We 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 and 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 a 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 took it.  The way of the Warrior, he finally realized was more complex than he had imagined.  You can, he came to understand, create an intangible yet obvious aura about yourself.  You can project non-aggression, 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 has nothing 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- the warrior 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 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 and 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 passage 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 all masquerading as skinhead punks- except that instead of the universal jackboots, which make noise on concrete, they were all making running shoes or ninja boots.  Two of them carried short machetes. Another held an old bayonet. The fourth held a cudgel.

 Ahead of us, two more skinheads came round the far corner, slapping heavy chrome chains.
 I took my Emerson folder off my belt.  “Mick, you carrying?”

 “Not to worry, mate.” He brought a collapsible, spring-loaded cudgel out of his jacket pocket and spronggged it open.

“Let’s go do ‘em.”

 You go into encounters like this accepting that your probably gonna get hurt.  The idea, of course, it to hurt the other guys more than they hurt you- and to do them first.  That’s the other thing: these episodes, when they are carried out by professionals, then to last only a few seconds- certainly less than a couple of minutes.  Everything is concentrated and crystallized.  Quick and dirty.

 Remember when I talked about violence of action?  That’s what had to happen here.

 So we didn’t wait to get zapped.  We didn’t run the wagons into a circle or go waving out hands in that hoodoo-judo-karate bullshit that you see in Hollywood movies.

 We did what every SpecWarrior knows how to do best- we went on the offensive.  Indeed, we knew all to well that a violent counter attack was the only acceptable solution to an ambush.

 So, screaming at the top of our lungs, we wheeled and charged the quartet behind us, intent to commit murder written all over our faces.  I brought down the pink-haired cudgel-man with my shoulder and sliced the back of the hand that held the club.

 I slit vein as well as cartilage, so there was a lot of immediate blood flow.  That is good, because when people bleed, they tend to become distracted.

 This was what you might call a textbook case.  The asshole looked down as his hand and screamed bloody murder, which gave me the opening that I needed.

 I thrust the Emerson into his neck horizontally and brought it straight out forward just above his Adam’s apple, severing his carotid artery and windpipe, just like you slaughter a sheep.
 He went down for good.  But not before he’d covered my new blazer with warm blood.
 That was one. Mick shouted, “Go right!’ I rolled.  A body came flying past me, flung face-first into the tile wall.  That was two.

 Rule one of the yet-to-be-written Marcinko street-fighting manual will be: Don’t waste your time counting the bodies.
 But I’d broken the rule.   So I got tagged.  One of the skinheads snuck up on my port side, reached down, and tagged me with the tire chain just below my right armpit.  I thought I heard ribs crack. It felt like I’d been frigging shot.  I dropped like a sack of shit and the Emerson dropped out of my hand.
 It was doom on Dickie time.

 He slashed again, the chain making sparks as it whapped the concrete inches from my head.  I kicked out in the skinhead’s direction rolled away, and tried to scramble to my feet.  Except, I was having a hard time getting off the deck.  My legs were rubbery and my whole right side had caught fire.  He came after me with the chain again.  I caught it as it bounced off the wall, pulled him down on top of me, and rolled over him.

 Now I got the chain around his neck, my legs locked around his waist, and neck, my legs locked around his waist, and twisted until I heard bones snap.  He was dead meat.

 Peripheral vision of orange hair.  A machete cane slicing toward my head.  I ducked. The punkster swung again, slicing the shoulder pad of my blazer.  Fuck- I unlocked my legs, rolled away, and put the fucking skinhead I’d just killed between me and the blade.

 Whaaack! The blade sliced through the meat of his thigh and stuck in the bone.  While machete man tried to extricate his weapon, I grabbed a handful of orange hair, pulled him close and head-butted his nose, broke it nicely, then twisted his head around and bit a chunk of his ear off.  When that didn’t appear to slow him down any, I gouged his eyes.  That finally made him scream.

 Mick pulled machete man out of my hands- lifted him four feet off the ground and brought him down hard, headfirst.  I heard the asshole’s neck break.

 I scrambled to my feet and put my back against the wall for protection, whipping the chain from side to side like the biker from hell.  I looked around- there was only two assailants left standing.  I limped toward one, flailing chain, but he turned and ran- skedaddled around the corner to the underpass that led toward Piccadilly.  The other turned and ran towards Knightsbridge.

 I approached the intersection cautiously and glanced up at the mugger mirror.  All clear.
 It was time to collect intelligence- see who these assholes were, and who’d sent ‘em.  I started back and knelt over the inert form with orange hair and exceptionally bad BO.  Gingerly I went through his pockets.  They were empty, except for small change and a five-pound note.  I checked a second skinhead.  He didn’t have ID either.  Was this a trend?

  I was on my way to the third skinhead when Mick’s huge hand turned me around and nudged me towards the Knightsbridge exit.  “C’mon.”  He slid his arm around my shoulder.  “Lets haul balls, Dick- before somebody shows up and discovers this mess and we get asked questions we don’t want to answer.”

 I was hyperventilating.  My ribs hurt like hell, too. But there was no way I was going to leave.  “Hey, hey, wait- my knife.”  Emerson CQC6s cost more than $600. I wasn’t about to leave it behind so some fucking London bobby could have a souvenir complete with my fingerprints.

 I went back, picked it off the ground, wiped the blade on an inert skinhead, and hobbled over to where Mick waited, big arms crossed.  I looked at him.

 There are times when you want to kick someone in the balls- and this was one of “em.
 Why? Because the son of a bitch wasn’t even breathing hard.

 Well, he’s four years younger than I am. And he hasn’t been rode hard and put away wet as often.
 “Okay, Captain Owen, your grace,” I groaned, “I’ve had the fucking dinner and the floor show.  So what’s next?”
 Mick looked me up and down critically.  “How about a visit to the fucking hospital?”
 I hate to admit it, but his suggestion actually sounded good.