Of course, I didn’t have a buoy or a weight, so I’d have to improvise. It occurred to me that my one-man circle search could easily turn into a one-man circle jerk.
It took me almost half an hour to work my way one hundred yards beyond the Mountbatten’s charred hull. I threaded my way around the barges, under the pontoons, and three small police boats that patrolled the dock area to keep onlookers away. That left me roughly another hour and a half of O2. The Brits had obviously gone over the hull and the area below it, so I began my first search pattern just off the end of the dock. I tied my rope to a piling and started circling. It quickly became obvious that here, too, the bottom was clean—in fact, in the flashlight beam it looked as if it had been raked. They’d probably gathered all the fragments they could find and taken them to forensics.
Okay, it was time to move. I switched locations, moving toward the center of the harbor by fifty yards, attaching the end of my rope to an old tire I discovered on the bottom. The channel got deeper here, and the water was moving faster, too. I checked my depth gauge. I was bottoming at about forty-five feet now—roughly four yards below the Draeger’s published safety specs. What the hell, I’d taken Draegers to sixty feet and I wasn’t dead—yet. My second search was unfruitful, too. So I dragged the tire fifty yards to my left—east-southeast on my dive compass—and began all over again.
As I moved farther and farther away from the piers, the bottom began to look like a fucking obstacle course. Sludge had settled atop the silt. On the one hand, that was good, because it kept the silt from clouding as I poked, probed, and prodded. On the other hand, that was bad because the fucking sludge stuck to everything—including me. Obviously, the Brits hadn’t dredged the harbor in some time, because there were timbers, tires, bottles, and other assorted chunks of junk all half-buried in the slimy silt. My vision was obscured by the murky water—visibility was about six yards at best—and despite the flashlight beam I kept bumping into things I didn’t particularly want to touch.
After forty-five minutes and four circle jerks, I still hadn’t found anything suspicious. Shit. I knew there was some piece of the fucking puzzle I hadn’t figured out yet, and it made me mad. I was overlooking something—something as obvious as the fucking Slovak nose on my face. But I was just too stupid to see it.
I stopped dead in the water. Hold on a fucking second. I was searching the way Frogmen are taught to search. That’s taught—as in “by the book.” I was breaking one of my own SpecWar commandments—the one that goes: “Thou shalt never assume.”
Ev Barrett’s paternal growl rumbled inside my head. “Every time you assume, Seaman Marcinko, you shit-for-brains no-load dipshit blankety-blanking bleeper-blanking asshole geek, you make an ASS of U and ME.” I went dead in the water. I’d assumed that the best way to search for some piece of evidence was to go about it the way Pinky would have wanted me to. Well, shit, I was a fucking unconventional warrior.
Okay, class, let’s think unconventionally.
How, for example, would Roy Boehm have hit the target?
Roy? He’d have come a-calling in an SDV—a Swimmer Delivery Vehicle—or a minisub. Roy would bottom it in the deepest part of the channel, where there’s the most traffic. Then he’d swim to the target, using the current to help him carry his goodies—no need to tire himself out when the water’d do the work for him.
When he’d finished committing mayhem—planting the bombs, setting the booby traps, or whatever—he’d swim back to the SDV or minisub, climb aboard, and haul balls outta Dodge.
Doom on me indeed. I surface-turtled carefully (I didn’t want to make a guest appearance on the nightly news) and got my bearings. Then I dove and swam due south. I didn’t give a shit that I was running out of O2. I knew how the Mountbatten had been hit.
I worked my way into the middle of the channel, right under the route taken by the Isle of Wight ferryboats. It put me about three hundred yards from the carrier. The bottom was real messy—filled with the nasty sorts of things that can damage boats. The current was bad—almost two knots by my estimation, and I had to fight my way down. Then, straight ahead, just about where I would have launched from, given the current and the harbor configuration, I saw something in the dark water. It was a shard of concrete piling about eight feet high and three feet across, and it stuck out of the harbor bottom like a pylon. It had probably come off a barge and wedged itself in like this. Next to it, half-buried, lay a piece of black metal, about three feet by four feet, shaped roughly like a shark’s dorsal fin.
I swam down and flipped it over to get a better look. Bingo. It was the stabilizer from a minisub, broken off at the stem end. It had probably been lost when the sub hit the concrete piling. Hot damn. I was ecstatic. I was so ecstatic I never noticed when Mr. Murphy arrived and perched on my shoulder.
When did he do that? you ask. He dood it when I ran out of O2. I sucked, and nothing happened. Doom on Dickie. I could see the headlines now: “SEAL Drowns During Unauthorized Probe of Friendly Harbor. U.K. Declares War on U.S.”
Nah. I turned the emergency valve. That gave me five minutes of grace. But it didn’t help me with the stabilizer fin. I hefted it. Guesstimation? Eighty pounds. Normally, you carry an inflatable bladder with you if you expect to find something that large and that heavy.
I had rope. Maybe I could tow it. I tried. It was like trying to make headway with a sea anchor out. Now I was getting frantic.
Lightbulb. My safety vest.
Quickly, I shed the vest, tied it to the stabilizer, and fiddled with the internal O2 valve until I achieved negative buoyancy. I quick-released my weight belt, climbed back into the Draeger harness, and taking hold of the fin and vest, swam for the surface. I came up just in time to see one of the Isle of Wight ferryboats one hundred yards from me and closing fast.
Okay, Dickie, go back where you belong. I bottomed like a lead weight and sucked silt. Even so, I thought the ferry’s twin screws were going to give me a crew cut as it chugga-chugga-chugged steadily over me. I hugged the bottom as best I could, just like the days when, as an enlisted Frog at UDT-21, we played Zulu-5-Oscar, or Z/5/O, exercises in Norfolk harbor.
They used to make us play hide-and-seek during the E&E (evade and escape) training. The instructors would dump us in the water and put boats out to search for us. So I cheated. That’s what E&Es are supposed to be about anyway—evading and escaping, by any means possible. Anyway, I used to swim to the slip where the Norfolk-Kiptopeke ferry berthed, then dive and hang on to a slimy piling for dear life as the ferry docked above me, its diesels going chunka-chunka-chunka, just like the ferryboat above me now.
The noise and turbulence subsided. It was time to try again. This time I checked my compass and swam out of the channel before I surfaced. Now I really was out of O2. I pulled the Draeger mask off and, spitting dirty water, looped the rope around my shoulder and side-stroked my way toward the shore, just over five hundred yards away. Except now I was swimming against the current, which (thank you, Mr. Murphy) had increased to about a knot and a half. So it took me almost an hour of painful swimming to get back to my point of departure.
Oh, did I hurt. I was about twenty yards from shore when the security detail finally decided to make an appearance. So, instead of hauling my ass out of the water, I got to wait as a jeepload of bored Brits cruised slowly around the sheds, smoking cigarettes. I hung on to the route line and whimpered imprecations at the god of goatfucks. Finally—it seemed like hours, but wasn’t longer than five minutes—they chugged off and I was able to haul myself up onto the shore.
Cold almost to the point of hypothermia, I dragged my piece of evidence into the shed and collapsed, retching wretched water. My arms and legs burned like hell. My shoulder was rubbed raw where the rope had cut into it. Somehow, I’d cut myself behind the left ear and was bleeding into my wet suit. Trust me—this is no way to make a living.
But I had something concrete. Evidence. The first road sign in a long trail that would bring
me to avenge CNO. I ran my hand along the smooth metal of the stabilizer fin. It was worth the pain.
I got back to the Marriott to find a stack of messages longer than my lizard. Most of them were from Vice Admiral P-P-P-Prescott. Then there were three from Hans, and singles from Sir Aubrey Davis and Major Geoff Lyondale. I took a twenty-minute shower and a double dose of Bombay on the rocks, then returned Hans’s call first. After all, he outranked everybody else.
“Yo, Hansie.”
“About time you decided to show up. Have a nice swim?”
Nice swim indeed. “Fuck you, Chief. What’s up?”
“Got a call from Sigonella. Your people will be here tomorrow morning before noon. I got ’em rooms at the Marriott.”
“Great.”
“And I charged the rooms to the embassy.”
Even better. Let the fucking State Department pay. “Who called?”
I heard Hans sip his coffee. “Guy named Tommy. Oh, he said to tell you the package didn’t make it.”
I didn’t need to hear that. You’re not supposed to lose prisoners—especially when you’ve worked as hard as I had to snatch him in the first place. Especially when a fucking frigate (or is that a frigging fuckit?) and an aircraft carrier are involved. They are not cheap to deploy. And—more to the point—deploying ships of the line creates a paper chain that admirals like Pinky Prescott can follow.
So now, there were going to be a lot of questions, and no answers. After all, only CNO and the president knew what my mission was about. But CNO was dead, Pinky Prescott wanted nothing more than to haul my ass into a courtmartial, and the Leader of the Free World wasn’t about to sacrifice his butt to protect mine by going to the Navy and saying, yes, Dickie actually was operating under a Presidential Number One Priority.
There was also something larger at stake: Green Team. Losing Azziz was like blood in the water to a political shark like Pinky, if he ever found out. If Pinky smelled failure, he’d do his best to chew me and my men up. The son of a bitch would come after us, and without a rabbi like CNO to protect us, we were all vulnerable. This was not good news.
There was nothing to do but play poker. “Tommy say anything else?”
“Nope. Just to tell you he’d explain when he saw you.”
Explain? There was nothing to explain. Doom on me. Still, there was a small—very small—bright side. We’d reduced the number of tangos worldwide by one, and the experience had provided some real-world training for the men. And as for Mahmoud Azziz abu Yasin, well, I rationalized, if he was as fundamental a Muslim as he said he was, he’d be just as happy making prayers in heaven as he was making bombs on earth.
“Any other news?” I asked Hans.
“I phoned around for you on the bombing.”
“Learn anything we don’t know already?”
“Nope.”
“I did.”
“What?”
“Come pay me a visit and see. I don’t wanna talk on an open line.”
“Aye, aye, cur.” I heard him chuckle as I rang off. I’d turn the stabilizer over to Hans. By 0600 tomorrow he’d know the length of the dick on the fucking machinist who’d made it.
On an impulse, I called my old pal Tony Mercaldi back at DIA. We couldn’t say anything important on the open line, but I used enough innuendo, allusion, and body English to make it clear what I needed. Tony, ever the Air Force colonel, harrumphed and grumped and made nasty noises, but said he’d start checking things out for me soonest. I gave him Hansie’s scrambler fax number so he could send me the goodies I needed.
The real work done, I dialed Major Geoff Lyondale. There was no answer, so I tried Sir Aubrey Davis’s office at the Ministry of Defense. The phone bring-bringed three times, then a male voice answered, “Extension fifty-six.”
He’d answered Sir Aubrey’s phone just like the spooks back at Christians in Action at Langley answered theirs. What did they do, send ’em all to the same goddamn training sessions? I studied the stabilizer I’d humped back on the train as I sipped Bombay and explained who I was.
There was a pause. Then the voice came back on the line and told me that Sir Aubrey would be pleased to take dinner with me at the East India Club on St. James’s Square at seven. That was an hour from now. “Sounds good to me.”
“Sir Aubrey will meet you in the American barroom. If you arrive first, please feel free to order,”
How genteel. How polite. I decided to be positively British. “Super. Smashing.” Fuuuck you.
I was sipping my second pint of Yorkshire bitter, and munching on my sixth quail egg, when he ambled in. He started to call me “Commander,” then halted, ratcheted his monocle into place, and counted my stripes. “Captain Marcinko, so pleased you could join me.” He extended his hand. It was no warmer or hardier than the time I’d shaken it at former secretary of defense Grant Griffith’s reception just about a year ago.
Sir Aubrey waved his hand vaguely in the barman’s direction. I watched as he slipped away for a few seconds, then brought back a bottle of red wine, uncorked it, and decanted it carefully into a simple, round decanter. He poured a balloonful for Sir Aubrey and slid the glass deferentially across the bar. “There you go, sir, your usual.”
“Thank you, Paulo.” Sir Aubrey’s hand went round the stem and he swirled the wine on the bartop. Then he picked the glass up and peered at it. His narrow nose went over the rim, he inhaled deeply, then sipped cautiously, swished the wine loudly in his mouth, then swallowed. “Ah.” He smiled. “Good Old Boat.”
“Old Boat?”
“Barca Velha—that’s Portuguese for ‘old boat,’ old man. A great—and as yet largely undiscovered—wine made in the Douro region by an old friend of mine. I buy ten cases of each exceptional year at the vineyard. They store it for me here. I drink nothing else at this club, save for port or champagne. This”—he swirled the wine again—“is the 1975 vintage. Would you like to try some?”
I drained the ale and cleansed my palate with a quail egg. “Sure.” Why not? So far as I am concerned, wine is wine. I keep boxes of blush Chablis in my fridge, and my red wine’s served by unscrewing the top. I’ve had good wines, but frankly I don’t go for all that sucking and swishing and “what an audacious vintage” talk.
A glass was put in front of me. I picked it up and took a mouthful. It was as if a claymore had gone off on my palate. I could sense flavor bursts of chocolate, currant, and at the back of my mouth, vanilla. It was wonderful. It was sensual. It was the best fucking wine I’d ever had. I drained the glass, savoring the aftertaste. “That is terrific stuff.”
He peered down his nose at me, ratcheted his cheek muscles, and allowed the monocle to drop. It swung like a pendulum thrice, then stopped dead center on his chest like a glass bull’s-eye. “Thank you, old man. Glad you approve.”
We stood at the bar for ten minutes or so, talking about the sorry state of things—mainly commiserating about CNO, and the sorry state of affairs that had allowed the assassinations in the first place. He was a strange one. His neutral gray fish-eyes never gave a hint of what he was thinking—they just looked at me, blinking every once in a while, showing no emotion at all. Then, the bottle of Old Boat sitting empty on the well-worn bar, he took my arm and ushered me down the long, wood-paneled hallway toward the main dining room.
As we walked, he explained that he and CNO had enjoyed a rare working relationship. They’d met two decades ago, when CNO had been posted to CINCUSNAVEUR as a three-striper (that’s a commander for those of you who don’t read uniform jacket sleeves) aide, and Sir Aubrey was, as he put it, “a minor functionary at one of our security services.”
He guided my elbow, steering me to the right. “We were two old Cold Warriors,” he said. “Our professional lives were entirely purposive: we did battle against the Soviet Bear. We hunted him. We stalked him. Trying to discover his most private thoughts, endeavoring to uncover his most sensitive political and military machinations, gave our lives significance. We had a God
-given mission.”
He paused while a maître d’ in black tie showed us to a lone table, separated from the others by two yards, that looked out on the square through huge, arched windows. We were seated. Sir Aubrey tucked a starched white napkin under his chin. A new bottle of Barca Velha was set on the table, uncorked, decanted, and poured. He tasted. He approved. He nodded at the sommelier to pour me a glass, then ordered him to leave the decanter on the table.
“Then,” he continued, “the Soviet Bear disappeared. The Cold War evaporated. For someone like me who’d focused his entire career—in my case more than a half century, Captain—on the Cold War, the loss of my sole adversary in what amounted to no more than a blink of time, left me feeling a strange sense of emptiness, of ennui, of purposelessness.” He stared out into the square. I followed his eyes.
He turned back to me. “It was Admiral Secrest—your CNO—and our Admiral of the Fleet, Sir Norman Elliott, who brought me round. They realized, perhaps before anyone else, that there was a new danger. This one perhaps even more critical than the Soviets. The Sovs, after all, were a single target. This new menace, they insisted, presented tremendous problems precisely because it was anonymous, faceless.”
“Fundamentalist terror,” I blurted. “That’s the battle CNO and I have been fighting at home.”
“Precisely.” Sir Aubrey waited as a waiter approached to hand each of us a menu. He sipped his wine. “I’m planning to have the curry. It’s quite acceptable. If not, I believe I’d take the entrecôte.”
Frankly, food didn’t matter very much right then. I had more important things to learn. “Sir Aubrey, why the hell did you ask Pinky Prescott to TAD me over to you?”
“Captain—may I call you Dick?”
“Of course.”
“Dick, then. Dick—in the past six months, your CNO, our Admiral of the Fleet, and I have all noted with distress a new trend toward terrorism of a certain sort.”
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