The muzzle of the silencer caught him right between the eyes. I smashed the bridge of his nose as hard as I could. There was a crunching sound, and his face split open. The man sprawled back, dropping the rifle and taking one of the other men down with him. They fell into the bottom of the boat, and Cheese was on them like a terrier. He clipped the second man under the chin with the butt of his M-14. Blood spattered and a tooth flew. I recocked my MAC-10 and shook the jammed cartridge from the chamber.
Rudi had leaped aboard. He had the M-60 stuck in the eyeball socket of the man at the tiller. He yelled, “THE MAN SAID ‘PARE SU BARCO,’ BUNDEJO!” Pure Miami Spanglish. And it worked.
The guy in the stern killed the engine. He raised his hands. There was general yelling in Arabic and English. The others put their hands up. Rudi covered the man in the stern, and Cheese and I herded the others into the bow.
“Who speaks English?” I shouted.
“I do,” sputtered the man with the smashed mouth.
“Stay in the bow. Don’t move,” I said.
My heart was pounding. Miraculously, no one had fired a shot. I could see two AK-47s lying in the bottom of the boat. I picked them up and tossed them into the Zodiac. “Check under the nets,” I said.
Cheese moved to the middle of the boat. He pulled up the nets, and we saw two sets of scuba tanks. Swim fins. Face masks. Next he lifted the canvas cover. There, in the sparkling sunlight, were two taped-together piles of Yugoslavian-made TNT. The explosives had been assembled into concave-shaped charges, each containing maybe ten pounds of TNT assembled around a two-pound chunk of Symtex. They were improvised limpet mines, and they had been improvised by someone who knew what he was doing. The TNT had been formed into an explosive “lens” capable of shaping the blast in a concentrated area. Fixed to the bottom of a ship, these charges were designed to punch three-foot holes into a steel hull. Both mines had fuses screwed into them. They were ready to go. These guys were combat swimmers, and Texas Pete had been their target.
The realization hit us like a bucket of ice water.
Cheese pointed his M-14 into the bow. “If you move,” he said, “I’ll kill you all.”
Luke and Stick roared up in the second Zodiac. True to his word, Luke had kept an eye on us. They’d seen us make the bust, and when they saw the rifles come up, they’d headed over to give us a hand. They crossed the bow of the fishing boat, thwart to bow, and stood with weapons pointed. Their guns now commanded the length of the fishing boat.
We quickly tied the prisoners’ hands with zip ties and blindfolded them with their shirts. Two of them were bleeding, one from the mouth and one from the face. Their blood soon soaked through the shirts and dripped into the bilges.
Each man was searched thoroughly. They had no additional weapons. Nor did they have wallets, ID papers, money, or pocket change. As Cheese covered the prisoners, we searched the boat inch by inch. By the outboard engine we found a folded nautical chart of the harbor with the position of the beachmasters and the anchorage of Texas Pete marked in pencil. Stuffed into the folded chart was an additional sheet of paper scrawled over in Arabic. The only Arabic I can read is numerals, in order to get the license plates of cars. The numbers are written right to left. The paper listed four-digit numbers: our radio frequencies. Also on the paper were the VHF frequencies used by the landing craft and the beachmasters. We searched for a radio but found nothing.
I bent down and studied the limpet mines. It didn’t appear that the timers had been set, though I couldn’t be sure. It wasn’t likely that these guys would arm the mines until they were placed against the hull of the ship. That was standard operational procedure for a maritime sabotage attack. But it was also standard operational procedure to make swimmer attacks at night. These guys had made their go in broad goddamn daylight. This was a wild-card operation, so dumb and ballsy that it might have worked. Just as the U.S.S. Cole bombing would prove a few years in the future, you couldn’t count on the bad guys to do things our way.
“What do you want to do about the mines?” Rudi asked.
“Nothing right now. We’ll have Steve make these things safe when we get ashore.” Our explosive ordnance disposal tech, Steve, was ashore with the trucks. What these things didn’t need was an amateur trying to take them apart. I recognized the clock detonators as Yugoslavian, and beyond that, I didn’t know squat. I knew that the safe and arming devices we used on our mines were automatically booby-trapped after the delay times were set. Any attempt to dislodge the mines or to remove the fuse would detonate the explosive.
We ran the fishing boat onto the sand in front of the beachmasters’ position. The prisoners were muscled over the side, and we sat them on the beach ten yards apart. The beachmasters and the allied troops had seen the punch-out on the fishing boat, and their radios were crackling. One of the allied officers waded into the water and pulled himself up on the gunwales of the fishing boat. His eyes got big when he saw the mines. He splashed back to his jeep and got on his radio. He sent his traffic in high-speed Arabic.
Standing with the beachmasters was a Pakistani-American marine lieutenant, a member of the shore party. I nodded to the Arab officer on the radio. “What’s he saying?” I asked.
“He’s calling his unit. He’s asking for a team from the security service to get down here.”
This would quickly turn into a pissing contest. I didn’t know who was going to wind up with custody of the prisoners, but I wanted local American input. I told the bosun in charge of the beachmaster detachment to call the ship. I got on the radio and talked to Texas Pete, actual. The “actual” postscript meant I was talking to the commanding officer in person. I told him we had four prisoners, mines, and weapons. I asked him to contact the embassy and have them send someone knowledgeable down here. “Someone knowledgeable” was a CIA officer. I was deferential to the captain but firm about what I wanted. SEALs may be assigned to do a job for someone, but we pull up short of working for anyone. We’d made a legit capture, and this was a SEAL gig now. Texas Pete’s commanding officer outranked me, but he did what I wanted done. The landing crafts were immediately recovered. The LCU was bigger, and recovering it would require Texas Pete to flood her well deck, an operation that took time. It was time to get the ship away from the beach.
In the real world, things don’t always happen like they happen in the movies. We’d wrapped up these jokers, but I didn’t know if they had backup or if they’d been merely a diversion. I thought there might well be more bad guys in play. I didn’t know if there was another boat packed with explosives waiting to ram the ship. I sent a Zodiac and four shooters to do a hull search of Texas Pete and the LCU to make sure nobody had managed to put a mine on them. Both were clean.
Texas Pete weighed anchor. I advised him to stay offshore and under way; we’d ferry the beachmasters out to the ship by Zodiac. The LCU would also stay under way, but closer to the beach. After we figured out who the players were, the LCU could land and pick up the four-wheel-drive forklifts.
We pulled everyone back from the fishing boat. Steve climbed in and rendered the mines safe. He handed the unfused explosives over, and I put the two charges on top of the Zodiacs.
In about an hour, a Mercedes sedan pulled up to the trucks. It was followed by a jeep driven by an Arab in a khaki uniform and a black beret. Close behind came a white Chevy Suburban with tinted windows, definitely an embassy ride. Out of the Mercedes came two Arabic men in suits. Out of the Suburban came a sandy-haired man and a thickset, red-haired marine gunnery sergeant. The sandy-haired man was wearing a safari jacket, a fashion statement usually tendered only by network journalists and CIA gumbies. All smiles, Mr. Safari Jacket shook hands with one of the suits. They walked down the beach toward us, the Arab’s shoes filling with sand.
One of the suits broke off and started talking to the senior allied officer, a major with a dark mustache. There was a lot of gesturing.
The guy in the safari jacket walked my way, his eyes on the
explosives piled atop the Zodiac.
“From the embassy?” I asked.
“You must be Lieutenant Pfarrer.” He smiled. That the man knew my name was surprising. That he pronounced it correctly meant that he’d been on the radio, or that he spoke German. “This is Gunnery Sergeant Foster. He’s an Arabic speaker,” he went on.
“Lieutenant Malik speaks Arabic as well,” I said.
“Has he interrogated them?”
“Nobody’s talked to them.”
The sandy-haired man looked at the prisoners. “Why are they bleeding?”
“We had a little punch-up on the boat,” I said.
“Nobody shot?”
“No shots were fired,” I answered.
That seemed to make him happy. The gunnery sergeant and the lieutenant went around talking to the blindfolded men on the beach. Nobody answered. They sat in the sand and bled.
“Was there anything else in the boat?” the sandy-haired man asked.
“Two AKs and this.” I handed over the nautical chart and the frequencies. The man’s expression didn’t change. I didn’t know what to make of this guy. I wasn’t into asking questions he probably wouldn’t answer, so I said nothing.
We stood together silently as one of the suits walked over and said something to the man who had been on the tiller. From under his blindfold, the man spat something back in Arabic, and the guy in the suit kicked him hard in the mouth. I suspected this was going to get a lot uglier in private.
“Are you assuming responsibility for the prisoners?” I asked.
“No,” Mr. Safari Jacket answered.
I was about to say something, but one of the suits called to the major in English, “Put these men into our jeep.”
“Is that all right with you?” I asked Mr. Safari Jacket.
“Fine with me,” he said. “I’m going to need to take the explosives.”
I was getting over this whole thing. “Be my guest,” I said.
He walked over and lifted one of the TNT piles onto his shoulder, then hefted the second one onto his other shoulder, balancing them like two sacks of potatoes. It occurred to me that he either knew exactly what he was doing or had no goddamn idea. There was enough explosive stacked on his head to blow him into the rarest gas in the universe: Safari Jacket 225.
The prisoners were led up the beach, still blindfolded. Two were put into a jeep, one into the Mercedes, and one into another jeep. Everybody drove off.
Mr. Safari Jacket and the gunnery sergeant tossed the explosives into the back of their Suburban, slammed the doors, and started the engine. The allied officers and troops piled into their vehicles and followed the Mercedes and jeep away. The Suburban pilled onto the coast road, did a U-turn, and followed the convoy.
They were gone and it was over, just like that.
We stood there like idiots. The beachmasters looked at us. We looked at them.
“Is that it?” Rudi asked.
“That’s it.” I hadn’t expected a ticker-tape parade, exactly, but maybe something. The man hadn’t even asked why we went out to search the boat.
“What are we gonna do with the boat?” Luke asked.
“Fuck, I don’t know. Sink it.”
“What about the AKs?” Cheese asked.
I could see the wheels turning in his square Norwegian head: He expected to keep them as war booty. For a brief moment I imagined Cheese, home on liberty, deer-hunting with a Chinese-made assault rifle. No Bambi in the state of Wisconsin would be safe.
His face fell when I said, “Field-strip the rifles and toss them into the boat.”
The LCU came ashore and recovered the forklifts. The beachmasters and Lieutenant Malik decided to go on the LCU when they discovered that there was a hot lunch aboard. The LCU drew up its ramp, backed off the beach, and headed for Texas Pete, now hull down on the hazy horizon.
We towed the fishing boat a half mile offshore and tossed in a hand grenade, and the bottom ripped out of her with a thump. The boat went down by the stern and disappeared in an oily swirl of wood splinters and fish scales. Cheese’s AK-47s went down with it.
To this day I have no idea what happened to the men we captured. The choices run from summary execution to imprisonment and torture. If they were locals, it’s more likely that they were ransomed back to their families. Anyone of value wouldn’t go unexploited in this country. They were either terrorists or members of a hostile military. If they were terrorists, as far as I know, this was the first and only time a combat-swimmer operation had been attempted. Combat swimming is a craft that takes a lot of practice. Practice costs money. Governments train combat swimmers, not raggedy-ass Tangos.
Why they thought they could run an op in broad daylight, I still can’t figure out. Maybe they didn’t dare run it at night. Maybe they thought we’d buy the local-fisherman charade. A lot of maybes and a lot of never-gonna-knows.
Anyway, they weren’t my problem—they were gone, probably to a bad place at the end of a piece of piano wire. Although they were turned over to the local leg breakers, I did not feel any responsibility for their fate. They were breathing when I last saw them. Texas Pete and the landing craft were safe, and I wasn’t going to lose any sleep over what happened to four hostiles. If you want to step up and play frogman, you take the chances.
When we returned to Texas Pete, I got on the secure voice back to the flagship. I recounted the story of the capture and the turnover of the prisoners. I added that we had sunk the boat because we didn’t know what the hell else to do with it. The amphibious group liaison officer wrote up the incident for the admiral. I never saw the report or the message traffic about the incident. I wrote citations for Cheese, Rudi, and Dave, but nothing ever came of them. They received no official recognition. Like everything else about this event, their commendations were swept under a rug.
Five months later, I received a navy achievement medal. The accompanying citation said essentially that I was an earnest and diligent young officer and was conscientious in providing security for the task force. It mentioned nothing about the men we had captured, the boat, or the explosives.
The medal came in a blue leatherette box, complete with a lapel pin to wear on my civilian attire. I wondered if it had been sent to the right guy.
* * *
WANDERING
I WAS IN THE DITCH for a couple of minutes, and the rain pattered into my face. The last thing I remembered distinctly was standing on the tail ramp of the 727, the other jumpers around me, the screaming engines, and the voice in my headphones shouting, “GO! GO! GO!”
Then it came back to me—a plunge from the airliner and the rough tumble through the sky. I remembered falling headfirst and watching Virginia Beach spin below me. The streetlights were white and ocher and the roads slick with rain. My parachute malfunction was a blur. Strangely, when I thought back on it, I saw myself falling, flailing at the risers, and spinning wildly as half the parachute deployed. It was as though I’d viewed it from a fixed point outside my body. It was like a movie, scenes from someone else’s life. I’d watched myself falling down and away, through a turmoil of gray cloud, down and down toward the drop zone. The memory of my fall shimmered like a mirage in my brain.
Sprawled in the gully, I tried to sit up, and my ribs shot pain. My right leg was angled back, calf and foot twisted under my left thigh, and the weight of my backpack pressed down, pinning me to the ground. Pulling the quick-release, I dropped the rucksack from its hook points on my parachute harness and pushed it off my legs. I rolled over and slowly came to my hands and knees. I took a few deep breaths. My ribs were killing me, but everything else seemed to work.
Now I felt the wet grass and the mud under my hands. My fingers pounded, and I flinched when a raindrop struck me directly on one of my ripped-up fingernails. I flicked the black blood from my fingertips. None of the pain mattered. I was on the ground, and I was alive.
I gathered up my parachute and limped out onto the road. Thunder rumbled somewhere
behind me. I could not help but look into the sky. The clouds were low and heavy and rushing past. I looked to the place where I had been just above the gray, swirling mist, and I felt as though I had fallen off a ladder.
Headlights loomed out of the rain and swept over me. It was one of the white Suburbans from the drop zone. The truck’s tires hissed on the wet road as it jerked to a stop. The window was down. Behind the wheel was Hoser, still in his jumpsuit. His dreadlocks were wet, and he looked frantic.
“Jesus Christ, Chuck.” I was standing in the road, almost half a mile from the place I was supposed to land. “Get in,” he huffed. “Somebody had a total and burned into the cove.”
I grinned as I walked to the back of the truck. “Relax,” I said. “That was me.”
The rest of the jumpers had watched me fall past the formation. They’d seen that I had a bag lock and that my parachute had not come free from the deployment container. They’d shouted to one another as I fell down and into the cloud deck. No one saw my canopy open, and no one saw my downwind slam into the beach or my wild drag across the road. They had taken a muster on the drop zone, and Coyote and I were the only ones missing. Coyote would be located, perfectly happy and intact, on the way back to the DZ. He had overshot the landing spot and come down behind the picnic area adjoining one of the soccer fields. That left me, and here I was, banged up but happy to be alive.
Hoser looked at my parachute rig as I lumped it into the back of the truck. The twinkie dangled free of its Velcro sheath, mute testimony to my close call.
“You throw away your rip cord?” Hoser asked.
I had. It was the first step in the emergency process. If my jump had gone right, I would have wrapped the cord around the handle after deploying my main canopy and tucked it into my flight suit as I descended. My rip cord was somewhere at the bottom of Little Creek Cove, the only one I ever lost in more than three hundred jumps. Every time a team member tossed a rip cord, the penalty was a case of beer. That night at the Raven, I would gladly pay the price.
Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL Page 39
