“Look—”
“Hey, Dick, you look. Our friend Paul and his family get dead. I pull a huge load of strings to send you over to do a little covert recon—precisely the sort of thing you, as a SEAL, are supposed to be good at. And what happens? Chongjin harbor all over again. Remember Chongjin? You and your Red Cell were supposed to sneak and peek and that was all. Instead, you blew up a gol-darn North Korean ship, and my butt almost got fried over it. Now instead of sneaking and peeking, you get yourself PNG’d. You’ll never be allowed back to Moscow, y’know? And that’s not the Russians talking—it’s our embassy. And guess what else? The French don’t like you very much, either. It seems as if you can’t even pass through an airport without causing a diplomatic incident.”
I shrugged. I had better things to talk about. “Big effing deal.”
His face told me it was a big effing deal so far as he was concerned. But he paused to let me speak. Instead, I retrieved the three sheets of paper I’d taken from Andrei Yudin’s flat and slid them across his desk. “I need these translated ASAP,” I said.
“What are they?”
“Don’t know—but I found them in a dead mafiosi’s apartment the night I got PNG’d, so I’d like to know.”
The admiral looked at me, plucked his phone up, and dialed a number. “I need a Russian translation done—now,” he barked. “Here. My office. Right.” He looked at me and sighed with the resignation of a pissed-off but devoted parent. “Okay—it’ll be done in the next hour. But I don’t think there’s anything you could discover that will improve your current situation.”
“Look, Admiral—I’m a SEAL. I’m used to all sorts of maritime situations. That includes hot water.”
He didn’t appreciate my attempt at humor. “Hey, if you don’t think this is serious, guess again. It’s gone to Pinky Prescott’s desk, and he’s gotten himself involved already. Meetings all day yesterday. Late into the night, too.”
“What about?”
The submariner drummed his finger pads on the desk in a silent arpeggio. “I don’t know. He shut me out. All I’ve been told is that he wants your behind in his office in—” Kenny Ross glanced at his watch. “Twelve minutes—zero nine hundred. And just in case you didn’t know, he isn’t very fond of you.”
Pinky—shit. Now I realized why Ken Ross was so upset. It was doom-on-Dickie time—which meant I was about to get fucked in Vietnamese (and every other language I could think of).
Okay, a few words of literary digression are probably in order here. If you have read the previous trio of Rogue Warrior novels, then you know all about my long-standing and ongoing relationship with Pinckney Prescott III, Rear Admiral (Upper Half), United States Navy, and you can skip the next few paragraphs. If you haven’t, then go out and buy the fucking books—now. You should also pay attention, because I might very well spring a little quizzie on you later.
Pinckney Prescott III, or Pinky the Turd, as I prefer to call him, is the son and grandson of admirals. Like them, he went to Annapolis. And like them, he has spent his entire Navy career in a series of landlocked staff jobs. The one disparity with his daddy and granddaddy is that Pinky the Turd somehow made it through BUD/S and ended up in Naval Special Warfare. Now, let me stipulate for the record that Pinky has never seen combat, or led men in battle, or engaged in any actual SpecWar operations whatsoever. He has, however, perfected the art of PAPWAR—paper warfare. Give the man a sheet of twenty-pound bond, a word processor, and a laser printer and he can slice you up good. In fact, Pinky is the goddamn Miyamoto Musashi of memo writing.
Ever since I can remember, he has used this singular talent to maul, bawl, and keelhaul me. It began when he was the commodore in charge of NAVSPECWARGRU Two, which is the mouth-filling acronym for NAVal SPECial WARfare GRoUp Two, and I ran SEAL Team Six. Pinky tried to have me disciplined for buying too many shoelaces. No, I am not kidding, so pick your jaw up off the floor. That’s the kind of guy Pinky is. And to show you what kind of guy I am, I have evaded, stymied, and just plain fucked with him ever since the shoelace incident.
Now, on the one hand, Pinky has always appeared to hold certain strategic advantages over me. For example, he’s always outranked me. I’m a captain. I wear eagles on my collar. He wears stars on his—currently two of’em and going on three if you believed the RUMINT—that’s RUMor INTelligence—on the fourth-floor E-ring. But on the other hand, I have always managed to maintain a slim tactical advantage or two over him. A few years back, for example, I was able to get my hairy paws on a certain Naval Investigative Service report focusing on Pinky’s extracurricular extramarital activities and blackmail him with it. Yes, I realize blackmail is not a nice thing to do. But in Pinky’s case, it was justified. Come to think of it, in Pinky’s case, murder would be justified.
These days, however, I’m a bit shaky in the tactical advantage department for a couple of reasons. First, the NIS report, which was hidden in a cache below the kitchen floorboards at Rogue Manor, was turned into mush about five months ago. While I was in California chasing down an asshole named LC Strawhouse, a goddamn pipe running in a channel under the kitchen floor burst. I came back to find my floor ruined and, more significantly, Pinky’s file destroyed.
Second, in the past I have generally had a rabbi—like CNO Arleigh Secrest, for example—who could shield me from Pinky’s wrath. See, the way things work in the Navy these days, if you have a protector who wears four stars, you can fuck with one- or two-star officers and suffer only minor dings. But I didn’t have any rabbis these days.
In fact, it had been so long since I had a rabbi to go to, I was beginning to feel like an out-of-work Shabbas goy. The only star I could count on was Ken Ross’s—and not only was he junior to Pinky, he reported to the sonofabitch. Currently, you see. Pinky was assistant to the deputy chief of naval operations for plans, policy, and operations. He was at the top of the food chain, Kenny Ross was somewhere in the middle, and I was the fucking dog meat.
How Pinky’d wangled the job I do not know. Probably, through one of his Annapolis classmates—notably a one-star named Don Layton, who was the executive assistant to the acting chief of naval operations. Point was, Kenny Ross was in no position to protect my hairy Slovak ass from Pinky’s wrath.
As you know from experience, I have a constant and ongoing relationship with pain. I hurt, therefore I am. This morning, however, I’d have preferred the birch tree from Chapter 1 to what I was about to experience. Still, as our dweeb editor is so fond of misstating, “no pain … no pain.” And so, hurting and therefore existing, I marched the three hundred feet from Kenny Ross’s office down the hall, turned right, then left, then right again, until I came to the warren that was Pinky’s suite.
Now, friends, let me add a couple of things here about Pinky’s character. First, he is a bully—and like all classic bully personalities, he acts aggressively only when he senses his victim is weaker than he. Second, his idea of unconventional warfare in interpersonal relationships is to spring something at the very last moment and hope that the person affected will not have time to react to it. Now, if one knows about these facets of his personality, one can react accordingly.
This SEAL do know, and this SEAL do-do. Or, as Roy Henry Boehm, the godfather of all SEALs, likes to put it, I was about to go out and fuck the fucking fucker.
He kept me in the anteroom, cooling my fins for seventy-five minutes. I knew what he was doing inside. He was watching Live with Regis and Kathie Lee, or whatever other morning trash was on the TV. I could fucking hear the muffled commercials and the banter right through the door. But the prissy yeoman behind the Executive Group Three, Bureau of Prisons-manufactured, genuine imitation walnut desk kept looking at me, and repeating the same goddamn mantra, as if it was that fucking recorded voice mail shit you get on the phone these days: “The admiral is quite overwhelmed this morning with urgent matters but he wants to see you and he will be with you shortly.”
It was like, “Press ’One’ to leave
a message; press ’Two’ to press ’One.’” After three-quarters of an hour, shortly had stretched to longly. I sat, meditating, my eyes focused on a small crack in the wall just above and to the left of the yeoman’s perfectly cut hair.
Meditating? Yes. You see, friends, you cannot allow assholes like Pinky to disturb your equilibrium.
That is their whole strategy—to knock you off balance and thus defeat you. But being in balance—with yourself, with your situation, and with the world around you—is a lot of what being a Warrior is all about. You see, Warriordom is more than the ability to jump out of a plane, or take down a building, or board a ship under way, or neutralize a fortified position with a flanking maneuver. Warriordom is also a mental state that incorporates a high, even spiritual degree of awareness.
Yes, I said spiritual. No, I am not about to enter the realm of touchie-feelie. I am about to give you a no-shitter, a wisp of the ethereal, metaphysical gestalt that surrounds the making of a Warrior.
Sure the Warrior can do anything that he has to in order to fulfill his mission. And the Warrior is always ready to die. As the seventeenth-century Japanese master swordsman and poet Fudo wrote: “The Warrior knows there is nothing to be won or lost, except that which is to be won or lost. Everything becomes everything, and death follows naturally.”
What Fudo is saying is that the Warrior must always be ready to accept death—death, after all, is the natural result of his art and his craft. And the soul’s acceptance of death is one important and fundamental element of the Warrior’s makeup.
But there is another essential principle as well. The thought was perhaps stated most effectively by Huang T’ai Kung, the famous strategist of the Han dynasty in China almost two thousand years ago. It was T’ai Kung who wrote: “Before the Warrior can face the enemy, the Warrior must face himself.”
What this means is that the Warrior must have a sort of spiritual and moral gyroscope; an internal mechanism that keeps his soul operating on an even and constant high plane, no matter how adverse the conditions under which he must operate.
It is this gyro that makes it possible to endure. You endure, because you know you are a better man than your opponent—purer, more consecrated, and sanctified. You have been blessed by the God of War. You can suffer, tolerate, or undergo anything.
It is my unshakable belief that when these two intrinsic values—the total acceptance of death as a natural condition of life, and the total acceptance of an absolute moral code—are combined, the Warrior becomes invincible.
We Navy SEALs begin the long inculcation of Warrior values during BUD/S by exposing our tadpoles to formidable doses of physical pain and mental strain during the fifth week of their training—a time that has come to be known as Hell Week Now, the challenge is overtly physical during Hell Week—lots of cold, and sleep deprivation, and exhausting exercise in the surf and the mud. But physical transmogrifies to mental, when, after Hell Week, those tadpoles who made it through realize that they can do about 1,000 percent more than they thought they could. They are beginning to think like Warriors.
But that is only the beginning. One begins the real training—the mental work—later. It is the mental edge that keeps a SEAL prepared to fight, and kill, even though he may never have to do so during his entire career. There are times—and I’ve been there—when you train for months on a single, exhausting mission element only to be stood down at the last moment because the diplomats have found a political solution. Or when you hone yourself to a razor’s edge, and train, and train—but never get the call to go to war. That is when the Warrior’s spiritual gyro becomes most important. When it sustains you and keeps you at your mental and physical peak—even though you may never be used in the ways you thought you would be used.
And so I sat and I meditated until my consciousness was invaded by the prissy yeoman’s prissy voice, the door opened, and I was admitted to the Royal presence. You’ll be pleased to know that Pinky looked terrible. He reacts badly to stress, and from the look of him, he was really stressed out. His hair, which has a tendency toward cowlickery, was in full Dagwood Bumstead. His skin was gray-yellow, his cheeks sallow. He’d tried to hide the fucking slimline TV remote control under a pile of papers. But it stuck out like the sore pencil-dick Pinky is. He followed my line of sight, saw that I saw what I saw, and tried—without success—to nudge the remote farther under cover.
“You called?” I didn’t see any sense in using his first name yet.
Pinky picked up a curly sheet of fax paper from a thick pile of faxes, messages, and other documents, and shook it at me as if it were a shaman’s rattle. “This c-c-cable is a c-c-ccomplete outrage,” he stuttered.
I wasn’t about to make things easy for him—and he didn’t know that the NIS file in my possession had turned to mush. So I asked, “What is, P-pinky?”
“G-g-goddammit, don’t do that. Don’t mock me.” He sat up as straight as he was able. “And that’s ‘What is—sir?’” he intoned. He pointed to the stripes on his sleeve. “What are those? Chicken liver?”
“No, sir,” I said, enunciating the c and the u so he could hear them plainly, “they are chicken something else.”
“D-don’t talk to me like that, Dick,” he said, trying his best to sound authoritative. “I’m a goddamn admiral. I am about to be appointed to a job at the White House.”
Oh, sure. And I was about to be made CNO.
Pinky closed his eyes and took a series of deep breaths—no doubt to bring his blood pressure down a hundred points or so. Then he laid the fax sheet back onto his desk, smoothed it out, and pointed at the pile it lay atop with a bony index finger. “It has come to my attention,” he said, accenting the syllables with finger taps on the fax sheet, “that you exceeded your directives in Moscow.”
“I did what I thought I had to do.”
“Precisely.” He smiled up at me in the supercilious way all bureaucrats smile when they have discovered that an i isn’t dotted or a t isn’t crossed. “‘Did what you thought you had to do.’ But you exceeded your directives. They were plainly spelled out in your mission order. I have them here in front of me and I have highlighted the relevant section. You and your men were to—and here I quote: ‘Advise and train U.S. Navy personnel assigned to AMEMB Moscow in security procedures, urban survival skills, and counterterrorism.’ Full stop. End of assignment. But not for you. No—you created a diplomatic incident. You were declared persona non grata and deported. And as if that weren’t enough, you caused our Naval attaché in Paris—an old and dear friend and a classmate of mine at the Academy, I may add—great personal embarrassment.”
“What’s your point?” I asked. I didn’t have time for this bureaucratic crapola. I had to get my men together, come up with a workable plan, and go hunting. There were bad guys prowling and growling, and I was stuck in a fucking office, wasting time with this arrogant asshole.
“My point,” Pinky said, an edge creeping into his voice, “is that I have disbanded your unit.”
“What?” It was absurd. He couldn’t have.
He was plainly elated by the expression on my face. “Oh, yes. Dismantled. Dissolved. Dispersed. Disassembled.” He clapped his hands together like a child with a new toy. “Scattered to the winds.”
Like I said, it was impossible. He couldn’t have moved so fast, and I told him so.
“It’s amazing what BUPERS—that’s our Navy’s BUReau of PERSonnel you’ll recall—can do when you light a fire under them,” Pinky said.
It had been a bad, bad error on my part to assume that no one at the Pentagon works late anymore. Obviously, Pinky had been working lots of overtime on this little move of his.
I also realized that Pinky wasn’t stuttering anymore. That, I understood in the very pit of my gut, was an exceptionally, exceedingly, extremely sinister omen.
“Your SEALs have been sent back to their original units,” he said sans repeating a single excess vowel. “Their transfers are irrevocable. There is nothing
you can do.”
Oh, yeah? Listen, I still had friends—at BUPERS, and elsewhere in the Navy. There was Karen, the new, young secretary in the SpecWar detailer’s office—she worked for my old friend Marguerite—who’d reassign a SEAL every now and then in return for a night of B&B and B&B, which as we all know stands for Benedictine & brandy, and blow jobs & back rubs. There were all those chiefs in my old Safety Network. There were a few young SEAL officers who I’d trained in my image who’d be willing to make a wave or two if necessary. “We’ll see about that.”
Pinky leaned back in his huge leather chair and grinned up at me. “Oh, this isn’t me talking, Dick. If it were only me, you’d find a way around. I know you. After all, I’ve been saddled with you for years. No—this is the system talking, not me. And the system works best for me these days—not for you. Moreover, the acting chief of naval operations himself has given his blessing to this new arrangement. It’s he who wants your unit disbanded—now that I’ve shown him some of these unfortunate messages. CNO doesn’t want any more humiliating embarrassments. CNO doesn’t want any more diplomatic incidents.”
“There was only one incident, Pinky. One.”
“In this Navy,” Pinky proclaimed oratorically, “CNO believes that is one too many. We tolerate zero incidents these days. Zero defects these days. Zero. None. No mistakes allowed. No social errors. No harassment. No sexism. No racism. No intolerance of any kind—implied or otherwise. And certainly, no diplomatic incidents. They are severe embarrassments, and severe embarrassments will not ever, ever be condoned. Let me be clear on this: four-star admirals have been fired for a single, ungentlemanly misstatement. Captains like you have been retired for lesser offenses than you have committed.” He riffled noisily through the papers on his desk. “The fact that you are still in the Navy—haven’t been relieved of duty and forcibly retired—mystifies me. But for some reason, you are being allowed to continue your service—continue … for the present.”
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