RW03 - Green Team

by Richard Marcinko

  A Commando’s Guide to Success

  RICHARD MARCINKO

  Richard Marcinko’s explosive #1 New York Times bestselling autobiography, Rogue Warrior, chronicled the wild, death-defying adventures of his thirty controversial years as a Navy commando. Now Marcinko blasts other self-help guides out of the water. In LEADERSHIP SECRETS OF THE ROGUE WARRIOR, he shows how anyone can apply the skills he has honed throughout his remarkable career to the challenges of business and everyday life.

  Coming Soon in Hardcover from Pocket Books BOOKS

  Pocket Books

  Proudly Presents

  ROGUE WARRIOR:

  TASK FORCE BLUE

  Richard Marcinko

  and

  John Weisman

  Coming from

  Pocket Books Hardcover

  March 1996

  The following is a preview of

  Rogue Warrior: Task Force Blue …

  I

  T HAS BEEN SAID THAT GETTING THERE IS HALF THE FUN. I

  f so, it must have been time to Get There already, because I was in real bad need of some fun. To help things along, I finished my quarter-mile, early-morning slog and emerged from the slimy-bottomed salt pond into the cool March Florida rain, looking, feeling, and (more significantly) smelling very much like your unfriendly Creature from the Black Lagoon.

  I drained sour, brackish water from my ballistic goggles. I shook sediment from the HK USP 45-caliber pistol strapped to my right thigh in a nylon tactical holster. I squeezed as much moisture as I could from my French braid, retied the black cotton “Do” rag around my hair, slipped the rubber radio earpiece into my ear, wrestled with the wire lip-mike that ran from the earpiece around my face under my mustache (it wanted to take up residence inside my right nostril, not above my lip, where it belonged). I pulled a soggy, fleece-lined nomex balaclava over my head, and then adjusted the forty pounds of Class IIIA Plus Point Blank load-bearing body armor that had slowed me like a sea-anchor while fording the pond, making me feel as if I’d been up to my 17-and-a-half-inch neck in deep you-know-what.

  The armor itself comes in at less than ten pounds—even when it’s wet. The real weight was from the dozen or so modular, custom-made pouches filled with everything from my ever-present Emerson CQC6 titanium-framed combat folding knife, my waterproof tactical radio, miniature 100-lumen Sure Fire flashlight, and four DEF-TEC No. 25 flashbang distraction devices, to the two dozen Flexicuffs, the half-dozen door wedges, the roll of surgical tape, the fifty feet of climbing rope, the eight magazines filled with eighty rounds of MagSafe Plus-P frangible SWAT loads, the lightweight surgical steel pry bar, the twenty feet of shaped ribbon charge and three electronic detonators, the—well, you get the idea. I was loaded like a fucking pack-SEAL.

  Anyway, I got the goddamn thing shifted around to where it should have been, reattached the Velcro flap as quietly as was possible (old-fashioned canvas web gear with all those buckles and laces does have a certain tactical advantage—in a word: silence), then began to crab forward, moving slowly, steadily, across the wet tarmac a few inches at a time, thinking all the while what an incredible batch of fun I was having Getting There.

  There was 150 yards away, at the very end of the taxiway where, almost invisible through the sheets of wind-whipped driving rain that stung my face, a 727 containing eighty-three passengers and crew of seven that had been hijacked out of San Juan and landed here in Key West sat, an immobile shadow in the darkness. Its tires had been shot out six hours ago, when the pilot had been ordered to take off for parts unknown and actually taxied the aircraft this far before the locals reacted. About an hour ago, the aft stairway had been lowered, and a lone terrorist armed with what we’d determined (at 1500 yards, thank you very much, through our 40-power night-vision spotting scopes) was a new model Colt 633HB 9-mm submachine gun, was standing wet and miserable sentry duty under the tail.

  It was my nasty assignment (shades of Mission Impossible) to sneak up without being seen or heard, wrest control of the aircraft from the bad guys, rescue the passengers, pat the stews—excuse me, the flight attendants—on their lovely, firm behinds, then climb back on my stallion, the fearless white charger Cockbreath, and ride out of town, while everybody’d look at one another and inquire, “Who the hell was that nasty-looking Slovak masked man with the ponytail and the bunch of renegade sidekicks, anyway?”

  Yeah, I know, I know—you’re asking what the f-word is Demo Dickie Marcinko, Shark Man of the Delta, the old Rogue Warrior, radio handle Silver Bullet, doing here, up to his bad ass in slime and tangos (which is radio talk for terrorists, for those of you who haven’t read our last three books), when he could be back at Rogue Manor, enjoying his 200-plus acres, sitting in the outside Jacuzzi with a yard-wide smile and a yard-long hard-on, holding a huge tumbler of Dr. Bombay’s best Sapphire on the rocks, bookended by a couple of big-bazoomed hostesses from Hooters doing the bare-bottomed, wet-T-shirt thing in my ozone-filtered, 100-degree water.

  Well, friends, the simple answer is that one of those eighty-three passengers on, well, let’s call it Pan World Airways Flight 1252, originating in Bogota, Colombia, and continuing through San Juan, Puerto Rico, Atlanta, Georgia, Charlotte, North Carolina, and terminating in Washington, D.C., was the Honorable 35-year-old S. Lynn Crawford, a registered democrat and professional fund-raiser, and—as of twelve weeks ago—our most recently appointed Secretary of the Navy.

  Among the other hostages was a pair of what the descriptive memo-writers might call highly qualified, well-trained Naval Investigative Service security agent personnel. In other words, a pair of pus-nutted shit-for-brained pencil-dicked no-load NIS assholes who go to the range twice a year, spend all their time writing memos, and tend to panic at the first sign of crisis.

  Why had the Hon. S. Lynn gone to Bogota in the first place? Who knew. More accurately, who cared. Such policy decisions are determined way beyond my pay grade—which is 0-6, or captain. The only fact that mattered to me was that SECNAV was now at the mercy of somewhere between six and who-knew-how-many nasties, armed to the teeth with bad-boy weapons and functional explosive devices, and that as the OIC—that’s Officer-In-Charge—of the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group subsidiary known as Unconventional Taskings/Risks, United States, acronymed UT/ RUS (and pronounced, with obvious SEAL political correctness, as uterus), it was my unenviable job to extract her exalted, sub-Cabinet-level butt out of there—preferably in one piece.

  It might also occur to you to ask what the hell the SECNAV was doing flying tourist class on a cut-rate airline, when the Navy has all those perfectly good (not to mention reasonably secure) aircraft at its disposal. The answer—I guess I have time right now to explain, even though you’ve probably surmised the answer already, because it’s so obvious—is politics.

  See, back in the early days of this particular administration, some of the more self-important, unelected White House and Pentagon panjandrums took it upon themselves to requisition military aircraft for occasional golf outings, speechifying jaunts to such hardship posts as Florida, Europe, and Hawaii, pussy-chasing boondoggles to Barbados, and other sundry nonofficial voyages. Then, the notorious journalist & junkyard dog, Samuel Andrew Donaldson of ABC News, blew the whistle on his Prime Time Live show. Within twenty-four hours, a polysyllabic dictum depth-charged from on high. It caromed around the White House West Wing, through the Old Executive Office Building, and finally detonated right in the middle of the Pentagon, creating the kind of ego devastation not seen in Washington since Jimmy Carter was president.

  When the decree had finally been ground down into the sort of one-and-two syllable gist I understand, I took note. Let me give you said gist in translation: “No More Fucking Riding on Fucking MILCRAFT [that’s MIlitary airCRAFT in Pentagonspeak], unless the fucking travel orders have been fucking signed by the fucking supreme Commander-In-Fucking-Chief and Leader of the Free Fucking World himself.”

  This has left the service secretaries, their
deputies, their deputies’ deputies, their military assistants, and other assorted bureaucrats—not to mention scores of two, three, and four-starred brass—to the untender mercies of commercial air travel. Now, I’m not a big believer in perks. But if you were to ask me, rank—certainly someone who has been appointed SECNAV—should have a bit of privilege every now and then. Especially when security is concerned—and flights into and out of Colombia, where Coke Is It, certainly seem to fit that category.

  But then, nobody ever asks my opinion. I’d never even seen a picture of the goddamn SECNAV before they handed me a publicity photo six hours earlier. The only time my cage door gets opened is when FUBARs like this happen, and they need someone to quickee-quickee makee-makee all better.

  Which is why I was currently dressed in my workaday party-time outfit of basic black sans pearls: the always-popular ensemble of Nomex balaclava, rip-stop BDUs, and body armor, not to mention the ever-fashionable high-top, currently squishy, black Reebok aerobic shoes. It also is why I was in my normal condition: cold, wet, uncomfortable, and dinging various extremities on rough macadam.

  I stopped to listen for anything untoward. Nothing. I resumed my crawl. So far, the mission was going perfectly. Of course, we’d been out of the salt pond for less than a minute.

  The rain drummed steadily, whipped into stinging ball bearings by the 20-mile-per-hour winds. That was good news and bad news. The good news: it meant that the fifty or so TV cameras atop their microwave trucks just outside the airport perimeter fence would have a hard time catching any of this early-morning action. The rain also would help stifle any ambient sound we made as we approached the plane.

  The bad news was that it would make our assault highly goatfuck prone, because everything we carried, touched, or assaulted was going to be as wet and slippery as a horny eighteen-year-old cheerleader’s pussy on homecoming weekend. From the wings we’d have to traverse, to the ladders we’d be climbing, to the emergency handles we’d have to ease open without alerting the tangos inside, this was one big cluster f-word waiting to happen.

  Two yards behind me, Machinist Mate First Class Stevie Wonder’s lean, mean body inched forward as he wormed his way across the black taxiway armed and dangerous. Ever the fashionable dirt-bag, he was dressed to kill. Literally. I turned to make sure he was keeping up. When he threw me a one-fingered salute I knew everything was okie-doakie. Hot on Wonder’s tail (and joined by the ladder they carried between them), Doc Tremblay, master chief hospitalman and sniper, slithered steadily in the darkness, his long handlebar mustache moving like antennae as he crawled on padded knees and elbows, a suppressed HK slung over his back.

  Behind Doc and Wonder, seven more shooters completed my lethal contingent. Senior Chief Nasty Nicky Grundle was rear security, protecting our six with his omnipresent Heckler & Koch MP5-PDW suppressed submachine gun. In front of him crawled Duck Foot Dewey, Cherry Enders, Half Pint Harris, Piccolo Mead, Gator Shepard, and the Rodent. Each pair of my UT/ RUS swim buddies was responsible for carrying one of our four padded assault ladders.

  I would have liked another seven men for the assault, but like the thin gent sings, ya cain’t always git whatcha wont, and I didn’t have another seven men. So we’d simply do the job with the shooters on-scene. We’d had enough time to rehearse on a 727—albeit a 727-200, not the older 727-100 sitting out here in the rain—that was stowed inside a hangar we’d commandeered as our HQ. That way we’d been able to refresh our beer-sodden, pussy-whipped memories about how to open the exit windows and doors, ease onto the wings without shaking the fuselage, and get inside the cabin without tripping over all the assorted ratshits, batshits, catshits, widgets, midgets, and other miscellaneous paraphernalia that’s normally stuffed, tied, gorged, screwed, crammed, bolted, wedged, and taped inside airplane cabins.

  The one question that nagged me most in the ten hours since I’d arrived was precisely how many tangos we’d encounter. There had been no intelligence about that most crucial element of hostage rescue since the plane had landed on Key West International’s single runway just over fifteen hours earlier.

  Okay, then, what did I know? Well, I knew very little more than what the rest of the world knew: that PWA 1252 had left Bogota at 0710, arrived in San Juan two-and-a-half hours later, departed for Atlanta at 1100 hours, and was hijacked nineteen minutes later, just north of the Dominican Republic.

  I’d listened to a tape of the pilot’s initial transmission. It had been brief and to the point: “San Juan center, this is PWA 1252 November. We have half a dozen or so fellas here who want me to divert to Key West. Since they’ve got guns and bombs, we’re gonna do exactly what they want us to do.”

  Since PWA 1252 had touched down here, there had been only a half dozen conversations with the plane. None had lasted longer than a minute. Each had been initiated by the pilot. None contained any further information—even oblique references—about the number of hostage-takers, or their weapons. And those pieces of intel are absolutely critical for a successful aircraft take-down, believe me.

  Let me digress here just long enough—I am cold and wet, after all, and in the middle of work—to give you a short course in aircraft hostage rescue philosophy and tactics, and a primer on the physical characteristics of the Boeing 727-100 aircraft, so you’ll understand what I was up against.

  The philosophy and tactics are simple enough: the key to success in any aircraft hostage rescue is surprise. Surprise. Remember that word—you will see the material again. The entry team must be totally dynamic—that is, they have to swarm the aircraft in less than six seconds, or they will probably lose hostages. If they fail to hit at the same instant, or they take too much time, or if Mr. Murphy of Murphy’s Law fame is along for the ride, innocent people will die. It’s as simple as that.

  So what’s so hard, you ask? Go storm the effing plane.

  Well, friends, it’s like this. Take our current situation. (Pul-eeze take it. It’s yours for the asking.) We were ten men out on the wet macadam. The 727-100 aircraft has nine possible entry points. You do the arithmetic.

  Ideally, it takes seventeen shooters to storm a 727. (If the plane’s a wide-fuselage model like a 767, an A340 Airbus, or a big old 747, you might need upwards of two dozen in the initial assault team, with another two dozen in the second wave to control passengers, sort the good guys from the bad guys, and generally make sense of the situation.)

  Now, to be honest, there were other shooters available tonight. While the FBI’s Quantico-based, national HRT—the Hostage Rescue Team—was stretched past the limit (it was dealing with a prison riot going full blast at Leavenworth, a white supremacist and six hostages barricaded behind barbed wire in Oregon, and a disgruntled commuter who with the help of a hand grenade had commandeered a puddle-jumper somewhere in California), the Bureau had, nonetheless, managed to scramble a twelve-agent SWAT team out of Miami. Slight problem: three weeks ago, the Attorney General’s office put out a Department of Justice Executive Directive. It said that forthwith and immediately, all local FBI offices and the units attached thereto, “Shall make every possible effort to reflect the cultural, ethnic, sociological, and gender diversity common to the location of the office.”

  You people think we’re making this stuff up, don’t you? Well guess what, folks—this crapola is real. I’ve even seen a copy of the goddamn thing, because it was faxed to my office anonymously by somebody at the Hard Glock Cafe—that’s shooter slang for the FBI’s Quantico HRT headquarters—who wanted to make me spit my coffee through a nostril.

  Anyway, the twelve-person SWAT unit that showed up included seven females (one of whom had bigger pecs than Nasty, and he presses four hundred pounds), six Hispanics, three African Americans, two representatives of what might be called in Bureauspeak single-sex relationships, one Asian, one Native American, and one lonely, white WASP male. They sure were diverse. The only problem was that they hadn’t ever trained together. They’d probably all been too busy going to EEO—that’s Equal E
mployment Opportunity—classes to bother with unimportant details like learning how to shoot, loot, and function as a team. Well, I have my own form of EEO, too—I treat everybody alike: just like shit.

  But enough about me. Let me tell you about them. They were led by the Special Agent in Charge of the Miami FBI Field office, a red-haired, five-foot-two, eyes of black pedigreed bitch Latina—Cuban, to be precise—named Esmeralda Lopez-Reyes. I immediately dubbed her La Muchacha. Incredibly, she’d appeared on-scene as if she’d come straight from a dinner party, clad in a dress that probably cost more than a Chief makes in a month, shoes that were equally expensive, and a Chanel clutch purse. Where she stowed her regulation FBI-issue firearm I hadn’t the foggiest. Actually, I had an inkling—and: A) she must have been real uncomfortable, and: B) her quick draw must be a sight truly to behold.

  Her attitude—if you could call it that—was infuriating. Obviously, she hadn’t been told that me and my team were coming—and when she arrived to find us already in place, she treated us like campesinos.

  To make matters more interesting, about six hours earlier five deputies from the Marathon Key Po-lice arrived. They were led by a pot-bellied, Pancho-Villa mustached, snaggle-toothed, paint-by-the-numbers, orderbarking sergeant named Bob. They were all decked out in matching starched camouflage fatigues, hobnail-soled Cochran jump boots squeaky fresh from the mail order catalog, and they carried enough brand-new automatic weaponry to wage a six-month guerrilla war. They traveled in a big white Ford step van with

  MARATHON KEY SWAT TEAM magnet-signed in foot-high letters on the side. Sergeant Bob tapped the sy-reen twice, climbed out (leaving the lights flashing), twirled his mustache, chawed, spat into a handy Styrofoam cup, and volunteered to lead us all to victory.

  Thanks but no thanks, fellas. See, the problem, folks, is this: dynamic entry—read surprise—demands not only good intelligence, but also great teamwork. Your shooters must not only have some idea where the bad guys are (that way they won’t shoot the passengers), they must also function as one. Timing is everything. Indeed, so far as I’m concerned, the absolute essence of hostage rescue—the core, the basis, the nucleus of every other element —is unit integrity.