RW03 - Green Team

by Richard Marcinko

  I know, I know—where’s all that bull’s-eye stress shooting you’re always talking about? you ask.

  Listen, bub—the object is to shoot ‘em dead. Form and neatness don’t count here. The motherfucker was down. I put a round into his head to make sure he stayed where he was. I checked myself for bumps and bruises—the back of my neck had been cut by something sharp—retrieved the AK, and shoved another magazine into it (without, of course, so much as a whisper of a problem), checked the hut to make sure I’d finished them all, then moved on.

  I hauled ass fifty feet down the street and linked up with Wonder, who reported that he’d taken out six tangos with no problem. Of course, his fucking flash-bang had gone where he’d tossed it. We moved slowly back up 150 feet of mud street, keeping close to the buildings in the early-morning half-light, our weapons ready.

  A sense of déjà vu came over me. I was back in Chau Doc on the first morning of the Tet Offensive with Eighth Platoon from SEAL Team Two, rooting VC out of the city, street-to-street and door-to-door with my asshole buddy Mike Regan protecting my six.

  Stevie slid in front of me and took point. A shadow moved. He fired from the hip, bringing it down. Bullets sprayed the wall behind us. I saw muzzle flash from the burnt-out T-72 and sprayed the tank skeleton. Wonder pulled the pin on a willy peter. I watched the spoon spronng, and then he tossed it—a great baseball pitch that went fifty yards smack-dab on target just behind the tank.

  It exploded in a huge white fireball. There were simultaneous screams. A burning figure silhouetted against the sky, then collapsed. Another tango down. I gave Wonder’s shoulder a slam, and we advanced cautiously.

  Something ahead of me moved. I squeezed the AK’s trigger and brought it down. The whole village was in complete chaos now—explosions, smoke, flames, and choppy bursts of automatic-weapons fire were everywhere. It was like being back in Vietnam, before the days of lip mikes, earpieces, and miniradios. We’d worked out the areas of responsibility and the fields of fire. So whatever crossed our sights was going to be presumed hostile. If it moved, we’d obliterate it.

  That’s the way it has to be when you go in at four- or five- or six-to-one odds. As that great American patriot and balls-to-the-wall warrior Colonel Charlie Beckwith put it about the time he led Delta Force on the Tehran rescue mission, “You kill them all and let God sort it out.”

  Within minutes, it was over. Quickly, we went back over the bodies, making sure that none of the tangos were playing possum. Each got a bullet in the head—that was our insurance.

  We formed up sweaty, dirty, and bloody in front of the ruined mosque and hunkered on the ground, totally exhausted. Frankly, we’d come away better than I’d expected. Tommy’d been nicked in the thigh. Bullet went clean through without hitting bone, but he was going to be one sore puppy if he tried to run any marathons in the next few days. He’d already popped himself with morphine and penicillin and was feeling neither pain nor gain. Nasty’s left earlobe had been shot away. No more earrings for him. He was bleeding like a motherfucker, though—worse than Tommy T. By the time we got the blood stopped, his ear was wrapped in so many layers of bandage it looked like a small cauliflower.

  Aside from those two, we were in good shape—if you didn’t count the stress, dehydration, bumps, lumps, contusions, battle deafness (you think firing all those rounds doesn’t affect your hearing? Huh, huh, huh—what are you saying?), and other normal wear-and-tear items.

  I bursted Mick to let him know we’d hit our target, and I’d report on what we found ASAP. Then we went through the camp with the proverbial fine-tooth comb, sorting things out.

  The thorough search of the village brought me to the conclusion that Lord Brookfield and Todd Stewart were not among the bodies, nor were they hiding anywhere. Well, at least the world was now home to thirty-two fewer tangos than it had been a few short minutes ago. They weren’t all Islamic fundamentalists, either. We confirmed our suspicions when we examined the collection of papers, passports, and other documents we gathered from the huts and corpses. Most of those we’d killed were from Islamic countries. There were five Egyptians, four Moroccans, four Algerians, one Saudi, even a Yemenite (you know what they say about them—every day a holiday, every night a Yemenite).

  But there was unmistakable evidence of CNO’s transnational-terrorism theory, too. We’d slam-dunked four Germans, a pair of Frenchmen, half a dozen Russians, a trio of Italians, and—most unsettling to me—a pair of Americans whose New Jersey driver’s licenses showed Newark addresses. I made a mental note to pass their names on to Tony Mercaldi at DIA—when, that is, I could talk to Merc without getting myself arrested. Detailed inspections of the quarters where the Americans had been housed and the garbage dump revealed further bad news: evidence of three or four other Americans.

  Why did I think they were Americans? Well, friends, when you use toiletries that have been made in the good old you ess of A, and you leave behind house-brand double-A batteries that come from a supermarket chain headquartered just outside Washington, D.C., and your empty prescription vial lists a pharmacy in Gaithersburg, Maryland, then I say you’re either an American or you’re living in America or you’re leaving a very well thought-out false trail. If I’d discovered everything in the hooch, I’d have gone for the false-trail theory. But because the garbage was buried and layered, just as archaeologists discover garbage from ancient Rome or Greece, I tended to believe that it was real, and that a quartet of Americans had recently departed the camp—probably with Brookfield.

  Something else had departed the camp as well: there were only five canisters of BWR. One had already started on its deadly odyssey. But where? With the Americans? With Brookfield? There was no way to know.

  I went through the camp again. It was like all the other tango training camps I’d seen in Libya, Lebanon, and Sudan—bare essentials and a lot of ammunition, all tucked away in a remote, inhospitable location. Given Lord B’s resources, why the hell couldn’t he have found a better place? The answer, of course, was because out here in the middle of the Afghan wilderness, no one would bother him and his men as they trained. Here, he was protected by the mullahs.

  I hunkered down outside one of the huts and fingered a few of the documents we’d captured. We’d been lucky to have hit them when we had. All the tangos had air tickets and travel documents. Obviously, they’d been waiting for Lord B and his six deadly care packages to arrive. Then—according to the paperwork we’d found—each team would head in a different direction.

  The Germans had been on their way to Bonn within hours. In their baggage were detailed maps of government buildings, with the security positions marked in red pencil, as well as stakeout studies, showing the schedules of guards and police patrols. They even carried a small notebook in which had been written their list of demands. Tommy translated. Among other things, they were going to call for the creation of a fundamentalist Muslim enclave in Germany. I checked the Egyptians’ papers. They were from Cairo. Their passports had Pakistani visas, just as Mahmoud Azziz’s had.

  Was this the very camp Azziz had been heading for when we’d snatched him in Cairo? God, the Cairo op seemed years ago—in reality it had been mere weeks. Could the world have changed that much since? It was altogether possible. The world, after all, is strange. The world, after all, is fucked up.

  The Egyptians were packing a hand-drawn map. Their notes were in Arabic, but the target they were after was obviously a big government complex somewhere in Cairo. They, too, had written demands, which Duck Foot was able to read—the resignation of the Egyptian president and the creation of a fundamentalist republic. I continued checking papers. Everybody was carrying maps, diagrams, and demands. The Russians were off to Moscow. The Moroccans were heading for Fez. The Frenchies and Italians were on their way to Geneva—they were carrying maps of the U.N. complex.

  You may consider all this concrete, written evidence foolish on the tangos’ part—a mere fictional device we’re using to keep the plo
t working. Well, friends, I’ve been there, and I can tell you in no uncertain terms that terrorists tend to keep very complete records of what they do.

  Why did the anarchist who threw the bomb that killed Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo back in 1914 keep a diary? Why did Mao Zedong keep notes and journals on his Long March more than half a century ago? Why did the PLO have more than two tons of paperwork—memos, phone messages, receipts, even doodles—detailing terrorist actions stored safely in bunkers in West Beirut back in 1982?

  Why? Who knows why. All I can say is that, from the FMLN in El Salvador to the Tamil Tigers, from the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine to the Red Brigades, tangos write down everything they do.

  Maybe it provides them a feeling of immortality. Maybe it validates their actions. I’m no psychiatrist, so I can’t say.

  What I do know is that because they put things on paper, my own work becomes easier. I can learn what tangos are thinking. I can peer inside their hearts and minds to find a pattern that I can use against them.

  I contacted Mick just after 0750, to transmit a list of names off the passports we’d gathered, as well as other information that confirmed my initial suspicions about the camp’s purpose. I told him we’d captured five canisters of BWR, but one was still at large, as was Lord B.

  Brookfield, Mick radioed, was back in the U.K. He’d arrived a few hours ago, with five companions.

  I did a little mental calculating. Lord B was flying a Gulfstream IIIA with auxiliary gas tanks. That gave it a 5,800-mile range. I knew that from firsthand experience. After all, Red Cell had flown Matsuko Machine’s Gulfstream back to the States after we’d taken out Hideo Ikigami and recovered the Navy’s stolen Tomahawk missiles, all of which you should remember from Rogue Warrior: Red Cell.

  I punched numbers into the Magellan keyboard and watched as the display came up. The Gulfstream IIIA cruises at 550 miles per hour. According to Magellan, the air routing from Kabul to London was a mere 4,352 miles. Even my slow Slovak mind could do the mental calculation: seven and a half hours flying time—let’s say eight and a half in case of headwinds.

  It was 0825 now. We’d been on the ground since 1945 last night—more than twelve hours. Shit—that gave Brookfield more than enough time to fly home. It wasn’t inconceivable that he’d been tucked in his beddy-bye in Hampstead while we’d been conducting our recon of this godforsaken place at 0-dark-hundred.

  That brought me up short. Then Brookfield’s plan became clear—he’d taken the missing Americans with him, and they were planning to attack the U.S. embassy in London. Evidence in hand? None. Gut instinct? Absolute. Had to be. I bursted Mick. I told him that Brookfield was planning to attack the American embassy and that Mick had to get the word out and take preventive action immediately. I could almost hear the “gulp” on the other end when I finished my transmission. But he gave me a “Roger, roger,” and then the radio went dead»

  He’d be a busy bugger over the next few hours—but then, so would I.

  My plans made, I set Rodent, Duck Foot, and Wonder to work. We rigged the bodies with explosives and grenades, setting a series of ingenious booby traps and IEDs just in case anyone got nosy.

  When those were done, the six of us dug a fifteen-by-twenty foot pit, nine feet deep. We used whatever scrap we could find to line the sides and bottom. We carefully laid the canisters of BA-PP3/I right in the center. Then we schlepped bags of opium from their hut and piled them atop the BWR. We found a beat-up pallet and used it to tamp the whole thing as best we could.

  While they dug, I formed all the remaining plastique into one huge piece of putty, which I crammed inside a 110mm shell casing I found near the T-72, thus making what we old Frogs in the Teams used to call a shaped charge. See, by shaping the charge, the explosive force of the C-4 becomes very, very focused. In fact, according to a completely unclassified portion of the current U.S. Navy operations manual, what I was doing would give the C-4 a 60 percent “kick” in potency—similar in power to the shaped charges we’d been supplied at SEAL Team Two to destroy nuclear weapons.

  I wanted a powerful explosion—something that would destroy the whole town with its concussion and also vaporize the cans of BWR. The deadly anthrax would be scattered over a hundred square miles of northwestern Afghanistan. But not for some days, if things went according to my design.

  When I’d finished stuffing and tamping, Nasty and Wonder inserted a pair of electronic detonators into the neck of the shell casing. Tommy, who’d been playing with the radio, attached an improvised remote-control firing device. We ran the antenna up to the surface, strung it along the ground, and ran it up the mosque’s minaret. Then we filled the pit in again.

  We’d be leaving now. We packed our gear, loaded all the tango paperwork into sacks, and clambered aboard a trio of Toyota Land Cruisers. Exfiltration would be reasonably simple. We’d move south down the ravine, following the stream to the Jalalabad-Asadabad highway, then swing north to Sarkani—about twenty-five klicks. At Sarkani, we’d veer south before we reached the town proper, then link up with a gravel road that crossed the Pakistani border at a lightly manned checkpoint. We’d have no problems—and if we did, we were carrying enough firepower to decimate an entire company.

  From the border, we’d go through the Nawagi Pass and slip down into Peshawar. From there—we’d improvise.

  There was a small rise three klicks south of the camp. I held up my hand and our vehicles stopped just long enough for me to set the electronic detonator to ninety-six hours and turn the switch to ON.

  I jumped down and made my way up a small rise one hundred yards from the road and concealed the transmitter behind an outcropping of small rocks.

  I wiped the dust from my hands, returned to the vehicle, jumped in behind the wheel, and gunned the Land Cruiser’s engine. It was time to move.

  Seventy-something hours after we crossed the pakistani border we hauled ourselves over the barbed-wire fence of the FAMFUC into Mick Owen’s waiting arms. How did we do it? you ask. How did six wanted men travel halfway around the world without getting caught? The answer, my friends, is depressingly simple. We did it the same way terrorists do it.

  In the Third and Fourth World, you can buy your way across borders—and besides, nobody really cares, just so long as you have lots of things stamped in your passport for them to examine. In fact, Marcinko’s First Law of Travel states that the more backward the society, the more stamps they’ll put in your passport.

  In Europe, there are no borders anymore. It’s easy to go from city to city, country to country. There are no thorough passport checks, no visas or travel permits necessary. Society is open. That makes it easy to move—for good guys and for bad guys as well.

  But the system, you say. All those computers. All those modern identification methods—what about them?

  Well, gentle reader, all the computers and all the sophisticated systems in the world are only as good as the people working them. And when the people working them don’t pay attention, shit happens.

  You want an example of such a clusterfuck? Okay. Remember when a couple of F-15s shot down a pair of NATO Blackhawk choppers in northern Iraq a few years back? Despite the fact that there was an AWACs plane flying overhead, and that everyone supposedly knew the IFF—Identification Friend/Foe—signals, the F-15s smoked the Blackhawks. That’s the perfect example of shit happening, of things falling through the cracks because attention isn’t being paid to detail (either that or it was a case of coldblooded murder).

  But Iraq was a military operation you say, and military operations are always subject to Murphy’s Law. Okay, take Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman—please. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, he’s the blind Egyptian fundamentalist cleric who was charged as the mastermind behind the bombing of New York’s World Trade Center.

  Consider this: even though Rahman was listed by the Department of State as a terrorist suspect, he got a U.S. entry visa when he applied for one.

  How’d he d
o that? Simple. Instead of applying in Cairo, Paris, Rome, or London, where all visa applications are checked on a computer database, Rahman traveled to Khartoum, Sudan. Sudan may be one of the main centers of world terrorism according to most of the world’s intelligence agencies. But obviously, it’s not a place where the State Department was concerned about terrorism. How do I know that? Because the agency hadn’t bothered to install the antiterrorism computer database there.

  Bottom line? The consul went through a months-old loose-leaf book and looked for Rahman’s moniker—which wasn’t there—checked his name with the resident Christian in Action gumshoe, who didn’t see anything amiss, and then stamped his visa U.S. Government Approved.

  No prob, Sheikh Omar—go to it. Blow up our whole fucking country if you want to.

  Well, we coasted through the cracks by going hi-diddlediddie, straight down the middle, too. We flew first-class from Peshawar to Paris, caught the train to the Channel ferry, and slipped into Britain with the rest of the EC day-trippers.

  We got to the FAMFUC by 1140. Mick’s watchers had put Brookfield’s house under surveillance an hour after I’d transmitted from Afghanistan. So far, however, it had been a bust—Brookfield was following his normal schedule of meetings with government officials, lunches at one of his clubs, and afternoon paperwork. There had been no suspicious meetings, no phone calls, no nothing. “Why can’t we just go in and bust the son of a bitch?” I wondered aloud.

  Because, Mick said, when you have as many friends in high places as Ishmael, Lord Brookfield, it’s a great way to end a career.

  “But the embassy’s been secured.”

  “Not exactly,” said Mick.

  What the fuck was going on?

  He explained that he’d passed a message through channels, and that the Threatcon had been raised from Alpha to Bravo. But that since there had been no direct evidence, the State Department had refused to go any further. “The regional security officer told me the ambassador didn’t want to make a fortress out of the embassy,” Mick said. “There was very little I could do.”