Okay, okay, I’m digressing. You wanted to know about the evening’s festivities. It’s actually quite simple. I was currently attempting to sidestroke through the Caspian Sea toward oil platform 16-Bravo, the main rig of a five-platform operation sitting nine miles from shore, about fifty miles due south of the Azerbaijani capital city of Baku. The rigs were owned by SOCAR, an oil consortium controlled jointly by CenTex (that’s the Central Texas Oil Corporation), and the Azeri government, and manned by a mixed crew of a dozen CenTex and expatriate Brit roustabouts.
But that wasn’t why I was here. I was here because 16-Bravo was currently under the control of a group of eight terrorists. They’d taken over the rig twenty hours ago, using darkness as cover to slip aboard from a pair of bright yellow Zodiac inflatables that were currently tethered to 16-Bravo’s northeastern hull column and bobbing in the gentle waves. The tangos captured the rig, took the roustabouts hostage, then used their own state-of-the-art cellular phones to call CenTex’s home office in Houston, Texas. The message, once it had been translated from Azeri into English, was pretty straightforward: we are pro-Iranian Azeris who do not like the fact that you Infidels are exploiting our nation. Get out of Azerbaijan, or suffer the consequences.
By chance, two hours after the bad guys’ phone call had been translated, I’d wheels-downed in Baku with a platoon of SEALs, on a stealth-grade training mission q-u-i-e-t-l-y undertaken at the behest of the secretary of defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But the well-planned secrecy went out the door the instant Americans were taken hostage. The Azeris knew all about my capabilities in the hostage-rescue arena, skills not possessed by any local military or police unit (which was one reason for my coming to Baku in the first place).
So, the government of Azerbaijan wanted me and my guys to do the evening’s dirty work. And to be honest, I was more than happy to oblige. The best way to teach, after all, is by example. And taking down this oil rig would serve as a real-life demonstration of hopping & popping & shooting & looting to our Azeri students.
That was the good news. Here’s the bad news: someone had told the press I was coming, and there was a big contingent of cameras and lights at the airport. The American networks wanted pictures of me and my guys, and interviews, too. Probably so Christiane Effing Amanpour could use the footage when she charged me with using unwarranted violence of action, nerve gas, or some other illegal substance on the hostage takers.
No effing way, José. I solved that problem by asking the Azeris to throw the reporters out, something they probably had a lot of fun doing. But there were two additional impediments to my merry nocturnal marauding. They were, in order of appearance, Her Excellency, the Honorable Mizz Marybeth Madison, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the Republic of Azerbaijan, and his exalted dweebship, Mr. Roscoe Grogan, Vice President for Security (Central Asia), the CenTex Corp.
The Honorable Ms. Madison just plain didn’t want me and my dirtbags in her bailiwick. We’d arrived on a JCET, an acronym that stands for Joint Combined Educational Training mission, sans notice, sans cables, sans anything. And as the ambassador put it so . . . diplomatically, yet firmly, to me: “No one, Captain, not even with your manifest testosterone level, cuts me off at the fucking knees like that and gets away with it.”
Since I understand that kind of language, I explained to the good ambassador that JCETs didn’t come under her jurisdiction. I wasn’t, I explained, heading a diplomatic mission. I was here to train my SEALs, because in point of fact JCETs are training for us, not the Azeris, even though the Azeris might indeed benefit from watching what we did and learning how we did it.
“That, Captain Marcinko, is a double trailer load of horse puckey, and we both know it,” quoth the ambassador, shaking her perfectly coifed streaked blond do. “I read the damn papers, and the damn cables too. I know what JCET missions are. No matter what you tell me, you’re here to train Azeris, and unless you’re gonna do it in Iran or Russia or the Republic of Georgia, or you’re gonna fly ’em back to the good ol’ Yew Ess of A, you’re gonna be infringin’ on my turf.”
She was correct, of course. But that’s never stopped me before. And it didn’t stop me now. Indeed, after one phone call from me to the secretary of defense back in DC, and another from the Azeri foreign minister to the principal deputy assistant secretary of state for former Soviet something-or-others (who they finally contacted via cellular during a boondoggle somewhere way out in one of the Stans6), Ambassador Madison’s fashionable scrawny-assed, Chanel-clad, Vuitton-clutching, perfectly manicured claws were removed from my back.
Security dweeb Grogan, a bolo-tie sporting former FBI Special Agent in Charge (read desk jockey) from Dallas, probably had his last meaningful relationship with law enforcement when Ronald Reagan was in his first term, Ambassador Madison was in grade school, and Tony Lama boots cost a mere two hundred bucks a pair. He was more difficult to deal with than the ambassador. She, at least, finally realized, after some, ah, interface with Washington, that it was the Azeris’ country, they’d asked me to help, and I had the backing of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense. While she didn’t like my presence here, the other political factors were nonetheless overwhelming. And so, being a realist, she bowed to ’em and stepped aside.
Roscoe wasn’t hampered by such political or diplomatic niceties. This was his company’s damn awl rig, and he was going to handle things his way.
And what was his way, you want to know. Well, it was Roscoe’s considered opinion that if we let a local self-help organization slip the tangos a hundred thou or so in American greenbacks, they’d jump back into their Zodiacs and hightail it outta Bah-Koo, toot sweet.
You say you don’t believe me? Hey, let’s go to the videotape.
As you can see, Roscoe and I are standing on the tarmac, nose to nose, off behind the greasy ramp of the big, black, unmarked C-130 on which my guys and I had flown in, so the two of us could have some privacy. See how his thumbs are hooked in his belt loops, like some dime-novel cowboy?
Let’s listen in. “Yo, Dick, I’ve been dealin’ with all these friggin’ assholes over here for the last two-and-a-half friggin’ years and three friggin’ American ambassadors by goin’ through the friggin’ Sirzhik Foundation. Turkish friggin’ Mafia. Chechen friggin’ Mafia. Georgian friggin’ Mafia. Russian friggin’ Mafia. Armenian friggin’ nationalists. Azeri friggin’ pistoleros. The friggin’ Foundation deals with ’em all. It has a friggin’ system, and here’s how it friggin’ works: I slip the Foundation a suitcase of greenbacks—it’s a 501-C charitable organization back in the States, so everything’s on the up-and-up and CenTex even gets a tax deduction. Then maybe the Foundation takes a cut, maybe it don’t, I frankly don’t give a shit, y’know? Then it pays out however much it wants to as a kinda self-help bequest to the parties in question, after which they friggin’ disappear. I’ve done this a dozen times in the past six months alone, so I know something you don’t. Even though these particular friggin’ assholes decided to up the friggin’ ante by takin’ hostages, they ain’t friggin’ terrorists, Dick—they’re friggin’ bidnessmen.”
Yeah, right. So, I friggin’ explain to friggin’ Roscoe in my quaint, Roguish friggin’ way that the friggin’ Naval Special Warfare technical term for friggin’ people who take friggin’ hostages, is “friggin’ terrorists.” I add (somewhat unnecessarily, I thought at the time) that we don’t pay friggin’ bribes to friggin’ terrorists, and we certainly don’t go through some friggin’ bogus foundation.
See how Roscoe’s right hand goes up like a traffic cop’s? “Whoa, Dick—I’m not talkin’ about a friggin’ bribe. That would be friggin’ wrong. In fact, it would be friggin’ illegal. This is what we in the friggin’ awl bidness call expeditin’, and the friggin’ ambassador over there, who as you probably know, has been in the friggin’ awl bidness for the past twelve years herself, agrees with me.”
It
struck me as odd that said friggin’ ambassador could have been in any business for the past twelve years. She didn’t look more than twenty-five. Of course, according to the file I’d read on the way over (I may look the part of the knuckle-dragging Rogue, but believe me, I do more homework than the chief stock analyst at Merrill Lynch), she was thirty-seven, the widow of the twelfth richest man in Texas, and she ran a corporation with more value than the GNP of most of the countries in the Third World. The article about her in Forbes told me that she was tough as nails, just as likely to season her language with F-words as the Parisian-pure French she’d learned at Madeira and the Sorbonne, or the economics-speak she’d absorbed at Harvard’s business school.
I should also admit that even the flattering photo spreads in Town & Country and Architectural Digest hadn’t done credit to her. Marybeth Madison may have been thirty-seven. But she had the muscle tone and firm skin of a woman who worked out regularly with a private trainer, and so she looked ten years younger than she was.
But all that bidness experience, all those advanced degrees, all that ability to use the F-word, and all that muscle tone did her absolutely no good when it came to dealing with hostage situations. In fact, it had worked against her. Because, for some reason—maybe it was the fact that they were fellow Texans; maybe she was just incapable of making tough choices when it came to dealing with human lives—she’d allied herself with Roscoe Grogan and Roscoe’s friends at the Sirzhik Foundation, whatever the hell that was (I made a mental note at the time to check it out). And Roscoe, as you have seen, was a government-inspected, Grade-A, Ruby Red, size extra-large Asshole of hufuckingmongous proportions.
Now, I could give you a blow by blow of my reaction to this RRA’s chop-logic, but that would waste both my time and yours. Suffice it to say that the ambassador and Roscoe went back to her embassy in a huff (actually they traveled in her armored limo), and I went to work.
Over the next eight hours, my men and I moved fifty miles south of Baku. With the help of the Azeri Army, I quietly set up a base of operations on the awl platform closest to 16-Bravo. While my two sniper teams (and the four Azeri Spec-Ops wannabes I allowed to observe the situation close-up) began to assess the situation through their night-vision spotting scopes, I got on the secure cellular and jump-started my intel network back in the States.
It didn’t take long for me to discover that the TIQs (look it up in the glossary) weren’t Azeri at all, but Iranian no-goodniks. They belonged to an over-the-edge splinter group from the Revolutionary Guards and called themselves the Fist of Allah. According to DIA, they had infiltrated from Iran—in point of fact their strike emanated from the old American CIA listening post in the mountains above the Iranian town of Astara, which sits just south of the Azeri border. Who says fundamentalists ain’t got no sense of humor?
I do—at least when it comes to murdering Westerners. Because the FAs had, over the past sixteen months, assassinated seven Americans, three Brits, a German, and a Frenchie. They hadn’t limited themselves to action in Europe and the Middle East, either. One hit had come in Japan; two others in Canada.
Anyway, shortly after nightfall, we confirmed that there were eight bad guys on 16-Bravo. Not a huge force of hostiles—but enough to cause both us and the hostages considerable damage. We also knew from what the Azeris had told us, and what we discovered through our own monitoring of the situation, that these tangos were efficient, professionally trained, and well equipped.
And oh, yeah: unlike me, they weren’t coated with crude oil.
I flicked goo from my face mask (I was swimming virtually fucking blind), released most of the air in my SEAL vest, dropped under the surface like the aforementioned brick, and kicked and twirled, trying to shed as much of the sticky, viscous crude as I could. I don’t think it did me much good at all. In fact, it was kinda disorienting. But it was still better than swimming through the goo. I breaststroked underwater, in what I thought to be the general direction of 16-Bravo for about thirty yards, then rolled and headed toward the surface for air, my fins kicking and my arms sweeping the water to break up the surface slick.
That was when Boomerang, who I thought had been swimming ten meters off my port side and six meters astern of my position, kicked me square in the face. My chin got in the way of his heel—and he got me good.
Smaaack! Oh, it smarted. Belay that. It fucking hurt. The blow knocked my mask off, and all the air out of my lungs. I breached better than most whales, sucked air—and in the process swallowed about a gallon of oil-soaked seawater. I retched the water back up, then dove again, clutching and snatching vainly for the mask—and got another extra-large, extra-stiff, extra-hard swim fin blow, this one right across my big Slovak snout. Instinctively, I grabbed the offending appendage and struggled back toward the surface.
Immediately, the fin wrenched out of my grasp and Boomerang’s long, narrow face appeared in the periphery of my blurred vision, my mask in his gloved right hand. He held me steady as I washed the glass off as best I could, slipped the strap over my head, fixed the mask back in position, vented it, then seated the fucking thing properly on my big, hairy face. His eyes told me he felt my pain. My eyes, which were smarting like hell from the effects of crude oil and polluted Caspian, told him he had . . . no idea.
I settled into a vertical position, trod water, blew some air into my vest to keep me afloat, and took bearings. We were about three hundred meters from the platform, well outside the ring of ambient light from the amber sodium work lights, catwalk incandescents, twinkly rail safety lights, red and white flashers atop the derrick, and a greenish fluorescent glow emanating from inside the modular living quarters.
There were twelve of us making the assault tonight. The four remaining SEALs in Echo Platoon were on one of the other four platforms in this cluster of five, protecting our six with suppressed, 50-caliber sniper rifles capable of making a two-thousand-meter shot with their hand-loaded, 750-grain Hornady projectiles. Tonight, they’d be shooting at roughly half that distance.
0232. As long as I’m catching my breath, let me take a minute or two to explain what we’re about to do. There are only three ways to take down an oil rig. You can swim in, climb up the skeletal frame, and swarm the bad guys. You can chopper in at wave-top height, then suddenly flare above the platform, fast-rope down, and swarm the bad guys. Or, you can jump HALO (high altitude, low opening) from a plane, fall five miles, pop the chute at four thousand feet above the water, parachute onto the platform, and swarm the bad guys.
Frankly, the HALO approach is the most risky, because HALO doesn’t assure that you’ll put enough shooters onto the rig simultaneously to do the job, e.g., control the platform and kill all the bad guys before they have a chance to waste the hostages. Fast-roping from a chopper is perhaps the most effective. In fact, if you combine a chopper assault with a water-borne (combat swimmer) operation, you can put a shitload of shooters on the platform all at once. But tonight, fast-roping was not an option because I’d been given to understand there wasn’t a single chopper capable of holding more than four people anywhere in the whole fucking country. And so, we were going to have to do this the old-fashioned way, a technique I call HP/SL. In other words, we’d Hump our way in, and then Pump our way up, so we could do what SEALs do best: Shoot & Loot, i.e., kill our enemies before they could do any damage to the hostages.
0234. Finally clear of the oil slick, I kicked off and started sidestroking toward the platform. Boomerang kept pace with me, his long, narrow head bobbing in the gentle current. Fanned out behind us swam the rest of the assault team. The core of Echo Platoon—Boomerang, Duck Foot Dewey, Nod DiCarlo, Half Pint Harris, Piccolo Mead, Gator Shepard, and the SEAL smidge I call Rodent—have been with me for years. Terry Devine, who I named Timex, because he can take a licking and still keep on kicking (butt), busted his cherry status with me in Germany last year.
The rest of the team is new—but they’re capable. Digger O’Toole, of Hollywood Beach, Florida, for
example. . . .
Hey, just who the fuck is that out there making all that goddamn noise? Oh, it’s the fucking editor. And he wants to know why I have a bunch of newbies on this mission.
I have two words for you, ed. No, not FUCK YOU—although the thought occurred to me. The two words are retention and reenlistment. Both are down in this politically correct, zero defect Navy. And so a lot of my old shooters have gone civilian. But there are still a handful of WARRIORS left for me to pick from. And these guys were the crème de la brouhaha.
Like, as I was saying, Digger O’Toole of Hollywood Beach, Florida. Digger’s the kind of can-do dirtbag you need on ops like this one. There’s nowhere he won’t go, and nothing he can’t climb. Rotten Randy Michaels and a wiry little Brit I call Nigel (his real name is Rupert. But who the hell is gonna call anybody Rupert these days of don’t ask don’t tell?) round out the assault group. Rotten Randy is built like a defensive linebacker—e.g., big and burly, and he can move like lightning when he has to. We call him Rotten Randy because he spent ten years as an Army Ranger—and if that ain’t a rotten existence, I don’t know what is. Then, he made the right decision: he realized that life should be an adventure, not just a job, and he joined the Navy. He went through BUD/S, where they retooled him to shout HOO-YAH instead of HOO-AH, at the ripe old age of twenty-nine. Currently, he’s an E-9. That’s a master chief for all you cake-eating civilians out there.
I shanghaied him from SEAL Team Eight after I saw him operate. Randy, friends, is the kind of Warrior you want to put your back up against when the merde hits the ventilateur and you’re outnumbered eight to one. It took him about half a second to volunteer for my Roguish band. His only demand was that I also take his E-5 swim buddy, Nigel, who weighs in at a mere 115 pounds. Nigel was born Rupert Collis in East London, down the Old Kent Road—and you can tell it from the way he talks. He is living proof that the only thing that separates us from the English is our common language.
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