Anyway, Nigel came here at the age of eleven; became a citizen at eighteen, and the first thing he did was join the Navy. He can run thirty miles in five and a half hours. That’s not a lot you say. You’re right. But Nigel can do it in the desert. While carrying an eighty-pound load of combat gear. And after he’s run his thirty miles, he can whip your ass no matter how big and bad you say you are.
Back on the platform I was using as a forward base was my four-man sniper/intel unit. Mustang, the lead spotter, is a half-Sioux (I think the other half is mountain lion) Warrior who grew up in Montana. He’s built sorta like a mailbox, which leads people to believe that he’s clumsy. Big mistake. Mustang is teamed with Hammer Johnson, who learned his nasty craft in the Marine Corps before he decided to leave Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children and become a SEAL. Hammer once made a twenty-six-hundred-yard head shot with the 50-caliber sniper rifle he helped develop for Desert Storm. The weapon he’s shooting tonight is a fourth-generation rifle that’s twice as accurate as the Mark-1, Mod-0 original.
Sniper Two is made up of Butch Wells, a smart-ass kid from Reading, Massachusetts, with a New England accent as broad as the fucking Haavaad Yhaad, and Goober. Goober (if he has a last name he’s never told anybody, and if I ever knew what it was I’ve forgotten) is Echo Platoon’s other sniperman. Goober is a boatswain’s mate first class from Georgia, and he can shoot the fucking eye out of a housefly at a thousand meters.
0245. My dirty dozen secured to a long, tubular member that ran between the thick, vertical hull columns. We were fucking exhausted already—and we hadn’t even begun the night’s work. Timex and I unhitched the pair of two-liter bladders of water. I passed one of my containers to the Pick, and the other to Duck Foot, so they could drink. Timex handed one off to Digger, and drank from the other. I lay on my back in the water, trying hard to breathe. It wasn’t easy. The water temperature was in the low eighties; the air was perhaps ninety-five, and the heat sapped what little reserves I had in the way of energy.
I waited until everyone had taken on water, then took one of the bladders and drained it. I’d sweat buckets during the swim—and as heavy as the water had been, I was glad I’d insisted that we carry enough to make sure each man got about two-thirds of a liter before we made our assault. Something I’ve learned over the years is that a dehydrated Warrior doesn’t perform as well as a hydrated Warrior.
0249. The platform towered above us, skeletal, gigantic, and imposing; a mélange of brightness and shadow, all mechanical angularity. Sixteen-Bravo sat in perhaps 180 feet of water. It was what’s known as a fixed rig, which means it was secured to the Caspian’s bed. If the water had been, say, a hundred fathoms deep here, the platform would have been a semisub-mersible, which floats on huge pontoons and is kept in one position by long anchor chains.
You may indeed be wondering how we could swim in with such impunity, knowing that the bad guys were on their guard. The answer is simple. First, the platform itself is huge, bigger than a twenty-five-story building. It is also virtually impossible to see directly down into the water unless you’re hanging off one of the catwalks suspended below the main deck. The arc lights play tricks on your eyes. The water’s surface, eighty to ninety feet below that decking, is indistinct. It’s damn hard to pick a swimmer out, even in becalmed conditions like tonight.
Second, there’s a lot of ambient noise on an oil rig. The metal creaks and groans; the platform itself moves in the water. The modular sheds and housing units shift as the currents below change. And then there are all those generators that power the electrics, the derricks, and the drilling units themselves. Even when 90 percent of the fucking rig is shut down—like this one was—it is still a noisy, distracting, environment. It is an environment that I can and do use to my advantage.
0251. Time to move. But first, I had to deal with the oil. Since I practice the credo of Roy Henry Boehm, Godfather of all SEALs,7 I’d hit the slick first and hence suffered more than the rest of my guys, most of whom saw what happened to me and swam under it. My BDUs were almost entirely covered by crude. So was my SEAL vest. But layered below, my modular body armor was pretty clean. So was the wet suit. I shrugged out of the vest, body armor, and BDUs. Then I pulled the body armor back on over my wet suit, peeled the modular pouches off the CQC vest and rigged them onto the Velcro surface of the body armor, reattached my pistol belt, thigh holster, mag holders, and combat knife. The scabbard that held my sub-gun was totaled. But the viscous goo hadn’t penetrated to the compartment holding the MP5.
0256. We plugged earpieces and lip mikes into our waterproof radios and checked to make sure they were all working. Well, I guess eight out of twelve isn’t bad, although I tell you, I’m gonna have some nasty things to say to the folks at Motorola when I get back to the States about the alleged waterproofness of their products.
I raised my snipermen, sitting in the darkness a thousand feet away, and told ’em we were going over the rail.
“Aye, aye, Skipper,” Mustang’s voice came back into my ear. “I can see you through the night vision. We’re on the case. The catwalk above is clear. I can see one tango on top of the doghouse. He’s got a weapon with night vision. Goober’s got another target on top of the monkey board—he’s got NV too. Looks like he’s holding a detonator.”
I flashed on the sketch I’d committed to memory earlier in the day. Okay: one bad guy had command of the high ground, because the monkey board is where the derrick man sits. That put the tango about seventy feet above the deck. From that position, his field of fire could control access to the chopper pad, modular living quarters, and the majority of the platform deck areas. From what Mustang said he also controlled the explosives.
A quartet of tsk-tsks in my ear signaled message received.
0303. We swam under the rig and I silent-signaled for the assault to begin. Digger secured the twenty-meter length of thin, nylon rope he’d been carrying over his shoulder, hoisted himself onto a thick vertical brace, and began the long climb up. He was followed by Duck Foot Dewey and Rotten Randy Michaels. I watched as they wormed their way up the slippery brace. I do not like taking down oil rigs. I lost a man during an oil rig operation in the Gulf of Mexico a few years ago. But, as the SpecWar Commandment says, we didn’t have to like it, we just had to do it. My climbers made steady progress. But I could see the energy they were expending to do their jobs—visible heat waves were radiating off their bodies.
As Digger, Duck Foot, and Randy climbed, Boomerang, Nod, and Rodent perched, their sub-gun muzzles pointed up toward the catwalk fifty feet above the water, scanning for targets. If one of the tangos decided to take a cigarette break or a piss, it was their job to neutralize the sonofabitch before he could raise any alarm or injure the climbers. We were real vulnerable until the first three shooters reached the catwalk. Then, with Duck Foot and Randy protecting his six, Digger would lower the line, bring the caving ladder sections up, link ’em together, secure the ladder to the rail, and lower it, so the rest of us could make our way onto the catwalk. Caving ladders are no fun. But they’re less painful to climb than the vertical braces my trio of shooters had just scaled.
0311. Eight minutes is a long fucking time when you’re vulnerable, and that’s how long it took us to get up the ladder. I went up last. Yes, I always lead from the front. But I’ve got a bit more age than my shooters, and they can scamper up a caving ladder, while I have to fight my way rung by rung.
I waited until Nigel’s narrow butt was ten feet above the water, then raised myself as high as I could, took hold of one of the narrow titanium rungs, pulled myself upward ounce by ounce, until I could get the toes of my right Rogue foot through the narrow opening. God, that hurt. And, yes, I press 450 pounds, 155 reps, every fucking day, rain, sleet, snow, or shine, on the outdoor weight pile at Rogue Manor. I have superior upper-body strength. In fact, I am one bodaciously strong motherfucker. But all of that doesn’t mean shit when you have to muscle your way up a twisting, narrow, slippery, wet caving
ladder under combat conditions.
It has been said that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. And for me, tonight’s journey would only begin when I took that first step up. I fought the fucking ladder as it twisted away from me; used my shoulders and upper arms to get some leverage on the contorted metal and cable, and—finally—thrust my fucking foot onto the rung.
Have I mentioned, friends, that I’d been swimming through an oil slick? You say you remember that fact. Well, good for you—because your memory is better than mine. Me? I’d forgotten that the bottom of my neoprene bootie was as slick as deer guts. My foot went skidding out from under me, my leg slid through the ladder, my hands lost their grip on the rail, and I dropped about two and a half feet, wedging myself—ooooh—up to my crotch on the fucking rung.
Let me be more explicit. All of my own weight—every stone, every kilo, every pound, ounce, gill, and gram, not to mention the combined weight of everything I was carrying—was now resting squarely on my right nut. The selfsame nut that was being squeezed into peanut butter by the titanium rung. Oh damn oh shit oh doom on Dickie, which as you probably know, means I was being fuckee-fuckeed in Vietnamese. Fuckee-fuckee indeed—if I didn’t do something soon, I was going to perform the rest of this fekokte mission as a goddamn countertenor.
I uncrossed my eyes, gulped air, and struggled to pull one hand over the other until I was able to extract myself and start moving upward once again. Except now, each step of that painful climb was accompanied by the tom-tom throbbing of my right testicle. Oh, let me tell you, by the time I finally pulled myself over the catwalk rail, I hurt in every molecule of my body and from the way my wet suit felt, I’d probably lost another four or five pounds of water weight. I’m not as limber as I was when I started playing the lead role in this series, friends, and it is climbs like this one that make the fact painfully obvious.
But as I have said in the past, and will say again, pain exists to ensure that I know I’m alive. And since I was very much alive, I unsheathed my MP5, loaded a mag, and dropped the bolt. It was about to be Show Time.
Our insertion point was the small catwalk at the flare tip end of an oil/gas separator line. Most platforms have two such flare devices. The catwalks, with one vertical and one horizontal gas nozzle, are affixed to the end of a seventy-foot arm similar to the long jib of a tower crane. In the “at rest” position, the flare catwalks sit about three yards below the lowest part of the platform. That made ’em accessible without exposing our flanks. And because it is possible to shinny along the jib, my shooters could remain invisible to anyone on deck until they reached the shelter of the tanks in the oil-processing area.
If you looked at this particular platform head-on, which is to say, with the helipad in the “twelve o’clock” position, one oil/gas separator flare cluster was at five-thirty; the other one was at eleven o’clock. We had swum under the rig and climbed at the little-hand-on-eleven position because it was completely shielded by the huge derrick superstructure and main engine heat-exchangers from the aforementioned tangos who were manning the monkey board and the doghouse roof.
Now that we were aboard, all that remained was to stay out of sight until we’d made it to our assault position, while praying that the rest of the bad guys—the ones we hadn’t seen yet—didn’t have night-vision equipment, infrared sights on their weapons, or thermal-imaging range finders like their two buddies.
The unfortunate and nasty truth, friends, is that these days tangos can obtain just about every techno-goodie that is used by Delta Force, DEV Group,8 or any other cutting-edge special-operations unit. Maybe not the absolute latest generation, but still better than most of the world’s armed forces carry on a day-to-day basis.
The good news was that given the heat—it was still in the high nineties—all the metal on the rig was just about as hot as our bodies. And that would help mask us as we moved into position if the bad guys had some techno-backup.
0313. Time to move out. We were real bunched up on the eight-by-twelve-foot platform, and crowds make me nervous under conditions like this.
I rubbed the soles of my booties against the non-skid flooring of the platform until I was satisfied that I’d removed all the oil residue. Then I silent-signaled to disperse.
Boomerang and I, accompanied by Nod and Duck Foot, would balance atop the four-foot rail of the flare platform and pull ourselves up onto the rig’s main deck, sheltered from discovery by a red-and-white-striped crane housing. From there, we’d scamper across thirty feet of unprotected ground, up a steel ladderway, around a corner, and along a narrow length of decking that led to the back side of the modular housing unit.
As we did that, the rest of the platoon would make its way along the jib. When they reached the end, Timex, Gator, Randy, and Nigel would move to port. They’d crawl under the oil storage tanks, slip behind the explosives locker, then secure the front end of the modular housing unit and wait for my signal to hit the main force of tangos and free the hostages. As they did that, Half Pint, the Pick, Rodent, and Digger would head to starboard, where they’d thread the needle between the outermost storage tanks and the modular drilling equipment sheds, then separate into two-man hunter-killer groups to neutralize any tangos in the commo shack and stowage areas. We had eight bad guys to deal with. We had pinpointed two—the lookouts. I knew from experience most of the rest would be in close proximity to the hostages.
Boomerang scampered around the vertical flare nozzle to the corner of the rail. He looked up at the platform bed, which was about ten feet above his head and perhaps two feet distant. He vaulted up onto the rail, and with the athletic balance of a ballet dancer, then jumped vertically, about eighteen inches, straight up.
His fingertips caught the steel edge of the deck, and he began to haul himself up, as if he were doing the last pull-up of a very long string. Then his left hand slipped. His gloved fingers lost traction on the platform surface and slipped off. He tried to regain his grip, but it was impossible. And he was wearing too much equipment to pull himself up one-handed.
I watched as he dropped back into space and fell. Yes, the vertical distance between the bottom of the deck and the top of the rail was only about eighteen inches. But there were two feet of horizontal space to consider as well. If Boomerang didn’t thrust himself backward at the same time he dropped onto the flare platform rail, he was going to fall about eighty feet into the water. And with all the weight he was carrying, falling eighty feet into the water was going to be like hitting fucking concrete from the same height.
I watched transfixed. This was one of those moves in which time seemed to stand still. Boomerang was suspended in space. But he didn’t descend. Instead, he turned his whole body 180 degrees. Then, like one of those goddamn circus trapeze geniuses, his body, facing the flare platform, kinetically impelled itself forward. Only then did he actually drop. He landed on the balls of his feet, right atop the two-inch rail. The only sign of exertion I could see was the tension on his face.
His lips moved. No sound came out, but I could read his lips as he mouthed, “Sorry, Boss Dude.”
He reversed his position, gauged the distance one more time, removed his Nomex gloves and stowed them in his belt, then leapt. The second jump was a lot higher than the first. Boomerang’s long hands wrapped around the edge of the decking. He drew himself up, up, up, and finally one-handed the support railing at the edge of the deck. Then he swung to his right, which allowed his knee to catch the edge.
He pulled himself up and over the rail, dropped to his knees, crawled under the bottom rung of the railing, and held his arms out wide. His expression said, “C’mon, Boss Dude—I’ll catch you.”
My expression told him, “Yeah—right.” When I was but a tadpole, the nastiest feature of the obstacle course at the Little Creek Amphibious Naval Base was a series of telephone pole sections, cut into different heights, and stuck in the sand dunes. We called it The Dirty Name. You had to jump from one pole section to anoth
er without falling onto the sand. But that was easier said than done. Because if you could make the vertical jump, the horizontal distance seemed too far to achieve. If you could make the horizontal leap okay, the vertical seemed too high.
Now, the grizzled, war-tempered UDT chiefs who first built the fucking thing long before I ever made it into training had done their jobs well when they put The Dirty Name together. They designed it, you see, with the high goal of making us stinking trainees realize that nothing is impossible. They wanted to construct the physical embodiment of a philosophical tenet basic to SEALdom. That concept is: if you set your mind on a goal and your spirit is the spirit of a Warrior, the word impossible DOES NOT EXIST.
And so, we assaulted The Dirty Name until we overcame it. Conquered it. Vanquished it. And, just as the chiefs wanted, we tadpoles finally came to realize by our victory that when we came up against an obstacle, whether that obstacle was in WAR or in life, we could make ourselves triumph over it by sheer will, pure tenacity, and absolute determination.
You don’t have to like it, they told us—you just have to do it. So these days, whenever I come up against an impediment, whether it is a physical challenge, a bureaucratic roadblock, or a tactical obstacle, I hearken back to The Dirty Name, and I know deep in my Warrior’s bowels that I CAN win the battle, and therefore I WILL NOT FAIL. NOT EVER.
And so, although I can honestly say that I do not like balancing on slippery metal railings, I Just Did It. I clambered up, balanced on the balls of my feet as best I could given my throbbing right nut, bent my knees, raised my arms high over my head, and launched myself into the void. My eyes were locked onto Boomerang’s; my concentration was total. I fucking felt myself approach the deck; sensed its bulk and physical mass. And then Boomerang’s hands clasped my wrists, like a trapeze catcher traps the flyer, and he swung me, a big Slovak pendulum, upward, toward my right.
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