RW16 - Domino Theory

by Richard Marcinko

  Mongoose led the way to a ladder that ran down to the next deck. There, he spotted a hatchway into the hold. They climbed down quickly and found themselves on a metal catwalk that crossed above the forward portion of the engine room. The engines themselves were to the right; there was a control area just forward of them, maybe thirty feet away. A man sat at a panel there, watching the board like a kid staring at Saturday morning cartoons.

  Take him out, and maybe the ship’s captain would realize that something was up as soon as he asked for a bit more speed.

  Leave him, and maybe he saw them and raised the alarm.

  Judgment call either way.

  Mongoose leveled his gun.

  Flit-flit went the MP5, barely audible over the hum of the power plants.

  The engineer dropped against the panel.

  “I told you I’m the better shot,” said Mongoose, moving forward across the catwalk.

  “You needed two squeezes to get it done,” said Junior. “I would have nailed it in one.”

  ( II )

  I had Admiral Yamuna’s personal phone number, but he wasn’t answering that either.

  So I called another number he’d given me, though he’d warned to use it only in the “most dire emergency.”

  A woman answered. She sounded sleepy, and a bit younger than his wife.

  Not that I could tell.

  “This is Dick Marcinko. I need to talk to the admiral. It’s very important. I have his helicopters.”

  The admiral was wide awake when he came to the phone.

  “It’s possible they’re getting ready to fly,” I told him. “You want to move in as quickly as you can.”

  “I owe you very much for this, scum-kisser,” he said.

  “Payback’s a bitch, asshole,” I said. “Don’t forget that.”

  With the Indian navy steaming to the rescue, I put my thoughts and priorities back on the warheads. As soon as Urdu and his taxi dropped me off, I sent him back to rendezvous with Doc at the outskirts of the city, where he was waiting after being dropped off by another cab. I left Trace sleeping in the dorm with the rest of the Scottish athletes. I knew she’d be pissed, but I didn’t want to leave them completely on their own.

  Shotgun hadn’t noticed anything unusual since taking the watch.

  “Well, except for the fact that my last batch of Twinkies are stale,” he said when I arrived. “That’s pretty out of character.”

  The Indian army had a good-sized contingent guarding the base. They sent over helicopter patrols every twenty or thirty minutes, moving men around the perimeter at irregular intervals. They were doing a lot of things right. And frankly, if the tangos followed the game plan they seemed to have been rehearsing, then in all likelihood the assault would fail miserably. There were several armed vehicles just inside the gates, so even if the tanks that blocked the way were somehow defeated, there was no way an assault on the main gate was going to succeed.

  But most terrorists are savvy enough to realize that they don’t have the firepower to take on an army on its terms. The few who don’t generally become ex-terrorists as soon as the fur starts to fly.

  Given that India for Islam had survived our raid, these guys by definition fell into the wiser camp.

  That would indicate that the front assault was just a bluff, something to take the army’s attention away from the real action. But what was their real game plan?

  I get a lot of credit for figuring out what terrorists are up to; I’ve always prided myself on trying to think the way they do. But my success really has depended a lot on the people I’ve worked closely with over the years. You couldn’t find a better bunch of slimeball scumbags than the bastards I fought with in Vietnam, unless maybe you’re counting the shit-tards who formed Red Cell with me. Over the years I’ve been blessed with subordinates who have made me look good, even a whole lot better than I should.

  Assholes.

  And I say that with the greatest affection.

  So it’s not surprising that it was Doc who came up with what had to be the terrorists’ game plan a few minutes after he arrived.

  “You have the main attack here,” he said, pointing at one of the satellite images we were using as a map. “What happens? Everyone rushes to their battle stations. You begin to respond. The reinforcements come in, yada yada yada. You secure the perimeter. The helos are in the air, the tanks are moving up. What do you have? A donut.”

  “But just two,” said Shotgun. “Otherwise I’d share.”

  “I mean that you’re vulnerable inside, shit for brains.” Doc has grown more tolerant of Shotgun in general, but there are still times when he’d like to give him a few reinforcing shots to the seat of his intelligence. “It also means that the tangos are inside already.”

  “So, that’s where we gotta be,” said Shotgun.

  “There’s hope for you yet,” said Doc. “Now give me one of those donuts before I kick your butt into next week.”

  * * *

  Junior and Mongoose, meanwhile, reached the port side of the ship, but were still belowdecks. The passages inside the superstructure were not arranged symmetrically. They had to move aft before finding a ladder that would take them topside. They were just about to start up when a crewman came down from above.

  Mongoose, who was at point, swung around the back of the steps. Junior retreated down the corridor. There was no way of knowing which way the man was going, or whether he’d been sent to check on the engine room, but they couldn’t take a chance. The sailor came down whistling, completely oblivious to the danger he was in, not even looking where his feet were landing.

  Mongoose reached to grab his boot as he passed, but somehow missed. The sailor, still blithely unaware, skipped on out into the passage, where his stomach met the butt of Junior’s submachine gun.

  Swing one, horizontal — into the gut.

  Pull back. Lift.

  Swing two, in a downward motion, being careful to apply full force to the vulnerable area above the neck.

  Angling the stock slightly helps, though you must be careful here, since it is easy to miss as your subject falls forward and strike only a glancing blow.

  Finish with a timely shot to the temple or whatever other vital area is handy.

  In other words, bend, fold, and mutilate.

  They hauled the fallen sailor back behind the ladder. Junior pulled off the man’s shirt to mop up some of the blood, then got a better idea — he dropped his ruck and pulled the shirt over his chest. He’d never pass any sort of sustained scrutiny, but even a moment or two of delay might be handy.

  “Let’s get out on deck,” said Mongoose. “The longer we screw around down here the less time we have before they take off.”

  They scrambled outside without any other encounters. Pausing near the rail, they got their bearings and made sure they weren’t being followed.

  Junior, who’s been a landlubber all his life, was starting to get a queasy stomach. There’s nothing for it, really, except to push on. Eventually you get a good set of sea legs that never leave you, but until then, you just have to be willing to accept the fact that your stomach no longer slots properly in your body.

  Or as Mongoose said later, you have to be ready to puke in the face of danger.

  The shadows were a little thicker along the port rail, and there was an oblong cutout in the metal deck bulkhead that blocked the view fore and aft. As long as they were willing to crawl along the pipes that ran parallel to the side, they’d be invisible.

  So that was the way they went, all the way up to the edge of the area where the containers were stored. A large housing for some of the unloading equipment sat at the edge, giving them a covered vantage of the men working near the bow.

  But they still didn’t have a shot on the gas equipment.

  They could see the helicopters, though. In order to fit in the train cars and then the shipping containers, part of the helicopter tail sections had been disassembled. The crewmen who’d set up the
launch platform were now engaged in lifting the helos upward, using a block and tackle mounted on a boom near the bow. They’d already lifted the tail sections.

  A pair of portable generators were running near the helo parts, powering the air tools they needed to bolt the sections back in place. A small tree of work lights was mounted on one of the generators. The lights shone in Mongoose and Junior’s direction, casting a long shadow across the nearby containers — a help or a hindrance, depending on how they used it.

  “I’ll have to climb the boom mast,” said Mongoose. “I can’t get a shot down here.”

  “We can go out along that container there,” said Junior.

  “Nah, they’ll see us.”

  “You think they won’t see us there?” asked Junior. He pointed straight up.

  “They won’t be looking there.”

  Mongoose went up the mast while Junior covered him from the nearest container. Parked in the well closest to the mast, the container was only a few feet away, and Junior had no trouble clambering up, crouching at the edge where he was partly hidden by shadows.

  By this time the first helicopter had been fully assembled and loaded with fuel. The platform where it had been lifted was relatively small, able to accommodate only one of the helos once the rotors started spinning. As Mongoose readied his shot on the fuel tanks, a pilot climbed into the Ahi cockpit.

  The rotors began whirling. It wasn’t the casual cough that you see in movies; these suckers spun right up as if propelled by a giant spring. Obviously the Indians had gone for the high-grade instant-on option.

  Wind from the helo wash swept across the deck. The effect was so severe that a few of the workers fell down; the others had to duck away and grab on to anything they could.

  Mongoose, with impeccable timing, fired into the tank and pump machinery, working his spray so that the last bullets in his gun struck the gas tank.

  You do remember, of course, that it is standard Rogue Warrior practice to load tracer rounds into the end of the magazine, alerting the shooter to the fact that he’s almost out of bullets and should reload.

  Tracer rounds — another way of saying little incendiary devices that would just love to set escaping gasoline fumes on fire.

  The tanks exploded with a violent burst of red, orange, and black. At more or less the same moment, the helicopter lurched upward. The pilot flew directly through the fireball. Perhaps blinded, his forward wheel bumped against the top of one of the containers. The helo lurched around, spinning so that its tail was now pointed at the bridge. The force of the fire made it back up a few yards before finally the pilot steadied it, lowering its nose and starting to bank off to the right.

  It was at that moment that Junior did the stupidest thing he ever did in his life.

  He leapt up, jumping at the winglet of the helicopter, trying to get into the empty cockpit seat.

  I guess. Sometimes impulsive stupidity is hard to explain.

  ( III )

  You and I know that was a foolish and even idiotic move. I think even Junior knew that at the time — or at least somewhere after his feet left the top of the container he’d been standing on.

  But once you’re in the air, there’s no turning back. Junior grabbed on to a bar on the winglet — it was designed as a foothold for the mechanics working on the engine — and tried to pull himself up to the cockpit area. Overwhelmed by the forces of gravity and momentum, he failed miserably, slipping and dangling from the bar like a trapeze artist who suddenly lost his nerve.

  He hung there for a good five seconds as the helicopter banked sharply right and twisted around. The pilot would have been oblivious to him — he was concerned with the fireball that had erupted unexpectedly at the forward area of the ship.

  That, and the small finger of fire at the nose area of the aircraft. Flying through the flames, he had inadvertently ignited grease smeared there by the workers or during transport. The fire flared, then turned into an inconspicuous yet even more ominous finger of blue, trickling around the nose and climbing in accordionlike threads toward the engine and fuel tank above his head.29

  Mongoose, watching from the mast where he’d climbed, didn’t realize what was going on. A series of unconnected images flashed in front of him — the fireball, Junior on the cargo container, the helicopter, something dangling off the side of the helicopter, Junior on the narrow winglet …

  He stared in disbelief, too stunned even to curse his companion.

  Then he saw something drop into the ocean from the helicopter.

  His first inclination was to hope it wasn’t Junior.

  Then, as the helicopter exploded into a fireball, he changed his mind.

  “Please God,” he said as he dropped to the deck. “Let that be Junior.”

  ( IV )

  I was blissfully unaware of all this excitement, luxuriating in a warm if pungent bath many hundreds of miles to the north.

  I would not go so far as to say I was enjoying myself. Swimming in a sewage lagoon is never a particularly good way to have fun.

  The lagoon was the last lap — excuse the pun — in our journey into the base. Doc, Shotgun, and I had walked through a large storm sewer, then followed the piping from the abandoned sewer treatment plant that once served the installation.

  When the base was shuttered, the sewage plant was abandoned. Before reopening it, a pair of barracks were renovated and their sewage shunted to a cesspool and large septic system near the barracks. A second septic tank and leach field served some temporary trailers used as command buildings. But the storm drains still connected into the treatment plant and the associated piping. This kept the pond full.

  I’m being generous by describing it as a treatment plant, since all existing evidence was that the treatment consisted of pouring the shit into a big bowl and letting water run through it. Once in the pipes, the effluent flowed into a tributary of the nearby river. The outlet was patrolled by a guard and watched over by a pair of video cameras. Defeating the video cameras in the dark wasn’t hard — we got up close, then used a bowl-like blackened mirror to cut down their image area, in effect blocking the camera’s view. This wouldn’t have worked during the day, or even on a very bright night, but the occasional clouds overhead made it relatively easy, even if they did require us to be a little more patient than I would have liked.

  The guard was a little trickier. We could have taken him out, but I didn’t want to leave the place completely undefended, in case the tangos hit on this route themselves. So we made our way along the rocky jag above the pipes, crawling on our bellies and waiting to cross into the lagoon as he swung on his foot patrol back and forth behind a wired fence.

  Again, it took a lot longer than I would have liked. It also meant that we had to slide gracefully into the murky swamp of decades-old sewage, rather than simply closing our eyes and jumping in.

  Yes, we were wearing diving gear. Nuclear protection suits would have probably been more appropriate.

  Delicate stomach?

  I’ll spare you any more of the slimy details. Instead, close your eyes and imagine us snorkeling through the pristine waters of the southern Pacific reefs, ogling schools of brightly colored fishlets and scantily clad tourists, whiling away the hot hours of the day in the cool waters. Visions of a decadent beach luau, pig on the spit and buckets of cold beer, play in your head. An errant bikini strap or two falls southward, there’s a gentle breeze and calypso music in the air …

  Got the vision?

  Do a one-eighty and you’re about where we were.

  We snorkeled up to a large concrete block where a large pipe entered the lagoon. Using a wrist lamp to light the way, I paddled through about three feet of stagnant muck into the treatment plant itself.

  The large cement tunnel that led to the pond opened into a large box made of grating on the south side of the building. The grate was at the end of a trenched pool. The trenches ran lengthwise and had once been used to collect sediment before it went out int
o the pipes. Now they were simply filled with sediment, a kind of shitty quicksand.

  We weren’t sure whether there might be a guard posted inside, or even if the building was used as a shelter or getaway by bored guards looking to grab a smoke while escaping their NCO’s glare. I doused my light and stared through the bars across the scummed surface of the shallow pool.

  I couldn’t see anyone, nor did I hear anything. So I swung my rubberized ruck up out of the muck and removed the battery-powered Sawzall.

  The bars of the grate were so corroded that they practically fell away as soon as the saw blade touched them. I cut a half dozen, just enough to pass into the pool.

  I stood and felt my left foot sinking, sucked into the thick sediment. I had to struggle and spin to get it out.

  “Be careful where you step,” I told Shotgun and Doc, pointing out the trench. Then I pulled myself up onto the concrete ledge.

  We could all have used a good shower at that point. But by now we’d been breathing in the stomach-turning smell for so long that we’d become immune to it. This was probably because the caustic fumes had burned our noses completely, but we weren’t in a position to analyze it. (Here’s a trick if you find yourself in a similar situation — stick some Vicks VapoRub beneath your nose. Then all you’ll smell is menthol-flavored crap, rather than the real thing.)

  While we had escaped the outer defenses, we still had a long way to go. The sewage plant lay at the northwestern corner of the facility, some two hundred yards from an interior perimeter fence that surrounded the area where the nukes were being held. A motor pool sat between us and the fence, and while it was very lightly staffed, it was well lit, and threading our way across its perimeter took almost twenty minutes.

  There were gas and diesel pumps on the western side not far from a gate connecting the parking area with the inner part of the base. Our plan was to sneak over the fence near that entrance.

  It was close to a guard post, but I figured that the proximity was actually an advantage — the guards would be watching the gate, not expecting someone to go over the fence right next to them. But as I hunkered down near the pumps, I got another idea. A truck had pulled up to the gassing area. The driver was topping off the tank. The truck would give us mobility and a good base of operations inside the area where the nukes were. There were plenty of vehicles there already, so it wouldn’t look out of place.