The Honorable Ms. Madison just plain didn’t want me and my dirtbags in her bailiwick. We’d arrived on a JCET, an acronym that stands for Joint Combined Educational Training mission, sans notice, sans cables, sans anything. And as the ambassador put it so . . . diplomatically, yet firmly, to me: “No one, Captain, not even with your manifest testosterone level, cuts me off at the fucking knees like that and gets away with it.”
Since I understand that kind of language, I explained to the good ambassador that JCETs didn’t come under her jurisdiction. I wasn’t, I explained, heading a diplomatic mission. I was here to train my SEALs, because JCETs are in point of fact, training for us, not the Azeris, even though the Azeris might indeed benefit from watching what we did and learning how we did it.
“That, Captain Marcinko, is a double trailer load of horse puckey, and we both know it,” quoth the ambassador, shaking her perfectly coifed, streaked blond do. “I read the damn papers, and the damn cables, too. I know what JCET missions are. No matter what you tell me, you’re here to train Azeris, and unless you’re gonna do it in Iran or Russia or the Republic of Georgia, or you’re gonna fly ‘em back to the good ol’ Yew Ess of A, you’re gonna be infringin’ on my turf.”
She was correct, of course. But that’s never stopped me before. And it didn’t stop me now. Indeed, after one phone call from me to the secretary of defense back in D.C., and another from the Azeri Foreign Minister to the principal deputy assistant secretary of state for former Soviet something-or-others (who they finally contacted via cellular during a boondoggle somewhere way out in one of the Stans6), Ambassador Madison’s fashionable, scrawny-assed, Chanel-clad, Vuitton-clutching, perfectly manicured claws were removed from my back.
Security dweeb Grogan, a bolo-tie sporting former FBI Special Agent in Charge (read desk jockey) from Dallas, probably had his last meaningful relationship with law enforcement when Ronald Reagan was in his first term, Ambassador Madison was in grade school, and Tony Lama boots cost a mere two hundred bucks a pair. He was more difficult to deal with than the ambassador. She, at least, finally realized, after some, ah, interface with Washington, that it was the Azeris’ country, they’d asked me to help, and I had the backing of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense. While she didn’t like my presence here, the other political factors were nonetheless overwhelming. And so, being a realist, she bowed to ‘em and stepped aside.
Roscoe wasn’t hampered by such political or diplomatic niceties. This was his company’s damn awl rig, and he was going to handle things his way.
And what was his way, you want to know. Well, it was Roscoe’s considered opinion that if we let a local self-help organization slip the tangos a hundred thou or so in American greenbacks, they’d jump back into their Zodiacs and hightail it outta Bah-Koo, toot sweet.
You say you don’t believe me? Hey, let’s go to the videotape.
As you can see, Roscoe and I are standing on the tarmac, nose to nose, off behind the greasy ramp of the big, black, unmarked C-130 on which my guys and I had flown in, so the two of us could have some privacy. See how his thumbs are hooked in his belt loops, like some dime-novel cowboy’s?
Let’s listen in. “Yo, Dick, I’ve been dealin’ with all these friggin’ assholes over here for the last two-and-a-half friggin’ years and three friggin’ American ambassadors by goin’ through the friggin’ Sirzhik Foundation. Turkish friggin’ Mafia. Chechen friggin’ Mafia. Georgian friggin’ Mafia. Russian friggin’ Mafia. Armenian friggin’ nationalists. Azeri friggin’ pistoleros. The friggin’ Foundation deals with ‘em all. It has a friggin’ system, and here’s how it friggin’ works: I slip the Foundation a suitcase of greenbacks—it’s a 501-C charitable organization back in the States, so everything’s on the up-and-up and CenTex even gets a tax deduction. Then maybe the Foundation takes a cut, maybe it don’t, I frankly don’t give a shit, y’know? Then it pays out however much it wants to as a kinda self-help bequest to the parties in question, after which they friggin’ disappear. I’ve done this a dozen times in the past six months alone, so I know something you don’t. Even though these particular friggin’ assholes decided to up the friggin’ ante by takin’ hostages, they ain’t friggin’ terrorists, Dick—they’re friggin’ bidnessmen.”
Yeah, right. So, I friggin’ explain to friggin’ Roscoe in my quaint, Roguish friggin’ way that the friggin’ Naval Special Warfare technical term for friggin’ people who take friggin’ hostages, is “friggin’ terrorists.” I add (somewhat unnecessarily, I thought at the time) that we don’t pay friggin’ bribes to friggin’ terrorists, and we certainly don’t go through some friggin’ bogus foundation.
See how Roscoe’s right hand goes up like a traffic cop’s? “Whoa, Dick—I’m not talkin’ about a friggin’ bribe. That would be friggin’ wrong. In fact, it would be friggin’ illegal. This is what we in the friggin’ awl bidness call expeditin’, and the friggin’ ambassador over there, who as you probably know, has been in the friggin’ awl bidness for the past twelve years herself, agrees with me.”
It struck me as odd that said friggin’ Ambassador could have been in any business for the past twelve years. She didn’t look more than twenty-five. Of course, according to the file I’d read on the way over (I may look the part of the knuckle-dragging Rogue, but believe me, I do more homework than the chief stock analyst at Merrill Lynch), she was thirty-seven, the widow of the twelfth richest man in Texas, and she ran a corporation with more value than most of the countries in the Third World. The article about her in Forbes told me that she was tough as nails, just as likely to season her language with F-words as the Parisian-pure French she’d learned at Madeira and the Sorbonne, or the economics-speak she’d absorbed at Harvard’s business school.
I should also admit that even the flattering photo spreads in Town and Country and Architectural Digest hadn’t done credit to her. Marybeth Madison may have been thirty-seven. But she had the muscle tone and firm skin of a woman who worked out regularly with a private trainer, and so she looked ten years younger than she was.
But all that bidness experience, all those advanced degrees, all that ability to use the F-word, and all that muscle tone did her absolutely no good when it came to dealing with hostage situations. In fact, it had worked against her. Because, for some reason—maybe it was the fact that they were fellow Texans; maybe she was just incapable of making tough choices when it came to dealing with human lives—she’d allied herself with Roscoe Grogan, and Roscoe’s friends at the Sirzhik Foundation, whatever the hell that was (I made a mental note at the time to check it out). And Roscoe, as you have seen, was a government-inspected, Grade-A, Ruby-Red, size extra-large Asshole of hufuckingmongous proportions.
Now, I could give you a blow by blow of my reaction to this RRA’s chop-logic, but that would waste both my time and yours. Suffice it to say that the ambassador and Roscoe went back to her embassy in a huff (actually they traveled in her armored limo), and I went to work.
Over the next eight hours, my men and I moved fifty miles south of Baku. With the help of the Azeri Army, I quietly set up a base of operations on the awl platform closest to 16-Bravo. While my two sniper teams (and the four Azeri spec-ops wannabes I allowed to observe the situation close-up) began to assess the situation through their night-vision spotting scopes, I got on the secure cellular and jump-started my intel network back in the States.
It didn’t take long for me to discover that the TIQs (look it up in the glossary) weren’t Azeri at all, but Iranian no-goodniks. They belonged to an over-the-edge splinter group from the Revolutionary Guards and called themselves the Fist of Allah. According to DIA, they had infiltrated from Iran—in point of fact their strike emanated from the old American CIA listening post in the mountains above the Iranian town of Astara, which sits just south of the Azeri border. Who says fundamentalists ain’t got no sense of humor?
I do—at least when it comes to murdering Westerners. Because the FAs had, over the pas
t sixteen months, assassinated seven Americans, three Brits, a German, and a Frenchie. They hadn’t limited themselves to action in Europe and the Middle East, either. One hit had come in Japan; two others in Canada.
Anyway, shortly after nightfall, we confirmed that there were eight bad guys on 16-Bravo. Not a huge force of hostiles—but enough to cause both us and the hostages considerable damage. We also knew from what the Azeris had told us, and what we discovered through our own monitoring of the situation, that these tangos were efficient, professionally trained, and well equipped.
And oh, yeah: unlike me, they weren’t coated with crude oil.
I flicked goo from my face mask (I was swimming virtually fucking blind), released most of the air in my SEAL vest, dropped under the surface like the aforementioned brick, and kicked and twirled, trying to shed as much of the sticky, viscous crude as I could. I don’t think it did me much good at all. In fact, it was kinda disorienting. But it was still better than swimming through the goo. I breaststroked underwater, in what I thought to be the general direction of 16-Bravo for about thirty yards, then rolled and headed toward the surface for air, my fins kicking and my arms sweeping the water to break up the surface slick.
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1 Fucked Up Beyond All Repair.
2 Bend Over, Here It Comes Again.
3 The climbing of the greased Herndon obelisk, named after Commander William Lewis Herndon, USN, is supposed to represent the three most important aspects of life at the United States Naval Academy: discipline, teamwork, and courage. Oh, that those were actually the values they taught there. If they were, we’d have a lot better Navy than we do.
4 Close Quarters Combat.
5 According to current NAVSPECWAR doctrine, it should take no more than four minutes to swim a hundred yards under combat conditions.
6 No, the Stans are not Maurice and his family. They are all those former Soviet republics that are now independent states, like Kazak stan, Turkmeni stan, Kyrgyz stan, and Tajiki stan, to name a few.
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