ROGUE WARRIOR DESIGNATION GOLD
RICHARD MARCINKO
and
JOHN WEISMAN
POCKET BOOKS
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James Wang
Roger Foley
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THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING ROGUE WARRIOR® SERIES BY RICHARD MARCINKO AND JOHN WEISMAN
DETACHMENT BRAVO
ECHO PLATOON
OPTION DELTA
SEAL FORCE ALPHA
DESIGNATION GOLD
TASK FORCE BLUE
GREEN TEAM
RED CELL
ROGUE WARRIOR
“Excellent…. All of the books are outstanding adventure stories and a short course in special operations techniques and weapons.”
—Col. Calvin G. Bass, USAF [Ret.], Tulsa World (OK)
AND BY RICHARD MARCINKO
THE ROGUE WARRIOR’S STRATEGY FOR SUCCESS
A Commando’s Principles of Winning
LEADERSHIP SECRETS OF THE ROGUE WARRIOR®
A Commando’s Guide to Success
THE REAL TEAM
True Stories from the Real-Life SEALs Featured in the Rogue Warrior Series
Available from Pocket Books
PRAISE FOR THE ROGUE WARRIOR® SERIES
ROGUE WARRIOR: DESIGNATION GOLD
“Marcinko and Weisman add new plot ingredients and push them to the limits of military technology…. Half the fun is Marcinko’s erudite commentary on the incompetence of U.S. military services, the complex and ultimately frustrating mechanics of international politics, and the manly art of protecting your ass.”
—Playboy
“The salty soldier of fortune raises enough homicidal hell to get himself expelled from Russia … hard-hitting.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Readers partial to Marcinko and Weisman’s fierce brand of escapism will find this bottling to be vintage and undeniably potent.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Excellent…. All of [the Rogue Warrior] books are outstanding adventure stories and a short course in special operations techniques and weapons.”
—Col. Calvin G. Bass, USAF [Ret.], Tulsa World (OK)
ROGUE WARRIOR: TASK FORCE BLUE
“Heart-pounding, white-knuckle, pure adrenaline action…. The fast-paced Mission: Impossible-style plot rockets along like a high-octane action movie…. a great book.”
—Beaumont Enterprise (TX)
“Extremely lively…. Not for the squeamish, politically correct, or saintly….”
—Lincoln Journal-Star (NE)
ROGUE WARRIOR: GREEN TEAM
“In-your-face four-letter action…. Marcinko gives new meaning to the word tough.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Liberally sprinkled with raw language and graphic descriptions of mayhem, Rogue Warrior: Green Team is the literary equivalent of professional wrestling.”
—Detroit Free Press
ROGUE WARRIOR: RED CELL
“In a field of wanna-bes, Marcinko is the real thing: combat veteran, killer SEAL, specialist in unconventional warfare….”
—Sean Piccoli, Washington Times
“A chilling, blood and guts, no-nonsense look into clandestine military operations told like it should be told. It doesn’t come more powerful than this.”
—Clive Cussler
ROGUE WARRIOR
“For sheer readability, Rogue Warrior leaves Tom Clancy waxed and booby-trapped.”
—Robert Lipsyte, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Fascinating…. Marcinko … makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Little Lord Fauntleroy.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Blistering honesty … Marcinko is one tough Navy commando.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Marcinko was too loose a cannon for the U.S. Navy…. Rogue Warrior is not a book for the faint of heart.”
—People
THE ROGUE WARRIOR’S STRATEGY FOR SUCCESS
“Picture Rambo in pinstripes…. Marcinko’s style is inspirational; his (literal) war stories are entertaining; and sprinked throughout are useful business insights.”
—Publishers Weekly
LEADERSHIP SECRETS OF THE ROGUE WARRIOR
“Look out, Bill Gates …”
—USA Today
“Bracing, gutsy, tough-talking, empowering…. Should be required reading for managers who want to weed out prima donnas, transform the lazy, and motivate the troops.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Fun to read….”
—The Money Review
Photograph by Roger Foley
The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this “stripped book.”
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. Operational details have been altered so as not to betray current SpecWar techniques.
Many of the Rogue Warrior’s weapons courtesy of Heckler & Koch, Inc. International Training Division, Sterling, Virginia
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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Copyright © 1997 by Richard Marcinko and John Weisman
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ISBN: 0-671-89674-1
eISBN 978-1-439-14103-8
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First Pocket Books paperback printing March 1998
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Printed in the U.S.A.
Once again, to the shooters—fewer still in number … and to Master Chief James H. (“Hoot”) Andrews, USN (Ret.) Man-of-Warsman
—Richard Marcinko
—John Weisman
The Rogue Warrior® series by Richard Marcinko and John Weisman
Rogue Warrior
Rogue Warrior: Red Cell
Rogue Warrior: Green Team
Rogue Warrior: Task Force Blue
Rogue Warrior: Designation Gold
Rogue Warrior: SEAL Force Alpha
Rogue Warrior: Option Delta
Rogue Warrior: Echo Platoon
Rogue Warrior: Detachment Bravo
Also by Richard Marcinko
Leadership Secrets of the Rogue Warrior
The Rogue Warrior’s Strategy for Success
The Real Team
THE ROGUE WARRIOR’S TEN COMMANDMENTS OF SPECWAR
I am the War Lord and the wrathful God of Combat and I will always lead you from the front, not the rear.
I will treat you all alike—just like shit.
Thou shalt do nothing I will not do first, and thus will you be created Warriors in My deadly image.
I shall punish thy bodies because the more thou
sweatest in training, the less thou bleedest in combat.
Indeed, if thou hurteth in thy efforts and thou suffer painful dings, then thou art Doing It Right.
Thou hast not to like it—thou hast just to do it.
Thou shalt Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Thou shalt never assume.
Verily, thou art not paid for thy methods, but for thy results, by which meaneth thou shall kill thine enemy by any means available before he killeth you.
Thou shalt, in thy Warrior’s Mind and Soul, always remember My ultimate and final Commandment. There Are No Rules—Thou Shalt Win at All Cost.
Contents
Part One: Zapodlo
Part Two: Trust but Verify
Part Three: Matryoshka
Glossary
Index
Part One: Zapodlo
Chapter 1
BORIS, LOOKING LIKE YOUR EVERYDAY RUSSKIE ALIEN IN HIS third-generation night-vision driving glasses, slowed the blacked-out Zhiguli to about thirty kliks an hour as we eased into the gentle curve.
Misha, who had a similar pair strapped around the northern hemisphere of his ugly Ukrainian puss, raised his left arm like a proper jumpmaster. He half-swiveled his bull neck, licked his thick, droopy mustache, and stage-growled, “Ready, Dicky,” out of the corner of his mouth.
He hadn’t needed to say anything. Even sans night-vision equipment, I could make out the rear of the old dacha through the windshield—a cedar-clad shadow among shadows, its crude shingle roof slightly concave in the cloud-obscured, last-quarter moonlight, sitting squatly atop a low ridge a hundred or so yards west of the single-lane, north-south, gravel service road on which we were driving.
Our car pulled abreast of the first gate, moving south, its tires scrunching on the packed crushed rock roadbed as Boris decelerated slightly. So far as I could see, there were no lights on inside the dacha. That was promising news—maybe they were all asleep, or drunk, or both. Less work for mother. That, of course, is as in mother … fucker.
We passed even with the second gate. That was my cue. As the rough-hewn wood fence flashed by I began counting the telephone-pole-size fence posts, slapped Boris on the padded shoulder of his distressed black leather jacket, threw Misha the bird, put my shoulder against the rear left-hand door, cracked it open, and—twenty-seven posts, twenty-eight posts, twenty-nine posts, thirty—rolled out into the unseasonably cool late September night, at precisely the spot I’d circled on the high-resolution aerial surveillance photo Misha had taken less than eight hours ago from a borrowed Russian Navy Kamov “Hokum” chopper.
But as I know from having traveled so many miles with Mr. Murphy of Murphy’s Law as a constant (and uninvited) companion, while every picture tells a story, it doesn’t necessarily tell the right story. No one, for example, had bothered to notify a certain stolid, solid, thick, and wholly unforgiving birch tree that grew uncomfortably close to the side of the road that I was coming and perhaps it should get out of the way. Nor was I aware of the tree’s precise location. So, with the first few bars of Ray Charles’s rendition of “Georgia on My Mind” playing in my brain, I tucked and rolled (expertly, I might add with justifiable pride), and was savoring this clandestine tactical infiltration triumph—even as my big, wide Slovak snout made forceful, emphatic, and painfully intense contact with the rough bark and dense wood of our aforementioned tree.
My friends, let me not go hyperbolic on you here—but geezus, that smarts. Of course, I didn’t have time to think about discomfort right then. The impact skewed my perfect tuck-and-roll, I careened to starboard and began to tumble uncontrollably. In the process, my right calf was snagged by a thicket of blackberry bushes. In case you didn’t know, the thorns on blackberry bushes are just as wire-lethal as razor or barbed when you roll into ’em at fifteen-or-so miles per hour.
Okay, okay, so shredded, faded jeans are all the vogue these days. But I ain’t no vogue rogue, bub—I like my jeans the old-fashioned way: dark indigo and in one piece. In any case, having completed a passable Brer Rabbit-tossed-through-thebriar-patch imitation, I spun along the shallow ditch that ran alongside the road, chipped a front tooth on something hard, slammed the point of my elbow against something else hard, bounced through another thicket of thorns into the woods, and finally came to a stop in the middle of what I hoped wasn’t a clump of poison anything.
I lay there listening to my heart, which was pounding out a reasonable simulation of the el-oh-en-gee version of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida—played at 78 RPM (or 160 pulse beats a minute, take your pick), and took half a dozen d-e-e-p breaths.
Now, those of you who already know me understand that I savor pain. I appreciate pain because it tells me that I am still alive. As that other old Frog Rogue, Descartes, might have said, “I hurt—therefore I am.”
But friends, this kind of pain was fucking ridiculous. Talk about too much of a good thing. You want specifics? Okay, let me give you a little geography lesson. I currently resembled either a fucking rag doll SEAL or a bowline knot, because my legs—still wrapped haphazardly in strands of blackberry thorns—were going east, while the rest of me was twisted in a more or less northwesterly direction. Blood from my newly mashed nose coursed southward into my mustache. Below the equator of my tactical nylon belt, my nuts throbbed kaboom, ka-boom, as tender as if they’d been flagrantly fondled by the fingers of a fucking feminist bodybuilder. Still farther south, there was more blood on my right leg—oozing down into the ankle-high Adidas GSG-9 tactical boot whose guaranteed unbreakable lace had somehow disintegrated in the last thirty seconds or so.
I untangled and dethorned myself, groaned, rolled onto my side, checked for broken body parts, and received some slight measure of welcome news as I pawed, probed, and poked my abused corpus. Dings there were aplenty. My ankle was going to be tender for a week. My nose—well, let’s just say I never had a pretty nose to begin with, I don’t have much time to smell da flowers, and my nostrils seem to get wider and flatter with age. My right knee was sore, my left elbow ached, and there was, I discovered, a knot the size of a chestnut blooming on my forehead, just above my Bollé SWAT goggles. But there was nothing broken—and like they always say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
With nothing to fix I did a quick equipment check. The suppressed Heckler & Koch 9mm MP5-PDW submachine gun in the padded scabbard on my back had survived its rough landing—and mine. I eased it out, loaded a magazine, and—quietly as I could—let the bolt slip forward.
Yes, I know that the good people at HK’s International Training Division recommend slapping the bolt down and forward avec panache, thus letting it slam into place with a satisfying ker-raacchhet! But what you can do on the range in Virginia, when you don’t give a rusty F-word who hears you lock and load, you can’t always do out here in the field, where sound counts.
I unbuttoned my tactical jacket and adjusted the lightweight bulletproof vest I wore underneath. Then I inventoried the jacket pockets. The contents were all present and accounted for. I pulled a coil of black parachute line from my left breast pocket, cut thirty-six inches from it with a Spyderco folder, replaced the broken lace in my right boot, and fastened it as tightly as I could to give me some extra support for my bruised ankle.
I ran my hand along the butt of She USP 9mm pistol in its tactical thigh holster to ensure that neither it nor the mag had come loose during my roller-coaster descent. Next. I made sure I still had the two spare fifteen-round magazines I’d stowed in horizontal mag-sheaths on my belt. They were there—filled with the same SEAL Team Six formula hand-loaded 147-grain Hornady XTP bullets in a Plus-Plus-P configuration that have more stopping power than a .45-caliber Silvertip hollowpoint. I rubbed my face and the backs of my hands to respread the dark camouflage cream. I retied the tiger-stripe “Do” rag around my head, the better to keep my French braid in place. Finally, my equipment check completed, it was time to move on out.
I checked the black, nonreflective Timex on my left wrist. There were nineteen mi
nutes until OMON hit the front gate. I was six minutes behind the OPSKED—that’s SEALspeak for operational schedule—I kept in my head. But now was no time to rush. So I lay in the swale by the side of the road and waited, listening for anything untoward. My breathing slowed. My pulse did, too. I held my breath and opened my mouth slightly to help amplify the sounds in my ears.
It was all quiet—only night sounds. That’s when you know it’s okay to move. Because when you can hear a chirp here, a falling something-or-other there, things are normal. When it’s all quiet, something is always wrong. Because the critters know better than you when it’s safe. With the forest sounding like a forest, it was time to go.
Cautiously, I rolled to my right, came up into a low crouch, and crabbed across the road, the sharp gravel cutting into my forearms and knees as I edged forward. It was slow going. At night, you can’t be quick. Since sight is all but lost, you have to rely on sound. So you have to take it low and slow. You move. You stop. You scan. You listen. That’s how you do it—if you want to stay alive. The technique had worked for me all over the world and I wasn’t about to rush things now just because I was a little behind schedule.
My progress was counted in inches, not feet. And I was glad of it—because, as my night vision grew stronger, I could make out the sentries as they leaned against trees, perhaps thirty-five or forty yards from my position. There were three—no, four—no, five—of them.
Doubly cautious now, I made my way across the road and up to the fence. It was made of rough wood boards, stained or painted black or dark brown. What I hadn’t seen in the darkness (nor picked up on the surveillance photo) was the heavy wire mesh affixed behind it. I thought about the pair of Navy-issue wire cutters sitting in their ballistic nylon tactical sheath that I’d left back in Moscow, rolled my eyes skyward, and cursed myself in six languages. My old shipmate Doc Tremblay is right: sometimes I do have fartbeans for brains.
Designation Gold Page 1