Option Delta

by Richard Marcinko

  There were four big bedrooms, each with two double beds. The suite had two bathrooms, and a huge sitting room that looked out over the city. And there was a note addressed to me sitting on the minibar.

  I slit the envelope. “Willkommen, mein Kapitän,” it read in block letters. “Then let’s meet and talk. See you at the Alt Deutsche Weinstube—it’s a wine bar behind the Dom—1900.”

  I checked my watch. It was 1525. If the meet was set for 1900, I wanted to recce the neighborhood and the wine bar for at least two hours beforehand. No, I am not being paranoid. I am simply following my own fucking SpecWar Commandment—the one that says Thou shalt never assume. So, we grabbed quick showers and then, as we were beer-deprived in the hotel room, secured our gear in the steel lockboxes John Suter had provided, and set out to explore.

  1605. We strolled the narrow modern streets. It had been some time since I’d been in Mainz, and I was amazed at the Americanization of the place. The city dates back more than two thousand years. It sustained heavy bomb damage during the World War II, and so most of the construction is less than fifty years old. But that’s not what I’m talking about. What I mean is that these days, Krauts buy their sneakers at Foot Locker stores, eat at McDonald’s, Burger King, and KFC, and snack on Pizza Hut pizzas instead of all those wonderful wursts.

  And if you want to go native and look just like the locals, forget about der lederhosen und der high-gezocksen, or der loden coats und hats mit der feathers in der brim. Just slip into an oversized UCLA sweatshirt, a pair of Levi’s or Gap jeans, a pair of Air Jordans, and one of those fucking Oakley “No Fear” baseball caps—worn backward, of course, and you’ll look just like 80 percent of all Krauts these days. We wandered through Mainz’s crowded shopping district and believe me, it was like we’d never left Georgetown, except everyone was sprechen sie Deutsching.

  Well, my own personal feeling is that ven you iss in Chermany, you vill eat der Cherman food—und you vill LIKE IT. Und zo, we as headed toward the Altstadt—the old part of the city where we were scheduled to meet Lieutenant Colonel Smith—I was drawn like der moth to der fire, toward the thick glass counter of a stall that sold the kind of old-fashioned Fleischwurst mit Saft (that’s sausage with mustard), on Brot—that’s bread—which is so absolutely, completely, perfectly, intensively, utterly German that it brings tears to your eyes (not to mention kilos of saturated fat to your arteries). I schniffed. I schnorted. I succumbed. I told the guys, who were looking longingly at the Mickey D’s not a hundred yards farther down the street, that we were going nowhere until we’d sampled every fucking variation sitting in the big glass case.

  They bitched und moaned—until, that is, I’d made ’em taste the goods behind the counter. One bite is all it took—I knew they were hooked. And so, we schtood und gemunchened, the fat dribbling down our chins, the mustard clotting in my mustache. Oh, gentle reader, I was in fucking schwein heaven.

  And then, satiated, with the guys pulling on my sleeve like kids always do when they’d been given only half a treat, we reconned the narrow streets between the cathedral and the river until we found ourselves a beer Stube.25 The task was harder than you might think, given the fact that Germany is supposed to be to beer what Switzerland is to chocolate. But Mainz, you have to understand, is a wine-making town. Hence there are scores, perhaps even hundreds, of WeinStuben. But old-fashioned German beer halls, the kind that line the streets of Munich and Stuttgart, or even the sorts of bars you can find in Düsseldorf, Berlin, Hamburg, Köln, and Bonn, are fewer and farther between.

  We finally found a likely candidate a few blocks south and east of the cathedral. It was on a narrow, graffiti-rich side street, halfway between a housing project and a small industrial block of what looked to be metal shops and garages. As we walked past the housing project, a four-story block of prefab concrete with louvered windows, many with small satellite TV dishes attached, the rich smells of Turkish cooking wafted down on us.

  The sign outside the bar read BINDING EXPORT, Mainz’s local brewski. The place was one of those medieval reproductions. There was lots of dark wood trim, and thick machine-made-to-look-hand-hewn-timber beams framing the doorway. The smoked glass windows were small, opaque, and mullion-intensive. You could smell the beer and cigarette smoke from twenty yards away. I held the heavy door open for my guys, and we trooped inside.

  As the door closed behind us, we froze. Have you ever been someplace that, the moment you walk in, you realize that you have made a humongous mistake? You have? Good—because that’s the way I felt right then.

  The vibes herein were all wrong. This was not a happy environment for Dickie and his guys. Oh, it was authentic, all right—the long, wooden bar; the hand-wrought bar stools; the tables, some of them made from antique beer barrel tops; the ancient brass taps from which der Barkellner26 could draw the local pils or lager from huge barrels in the basement. But the ambience was fucked.

  And what was that fucked ambience, you ask? Well, there were one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten drinkers at the bar. Another trio stood at the beer keg–table to my starboard. Two more lay to port. And each and every one was clad in some version or other that included black leather over greasy jeans cinched by chromed chain links and/or garrison belts, and sporting the kind of thick-soled Dr. Martens steel-toe boots that hurt like hell whenever they make contact with your rib cage—or any other portion of your anatomy, for that matter. Even in the dim light, I could see lots of body-piercing, too. Hairwise, they wore the kind of close-cropped buzz cuts inflicted upon first-week boot camp Marines. Yup: we’d walked into a skinhead bar.

  You want to know about skinheads? Well, I guess there’s time for a short sit-rep. We’re talking right-wing, punko, pseudofascist dilettante bullshit, for the most part, mingled with neo-Nazi racist philosophy, cowardly attacks on foreign laborers, and an ultranationalist, anti-American outlook on life. Heard enough? Good.

  I 20-20’d the sorry bunch of scrotes arrayed in front of us, and took note. Why is it that assholes like these have such bad skin and seldom remember to bathe? Let me put it another way. My friends, where the fuck’s gemütlich when you need it?

  Let me say here and now that despite the fucked vibes, we weren’t about to back out the door and go somewhere else. SEALs do not—repeat, NOT—ever back away from a situation, or a fight, just because it may be prudent to do so. Not my SEALs, at least.

  I select my people for their aggressiveness and their love of kicking the proverbial ass and taking the proverbial names. I want each and every one of my men to have a playful manner—and if “play” includes tossing you and twenty more like you through a plate glass window, well, so be it.

  Besides, we’d had a hard couple of days. We’d swum and we’d climbed and we’d been shot at and we’d had to kill a bunch of nasty, dangerous, and well-armed tangos. We’d been cold and wet and we’d shit on ourselves and we’d suffered dings aplenty. And frankly when you have done all of that, it’s actually quite a relief (and an emotional as well as physical release) to get the kind of deep satisfaction that whup-ping the shit out of some sphincter-minded skinhead in a bar gives you.

  Hold on, hold on—there’s someone out there yelling a question. Repeat it once more, will you?

  You what? Oh—you want to know if kicking ass in a bar is as effective in releasing the pressure as a long session of pussy.

  Hey—nothing is as good as pussy when it comes to releasing the pressure. But you know as well as I do that there was no pussy in sight. Not a fucking female in the bar. And thus, these leather-clad, body-pierced schmucks were going to have to do. And so, we sailed ahead full, bellied up to the bar, and asked for acht Bieren, bitter.

  Der Barkellner, who sported three small silver rings on the outside corner of his left eyebrow, five similar rings through the cartilage of his right ear, and a large, ornately crafted silver monkey’s paw stud embedded just below the center of his lower lip, looked at us with undisguised hatred. He stood with his
arms folded across his old black leather apron, a cigarette dangling from the middle fingers of his left hand, and said, “Ve don’t here zerve Amerikaners.”

  “Hey, fuck you, you fucking asshole.” Baby Huey put his petulant puss right in the bartender’s face. “We want some fuckin’ beer and we want it—now.”

  I know, I know—he’s only a wet-behind-the-balls kid, and therefore he’s impetuous by nature. But behavior like this is unacceptable. Like Don Vito Corleone once said, “Nevah let anybudy know what you ah thinkin’. Nevah reveal yawself to yaw enemies.” Well, so far as I’m concerned, da Godfather could have been a SpecWarrior from the way he thought.

  I was beginning to have my doubts about BH. My hand settled around the back of the kid’s neck. I physically removed him from his face-to-face with the bartender, and brought him nose to nose with moi.

  “Nobody elected you the fucking spokesman for this fucking delegation,” I said. “So you get the fuck over there”—I pointed to a bar stool one table away from the pair of port-side skinheads—“and stay there until I say so.”

  His eyes went wide. “I didn’t mean anything, Skip—”

  There he went again. I cut him off with a look, and he stopped in midsyllable.

  “Terry—”

  The kid’s big lower lip stuck out about an inch and a half. He let out an audible sigh, his big shoulders hunched, and he shambled over to where I’d directed. The closest skinheads watched him, nudged one another, and schnickered. Oh, that was gonna be their problem.

  I turned back toward the bar, hoping I’d kept things on an even keel and knowing I’d accomplished my goal when I heard derisory laughter from the rest of the skinheads. Oh, I knew we were going to have to clean this place out. But I wanted to do it on my terms, not when the resident assholes chose to act.

  “I apologize for this young man’s behavior,” I said. “How he said it was wrong. But we would like some beer.”

  The bartender’s arms were still crossed. He glared at me.

  “That’ll be eight beers, please.” I checked my watch. It was currently 1656. You will remember that I wanted at least an hour and a half in the Altstadt to reconnoiter the meet with Lieutenant Colonel Smith. I looked over toward the very rear corner of the bar and saw that Mister Murphy had snuck in behind us and was sitting there with a big fat schmirk on his ugly puss. Oh, doom on Dickie. From the shit-eating look on Mister Murphy’s face, I knew that we were going to end up way, way behind schedule.

  Off to my right, Boomerang giggled. I shifted my stance slightly—just enough to perceive that each of my men had selected a target and a secondary. The great thing about traveling with Warriors is that you don’t have to talk a lot about situations like this one. They simply know WTF to do, and they Just Do It.

  Boomerang giggled again. Most people read it as a sign of nervousness. It’s not. Boomerang giggles before he kills things. In fact, that’s one of the reasons I like the boy so much. He has a truly perverted sense of humor, which exhibits itself at times like these. Maybe it’s because he’s the only California surfer in my band of merry marauders. At six foot one, two hundred pounds, he’s a former linebacker from the UCLA who tells people he enlisted in the Navy because he wanted to get paid to surf. He’s called Boomerang because during BUD/S he just kept coming back for punishment, no matter how dinged up he got. During Desert Storm, he chased SCUD missiles in the Iraqi desert, blowing up three launchers and killing nineteen Republican Guards in the kinds of one-on-one encounters he likes best—late at night when Boomerang’s out and about all alone, with his K-Bar and his piano-wire garrote.

  Next to him, Nod cracked his knuckles, then his neck. Eddie DiCarlo is a former blankethead—a Green Beret for whom Special Forces got b-o-r-i-n-g. And so, at the age of twenty-nine and a half, he enlisted in the Navy. At thirty, he went through BUD/S. Now, the average age at BUD/S is twenty-two. And Nod’s knees were kinda beat up, due to the fact that he had six hundred jumps to his credit, and more than his fair share of rough landings, before he became a Frog. But he persevered. In fact, he excelled. He’s a moody, quiet kind of guy who didn’t have much success in the Teams because he had no respect for the can’t-cunt officers who lead from behind these days—and he showed that disrespect at each and every opportunity.

  But, you see, Nod had been to war, whereas most of the SEAL lieutenants, lieutenant commanders, commanders and captains with whom he dealt had not. As an E-6 Green Beret, Nod chased drug dealers in Colombia and Bolivia and tangled with Manny Noriega’s Israeli mercenaries in Panama. As a SEAL, he worked as a countersniper in Somalia, and he has nineteen varmints to his credit. That’s three more than the normal bag limit there. But after Mogadishu, things went sour. The administration changed, the Clintonistas came into power, and all of a sudden Warriors like Nod weren’t appreciated. In fact, back in the mid-1990s officers discovered that they didn’t get promoted if their units were filled with the kinds of men who liked to pull the trigger.

  Under the Clintonistas, aggressiveness was a nono. You want a star? Teach your troops to recycle. Send your men to Save the Rain Forest School. The sorry result was that Nod’s post-Somalia fitreps read like shit. Some of the better descriptions included insubordinate, recalcitrant, uncontrollable, stubborn, and overaggressive.

  In fact, most of my men were considered scum by the current Powers That Be. That’s why they were assigned to me. I got “stuck” with the brawlers, the incorrigibles, the aggressive, pushy, cunning, tricky sonsofbitches that nobody else wanted.

  Well, friends, lemme tell ya. I’m an old-fashioned kind of leader. I like all those above-listed qualities in a man. Roy Boehm, the godfather of all SEALs, used to say that given the choice, he’d rather get his men from the brig than from the Naval Academy, because guys from the brig were more likely to delight in breaking things and killing people, than the tea-sipping, memo-writing, ring-knocking ossifers and gentlemens they breed these days at Annapolis. (Oh, yeah—it’s a sorry situation when the school that gave us Arleigh Burke, Chester Nimitz, and Bull Halsey now produces dope-dealing, test-cheating manager-officers who quake at the thought of making WAR.) How right Roy was (and is). Moreover, Roy taught me how to channel those destructive energies; how to harness all that drive and determination. And so, I lucked out when Nod as well as the rest of my recalcitrants were assigned to Red Cell as a way of quashing their careers (and mine, too).

  But talk about tossing a squad of Br’er Rabbits into the fucking briar patch! And—whoa, hold on a sec. I’d rhapsodize a bit longer on this theme, but der Barkellner just spat some Kraut in my direction, and he’s looking at me very strangely. So, I’ll tell you more about my guys later. Right now, things are about to get very interesting.

  “Excuse me?” I leaned across the bar.

  “Nicht serviert Amerikaners hier—ve don’t zerve here Amerikaners,” the bartender said once again, jabbing the air in front of my face with his cigarette for emphasis. Off to my port side, one of der skinheads added an exclamation point to the Barkellner’s statement by slapping his chrome steel chain across the bar and laughing.

  Things were getting far Teutonic for me. And so, I wide-arm shrugged (as if I wasn’t really in the mood to argue), and began to turn, as if we were actually going to leave, and said “Well-l-l-l . . .” in a passable imitation of Ronald Reagan, or Jack Benny.

  Now, as all of that is taking place, allow me to give you the Rogue Warrior’s First Law of Physics.

  It goes like this. “Grab an asshole by the monkey’s paw stud in his lip and pull hard enough, and the rest of the body will always follow the lip.”

  Und now, I vill illustrate.

  I whirled, reached across the bar, grabbed der Barkellner by the stud in the center of his lower lip, yanked him clear over the beer-stained wood, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and the rear of his belt, and slammed him into the floor face first.

  There was this incredible momentary lull—the skinheads were too fucking shocked to re
act. That was when Boomerang, that big smile on his face and a giggle in his throat, sucker-punched the skinhead closest to him. Oh, it was an astonishing, amazing, pile-driving hit. I mean, Boomerang used every bit of power in his legs, torso, back, shoulders, and arms to bury his left fist wrist-deep in the poor asshole’s solar plexus. The punch lifted the Kraut eight inches off the ground. He puked about a gallon of lumpy, beer yellow puke on the way down, and collapsed in a heap on the floor. I sidestepped just in time to miss getting puked on—hey, I was wearing clean clothes for a change.

  My friends, let me give you a tactical suggestion about bar brawling: do not get absorbed in the action, because you will not pay attention, and you will get surprised. That’s what happened to me. I was admiring Boomerang’s handiwork when someone wearing four silver skull-shaped death’s head rings on his right hand grabbed my French braid and tried to use it like a slingshot to throw me through the window. I stepped back, slamming my bulk up against him to jam him and keep him from leveraging me.

  A real-world, European aside: God, he stank. What’s with the counterculture vultures here on the Continent? Don’t these scumbuckets ever fucking believe in taking a fucking shower? Okay: back to real time. This asshole was a handful—six inches taller than me, and probably forty pounds heavier.

  We bumped around against the bar like a couple of pinballs, all elbows, knees, chins, teeth, and feet, fighting for position. I thought I’d managed to slow him down a little: a gentle love tap to the nose here, an affectionate poke to the balls there—until he push-me-pull-you-do-si-do swung me around, looped my braid around my throat, and tried to garrote me with my own fucking hair.