He didn’t bother to rise. He pointed at a straight-back chair with a bony index finger and, by way of greeting, said, “Sit.”
I sat.
“Where have you been?”
I wasn’t about to say. “That’s classified.”
“I’m the goddamn A/VCNO,” Pinky bawled. “Now tell me where you’ve been and what the hell you’ve been doing.”
“I can’t tell you, sir,” I said, spelling it with a c and a u. I couldn’t, either. My assignments were all need-to-know, and Pinky didn’t have the need. CNO had wanted things that way.
Pinky sighed audibly. He fidgeted in his chair. He cracked his knees and his knuckles. “I will make it a point to find out. And when I do, you will suffer.” He opened his pen and wrote himself a note.
Pinky sipped from a CINCUSNAVEUR mug of coffee that sat on a CINCUSNAVEUR coaster. He took his time, too. Finally, he replaced it and stared at me. “You n-n-never answered your pager,” he whined. “Now you turn up here, uninvited. I wanted you back in Washington or wherever the hell you base these days, waiting for orders, not here, running around like a b-b-bull in a—a d-d-damn china shop.”
I was delighted to see he’d started to develop a stutter in the six weeks since I’d last seen him. I decided to encourage it. “I t-t-t-thought I c-c-c-could h-h-help.”
Pinky didn’t find my attempt at humor comical. “Don’t d-do that, goddammit—don’t mimic me.” He stopped, caught himself, took another sip of coffee, and tried to regain his composure. “And as for your helping, the idea itself is ridiculous. P-p-pathetic.”
Randy Rayman sidled into the room. I caught him in my peripheral vision, leaning against the wall, a smug expression on his face. I decided to give him a floor show. After all, I was in as sunny a mood as Pinky. “Thanks for the vote of confidence. And fuck you very much, too, Pinky.”
Pinky’s eyes went wide, and his face flushed in embarrassment. “Don’t you talk to me like that,” he protested. “I’m in charge here.”
I started to answer him but he cut me off. “You don’t have CNO to protect you anymore. And vice chief doesn’t like your methods any more than I do. So sit down and shut up, Dick, or I’ll have you removed under custody.”
He pouted. He shot his cuffs. He played with his bureaucrat’s pen—a hundred-dollar, burgundy Montblanc rollerball—while he waited for me to begin squirming.
I wasn’t about to squirm. I have the goods on Pinky: an NIS—Naval Investigative Services Command—SLUDJ (for Sensitive Legal [Upper Deck] Jurisdiction) file codenamed Foxhunter. Those of you who read Rogue Warrior: Red Cell will remember that I stole it from NIS headquarters. For those of you who haven’t, SLUDJ is NIS’s topsecret witch-hunting unit. Its agents are known as Terminators. They specialize in obtaining political dirt on admirals.
The Foxhunter file is typical of their efforts. It contains pictures of Pinky in flagrante delicto with a female Japanese agent. It contains telephone transcripts of Pinky and said bimbette engaged in aural sex. If anyone from the Senate Armed Services Committee ever saw it, Pinky’s third star would get flushed down the tubes.
The problem was, the file was concealed under the kitchen floor back at Rogue Manor, and no one but me (with the possible exception of Stevie Wonder) knew how to get at it. But the knowledge that I had a SLUDJ sledge to pop Pinky with kept me from getting nervous about his threats. So I didn’t squirm or fidget or look nervous. I did the most obnoxious thing I could do to him—I smiled beatifically and sat as still as Buddha.
And when it finally became obvious—even to Pinky—that I wasn’t about to play his game, he started up again. He said that Randy Rayman had come to him and complained about being manhandled. That alone provided grounds for my immediate arrest. But there was more. I’d asked for guns. Guns, in Britain, where they are illegal. Another black mark had gone next to my name.
“Does that mean my request for weapons is being denied?”
That sent him into another spasm of stuttering. When he recovered, he d-demanded to know where the six men I’d mentioned to Randy Rayman were coming from. I told him they were on their way from Sigonella.
“What were they doing there?”
When I told him that the information was sensitive and that he wasn’t cleared to know, he went off into another paroxysm.
Then he ran down the usual list of complaints. He b-b-bitched about my long hair. He screamed that I was an uncontrollable m-maverick. It was quite a performance, filled with the heretofores and whereupons and whatwithals bureaucrats love to use.
In fact, it reminded me of the time in Vietnam when, as a green-behind-the-ears ensign on my first combat tour, I’d taken two STABs (the SEAL Tactical Assault Boats we used in Vietnam) and run a free-fire operation at Dung Island, which was just down the Bassac River from Juliet Crossing, the area’s top hotbed of VC activity. Bravo Squad spent two hours there, raking the island with every fucking round of ammo we carried. I even called in a Spooky—one of the old C-47s equipped with Vulcan Gatling guns that could spew out 6,300 rounds per minute—by waking up the PROCOM (the local Vietnamese PROvincial COMmander) and convincing him to authorize it.
The wrinkle was that I did everything without prior authorization from the ops boss, a rule-abiding, ship-driving lieutenant commander named Hank Mustin. When we finally got back to our base at Tre Noc, Mustin was waiting for us on the end of the dock, jumping up and down like a fucking organ grinder’s monkey.
He was going to have me court-martialed. He was going to have me shot. It took the base commander, a lanky captain named B. B. Witham, to get him off my back. And then, lo and behold, it turned out that we’d—quite by accident—interrupted a humongous VC operation the night in question, and we were all going to receive commendations, Hank Mustin included. From then on, I had old Hank by the balls.
And when Pinky finally got around to the bottom line, I realized I had him by the short and curlies, too.
“I don’t know why, Dick, but Sir Aubrey has insisted that you work with his people on this. I have tried to convince him otherwise. After all, we have Lieutenant Commander Rayman over here—he’s the kind of new-generation SEAL I prefer—but Sir Aubrey wants you, and this is his operation.”
I tried to look glum, but the prospect of being thrown back into the briar patch must have put a distinct smile on my face, because Pinky’s thin lips distorted as if he’d just licked a styptic pencil “Don’t smile like that,” he said. “This is serious.”
He rapped his pen on the desk surface. “There will be no UNODIRs in the U.K. I am assigning Lieutenant Commander Rayman TAD to your unit. He will be your liaison with me.”
I turned toward Randy Rayman. “You know what TAD stands for?”
“Temporary Additional Duty,” he recited.
“Not to me it doesn’t. On my team it stands for Traveling Around Drunk, Randy, and don’t you fucking forget it. You flunk lunch with me, you’re dead meat.”
Pinky rapped his pen again. “Quiet, goddammit. I will be kept informed. I’ll be watching you.”
I dropped the pager on his desk.
He pushed it back at me. “You can’t take that off.”
“CNO gave it to me, not you, sir,” I said, spelling it c-u-r again. I didn’t wait for him to react further. “Now, if the admiral will excuse me, I’d like to go and set up a meeting with my counterparts.”
“Dismissed.” Pinky sighed. He looked horrible.
His reedy voice pursued me as I quick-marched out the door followed by his asshole acolyte, Randy Rayman. “Don’t forget—you are to keep me informed. That is an order.”
Oh, I’d keep him informed. After a fashion. My fashion.
When I got back to my suite at the marriott, a black ballistic nylon duffel bag was sitting in the middle of the living room. I hefted it. It weighed, I estimated, just under one hundred pounds. I opened it up and discovered a fully charged U.S. Divers OXY-NG, bubbleless, self-contained O2 rig, weight belt, inflatable SEAL comba
t safety vest, U.S. Divers best fins, diving hood, Kevlar-reinforced socks and gloves, knife, waterproof flashlight, mesh bag for holding souvenirs, compass, depth gauge, two hundred-foot lengths of strong, lightweight nylon line, and a forty-six-long coldwater wet suit in dull black neoprene.
God bless all chiefs. You will see this material again.
By 0730 I’d changed out of my dress blues back into real work clothes—my rancid jeans, thong sandals, a sweat shirt, and an old leather jacket I’d bought in Pakistan. Then I called down to Hereford, to contact my old friend Mick Owen, but was told he wasn’t about.
Damn. Mick’s an SAS shooter. He’s a bad boy from Wales who enlisted in the paras, only to discover that throwing himself out of planes was too tame. So he put himself through SAS selection and was badged, as they say, by 22 Regiment.
We’d met just after the Princes Gate incident. Mick was part of the Pagoda Troop team that took the Iranian embassy back from a bunch of tangos. I was CO of SEAL Team Six at the time and visited SAS for a debrief on the operation. Mick—he was a junior lieutenant then—conducted it. Afterward, we hit all of Hereford’s pubs for a series of quadruple gins and pints. It must have been love at first sight, because we were inseparable for the entire ninety-six hours I spent with the regiment. He bunked me in his BOQ (that’s Bachelor Officers’ Quarters for the nonmilitary among you). He took me shooting and looting at the SAS kill-house. We fast-roped from Sea King choppers. We jumped HALO—High Altitude/Low Opening—from C-13Os. Talk about your whirlwind tours.
Ever since, we’d stayed in touch on an irregular basis. These days he was a captain, in command of his own twenty-four-trooper Special Missions detachment. Translation: he was one of the select few allowed to go hunting on his own, tasked by the top echelon at SIS—the British Secret Intelligence Service—much the same way my own Green Team operated. So he was probably off somewhere trying his best to slot—that’s SAS slang for kill—some poor tango sod.
I left my name and my number, gave Hansie’s extension as a backup, and rang off. Then I threw the duffel over my shoulder and slipped out the Marriott’s service entrance, took the blind curve on George Yard, and worked my way around to Weighhouse Street, a narrow thoroughfare lined with red-brick apartment houses that probably hasn’t changed a hell of a lot since Victoria was queen. I bought a newspaper, then sat down to an English breakfast of percolated coffee, lard-fried eggs, limp bacon, beans, and fried tomatoes at an Italian luncheonette filled with taxi drivers. So far as I could tell, I wasn’t being followed.
Fortified, I walked two and a half short blocks to the New Bond Street underground station, bought a 70P ticket, took the escalator down to the Central line, grabbed the first train, and rode one stop to Oxford Circus. There, I changed trains. In another ten minutes, I was at Waterloo Station.
There was an express to Portsmouth leaving in six minutes, according to the flip-flop-card train-information board high above the gates. I bought a round-trip ticket, marched down the platform, opened a coach door, heaved the gear atop the divider, and plunked myself onto the upholstered seat. The trip would take about an hour and a half. And guess what—I’d forgotten to let Randy Rayman know where I was. Pity. I closed my eyes.
Portsmouth was cold and there was a slight drizzle as I trudged out of the Portsmouth and Southsea Station. From somewhere behind me, a ferry to the Isle of Wight sounded its foghorn, a mournful, gloomy bellow that fit the day’s mood. The decommissioning ceremony had been held at the Royal Navy’s Portsea dock, across the wharf from HMS Warrior. Warrior, built in 1860, was the first of the ironclad warships. It was one of Portsmouth’s foremost tourist attractions.
I caught a taxi to the naval dockyard and climbed out about one hundred yards from the main entrance. An eight-foot, chain-link perimeter fence ran along the side of the road, which dead-ended at Victory Gate—the gate leading to HMS Warrior. Just past Victory Gate, another eight-foot fence—this one topped by three strands of barbed wire—ran parallel to a street named the Hard Park Road. A quarter mile away, I could see the Portsmouth central bus station and the ferry terminal. To my right, beyond the fence, lay a series of one-story sheds. There was no traffic. I tossed my bundle over the top, climbed the fence, heaved myself over the barbed wire without incident, and landed on the other side.
Just like that? you ask. What about sensors or other goodies meant to keep intruders out? What about Royal Marines with guard dogs patrolling the perimeter? What about TV cameras sweeping the area? What about jeeps with fifty-caliber machine guns on pintles?
Fiction, my friends. All that sci-fi crapola is the stuff of fiction. In actual fact, in the real world, most military bases—from San Diego to Sigonella, from Norfolk to Naples, and from Pensacola to Portsmouth—are wide open and ripe for plucking. And I was the mean motherplucker about to do it here and now.
I jimmied a shed door with my EmersonCQC6 folder and slid inside. The place had the musty smell common to storage facilities worldwide. I shed my civvies and shrugged into the wet suit. I pulled the vest on, attached all the accoutrements, put my fins under my arm, and grabbed the Draeger by the harness. Then I snuck a peek outside to make sure all was clear, and—Frog that I am—headed for water.
I could feel the chill as I submerged—the water temp was probably somewhere in the low forties. It was going to be real invigorating until the outside water seeping into the wet suit was trapped and heated by my body and started to provide insulation against the cold. Well, you don’t become a SEAL because you like to stay comfortable. During my UDT training back in Little Creek, the instructors would sometimes muster us at about 0400, when the air was in the high forties and the water slightly cooler, and stand us naked outside for an hour and a half or so while they hosed us down every fifteen minutes. Swim buddies were allowed to keep themselves warm by pissing on each other.
It’s the sort of harassment-slash-bonding experience the Navy frowns on these days. But lemme tell you—it works, both to build character and to create unit integrity. Indeed, something that the nonwarriors in charge of things these days never seem to realize is that bonding between men in combat units doesn’t just happen. It is created.
In the old Navy, it was done by chiefs like Ev Barrett, who rode the men hard and impelled them to new and higher limits every day, through a mixture of tough love, intimidation, and physical abuse. Or it was done by officers like my mentor Roy Boehm, the godfather of all SEALs, who pushed the edge of the training envelope by proving to his men that the word impossible does not exist.
These days, if you rough up a man, you’re history. If you call him names, he can put you on report. And as for realistic training, well, these days, an accident can mean the end of an officer’s career. So unit commanders—all of whom want to make flag rank—tend to take it easy on their men. The result is that we bleed less in training—but we die more in battle.
The water wasn’t just cold—it was dirty, too. It smelled like a goddamn sewer—and so would I. Well, I’d purify my body with Vitabath and Dr. Bombay later. Right now, it was S3 time. That stands for swallow, swim, and shut the fuck up.
Even close to shore, the current was pretty strong—over a knot. But it was moving in my direction, so I lay back and went with the flow. The hard part would come on the return trip, when I’d have to struggle against it. A one-knot current is about all that most swimmers can handle. I can go against a one-and-a-half-knot current, but my life had better depend on it. And two knots? You can hold the fucking world record in freestyle, and you’ll still look like you’re treading water. To play it safe, I ran seventy-five feet of my route line from a piling, so if Mr. Murphy was swimming along with me, I could pull myself hand over hand the last twenty-five yards.
After twelve minutes underwater, I turtled to grab a look-see. I was about three hundred yards north of HMS Warrior. It was another two hundred and fifty yards beyond that to the Mountbatten, which was surrounded by barges and pontoons. I’d have to be careful working my wa
y around Warrior. It was past midmorning now and there’d be tourists aboard. I could also make out TV lights and cameras set up on the docks, and reporters holding hand mikes, opining.
Fucking television was going to be the death of us all. Interview the Special Operations Teams as they landed at Mogadishu? No problem. Turn the cameras on to show the Iraqis exactly where their SCUD missiles were hitting Tel Aviv? Absofuckinglutely—why not. Broadcast the Pentagon briefings live and ask exactly when and where the next air strikes were going to take place? But of course. Cover firefights from the Kuwaiti border as they happen? Can do.
I’ll tell you the logical conclusion to this kind of mindless shit: it is when some blow-dried, air-bag, pretty-boy correspondent does a live, split-screen remote from the home of a Marine lance corporal, who’s being covered by a CNN Minicam crew while he goes on patrol in Lower Slobovia. The Marine is blown away by a land mine, and Pretty Boy turns to the camera and says, “How does it feel to see your son waxed, live, on CNN? We’ll find out after these commercial messages.”
I submerged, went deep, and swam with a slow, steady pace, counting kicks until I reached my objective.
Underwater searches are usually performed with two, four, or even six men. The three most common methods are known as the running jackstay search, the checkerboard jackstay search, and the circle-line search. The first two require a minimum of two divers, four buoys and four weights, and two grid lines. In the running jackstay search, the divers work their way through a 250-by-50-meter course, which they traverse lengthwise. The checkerboard jackstay search requires nine separate grid lines and weights. It can be swum by one or two divers.
The least complicated is the circle-line search. You set a buoy, attach it to a weight, and run the search line around the buoy line. Then you swim in circles, working your way concentrically to the end of the rope.
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