And what is that? To me, it has always translated as a bunch of assholes who care enough about each other to eat, sleep, work, and party—all of it together, as a group. A bunch of men who know how each of the others thinks; a unit that can read each other’s minds; men who react to each other without having to stop and think about it.
Bottom line? You simply cannot assemble a patchwork quilt of shooters, no matter how talented they may be individually, and expect them to function as a team without having worked together. They won’t function as a team—and hostages will get killed.
I expressed this point of view in my usual, shall we say, blunt style. Marathon Bob chewed on his mustache, spat tobacco juice into his empty coffee cup—and finally, grudgingly, agreed with me. But, if it was okay, he added, he’d sure like to stick around and help out. That was all right with me. I had a gut feeling that ol’ Bob and his boys would turn out to be just fine under pressure. And besides, they, at least, had trained together as a unit, which was more than could be said for the FBI’s personnel.
But similar persuasion didn’t work with La Muchacha. She had twelve shooters to my ten, which, she insisted, gave her tactical superiority. The airport—a civilian site, she stated somewhat pedantically—came under her, not my, jurisdiction. Thus, it would be her team, not mine, on the line.
Okay—if the only way to sort this chain-of-command crap out was to give her people a chance, then I was willing to give her people a chance. After all, what was at stake here was the lives of the hostages—and if that didn’t bother La Muchacha, who was I to worry? We all repaired to a nearby hangar where I’d had a 727 towed so that we could practice our assault sequence. I handed La Muchacha my stopwatch, let her borrow my assault ladders, then stood back and let her people demonstrate how well they could do.
It took them four minutes and forty-five seconds to get inside the plane—and they didn’t even open all the hatches. That, friends, is just over four minutes too long. You know as well as I do that by the time they got inside, the hostages would all be DOA.
Well, she said, that was the first time—so it doesn’t count. Let us try again.
Oh, I’d heard that song before—and the music was just as unacceptable now as then. Back when I was CO of SEAL Team Six, I’d run a joint training exercise with the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment—Delta, otherwise known as Delta Force. Delta’s CO back then was an asshole spit-and-polish colonel named Elwood Dawkins—known as Dawg to the troops. Well, Dawg’s mutts fucked up their portion of the exercise, and he demanded that we do it all over again, too.
I told the SAC what I’d told Dawg—and just as politely. “No fucking way. You get one shot at a hostage rescue—and if you screw up, it’s all over.”
Then it was our turn. I put my boys on the line. We took thirty-six seconds from the “go” signal to get our ladders in place, and break into the plane. Marathon Bob spat chaw juice into his cup and gave me a big, snaggle-toothed grin. “Sweet Jesus,” he said, “it was like watching poetry in damn motion. Can we come North and go to school with you boys?”
La Muchacha was not as impressed as Bob. In fact, when I asked her to join him as the backup force, she refused. FBI agents, she said, did not play support roles. Then she threw a handful of bureaucratic chaff in my direction. The Federal Aviation Administration, she promptly announced, had, not a week ago, issued a new batch of hard and specific rules of engagement that had to be followed to the letter when storming an aircraft at a domestic location. Until I had read those ROEs and signed a copy, she insisted that it would be impossible for me to take any action.
Moreover, she added, she had read the regs. And it was her understanding that since I commanded a military unit and held no sworn police powers, I could not legally act until I received direct authorization from the National Command Authority—which translates as either the president or the secretary of defense. Period. Full stop. End of story.
Friends, I’m not an unreasonable man. So we agreed to disagree until everyone checked with his/her/its superiors in Washington.
I punched the Secretary of Defense’s command center number into my secure Motorola cellular. Would you believe I got a busy signal? What the fuck were they doing, ordering pizza?
I handed the phone to Grundle and told him to redial until we made contact. God, how I love bureaucracies.
While he’s dialing, let me sit-rep you readers. Here, in a nutshell, is everything we knew.
• The tangos called themselves the ADAM Group, ADAM standing for Alpha Detachment, American Militia. They did not say where they were from, or what cause they were promoting.
• The ADAMs had boarded the plane in San Juan, knowing that SECNAV was onboard.
• The pilot said that the ADAM gunmen had told him they had evidence SECNAV had concluded a secret agreement with the Colombian military—an agreement that the U.S. Navy would turn a blind eye to the thousands of tons of cocaine being exported to the U.S. They had taken her hostage to protest her action. Their original goal—now stymied—had been to fly back to Colombia to make her renounce the treaty.
• Since the plane had been prevented from leaving, the ADAMs now shifted their demands. They demanded to speak to LC Strawhouse, a California billionaire who has been making noises about running for president on every media outlet from Larry King and the Home Shopping Network to Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy’s radio call-in shows.
When I asked, nicely, thrice, about the situation, La Muchacha grudgingly told me that FBI Washington had made contact with Strawhouse’s people, but the Californian was unavailable.
• When the hijackers were informed that LC Strawhouse couldn’t talk to them, they went batshit. Not half an hour after they’d been told, they killed one of the NIS agents and tossed his body onto the tarmac. They promised to kill one civilian per hour, until LC himself came and met with them.
The airport manager, who was handling the negotiations until a professional arrived, raised the plane from the tower radio and asked if they’d be willing to talk to a high administration official—the Secretary of Defense, perhaps, or the Attorney General. The answer was an unequivocal no. What about the vice president? The tangos said it was LC Strawhouse, or no one. If he didn’t show, the executions would start in three hours.
Those were the facts. Additional information? There was very little. Had anyone ever heard of the ADAM group? Sergeant Bob chewed, chawed, and shook his head, “nope.” According to La Muchacha, the FBI had washed the name through its computer and come up dry. It wasn’t on any of my lists, either.
But the fact that they’d targeted SECNAV specifically told me they’d had good intelligence—better intel, in fact, than we had right now. SECNAV Crawford’s trip hadn’t been prominently covered in the press, and her schedule hadn’t been made public at all. Yet they’d managed to secure it, get aboard the flight, and commandeer the plane.
How had they gotten their weapons onboard? The answer to that, friends, is depressingly simple. They got them onboard because the fucking airlines normally pay more to their baggage handlers than they do to their security guards. The folks who toss your suitcases around have union contracts, health plans, and pensions. The folks who check bags going through the X-ray machines generally make minimum wage. They’re not even airline employees, but temps, hired sans benefits, from a body-broker.
Now, at what motivation level do you think they operate? If you answered “slim to none,” pour yourself a Bombay and let me get back to work. Frankly, it’s wet and cold out here and I’d like to get this fucking thing over with so I can change clothes, then find some cold beer and hot pussy. This is Margaritaville, after all, ain’t it?
Look for
Rogue Warrior: Task Force Blue
Wherever Hardcover Books Are Sold
March 1996
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
RICHARD MARCINKO retired from the Navy as a full commander after more than thirty years of service. He currently lives in the
Washington, D.C., area, where he is CEO of SOS Temps, Inc., his private security consulting and special investigations firm whose clients are governments and corporations, and Richard Marcinko, Inc., a motivational training and team-building company.
JOHN WEISMAN is a writer specializing in espionage and military themes, and a creative consultant to major corporations. His recent books include the critically acclaimed novel Blood Cries, and the bestseller Shadow Warrior, the biography of CIA agent Felix Rodriguez. He divides his time between homes in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. John Weisman can be reached via the Internet at [email protected].
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