Detachment Bravo

by Richard Marcinko

  Randy slipped out of my line of sight and dropped flat behind the far side of the FedEx truck, where he might have been vulnerable to ricochets off the courtyard tile, but impervious to direct fire from the house.

  And I? Well, I guess I’m a “do what I say and not what I do” kind of Rogue, because I was stuck in the FedEx truck, hunkered down behind the TOW tripod, with no cover except for the three-missile launch package, a three-foot by four-foot waterproof plastic container.

  But by that point I was in sight-acquire-fire mode, while he was still trying to identify any possible hostiles. I had my front sight centered on his upper torso and a perfect cheek weld on the collapsible stock of my PDW. The center body mass shot was how I’d inculcated the shooters when I ran SEAL Team Six. These days, when most of the bad guys wear body armor, you take head or groin shots. But PNU was dressed in a short-sleeved shirt open to the middle of his chest and I saw nothing but skin. So, with both eyes open, I centered the PDW’s bright orange holographic dot on PNU’s center mass—the region covered by his pecs, below which the arch of aorta and superior vena cava pumped blood in and out of the heart, let out half a breath, squeezed the trigger, and loosed a triple tap.

  The first two sounds were a trio of rapid clicks as the PDW’s hammer fell and the ping of shell casings. PNU’s chest exploded. The Glock fell out of his hand and clattered onto the courtyard tiles. His mouth dropped open. I sight-acquire-fired again with another three-round burst, this time in the head (I can report that the fucking PDW handled like a dream), and what was left of him fell backward and collapsed in the doorway.

  Someone inside the hacienda shouted, “¿Conjo, Hector—qué pasa?”

  Hector, of course, was not about to answer. So the shouted question was followed by what you might call a conspicuous silence.

  Obviously, the other pelotudos weren’t as dumbass as their defunct compañero, because they didn’t stick their hocicos55 outside to check.

  No, instead, they spray-and-prayed. Full auto. It was like fucking D day—or the big shoot-’em-up downtown Los Angeles bank robbery scene in the Robert De Niro movie Heat. The French doors disintegrated. The windshield of the fucking van exploded into a million pieces.

  And let me tell you: it was LOUD out there. Something no one ever tells you about CQC is how loud it is. These guys were firing unsuppressed weapons—from the sound of ’em they were Uzis—in full auto mode. Think of the sound a big, outlaw Harley hog makes. Multiply it by a decibel factor of two. And if the sound wasn’t bad enough, they were shooting real goddamn rounds. This was no fucking movie. There was high explosive in the fucking truck. A Rogue could get killed out here. My arm caught a shard of something. I wiped blood from it and flattened onto the truck bed, trying to make myself invisible.

  A pause in the firing; no doubt a momentary lull as the pelotudos reloaded. But we took advantage of the pause. I heard the distinctive chatter of Timex’s Uzi as he fired two-shot bursts. One by one the halogen spotlights exploded, and the courtyard was plunged into welcome darkness. Then the frigging spray-and-pray began all over again and I caught another fragment—this one a splinter of wood that stuck me in the forehead giving me a very Unicorny look.

  Shit, maybe they weren’t such pelotudos after all. Face it: from the way they were shooting, they had unlimited supplies of ammo. Me? I had a pocket full of useless .380, and fourteen rounds of hollowpoint left in the PDW. Boomerang still had all twenty rounds in his mag. I had no idea how many rounds Timex had left in Señor Brut’s Uzi, but at least he had a spare pair of loaded mags.

  I pulled the wood sliver out. I rolled onto my side and poked the PDW’s muzzle out, searching for targets. Nada. The assholes were staying put behind the cover the villa provided.

  “Boomerang—”

  “Yo, Pibe?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Hunkered, Pibe. No targets.”

  I heard Randy’s basso from behind the van: “I shoulda packed some fuckin’ frags.”

  He was right, of course, but this wasn’t the time for woulda-shoulda-coulda, and besides, we didn’t have any frags to bring. We had to act—and do it NOW. I rolled back behind cover, reached up, and released the quartet of clamps on one of the heavy wood crates I was hiding behind. I slipped the goddamn cover off and peered. Inside was cradled another, smaller box, with two handles. I yanked it out and opened it up, too. It was a battery/control unit. Better: it was the battery assembly package that supplied the TOW system’s main power to the launch package and its MGS—Main Guidance System.

  That was the good news. The BN was that it has been years since I’ve assembled and fired one of these fucking things. But assembling TOWs is like fucking. Once you learn how to do it right it’s hard to forget. I ran my hands over the tripod unit to see what was there and what wasn’t. The answer was that they were waiting to assemble the unit just before they’d use it.

  Okay, let’s do this by the numbers. Step one: I rooted around until I found the traversing unit, took it out of its case, and secured it to the apex of the tripod base. I dug out the big, square, main guidance system box that was the brains of the whole system, unlatched the box top, and set the MGS by the base of the tripod. Next, I found the coil of guidance cable, took the J1 connector, and plugged it into the M1 receptacle on the MGS box. Shit—I hoped that the yellow lines were aligned, otherwise the fucking thing wouldn’t fire. But there was no way to know, since I was working purely by feel. Well, just like fucking, it felt good to me.

  My efforts were interrupted by another spray-and-pray session from the house. Can I admit something to you? It is difficult to concentrate when a bunch of A&D56 pelotudos are trying to wax one’s ass.

  But guess what: real Warriors don’t succumb to such distractions. REAL WARRIORS PREVAIL under any and all conditions. That’s what Hell Week was all about. That’s what the old chiefs drummed into our tadpoles’ heads when they forced us to do things we didn’t want to do. To a Frog, or a SEAL, failure is always unacceptable.

  Indeed, the biblical-sounding phrase THOU SHALT NOT FAIL is the philosophical nucleus of what being in the Teams has always been about. And so, indifferent to the unfriendly fire, I went to work. I unhitched the four clasps on the launch tube box lid, retrieved the tube assembly, dropped it onto the traversing unit, and secured it with the launch tube latch. Now the fucking thing was starting to look like a TOW.

  There was another fusillade from the villa. “Timex, goddammit—gimme some fucking protection.”

  There was welcome suppressive fire from my port side. As I heard it, I found the daylight tracking device, installed it in its bracket on the left side of the traversing unit, and locked it into place. I followed that by bracketing the night sight into its bracket. Next, I took the TVPC power cable, and attached the P1 connector just as another burst of Uzi fire from the tree shut down the spray-and-pray from inside the villa.

  I took the opportunity to install the battery assembly to the MGS, then ran my hands over the connections. It seemed that I’d got everything right. But who knew. If I’d been doing this purely by the book I would have run the self-test program right then. But there was no time for any self-test program. So I said a fervent prayer to the God of WAR, then turned the system on.

  And the God of WAR said, “Let there be light.”

  And when I saw the lights come on, where lights should have been, I knew that there is a God and that HE is indeed the GOD OF WAR, and that he loveth Rogues like me.

  And the GOD OF WAR spoke to me in voices. And He said, “Loadeth thine fucking missile, thou worthless cockbreath.”

  And yea and verily, it was indeed time to lose the fucking Epiphany and load the fucking missile.

  I jumped up and pulled a TOW in its cylindrical fiberglass tube off the truck shelf and rolled it into my arms. Which, of course, was precisely when the God of WAR decided I was having too easy a time of it, and caused the pelotudos to loose another barrage of full-auto in my direction.

/>   But I wasn’t about to be thwarted. My rage was so fucking white hot by now that a round straight to my brain wouldn’t have stopped me. I rolled onto my side, eased the tube onto the deck, ran my hands over the fiberglass, and discovered two bullet holes a third of the way down the tube.

  Oh, shit. Oh, fuck. Oh, Doom on Dickie. I was now holding a potential time bomb. The midsection of a TOW missile contains thermal batteries that provide both heat and electricity. They are powered up by an explosive squib that is set off when the TOW’s trigger mechanism is depressed. The squib is also vulnerable to gunfire, or anything else that might produce a spark.

  I wasn’t about to take any fucking chances. I took the missile container into my arms, crawled to the aft end of the truck, rolled it out, then crawled back to the tripod, and raised myself off the deck so I could pull another missile container off the shelf, and began all over again.

  The pelotudos must have sensed something, because there was another burst of Uzi fire. The bullets splintered the deck six inches in front of my nose and sent a wood splinter through my jeans into my upper thigh.

  Oh, fuck me. This was getting old fast. I pulled myself up and grabbed a second cylinder, just as another wave of Uzi fire shattered the metal shelving three inches above my head. But this time I’d learned from my mistake. I brought the whole fifty-six-pound cylinder down onto the deck and waited until they’d finished before proceeding.

  Silence from the villa. I pulled myself to my feet, dropped the launch tube about eight degrees, then cradled the missile container in my arms, keeping the aft end higher than the nose, and eased it into the launch tube. By feel, I made sure that the indexing lugs were aligned. I dropped the rear end of the bridge clamp that sat on the traversing unit and pushed down. I pulled the bridge clamp locking handle down and back, which locked the missile in the launch tube.

  Was it ready to fire? Fuck, I certainly hoped it was. I dropped behind the optical sight and centered the crosshairs on the farthest wall of the hacienda’s living room area. The fucking image was fuzzy because it was so damn close—we’re talking somewhere in the sixty-yard range at the most. That was a potential fucking problem. Why? The TOW A1’s minimum range is about sixty-five yards, because it takes sixty-five yards for the missile to arm itself. But frankly, friends, at that point in time I really didn’t give a shit about fine-focus or a yard or two of range. I just wanted to blow the cocksuckers into next fucking week.

  My right arm swiveled the launcher up and level. My left hand settled down onto the firing mechanism. I raised the arming lever, unlatched the trigger cover, and pressed the trigger down. Firmly.

  Nothing happened.

  And then I realized why nothing happened. Nothing happened because it takes the TOW system one and a half seconds to send the prefire sequence to the missile, starting the chemical reaction in the internal thermal batteries, blowing the explosive squib off the nitrogen bottle, and spinning the missile’s gyroscope.

  That was when I thought I heard an audible series of clicks and pops in the missile tube. At which point, the fucking launch motor fired up and the missile launched.

  Here is a Roguish rule of physics: fire a missile from an enclosed area, and the blast will hurt you. As if to prove the point, the concussion knocked me face first into the wall. But I was lucky: the fucking afterblast demolished the driver’s compartment, not me.

  According to a set of unclassified specs, the TOW A1 covers just under three hundred meters in the first two seconds of flight. This missile exploded with an incredible explosive concussion just over half a second (to be absolutely precise, fifty-three hundredths of a second) after I’d launched it.

  That, friends, is why the missile needed a full sixty-five yards of flight. At eighteen hundredths of a second after launch, the arming device unlocks. At 0.53 seconds, the safety and arming clock rotates and aligns the detonator with the warhead.

  And that’s when things got interesting. See, there’s just a little over five pounds of explosive filler in a first-generation TOW missile warhead. That’s not a lot. So, from the size of the explosion—which was huge—I figured the missile made it into the kitchen and hit one of the hundred-gallon propane tanks they use for powering cooking stoves in this part of the world. Why? Because the blast was big enough to lift the fucking roof off the goddamn hacienda.

  That was only part of the good news. The rest now ensues: said hufuckingmongous explosion was followed by lots of pelotudo screams. I guess that meant I’d finally gotten their attention in the manner I like to get attention.

  Show Time. I grabbed my PDW, jumped out of the FedEx truck, and charged into the smoke, Boomerang and Rotten Randy following on my heels. There was an immediate acrid smell: a mélange of high explosive, burning plastic, charred human flesh, and blood. It was the smell of WAR, and I love it. I crossed the threshold, my PDW at low ready, my trigger finger indexed alongside the frame of the weapon, advancing steadily, foot by foot, forcing myself to keep going so my guys wouldn’t bunch up behind me, talking to myself all the while so I’d remember the basics. Scan, and breathe. Don’t tunnel. Keep your fuckin’ eyes moving. Scan and breathe.

  Scan-and-breathe. Scanandbreathe. Scanbreathe. Scan-breathe. Scanbreathe. There was motion to my port side. The PDW came up-up-up and my front sight found a target. I squeezed the trigger and stitched one of the Colombians diagonally—nine shots from thigh to shoulder. He went down behind a burning couch. I jumped the couch, singeing my beard as I did, and put a three-round burst into his head to make sure he’d stay where he was.

  “Going right.” That was Boomerang’s high-pitched voice. I turned just in time to watch as he and Randy disappeared into thick smoke, heading toward the master-suite area.

  I heard noise to my left, turned, fired two shots as I whirled, instinctively inhaling a huge breath—of dense brown smoke from the fucking couch. It burnt like hell as it went down into my lungs—as nasty a sensation as if I’d just taken a Rogue-size swallow of battery acid. But a guy’s gotta breathe. I tried dropping down to the deck where the air was better. But it didn’t make much difference: all the smoke was beginning to make me woozy and sick. But, so what? FIDO,57 right?

  I drove on, moving toward what was left of the arched doorway leading toward the kitchen and staff quarters. From the extent of the damage and the fire that was burning out of control in that part of the house, I was heading toward the area where the TOW had exploded.

  Scan and breathe; scan-and-breathe. I made my way into what must have been the den, past the shards of what had just a few minutes ago been a big-screen TV set into a huge wooden entertainment center. I stepped over the bottom half of a Colombian. The pelotudo had obviously been blown in two by the explosion. Six feet away, through the thickening smoke, I could see what was left of his torso. His guts splattered the wall ahead of me.

  Then I saw something moving off to my right, and instinctively I fired at the motion.

  Dear readers, have I ever made the point about how important it is to count rounds?

  I have indeed made that point many times, you say. It is a lesson you have taken to heart, you assert. Well, okay: how many rounds have I expended so far?

  There’s a deafening silence from all you assholes out there. Ah—finally, one squeaky little voice admitting that you’re not quite sure how many rounds I’ve fired tonight.

  Well, here’s the point of this short, Socratic dialogue: I didn’t know, either. I got that one shot off and then the fucking PDW’s bolt locked back. That’s when I realized I was out of ammo. Empty. Dry. And we all know I wasn’t carrying a spare mag.

  I guess the look on my face must have given me away. Because the pelotudo I’d been shooting at had a shit-eating grin on his as he stood up, raised the muzzle of his Uzi in my direction, and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened. Guess what: the pelotudo’s weapon was also empty. He’d been as good at counting his rounds as I had at counting mine.

  But that didn’t
deter the sumbitch. He tossed the subgun aside and came at me through the smoke, a two-inch, serrated blade folding knife in his right hand held in what’s known as a ninja grip: blade tip pointing up his arm and parallel to it, cutting side out. That way he could rake the blade tip at my face, whirl, and stab if I gave him an opening, or he could slash at me with the cutting edge, punching and jabbing like a boxer.

  You’re saying something. You want my attention. Now? With an armed-and-dangerous asshole coming at me? You want to know why I’m afraid of a pelotudo with a tiny-bladed knife.

  Hey, lemme tell you something very basic about knives. Ninety-nine percent of those testosterone-intensive six-inch drop point special steel self-proclaimed badass-designed high-dollar fighting blades are so much bullshit. Any knife is a lethal tool if you know how to use it. All you need to do fatal damage to the human body is a ten-dollar imitation Spyderco with a one-and-three-quarter-inch blade. It will sever all the important arteries; it will cause terminal damage; it will do proper mayhem. The best folding combat knife I’ve ever used, the Emerson CQC-7 (in the old days Ernie Emerson used to put serial numbers on his knives; mine is number 007; fitting, huh?), has a blade that’s just under three inches in length, and even Ernie will tell you some folks think that’s slightly oversize for an efficient folder blade.

  Okay, let me get back to work, will ya? The PIQ (if you don’t know it stands for Pelotudo In Question you’re a bigger dumbass than he is) came at me, fists raised like a boxer’s. He jabbed with his right hand—the one in which he held the knife. He turned his wrist out, the blade edge slashed in my direction—and I stepped back, heel first, to move out of range.