RW03 - Green Team

by Richard Marcinko

  Ahead of us, two more skinheads came round the far comer, slapping heavy chrome tire chains.

  I took the Emerson folder off my belt. “Mick, you carrying?”

  “Not to worry, mate.” He brought a collapsible, spring-loaded cudgel out of his jacket pocket and spronggged it open. “Let’s do ’em.”

  You go into encounters like this accepting that you’re probably going to get hurt. The idea, of course, is to hurt the other guys more than they hurt you—and to do it to them first. That’s the other thing: these episodes, when they’re carried out by professionals, tend to last only a few seconds—certainly less than a couple of minutes. Everything is concentrated and crystallized. Quick and dirty.

  Remember when I talked about violence of action? That’s what had to happen here.

  So we didn’t wait to get zapped. We didn’t run the wagons into a circle or go waving our hands in that hoodoo-judo-karate bullshit you see in Hollywood movies.

  We did what every SpecWarrior knows how to do best—we went on the offensive. Indeed, we knew all too well that a violent counterattack is the only acceptable solution to an ambush.

  So, screaming at the top of our lungs, we wheeled and charged the quartet behind us, intent to commit murder written all over our faces. I brought down the pink-haired cudgel-man with my shoulder and sliced the back of the hand that held the club.

  I slit vein as well as cartilage, so there was a lot of immediate blood flow. That is good, because when people bleed, they tend to become distracted.

  This was what you might call a textbook case. The asshole looked down at his hand and screamed bloody murder, which gave me the opening I needed.

  I thrust the Emerson into his neck horizontally and brought it out straight forward just above his Adam’s apple, severing his carotid artery and windpipe, just like you’d slaughter a sheep.

  He went down for good. But not before he’d covered my new blazer with warm blood.

  That was one. Mick shouted, “Go right!” I rolled. A body came flying past me, flung face-first into the tile wall. That was two.

  Rule One of the yet-to-be-written Marcinko street-fighting manual will be: Don’t waste your time counting the bodies.

  But I’d broken the rule. So I got tagged. One of the skinheads snuck up on my port side, reached around, and tagged me with the tire chain just below my right armpit. I thought I heard ribs crack. It felt like I’d been frigging shot. I dropped like a sack of shit and the Emerson dropped out of my hand.

  It was doom on Dickie time.

  He slashed again, the chain making sparks as it whapped the concrete inches from my head. I kicked out in the skinhead’s direction, rolled away, and tried to scramble to my feet. Except, I was having a hard time getting off the deck. My legs were rubbery and my whole right side had caught fire. He came after me with the chain again. I caught it as it bounced off the wall, pulled him down on top of me, and rolled him over.

  Now I got the chain around his neck, my legs locked around his waist, and twisted until I heard bones snap. He was dead meat.

  Peripheral vision of orange hair. A machete came slicing toward my head. I ducked. The punkster swung again, slicing the shoulder pad of my blazer. Fuck—I unlocked my legs, rolled away, and put the fucking skinhead I’d just killed between me and the blade.

  Whaaack! The blade sliced through the meat of his thigh and stuck in the bone. While machete man tried to extricate his weapon, I grabbed a handful of orange hair, pulled him close and head-butted his nose, broke it nicely, then twisted his head around and bit a chunk of his ear off. When that didn’t appear to slow him down any, I gouged his eyes. That finally made him scream.

  Mick pulled the machete man out of my hands—lifted him four feet off the ground and brought him down hard, headfirst. I heard the asshole’s neck break.

  I scrambled to my feet and put my back against the wall for protection, whipping the chain from side to side like the biker from hell. I looked around—there were only two assailants left standing. I limped toward one, flailing chain, but he turned and ran—skedaddled around the corner to the underpass that led toward Piccadilly. The other turned and ran toward Knightsbridge.

  I approached the intersection cautiously and glanced up at the mugger mirror. All clear.

  It was time to collect intelligence—see who these assholes were, and who’d sent ’em. I started back and knelt over an inert form with orange hair and exceptionally bad BO. Gingerly, I went through its pockets. They were empty, except for small change and a five-pound note. I checked a second skinhead. He didn’t have ID either. Was this a trend?

  I was on my way to the third skinhead when Mick’s huge hand turned me around and nudged me toward the Knightsbridge exit. “C’mon.” He slid his arm around my shoulder. “Let’s haul balls, Dick—before somebody shows up and discovers this mess and we get asked questions we don’t want to answer.”

  I was hyperventilating. My rib cage hurt like hell, too. But there was no way I was going to leave. “Hey, hey, wait—my knife.” Emerson CQC6s cost more than $600. I wasn’t about to leave it behind so some fucking London bobby could have a souvenir complete with my fingerprints.

  I went back, picked it off the ground, wiped the blade on an inert skinhead, and hobbled over to where Mick waited, big arms crossed. I looked at him.

  There are times when you want to kick somebody in the balls—and this was one of ’em.

  Why? Because the son of a bitch wasn’t even breathing hard.

  Well, he’s four years younger than I am. And he hasn’t been rode as hard and put away wet as often.

  “Okay, Captain Owen, your grace,” I groaned, “I’ve had the fucking dinner and I’ve had the fucking floor show. So what’s next?”

  Mick looked me up and down critically. “How about a visit to fucking hospital?”

  I hate to admit it, but his suggestion actually sounded good.

  Mick patched me up at his girlfriend’s house. There was no need to raise eyebrows at any emergency room. Besides, I may have been bruised, tender, and sore as hell, but nothing was broken.

  Then we spent the rest of the night listening to the radio to see if our fracas had made the news (it did, described as a fight between skinhead factions, which made me wonder who was doing the covering up—the government or the bad guys), sipping Bombay Sapphire and analyzing our situation.

  Who the hell had set those assholes on us? What was the motive?

  Mick’s first question brought a smile to my face. “Okay, Dick, who wants you dead?”

  I laughed. “We do have all night, don’t we?”

  Three hours later, we hadn’t reached any conclusions, but at least we’d made some decisions. Most important among them was that it was time to take the offensive. With Hansie’s help I’d assemble my shooters quietly and slip them out of town before Pinky knew what was happening.

  There was another element as well: Mick was concerned that since one attempt had been made on us, another would follow. We weren’t sure whether it was me or Mick the skinheads had been after. Mick had left a long trail of IRA corpses in Ulster—in fact, the Provos had put a twenty-thousand-pound bounty on his scalp. So he solved that problem by taking us both out of circulation. We shifted our base of operations to an SAS urban-warfare training center outside London. He had six hundred acres of buildings, hangars, tunnels, roadways, and sewer lines, all contained on a secluded, classified site less than fifty-five miles from Piccadilly Circus,

  The place was known as the FAMFUC (for FAMiliarization Facility/Urban Combat). It was where SAS’s Special Projects teams developed and refined the scenarios they’d use to deal with hijacked planes or trains, formulate new ways to stop buses, cars, and trucks, and devise effective, lethal ways in which to deal with urban terror. The Queen’s bodyguards trained there. So did the three-man SAS wet-affairs units that worked with SIS, snatching or neutralizing IRA tangos the same way we used to go out with Christians in Action in Vietnam to kidnap and kill
VC cadres.

  We used to call our assassination ops “taking out the garbage.” SAS’s current terminology isn’t too far from ours. They’re calling it “rubbish removal” these days.

  Forty-eight hours later, we’d set up a joint command post at FAMFUC, far away from Sir Aubrey’s watchers, and Pinky’s whining. Now da Turd was probably doubly pissed at me—first, I’d managed to escape his arrest order without so much as a by-your-leave. Second, the commander of SAS’s most elite counterterror team had just requested that my men and I be TAD’d to his unit.

  Pinky’s immediate reaction was to deny the request. He fired a salvo of cables back to the Pentagon. He argued that I was an American officer and as such should not be subordinate to a Brit (it hadn’t bothered him a whit when he’d assigned me as Geoff Lyondale’s subordinate, but that was then and this was now). He maintained that, since I had violated my orders by trashing poor old Geoff, I should be removed from command. He hinted that I was drunk most of the time and therefore unfit for command in the first place.

  But Mick knew how to play the game, too. He had his old comrade-in-arms, SAS’s most decorated former commanding officer, General Sir Peter de la Billiere, phone his old friend, a four-star Army rat I’ll call Cash Harris.

  These days, Cash runs the Special Operations Command back in the U.S. He has a thick book with a lot of markers in it, too. So Cash called one of them in. He phoned his old friend, Tom Crocker, a four-star who just happens to be deputy chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. When Cash played quarterback at West Point, Tom Crocker was his favorite wide receiver.

  General Crocker did what he did best: he ran with the ball. He loped down the sidelines, sidestepped the defense by cutting through a private door with cipher lock, and headed straight into the hideaway office of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a Marine general named Barrett, who also wears four stars. Let’s do the math on this. Four plus four plus four equals twelve. Pinky—you remember him—wears a mere three stars. That was nine too few to do anything about Mick’s bumper-pool politics.

  So, with Pinky shut out for the time being, we set up housekeeping at FAMFUC. It was the perfect situation: not only had we been officially seconded to SAS, but neither Pinky nor anyone else had any idea where we were.

  I played stay-at-home the first few days, raising my Safety Net back in the States on a secure telephone. I called my old pals Tony Mercaldi back at DIA and Irish Kernan at No Such Agency. I wheeled, dealed, cajoled, and threatened until they promised to perform enough sleight of hand to get a couple of VELA or Lacross satellite tracks shifted for a few weeks. Stevie Wonder got on the horn to his pals at Vint Hill Station and convinced them to play with their switches and dials, too. Mick, bless him, worked his wiles on the boys at Cheltenham, where Britain’s Big Ears were housed. When he was in London, he made a point of chatting up his contacts at MI5 and MI6 to find out what the bad boys were up to.

  In seventy-two hours, we’d developed half a dozen leads. Concrete? No. Possible? Certainement.

  I told Mick that no matter how many leads we developed or suspects emerged, we still had to run a break-and-enter at Lord B’s villa in Hampstead.

  Mick was chary about a black-bag job at Brookfield House. Too much risk, he argued. Not enough evidence, he said.

  I ticked off the arguments in my favor. It all came down to one indisputable fact: it had been Lord B who’d pointed the finger at the Sons of Gornji Vakuf as the perps, shifting the entire direction of the British response to the assassinations.

  Yeah, Mick said, that’s true. “But the more we investigate, the more it appears as if the SGVs actually did the job.”

  “Sure, they may have done the killings. But not for the reasons we’ve been told.” I ticked off my disinformation theory for Mick. I added that since the Sons of Gornji Vakuf had conveniently blown themselves up, there was no one to interrogate about motive. Besides, I added, my instincts were seldom wrong in cases such as these. “Unless we take a look for ourselves, we won’t know for sure. There are too many fucking mazes and mirrors here.”

  Mick sighed. He rolled his eyes. But in the end he agreed that there was too much at stake for us not to go in. If we discovered Lord B was pure as the driven snow, fine and dandy—then the suspicion could be shifted to Sir Aubrey, or even Geoff Lyondale. But if we found out Brookfield was dirty, then we’d know how to deal with him.

  Mick and I snuck down to London and began a recon of Hampstead. Meanwhile, we put our men on an eighteen-hour schedule of concentrated shooting and looting. We drew weapons and supplies from SAS’s quartermaster—MP5 submachine guns, black Nomex coveralls with Kevlar-reinforced elbows and knees (does it seem to you that ever since Vietnam I can’t get away from working in black pajamas of some sort? Seems that way to me), antiflash hoods (commonly called balaclavas), body armor, gas masks complete with secure radios, and side arms. SAS prefers the old-fashioned, single-action Browning Hi-Power. For us Americans, Mick provided Glocks in nine millimeter. Once we were armed and dangerous, we drew fifty thousand rounds of ammo and went to work, rehoning our skills, shooting against SAS’s best for pints of IPA bitter.

  Why all the ammo? Why all the practice? The answer is simple. In CT work, you have one goal and one goal only: hit the bad guy first and make damn sure he/she/it can’t get back up. You have to be able to shoot without thinking—pure reflex. That’s the reason behind all the weapons training.

  See, for a Green Team shooter, the hardest part of the job is getting to the target. The easy part is killing the son of a bitch. Remember when I told you that stress shooting and hostage-rescue tactics are a perishable skill that can be lost in days? Okay—now here’s the rest of the equation. Think about pulling the trigger and double-tapping your target—in training it’s a three-by-five index card; in real life it’s an armed and dangerous tango—after you’ve just (please select one or all of the following):

  Humped it on a two-mile swim in forty-eight-degree water.

  Spent the last two hours beating your kidneys into Jell-O riding a small boat in the open ocean on ten-foot swells, then climbed a slippery caving ladder to storm a ship, the same way we did in Red Cell.

  Sailed into town on a “foil” parachute after dropping twelve thousand feet free fail sans benefit of oxygen and skidding thirteen miles from where you dropped out of the plane.

  What I’m trying to say is that you’ve already extended yourself physically more than 99.99 percent of the world’s population ever will, and only now (Now!) do you get the chance to settle down, be cool, shoot the bad guy first, and save the hostage.

  In the movies it looks easy. Of course, in the movies, it isn’t really Arnold Schwarzenegger or Charlie Sheen or Sylvester Stallone dropping out of the sky, coming up out of the water, or down the fast rope. It’s some Stuntman (probably an ex-SEAL).

  Besides, in real life, it doesn’t happen like that. In real life you’re so hyper, so absolutely juiced from your freefall/swim/boatride/climb/fastrope, that you’re absofuckinglutely ready to fucking kill the first fucking thing you fucking see. Am I fucking making myself clear through ironic repetitive use of the F-word?

  In real life, to real SEALs, killing becomes a form of emotional and physical release—it’s the reward for having survived the ordeal of getting to the target in the first place. In fact—and I’ve been there—all you really want is to get the job over with. You want to kill the motherfuckers and be done with it, so you can go off somewhere with a cold beer and a hot piece of ass and release the pressure.

  Did you ever wonder why SEALs train so hard? Have you ever thought about the rationale behind hell week back at BUD/S, when SEAL pup trainees—the 10 percent or less who survive hell week—are formed on an anvil of unbelievable pain, hurt, and stress. The answer is that during hell week they get their first taste of what it will be like when they’re called on—maybe it’ll be only once in their lives—to hit their man or fulfill their mission no matter how juiced, how cold, how w
et, how tired, how dinged, or how fucking scared they are.

  So we went back to the basics, too. Sight-acquire-fire. Hit the goddamn three-by-five like it’s a no-brainer. That’s what I taught SEAL Team Six when I created it. And that’s what we did at FAMFUC. Sight-acquire-fire. Sight-acquire-fire. Do it until you get it right. Then do it under stress—after climbing ten flights of stairs at breakneck speed. Or fastroping fifty feet from a flared chopper. Or abseiling off a roof and slamming through a window. Or—well, you get the idea.

  Now, as to our gear, conventional wisdom states that the better gear you have, the easier the job is. So far as I’m concerned, however, Kevlar-reinforced clothes, state-of-the-art MP5s, night-sighted Clocks, and other, more exotic Star Wars equipment isn’t the answer. It’s part of the solution, but not the whole solution. Equipment is a tool. It’s the man using it that makes the real difference.

  Indeed, I’ve always maintained that the right man is the ultimate weapon; that the right man makes the best fighting machine. Bottom line? All the tech toys in the world aren’t worth a shit if you don’t have a warrior’s heart.

  It’s like the asshole who takes years of judo, karate, kendo, et cetera. Then, on the one day he’s finally called to task on the street, the stupid numb-nuts doesn’t know how to function because there’s no one holding a score card, and nobody to call “time out” when it starts to get rough. That’s not what a Warrior’s about.

  Being a Warrior is to be about death; to be about killing. In my line of work you have to be able to hate. You must have the instinct to go for the kill—to look your opponent in the eye and to murder him without thinking—or you’ll be the one who’s killed.

  So, as far as I’m concerned, it’s fine to have all those nice toys to play with, and all those nice costumes to wear. But it’s the animal underneath that counts. Please try to remember this material, because you’ll see it again and there’s going to be a quiz. End of sermon.

  Meanwhile, the clock was ticking. Now, Mick and I stayed at FAMFUC working the phones, while I sent Wonder into Hampstead for sneaking and peeking. After all, he was a Force Recon Marine and didn’t mind long trips behind enemy lines. Three days later, he came back to report that Brookfield House was empty—Lord B and Todd Stewart, along with four suitcases—had taken a cab to Terminal Four at Heathrow, where they’d climbed on an Air France flight to Nice.