I used my bulk to help, adding to my speed and angle of trajectory. I shouldn’t have. I should have let Boomerang do what he was doing, because he was doing it very well. But I couldn’t leave well enough alone. And so, as I propelled myself up, the point of my right knee—the tender ball joint known as the patella—caught the metal edge of the steel deck.
How hard did I hit my patella?9 Hard enough to bring tears to my eyes. Hard enough so that I couldn’t feel my toes. Hard enough so that I forgot how much my right nut hurt.
I started to fall back. I kicked and twisted involuntarily as I did so. Bad move, because Boomerang lost his grip on my left wrist.
Oh, fuck, oh, shit, oh, doom on Dickie. He was one-handing me, now. And even that was fucking tenuous. It was a very, very long way down. I didn’t want to hit that water. Remember: you drop eighty feet, and hitting water isn’t much different from hitting concrete. More serious so far as I was concerned: I really didn’t want to make the fucking climb a second time. I gritted my teeth, swung my left arm up, and grabbed his left wrist—which was still clamped viselike onto my right wrist—with both hands.
“Gotcha,” Boomerang said through clenched teeth. The fingers of his free hand wrapped around my wrists, and, straining, he swung me, the selfsame big Slovak pendulum, up toward the deck once again.
This time I let him do the work, and allowed my body to go where he wanted to put it. My knee caught the lip of the deck correctly. I put my weight on the leg, extricated my right hand from Boomerang’s grasp, reached out and up to the support rail, hauled myself up, and pulled myself under the dark tubular metal.
I rolled over onto my back unable to breathe, bathed in sweat, my vision clouded by phosphorescent blue and orange spots. Oh, fuck. Not only was I hyperventilating, I was in the goddam HoJo Zone. I fought against it; made myself breathe steadily. Concentrated on overcoming the pain. Slowly, I regained control over my body and my mind.
By the time I sat up and began to massage my sore knee, Boomerang, Nod, and Duck Foot were all staring down at me. I gave them the kind of dirty look battle-weary veterans reserve for smart-assed youngsters who’ve kicked ass all day, and want to chase pussy all night. I groaned audibly, and grimaced up at them through my pain.
Nod pointedly ignored me. “Now that the Skipper’s had his nap,” he stage-whispered to Boomerang and Duck Foot, “maybe he’ll be ready to come out and play.”
“Negatory,” Boomerang shook his head. “He probably wants milk and cookies first.”
I struggled to my feet feeling each and every year, month, and day of my event-filled life. “Fuck you all very, very much.”
2
0317. I TOOK POINT, MY MP5 IN LOW READY POSITION, scanning and breathing as I heel-toed deliberately along the red-and-white-striped derrick housing. Behind me, Boomerang’s MP5 covered my left flank. Behind him, Duck Foot followed, the snout of his weapon covering my right side. Nod, a fourteen-inch Benelli breaching shotgun in the low ready position, worked the rear-guard slot, the muzzle of his weapon moving slowly right/left, left/right.
It was six yards to the corner of the derrick housing, and we covered the distance without incident. I stopped at the corner, dropped to the deck, slipped my adjustable night-vision goggles out of their pouch, and slid up to the edge of the red-and-white housing. You do not want to present your enemy with a silhouette to shoot at, so moving at ground level’s a lot more effective than sticking my big Rogue nose around the corner at a height of six-foot-plus.
Slowly, slowly, slowly, I crept forward until I was able to get enough of my head around the corner. I knew I couldn’t see the doghouse roof from where I was, but I should be able to look toward the monkey board.
The hair on the back of my neck stood straight up. There he was, the sonofabitch. I could see him. He had an automatic weapon—an AK-74 from the look of it—with a night-vision sight slung around his shoulder. And he wore what looked to be a current issue, Kirasa-manufactured, Russkie Army Model-5, mil-spec bulletproof vest, with the extra-extra-high neck and the thick, ceramic strike plates fore and aft. It would take every molecule of the big, 750-grain hand-loaded bullet to take that s.o.b. down.
The tango was hunkered chest-high behind the monkey board windscreen, a pair of big Russkie or East German surplus first-generation night-vision glasses scanning the area from the starboard storage tanks to the port-side chopper pad. There was something clutched in his left hand. I zoomed my night vision in to take a closer look. Yeah—it was a fucking detonator. Soviet Army issue from what I could see.
My group would be moving in his blind spot, because he’d have to look through the huge drilling derrick superstructure to see us. But we were going to have to take him out before he spotted the four SEALs moving around the modular drilling equipment sheds toward the commo shack.
I eased back around the corner, flicked the transmit switch on my radio, and told Hammer what I wanted.
“Got a prob, Skipper,” his voice said evenly in my ear.
I do not like to hear about problems. Especially under conditions like the ones under which I was currently operating.
Hammer’s voice continued playing in my ear. “Goober’s drawing a blank,” he said.
Since we were all broadcasting on the same frequency, I knew that everyone whose radio was working had heard what Hammer’d just told me. But as you know, I have learned never to assume anything. And so, I said, “Hold-hold-hold, acknowledge,” into my lip mike.
The situation was beginning to concern me. Was Goober’s TIQ10 off somewhere prowling and growling? Had he seen something and gone to investigate? Or was he just off draining his lizard? I wanted to know. But I wasn’t about to ask. I don’t like to use the radios too much on ops like this one. You can be overheard, no matter what the folks at Motorola say about secure transmissions. If you get too close to a TV set, your transmissions can cause ghosting and static on the screen—and the bad guys will know you’re in the neighborhood. So I speak very little. And when I do speak, I do it in ambiguous terms. I never say, “Shoot the tango in the red shirt on the left side of the balcony.” Because if said tango is monitoring my comms, he will duck out of the way and live to fight another day. I will simply say, “Go,” which tells the bad guy nothing, or leads him to believe that we are staging a frontal assault. Sometimes, I will use the old SAS Colour Clock Code, which assigns a set pattern of colours (or colors, if we’re in the USA) and numbers to a target. But I will not ever broadcast specific directions that can be understood by the enemy. Thus endeth the lesson.
Back to real time. I heard six tsk-tsks in my ear. The problem was, I couldn’t remember how many of the radios were working.
You disbelieve me? Listen, there were hundreds of thoughts and thought fragments running through my mind simultaneously. I was playing out every fucking scenario possible—and most of ’em ended badly. Only in Hollywood or in the books written by wannabe assholes does everything work out every time sans problems, sans fuckups, and sans Mister Murphy showing his ugly puss.
What would happen if the tango draining his lizard ran into my SEALs and started shooting?
What would happen if one of my hunter-killer groups hadn’t gotten the “hold” message and started the takedown before we were all in position?
What if Goober or Hammer missed the first shot, and the tango on the monkey board detonated his explosive charges?
What would happen if . . . well, you get the idea.
0320. Butch Wells’s voice interrupted my series of dark nightmares. “Goober’s G2,” which I knew meant he was Good to Go.
“Roger.” I eased forward again. My night vision focused on the monkey board tango. “Engage-engage.”
You never heard the shots because they were using suppressed weapons and subsonic hand-loads. The target on the monkey board just dropped from sight, as if he’d been poleaxed. Well, poleaxed is just about what happens when you’re hit by a 50-caliber slug bigger than a baby’s fist.
I couldn’t see Goober’s target—the guy on the doghouse. But Butch’s voice in my ear told me he’d been neutralized, too.
Yes, it is nice to know that some things do work the way they are supposed to.
And then Mustang’s voice played in my ear. “Clear.”
“Roger-roger.” The lookouts had been taken down. Do you know the significance of what that signal meant?
You are correct. It meant we had no time to waste.
If the bad guys inside tried to radio the pair of lookouts and they couldn’t raise ’em, they’d realize that something was wrong. They’d go defensive. They’d put up their guard. Since the two most vital elements of a hostage rescue are surprise and violence of action, I didn’t want these tangos forewarned. Because forewarned, as you know, is forearmed.
By killing the lookouts, therefore, we had committed ourselves to immediate and (here’s the good part) violent action.
0321. We moved forward. I led the way across fifty feet of open ground, scampered up the narrow ladderway that led around the perimeter of the modular housing unit, vaulted a low railing, and scampered along the narrow outdoor passageway that led to the housing unit’s rear hatch. Behind me, I heard the muffled scuff of Boomerang’s booties as he followed in my footsteps.
I waited until he caught up with me. Then Duck Foot arrived. And Nod. We formed up into a four-man train. Eased along a metal bulkhead. Ducked under a pair of shuttered windows (yes, they were closed and darkened but why take chances?) and stacked by the doorway. But now, our positions had changed. Nod, the breecher, stood opposite me. Duck Foot had taken up the rear-guard position. Boomerang and I would go through the doorway first, neutralizing any threats we found.
I pressed my ear to the metal of the door and listened. I heard nothing. I drew back, and tsk-tsked into my lip mike. I wanted to know that Randy, Nigel, Gator, and Timex were in position—stacked just like we were, outside the modular housing unit’s front door. Again—no response.
I do not like getting no response. Getting no response makes me uneasy. Perplexed. Apprehensive.
I was somewhere between perplexed and apprehensive when I heard Rotten Randy’s low growl in my left ear. “Problem, Skipper.”
Have I told you I do not like to hear about problems? Well, I was serious when I said it a while back, and I am serious now.
I waited in silence. Randy’s voice continued: “There’s something nasty about the front door.”
Without warning, the hair on the back of my neck stood straight up. This instinctive reaction to my surroundings has kept me alive for a long, long time. My body was telling me that something was very wrong here. Very extremely wrong.
First off, I told Randy to shut up RIGHT NOW, and thought about WTF was going on. First of all, we were spending a lot more time on the radio than we should have been. You already know I don’t like to broadcast during ops. A couple of tsk-tsks, and we hit the motherfuckers is the way I work. But tonight, all of a sudden the situation has apparently deteriorated so much that my B-team leader has to exfuckingplain the new sit-rep in excruciating detail.
When the light bulb went off, I had to blink, because it was so fucking bright it blinded me.
They were monitoring our comms. They were listening to us. They knew we were here, and they thought they knew where we were. They were waiting in ambush.
Of course they were. It was so fucking obvious. And, having discerned the fact that they were lying in wait for us, I understood in the depths of my Roguish soul how to defeat them. Once you know there is an ambush, you can overcome it. You can turn it around, and kill your enemy before he kills you.
How? Watch, and learn, tadpoles.
The first element is deception. You must make your enemy believe that he is still in control of the situation. And so, I got back on the radio.
“Tell me about the front door problem, in detail,” I said.
There was a pause. Randy’d never heard me ask for something like that in a situation like this. Then his voice came back at me five by five. “The goddamn thing’s electronic and it’s sophisticated, too.”
“What’s your guestimate about defusing it?”
“I dunno,” Randy’s voice buzzed in my ear. “It’s gonna take me like half an hour to bypass the fucking thing because I gotta make sure they didn’t screw with the interior side of the hatch as well as the exterior.”
Of course, the folks monitoring my conversation knew we didn’t have half an hour. They knew we had to act—soon. Why? Because they’d just heard me say, “go-go-go,” and they knew I couldn’t call a halt to the action once I’d committed my troops. I pressed the transmit button. “Can you blow it and then hit from the front end?”
“Not without causing a lot of casualties inside. The explosives are behind the hatch. If the hatch blows, the force of the charge goes inward—into the room. And my thermal tells me they’ve got folks in the front room.”
“Good guys or tangos?”
“HTF should I know, Skipper? Thermal can’t differentiate.”
I already knew that blowing the door wasn’t an option. Hostage casualties couldn’t be tolerated. Not tonight. Not with the politics of this situation just as explosive as the tactical side. But I wanted to paint a certain picture for the bad guys, and so I played the scene out. “Okay—we switch plans. Can you bottle up the front of the unit?”
“Can do.”
“Then have Gator and Timex bottle it up. You get your ass and your partner’s ass over here double-time. We’ll all hit ’em from the back end at once.”
Randy came back right on cue: “Aye, aye, Skipper.”
I shut my radio down, and silent-signaled Boomerang, Duck Foot, and Nod to do the same. Boomerang looked over at me quizzically. His expression told me that he had no fucking idea what I was thinking. All he knew was that we were about to enter what’s known in the trade as a fatal funnel, and that the bad guys were waiting for us inside.
Indeed, the tangos were following the same course of action I would have taken myself if I’d been them: set the agenda for the attacking team. Make ’em come to you the way you want them to come to you. And then you ambush ’em with great violence, and kill ’em all.
They were trying to fuck me. Well, I’ve been fucked by the best, and lemme tell you I have learned my own fucking bag of tricks.
Here’s what I knew. According to the plans faxed from CenTex headquarters, the modular living quarters had been constructed from two double-wide trailer units—that is, four separate sections covered by a single roof. The trailer that contained the dorm rooms formed the shaft of an irregular capital T; the common living area was the top of the T, except that the trailers had been set so that one side of the top T was longer than the other.
The vertical shaft of the T comprised eight double-bunk rooms, four to a side, all sharing a common corridor. At the bottom end of the corridor was the outside door. At the top, or interior, end of the bunkhouse unit were two bathrooms, one on each side of the corridor. The bunk area was separated from the common room by a short L-shaped passageway, and a hollow-panel door.
The common room itself was wide open. The front entry was a hatch on the far right-hand side of the modular unit as you faced it. The front door opened directly into the galley, which had two long picnic tables and four benches, and a corner kitchen—a four-burner electric stove, a big double-size restaurant quality fridge, a food-prep area, and a microwave. The pantry—what there was of one—was a stowage area above the stove and food-prep area, and a series of deep cabinets below.
To the left of the galley was the big living-room area. That’s where they kept the big-screen TV, with the theater-quality sound system, DVD and videocassette decks, and the rig’s extensive library of girlie magazines. Creature comforts are important to people who work on oil rigs. Above the galley area was a huge air-conditioning unit, with a spider’s web of insulated ducts that ran the cooled air into the living area, the sleeping quarters, and the heads.
Now, the keep-it-simple-stupid way to take this place down, according to the book, was this: we’d hit the front and back doors simultaneously, and swarm both living and sleeping areas, catching the bad guys in between.
But it was obvious that these assholes had read the same book we’d been using. That’s why they’d been so fucking obvious about booby-trapping the front door.
Why? Because they thus ensured that we’d make our assault through the back entrance. Where, of course, they’d be waiting for us.
Not all of ’em. We had eight tangos to deal with. Two had been neutralized. That left six. For argument’s sake, let’s say that one man is a free-floater, who’s roaming the rig. That left five. At a minimum, they’d have one or two with the hostages, so that he/they could start killing them quickly. That left three or four. Of those, they’d probably set one guy in the common room. He’d be the backup just in case Mister Murphy screwed with the booby traps and they didn’t work. He’d probably have grenades and maybe even explosives. The others would set up in ambush positions so they’d have a free-fire zone as we hit the back door.
Whoa. Let’s stop right here, and take the time to war-game this scenario, as it has been submitted.
Action: we hit the place and engage two or three of the bad guys. The remaining tangos wax the hostages—either by shooting ’em or killing ’em with grenades or other explosives. Then having done that, they try to kill as many of us as they could before we overwhelm them and send ’em on the ol’ MCRTA—which as you can probably guess, stands for Magic Carpet Ride To Allah.
My friends, I didn’t like the way the plot played out. I don’t mind sending tangos to meet their maker. But I prefer to do it without allowing them the opportunity to kill hostages or my men and me, before we help them make that one-way trip Allahward.
That’s why I had to rewrite the book they’d written. I wasn’t going to get a lot of time to redraft their manuscript, but I hoped I had enough to make sure the denouement would come out the way I wanted it to end: HEA11 for moi; MCRTA for them.
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