I crouched to give myself a better swing and edged forward to the corner of the saloon. Then I took the fucking boat hook like a baseball bat, wound up, and swung the motherfucker hook first into the glass. Just before I made contact I pulled the nylon line, releasing the grenade pin, which kicked the spoon out and lit the device’s second-and-a-half fuse.
I knew enough to look away as the fucking thing went off and shattered the saloon’s safety glass doors into dust. Even so, I was virtually blinded by the blast. I charged through the opening where the doors had been, seeing stars and spots instead of targets or threats. Finally picked out two targets three maybe four yards away. Fired from the hip. They both went down. Closed the distance and discovered one Mausetot14 Taliban.
Great, I was now seeing double. I heard Boomerang behind me. Turned to make sure (never assume). There were two of him, too—kind of a parallax view. Fuck me. I am getting too damn old for this kind of fun and games.
Swung back. Vaulted over the twin pianos, which were looking a lot worse for wear since I’d loosed half a mag into it (them?). Picked the wrong piano to vault—the one that obviously didn’t exist—and landed flat on my Slovak snout. Since I was down, I took the time to reload the PDW—one fuckup like that a night is all I allow myself—then I gathered myself up and kept moving.
There was a passageway at the rear of the saloon, ending in a set of antique wood-and-multipaned French doors that led to the master suite. I knew that’s where Khaled would be. Of course I bounced off the door frame—I really don’t like this double-vision shit at all—and caromed crazily along the bulkheads, skimming across the oriental carpet.
Whoa—there were two single-compartment doors on opposite sides of the passageway about halfway to the master cabin. Here is a CQC rule that will keep you alive: never go past an unsecured space. I stopped just shy of the first, rubbed at my eyes, which were almost back to normal vision by now, and turned the handle. The door opened. I let it swing back up against the interior bulkhead. It opened all the way. I eased around, and peered inside. Reached in andflicked the light switch.
It was a guest compartment—a rectangular cabin with a double-sized bed, a big closet with two louvered doors, a sofa, coffee table, and two armchairs. The bathroom—I could make out the door—was off to the right. Subgun at the low ready, I worked my way around the perimeter of the room. Checked behind the sofa and under the bed. Worked my way past the credenza. Opened the closet doors. Inspected the bathroom. The cabin was empty.
I wedged the door open and went back out into the passageway to see Boomerang working his way up to the doorway opposite the one I’d just cleared. We stacked and made entry, working quickly and efficiently. It took less than thirty seconds to clear the second compartment, a mirror image of the one I’d done solo. That left the master suite.
Now, let’s just stop the action for a minute or so here, so I can give all of youse some Roguish pointers about what we in the counterterrorism trade call dynamic entry operations. As I’ve pointed out recently, the key to success in these kinds of ops lies in surprise and in violence of action. But (there’s always a but, ain’t there?) there is one condition in which a dynamic entry is both foolhardy and dangerous. That is when someone knows you are coming, all surprise has been lost, and you still decide to go through the door into unknown hostile territory. Yes, sometimes it’s absolutely necessary to do so. But in 99 percent of all cases, it is ill-advised, misguided, and downright foolhardy.
I have seen it happen. Some young, energetic SWAT cop on a dynamic entry sees a malefactor run down a hallway. The perp disappears around a corner, or into a room. The cop’s adrenaline is pumping. So he gives chase and busts into the room, or turns the corner of the hallway. The perp is waiting with three friends and five guns, and the cop becomes dog meat.
Remember this piece of advice and take it to fucking heart: when some asshole scarpers down a hall or into a room on you and you lose sight of said AS—which stands for aforementioned sphincter—you have lost surprise. The dynamic entry portion of Show Time is over. Finished. Complete. Elvis has Left the Building. Now what you have is a barricade situation, and it should be treated as such.
So, instead of charging into the room or down the hall, you must RRXING—in other words, stop, look & listen. You must wait for backup, so that your firepower will absolutely positively completely suppress and overwhelm anything that may be inside that room or down that hall.
And then, instead of doing a Light Brigade and charging half a league, half a league, half a league onward into the valley of death, you must try to call the mutt out to you.
“Yo, scumbag inside the room, come on out or I’ll use a year’s supply CS gas on your worthless pus-nuts ass and then interrogate you with the help of a fuckin’ plunger,” is one way to open the dialogue. Sending Caesar the Squeezer K9 killer is another viable option. Or, if the scumbag has hostages, you just bottle him (or her, or it, because in these politically correct days we can and we do have female scumbags, and indeterminately gendered scumbags, too, y’know) up, cut the water and the power, commandeer the phone lines, and wait for the hostage negotiator.
But to be honest, most of the time, you’ll get a response. It may be a hostile response, but it will be a response. And, from that first exchange, if you are agile, and sharp, and you play the situation right, you will be able to talk the perp out. And if he decides not to cooperate, and you have to escalate things, then the grand jury in front of which you will appear will find that you used prudent and reasonable force when confronting an armed and dangerous suspect, and your ass won’t be hung out to dry.
Okay, so you realize right now that I wasn’t about to kick in the French doors, just in case Khaled had trained an RPG or a machine gun on ’em. Boomerang and I held in the guest cabin. I peered around the door and yelled, “Khaled!”
No answer. I shouted his name again. This time I got what the social scientist dweebs sometimes call a nonverbal negative response: a long burst of automatic weapons fire shattered the glass panes of the French doors and ripped past us, down the passageway.
Now, we knew from our surveillance imagery that there was no way out of the master cabin except down this passageway. The suite had two rooms—a bedroom and a sitting room—plus a huge bath. But no back door. No escape hatch. Just six portholes on the starboard side, and six on the port side. And Khaled was a chubby little motherfucker with a forty-four-, maybe forty-five-inch waist, and those portholes, which opened out onto the deck, weren’t more than eleven-and-a-half to twelve inches in diameter. I did the math in my head: no way he’d squeeze his royal bulkness through them.
I tried one more time to get him to do the right thing. “Hey, Khaled—you’re bottled up. Just come the fuck out and stop this shit, and nobody gets fuckin’ hurt.”
Khaled’s only response was another long burst.
Well, fuck him. You can’t say I hadn’t tried to work things out like Mister Nice Guy. But it didn’t look as if Khaled wanted to play my game. And there wasn’t a whole lot of time to waste—remember all those nasty Corsicans just over the horizon. I hand-signaled Boomerang to tell him what we were about to do. Then I plucked the last of the distraction devices out of its pouch, straightened the pin, yanked it, reached around, and softball-pitched the fucking thing through the shattered French doors right into the center of the cabin. At first I thought I’d tossed a dud—because the goddamn flashbang didn’t explode for three, four, five seconds, and the Mark 2 Mod 3 distraction devices I was carrying all had 1.5-second fuses. When the damn thing finally blew, the explosion made the whole fucking yacht shudder.
That’s when I realized that what I’d tossed wasn’t a fucking distraction device, but a goddamn Mark 3A2 concussion grenade. We are talking about half a pound of TNT here, folks. And it is spelled l-e-t-h-a-l.
I charged the French doors, my PDW working straight ahead. Boomerang was at my heels, his MP5 over my starboard shoulder. I kicked through the shattered do
uble doors into the cabin. The fucking place was totally destroyed—broken glass and wood fragments everywhere. The draperies and furniture were on fire. The marble tabletops and counters had disintegrated—the explosion had turned the stone into lethal flechettes.
Khaled lay on his back, faceup—well, what was left of his face, anyway—behind the smoldering sofa, the Styr-Aug assault weapon he’d fired at me was still clutched in his right hand. From the look of things, he’d caught the brunt of the grenade blast directly. He wasn’t a pretty sight. But I wasn’t about to waste time admiring my handiwork. After all, I had the bomb salesman—and the Russkie device—to worry about.
The Kraut obviously wasn’t in the sitting room. That left the bedroom, the closet, or the head.
Bedroom first. I silent-signaled Boomerang. We stacked outside the port side of the doorway. When he was ready to go, he squeezed my shoulder. I “cut the pie,” working my muzzle around the doorway, exposing as little of myself as possible while scanning the ever-widening wedge of bedroom that I was able to see.
What I saw made the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up. Oh, the little Kraut was there, all right—all four feet eleven of him. He was standing in front of the bed. His left hand was in the air, minuscule palm facing toward me, waving in surrender. He was braying, “Kapitulieren, kapitulieren,” which even my kleine Deutsch managed to translate as “I surrender, I surrender!”
I nodded. And then—holy shit—I focused on what the Kraut was resting his right hand on. “Machen mit der hands up, schnell, schnell, schnell!” As I gestured with my weapon, the expression in my eyes left no doubt about what I’d do if I wasn’t obeyed right now. The tiny Kraut’s paws shot above his head.
Now I could concentrate. And like I just said, holy shit. What had me worried was a capped metal cylinder about two feet long and four inches in diameter. The top of the cylinder had a small rod protruding from its center. Below the cap was a thick collar, in the middle of which sat a large keylock device, surrounded by a series of buttons and switches.
The cylinder itself was fixed in what looked like a trio of ten-kilo weights—the same sort of iron plates that sit on the outdoor weight pile behind Rogue Manor. But I knew all too well that I wasn’t looking at iron here. No—these plates were made of U235. What was even more disturbing was the fact that my contacts at Christians In Action had been inaccurate. The Kraut hadn’t been about to sell Khaled a Soviet atom bomb. What sat in front of me was a USGI15 SADM, which is the U.S. military acronym for a Small Atomic Demolition Munition, more popularly known as a tactical, man-portable nuke. This guy’d been about to sell Khaled one of our fucking atom bombs.
The question was, where the fuck had he got hold of it. The answer to that mystery was something I was going to make a point of finding out—and soon.
2313. We secured the ship. Gator kicked the Kuz Emeq into “ahead, one third,” and we headed west-northwest through the gentle current, toward our rendezvous point. One additional piece of good news was that the Corsicans never showed up. I considered that good tactical judgment on their part; after all, it hadn’t been their fight. Like many mercenaries, they’d simply taken the money—and then they’d run.
While my guys put out the remaining fires and searched all the bodies for papers and other assorted intel, I got on the radio to the Feds with the bad news about Khaled’s untimely demise. The SAC—for Special Agent in Charge—had some choice words for me, few of them suitable even for this book. Well, fuck him—he hadn’t been on site and I had. Besides, I had the Kraut, and I had the weapon, and two out of three (as the old country song goes) ain’t bad.
Moreover, one might well argue (I most certainly would argue) that Prince Khaled Bin Abdullah dead actually made a lot more sense than Prince Khaled Bin Abdullah alive. First of all, it paid him back in kind for the nasty things he’d been doing over the past ten or so years—illustrating in no uncertain terms those old biblical and Koranic maxims about living by the sword results in dying by the sword. Second, Khaled’s demise got him out of the Saudis’ hair permanently, and sans any further embarrassment to them. The royal family would be spared seeing one of its own on trial in the United States—so the king wouldn’t have to posture about tossing all the Americans out of his kingdom (big fucking chance of that, as it is the United States military that protects his fat-assed royal butt), or threatening an oil embargo, or whatever. Perhaps most important so far as I was concerned, killing Khaled prevented what I call the NRE, or Negative Ripple Effect, of counterterrorism. Whenever you capture one of these assholes and hold him for trial, there’s always the risk that the asshole’s pals will cause ripples: take hostages, blow up an embassy, send a series of suicide bombers into your capital city, or do some other heinous, nefarious, nasty shit, just to force you to let the guy go.
Finally, since it’s the good old U.S. of A. we were talking about bringing Khaled back to for his trial, there was always the possibility that one of the prince’s $500-an-hour pussy-ass liberal lawyers would be able to find a fucking Let ’Em Loose, Bruce judge, and get the scumbag off on some outrageous technicality. Well, given the chain of events, all of the above were problems we wouldn’t have to face anymore so far as His Royal Corpseness, Khaled Bin Abdullah, was concerned.
But that wasn’t the way the FBI saw it. Indeed, the very same instinct that has saved my life in the past caused me to forget to tell the FBI we’d taken the Kraut bomb merchant alive. We had ample opportunity to hide him before they came aboard, which is exactly what we did.
And my innate sensitivity to such situations turned out to be absolutely on the money. In fact, by the time the six-man crew of Special Agents showed up in their state-of-the-art VSV, the self-important SAC of shit who considered himself top gun in this little operation had already called Washington to complain about moi. He strode onboard the Kuz Emeq and, sans any of the usual formalities, began to dress me down like some wet-behind-the-balls recruit at Quantico. Now, this sort of behavior offends me. And so, provoked, I replied in kind.
I could replay the scene for you here. But why? Frankly, the sight of a pair of grown men screaming obscenities at each other doesn’t do much for me, and it certainly doesn’t move the plot of this book forward.
Moreover, there was no way I was about to submit to the Bureau’s demands. Said SAC of shit wanted the SADM, and he wanted no part of Khaled’s corpse. For my part, I was unwilling to part with the SADM, although I was willing to let the corpse go.
And so we called each other a lot of compound, complex names that included the F-word in most of its forms. But I was not about to give in. You see, so far as I can recall, it is the United States military, not the Federal fucking Bureau of Investigation, that has responsibility for the nation’s arsenal of nuclear weapons—especially our tactical nukes.
Let me put it to you this way. I’ve been on the fucking FBI tour half a dozen times, and while I have seen John Dillinger’s Colt .45, Machine Gun Kelly’s Thompson submachine gun, and Lee Harvey Oswald’s sniper rifle, I’ve never seen a SADM (or any other atomic device) among the collection of weapons stored and displayed there.
And what about the Kraut? Well, so far as I was concerned, he was my very own material witness to the theft of U.S. government military property. I wanted to interrogate him about where, when, and how he’d obtained the device. There was no way I was about to let the FBI know I had him.
So, suffice it to say that the SAC and I agreed to disagree, and when he threatened to call the attorney general’s office and have me ordered off the case, I called the private line of General Thomas Edward Crocker, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the officer for whom I work, reported to the Chairman the nasty details of my discovery, and received formal instructions from him to protect the device.
I even turned the phone over to the FBI’s aforesaid SAC of shit so he could hear General Crocker for himself. It did no good, of course. Said sad SAC kept insisting that he didn’t come under the f
ucking command of any fucking general except the one whose title began with “Attorney.” Well, it was getting late, and I was wet, cold, worn out, and—with no pussy in sight—I was feeling decidedly antisocial. And so I ended the discussion abruptly by unceremoniously tossing the SAC’s self-important butt, and his cellular phone, overboard, and ordering his six-man detachment off my fucking ship at gunpoint.
No, it might not have been the smartest thing to do. But watching him sputter and kick in his $1,500 suit and fancy Italian loafers gave me a certain amount of transitory, visceral satisfaction. After all, it had been a hard night, and we gotta take our small pleasures where we can, right?
Yeah, well the priests used to tell us kids at St. Ladislaus Hungarian School that for each act of pleasure, there will be compensatory pain. Or, as the famous Italian street philosopher, Detective Anthony Beretta, once said on TV, “If ya do da crime, ya do da time.”
In my case, the pain came at dockside at Mazara del Vallo, Sicily, where my men and I did not pass “Go,” did not collect even a single fucking lira, but were ordered forthwith, at once, immediately, and tout de suite to promptly surrender everything we’d removed from the Kuz Emeq to the proper authorities, and then promptly remove ourselves onto a Frankfurt-bound aircraft.
Surrender—WTF? Remove—WTF? Frankfurt—WTF?
WTF indeed. We’d been received at this out-of-the way port on the very southwest coast of Sicily by an unlikely welcoming committee that included more than a score of representatives from four of the five armed services (only the Air Farce was missing). A Coast Guard cutter escorted us the final fifty nautical miles into Sicilian waters. There were sailors and marines galore on the dock awaiting our arrival.
And there was a tall, lanky BDU’d colonel, complete with loaded side arm, spit-shined boondockers, and the white-walled buzz cut that’s fashionable amongst gonna-be generals at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, pacing up and down on the quay as we nudged the Kuz Emeq alongside. Tucked under his left arm was a big, well-worn, brown leather document folder. Off to the side, a platoon of green-bereted Special Forces shooters in full battle gear ringed a big, black Pave Low chopper that sat, Ready to Go, at the end of the dock.
Option Delta Page 5