Echo Platoon (2 page)
Authors: Richard Marcinko,John Weisman
The Real Team
Also by John Weisman
Fiction
Blood Cries
Watchdogs
Evidence
Nonfiction
Shadow Warrior
(with Felix Rodriguez)
Anthologies
Unusual Suspects
(edited by James Grady)
The Best American Mystery Stories of 1997
(edited by Robert B. Parker)
The friend of my enemy, he is my enemy;
The enemy of my friend, he is my enemy;
But the enemy of my enemy, he is my friend.
—O
LD
A
ZERI
P
ROVERB
THE ROGUE WARRIOR’S
TEN COMMANDMENTS OF SPECWAR
• I am the War Lord and the wrathful God of Combat and I will always lead you from the front, not the rear.
• I will treat you all alike—just like shit.
• Thou shalt do nothing I will not do first, and thus will you be created Warriors in My deadly image.
• I shall punish thy bodies because the more thou sweatest in training, the less thou bleedest in combat.
• Indeed, if thou hurteth in thy efforts and thou suffer painful dings, then thou art Doing It Right.
• Thou hast not to like it—thou hast just to do it.
• Thou shalt Keep It Simple, Stupid.
• Thou shalt never assume.
• Verily, thou art not paid for thy methods, but for thy results, by which meaneth thou shalt kill thine enemy by any means available before he killeth you.
• Thou shalt, in thy Warrior’s Mind and Soul, always remember My ultimate and final Commandment. There Are No Rules—Thou Shalt Win at All Cost.
Part One:
The Friend of My Enemy
Part Two:
The Enemy of My Friend
Part Three:
The Enemy of My Enemy
HE
F
RIEND
OF
M
Y
E
NEMY
1
F
IRST THINGS FIRST
. T
HE TIME IS CURRENTLY 0230, AND
the situation is currently FUBAR.
1
Now, having given you the complete (yet still Roguishly pithy) sit-rep, I can proceed with the confessional portion of this affair.
Here goes. I have often maintained that Getting There Is Half the Fun. But today, following the presidential example, I can finally admit the truth: I have misled you. It was all mendacity. Lies. Duplicity. Prevarication. After almost a decade of these books, here is the unvarnished, frank, candid, pellucid, and wholly unadulterated acronymic truth: GTINFFAA. Getting There Is No Fucking Fun At All. None. Nada. Bupkis. Zilch.
There is precious little merriment involved in jumping out of a perfectly stable fucking aircraft into minus-sixty-degree-Fahrenheit air, seven miles above the ground, so you can surprise some hostage-holding malefactors unaware. It is not blissful to leave a perfectly fucking sound rigid inflatable boat and insert by
wallowing snout-first through several hundred yards of oozy, chest-deep mud, all the while fending off nasty, often lethal creepie-crawlies, so you can reconnoiter a village of no-goodniks and then withdraw without being seen. There is no ecstasy in humping several score miles across hundred-plus-degree desert carrying everything but the fucking kitchen sink on your back to blow up a motley crew of transnational tangos.
Indeed, the sorts of experiences I’m describing here can be summarized in a single, evocative, one-syllable word. I am talking, friends, about
PAIN
.
Not the cartoon pain of television dramas and Hollywood shoot-’em-ups, either. I mean the real thing. The kind of pain that
hurts;
hurts for days. The lingering agony of a badly hyperextended joint when you smack the water the wrong way at thirty miles an hour. The month of searing suffering when your chute malfunctions during free fall, a nylon line slaps you across the eyes, ripping your goggles off and tearing your cornea loose. The involuntary tightening of sphincter muscles as a ricochet from your own weapon caroms off a metal wall, bounces off the floor, comes hurtling back at you, and slices through your side, just below the brisket half an inch below where your bulletproof vest stops.
Now, let me say that all of the various varieties of pain encapsulated in the above activities: each and every ding, all the blisters, bruises, contusions, and concussions, the gashes, lacerations, and plain, no-frills smacks upside the head, all of them pale when compared with my current situation.
And what, precisely,
was
my current situation? All you Enquiring minds want to know, huh?
Let’s put it this way: my current situation comes straight out of the BOHICA
2
handbook. I mean, I’ve been cracked, smacked, whacked, and hacked; I’ve been thumped, dumped, bumped, and whumped; I’ve been ground, crowned, browned, and drowned. But until tonight, I’ve never experienced it while
greased
.
Yeah, greased. Like a cheap French fry. I mean as thickly coated with petroleum jelly as the Herndon Monument the day the plebes at the Naval Academy climb the fucking thing as the last act of their first year.
3
I mean schmeared. Like a bagel. I mean daubed, as with lard. Like Gertrude Ederle on her first attempt to swim the English fucking Channel.
So okay, maybe if you’re a Channel swimmer, and you’re wearing a 1930s one-piece wool bathing suit, maybe it helps if you envelop yourself in pig fat, or Vaseline (or love-jelly or K-Y, for all I care). But me, I had a little more to carry than Gertrude did. I was wearing a wet suit, which was uncomfortably hot in the tepid water in which I was currently attempting to swim. Over the wet suit was a set of basic black BDUs, which as you all probably know after seven of these books, stands for the oxymoronic Battle Dress Uniform. I was also sporting the ever-popular Point Blank Class III-A Tactical bulletproof vest, with its six-pound ceramic chest plate Velcro’d directly over the ol’ Rogue heart. Atop that, I wore my
inflatable SEAL CQC
4
vest—and lucky I did, because with all this extra weight I’d have sunk faster than what my longtime Kraut
komrade
in arms, Brigadier General Fred Kohler, would refer to as
ein Backstein
.
Sink like a brick? Oh, yeah—I was carrying almost seventy pounds of equipment tonight. Cinched around my waist was a tactical pistol belt. Descending from it, and attached to the Roguish right thigh, was a ballistic nylon holster that held my suppressed Heckler & Koch USP-9 and five spare fifteen-round magazines.
To balance things out, my left thigh supported six thirty-round submachine gun magazines loaded with 115-grain Winchester Silvertips. Strapped to my back was a scabbard holding HK’s ubiquitous MP5 submachine gun in 9-mm, with a Knight wet-technology suppressor screwed onto the barrel, and a seventh full mag of Silvertips within easy reach. I had six DefTec No. 25 flashbangs in modular pouches Velcro’d to my CQC vest, along with a secure radio, lip mike, and earpiece, twenty feet of shaped linear ribbon charge on a wooden spool, primers, wire, and an electric detonator, a pair of eighteen-inch bolt cutters, an electrician’s screwdriver, lineman’s pliers, a short steel pry bar, and a first-aid kit. Since I am from the carry-the-coals-to-Newcastle school of SEALdom, I carried a pair of two-liter bladders of drinking water. My fanny pack contained a handful of nylon restraints, and a small roll of waterproof duct tape.
Strapped to my right calf I wore a Mad Dog Taiho combat knife with a nonmagnetic blade. Wound
around my waist was twenty feet of caving ladder with modular, titanium rungs and stainless steel cable-rail.
With all that dreck attached to my body, swimming the thousand yards from my insertion point to the target would have been, shall we say,
difficult
, even under the best of conditions. But I had no choice. Besides, we were all similarly loaded down. After all, once we’d made the swim, there was no place to go for supplies. If there was a possibility we’d need to use something, either we schlepped it with us, or we’d have to do without when the time came.
Having just said all that, I must admit that tonight’s conditions were, in the abstract, not intolerable toward me and my men. Many elements actually worked in our favor. The water was warm and calm, with a mere eight-to-ten-inch chop. The current flowed obligingly directly toward my target from our launch point. The cuticle-thin sliver of moon low in the east was intermittently obscured by high wispy clouds, which gave me and the eleven men swimming with me a certain degree of invisibility.
Which is why, I guess, Mister Murphy of Murphy’s Law fame, decided that my task was too simple and my goal too easily reached. A twelve-man assault team, swimming roughly one thousand yards, should reach its objective in about forty minutes.
5
We had gone about half that distance in less than twenty minutes—and were therefore ahead of schedule.
And so, with his usual sense of the ironic, Mister Murphy came up with an additional element of difficulty to layer on the night’s events. An unforeseen, unanticipated, and totally unappreciated oil slick coated the water through which I swam tonight. I hadn’t seen it until I was six feet into it—enough time to wave my guys off, but too late for me. We’re not talking about a lot of crude here. The scum was perhaps a thirty-second of an inch at its thickest. But let me tell you something about crude oil: it doesn’t take a lot to fuck you over, and that thirty-second of an inch of oil fucked me over good. The goddamn stuff stuck to me. It coated all my equipment with sticky, foul-smelling goo. And it weighed me down—almost doubling the load I had to swim under.
Moreover, oil slicks come under the rubric of what the tree huggers at the Environmental Protection Agency refer to as HAZMATs, which of course stands for HAZardous MATerials. Indeed, according to the EPA’s current Rules of Engagement (and I’ve read ’em), one must not come into contact with oil slicks unless one is wearing: 1: a set of EPA-approved HAZMAT coveralls; 2: an EPA-approved HAZMAT mask; 3: EPA-approved HAZMAT gloves; 4: HAZMAT footwear; and 5: an EPA-sanctioned hard hat (in visibility orange, or bright yellow only, please). Violators will be severely fined. Their names will be put down in The Book.
But since there wasn’t an EPA tree hugger within six thousand miles, and since I have devoted my life to operating in spite of whatever mischief Mister Murphy or any of his relatives strews in my path, I just kept swimming. Shit, a few years ago, I took a dip in a fucking nuclear wastewater pool. I cured the resulting luminescence (I’m probably the only Richard whose dick
has glowed in the dark) with Bombay Sapphire—and I haven’t noticed any incidences of lighted lizard syndrome since. So, if Bombay can treat the effects of a nuke wastewater pool, I had no reason to think a dollop or two (or three, or four), after this little exercise wouldn’t do the trick, too.
Okay, okay, I’m digressing. You wanted to know about the evening’s festivities. It’s actually quite simple. I was currently attempting to sidestroke through the Caspian Sea toward oil platform 16-Bravo, the main rig of a five-platform operation sitting nine miles from shore, about fifty miles due south of the Azerbaijani capital city of Baku. The rigs were owned by SOCAR, an oil consortium controlled jointly by CenTex (that’s the Central Texas Oil Corporation), and the Azeri government, and manned by a mixed crew of a dozen CenTex and expatriate Brit roustabouts.
But that wasn’t why I was here. I was here because 16-Bravo was currently under the control of a group of eight terrorists. They’d taken over the rig twenty hours ago, using darkness as cover to slip aboard from a pair of bright yellow Zodiac inflatables that were currently tethered to 16-Bravo’s northeastern hull column and bobbing in the gentle waves. The tangos captured the rig, took the roustabouts hostage, then used their own state-of-the-art cellular phones to call CenTex’s home office in Houston, Texas. The message, once it had been translated from Azeri into English, was pretty straightforward: we are pro-Iranian Azeris who do not like the fact that you Infidels are exploiting our nation. Get out of Azerbaijan, or suffer the consequences.
By chance, two hours after the bad guys’ phone call had been translated, I’d wheels-downed in Baku with a platoon of SEALs, on a stealth-grade training mission
q-u-i-e-t-l-y
undertaken at the behest of the secretary of defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But the well-planned secrecy went out the door the instant Americans were taken hostage. The Azeris knew all about my capabilities in the hostage-rescue arena, skills not possessed by any local military or police unit (which was one reason for my coming to Baku in the first place).
