Option Delta

by Richard Marcinko

  After about forty minutes, having worked up a good sweat, we left the series of nature trails, crossed onto the castle grounds, and made our final approach from the west, so the sun would be in the eyes of anybody looking out for intruders. We passed the camouflaged OP (yeah—it stands for Observation Point) manned by Half Pint and Werner, exchanging our greetings in hand-signs.84 Nod took point. He slowed the pace as he left the trail he had obviously taken earlier and began a long, deliberate encirclement that would take us where we had to be.

  After sixteen minutes, he eased over the crest of the ridge, and beckoned me to follow. I caught up with him—and stopped cold.

  Below us was the Mosel tributary known as the Eltz. The river wasn’t very wide, perhaps twenty meters in some places, twenty-five or thirty at others, maybe a little more. But I could tell it flowed fast and cold through the narrow, S-shaped gorge that had been worn deep and smooth over thousands of years.

  The bottom of the S formed a peninsula of solid rock about a hundred meters long by perhaps seventy meters wide. Built atop that solid stone foundation stood Schloss Barbarossa. It was impressive. From the river, outer walls, which looked to be six feet thick at least, had been designed in the same irregular elliptical pattern as the S-shaped peninsula, giving the impression that the castle had been hewed from solid rock.

  The walls, which metamorphosed into parapets and towers, rose at least sixty, perhaps even seventy feet above the rock foundation. At each end of the ellipse, the walls separated from the castle, creating a series of narrow courtyards. The castle itself, six stories high, with half a dozen separate towers (some with crenellated bartizans), surrounded a secure inner bailey that was accessible only by going through the main castle itself.

  I pulled my binoculars out to take a closer look. What I saw wasn’t encouraging. The castle’s natural defensive qualities had been augmented by a fair amount of twentieth-century technology. Efficient halogen and sodium floodlights were mounted on the towers and parapets. The most accessible of the walls were all topped by four strands of razor wire and topped by a single strand of electrified fencing. The riverbank was edged in a double roll of concertina wire. The grounds around the side facing away from the river were combed, a sign of sensors or land mines.

  Formal entry to Schloss Barbarossa was via a single lane of well-maintained private blacktop, which, according to Duck Foot, stretched two kliks to the two-lane country road along which we’d seen Lothar and Franz traveling only a few days ago, when we’d been searching for ADMs in the cow pasture. The castle’s narrow private road descended in a series of sharp S-curves from the ridge directly opposite where Duck Foot and I hunkered down. I swept the roadside and picked up telltale signs of electronic sensors. The blacktop terminated at an arched stone gate, which was blocked by a heavy, pneumatically raised, steel antiterrorist barrier. Behind the arch, where the macadam was replaced by smooth cobblestones, stood a gatehouse big enough for a two-man detail, where the steel barricade was no doubt controlled from. The glass looked to be thick and bulletproof. The gatehouse itself was constructed to look as if it was flimsy. I knew better. Past the gatehouse, the road followed parallel to the walls, up a steep incline, to the outer bailey.

  It was cleverly designed. That outer courtyard was in fact a fatal funnel—a killing zone—because it lay between two natural defensive ridges: the thick outer fortifications, and a row of four-story-high inner walls that protected the wood-framed, stone-walled structures that made up the Schloss itself.

  I scanned left to right, and back again, looking for signs of life. It didn’t take long to discover ’em, either. I panned along one of the parapets, then stopped. A pair of hoods in black overalls lounged, smoking, against a waist-high wall. I zoomed the binocs. One had a suppressed submachine gun slung over his shoulder. The other wore a pistol in a belt holster. Both had field glasses suspended around their necks. But they were too busy talking and smoking to bother using ’em.

  I scanned some more, and spotted another half-dozen armed men, all looking like cheap hoods standing outside some social club in Little Odessa. Obviously, there was something valuable on-site. I plucked the radiation detector from my rucksack and turned it on. Even at this distance, through the Schloss’s thick stone walls, I got a reading. That’s your tax dollars at work, folks. Once in a while, the Pentagon manages to do better than six-hundred-dollar toilet seats and three-hundred-dollar hammers. I checked the readout again. Oh, yeah: Lothar had his ADMs here.

  And the guards? Indeed, from the careless, un-Teutonic look of ’em, I was looking at a pair of Lothar’s foreign workers. Bandity. Ivans. Herr Subgun flicked his cigarette into the gorge. I followed its parabolic descent with my glasses until it fell onto the rocks sixty feet below.

  I raised my glasses and swept the castle from northwest to southeast, catching another half dozen of the black jumpsuited, binocular-rich Russkies as they lounged in their duty stations, smoking, talking to one another, and paying almost no attention whatsoever to their jobs, which no doubt included looking out for people like me.

  This, friends, is a common problem in military units. Sentry duty is lonely, boring work, and as we all know, war is 99 percent waiting, and 1 percent chaos. The waiting is what most sentries do. Young officers do not realize that after about half an hour, one’s defenses start to wane, and concentration drops. But today’s lookouts are often on post for hours, trying to do nothing except watch, and look, and listen. Frankly, it is no fun. It is easy to daydream, to become distracted. And yet, if you do not remain alert, then people like me are going to take advantage of you, with the result that you and your men will end up riding a body bag home.

  Still, the best way to deal with sentries—good or bad—is to bypass ’em altogether. And that is what I planned to do tonight. I sat down, cross-legged, and sketched out a rough diagram of the castle. From the positioning of the sentries, it was possible to gauge where we had to go. Undefended areas were less likely to contain valuables—either human or otherwise. I noticed that the southwesterly walls were the least protected, while the heaviest concentration of Ivans was spread across the castle’s easternmost perimeter.

  I shifted position and checked through the binoculars again, trying to make certain I hadn’t overlooked anything that could come back and bite me in the ass later. I’ve staged enough missions with Mister Murphy sitting on my shoulder to know I don’t like surprises. Like Everett Emerson Barrett used to tell us tadpoles in the Second-to-None Platoon of UDT-21: “If you blankety-blanking blanker-blankers plan for every motherbleeping contingency, and then when that blanker-blanker Murphy blankety-blanks you over, you won’t be blanking hurt too bleeping bad, and you’ll still make your bleeper-blanking objective.”

  So, maybe I was taking a little more time than I should, but I wanted to cut the margins for error before we inserted and Mister Murphy started fucking with us. I mean, you had to hand it to Lothar and Franz: Schloss Barbarossa was well defended, and highly fortified. But as is the case with every well-defended, highly fortified position, there is always a way in.

  1800. I put a call through to the Chairman on Fred’s secure telephone, and received good news. For once, Mister Murphy wasn’t screwing with us. John Suter was on full alert. He’d scramble on my signal. And best of all, the Chairman had managed to get in touch with an old NATO colleague, a German general named Dieter Schulz, whom he’d known for twenty years and trusted the way I trusted Fred Kohler. Dieter had promised the Chairman that he had enough assets to wrap up the Kraut nets quietly.

  When I mentioned Dieter Schulz’s name to Fred, the first hint of a smile since I’d returned spread across his face. “Ja,” he growled, “Dieter is a gut man. He will handle his end—just as we will handle ours.”

  1840. I finished sketching out my plan of attack. So far as I was concerned, the only way to go was to come through the back door, the way they’d least expect us. Let me, therefore, take you through this little op before we get started, b
ecause once I’ve committed my forces, there won’t be a lot of time to explain things.

  Schloss Barbarossa had been built on a peninsula that sat, more or less, on a northwest-southeast axis. The gate was on the northwest side, the tail of the peninsula faced southeast. The sensors and land mines were planted across the landlocked side of the castle, around the main gate and single-lane road. Then came the razor wire-topped walls. Multiple layers of razor-sharp concertina wire were also strung around the southeasterly side of the Schloss, because the walls there were low and scalable. The one point that was obviously impenetrable, and therefore lacking in ancillary defenses, were the sheer rock walls rising from the river gorge on the castle’s southern tip. At that place, where the waters rushed past a series of minirapids, there was no protection other than the bulwarks provided by Mutter Natur: fast-moving water, unyielding stone, and a long, dangerous motherfucker of a climb.

  Now you know how we’re going to get in. But I wasn’t done yet. Castles are big suckers. There are lots of antechambers, and chambers, and rooms, and galleries, and all kinds of miscellaneous architectural detail shit, including secret passages and hidden rooms and the like. Now, as I saw at BeckIndustrie headquarters, Lothar likes those special details. The antechamber he’d had put into his HQ had a hidden door that even I didn’t spot.

  Now, if I were Lothar, or Franz, and I was being attacked by moi, I wouldn’t waste any fucking time at all: I’d get the hell out, through a secret passage or similar. But before I did, I’d set the ADM timers so when big bad Dickie came a-hunting, he’d get the shit nuked out of him.

  That knowledge made the job tonight even more difficult. We’d have to get in and cancel the opposition without alerting Franz or Lothar. Only when we were in position to take ’em down could we let ’em know we’d come a-calling. And even then, I didn’t want ’em thinking I was on the premises. I needed a major distraction.

  That would be Boomerang and Nod’s job. The pair of SEALs would get moving now. They’d infil from the ridge on the Schloss’s west side, and plant a series of charges directly across the approaches to the castle. They’d rig timers. But as we all know, Mister Murphy likes to play havoc with explosives. And so, Boomerang would back the timers up with a radio-controlled detonator.

  At 0130—or on cue if we needed them beforehand—the explosions would “walk” right up to the gatehouse. They’d accomplish two goals: first, they’d make Lothar believe a frontal assault was coming his way—right toward the fatal funnel he’d devised. And thinking so, he’d take a few extra minutes before making his escape. Second, they’d destroy the only means of escape from the Schloss: the narrow, winding blacktop road.

  More than two thousand years ago, the Chinese Warrior General Tai Li’ang wrote: “Give your enemy false confidence and he will defeat himself, even if he outnumbers you ten to one.” That simple advice is as true today as it was back then.

  Because tonight, we were outnumbered and outgunned. Tonight we would win by stealth, and craft, and pure Warrior spirit. Fred’s face was a mask. He’d lost men to these Teutonic traitors—and I could see the fury burning within him. He wanted to go—NOW!

  So did I. These men were dealing in weapons of mass destruction that could kill tens of thousands of innocent victims. “Any questions?” I slow-panned my own merry, murdering marauders, and was all of a sudden transfixed. Their confident expressions, their belligerent body language, their aggressive, can-do attitude, and the self-assured killers’ looks in their eyes made me humble in their presence.

  I took a few seconds to offer my silent prayers and gratitude to the God of War, who has allowed me to lead such men into battle and kill my enemies with great brutality and in large numbers not once, not twice, not even thrice, but scores upon scores of times.

  Indeed, all of these Warriors—Fred’s and mine—were filled with the sort of resolve, persistence, tenacity, and determination that told me they had the ABSOLUTE WILL TO WIN. To them, the word impossible did not exist.

  And so, no matter what the odds, no matter what challenges they would face, I knew in my own Warrior’s soul, that, tonight, WE WOULD NOT FAIL.

  18

  1944. I SPLIT OUR FORCE INTO TWO SIX-MAN UNITS. THE first squad, Duck Foot, Gator, and Baby Huey, would be mine. Fred took the second squad: Wolf, Max, Werner, Rodent, and Half Pint. My four would be augmented by Nod and Boomerang, when that pair of lethal SEALs finished planting the charges. The plan was KISS. We’d cross the ridges above the castle on the network of trails until we intersected the river. Then we’d infiltrate down the Eltz bank until we reached the deepest part of the gorge. There, we’d go into the water and let the current carry us downstream until we reached the Schloss.

  We’d crawl onto the bank below the castle’s escarpment, wriggle under the concertina wire, then send a climber up the rough stones to the port-most of three small, barred cellar windows that looked out on the gorge, some thirty, perhaps thirty-five feet above the rocks that formed the castle’s foundation. A pair of ropes would be secured to the bars and lowered. Then we would all clamber up, because from the barred window it was only eight or nine feet more to a pair of crenellated doors that opened onto a narrow, awninged balcony. Half Pint would make short work of the door lock. From there, we’d enter the Schloss proper, split into two efficient killing groups, and work from the outside in, neutralizing the opposition as we went.

  If things went well, we’d maintain surprise until it was too late for Lothar’s goons to respond with any efficiency. If they didn’t, well, we could always improvise.

  On ops such as this one, it’s preferable to have all the latest SpecWar goodies: thermal imagers and miniaturized, waterproof communications; night-vision devices, computer satellite imagery—you have a good idea what I’m talking about. Well, we were going in with very basic equipment tonight. We had eight radios, two climbing ropes, eight suppressed and four unsuppressed submachine guns, twelve pistols, our combat knives, one night-vision monocular—and that was just about it.

  But my old friend Avi Ben Gal has a saying that covers this situation. “Haver shelli,” he says, calling me his friend in Hebrew, “you Americans sometimes forget that in wartime, great is often the enemy of good.”

  What is he saying? He’s saying that we Americans tend to always hold out for the most sophisticated equipment, when sometimes, basic is more than enough to win the day.

  Would the technogoodies make our work easier? The answer is sure they would. Except if the batteries on the thermal imager went down, and the waterproof radios leaked, or any other of the myriad things Mister Murphy can do to screw with an op.

  So, tonight, as I said above, would be Keep It Simple, Stupid. Or, to paraphrase the old brokerage firm TV commercial, we’d make our corpses the old-fashioned way: we’d earn ’em.

  2020. The clock was ticking. Boomerang and Nod had slipped out of camp half an hour ago, and now it was our turn. We’d planned on a 2300 rendezvous a klik and a half west of the castle. We’d leave the base in one group and traverse the forest and ridges, then (since we are maritime creatures) we’d head for water. We would use the riverbank for cover and get as close as possible before slipping into the water. Everyone would be tied together in pairs—no stragglers allowed tonight. My squad would make the first infil, and secure the LZ. Duck Foot, my most experienced climber, would do the initial ascent. When he secured the ropes, the rest of us would pull ourselves up.

  2026. Since things were going so well, Mister Murphy paid us a visit. Duck Foot, my stealthy, surefooted, catlike hunter, the selfsame SEAL who’d spent his childhood silently stalking deer, Canadian geese, wild turkeys, and other miscellaneous game all across Maryland’s Eastern Shore, forgot to pay attention to what the fuck he was doing, tripped over a dead branch in the darkness, went tumbling ass over teakettle, and sprained the hell out of his right ankle.

  It took seven minutes to tape him up (thank God we had two first-aid kits between the ten of us because the smal
l rolls of inch-wide tape in the SpecWar-issued kit is not designed to tape sprains but cover wounds) and feed him a handful of aspirin.

  I put Gator on point—and on notice. He’d be the lead climber tonight. Have I mentioned in the past that Gator does not like to climb things? Heights, you see, make him nervous. Then why, you ask, is he in a trade where jumping out of perfectly good aircraft, slithering up ice-encrusted oil-drilling rigs, climbing miscellaneous structures from the outside, and doing other elevation-intensive assignments are an incessant, constant, even immutable part of his life?

  There are two answers. The glib, Roguish one is that Gator doesn’t have to like what he does—he just has to do it. But there is a deeper psychological element at play here as well. To Gator, as is the case with most SEALs, life is a never-ending series of challenges that must be overcome. To him—and them—the word impossible does not exist. And so, if I order him to climb a sixty-foot tree in a forty-mile-an-hour wind, he will refer to me by rude imprecations. But then, he will grit his teeth, and he will inch his way up the fucking trunk no matter how much it hurts or how nervous it makes him, because there is no way he is not going to succeed. That’s how he manages to jump out of planes at thirty-five-plus thousand feet (that’s more than seven miles to the ground, friends—a long way down when you don’t like heights), without my having to toss him out. That’s how he muscles his way up caving ladders, climbing ropes, drainpipes, and other sundry things, to climb the sides of buildings, ships, and those nasty oil rigs when he has to. Gator understands that WAR is an acronym for We Are Ready—and he’s always ready.