The goddamn thing cut through steel like the proverbial hot knife through butter. But it took about seventy seconds to go through each bar—two thirty-five-second cuts. There were eight bars. That was almost ten minutes of cutting time, and we were less than three minutes from H hour. Doom on Dickie. I hit the tit transmitter to let Mick know I was about to be behind schedule and got a gruff “Roger” for my efforts.
Fucking Brits always want to be on time—well, let him come out here and hang by his heels for a while.
The work was hot and uncomfortable. My arms were sore, my hands hurt inside the gloves, and the heat was beginning to take effect on my respirator—I could feel it coming through the rubberized fabric. The weight of the composite helmet was almost unbearable now. It only weighs 925 grams—that’s just over two pounds. But it was strapped tightly around my chin, which jammed the respirator, mike, and earpiece up against my face and neck. It gets uncomfortable when worn for long periods of time—and that’s standing right-side up. I was doing an imitation of a sleeping bat. So, the whole cumbersome apparatus was like a five-pound weight pulling on my neck while I hung upside down. I was going to look like a fucking giraffe before this sorry episode was over.
Six bars down, two to go. I was sweating like—well, like me. Do I sweat heavily? Is the Pope Polish? I could feel the perspiration build. It started between my toes, ran up along my legs, over, around, and through my crotch, seeped upside my waist and back, oozed under my armpits gaining strength and bouquet as it wended its way up my neck, an inexorable, inevitable, unavoidable stream that ran over my Adam’s apple, up my chin, and straight into my big, wide, spaghetti-sucking nostrils, making me choke and gag.
Dickie wanted relief. Dickie wanted a break. “But you’re not gonna get one,” said the Froglike growl of Chief Gunner’s Mate/Guns Everett E. Barrett, in my brain. “Remember how it was back on Vieques Island? You wanted to lie on the beach and drink beer. Instead, I made you clamber up the goddamn coconut palms to pick fronds so you could weave hats. Why? Because it gave you a sense of self-discipline. Remember when you showed me your spit-shined boots, and I made you spit-shine the soles, too, because he who shines only half a shoe is only half a man? That gave you perseverance. Remember when you were hung over and I made you run all those miles in soft sand wearing a twenty-six-pound wet kapok vest to shape your timber? Now listen, Petty Officer Second Class Marcinko, you worthless geek: I didn’t do all of that goddamn character-building for nothing. So, get the fuck back to work. You don’t have to like this shit, you just have to do it.”
As always, the chief was right. I scrunched my neck muscles to ease the strain and kept at it.
Which was fine, until I ran out of acetylene just as I started to make the final cut. I watched the flame sputter out six inches from my nose and mouthed a curse at the gods of war who’d left me hanging (literally, I must remind you) high and dry. No way was I going to be screwed out of my revenge. I dropped the torch and took the bars in my hands, wrenching them violently, screaming obscenities into my respirator mask. I didn’t give a shit—the fucking thing was going to move.
It didn’t budge. That was good-grade steel. I twisted my body, trying to get myself more purchase and leverage. I slid my hands behind the grate, nudged my shoulder into the narrow space between grate and window, and heaved. I could feel things popping in my back, but this was no time to give in to my body. I wrenched at the bars again.
This time I felt a hint of “give.” And yeah, if it weakened, even ever so slightly, I knew in my soul that the fucking thing was mine.
And it finally gave. I twisted it back and forth until I pulled it loose. I was exhausted. I couldn’t get my fingers to release the bars. Finally, I was able to pry them from the metal, and someone above me pulled the grate up and sat it on the roof. Then Wonder and Grundle retrieved me. They pulled me up. I lay on my back, burnt out, gasping, hyperventilating, and totally drained—and we hadn’t even begun our mission yet.
Every bone, every piece of cartilage, every joint in my body, burned and ached and spasmed. I was a wreck. I pulled myself to my knees and made the silent signal for “circle the wagons.” It was time to move out. I pressed the send button attached to my chest and let Mick know we were finally on our way.
0412. Rodent took point. He went down the rope, cut silently through the shards of glass, slipped inside the comm center, checked for booby traps, trip wires, and other possible hazards and, discovering none, took a defensive position at the far side of the room to cover the rest of us as we made our way down and in.
We spread out. Even though it was important to get down to where the hostages were being held on two, I wanted to comb through as much of the debris here as possible to make sure that the tangos hadn’t hidden the canister of BWR and a chunk of C-4 up here. It would have been a perfect place to set off an explosion—because the anthrax would have been carried directly all over metropolitan London. We went over the room inch by inch. I saw that, as I’d suspected, the wounded comm center personnel had been executed with shots to the head. I made a silent vow to the corpses that I’d even the scores.
Nothing. We made our way down the hallway, moving in the single-file “train” we knew so well. Rodent took point, his suppressed MP5 at the ready. Nasty Grundle, the breach man, equipped with an H&K shotgun, followed slightly behind his left shoulder. I followed, four feet behind Grundle. Then came Duck Foot. Wonder provided rear security. The sixth-floor stairs came just after the hallway swung left. We stacked, and Rodent went ahead. He gave the all-clear signal, and we followed.
We moved down the stairwell slowly, working our way in the darkness foot by foot. It was a reverse of Cairo—now we moved down riser by riser, checking for trip wires and other deadly pitfalls. We cleared the fifth floor in a matter of minutes. The offices had been ransacked. Three bodies were in the ops center—Randy Rayman was one of them. He’d gone down with a pistol in his hand, although he hadn’t fired a shot.
Of course he hadn’t. He wasn’t a shooter. He may have been nice, kind, and well-groomed. But when it had come down to the nitty-gritty, he couldn’t pull the trigger. My men always got bad fitness reports from officers like Randy, who thought they were ash-and-trash misfits, rogues, even scum.
But my men and I could—and did—pull the trigger when we had to. That’s why the Navy needs us. They might not like us—but they need us.
There was no anthrax here, either. We swept down the stairs to four. It was clear. We crept to three. Empty. This was going too smoothly for me. Was I being mud-sucked?
Mr. Murphy made his long-awaited appearance in the stairwell between two and three. Rodent tsk-tsked into his mike and called me forward. I went for a look-see.
Nice. I had to hand it to them. Six treads, each with a pressure mat, made it impossible to proceed. The handrail and banister had also been booby-trapped.
It was a well-thought-out bottleneck, a choke point I would have been proud of.
But I wasn’t proud—I was frustrated. I crooked my gloved hand and Wonder and Grundle presented themselves front and center.
“Nu?”
Wonder shrugged. “We go over it, or we go through it.”
“Through?”
“Blow it up, Dickhead.”
That was not an option—we were too far away from the hostages to do that and be able to reach them before the tangos began waxing ’em.
Duck Foot elbowed his way up for a look. I could barely see his eyes behind the respirator mask. But he gave me a thumbs-up and went to work.
He went back to three and rigged a rope line from the fire door down toward our position. He drew the rope tightly around the banister above the booby traps, then flung it—ever so carefully—down below the pressure pads and explosives.
He extracted a length of fish line and a hook from his thigh pocket, knotted the hook and snagged the rope, which he brought back up around the explosives.
Then, he tied the rope off, stored his fish li
ne and hook, and gave me a thumbs-up.
If he’d had tits on his back, I would have married him then and there. In four minutes he’d built us a bridge. It was narrow. It was precarious. But it would work.
Duck Foot went first because he was the best climber. At the bottom, he reversed himself to make sure the landing wasn’t booby-trapped. It wasn’t. So Rodent followed, then Wonder, then Nasty, then me. Why did I go last when I always talk about leading from the front? Because I have the biggest butt—so if anyone was going to trip the explosives, it would have been me.
We set ourselves up. I worked the radio to let Tommy know we were—finally—in position. I could hear the relief in his voice.
“Minus fifteen seconds,” he told me.
We hunkered down and waited, counting. This was make-or-break time. We knew what had to be done—the question was whether we could beat the clock.
There is nothing that quite describes the madness and chaos of a hostage-rescue assault. Speed and surprise are the two keys to success. Disorienting the hostage takers is paramount. So flash-bang devices are important because of the amount of noise and light they create. Gunfire, too, can be of help.
There were explosions as Mick’s troopers came through the first-floor windows. The instant we heard the flash-bangs come through the second floor, we moved.
I led the way. I tossed three flash-bangs ahead of me and shielded my eyes as they went off. I moved through the rising smoke.
A tango blocked the hall. I brought him down with a three-round burst. I saw another. I shot him, too. A third man appeared, and Nasty cut him in two with a blast from the shotgun. Unit fucking integrity—we knew where each other’s fields of fire were so we could literally shoot over one another’s head without incident.
With Stevie Wonder at my heels I rushed the hall, heading for the conference room. The others would clear the other offices as they followed.
As I hit the heavy wood door and tossed my last flash-bang, things started to move in slow motion. I could pick out the hostages, sitting, hands clasped behind their heads, in a clump at the far side of the room, below the big windows that looked out on Grosvenor Square. I screamed at them not to move, not to get up, to suck the floor, but my voice was squelched by my respirator—not to mention the 185 decibels of the “bang” portion of the device.
It went off with an incredible boom—the concussion broke glass, showering the room with deadly shards. The orange-white explosion hit like a goddamn firestorm. Sparks flew everywhere. The drapes above the big window started to smolder—in a matter of seconds they’d caught on fire.
But the device did its job—the asshole holding an MP5 had dropped to his knees, his hands moving toward his ears because he hadn’t had any hearing protection.
But he was wearing body armor, so I stitched him upside the head with a three-round burst. April fool, motherfucker.
I cut to my right, my back to the wall, and moved around the perimeter of the room. That was the prearranged plan. Wonder would be performing the same choreography on the opposite side. Our field of fire was always the same, forty-five degrees, which gave us an overlapping kill zone without shooting either ourselves or the hostages.
I put my back into the corner of the room and slid ninety degrees south. “Wonder—corner!”
“Yo. Roger.” He’d made the turn, too.
Two three-round bursts from Wonder’s side. Then two more. He was earning his money today.
I wanted to clear the goddamn room fast. There were too many unanswered questions. Where the fuck was the BWR container? Had they wired the hostages? But we had to proceed by the numbers.
At least things were going well for Mick’s lot. I heard the radio chatter and knew they’d secured the basement. No anthrax container, and all the hostages clear.
They were sorting them out now—rushing them out the building, flinging them prone on the street, and going over them one by one to make sure no bad guys were among ’em.
I saw something going on at four o’clock. Two shapes through the smoke. I let the MP5 drop on its sling, reached down, and brought up my Glock—but they’d disappeared. I moved like a fencer, sliding along the wall foot by foot, through the fog, the laser cutting a swath around me right-left, left-right.
Movement again. A shape in front of me. No time to aim. The laser touched the shadow and I fired twice, ba-blam, then dropped into a prone position.
Two inches above my head, three rapid shots vaporized the wood paneling. Shit. This asshole was good. He’d either tracked the muzzle flash or the laser.
Things were getting precarious. I knew that if I moved into the center of the room Wonder might, could, and would take me for a hostile and wax my nasty Slovak ass.
But there was really no other way to take this one down. So I dove five, maybe six feet into the room—dinging my elbows and knees nicely on the parquet floor in the process—rolling to my right (his left), came up on one sore knee, and hit the laser sight. He was four feet away, still calmly shooting at the wall where I’d been.
Gotcha! I was Admiral Horatio Fucking Nelson. I was John Paul Fucking Jones. Because I had the cockbreath broadside in my sights. Ready your cannons. All the frustrations I’d experienced in the past hours—hanging upside down, cutting the goddamn bars, wrenching my back out—threaded their way out of my brain, flooded through my nervous system, and dumped into my arms and hands, down into my right index finger, which staged the Glock’s six-pound trigger. Aim your cannons. Oh, I was pumping— a steady 140 at least. Fire your cannons. But I held the fucking gun steady enough to put three shots into him. Head, neck, and armpit. He dropped in his tracks.
I put one more in his head to make sure he wouldn’t get up. Like Admiral J. P. Jones, I hadn’t begun to fight yet, either.
I heard Nasty on my earpiece. He, Duck Foot, and Rodent had their rooms cleared. Now they were moving toward us.
This was the ticklish part. See, you’re going at top speed. In fact, it’s taken me longer to tell this all to you than it took to do it. Plus, the more bodies you add, the more confusing it gets.
But what the fuck—I could use some help. We had forty or so hostages huddled here, and they were beginning to make the wrong noises—like they wanted to get out. I called them in, letting them know—more or less—where Wonder and I were.
“Nasty—blow the windows.”
That would help vent the place, so we could see what the hell we were doing.
I heard four quick blasts of Grundle’s H&K breaching shotgun, and the smoke started to clear. When it had gone from cumulus to cirrus, I ripped the respirator from my face and shouted, “Everybody down—facedown on the fucking floor.”
The hostages didn’t seem to think I was talking to them, so I hosed the wall four feet above their heads with my MP5. They sucked parquet.
“Spread-eagle—hands and feet out—out, out!” I kicked at a recalcitrant body to make sure my directions were being followed to the letter. The hostages lay on the floor, facedown, spread-eagled. I radioed Tommy to send reinforcements quick.
Now we moved among them, our weapons at the ready. Rodent, Nasty, and Duck Foot stood watch, Glocks aimed, triggers staged, lasers pointed at vital parts, as Wonder and I frisked the hostages one by one, stem to stern.
There is no way to be either gentle or genteel when you’re doing this. When I commanded Red Cell, we taught the base security commands how to frisk someone correctly. Women security operatives, for example, are often squeamish about frisking men’s crotches. They can’t be. Neither can men be shy about working around a woman’s breasts and crotch.
Believe me, it isn’t sexual harassment, it’s life insurance. Many’s the time my men would conceal a.22 or a grenade in their Skivvies because they knew women officers wouldn’t want to grope them. Many’s the time we used a woman to carry weapons for us because we knew the sailors doing the frisking wouldn’t touch her tits.
Who was a hostage and who was a tango? There was no
way of knowing for sure. So we worked everyone over, searching for weapons, explosives, and booby traps. Everyone—even those people I knew.
I let Wonder have fun with Pinky—he was halfway to giving him a goddamn proctoscopy by the time I waved him off.
Pinky didn’t see anything funny about the situation, either. No sooner did we get the tape off his mouth than he began making a pain of himself. He started yelling and screaming for someone to come and arrest me.
By now, gentle reader, you will have realized—even so, it pains me to admit this—that perhaps I’m not the world’s most tender, understanding, empathetic chap. Perhaps you’ve noticed I’m not big on Phil Donahue huggie-cuddily-touchie-feelie shit.
But I gotta tell you, even my sandpaper sensitivities were bruised by Pinky’s rude, unthoughtful, intemperate outburst. I mean, here I’d just saved his ass. We’d come a long way to do it, too—halfway around the world, give or take a few hundred miles. We’d just performed a successful, I might even say virtually letter-perfect, hostage-rescue take-down.
So far as I knew, we hadn’t lost a fucking hostage—I glared at Pinky—hadn’t lost one yet, that is. But here, as if to tempt me toward mayhem, was this pompous three-star asshole—who’d been so scared a few hours ago that he’d pissed in his pants—braying at all and sundry to come and clap me in irons, drag me away, and shut me in a cell pending some sort of summary court-martial where he’d have all the votes.
Such lack of tact made me despair, especially when you consider that Pinky was allegedly an officer and a gentleman.
So I brought the subject up. “Really, Pinky, that’s no fucking way to say thank you” is how I phrased it.
And, since there was further work to do, and since I’d made my feelings known, and since there was nothing left to say (and since Pinky chose to ignore me), I took my normal direct—some might even call it rogue—approach. I wheeled, set him up with my left hand, and—whop!—coldcocked the son of a bitch.
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