Detachment Bravo
Page 1
From top-secret diplomatic tunnels beneath London to the high seas off the Azores, the New York Times bestselling SEAL commando of eight explosive thrillers takes on a lethal group of Irish Republican Army terrorists in
The Rogue Warrior is back in another fast-paced, furious, in-your face adventure! This time he’s on the hunt for a high-tech army that smashed the Good Friday Peace Accord and killed a half dozen American and British CEOs. Launched by two self-financed, new-generation terrorists, this murderous wing of the IRA has an even bigger assault plannded—one that promiseds to stun the world. Now, along with a special ops team made up of Brits, SEALs, spies, and NSA operatives, Marcinko is determined to stop them, but there are a few unknowns: they don’t know the target, they don’t know the date, and they don’t know the targed, they don’t know the date, and they don’t know where the terror is going down.
“Unbashedly testosterone-addled.”
—Publishers Weekly
“In a field of wanns-bes, Marcinko is the real thing.”
—The Washington Times
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ROGUE WARRIOR: DETACHMENT BRAVO
“The ninth installment in the Rogue Warrior series cuts another swath through posturing bureaucrats and waffling military brass.”
—Publishers Weekly
ROGUE WARRIOR: ECHO PLATOON
“[An] exercise in hairy-chested readability.… Mouth-drying, palm-moistening, exceptionally informative.… Hardened fans will salute and read.”
—Booklist
ROGUE WARRIOR: OPTION DELTA
“[A] classic crowd pleaser.… Great fun, more intelligent than you may think.… Marcinko’s Rogue Warrior yarns…are the purest kind of thriller around, with action, pacing, and hardware galore.”
—Booklist
ROGUE WARRIOR: SEAL FORCE ALPHA
“Entertaining.… Marcinko and his team handle, with gusto, both enemies without and traitors within, using their wits, a staggering array of weapons, and an obvious appetite for violence.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Authentic.…This action-filled novel is a genuine thriller, one that keeps the reader in suspense throughout.”
—The Free Lance-Star (Fredericksburg, VA)
ROGUE WARRIOR®: DESIGNATION GOLD
“Marcinko and Weisman add new plot ingredients and push them to the limits of military technology.… Half the fun is Marcinko’s erudite commentary on the incompetence of U.S. military services, the complex and ultimately frustrating mechanics of international politics, and the manly art of protecting your ass.”
—Playboy
“Hard-hitting.”
—Kirkus Reviews
ROGUE WARRIOR: TASK FORCE BLUE
“Heart-pounding, white-knuckle, pure adrenaline action.… The fast-paced Mission: Impossible–style plot rockets along like a high-octane action movie. … Agreat book.”
—The Beaumont Enterprise (TX)
ROGUE WARRIOR: GREEN TEAM
“[A] fast-paced yarn with vivid, hardware-laden detail.”
—Booklist
“Liberally sprinkled with raw language and graphic descriptions of mayhem.”
—Detroit Free Press
ROGUE WARRIOR: RED CELL
“[A] bawdy action novel. … never stops to take a breath.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A chilling, blood and guts, no-nonsense look into clandestine military operations told like it should be told. It doesn’t come more powerful than this.”
—Clive Cussler
ROGUE WARRIOR®
“For sheer readability, Rogue Warrior leaves Tom Clancy waxed and booby-trapped.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Fascinating.…Marcinko…makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Little Lord Fauntleroy.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Blistering honesty.…Marcinko is one tough Navy commando.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
THE ROGUE WARRIOR’S STRATEGY FOR SUCCESS
“Picture Rambo in pinstripes.…Marcinko’s style is inspirational; his (literal) war stories are entertaining; and sprinkled throughout are useful business insights.”
—Publishers Weekly
LEADERSHIP SECRETS OF THE ROGUE WARRIOR
“Look out, Bill Gates.”
—USA Today
AND PRAISE FOR THE REAL STORIES FROM THE REAL SEALS
THE REAL TEAM
“When a guy who could kill you with his bare hands writes a book, how can you not love it? Pick this up or he’ll find you.”
—Stuff
“Marcinko satisfies not only his readers’ interest in knowing more about the team members, but their desire to know how he selects and maintains a team.”
—Tulsa World (OK)
Photo by Michel Le Grou/MPG
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Operational details have been altered so as not to betray current SpecWar techniques.
The Rogue Warrior’s PDW courtesy of Heckler & Koch, Inc.
An Atria Book published by
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 2001 by Richard Marcinko and John Weisman
Originally published in hardcover in 2001 by Atria Books
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN: 0-671-00075-6
ISBN: 978-1-4391-2006-4(Ebook)
First Pocket Books paperback printing March 2002
ATRIA BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
ROGUE WARRIOR is a registered trademark of Richard Marcinko
Cover design and illustration by James Wang
To the loyal fans of many years who follow the Rogue Warrior®’s travels and endure the long lines patiently. YOU ALL ARE “THE TEAM.”
—R.M.
For the Warrior-shooters at HK’s International Training Division: John T. Meyer Jr., Chris Shepard, Gene Zink, Dan Cusiter, David Brancato, Marty Labrusciano, Fred Yates, Skip Pavlischak, Joe Tuzzolino, Mark Kunnath, J. W. Johnson, Dale Carrison, Gary Klugiewicz, Dave Buchanan, and John Zamrok
And for the Honorable Roger Dale Semerad Man o’ Warsman & Patriot
—J.W.
The Rogue Warrior® series by Richard Marcinko and John Weisman
Rogue Warrior
Rogue Warrior: Red Cell
Rogue Warrior: Green Team
Rogue Warrior: Task Force Blue
Rogue Warrior: Designation Gold
Rogue Warrior: SEAL Force Alpha
Rogue Warrior: Option Delta
Rogue Warrior: Echo Platoon
Rogue Warrior: Detachment Bravo
Also by Richard Marcinko
Leadership Secrets of the Rogue Warrior
The Rogue Warrior’s Success Strategies
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)
You lot say you want to know
the two most important things about Ireland?
Well, first of all, Cain and Abel, they had to be
from bloody fuckin’ Belfast, didn’t they?
Second, in Ireland we have our own Holy Trinity:
Death, Pain, and Sufferin’.
—PADDY COHAN OF THE IRA, HOLDING COURT AT THE LION’S HEAD TAVERN, NEW YORK CITY, 1962
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.
Contents
Part One: Death
Part Two: Pain
Part Three: Suffering
Glossary
Index
Part One
DEATH
1
OH, DEAR GOD, HOW I DO LOVE PAIN. IN FACT, THOSE OF you who have read the previous eight books in this series understand all too well that I have an ongoing, enduring, even unique relationship with pain. For those of you who haven’t, let me say that pain and I enjoy a symbiotic bond, a fundamental, intrinsic link, a basic and perpetual connection. The gist of this link is that whenever I endure pain, I realize I am guaranteed to still be very much, very Roguishly, alive. In fact, my life is the perfect articulation of an essential, Froggish precept taught to me during Hell Week by an old, grizzled pipe-smoking UDT chief boatswain’s mate named John Parrish. Chief Parrish’s theory goes: no pain… no pain.
And so, friends, I can report to you with no hesitation whatsoever that right now I was very much … alive. And where was I, you ask? Where, precisely, was I experiencing so much life?
I was flat on my back, punctured by an irregular bed of nails. Big nails. Sharp nails. Many of them antique nails—the old-fashioned, hand-wrought kind of nails. I was stuck, arms and legs akimbo, in a crawl space between the second and third floors of a Victorian-era mansion that had been turned into a series of flats (which is how the Brits refer to apartments) in Hammersmith, one of Central London’s closest-in suburbs, trying not to make a sound as I made preparations to use a silent drill to install a flexible, fiber-optic cable attached to a fish-eye lens through Victorian hardwood subfloor, 1930s asphalt tile, and 1950s carpeting that sat precisely seven inches above the ol’ Rogue snout.
Except—there’s always a catch, isn’t there?—to get to the target area, I’d had to wriggle on my back across seven feet of nail-enhanced, back-lacerating crawl space. Why were the nails there in the first place? Who the fuck knew, and who the fuck cared. I hadn’t seen them at first because I hadn’t used any lights as I made my way into the crawl space because light might give away my existence to the six armed and dangerous IRA splinter group tangos just above me. Oh, I had a tiny, red-lensed flashlight that would assist me once I was ready to do the drill bit, but that was it. I’d do my drilling, install the fish-eye lens, and then retreat, unspooling fiber-optic cable as I did, so it could be plugged into our TV screen, allowing us to see the bedroom of the flat above, and see what they were doing in there. We already had video of the living room and kitchen areas. But when it came to the bedroom we were blind.
Yes, I see you out there. You’re saying, “Hey, what the fuck? Why not use all those techno goodies in your arsenal. Like micro thermal viewers that can pick up human beans from across the street, and state-of-the-art X-ray glasses, and all that shit. It is the twenty-first century after all.”
Well, friends, “all that shit” is dandy if you are a cardboard-and-meringue Hollywood adventure hero whose action toys are made in China by slave labor. But me, I’m the old-fashioned real thing, and unfortunately the real action adventure hero doesn’t get to play with gadgets that work in movies but not real life. In the movies, there are always timers on bombs to tell you how many seconds are left before the hero’s gonna get blown up. In Hollywood, the good guy always manages to crack the computer password in a matter of seconds. In Hollywood, they never count the rounds they shoot.
Not us. My men and I do things the old-fashioned way. We count rounds. Why? Because most SEALs go into combat with only three hundred of ’em, and you can’t fucking afford to waste a single shot. And in all the years I’ve ever played with explosive devices, I have never, ever, even once, seen a bomb that had a digital or analog timer courteously counting down the seconds for me so I’d know precisely when the sucker was gonna explode. No fucking way. And last, I leave all the serious computer shit to the professional hackers. Sure, I can tell you all about sniffers and protocols. I can program in COBOL. I can even write UNIX code if I have to. But these days everything computerwise changes so fast that I’d rather hire some nineteen-year-old PO3 puke who knows it all, rather than have to spend twenty hours a week trying to keep up with the latest developments in bits and bytes.
Nope, I want to save my time for what I do best: killing tangos and breaking things. To wit: I sneak and I peek, and then I hop and I pop, which I almost always follow with the ever popular shooting & looting.
The sneaking and peeking part of this particular goatfuck was long finished. We’d deployed a piece of National Security Agency eavesdropping gizmo known as a Big Ear to monitor the apartment the tangos were in. Big Ears are laser microphones with a throw of about 150 yards. But our twenty-million-dollar gizmo could not tell me whether or not the tangos inside had finished assembling the weapon they were working on. That called for what the military bureaucracy formally refers to as “eyes on.”
After all, no piece of equipment, no matter how much it costs, can force people to talk if they’re security conscious. And these tango assholes understood the rudiments of surveillance. So they never spoke to one another about what they were doing, or how it was going. Instead, they spoke in generalities. If there was anything to say about the weapons they were building, it was most certainly done by sign language and notepad. They’d obviously seen all the current action adventure movies, too, and they were taking no chances. So I was stuck here, doing my snoop & poop the old-fashioned—by which I mean painful—method: creeping, crawling, and bleeding.
Now, I’m sure you want me to explain why I, a humping, pumping, cap-crimping, deep-sea–diving SEAL, whose proper element is H2O, was flopping around like a suffocating flounder in the first place. Hey, asshole—there’s water in those copper pipes over there, and that’s close enough for me. So shut the fuck up, sit the fuck down, pay some attention, and I’ll give you the sit-rep—or at least as much of it as time permits.
I was here because I’d been assigned to a clandestine, patchwork, multinational, joint counterterrorist task force known as DET (for DETachment) Bravo. DET Bravo was headquartered in London. It was made up of Americans and Brits and assigned to deal proactively with the no-goodnik splinter groups who were trying to wreck the Good Friday peace accord, which was bringing reconciliation to Northern Ireland in fits and starts. By no-goodniks, I mean those few hard-lin
e terrorist groups, both IRA and Unionist, that had decided the best way to bring the agreement to a screeching halt was to target Americans and Brits in London and in Northern Ireland.
As you probably know, one of the by-products of the Good Friday Accord was the immediate expansion of American multinational companies into Northern Ireland to bolster the economy. Corporations—from Dell Computer, to American Express, to Intel, to Cisco Systems, as well as scores of other cutting edge businesses—moved some of their operations into Northern Ireland. There were enormous tax advantages for doing so, not to mention a large and well-educated labor pool.
But all of that economic expansion and growth had come to a full stop. The Good Friday Accord had come unraveled because groups of hard-line tangos were targeting American executives in Belfast, Derry, Portadown, Newry, and Ballymena in Northern Ireland, and—more to the immediate point—right here in London. Half a dozen American businessmen had been killed in the past four months alone. The result: the corporations were shutting down offices and pulling their people out.
With the economic situation deteriorating and the political polls hitting rock bottom, our government and the Brits finally decided to form a joint task force to deal with the tangos targeting Americans. The Irish would not stand for any armed Americans on their soil—and the Brits weren’t about to push the issue. But London was open turf. And so, working out of a suite of MI5’s former offices on the fourth floor of Curzon Street House, a six-story office building located at the top of Curzon Street in London’s fashionable Mayfair district, was DET Bravo, a unit composed of FBI and CIA counterintelligence analysts, elements from Scotland Yard and Special Branch, as well as NSA and its British equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), based in Cheltenham. Finally, exiled to the dank, bomb-proof basement of Curzon Street House (and at the fist, or business, end of a largely analytic and bureaucratic arm), was an unwieldy patchwork of British military units, American SEALs, and a working group from SO-19, Scotland Yard’s armed, special-operations unit.