RW03 - Green Team

by Richard Marcinko

  I let him edge ahead and slipped back into the middle of the group. Six minutes later, Nasty’s hand went up. I went forward to see what he wanted.

  Nasty looked like a good hunting dog—his ears were back, the hair on his neck was standing straight up, and his right index finger was indicating a spot on the ground some two yards in front of him. I peered intently. The news was not good. How the fuck he’d seen it was beyond me. But that’s what makes the great point men great—their ability to concentrate, to lock out everything but the ground ahead of them. There it was—the nasty top of a Soviet dragon-tooth land mine. These are similar to our BLU-43B antipersonnel mines or British Elsies. The Soviets had seeded hundreds of thousands of these and other various mines all over Afghanistan. They were sown indiscriminately—fired from projectors on helicopters and armored vehicles, shot out of howitzers, and dropped from planes. There were so many of them scattered that the Soviets often hadn’t even bothered to conceal them—they knew the inhospitable terrain would take care of that after a couple of months.

  I watched as Nasty made his way up to the mine and dug around it with his Field Fighter. He uncovered the little bugger and then retreated carefully the way he’d come. These were particularly nasty explosive devices. They were irregularly shaped and slightly bigger than golf balls—just nasty enough to take off a foot at the ankle. Shit. I didn’t need this kind of problem tonight.

  We’d have to make a detour—although I had no idea how far the fucking minefield extended. I wasn’t even sure whether or not we’d already strayed into the goddamn minefield. The only thing to do was backtrack at least one klick, then work our way around in a big arc—adding perhaps five to ten miles to our trek. The schedule I’d carefully calculated was now OBE—in other words, Overtaken By Events—and we were clusterfucked.

  I backed off, gave hand signals to tell the men what had happened, and we all retreated very, very carefully, retracing our footsteps as best we could. Six hundred yards back, I bursted Mick Owen to make sure the BA-PP3/I hadn’t been shifted on us—I didn’t need more bad news. We waited until he came back on line to tell me the canisters hadn’t been moved. Then I took the Magellan and punched new coordinates into the keyboard, noted the changes, and showed them to Nasty. He gave me a thumbs-up, then set out moving to the north.

  We moved even more slowly than we had because everyone was now paranoid about mines. Moreover, visibility was hampered because there was no moon. At least that dark cloud had a silver lining: the landscape we were walking over was positively lunar, completely lacking in cover. There was no vegetation, no rock formations, absolutely nothing to give us shelter. If we’d been patrolling by moonlight, we’d have resembled the human silhouette targets I’d used when training SEAL Team Six for night missions. We might as well have had big bull’s-eyes painted on our black coveralls.

  I looked at my watch: 0125. I checked Magellan. We were miles off course and hours behind schedule. Situation normal—all fucked up.

  It was 0420 when an exhausted stevie wonder finally silent-signaled me forward with the arm pump that translated as “enemy ahead.”

  I crept to his position and peered through the range finder. There they were—250 yards away, according to the digital readout. I’d expected tents—you know, like bedouins in Arabia. What I got was houses—you know, like Muslims in Afghanistan. It was a real kick in the balls reality check and a reminder of what happens to you when you’re not on the receiving end of good intel (or, as was the case here, any intel).

  Village was an overstatement. What we had here was the remains of a small village—a warren of perhaps a dozen sun-dried brick huts, some of them visibly decimated by gunfire, others shuttered and boarded up with scrap lumber and other detritus. It looked like any other poor Fourth World village from Asayut to Islamkot—the houses stood cheek by jowl along a single rutted street. There was a small square at the head of the street. On the square stood the twenty-foot minaret of a one-story mosque. The tower had been cut in half by a shell, and the mosque’s roof had pancaked in. No one was going to kneel in prayer there anymore.

  Behind and slightly below the houses lay a slender, winding stream that probably served as the town’s drinking water, outdoor laundry, and main sewer. The stub of a burnt-out tree was silhouetted incongruously in front of the closest house—maybe that had been the village chief’s home. Six utility vehicles were parked randomly in the dirt—whether they were Toyotas or Land Rovers I couldn’t tell in the darkness. But I was buoyed by their presence—at least we’d have some way to haul our butts out of this place when we’d finished our work here.

  About fifty yards past the village was the rusting skeleton of a T-72 Soviet battle tank, minus turret and gun, I could make out two other hulks in the darkness. Obviously, there had been a battle here once. Whether it had been versus the Soviets or the current Afghan government was impossible to tell.

  I cursed Mr. Murphy silently. Doom on Dickie for narrow thinking. I’d assumed we’d be going against tents. Tents are simple. You run a thermal imager over ’em, see which ones are occupied, then hit quick and dirty.

  Huts are hard. Thermal doesn’t penetrate six or eight inches of sun-dried brick. So you have to go door-to-door like a fucking vacuum-cleaner salesman. Knock knock. Anybody home? Yes, you say? Okay—then die, motherfucker.

  We had to work fast. It would be light in less than two hours. When I’d planned this little jaunt, I’d timed our assault for 0400, the best time because that’s when people are sleeping deepest. But because of the minefield and our consequential circumnavigation (now there are a couple of $20 words), it was 0430, and the earliest we’d be able to hit these tangos would be in the 0500 range—which is when light sleepers (like me) tend to get up for their predawn piss.

  And we couldn’t just go shooting and looting by the seats of our pants, blasting away at everything in sight. There are certain formalities that would have to be observed first.

  Like what? you ask. Like reconnaissance, I say. After all, without reconnaissance, we’d be going in blind—and shooting holes in canisters of BA-PP3/I is something I didn’t need right now.

  In fact, to give you some idea why I have a few strands of gray in my hair and beard, let me lead you through a few of the scores of questions running through my mind at 0432 as I stared through my range finder at the huts 250 yards away.

  There were a dozen-plus houses in the village. Were they all occupied? Yes? No? If not, which ones were? How many tangos were there, anyway?

  Where were Lord B and Todd Stewart? Could we take them alive?

  Where were the six containers of anthrax/plague we’d come for? Were they being guarded?

  What kind of weapons were we going up against? Was there a sniper post in the tank shell?

  Had the bad guys scattered land mines or put out any other sort of perimeter defenses?

  Are you getting the picture yet? You are? Good.

  Questions like the ones above are why recon is so basic even the Bible teaches it. So, just as Joshua—a greatly underappreciated SpecWarrior, I might add—had done before he fit de battle of Jericho, I, too, sent out two spies secretly and said, “Go view the land and give me a sitrep.”

  And verily, Tommy and Duck Foot sneakethed and peekethed inside the village and returnethed safely unto my bosom to give me a status report. (Unfortunately for them, they didn’t find anything similar to the harlot Rahab’s house here in good old Afghanistan. Well, that’s fundamental Islam for you—very little sense of humor, no Bombay, and distinct lack of pussy. And you ask why the motherfuckers deserve eradication.)

  Anyway, when they came back to tell me what they’d discovered, they said they’d swept around back and come up the stream, moving through the village like the proverbial shit through the proverbial goose.

  Sitrep? They’d found a pile of opium in the biggest of the huts—scores of burlap bags filled with brown stuff waiting for pickup. That made sense—opium is how much of this jihad wa
s being financed.

  They’d discovered the vehicles were gassed up and ready to go—auxiliary tanks filled to the brim and strapped down, and jerry cans of water stowed behind the rear seats. Conclusion: now that the tangos had their biological warfare goodies, they were going to move out.

  They’d found an improvised shooting range beyond the stream, directly behind the flattened mosque—silhouette targets lying around and lots of 9mm and 7.62 shell casings on the ground. Weapons we’d be facing, then, included AKs and 9mm submachine guns and semiauto pistols. No probs there.

  Occupied houses? At least four—maybe six, according to Duck Foot. They hadn’t wanted to risk compromise by going inside. But from the scuff marks in doorways and general signs of foot traffic, they’d guesstimated four to six houses.

  Numbers inside? No way of telling. Twenty to thirty from the tracks.

  And Lord B? Todd Stewart? “No can say, boss.”

  It occurred to me that neither might be in the village. But what about the satellite—it had tracked the canisters here. Well, I’d assumed (assuming is bad juju, Marcinko) that Lord B would travel with the canisters.

  Yeah? Well, who wrote those rules? Certainly not moi. The consolation was that we knew the BA-PP3/I, which I’d renamed BWR (pronounced beware, and standing for Biological Warfare Rat-shit), was somewhere in the village.

  Also on the positive side, Tommy was happy to report that there were no sentries, booby traps, land mines, barbed wire, or other defensive elements set out. “The place is wide open, Skipper.”

  That made sense. This place was so far inside enemy territory, so out of the way and obviously inaccessible, that very little thought had been given to defense. Remember the Brooklyn cop? “A poip is a poip is a poip.” It had been like this in Libya, too. Muammar baby had been so sure of himself that he’d set up many of his tango training camps with virtually no security measures at all. He was convinced, for example, that no military force could make it unobserved four hundred miles south of the Sidra Gulf to the camp twenty klicks outside Bi’r al Ma’ruf where IRA snipers trained alongside renegade Israelis, CIA turncoats, North Koreans, and Lebanese.

  Of course, Muammar baby didn’t know about Red Cell. It only took six of us. In December 1985, we went off the back steps of an Egyptair 727 at thirty-five thousand feet, parasailed thirty miles, walked another ten, then made hamburger out of sixteen of his best-paid assassins as they slept in their beddy-byes. We exfiltrated in the tangos’ Libyan Army vehicles, running due east 342 miles in eight hours, right across the Egyptian border, before Tripoli had any idea something was amiss. Well, there were six of us tonight, too. Three—Wonder, Rodent, and me—were veterans of the Libyan action.

  0509. Time to go. The best way to do this deed was quick and dirty, keep-it-simple-stupid direct. Thus, the scenario was writ as follows: we’d move in, then we’d kill as many as we could before they realized what was happening. With luck, we wouldn’t blow up the canisters of BA-PP 3/1 while blowing up the malefactors. That way, we’d stay alive and healthy.

  I scratched the basic blueprint for the assault in the dirt and made assignments. We’d hit the houses Tommy and Duck Foot had marked as probables first, then work our way through the rest of them. We’d move in pairs, each with responsibility for a fire field of roughly sixty degrees. That was important. I didn’t want us shooting at each other in the darkness, and because we weren’t carrying walkie-talkies, we’d actually have very little idea where we were from second to second.

  And we’d have to be quick. That’s another Murphy factor. You want an ambush like this to be finished in a span of minutes. No prolonged fire-fights, no drawn-out assaults, no barricade situations. It’s got to be wham, bam, slam—and it’s over. Because if it isn’t, you’re in trouble because you’re probably already outflanked, outgunned, and outnumbered.

  We had another basic problem here. Four to six huts with probables, three pairs of swim buddies. That meant each pair got 1.33 huts at a minimum. Right.

  Three of the probables sat next to each other at the head of the dirt street. They’d been hit by previous gunfire and lacked windows and doors. One of ’em had a gaping shell hole in the middle of the wall. All had been peppered with small-arms fire. The fourth hovel was slightly separated from the others. It had shutters and a door. I gave myself the dirty job of taking it on alone.

  Wonder volunteered for the one at the foot of the street. That was fine by me. Wonder’s always preferred to work solo. I asked him why once. He smiled that goofy Howdy Doody smile of his from behind his mirrored-lens shooting glasses and said slyly, “No witnesses.”

  The remaining two pairs of huts would be covered by Tommy and Duck Foot, and Nasty and Rodent, who would sweep through one then hit the other. Then we’d leapfrog house to house. The clearing method would be the same: toss a grenade in, then follow. I knew the men wouldn’t waste ammo, either. First, they had fire discipline. Second, as I tactfully explained, you never want to get caught holding your dick in your hand in a village full of hostiles.

  The morning’s strategics and mathematics solved, we started our wrist timers, split up, and crept toward our targets. I crabbed slowly, finding what cover I could as I advanced. It’s always the final 25 yards or so that are the most difficult. You’re moving so deliberately, so painstakingly, that it feels as if you’re moving mere inches at a time—which is exactly what you are doing. Moreover, you feel totally exposed. It’s a sensation of complete vulnerability—as if spotlights were bathing you in brightness. Every sound is magnified tenfold. Every scratch of boot on gravel, every breath, every heartbeat, is amplified in your mind to boom-box proportions.

  I wormed my way the last fifteen yards and settled myself under a window over which a battered wood shutter was attached by what looked like baling wire. I lay on my side, stuffed my ears with a pair of disposable foam plugs, adjusted my goggles, then reached up onto my vest and extracted a flash-bang device the size of a 16-oz. beer can. I pulled the pin but held the spoon securely. These flashbangs had four-second fuses. I checked the countdown readout on my digital watch. We’d all set our timers at four minutes before moving out—and there were fifty-two seconds remaining.

  As the timer read eight, seven, six, I let the spoon fly over my shoulder. At five I yanked at the shutter so I could heave the grenade inside. The shutter was attached solidly. I yanked again. Nothing. The goddamn thing was bolted in place, and the flash bang was about to flash and bang in a big way.

  I threw the fucking thing back the way I’d just come. It went off in midair fifteen yards away. Even though I’d hunkered, the two million candlepower flash still worked its magic on my retinas.

  Spots before my eyes, I rushed the door. I was so goddamn mad now that even if the fucking thing had been secured by steel bars, I would have gone through it. I hit it with my foot and the wood splintered.

  I was inside—there was movement to my left. Two of them. It was time for target acquisition—which meant getting the one with the pistol pointed vaguely in my direction first. Except I couldn’t really see him—I was still seeing spots. I squeezed a burst and cut him in half. Lucky me. The AK’s muzzle rose, dammit—fucking AKs always go up and right—and I had to force it down and left to hose tango two. At least I had peripheral vision—I sensed someone to my right. Another tango—he had an AK. Sick and tired of ducking my own ricochets, I kneeled and fired. The impact caught him in the chest and he staggered backward, into the room from which he’d come.

  I followed, firing into the doorway to keep him away. Into the room. The tango was on his back and I put a burst into him to keep him that way. Two rounds went into his body—and then I heard an ominous click.

  The sound of the firing pin falling on an empty chamber after the coup de grâce told me I was out of ammo. Doom on me—because tango number four over there on the far side of the room was leisurely reaching for his own weapon while I fumbled with my magazine release, groped for a full mag, and tried to shove
it up into the housing, then ratchet the charging handle back and chamber a round—all in the space of a second or two.

  He was just sitting on the edge of his bed as if he hadn’t got a fucking care in the world—a huge man with curly blond hair wearing a bright blue thermal sweatshirt and ski underwear. Looked like a fucking Kraut, he did. Whoever he was, he was a pro. The expression on his face told me he knew exactly what was happening. His eyes never left me as I floundered with the AK. He reached up toward his weapon, a submachine gun, hanging from a peg by his cot, a slight smile on his thin lips.

  It was all happening in slow motion. The muzzle was pointed at the ceiling. Ev Barrett’s voice was in my ears. Do not be a fumblefingers, Seaman Marcinko, you shit-for-brains geek asshole.

  His long, muscular left arm reached up. His hand grasped the pistol stock. Take the fucking magazine and shove it into the fucking receiver.

  I was not ready. You are not listening to my instructions, Seaman Marcinko. Your clumsy fingers are not working properly because you cannot control them if you persist in hyperventilating. Your weapon is empty and therefore worthless.

  The gun came down, down, down. Its muzzle swung toward me as he fired one-handed. Seaman Marcinko, you had best seek an alternative method to do this cocksucker in, or you will soon be dead meat.

  The first shots of the burst hosed the wall six feet from my head, spraying me with brick fragments. He paused long enough to bring his right hand onto the gun to steady it.

  Fuck. Talk about dogs that won’t hunt—this AK wasn’t gonna load. What did I need, a fucking memo from the chief of staff to tell me that? I dropped the assault rifle and rolled to my right, away from the sweep of his gun and the deadly swath of rounds.

  I ripped the Glock out of its holster with my right hand and came up shooting. Talk about bad form—I hit him in the toe, the knee, the groin, the right elbow, and the neck. But he went down, still squeezing the trigger as he did, cutting a chewy pattern into the ceiling tile.