Now, I wasn’t about to violate op sec and share any thoughts about my epiphany.
Mick drained his bitter. “I assume you lot can find your way back to the Holiday Inn?”
“Us highly fucking trained individuals?” I said. “Remember, you dip-dunk, no-load Brit asshole, we’re elite U.S. Naval Special Warfare commandos—we can find our asses with either hand in total darkness.”
“Without rehearsing,” said Stevie Wonder.
“And chew gum at the same time,” said Nasty.
“A thousand pardons, kind sirs,” Mick said, bowing low. He slipped three five-pound notes on the bar. “A round for my delightful, if learning-disabled, children,” he told the bartender. “And pay them no mind if they get a bit silly after a couple of pints—they’re Americans, and they don’t handle our good, strong British ale very well.”
The next morning we split up, arranging a 1900 rendezvous at the downtown garage where we’d left our cars. Carlos, Rodent, Tommy, and Wonder decided that since their work was finished, they’d wander around Hampstead, trolling for birds—the kind that wear skirts. Nasty and I walked to Finchley Road and took the train to Bond Street, three or four blocks from CINCUSNAVEUR. I wanted to check in with Hansie, and he wanted some Copenhagen snuff, which was available at the North Audley commissary. I had a second mission, too: dropping in on the Bruton Street travel agency whose card was in my pocket, to talk to one Doreen Sims.
I left Grundle at the tube stop and made my way down South Moulton Street past a gauntlet of fashionable boutiques and restaurants, then window-shopped the antique dealers on New Bond Street. I turned left on Bruton Street and walked about fifty paces until I came to a small alley. There was a wedge-shaped pub on the corner, and a small eighteenth-century town house behind it. To the left of the door were three doorbells, and three brass placards. Engraved on the top two-by-four-inch brass rectangle was the inscription
BRUTON TRAVEL, FIRST FLOOR, PLEASE RING.
I rang.
A voice said, “Yes?”
“Snerd, Herman Snerd,” I said by way of introduction. I asked if I could come up.
Of course I could. I walked up a narrow flight of stairs and rapped at the door. It was answered by a statuesque woman in a tweed suit, ankle-length skirt, and high boots. “Yes?”
“Are you Doreen Sims?”
“Yes, I am.”
I smiled. “I was given your card by a friend, who says you’re a terrific travel agent.”
“Really.” She paused and looked me over. She looked at my B&E clothes—ragged jeans, old sneakers, and my faithful $65 Pakistani leather jacket. I could see her doing mental calculations about the safety of admitting me. Finally, she said, “Do come in.”
I followed her inside. It was a simple but elegant office—the kind of understated, posh milieu favored by people with huge trust funds. On the walls, dozens of inscribed photographs of movie stars, rock-and-roll musicians, and politicians hung like so many pop icons. I picked out Geoff Lyondale’s smiling countenance—and the Duchess of Wales’s. Obviously, Doreen Sims had somehow garnered most of London’s celebrity business.
She sat down primly behind a low roll-top desk and indicated I should take the leather armchair opposite. “So—Mr. Snerd, isn’t it?—what can I do for you?”
“I’m a friend of Lord B’s.”
“Lord Brookfield?” The look she gave me indicated that she wasn’t giving my story a lot of credence. Still, I slid the card onto her desk. “He gave me your name last week. Told me you were a super travel agent—you could get me anywhere, anytime, on a moment’s notice.”
“That was kind of him.” She picked up the card and examined it in an offhand sort of way. Then she looked at me quizzically. “Have you known Lord B long?”
“No. We were introduced recently by a mutual friend. I’m here on business. But I travel a lot.”
“I see.” She handed the card back, then gave me a warm smile. “Well, that was kind of him. I’ve only booked for him twice, y’know—the Italian trip two months ago, and now to Nice.”
“He likes his vacations, doesn’t he?”
“Oh, I don’t think it was a vacation in Italy. He took Mr. Stewart and five other associates.”
I nodded. “Right. Of course. And they went …”
“To Abruzzi. To Pescara, actually, on the Adriatic coast.” She pointed at a huge, framed antique world map on the wall behind her desk.
I looked up, focusing on Italy. If the country looks like a boot, you find Abruzzi midway up the calf. I looked again—and actually saw something this time: the city of Pescara. It was directly opposite the Yugoslavian town of Split.
Split, in Croatia, was one of the major bases for the old Yugo Navy. More to the point, it was the location from where—according to the intelligence developed by Lord B’s sources—the Sons of Gornji Vakuf stole the Foca minisub and used it to bomb the HMS Mountbatten and murder CNO.
That is, if they, in point of fact, had done the deed.
Whoa, you say. Where the hell is Dickie coming from now? Why is he all of a sudden wondering whether or not the Sons of Gornji Vakuf had actually killed CNO, when there’d been so much proof positive offered up?
Since you asked, I’ll tell you.
Item: I was the one who’d confirmed that the Foca whose stabilizer fin I found had, in fact, been delivered to the Yugo Navy three years ago.
Murphy factor: It was Lord B who’d said it had been stolen by the Sons of Gornji Vakuf. Until then, not even Sir Aubrey, whose networks were pretty damn good, had known about that specific splinter group of Bosnian tangos.
Item: Both Sir Aubrey and Mick Owen had confirmed the group’s existence.
Murphy factor: But neither Sir Aubrey nor SAS could say whether the SGV had actually stolen the Foca. All we knew for certain was that a fin from the stolen sub ended up in the main channel of Portsmouth harbor.
That left me with a lot of questions unanswered, and a lot of potential for bad assumptions.
I know I’m being oblique. But follow me and you’ll see where I’m coming from.
One of the most important elements both to spookery and special operations is deception. In the Gulf War, for example, a mere platoon of SEALs managed to convince two Iraqi divisions that they were in fact a huge Marine amphibious landing force. Their deception, which took the form of marking a beach as if it were being prepared for a landing, blowing up obstacles, and engaging in other forms of harassment, kept the Iraqi divisions in the Kuwait City region—miles and miles from the location where the real invasion would take place.
In the spook world, which the great old spymaster James Jesus Angleton used to call “a wilderness of mirrors,” deception is more subtle than a platoon of SEALs and one hundred pounds of plastic explosive.
The objective is to create a series of events or facts that convince your opponent you are planning to do one thing, when in truth, you are preparing to do absolutely the opposite.
To accomplish this, you allow your adversaries a certain amount of real intelligence information—after all, they’d know if everything was fake. But within the real stuff, you slip in what’s called in the trade black information—disinformation (see—I told you you’d be seeing this black-info material again).
Anyway, the percentage may be 95 percent truth and only 5 percent falsehood—but it is often enough to (a) convince your adversary that he has in fact uncovered something genuine, and (b) cause him to act on that information, and when it causes him to fail, not ever realize that he’s been had. If you are successful, it is kind of like the old movie The Sting, in which the bad guy, played by Robert Shaw, goes off without ever realizing that Paul Newman and Robert Redford have, in fact, goatfucked him.
In the case at hand, Lord B told us about a new terrorist group, the Sons of Gornji Vakuf. The SGV were, in fact, genuine tangos. So far, so good. But what if he then injected a sliver of disinformation—that they’d stolen the Foca minisub from the former Yugo
base at Split—into the story.
By doing so, he could lead us astray, causing us to assume, falsely, that these lethal, desperate Muslims had stolen a specific Foca, sailed it into Portsmouth harbor, and used it as a platform from which they attacked the HMS Mountbatten and murdered Admiral Sir Norman Elliott and CNO.
But that wasn’t the only way to kill CNO. The SGV—or any other tangos—could, for example, infiltrate the Navy base at Portsmouth (it hadn’t been very hard for me to do just that), swim out to the Mountbatten, plant their limpet mines or bombs or whatever, and then swim back to shore the very same way I had, without being observed.
In other words, you wouldn’t necessarily need a sub to make the hit.
But what about the fin? you ask. Hadn’t I cemented Lord B’s theory when I found the Foca’s stabilizer fin, traced it back, and discovered where it had come from.
Nope. I simply confirmed that the fin had come from a sub delivered to the Yugo Navy. Sir Aubrey confirmed only that it had been stolen six weeks before the Mountbatten was attacked. But the information about who had stolen the minisub had come from Lord B. It was Sir Aubrey—and I—who put two and two together. And now I realized we’d come up with five, not four.
Because, so far as I was concerned, it was altogether possible to steal the minisub, break off a stabilizer fin, and drop it slam-bang in the middle of Portsmouth harbor for someone enterprising like me to discover.
Am I sounding paranoid? Well, to be honest, I’ve been accused of being paranoid in the past, and it has kept me and my men alive.
My reverie was interrupted by Doreen, who was telling me something about Lord B’s traveling to Nice. I knew that. But maybe she could tell me why. “Nice? You say he’s in Nice these days. That means he’ll be staying at his cottage in Beaulieu-sur-Mer?”
Doreen smiled at me. Obviously, I knew Lord B well enough to know he had a house on the Riviera. “That’s right—he’s at l’Oasis bleue, with Mr. Haji and Mr. Yusef. If you’re going to visit them, I’d suggest a lovely inn, La Résidence, nearby. Or you could stay in town at the Negresco.”
She paused and uncapped a $500 gold Montblanc fountain pen, which she held poised over a sheet of ivory writing paper. “Can I make you a reservation now, Mr. Snerd?”
So he’d gone to southern France with Mr. Haji and Mr. Yusef, the ubiquitous Pakistani majors. That factoid certainly gave one pause. “Not at the moment, Doreen—I’ll get back to you.” I had things to do. People to see. I wanted to get to North Audley Street, hit the fifth floor—that’s where CINCUSNAVEUR’s operations staff keeps its files—and see what the hell was in Nice.
I walked up Brook Street toward Grosvenor Square in a fog, my eyes on the pavement, my mind racing. Lord B was a diver—there were pictures of him in National Geographic raising his Phoenician galley or whatever. He was a crack shot. He’d been on the British Olympic team. He’d converted to Islam—so he said—during the time he’d been held hostage in Lebanon.
But what if he hadn’t really been held hostage? What if he’d staged his own kidnapping and gone off to Afghanistan to take Tango 401? What if he’d been tutored by one of the thousands of ex-Spetsnaz, or former GRU and KGB paramilitary experts who, unlike me, didn’t have a pension and hadn’t written two best-selling books? He could afford to hire a brigade of ’em if he wanted to.
A lot of questions were on my mind, and very few answers.
Now Brookfield was in France. What in the hell could he be doing there, when there’d just been a bad terrorist incident right here in Goode Olde Britain? It didn’t make sense.
I mean, here he was, an important consultant to the Brits, and he still goes off to France when he should be scouring his alleged network of sources to help Sir Aubrey.
Something in the equation didn’t compute. I decided to list the possibilities.
One was that he could be taking a long-anticipated vacation. Nah—it wasn’t his style. Lord B was not the type to abandon a project, especially one as important as his government consulting, to lie in the sun. He—like me—was obsessive about his work. I’d learned that when I’d researched about him. So he’d gone to Nice because it was important for him to be there. Why? That was the proverbial million-dollar question.
As I crossed Duke Street into Grosvenor Square, I stopped in my tracks. This sort of thing has happened to me before—and it’s saved my life. Once, in Vietnam, I pulled up short, my foot holding just above the ground on a dike just south of Khe Sach. Why I didn’t take that last step I’ll never know—I can only describe it as some kind of primordial alarm system. Anyway, my foot frozen in space, I looked down carefully at the ground. There, embedded carefully in the clay dike, was the nipple of a “dragon’s tooth.” Dragon’s teeth were what we called Soviet-made mini-mines. They didn’t kill you, just maimed you. When you stepped on them, they blew your foot off.
I can’t explain why I didn’t take that step. But I didn’t. And I can’t tell you why I stopped short of walking into Grosvenor Square either. But my early-warning system went off, and just as I didn’t drop my foot on the DT, I didn’t continue into the square.
Instead, I stepped into a doorway and began to pay attention, treating the area as if it were hostile territory. And the more I looked, the more I realized that that’s exactly what it was.
I counted sixteen Marines in their civvy gray blazers and dark trousers positioned around the CINCUSNAVEUR building. Judging from the bulges on their hips, they were carrying side arms.
That was truly extraordinary. Whenever the CINC was in residence, a pair of Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children would normally be posted outside, walking an informal beat up and down the sidewalk in front of the old wrought-iron spike fence. But they’d be unarmed. Indeed, the Brits absolutely forbade any weapons outside the building, so all they carried were radio transceivers. That way, in a crisis, they could talk bad guys to death.
But as we all knew, the admiral was not in residence—he was back at Bethesda, having gallbladder surgery. Yet here was a full fucking platoon of Marines, all of them carrying heat, positioned outside the HQ building. Who were they expecting, the fucking president? Had they suddenly been scrambled to Threatcon Delta because Abu Nidal and the entire Baader-Meinhoff gang were about to gang-bang CINCUSNAVEUR?
Or was the terrorist they were seeking even more dangerous than any and all of the above—at least so far as one Pinckney Prescott III, VADM, USN, was concerned. The TIQ: that hop-and-popping, shoot-and-looting, hairy-assed Frogman known as Demo Dick Marcinko, Sharkman of the Delta—in a single word, moi.
From cover, I recced the area. Within the square itself, one, two, three, four, five pairs of men wandered aimlessly. Their bodies semaphored they were trying not to call attention to themselves—which made them all the more obvious to me. At the far end, in front of the embassy, two battleship gray USN cars sat idling. Six other vehicles—I could make out U.S. diplomatic plates—waited in no-parking zones close to each intersection at the embassy end of the square. They were positioned to cut off traffic, creating roadblocks that would make the entire square into a cordon sanitaire.
I squinted. Even from two hundred yards, the silhouettes inside seemed all too familiar: they had the bloodless look of NIS Terminators—the top-secret Naval Investigative Service Command Gestapo unit that targets four-stripers and above.
Grosvenor Square was no place for me today—not if I valued my freedom. So, instead of crossing into the square and heading blithely toward North Audley Street, I reversed course and headed back toward Bond Street, head down, face averted. One block away, I turned into the small lobby of Claridge’s Hotel, straight-arming the liveried doorman who tried to stop me. Once inside, I found a phone booth, squeezed inside, dialed up the phone on Hans Weber’s desk, and dropped the requisite 10P coin when I heard the sound of his voice.
“Command Master Chief Weber.”
“It’s me. What’s all the fucking commotion at your place?”
“Jeezus—�
� There was real anxiety in Hansie’s voice. He sounded absolutely panicked. “No names, son—the phones ain’t secure.”
“Roger that, Master Chief. Sitrep?”
“TARFU. Somebody told the admiral something that sent him over the edge. He wants your ass keelhauled in the worst way. Called up the whole goddamn cavalry to do it, too.”
Damn. Nasty Nicky Grundle had been on his way to the commissary. Had they grabbed him? I started to ask Hans, but he was prescient.
“Your boy was snapped up the minute he walked in here. He’s locked in the basement—Pinky’s using him as bait to get to you.”
“Can we talk?”
“Not now.”
“When? Where?”
“We can’t. I’ll leave a message at the place we usually meet.”
Usually meet? Where the hell was he talking about? My mind was blank. Before I could say anything else, he hung up.
Shit. Fuck. Doom on Dickie. I sat in the booth, sweating bullets. I had no idea what Hansie’d meant. Then the sound of sirens told me I’d better move—right now.
I bolted across the lobby, charged through the double doors to the dining room, crashed the kitchen, and went out the service entrance of the hotel just as I heard cars screeching to a halt at the front entrance. I cut down a mews, worked my way up an alley, and ran against traffic up a series of one-way streets, until I reached South Audley Street. I pushed open the front door of a church and caught my breath safely inside the vestibule.
What the hell was going on? I had no idea. All I knew was that I had to figure out what the hell Hansie had been talking about, then get to the garage behind Victoria.
Three minutes later I worked my way back to Berkeley Square, out of breath, frantic, and painfully aware that at least one gray car of Terminators was gaining on me, its insistent, American-style siren getting louder and louder.
I tried the front door of an office building. It was locked. I tried the town house next door. It, too, was locked. They were getting closer. I cut across the square, unmindful of
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