Detachment Bravo

by Richard Marcinko

  “Backchanneled?”

  “That’s what she said,” Digger repeated. “The RUMINT is, he was being cut out of all the action and he didn’t like it.”

  “Any idea what kind of action we’re talking about here, Eddie?”

  Digger shook his head. “Can’t say, Skipper—it’s way above her pay grade.”

  The following afternoon I sent Goober and Timex back to Mike’s pub and asked them to dig a little deeper, too. Why did I do that? I did it because if the Brits spent the equivalent of five and a half million dollars on a seventy-two-hour op, and it produced no results, and no one’s head rolled, they were either: (A) very flush with cash, or (B) hiding something. I believed it was the latter.

  I believed that the op had borne fruit, and that the Brits had quietly backchanneled us and asked for a covert favor or two. The one person I knew who could verify that supposition was my old comrade in arms and reluctant information-provider, Pepperman. And so, I dialed da Pepperman on the secure phone and refined my original request by asking him to review all the liaison work our Echelon people did for the Brits roughly five months ago.

  Forty-eight hours later, he called me back.

  “What are you, a fucking crystal ball reader?”

  “Say what?”

  “You sent me to dig up that… info, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I can’t get my hands on it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s all blue-tabbed PEO.19 It’s all ZU-Message reporting.”

  “Any idea what’s inside the folders?”

  Pepperman paused. “Look, Dick,” he said, “I could lose my job over this. And I need my pension. Believe me, I still have two kids to put through college.”

  “It was that sensitive?”

  “The director sent the file to the White House. From there, so the story goes—and I can’t substantiate any of it—it was taken by armed courier directly to London.”

  “London?” That was unexpected.

  “Ten Downing Street.”

  I thought about it. “Bill, you gotta help me here. Give me something I can work with. Something I can follow up. I don’t have any hooks into the PM’s office, and you know that as well as I do.”

  He started to say something, stopped himself short, and then continued. “Okay, we’re talking about a conversation that took place in Northern Ireland.”

  That was no help. “Where?”

  “Someplace called Randallstown.”

  The name rang a bell, but I was obviously having a Senior Moment, because I couldn’t come up with what it was. “So?”

  “We did some work on the intercept for our cousins,” he said noncommittally.

  That was when the bells rang and the whistles went off. Pepperman was obviously talking about the surveillance op in the Northern Ireland pub Goober and Timex had heard about. “Bill, you’re not being very helpful here.”

  “I could go to Leavenworth for what I’m telling you, Dickie.”

  “So far you haven’t told me very much.”

  Pepperman sighed. It was a long, deep, mournful sigh. He has spent his entire professional life at NSA, and he is devoted to the organization. “We used a new voice-recognition system to distinguish what was being said and separate it from the rest of what was going on in the pub.”

  “Did you say pub? My people here just picked up some bullshit about a tango plot that the Brits discovered in a pub in Northern Ireland about six months ago, but no one mentioned Randallstown. Are we talking about the same incident?”

  I was greeted with silence. Then Pepperman said, “Shit.”

  “If you don’t say something, I’ll take that for a yes, Bill.” I waited. There was nothing but sweet, confirming silence.

  Do you see what I see here? I was starting to see a pattern emerging. And so, it was time to start connecting dots. “Bill,” I said, “about a month after Randallstown, the Brits staged a huge and very expensive op in a place called Ballynahinch. Allegedly they came up dry. Did the first event have anything to do with the second one?”

  More silence. And then Pepperman said, “Thing was, that because of our voice-recognition program we were able to establish for the Brits that the accents in the first conversation were from Ballynahinch, not Randallstown. Then we programmed our Echelon equipment to sweep every phone conversation in Ballynahinch until we matched one of the voices.”20

  I asked, “Wasn’t that illegal?”

  Bill answered, “It would have been if the Brits did it.”

  In case you don’t get the significance of what Pepperman is saying here, let me explain it for you. Since the United States does not answer to the British rules of law, we eavesdrop on phones for them in their country, and since they are not subject to our laws, or have to report to Congressional oversight committees, they eavesdrop on phones for us within the United States.21

  I wasn’t about to get into the finer points of ethical conduct with him right then. (And besides, according to the TEN COMMANDMENTS OF SPECWAR©,22 you do whatever you have to do to win, right?) I pressed him hard. “What do we know, Bill? This is goddamn important to me—and it may be critical to my mission.”

  He groaned and grunted, as if he were in pain. I waited out the silence. “Dick,” he finally said, “if I were you, I’d start looking at a company called Globex and a kid called Kelley—that’s spelled with an e and a y—who owns it.”

  Globex? Globex was the selfsame corporation that had paid for the ad campaign that was plastering my Roguish puss on double-decker buses and protesters’ placards. And now I was being told that Globex had something to do with a five-million-dollar-plus covert op in Northern Ireland, a series of Echelon intercepts, and a Whiskey-Number message that had been sent directly from the White House to Ten Downing Street.

  My friends, there is a God. And so far as I am concerned, He is the God of War. He is the fearsome, Unnamable Name of the Old Testament, who wreaks vengeance on profaners and sinners and his enemies and slays them all—every single fucking one. That’s my kind of God. So if, by chance, the selfsame Globex corporation that had been gibbeting moi in a negative public-relations campaign had anything whatsoever to do with the death of Butch Wells, or the Brook Green School hostage-taking I’d just been flayed over, I’d wreak my own form of Old Testament, Roguish vengeance on Globex—and the people who owned it.

  But that would come much later. Meanwhile, Pepperman was talking. “Look, Dick,” he said. “I gotta go now. I gotta make the world safe for democracy.”

  “Bill,” I said, “thanks. You have been more help than you know.”

  “No prob,” Pepperman told me. “But, hey, Dick?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s not that I don’t like you. But don’t call me again. Not for at least six months, okay? This one’s gonna get just a little bit hot.”

  It took me about sixty-eight seconds to punch the word Globex into the Google.com search engine on my Dell Latitude. Globex, I discovered a few nanoseconds later, was a software program that takes Sun Computer Systems’ Java software ten steps further in helping different types of programs communicate with one another. Globex software was a key part of many Fortune 500 computer systems. The company, which had gone public nineteen months previously, was controlled by Gerry and Gwilliam Kelley, two of Northern Ireland’s most prominent software billionaires. Yeah, billionaires. For the past two years, Globex’s annual capitalization had been well into the high twelve figures, and the Kelleys’ stock options alone put them at number sixty-nine in the Forbes Four Hundred.

  I did some more research. Gerry and Gwilliam Kelley were a pair of gregarious twentysomethings from Ballynahinch who, within the past half decade, had transmogrified themselves from a couple of hackers with desktop computers in a rented garage, into a two-thousand-employee corporation of internationally known and respected software providers. According to articles in Business Week and Fortune, the Kelleys were smart, shrewd, and politically
very well connected. A huge photograph of the two of them at Bayley’s Hill, Gerry’s sixty-acre estate just outside Sevenoaks, Kent, southeast of London, showed an attractive, even striking pair. Gwilliam was the younger Kelley—twenty-two according to the magazine clips. He had an impetuous, curled-lipped, Euro-trash look to him as he stood, his arm crooked against one of the estate’s gateposts, red mud on the toe of his loafer, dressed in what looked to be a five-thousand-quid23 suit.

  Gerry Kelley was twenty-four. He was tall, and gangling, with a mop of unruly, curly, carrot red hair, and dark, passionate, fiery eyes. In the picture, he was holding a tennis racquet, the ragged jeans low around his hips revealing high-hitched patterned boxer shorts, a UCLA sweatshirt that had been cut back into a T, and old, duct-taped running shoes, looking somewhat like a tall, thin, muscular version of a college sophomore from some midwestern university. Gerry was the brains behind the company—the programmer who’d been known to closet himself for weeks of hunt and pecking on the keyboard. Gwilliam, as baby-faced as whatsisface Cappuccino from Titanic, was Mister Personality. He handled sales and marketing, and managed the company’s considerable outside investment portfolios, which included a venture-capital fund focused on developing the economy in Northern Ireland, and Mrs. Kelley’s Kitchen, a string of Irish-pub-themed, highly profitable saloon franchises in Germany, France, Argentina, and the United States.

  Next, I dug up the list of franchisees for the bars and asked Digger to have his squeeze wash them through the Christians In Action database. Why did I do that? Because bars and restaurants are a great way to move a lot of cash without leaving very many tracks. In the United States, La Cosa Nostra uses bars and restaurants to launder its money. So do the cocaine cartels and the Russian vory.24 I wanted to see if the Kelleys were allied with anyone in Russian organized crime, or South American drug smuggling.

  I began to pass the Kelleys and Globex along to my support network of chiefs, gunnery sergeants, and grunts. If Gerry and Gwilliam were making ripples almost anywhere around the globe, I’d learn about it. And here is a piece of intelligence-gathering truth, my friends. When you are looking for hard information, it is more productive to know the gunny who runs an embassy’s Marine security detail than it is to go to dinner with the friggin’ ambassador. The ambassador’s too busy passing out cookies to hear anything worthwhile. But ol’ gunny has his ear to the ground. He’s heard the rumors. He’s got his antenna up. And so, I started casting my net—worldwide.

  Finally, I pulled an all-nighter and did my own intensive research on the brothers Kelley, owners of Globex, Ltd. The company was headquartered five miles north of Ballynahinch in a compound that had obviously been modeled after the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington. But the Kelleys didn’t live in Northern Ireland anymore. You already know that Gerry, who the Times rumored to be on the short list for a peerage, has his sixty acres in Sevenoaks. But I discovered he also kept a nineteenth-century carriage house on Hay’s Mews, just off Berkeley (pronounced Barkley) Square, in London’s Mayfair district, not six blocks from the American Embassy. I browsed the photos on the Architectural Digest Web site and discovered that his “carriage house” was actually two adjacent Victorian structures that had been gutted and crocheted together. The result was spectacular. Oh, yeah: Gerry (or his decorator) had discrimination. Belay that. Gerry had something better than discrimination. He had money.

  But I wasn’t looking at those photos to see Gerry’s taste in art and fabric. I was looking to see where he lived. Even though the photos didn’t reveal his address, I was able to figure out exactly where the house was located by analyzing the pictures and comparing them to an exceptionally detailed map of Central London streets.

  Gwilliam, whose string of pubic … whoops, excuse me, that was public relationships with bulimic-looking VERBs25 was regularly chronicled (and amply photographed) in the Mirror and the Sun, owned an eighteenth-century row house in Hampstead, two doors away from where the poet John Keats had once lived, as well as a hilltop villa on the French Riviera, halfway between Nice and Cap Ferrat, from which he could keep an eye on the Kelleys’ 293-foot oceangoing yacht, the Báltaí.

  I found a short picture spread on Báltaí, which the Kelley brothers had bought only nine months ago, in the Observer Sunday magazine. The interior was Keep It Simple, Stupid modern, down to the lavish use of ultramodernistic stainless steel, copper, and brass fixtures and cutting-edge communications devices and computer systems. The boat came complete with a small covered swimming pool on the aft end of the quarterdeck, a chopper pad (the chopper, an Aérospatiale Écureuil [squirrel] AS-350 according to the article, its rotors obviously folded, was domed over with an outsize plastic pod, giving it the look of those radome telecommunications antennas you see at Fort Meade when you visit No Such Agency), and a permanent crew of twelve.

  When it wasn’t anchored near Cap Ferrat, it could take Gwilliam and his VERBs on long cruises. Put the emphasis on long, please: Báltaí’s range was just over 5,100 nautical miles at its cruising speed of thirty-three knots, with slightly less range at flank speed, which was just over forty knots. She was sleek—and she was almost as fast as one of Admiral Arleigh Burke’s destroyers

  Indeed, Gwilliam, I read in the electronic version of the Daily Telegraph, was currently somewhere overseas, ostensibly checking up on the ever-expanding world of Mrs. Kelley’s Kitchen franchises. But thanks to my noncom support net, I could be a lot more precise than the Telegraph. According to a piece of E-mail from a gunny named Jarriel, Gwilliam Kelley was currently conjugating one of his VERBs in the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires. That put Gwilliam beyond my reach—at the moment. But, according to the latest newspaper OSINT, Gerry the cherry was right here in London.

  I checked the big-watch-tiny-pecker timepiece on my left wrist. 0500 hours. I debated the likely consequences of taking some direct action vis-à-vis the Kelleys for perhaps thirty seconds, then resolved to pay Gerry an early morning visit.

  Now, I understood that there would be consequences to my action. Under normal circumstances one does not go a-calling on one’s enemies. In fact, it is probably a good idea to keep one’s enemies at arm’s length, relationshipwise, so that he/she/it can be demonized in an impersonal way. It makes killing ’em so much easier. But there are times when the rules should be broken, and this was one of them. I wanted to take the measure of this man. If my instincts told me he was dirty (and my instincts seldom are wrong), I wanted to shake him up and make him act precipitously. And so, I decided that a social call was in order, even though I hadn’t brought any engraved formal calling cards with me. That was okay. I always carry something far more effective than a calling card when it comes to making up-close-and-personal introductions. I pack a pistol.

  6

  SOMETIMES, AS GENERAL TAI LI’ANG WROTE, ONE TAKES the indirect path to victory. But in other cases, the straightmost course is best. That’s one of the reasons flexibility in all situations is the sign of the true Warrior. Besides, it has always been my practice to take the measure of a man eyeball to eyeball, not by reading news clips, analysts’ reports, magazine profiles, or bureaucratic memoranda. And so, I secured my research and made sure my men knew their assignments for the day. Then I showered, threw on a fresh suit, tucked my P7-M8 into an inside-the-pants holster, and made ready to hit the streets. (Yes, I know that handguns are completely outlawed in Britain. But I’m not British, I’m Roguish. And I also know that ever since handguns were banned, the rate of violent crime here in Britain has skyrocketed. That’s because when guns are banned, only the criminals have guns. Remember that, the next time some gun-grabbing candidate is running for office and vote accordingly.)

  So, here is the Rogue Warrior’s First Law of Self-Preservation: we of the Roguish persuasion practice on the range at least twice a week. And then, we carry our guns on the job. All the time. No matter what the rules may say.

  It was just before 0630 hours when I took the fire stairs to the ground floor of t
he hotel, made my way through the small but cozy reception area, and pushed my way through the double doors onto Half Moon Street. It was far too early for any protesters, who tend to sleep late because their fucking work is so demanding. It had rained overnight and the streets were slick. But it wasn’t too cold, and the sky was clear. I peered up the street toward Piccadilly, glancing at the sparse traffic. Then I turned left and started toward Curzon Street.

  It didn’t take me more than the half block between the hotel’s front door and the dry cleaners on the opposite corner to realize that I wasn’t alone. As I came out of the hotel, a maroon taxi that had been idling perhaps sixty yards back, growled into gear and eased onto the narrow asphalt street at a crawl. And a pair of baby-faced U2s,26 one in a shiny ill-fitting shit brown suit and the other a greasy leather boy clad in a black leather jacket, thick wool turtleneck, and jeans, moved out of the apartment house doorway just off Piccadilly where they’d been lurking, flicked their cigarettes into the gutter, and started marching in syncopated lockstep, thirty yards behind me.

  Who were they? I had no idea. More to the point, I didn’t give an F-word who they were. Not right now. Right now I had other priorities. Besides, from the look of them and their lack of subtlety, they were amateurs: anti-Rogue student protesters, perhaps, hoping to buttonhole me. Or more maliciously, tango wannabes from the Irish Brotherhood or IPA, the gangs-that-couldn’t-shoot-straight groups Nod DiCarlo had been researching.

  The bottom line was, it didn’t matter who they were. I wasn’t about to waste an hour engaging in a long and complicated cleaning route to shake this tail. Nor was I going to go offensive and take the assholes out. I didn’t need trouble, or complications, this morning. I had a mission to fulfill. And so I decided to KISS them off. That meant keeping it all very simple, stupid, and keeping on schedule.