We pulled over and I jogged into the Ren Cen hotel, asked for two rooms, and was told they were booked full up. I asked for alternate accommodations, and was given the name of a hotel about eight blocks north on Woodward Avenue.
Rodent drove while I played naviguesser, which meant that it probably took us an extra quarter hour to find the place because of the confusing series of one-way streets that sent us driving in circles. Well, no matter—we were already behind schedule. We claimed our rooms and dropped our bags.
Rodent, Gator, and the road map climbed back into the car and headed for Ypsilanti, which, Wonder had learned by checking his computer database, was the regional headquarters for the Sixth Michigan National Guard Infantry Division. I changed into real clothes, then went to the back of the line of guests waiting for taxis, as the downtown weather was currently halfway between mist and drizzle.
The taxi line wasn’t moving—no cabs to be seen anywhere. I rocked on my heels for ninety seconds or so, then made what for me was an incredibly polite inquiry of the doorman. And how long is the wait for a cab? I asked. He cast a practiced eye along the queue, swiveled, peered up and down the empty street that ran in front of the hotel, and told me half an hour. I slipped him a fin for his honesty and cast off on my own.
Fuck it—even though I’d never been here before, I knew I could walk eight blocks to the Renaissance Center in fifteen minutes or less. And I wouldn’t have to contend with one-way streets, either.
Big mistake. Four blocks into my stroll it began to rain in earnest. Half a block later, with Mr. Murphy right at my side—he was wearing galoshes and a Burberry—earnest rain turned to total downpour.
Now, gentle reader, as I am a SEAL, I do not believe in umbrellas. I am supposed to operate in maritime environments. But let me say here and now, that when I am dressed in my English-cut double-breasted blue flannel blazer and Oxford gray trousers (all from Marks and Spencer of Oxford Street, London), a distinguished, gray-striped shirt, and a fashionable paisley silk tie, I do not enjoy being rained upon. If I wanted to look rained-on, I’d wear seersucker.
However, I once took a physics course and hence I understand the laws of nature. Therefore, I hauled balls for the last two blocks. The law of nature I was thinking about goes, The quicker you move, the fewer raindrops will hit you. You can find it in your illustrated high-school textbooks under Marcinko’s Third Principle of Maritime Physics. It holds true about 50 percent of the time. This time, it didn’t hold true at all.
By the time I made it across eight lanes of traffic (not to mention over a five-foot-high concrete divider), and through the Ren Cen’s heavy plate-glass revolving doors, I was soaked clear through my nice Egyptian broadcloth from the inside as well as the outside. You see, one can, and one do, sweat buckets when one sprints four blocks. If, that is, one be as large, as hirsute, and as intrinsically, genetically, inherently, sweat-conducive as I am. This was not a good development. Certainly, it was not the sort of appearance I wanted to cultivate.
So I threaded my way through the moderne lobby, past the bar (I saw they displayed a big Bombay poster and vowed to return shortly) and found my way down a series of corridors to a secluded double-vay say, as they say in French, where I could improve my soggy condition without too much interruption.
I sloshed my way up to the lavatory door. It was obstructed by a big youngster wearing a Secret Service-style radio earpiece, blue pinstripes, and a fifty-dollar haircut standing dead center in front of said door, arms crossed.
Did I mention that he was big? Let me rephrase. He blocked the light. Six foot seven. Three hundred pounds. No noticeable body fat. He looked like one of those ex-football players. Belay that—he looked like a whole fucking football team.
I stepped around him. “Excuse me.”
He dropped his arms. “Sorry—this room’s in use.”
I stepped back so I could see the sign above the door. I shrugged. “Seems to me that’s the universal sign for Men’s Room up there—it doesn’t say anything about ‘private.’”
Señor football team wasn’t overtly impressed at my ability to interpret nonverbal imagery. He simply stood there and repeated himself.
I sighed. This conversation, I realized, was going to go nowhere. And it was, after all, a public rest room. So I feinted right, cut left, and went for the door.
He put his hand on my chest to stop me. This was not a wise choice—even for someone his size. Not when I was in my current mood. You will remember, gentle readers, that it has not been a good week for Dickie.
So I trapped and pressed his hand against my chest, bent his wrist backward, nearly breaking it (I could hear the tendons and cartilage popping), and while he was thus preoccupied I kneed him smartly thrice in the groin, lifting him four or five inches off the floor with each impact.
It’s amazing what a good knee in the balls will do to take the wind out of a BAW—that’s a Big Asshole Windbag. So, since said BAW had been properly deflated, and wasn’t offering any resistance, I sat him on the floor next to the doorway, removed the little microphone dangling from his wrist, and stomped it—the better to keep him from summoning more of his ilk (I’m not big on ilk), then I walked into the men’s room.
Inside, the place was empty, except for what appeared to be a pair of real expensive, pale gold-colored ostrich cowboy boots, with a pair of equally expensive soft wool trousers and an extravagantly expensive pair of boxer shorts, both of which were draped down around the ankles of someone sitting in stall number three.
I see all of you out there. You people are shaking your heads, wondering how I know those boxer shorts around those ankles were—in my own words—“extravagantly expensive.”
Well, friends, it was because they had three snaps on the fly front and they didn’t have any elastic. Now, the kinds of boxer shorts most folks wear—they come in packs of three—have elastic waists and no front closure. The real good ones—the kind you buy if your last name is Rockefeller or Harriman and your underwear costs more than most people’s suits—are made by individual waist size, and they have little snaps on the front so your pecker doesn’t fall out and embarrass you in the dressing room of the Union League, or the New York Athletic Club.
You’re probably wondering where I got all of that. Hey, bub, ain’t it amazing, the trivia you pick up after a life in unconventional warfare?
“Don’t mind me,” I said in the direction of the fifty-dollar skivvies. “I just need to dry off a bit, then I’ll be out of here.”
I received no answer, so I shrugged, then went to work. I peeled off my blazer and jury-rigged it across two of the hot-air hand dryers, with the nozzles shooting down the arms. I used a third machine on my shirt and tie. After five or six minutes, steam began to rise from my blazer and I pulled it off the hot-air machine because I realized if I didn’t, it would begin to shrink on me soon.
I’d just hung the jacket on a stanchion, when I saw old Mr. BAW in the mirror as he came huffing and puffing through the door. He had a collapsible spring-steel baton in his hand and murder in his little round pig eyes.
I tossed my shirt over a stall door, then wheeled to face him. I thought about extracting the Emerson CQC6 on my trouser waistband and simply killing him. But frankly, I didn’t want any blood on me today. It would be impolite when I met LC Strawhouse.
So, as Mr. BAW feinted left, I countered right. He weaved. I bobbed. I weaved. He bobbed. We both feinted again, our feet and shoulders going in opposite directions. Then his eyes focused, and I knew the next move was going to be for real.
His feet went right, he went left, and the baton came around like a baseball bat, aimed right at the side of my face. I swiveled. But I didn’t move quite fast enough—the grip of the shaft caught me upside my ear hard enough to make me see stars. Shit, those things hurt.
He knocked me into a stall door and followed after me. I reacted instinctively, moving as the baton dented the gray steel panel with a nasty thwock.
I was grow
ing sick and tired of this motherfucker—it was time to put him away. Besides, he was using the baton like a baseball bat, swinging it, not chopping with it as I prefer to do.
That was a big mistake. I pulled back and let his swing go by me—strike one—then exploded forward, using my shoulder to hit him in the lower rib cage.
He grunted, and tried to bring the wand down on my back.
Except, I’d caught his wrist and he couldn’t move very well. That was strike two.
I moved him backward—kind of the same way a defensive lineman works with a tackling dummy, except I wasn’t playing by any rules. I really put my shoulder into it, and I heard his ribs break as he hit the six inches of exposed nozzle on one of the hot-air machines. It must have hurt like hell, because he dropped the baton.
That was strike three. I whirled, snatched it off the floor, and chopped him about the face four or five times. His cheekbones and nose were going to need medical attention soon. But that wasn’t my concern. My concern was putting the cocksucker o-u-t. So, I wheeled him around, set him up about a foot away from the wall, and using my right forearm, knocked him—whaaaap—up against the heavy tile as hard as I could.
Heckler & Koch’s International Training Division offers an intensive, week-long SWAT course called Tactical Team for police officers, as well as spooks and other sundry government types. One full day is spent studying and practicing what is known as “Active Countermeasures.” That is a way of saying it is the day the trainees get to beat the shit out of one another. See, unlike SEALs, cops can’t always kill an armed suspect. Unless they’re in imminent danger of being killed themselves, their rules of engagement say they have to subdue the bad guy, not shoot him.
Now, if that subduing is done badly, you get the Rodney King case. If it is done well, it is over in a matter of a second or two, the perp hurts like hell for a week, and no one gets accused of police brutality.
The instructor for the Active Countermeasures segment of Tactical Team is a tough, impassioned, zealous lieutenant from the Milwaukee County Sheriffs Department named Gary Klugiewicz, who has held the U.S. National title in full-contact karate. You can get hurt doing full-contact karate. (I can identify with Gary because he, like I, believes that pain exists to tell you you’re still alive.)
Anyway, Gary insists that one of the best weapons police officers have at their disposal is the common, everyday brick, masonry, tile, or concrete wall. He has, in fact, refined a wonderful technique by which you can knock the bejeezus out of anyone with one blow by using the laws of physics, a fast-traveling projectile (the perpetrator), and an immovable object—the wall. You don’t have to send the bad guy very far. Six inches will do (although a couple of feet is better). But you have to hit him decisively, so he bounces off that wall—hard. In training—and I had all my guys from Green Team study this technique with Gary until they had it down—you see stars. How do I know you see stars? I know because we used to practice on one another. In real-life situations, you can use Gary’s technique to cold-cock some son of a bitch better than any sucker punch, and with less potential damage to you.
In the current situation, for example, Mr. BAW came off the wall with his eyes rolled back in his head like a fucking slot machine gone TILT. By the time I slapped him against the wall a second time for good measure, he was gone for the week.
There was still not a peep from the occupied booth, and I hoped that whoever was inside hadn’t had a heart attack during my little fracas. But that wasn’t my concern. My concern was creating a resting place for Mr. BAW. So I dragged him over to a stall, sat him on the seat (leaning him against the back wall for support), and closed the door. If there’d been an OUT OF ORDER sign available I would have hung it to complete the aesthetics of my still life creation titled, Big Asshole Windbag Recumbent. Then I sat down on the cool tile, tucked my head between my knees, and tried to calm myself down both physically and mentally.
One of the things you should understand about violent interludes—gunfights, knife fights, and free-for-alls—is that they don’t go on for very long. This one, for example, had probably taken less than twenty seconds from the first feint to the time I dragged Mr. BAW into the toilet stall. But even though the duration is short, they are nonetheless incredibly draining, both on the body and on the mind.
Yes, the mind. Now don’t go accusing me of pseudomacho psychobabble here, because I know from what I’m talking about. The bottom line is that in those few seconds or minutes during which you are putting your life on the line, not only your body is challenged, but your mind is also working at warp speed. The combination is tremendously debilitating. When that mind drain is coupled with the 1,000 percent you have to give physically, the result is total exhaustion.
But sometimes, you just have to keep going. And this was one of them. So, while I wanted to stop at the lobby bar, down a couple of double Bombays, and strike up a conversation with something blonde and buxom, I wiped my face, straightened my clothes, and made my way down to the convention floor to do some serious recon. I had a billionaire to find.
* * *
Three hours later, walked and talked out but without having made contact with my target, I was finally perched atop a faux-leather stool in the smoked Plexiglas, neon-accented bar just off the main lobby, nursing Dr. Bombay, simultaneously fascinated and horrified as the bartender, a short-haired person of indeterminate gender who wore four earrings and bore the name tag KIM on … i-t-s black tunic, concocted a martini by adding three parts cold vermouth to one part warm gin and then dropping a maraschino cherry into the glass.
I sipped my gin and tried my damndest to figure out why martinis hadn’t been programmed into the humongous back-bar computer, which siphoned, mixed, poured, and then rang up everything from draft beer, blush wine, and scotch-on-the-rocks, to Long Island iced teas and tequila sunrises—each drink precisely portion-controlled down to the last milliliter.
Probably, I decided, because the goddamn thing had been designed by some freaking twenty-five-year-old Harvard MBA dweeb scum who’d been brought up on Santa Fe margaritas and Jell-O shooters and had never heard of martinis.
Why am I carrying on like this about a fucking machine? Because, friends, there is a parallel situation going on right now at the Pentagon—yes, the Pentagon—where they are taking SpecWar away from platoon chiefs with combat experience and turning it over to machines—computer-driven simulators. Just like the fucking hotel manager here had turned quality control, portion control, and total control over to a goddamn Rube Goldberg contraption made of rubber hoses, stainless steel nozzles, and shiny chrome gizmos.
Oh, yeah—SpecWar is now firmly in the hands of the portion-control crowd, too. And with what results? With bad results. Currently, for example, portion control dictates that each SEAL gets precisely one hundred rounds of ammunition per month. And what if he wants more? The answer is that he can buy it himself. My SEALs used to shoot one hundred rounds of ammunition in ten minutes. My SEALs used to shoot more ammo in a year than the entire U.S. Marine Corps.
Not today’s SEALs. Portion control says one hundred rounds per month. And that’s what they get. Portion control also says they get twenty-four parachute jumps per year. And how do you build confidence with such a low volume? The answer (I’ll bet you knew this already) is that you don’t. Which means that under combat conditions, SEALs will spend too much of their precious time worrying about whether they’ll survive the drop, and not enough time figuring out how they’re gonna kill the bad guys.
And what does portion control do? It saves money, so that the Navy can buy toys, such as their new Cyclone class ships. (Cyclones are officially designated PCs, which stands for Patrol Coastal, but the more roguish sailors have renamed them Politically Correct-class ships). Anyway, PCs are 170-foot craft designed to work in brown water—that is, the shallow waters in which more and more conflicts (Cuba and Haiti come to mind) take place these days. They are CALOW—Coastal and Limited Objective Warfare—ships, as op
posed to blue water, or mid-ocean craft. They were designed to patrol and interdict. A secondary role is SpecWar operational missions, because the PCs can hold up to nine SEALs.
But there’s a basic problem here: we SEALs don’t need a dedicated, 170-foot ship to do our work. We can insert and extract from any kind of craft—from a dingy to a goddamn ferry boat, to a fucking sampan. So it’s not SEALs that need these ships—but the goddamn Navy hierarchy.
Why, you ask? Because it means thirteen new commands for young line officers, so they can be promoted and become captains, then admirals, which will ultimately put them in the position to buy more ships.
Now, the funding for these PCs has come from the Special Operations Command. So far as I am concerned, the money would have been better spent on two or three new kill houses and a few million rounds of ammunition. Kill houses allow SEALs to practice their deadly craft under stress and with some danger involved. But the people who run SOC don’t think the way I do. They’d rather have their toys. So, these days, SEALs shoot electronic bullets at bigscreen TV sets, and the Navy has thirteen new ships.
But when the merde hits the ventilateur, some young SEALs are going to get themselves killed because they won’t have spent enough time shooting real bullets in real-life environments where ricochets can ding ’em, and where seemingly impenetrable concrete walls suddenly look like Swiss cheese. They won’t have learned how to take cover under fire, or shoot under stress.
The new regime doesn’t like live-fire exercises because people might possibly possibly get hurt. And an injured SEAL can ruin an officer’s chance at promotion. And in today’s Navy, promotion, not leadership, is what being an officer is all about. Which is why my way of doing business—the old-fashioned, in-your-face style of operating—is out the window. And it is why simulation, not live-fire exercises, now provides “experience” for operators.
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