2109. Back on course. There were, of course, all those rough-track nature-lover’s hiking trails to follow, but we didn’t take any of ’em. Walking along an established trail is a bad thing to do when you’re on patrol. It was too late for hikers, which meant that any contact would be hostile. So I followed the same procedure I’ve done for years: we’d parallel the trail, so as to leave no new tracks. It made our progress slow. But it ensured that we wouldn’t be spotted. Wolf followed Gator. I trailed behind the tall skinhead, with Rodent and Duck Foot behind me. Baby Huey trailed behind on a parallel course, keeping an eye on our flank. Sixty paces behind BH, Fred and his trio of shooters played rear security. I didn’t want any surprises tonight.
Now, lest you think this is a cakewalk, it is fucking hard to move through the woods at night sans lights, sans noise, and sans conversation, if you are carrying nothing. It is incrementally harder to do it when you are hefting weapons and ammo, ropes, and other sundry items. Moreover, we had no way of knowing whether or not Lothar put out one or two or three picket lines of Russkie byki85 to make things difficult for intruders, and so we had to err, if we were going to err, on the side of total stealth.
This is the long way of telling you that my three-hour window was slamming down on my hairy knuckles much faster than I would have liked. It was three and a half kliks to the rendezvous point. After just over an hour and a half, we’d moved only 1.25 kliks. That is a mere 1,250 meters, folks.
2114. Six yards ahead of me, Wolf froze. His right hand went into a fist and his thumb pointed toward the ground. Enemy seen or suspected. I reacted to his move. I stopped abruptly. My fist clenched and my arm went up in the silent signal for an emergency halt.
Now Wolf’s hand unclenched. Palm down, parallel to the ground, he moved it right, right, right. Deploy, deploy, deploy. As I dropped off into deep cover I gave silent thanks for cross-training. The kid had learned American military field signals—and that knowledge was paying off handsomely right now.
I rolled onto my back so I could see behind me. Everyone had cleared the track. And, I hoped, we were all on the same side. It is considered impolite in SpecWar circles to fire into your own team.
I rolled onto my elbows and held my breath, listening for anything untoward. Nothing.
And then . . . the hair on the back of my neck stood straight up. And I knew, there was danger somewhere out there. Just how this fundamental, instinctive early-warning device works I do not know. But it works—and it has saved my life countless times in the past.
There. Perhaps fifty yards ahead, a sudden shaft of light. It disappeared, and then it was back, probing at the undergrowth. It grew closer, jerked away, then back. Now I heard low voices in a language I didn’t understand.
This is something I cannot comprehend. No—not the fucking language, you assholes, the talking. Sound carries. At night, a stage whisper can carry almost as far as normal conversation. Full stop. End of story. So, why talk at all? The answer is because most people are careless, and as I’ve said many times before, they do not pay attention to their work.
Inexorably, the light grew closer. Now it was twenty-five yards out, and getting closer. I shut my right eye. Didn’t want to lose night vision. Fifteen yards. They’d be coming up on Gator. I knew he was making himself invisible. Waiting them out. Now I could hear the messy scrunch of footsteps on the thick bed of pine needles that made up the trail. Whoever these people were, they had no tradecraft at all. They sounded like a bunch of fucking heffalumps. All the better: when they went past Gator, he could turn and fire, and we could catch ’em in a classic ambush crossfire with suppressed weapons. They’d be dead before they fucking heard anything.
Except . . . they stopped. WTF had they seen? Were we compromised? There are hundreds of options that run through your mind in the space of a millisecond, and none of ’em are pretty. I mean, I didn’t know if these guys had spotted one of my men and were figuring out how to wax us all. I had no way of knowing if one of ’em was wearing an open radio, and was being monitored by a security office somewhere in the Schloss.
And then Wolf just fucking stood up. Pulled himself to his feet and went toward the light, snapping branches and kicking leaves and pine needles and making as much noise as a fucking herd of oxen. I saw right away he’d left his gear behind. Shrugged right out of the CQC vest. Left the MP5 and his pistol belt behind, too. Nothing but his black T-shirt and Bundeswehr-issue moleskin fatigues.
I crept forward to a position that let me cover him while still remaining hidden. I slid the suppressed MP5 forward, brought it up into a prone firing position, and searched for a target. I found none. The thick trees and underbrush made target acquisition impossible.
Then I heard Wolf. He was chattering away in loud Deutsch. I got about every sixth word. Then he switched to English, which made it possible for me to understand every third word. Yes, I am using literary irony. Even here. Even now. That’s the kind of guy I am.
And the gist of what he was saying? The gist was that these weren’t security guards. They were fucking touristen. Hikers who’d gotten lost on the fucking trail. And Wolf, that Skinhead Samaritan, was explaining how the fuck they could take themselves back to civilization.
What he left unsaid, of course, was that these two assholes had almost gotten themselves whacked. Because my rule of engagement when it comes to suspected enemy contact, is to kill ’em all first, and ask questions later.
2220. We left the Stadtwald and began our descent to the Eltz. Mister Murphy decided to put in his second appearance of the night, guiding us down a nasty slope filled with hollylike evergreens, whose spine-tipped leaves did our pedal extremities no good at all. We reached the gorge looking as if we’d rolled down a hill of fucking barbed wire.
I checked my notes and pondered the hand-drawn map I kept in my left breast pocket. We should be just over two kliks west of the Schloss now, some five hundred yards from the rendezvous point with Nod and Boomerang. And despite Duck Foot’s twisted ankle and the ATE (look it up in the Glossary), we were still slightly ahead of schedule.
2255. We stayed ahead of the curve for almost two minutes. Then it became obvious that we were going to be late for our Treff86 with my plastique-planting mavericks.
We spread out into a long skirmish line and moved down the gorge, obscuring our trail in the soft riverbank by staying in the river itself. Now, for those of you who haven’t done this sort of thing lately, patrolling down a riverbank is not like walking along Riverside Drive or strolling Venice Beach. The bottom is uneven. You’re ankle deep one step, knee deep the next, and testicle-shriveling waist deep the next. The mud sucks at your boots (if you haven’t knotted ’em tight they’ll pull off and disappear), and the stones—where there are stones—are greased-pig slippery. And as if that’s not enough, you can fucking multiply everything by a value of ten because it is nighttime, and what little light there is plays tricks with you. But despite the problems of terrain, and the fact that we were behind schedule, I was breathing a little easier now that our movements were covered by the white sound of fast-moving water.
As you know, every piece of good news has an opposite side. In the present case, even though the sound of moving water masked our movements, it also would muffle the movements of the opposition. And so, Gator took excruciating care as he advanced, foot by foot, through the fast-moving water, sixty yards ahead of us. Which made our forward progress into something of an oxymoron.
2328. Boomerang, Nod, Gator, and Wolf were all ostentatiously stargazing on the rocky riverbank as I slipped and slid around a sharp bend and they came into sight. I thought about saying something creative, but frankly, nothing came to mind except “Fuck you very much, assholes.”
“Oh, really highly, coolly inventive, Boss Dude,” Boomerang said. “And when, pray, does the real fun begin?”
“Right now, cockbreath. From here on, we’ll be making our approach in the water.”
19
2340. I BEGAN THIS H
ERE SAGA A COUPLE OF HUNDRED pages ago explaining how fortunate it is that I love the cold and the wet. It is always amazing to me how things change very little over time. I was still cold, wet, tired, hungry, and suffering from terminal lack o’ pussy, and my circumstances weren’t going to change anytime in the immediate (or even relatively near-term) future.
Of course, if it’s the big picture we’re talking about here, cold and wet were going to be the least of my problems. The Eltz, which moved pretty fast for a small tributary of a slow-moving river (the Mosel), was flowing even faster now that the gorge had narrowed and big underwater rocks pushed the current in mysterious and potentially dangerous patterns.
We’d tied ourselves into pairs of swim buddies and begun the short but nasty swim down to the small, pitifully narrow scrap of riverbank that lay directly below the Schloss. Nasty? Oh, it was definitely doom-on-Dickie time. You already know that the water was so cock-shriveling cold that even the SAP/BJ87 I told you about earlier would have trouble dewithering me tonight. What I hadn’t anticipated was the raw energy and kinetic power of the Eltz’s subsurface eddies, swells, and whirlpools.
I’d roped myself to Wolf, who’d allowed that swimming wasn’t his best sport. Well, not to worry: there’s no water, friends, that I cannot traverse.
Of course, having said that (even to you), the War God immediately decided that I’d committed hubris. And as we all learned in English Lit 101, the noxious consequence of hubris is nemesis.
And so, having just inserted waist-high into the fast-moving water, my right boot tip caught itself between two rocks, at which precise instant I was hit by a subsurface whirlpool in the current. The water stood me up, then knocked me over, and twisted me 180 degrees to the starboard, with the result that my right knee was quickly hyperextended in a way that nature never intended it to be.
Oh, I must truly adore both God and pain, because God, ever beneficent, has provided me with multitudinous gifts of acute, intense, passionate suffering over the course of my professional life.
It was like being butt-fucked with a cattle prod. Belay that. It was worse. My knee was bent sideways, then backward, then sideways again. When it did, there was no more wet, or cold, only the pure, white heat of absolute, perfect, God-given agony. My whole body lit up. And then the fucking water slapped me around, turned me over, flipped me free of the toe-holding rock, and sent me sluicing downstream, headfirst, before I could reclaim any semblance of control.
My cheek was opened up as it hit something rough. My left shoulder cracked when I bounced off one hufuckingmongous underwater boulder as I threw myself in the opposite direction (or whatever direction it might have been), trying to correct my roll, pitch, and yaw problems. But they didn’t want to be corrected. My rucksack wedged between two rocks, holding me underwater. I’d no sooner pushed myself free—no mean feat, given the speed and force of the current—when the MP5’s web strap came loose. The pistol grip slammed into my kidneys, knocking out what little wind remained in my lungs. I inhaled water—fuuck—muscled myself surfaceward long enough to grab as big a lungful of air as I could manage under the circumstances, then rolled back into the roiling water and lunged for the submachine gun (no way I was going to lose it here and now), and managed to grab the CQC strap just as the fucking thing disappeared beyond my grasp.
And then, and then, the rope around my waist drew taut and I was brought up short. I managed to surface again, sputtering, in a narrow cleft between two nasty-looking flat rocks. I pulled at the MP5 and freed it from wherever it had stuck itself, and brought the gun toward me until I held it close. Three yards away, Wolf, teeth audibly chattering above the water’s noisy rush, reeled me in, lay me in an eddy, separated me from the weapon, and ran his hands around my throbbing knee. “Is nicht kaput,” was his verdict. “Not broken.”
“But is nicht gut, Dickie,” he said, strangely disapproving, given the circumstances. “Du bist der Kampfschwimmer. Ich—” He mimed a race-car driver’s hands on a steering wheel.
I puked up about a pint of water, flexed my knee in the way it was intended to bend, and considered telling Wolf that perhaps we should trade specialties tonight. But it was getting late, and there was work to be done. And so, I clapped him on the shoulder, gave him a hearty “fuck you,” reaffixed the subgun, double-checked my web gear, made sure the rucksack hadn’t sprung any leaks, and then rolled back into the water with a groan. As the former dweeb editor was so fond of misstating, “No pain . . . no pain.”
2346. We floated under the orange blanket of sodium security light from the castle that bathed the river gorge. Slowly, slowly, I made landfall, turtled onto the steep, stone bank, unknotted the rope from my waist, shifted my MP5, eased a mag into position, slid the bolt forward, rolled over onto my back, crawled oh, so carefully under the rolled concertina razor wire that ran parallel to the river, and took up a defensive position in the shadow of a boulder. On my starboard side, Wolf mirrored my movements.
I felt half dead, and we hadn’t even begun the serious part of the evening’s entertainment yet. But you see, that’s what makes SEALs different. Take Rangers. No disrespect meant, but they ride in a plane, jump out, and take their objective. Or take Delta Force—again, no disrespect meant here, either. Delta rides a plane to its preinsertion destination, then jumps aboard a chopper to the insertion site, then fast-ropes down, and takes the objective.
Now let’s look at SEALs. We’ll spend ten days crammed inside a fucking submarine, hot-bunking atop fucking torpedoes and getting a shower every third day, then have to lock out into the ocean, which is nasty and cold (with all the nasty goatfuck factors lockouts often entail). Then, having not killed ourselves during lockout, we’ll load up our combat gear and swim two miles underwater to a precise dot on some chart. And now that we’ve thoroughly exhausted ourselves (as you will remember from the opening scenes of this book, swimming a long distance with combat gear is not an easy thing to do), we must then climb an ice-coated oil rig, or perform some similar body-numbing, debilitating, potentially lethal exercise. And then, after all of that Murphy-enriched foreplay, then we get to take our objective and wax the bad guys.
Yea, and even so, thus it was to be in our current situation. We were exhausted. We were wrung out. We were overstressed. And yet we weren’t even halfway through getting to the point of waxing the bad guys yet.
Half Pint and Max the pilot arrived not thirty seconds behind Wolf and me. They unhooked and scrambled under the concertina wire toward a flanking position on the yard-wide riverbank. Fred and Werner rolled ashore. Then Duck Foot and Gator pulled themselves out of the water, followed by Baby Huey, Rodent, Boomerang, and Nod. As they used to say in all those World War II war movies: “All present and accounted for.”
2349. We weren’t alone: Mister Murphy had crawled ashore with us. Even though we’d made it through the perimeter lights unnoticed; even though we’d managed to crawl through the concertina wire without anything but a few scratches and a ripped BDU or two, we were still fuckee-fuckeed. Why? Twenty feet above the fast-moving river, the castle wall was climbable—it was as uneven as one of those training modules used by rock climbing professionals. But the first six or seven yards were sheer, smooth escarpment. Even Duck Foot couldn’t climb it. And Gator was no Duck Foot.
I looked over at Boomerang, tapped my watch face, and shrugged, as if to ask how much time we had.
He shook his head dejectedly and signaled back: “One hundred and one minutes until boom-boom. Just as you commanded, Boss Dude.”
Fuck the boom-boom. This was doom-doom. Doom-doom on Dickie time.
Roy Boehm, who was and is a serious student of Asian philosophy, used to tell me, “When you’re confronted by what looks like the impossible, just let your mind wander, and a solution will come.”
I hunkered down at the base of the castle’s foundation and let my mind wander. Fred hunkered down next to me, his shoulder brushing mine. At which point, Baby Huey, who’d been uncharacteristically quiet
all night, said, “Hey—don’t move, Skipper.”
I didn’t move. BH stepped between us, then put one boot onto my right shoulder and the other on Fred’s left shoulder, his arms steadying him as he spread-eagled on the Schloss’s foundation. “Now stand up,” he said.
We did—carefully. BH waited, then jumped down, gingerly. He turned to me, his face full of excitement. “It’s like my cheerleading squad in high school,” he burbled. “We use a four-man base, three guys on top of them, two on top of them, and then Gator—he can reach the castle, I think,” BH said.
Nod looked quizzically at Baby Huey. “You were a cheerleader in high school?”
“Hey, can you think of a better way to get to feel up good-looking chicks on a daily basis and get phys ed credit for it?” BH’s face clouded over. “Why, you wanna make something of it?”
“Hell, no, kid. But it answers one question I always had about you.”
Gator gave his shipmate a quasinasty look. “Oh, yeah?”
Nod ruffled Baby Huey’s hair and grinned. “Yeah—it tells me why you’re so fuckin’ perky all the time.” He stepped out of the way as BH took a good-natured swing at him. “C’mon—Terry’s got a great idea.”
2355. We built the pyramid. It was hard, because the rock bowed outward slightly, which meant we couldn’t stand up against it at the base. If anybody took a tumble, they’d end up on the rocks—and I didn’t need any broken bones tonight.
Gator waited until I gave him an upturned thumb. Then he began his long climb. He used my sore knee as his launching pad, then clambered up onto my shoulder. I helped hoist him up as far as I could, Fred’s strong arm supporting him as he went. Then Rodent, Werner, and Max took the strain. Gator went over them, passed along to Half Pint and Nod by the second level of the pyramid.
“Fuck—”
I couldn’t see shit from my position on the bottom. “What’s up?”
Option Delta Page 28
