RW03 - Green Team

by Richard Marcinko

  KEEP OFF THE GRASS signs, and sprinted up Bruton Place to the Guinea, praying it wasn’t closed. I pulled open the door and heaved myself inside, breathing hard.

  “We’re shut.” Eric was washing pint glasses. Then he recognized me, waved me to the bar, and drew me a Young’s without asking. “You look fuckin’ dreadful,” he said by way of greeting. “What’s happened?”

  I drained the pint. “Fuck you very much, too,” I wheezed.

  He’d started to pour me another when he was interrupted by the sound of a car screeching to a halt outside, and my exclaiming, “Oh, shit!”

  I went wild-eyed. “Eric—”

  God bless the paras. He didn’t have to be told anything. “Kitchen,” he growled, pointing toward the rear of the pub with one hand while he swept my glass off the bar with the other. “Left-hand door. Move!”

  I hauled ass and hunkered down behind the fridge, heart ka-bump-ka-bumping. As the pulse pounded in my head, I realized all of a sudden what Hansie had meant on the phone. We’d always meet at the Goat—the old pub on Stafford Street where they served bratwurst as well as bangers.

  From somewhere outside the kitchen door came the sounds of muffled voices. Then it went all quiet. Eric retrieved me three minutes later. A fresh pint of Young’s was waiting for me, and I downed it fast.

  Eric stood there with his arms crossed. “So, who the hell did you kill?”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. But I knew I’d fucking find out soon enough—when I got to the Goat.

  DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY

  OFFICE OF THE CHIEF OF NAVAL OPERATIONS

  WASHINGTON DC 20350 2000

  Secret

  SER 0392/6N30864

  19 November

  FROM: ASSISTANT/VICE CHIEF OP NAVAL OPERATIONS (OP09B)

  TO: COMMANDER, NAVAL CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIVE COMMAND (0909N)

  SUBJ: CAPT. RICHARD (NMN) MARCINKO, USN 156-93-083/113O: (APPREHENSION OF)

  REF: (a) 11 USC 214.07

  (b) 42 USC 688.32 (e)

  (c) NAVCRICINST 0240.661

  1. Subject to be apprehended and charged with the murder of Mahmoud Azziz abu Yasin, an Egyptian national.

  2. Subject is to be considered armed, dangerous, and Irrational.

  3. Full interagency cooperation is deemed essential.

  4. OP09B will brook no foreign-government interference in this Internal USN matter.

  5. OP09B to be advised dally on this matter through Elder Brother channel.

  6. (Signed): Pinckney Prescott III

  Vice Admiral, U.S. Navy

  Assistant/Vice Chief of Naval Operations

  Secret

  CHARLIE

  One of the most significant training exercises I’d devised as the CO of SEAL Team Six was an E&E in which I took away everybody’s documents—their passports, driver’s licenses, military IDs, AMEX or VISA cards, and so on, then assigned them to go from point A to point B within a defined time frame. My old friend Charlie Beckwith had developed much the same thing for Delta Force—but his exercises were almost always played out in CONUS—the CONtinental U.S. Mine were nearly all held overseas. I’d turn my guys loose in Brussels with $20 worth of Belgian francs and tell them to meet me ninety-six hours later at a trattoria in Rome’s Piazza Navona. I’d dump them out of a truck just outside Frankfurt, give them one hundred deutsche marks and a slip of paper with a London address. I’d land ’em on the beach twenty miles from Alexandria with a handful of Egyptian pounds and directions to a villa in Cyprus. I’d toss ’em out of a plane over Guatemala and tell them to meet me at a bar in San Salvador’s zona rosa.

  Not everybody was equally successful at the game. All SEALs can chase pussy, drink beer, pump iron, swim for miles, throw themselves out of planes, and navigate underwater. Some SEALs can kill. I needed men whose unconventional talents—in addition to those listed above—also included role-playing and sweet-talking in various foreign languages. I wanted con men who’d be able to survive in any kind of environment, without the benefit of the military support system—in fact, without any support system. I needed individualists who wouldn’t feel threatened if they were left behind after a mission to make their own way to safety. Those who did the best at my little unguided tours of Europe, the Middle East, and South America I kept; those who didn’t were jettisoned.

  I didn’t create the E&Es from whim, either: during the Iran rescue mission back in 1980, two SEALS—let’s call them Kline and Joey—went to Tehran under civilian cover to help Delta Force. After the mission aborted, Kline made his way across more than six hundred miles of hostile territory to safety in Turkey. Joey pulled off an exfil right under the Iranian mullahs’ noses in Tehran. I learned from their experience.

  Now, looking at the single sheet of CNO letterhead Hansie had left for me at the Goat, I realized that my men and I were in as much jeopardy as Kline and Joey had been back in 1980—except the enemy wasn’t a bunch of Shiite tangos, it was the U.S. Navy. I was under indictment for murder. The Green Team squad I’d taken to Cairo would be charged as accessories. Nasty Nicky Grundle was sitting in the basement of 7 North Audley Street behind two inches of steel door.

  Not to mention the fact that somewhere near Nice, in southern France, Lord B and his Paki friends were probably sipping champagne and making plans. We had to figure out what they were planning and stop him.

  I took inventory. Actually, things could have been a lot worse. My Cairo team had its Freddie the Forger documents—which no one knew about, as the guys had entered the U.K. using the real names on their military IDs. That gave us passports and driver’s licenses—most of ’em British Commonwealth, or EC. We had Azziz’s fifty thousand pounds in cash, three of Freddie’s best credit cards, and the clothes on our backs.

  Oh, sure, on the one hand, we had no weapons, equipment, logistical support, or intelligence. But we could obtain all of those easily. And on the other hand, we had the most crucial elements for victory: raw energy, guts, determination, and the absolute will to succeed.

  Obviously, then, we could not fail.

  I sat the guys down and gave them a no-shitter. The fact that Pinky knew about Azziz’s death meant he’d been handed the information. He’d not been need-to-know about our mission—in fact, CNO didn’t trust him at all.

  Okay, who knew about Cairo? Well, CNO, of course, but he was dead. The president did, too—but he and Pinky weren’t on speaking terms. That pretty much ended the information chain.

  Except … one other person knew about Cairo, too. Sir Aubrey Davis knew. He’d intimated as much to me over dinner at his fancy club on St. James’s Square. My list of suspects, therefore, was pretty short. When detectives want to narrow their lists of suspects, they use three criteria to search out the guilty party. Those are means, motive, and opportunity.

  Means: Sir Aubrey knew about my mission in Cairo. He’d probably dropped a tidbit to Pinky da Turd. Pinky, of course, went batshit—and issued an arrest order.

  Motive: Sir Aubrey had been the one to request my services, then tie my hands by insisting that I work with the incompetent Geoff Lyondale. It had been Lyondale who’d brought Lord B on board as a consultant. The answer, then, was obvious: Sir Aubrey had been bought and paid for. Lord Brookfield—estimated annual income £340 million a year—was probably paying Monocle Man a truckload of cash to sell out his country.

  Opportunity: with the Admiral of the Fleet, CNO, and me out of the way, and the traitorous Sir Aubrey in charge of Britain’s CT operations, a world-class clusterfuck situation could be created by Lord B and his tango compatriots. Talk about transnational terrorism.

  Except, there was a frog in the ointment, and its name was Marcinko.

  I’d come a-calling, planting my size 11E’s where they shouldn’t have been. So the situation had to be remedied. First, they tried to elbow me out of the way by foisting Geoff on me. When that didn’t work, they tried to wax my ass in the underground passage. And when that fell through, somebody leaked word abo
ut Azziz’s untimely demise to Pinky da Turd, who didn’t need much urging to issue an arrest warrant with my name on it.

  So, there was no doubt about the fact that we had been double-crossed. I held the evidence for that in my scarred hand. The bottom line, no matter who had betrayed whom, was that I—and, by extension, my men—were all outlaws now. That meant no contact with our normal information sources at DIA and No Such Agency—they’d simply turn us in. Nor could I ask support from my Safety Net of chiefs scattered across the globe—helping me would put their careers in jeopardy, and there was no way I’d ask them to do that. No—we were on our own. We’d have to live off the land—rape, pillage, loot, and burn as we went.

  “Sounds like your everyday SOP to me, Dickhead,” Wonder said.

  “Yeah, what’s your point—sir?” asked Duck Foot, spelling it with a c and a u.

  I’m blessed to have men who know me well enough to be properly respectful.

  Their reaction buoyed my spirits immensely. Okay—it was time to act. Our first objective would be to get Nasty out of jail. After that, we’d scatter. The Cairo squad—Tommy, Nasty, Howie, Wonder, and Duck Foot—would make its way to Germany, then go south, through France, to Nice.

  I drew up my duty roster and listed the men’s assignments. In a flash of inspiration, I decided to take Rodent with me—much to his obvious delight. He was a scrounger in the tradition of James “Hoot” Andrews, the chief storekeeper whom Roy Boehm shanghaied from under Admiral Hyman Rickover’s nose (Hoot was serving on the Polaris missile sub USS George Washington at the time), when Roy needed a world-class “expediter” to equip SEAL Team 2. Hoot may have worked for Rickover, but he’d served at UDT-21 for six years, and once you’re a Frogman, you’re always a Frogman—the Teams come before anything else. So Hoot went to work for Roy, and Roy got his new command equipped in record time.

  Besides being an able thief, Rodent wasn’t on anybody’s wanted list. That meant he could use his ID to get inside Patch Barracks, the European HQ for the Special Operations Command that sits on a hillside overlooking Stuttgart. Once he was through the gate, he could “borrow” equipment, purloin intelligence, and filch whatever else he thought we might need. And if we didn’t find what we wanted at Patch Barracks, we could utilize one or two of the POMCUS caches in southern Germany.

  POMCUS (Prepositioned Outside Military Custody of the U.S.) stores include weapons, ammo, fuel, trucks, radios—all the crucial resupplies that NATO forces would have needed for the first thirty days of a Soviet land invasion of Western Europe. Some of the goods were on NATO military bases. Some were in municipal storage facilities. Others were hidden away in secret bunkers—bunkers I knew the locations of.

  So, while Pinky might think we were outmanned, outgunned fugitives, it wasn’t going to be like that at all. In fact, when we finally went nose to nose with Lord B, we’d be as prepared as we would have been if we’d come straight from Dam Neck. Doom on you, Pinky.

  Moreover, while me and my merry band of renegades toured Europe, the rest of Green Team would knuckle-drag around Britain, leaving obvious trails for Pinky and Sir Aubrey to follow. Hopefully, Sergeant Snake, Rooster, Carlos, and the rest of the team would lead them and their bloodhounds far enough off the scent so that we could do our work, neutralize the tangos, and come back with enough scalps on our belts to clear ourselves—or at least make it too embarrassing to prosecute.

  By the time we got back to the FAMFUC, Mick Owen had heard the bells, whistles, and sirens, too. He figured we had about two hours before the roof fell in.

  “I wish I could help fix this, Dick—but it’s way above my pay grade. Special Branch and MI5 have been brought in. MI6, too. Every fuckin’ spook in the world is probably gonna be looking for you. Shit—I probably had an easier time getting out of Iraq than you’re gonna have leaving the U.K.”

  He might not have been able to grease the skids anymore, but he was still able to slip us a few goodies. He gave me two Magellan GPS trailblazers—battery-operated, handheld Global Positioning System computers that use a network of satellites to provide precise data on your location. They’re smaller than this book in your hands, but they’re powerful. You punch data into the Magellan using its twenty-four-key system, and presto: your precise position in latitude and longitude appears on a small screen.

  We could also use the Magellan to chart our course. You punch your destination in, and the computer gives you a series of readouts showing where you are relative to the target—very, very helpful if you’re looking for a tango camp out in the desert. Mick also gave me a waterproof, thermal range-finder, seven Glock-19 pistols with Trijicon night sights, twenty-eight sixteen-round magazines, and five hundred rounds of his best hollowpoint ammo.

  Best of all, he let me have two of SAS’s secure SATCOM burst transceivers. So long as the British military’s secure telecom system was running, and I could recharge the batteries once a day or so, I’d be able to talk to Mick and communicate with my men. Mick and I devised an eight-digit KISS cipher system so I could report where I was and what we were up to. Because my old Safety Net wasn’t going to be much help anymore—not for a while—Mick was going to be my single point of contact while we were on the run. I gave him a general outline of what I planned to do—omitting several specifics. I didn’t, for example, tell him about my plan to liberate the POMCUS goodies, or my final destination in France. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Mick, but just in case MI5 decided to slip him 75 mgs of IV sodium pentabarbitol or any of the new designer drugs, I didn’t want him talking in his sleep.

  We left the FAMFUC singly and in pairs, slipping over the fence at half a dozen points just in case the gate was being observed. Our rendezvous point would be the Guinea, four blocks from CINCUSNAVEUR—from which we had to extricate Nasty Nicky Grundle. Mick had already called Eric Wells from a pay phone. The former para said he’d be happy to find us a foxhole to crawl into for a couple of nights. After that, though, we’d be on our own—blind jumping into space.

  I was last out. I hugged Mick. “Fuck you, asshole.”

  “Sod you, you sorry wanker. If you need me, either burst me or contact me through Eric. I’ll make sure he knows where I am.”

  “Roger that, Mick. But make sure you check your six—they’re gonna pull your short-and-curlies to get at me.”

  CINCUSNAVEUR is a hundred-year-old, seven-story building with two basement levels. Hey, hey, out there—no skipping forward to the next action sequence. Come on, pay attention: you will see this material again. Anyway, as I was saying, on the ground floor and first basement level are many of the command’s creature features—the barbershop, medical unit, bank, cafeteria, gift shop, and so on. The second floor is filled with VIP offices—the CINC’s cabin, for example, is on two—and the unit’s ornate conference room, which is located right where Dwight D. Eisenhower had the office from which he planned D day. Next door to the conference room lives the State Department POLAD—the resident POLitical ADviser who makes sure CINC doesn’t say or do anything impolitic.

  The first, third, and fourth floors hold CINCUSNAVEUR’s apparatchiki—hundreds of three- and four-striped middle managers, who justify their existence by turning out reams and reams of memos, treatises, reports, assessments, and briefs. How anybody can call something seventy-six fucking pages long a “brief,” I’ll never know.

  During my UDT Replacement Class 26 training, we incipient Frogmen wore WWII-vintage kapok life vests as part of our training gear. The vests weighed six pounds dry and twenty-six pounds wet—and the instructors managed to keep them wet all the time. In the water, the vests became cumbersome sea anchors, weighing us down and keeping us from swimming efficiently. On land, coated with sand, they got even heavier. Like those kapok vests, CINCUSNAVEUR’s blue-uniformed bureaucrats manage to keep the Navy from decisive action through the sheer weight of their redundantly overwhelming, cumbersome paperwork.

  Please, sir, your exalted paperpushership, the IRA has just tossed a grenade
through the window of the British Admiralty. May I humbly request that we buy a set of antigrenade screens for our own windows so we won’t be vulnerable? Intelligence tells us that the Paddies are gearing up to make an example of us next week.

  Of course you can, my beamish boy. Just fill out this requisition, sign these few dozen forms, and we’ll have your antigrenade screens in twelve to eighteen months.

  But your exalted penmanship, our need is immediate. The threat is real and imminent.

  Imminent? Why didn’t you say so, lad. No problem. Just put your John Hancock on this additional sheaf of papers, write me five or six memos outlining the reasons why and how screens stop grenades, and we’ll have those little suckers to you in a mere nine months. Of course, moving that fast means you’ll need the permission of my superiors, who’ve just left on a three-month TAD to Washington. As soon as they get back, I’m sure we can accommodate you. In the meanwhile, bub, it’s time for my scheduled coffee break, so buzz off.

  The top two floors—five and six—are where most of the command’s classified materials are located. On the North Wing of Five, protected by cameras, cipher-locked doors, and an impressive array of passive detection devices, is the NAVOPS—NAVy OPerationS—center, where all of NATO’s war plans for Europe are contained inside six massive fireproof safes. Five others hold all of the Navy’s unilateral tactical and strategic plans for the defense of Western Europe. There are SpecWar scenarios and fleet deployments, aircraft-refueling logistics, sea-lift capabilities—in essence, most of the Navy’s current classified, sensitive, and top-secret documents for every destination between the Washington Navy Yard and the Seychelles can be found on the computer disks, microfiche negatives, or hard-copy files on the fifth floor.

  On the sixth floor, behind barred, sealed windows, lies CINCUSNAVEUR’s massive communications center. The climate up there is strictly controlled by four massive air-conditioning and filtering units that sit on the building’s roof. Shielded UHF, VHF, microwave, and satellite antennas are connected by bug-proof fiber-optic lines to the NSA-built transmitters and receivers. From top to bottom and wall to wall, the place is filled with billions of dollars of communications gear. There are satellite transceivers that bounce scrambled signals 22,000 miles in the sky. There are microwave radios, cellular phones, analog and digital devices—you name it, they got it.