ROGUE WARRIOR®

by Richard Marcinko

  The parameters of our job were tight. The embassy knew a survey team from JSOC was going to be coming in, but the dip-dunk diplo-dinks wanted nothing to do with us. So far as they were concerned, embassy security was A-okay and there was nothing to worry about; ‘twas the season to be jolly, and fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la.

  Screw ‘em—we’d save them in spite of themselves.

  I broke us up into two-man teams—swim buddies. Paul and Duke, Snake and Pooster, the Gold Dust Twins, Rich and Ho-Ho-Ho, and Jew and me. The mission was to see if there was a terrorist threat, and if there was, how it could be countered. We knew the Marines were already taking sniper fire from the Shiite slums facing the airport, so I sent Paul and Duke to recon the area from one side, and the Gold Dust Twins to take the opposite point of view for their target assessment. Snake, Pooster, Jew, and I would concentrate on the embassy. The other two pairs would do a general sneak and peek, assessing the mood of the city and trying to locate specific areas of concern.

  Specific—shit, the whole city was an area of concern. The following morning Jew and I went for a quiet stroll along the neatly manicured paths that ran through the American University of Beirut, which sat behind the embassy. Jew carried an autofocus camera, and so far as any passersby were concerned, he was just another asshole taking occasional snapshots. What he was really doing, however, was classic target assessment: producing a visual “narrative” showing how unprotected the rear of the embassy was, and how easily it could be breached from every side.

  We walked and talked and took pictures for about an hour, then decided to find a place and grab some lunch. Outside a small shop near Bekhaazi Street, Jew turned to me. “Smile …” He brought the camera up.

  I waved. “Hi, Mom.”

  He snapped away, and we turned to continue down the street.

  In a split second, six teenagers, four with drawn pistols and two with AK-47s, lunged at us from an alleyway, babbling in rapid-fire Arabic, pointing at Jew’s camera, and signaling us to stop.

  Jew started to react defensively. I stopped him with a flick of an eyebrow—we didn’t want any trouble in broad daylight on a crowded street. I raised my hands and put my back against the wall. Jew did the same. “What’s up?” I smiled at the gunmen reassuringly. No response. “Parlez vous franÇais”

  One of the kids answered me in heavily accented French. “Who are you?”

  “Je suis journaliste. Sahafa. Press.”

  He translated for his friends. They weren’t impressed. The AKs pointed at our throats. I noted for the record that the weapons’ selector switches were on full automatic fire, and the kids had their fingers on the triggers. I tried to remember how many pounds of pressure it takes to set an AK off. I decided it was a piece of trivia I didn’t want to remember.

  The French speaker turned back to me. “Your friend took a picture of a secret military installation.”

  I told Jew what he’d done. “Look ashamed, asshole,” I chided.

  Jew hung his head and muttered something under his breath. Then he opened the back of the camera, took the film, and pulled it out, exposing the entire roll. “Ask ‘em if it’s okay now—‘cause if it isn’t, I’m gonna waste the motherfuckers.”

  French speaker took Jew’s film. The weapons were lowered. “What installation did we violate?” I asked.

  The kid pointed toward the storefront. “Militia live here. Murabitoun.”

  “That’s a secret installation?”

  The kid nodded seriously. “The whole street belongs to Murabitoun.”

  “And the next street?” I pointed west.

  He shook his head. “Belongs to Amal—Shia militia,” he explained.

  “And there?” I indicated eastward.

  “One street, Murabitoun. Next street, Syrian National Party.” He pointed toward the slums beyond Hamra. “There Hezbollah—Party of God Shia militia.”

  I inclined my head graciously. “Shukran. Merci beaucoup.” Jew and I turned and walked away.

  “It’s like the goddamn South Bronx,” Jew said. “Every street is another gang’s turf.”

  By the end of the first week we knew “they” were watching the embassy. What we didn’t know was who “they” were. There were too many unhealthy patterns—the same cars coming by at irregular hours; the same bearded faces pausing as if to see how many guards were on duty; the same cabs and trucks probing the side gate and front entrance to test whether or not they’d be stopped.

  I set up some patterns of my own. We watched the embassy twenty-four hours a day, using cameras, binoculars, and lowlight glasses. Snake and Pooster, who had the graveyard shift, took to coming and going by climbing up and down the outside of the apartment house. That way, they wouldn’t disturb the gunmen who often slept in the stairwell, and no one would hear the elevator as they came or went.

  From what we could tell, there were roughly two dozen separate armed groups in West Beirut, not counting the MNF, the Israelis, the Syrians, or us. That included militias, private armies, street gangs, just plain thugs, and dyed-in-the-wool terrorists, so we had a full spectrum from which to choose our bad guys.

  By the beginning of our second week in Beirut we’d heard half a dozen car bombs go off. We’d rushed to the scene a couple of times to see the extent of the damage. It was considerable. Pack a Mercedes with a hundred kilos of explosives and the same weight in nails and other scrap metal, set it off in a crowded neighborhood at rush hour, and you can do a decent amount of damage.

  There is also something innately terrifying about the concept of car bombs. Any car can become one. They are designed to kill innocent people in a horrifying manner; they are almost undetectable without specialized equipment; and they can be set off either with a clock timer, by infrared signals, or with a remote-control radio device.

  The array of weaponry available to the allegedly disarmed Beirut militias was awesome. But no tank, or rocketpropelled-grenade launcher, no mortar, or even howitzer, had the slam-bang, horrific impact of a car bomb.

  Paul’s forays to the shantytown slums of south Beirut also brought a pessimistic prediction. “The Marines are being dragged into a fight they can’t finish,” he said. Paul explained that the Marines faced Shia and Druse guerrillas. To the south, he said, the Israelis were conducting reconnaissance by gunfire against the Shia slums at Hay al-Sellum. The Marines held the low ground near the airport, while the militias held the high ground in the hills to the east. That in itself was crazy. But the ten-point rules of engagement under which the Marines operated, Paul concluded, were absolute lunacy:

  —When on the post, mobile or foot patrol, keep loaded magazine in weapon, bolt closed, weapon on safe, no round in the chamber.

  —Do not chamber a round unless told to do so by a commissioned officer unless you act in immediate self-defense where deadly force is authorized.

  “The only instruction they didn’t give those poor bastards is, ‘When firing starts, bend over, put your head between your legs, and kiss your ass good-bye.’ ”

  Marine security, Paul concluded, was just as bad as the embassy’s.

  We celebrated Christmas Eve by running our own sneak and peek against the embassy to see how close we could get without being noticed. The answer was not good: Fingers, Duke, and Baby Rich were able to set enough “charges”—we used plastic bottles filled with water—to turn the whole building into a pile of concrete flapjacks, and no one in authority saw or challenged them. Larry and Frank took a piece of plastic pipe the size of a bazooka and worked their way around the beach side of the building, leaving the plastic tube zeroed in on an office where we believed the CIA station was located.

  Snake and Pooster climbed the back side of the embassy, edged their way around, and left a four-by-six Post-it note on the outside of a closed window. It read: The boys was here and fuck you all. Paul and I reconned the front door. If we’d been murderers, it would have been a slaughter. The Lebanese guards were asleep, the Marines were inside, and the embassy
security detail was a joke. Even Egyptians would have done a better job.

  We camped out on Christmas Day in the big safe house facing the sea, feasting on roast chicken, french fries, and beer, while the men debated how the tangos would hit the embassy.

  “RPGs,” Pooster said. “They’re the weapons of choice for the region—every militia has hundreds of ‘em.”

  “Plus,” Frank added, “with an RPG you can hit from anywhere—break into an apartment anywhere in the neighborhood and zero in on the ambassador’s goddamn office.” “Not his office,” Paul corrected, “His secretary’s office—that’s the one with the outside window.”

  “Whatever, Skipper,” Pooster said. “What I mean is, there’re a lot of ‘em, they’re easy to use, and they’re effective.”

  “You could coordinate an RPG attack real easy,” Baby Rich chimed in. “Hit with twenty, even thirty at a time—that would cause confusion.”

  Fingers popped the top on a Heineken and took a long, slow swallow. He belched and sighed. “I don’t see it.”

  “See what?” Pooster dipped a drumstick in garlic sauce and chewed.

  “RPG attack. Poost. Seems to me. if you’re gonna hit an embassy, you want to hit it hard.”

  “Guerrillas shot at the embassy in El Salvador with RPGs,” Snake said.

  “They use ‘em in the Philippines, too. So what? That don’t mean anything.” Fingers was adamant. “First, they were guerrillas, not terrorists. Second, they didn’t have anything heavier.”

  “So?” Pooster three-pointed the bone into a wastebasket.

  Ho-Ho-Ho weighed in. “I think Fingers is right. RPGs are a possibility, but they got mortars here, too, plus Amal has a bunch of armored personnel carriers the PLO left behind, and a tank or two.”

  “Hezbollah’s got tanks, too,” said Duke. “And maybe even a howitzer.”

  “Shit,” said Paul, “the damn Phalangists probably have as much armor as the Lebanese Army—but what does any of that prove?”

  “It proves,” said Jew, “this place is a frigging powder keg.”

  Gold Dust Larry sat on the corner windowsill, quietly sucking on a beer and communing with the Mediterranean. He swiveled to cast a melancholy glance at the rest of us. “I’m gonna let you boys in on a little secret,” he drawled. “If I was a fucking tango, I wouldn’t go around pissing away my tactical fucking surprise with any fucking RPG. You want to get somebody’s attention, you hit the motherfucker dead between the eyes with a fucking two-by-four. You build the biggest fucking bang you can get for the buck—and that’s a goddamn fucking car bomb, and that’s the fucking truth, and that’s all she wrote.” He turned back to watch his ocean.

  I guffawed. “Well, fuck you very much, Chief.” I drained my beer. “Gentlemen,” I said, “that’s the longest comment we’ve ever heard from Larry—probably the longest observation anyone’s ever heard from Larry. So it should be treated with respect.”

  “Well, he’s right,” Fingers said.

  “Bet your ass he’s right,” I said. “Car bomb is what they’ll use. So let’s do some reverse engineering: they want to come in Uncle Sam’s back door—and we want to keep ‘em out. How do we do it?”

  Five days later we had our answer. I’d called back to the techno-wizards on our SATCOM and explained the problem. They sent us two black-box gizmos, and a single page of instructions.

  The concept was simple enough: radio-controlled bombs are detonated by sending a signal over a specific frequency. If you broadcast the range of frequencies used by radiocontrol devices, and you hit an active one, the detonator will activate, and the bomb will go off.

  The black boxes had a 1,000-foot range. The question was, did they work.

  There was only one way to find out. Paul and I each took one and packed them inside nylon rucksacks, then he and Fingers, and Larry and I, went for leisurely drives through West Beirut. I drove with Abu Said Alpha; Paul took Abu Said Bravo.

  We drove slowly. Larry sat in the backseat, an attachè case that had been specially fitted to hold an HK MP5K submachine gun resting easily on his lap. To fire the weapon, all Larry had to do was press a trigger on the attache’s handle. The attachè bore the logo of a TV news organization. I sat in front, the knapsack on my knees, the black box inside switched on.

  We drove along the Corniche al Mazraa to the northern edge of Fakahani, the district in which the PLO had its offices during its long occupation of Lebanon. Now, the leastdamaged buildings had been occupied by new tenants, Lebanese Muslims. According to Abu Said, many of them were poor Shiites. From there, we’d go south toward Bir Hassan and Bir Abed, two of the poorer Shia neighborhoods. It seemed a likely place for bomb makers to live.

  “What you want first?” Abu Said asked.

  “To show my colleague the old PLO offices,” I said. “He is a television producer from America, a very important man. What they call a big gun.” I said it with a straight face, too.

  “Ah—big gun.” The Lebanese grunted. “I will take you.”

  We turned off the Corniche, edging toward the warren of bombed-out houses, bunkers, and offices that had once been home to Yasir Arafat’s legions. The streets, still strewn with debris and massive chunks of concrete, were nonetheless filled with people.

  Abu Said pointed to a charred house on the right. “Here was one of Arafat’s offices.”

  Larry grunted.

  “And there—across the street—more PLO offices.”

  Larry peered through the open window. “Who lives here now?”

  “Shia live here. Shia who lost their homes.”

  We circled the block while Abu Said pointed out more of the PLO’s former sites. Then he turned south again, and we moved toward the old Sabra camp.

  Two blocks ahead, a three-story building suddenly erupted like a volcano. A large red fireball consumed the house; the roar of the explosion was deafening; the shock wave kicked our taxi a foot in the air.

  “Jesus—” Larry ducked onto the floor as a shard of concrete slammed into the car’s roof.

  “Turn the car around and wait for me here.” I jumped out and ran in the direction of the explosion. Larry followed, briefcase at the ready. The closer I got the hotter it became. Flames were everywhere. Half a dozen autos had been tossed into the air like matchsticks; where the apartment house had been, a crater perhaps thirty feet deep now sat, filled with burning rubble. Dozens of Lebanese, some of them in pieces, lay in the street. Two men struggled to open the door of a burning station wagon in which two women were trapped. As the flames rose higher, they abandoned their efforts; people watched, sickened and repulsed but still unable to turn away, as the women were consumed.

  Sirens and horns sounded in the distance. A pair of pickup trucks with 20mm Triple-A cannons bolted to their beds careened onto the street, two gunners dressed—somewhat bizarrely, I thought, for gunners—in short, padded black leather jackets and designer jeans, firing blindly into the air. They must have thought there’d been an Israeli bombing attack.

  I grabbed Larry by the shoulder and we made our way back to the cab. “Was that real, or was it Memorex?” I said as we shouldered our way through the hysterical Lebanese. “Does it really matter, boss?”

  I paused to look back at the carnage. “Not anymore it doesn’t.”

  My request for a meeting with a senior American official was granted, but grudgingly. To maintain operational security, only Paul and I would show up, and we’d try to change our appearance just in case the watchers were snapping pictures or videotaping the comings and goings.

  We were shown into a huge office on one of the upper floors. After a few minutes the official and an aide arrived. He was another Central Casting diplomat: tall, gray haired, and distinguished looking in an aristocratic way. He clearly didn’t want to be at this meeting, and he showed it.

  Introductions were made. He gave Paul and me a cold handshake, then sat on a couch and waited for us to make our presentation.

  I’d brought our
black box, as well as some evidence we’d assembled about the state of the embassy’s security. I got to the point right away: “Sir, my men and I have spent almost three weeks surveying your site, and we believe you’re vulnerable to attack.”

  “If that is your opinion, Commander, I assure you I will take it under strict advisement.”

  “We’ve been keeping tabs on your security, and it has gaping holes.”

  He cleared his throat. “Somehow, Commander, this embassy has managed to withstand the Lebanese civil war, which has gone on unabated since 1975. We have endured the PLO, the Syrians, and the Israelis. We are still here. Now you have come and spent three weeks in country, and—instant experts that you are—you tell me that my security apparatus has ‘gaping holes,’ Let me remind you, Commander, that I know this country, and these people, and I know and trust my staff. The security of this embassy is airtight. That is my position.”

  “But the situation has changed in the past few weeks, sir. Our survey indicates that Americans are beginning to be seen as allies of the Maronites, not as honest brokers protecting all the Lebanese. There’s resentment in the Shia, Sunni, and Druse communities, and—”

  He cut me off. “I am well aware. Commander, of the political situation here. And while there is some flux in the situation, our security posture has no need of change.”

  “With all respect, sir. I think your situation is about to become all fluxed up.”

  The diplomat flushed. “Commander, there’s no need—”

  “Our survey indicates a strong possibility that the embassy will be the focus of a car-bomb attack in the near future. Therefore, I’d strongly recommend, sir, that you reconfigure the access to the embassy, bolster the armed presence on your perimeters, and employ devices such as these.” I indicated the box.