Except—she’d had her finger on the fucking Skorpion’s trigger, and the gun went off as she fell.
I launched myself at Elevator Lady’s corpse, caught the barrel of the goddamn weapon just as it was coming down below horizontal, and fought to keep the muzzle angled upward, toward the ceiling and away from the huddled, screaming kids. When it was finally pointed in a safe direction, I yanked the Skorpion out of her dead hand, dropped the magazine to the floor, and thumbed the weapon’s safety to the “on” position.
I ripped the little girl hostage out of EL’s grasp and held her against my chest. She was okay but in such traumatic shock she was unable to talk. I tucked her under my left arm and out of the way. I rolled Elevator Lady over with my foot. She wasn’t going anywhere. I turned and saw that Goober had the room covered from the window. His hands told me we were secure.
I pressed the “transmit” button and said, “Alpha clear. One tango down.” Then I dropped the MP5 on its sling and swept the little girl into my arms. She was covered in blood spatter and brains. I wiped her face. “It’s all right, honey—it’s over. You’re safe.”
As I spoke I heard Rotten Randy in my ear. “Bravo clear. No casualties.” I hoped he meant among the hostages.
“Where’s the bomb?” I wanted to know where the hell it was.
Boomerang’s high voice gave me the news I wanted to hear: “I got it, Boss Dude. It’s safe—disarmed. We’re clear. No one hurt.”
I have been a part of these sorts of missions for a long time, my friends, and I have never before seen an operation go down so perfectly. This had been flawless. Textbook. They’d teach this one in every goddamn special operations school in the world.
Best of all, my WARRIORS had come through. They’d avenged their brother SEAL. I yanked my ballistic goggles down around my neck, and gave the little girl in my arms a bearded, ticklish kiss on the cheek. She nestled in the crook of my neck and shoulder, arms around me tight, and began to sob great gulping sobs of relief. “Honey,” I said, giving her another smooch, “we took care of the bad people. Everything is gonna be just fine. You’re gonna be all right.”
“Oh, sir, oh, mister constable, I hope I will be,” she sobbed, and then she squeezed me as tight as she could around my neck.
My friends, there is nothing so wonderful as the innocent love of a child except, perhaps, to wreak Roguish vengeance on anyone who would harm such a child. I stood among all those screaming but safe kids, feeling totally and professionally fulfilled.
And then, the moment passed, and it was time to go back to work. I shifted the little girl’s weight in my arms and pressed the “transmit” button on the radio mike. “Okay, so let’s call in the cavalry to disarm whatever the hell they have on the doors, so we can get these hostages out of here and back to their parents.”
I gave the little girl in my arms another big hug and kiss, and watched as some small part of the ordeal she’d just been through evaporated from her eyes. Ecstatic, euphoric, exultant, elated, I hit the mike button again. “Bravo Zulus, guys. You made ’em pay for what they did to Butch. You did great work—you killed ’em all.”
5
ANY ELATION I MIGHT HAVE FELT LASTED ONLY AS LONG as it took for the bulldog editions of the morning newspapers to hit the stands. Somehow, a photographer from the Daily Herald, one of London’s less principled tabloids, had managed to infiltrate the perimeter, and he’d videotaped our assault with a digital camera equipped, it would seem, with a very effective telephoto lens. His video appeared on the paper’s Web site.
One huge, graphic still photo covered the front page of the paper’s bulldog edition. Above it, the headline read: “American Bullets, British Babies.” Maybe it wasn’t as dramatic as the shot of Elián González being snatched out of a closet by an MP5-carrying Fed, but it did the job. It caught me in profile, just as I shot Elevator Lady. The picture froze my kill-’em-all-and-let-God-sort-it-out expression, the cloud of blood as EL’s head exploded, and the look of pure terror on the little hostage girl’s face.
It is said that every picture tells a story. But the stories pictures tell are not necessarily true. The truth, however, did not matter to the Powers That Be. Not even when there was a dead American SEAL (whose flag-draped coffin rated not a single picture in the British newspapers) to be mourned.
Of course, the powers that be didn’t have time to mourn Butch Wells. They were too busy dealing with the fifteen hundred protesters marching outside the American Embassy protesting the fact that American military personnel were shooting British nationals on sovereign British soil. The fact that the TIRA terrorists had murdered two British military personnel and one U.S. Navy SEAL, and taken a school full of children hostage appeared to be totally irrelevant to the protesters. Go fucking figure.
Our ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary, a cookie pusher from Foggy Bottom, was called to Downing Street and read the well-known riot act by the prime minister for allowing such undiplomatic behavior to be committed by U.S. nationals on her watch. (Being politically correct, she never once brought up Butch’s ultimate sacrifice on behalf of the peace accords.) Mick Owen, who reports to folks a lot less diplomatic than the prime minister, was unceremoniously reamed a new asshole for allowing me to do the down and dirty. And I? I was summoned posthaste, chop-chop, double-time, hup-two, hup-two, to report to the antique-filled office suite of Admiral Eamon Joseph Flannery, United States Navy, at 0900 the following morning.
Admiral Flannery, USNA13 1968, known to his subordinates as Eamon the Demon, is currently CINCUSNAVEUR, which translates from Navyspeak as Commander IN Chief, US NAVal forces, EURope. His offices, which face Grosvenor Square, are in the same building on the corner of North Audley Street that once housed the headquarters of Dwight D. Eisenhower when Ike planned Operation Sword, the invasion of Europe in 1944.
But the similarities stop there. Ike was a Warrior. Eamon the Demon is a wimp. Ike was willing to take responsibility for his decisions. Eamon the Demon is known as “The Stealth CINC” because he seldom (if ever) commits his signature to a binding document or memo, but has his subordinates write and sign ’em instead. And, as Roy Boehm, the Godfather of all SEALs, reminded me when I told him who was running CINCUSNAVEUR, “Remember, Rotten Richard, Ike did his pissing into a urinal. From everything I’ve ever heard, Eamon the Demon sits down when he makes a wee-wee.”
But Eamon Joseph Flannery still wears four stars, which gives him a certain amount of clout in matters of Navydom. And even though I didn’t come under his chain of command, he had the political muscle to make me show up at his office. And so, after a 0430 wake-up call, and a 2.5-hour PT session with my men that included an eight-and-a-half mile run twice around Hyde Park, I showered, shit, and shaved, and dressed in a blazer and pressed gray flannels, a dress shirt, and my raincoat, trudged through the cold drizzle from our out-of-the-limelight hotel on Half Moon Street up along Curzon Street, worked my way to New Bond, and from there turned port on Brook Street. I crossed the police barriers on the northeast side of Grosvenor Square by the Marriott hotel, steered starboard on North Audley, and pushed through the glass-and-steel revolving door of CINCUSNAVEUR headquarters.
In the old days, I would have gone directly to the office of my old shipmate Command Master Chief Hans Weber, and received an intel dump that would forewarn and forearm me about what was happening at North Audley Street. But Hansie was long gone. He’d retired not six months after I left London to chase down a bunch of Russian mininukes in the Rhine Valley a couple of years back. So these days I didn’t have a single intelligence source here. In fact, even the network of chiefs on which I’d relied since I’d been an E-2 tadpole was unraveling one by one, due to retirement, or just plain exhaustion from having to deal with a military that grows more dysfunctional by the day.
And so, I showed my creds to the Jarhead behind the bulletproof, glassed-in guard post on the ground floor, took the elevator to the third floor, turned left, then hove right and sailed into
the admiral’s reception area on the dot of 0900 hours.
A so-young-he-was-probably-still-wearing-nappies-at-night lieutenant commander was waiting for me, t-t-tapping a government issue ballpoint pen impatiently on his knee as he sat in an uncomfortable-looking armchair. As I pushed through the door he rose.
“Captain Marcinko.” It wasn’t a question, and he didn’t give me time to reply. Instead, he actually looked down his nose at me. “I am Lieutenant Commander Troy M. Wesley, Admiral Flannery’s aide,” he said, a snide tone to his voice. “The admiral has been waiting for you in his private office.”
I wrinkled my brow at his behavior and replied in kind, mocking his snotty delivery. “I am Captain Richard No Middle Name Marcinko,” I stated. “And I guess I should be overwhelmed that you have deigned to take the time from what must be a busy schedule to welcome me to the command.”
He looked at me as if I’d stepped in something nasty. “Oh, please don’t be overwhelmed … sir.” The kid wheeled, giving me his back. Obviously, he was performing for the attractive yeoman first class sitting behind the receptionist’s desk. I winked at the yeoman, whose name tag identified her as P. Baker.
“I’ll show you the way … Captain,” Troy M. Wesley said to the wall, the disdain in his voice echoing off the wood paneling.
I peered at Lieutenant Commander Troy M. Wesley’s narrow shoulders as he prissed past the yeoman’s desk toward the hidden door that led to the admiral’s hideaway. Well, fuck him. He was representative of most of the young staff officers you see these days. He was no warrior. His eyes had already told me he was unprepared to die. His eyes had already told me he was more interested in making real estate investments and building stock portfolios than he was in making war and breaking things.
And so, in no mood to be screwed with by officers whose behavior had been influenced by spoiled children, I treated him like the brat he was. I caught up with him, turned him around with a big paw to his shoulder, backed him up to Yeoman Baker’s desk, and wedged him there so he couldn’t move. “Fuck you, Commander. I was coming in and out of this place when you were still shitting mustard in your nappies—that’s Brit for diapers, in case you didn’t get it. So you will not fuck with me. In fact, you will pay me respect. Not because I wear a lot more stripes than you do—which I happen to—but because I’ve actually killed people and you haven’t, and you probably won’t, unless you panic and blow up a lot of innocent civilians by mistake when the assholes who run this here Navy give you command of something big and gray to play with long before you’re ready to assume any real responsibility.”
I paused long enough to watch him grow wide-eyed. He kind of sagged against the desk. I put my face up against his face just like old Navy chiefs like my UDT 21 platoon chief, Ev Barrett, used to do to me, or Marine drill sergeants used to do to their boot-camp Jarheads when they wanted to terrorize them. “What’s the matter, sonny?” I asked, my rough beard hairs touching his cheek. “You scared?”
I watched with delight the effect my words were having. So, like the generations of chiefs and gunnies I knew as I came of age in the Navy, I examined his nose. Carefully. Up close.
As I did, Lieutenant Commander Troy M. Wesley started to flinch. Big mistake. I did my best Everett E. Barrett imitation. “You will stand at attention, you no-load, pencil-dicked, numb-nutted puke, or I will reach down your fucking throat, grab you by the sphincter, turn you fucking inside out, and drag your worthless ass into the admiral’s office in that condition so he can see what a real-life, government inspected, ruby red, grade A, size-one asshole really looks like.”
I shifted my body so that Lieutenant Commander Troy M. Wesley couldn’t see my face, and checked to make sure my performance was playing well with Yeoman Baker, who was sitting directly behind the officer’s back. She had what can only be described as a shit-eating grin on her face. She gave me the thumb-and-forefinger in a circle hand sign that told me that either I was a Brazilian asshole, or everything was A-OK. I chose the latter interpretation and winked back at her.
Then it was back into character. After all, the admiral was waiting. Okay: it was time to see whether the training session had worked and the kid could be controlled off-leash.
I crooked my finger toward the young officer. “Come,” I growled.
Lieutenant Commander Troy M. Wesley came.
I do so love success. “Heel,” I barked, and wheeled toward the hidden door.
The admiral was standing posed somewhat grandly by his fireplace as I came into his hideaway office. He turned toward me and lowered his arm off the mantel. “Captain,” he said, watching intently as his cowed aide followed me into the small but nicely appointed office.
I inclined my head toward him. “Admiral.”
There was an awkward pause. I guess he’d expected me to appear more contrite, given the uproar over my actions.
Yeah, right. I growled, “You sent for me.”
He turned away to inspect the gas fire in the fire-place. “Yes,” he said.
I watched him watch the flames. “Is there something you want me to do?”
Eamon the Demon glanced over to where Lieutenant Commander Wesley stood. “Dismissed,” he said to Lieutenant Commander Troy M. Wesley.
We both watched as the young officer turned and left, closing the door behind him. Then there was more silence. The admiral was a tall man, and lanky. There was a certain awkward, geeky disjointedness to him.
He veered across the room to a leather wing chair and finally settled himself into it, his long legs dropping onto the adjacent ottoman, his bony knees protruding at different angles. I could make out the joints through the material of his trouser legs. He touched his fingertips together, forming his hands into an angular little house, and then wiggled his fingers. Finally, he looked over at me. “There is a problem,” the admiral said obliquely.
I really wasn’t in the mood for games. “Care to tell me about it?”
He looked at me, annoyed. “You know, you are not much beloved by our British hosts,” he said.
What was this, Obvious 101? As if I didn’t know. As if I hadn’t had to make my way through the fucking demonstration still going on in front of the embassy. But I wasn’t about to give him anything. So I said simply, “Oh, really?”
He stared at me. “Do not play games with me, Captain,” he said. “This is serious.”
“I did my job, Admiral. I lost one of my best people. But I got the kids out. I neutralized three assholes who would have gone on to kill a lot more innocent victims, and I’m damned if I’m going to apologize for it.”
“I know all of that,” he said. “I’m sorry you lost that man. And you have a point: you did your job. But you also have to think about the political consequences of the situation. You cannot act without factoring in the politics.”
“Oh, yes I can.”
He looked at me, shocked. “What?”
“It is not my job to factor in the politics of what I do. That is your job, Admiral. It is an admiral’s job to deal with the press, and the problems of political correctness, and all the public opinion pollsters. It’s an admiral’s job to keep the fucking politicians off my back. My job is to hunt down terrorists and kill them.”
He came out of his chair like a pair of shots and lurched over to where I stood, wagging his long, bony finger all the while until it was within six inches of my oft-squashed snout. “I will not have you speak to me in that derisive tone of voice, Captain. I know that you enjoy the protection of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. But if you will remember, General Crocker’s term is about to expire, and I do not think he will be appointed a third time. And that is why you are here, with me, right now. To deal with your problem.”
I watched the admiral’s lips flap. But I wasn’t listening. Unfortunately, what he’d just said was absolutely true. I was in London because General Thomas E. Crocker, the JCS chairman, had insisted, over the objections of the chief of naval operations and a laundry list of other
federal agencies and cabinet secretaries, that I be designated as the OIC, or Officer In Charge, of the American military component of Detachment Bravo. The Navy certainly hadn’t wanted me here. The State Department hadn’t wanted me here—in fact they’d tried to blackball me by going behind General Crocker’s back to the White House. But since General Crocker had wanted me to take on this job, and since he has balls, that is what happened.
That was all on the one hand. On the other hand, Eamon the Demon was absolutely correct: General Crocker’s term was swiftly drawing to a close. He’d be gone in a matter of weeks now. And the new administration had no intention of renominating him. The heir apparent was a Marine general named Carlton “Chip” Walker. His rise within the Corps had been truly spectacular. Twelve years ago, Chip was a blockhead colonel serving as a military aide to the secretary of defense. But he also played basketball—as did the then-SECDEF. Walker’s talent as a power forward got him his first star. His talent as a power brown nose got him his second and third stars, according to the corridor RUMINT at the Pentagon.
And how did he get his fourth star? I don’t want to go there—and neither do you. And besides, isn’t our military governed under the policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” these days? Currently, Chip was serving as the Marine Corps commandant. And his name had been floated in the press—he’d probably leaked it himself—as the “best in breed” selection for the Chairman’s slot.
Except for one small fact. Chip Walker was an idiot. Okay, so that’s not enough to disqualify him. You are right. There have been a fair number of idiots who have served as JCS Chairmen. But Chip Walker was a dangerous idiot, in that he had the habit of knuckling under to any—repeat, ANY—political pressure. And so, he had already eviscerated the Corps’ rapid response capabilities. He had instituted the same kind of integrated male/female training that had brought the other uniform services to their sorry state of readiness. And he hated Warriors. Despised them as knuckle draggers and Neanderthals. He’d even said so in a speech once. He’d been invited to address the national convention of the feminist organization NOW, and there he’d actually called Warriors “a necessary evil in a postsexist democracy.” No, I am not kidding.
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