Okay, okay, okay—I’m a Frogman. I’m supposed to operate in maritime environments. Even so, I hoped they’d reach their destination soon, because it was getting maritimely uncomfortable.
I got my wish. Just past a small church, they turned right, walked through a waist-high wrought-iron gate and into an immaculately restored, ivory-colored, four-story, stucco Regency villa. An antique tile plate cemented into the stucco gate pillar read
BROOKFIELD HOUSE. I ducked onto the church portico and watched, shivering.
Six minutes later, a familiar car the size of an admiral’s barge eased down the street and stopped in front of the villa. Lord Brookfield himself emerged, immaculate as ever, and dodged the raindrops as he scampered up the stone walk to the ornate wooden door. The limo pulled away.
There I was, my hair soaking, water running down the back of my neck, my feet squishy-wet cold. Let me tell you—it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter because I was hit with the proverbial ton of fucking bricks.
Let me lead you down my convoluted—and I will admit completely unconventional—trail toward enlightenment.
Item: CNO and Sir Norman Elliott were the two leading proponents in their respective countries of a revolutionary hypothesis about a new form of transnational, Islamic-based, fundamentalist-inspired terrorism emanating from Afghanistan.
Item: Mahmoud Azziz had a Pakistani visa in his passport and fifty thousand British pounds in his pocket the night Green Team had snatched him. He was, logic said, on his way to Pakistan.
Item: Pakistan—a nation riddled by corruption, ethnic strife, and growing Islamic fundamentalism itself—was, so it happened, next door to Afghanistan, where thousands of CIA-trained mujahideen fighters now mustered to fight a new fundamentalist jihad, a total effort directed against the West.
Item: two Pakistani officers were now meeting with the man who had apparently convinced the entire British intelligence apparatus that CNO and the Admiral of the Fleet had been killed because the U.S. and Britain hadn’t supported Bosnia against Serb aggression.
Why had the Brits swallowed that story? They swallowed it because it made sense. Besides, I’d had a hand in obtaining hard proof that the hit against CNO and Sir Norman had been staged by perps who’d stolen a minisub from the former Yugo Navy base at Split. Moreover, given the current world sitrep, the assumption just plain made sense.
But wasn’t I the Slovak sphincter who was always saying, “Thou shalt never assume?”
In other words, what if our supposition about motive was based on what the KGB used to call aktivnyye mery—active measures—or what CIA officers refer to as black or disinformation (gentle readers, take note: you will see this material again).
What if CNO and Sir Norman hadn’t been murdered because the Western allies didn’t support the Bosnian Muslims, but had been assassinated because they’d been leading the fight to alert the West against this new transnational, fundamentalist wave of terror?
What if all those supposedly “connected” acts of terror Sir Aubrey had spoken of were simply diversions—random attacks designed to distract Western intelligence from the real terrorist targets, CNO and Sir Norman Elliott. If that was the case, there had to be (as they’d say in Navyspeak) an unequivocal, guaranteed, indisputably defective component in the chain-of-command interface.
Let me put that in plain English for you. Somebody was a fucking traitor. And I was going to discover just who it was.
A message was waiting for me back at the SF Club. A Captain Owen had called and would meet me at the Guinea for dinner at twenty hundred hours.
That buoyed my soggy spirits. Mick was a shooter and a looter, a lead-from-the-front, kick-ass-take-names hell-raiser who’d served with 22 Regiment for more than a decade now. As a precocious junior officer he’d been part of the assault team that had gone into the Iranian embassy at 16 Princes Gate. Later in the decade he’d led the raid that blew up eleven Argentine aircraft on Pebble Island during the Falklands War.
During Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm, he’d spent thirty-seven days behind Iraqi lines, destroying communications facilities, sniping at isolated pockets of Iraqi troops, and spotting mobile SCUD launchers before his platoon from D Squadron was discovered by two entire Republican Guard companies—more than three-hundred men against Mick’s eight. A fierce firefight ensued, and Mick lost two of his men. The survivors then led the Iraqis on a merry chase across more than 130 miles of cold, rough terrain that claimed another of his platoon, a sergeant who died of hypothermia. Even so, before Mick’s five survivors slipped across the Syrian border to safety, they’d managed to kill more than 220 of the Iraqis, destroy three tanks, four APCs, as well as half a dozen trucks and Land Rovers.
For his exploits in Iraq, Mick received the Distinguished Conduct Medal—one of only four to be awarded during the Gulf War. His men all received Military Medals. Not content to let things rest, he’d lately spent his time covertly hunting IRA tangos—there were still a few there despite the peace talks—in Northern Ireland. The score so far was Owen twelve, IRA nil.
At 1920 I pushed my way into the crowded bar at the Guinea, put my back up against a long-legged bird in boa and miniskirt, ordered myself a pint of Young’s bitter, and made small talk with the bar manager, an engaging chap named Eric Wells, who’d served with the paras as a boy and loved the work. Finally, he got around to asking me what I did for a living.
“I shred.”
“Shred what?”
“People, mostly.”
A broad smile came over his face. “Sounds like you have fun.”
“Beats working.”
“What did you say you did?”
“I didn’t.”
“What’s your name?”
I told him.
He looked at me again, and this time he really saw me. “You’re the American SEAL they call the Rogue Warrior.” He wagged his index finger at me. “You’ve been on the telly lately doing the nasty-nasty to the CO of SBS.”
So he’d caught my performance on CNN. I asked him what he’d thought.
“Well, old Geoff Lyondale sounds like a real sorry bugger—”
“He is.”
“Then I guess he deserved what he got.”
I grinned. “How would you feel about writing a letter to a certain admiral I know saying just that? I need all the help I can get these days.”
Eric guffawed. “What about another pint instead?”
Half an hour later, Mick’s hefty frame filled the doorway. He’s built like an NFL running back—five nine and 225 pounds, with twenty-four-inch thighs, a nineteen-inch neck, and a thirty-two-inch waist. He’s a terrific amalgamation, combining the density of cinder blocks with the agility of a great broken-field runner and the quickness to do the hundred in less than ten seconds. He crushed my hand in his size-10 paws and bellowed up to the bar.
“Nurse!”
Eric took a peek and came a-running. “Mickey, you old sod.” He stuck his thumb in my direction. “He with you?”
Mick nodded affirmatively.
“I shoulda known.” He drew a pint of Young’s and slid the glass in front of Mick. “Mick and me was squaddies in the Para Reg.” Eric displayed the backs of his hands, which were crisscrossed with scar tissue. “Majored in fuckin’ pub-brawling in those days. Wear our Class Twos out to the local and work ourselves into a lather takin’ on all comers.” The thought brought a smile to his face.
It made Mick throw back his head and laugh, too. “Hadn’t thought of that in years,” he roared. “Then there was Northern Ireland.” He stuck his huge thumb in Eric’s direction. “He was in my brick.”
“‘Brick’?” I’d never heard the term.
“Brick. Patrol, you stupid bloody wanker,” Mick explained with all the obscene patience of a chief.
The two of them looked at each other and grinned, sharing what had to be a secret, deadly memory—the kind of thing my old SEAL shipmate from Vietnam days Mike Regan and I share when we remin
isce about hunting VC on our two-man, weeklong patrols along the Cambodian border.
Mick showed his big teeth. “Oh, Dickie—you woulda loved it in Ulster.” He lifted his glass and inclined it in Eric’s direction. “To the auld days, you murderous sod.”
Eric drew himself a pint, returned the toast, and the two of them downed their brews without stopping.
“Have you done with the goddamn touchie-feelie shit already?” I nudged my empty glass across the bar in Eric’s direction. “All this fucking sentiment is making me thirsty.”
We ate real Black Angus steaks two inches thick and English-grown baked potatoes with the best Devonshire sour cream I’ve ever had, sharing two bottles of great French red that Eric and the Guinea’s manager sent over. I’d thought the Guinea served only pub food, but hidden behind the pub is a first-class, full-service restaurant that has to be one of the ten best in London, so far as I’m concerned.
Mick and I caught up on SpecWar gossip, complained about the assholes to whom we reported, groused about imperfections in the chain of command, traded war stories, and then got down to the business of sharing information along with our wine. Like Toshiro Okinaga, my old friend with Kunika, the special police intelligence unit in Tokyo, who helped me recover the Navy’s lost nuclear Tomahawk missiles, Mick Owen and I go back a long way.
And, like Tosho, Mick stayed in my corner when most of my so-called “friends” deserted me in droves because the Navy put pressure on them, and they succumbed. Mick hadn’t. He’d written me in prison. He’d called after my release. And he’d lobbied his bosses in my behalf.
So, there’s very little I won’t talk about with Mick, although there wasn’t a whole lot I was willing to say inside the restaurant. The tables were close together, and you never know who’s there.
So, we finished with good cheese and vintage port. Then Mick had a double Remy and I had a quadruple Bombay Sapphire, we bid good night to our hosts, paid the bill, and walked out into the cold night air.
It had stopped raining and the black sky was studded with stars. We turned right, walked up Bruton Place to Berkeley Square, and turned right again, walking against the traffic flow.
Mick brought me up to date on operational intel in the matter of CNO’s and Sir Norman’s murders. SAS—unlike SBS under Geoff Lyondale—maintains a huge network of informal intelligence sources. Within hours of the assassinations, even though the unit had not been assigned to help solve the case, that net had been activated. Within fortyeight hours, Mick’s people had quietly targeted a number of suspects—among whom were the same Bosnian Muslims from the Sons of Gornji Vakuf Geoff Lyondale had been tracking. But the SGVs weren’t the only probables: SAS believed that while SGV may have done the actual operation, some sort of huge tango network was involved.
I agreed with that premise. The op that killed CNO was too big, too complicated, too professional, to have been pulled off by half a dozen fundamentalists acting alone. They needed support, money, gear, and training. After all, what they’d done was equivalent to a SEAL op I would have been proud to lead.
They’d brought a minisub into a hostile harbor, either from a mothership or by sailing it across the Channel, and navigated it onto a bull’s-eye a few hundred yards from their target.
They’d breached Royal Navy security (okay—so it wasn’t very good, but they’d done it anyway) and placed their mine directly below the gangway CNO and the Admiral of the Fleet would use.
They’d made the hit, then exfiltrated cleanly.
When attacked, they’d killed a large number of their enemies, created confusion, and sowed terror.
That sounded pretty fucking good to me. It also didn’t sound like any goddamn terrorist op I’d ever heard about. No, this was a professional job. The people who did it were good. They had money. They had training. They had expertise. They were warriors. That made them very, very fucking dangerous.
What’s more, SAS’s CO had informed the permanent war council of top-level Ministry of Defense, Home Office, MI5, and MI6 officials of his intelligence-gathering activities. The group, called the Cabinet Office Briefing Room, was known as COBRA. Sir Aubrey Hanscomb Davis represented the MOD on COBRA, which meant he had known about the Sons of Gornji Vakuf at least twenty-four hours before my first meeting with Geoff and Lord B.
I could see the pulse in Mick’s big neck pumping when I told him I believed that Monocle Man, which is what I called Sir Aubrey, had been holding back in a big way on operational intel.
Mick frowned. “It’s almost as if he wanted Geoff’s op to fail.”
That was the way I saw things, too. I told Mick about my unscheduled tour of Hampstead earlier in the day and added I was planning to take a look inside Lord B’s mansion.
“That could be hazardous to your career.”
“Career? What career?”
“Okay, okay, I know you don’t give a shit about—what the hell do you Americans call it? Career path?”
“‘Career track.’”
“Career track. But a black-bag job—it’s dicey. Even for us. Especially for you.” Mick’s face was serious. “Besides, I wouldn’t assume anything. You know how fucking devious spooks are. The meeting with those Paks could be anything.” We walked a few dozen yards in silence.
“That’s why I want to see what’s there,” I said. “It could be anything.”
“Smart-ass.” We’d gone completely around the square one and a half times, now. Mick edged me toward Berkeley Street. “I’ll walk you back to the SF Club.”
“Where are you staying?”
He winked lasciviously. “Belgravia. With a friend.”
They hit us in the labyrinthine pedestrian underpass that runs beneath Hyde Park Corner. There are perhaps half a dozen of these in London. This one—one of the two biggest—runs almost a third of a mile from end to end. It has more than a dozen entrances and carries pedestrians under the endless stream of traffic from three of London’s busiest thoroughfares, Grosvenor Place, Piccadilly, and Park Lane, where they run together at Hyde Park Corner.
During the day, buskers—street musicians—play guitars in the tile-walled, concrete tunnels that run like mazes for hundreds and hundreds of feet. Knots of people bustle through. Late at night the tunnels become eerily quiet, taking on a sinister, quasi-ominous patina. The traffic noise disappears once you’re twenty feet below ground. Still, footfalls echo. Voices carry.
We’d walked down the ramp on Piccadilly, just past the Intercontinental Hotel and across from the Wellington Arch, when we realized we weren’t alone. It’s at times like these that the antennas go up. I didn’t have to say anything to Mick. Like mine, his body had already changed its whole attitude. It was an imperceptible shift, but it was there. We’d suddenly become aggressive in body and spirit. We exuded deadliness.
Okay, okay, gentle reader, I know you’re going to accuse me of using pseudo-macho psychobabble bullshit. Well, as Ev Barrett would say, “listen, and learn, boychik, because you’ll see this material again.”
Story: as a youth, the great Japanese warrior and swordsman Miyamoto Musashi visited a monastery where a particular martial technique was taught. Instead of being welcomed by the novices, from the moment Musashi entered the dojo he was instead confronted aggressively by them. Finally, one of the school’s most advanced students challenged him to fight. Musashi killed him with a single blow of a wooden sword.
Why had this episode taken place? An old priest took Musashi aside and explained why his mere presence had incited such a negative reaction. “You must learn how to project qualities other than anger and blood,” the priest told the ambitious young swordsman. “Right now, your aura is too fierce—it compels others to challenge you. But there will be times when you do not want to arouse, when you want to camouflage yourself, to go unnoticed.”
Musashi thought long and hard about the old priest’s advice—and ultimately he took it. The Way of the Warrior, he finally realized, was more complex than he had imagined. Yo
u can, he came to understand, create an intangible yet obvious aura about yourself. You can project nonaggression, or you can radiate deadliness.
What I’m talking about here has nothing to do with the kind of saloon bravado I see all too often—the brash, snotty braggadocio that too many guys mistake for manliness. No, this is different. This doesn’t have anything to do with a combination of testosterone and alcohol.
It has to do with Warriorship—with the ability to control your aura, your ambience, at all times. So much of warfare is uncontrollable—the weather, the odds, the arrival of Mr. Murphy, for example—that Warriors should strive to influence as much of the situation as they can. You can manipulate the way you are perceived.
As we’d taken our after-dinner stroll, Mick and I had projected neutrality—two white guys, walking and talking. Our body language betrayed nothing about who we were or what we did. There was no aggressive tilt, no menacing slant to us. People didn’t cross the street to stay out of our way. An elderly woman walking her Airedale had smiled at us as we passed her.
Now, that all had changed. I glanced at Mick. The whole way he carried himself projected mayhem, death, pestilence, and affliction. His body language told the world, “Do not fuck with this one.”
We came to an intersection in the maze. The Brits, bless ’em, had built these things well. They put mugger mirrors at each intersection, so you can see if there’s some coster waiting with his cosh. We could see it was all clear, so we rounded the corner. Now we’d come to the deepest part of the underpass—a passageway that ran for a hundred yards, uninterrupted, under Knightsbridge.
Our footfalls echoed in the tunnel. I glanced behind me. Four men dressed all in black were moving up behind us. They were masquerading as skinheads and punks—except that instead of the universal jackboots, which make noise on concrete, they were all wearing running shoes or ninja boots. Two of them carried short machetes. Another held an old bayonet. The fourth had a cudgel.
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