Option Delta

by Richard Marcinko

  31 A Schedule C employee means that no experience in the field is necessary, as said employee has been given his/her/its job because of work in the presidential campaign, or influence from whatever party won the White House.

  32 MEMorandums of CONversation

  33 I don’t have time to get into this right now, but it’s important for you to know that most of our admirals and generals do not get promoted because they are good at making war, or will be able to lead men. They get their stars because they have spent most of their time as staff assistants or aides to senior generals or admirals. The most recent Navy board, for example, selected thirty-four captains to be promoted to one-star rank. Of those thirty-four, twenty-three held the positions of executive assistant, or chief of staff to a four-star admiral. Seven were senior military aides or executive assistants detailed to the White House or the Pentagon. Only four came from an operations slot.

  34 Lovely word, isn’t it? It derives from Middle English, where sward means turf, and green means green.

  35 Grenzschutzgruppe 9 was formed as a unit of the West German federal border police.

  36 Okay—I know I’m not wearing anything that has lapels right now, but this is a novel, after all, and I’m therefore allowed to occasionally use what the old editor describes as “literary license.”

  37 OPerational SECurity

  38 Los Angeles Police Department

  39 Punk, in Russkie.

  40 Rogue

  41 I was sent to Moscow after my old shipmate Paul Mahon was murdered by an Ivan vor v zakonye named Andrei Yudin. You can read about it in Rogue Warrior: Designation Gold.

  42 Remember, it stands for “the tiny” in Kraut-speak.

  43 JCET stands for Joint Combined Exchange Training. JCET is not subject to State Department strictures, so the units are often made up of soldiers whose human rights history is not quite all that the ACLU might like.

  44 RUMor INTelligence.

  45 Roguishly Unvarnished Terms

  46 Rock

  47 That’s “bolt out of the blue” in German.

  48 Numbers in question

  49 Foreign national

  50 LEGal ATtaché: resident FBI agent

  51 Remember that in Kraut, the “B” sounds like a double “s.” Hence “StraBe” is pronounced “Strasse.”

  52 No entry

  53 That’s how they say up-to-the-minute fashionable in Paris.

  54 Thorough Visual Exam, remember?

  55 That’s Ivan slang for punks.

  56 Doubles

  57 Russkie slang for bodyguards

  58 It pronounces like boss.

  59 German People’s Party

  60 Big, strong hugs

  61 Evening

  62 That’s Spanish for grill.

  63 These are Argentine steaks.

  64 Sausages

  65 Kraut for “paying through the nose.”

  66 NASty CAR.

  67 The editor wants me to remind you that, being Krauts and therefore meticulous, Fred and Wolf have STS Model 2722 LP/NVGs (Low Profile Night Vision Goggles), which transition in milliseconds from low light to brightly lit environments. This state-of-the-art see-through capability (that’s what it’s called) allows the NVGs to scan past headlights and other bright light sources without blinding the wearer.

  68 Remained OverNight.

  69 Can’t Remember Shit

  70 Wrinkle

  71 Square one

  72 Don’t Give A Shit

  73 That’s a Kraut’s dick.

  74 The Greens, you will remember, are basically against NATO and for total disarmament and the disbanding of all armies. They are the same kind of politically and ecologically correct sanctimonious politicians as Albert Gore—and just as untrustworthy.

  75 Tiny.

  76 Buenos Aires, for the uninitiated amongst you

  77 Field exercises

  78 In Joint Chiefs language, “Designation Gold” means ultraurgent.

  79 That’s a formal diplomatic protest, filed by a nation’s foreign ministry, to the foreign ministry of another country.

  80 Fucked very much.

  81 Oh, they’re secure vis-à-vis foreign governments. But there are often internal snoops who like to peek at what’s being sent from one bureau to another. Bottom line: why take chances?

  82 Auxiliary power unit.

  83 Roguishly blunt language

  84 No, I wasn’t being paranoid. The human ear can pick up normal conversation up to a hundred meters away. Whispered conversations can carry as far as eighty meters. You can pick up the sound of a hammer cocking on a weapon five hundred meters distant. Indeed, noise discipline is probably the most important tactical lesson you can learn during field exercises. It can keep you alive. And it can make it possible for you to find and kill your enemy.

  85 Goons.

  86 Remember, that’s Kraut for rendezvous.

  87 Remember that acronym? It stands for Special Assistant to the President for Blow Jobs.

  88 Shit would happen.

  89 Double

  90 That’s the Kraut way of saying, “In a nutshell.” They are a loquacious bunch of assholes, aren’t they?

  91 Endorphins (a fusion of the words endogenous and morphine) are natural peptides occurring in the brain and other body tissues. They resemble opiates, and they react with the brain’s opiate receptors to raise the pain threshold.

  92 Cockbreath asshole.

  93 The T.K.O. (Tactical Knock-Out) is a frangible 12-gauge slug that is made of compressed zinc powder. It disintegrates locks and bolts when fired from a shotgun whose barrel has been equipped with a standoff attachment.

  94 If you can’t figure out what this means by reading it in context, look the fucking word up in the Glossary.

  95 These days, many shooting schools have stopped using the term “weak hand,” which was deemed politically incorrect because the word weak did not encourage the shooter’s self-esteem. Instead, they use the term “support hand.” Well, fuck all that touchy-feely shit. My belief is that if you practice with your weak hand long enough, it will no longer be weak. You will be strong on both sides, and you will be able to kill your enemy ambidextrously.

  96 Remember, that’s the Kraut way of saying I wanted the motherfucker as dead as a doornail.

  97 That’s when you don’t spend a lot of time aligning the sights, but simply put your target in your front sight, thus narrowing the channel down which you are going to shoot. It is a concept used by hostage rescue teams, where there may be lots of friendlies in the immediate area, and point shooting could be fatal to the wrong people.

  98 Special Forces.

  ATRIA BOOKS PROUDLY PRESENTS

  ECHO PLATOON

  Richard Marcinko

  and

  John Weisman

  Available Now from Atria Books

  The following is a preview of Echo Platoon . . .

  FIRST THINGS FIRST. THE TIME IS CURRENTLY 0230, AND THE situation is currently FUBAR.1 Now, having given you the complete (yet still Roguishly pithy) sit-rep, I can proceed with the confessional portion of this affair.

  Here goes. I have often maintained that Getting There Is Half the Fun. But today, following the presidential example, I can finally admit the truth: I have misled you. It was all mendacity. Lies. Duplicity. Prevarication. After almost a decade of these books, here is the unvarnished, frank, candid, pellucid, and wholly unadulterated acronymic truth: GTINFFAA. Getting There Is No Fucking Fun At All. None. Nada. Bupkis. Zilch.

  There is precious little merriment involved in jumping out of a perfectly stable fucking aircraft into minus-sixty-degree Fahrenheit air, seven miles above the ground, so you can surprise some hostage-holding malefactors unaware. It is not blissful to leave a perfectly fucking sound rigid inflatable boat and insert by wallowing snout-first through several hundred yards of oozy, chest-deep mud, all the while fending off nasty, often lethal creepie-crawlies, so you can reconnoiter a village of no-goodniks and then w
ithdraw without being seen. There is no ecstasy in humping several score miles across hundred-plus-degree desert, carrying everything but the fucking kitchen sink on your back, to blow up a motley crew of transnational tangos.

  Indeed, the sorts of experiences I’m describing here can be summarized in a single, evocative, one-syllable word. I am talking, friends, about PAIN.

  Not the cartoon pain of television dramas and Hollywood shoot-’em-ups, either. I mean the real thing. The kind of pain that hurts; hurts for days. The lingering agony of a badly hyperextended joint when you smack the water the wrong way at thirty miles an hour. The month of searing suffering when your chute malfunctions during free fall, a nylon line slaps you across the eyes, ripping your goggles off and tearing your cornea loose. The involuntary tightening of sphincter muscles as a ricochet from your own weapon caroms off a metal wall, bounces off the floor, comes hurtling back at you, and slices through your side, just below the brisket half an inch below where your bulletproof vest stops.

  Now, let me say that all of the various varieties of pain encapsulated in the above activities: each and every ding, all the blisters, bruises, contusions, and concussions, the gashes, lacerations, and plain, no-frills smacks upside the head, all of them pale when compared with my current situation.

  And what, precisely, is my current situation? All you Enquiring minds want to know, huh?

  Let’s put it this way: my current situation comes straight out of the BOHICA2 handbook. I mean, I’ve been cracked, smacked, whacked, and hacked; I’ve been thumped, dumped, bumped, and whumped; I’ve been ground, crowned, browned, and drowned. But until tonight, I’ve never experienced it while greased.

  Yeah, greased. Like a cheap French fry. I mean as thickly coated with petroleum jelly as the Herndon Monument the day the plebes at the Naval Academy climb the fucking thing as the last act of their first year.3 I mean schmeared. Like a bagel. I mean daubed, as with lard. Like Gertrude Ederle on her first attempt to swim the English fucking Channel.

  So okay, maybe if you’re a Channel swimmer, and you’re wearing a 1930s, one-piece wool bathing suit, maybe it helps if you envelop yourself in pig fat, or Vaseline (or love-jelly or K-Y, for all I care). But me, I had a little more to carry than Gertrude did. I was wearing a wet suit, which was uncomfortably hot in the tepid water in which I was currently attempting to swim. Over the wet suit was a set of basic black BDUs, which as you all probably know after seven of these books, stands for the oxymoronic Battle Dress Uniform. I was also sporting the ever-popular Point Blank Class III-A Tactical bulletproof vest, with its six-pound ceramic chest plate Velcro’d directly over the ol’ Rogue heart. Atop that, I wore my inflatable SEAL CQC4 vest—and lucky I did, because without it I’d have sunk faster than what my long-time Kraut comrade in arms, Brigadier General Fred Kohler, would refer to as ein Backstein.

  Sink like a brick? Oh, yeah—I was carrying almost seventy pounds of equipment tonight. Cinched around my waist was a tactical pistol belt. Descending from it, and attached to the Roguish right thigh, was a ballistic nylon holster that held my suppressed Heckler & Koch USP-9 and five spare fifteen-round magazines.

  To balance things out, my left thigh supported six 30-round synthetic submachine gun magazines loaded with 155-grain Winchester Silvertip. Strapped to my back was a scabbard holding HK’s ubiquitous MP5 submachine gun in 9-mm caliber, with a Knight wet-technology suppressor screwed onto the barrel, and a seventh full mag of Silvertips within easy reach. I had six DefTec Model 25 flashbangs in modular pouches Velcro’d to my CQC vest, along with a secure radio, lip mike, and earpiece, twenty feet of shaped linear ribbon charge on a wooden spool, primers, wire, and an electric detonator, a pair of eighteen-inch bolt cutters, an electrician’s screwdriver, lineman’s pliers, a short steel pry bar, and a first-aid kit. Since I am from the carry-the-coals-to-Newcastle school of SEALdom, I carried a pair of two-liter bladders of drinking water. My fanny pack contained a handful of nylon restraints, and a small roll of waterproof duct tape.

  Strapped to my right calf I wore a Mad Dog Taiho combat knife with a nonmagnetic blade. Wound around my waist was twenty feet of modular, titanium rung and stainless-steel cable-rail caving ladder.

  With all that dreck attached to my body, swimming the thousand yards from my insertion point to the target would have been, shall we say, difficult, even under the best of conditions. But I had no choice. Besides, we were all similarly loaded down. After all, once we’d made the swim, there was no place to go for supplies. If there was a possibility we’d need to use something, either we schlepped it with us, or we’d have to do without when the time came.

  Having just said all that, I must admit that tonight’s conditions were, in the abstract, not intolerable toward me and my men. Many elements actually worked in our favor. The water was warm and calm, with a mere eight-to-ten-inch chop. The current flowed obligingly directly toward my target from our launch point. The cuticle-thin sliver of moon low in the east was intermittently obscured by high wispy clouds, which gave me and the eleven men swimming with me a certain degree of invisibility.

  Which is why, I guess, Mister Murphy of Murphy’s Law fame, decided that my task was too simple and my goal too easily reached. A twelve-man assault team, swimming roughly one thousand yards, should reach its objective in about forty minutes.5 We had gone about half that distance in less than twenty minutes—and were therefore ahead of schedule.

  And so, with his usual sense of the ironic, Mister Murphy came up with an additional element of difficulty to layer on the night’s events. An unforeseen, unanticipated, and totally unappreciated oil slick coated the water through which I swam tonight. I hadn’t seen it until I was six feet into it—enough time to wave my guys off, but too late for me. We’re not talking about a lot of crude here. The scum was perhaps a thirty-second of an inch at its thickest. But let me tell you something about crude oil: it sticks to you. It coats you and your equipment. It weighs you down.

  Moreover, oil slicks come under the rubric of what the tree huggers at the Environmental Protection Agency refer to as HAZMATs, which of course stands for HAZardous MATerials. Indeed, according to the EPA’s current Rules of Engagement (and I’ve read ‘em), one must not come into contact with oil slicks unless one is wearing: 1: a set of EPA-approved HAZMAT coveralls, 2: an EPA-approved HAZMAT mask, 3: EPA-approved HAZMAT gloves, 4: HAZMAT footwear, and 5: an EPA-sanctioned hard hat (in visibility orange, or bright yellow only, please). Violators will be severely fined. Their names will be put down in The Book.

  But since there wasn’t an EPA tree hugger within six thousand miles, and since I have devoted my life to operating in spite of whatever mischief Mister Murphy or any of his relatives strews in my path, I just kept swimming. Shit, a few years ago, I took a dip in a fucking nuclear wastewater pool. I cured the resulting luminescence (I’m probably the only Richard whose dick has glowed in the dark) with Bombay Sapphire—and I haven’t noticed any incidences of lighted lizard syndrome since. So, if Bombay can treat the effects of a nuke wastewater pool, I had no reason to think a dollop or two (or three, or four), after this little exercise wouldn’t do the trick, too.

  Okay, okay, I’m digressing. You wanted to know about the evening’s festivities. It’s actually quite simple. I was currently attempting to sidestroke through the Caspian Sea toward oil platform 16-Bravo, the main rig of a five-platform operation sitting nine miles from shore, about fifty miles due south of the Azerbaijani capital city of Baku. The rigs were owned by SOCAR, an oil consortium controlled jointly by CenTex (that’s the Central Texas Oil Corporation), and the Azeri government, and manned by a mixed crew of a dozen CenTex and expatriate Brit roustabouts.

  But that wasn’t why I was here. I was here because 16-Bravo was currently under the control of a group of eight terrorists. They’d taken over the rig twenty hours ago, using darkness as cover to slip aboard from a pair of bright yellow Zodiac inflatables that were currently tethered to 16-Bravo’s northeastern hull column and bobbing
in the gentle waves. The tangos captured the rig, took the roustabouts hostage, then used their own state-of-the-art cellular phones to call CenTex’s home office in Houston, Texas. The message, once it had been translated from Azeri into English, was pretty straightforward: we are pro-Iranian Azeris who do not like the fact that you Infidels are exploiting our nation. Get out of Azerbaijan, or suffer the consequences.

  By chance, two hours after the bad guys’ phone call had been translated, I’d wheels-downed in Baku with a platoon of SEALs, on a stealth-grade training mission q-u-i-e-t-l-y undertaken at the behest of the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But the well-planned secrecy went out the door the instant Americans were taken hostage. The Azeris knew all about my capabilities in the hostage-rescue arena, skills not possessed by any local military or police unit (which was one reason for my coming to Baku in the first place).

  So, the government of Azerbaijan wanted me and my guys to do the evening’s dirty work. And to be honest, I was more than happy to oblige. The best way to teach, after all, is by example. And taking down this oil rig would serve as a real-life demonstration of hopping & popping & shooting & looting to our Azeri students.

  That was the good news. Here’s the bad news: someone had told the press I was coming, and there was a big contingent of cameras and lights at the airport. The American networks wanted pictures of me and my guys, and interviews, too. Probably so Christiane Effing Amanpour could use the footage when she charged me with using unwarranted violence of action, nerve gas, or some other illegal substance on the hostage takers.

  No effing way, José. I solved that problem by asking the Azeris to throw the reporters out, something they probably had a lot of fun doing. But there were two additional impediments to my merry nocturnal marauding. They were, in order of appearance, Her Excellency, the Honorable Mizz Marybeth Madison, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the Republic of Azerbaijan, and his exalted dweebship, Mr. Roscoe Grogan, Vice President for Security (Central Asia), the CenTex Corp.