The bottom line was that, like any good bureaucracy, the CIA kicked the problem upstairs. In this case to the White House. Violation of the law was grounds for impeachment. However, bombs going off in Europe during the election year of an incumbent American Government that could have done something to prevent it was something that struck right to the heart of politics itself.
The solution was also typically American: call in the lawyers. They drafted a tortuously reasoned finding that required Blake Murdock and 3rd Platoon, SEAL Team Seven, to “attempt” to “apprehend” the terrorists.
Surrounded by embarrassed CIA officers who did everything but wink and nudge him with their elbows to let him know what was expected, Murdock had merely shook his head in disgust and signed the required five copies of the form acknowledging that he understood the orders and took complete responsibility for carrying them out. But later, in private, he’d broken it down this way for his platoon: “We’re going in to kill the motherfuckers.” And that was exactly what they had done.
So, since they couldn’t go to war with Syria even though they were going to war with Syria, all Murdock could say was, “I understand.” Then he took a deep breath. “But I’m concerned that this mission seems to be outside NAVSPECWAR’s parameters for SEAL operations.”
First developed during the Gulf War, the criteria for the employment of SEALs had proven very effective. They included:
1. A high probability of mission success.
2. Operations in a maritime environment or within one day’s patrol of the water.
3. Missions which required no more than a full platoon to undertake successfully.
4. Taskings which assured high survivability of the operators involved.
Murdock had been referring to criteria number two, though what he really had in mind was number four. These people seemed to be asking a SEAL platoon to bite off a lot more than it could chew.
“According to USSOCOM protocol this would normally fall under the heading of a Delta Force mission,” said Stroh. “However, we would like to keep the number of people with knowledge of the operation as small as possible. You were already acquainted with the details and the money through the Port Sudan operation, and frankly, in view of its success, we wanted you to take this on. Admiral Raymond concurs with US.”
If the admiral was going to put his chop on it, Murdock knew that avenue was closed. “I don’t have any other immediate concerns,” he said, leaving himself a little room. “I’ll start my planning immediately. Will I be working with you and Paul Kohler again?”
“We don’t want to mess with success,” Stroh said with a smile.
Then Gene Berlinger, the CIA Director of Special Operations, spoke his first words of the afternoon. “We have already assembled an operational plan for Lieutenant Murdock’s platoon.”
Probably something the CIA paramilitary guys had put together, Murdock thought. Some of them were former SEALS, but even so, they weren’t out operating every day the way he and 3rd Platoon were. “I’ll be glad to take a look at it, sir,” Murdock replied. “But I would only be comfortable executing my own plan.”
“Your comfort, Lieutenant, is not a consideration in the execution of this mission.”
So now the games had begun. Murdock had had some experience with this sort of thing. Special Operations command staff officers, generally Army types, thought you should sit in the corner sucking your thumb while they put together a plan worthy of Alexander the Great. Then they’d pat you on the ass, send you out to execute, and blame you when it fucked up.
Blake Murdock had been required to jump through his ass due to inadequate planning too many times in his career. He wasn’t afraid of assholes in suits. He was a little afraid of a career-ending fitness report, because he really liked being a SEAL. But he was absolutely terrified of getting his whole platoon wiped out.
“With respect, Sir,” said Murdock. “If I’m the one who’s going into Lebanon, it’ll have to be to execute my plan. Not the plan of anyone who isn’t coming along. If that doesn’t fit in with your plans, then you need to find someone else.”
“You seem so reluctant,” said Berlinger. “Perhaps we should.”
Whitbread of Covert Action Staff, a separate department in the CIA, seemed amused by the whole scene. Commander Masciarelli looked utterly horrified. Commodore Harkins sat impassively, waiting to see which side of the net the ball would land on. But Admiral Raymond had a “that’s my boy” expression on his face.
“I want him to be cautious,” Admiral Raymond growled. “Especially with this mission. I don’t want someone who’s just going to buckle up his chin strap and go out and get a bunch of my SEALs killed. Lieutenant Murdock is absolutely right. He’s more than proved that he can both plan and operate. And he’s not going anywhere near Lebanon until he tells me he can get the job done. Since we’ve already decided that he will do the mission …” At this the admiral paused, and when no one in the room contradicted him, he went on. “Before anyone gets bent out of shape, let’s allow him to put together a plan and brief it back to us.”
No one objected to that, especially since the admiral, and by implication Murdock, had now assumed full responsibility for the operation. Everyone else’s ass was fully covered.
“Blake,” the admiral ordered, “get to work. Don Stroh will give you whatever you need to get started.”
“Aye, aye, Sir,” said Murdock. “All I need right now is permission to bring my second in command and platoon chiefs in on this. And also the Team Command Master Chief.”
“That’s unacceptable,” said Berlinger.
“Not counting staff jobs and a tour I did at BUD/S, I have about five years of Special Operations experience in the field,” said Murdock. “My two chiefs have a combined total of thirty-one. The Master Chief has nearly that much himself.”
That had always been Murdock’s gripe. The chiefs were what made the teams, and compared to their experience officers were just a bunch of amateurs. Yet officers always thought they knew best.
Now Whitbread, the director of Covert Action staff, spoke his first word. “Granted.”
The meeting broke up, and the admiral brought Murdock over to a quiet corner. “What do you really think about this, Blake?” he asked.
Sometimes when the brass did that, they were really asking you to tell them what they wanted to hear. But this wasn’t one of those situations.
“I’ll tell you the truth, sir. I don’t have a good feeling about it. I know what I can do. I can go in and take out the key players if someone can target them for me. I may be able to blow the warehouse. But as far as guaranteeing what’s going to be destroyed in it, you know I can’t do that. At this stage of the game I don’t even know if I can get all the way in to the target, do the job, and then get out.”
“I hear what you’re saying,” the admiral replied, obviously hearkening back to his days in Vietnam. “If you had a couple of fighter squadrons putting close air behind you as you exfiltrated Baalbek, that would be one thing. But you won’t have that, or fire support of any kind.”
“Sir, if it can be done, I’ll do it. I just don’t know if it can be done without either an F117 or an entire Ranger battalion.”
“Blake, this is a hairy one, but it has to be done. And for a lot of reasons, we have to do it. And we can’t fail. You do it your way, and if anyone screws with you or tries to force you into anything, I want you to sit right down on your ass and not move until you get on a secure phone with me. That’s an order, you understand?”
Now Murdock really felt like killing someone for the man. “Yes, sir.”
8
Tuesday, September 5
0800 hours Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, California
“I’m sorry, sir, but this sucks,” Razor Roselli raged. “I mean, this really blows. It’s going to take the whole platoon to pack the demo and do the shooting on this op. The fucking target is in the center of a town right smack in the middle of Indian Country w
here everyone and his fucking dog packs an AK or an RPG, and they all sleep with one eye open because the Israelis fly in and snatch Hezbollah chiefs whenever they can. Now maybe, just maybe, I can infiltrate a platoon through the fucking town and the checkpoints and the barking dogs and get them to the target. As far as getting them the fuck out and home in one piece, I have no fucking clue.”
“Razor, shut up,” Master Chief MacKenzie ordered. “You’re making my ears hurt. Everyone gets your point. But since the reason we’re here is to see if we can do the job, let’s get on with it.”
Unlike many officers, whose reaction would have been utter horror, Murdock liked what he was hearing. SEALs had died in Vietnam, Grenada, and Panama because they were so motivated and anxious to accomplish the missions that they ignored the fact that the missions were flawed and the op plans sucked. It had almost happened to him a couple of times, and it wasn’t going to again. He was glad his chiefs had that mind-set too.
Murdock was also silently patting himself on the back for including George MacKenzie in the planning group. He, Mac, Roselli, Kos Kosciuszko, and Ed DeWitt were sitting in a secure planning room amid stacks of maps, papers, intelligence files, and satellite photographs. Some of it was on computer, such as all the SEAL mission planning checklists, and SOCRATES, the Special Operations Command Research, Analysis, and Threat Evaluation System. Unfortunately, SOPARS II, a computer system which would have automated the whole pre-mission planning process by combining digital maps, virtual-technology terrain models, building blueprints, all the planning checklists, and everything else you needed in a single desktop PC, had been cancelled due to funding constraints.
It wasn’t that there was no money, just that all the services preferred to step back and let USSOCOM fund projects like that out of its own hide; then they’d swoop in and reap the benefits. USSOCOM was currently having to pay for very expensive helicopter programs, and feeling the pinch.
DeWitt chimed in. “Let’s do this by the book. Start on actions at the objective and work backward from there to how we’re going to get in and get out. Work from general to specific.”
“Mister DeWitt is right,” said Kos Kosciuszko. “The only way we’ll knock the problem is by blocking it out piece by piece. If the planning’s done right, there’s no such thing as a target that can’t be taken down.”
Murdock thought they were on track. Surprisingly enough, SEALs frequently paid less attention to planning and rehearsal than they needed to. The culprits were usually officers, who thought that because they’d graduated from BUD/S, they were so big, so tough, and so bad that they could just strap on their six-shooters and take out anyone without even trying. But as a wise old chief had told an aggressive young Ensign Murdock years before, the SEAL Budweiser badge might be pretty but it didn’t make you bulletproof.
And whenever time was short and he was tempted to half-ass some small detail of his planning, Murdock remembered the time he’d gotten tapped as a junior evaluator on a Marine Corps Expeditionary Unit Special Operations Exercise. The MEUs went out to sea on six-month deployments, and a SEAL platoon was always part of the amphibious squadron. This platoon had been led by two lieutenants, which sometimes happened. For the exercise they were going to conduct a HBVSS, or Helicopter Visit, Board, Search-and-Seizure, of a suspected hostile merchant ship, something that had been done every day during the Gulf War. The two lieutenants showed up at the planning conference without their chief, and in full view of all the Marines started arguing like a couple of little children over who was going to carry the SATCOM radio. It went on for a while, along the lines of, “I carried it last time.”
“No, you didn’t, I carried it last time.”
Murdock had been appalled. Then the Marines broke in and asked the SEALs how they wanted the Cobra helicopter gunships to deploy. What did they mean? the SEALs asked. Well, the Marines explained, after the SEALs fast-roped onto the deck, did they want the Cobras in a racetrack pattern around the ship, or hovering near the bow to cover the bridge with their 20mm cannon? Oh, came the response. After they’d gotten that straightened out, the Marines asked the SEALs what they planned to do. Head for the bridge, came the reply of the two John Waynes. Okay, said the Marines, but how are you going to get there? What ladderways will you use? What if they’re blocked? Will you breach them or go around? All absolutely elementary stuff. Duh, responded the SEAL lieutenants.
Murdock had felt like slapping the shit out of them. It was okay for SEALs to have a reputation as prima donnas. They were. But not as idiots and non-professionals. He’d never forgotten it, and after that he never went anywhere or did anything without first consulting a chief or a leading petty officer.
“Okay,” said DeWitt. “What about a standoff attack with a couple of mortars?” It never made any sense to walk all the way up to the target if you could stand back and shoot it up from a distance.
“Not sure enough,” said Razor Roselli. “We might damage the place, but we’d never know how well we really did. And no way could we come back and do it again if we didn’t do it right the first time.”
Murdock was measuring a Lebanon map with a ruler. “We’d need at least a 120mm mortar and a shitload of ammo, and that’s a lot to be dragging around the Bekaa Valley at night.”
“A few fast-attack vehicles and the mortars on trailers,” DeWitt responded.
“There’s no ground high enough in a ten-thousand-meter circle around Baalbek where we could observe and adjust the rounds on target,” said Murdock. “We’d use up all the ammo and never hit the warehouse. And like Razor says, even if we hit it we wouldn’t know how much damage we did.”
“We’ve got to get all the way in to the objective,” Roselli insisted. “Okay, we tiptoe in. Now, if we’re not compromised on the way in and the guard force has its head up its ass and somehow we manage to get into the warehouse, we’re not going to have a lot of free time to plant charges. And if we can’t place the charges in the right spots, we’ve got to pack in a lot more explosives. Which is even more trouble.”
“You know what this really looks like,” said DeWitt. “A destruction raid mission for a whole Ranger battalion.”
“I already brought that up,” said Murdock. “It didn’t fly.” At that point Murdock called a lunch break, which for one and all meant throwing on shorts and a T-shirt and trying to get rid of their frustrations with a solid hour-and-a-half workout.
When they got back to the planning room, Murdock said to MacKenzie, “Okay, Master Chief, you were wearing that happy face all during PT, and it wasn’t just the extra atomic sit-ups you made Ed do for missing the count. What did you come up with?”
“We have to do a pseudo operation,” said MacKenzie.
“Meaning?” asked Ed DeWitt.
“Meaning we dress up like the bad guys and drive right up to the front door. Like how the Israelis drove a duplicate of Idi Amin’s Mercedes right up to the terminal at Entebbe. Like the Vietnam SEALs dressed their point men in black pajamas, coolie hats, and AK47’s to give them a little edge.”
“By George,” exclaimed Kos Kosciuszko. “I think he’s got it.”
“So we dress up like Syrian commandos?” asked DeWitt. “Or Hezbollah?”
“Neither,” said Murdock, really warming to the idea. “You don’t dress like someone they’re going to want to stop and chitchat with. You dress like someone who makes them shit their pants and wave you right through.”
“Syrian Presidential Guard,” said Kos Kosciuszko.
“A big limo,” DeWitt burst out. “And a couple of vehicles filled with Presidential Guards. Jeeps, land rovers, Russian Zils, whatever they use. Something we can fly in by helo.”
“Tinted windows on the limo,” said Kosciuszko. “Syrian flags on the bumpers. You don’t know who’s inside, but it’s got to be someone you don’t want to fuck with. That’s the great thing about dictatorships.”
Once the initial excitement passed, Razor Roselli, the wet blanket, weighed in. “That
might get us into town without compromise,” he conceded. “But we’ve still got to set charges and get out. And the problem with dressing up like Syrians and then having to deal with Syrians is like the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. They dressed up like Americans and caused a lot of confusion, but they nearly all got bagged because at close range they couldn’t pass.”
Razor Roselli had never yet failed to amaze Murdock.
“It’s like North Korean Special Forces dressing up in South Korean uniforms and slipping over the DMZ,” Roselli went on. “They get caught as soon as they open their mouths, because every Korean can tell the difference between a Northerner and a Southerner.”
“Which means,” Kos translated, “that the uniforms might get us all the way up to the warehouse if we showed up at night. But even if the CIA gave us someone who could speak fluent Syrian Arabic, we ain’t getting invited inside without a lot of shooting.”
That brought them back to earth. Then DeWitt suggested, “Maybe if we bring along something to shoot our way into the warehouses Like a Russian BRDM scout car. The armor will stop small arms, and they pack a big-ass 14.5mm machine gun.”
We could ram our way right through the security.”
“I’m sure the CIA could come up with one or two for us,” said MacKenzie, giving DeWitt an approving nod.
Razor Roselli left the room and returned with the reference book Jane’s Armor and Armament. He flipped open to the Russian BRDM and said flatly, “it won’t fit inside either an MH53 Pave Low or an MH47 Chinook. You’d have to sling-load it under the helo, and I don’t know who we’d get to do a night low-level penetration with a slung load. Especially that kind of air defense threat.”
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