“What about Special Branch?”
“We’ve doubled outside surveillance, set up additional vehicle barriers, and put no-parking signs up all over Grosvenor Square. But without any concrete evidence, it’s hard to make a case against Brookfield—or anybody else.”
“What about the BWR?”
“Have you actually seen him with it?”
I had to admit that I hadn’t. Mick was right—the unhappy truth was that every bit of evidence I had on Brookfield so far was circumstantial. There was nothing concrete. His security man, Todd Stewart, had met with Azziz in Cairo. That could be sloughed off as Todd’s doing. The meetings with the Pakistani officers in London could be put down to intelligence gathering. Ditto the confabs with Marcel Mustache in Nice. Lord B kept himself at arm’s length. And knowing his smooth operational style, he’d probably weasel his way out of any charges I brought against him.
As much as I hated to admit it, Mick was right—we’d have to wait until we could connect him posolutely and absitively both with the terrorists and with the anthrax.
Speaking of which, I asked Mick what he’d done about the six canisters of BA-PP3/I I’d sent back through Colonel Angelotti. The news was good: since the anthrax spores used in the BWR had been developed by the Soviets back in the mideighties, there was already an antitoxin for it. Moreover, Mick’s epidemiologists were confident that the drug’s plague component could be combatted with massive doses of tetracycline. Mick was keeping the BWR under wraps—no sense letting anyone, especially Lord Brookfield or his friends in the intelligence community, know we had the stuff. We knew Brookfield’s sources were good, so there was no reason to tell anyone we were holding BA-PP3/I, or what we knew about it.
And what of the five companions—nationality British—with whom Brookfield had arrived?
Of them, there was no trace whatsoever after they’d cleared customs.
Of course there was no trace, or contact. I believed I knew why, too—because those “Brits” were really Americans. To be precise, they were the American tangos we’d missed in Afghanistan. And I knew—just knew—that they were about to hit the embassy.
Why? Because it was exactly the sort of thing I would do. It was an inviting target. Security was lax—the huge loading dock on the building’s west side provided an inviting target for infiltrators. And the embassy was in every sense of the word a public building. Every day, hundreds of applicants lined up on the building’s south side to apply for visas to visit or emigrate to the United States. Americans by the scores marched through the metal detectors and bulletproof Plexiglas of the main entryway on Grosvenor Square to visit consular officers or commercial attachés. The Brits also held regular meetings there, with resident attachés from agencies ranging from the FBI and the U.S. Customs Service to DIA and No Such Agency.
Moreover, the embassy was situated in one of the most bustling areas of London: two blocks from the city’s biggest shopping district, Oxford Street; only a few blocks from New Bond Street and its pricey boutiques, auction houses, and art galleries; a few hundred yards from Park Lane, one of the city’s most heavily traveled streets. If the BWR canister was exploded on the building’s roof, it would infect all of central London.
I may have been on the wrong end of a murder indictment, but it was still my duty to tell Pinky that the balloon was about to go up. So I used the FAMFUC’s scrambled cellular network to place a call to CINCUSNAVEUR from the messy room Mick used as his office.
“Admiral Prescott’s office.”
I didn’t waste time on niceties. “Tell him Dick Marcinko’s on the line.”
He picked up in a flash—so agitated he sounded like a tape being run backward. He threatened. He fulminated. He ranted and raved. When he finally stopped to catch his breath (or wipe the drool off his chin), I interrupted his tirade. “Look, asshole, all this screaming isn’t going to get you anywhere.”
That only set him off again. Finally, I’d had enough.
“Listen, cockbreath—”
That quieted him down. I heard him slap his palm over the receiver and listened to him as he shouted something into the next office. “You can’t trace this call, Pinky, so don’t even try.”
I could almost see him roll his eyes in frustration. “Now, listen, Dick—”
“No, you listen to me. We’ve got problems here. Not bullshit problems, real ones.”
He interrupted me and started to rant again, so I hung up on him. There wasn’t time to waste—especially on idiots like Pinky.
When unable to go through, go around. I called Hans Weber’s extension. A strange voice answered. I asked for Hansie and was told he’d been transferred.
“Where?”
“Back to the U.S. He’s TAD in Norfolk for the next one hundred and eighty days. Handling the restricted-duty personnel for the master chief at arms.”
Talk about your world-class fuckings. Hansie had been royally screwed. He’d been assigned to baby-sitting at Norfolk; put in charge of the screwups, misfits, malcontents, and chronic troublemakers confined to the base. Worst of all, he was working for another command master chief—probably a nitnoy no-load by-the-book asshole, too. This was Pinky fucking Prescott’s handiwork, no doubt about it—Pinky’s revenge against Hans for the help he’d given me. Another black check mark went up next to the good admiral’s name in the mental notebook I carried.
I called the embassy and asked for the RSO—the Regional Security Officer. He’d left last night, I was told, on home leave.
“Let me talk to his assistant.”
“She’s out to lunch. May I leave a message?”
Out to lunch was right. Oh, sure—tell her to straighten her seams and touch up her lipstick because she’s about to be attacked by a mean bunch of tangos. “No—I’ll call back.”
I tried my old girlfriend Nancy’s extension at the CIA’s office. It was busy. I dialed the Marine duty desk. No answer. No answer? What the hell were these people up to, anyway?
I tried the ambassador’s office. No one picked up there, either.
Frankly, I was getting frantic and said as much to Mick. He was in no position to operate—without an official call-up from the Home Office, he couldn’t mobilize his troopers.
I wasn’t impressed. I knew from experience how easy it is to foil basic precautionary measures—I’d done it hundreds of times with Red Cell. “Let’s raise the ante,” I told him.
Mick agreed. He dialed the commander of London police’s D-11 unit. D-11 is the metropolitan police’s SWAT team. Unlike almost all other British police units, the constables on D-11 are armed. They carry pistols and have access to weapons ranging from submachine guns to sniper rifles. Mick suggested that D-11’s CO contact Special Branch and work out a rapid-response contingency plan.
Mick shrugged at me. “Not much more I can do right now, mate.”
I stood up and stretched, peering through the dirty window toward the two-story concrete kill-house a hundred yards away. “What about picking Lord Brookfield’s ass up off the street, clapping him in a padded room out here, and letting me have a go at him?”
Mick’s expression told me it wasn’t an option.
“You’re getting soft in your old age.”
“Maybe—but you’re only a transient. I have to live here, y’know?”
“Sure, sure.” I grabbed the phone again, dialed CINCUSNAVEUR, and asked for Randy Rayman’s extension. He picked up after three rings. “Plans and Policy, Commander Rayman.”
“It’s Dick Marcinko.” I heard the intake of breath. I could just see him reaching out for the intercom button to let someone with more stripes than he know I was on the line. “Listen, asshole—”
Randy started to say something, but he was interrupted by a loud Klaxon horn at his end of the conversation. I heard two rapid five-ougah bursts, then the phone went dead.
Aboard a ship, five blasts of the Klaxon horn means battle stations. In a land-based facility, it means that you have just gone to a
wartime footing.
“Well, fuck me,” I said to Mick. “We’ve been worrying about the wrong damn building. The goddamn tangos just hit North Audley Street—CINCUSNAVEUR.” Serious as the situation was, the thought of Pinky Prescott as a hostage brought a wry smile to my face. It occurred to me in passing that perhaps I could make a serious mistake when Green Team went in after the bad guys.
Most people look at buildings and see architecture. I look and wonder how to best destroy them. That’s how I’d evaluated CINCUSNAVEUR’s hundred-year-old building when Pinky had clapped Nasty Nicky Grundle in chains a couple of weeks ago. So, it didn’t take long to formulate a tactical plan of action with Mick. In fact, it took longer to ensure that my men and I wouldn’t be arrested when we showed up on-site.
But after fifteen minutes on the phone to COBRA—the Cabinet Office Briefing Room—team, Mick managed to convince the powers that be to let us participate. His logic was incontestable: we were an American Navy hostagerescue unit. We were on scene. No one knew the building better. And those were our guys in there.
So, after holding up my right hand and promising to turn myself in as soon as the crisis was over (I crossed two fingers behind my back), Green Team and Mick’s Pagoda Troop of thirty choppered from the FAMFUC, landed just north of the Hyde Park police station, and took a roundabout approach to Grosvenor Square. We arrived on-site at 1455 and went to work immediately.
The Brits had already evacuated the Marriott. That’s where we set up our command post. It was convenient. The hotel is actually contiguous to CINCUSNAVEUR—you can get from one roof to the other. In fact, the Marriott’s basement kitchen abuts CINCUSNAVEUR’s boiler room, too. There is a common wall—made of Victorian brick laid six feet thick. Waiting for us was Sir Aubrey Hanscomb Davis and his monocle. He would be the MOD monitor.
Sir Aubrey didn’t look happy to see me. In fact, he refused to speak to me directly. Instead, he did his communicating through Mick. That was all right with me—I didn’t need his brand of pompous self-righteousness just now.
Another double-breasted, chalk-striped suit was in attendance, too. It belonged to the Home Office undersecretary for terrorism, a sallow-faced, lanky 44-extra-long named Sir Roderick Townley. He performed better than he looked—he’d already had the telephone trunk lines to CINCUSNAVEUR diverted. That was good—we could reach out and touch anybody inside, but they couldn’t get an outside line. That also meant there would be no calls to the press for these tangos, no interviews with asshole TV anchors, radio talk-show hosts, or print reporters. They’d speak only to us—on our schedule. Unless, of course, they were carrying cellular phones, in which case they’d be able to talk to whomever the fuck they wanted to. I asked Sir Roderick if we could get a cellular-jamming unit on-site. He said he’d already sent for one—just in case.
Simultaneously, we had the London police set up a wide cordon sanitaire. Mick took an A-to-Zed map and drew a thick red rectangle that went from Marble Arch to the northwest, down Park Lane, across Mount Street, north along Davies Street to Oxford Street, and back to Marble Arch. “Nobody inside those lines,” he instructed the police inspector assigned as his liaison. No way was a single TV camera going to get any pictures of us doing our work.
Mick had learned that lesson during Operation Nimrod at Princes Gate, when BBC cameras captured the whole rescue on videotape and broadcast it live. I knew that CINCUSNAVEUR had a satellite dish on its roof. It got CNN, Sky News, BBC, ITV—he whole panoply of twentyfour-hour news services. It would be easy for the tangos to keep tabs on us if we let even a single camera through our boundaries.
What do I hear, an argument out there? So, you think the public has a right to know. Well, I agree with you—it does. And as soon as we’d finished our work, the goddamn networks could interview anybody they wanted to. But not now. Not when lives were at stake and a single careless word by some idiot correspondent could cause innocent people to die.
Almost as if they’d been monitoring our conversation, we received word that CNN and the Daily Mirror had hired a chopper, which was trying to get close enough to use one of their 1,000mm lenses—the ones they use to spy on topless Royals in the Bahamas. I ordered a police chopper aloft to intercept and arrest the sons of bitches, and if that didn’t work, shoot ’em down. I also made sure that we used only scrambled communications from here on in. No journalist asshole was going to intercept my messages.
But the press had to be informed.
Well, that’s why God invented men who wear suits—to stand there and rock on their heels and say nothing. Which is exactly what Sirs Aubrey and Roderick did. We set up a press center at the Park Lane Hotel—almost half a mile from our operations center. Every half hour on the half hour, Sir Roderick or Sir Aubrey, accompanied by an inspector from the Metropolitan Police Department, shambled to the microphone and mumbled four or five minutes of gibberish, took another five minutes of shouted questions, then shuffled off to Buffalo again. They looked miserable. Well, fuck ’em—they didn’t have to like what they were doing, they just had to do it.
1522. Mick and I got down to serious planning. You want to react immediately in cases like this. But I knew from experience that we’d do better if we proceeded one step at a time.
Detail number one was the perimeter. As soon as we’d established that, we positioned our three SAS sniper teams. In a perfect world, I’d have used SEAL Team Six snipers because I believe they’re the world’s best. But there were no SEAL Six snipers here, and my guys hadn’t shot lately, while the SAS teams had been doing more than 100 long shots a day at the FAMFUC.
One pair went atop the roof of the hotel directly across the square from North Audley Street—a 150-yard shot. Another team looked down on CINCUSNAVEUR’s western facade—a 50-yard shot. And we set the third team atop a building one hundred yards north, looking down at the rear windows and smokers’ door. While the snipers moved into position, we assembled medical units and fire trucks on Brook Street, just below the Square, so they’d be well out of the tangos’ line of sight but readily available to us. The preliminaries completed, we turned our attention toward necessity number one: the gathering of intelligence—learning the same basics they teach at both DIA and journalism school: who, what, when, where, how, and why.
We had fragmentary intelligence about what had happened from a hysterical Navy wife who’d been coming out of the medical unit just as the takedown took place, and the young Marine lance corporal security guard who’d managed to get her and her eighteen-month-old out of the building through a hail of gunfire. He’d taken a round through the lung, but he fought the pain and told us what he knew. I squeezed his shoulder and told him he’d done good.
The Marine’s story told me that we were up against professionals—they’d Kept It Simple, Stupid. A cleanshaven young man with a Navy ID card and a regulation haircut showed up at the main security barricade—a six-by-eight-foot cage of seven-eighths-inch bulletproof glass, you’ll recall. He was admitted. He stopped long enough to stick his head through the open door into the security cage and ask for help finding a warrant officer in the personnel office. As the duty sergeant reached for his building locator, the visitor shot him in the back of the head. Then he hit the release button, which allowed three other colleagues who’d been loitering just outside the front door past the barrier.
The trio had submachine guns under their coats and carried huge duffel bags over their shoulders. But that didn’t keep them from moving fast. Before anyone could react, they killed three more Marines, wounded the civilian security guard in the information booth, and took control of the ground floor.
That was the Marine’s story. I asked for a description of the perps, He went blank. “I just don’t remember, Captain. They were just guys—three white, one black.”
The Navy wife didn’t have much more to add. She’d been too terrified, she said, to remember anything but the sound of the shots, the screaming, and the Marine who put himself between the tangos and her and
dragged her and her baby outside.
So there were at least four of ’em inside. There could be more, of course; Navy IDs were easy to obtain if you knew how, and another half dozen—hell, another dozen and a half tangos—could have filtered in without being noticed. Remember the “smokers’ door” on the alley? Any selfrespecting tango would have picked up on it the very first time he walked around the building.
Four was too few. I figured they had to have at least eight to ten inside. The size of the building and the number of occupants—120 so far as we could tell—required that many.
Well, there were ways to find out. CINCUSNAVEUR, if you remember, has security cameras in the hallways on each floor and mounted high atop the outside walls. Those cameras were hooked up to a central unit that sits in the security room on the ground floor. But—and I wasn’t altogether sure that the tangos knew this—the system had been designed with a passive link to the security cameras at the embassy across the street.
Which meant that if we played with enough patch cords, we could see what was happening inside CINCUSNAVEUR by looking at screens in the embassy. Better still, we could run another six hundred yards of cable and set up our own screens at the Marriott.
There were no mikes in the security system, however, so we’d have to find ways of getting audio sensors inside the building. That wouldn’t be hard. Sensors can be dropped down plumbing vents. They can be planted on outside walls. They can be drilled into the target building itself. Parabolic mikes can pick up the vibrations that the human voice makes in glass windows. Other, more sensitive devices can listen through a foot of steel and stone.
Our most difficult task would be ascertaining what was happening on the fifth and sixth floors. That was where most of the command’s top-secret materials are located. One hoped that, even as the Klaxon horns went off, the NAVOPS people on five were shredding and burning as much as they could behind their cipher-locked doors.
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