The bottom line was that I was about to lose my one remaining rabbi at the Pentagon, the result of which was that I’d be tossed to the wolves by the long, long line of admirals, including Eamon Joseph Flannery, to whom I’d said, “Fuck you, strong message follows,” one or two or three times too many.
My reverie was interrupted by Eamon the Demon’s chicken-squawk voice. “And so,” he clucked, “I had to take steps.”
He was looking at me strangely. Oh, fuck. I’d missed at least a paragraph—maybe more.
“Come again?”
His expression was disdainful, as if I was learning-challenged. We used to call it thick-as-a-brick dumb. But that was before everything was politically correct. The admiral sighed. Have you noticed how good our alleged leaders are at sighing these days? Greta fucking Garbos, all of ’em.
“I have been handed a problem,” Eamon said slowly, as if I didn’t speak much English. “A previously unknown Irish terrorist group, the Green Hand Defenders.”
“Never heard of them.”
“Nor had anyone else,” Eamon said. “Until our British cousins overheard a conversation between two of their members.”
“A conversation.”
“It dealt with the targeting of Americans.”
“Was this recent?” If it was, I should have been told. This was obviously something that fell under Detachment Bravo’s bailiwick.
“Six months—maybe more,” the admiral said. “But we—that is to say, I—only found out about it three days ago.”
“We?”
“I. We. Us. The United States Government.”
“The Brits were holding back?”
The admiral retreated to his wing chair and turned away from me. “It seems that way.”
“I’ll have a word with Mick Owen.”
Eamon the Demon swung toward me. “That is precisely what I do not want to happen,” he said. “We did not discover about the Green Hand Defenders through the normal liaison relationship I enjoy with our British friends from the Ministry of Defense, or the Intelligence Service. We—that is to say, I—came upon them through a backchannel source who has been vastly helpful to me in the past. Therefore, I would like to keep our knowledge of this particular group compartmented.”
“Compartmented.”
“Private. Some of our British friends have obviously sought to deprive us of information we—that is to say, I—believe they should have shared. I want you to find out why.”
I thought about what the admiral had just told me. “Then why me?” I asked. “Like you said, my rep with the Brits is none too good right now.”
“Precisely.” The admiral smiled, as if to himself. “Precisely.” He ran a hand through his thinning hair. “Let me be specific,” he said. “You will report what you find to me. To no one else. When I know all there is to know about the Green Hand Defenders, I will decide upon the appropriate action, which you will implement.”
“And if I decide that what you are telling me now is inappropriate and go to the Chairman?”
Eamon the Demon looked at me, his eyes narrow. “That,” he said, “would not be a wise decision on your part. You are in deep trouble in Washington because of this last escapade of yours.”
“I’ve been in trouble before.”
“But this time is different,” the admiral said. “This time, the Chairman can’t protect you.”
He paused, then fired for effect. “But I can protect you. And I will—if you help me.”
I’d just about had enough of this asshole. “Pardon my French, Admiral, but why the fuck should I ever help you? You have no chain-of-command responsibility over Detachment Bravo. You don’t write my fitreps. I don’t work for you—I work for the Chairman. And until he is relieved, that’s the way things are going to be.”
He looked at me evenly. “I don’t like you, Captain,” he said. “I do not like your methods, your manner, or your style of command. But this is business—serious business. And I am willing to work in a strictly quid pro quo relationship. I want to find out about the Green Hand Defenders. Who they are. What they are up to. What their capabilities and intentions are. Whom they are targeting. You can do that for me much more easily than I can do it for myself, and with much less attention from the British authorities. In return, I will, for the time being, protect you and your men from those who would like to end your careers more abruptly and immediately than you might like.”
Now he was finally beginning to make sense to me. I didn’t give a shit about my career. I never have. But my men had to be shielded from the sort of political vengeance that Pentagon admirals, especially petty, spiteful, vindictive admirals like Eamon the Demon, can wreak. And if this pussy-ass was willing to protect them, then I would most certainly deal with him—until I came up with something better.
“Will you put this in writing?”
“I am not a stupid man, Captain. Writing does not… enhance, shall I say, understandings such as this one.” Then he grew serious. “But I know you to be a man of your word. And so, I will shake your hand, and consider the matter closed and the bargain sealed.” And with that, he offered me his hand.
I took it in my own. It was soft and the nails were manicured, as befits an ossifer and a gentleman, not to mention the kind of paper-shuffling, responsibility-shirking C2CO that Eamon represents. And so, I applied a fair amount of Roguish pressure as we stood there, eyeball to eyeball, cementing the deal.
I stared directly into his baby grays, which told me I’d put him in considerable pain. But I wasn’t about to let him go until I’d made him understand how I operate. I squeezed even harder. “I take my bargains very seriously, Admiral.”
Wincing now, he pulled back until he managed to free his hand from mine. “So do I, Captain,” he said, rubbing the injured paw as he did. “So do I. And believe me, when the timing is appropriate, you and your men can go after the Green Hand Defenders and obliterate them. As you just said, it is your job to hunt terrorists down and then kill them. That is precisely what I am giving you the opportunity to do.” Reflexively, he massaged his sore hand some more, grimacing as he worked the joints. “Unless, of course, you’d like to be on a plane to Washington tonight.”
If the real goal of Eamon’s assignment to find out about the Green Hand Defenders was to make sure that I kept a low profile for the next week and a half or so, he achieved his objective, and then some. The protests continued. In fact, some fucking company called Globex even hired an ad agency to put anti-American posters on the sides of London’s double-decker buses. The poster had been taken from one of the Daily Herald’s photos during the Brook Green School operation. It was a pretty good picture of me, seen in Roguish profile as I staged at the base of the assault ladder to go through the window of the school. One result of the publicity was that now a gaggle of protesters marched in front of our hotel, holding placards that declared me a murderer, and worse.
But I didn’t give a shit. I was too busy. My face may have become public. But my guys, thank goodness, were still unknown. And they were neither idle, nor in hiding. In his 374 B.C. work on military philosophy, The Li’ang Hsi-Huey, General Tai Li’ang, the great Chinese tactician, wrote: “The straight line is not always the most direct path to victory.” And so, I sent my men out to do what SEALs do best: sneak & peek & gather intelligence without leaving any trails or signs that they’d been in the neighborhood.
Since he was fluent in their native tongue, I sent Nigel off to pub-crawl with his pals in SO-19, Scotland Yard’s special ops and counterterrorism unit. Goober and Timex began hanging out in a couple of pubs frequented by British special forces and intel types, picking up snippets where they could. Rotten Randy kept his eyes open (and his lock-picking kits handy) around the DET Bravo offices. I wanted him to check the secure files to see if anybody was keeping secrets from us.
Digger O’Toole worked the American Embassy. Because of his charm, his flair, his conversational abilities, and most of all his long, swinging
dick, he’d already managed to form what might be called a “highly meaningful relationship” with one of the communicators at the CIA station. And while one end of him was humping her, the other end of him was pumping her. Oh, yeah, even in this new century, pillow talk is still one of the most effective ways of obtaining human-generated intelligence.
While Digger was H&P, my two most computer literate shooters, Boomerang and Nod, started playing the Internet search engines. It is absolutely amazing, friends, what you can find using what’s known as OSINT, or Open Source INTelligence, these days.
While the men toiled at their assignments, I quietly activated my support network back in the States. First, I used the secure phone to get hold of da Pepperman (real name Bill, and he’s called Pepperman because he grows ornamental bushes of fifty thousand Scoville-unit, bright red Thai peppers in front of his three-bedroom center-hall colonial in Crofton, Maryland). Pepperman is my inside guy at No Such Agency.
I caught up with the former Noo Yawka, and after the usual FYVM14 greetings, I begged, cajoled, and threatened until he promised to take a look at all the ZU-Messages, Whiskey-Number files, and Echelon intercepts over the past six or so months,15 looking for anything that might in any way relate to something called the Green Hand Defenders. Da Pepperman was somehow unhappy with my request. “Goddammit, Dick, I already have a full-time job. Do you know how much fucking work this is going to be?”
I wasn’t impressed. “What’s your point?”
There was silence on the line. And then: “You are going to owe me. Big time.”
“This won’t be the first time for that, either.”
I rang off and tried to call my old pal Jim Wink at Christians In Action. Wink’s radio call sign is Heinz 57, since he has taught counterterrorist tactics in fifty-seven varieties of countries before they promoted him to supergrade and chained him to a desk to run Langley’s CTC, or Counter Terrorism Center.
But Wink was nowhere to be found. He’d picked the locks on his shackles and escaped, his office said. He was working on some code-word project in Jordan while simultaneously trying to repair the current fractured relationship between King Abdullah’s intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, and CIA. If anybody could do that, it was Wink. Jim and Abdullah were old friends. They’d known each other so long that they were on a first name basis. By this, I mean to say that the king called Wink “Jim,” and Wink called the king “Sir.” He didn’t spell it cur, either. Anyway, Wink might be back in a couple of weeks. Or he might not be back for months.
So, next I dialed up my other top-flight source when it comes to matters of intelligence, the Brooklyn-born, Bay Ridge–bred colonel at DIA I refer to as Tony Mercaldi.16 I struck out there, too. Da Merc was on leave. In Sicily, taking a month of vacation to celebrate his twentieth wedding anniversary. This was quickly becoming Doom on Dickie time.
But as you probably know by now, we SEALs are resourceful. So I started making calls and developing new sources of information. Doing this kind of research is not easy. Indeed, gaining closely held intelligence never is. You have to be persistent, and guileful, and you have to know how far you can push people, so that they give up their info without knowing it. What works in your favor is the fact that intel people tend to stovepipe their information, not sharing it with other service branches. And so, what NSA knows is not necessarily passed on to DIA. What the Navy knows is not shared with the Army or the Air Farce.
And so I persevered. I didn’t have to like it, I just had to do it. Similarly, my guys bitched and moaned, but they also came up with results. Nothing overwhelming, but enough so that this old Roguish camel was able to get his snout under the edge of the Green Hand Defenders tent, and glimpse a little bit of what was going on inside.
Like what, you ask?
Okay, here’s what I knew by the end of the first week. And don’t skip over this stuff, because it’s going to become significant later in the book.
• Digger’s CIA communicator told him that right after a top-level meeting at MI6 three or four months ago, the London station chief had put in his retirement papers, taken terminal leave, and gone house hunting in Provence. It was station RUMINT that he’d been told about some new kind of Irish Hezb’allah and didn’t want to get involved.
I interrupted Digger’s narrative. “Hezb’allah?”
“That’s what she said,” Digger told me. “Not that they’re Arabs. But that they’re organized like Hezb’allah.”
I thought about that, and part of it made sense. What made the original Hezb’allah terror organization unique was that unlike other tango groups, Hezb’allah had been built around a single clan: the Musawis. That had made it hard to infiltrate. Now, our station chief had been told by MI6 about a terrorist group that couldn’t be infiltrated. He’d been asked to help, and, Digger continued, it was rumored that he’d demurred because he didn’t have the resources—read agents—to do the job, and didn’t want to be embarrassed by admitting it. And so, he had retired abruptly.
What did not make sense was the COS’s resignation. There had to be something else in play here, and I told Digger to go back and hump & pump until he found out what it was. The shit-eating grin on his face told me what he thought about my tossing his hyperactive Brer Lizard right back into the friendly briar bush.
• Nod DiCarlo’s on-line hunt-and-pecking uncovered the fact that credit for the five assassinations in which Americans had so far been killed had been taken by two obscure and heretofore largely ineffective IRA splinter groups, the Irish Brotherhood and the Irish People’s Army.
“I already know that,” I told him. “What’s your point?”
“My point, Skipper,” Nod said, “is that neither one of these fucking groups have ever been able to stage a successful hit. Not one of ’em. I went back ten years, looked at news clips, court records—everything I could get my hands on. None of ’em was ever able to get it together. The Irish Brotherhood lost more of its own people to bombs that went off prematurely than they ever killed. Two IPA guys once got in a fight outside a bar full of English soldiers over which one of ’em was badder, and they actually shot each other instead of setting up to ambush the Brits. Now, all of a sudden, these same IPA assholes are pulling off complex, intricate hits, and the Irish Brotherhood is planting sophisticated, complex IEDs.17 It just doesn’t make sense.”
Nod was right, of course: it didn’t make sense. But I could extrapolate one conclusion from his research that made a lot of sense—to me. Some smart, manipulative, and above all covert tango was doing the research, the mission planning, and even, perhaps, the dirty work. Then he allowed the dumb, bungling, amateurish assholes from the IPA and the Irish Brotherhood to take all the credit, and—sooner or later—the whole fall, too.
• Goober and Timex became fast friends with a retired Brit EOD sergeant major named Mike, who ran the Rose and Thorn, a pub just off Piccadilly where both active and retired Brit shooters congregated. It didn’t take more than a few gallons of Everards Beacon Bitter for them to develop the following info bits.
It seems that just about six months before we’d come to London, it was rumored that a GCHQ—that’s Government Communications Headquarters, the British version of NSA—listening device in a pub somewhere in Northern Ireland picked up what appeared to be fragments of a whispered conversation between two Green Hand Defenders.
The intercept had to do with a coordinated, two-part operation against one unnamed British and one unnamed American target, culminating in a pair of simultaneous attacks in which hundreds of Americans and British nationals, many of them VIPs, would be killed in one devastating blow. The ordnance for the assault would be delivered in eight months, and it would come from a Middle Eastern source, who would also supply much of the other material needed. Once the ordnance was obtained, only three or four more steps would be necessary until the operation could be mounted.
The eight-month wait might have seemed strange to some. But not to me. The IRA has a history of carefull
y planning its terrorist attacks. The bomb hidden by the IRA in the Grand Hotel in the British seaside city of Brighton, which almost killed British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her entire cabinet back in 1984, had been cached forty-eight days ahead of time and never discovered. That is impressive work.
There was more: according to Mike, the Brits couldn’t analyze the tape because they didn’t have the right voice-recognition program software. “Scuttlebutt is that the tapes were sent to that humongous NSA installation at Menithwood Hill, about twenty miles southwest of Birmingham, Skipper. After that—who knows.”
• Nigel told me that according to his SO-19 contacts, there’d been a real goatfuck of an MI5 op in Northern Ireland about five months previously. The cops were still laughing about it. It seems that a town called Ballynahinch had been blanketed by MI5’s top CT action group, augmented by the British spec-operators formerly known as 14th Intelligence Company,18 as well as a laundry list of other British intelligence-gathering and Special Operations units. About 3.5 million pounds sterling had been spent on the three-day op, with no evident results. According to SO-19 gossip, the political consequences for Sir Roger Holland, MI5’s embattled director general, should have been disastrous, but despite the huge and expensive fiasco, he was still firmly in place. The single slap on the wrist MI5 had received was that it had been shut out of Det Bravo when the joint counter-terrorist task force had been formed.
• Digger reported back that I’d been right: his Langley squeeze had told him that corridor gossip had the station chief resigning because he was sick and tired of being backchanneled.
Detachment Bravo Page 7