My mask came off—the back strap separating from the clasp and disappearing into the void between my legs. And then the sonofabitch hit me again—this time smack upside my wide Rogue snout, which knocked my mouthpiece clean out of my mouth. I gagged and snorted, which just about fucking drowned me, because as you will remember I was completely underwater, and gagging and snorting when underwater means inhaling what in SEAL technical language is known as the old double-sierra: a shitload of seawater.
It occurred to me that perhaps I should yell “CUT!” and start this process all over again. But that, of course, was impossible. This wasn’t fucking Hollywood, where you get as many takes as you need to Get It Right. Or a goddamn training exercise, where you can take a time-out to regroup, rethink, and reapply yourself to the task at hand. This was for real. And there was a mother-blanking, bleepity-bleeping schedule to keep.
You what? You want to know what that schedule was? And you want me to explain it all now? When I’m in serious fucking pain?
Geezus, have you no sense of timing? Okay, okay—you paid good money for this book, so I’ll be fucking accommodating. To be brief about it, the mission tonight was for me and my seven SEALs to lock out of the Nacogdoches, swim undetected roughly eighteen hundred yards to the northeast, and make our way under half a dozen picket boats manned by armed and dangerous nasties. Then we’d locate die Nadel im Heuhaufen1—in this case it was a certain seventy-five-meter boat—board it, obliterate any opposition, and then capture a Saudi royal yclept Prince Khaled Bin Abdullah. We would do all of this sans any hullabaloo whatsoever.
The reason for our stealth was that Khaled baby was the forty-seven-year-old scion of the Abdullah family, third cousins of da king, and Saudi Arabia’s sixteenth most wealthy clan. Khaled’s annual income was somewhere in the $400 million range, which works out to something like thirty-three million U.S. smackers a month. Educated in Germany, England, and France two decades ago, he’d eschewed the lavish single-malt scotch, Cristal champagne, beluga caviar, and hooker-rich lifestyle most of his fellow princes took up. Instead, he’d somehow gotten involved with the campus radicals, e.g., assholes from the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Red Brigades, and others like them. So Khaled wasn’t into conspicuous consumption like most of your Saudi blue bloods. Instead, he’d invested his profits from Microsoft, Dell Computer, Cisco, and Intel, his circa 1980 12.5 percent zero coupon bonds, and his ARAMCO oil royalties in transnational terrorism.
Khaled funded Hamas suicide squads, Algerian GIA (Armed Islamic Group) death squads, and Kurdish car bombers. You could say that his money endowed “chairs” in murder and assassination at two of the five “universities” the mullahs have set up outside the Iranian cities of Tehran and Qum to train transnational terrorists. He’d provided financial support and logistics to the Harakat-ul-Ansar’s program to assassinate westerners in Kashmir and Pakistan. He’d even given money to American neo-Nazis, German radicals, and Puerto Rican ultranationalists. This scumbag was a real equal-opportunity tango.
And until now, between the reluctant but constant protection of the Saudi royal family (he was, after all, an illegitimate third cousin to the current Saudi ambassador to the United States, which made him a directly indirect relative of da king), and his residence in rural Afghanistan, where he was protected by a brigade of Come-Mister-Taliban-Tally-Me-Banana-clip-on-your-AK-47 gunmen, it hadn’t been politically prudent, tactically practical, or diplomatically realistic to lay our hands on him without creating what the State Department tends to describe as “a deplorable, regrettable, and unfortunate violation of sovereign territory involving United States military personnel.”2
But tonight, his illegitimate ass was going to be mine. Because my guys and I would nail him in international waters, where the State Department has no jurisdiction. Once he’d been properly TTS’d—which as you know means tagged, tied, and stashed—we’d turn him over to the proper authorities, i.e., a team of special agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who were already waiting on a close-but-not-too-close VSV.3 They’d ferry him to an aircraft carrier cruising off Malta, where he’d be put on a plane that would, through the marvel of in-flight refueling, not touch down until it reached the good old U.S. of A. Bottom line: he’d stand trial for financing the bombing of the Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia a few years back and killing nineteen American military personnel.
Yes, friends, when it comes to terrorists, the United States has a long, long memory. And sometimes, despite the current State Department’s best efforts to the contrary, we even act on it.
Ninety-six hours ago, Khaled, the TIQ4, had been lured out of his safe haven in Afghanistan to these here international waters, which happen to be eighty miles due southwest of Akrotiri, Cyprus, by the promise of securing something he’d been trying to buy for the past decade: a ready-to-go, .025-megaton Soviet special demolition munition device, popularly described as a suitcase atom bomb (even though the goddamn thing does not come in a suitcase). The bomb was real—and the man selling it to him, a former Stasi5 officer–turned–black marketeer, smuggler, and arms merchant named Heinz Hochheizer, was a bona fide no-goodnik. Neither Heinz nor Khaled realized they’d both been set up in a protracted, complex, and very intricate sting by the CIA, which thought that getting its hands on one of the old Soviet devices at the same time Khaled was being scooped up made an excellent idea.
It had taken more than nine months to get this far, but Khaled had finally nibbled at the bait, and the folks at Langley had allowed the hook to be set—hard. Still, Khaled was a smart sumbitch. He knew that Fawaz Yunis, one of the tangos involved in the hijacking of TWA 847 back in 1985, had been seduced into international waters by the lure of pussy. But as we all know now, the PIQ (look it up in the Glossary) had been a female FBI agent, an integral part of the FBI’s aptly named Operation Goldenrod (sometimes the Bureau actually does have a sense of humor). And Khaled remembered all too well that Mir Aimal Kasi, the wealthy Pakistani who’d killed two CIA employees and then fled to his homeland, had been sold out by his fellow countrymen—his bodyguards, actually—and scooped up in the summer of 1997 by a joint task force of CIA officers, FBI Special Agents, and Delta Force shooters.
And so, Khaled was real careful about leaving his Afghan sanctuary, even with the wonderful prospect of securing an atom bomb staring him in the puss. It had taken three months of negotiation before he’d agreed to meet Heinz in a non-Islamic venue. Only the threat that others were interested in securing the weapon had finally brought him out of hiding. And Khaled had insisted on making all the arrangements for the exchange—arrangements that changed daily, sometimes even hourly, all posted in encrypted messages on the Internet.6
But he was being watched by a joint CIA/FBI team. And so, Khaled’s progress was noted as he flew in his private jet from a small airstrip southwest of Meymaneh, to Tehran. He was shadowed as he’d driven through Damascus, to Beirut, where his chopper awaited him for the final leg of the journey. It was in Beirut that Mister Murphy showed up and our intrepid American gumshoes lost him. Khaled climbed into his limo and drove to the airfield where his chopper was waiting to take him on the final leg of this nasty odyssey, a 230-mile flight onto the deck of the transatlantic-capable, seventy-five-meter boat I’ll call the Kuz Emeq, which had sailed from Cannes to the anonymous rendezvous point Khaled had chosen in the middle of the Med. But when the big Mercedes limo pulled onto the tarmac, Khaled was nowhere to be seen. He’d pulled a fucking vanishing act that would have done David Copperfield proud.
The team panicked—and with good reason. This op had cost us a bundle—not to mention more than a dozen assets. The alarm bells went off, and our people combed the whole goddamn Mediterranean from Libya to fucking Marseille. But Khaled had disappeared. And then, after thirty-six hours of nothing, they spotted another of his private choppers, a CH-3C with a range of more than six hundred miles that we’d originally sold to the Saudi Air Force. It was flying south, threading the needle between France and Italy. When it re
fueled at Cagliari, Sardinia, one of our people got a peek inside. And guess what? Khaled was there, sipping on his Evian water and reading the Koran. Two hours later, he was sitting in the main salon of the Kuz Emeq as it steamed eastward toward the rendezvous point, with us, and the USS Nacogdoches, in hot pursuit.
Khaled had arranged for the bomb vendor, Heinz the East German (he had Russian Mafiya ties, worked out of a mail drop in Frankfurt’s red-light district, and, as I’ve just mentioned, was an unwitting accomplice in this little charade), to be brought in by another of his choppers, so even the Man with the Bomb would be ignorant of precisely where the meet was going to be, and therefore unable to bring any of his own hired guns along. For his part, Khaled made sure that his security people, six fast boats of well-paid Corsican Mafiosi, as well as a dozen fanatical Taliban shooters aboard the Kuz Emeq, were handy, and well armed. For a quick getaway, he had his chopper sitting on the Kuz Emeq’s chopper deck, its engine warmed up and its pilots ready to go am geringsten AnlaB, which is how the scumbag had learned to say “at the drop of a hat” at the Free University of Berlin back in the late 1970s.
But every once in a while the folks at Christians In Action (which is, you recall, how we SEALs refer to the Central Intelligence Agency), get things right. This was one of ’em. The Agency’s sneak-and-peekers had managed to plant a beacon aboard the Kuz Emeq so subtly that even Khaled’s head of security, a former KGB one-star technical guru, failed to spot it during his twice-daily ELINT/TECHINT/SIGINT7 sweeps. And by modifying the sub’s ESM—it stands for electronic support measures—equipment and then glomming onto the beacon’s signal, the Nacogdoches’s skipper, a bright young Annapolis ring-knocker named Joseph Tuzzolino, aka Joey Tuzz, aka Captain Tuzzie, had stealthily slipped his boat to within just over a mile of Khaled’s yacht.
Now all that was left was for us to lock out of the sub, swim in, while keeping the beacon signal dead ahead of our position, slither onto the yacht, and perform the actual takedown. There were even a couple of bonuses for us if everything went right: that suitcase full of cash was one—I like being able to help pay down the national deficit—not to mention that compact, man-portable Soviet atomic munition device.
And, hey, this was gonna be a piece of cake, right? An easy swim followed by an effortless shoot & loot. Oh, sure it was—and if you believe that, I have this nice bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. Anyway, so much for background. Now let’s get on with the fucking action sequence, shall we?
I bent forward to try and retrieve my mask strap, and was knocked into the ladder again by yet another elbow to my head. What the fuck was Boomerang trying to do, kill me? I reached around and grabbed the offending arm and shook it hard, as if to say WTF.
In answer, I received two taps on my right bicep, and a squeeze back. Which meant he was being properly apologetic—and would S2, which as you probably know stands for sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up, until I signaled otherwise.
I found my air hose, clamped it back in my mouth, swallowed more seawater to clear the line, and then took a very welcome gulp of oxygen. I bent forward again—not an easy task, given the thick respirator on my chest—and fumbled between my legs. Gator reached up, his fingers finding mine in the darkness, and handed me the missing mask strap. I reattached it, pulled it snug, then vented air through my sore-as-a-gangbanger’s-dick nose until I’d cleared the fucking mask.
Murphy-time over, perhaps it was time to do real work.
I climbed the ladder, reached up, found the first dog, and twisted until it released. Once I’d cleared the first one, I went on, working my way counterclockwise. The fourth one stuck, but I muscled it free and wrenched until it opened.
Then, the sixth dog undogged, I braced my feet as best I could against the ladder rung and pushed upward with all my strength. The hatch opened outward, and I pulled myself through, and struggled up and along the deck until I found the half-inch nylon line we’d run from one of the midships cleats to the sub’s mast so we could find our way in the darkness.
I pulled myself along the line toward the sail. I could sense the current moving against my body as the sub continued on. Nuclear subs are like sharks—they hardly ever stop moving. And so, locking out is an intricate exercise in which the sub’s captain has to keep his boat on a perfectly flat plane while moving at the slowest possible speed—that’s between one and two knots—so that the swimmers can exit without being swept off into the current, unable to catch up with the sub as it continues onward and out of sight.
In fact, that was one of the potential goatfuck factors of tonight’s escapade. Los Angeles–class submarines are built for speed. They do not like to be driven slowly. And so, Joey Tuzz, the CO of this particular sewer pipe, currently had his hands full. Launching me and my guys was going to give him a Rogue-sized headache.
I felt a hand on the knife sheath strapped to my left calf. Good news. That meant my guys were following. I kept moving, pulling myself foot by foot until I felt the rough surface of the mast. I worked my way around until I came upon the elastic netting that held our equipment bags. Reached through to find the outer compartment, where I’d stored my dive light. Found it. Attached it securely to my wrist, then turned it on, so I could see what I was doing. If it had been daytime, we could have seen one another clearly, as the deck was only sixty-five feet below the surface. But it was just after 2100, three hours after sunset, and the only way to describe things was d-a-r-k. None of the phosphorescence you normally see in the water; no hint of light from above. Or anywhere else. Which added to the goatfuck factor. You can easily become disoriented in these sorts of conditions. Down becomes up. Up becomes sideways. Distance, time, and direction get obscured. You can die.
Boomerang’s narrow face came close to my own. I put the light on him. Then, using hand signals, I asked him if he was okay. In answer, he gave me an upturned thumb. Behind him, I could make out Gator Shepard and Duck Foot Dewey as they pulled their way along the line.
I took the light and slid past my guys, working my way back toward the escape trunk hatch. I secured it, then twisted the wheel atop the domed steel until it was tight. I paused, counting the seconds off. Finally, I heard the sounds I was waiting for: water was being pumped out. The clearing process would take four and a half minutes. Then, after the pressure had been neutralized, the bottom hatch would be undogged, my final four shooters would load, the chamber would be flooded once again, and the whole process repeated.
Meanwhile, there was work to be done. I crabbed my way back to the mast and checked the big watch on my left wrist. The shine-in-the-dark display read 2113. Fuck me. We were already three minutes behind schedule, and we hadn’t even begun.
2119. The rest of my crew arrived. Half Pint Harris, Nod DiCarlo, and the Rodent led the way. They were followed by a big, burly, eager puppy of an FNG (look it up in the Glossary) named Terry Devine, aka Baby Huey.
No, I do not like operating with cherrys—in other words new personnel—especially on jobs as important as this one. But on tonight’s particular mission, there’d been no alternative. The shooters I call the Pick and Nasty Nicky Grundle were in sick bay with badly broken bones. It was doubtful they’d ever be able to operate with the same balls-to-the-wall efficiency they’d once been able to. Doc Tremblay’d retired—he’d had enough of the new, zero-defect Navy. And Stevie Wonder had finally passed his chief’s exam. That was good news and bad news. Good news because the Navy needs more chiefs like Wonder. Bad news because the Bureau of Personnel—BUPERS in Navyspeak—had, in its infinite wisdom, transferred Chief Wonder from his sinecure at the Navy Yard down to Norfolk, and I was going to have a hell of a time getting him back under my Roguish wing. Shit, I was going to have a hell of a time bringing him back long enough to give him the sort of proper, old-fashioned, rocks-and-shoals chief’s initiation that he deserved.
All those developments had left me one man short. I’d checked the personnel files and, mindful that one officer’s scum is another officer’s
jewel, selected Baby Huey, who was just about to be tossed out of the Teams for disciplinary infractions. He was my kind of kid. First of all, he’d graduated dead last in his BUD/S class. The training officers had given him a black mark for his low standing. To me, it said that the kid had determination and grit—he’d stuck things through until the bitter end.
Second, he’d been a SEAL for less than a year—still a pup—when he’d been scheduled to receive a captain’s mast for off-duty brawling. In today’s zero-defect Navy, one bar brawl or DUI is enough to get a chief with fifteen years as a SEAL shit-canned from the Teams. As for Boatswain’s Mate Third Class Terry Devine, another black mark was placed next to his name, which meant he was unofficially classified as LTWS8 by the pucker-sphinctered, holier-than-thou, bean-counting, teetotaling bureaucrats who run NAVSPECWARGRUTWO these days. Oh, and run it they do: right into the fucking ground, so far as I’m concerned.
To the SpecWar panjandrums at NAVSPECWARGRUTWO, Baby Huey’s brawling suggested that he might be overly aggressive. Which meant he might actually kill something someday. And that possibility put his future as a SEAL in jeopardy.
That’s what they saw. But as we all know, Rorschachs mean different things to different people. What the LTWS blot told me, was that Terry Devine was yes, aggressive, and that he liked to play the kind of up-close-and-personal, body-bruising games that relieve the pressure of being a SEAL. But I saw that as a positive, not negative, attribute. Frankly, I don’t think you can ask a man to risk his life every day, train at the very edge of the envelope, and then tell him to go out and relieve the stress by playing tiddledywinks, or sipping cocoa and perusing the New Yorker, although there’s nothing wrong with either. Sometimes SEALs need an evening (or a weekend) of full-contact boogie rock ’n’ roll, smack ’em upside-the-head, rabble-rousing brawling. Like clearing a fucking barful of Jarheads, par example.
But no matter what my positive instincts about the kid may have been, the reality was that I was about to go shooting and looting with an untested, untried, unblooded, twenty-year-old tyke. A big, contentious, muscular tyke, but a tyke nonetheless. Until this very moment of his life, it had all been training and simulation. He’d never had to Do It for Real. Gone into battle. Been wounded. Killed a man face-to-face.
Option Delta Page 2
