It took us about sixty-five minutes to get from the Manor to the Inn. We were greeted by an old black Lab named Leroy, who immediately fell in with Wonder. I paid $1,500 in advance for seven nights in the Inn’s honeymoon cottage. The cottage—actually it’s a two-room suite built in an old barn—sits about three hundred yards behind the Inn, way up on a hill, hidden in a grove of hundred-year-old oak trees. It is secluded, quiet, and completely invisible from the road. No one would see our satellite dish or other electronic goodies.
I made small talk with Uta and Don, the 1763’s owners, as I counted Franklins.
Wonder, ever the smart-ass, squeaked, “Are you gonna carry me over the threshold, sweetie pie?” when he heard me ask for the honeymoon cottage.
“No, poopsie-whoopsie,” I answered sweetly. “I’m going to pull your fucking nostrils back over your fucking ears, roll your head up your ass, and bowl you through the fucking door from fifty yards away.”
That brought a guffaw from Uta. “You ever in the Navy?” she inquired.
“Retarded O-5. How’d you guess?”
“Our head groundsman’s a retired chief. You sound just like him.”
That brought a smile to my face.
“What brings you to our neck of the woods?” Don asked.
“We’re here to do some quiet research,” I said noncommittally, explaining that Stevie would be staying for the week, while I’d come and go.
The conversation played on while I examined the bar. I was delighted to see they served draft Dortmunder Union beer. I’d developed a taste for Dortmunder thanks to General Ricky Wegener, the commander of Germany’s Grenzchutzgruppe-9, or GSG-9 counterterror commando team. In the early eighties, SEAL Team Six and GSG-9 staged combined training exercises in Europe. Herr General Ricky had introduced me to two new experiences: Mercedes armored tactical jeeps and Dortmunder Union beer.
“Could we have a couple of Dortmunders, please, Uta?” I pointed at the tap.
The beer was cool and fresh—real German draft. Wonder and I drained our glasses quickly and ordered refills.
“Boy, that’s good,” he said, smacking his lips.
I wiped foam from my mustache and nodded. “You might want to order an extra keg, Uta”—I hooked my thumb toward the Dortmunder—“because we’ll drink this stuff by the gallon.”
A smile a yard wide crossed Uta’s face. “Jawohl, Herr Fregatten-kapitän,” she said. “I’ll get right on it.”
By midnight Wednesday we’d done half a dozen sneak-and-peeks, leaving goodies stashed behind. The Hustings covered just under four square miles of paddocks, meadows, and woods. It ran from the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where hikers roamed the Appalachian Trail, down through a series of thickly forested woods to the meadows and grazing land for Griffith’s purebred French Charoláis cattle and his Arabian racing horses and polo ponies.
The property was bordered on the east and west by two-lane blacktop roads that ran on a north-south path from Route 50 into the Blue Ridge. From northwest to southeast, it was bisected by a small river, and from southwest to northeast by a paved county road, which divided the land into four roughly equal quadrants. I named them Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and Delta, starting at six o’clock, which is the quadrant where the main house was located.
Then we subdivided the quadrants, using map coordinates that ran south/north and west/east, so that I could call Wonder and tell him I was at Charlie 16/10 or Delta 20/21, and he’d be able to locate me within one hundred yards. Since we had no idea where or how the game would be played, we cached quadruple sets of supplies. No matter where the ANT squad ended up, we’d be able to lay our hands on extra goodies within minutes.
I called Joe early Thursday morning and suggested that we all link up prior to the formal assembly at Griffith’s place. I didn’t tell him about Wonder, or our forays onto Griffith’s property. He had no need to know that we had any aces in the hole. We agreed to rendezvous at the Hidden Horse Cafe, a friendly tavern in Middleburg, at about 1500 hours on Friday, then move as a group to Griffith’s place. I reminded him to bring extra laces for his boots. He reminded me to wear a suit.
The five of us drove to The Hustings in a civilian version of an Army Hummer that Joe had rented specially for the occasion. I was all for making the trip in Steve’s pickup—so we’d look like a truckload of Tehran terrorists driving up—but Joe insisted we had to arrive dressed fashionably, and with appropriate quasimilitary style. During the fifteen-minute drive, I had the dweebs recite Roger’s standing orders to his eighteenth-century Rangers like a SpecWar mantra.
I’d worn my best suit—a gray flannel, double-breasted number—and a white shirt. My hair was tied back with a black band. I was glad Joe’d insisted I dress formally, because as we crossed the wood bridge over the old millstream, turned hard right, and crunched onto the crushed-stone driveway, I saw we were being followed by two black stretch limos with diplomatic plates. So it looked to be a high-style, high-power weekend, and I knew from my days as a naval attaché in Phnom Penh that diplo-dinks prefer to mix and mingle with people wearing suits, not Skivvies and sandals.
It was already growing dark as we pulled up in front of the house, so you couldn’t see the expanse of manicured grounds that stretched a hundred yards in each direction. But the house, which was lit by dozens of hidden lamps, was impressive enough.
I snuck a look as we pulled our bags out of the Hummer. The centerpiece of the estate was a stone field house that bore the words The Hustings and the date 1788 above the doorway. A wood addition that looked nineteenth century by its architecture sat to the right; a fieldstone addition was joined to the left side of the original house by a passageway.
A trio of butlers appeared as if by magic, shooed us away from our baggage, slipped hotel claim tags on them, gave Joe the stubs, and whisked the bags away.
“You will find your luggage in your rooms, gentlemen,” Butler No. 1 said in the Queen’s English. “Please follow Cedric into the drawing room, where Mr. Griffith is awaiting you.”
Joe nodded, and we moved off just as a new crew of handlers appeared to welcome the stretch limos behind us.
We walked through the foyer, down a pegged-pine corridor covered with what I assumed were antique Oriental rugs, and through a narrow hallway lined with framed eighteenth-century French military prints. We hadn’t gone thirty feet when we came to a huge archway.
Beyond it was a massive atrium that had been built onto the old colonial house. It must have been fifty yards wide and twenty yards deep, with glass walls twenty-five feet high. The huge space was divided into separate entertaining and dining areas by a series of marble pedestals on which stood full medieval sets of armor.
The outside brick wall of the original house looked as if it had been sandblasted. Suspended from it was a breathtaking collection of Revolutionary-period firearms. A pair of Civil War cannon formed the base of a huge dinner table. Couches were flanked by old mortars. Through the atrium window I could see a display of World War II American and German tanks, dramatically illuminated by hidden spotlights.
Grant Griffith was waiting for us just inside. I’d seen pictures of him on the TV news shows and in the papers for years. Whenever the news media did a story about “Whither the Military,” they quoted Grant Griffith. There was good reason. Griffith had served as secretary of defense for Lyndon Johnson and done such a good job that when Richard Nixon was elected, he’d asked Griffith, who had just opened his own law firm, to advise him on defense matters as well.
Every administration since, whether Republican or Democrat, had solicited Griffith’s advice on defense policy. Gerald Ford appointed him to a commission on Vietnam policy. For Jimmy Carter he had worked to assuage veterans groups when the Georgian wanted to declare an amnesty for Vietnam-era draft evaders. Ronald Reagan made him chairman of the task force that developed SDI; for George Bush he made quiet trips abroad, forging critical military and political support for Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Be
tween his quasi-official commissions, Griffith worked as a lawyer and lobbyist for what Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex.
Only the current president, who had made preelection vows to ban influence peddlers and the government/ industry revolving-door circuit from his administration, had banished Griffith from the Oval Office.
Now, here he was in the flesh, a wide, inviting smile on his tanned, reptilian face. I had to admit, his pictures didn’t do him justice. He was tall—gaunt, even—and regally white-haired, with that sort of wrinkled complexion that told me he either had his own ultraviolet tanning bed somewhere in the house or he spent three days a week in Puerto Vallarta.
Griffith’s eyebrows were as thick as Brezhnev’s, except they were absolutely snow-white, making them all the more prominent against his pecan-colored forehead and setting off his bright blue eyes. He waved us over with long, aristocratic hands, ending in perfectly manicured fingernails that I could see from five yards away had been buffed and polished. On his right pinky was an antique Roman ring. I knew it was antique and Roman because I’d read about it during my research. The ring had once belonged to Julius Caesar, and it had cost more than the national debt of most Third World (and a few Second World) nations.
He was dressed in the way only the rich can afford to dress—a bespoke suit (I knew it was custom-made because the bottom two buttons on his coat sleeve were unbuttoned) in somber, ministerial gray that, while reeking Savile Row propriety, was genteelly shabby at the elbows and lapels. His shirt and tie were also English. The shirt had broad stripes of purple, blue, green, and black, a wide, long-point collar, and starched French cuffs held together by small, gold monkey’s-paw knots. The tie, unfashionably narrow, was black pin-dot. His black cap-toes had the soft patina of gentle buffing on the best kidskin. Spit shines were just not this guy’s style.
I’ve done my share of entertaining. I gave regular diplomatic receptions when I was a naval attaché in Phnom Penh; I threw parties in my home when I commanded SEAL Team Two. I have attended hundreds of dinners, downed probably tens of thousands of cocktails, and munched on several tons of hors d’oeuvres while attending countless receptions thrown by a spectrum that includes weapons-makers, business executives, Navy leagues, Kiwanis and Rotary clubs, company picnics, and manager’s training sessions.
But nothing prepared me for the opulence of Griffith’s home, or the grandeur of his style. It was simply not a factor of my life experience.
Griffith extended his hand to Joe. “I’m delighted you could attend,” he said. His voice was as perfectly manicured as his fingernails.
“We’re happy to be here, Mr. Griffith,” Joe said.
“Grant. Call me Grant, please. Now, whom did you bring with you?”
Joe introduced his team, saving me for last. I watched Griffith’s eyes. They flickered. “You wrote Rogue Warrior,” he said. “You were on ’60 Minutes.’”
“That’s me.”
“Great book. Wonderful stories. But you screwed up in the end, didn’t you? The Navy got you.”
“Some people think so.”
He grunted. “You served time.”
“A year—in Petersburg.”
“Know why?”
“Tell me.”
“You had the wrong lawyer,” Griffith said, a wry smile on his face. “You should have come to me.”
“Probably. But I couldn’t afford you, from what I hear.”
“Sometimes, I take cases that interest me on a pro bono basis.”
“If I’d known that, I’d have called—and saved myself two hundred grand.”
“Not to mention the year in jail, eh, Commander?” He reached over and squeezed my upper arm, checking my biceps. “Still stay in shape, I see. Good.”
He paused, patriarchically surveying his domain. You could tell from the look in his eyes that he saw that It Was Good. His hand remained on my biceps. It was making me uneasy. I do not like to be touched by men I don’t know.
Griffith was oblivious. “Give me a call sometime. Come and visit. I’ve got a lot of friends on Four-E,” he said, using the Pentagon shorthand for the row of fourth-floor office suites with river views on E Ring, where the secretary of the navy, the chief of naval operations, and most of his deputies reside. “Maybe I can help you straighten things out with the Navy.”
Then Griffith removed his patrician paw and turned to Joe. “Please make yourselves at home,” he said warmly. “We’ll be eating at seven-thirty. The exercise starts at midnight, with a briefing at eleven.”
“Will you be doing the briefing?” I asked.
“Heavens, no.” Griffith’s cotton-puffball eyebrows fluttered briefly. “It will be conducted by Major Brannigan.” The ex-secretary’s head moved vaguely to his right. “Last I saw of him, he was somewhere over there, talking to the gentlemen from General Dynamics.”
Griffith smiled benignly and shook Joe’s hand in a way that hinted we should move on. Indeed, he was already looking toward the next group of arrivals.
I knew a Major Brannigan. Thomas Boyd Brannigan, aka Buckshot. A lean, mean fighting machine from Nashville, Tennessee. He’d had a long history in special ops. As a lieutenant he’d been a raider for Bull Simon’s assault on the Son Tay prison in North Vietnam back in 1970. In April of 1975, he’d stayed behind in Saigon after the North Vietnamese took the city, setting up an underground railway to get his ARVN people out of the country under the Communists’ noses.
When Charlie Beckwith formed Delta Force he’d picked Captain Buckshot Brannigan as his ops boss. Buckshot had been on the ground with Charlie in the Iranian desert during the disaster that was Operation Eagle Claw. In the mid-eighties, as a major, Buckshot was part of what became the Army’s Intelligence Support Activity, or ISA.
A “black” operations group jointly tasked with obtaining intelligence and acting on it, ISA’s missions ran the gamut from trying to locate and extract U.S. POWs still held in Southeast Asia, to maintaining covert support for the anti-Sandinista army the CIA maintained in Central America, to locating and rescuing the American hostages in Lebanon.
I was running SEAL Team Six in those days, and it was as if we were all part of a big, covert fraternity that had special handshakes, high-signs, and decoder rings. We felt we were invincible. Unstoppable. Immortal.
Obviously, we suffered from hubris—and our nemesis, punishment by the gods, was inevitable. Indeed, like me, Buckshot had retired under a cloud.
First, a retired Special Forces lieutenant colonel named “Bo” Gritz inadvertently blew ISA’s cover. Gritz had been working in concert with—but not for—ISA in Asia. One of the nation’s true Vietnam-era heroes, he was convinced that Americans were still being held in Laos and Cambodia, and he went there to investigate. A New York Times story about Gritz appeared, which also mentioned ISA’s activities. Congress, which had been told nothing about what was going on, immediately started its own investigation.
By the end of 1986, two dozen of the Army’s best Spec Warriors had either resigned or taken early retirement. Among them was Buckshot Brannigan. He’d kicked around Fayetteville for a while, hobnobbing with his old friends at Delta Force. Then he moved north, to Washington, where he had scores of contacts from his SpecOps days.
In the late eighties he worked as a Class A contract agent for the CIA, helping to coordinate anti-Soviet resistance activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 1989, he’d been hired by a Saudi prince as a security consultant. That was the last I’d heard of him.
I excused myself and threaded my way across the room, checking faces. I’d seen many of them in the newsmagazines and on television. Buckshot’s back was toward me and he was in animated conversation with a blue-suited asshole wearing a monocle and a rosette in his lapel.
I bumped him gently with my shoulder. “Yo, bro.”
He turned. It took him six seconds or so to identify and confirm. I could see the Rolodex cards whap-whap-whapping behind his eyes. “Dick—great to see
you. God, it must be what—five, six years.”
He turned back to Monocle Man. “Sir Aubrey, this hulking, hirsute creature is Dick Marcinko. Dick, this is Sir Aubrey Hanscome Davis, who’s visiting from London. Sir Aubrey is deputy minister for defense. He carries the CT portfolio.”
Translation: Monocle Man was a spook who ran counterterror operations for the British Foreign Ministry. I shook the Brit’s hand, which was as cold and limp as their bacon. “Pleased to meet you.”
Buckshot rested a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t let the hippie disguise fool you, Sir Aubrey. Dick was the first commander of SEAL Team Six. He built the unit from scratch.”
“Of course he did.” A look that might have passed for a smile crossed Monocle’s face. “Trained with our Royal Marines in the North Sea, as I recall.”
SIX and the SBS—Special Boat Squadron—had indeed spent many freezing fucking hours in thirty-degree water, practicing joint assaults on North Sea oil platforms. “That’s right, sir,” I said. “They’re first class, too.”
“Yes, they are, Commander. You should come over and see how they’re doing these days. There’s a new boy in charge—young Geoff Lyondale. A real go-getter.” He looked me up and down again, then dropped the monocle from his eye and backed away. “Well, I’m running off at the mouth when you chaps probably have some catching up to do.”
He was right, and neither Buckshot nor I protested too loudly as he veered off to starboard, heading toward a waiter bearing a tray of champagne.
Buckshot looked prosperous. He’d put on some weight, and his butterscotch hair had gone gray at the temples. The eyes were the same, though—blue-gray killer’s eyes, hooded as a cobra’s.
“Whatcha up to, asshole?”
“Gone into business for myself.”
“Making money?”
“Hand over fist.” He wagged an index finger at the champagne waiter, retrieved two glasses, handed me one, and touched the rim of my glass with his. The glasses chimed. They were goddamn crystal. From the sound of it, goddamn good crystal, too.
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