I didn’t recognize the name but Mick did. He pulled the file from our DET Bravo database. O’Donnell was a TIRA killer who had served sixteen years in a British prison for murder, arms dealing, and bomb making. He’d been freed during one of the many Tony Blair amnesties of the late 1990s, renounced the IRA for being soft, and made his way to Argentina, where he raised money for IRA splinter groups like the TIRA tangos who’d taken over the Brook Green School. In fact, when Mick and I cross-checked, we discovered that four suspected TIRA tango assholes were currently in BA. They all worked for the Mrs. Kelley’s Kitchen franchise, too. Like I said, in my profession there are no coincidences.
More to the point was this: Argentina is a hotbed of radical Islamic fundamentalism. No, I am being serious. There is more to Argentina than red wine, great steaks, and tango dancers. But tango dancers aren’t the only sorts of tangos in Argentina. There are tangos there who have nothing to do with dancing. For example, Hezb’allah is active. So is the Islamic Jihad Organization. So is Hamas. There are large Palestinian and Iraqi communities in Misiones Province in the north of the country. Misiones is a kind of landlocked peninsula between Paraguay and Brazil. And according to Mick, Misiones was the figurative headwaters for a huge river of black market weapons, which flowed from Brazil and Paraguay, ending hundreds of miles later in the smuggler’s paradise of the Tigre delta, about twenty miles northwest of downtown Buenos Aires. From Tigre, Argentina’s fundamentalist Islamic community could move the arms through Argentina, shipping them out of the big port of Buenos Aires, or take them across the Río de la Plata to the more loosely controlled Uruguayan cities of Colonia or Montevideo, from where they could easily be shipped anywhere in the world.
The intel we’d originally received indicated that the arms the GHD planned to use against their target would come from the Middle East. I had always assumed—so had Mick—that meant originating in a Middle Eastern country. But that’s because I’d forgotten Everett Emerson Barrett’s credo, which he repeated more times than I care to remember, to us fledgling tadpoles. “Never ASSUME,” Chief Barrett would tell us. “Because ASSUME makes an ASS of U and ME.”
So, what if the arms dealers were of Middle Eastern origin—Palestinians, or Lebanese from Hamas, Hezb’allah, or the IJO—but they actually lived in Argentina, Paraguay, or Brazil?
A lot of the pieces for an op in that part of the world were in place, so far as I was concerned. Brendan O’Donnell was a bonafide no-goodnik. He was a stone-cold killer, an arms dealer, and most important, a bomb maker. He managed Gwilliam Kelley’s bar franchise in Buenos Aires.
Four TIRA tangos were also on scene, and there was a convenient arms and ordnance market available to them. Both Britain and the United States maintained sizeable diplomatic communities in Argentina. We already knew that Brendan O’Donnell had motive. But we also now realized that he had the means to kill large numbers of victims, as well as the opportunity—a large number of potential targets. To me, there was only one possible reaction, and it included making reservations to Buenos Aires.
I told Mick what I was thinking, and he immediately agreed. That just floored me. I mean, the guy was putting his star—indeed, his whole career—on the line for me. Not one general in a hundred would do that these days. I looked across the table at Mick. “You don’t have to do this,” I said. “I don’t give a shit about my career. I’m never gonna get another stripe. But you have an incredible future in front of you.”
“Oh, hell, man,” Mick said, his face serious, “the only thing that really matters is getting our friggin’ jobs done, by which I mean making sure these assholes don’t get their friggin’ job done.” But, he counseled, anything we did would have to be done stealthily. We’d have to leave a crew behind to make waves in London in order to keep Eamon the Demon off my back and Sir Roger, MI5’s director general, off his.
That made perfect sense. Moreover, I wanted to keep an eye on Gerry Kelley. If I had hocked Gerry’s choinik,31 as Avi Ben Gal is fond of saying, then he’d be speeding up his schedule. I wanted to blanket him with surveillance: follow his every move, tap his phones, slip beacons on his vehicles—the whole full-court press.
But that kind of surveillance is labor intensive. And neither Mick nor I had huge crews of people available to us. But lack of numbers has never hampered SEALs. Boomerang, Rotten Randy, and Timex were each level-four fluent in Spanish. They’d make the trip with me. The remainder, Nod, Goober, Nigel, and Digger O’Toole, would work the streets in London in a joint CT op with Mick’s SAS shooters. They’d handle any DET Bravo problems, and keep Gerry Kelley under close surveillance. It would be demanding, time-consuming work that would cut into the usual pub crawling and pussy chasing. But they’d do it.
Mick wouldn’t travel alone, either. He’d bring an Arabic-speaking SAS trooper named Hugo, just in case we had to ask up-close-and-personal questions to any IJO scumbags we might come across.
One serious question was how we’d get to Buenos Aires in combat-ready mode without attracting any attention. It is hard to move heavy locked boxes of arms and explosives across international borders when you are trying to travel in mufti. It is even more difficult when your own government has to be kept in the dark.
Actually, the keeping-our-government-in-the-dark aspect of this stealth op was the easiest problem to deal with. We simply dropped off everyone’s radar screens. First, I waited until 1735 hours, five minutes past the scheduled workday, to make sure that Eamon, who never worked a minute beyond his allotted eight hours (which includes his two-hour lunch) had left North Audley Street. Then I called his office and asked his secretary (“Oh, he’s just left? I’m soooo disappointed…”) to pass the admiral a UNODIR32 message that I was doing some in-depth research and would be out of touch for a few days—maybe a week or so, maybe more. By the time Eamon learned anything, I’d be long gone.
Meanwhile, Mick met his MI5 cutout over a double whiskey at White’s on St. James’s Street and said much the same thing. Then we went out and bought a few warm-weather items (it was going to be late spring in BA). Mick, who’d been to Argentina operating covertly during the Falklands War, handled the hotel accommodations. I took care of making airline reservations, and that was that.
You want to know how we smuggled all our stuff on commercial flights. The answer is that we didn’t. We left it all—CQC gear, diving equipment, weapons, ammo, and explosives—behind, and traveled like weekend tourists, with carry-ons and dressed in civilian clothes. We went singly and in pairs, too—not as a group. Half a dozen large, muscular young men tend to stand out when they travel together, and standing out was something I did not want us to do. Moreover, when we fly on commercial aircraft, my men and I may carry military documents and burgundy “official” passports, but we travel with blue-jacketed civilian U.S. passports. That way we do not attract a lot of undue attention as we pass through airports or cross international borders. Mick’s people follow a similar operational mode. It was all a lot less complicated than you might think. And so, we made our way to Buenos Aires with just our tourist passports. No guns, no gear, and no idea where to begin our search.
Part Two
PAIN
9
SO, HERE’S THE BOTTOM LINE: I SET UP COMMUNICATIONS lines so I could stay in contact with Nod. Then I took the Chunnel train to Paris, where I caught an Aerolíneas Argentinas nonstop flight from Charles de Gaulle Airport. Thirteen hours later I wheeled down at BA’s Ezeiza International Airport, and passed through Customs and Immigration without any problems. I hired one of the local Remises (prepay taxis) from the airport and headed into the city.
As I’m going, there are a few things you might want to know about Argentina, and about Buenos Aires. The most basic is that in Argentina, dollars and pesos are interchangeable. The exchange rate is one to one. And so, we’d pay our way in greenbacks with no problemas. Second, Buenos Aires is huge. The city encompasses hundreds of square miles. The population is just over twelve million people. In
deed, more than a third of the Argentine population lives in Buenos Aires. Third, every single one of those twelve million people thinks he or she is Mario fucking Andretti. Put an Argentine in a car, and you have an instant Formula One race driver. And so, the trip into town reminded me of the cut-to-the-chase training sessions we used to have at BSR raceway in West Virginia, where we honed our tactical driving skills by playing bumper tag at 130 miles an hour. Lemme tell you: riding in a Remise can be a white-knuckle experience even to those of us of the Roguish persuasion.
I clambered unsteadily out of the taxi on a small, cobblestone plaza in Recoleta, right in the center of town. I looked around. I’d always been told that BA is like Paris. Actually, at first glance it was nicer than Paris. The weather was better, and the people were certainly more friendly. Parisians almost never smile. Porteños, which translates roughly as “port people” and is how the Buenos Aires natives are called, had a Latin sparkle in their eyes. And the Porteñas—you make your own translation here—Hoo Yah! Lemme tell you right now, having only been on the ground for an hour or so, the women in Argentina were something wondrous to behold.
I did a quick recon. Directly in front of me were the thick, unimposing double glass doors of the Hotel Étoile. Off to one side of the entrance were two bright red public phone booths, exact copies of what they had in 1950s London. At my back was a small, triangular park filled with a dozen young men and women, each holding eight, nine, ten happy, smiling, tail-wagging dogs on leashes. Couples sat on benches under the shade trees. Roller-bladers cruised the narrow, winding paths, slaloming among the pedestrians. Directly behind the park loomed the huge, ornate gate of the Cementerio de la Recoleta, the huge, nineteenth-century necropolis where Eva Perón, among others, lies in her mausoleum. And off to my port and my starboard were a series of bustling outdoor cafés, filled with a boisterous, lunchtime crowd. White-jacketed waiters carried trays of steaks, salads, omelets, and sandwiches. There were mugs of foam-topped draft beer and carafes of red and white wine. It was like a fucking midday carnival.
I paused long enough to do a quick look-see. The tables were filled with an eclectic mix. There were suit-and-tie businessmen working cellular phones in pursuit of profit. There were tables of VERBs in Chanel and Lanvin, sipping bottled water and picking at endive salads as their cigarettes, marked with thin rims of lipstick, sent narrow columns of smoke skyward in the still spring air. A pair of lovers sitting side by side stroked each other’s faces, shoulders, and arms, their omelets untouched. Two casually dressed men in their twenties sitting opposite one another worked feverishly on laptops connected to cellular modems.
From somewhere off to my port side, I caught a shrill whistle. I turned and looked. Fifty yards away, at the largest of the cafés, protected from the adjacent street by a six-foot hedge of green, Mick Owen was standing, a smile on his face, beckoning to me. He was with Hugo, Boomerang, Rotten Randy Michaels, Timex, and a stranger in a suit and tie, who were in animated conversation seated around a small, white table under the shade of a huge, white beach umbrella that alternately bore the logo of Old Smuggler Scotch whiskey and ornate script spelling out the words La Biela.
I slung my bag strap over my shoulder, threaded my way through the maze of crowded tables, snagging a vacant black plastic armchair as I went, and dragged it toward them.
Boomerang looked past the Art Deco, obviously Paris-influenced streetlamp, squinting vaguely in my direction as I approached. He was wearing a loud Hawaiian print shirt, jeans, and sandals. The former surfer had been on the ground for less than a day but he’d already managed to pick up a fair amount of color. He raised his Oakleys onto his high forehead and his face took on a huge grin as I hove up to the tableside. “Buenos días, Pibe.33 ¿Cómo está usted?”
“Todo bien, gracias. ¿Y usted?” I dropped my carry-on next to Timex, who was eagerly working his way through a bottle of Quilmes, the local beer, and plunked myself down.
Boomerang sipped his pastel-colored jugo. “Piola.”34 He jerked his thumb toward the thin stranger sitting with the group and said, “This is Robert Evers, Boss Dude. He’s Mick’s friend from the embassy.”
From the way Robert Evers looked he was an indubitable Robert. Let me explain. Before I became a complicated, complex, multifaceted Richard, I was just a simple Dick. Not this guy. He’d never been a Bob—always a Robert. He wore the same sort of embassy uniform common to senior American and Brit diplomats worldwide: a gray pinstriped suit, starched white shirt, and a green tie that told me he was a member of the Naval and Military Club of London. He was younger than Mick or me—late twenties or perhaps early thirties—with flecks of prematurely gray hair around the temples and the kind of unremarkable face that you don’t ever quite remember. In other words, he was an archetypal spook.
I reached across the glass-topped table and extended my hand. “Dick Marcinko, Robert. Good to meet you.”
His grip was firm and dry. “Robert Evers, Mr. Marcinko. Good to meet you, too.”
Mick jumped in. “Robert’s a political officer at our embassy. Been here just over a year.”
“You must like it.”
Evers looked at me. “It has its moments,” he said cryptically.
The formalities over, I waved at a waiter, ordered a double espresso, then looked back at Robert Evers. “So, here we are—a group of average tourists. What are the best sights for us to see?”
“Oh, I gather you won’t be staying in BA long enough to visit very many of the sights,” Evers said.
I decided to follow his lead. “Oh?”
“No,” Evers continued. “From what Mr. Owen told me, you chaps are anxious to take a trip up-country and get out in the bush. Just as you arrived, I was suggesting to Mr. Owen and your chaps that you visit Misiones Province and do a little camping.”
I know all about Misiones Province—and so do you. Remember? That’s where Palestinian and Lebanese arms dealers smuggle weapons across the loosely watched Brazilian and Paraguayan borders, so they can be brought by truck or boat down the network of roads and rivers that finally lead to the Delta del Parana, near the town of Tigre, where they’re cached in the thousand-plus square miles of swamp and grassland that extends from the federal capital region into Entre Ríos Province. I grinned at Robert Evers. I do so like it when you can speak in code right out in the open. “That sounds about right,” I said. “I’m a big believer in Outward Bound sorts of activities. They’re good for building character.” I paused. “Of course, I’d like to do a little hunting, too, if that’s possible.”
“Oh, the hunting is very good in Misiones these days,” Robert Evers said. “But you’ll have to be quick about it because the game moves very fast, and can be tremendously difficult to track unless you’re proficient.”
“We always try to be good when it comes to tracking game. In fact, the challenge is in the tracking.” I waited until a waiter slid my coffee in front of me, said gracias, and then continued once he’d withdrawn, “I’d like to get going within a few days.”
“I’d suggest that you move even sooner than ‘a few days,’” Evers said. “The hunting season in Misiones is actually quite short.”
“So, we should leave by when?”
“I would recommend that you depart by tomorrow evening at the latest,” Evers said.
I looked at Mick. “How does that sound to you, Mick?”
Mick’s face was impassive. “From everything I’ve heard, I’d have to say Robert’s suggestions seem to be right on the money, Richard.”
“Well, that still gives us a full day for sightseeing, doesn’t it?” I asked. I looked past Evers. Two young men, each with about a dozen dogs, made their way down the sidewalk toward the corner, a four-lane thoroughfare crammed with taxis and cars gunning their motors as the drivers waited for the lights to change.
“Hey, Robert,” I said, pointing, “what’s with all the dogs?”
He followed my finger. “Ah,” he said. “Those are a staple of the Buenos Ai
res lifestyle. We call them pasaperros. It means professional dog-walkers.” He gestured at the high-rise apartment houses crammed close together on the streets that bordered the small park. “There are, so the story goes, three million dogs in this city. And Porteños love their dogs. They pamper their dogs. So, the people who live in flats hire professional dog-walkers—pasaperros—to take the dogs out two or three or even four times a day and exercise them. It’s quite a sight, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “Does this happen all over the city?”
“Wherever there are high-end flats,” Evers said. “In the poor neighborhoods the dogs run free. In the neighborhoods where there are villas, the dogs get exercise in their own private backyards. Mostly, you see it here in Recoleta and the Barrio Norte, or in the upper-class barrios—that’s how they refer to neighborhoods here—of apartment flats like Belgrano, San Telmo, or the Microcentro.”
Live and learn. “I guess there’s a lot to see here.”
“I’m still a neophyte,” Evers said. “And I’ve been roaming the city on a serious basis for a year.”
I’ll bet he had been doing his roaming on a serious basis. Lemme tell you, if you want to get to know a city well, go out with a seasoned, gifted intelligence officer. Good case officers know every back alley, every side street, and every nook and cranny of a city, because when they go out to meet with their agents, they can’t ever get lost or become confused about where they are. They have to be able to ACT, because they must always consider themselves under surveillance. And so, they take the time to learn the cities in which they operate.
“We probably don’t have any time for sightseeing,” I said. “But we’ll need dinner tonight, and I think it would be nice to find a place where we could have a few brewskis. Any suggestions?”
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