Detachment Bravo

by Richard Marcinko

  As they used to say at SAS, buggers can’t be choosers. And so, Mick shrugged, gave me an upturned thumb and mouthed, “Happy landings, mate.”

  I tapped his shoulder. “Oh, and fuck you very much, too, Mick.” Then, parting the saw grass, I eased down the bank and slid into the water. Oh, fuck me. The water was only about sixty-eight or so. That was a lot cooler than I’d expected. In fact, you can get hypothermia in sixty-eight-degree water if you remain in it long enough and the air temperature drops. But that didn’t bother me. SEALs do not approach the water and test it with their tippy-toes. SEALs do not complain about cold water. SEALs JUST DO IT. And so, I eased down the bank and slipped into the river, my nuts shriveling appropriately as I went.

  The bottom was soft mud. Soft, oozy mud. Nasty, soft, oozy mud. I pushed off as best I could and started moving across the dark water with a slow, steady sidestroke, my head low and my eyes on the opposite shoreline. Boomerang, Timex, and Randy followed me into the water and swam behind in a ragged formation.

  There wasn’t much of a current—only a half a knot or so. But given the fact that we were all being weighted down by what we carried and what we wore, swimming across any kind of current was a chore. I let the water carry me downstream, cutting against it to take me to the far side of the Lujan, so I’d be as far away as possible from the diners on the hotel veranda.

  2142. I swam slowly and deliberately, keeping my right arm under the surface of the water as much as I could. It wasn’t as effective as a real sidestroke, but it kept the water movement to a minimum. We would pass within eighty or ninety feet of the hotel. I could already make out the pinpoint lights of the candles on the tables, and hear the music.

  2149. I stroked carefully past the veranda. The lanterns were festive. I could hear the murmur of conversation—or thought I could. Oh, yeah: the tables were filled with couples and foursomes, all of them drinking wine, eating good food, and looking forward to a late night that would culminate in endless nookie.

  And then there was me. Cold, wet, and suffering from terminal lack o’ pussy. My friends, there is no fairness in life.

  2156. A hundred yards past the hotel, I increased the pace of my stroke and made good time as I swam up the tributary. I slowed once to check up on the rest of my crew. Once I saw them strung out behind me, I resumed my steady sidestroking.

  2212. About a half klik of swimming later, I pulled up and treaded water. Perhaps 150 yards ahead, on the port-side bank, I could make out a long wooden dock rising out of the water. Above it ambient light from Gwilliam’s villa punctuated the darkness. The villa was the only structure on the tributary.

  I’d already decided that we would attempt a two-pronged approach tonight. Boomerang and I would swim to the dock and probe the house from there. Rotten and Timex would swim past the dock and check things out from the far—which is to say the eastern—side. Now I waited for the rest of the team. We formed up and continued our infil, keeping close to the riverbank so that we could use the thorn brush, marsh grass, palmettos, and mangrove to conceal our approach.

  2218. Eighty yards upstream, the dock lay ahead of me. But there was more. Just as promised, a riverboat was berthed to the far side of the long wooden structure. It looked like one of the hundreds of small craft that plied the Río Parana all the way north past the city of Rosario, eight hundred miles north, to Misiones Province, or churned the waters between Argentina and Uruguay on the Río de la Plata. The boat was about sixty-five, maybe seventy feet long, and from the look of its silhouette, it pulled a draft of no more than a yard. The small, raised wheelhouse was aft, connected to a kind of shack, which is probably where the captain slept and ate. The rest of the bargelike deck was reserved for cargo—and cargo there was: even in the dark I could see a tarp covering a pile of something. I swam closer so I could make things out more clearly. Three small hatch covers lay atop the shallow hold. Atop two of them, a pair of tarps had been laid over something, then tied down tightly.

  The running lights—one atop the small single mast, another atop the wheelhouse, and two more to port and starboard about amidships—were all extinguished. There was no glow emanating from the single window of the shack behind the wheelhouse. I listened carefully for the sound of a generator. I heard nothing. This craft was unoccupied.

  2221. Fifteen yards in front of my Roguish snout I sensed movement. I froze in the water. A lone security guard, a pistol jammed in his belt and an Uzi on a sling over his shoulder, walked down to the edge of the dock and flicked a cigarette into the water. As it hit, the hiss was surprisingly loud. But then, all sounds seem to be amplified at night. I watched as the guard checked the boat, then ambled back up the dock and disappeared from sight through a curtain of vegetation.

  Thank God for ambient light, and for unprofessional security assholes who wear light-colored clothes at night. At least for the moment, Mister Murphy was screwing with the opposition instead of fucking with me.

  2223. Boomerang and I treaded water under the dock while Rotten and Timex swam behind the riverboat and kept moving upstream. We would link up in two hours under the dock, and exfil as a unit. I let them have three minutes to work their way toward their positions, then I began my own evening’s fun & games.

  I slid my arm into Boomerang’s knapsack, grabbed my diving mask, washed the silt out of it, and snapped the rubber band tight under my French braid. Then I retrieved the waterproof flashlight and looped its lanyard around my wrist. First things first: I dove under the riverboat and examined its hull, to see if there was anything attached. It’s an old UDT caching trick to build a small watertight compartment on the outside of a boat’s hull and use it to carry contraband or anything else you don’t want most folks knowing about. This was not fun. It was painstaking work, especially in the dark; especially because noise discipline had to be maintained. Even so, it took me less than five minutes to resolve that this riverboat’s hull was clean.

  Well, “clean” is an overstatement. The boat appeared to be in fair overall shape at best. The cabin siding was rotted in places, there were rust spots on the metal, and the exterior wood needed a lot of attention. I surfaced, took in fresh air, then went under again and used the waterproof flashlight to check the prop and rudder area. The prop had recently been replaced. It, and what I could see of the shaft, were well maintained. That, too, is an old Warrior’s trick: you keep your craft in shitty cosmetic shape, and the world underestimates you.

  I silent-signaled Boomerang to start a pattern search on the downstream side of the dock. While he did that, I swam to the stern, pulled myself up on the old tire that partially obscured the boat’s name—it was indeed the Patricia Desens, and its home port was Santa Elena—and eased my way over the low railing onto the stern, just behind the shack’s narrow louvered wood door.

  What I wanted to do was to check the wheelhouse. I wanted to see if the Patricia Desens had any state-of-the-art communications or global positioning equipment. I wanted to check its charts and see if I could determine where it had been and where it might be going. Then I’d creep forward and examine whatever was concealed beneath the tarps. But between me and everything else was that ramshackle ramshack, and it is a hard-and-fast rule that one does not go past an unsecured area without checking it first.

  So, first things first. From the position of the hinges, the door opened outward, pulling from starboard to port. I tested the doorknob. It was not locked. I eased the door open c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y, and maneuvered myself inside.

  The space was tight, and it smelled of stale sweat, old beer, and piss. To my left, I could make out a dim shape in the darkness—a bunk, maybe, or a low cabinet. I hit the switch on the red-lensed flashlight to take a closer look.

  Which, of course, is when the captain of the Patricia Desens awoke because he’d sensed someone invading his space. He lurched into a sitting position with a confused “¿Qué pasa?”

  I wouldn’t want to take bets on which one of us was the more startled. But the difference
between el capitán and mí, was that my reaction time was a lot faster than his, no doubt because he’d recently polished off the empty rum bottle that lay beside his dirty pillow.

  Instinctively, I snapped my right arm out and hit him—whaaap!—with a jab that caught him right on the point of his jaw. The blow sent his head slapping back against the bulkhead of the shack, and my fucking fist waving lamely in the stale air like that old Italian guy going “Mama mia thatsa spicy meatball” in the Alka-Seltzer® commercial. Geezus H. Keerist, I’d jammed my hand against the asshole’s jaw, and the pain shot from wrist through elbow and shoulder, right up behind my now-crossed eyes.

  But pain be damned, it was a perfect punch. El capitán dropped neatly back onto his bunk, unconscious. It had all gone perfectly. Except, of course, for the fact that my left hand was now sending distinct SOS signals to my brain. Oh shit oh damn oh fuck that hurt. And why the hell hadn’t I just smacked him with the flashlight? Hey, if you don’t ask, I won’t tell.

  But I wasn’t about to spend precious seconds hurting. I looked around for something to secure him with. I cut a length of rope from a coil at the stern and tied him down. I ripped a square of fabric off his pillowcase and stuffed it into his mouth, and then used more strips of the pillowcase to secure the gag in place. All of which took longer than you might think because I basically didn’t have the use of my left hand.

  2229. I searched the wheelhouse. There was a state-of-the-art radio transceiver, as well as a pair of global-capable satellite cellular phones. I checked the chart locker but came up with nothing. On a small oilcloth-covered table was a chart the captain had been working on. I gave it a QOO.44 It was a pilotage chart of the Río de la Plata and the Uruguayan coast. I directed my flashlight onto the sheet of waterproofed paper. A course had been set—a thick line of red grease pencil zigged and zagged toward the little port town of Punta del Este, which sat on the tip of a peninsula about thirty miles east of Montevideo, Uruguay. I knew about the place: it was a high-class beach resort. The kind of thousand-buck-a-day hotel where you find Eurotrash like Gwilliam and his VERBs. I folded the chart and stuck it in the rear left pocket of my soggy jeans. I took everything else I could lay my hands on and stashed the booty in a blue plastic pail, which I left on the Patricia Desens’s stern, to be picked up later. Then I began a systematic search for cargo.

  It didn’t take long. Oh, sure, I went below, checked the cofferdams for explosives, and found nothing. And I made a cursory search of the small cargo area in the forecastle. And I checked the line locker and found nothing but line. No, what I was looking for was right in plain sight: resting atop the hatch covers under that pair of old tarps.

  How did I know what I was looking for? It is because I am a professional, and I know bad shit when I see it. And in this case, the bad shit was a pair of sealed cylinders, each about twenty feet long and two feet in diameter, and each marked with the same two Arabic numerals—38—painted in white on the dark plastic.

  I can’t read much Arabic, but I can understand Arabic numerals. 38 stands for Talateen tamanya. Thirty-eight.

  And even though I’ve never taken the DIA’s crateology course I knew damn well what I was looking at: a pair of missiles. Precisely what kind of missiles they might be, I didn’t know—the number thirty-eight sounded familiar, but for the life of me I couldn’t put a missile designation to it. That’s right: even the Rogue Warrior® isn’t omniscient all the time. Besides, I wasn’t about to take the time to find out.

  Later, after we’d checked the villa, come back aboard, hijacked the boat, and had the Patricia Desens all to ourselves, we’d open up the cylinders and see what specific model missile Gwilliam had bought. We’d spend some time interrogating the captain, too.

  2239. But there was no time to ponder hypotheticals. I was already way behind the schedule I kept in my head. So, I slipped back over the side to see if Boomerang had come up with anything else.

  The answer is that he hadn’t. I gave him the flashlight, then pulled a lightweight, twenty-four-foot line from the bag on his back and started my own pattern search on the upstream side, using the pilings and the Patricia Desens as my reference points.

  2244. Nothing. I unhitched my guideline, surfaced, moved a dozen feet toward the shoreline, attached the line to another piling, and started all over again from ground zero. Again, I found nothing.

  2250. I struck gold on my third pattern search. Tied to the base of the piling, beneath three inches of mud, was a hefty piece of line. I tested it and discovered resistance on the other end. I untied my own lightweight search line, then used the taut line, covered with delta goo and muck, to guide myself upstream, feeling gingerly as I went. I didn’t want to hit a trip wire or a booby trap, so I proceeded inch by inch up the line until I finally felt a knot. I ran my fingers over the knot and then, carefully, beyond it—and discovered that the line had been tied to a heavy plastic crate that was half buried in the muck and goo of the river bottom. I surfaced, and grabbed some air. Forty feet away, I saw Boomerang’s narrow face in the ambient moonlight. I waved him over to my position.

  We spoke using our hands. Boomerang had discovered two more waterproof crates tied to one of the pilings on the downstream side of the dock. I silent-signaled about what I’d found. I added that I was going back to take another look-see. He slipped the red-lensed diving light’s lanyard over my wrist.

  We both dove into the ten-foot-deep water of the channel. When I reached the crate, I hit the switch on the light. I used the flashlight so he could see my hand signals. He lifted the crate off the bottom, and the two of us swam it back toward the dock.

  I muscled my way back onto the stern of the Patricia Desens. Then Boomerang handed me the crate we’d carried back and I carefully laid it on the deck. He retrieved the other two crates he’d found, handed them up to me, and I laid them gently on the decking.

  Why not open ’em up now? Because later, I’d have all the time in the world—something I didn’t have now. Remember: once we’d finished our recon at the villa, we’d slip back aboard, untie the mooring lines, and drift downstream. Then, once we’d put some distance between us and the dock, I’d start the engine and we’d make off with all of Gwilliam’s goodies—and doom on him.

  I checked my watch again. 2320. Shit—sore wrist or no, it really was time for us to go to work.

  13

  BOOMERANG AND I MADE OUR WAY ALONG THE PILINGS and worked our way onto the shoreline, progressing slowly and deliberately, searching for sensors or trip wires and careful to leave no trail. Even though the night air was warm, we were thoroughly chilled through by almost an hour and a half in the water. Well, guess what: cold is just a sensation, and like all sensations, it, too, would pass. And if not, it didn’t fucking matter—we’d finish our work no matter how cold we were.

  It was time to DAC,45 so we split up. I melted into the underbrush on the port, or western, side of the path, while Boomerang worked his way up the eastern—star-board—edge. I made my way slowly, a few inches at a time, careful to stay well away from the wide gravel swath that led toward the walled villa fifty yards away. I hadn’t progressed eight yards from the dock when it hit me: a thick, sweet scent, wafting down along the ground toward the water. I stopped moving and waited, all my senses keened, trying to identify the perfumed smell.

  And then I realized what it was: it was men’s cologne. Sickly sweet men’s cologne. And there was a señor, nearby, who was wearing it. It was immediately obvious to me that his name was Señor Brut, and he was somewhere very, very close by, waiting to ambush me.

  Now, you might ask why someone who was about to spring an ambush would ever douse himself with cologne in the first place. That is a good question, but it betrays a certain cultural naïveté on your part. I will explain. In some societies, and the populations of many countries in South America are among them, cologne is worn by some men all the time. The group in question includes even soldiers in combat and cops on duty. Maybe they don’t reali
ze that the opposition can actually smell ’em coming. Maybe they don’t give a shit. Maybe, since everyone is wearing cologne, they realize that all those smells just merge, and no one knows if the odor he’s sniffing is friendly or unfriendly.

  But let me assure you, it is always easy for moi to locate a platoon of Venezuelan commandos hidden in ambush, or a SWAT team of Brazilian cops setting up a stealthy, clandestine approach to take down a house of no-goodniks, even in the thickest part of the upper Amazon basin or the nastiest stretch of São Paulo’s urban jungle. Why? The answer is, because so many shooters are wearing Canoe, Habit Rouge, Obsession, or similar potent scents. And those … odors precede them by some eight or nine yards, or sometimes even greater distances than that.

  It’s actually quite self-defeating: the teams use camouflage to make themselves invisible; they darken their faces so they won’t reflect light at night; they wear the ever-popular jungle camouflage, or ninja black, BDUs so they will blend in with their surroundings. And then they douse themselves with fucking perfume.

  I think it is dangerous. I believe it is a grooming habit that can get you killed. Which is why I do not allow my men to wear any kind of scent whatsoever. Ever. In the units under my command, all perfumed soaps, fragrant unguents, aromatic aftershaves, and other senseless perfumery are Zutritt verboten.46 So much for the Rogue’s theory of scent-based warfare. And now, let’s get back to real time.

  2324. I froze exactly where I was, and listened. It took half a minute, but then I heard Señor Brut breathing. He was obviously a heavy smoker who therefore couldn’t draw a lot of air into his lungs noiselessly. He wheezed. And that—along with his cologne—is how I was able to find him.

  I followed my nose and my ears, moving grass blade by grass blade as silent as a jaguar or Bengal tiger in hunting mode. Yes, I am a big man. But I can move my rippled muscle mass without making a sound, and that is what I did. Stalked the sonofabitch in the darkness just like a big, stealthy cat, until I was close enough to see him.