Detachment Bravo

by Richard Marcinko

  Evers wore a variation on the diplomatic uniform once again. This time it was gray houndstooth, a white Turnbull and Asser shirt, and a blue tie that told me he was a member of the Naval and Military Club of London. He inclined his glass in Mick’s and my direction and said, “Cheers.”

  We returned the greeting. Evers waited until the waiter serving our drinks had come and gone. Then he leaned toward Mick and me.

  “You’re lucky you didn’t visit Misiones Province,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “The very people you were interested in finding returned to Buenos Aires last night.” The Brit sipped his Campari, then returned it to the table. “They flew into a small private airport in the delta. Six hours later, they rendezvoused with a small riverboat, the Patricia Desens.”

  “Small?”

  “Sixty, maybe seventy feet,” Evers said. “There are hundreds and hundreds of these little craft on the rivers. They carry fruit or vegetables, and they’re rumored to make extra money by smuggling.”

  “Rumored.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “Where’s the Patricia Desens now?”

  “It tied up to the dock at that villa Gwilliam’s Colombian friend bought for about eight hours. Then it disappeared into the delta.”

  “How do you know all of this?” I asked.

  Robert Evers’s body language told me loud and clear not to proceed any further.

  I shrugged. Hell, I can take yes for an answer as well as anybody.

  There was a momentary silence. Then Evers blurted, “The political situation where I work is not very good.” He sipped his drink and continued in a low voice. “I am virtually prevented from doing my job. My chief tells me continually he does not want me poking my nose in areas that could prove, as he calls them, embarrassing for Her Majesty’s government. But you see, there are areas of concern that I believe should be addressed. Since I cannot deal with these problems, I was hoping that perhaps you would get the job done.”

  What Evers was telling me made perfect sense. After all, over the past two decades, MI6 has become as toothless as the CIA. Like the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, or DO, MI6 now eschews risk-taking and audacity. Just like the Agency considers political correctness when it collects information for the president, MI6 now skews its information to the political views of the prime minister. Like the CIA, it has been corrupted. And Evers didn’t like that, so he was helping us out.

  Abruptly, the British spook changed the subject. “By the by,” he said, “the license plate Mister Owen called about earlier was stolen just over two weeks ago.”

  If I’d needed formal confirmation that the pasaperro eyeballing the embassy was a tango, the fact that he had a stolen license plate on his van made it official. I rapped the table with my knuckles. “I’d be willing to bet that the Mrs. Kelley’s franchise owns a brown van.”

  “You’d be right,” Evers said. “Very similar to the one you described to Mr. Owen, too.”

  In my book, friends, one and one equals two.

  I looked at Evers. “I owe you a big one, Robert.”

  He looked at me with his gray eyes, trying to read where I was going. “I’ll just hold the chit for now, Mister Marcinko,” he said warily.

  “That’s a good idea, Robert, because you’re going to be holding a lot more of ’em by the end of this lunch.”

  Young Robert Evers could have been a SEAL, because he may not have liked it, but he did it anyway. Later in the afternoon we checked out of the Étoile, and after we ran an SDR, or Surveillance Detection Route, and came up clean, he installed us in a safe house in the Belgrano district, about fifteen minutes by car northwest of the American Embassy.

  It was a comfortable place—four bedrooms, a big living room, and a decent kitchen—on the fifth floor of a narrow, eight-story apartment house. It had a huge terrace that looked out southeast across the huge Palermo golf club and beyond it, the Río de la Plata. Four blocks away, Evers said, drawing us a map, was an MI6 car with local plates, parked in a locked garage. He looked at the happy expression on my face and then pointedly handed the keys to Mick.

  But best of all, the safe house came… furnished. There were six Glock Model 19, 9-mm pistols, each with two fifteen-round magazines, sitting on the couch, along with four Heckler & Koch machine pistols and twelve twenty-round magazines of a type I’d never seen before, and two detachable Gem-Tech suppressors. Robert Evers explained that the machine pistols had been delivered to the embassy for evaluation as side arms for the military drivers and bodyguards, and he’d managed to get his hands on them because no one in the mil-group office had the time to take ’em out and do any field testing, so they’d been sitting gathering dust. On each receiver was stamped the letters PDW—for Personal Defense Weapon.

  I picked up one of the machine pistols. It was very light—less than four pounds, including a permanently illuminated holographic Trijicon sight. I made sure the weapon was empty by dropping the flush-fit, double-stack magazine out of the grip handle, locking the ambidextrous bolt back, and then doing a visual and physical examination of the receiver and chamber. Then I pulled the retractable stock out, locked it in place, and fitted the weapon to my shoulder. It was a wee bit small, but still comfortable. The iron sights were big and clear—and so was the holographic sight. I liked the fact that I could use either one. The trigger was smooth. I hefted the pistol in my hand. It was actually only a couple of inches longer in length—and a shitload lighter in weight—than the .45-cal MK-23 SOCOM (Special Operations COMmand) pistol built for SEAL and Special Forces clandestine ops.

  “What the hell do these things shoot?” I asked Evers.

  “Four point six by thirty-millimeter rounds,” he said.

  I don’t like peashooters, and 4.6 x 30 falls under that category. “What are the ballistics?”

  “I’m not altogether sure,” he said. “The bullet weight is 29 grains. From what the armorer told me, the muzzle velocity is just over twenty-three hundred feet per second.” He paused. “Whatever that means.”

  What that meant was that the PDW was only a couple of hundred feet of velocity behind the current M4 carbine carried by most SpecOps troops. And the machine pistol in my hand weighed about one-third of what an M4 weighs. “Let’s see the ammo.”

  The MI6 officer eased a trio of cardboard cartons from under the couch. “Take a look.”

  There was one carton labeled 115-grain NATO ball 9-mm, and two with no markings whatsoever except a stamp that read: MADE IN THE UK. I slit the first of the anonymous containers, pulled a box of cartridges out, and opened it up. The round was made of solid copper, with a classic hollowpoint tip. The second carton was filled with ball ammo: hardened copper-projectiles. The spec sheet said the ball ammo would penetrate a NATO-spec (trauma) plate at two hundred meters. That’s impressive ballistics for such a tiny round.

  I looked at Evers. “I guess shooting this is kind of like firing a twenty-two caliber on steroids, right?”

  Robert Evers shrugged. “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “I’ve never fired a handgun in my life. My experience is limited to shotgunning at partridge and pheasant on the weekends.”

  I closed the stock, flipped the front hand grip back, and hefted the PDW as if it were a pistol. It was a little ungainly, but far more balanced than the MK-23 SOCOM handgun. I fitted one of the suppressors to the end of the stubby barrel and dry-fired the weapon. It handled nicely.

  Let me phrase that in a slightly different way. It handled nicely in the living room of a safe house with no ammunition and Mister Murphy kept at a safe distance. How it would handle in the field, under sphincter-puckering conditions when the adrenaline was pumping and the weapon had been carried underwater in the muddy delta, I had no idea. Because those were the approximate conditions under which the PDW would have to prove itself.

  Normally, I would have preferred a battle-proven MP5, or a CAR-16, to this new, untested gun. And I would have liked USPs, not Glocks. But I
was the supplicant here, and beggars can’t be choosers. Besides, let me tell you a truth about Warriors: Warriors consider weapons as their tools. And frankly, it really doesn’t matter what kind of hammer you use to drive a nail—just so long as you know the proper technique for nail driving. The same theory goes for weapons, too. I may prefer HKs. But I will use whatever I come across to get the job done.

  Finally, Robert Evers provided us with a few nuggets of tactical intelligence before he left. Gwilliam Kelley and his VERB had checked out of the Hyatt and moved into the villa near Tigre. The Patricia Desens, the shallow-draft riverboat that Robert’s agents had lost track of, had been spotted a few hours ago, making its way back up the river toward the house where Gwilliam was now staying.

  Evers flattened out a detailed commercial map of the Tigre delta and marked the location of Gwilliam’s villa with a Mont Blanc ballpoint. It certainly was isolated. A narrow dirt road, no doubt built on a berm above the brackish water, led from the house about half a mile northeast, ending on the two-lane highway that meandered from west to east traversing the delta.

  The rear of the house backed up on a wide tributary that ran roughly north/south. I knew that we had to insert quietly and take a look-see. I wanted to know what, if anything, was aboard the Patricia Desens. I wanted to discover what Gwilliam might be hiding in his villa. So, I stared at the map, war-gaming insertions and extractions. It didn’t take long for me to put a couple of scenarios together.

  After the MI6 officer departed, Mick closed the door and threw the bolt. “So,” he said, “what’s on your mind?”

  I studied the map of the delta some more, then pointed toward the weapons on the couch. “I think they need a little practical field evaluation. Robert claims that the suppressors work wet and dry, and that the PDWs won’t jam even if you swim ’em in to a target. I say we make sure he’s right.”

  We left shortly after dark. Mick went and got the car; Boomerang, Rotten Randy, Hugo, Timex, and I waited just inside the tiny, sweltering lobby, each of us holding a bag of equipment. The load-in didn’t take very long—although by the time we squeezed the six of us into the fucking vehicle it probably looked like one of those tiny circus cars out of which twenty clowns tumble. Within a few minutes, we were moving northeast on a wide boulevard lined with tall apartment buildings, heading toward the six-lane expressway that would carry us through the bedroom suburbs of San Isidro and the outer suburb of San Fernando, all the way to Tigre.

  The car, an ancient four-door Fiat, had more than local plates. It had the kind of Latin American, Third World air-conditioning known as four-seventy air. That means you open four windows and go seventy miles an hour and maybe you get cool. I hoped that would be the case, because even with the sun down, it was still in the eighties, with the kind of pervasive humidity common to tropical climates.

  We sat in silence, staring out the windows as Mick drove. I realized that as we progressed from the center of the city, the gestalt of the landscape changed. The suburb of San Isidro resembled in many ways the upper-class suburbs of Paris or Madrid. But as we moved farther north, the First World gave way to the Second, and then the Third. The roads grew narrow. By the northern end of San Fernando, concrete had been replaced by asphalt. By the time we were nine kliks past Tigre’s mercado de frutos, the asphalt gave way to dark, pocked macadam. And by the time we left the old two-lane highway and turned north onto a rough, gravel track that ran parallel to the Río Lujan, we were in a place that more closely resembled the Fourth World fringes of San Salvador or San José, Costa Rica, than the suburbs of Paris or Madrid.

  The gravel road dead-ended in a T-shaped intersection. I used a red-lensed waterproof flashlight to chart our position on the map Robert Evers had given me. I tapped Mick on the shoulder and pointed left, toward a narrow one-lane dirt road that I hoped ran parallel to the river. “We should be able to drive about a mile—maybe just a little more—in that direction.”

  “And then?”

  “And then we walk.”

  Mick grunted. He eased the Fiat to port. He switched the headlights off so we wouldn’t be seen. “Done and done.”

  It was just after 2100 when Mick pulled into a ragged clearing half a mile from the end of any road, and—we hoped—roughly two hundred yards from the riverbank. Mick turned off the ignition and we sat in the damn car for fifteen minutes in absolute silence, so that we got used to the sounds of our new environment, and our environment got used to us.

  Then—slowly and silently and not before we’d made sure that the interior dome light had been turned off—we exited the car, opened the trunk, and started to pull out our equipment. Only Boomerang, Rotten, Timex, and I would make the river crossing. Mick and Hugo would stake out this bank of the Lujan, protecting our six with two of the PDWs, and sweeping the area with the one set of commercial-grade night-vision goggles Hugo had found at a sporting goods store.

  I have to admit that our assault was pretty sparse. We’d managed to buy masks and fins, but we had no SEAL vests or CQC load-bearing equipment. We had thick nylon belts, on which we’d hung the diving knives Boomerang had bought us. Tonight, we’d forgo the fins—no need for ’em on an op like this one, although each two-man team would pack masks, just in case. I’ve been on too many ops where you just know you’ll never need a certain item, and then guess what—the one thing you left behind is the one thing you need the most. And so, we’d pack the masks. Rotten Randy and I would do the swim with the suppressed PDWs strapped to our backs. The Glock pistols, all the spare magazines, and everything else we might need would travel in nylon knapsacks carried by Boomerang and Timex.

  The situation was far from ideal. We had no wet suits, or coral booties either. Instead, we’d swim in jeans and dark sweatshirts. You say that sounds cumbersome; bulky; unwieldy, and therefore dangerous. You are 100 percent correct. But it would be even more dangerous for us to try to make our assault at night—in this bright moonlight—while exposing large areas of our, how-can-I-put-this-succinctly… lily white skin. To complete our sneak & peek outfits, my guys would swim in tennis shoes. Yes, they’d probably be squishy once they reached the opposite shoreline. But that was the hand we’d been dealt, and that was the hand we were gonna play. Me, I’d go barefoot. Those of you who know me know that the soles of my size extra-extra-Rogue feet are just as hard as any fucking Vibram hiking boot sole. They got that way when I was in prison, because I ran two miles barefoot every day on the six-laps-to-the-mile cinder track at the Petersburg, Virginia, Federal Boys’ Camp and Mayoral Blow-Job facility. Sure, my feet bled the first month. But I just ran through the pain and the soles finally toughened up. That’s the Warrior’s Way, my friends.

  We took our own damn time making preparations. First of all, there was no requirement to be in and out by any specific hour, although I certainly wanted to be long gone by the time the sun came up. And second, we were operating blind tonight. We had no up-to-the-minute tactical intel, except the nugget or two Robert Evers had told us about the crew of imported gunsels guarding the villa, and the lack of cameras. Let me tell you, gentle reader, that operating under such conditions often leads to what we SEALs refer to in Naval Special Warfare technical terms as a C2, or clusterfuck condition.

  Huh? What’s that? You say you think ops like this are POCs.42

  Hey, fuck you: strong message follows. I am the Rogue Warrior®. I know about this shit and you do not. Now sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up, and let me explain the C2 possibilities.

  C2-1. The body of water that must be crossed is infested with alligators, who tend to think of SEALs as a basic food group.

  C2-2. The opposition has night-vision equipment, and they see you coming before you see them.

  C2-3. The opposition has taken precautions against maritime ops and strung up a series of nasty booby traps in the water.

  C2-4. There are animals and/or other protection devices loose around your target. For example, there could be dogs in the compound. Worse, there coul
d be geese. Geese are among the most effective protection devices known to man. They raise a horrendous ruckus whenever any strange creature approaches. More than a quarter century ago, the VC used geese as early warning systems when SEALs were staging snatch ops in Vietnam. The geese were more effective than guard dogs, because they sensed the SEALs approaching at a greater distance and were much harder to silence.

  C2-5. Mister Murphy could show his ugly puss by ensuring that just as we made it to the dock, one of the local guards decided it was time to wander down the dock and drain the old lagarto43 in the lagoon, or flick his cigarillo into the water.

  C2-6. Oh, fuck—you get the idea. Besides, it’s actually getting late, which means it’s time to move out already.

  We made our way about 180 yards from the clearing down to the riverbank. Mick swept the opposite bank with his night vision, then looked south, then frowned. He offered me the glasses. “Take a look.”

  I peered downstream. I didn’t need his night-vision glasses, either. That’s because less than a quarter mile downriver of where we lurked, and not more than a hundred yards below the tributary where we’d pass in order to get to Gwilliam’s villa, was a fucking guest house cum restaurant cum bed & breakfast. They were currently serving dinner on the veranda, which was strung with festive lights and which, of course, overlooked the tributary’s waters. Right past where we would be swimming. There is an old SEAL rule of thumb that says, “If they can see you then you are fucked.” Well, they would see us, if we made any kind of a disturbance while making our infiltration. They’d see us because we would have to swim directly under the brightly lit veranda on our way in, and also during our exfiltration. It was yet another C2 factor to consider.