And I hadn’t failed—until now, it seemed. Was it now all going to come to this? Dickie gets slam-dunked and misses all the fun while the rest of the guys get to kick ass and take names?
No way. I was only forty—far too young to die. I yanked on the guides again. No fucking way I was going to buy it. Not like this. Not because my outrageously expensive, personally selected, ingeniously modified, packed-by-my-own-loving-hands, goddamn fucking parachute didn’t work.
I dragged at the lines with as much force as I could muster. Finally, the two far right-hand cells filled with air and I began a controlled descent, spiraling in lazy circles as I hung in the harness, sweating, and tried to figure out where the hell I was.
Where I was, was about three miles out over the ocean, the speed of the C-130 and the free-fall having carried me way off my original flight path. I could see beach below, so I checked my compass and altimeter and changed course, parasailing back toward the prearranged 300-square-yard landing zone, a little airstrip cut into the rough countryside about half a mile from where the terrorists were holed up. We’d chosen it as our assembly point from an ultra-highresolution NSA satellite photo that had been faxed to us during our flight down from Norfolk.
I was at eleven thousand feet now, and by my best guesstimate I had about ten miles before touchdown. I watched the breakers wash ashore more than two miles beneath my feet, phosphorescent white crescents moving in rippling, parallel lines. Beyond the sea was the jungle. It was, as I knew from the intel pictures, scrubby jungle, the kind common to much of the Caribbean and Latin America. Not rain forest, thank God, with its treacherous high canopy of trees that made parachute landings a bitch, if it’d been rain forest we’d have had to jump way offshore and land on a narrow strip of beach, or come in by sea, swimming from a mother ship, an innocent-looking, apparently civilian vessel that passed far off the coast, or landing in specially modified IBSs—rubberized inflatables that, along with us, were dropped by ships or low flying planes.
I looked up. No stars. No moon. The chute was now working perfectly, and from the way the wind was blowing, I knew I’d make the landing zone easily. I had a twenty-minute glide ahead of me, and I decided to sit back and enjoy the ride.
I figured I could. Surprise would certainly still be on our side. All the intelligence we’d received during our flight from the States indicated the bad guys wouldn’t be expecting us. Not so soon. That’s what made SEAL Team Six so special. We were unique; a small, highly mobile, quick-reaction team trained to do one job: kill terrorists and rescue hostages, and do it better than anybody in the world. Nobody could move as fast as we could. No other unit could come out of the water, or the sky, with equal ease.
Delta Force, the Army’s hostage-rescue unit originally commanded by my old colleague and sometime rival Colonel Charlie Beckwith, was good. But it was also big—more than two hundred operators—and it was cumbersome as a bloody elephant to move. My entire unit numbered only ninety, and we traveled light. We had to go that way: often, we had to swim to our objective with everything we’d need in tow.
Tonight, fifty-six SEAL Six jumpers parachuted off the ramps of two C-130s that had taken off from Norfolk, Virginia, six and a half hours previously. If my chute was the only one that had screwed up, they’d all be on final approach to the LZ by now, gliding into circular formations of seven, then dropping onto the ground by quickly pulling up, or flaring, just before their feet touched. It kept you from being dragged by your chute and making a furrow with your face.
Normally I’d have been a part of the pattern, but I’d been unavoidably detained and wanted to get onto the ground fast, so I flew a straight approach into the LZ. As I came in, I could hear ambient canopy flutter all around me, and I knew the team was S-turning to eat up ground speed, then corkscrew circling and landing just as we’d trained to do. As for me, I came in fast and high—I didn’t brake as I was supposed to, never flared, and took out a small tree at the end of the overgrown runway. I never even saw it coming. I was at maybe fifteen feet or so and then—blam—took the trunk smack in the face.
It was a good hurt. The kind that made me feel I was alive. I left the canopy up in the foliage, hit the deck, and started to assemble the teams.
We did a fast count. I was ecstatic. Every man had made the LZ with equipment intact. I called JSOC—the Joint Special Operations Command—on the SATCOM and reported we were fifty-six out of fifty-six on the ground and were about to move.
Paul Henley, my XO—Six’s executive officer, who I’d nicknamed PV because of his Prince Valiant haircut—and I formed the teams into four prearranged assault groups.
I punched Paul on the upper arm. “Let’s go hunting.”
Following our NSA maps, we moved off silently into the jungle to the southwest, single file, weapons at the ready. We functioned entirely through hand signals, the way I’d done in Vietnam more than a decade earlier. Our moves were choreographed into a deadly sort of ballet—pas de mort—we’d worked on for months. No one spoke. No one had to. By now, PV and I thought alike. He’d been the first man I’d chosen for Six, a bright, energetic, capable young SEAL officer who could jump and shoot and party with the best of them.
Moreover, unlike me, he was an Academy grad, which gave Six some cachet with the bean counters. The Navy’s caste system has the reputation of being about as rigid as any in the world. The first thing most Navy officers do when they meet you is look at your hands to see whether or not you’re wearing a Naval Academy class ring. If you do, then you’re a part of the club. If you don’t, then you’re an untouchable. I was the original untouchable. The only things I wore on my knuckles were scars. But I loved my work and was uncommonly good at it, and in a few rare cases—mine included—the Navy establishment rewards ability almost as nicely as it does jewelry.
I checked my watch. Twenty-one seventeen. Two minutes behind the schedule I kept in my head.
We’d gotten the word to move twenty-seven hours beforehand. It came from JSOC. The first info was pretty sketchy: a Puerto Rican terrorist group called the Macheteros, or “machete wielders,” had broken onto the National Guard airfield just outside San Juan and destroyed $40 million worth of planes and equipment. That much of the story would make it into the newspapers.
What wouldn’t be reported, according to JSOC, was that during the attack the Macheteros—we commonly referred to terrorists in the radio phonetic term as Ts, or tangos—took a hostage, and a pallet load of equipment. Including, it was believed, a nuclear weapon. No one was sure. Don’t ask how no one could be sure whether or not an A-bomb was missing. This was the United States Air Force after all—home of $600 toilet seats and $200 pliers.
Anyway, the Macheteros, I was told, had managed to evade police dragnets, roadblocks, and SWAT teams and disappear. Except that U.S. intelligence tracked them to Vieques, a small island due east of Puerto Rico, where they had a clandestine training camp. That was where they were now.
I knew Vieques Island. I’d trained there as a member of Underwater Demolition Team 21 two decades ago. It seemed somehow incongruous that a bunch of tangos would choose for their clandestine base an island that normally crawled with U.S. military personnel.
Moreover, we’d had so many false alarms, I was suspicious that this scramble was just another cry-wolf operational drill, or another training exercise to be done in “real time,” known as a full mission profile. Indeed, we’d been scrambled by Dick Scholtes before, only to find out while we were in the air on the way to the “target” that we were part of some goatfuck war game JSOC had based on a real incident, to make us think we were playing for keeps.
Game or not, I was willing to play along. We had never performed a massed night jump over a hostile target. We’d also never coordinated so many elements at once—clandestine insertion, taking down the target, snatching a hostage and a nuke, and synchronizing an extraction from a hot landing zone was as complicated a series of tasks as SEAL Team Six had been required to perform in its
short history.
The call-up had gone right according to schedule. Each man at Six carried a beeper at all times. When it went off, he had four hours to show up at a prearranged location with his equipment.
During the initial hours, while the crews were assembling, PV and I called in my ops boss, Marko, and Six’s master chief petty officer, Big Mac, and we began putting together our basic strategy. That’s the way it worked at Six. Officers, petty officers (Navy noncoms), and enlisted all had a say in what went on, although I made the ultimate aye-or-nay decision on everything.
We realized from the start that a seaborne operation was out of the question because it would have taken too long to land from a mother ship. That meant we’d be launching an air strike. And given the location of the terrorist camp, it would be easier to go straight in than drop us eight or ten miles offshore with our boats.
The first intelligence we received came from a guy I’ll call Pepperman, a former Marine lieutenant colonel who was working special ops assistance at the National Security Agency at Ft. Meade, Maryland, out of a room five or six stories below ground. That basement room was the hub for covert and clandestine operations all over the world, and my old friend Pepperman sat there like a balding Buddha, watching and listening as things went down.
Pepperman—I called him that because he grew his own incredibly hot Thai peppers in the backyard of his suburban Maryland home, a culinary holdover from his special ops days behind the lines in Southeast Asia—was one of those wonderful, ex-military scavengers who could get you anything, anytime. In Vietnam he’d probably been the type who could lay his hands on a bottle of Chivas or a case of beer even though he was six days into a ten-day long-range patrol behind the Green Line in Cambodia. Now, he was in the code-wordsecret classified-information business, and there wasn’t much he couldn’t come up with, if you were a friend in need—and if you had the proper clearances, which I did.
He immediately supplied us with the kind of info that allowed me to outline our basic strategy: a thumbnail of who the bad guys were, their history, modus operandi, and basic political and military objectives. It didn’t take long to reach the bottom line: these people weren’t nice.
The Macheteros had been active since 1978. They were a small, well-financed, tightly organized guerrilla force of ultranationalists. Their objective was to wage a terrorist war against what they called “U.S. colonialist imperialism” in the broadside “communiquès” they distributed following dozens of attacks. They’d received training in Eastern Europe courtesy of the KGB—and they’d learned their deadly lessons well. The Macheteros had staged a number of lethal, effective attacks. Half a dozen Puerto Rican policemen had been shot, and in the fourteen months before the current raid, they’d murdered two U.S. sailors and wounded three other American military personnel in separate ambushes.
About an hour into the planning, my jumpmaster, a boatswain’s mate I called Gold Dust Frank, showed up. I gave him a quick rundown of what was going on. Then he and PV, who had been a member of the Navy’s parachute team, began to work out the intricacies of a 56-man clandestine jump and a ten-nautical-mile glide, given the approximate load each man would be carrying, the topography of Vieques Island, and the sort of landing zone we’d be dropping into.
Another pair of SEAL Six petty officers, Horseface and Fingers, showed up. They were my top demolition experts, and they started to assemble the explosive bundles necessary to take down an armed installation. Except they had a question or two I couldn’t answer.
Like: “How thick are the doors, Skipper? And are they wood or metal?”
“What am I, a goddamn clairvoyant?” I punched up the all-knowing Pepperman in his NSA basement.
“Pepperman, Dickie here. Can you give us an info dump on door thickness and material?”
He laughed out loud. “That’s always Delta’s first question, Marcinko, you dipshit asshole. What’s the matter, can’t you be original?”
I loved it when he talked like that. “Screw you, shit-forbrains.” I asked him to fax us a quick flick of the target area—the terrorist camp—so Horseface could determine the approximate size of a charge that would breach the door without blowing up the hostage inside. Meanwhile, Fingers (he was called that because he’d lost a couple doing demolition work) began building the other explosive charges—the ones we’d use to destroy the nuclear device if it couldn’t be brought out with us.
“I got a Blackbird working, Dick,” Pepperman said. That was good. It meant he’d already scrambled an SR-71 spy plane and its cameras were snap-snap-snapping away from 85,000 feet. At that height the bird was invisible to the normal eye—even to most binoculars. We’d have pictures in a couple of hours at most. “And we’ll start getting full imagery in seven, eight hours,” Pepperman continued.
“Full imagery” was the stuff from one of the KH-11—for Keyhole-11—spy satellites that NSA operated in conjunction with the CIA and the military. “Sounds good. Keep me posted, cockbreath.” I rang off before he could insult me back.
Our communications maven—I called him Ameche, after Don Ameche, who played Alexander Graham Bell in the thirties movie—reported for work. He began getting the SATCOM relays up and working. We don’t like to go through the operator in SEAL Team Six; we’re much more a directdial outfit. Our portable phones were called PSC-I manpacks, which in Navy speak translates as Portable Satellite Communications terminals.
PV and I worked the phones, negotiating with the Air Force to set the pickup time so Six, the hostage, and the nuke could all be exfiltrated by HH-53 choppers flown from the Air Force’s 20th Special Operations Squadron at Hurlburt Field, located on the western edge of the Eglin Air Force Base complex in Florida. Coordination was important: the four HH-53s had to be refueled in flight by a pair of MC-130E Combat Talon aircraft; moreover, they couldn’t arrive too early because they’d give our position away. If they kept us waiting, they’d leave us vulnerable in hostile—potentially deadly—territory. Once airborne, they’d sprint us from Vieques to a friendly airfield on the main island, about eleven minutes away. There, we’d rendezvous with a C-141 StarLifter out of Charleston, South Carolina, which would in turn move us and our packages back to CONUS—the Continental United States.
The team started to arrive midevening; guys drifting in from all over the Virginia Beach area. We looked like a bunch of dirtbags. The Navy called it “modified grooming standards.” I called it ponytails, earrings, beards, and Fu Manchu mustaches, biker’s jackets, tank tops, and T-shirts.
The guys’ cars and pickup trucks were crammed to overflowing with gear, covered with tarps or canvas. I’d bought them the best of everything, from mountaineering equipment to Draeger bubbleless underwater breathing apparatus. And until we were able to build each team member his own personal equipment cage, they had to bring everything with them each time there was a call-up. Who knew where we’d be going.
We went wheels up at 1400 hours. The guys looked tired but ready as they settled as comfortably as they could in the canvas cargo sling seats that ran up and down the sides of the C-130’s fuselage, or sacked out on the cargo pads that lay strewn on the greasy floor. Our shrink, Mike the Psych, wandered up and down, making sure nobody got too apprehensive. We’d learned from Delta that an SOB—Shrink On Board—was a good idea. First, you didn’t want a guy who’d go bonkers on you jumping with the team. Mike knew these men—if he sensed there might be a problem, I trusted him to let me know immediately.
Once we got airborne, I’d formulate our final plans based on the information and pictures that would start arriving on our scrambled fax machines. PV and I were on separate aircraft, but we could talk on secure phones and share information, or consult with Dick Scholtes at Ft. Bragg or call Pepperman in his Maryland basement for advice if we needed to.
I climbed the ladder to the cockpit and peered through the windshield, watching the sky darken. Pretty soon we’d refuel, a pair of KC-135 tankers lumbering above us at four hundred knots while t
he pilots nudged our C-130s up to the trailing fuel drogues, plugged up, and sucked gas. Absentmindedly, I dropped the clip out of my Beretta and popped a round into my palm. The clip—in fact, every round of ammunition carried tonight by SEAL Team Six—came from a special section of the base ammo lockers. It had been preloaded into magazines for our Berettas and HK submachine guns. Its release had been authorized by JSOC just prior to our departure.
Something was awry. The weight was wrong—lighter than the custom load I’d helped design. I dragged my fingernail across the dull lead hollow-point and left a track. It was a compound bullet—a goddamn training round. They were sending us on another pus-nuts exercise—a full mission profile.
Goddammit—the Macheteros were real enough, why the hell not let us take ’em on? We’d designed a good mission, based on real intelligence—and were executing it according to the numbers. Why the hell didn’t they let us do what we’d been trained to do? A decade and a half ago, in Vietnam, I’d learned firsthand what SEALs did best: hunt men and kill them. But even in Vietnam, the system kept me from hunting and killing as many of the enemy as I would have liked. Since Vietnam, no one had given me the chance to do that job again—until I’d been ordered to create this team of men whose only job, I was promised, would be the hunting and killing of other men.
Now the system was at it again. We were ready. Capable. Deadly. Why the hell weren’t we being used? I’d never considered SEALs strategic weapons—expensive systems that you keep in your arsenal as deterrents, but don’t use. SEALs are tactical. We want to be sent on missions. We wanted to shoot and loot, hop and pop—do all the wonderful, deadly things that SEALs are supposed to do.
I’d begun to believe we were finally getting our chance. The bullet in my palm told me otherwise.
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