A pouch secured to the nylon web belt at the small of my back held a roll of duct tape—like your American Express card, we SpecWarriors don’t ever leave home without one—a dozen nylon handcuff restraints, a small bolt cutter, and a five-yard coil of eighth-inch nylon line. And if you think that swimming a mile or so underwater with all this shit strapped to your body is easy, guess again, bub. I fucking hurt right now. But then, as you know if you know me at all, if I’m not hurting, I’m not living. So you can guess I was very much alive tonight.
Since I believe in Roy Boehm’s two-word definition of leadership (“Follow me!”), I’d assigned myself and my senior enlisted man—Boomerang—the hardest and most exposed responsibility: the stern. We’d surface alongside the dive platform (and just above the yacht’s nasty twin screws, which were idling), hoist ourselves across the dive platform and over the transom, neutralize Khaled’s aft security force—the largest cluster of armed & dangerous fuckers aboard—then move across the fantail, which was totally exposed to fire from the quarterdeck and chopper pad, and make our way through the big double sliding glass doors into the yacht’s main saloon. There, we’d take down Khaled and the Kraut bomb salesman before they had time to deep-six any of the evidence—or the money.
Gator and Duck Foot would come over the starboard rail just aft of the bow. They’d clean-sweep any security off the deck, then drop through the Kuz Emeq’s forward hatch and clear the forward cabins. Half Pint and Rodent were responsible for the port side, where there was an amidships ladder leading to the bridge. They’d neutralize it, close down the adjacent communications shack, then head for the engine room and temporarily disable the yacht. I say temporarily, because if something went wrong and the cavalry—read FBI—didn’t show up on time, my orders were to sail the Kuz Emeq to the closest U.S. warship and make the transfer there.
Nod and Baby Huey would insert starboard amidships, up the accommodation ladder that sat alongside the main cabin. They’d take another ladder to the chopper deck, charge up, disable the chopper on its landing pad and neutralize the crew and any security personnel. Then they’d double-time it to an adjacent passageway, which led below decks to the crew’s quarters, where they’d handcuff and lock down the Kuz Emeq’s staff. If they met any resistance they were authorized to have the kind of lethal fun that SEALs seldom get to have these days when the ROEs11 put out by the White House for counterterrorism missions stipulate more first aid for wounded tangos than wounded SEALs.12
The plan was KISS-simple, which is the way I like to do things. Yes, we were outnumbered. There were a dozen Taliban gunmen, and a crew of sixteen. But we would retain the tactical advantage, and therefore we would win through surprise, speed, and violence of action. Timing the assault was not a problem. We’d synchronized our watches aboard the Nacogdoches; besides, we carried waterproof radios. Once we’d broken the surface, we’d be able to communicate through our lip mikes and earpieces—if, that is, Mister Murphy hadn’t screwed with the equipment.
I hand-signaled and we separated, each pair of swim buddies moving to locate their assigned insertion points. Boomerang and I moved away from the sea anchor line and had started to ascend gently—no telltale signs from us accomplished sneak-and-peekers—when I fucking passed out. I mean: one moment I was swimming, and then I don’t remember fuck-all. Nada. Zero. Zilch. Somebody turned my fucking lights out.
Now, the fucking Draeger LAR-V is fed by a 1.5-liter oxygen bottle. Under what passes for normal operating conditions, it is expected that an experienced swimmer can operate for up to five hours underwater. Unless something goes wrong. And obviously, something had gone wrong.
Anyway, next thing I knew, I was being rudely shaken. I opened my eyes and saw Boomerang’s face up against my own. One of his hands was holding my face steady. With his other, he pulled the mouthpiece out from between my teeth. Then he drew his hand across his neck to tell me, “Don’t breathe.” Then he passed me his own mouthpiece.
Someday, I am actually going to meet Mister Murphy. When I do, I am going to kill him. Slowly. Painfully. With extreme prejudice. That would be then. For now, all I wanted was a little fucking oxygen—just enough to get me to the surface. I didn’t know what had gone wrong with my rebreather. Maybe there was water in the Barrel Lime, maybe it was cursed by dry rot, maybe . . . well, who cared. All I knew is that I’d blacked out, and if it hadn’t been for Boomerang, Mister Murphy would have won this little contest.
I held on to my swim buddy as he passed the mouthpiece to me and we shared air for the final four fathoms as we eased ourselves toward the surface.
At about two fathoms we began to pick up the Kuz Emeq’s lights. Bright halogens, directed toward the water. That would make popping the surface more difficult. But it wouldn’t necessarily help the folks aboard pick us up. The surface of the ocean is not mirrorlike. There’s the chop—which tonight was about a foot—as well as surface winds, currents, and other elements. Bottom line is that unless you are looking—and I mean really looking—it will be hard to make out a swathed-in-black combat swimmer when he pops the surface adjacent to your ship. Especially if said combat swimmer knows enough to come up as close to the hull as possible, so that to see him, you have to lean way over the rail and look straight down.
I swallowed water, took a last gulp of O2 from Boomerang’s mouthpiece, and pushed off, giving him the air hose back. I exhaled gently—didn’t want a bunch of bubbles giving my position away after I’d come so far undetected—and turtled the surface at snout depth at the port side corner of the transom, protected by the shadow of the dive platform.
Taking air through my nose and mouth quietly but rhythmically so I wouldn’t start to hyperventilate and tunnel-vision, I eased the MP5’s thick muzzle suppressor up, brought it out of the water next to my head, reached down and illuminated the waterproof electro-optical sight, and took a firm, one-handed grip on the weapon. Switched the radio on. Carefully inserted the earpiece and brought the lip mike into play.
I tsk-tsked. No response. I waited another fifteen seconds and tsk-tsked again. Nothing. WTF? Played with the radio and tried once more. Result: silence. Eased my right arm up far enough to check the dial of the big-watch-little-cock dive watch on my big hairy wrist. Despite all the goatfucks we’d endured, and the various dings that still made my teeth ache (not to mention running out of O2), I was still ninety seconds ahead of schedule. I gave it fifty-five seconds (and believe me when you are fucking sitting in hostile territory, fifty-five seconds is a long, long fucking time), then tsk-tsked once again.
This time, seven tsk-tsk echoes came back at me. All the signals were five by five. That meant everybody’s radios were on—and working. Will wonders never cease?
Now that I knew we were all set, it was time to prowl and growl. My body told me it was ready for combat: my breathing had become shallow; there was a slightly hollow feeling in the pit of my loins. My heart was pumping at about 150, my adrenaline level was off the charts—and I’m willing to bet you couldn’t work a single fucking strand of capelli d’angelo up my sphincter right now no matter how much olio you doused it in.
I scanned (so as not to tunnel), breathed evenly, and pushed myself slightly aft to gain a better position and a better purchase on the dive platform.
Scan . . . and . . . breathe. Moved my left arm oh so s-l-o-w-l-y onto the sea-bleached teak, my fingers grasping through the wood.
Scan and breathe. Peered across the wide transom to see Boomerang’s narrow face mirroring my own movements, so that he’d cover my blind-spot areas and I’d cover his.
Scan, breathe. Except I held my breath as a shadow fell across the dive platform.
Scan breathe, goddamn it. I fought the impulse to move my arm, which lay up against the transom. Eased the suppressor of the PDW up so it angled into the shadow. Waited. Watched as the shadow lengthened and intensified.
Now, I perceived a hint of something physical—edge of head; hair; a whiff of . . . garlic. The motherfucker was s
tarting to bend over the transom.
Scanbreathe. Scanbreathe. A dark, bearded face came into view, bisecting the V between transom and dive platform. Scanbreathe. I saw his eyes widen as he discovered my arm and leaned farther out to see what it was attached to.
I reached up, put the muzzle of the gun under the thick beard on his chinee-chin-chin. Squeezed the PDW’s trigger before the sonofabitch could react. Put a three-round burst up and into his head.
This all took place under the physiological condition that piled higher-and-deepers13 at graduate schools of psychology call “tachypsychia,” which is a fifty-dollar word for the kind of time-stands-still slow motion under which so much combat seemingly happens. There was almost no noise—the suppressed sound of the hammer pu-pu-popping was lost in the ocean’s chop and the ambient sounds coming from the yacht. Then the top of his Talibany turban exploded, and I was showered with blood, brain, and bone fragments.
He dropped like a sack of shit, collapsing over the transom, his weapon clattering to the deck out of sight. Then—this is in real time—he fell forward, onto the dive platform. Precisely where I had to be.
I heard the babble of Babel from SOD—somewhere on deck—followed by the long, deadly r-r-rip of automatic weapons fire. They were shouting to one another. Was it Arabic? Urdu Pak? Pashto Afghani? Who knew. More to the point, who cared.
The transom just above my head splintered as a barrage of rounds cut through it. Instinctively, I ducked behind the Taliban’s corpse. Fuck me—sitting here in the water wasn’t going to do anybody any good—especially if any of the motherfuckers on deck were carrying grenades.
I let go of the PDW, reached up, and pulled on his corpse, dragging it into the water, shouting “Go-gogo!” into the mike. No need for stealth anymore—what we needed was fucking violence of fucking action. Lots of both.
“Boomerang—let’s go!” I grabbed one of the distraction devices out of its pouch, pulled the pin, heaved it over the transom, and pulled myself onto the dive platform.
As the two-hundred-decibel concussion and 1.8-million candlepower flash rocked the yacht I rolled over the transom, and came up on one knee, my MP5 up and ready to rock and roll, my Roguish eyes scanning for threats.
And because the God of WAR is a great and beneficent God, and because the God of WAR loves me as I was created in His image, He provided me with manifold threats to neutralize.
Threat One was that Taliban over there with the AK pointed vaguely in my direction. I smote him from his crotch to the bridge of his nose with three three-round bursts, and yea he went down and verily he died most nastily.
Threats Two and Three were still blinded from the flashbang. I shot them as they fought to see WTF was happening, holding the HK’s front sight center-mass on their bodies and filling them with one-two-three-four-five three-shot groups until they fell and didn’t move.
I heard Boomerang roll over the transom behind me, and the welcome sound of his suppressed PDW in triple-burst. A body fell off the aft starboard side of the upper deck, landing off to my right with a hollow thud. “Gotcha covered, Boss Dude—”
“Roger.” I moved forward, listening to the sounds of my assault team as they commandeered the Kuz Emeq. Gator’d cleared the forward cabins and was already on his way aft. Rodent was inside the radio shack. Seconds later I heard him shout, “Commo hut clear.”
I heard Baby Huey’s hyperexcited voice report he’d taken care of the chopper and its crew. “Chopper clear chopper clear chopper clear,” he screamed sans punctuation. Yes—this motherfucking operation was going like fucking clockwork. In fact, I was the only motherfucker behind schedule.
“Boss Dude—” That was Boomerang’s urgent voice, coming from somewhere behind me. “Red four o’clock.”
I concentrated on the sounds coming through my earpiece and kept moving toward the wide glass doors to the main saloon, where I could make out two, three, four people inside. My focus was diverted as Boomerang’s voice exploded inside my ear. “Chopper pad! Red four o’clock,” he screamed. Then he yelled, “Can’t get a shot, going right, going right, going right.”
Okay, enough already. Boomerang was telling me in SAS shorthand that he was moving to our right. I would have said something military like “Roger,” except that the fucking expensive wood that Khaled had bought for Kuz Emeq’s fantail splintered right in front of me, and a long, nasty splinter of that selfsame very costly teak—it was about the size of a chopstick but much, much sharper—drove itself all the way through the meaty portion of my left calf.
It occurred to me right then that perhaps Boomerang hadn’t been telling me where he was going, so much as trying to warn me that there was another fucking threat on my right-hand side—and that he didn’t have a clear shot. It occurred to me right then that perhaps the God of War was angry with his child—that’s moi—for exhibiting what the ancient Greeks called hubris, and Izzy Cohen, who ran Izzy’s Kosher Deli & Numbers Running Establishment back in the old New Brunswick, New Jersey, days of my ute, used to refer to as chutzpah. Hubris, chutzpah—either way, I was fuckee-fuckeed.
I swung the PDW’s muzzle toward the threat. But I couldn’t perceive any fucking threat. I swept left. I didn’t see a fucking thing. I swept right. I didn’t see bupkis there, either. That was when I realized that I was neither breathing nor scanning. Not good. I was tunneling: focused on the narrow, pie-shaped field of vision directly to my left and to my right. But that’s like going into combat wearing blinders. Tunneling cuts off about 80 percent of your vision. Most crucially, it cuts off your peripheral vision—and peripheral is where most of the fucking action is going to take place.
Like the area above me—the edge of the chopper pad, from which, now that I’d bothered to raise my eyes, I saw a nasty, turbaned sonofabitch drawing down on me.
Just as he fired I rolled left and shot without aiming, stitching the rim of the cantilevered pad vaguely in his direction. Well, to be honest, that is an overstatement. I fired. But unlike all those fucking Hollywood movies where the good guy somehow manages to eke 218 shots out of his single-stack hard chrome frame and aubergine purple finish slide Bill Fabus custom-made hybrid Caspian .45 sans reloading, this was the fucking real world, and the thirty-round magazine in my PDW had just gone dry.
Now, a big part of being a SpecWarrior is training for situations such as this one. Saturation training. Hours and hours on the range, working out the most fluid way of dealing with stoppages, stovepipes, malfunctions, empty chambers, and just plain fuckups.
And so I didn’t panic. I didn’t even have to think. My mind went onto autodrive. I shouted, “Cover—Cover!” rolled under the sheltering lip of the quarterdeck and dropped to one knee.
“Gotcha, Boss—” That was Boomerang’s voice as he lay down a comforting blanket of suppressive fire. It was even more comforting when a body dropped off the chopper pad onto the fantail.
The muzzle of Boomerang’s HK followed its trajectory, and as it hit he pumped two shots into the Afghan’s head. Yeah—I hate to waste ammo, too. But this way Boomerang was certain that this motherfucker wasn’t gonna come back to haunt us.
I racked the bolt back. Dropped the mag. Took a new one from my thigh pouch, jammed it sans any foreplay into the receiver and shook it to make sure it was secure, then slapped the bolt forward. Total time was less than six seconds—an eternity when you’re under fire, but better than anything I’d ever managed on the range.
I was ready to rock and roll, and I shouted, “Clear!” so Boomerang would know it.
Sometimes, friends, I am given to understatement. This was one of them. I was not clear, in any sense of the word. In fact, I was in what the former Leader of the Free World, George Herbert Walker Bush, has referred to so genteelly (and presidentially) as, “deep doo-doo.”
Tonight’s deep doo-doo was located inside the saloon, where an enterprising Taliban or two realized that he/they could fire the heavy rounds from their AKs right through the heavy, reinforced safe
ty glass of the doors without shattering the glass itself. This was not especially good news to me. See? I told you that I am sometimes given to understatement.
I received this not especially good news in the form of half a dozen bullets directed at me. Luckily, these Taliban, while resourceful, were religious shooters. By that, I mean they were of the “spray and pray” school. I scampered on hands and knees out of the line of fire and retreated to shelter alongside a steel bulkhead adjoining the saloon.
“I can’t keep their heads down, Boss Dude—” Boomerang’s voice called urgently from across the fantail. “My HK ain’t gettin’ through the friggin’ glass.”
This was a problem we hadn’t anticipated. The AK fires a heavy 7.62 -T× - 39 round that punched clean through the double panes of half-inch thick tinted safety glass. Our suppressed, 9-mm hollowpoint rounds basically shattered on impact. They’d been designed that way for CQC (Close Quarters Combat, don’tcha know) in steel passageways, aircraft fuselages, and narrow hallways, where you don’t want ricochets slamming into your own men or killing innocent hostages.
Fuck me. Belay that. Fuck us. I was dangerously behind schedule. By now the goddamn Corsicans had to have heard the shooting, and I’d wanted to be in total control of the fucking yacht by the time they’d had time to react.
Wild-eyed, I looked around. Saw a boat hook hanging on the bulkhead. Six feet of stout hickory, tipped by a steel shank with a solid spur. Grabbed it. Rooted around in my thigh pouch until I retrieved a distraction device. Fumbled until I came up with my duct tape and the coil of nylon line. Taped the distraction device to the steel shank of the boat hook, setting it so that the spoon was horizontal, and the ring head of the grenade pin pointing toward the deck. Half-hitched six feet of nylon line to the ring. Then, c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y, straightened the grenade pin.
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