The body of the DefTec No. 25 is made of thick steel. It weighs almost two pounds. It makes a hell of an old-fashioned cold-cocker. And between the fucking spider, and my fucking foot, and my currently mashed Slovak snout, I was in the fucking mood to fucking kill somebody and do it soon—brass knucks or no.
I felt the welcome sound of steel on flesh, followed by a gurgle. I rolled on top of the motherfucker and brought him down to the deck. I saw the flash of Nod’s knife and tried to get out of the way so Nod could slit this asshole’s throat. But it was dark and it was complicated and we were all moving at the same time and trying like hell not to make any noise, and the fucking tango was tough and he was wiry, too, and he rolled away from Nod and me, and as he did, he bit me—hard—right through my black Nomex and leather assault gloves, and I reacted by dropping the fucking DefTec.
Which, of course, exploded just as I reflexively looked toward it.
Have I recently told you the specifications of the DefTec No. 25? Of course I have, but since you don’t retain much information, you’ve probably forgotten the pertinent details. Well, here’s a fucking refresher. The DefTec No. 25 has a sound level of 185 dB at five feet, a light level of 1.8 million candela, and a duration of nine milliseconds.
Here is what little good news I can give you: most of the energy of the explosion, which emanates from vent holes in the top and the bottom of the grenade, was absorbed by the unfortunate tango who’d caused me to drop it. It must have gone off pretty close to his face, because there wasn’t a whole lot left of his head.
Not that I could tell. Not right then. Right then, all I saw was fucking dots and spots and a ball of white/ orange/red/white light.
I did exactly what most people do when they are confronted by a distraction device: I fucking froze.
Which did not make the rest of the team’s lives any easier. Perhaps the most basic tactical rule of dynamic entry is KTFM, or Keep The Fuck Moving. If you freeze in a doorway, you will get someone killed, and there I was, frozen on all fours, right in the fucking middle of the doorway, having just told every hostile within three hundred yards that there were visitors in the neighborhood, visitors who were boding them no good at all.
And so, Boomerang, Nod, and Timex, not wanting to become statistics, kept going. They didn’t wait. They leapt over me, their War Faces on, screaming as they made their entry.
I wasn’t about to let ’em go it alone. I might not have been able to see much or hear much, but there are times when instinct and the WILL TO WIN allow you to do 200 percent more than you ever thought you would be able to. And so, I made myself see; I forced myself to hear; I made myself scan, and breathe, and pay attention to the hostile environment.
No, I was not in good shape. But that was secondary to making sure that Nod, Timex, and Boomerang stayed alive tonight.
“I’m behind you,” I shouted—at least that’s what I think I said.
“Going left.” That’s what Boomerang’s hand signal told me. Just to make sure I understood, he kicked the port-side door in and tossed a grenade.
The concussion lifted our feet off the floor. It was echoed by more explosions, coming from the other end of the hallway, where Gator and Nod had staged. Then Boomerang disappeared through the doorway. He’d already fired off two three-round bursts by the time I made entry, my back sliding along the right-hand wall, MP5 muzzle up and scanning.
Something at eleven o’clock—well within my field of fire—moved. I shot in its general direction. Heard a scream. Fired a three-shot burst toward the sound. Now more motion. Spray-and-prayed the opposite wall until I heard Boomerang scream, “Clear-clear-clear . . .”
He backed out, pulling me by the straps on my vest, making sure I stayed close.
More explosions. Nod and Timex were working the opposite side of the hallway, leapfrogging Boomerang and me. I began to be able to make out the sounds of return fire coming through the cinder block walls. Shit, the fucking cinder blocks were thin and porous, and rounds were cutting through ’em. Talk about your fucking second-rate government contractors.
I dropped to the deck and started crawling. War may be hell. But close quarters battle is worse than hell. We are talking pure chaos here, friends, coupled with the nasty reality that everything happens within a few feet, and takes only a few seconds.
I pulled myself around Boomerang, rolled over onto my back, and kicked in the next door, only to be greeted by what sounded like a fucking brigade of AKs spraying and praying. How many were really firing? Two, maybe three. But who the fuck cared. One’s enough to wax your ass.
I backpedaled, sucked more concrete, turned around, stuck the business end of the MP5 around the door frame, and squeezed off a mag’s worth of jacketed hollowpoint.
From the return fire we were getting, my fucking fusillade hadn’t seemed to do any good.
“Motherfucker—” Boomerang’s high voice cut through the noise. I turned to look at him. He’d been caught by a fragment of cinder block or a jacketed ricochet and was bleeding heavily around his Oakleys.
Then it was my turn. I’d just dropped the empty mag, shoved a new one up and into position and slapped the bolt forward when a fucking baseball bat whacked me in the left arm, knocking the subgun out of my hand. As I reacted to that, the business end of a church key slashed me from my right ear down to my chin. I tried to make the fingers of my left hand work—but I couldn’t. Meanwhile, blood was beginning to obscure the vision in my right eye.
“Use the fucking Mark-Three, Boss Dude,” Boomerang shouted in my virtually deaf left ear. He was right, of course—and now I realized what he’d been trying to tell me when he was tapping me on the shoulder outside. Well, fuck—wasn’t I the fella who told you a few pages back that we wouldn’t be concerned about taking prisoners tonight? Well, fuck—wasn’t it time to get serious? Well, fuck—weren’t we here to kill people and break things? So, fuck—why risk an entry into a room full of hostiles when you can Boehm ’em: fuck the fucking fuckers with a grenade, and then go in with a dustpan to sweep up the pieces.
Good question. Sometimes I am a dense fucking Rogue. But never for too long. I tore at my CQC vest until my fingers found one of the four Mark 3A2 concussion grenades I was carrying tonight. Mark 3A2s contain half a pound of TNT. They work wonders in enclosed spaces, like the interior of T-72 tanks, or small rooms. I forced my left hand up, inserted my index finger in the ring, pulled the pin, let the spoon fly, screamed, “Fire in the hole,” and rolled—rolled, not tossed—the fucking thing, around the doorway into the room.
Why am I emphasizing roll? You want to know that now?
Quick answer: because if I tossed it, Mister Murphy would probably catch the fucking thing and toss it back at me. By rolling it, I made sure it wouldn’t bounce off anything and come back my way.
I dropped as close to the deck as I could and pressed my body over Boomerang’s. Even so, we were both lifted off the floor by the explosion, picked up, then body-slammed onto the hard concrete.
But there was no time to complain. I struggled through the doorway, the acrid smell of high explosive permeating my nostrils, Boomerang in my wake.
Scan and breathe. Search for the threat. I wiped blood out of my eye, blinked, tried to focus, blinked again. All I saw was body parts.
Time to move. I backed away. Boomerang took point. Now it was his turn. He didn’t bother making nice-nice. He started with the Mark 3A2. Pulled it from his vest, pitched it into the door he’d just kicked in, then dropped onto the deck. The earth moved once more, and the laws of physics prevailed, proving that TNT can be hazardous to human flesh.
0312. We mopped up. You can take that simple declarative sentence literally, because there wasn’t much left of the opposition except for lots of small, bloody chunks of skin and bone and flesh. We’d managed to go through ’em like the proverbial shit through pig. But there was no time for high-fiving now. We began working at a double-time pace to sort through the camp, assess the situation, grab all t
he intel we could lay our hands on, set the explosives, and then haul our butts down to the sea at flank speed.
While the guys are doing their jobs, let me nutshell the most important thing I discovered. It was that the tangos we’d waxed were either the stay-behind force or the terrorists who hadn’t been assigned their targets yet.
How did I understand that? Well, by looking over the clothes, supplies, equipment, as well as the creature features, bunks, and other accoutrements. All the signs I read told me that as recently as a week ago, this camp had been home to at least twice the number who were currently lying dead.
Couple that info-shard with the materials I’d discovered in Steve Sarkesian’s office, as well as the fact that he and his foundation were tied in with Ali Sherafi and Oleg Lapinov, and I got real worried, real fast.
Moreover, the bad guys had made our lives difficult before they’d died. These hadn’t been pussy-assed opponents who’d provided only token resistance. They’d fought with determination—and they’d extracted a high price for riding the magic carpet to Allah’s side.
My left arm was virtually useless. I could hardly make my fingers obey my brain—which indicated some sort of nerve damage—and the dull constant pain between my wrist and elbow told me I’d jammed the bone in some new way. Boomerang could probably use a dozen stitches to close the nasty gash above his eyebrows. And if I’d had a staple gun, I’d have used it on the two inches of my right cheek that ran right up to the ear.
But all that was superficial compared to Rodent, who’d taken a round through the chest, and was bleeding the kind of bright red blood that told me he’d been shot through the lung. Yes, he’d been wearing his bulletproof vest. But the shot had hit him at an oblique angle at the armhole, ricocheted off a bone, gone into his chest, and punched out the back through the scapula. Digger and Nigel had stabilized him as well as could be done. They’d filled the tough little SEAL with morphine, inserted an IV, packed the wounds, started the procedures that would, I hoped, keep him alive. Then they’d improvised a litter so Rodent could be carried out. But once we got back to Baku, Rodent would be heading straight for the military hospital at Rhine Main for major surgery and who knows what else. As much as I wanted to believe otherwise, I knew his shooting and looting days were over.
The rest of us had assorted dings and dents, too—but nothing to compare with Rodent. Although Randy Michaels, who is as indestructible an asshole as you’ll ever find, had managed to hyperextend his knee as he blew through the hatch of the comms shed. The joint had swelled to the size of a small melon. Oh, he was gonna love the exfil.
All the above was on the debit side of the book. On the credit side was the fact that we had twenty kilos of intel materials—journals, diaries, notes, and messages,64 radio logs and frequencies. Two of the men—Nigel and Randy—read Farsi. Not perfectly, but well enough to be able to provide me with the gist of what we’d discovered. But the most valuable intel we were able to lay our hands on was a half dozen sheets of paper that looked like hand-drawn maps of streets and buildings, overlaid with tiny Xs in black, red, and orange. Yup—they were the diagrams the tangos had been using to lay out all those colored wood stakes.
I discovered that one of those targets had been Avi Ben Gal. When I looked at the sheet of paper, with its hand-drawn map and overlaid pattern of small red, white, black, and orange Xs, it suddenly made sense.
Avi’d told me he lived on a one-way street—Abbas something or other street. And that he couldn’t vary his route until he made the turn onto Azadiyg Prospekt. And he’d told me that at the corner of his street and Azadiyg, there was a big house with a high wall on the left-hand side. I looked at the sketched sheet of paper in my hands.
Fuck. They’d outlined the street Avi lived on. The position of the wall was highlighted. And the car holding the bomb was also highlighted. A row of black Xs depicted Avi’s route. The position where the bombers would make ready was delineated in orange, and the detonation point was a red X. It was all there: they’d worked out the positioning; determined the placement of the explosive charges; laid everything out on paper. When I walked the compound, I discovered corresponding stakes—and pieces of burned vehicle. So they’d even tried it for real, using junked autos.
Oh, I was glad right then we hadn’t taken any prisoners, because I wouldn’t have trusted myself with ’em. Oh, I stared at the burned-out car in that desolate place, and I wept. At that instant my rage was absolute, and my hate was incendiary, as hot as white phosphorous. These cockbreaths had killed the wife of my good friend, and I would not have been gentle with them if I’d had the opportunity.
I stood on their range, holding the hand-drawn diagrams in my hand. Without a detailed map of Baku, they were useless. And who was to say that all the targets were in Baku. I might be looking at sketches of streets in New York or Washington. London. Paris. Geneva. Rome. Obviously, I’d have to get these docs to Tony Merc so he could use his computers to narrow the search. Because once I knew where the targets were, I could get to ’em first. And then I’d Boehm the assholes. Yeah, that’s right. I’d fuck the fucking fuckers.
0355. We set the timers for 0420, and headed out, more than half an hour behind schedule. Timex and Hammer carried Rodent’s litter. Randy’d built himself a makeshift crutch, and hobbled gamely as we picked our way up onto the ridge and moved east, down the bolder-strewn defilade toward the dry streambed, and the safety of the water, eighteen kliks away.
0500. I decided to break radio silence. The way I’d designed this mission, we’d scheduled to exfil the camp at 0330, then scamper back to the Caspian by 0700. But we’d made less than three kliks, because between Rodent’s litter and Randy’s knee, we were moving ahead at about one quarter of the speed we needed to make the rendezvous.
So I’d need them to hold for a while. I didn’t want Pick and Butch bobbing offshore for almost a full day while we struggled out of the mountains.
I turned the power switch on, adjusted the squelch knob, then pressed the transmit button on the secure VHF transceiver. Let me be succinct about this. The fucking radio didn’t work.
I pulled it from the pouch on my CQC vest to check the battery, and realized that perhaps—ah-hah!—perhaps it was the large shard of shrapnel, which had lodged itself in the radio’s guts and mashed most of its transistors, that was causing the problem.
Of course, since Mister Murphy had helped me plan this mission from the git-go, he’d made sure that I was carrying the only secure VHF transceiver. Just like he’d made sure I was the only asshole with the wire cutters.
My friends, remember this advice: do as I say, not as I do. Because obviously, if you do as I do, you are going to be stuck in the fucking middle of fucking Iran without the means to get yourself out.
Okay. It was time to go to Plan B. Except we didn’t fucking have a Plan B. And Plan A had just come apart at the seams.
That was when Digger kinda hemmed and hawed and scratched his boot soles on the rough ground, and looked at me all guiltylike because he’d forgotten something, and then displayed the dozen cellular phones he’d stashed in his assault pack. It was good intelligence gathering—by tracing the numbers and the billing, we’d be able to see who was funding the Fist of Allah tangos.
Okay, now I had a bunch of cell phones. Sure, it was better than nothing. Except Mahmoud’s place didn’t have a phone, and neither did Butch and Pick.
But Ashley Evans had a phone. And she’d be home now. I held out my palm until Digger laid a sample of his booty in it. I turned the phone on, flipped it open, and listened for a dial tone. Nada. I tried a second unit without success, and a third.
Gator surveyed our position. “Maybe we’re in a dead spot, Skipper. I bet it’ll work when we’re closer to the coast.”
That might be true, but it would also mean a long, long wait—and Rodent’s condition wasn’t improving as time went on. I tried a fourth phone. This one worked, but when I tried to dial Ashley’s number, I heard a series of be
eps, and instructions in Farsi.
“Nigel?” I handed him the phone.
He shrugged. “Try again, Skipper.”
I dialed Ashley’s flat, and handed the phone back. He listened and nodded. “It wants your access code,” he said.
Well, I didn’t fucking have a fucking access fucking code. I looked at Digger. “Couldn’t you have fucking stolen a fucking satellite phone without a fucking security system, asshole?”
He had to check twice to see that I wasn’t serious. Except, I was serious, and he knew it. He rummaged through his stash, then bright-eyed, came up with a Motorola, and examined it closely. “Hey, this is an Iridium,” Digger announced proudly. He switched the damn thing on, watched as it cycled, then punched in about twenty numbers, and waited until he heard something on the other end. A huge, self-satisfied grin spread over his round face. “Yo, Skipper . . .”
He handed me the phone. This is what I heard: “. . . the weather forecast for New York City and vicinity. Today, partially cloudy with winds from the southeast, highs in the sixties, lows in the midfifties.”
I disconnected quickly, then hit him on the arm hard enough to make his eyes water. “Good work, cockbreath,” I said, using the universal SEAL term of endearment. “Now let’s hope you didn’t fuck the battery with that call.”
I could spend the next twenty pages or so giving you a minute-by-minute description of our exfil. But that wouldn’t do much to move the action of this book along, so I’m just going to skip it and tell you that eventually, we made it out sans too many more visits from Mister Murphy, and/or his relatives.
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