Echo Platoon - 07

by Richard Marcinko

  0614. I hoisted myself over the edge of the empty quay, received the line from Mustang, and made us fast to a heavy cleat. The sun wasn’t even up yet, and it was already close to a hundred degrees.

  “Captain Dickie—”

  I turned at the sound of my name. A tall, mustached officer in a sweat-stained, dust-streaked uniform came around the corner of a two-story concrete warehouse, his arms outstretched to give me what my Cuban friends call un gran abrazo.

  I was enveloped in an Azeri bear hug and the odor of stale tobacco and alcohol. I squeezed back. “Araz. Good to see you.” Araz Kurbanov, the field-wise officer who’d helped me set up the hit on 16-Bravo, was the titular head of Azeri special forces. We both knew that was an oxymoron. The Azeris have no special forces—except on paper. That’s why we’d been sent here: to give Araz’s company-size unit some basic training, so they could operate in crisis mode and not get themselves—or the hostages they’d be trying to rescue—killed.

  “God, you SEALs really do like all that touchie-feelie stuff, despite all the macho psychobabble you sell the public, don’t you?”

  I released Araz, stepped back, and turned toward the sound. A tall, lean, redheaded Jarhead major in well-worn green cammie BDUs and spit-shined boondockers, carrying a black ballistic nylon briefcase and a holstered sidearm on a lanyard stepped warily around a pile of dry donkey dung. “Out a little early, ain’t we, Major Evans?”

  “Hell, Captain Marcinko, I’m a diplomat—and dontcha know, we diplomats work the regulation United States Marine Corps twenty-four-hour day, twenty-four hours the day, seven days the week, three-hundred sixty-five days the year. We diplomats are very dedicated to our work.”

  The major smiled, brightening the dusty morning with her perfect teeth. “Besides, the ambassador ordered me to keep an eye on you people and make sure y’all stay out of trouble.” She wrinkled her nose as she drew within arm’s length of moi. “Geez, Dick, you’re pretty ripe. Maybe I should do my watching through binoculars.”

  “Ripe? Hell—this is the real smell of battle. You’ve been living the soft life too long, Major. All those mess-dress dinners. Receptions. Cocktail parties. What you need is a good, long deployment to someplace like Lagos.”

  She shook her head. “Negatory, Dick. BTDT. Been there, done that.”

  Actually, there wasn’t too much that Major Ashley Evans, USMC, hadn’t done. She’d grown up in Tennessee, then gone to the U.S. Naval Academy, where she’d won a varsity letter in small-bore rifle. As a Marine intelligence specialist she’d come under fire in Somalia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone; she’d survived a chopper crash in the mountains behind Split, Croatia. And she’d run interference for the plain-speaking, pocket rocket commandant of the Marine Corps as a congressional liaison. These days she worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency, as one of two assistant defense attachés here in Azerbaijan.

  As such, she (like all attachés) came under the ambassador’s chain of command. And the boss had ordered her to make sure I didn’t commit AFR, which as y’all can probably gather, stands for Any Fucking Roguery.

  But luckily for me—and for this book—Ashley Evans was imbued with the Warrior Spirit. She’d let me know that she was on our side as soon as we’d met back at the airport when I was still a sweet-smelling SEAL. She’d quietly gathered as much tactical intel as she was able to and passed it in my direction. She’d funneled telephone numbers, whispered answers to logistical questions, and made sure I knew that Araz Kurbanov was one of the few Good Guys I could count on out here in the Azeri hinterlands.

  Within minutes of our first handshake, she’d also made sure I understood—with a series of nods, hitches of shoulder, and other miscellaneous body language—that any working relationship we might enjoy had to be clandestine in nature. I grasped her point instinctively. I know from personal experience (I may not seem the type, but I was actually a naval attaché once) that while attachés are detailed by the Defense Intelligence Agency, they work for the ambassador, and if an ambassador gets pissed off at an attaché, the attaché’s work can become hard, even impossible to do. And while I didn’t mind Ambassador Madison’s looking to put my pigtail on a platter, it did me no good if she saw one of her staffers as a turncoat.

  So much for what we in the literary profession call backstory. Let’s get on with it. “What do you know, Ashley?”

  “Not a hell of a lot. I drove down with Grogan. Geez, that was real hardship duty. If that sleazebag tries to grope me one more time, I’m going to break his fingers in six places.”

  We all watched as the second Zodiac tied up. Then Araz put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. Half a dozen soldiers, in uniforms even more sweat-stained and dusty than his, double-timed around the corner. The Azeri barked at them in his native tongue, and they set about helping my guys unload the boats.

  He joined Ashley and me as we stood up close to the warehouse. “You missed the beeg three-rings circus show,” he said in heavily accented English. “Big times show. CNN alive broadcast and the whole nineteen yards.”

  “We didn’t need our faces all over the TV.”

  He shook his head in agreement. “I understand.” He paused. “Besides, that tolkatch da’ma’ak24 from the oil company. He was giving all the . . .” There was another pause as he searched for the right word in English. “The . . . the in-ter-views, and taking authority for the whole things, and of course, the ambassador too.” Araz spat through his thick, Stalinesque mustache onto the dusty concrete of the dock to show what he thought of Grogan’s performance. “He is saying that if he had been allowed to do things his way, through Sirzhik Foundation”—Araz spat once again, letting me know what he thought of that organization, too—“then all the how you say hostage takers they would have surrendered peacefully and no need for you for making such nasty violence.”

  Of course. It figured. Grogan was the type of executive who elbowed his subordinates out of the way to take credit for anything that went right, couldn’t be found within miles when things went sour, and spent all his spare time second-guessing. I’m surprised he wasn’t a retired four-star admiral instead of a retired FBI Special Agent in Charge.

  “Whose chopper was that, Grogan’s?” It would have been in character for him to stiff me.

  The colonel’s dark eyes scanned the pale sky, which was growing lighter by the minute, to the north. “Ah—the Dauphin,” he said longingly. “Pokh25—I’d give my Yaytz naprávo for it,” he said, tapping the right side of his fatigue-trouser crotch by way of simultaneous translation. Araz noted my smile, and the color on Ashley’s cheeks. He withdrew a pack of cigarettes from the breast pocket of his uniform, tamped it on his palm, then pulled a half inch of a yellow-papered cigarette made of black tobacco out of the pack and offered it in my direction.

  I faced my palms toward him. “Hem cnacuo—no thanks.”

  He shrugged, took the cigarette out, placed it between his lips, lit it with a cheap butane lighter, inhaled deeply, and then exhaled dragonlike through his long nose. I noted the look of relief on Ashley’s face when I didn’t press for a quick answer to my question. But then, I knew perfectly well it would have been rude.

  No, I haven’t been here in Azerbaijan before. But it didn’t take me more than a few minutes on the ground to understand that the culture here is more Middle East than European, and Middle East is a mentality, a culture, a gestalt, that I understand as fundamentally as any Islamic fundamentalist. And so, one takes one’s time in all things; one does not press one’s hosts unnecessarily. One does not “step in front” and cut off a colonel. That’s why Ashley, who knew all the answers to these questions, kept her diplomatic mouth shut, and was obviously gratified to see that I was doing the same.

  More smoke. More wistful staring at the sky. “The Dauphin,” Araz finally said, a longing tone to his voice. “It belongs to your ambassador Madison. She brought it with her from the United States.”

  Y’know, friends, it pisses me off when I discover that
my life could have been made easier, not to mention less dangerous, if I’d been given an asset that was on hand.

  Let me pause long enough right now to explain something about Warriordom. The Warrior does not look for death unnecessarily. He is not afraid to die, but he doesn’t want to die without reason, or because of stupidity—his or anyone else’s. And so, while danger and peril are both a part of the Warrior’s life, the true Warrior will always look for ways to make his job less risky. The ambassador’s chopper would have given me an alternative way in which to take the platform down. And it is always preferable to have alternatives—which add flexibility to an operation—than to be forced to use a single, rigid plan.

  And so, from here on in, you will see that I’ll be dealing with Ambassador Marybeth Madison carefully. I will treat her with the Roguish respect to which her rank entitles her, just as I will salute the president because he is the nation’s commander in chief, even though I know that he is a lowlife, cowardly, draft-dodging, nipple-rolling, pussy-fingering, double-dealing, lying cocksucker (and those, as we all know, are a litany of Blow-Job Bill’s best attributes).

  Likewise, knowing that Madam Ambassador put the lives of my men at greater risk than necessary, I will still treat her with respect. But I will deal with her as if she were my enemy, not my ally. Full stop. End of story.

  But now, it was time to get on with things. The hostages were safe, and we had training to do. “Araz,” I said, “let’s get the fuck back to Baku. I’m bone tired and the major here has already told me I stink. I’d like a hot shower and a cold beer—and not necessarily in that order.” I didn’t say what I was simultaneously thinking: that I wanted to get back to Baku to check out this Sirzhik organization, because it didn’t sound very kosher to me. But that was for me to know, not Araz.

  The Azeri looked at me strangely. I could see the translation forming in his mind’s eye. Then he threw his head back and laughed, snorting cigarette smoke all the while. “Then we go—now,” he roared. “I bring the trucks. We load. We go back to Baku. I hose you down. Then we drink much vodka, we eat grilled goat balls, then the rest of the goat, and then we drink much vodka some more.”

  He may not have been talking about Bombay Sapphire, but it still sounded good to me. “Spaciba—thank you,” I said. Araz and his men watched as my guys sorted equipment, reloaded magazines, and put their gear in working order.

  Not one unit in a hundred would do that so soon after coming through an op. But these were SEALs, and so their dedication was unmatched. They also knew that they were here in Azerbaijan as teachers—inculcators, who had to show by example that attention to detail, and a constant readiness, were a big part of what SpecOps is all about.

  So, sure, they were exhausted. No doubt about it. But they also had the glow of accomplishment about them—the kind of can-do body language that told the Azeris there was nothing they couldn’t do, even though they were bone weary, wrung out, and overworked.

  We were on the road by 0800, chugging at thirty-one kliks an hour (that’s a whopping nineteen mph) in a trio of circa-1968 Czechoslovakian-invasion, Soviet Army surplus diesel two-bys. You’ve probably seen similar transport in all those Cold War–era documentaries on the History Channel. We’re talking big, high, squared-off, ugly trucks with uncomfortable wood bench seats, drafty canvas tops, and no springs. I rode shotgun in the first truck. Major Evans sat in the middle. Araz drove, fighting the eight-speed, synchro-smash transmission and strength-sapping Stalinesque steering every fucking centimeter of the way. I thought about asking Ashley about the Sirzhik Foundation, but didn’t want to do it in front of Araz. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him, but I didn’t know him well enough to allow him a hint of what I was thinking. That is the Warrior’s Way: keep thy thoughts to thyself and thine enemies guessing.

  We wound our way through the narrow streets of Alät, slaloming around the vegetable vendors with their donkey carts, and big-wheeled tractors pulling flatbeds filled with miscellaneous crap, and finally ground our way onto the main road headed north, a two-lane ribbon of concrete whose bullet-dinged road signs told me we were on the A-322, which paralleled the twin high-speed (okay—it was only relatively high-speed) electric-powered railroad line, running on a more or less north/south axis.

  We hit Gobustan at 0935. I nudged Araz and pointed toward a small shed at the side of the road where a wrinkled old man in an embroidered skullcap was selling tea from a shiny samovar, and cakes from a brass tray. “Let’s pull over and get something to drink.”

  Let me tell you something about Azerbaijan: it is hot here. Moreover, between the trucks (which were like ovens), and the dust (which was persistent), and the stench of raw petroleum (which was ever present), and the remorseless heat of the diesel engines, even I of the cast-iron constitution was queasy.

  Araz nodded. He steered hard right rudder, hit the brakes, and we shuddered to a stop. I clambered down and stretched, relieved to ease the pressure on my spine.

  1010. Back on the road. I let my head loll back against the hot metal of the cab and closed my eyes for a short combat nap. I hadn’t even begun to relax when Ashley Evans smacked me in the chest. “Yo, Dick—reveille.”

  I shook myself awake and tried to get my bearings. I looked at my watch. It was almost 1100. “Where are we?”

  “Near Sangachaly,” Araz answered from behind a haze of thick, acrid cigarette smoke, as if the name would have meant something significant to me.

  Ashley pointed east. “There—” She pointed ahead and off to the right, where heavy black smoke was coming from somewhere beyond the scrub-covered dunes that lay between the highway and the Caspian.

  I gestured toward the plume of black smoke. “What’s over there?”

  “Old Russian airfield,” Araz said. “Deserted now. Empty.”

  I scanned the road ahead of us. About half a klik away, I could see a detour sign had been set up on a wood post. The main road had been blocked off by a pair of heavy wood blockades, with the international road sign for “construction ahead” tacked to them. Burning flares were spiked into the black macadam of the highway. An arrow pointed to the right, directing traffic toward the sea. “I guess we take it.”

  “But that is the road to the airfield—not the way to Baku.” Araz scratched his head. “It wasn’t this way when we are driving to meet you, Captain Dickie.”

  “It wasn’t like this when Grogan and I convoyed the limos down, either,” Ashley said. “And that was two, three hours after Araz came through.”

  The little red warning light in my head—the one behind the bullshit meter and next to the pussy detector—started blinking like crazy. The hair on the back of my neck stood straight up.

  I wasn’t about to drive blind down that fucking road. No way. “Pull over. We’ll take a look before we do anything.”

  Araz’s men removed the barricade and extinguished the flares. Then we hunkered down at the side of the highway while Araz drew a rough sketch of the airfield with a stick in the dusty shoulder of the road. He drew the highway we were on. Then the long runway, which ran parallel to it. Then the narrow, unpaved service road leading to the airfield, which resembled a capital L, with a single half kilometer approach from the south leading to the airfield. A second, slightly longer L-shaped road led to the airfield from the north.

  I borrowed his stick and used it as a pointer.

  As I spoke, Ashley provided simultaneous translation. “You go here”—I indicated the northern service road—“and head back toward the airfield. I’ll work my way up the south road.” I pointed toward the bottom of the L, where the northern road took a ninety-degree turn. “There’s the point to be careful,” I said.

  Araz looked at Ashley and nodded. His finger traced the curve. “Bad ambush spot?” he asked.

  Ashley and I nodded simultaneously. Then, she rattled thirty seconds of machine-gun Azeri, her hands speaking even faster than her voice. When she finished, Araz looked at his men. They all shook their heads in a
greement and spoke to one another, expanding on Ashley’s riff.

  “What did you tell ’em?”

  “I said it’s much more effective to ambush on a curve than it is on a straightaway. First of all, you can employ two fields of fire. Second, I told them it’s normal to slow down on a curve, which gives you more time to kill your enemies, so we have to be very careful as we approach that curve up there.”

  “Okay—then let’s go to work already.” Quickly, we unpacked enough gear for a counterambush. Nod made sure our radios were working.

  I looked at the force at my disposal. “Boomerang—take seven guys with you, and take all the Azeris, too.”

  Boomerang’s long index finger pointed at Mustang, Butch, Goober, Hammer, Randy, Digger, and Nigel. “You dudes come with me.”

  “That means I’m going with him,” Ashley said, her thumb jerked in Boomerang’s direction. “Just in case we need some translation.”

  “Fine with me,” I said.

  “I’ll need a weapon.”

  I unstrapped my tactical thigh holster with the USP-9, three extra mag pouches, and handed them over. “Go crazy,” I said.

  She withdrew the weapon, dropped the mag into her palm, ratcheted the slide back and extracted the chambered round, then secured the slide back and examined the pistol stem to stern with a practiced eye.

  Happy with what she saw, she released the slide forward and listened to it as it shot home. She sighted, aligned, and dry-fired into the scrub alongside the road.

  The USP passed muster. She locked the slide back, shoved the mag home, released the slide and chambered a round, then dropped the magazine, put the single round she’d first extracted back in it, slammed the mag northward once again, then attached the holster and mag holders to her web belt. When she was finished doing business, she smiled in my direction. “Nice piece. You have some trigger work done?”

  It’s always nice to work with a pro. “Good of you to notice.”