That sort of chutzpah wasn’t appreciated. I stomped his instep—ineffective, dammit, because he was wearing these big high-top Dr. Martens steel-reinforced boondockers. He caught me with his free hand—a solid blow to my big, wide, Slovak snout that brought tears to my eyes.
Oh, that hurt. But there was no time to deal with the pain. I slammed him in the balls, which bent him forward, and followed up with a quick backhand to the face with the trailing edge of my fist. But the ScheiBkerl27 had my hair wrapped around his hand and wasn’t letting go.
I shifted gears, wound up, and elbowed him in the gut as hard as I fucking could. Progress: I dropped Herr Vier Ringen to his knees. But he took me with him (I told you, he vas a ScheiBkerl), slamming my chin against the edge of the bar hard enough to loosen several molars as he dragged me floorward. Yeah: right into the huge, fucking puddle of fucking lumpy fucking puke (you remember the aforementioned puke; it’s courtesy of Boomerang’s fucking sucker punch). Since Mister Murphy saw fit to make an appearance at this point in the festivities, I (of course) careened into said fucking puke face first, catching a good snoutful of the stuff.
Believe it or not, that was GNBN. BN is that puke stinks. GN is that puke be as slippery as a horny seventeen-year-old prom queen’s pussy. And more BN (for Herr Vier Ringen) was that I am a former pea-snorting, spaghetti-inhaling geek enlisted man. In fact, as a young tadpole, I used to trade snot with my teammates. So, practiced in the green arts, I simply snorted puke and kept on going. Herr Vier Ringen, on der other hand, tried his best to keep his face out of the stuff. That was BN for him and GN for me. While he was scrambling ass over teakettle, I broke away, swung my right arm, and caught him nicely with my elbow, nailing him in the cheek with a solid thwack, sending him pukeward on his back.
Herr Vier Ringen struggled, cockroachlike, to regain his hands and knees. He crawled doorward through the puke. I grabbed him by his ankles and dragged him back, facedown, to me. Desperate, he caught hold of a bar stool and pulled it between us.
Lemme tell you something, folks: when you are spending all your energy trying to hold on to a bar stool, you are not trying to kill the ol’ Rogue. That gave me the opening I needed. I pulled myself up the length of his body as if I were going up a caving ladder. Using my forearm, I smashed the back of his head into the floor, wrestled the stool away from him, and used it to leverage myself onto my feet, then I reversed it, brought it around by the legs, and swung it—fore!—like a fucking golf club, catching him square in the Adam’s apple as he struggled to regain his own footing. He collapsed mit much gürgeln und schpittin’ der teeth.
I’d just started to admire my handiwork (don’t I ever learn?), when another FSK28 armed with a yardlong length of chrome tire chain launched himself across the floor in my direction, traveling chain-first, a nasty expression on his round, double-chinned FSK face. Oh—he was another big, fat one, with a shaved head and a blond mustache that gave him the look of the guy on the Mister Clean liquid detergent labels.
Feeling my oats like a fucking thoroughbred, I whirled away just as the fucking steel came down toward my head. The chain slashed past my ear, heading for my shoulder, and would have broken my clavicle, except that I got the fucking bar stool up in time. The wood took the brunt of the hit, shattering, but absorbing the energy of the blow. I reached out, grabbed the end of the chain, and—since I’m a damn Yankee, I yankeed hard and reeled the lard-laden asshole toward me.
But FSK realized what I was up to—and so he charged, closing the distance between us faster than I would have liked. But it didn’t matter—you see, I had taken control of his fucking chain. And since I bench-press 450 pounds, 155 times a day, rain or shine, hung out or hung over, on the outdoor weight pile at Rogue Manor, I am very much stronger than your average, everyday skinhead. I am, in point of fact, very much stronger than your above-average, extraordinary skinhead. I am also more Roguish, which means I’m nastier, too.
So, as I reeled the sonofabitch in, I was wrapping his chain around my hand and arm. And since he’d obliged me by getting up close and personal, I decided to do the same with him. I stepped up and caught him with a downward, sledgehammer blow from my chain-augmented fist—wham!—right above the heart. His eyes crossed, an incredulous, porkish expression came over his face, and he collapsed into the puke puddle beneath his feet.
Quickly I scanned, searching for other threats, but there were none.
“All clear, Skipper,” BH called out.
Boomerang shook his head. “Negatory. Not fucking clear, yet, Baby Huey.”
He turned the tadpole to starboard to observe as Rodent upended the last standing FSK, ran him headfirst into the bar, and stood back as the Kraut krumpled kaput.
“Now we’re all clear,” he said. He put his arm around the young man’s shoulder. “That’s the third fuckup, kid—it’s time for you to start paying some fuckin’ attention to what you do. You almost got Boss Dude and me whacked on the Kuz Emeq when you said the chopper deck was clear, but it wasn’t, and we had to take out somebody you should have dealt with. Just now, you almost blew our fuckin’ cover. And here you go again, shoutin’ ‘Clear’ when it ain’t clear yet.” He paused. “Baby Huey, my man, you better start payin’ better attention to detail if you’re gonna make it in this little unit of ours.”
Gator Shepard, who wasn’t even breathing hard, nodded in agreement. “Amen to that, bro.”
Baby Huey’s round baby face fell. He clenched his fists. “Hey, look, I was just trying—”
“Look, BH,” Gator said, “we don’t try. We do. There’s a difference.”
Duck Foot put his hands up. “Yo, kiddo, lemme tell you what a chief once told me when I was an FNG at Team Four. He said the most important thing I could do was S2—which meant I should sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up, and learn from the more experienced guys.”
“You wouldn’t be here if Boss Dude didn’t think you had potential, my man,” Boomerang said. “But be cool. Lay back. Like Duck Foot says, S2. Learn how we work as a team. Then you become part of it.”
“Because if you don’t,” Nod said, “your ass is gonna go out the door. We don’t have room for loners.”
Baby Huey stood there, his big eyes moving from one SEAL to another. Finally, he nodded, and swallowed hard. “Got it,” he said, his big jaw moving up and down.
Gator clapped him on the back. “Cool.”
I watched as they all piled on BH as if he’d just scored an eighty-yard touchdown, tackling him, roughing him up, rolling him around in the puke. Now, this is why I truly love my men. I didn’t have to ream Baby Huey a new asshole. My men did the job for me. And did it in the Old Navy style, by which I mean the kind of tough talk that inspires, stimulates, and motivates. Moreover, from the way they were acting, I knew they’d accepted the kid, flaws and all. And they’d told him in no uncertain terms that from here on in he’d have to pull his own weight or he’d be gone. But their actions had said, “You’re one of us.”
“Screw all this touchy-feely shit. I need a fucking beer,” Rodent chirped, separating himself from the pile of puke-coated bodies. The tiny SEAL vaulted the bar and began searching for unbroken glassware. “Any of you assholes want to join me?”
“We all will,” Half Pint said. “But we’d better drink quick, then get back to the hotel and clean up. I mean, I don’t wanna walk around stinking of some fucking skinhead asshole’s puke. We’re supposed to be low profile, ain’t we, Skipper?”
It was 1948 before we arrived, double-time, in front of the Alt Deutsche Weinstube. Like most of the wine cellars in the Altstadt the restaurant was built into a three-story timber-framed, seventeenth-century house, with wonderful vaulted roof, dormer windows, and intricate gables. We cut around the wide market square in front of the Dom29 and turned into the Altstadt, jogging along narrow cobblestone streets, slaloming past knots of locals walking their dogs, tourists gawking at the sights, and university students threading their way home on the sorts of ubiquito
us, old-fashioned single-gear bicycles one can still see in Europe.
Outside the wine cellar, a dozen or so tables were filled with groups of Krauts in animated conversation. We slowed down, split up, ambled closer, and recced the folks sitting al fresco from a distance. Baby Huey and Boomerang window-shopped the souvenir stand ten yards downstream from the tables to make sure there was no one nasty lurking in the shadows. Half Pint, Nod, and I perused the display window of a wine store while we took the street’s pulse from the upstream side. And Duck Foot, Gator, and Rodent—all animals of the party kind, after all—checked for beaver and pussy at Murphy’s Farm, one of the Irish pub franchises that are so popular in Germany these days, which sat diagonally across from the wine cellar.
It didn’t take long for me to sense that everything was kosher. Now, if circumstances had been different, I’d have broken us into three groups, run three separate SDRs—that’s Surveillance Detection Routes—and been in position by 1700, watching, looking, and listening to see if any bad guys were in the neighborhood. Frankly, urban countersurveillance is much more difficult than it is in the field. In the boonies, you dig in, camouflage your position, and wait for the flora and the fauna to go back to their natural patterns—birds singing, crickets chirping, and insects buzzing. If those patterns are disturbed you know that there’s someone else in your neighborhood. Same thing goes for a small town. In the Kraut Kuntryside (or just about any other rural location anywhere in the world), a stranger fallt entsetzlich auf—schticks out like der sore thumb.
But in the city, things are much harder. Instead of listening to the sounds of nature, you have to search for untoward patterns—teams of watchers passing through on a regular, or irregular basis. Customers at the street cafés who don’t blend in with the regulars. But how do you know? Cities like Mainz (and Rome, and Paris, and London) are populated with transients, and tourists, and one-day-trippers, as well as the huge pool of residents. Oh, sure, you can handle things if you have a week or two to detect those normal patterns. But to do it in a day, or worse, in a couple of hours, is virtually impossible. And so, I’ve discovered that urban countersurveillance requires a sixth sense kind of gestalt, which you must develop over time. I treat it the same way I deal with taking point: I follow my instincts.
Tonight, my instincts told me things were okay. No hair was standing up on the back of my neck; no klaxon horn was sounding; the bullshit meter that sits below and behind my pussy detector read “zero.” This was no ambush. No setup. And so, after twenty-five minutes of watching for watchers and spying none, I signaled the guys, we assembled, and made our way past the crowded outdoor tables, through the narrow open door, and inside the candlelit restaurant.
It was one of those old-fashioned places made up of half a dozen or so small rooms filled with tables. The ceilings were low and accented by real, antique hand-hewn beams. The tables were heavy and ornately carved, as were all the chairs.
I squeezed past a knot of English tourists working their way toward the front door and squinted into the dimly lit room directly in front of us but didn’t see anyone I recognized. I began to move toward a small alcove to my left, when a maître d’ in a well-worn, shiny double-breasted tux approached, a fistful of menus in his hand.
“Willkommen,” he said, a big smile on his perspiring face. “Gut naben, mein herren.”
I answered him in kind.
He ignored my German and continued in flawless English. “And how many will you be tonight?” he asked, shifting so he could peer past my shoulder.
“We’re eight—but we’re meeting someone,” I said. “A Mister Smith. Has he arrived yet?”
“Ach, sooo—Herr Schmidt,” he said. “So, you are his party.” He gave me a fidgety but not angry little frown. “Herr Schmidt has been waiting for you—very, very patiently.” From his tone, Herr Schmidt was a big tipper. The maître d’ did a passable Veronica as a tray-bearing waiter sidled past him into the alcove. “Please, follow me. Herr Schmidt has reserved one of our private rooms in the wine cellar.”
He turned on his heel and strode back through the narrow, smoky room, turned to his right, took a second sharp turn to the right, and descended a long, creaky, bannisterless staircase. At the bottom were three doors. Through the first, which was open, I could see the restaurant’s bustling kitchen and the dumbwaiters on which the food was sent upstairs. The second door had a big padlock on a hasp. That left door number three. The maître d’ swung it outward, and stood aside to allow us entry.
The cool, dank air of the wine cellar washed over me. It was twenty degrees cooler down here than it had been up in the restaurant. That was because the room was all stone—floor, walls, ceiling—all of ’em had been hewn from the solid-rock foundation of what was obviously a very old building. Suspended from the ceiling were three large, wrought iron chandeliers that hung, evenly spaced, over the sort of long, wide, majestical table that you see in old King Arthur movies. Huge wine racks lined the walls; each of the six-foot-high structures was filled with bottles whose brown and green glass reflected the dim light.
A single figure sat at the far end of the long table, an open bottle of wine and a small-bowled, half-filled Rhinewein glass in front of him. Four place settings were arrayed on each side.
“Herr Schmidt . . . ,” the maître d’ said by way of introduction. He closed the door behind us.
From the head of the table, Thomas Edward Crocker, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and no less of his general’s bearing in the thick tweed jacket, cashmere turtleneck, and hunting cap than if he were in his Class A uniform, pointed his trademark thumb and forefinger like a locked and loaded Colt .45 at my chest. “You’re one goddamn hour and six goddamn minutes late, Dick,” he growled.
Then he stood up, extended his hand in my direction, and a big wide smile washed over his face as he took in my bruised puss and smashed nose. “What’s the problem, Dick—had a little trouble on the way over?”
4
WE SAT DOWN TO A MEAL OF PORK SCHNITZEL COOKED in wine and shallots, red cabbage, rost—which means grilled—potatoes, and the wonderful, buttery German form of pasta they call spaetzle, all topped off with more than a case of the best Rhinegau Kabinett I’ve ever had. The Chairman was in an expansive mood, which was fortified even more by the great wine. He brought us up-to-date on the latest Washington gossip, joked about the pukes on the Joint Staff, reported that his former aide (and my old compadre) Joanne Montgomery was rehabilitating nicely from the shotgun pellet wounds that had put her in physical therapy for eight months.30
He even told us a bizarre story about a senior White House staffer who’d been caught in flagrante delicto by one of the Marines who work the security detail at the State Department the previous week. Said senior White House official’s main squeeze was a speechwriter for the secretary of state, and the Marine had caught them in full flagrant fudge-packing, or however two guys do it, on SECSTATE’s very own antique desk.
Once everyone was at ease, he looked around the table and asked each of my shooters about themselves. From the way he asked the questions, I knew he’d spent time reading each man’s file. He queried Duck Foot Dewey, whose real name is Allen, about growing up on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and hunting quail, dove, geese, and deer with his father and uncle.
“Maybe you’ll take me up there one day,” the Chairman said. “Nothing I like better than the first day of deer season.”
Duck Foot’s eyes brightened. “Any time, sir. Just ask.”
General Crocker teased Nod about trading the Army for the Navy. He reminisced about college football with Boomerang, and talked law enforcement with Gator Shepard, who’d worked as a SWAT deputy before joining the Navy. And believe me, Gator’s good. Gator can hit a frigging dime at fifty yards with an MP5.
He even asked Rodent how he’d come by his nickname.
“My big brother’s called Fat Rat,” Rodent chirped. “He enlisted in the Navy six years before I did—went through BUD/S and mad
e it to Team Two. By the time I enlisted he was an E-5—and he had a lot of friends. So when I went through BUD/S, he made sure the chiefs knew I was coming so they could give me an especially hard time. There was this one badass instructor—I’ll never forget, his name was Denny Chalker, and he was the biggest, meanest sonofabitch I’d ever seen—and the first fucking day (pardon my French, General, but you know what I’m talkin’ about), he took one long, nasty look at me as I clambered out of the pool all cold and wet, and he said, ‘You are not only lower than whale shit. You are also so much fucking smaller, so much fucking weaker, and so much fucking more insignificant than your fucking fat rat brother that you are nothing but a fucking rodent.’”
He laughed. “And I guess it stuck, ’cause I’ve been Rodent ever since.”
The Chairman turned his gaze toward Half Pint. “You’re Mike—the one they call Half Pint.” As Half Pint nodded, General Crocker looked at me. “Isn’t he the one who likes to eat ears?”
Half Pint’s eyes went wide. Some years back, during one of the regularly scheduled SEAL-versus-pilot brawls at a rough-and-tumble bar called the Ready Room (for those of you who are into naval trivia, the Ready Room sits just behind the main gate of Oceana Naval Air Station), Half Pint bit off most of an Airedale lieutenant’s right ear. The Ready Room’s owner, who has a very weird sense of humor, wanted to pin the fucking thing behind the bar for a month while it dried out. But the Airedale insisted on snatching it back and taking it posthaste to the Naval Hospital in Portsmouth, where he had it reattached.
Said Airedale got a new radio handle out of the fracas—he’s still known as Frankenstein. And Half Pint is greeted by cries of “Yo, Jaws!” every time he walks his five-foot-five frame into the Ready Room.
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