Well, this was the big leagues. Baby Huey would learn quick—or he’d be dead.
You think that sounds cold? Well, it may indeed sound cold. But it’s the fucking truth. The men who work for me are always selected because they can look into their enemies’ eyes and kill them dead. Not wound. Kill. Roy Boehm, the godfather of all SEALs, taught me by example that breaking things and killing people is what being a SEAL is all about. I see no reason to modify his operational philosophy even in these politically correct days of nonlethal weapons and touchy-feely military doctrine.
2121. First things first. We lashed ourselves together, and I lashed the line that tied Boomerang and me together to one of the mast cleats, thus assuring that all eight of us were attached to the sub. Under normal OPCONs, SEALs travel in pairs. Tonight, our four pairs of swim buddies would move as one until we reached the Kuz Emeq. Night swims are tough. Clandestine night underwater approaches are even tougher. I wanted to know where each and every one of us was, at all times—and that meant moving together. We began to unpack the gear and affix it to our bodies. We were traveling light tonight, because it is no fun swimming when loaded down with equipment. Eighteen hundred yards is an easy swim—if you are on the surface, and you can drag your gear in a flotation bag. It is an easy swim at a depth of thirty-five feet as well, despite being hampered by your rebreather, which has all the hydrodynamics of a small refrigerator. But tonight it would not be an easy swim, because tonight in addition to the Draegers, we’d be encumbered by weapons, ammo, and other takedown equipment. There would be hostiles patrolling on the surface, and crosscurrents to face. No, this was going to be work.
2127. I finally strapped all my gear on—the last step was attaching my suppressed MP5-PDW—when I received a hand signal from Boomerang that everybody was packed up and ready to launch. Good news. I undid the half-hitch that secured us all to the mast cleat. Just as I turned us loose I sensed the current intensify. The fucking Nacogdoches was picking up speed—three, maybe even four knots right now. Not good. Like I said, speed is not a plus when you are trying to launch swimmers.
I grabbed for the long line I’d used to pull myself from the escape trunk to the mast. But now the fucking sub began to roll counterclockwise, and the line was nowhere to be found. What the fuck was Tuzzy trying to do—drown us?
I kicked as hard as I could. But it is impossible to keep up with something moving at four knots, especially when you are tied to seven other bodies by five-yard lengths of nylon rope.
Relentlessly, inexorably, the big boat slid away from me, a receding shadow in the blackness. And then, as if snapped up by a huge grappling hook, I was whipped around, turned topsy-turvy, and—wham—slammed against the sub’s hull.
I reached out to grab something, but there was nothing to take hold of—just smooth hull beneath my fingertips. Now the fucking sub rolled another four, five, six degrees away from me, and the current slammed me up against the hull. Oh, terrific. If Joey Tuzz kept this up, he’d roll us right into the path of his goddamn screw, and we’d end up as SEALburgers. What the hell was he doing? There was no way to ask—and no way to find out. Once we’d left the escape trunk, we had no comms. Oh, this was not the way I’d fucking conceived this mission.
My instinct told me the sub’s speed had just increased again. Maybe up to six, six and a half knots. Yes, I know that six knots is just about the speed at which most joggers jog. But underwater, when you’re being bounced against a fucking submarine hull, six knots is enough to get you fucking killed.
Well, I wasn’t about to get myself—or any of my men—killed tonight. This mission was too important. There was too much at stake. I clawed at the hull, my fingers seeking any goddam purchase they could find. They found nothing. And now, the combined weight of my seven men started to pull me aft along the hull. I was slipping farther and farther astern—toward that goddamn lethal screw.
Fuck. I wound the lifeline around my left arm, stretched my right arm as far out as I could reach, summoned every particle of energy left in my body (and more importantly my soul), and kicked, trying to propel myself in the direction of the sub’s roll.
Nothing.
I kicked again, and again, and again, and again, until the muscles in my calves, my thighs, my back, and my chest all caught fire.
I hurt like hell. But I made progress. My hand brushed against the rough surface of the narrow, non-skid safety track that runs almost the entire length of the sub’s hull. I knew that two feet from the track, a parallel line of fixed cleats runs along the spine of the hull. I kicked, kicked, kicked. Every atom of my body fought against the water, the current, and the sub’s movement. Every particle of my mind willed forward progress. I bit through my mouthpiece, but I didn’t give a fuck—I was going to get us out of this. I WOULD NOT FAIL.
And then, the fingers of my outstretched left hand found a fucking cleat. I muscled my big paw around it, joint by joint, holding tight, my arm clenched as tight as it was when I did the last fucking pull-up in the last fucking rotation during Hell Week at BUD/S, when you are so completely fucking exhausted that you know that you can’t even draw one more fucking breath—and then the fucking instructor tells you to give him another twenty pull-ups or you are gone from the program.
Yes, I gave him twenty fucking more back then—and another, just to show I could fucking do it. And the lesson I’d learned has stayed with me my entire career: when you believe it is over, it ain’t over. When you think your body cannot do any more, it CAN do more, and it WILL do more. And you WILL NOT FAIL in your mission.
And so, yes, I held on to the cleat, clawing, clenching, grasping, clutching, until I could wrap the safety line around the cleat and secure us to the boat once more. With the line secure, I hung there suspended, hyperventilating, expended and sweating into my wet suit, as the sub moved steadfastly on through the dark water.
I was totally spent. I was emotionally drained and physically exhausted—completely burnt out. And we hadn’t even begun the night’s work yet.
2129. Just as inexplicably as it had accelerated, the Nacogdoches now dropped its speed and eased back to vertical, barely moving placidly through the water at the proper one-knot velocity. What had the problem been? Had Captain Tuzz been evading something one of his multiple warning systems had picked up? Had the sub started to take in water—foundering because of its slow pace? Had the boat simply begun to stall out and he’d had to act to save it—even if it meant losing us? There was no way of knowing. We were out here on our own.
And frankly, it didn’t matter. We’d survived. We were locked, loaded, and ready to go—and it was way beyond the time to go to work. I released the hitch tethering us to the sub and peeled away, checking the lighted dial of the underwater compass strapped to my right forearm to get our heading. I looked at my depth indicator. We were at fifty-five feet right now. Yes, I realize that according to the current NAVSEA operational manuals, our Draegers should not, and here let me quote, “be used at depths greater than six fathoms under any circumstances without the express authority of NAVSEA.”
Now, it doesn’t matter that no one at NAVSEA has ever used a fucking Draeger LAR-V anywhere but in one of the fucking swimming pools in which they certify the goddamn things. That’s right, gentle reader: the nitnoy, pus-nutted paper pushers who are charged with buying these items for the Teams are not the selfsame salty-balled SEALs who have to use ’em. The result is that those desk-bound bean counters don’t give much of a rusty F-word whether equipment works or not, or whether it’s suited to the SEAL mission profile or not, or much of anything else.
This sort of shit-for-brains U.S. Navy institutional mind-set is nothing new. When Roy Boehm created the first SEALs back in 1962, he was duly and properly authorized by the powers that be to carry M-14 rifles and .38-caliber pistols, because those are what the desk-bound bureaucrats at BUWEPS—the Bureau of Weapons—decided that he needed. Roy, to his credit, went out and bought .357 Magnum pistols, and AR-15 assault rifles
for his shooters. The M-14 is a terrific rifle at a thousand yards. And the .38 Special is a good target round. But even as far back as 1962, Roy realized one of the places his new team of merry marauders would be sent was Vietnam. And Roy had studied enough war to know that the SEALs would have to be capable of disabling the Viet Cong’s motorized sampans and junks with their pistols—which is something the .357 round can do. He also knew from his experience of working with the Philippine guerrillas in World War II that most of the rifle work his men would do they’d do from ambush positions—a hundred yards or closer.
Knowing all of this—and unable to convince the apparatchiks at BUWEPS that he was correct—Roy simply went out and bought his men Smith and Wesson .357s and AR-15s without going through the system. And the Navy tried to court-martial him for doing so. In fact, if it hadn’t been for President John F. Kennedy, the Navy would have succeeded in keelhauling Roy’s horsehide-tough ass, and we SEALs would have been much worse off today.
Anyway, the rebreathers we were currently using weren’t Navy-certified beyond forty-one feet of depth—in fact, the Navy doesn’t want ’em used any deeper than about thirty-five feet. It didn’t matter that I have been using them at depths up to sixty feet for more years than I care to remember. I’ve just never bothered to tell the folks at NAVSEA what I’ve done.
2145. We moved ahead in the darkness. I felt a crosscurrent, coming from starboard to port. Now it took 50 percent more effort, as I kept my eyes focused on the underwater compass’s dial, to keep us on course. Behind me, Boomerang was counting kicks (two to the yard), so he could guestimate how far we’d come, and how far we had to go. I checked my depth gauge: twenty-three feet. Maybe there’d be less current a bit deeper. I angled my body down slightly, and kicked forward into the blackness, gently bringing us down to a depth of thirty-two feet. After eighty or ninety seconds, the crosscurrent subsided and I began to make decent progress once again. I began to sense a dull ache in the forward portion of my brain—I’d probably been so intent on swimming, I hadn’t been breathing deeply enough. I sucked a big gulp of O2 to clear my head and swam on.
I checked my depth gauge as my legs kicked rhythmically. Steady as she goes at thirty feet. I liked that depth: it gave us a big safety margin. Highly unlikely we’d be spotted. Shit, with the night this dark, we could come in at six feet and they’d never see us. But as my old platoon chief, Everett Emerson Barrett, used to tell us tadpoles, “Never assume, you worthless, pencil-dicked geeks: assume makes an ASS of U and ME.” And so, I wasn’t about to assume anything. A whole bunch of agencies had actually come together and worked their butts off putting this op together, and I wasn’t going to screw things up for any of us.
2203. There was something above my head. I couldn’t see it. But I could feel it, as if, despite swimming in the darkness, a shadow had loomed over me. The sensation was completely and absolutely palpable. Instinctively, I angled myself downward, slowing my pace. From the angle of the safety line attached to my waist, I noted that the SEALs behind me did the same. I fought the urge to turn the light on and go take a look. Instead, I kicked on single-mindedly, moving in the heading my compass was pointing. And I prayed to the God of War that whatever was up there didn’t have a sonar system deployed, or any other detection device for that matter. I didn’t need any more fucking problems than I’d already had.
I swam on another 150 kick strokes, then paused long enough to let Boomerang and the rest of the team catch up. My head still ached—in fact, it now felt as if a vise was tightening down between my ears. Well, fuck it—I had work to do. We all hung suspended in the water, nose to nose, and conversed with our hands.
“There was something up there, right, Skipper?” Duck Foot gestured.
I shrugged, giving him the universal sign for, “Your guess is as good as mine.” But I think we both knew we’d passed under one of Khaled’s picket boats. Well,
whatever it was, Duck Foot had sensed it, too. It was the hunter in him.
I asked Boomerang how far we’d come. His hands told me we were almost halfway there. Hmm, I realized my thigh muscles had lied to me. From the way they were burning, I’d have guessed we’d have made a lot more progress than that.
2257. On the target, my ears were now ringing like Big fucking Ben, and my head was pounding like I’d just been kicked by a steel-toed boondocker. WTF was causing it? There was no time to ask or answer that question. Too much else to think about. Like the Kuz Emeq. We were, to be precise, twenty-nine feet below Khaled’s vessel. Not that we could see anything. But there was ample evidence that we’d hit the spot.
Boats, you see, make a shitload of noise—much more than you might expect. And this one was no exception. We could hear the ship’s generators and pumps working; I could discern the ebb and the flow of the crew as they moved around the ship. Even make out the reverb from some rock and roll someone was playing up above. We knew it was the right vessel because the homing device told me that I was dead on. And, to make our lives easier, Khaled’s crew had obligingly deployed a pair of sea anchors to keep the yacht’s movement at a minimum. Indeed, I was currently hanging on to one of the anchor hawsers.
Time to make ready. For those of you who have been through the process with me before, think of this as a refresher in Roguish SpecWar philosophy. For those of you who haven’t, pay fucking attention, because you will see all of this material again.
Okay. Here’s a fundamental SpecWarrior truth: whether you are taking down an aircraft, a train, a bus, a car—or a luxury yacht, the three elements most crucial to the success of your operation are, one: surprise, two: speed, and three: violence of action.
And here is another vital but essential rudiment of SpecWar. At its core, each special operation pits a small but highly trained and motivated force against a larger but less well-motivated unit. The spec-operators achieve their victory through achieving something called relative superiority, or RS.
Simply put, relative superiority is when that small, elite force achieves a swift tactical advantage over the larger body of defenders. The obvious truth of the matter is that if you do not overwhelm the bad guys quickly, ruthlessly, and efficiently, they will overwhelm your shooters before you can kill enough of them to achieve RS.
That’s where the speed and the violence of action comes in. There can be no hesitation, no doubt, no restraint. You must balls-to-the-wall ATTACK. And when you do ATTACK, you go in, as my old shipmate, Colonel Charlie Beckwith,9 the godfather of Delta Force, used to say, to “kill ’em all and let God sort it out.”
Now, the most critical period in a special operation has come to be known as the Area of Vulnerability, or AV. The AV in an aircraft hostage takedown, for example, starts when the assault group begins its approach to the plane. Because if the shooters are spotted before they Get There, the hostages will be killed before a single rescuer makes it into the cabin. When you go over the rail of a ship under way, you are most vulnerable as you are making your climb up the caving ladders. There’s a thin line of shooters, spread out as they muscle their way up and over the rail.
Oh, sure, you may have a security team in the boat below, but the fact of the matter is that the defenders hold the high ground—i.e., the deck and superstructure of the ship—and if a tango decides to take a cigarette break, spots you, and calls for reinforcements before you can neutralize him with a head shot from a suppressed weapon, you’re dog meat. Even so, tonight’s assault was marginally easier for us than if we’d been tasked with boarding a ship under way.
Obviously, it is much simpler to clamber onto a craft that’s not moving than it is to have to factor in all the myriad components of current, velocity, wind, waves, and other Murphy-prone elements of underway assaults. Second, the size of the Kuz Emeq made our job getting aboard less problematic. Oh, the boat may have been over a hundred feet in length, but it had the sort of shallow draft common to pleasure craft, with the happy result that its custom teak side deck and ebony-inlaid gunwale weren’t t
en feet above the water’s surface.
Moreover, there was a diving platform suspended from the transom, and since the crew had obligingly set out sea anchors, we now had lines to climb.
2301. We jettisoned our fins, lashed all our extraneous equipment to the sea anchor lines, and made ready to hit the Kuz Emeq. Each man knew exactly where he had to be, and just how he’d go over the rail.
Our final assault plans had been assisted by satellite surveillance photographs of Khaled’s yacht courtesy of a specially diverted National Reconnaissance Office Lacrosse/Crystal/Flagpole satellite, which provided us with thermal simulations as well as 0.039-meter imagery, which comes out to be a resolution of about 1.5 inches from a constant trajectory of 287 miles above Earth.10 And when the intel squirrel wonks and photo-interpretation dweebs at NRO and DIA’s labs had finished playing with—read computer enhancing—those satellite snapshots into the two-thousand-pixel-per-inch range, we’d been given a bunch of real Kodak Moment–quality pictures from which to work. Ain’t science grand, folks?
2
2303. SHOW TIME. I SHOOK MY HEAD TO CLEAR IT—I WAS really getting fuzzy now—double-checked my Knight-suppressed MP5-PDW to make sure the lightweight mag was locked firmly in place and the safety was on, slapped the bolt forward to chamber a round, then slung the nylon strap over my shoulder. With this new model suppressor, the HK would fire coming right out of the water. Shit—it would even fire one shot underwater. Strapped to my right thigh was the bulky ballistic nylon holster package containing my backup weapon (a suppressed HK USP nine millimeter, fifteen in the mag, one in the pipe), and three spare fifteen-round mags all filled with subsonic hollowpoint rounds. My big, nasty saw-back dive knife was strapped to my left calf. High above it, a nylon thigh pouch held two waterproof flashbang distraction devices, one waterproof concussion grenade, and three spare thirty-round MP5 magazines.
Option Delta Page 3