Wonder wasn’t necessarily convinced. “Maybe—maybe not.”
“What are you thinking?”
“Remember when we hauled balls out of the radwaste facility?”
“What’s your point?”
“We set off the ARMS.”
That was true. “Well, we’d been swimming in all that heavy-water shit. We probably looked like Cyalume in the dark.”
“Yeah. Or Day-Glo.” He scratched his nose. “But maybe it was the canisters.”
“They were packed in lead. Besides, we washed them off,”
“Maybe we didn’t wash ’em off completely, Dickhead.”
I thought about that.
“But remember,” Wonder continued, “the outside shell leaked. The canisters were wet when you opened the carton.”
No, I hadn’t remembered. But Wonder had. He has a mind for details like that, which is why I’m happy I hadn’t let him drown back there.
“FORTE can smell radiation,” he said. “If it’s the only radiation around. I learned that in Iraq.”
He was right, of course. In the years after the Gulf War we’d used FORTE satellites to spot the locations where Saddam Hussein had stashed radioactive elements of his nuclear weapons program. Wonder had gone along on a couple of the inspection trips, masquerading as a U.N. weapons inspector. The thought of Wonder trying to be diplomatic brought a wry smile to my face.
I queried Mick Owen, who answered that they’d play with the switches and dials and get back to me. I wondered how he was getting them to move a pair of birds—he certainly couldn’t say it was for me, because I was a persona non grata. Well, frankly I didn’t give a shit how he was getting it all done—just so that it was getting done.
Dick Campbell brought out his charts and went over the flight plan he’d devised. We’d take off to the southeast and fly out over the Indus delta about fifty miles, as if we were heading toward one of the GTI drilling sites near the Indian border. Then we’d bank east, staying well away from the Pak missile sites at Dati and Badin, and work our way to the oasis at Cachro, where we’d make visual contact, then turn northwest, flying a basic straight line to Sukkur. From there, we’d follow the Indus River as it meandered north-northeast, taking a visual sighting on Dera Ismail Khan, then threading the needle through the mountain passes just to the west of Peshawar. Then we had two choices: we could breach the Afghan border by going over the Safed Mountains, or we could skirt Peshawar flying to the east, cross the border north of Asadabad, and hit the targets from the north side.
It sounded good to me. But flying wasn’t my job. I hadother variables to worry about. Like wind speed and direction and weight and oxygen (or lack thereof). My plan was to HAHO in. That meant we had to leave the plane at a minimum of twenty-eight thousand feet—perhaps more, depending on the altitude of the target.
See, with 28K of altitude, you can get a twenty-mile glide, if the weather’s right and if the winds are with you. We learned that back in the Arizona desert, where we jumped out of 727s and C-141s from as high as thirty-five thousand feet. How high is that? Have you ever flown cross-country? The normal civilian flight path is thirty-seven thousand feet. You can’t see a 727 from the ground at that altitude. We jumped from a mere two thousand feet lower—and you couldn’t see us, either.
Anyway, if you’re jumping from 28K and your target is at 150 feet above sea level, you can glide X miles. But if the target is in a high-mountain plateau and sits 6,700 feet above the ground, you need an extra 6,700 feet or so to make the same jump. Actually, you need more. Because the air is thinner on the ground—if that ground sits one-plus miles above sea level. And thin air supports a parachute less well than “fat” air. Which means that we’d be moving faster and descending quicker than if we were jumping over Phoenix or Tucson.
And there’d be the usual Murphy factors as well—headwinds, updrafts, and thermals, not to mention hypoxia (that’s oxygen deprivation in the bloodstream for you nonmedical types out there), freezing cold, and the altogether possible malfunctioning of our well-used Italian chutes.
It was time to talk about happier things. “What are we flying?” I asked. I was hoping for a stable platform.
I wasn’t going to get one. “A Provider—C-123,” Rocky replied, a regulation USMC shit-eating grin on his face.
“What’s the matter, couldn’t you find a C-47?” Jeezus. I hated C-123s. They were first flown in the midfifties, powered by a pair of big radial piston engines. We used ’em in Vietnam. Back then, they’d added a couple of jet engines to assist during takeoffs because the plane was noticeably underpowered, and there’d been a number of crashes during crosswind conditions.
After Vietnam, C-123s could be seen in various Third World air forces, or flying on a number of Christians in Action assignments. They are not good aircraft. Despite that fact, Richard Secord, a retired Air Farce general, bought one of the old rattletraps for Marine Lieutenant Colonel-turned-politician Ollie North’s covert contra resupply effort. It lacked the proper navigation gear and was seldom airworthy. Even so, the pilots managed to fly dozens of supply missions until the Sandinistas shot it down with a Soviet-supplied SAM-7 missile on October 5, 1986, and thus began the scandal we have come to know as the Iran-contra affair.
The one positive thing about a C-123 is that it, like the C-130 Hercules, has an aft ramp, which can be lowered during flight. That makes a mass jump easier, because we could all go out at the same time if we wanted to.
“Don’t sweat it,” Campbell said. “This is GTI’s plane. We take good care of it.”
I hoped so. Some of the C-123s I’d seen were so beat-up that the foam that lined the tanks had come loose, which allowed chunks of plastic to work their way into the fuel lines—doom on whoever flew those rattletraps. In others, there was so much rust and fuselage deterioration that pieces of the plane had actually fallen off during flights. “Any other good news?”
“Yeah—the weather report for your AO is good. No rain or snow or other distractions.”
That was good news. “What about cloud cover?”
“Clear as crystal for the next seventy-two hours.”
“Great.” Actually, I hate getting good news—it simply means something else will go wrong. I prefer the situation to be completely FUBAR—Fucked Up Beyond All Repair. When you’re really goatfucked, things can do nothing but improve.
Mick owen came through. “We have signal” is what he bursted me. That meant we were officially (by which I mean covertly) in business.
Brookfield moved six hours later. We let him go. The satellites would do their jobs. I received tracking information from Mick, punched the coordinates into the Magellan GPS, and drew corresponding lines on Rocky’s air navigation charts. Two and a half hours after he took off, Brookfield’s plane, which had feinted west toward Iran, turned north, and flown over Baluchistan, landed in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. The next TECHINT report told us he was heading north on the main highway toward Asadabad.
He stopped well south of the city, and the readings were constant for an hour. Once again, I punched the numbers into the Magellan, and we compared them with the topographical navigation chart on Dick Campbell’s desk. Lord B was about halfway between Sarkani and Khas Konar, which put him in the foothills of the Kashmund mountain range. As the crow flies, that’s less than twenty-five miles from the Paki border. But crows—not to mention C-123s—would have a hard time flying straight over those mountains.
Once again, it was time to move.
I couldn’t risk a night jump because we didn’t have the necessary equipment to allow us to see one another. So we’d go at dusk—enough light to make it reasonable, but dark enough to keep the bad guys from seeing us easily.
I was worried about hypoxia. The chute rigs had O2 bottles. But I had no way of knowing whether they were full, half-full, or empty, or whether the oxygen had been in there for so long it had become contaminated.
As we packed out, Dick Campbell handed me a waterproof pac
ket. I opened it. There were twelve gold coins inside.
“What’s this?”
“Extra get-out-of-jail money for Afghanistan. Just in case.”
I slammed him on the shoulder. “Damn, Rocky—”
“Hey, don’t sweat it. I’ll put it on the tab. You’re already into me for so much fucking Bombay you’ll never earn it out. Just do me one favor.”
“Sure.”
“Sign my books.” He handed me his copies of Rogue Warrior and Rogue Warrior: Red Cell. I inscribed them with the appropriate four-letter words. “Fuck you very much, Bro—”
“No problem. Now let’s get the hell out of here. Time’s a-wasting, and we’ll need a half-hour preflight check before we can go wheels up.”
We took off, went into our preplanned evasion sweep southward, then flipped northwest. No one seemed to care who we were or where we were going. Rocky kept the plane between 10 and 12K in altitude. That was high enough so we could see where the hell we were going, but low enough so we didn’t have to pressurize and deal with the C-123’s O2 supply.
There was no way I was going to play with a C-123’s O2 supply. I’d learned that unhappy lesson as an enlisted Frogman. I was an RM2 (that’s a Radioman Second Class, whose theme song is “Clickity-clack, clickity-clack, here come the girls from the radio shack”) doing my time in Ev Barrett’s Second-to-None Platoon at UDT-22.
I was also a parachute rigger, and in that guise I was assigned to act as jumpmaster for a series of UDT-21 night-jump exercises out of Suffolk, Virginia, about thirty miles southeast of what I still think of as the pussy-filled resort town of Vagina Beach. Suffolk’s municipal airport, which was leased by the Navy, sat next to a big hog farm. That way, we Frogmen could jump out of planes and get happy as the proverbial (and in this case literal, if we drifted too far off course) pigs in you-know-what.
We were flying a C-123 nicknamed the Rusty Scumbucket, the only aircraft available that evening. It was my first time in a 123. It was also my first up-close-and-personal encounter with the young officer in charge that night, a young ensign from UDT-22 named—well, let’s call him Eddie Emu, because he looked like a big, scrawny, bug-eyed bird who can’t fly.
(A real-life digression. Just about two years ago, as Vice Admiral G. Edward Emu, deputy chief of staff of the Special Operations Command, Eddie tried to flip me the bird by getting my SEAL Team Six mementos chucked out of the UDT/SEAL Museum because he viewed—and still views—me me with considerable disdain. Well, the feeling’s mutual—I don’t respect SEAL admirals who try to talk like warriors but have never actually killed anything on two legs. The toadies-cum-Frogmen who run the museum tended to agree with Eddie the Bird. But luckily for me, my sea daddies Roy Boehm and Ev Barrett, as well as a bunch of other fleet-sailor old-time Frogs, were around to show up at the membership meeting when Eddie’s chuck-out-Demo-Dickie-or-you-won’t-receive-any-support-from-the-Navy-anymore proposal was being debated. They derailed the good admiral’s plans. Which means you can still see the engraved pistol and a replica of the sterling-silver SEAL Six belt buckle my men gave me when you visit the UDT/SEAL Museum at Ft. Pierce, Florida.)
Okay—back to the story. So I’d spent the night as jumpmaster, putting UDT-21 jumpers out the 123’s side hatch, watching longingly as they disappeared into the darkness, emergency flares trailing after them. I wanted to jump, too. But Ensign Emu categorically denied me the pleasure. The evening’s activities had been scheduled by UDT-21, and without the proper manifests, releases, and other rat-shit paperwork, and—well, let’s put this sentence in his words: “No UDT-22 personnel can exit the goddamn plane unless it’s parked on the goddamn runway—and that specifically means you, Radioman Second Class Marchinko.”
I saluted and said, “Aye, aye, sir.” In truth I guess I have to add that I spelled it with a c and a u, and that my fingers were crossed behind my back. So, as soon as the final jumper cleared, I looked around and discovered that the only personnel on board were the flight crew and me. My immediate conclusion? I deduced that the manifest had somehow been changed, and the plane had been, mirabile dictu, assigned to carry me—ich, yo, moi, ani—up for a UDT-22 night free-fall jump. I asked the pilot if that sounded okay to him. He said he had no problem—in fact, he gave me a double thumbs-up. So I strapped on a chute and a boot-flare and stood in the door while he banked back toward the target area for one last pass.
Of course, to suit up properly I had to remove my oxygen mask, then replug it when I’d finished. Well, the 123’s O2 hookup was TARFU, and so when I plugged back in, I got no O—just nice, thin air. And since we were flying at twelve thousand feet, I got more than a little dizzy and blurry eyed while waiting for the pilot to fly over my exit point. In fact, by the time I finally went out the hatch, I was barely semiconscious. But what the hell—one of the basic rules of being a hairy-assed Frogman is Never Lose a Good Free Fall. (We used to consider losing a good free fall about as nasty a thing to lose as a good hard-on.) So, I just went out the door woozy, dropping in a long HALO fall, the red-flaming flare trailing from my boot, and the wind up my spaghetti-sucking nostrils waking me up just as I fell through five-thousand feet. I finally pulled at nineteen hundred and dropped right onto the top point of the A-shaped runway—a perfect bull’s-eye.
Eddie—he was always quick on the uptake—realized what perfidy I’d perpetrated when we both showed up in the UDT compound at about the same time. He knew I was supposed to be in a plane, not heading toward the rigger’s loft with a balled-up parachute under my arm. One plus one equaled two, and he started in on me, trying to ream me a new asshole.
Of course I denied everything. But Eddie had spotted the chute, and then he saw the flare holder on my boot. He snagged them as exhibits one and two for the prosecution. He brought me up on charges of reckless endangerment or some similar bullshit and tried to have me court-martialed. Luckily, UDT-22’s CO at the time, a Reserve lieutenant commander I’ll call Dick Swanson, didn’t see things the way Eddie did, and the charges were never filed.
Okay, I know what you’re about to say. That I could have blacked out after I exited the plane and burned straight in, turning myself to jam on the runway. But I didn’t burn in. I flew the edge of the envelope. And I learned a couple of valuable lessons. First, that the oxygen supply on a C-123 is unreliable. And second, that when you’re in a bad situation, you have to trust in your ability to make it better yourself—without anybody else to hold your hand (or in this case, pull your rip cord).
Segue to the present. Both of the lessons I’d learned back then applied right now. I knew that because of the need to get these bastards, I’d probably do something just as dumb and/or reckless tonight. And if shit happened? Well, it’s how you manage to fight your way through that counts, not the shit or the happening. Mr. Murphy will always be around. You have to ignore him when you can and work around him when you can’t.
So we’d push the envelope tonight—maybe push it beyond where we’d ever gone before. I never want to lose a man, but if I do, I want it to mean something—to him as well as to me.
Everyone knows my position on this. I tell my men that safety has its place in SpecWar: during basic training. Safety is not something I factor in during real operations or final training workups. If you’re going to go to war, you must train for war—not for peace or safety. You’re supposed to be a professional who knows how to function in and during extremis. The sorry fact is that shooters don’t get authorization to do that very often these days. Today’s C2COs don’t want to have their records blemished with something as foolhardy as a training accident.
So, the current crop of SEALs don’t get the chance to hear real bullets whistle by their heads very often—which hurts them when the real thing comes along, because they’re not ready for it. To be a warrior, you have to be willing to die. I know that sounds like so much fucking machismo bullshit, but that’s the way it is. That’s real life. You have to be ready for death. In training, that means taking things to
the point where you could actually get killed—otherwise your men will never know what to expect or how they’ll react. Now, this doesn’t mean that I’m looking for ways in which to kill my men. I have always preached that while I’m ready to die, I’d rather kill the other guy before he kills me. Or, as Roy Boehm, who’s killed his own fair share of bad guys, puts it, “Don’t get mad, don’t get even—get ahead.”
We made the second and third checkpoints without problems. There was no extraneous radio traffic, and no other visible planes. I bursted Mick every ten minutes—without avail. That was a problem looming large. We couldn’t circle above Pakistan endlessly without attracting attention, and we certainly weren’t about to cross the border, where they had hundreds of Stinger missiles, until we knew precisely where the fuck we were going.
Welcome to Murphyville. I went up to the cockpit and plunked myself into the naviguesser’s chair behind Howie Kaluha, who was flying copilot. “How’s the fuel sit?”
Rocky Campbell shrugged in his harness and tapped the dials above his head. “We have another hour or so—maybe a little more.”
Terrific—if the intel birds didn’t pick up on the canisters’ location in time, we’d run out of fuel. I considered a kamikaze attack. Nah.
We had about forty-nine minutes of fuel left when Mick Owen bursted a set of coordinates to the transceiver I held in my sweaty paw. I punched the numbers into the Magellan, ran forward to the cockpit, then entered our present position.
Rocky looked at the readout and nodded. “No prob.” He played with switches and dials, then turned toward me. “You go out the door in seventeen minutes, which gives me half an hour to make Peshawar airport. I’ll be burning fumes at that point, but what the fuck. Life ain’t fun unless you got a few problems, right?”
How could I argue with the man?
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