RW03 - Green Team

by Richard Marcinko

  I tapped Stevie. “Keep moving. Go slow. And take that stupid Egyptian hat off.”

  The fellah cap disappeared. Quickly, we rolled Azziz onto the floor just in back of the front seat. Nasty and Howie put their feet on top of him.

  We eased into the bright, generator-driven lights of the roadblock. An officer in fatigues, flak jacket, and Beretta M-12 submachine gun slung horizontally over his right shoulder waved for us to slow down.

  Stevie waved back.

  The officer held up his hand. Wonder brought us to a halt. The Egyptian peered into the car. We five grungy gringos stared back. I saluted. “Hi.”

  Doc said, “How’re ya doin?”

  “What’s happenin’?” Stevie asked.

  The officer waved a second man over and they conferred in Arabic. Nasty and Howie leaned forward, the better to camouflage Azziz’s body with their own.

  The Egyptian asked Stevie something in Arabic. Wonder’s palms went up and he shrugged: “I’m American. I speak English.”

  “You Ameerica?” The Egyptian looked down at Wonder critically and spoke haltingly. “Where you are go?”

  Wonder shifted slightly behind the wheel. “We are tourists,” he explained as if speaking to a three-year-old. “Pyramids. We are go to pyramids.”

  The officer considered what Wonder’d said. He smiled. He nodded. “Pyramids,” he repeated.

  “Right.”

  He hooked his thumb toward the opposite bridge railing. “Getting out.”

  “Huh?”

  “Outing. Show passport, please.” He backed away from the car slightly. As I watched, the Beretta on his shoulder came level with the windows, and his finger slipped from the trigger guard onto the trigger itself. I knew that six pounds of pressure was all he needed to make hamburger out of us all. I started making mental calculations about how many of the ten soldiers at the roadblock we could take out if it became necessary.

  We’d hit the two officers and four machine gunners first—they posed the greatest threats. The other four, who were carrying AK-47s, looked like your average conscripts. We could do ’em on the second go-round.

  As for the APC—well, I hoped Doc had at least one grenade hidden somewhere on his person.

  My hand moved down my leg toward the USP. I held my breath. I’d take the officer with a double tap—then the second one.

  “Doc—”

  Doc Tremblay’s lips barely moved. “I’ll do the right machine gun.”

  “Nasty—” I tapped Grundle’s shoulder. “You’ve got the left one.”

  “Check.”

  Stevie opened his door. I hoped he’d concealed the hush puppy.

  He stood up. He stretched. He lifted the hem of his gallebiyah, dug into his jeans pocket, and extracted a well-worn blue passport, which he handed to the officer.

  The guy held it upside down, which gave me a pretty good idea about his command of written English. Still, he pawed through it with dogged determination until he came to the Egyptian visa. He studied the writing. Then he smiled and handed Wonder the passport back.

  “Tourist,” he said with a big smile on his face. “American tourist. Welcome to Egypt.” He actually embraced Wonder, kissing him on both cheeks. Then he stood back and saluted.

  Stevie returned the gesture, a big smile on his face.

  “I guess that means we’re on our way to the pyramids,” I said loudly. “Let’s go, Stevie boy.”

  That’s when the fucking Peugeot died.

  “Stevie …”

  “I know, I know.” He hit the ignition. Nothing.

  He turned the key again. This time we got a weak groan as the starter coughed, wheezed, coughed again, then finally caught. He revved the engine, slid the car into gear, and we moved off, waving like assholes and grinning Louis Armstrong smiles at the Egyptian soldiers.

  By the time we cleared the university circle, the sky was changing—from the blue-black of night to the distinctive purple-rose glow that presages sunrise in the desert. I took the big manila envelope from my stowage pocket and examined its contents.

  There was an Egyptian passport. I flipped through it. He had recently received a Pakistani visa. I counted the money. Azziz had been given fifty thousand English pounds—$75,000. What was it for? Had he already earned it, or was it a down payment for services to be rendered? Well, he’d tell us, sooner or later.

  I put my back up against the rear door, tucked my chin against my knees, closed my eyes, listened to the throbbing of tom-toms in my head, and thought about the possibility that I might be getting too old for these kinds of full-contact diversions.

  Moi? Too old? No fucking way.

  I took a fifteen-minute combat nap once we left giza and hit the desert highway to Alexandria. Despite the occasional brush with Mr. Murphy, things had gone pretty smoothly to this point. Score one for the SEALs.

  Yeah—that’s us. Navy SEALs. We’re on the books as Naval Special Warfare SEa-Air-Land units, although I’ve always believed the acronym stands for Sleep, Eat, And Live it up. The little brood of killers I command, however, isn’t on anybody’s books.

  I’d created it myself—carved three platoons—that’s forty-eight men—off from SEAL Team Six and disappeared into the ether. Vanished off everyone’s organizational charts, into the black hole of covert operations.

  Why? Because America needs a unit like this to do jobs like the one we’d just done. Frankly, there are too many SpecWarriors these days—more than ten thousand of them when you count the Army’s Special Forces, the Air Force Special Operations Air Wing, U.S. Marine Expeditionary Units’ SOC (Special Operations Capable) forces, and the Navy’s SEAL teams. There are so many SEALs at SEAL Team Six these days that it takes the unit a full day and a half to mobilize, instead of the four hours from call to out-the-door when I was in charge.

  Moreover, because there are so many, and they’re so versatile, the system tends to forget the sole reason SpecWarriors were created in the first place. Which is, to kill. We are not armed guards or peacekeepers; we do not pacify a region or occupy a zone.

  My job is to infiltrate a hostile area and kill as many of the enemy as I can, without his knowing that I’m even around, then get away without leaving any fingerprints.

  But don’t tell such things to the folks who run the Pentagon these days. Most of ’em believe that killing’s a bad thing—unless you do it with words.

  In point of fact, the system has almost always used us special-operations types as shock troops—in other words, as rapid-deployment forces. That’s akin to employing a team of neurosurgeons to inoculate cattle. Sure, they can do it—but what a waste of talent.

  Knowing the system’s flaws, I created SEAL Team Six. At the moment of its birth, Six was made up of seventy-two seasoned shooters with a well-defined, single-purpose mission: counterterror. Translation: hit the bad guys before they hit us. How many times has it been used that way? The answer is classified. But it’s less than the fingers on one hand.

  Five years later, I created Red Cell, a fourteen-man unit with a two-tier responsibility. Red Cell’s primary mission was to test the vulnerabilities of naval installations worldwide against terrorist attack. Our other assignment—codeword secret at the time—was to slip away in pairs and neutralize bad guys before they had a chance to hit American targets.

  But those days are gone now. Red Cell was disbanded late last year. Not cost-effective, according to the new powers that be at the Pentagon. And what have the more than five hundred SEALs at SEAL Team Six been doing instead of waxing bad guys? The unhappy fact is that, most recently, they’ve often been used as an extension of the State Department, assigned to the Bureaus of Diplomatic Security, and “Thugs and Drugs.”

  That means they do such things as teach African cops how to establish SWAT teams, run after cocaine smugglers in Peru and Bolivia, or train a professional presidential bodyguard corps in Turkey. Shit, in Turkey they were pulled off bodyguard training so they could go help locate earthquake victi
ms.

  Well, so far as I’m concerned, if you want to train policemen in Kinshasa, join the Agency for International Development. If you want to chase cocaine smugglers in the Andes, apply to the DEA or FBI. And if you want to deploy as a rescue worker, become a goddamn Boy Scout.

  Luckily for me, CNO thinks the way I do. He fought hard to get me the authority I needed to create Green Team. That meant a lot to me. But he went the extra mile: he fought even harder to keep me and my men outside the normal Navy chain of command. I report to CNO, and through him, to the secretary of defense and the president. No one else.

  In conventional warfare, a well-defined chain of command is all-important. In Somalia—remember Somalia?—the chain of command for U.S. forces was a clusterfuck, because there wasn’t one. At one point early in the Somalia escapade, for example, a platoon of Marines discovered a huge arms cache belonging to one of Mogadishu’s top thugs, Mohammed Aideed. They were under orders to blow all the arms caches they found, but an Aideed aide on the scene convinced the young platoon lieutenant to call the U.S. embassy, where some asshole staffer told him that one of our special ambassadors in Mogadishu had indeed made a side deal with Aideed—they’d agreed that if the warlord kept his arms caches locked up in warehouses, we wouldn’t destroy them. “Don’t blow it up,” the staffer ordered.

  What the lieutenant should have answered was, “If you’re not wearing railroad tracks [captain’s bars], [colonel’s] eagles, or [general’s] stars on your collar, you can go fuck yourself, sir.” Then he should have pulled the pin on the willy-peter grenade he held in his hand, popped the spoon, counted to three, and rolled it into the warehouse.

  Then, he should have said to the Somali asshole, “If you can unscrew the fuse out of that fucking grenade in the next four seconds, go ahead and do it. And if you can’t, your fucking warehouse is about to blow, because those were my goddamn orders.”

  But the lieutenant didn’t do that. He spared the warehouse. After half a dozen similar instances, Aideed was able to convince a lot of Somalis that he was actually just as powerful—perhaps even more powerful—than the Americans with all their troops and sophisticated weaponry. They believed him. And when they did, the assignment in Somalia began an inevitable descent from humanitarian mission into absurd clusterfuck.

  Why? Because, when you diagrammed the chain of command in Somalia, it looked like a goddamn Rube Goldberg design. There were U.N. military commanders and American special ambassadors and U.N. political types and generals from the Pentagon, all vying for control of forces that used different radio frequencies, ammunition, and spoke in half a dozen languages. For a while, the pretty boy White House communications director issued rules of engagement by long-distance phone to the American forces that patrolled south Mogadishu. There was a so-called unified command, but it was composed of Italians, Nigerians, Pakistanis, Americans, Brits, and French—with no one taking responsibility for anything.

  At one point the Nigerians and Italians went out on a joint patrol. The Nigerians got hit by snipers—lost half a dozen men.

  What did the Italians do? They watched.

  So who suffered the most? Not the generals, admirals, or ambassadors, believe me. Nor the folks at the White House, whose participation was never reported. It was grunts who got killed. And why did they die? They died because no one took fucking responsibility. They were commanded by committee.

  If there had been a well-defined chain of command, like the one we’d set up during Desert Storm, things would have worked better. Not perfectly, because war is an imprecise goddamn science, filled with that unpredictable “fog of war” that Clausewitz, the great Prussian philosopher of warfare, called “la friction.” But fewer soldiers would have died, fewer families would have had to bury their sons. Chain of command is important. End of sermon.

  Having said that, let me now add that in SpecWar, you can’t utilize the normal chain of command, because there are too many levels, which slows down reaction time to an unacceptable velocity. Unconventional warfare demands a swift-reaction, unconventional chain of command, which is exactly what CNO and I devised for my unit. My chain of command is simple: the president or the secretary of defense talks to CNO, and CNO talks to me.

  CNO engineered this unique chain of command on my behalf despite the absolute, clear, and emphatic opposition of his deputy, the newly frocked vice admiral Pinckney Prescott III, A/VCNO, or Assistant Vice Chief of Naval Operations. But that was to be expected.

  Pinky da Turd, as I like to call him, is the son and grandson of admirals. Pinky da Foist was foisted on the Navy because, as a pseudo-aristocrat from a Philadelphia Main Line family sans benefit of trust fund, he had to make a living. So they sent him to Annapolis. Little Pinky II followed in his daddy’s black-shoe steps twenty-five years later, and—as if to prove the Peter Principle once and for all—Pinky da Turd, Annapolis ’72, brought up the rear. Luckily for the nation, Mrs. Pinky da Turd, the former Harriet Lickadick Suckacock of Blue Balls, Pennsylvania, has whelped no children. Anyway, somehow, after Annapolis, Pinky managed to survive BUD/S training and become a SEAL. Well, let’s be honest. He wears the same trident that I do. But he’s never been in combat. He’s never led men from the front. He’s never done anything in the military but fight paper wars, which makes him the epitome of the Can’t Cunt CO—a lard-assed, worthless, shit-for-brains turd-bucket staff puke. Am I making myself clear yet?

  He’s been the bane of my existence since I commanded SEAL Team Six, and he was grand panjandrum of NAVSPECWARGRU TWO—that’s the commodore of NAVal SPECial WARfare GRoUp TWO to the uninitiated among you. A by-the-book officer whose forte lies in memo writing, Pinky tried everything in his power to get me court-martialed for insubordination when I was CO of Six. When that failed, he spent $60 million of the Navy’s money to investigate me. When nothing turned up and I retired with a full pension, he gave my files to the U.S. attorney general’s office.

  I thought once I’d retired from the Navy, Pinky would be purged from my life. But roughly two years ago, he—and, as I discovered much later, CNO—engineered my unwilling recall to active duty. I was shanghaied to solve a slight problem: a batch of missing nuclear Tomahawk cruise missiles. It was only temporary, they said at the time.

  Well, my “temporary” assignment has lasted more than a year. Sure, Pinky was able to disband Red Cell. But he wasn’t able to stop me from creating another small unit of real shooters to satisfy the critical counterterror mission in which CNO and I believe so strongly. Indeed, despite all da Turd’s clout I slipped down to Dam Neck, Virginia, where SEAL Team Six is currently based, and made off with four dozen old-fashioned shoot-and-looters.

  Moreover, regardless of Pinky’s absolute, categorical and unequivocal orders to the contrary, Green Team operates out of my two-hundred-plus acres of snakes and lakes behind Rogue Manor, where I’ve built a passable kill-house and functional twenty-five-yard pistol and hundred-yard submachine-gun ranges. I’ve got room for fifty shooters in the converted barn, a weight pile outdoors, and a universal machine with half a ton of iron in the basement next to my sauna. There are two Jacuzzis—indoor or outdoor, take your pick—a twenty-four-foot wet bar, and no less than twenty cases of Coors Light and Stroh’s on hand at all times.

  I get away with it because CNO doesn’t mind where we bunk, just so long as we get the job done. Pinky, on the other hand, gets hemorrhoids just knowing that I’m off the reservation. He deserves each and every one of them. After all, it was Pinky who took all the credit for solving the Case of the Missing Tomahawks. He got himself frocked for another star—frocking means that he wears three stars but gets paid as a rear admiral because he hasn’t gone through Senate confirmation yet.

  Simultaneously, he engineered the A/VCNO billet for himself and said, “Thank you for everything, Dickie,” by putting Red Cell, the unit I conceived and designed to test the Navy’s antiterror capabilities, out of business permanently. He got frocked, and I got frucked. Typical.

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nbsp; Wonder threaded the Peugeot into Alexandria shortly after 0800, and we linked up with Doc Tremblay and the others on the eastern edge of the Corniche 26 July, which runs along the Med. The boat we’d chartered was tied up below the Maritime railroad station in the Western Harbor, about two miles and six minutes away. I knew it was six minutes away because we’d driven the route twice at this same time.

  Except today, Alexandria was in gridlock. Nothing was moving. It took us six minutes to go half a block—eight lanes of traffic crammed into a four-lane street. Fifty minutes later, we’d inched another three blocks and were now embedded in the middle of a humongous traffic jam halfway around Midan Tahrir (Tahrir Square) directly in front of the central bus station. Since then, despite the wild gesticulating of half a dozen traffic police in black uniforms, and a cacophony of horns that made all conversation impossible, nothing had moved.

  I was getting nervous. What the hell would happen if Azziz, rolled in the rug in the trunk of Doc’s car, suffocated from exhaust fumes—the fucking square was blue with diesel smoke, and catalytic converters are unknown in Egypt. I didn’t need a corpse on my hands right now.

  Worse, what would happen if he regained consciousness and started banging on the trunk lid? We didn’t need that problem either.

  Doc’s sedan was two vehicles ahead of me, but the cars on either side of us were so close I couldn’t open the door. I climbed out the hatchback of the Peugeot and threaded my way past a horse-drawn wagonload of carrots and a huge tank truck to where Doc’s Mercedes idled.

  Doc rolled down the window. “What you want to do?”

  “I’m worried about our package.”

  He nodded. “Me, too. I’d like to slip him some water.”

  Now, I wished I’d kept the motorcycles instead of jettisoning them just outside Cairo—Tommy could have gone ahead to see what the hell was going on and found us an alternate route. Now, we were just fucking stuck.

  “What do you wanna do, Skipper?”