Believe me, if there’d been time, I’d have been asking myself the same question. But there was no time for anything but the matter at hand. To whit: scratching and snatching then whopping and popping.
Translation: Our mission was to sit around and scratch our asses until the time was right, then snatch one Mahmoud Azziz abu Yasin, Islamic fundamentalist and terrorist asshole, from his beddy-bye. Then I’d whop him upside the haid with my handy little sap, knock him cold, and hustle his ass down to the Peugeot, where Doc would pop that 200 milligrams of Dr. N’s Ketamine right into his upper deltoid, which would drug the shit out of ol’Mahmoud for a few precious hours.
Then we’d spirit the Tango Adam Henry (that’s radio talk for terrorist asshole, for the uninitiated among you) out of Egypt on a thirty-two-foot fishing trawler Doc had rented in Alexandria, and after a pleasant ocean cruise, we’d rendezvous with a guided-missile frigate that had orders to be standing by, 75 miles off the Egyptian coast, during a six-hour window. From the frigate, we’d chopper to a carrier task force that sat another 125 miles out to sea. Then we’d use a Grumman C-2 Greyhound carrier on-board delivery plane to COD us all to Sigonella, Sicily.
Money being no object, we’d quietly slip Azziz aboard his own C-141 StarLifter aircraft and fly him back to CONUS (or the CONtinental United States, in civilian speak), where we’d drop him off in such plain sight that even the FBI would be able to find him. We would then disappear back into the shadows from which we’d come, leaving the feds to take all the capture credit when Azziz finally stood trial for his lethal part in a series of bombings across the United States that had cost sixty-five lives in all, and disrupted the cities of New York, Chicago, Houston, and Washington, DC. for more than a month.
Piece of cake, right? Guess again. Snatch-and-grabs (or, as the Brits call ’em, cosh-and-carrys) like this one are precarious, risky operations. Probs and stats? Bad. Goatfuck likelihood? High.
GF factor 1: You’re operating in a hostile environment with no backup.
GF factor 2: Your government will disavow your actions if you’re caught.
GF factor 3: If the locals do get their hands on you, the odds are that you’ll end up being dragged behind a car or truck for a few hours while they cut off significant pieces of your anatomy joint by joint.
So, you ask, how did I feel right now?
Brief answer: I felt as happy as a pig in shit, although you probably couldn’t get something the width of a hairpin up my sphincter because the pucker factor was off the charts.
Above me, something moved. My hand went up. We stopped. I gave signals, and Nasty pressed himself against the stairwell wall, giving himself the greatest field of fire. His free hand grasped my shoulder. That way I’d know where he was all the time. Knowing where everybody is all the time is an important element of operations such as these. It’s altogether possible to kill your own man if he’s out of position by as much as a few inches. I know—because it has happened during training.
I kept moving in the same steady pace I’d set two floors below, progressing inch by inch, the fingers of my left hand sweeping carefully, caressing the stair treads and risers as carefully if they were virgin pussy. These assholes were SUCs—smart, unpredictable, and cunning. And they fucking owned this part of town—even government troops stayed away from this neighborhood.
We’d learned this fact—and others—during the past week as we surveilled our target. We’d infiltrated commercially ten days ago. Nasty Nick, Tommy, and I came through Rome, Messina, and Cyprus, catching a ferry from there to Port Said and busing the dusty road through Ismailia, south to Cairo. Howie, Duck Foot, and Wonder flew commercial—TWA to Frankfurt, changed planes for Athens, then straight on here.
Doc Tremblay had the toughest commute. He drove from his house in Maadi, six miles from Tahrir Square in central Cairo. He was on a two-year assignment here. And, glutton for punishment that he is, he’d volunteered to come along for the ride when I called him on the secure line and told him we’d be visiting.
That was a-okay with me. I always like to have a mole—a covert operator no one knows about—to wheel and deal for me. So, Doc took three weeks of leave and disappeared from the Mil Group. He told the embassy people he was taking vacation time in Alexandria, Suez, and Ismailia. Instead, he slipped into Cairo’s back alleys to assemble our weapons and ordnance, buy a Peugeot and a pair of motorbikes, and arrange rooms at a local tourist hotel, all without alerting the Egyptian secret police, the local Christians in Action station—Navy talk for CIA agents—or the Foggy Bottom apparatchiki.
Once we’d arrived and set up shop it hadn’t taken us long to locate Azziz. Why? First, because we already knew where he lived. The Defense Intelligence Agency—DIA—had provided my boss, the Chief of Naval Operations, with a detailed map of the area. And second, because, as cops are fond of saying, a perp is a perp is a perp (actually, cops say that everywhere but New York, where they say a poip is a poip is a poip). Translated into English, that means perpetrators are creatures of habit. And Azziz the perp’s habits were centered on politics and prayer.
Moreover, Azziz enjoyed a certain celebrity status on the local fundamentalist scene. No matter how low he may have wanted to keep his profile, the local mullahs singled him out, citing ol’ Mahmoud as an example of righteous dedication to Islam’s cause. He had defied the infidel. He had waged war against the Great Satan on the Great Satan’s turf—and he’d won. So they showed him off. They displayed him at their rallies. They stood him at attention during their sermons.
So, finding our Muslim needle wasn’t going to be hard—not in this here haystack. The challenge would be to snatch him up without creating a ruckus, in the same sort of low-key, quick-and-dirty kidnap operation I’d perfected more than a quarter-century ago in Vietnam.
We called them parakeet ops back then. We’d take four or five guys and hit a village, nabbing a VC paymaster or political cadre out of his hootch in the middle of the night with such quiet efficiency that the people in the adjacent hootch wouldn’t hear a thing. They’d wake up the next morning, and Bin, or Phuong, or Tran, would just have disappeared into thin air. His bodyguards would still be there—dead, of course, and nicely, cunningly, lethally booby trapped. It was unnerving. It was intimidating. It was wonderful.
Parakeet ops took splitsecond timing. They also took good operational intelligence—you had to know how, and where, the bird lived before you could snare him.
So, when Doc showed me the latest Cairo Weekly—a newsletter published by the embassy’s personnel office—and I read the listing titled Security Advisory, which said, quote, “AMEMB personnel should avoid the areas adjacent to the Rifai, Saiyida Sukayna, and al-Hambra mosques this Wednesday as DIPSEC has been advised that Islamic rallies have been planned,” a 100-watt lightbulb went off in my thick-as-rocks Slovak skull.
All three mosques were in the general area where Azziz’s family lived—the southern section of Islamic Cairo adjacent to the City of the Dead and below the Citadel. Odds were that Azziz would be featured at one or more of the rallies.
My plan was Keep-It-Simple-Stupid simple: Duck Foot and Howie would surveil one mosque, Wonder and Nasty would cover the other, and I’d handle the third with Tommy. We knew what Azziz looked like—his red hair and broken nose made him easily distinguishable. We’d shadow him at a discreet distance, check the opposition out, see what patterns he established, and once we could be reasonably certain of them, we’d go in and grab his ass. DIA’s locals had no need to know we were in the city—which would protect their butts, bureaucratically, and our asses on the operational level.
We arrived Sunday. That gave us roughly forty-eight hours to become familiar with the territory. Not a lot—but it would have to do. Cairo, after all, is impenetrable to the first-time visitor. There are thousands of unpaved streets and muddy alleyways that run together in labyrinthine mazes. There are cul de sacs from which it’s impossible to escape. There’s the City of the Dead—six square m
iles of cemeteries turned slums, where more than half a million people live in mausoleums and mud hut shanties with open trench sewers.
I’d done time in Cairo back in the late ’80s and was familiar with the city. Doc Tremblay, whose passion is shopping, knew it like the back of his hairy fucking hand.
But my youngsters had never been here before. I knew they’d have to get the feel of the place before they felt confident operating with the splitsecond timing the mission required.
There’s a philosophical point about operations I should mention at this juncture. It is that you can’t send a SEAL off to Cairo, Kabul, or Kinshasa and say, “Just do it.” SEALs have to be able to blend in. Just like we learned how to use camouflage in Vietnam to render ourselves invisible to Mr. Charlie, you have to be able to hide in plain sight when you’re in an urban jungle too.
One thing that often helps immeasurably is the ability to not sound like a Yankee. Me? I speak French and Italian, and get along in gutter Arabic, Spanish, and German. Tommy K is fluent in French, German, and Russian. Howie’s Spanish is better than his English. Nasty Nick and Wonder habla Espanol too. Duck Foot can pass as Polish if he has to. Doc Tremblay? His Farsi is passable, his Arabic’s fluent, and his French? Superbe. Those linguistic abilities are what help make them dependable shooters overseas.
You send someone sounding like an American farm boy out in the Azerbaijani boondocks, and he’s gonna stick out like a sore szeb. That will compromise your mission. Then there’s the operational gestalt. You have to be able to blend in—whether it means passing as a tourist or a truck driver. If you ‘read’ like U.S. GOVT. ISSUE, you’ll probably be deadmeat body-bag material before you get to shoot or loot.
So the boys and I took two days and played our own brand of tourist—familiarizing ourselves with the warp and weave of this huge, gawky city. I like Cairo, and I wanted my men to like it too. Sure, there are more than 15 million people living in a space barely adequate for half that number. Life is tough. The air pollution is horrible—equivalent to smoking more than a pack of cigarettes a day. The traffic is abysmal—which is why I’d ordered motorbikes for Tommy and Duck Foot. Sanitary facilities are often rudimentary—thousands do their bathing in the Nile—and millions do without such conveniences as indoor plumbing, sewers, and electricity. But Cairenes are special—they have a sense of humor that, at its best, resembles the droll, dry wit of New Yorkers. They treat life with a maalesh disposition—a sort of “whatever fate decrees, we’re going to be forgiven” attitude.
We started at the mosques. All three sat in the shadow of the Citadel—the fortified complex built by Salah al-Din in the twelfth century. The Citadel still dominates Cairo’s skyline, accented by tin mosque domes that reflect the sunlight and a series of needle-like minarets that look skyward like ready-to-launch SAM-7 missiles.
Each two-man team, dressed like tourists and equipped with the requisite cameras, guidebooks, and maps, worked outward through concentric circles, charting alleyways and narrow passages, making mental notes about the decrepit three-and four-story apartment houses that sat cheek-to-jowl on narrow streets, laundry fluttering like flags from shuttered windows and shaky balcony railings.
Nasty and Duck Foot (and their sweet teeth) hit the neighborhood tea houses. They sat at window tables, Duck Foot tried his Polish on the waiters, and they maintained cover by sampling dozens of honey-covered cakes. Tommy and Howie wandered the souk, munching grilled meat wrapped in hot Arab bread, seasoned with fiery green pepper and chopped onion and sold by voluble street vendors dressed in the kind of sweat-suit pajamas common to backstreet Cairo. (Whether the kabobs were cat or rat they couldn’t tell, but they’re snake-eaters, so what difference would it make anyway?)
Wonder, Doc, and I poked our noses into small grocery stores, reveling in the pervasive smells of cardamom, cumin, allspice, and cinnamon. I tried my backstreet Arabic and was gratified to discover I could still make myself understood. Doc Tremblay—whom I first met back in Naples when he was a Second Class corpsman in search of a good time and I was working for the legendary Frogman Everett E. Barrett, Chief Gunner’s Mate/Guns, at UDT 22—was positively loquacious, much to the delight of the natives. Doc reminds me of Jim Finley, my utility man from Bravo Squad, Second Platoon, in Vietnam, 1967. We called Jim “the Mayor,” because no matter where we went, he’d be out pressing the flesh and making friends within minutes of our arrival. Doc’s much the same—he’s the kind of guy who looks like he just belongs, whether he’s in Chicago, Cairo, or Katmandu.
By the evening and the morning of the third day, we were ready. Each team knew its neighborhood; each pair of swim buddies felt they could move unhampered. And twenty-four hours later, having blanketed the neighborhood, Tommy T and Duck Foot finally sighted our quarry coming out the back of the Sidi Almas mosque just north of Saleh ed-Din Square.
Azziz, they said, was flanked by a pair of bodyguards who looked as if they were packing heat. He was in deep conversation with a huge black guy—could have been Sudanese, or Somali, but they’d dubbed him the Nubian—dressed in flowing robes and cowboy boots. The trio climbed into a huge Mercedes limo with blacked-out windows and drove to a coffeehouse, where the Nubian and Azziz sat for two hours in deep conversation, while the bodyguards waited just outside the doorway.
Tommy and Duck Foot gave them a loose tail when they left. Azziz was dropped right here at his apartment house. He was patting his pocket as he got out of the car, which told Duck Foot he’d been given something valuable—perhaps documentation, or money, or both. Tommy stayed with Azziz, watching as he and his shadows climbed the three flights of stairs to his flat.
Duck Foot followed the Mercedes, which wove its way downtown, finally pulling up on the long driveway to the Cairo Méridien. The Nubian disembarked there. Duck Foot, ever patient, walked into the lobby and plunked himself down at the bar, watching as the Nubian took the elevator to the sixth floor. Six minutes later, the tall black man reappeared, now dressed in a fashionable Western suit and carrying an overnight bag. He paid his bill in cash, tipped the concierge handsomely, and climbed back into the Mercedes, which Duck Foot followed out to the airport.
I duly noted Tommy and Duck Foot’s reports. They indicated strongly that Azziz was about to do something, which put pressure on me to act—right now—despite the fact that we hadn’t prepped as much as I would have liked. My intuition was supported by the twenty-four-hour stakeout we maintained on Azziz’s apartment. He started to receive a continuous stream of visitors. The first night, I had Duck Foot shinny up the power pole that also held the phone line and drop a passive device in place. We couldn’t overhear Azziz’s conversations, but we knew he was making lots of overseas calls from the number of blips we heard as he dialed.
While the squad worked overtime, I prepared a main escape route and two alternates. I went over my lists. I studied my maps. I ran my mental stopwatch. I tried to factor Mr. Murphy in at every stage.
I carefully made the sign the priests taught me when I was an altar boy: spectacles, testicles, wallet, and watch. Then I faced Rome, Jerusalem, and Mecca, and prayed to every deity I could think of. Because, ready or not, we had to act.
Look for
Rogue Warrior III: Green Team
Wherever Hardcover Books Are Sold
mid-March 1995
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
RICHARD MARCINKO retired from the Navy as a full commander after more than thirty years of service. He currently lives in the Washington, D.C., area, where he is CEO of SOS TEMPS, his private security consulting and special investigations firm whose clients are governments and corporations.
JOHN WEISMAN is a writer specializing in espionage and military themes. His recent books include the critically acclaimed novel Blood Cries, and the bestseller Shadow Warrior, the biography of CIA agent Felix Rodríguez. He lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
Table of Contents
Part One: SNAFU
Part Three: FUBAR
Par
t One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Two
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part Three
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Red Cell Page 39