose structure I remembered. I was certain that the rations inside would be the same tasteless, gluey glop they’d fed me before, and that when I went to the crapper, the TP would be shiny on one side, sandpaper on the other, and have the cardboard consistency of mashed egg cartons. We drove past. The well-worn red brick and the cracked concrete pathways were coated with rain.
Tommy drove straight to HQ and parked our Land Rover in the visitor’s spot. The others pulled up next to us, and I watched as my grungy bunch emerged and stretched, oblivious to the downpour. Tommy—always the fashion plate—wore a Burberry, a blazer, and his Royal Marines tie. Everyone else, me included, were in casual civvies—jeans, boots or running shoes (I was in my thong sandals), sweatshirts, and assorted Gore-Tex or leather jackets. We were met by a spit-and-polish lance corporal who gave Tommy a big smile, looked at the rest of us as if we’d materialized from another planet, then ushered us onto SBS’s quarterdeck.
The news Tommy’d brought back to London after his trip down here had been as gloomy as the weather was right now. Things were bad. Morale sucked. The reason could be summed up in precisely three words: Geoffrey fucking Lyondale.
It would seem, Tommy had learned, that the earl was more interested in pursuing the good life in London than he was in making sure that his shooters honed their fragile, frangible skills. So, training these days was slack.
Let me digress, gentle reader, to put this unhappy fact into context for you. When I was CO of SEAL Team Six, each man shot a minimum of three-thousand rounds a day during training cycles, and one thousand rounds a day between training cycles. I didn’t care how they shot—one-handed, two-handed—shit, they could have used their cocks to squeeze the triggers for all I cared. My orders were simple and precise: to hit a three-by-five index card planted on a human-sized target every time they pulled the trigger.
For a shooter, that’s the bottom line—hit your goddamn target every time you shoot. They had to hit the fucking target whether they were climbing an ice-coated oil rig, struggling up a slippery caving ladder to board a ship, dropping off a bouncing chopper, or coming out of the fucking surf. They had to hit it whether they were fresh or burnt out, sharp or hungover, well rested or shit-can tired.
I just love it when SpecWar commanders hold shooting competitions these days. They run them like conventional target shoots—complete with warm-ups and slow-fire events. And what do the participants do? They punch paper.
Well, combat is different from target shooting. Your adrenaline is pumping, your sphincter is tight, your mind’s racing, and there are assholes out there who’re shooting back at you. It’s known as stress shooting—emphasis on the word stress. You go through the door and you ding yourself on walls or furniture. There’s smoke and there’s noise. You’re hurt or confused. And you still gotta hit the tango and kill him. There’s only one way to do it. The same way you get to Carnegie Hall—practice. Shoot hundreds of thousands of rounds, until shooting becomes as natural as breathing. At SEAL Team Six I used more ammo in a year than the entire U.S. Marine Corps did.
Now, here’s the rub: if you miss even a few days of shooting practice, your edge disappears. Just like your muscles will start to deteriorate if you miss more than three days of PT, your shooting skills will erode if you don’t shoot all the time. Not so much that anybody will necessarily notice—but a hair’s width at a time. That infinitesimal erosion, however, is just enough to make you lose the edge in a one-on-one with a bad guy. So the answer is simple: you shoot. All the time. Every day. And thus will thou stay alive. End of sermon.
At Poole, they didn’t shoot every day. Not anymore. Not since Geoffrey had taken over. He’d cut back on ammo to save money. He’d cut back to save wear and tear on the kill-house. He was probably related to most of the American SpecWar COs I knew—Can’t Cunt Commanding Officers, who spend their time whining and explaining why they can’t do this or can’t do that.
There was more. The earl had also restricted SBS’s ability to maintain what he called unauthorized—read back-channel—intelligence networks. Everything had been centralized, so that the earl and his old Eton buddy Call Me Ishmael controlled the flow and the scope of SBS’s operational intelligence. There were no more forays into Britain’s port areas to chat up the wharf rats, stevedores, crane operators, and tugboat hands. By curtailing the activity, Lockemont ran a neater organization. But in my opinion, he’d lost the ability to develop operational intelligence that would allow him to act quickly and effectively.
Geoff Lyondale, dressed in starched Royal Marine BDUs, greeted us just inside the doors. The look on his face told me he hadn’t been told I’d arrived with more than five shooters. And he asked where Randy Rayman was. Damn, I said apologetically, we’d forgotten him again. I shook my head and suggested that perhaps he could catch a train later in the day.
I introduced my men to the SBS commander. He shook hands with each one formally but distantly. They didn’t have the spit-and-polish look officers like Geoff mistake for military competence. No, my men look and act like dirtbags. If you read their fitreps, they were unruly scum—rogues who should be kept in cages between wars. But those fitreps were all too often written by professional staff officers like Pinky, or unproven youngsters like Randy Rayman, who had no firsthand knowledge of what qualities make a true warrior.
I, however, was happy with my long-haired, scurvy-looking crew. Tommy, Wonder, Nasty, Howie, and Duck Foot had acquitted themselves well in Cairo. And as for the newcomers, Half Pint Harris had rostered himself and his old swim buddy, Piccolo Mead, to the contingent. Like my XO Tommy, Half Pint had once served a tour in Britain: a year and a half with the SAS. Rodent was another pint-size shooter. At the age of eighteen, he’d made seventeen kills during a six-month Vietnam tour. Warrant Officer Second Class Purdy Boy Floyd was a machine-gun specialist from Oklahoma whose second love was C-4 explosive. Chief Petty Officer Carlosito, like Duck Foot, was a SEAL Team Six survivor of the clusterfucked Grenada operation where he’d lost four of his closest buddies. He’d rejoined Green Team from a billet in Puerto Rico after I assumed command. Carlosito had worked for me at Red Cell. So had Rooster, Sergeant Snake, an airborne asshole turned SEAL, and Doctor Dan. They were all old-fashioned shoot-and-looters: each one of them was combat tested and battle proven, as the weapons ads are fond of saying.
Speaking of shooting and looting, I mentioned to Geoff that we were light on weapons. Oh, the eight guys from the Manor had come armed. They always travel with Mad Dog Frequent Flyer knives in their belts or boots. FFs are composite knives that do not show up on any X-ray or metal detector, but can still slice through a thick web belt—or a human neck—without any effort. They’d also smuggled H&K USP pistols in their checked luggage, as well as schlepped a suitcase full of my clothes and other personal goodies. But we had no submachine guns, and no ammo. I asked if it was possible to remedy the situation. Geoff’s hemming and hawing told me that I’d better start scrounging. I flicked an eyebrow at Rodent, my SFC, or Scrounger First Class, who got the message loud and clear.
Lyondale asked whether he could speak to Tommy and me in private, while my shooters grabbed some breakfast in the enlisted mess with his men. “It’s your show, Geoff.”
Accompanied by Squadron Sergeant Harvey�
�the Royal Marine equivalent of a SEAL master chief—we quick-marched through a series of hallways into what appeared to be a nonsecure conference room. In the center, nevertheless, sat a table to which a huge sheet of paper had been taped. I recognized the outline of Portsmouth harbor, drawn in bold lines. A series of clear plastic overlays with red crayon markings on them designated several of what appeared to be dockside warehouses in the narrow strip of land between the west of the Navy base and the town proper.
Two officers in tunics, a captain and a lieutenant, waited tableside. They had the bookish look of intel squirrels.
Lyondale made introductions. Handshakes all around. He offered coffee. Tommy and I accepted. Squadron Sergeant Harvey poured. I know enlisted men. After all, I used to be one. And I’ve never forgotten the lessons I learned as an enlisted Team puke. Well, the look in Harvey’s eyes was the same as the look in my old platoon chief Ev Barrett’s eyes, when Barrett was faced with incompetent, idiotic, prissy young officers who believed the gold badges on their collars made them gods. It’s a look that says, “Disregard following messages.”
I gave Harvey a wink and a nod, then turned back to the table ready for business. The anxious intel weenies tallyho’d and began their formal show-and-tell.
Half an hour later, I knew no more than I’d known when we’d walked into the room, and I said as much to Geoff. He hadn’t run any thermal tests on the warehouses. Nor had he done visual or sonic penetrations. What his operators had done was cruise up and down the warehouse area under his direction, looking for movement. Minute-by-minute reports of activity were transmitted back to HQ on secure scrambler radios, then analyzed on a huge grid. The results were predictable: zero.
“What about operational intelligence?”
Lyondale assured me that he’d obtained hard evidence.
Hard and operational are not necessarily the same thing. I asked how old the data was, and what kind of sources he’d used. He said he’d used satellite data.
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