0205. Down the stairs and out the back door, which put us on the north side of Place St. Augustin, on the Rue de la Pépinière. I took point, Wonder played rear guard fifty yards back, with Avi floating between us. I wasn’t especially sanguine about tonight’s little jaunt—my record of sneak & peeks in this book hasn’t been very good, so far. I mean—Andrei Yudin’s dacha had been cleaned out, and by the time we reached the Yudin apartment in Moscow, Andrei himself had been disposed of.
But that’s the way it is in real life. In real life, unlike movies, Mr. Murphy is always around to keep you on your often-stepped-on toes. And just because you have struck out before doesn’t mean you won’t strike out again.
0252. We worked our way across Peter the First of Serbia Avenue, turned left, then right, and then worked our way along the street directly behind Werner Lantos’s offices.
What I’d seen during my target assessment was going to make our lives as cat burglars a lot easier. You will remember that Werner Lantos’s offices were located on the third level (the deuxième étage, or second floor) of a turn-of-the-century stone building—the easternmost of three adjoining buildings, all of which sat on the quiet, mostly residential street. The building housing Lantos & Cie had a security system—television cameras scanned the street and the entryway. The other two had no such devices. What they did share in common was a series of wrought iron balconies on each of the upper floors.
If you will remember my notes, two of the cameras were on gimbals.
And what might the significance of gimbals be, Master Marcinko-san?
Well, tadpole, gimbals mean the cameras can pan and zoom. Which in turn tells me they are remote controlled. Which in turn means that there’s someone operating ’em. The question was whether that camera operator was on duty at Lantos & Cie, or whether he was at a security operation in another part of the city. No use guessing—we’d find out soon enough.
I parked Wonder and Avi in a dark cul-de-sac one street away from our target, then, following Chief Gunner’s Mate/Guns Everett Emerson Barrett’s advice of never assuming (because, as he told me so often, “It makes an ass of u and me”), I figure-eighted the two blocks on each side of Lantos & Compagnie by myself to scope the area out and make sure we were going to be able to operate safely.
As usual, Ev’s advice was right on the old argent, which is how they refer to money in these parts. There were a few potential problems that I hadn’t noticed before.
The first was that the Egyptian Embassy sat two blocks away—and from the number of blue-uniformed French security forces cordoned around the building the Egyptians were receiving Threatcon Charlie-level protection. That meant if we were discovered, there were lots of cops available to chase us. Second, I saw that the streetlights on our target block were all working. Under normal OPCONs—OPerational CONditions—streetlights are never a problem. We always carry a small sack of ball bearings and a slingshot as part of our assault gear. But not tonight. Not when our “assault gear” was improvised. Tonight we’d have to move quickly and hope not to attract any attention.
0311. My plan was simple and direct. We’d go up the thick, cast-iron drainpipe to the fourth level (the third floor, or troisième étage) of the adjacent building, work our way along the balcony, then drop down one floor when we got to the Lantos & Cie location. There, we’d recon to make sure there were no security guards inside. Once we’d ascertained it was all clear (I didn’t even want to think about the possibility that it wasn’t), then Wonder would shimmy the window, and we’d be in like the proverbial Flynn.
0312. Mr. Murphy decided that we needed company so he showed up. I sidled up to the drainpipe, felt around the back, reached up, straddled it with my knees, hugged with my thighs, and pulled my weight skyward.
The fucking thing gave. I tried again. No—it was definitely loose. No way was I going to try to get up that sucker.
On to drainpipe number two. Same drill. I waved Wonder over, and he gave me a boost. I took hold of the pipe, wrapped my legs as tight as I could, and pulled myself up. I was ten feet from the sidewalk when the pipe started to shake—there was this awful fucking ominous rumble, and the goddamn thing twisted three inches to port, then back to starboard. I came down like a fucking fireman on his way to a three-alarmer. As I stepped away from the wall, a rusty bolt hit me on the back of the neck.
The first climbable pipe was two buildings away—the very last house. That meant we’d be sneaking along forty-five to fifty yards of balconies instead of ten to fifteen. Which raised the possibility that we’d be spotted, unless we moved very carefully, and very quietly. Fuck—our six-minute entry was about to take half an hour.
I tested the pipe. It was solid. I shook it back and forth. It didn’t move. So I made sure that everything in my pockets was stowed correctly, checked the coil of rope that sat athwart my shoulders, pulled Monsieur Henri’s work gloves back on, and began my climb. Clambering up a six-inch cast iron drainpipe is harder than it looks. Belay that. It even looks hard—actually doing it is sheer torture. Especially when you are no longer a spry twenty-five-year-old, with buns (and abs, and dick) of steel. I pulled myself up the pipe half foot by half foot, my arm muscles burning, my thighs on fire. At least I was comforted by the knowledge that all those reps on my weight pile were getting me through this current ordeal. Yeah, right. Sure.
It was twenty feet to the first balcony, give or take a groan or two. From there, things were easy—well, relatively easy. I stood on the rail, reached up, grasped the floor of the balcony above, fingertip pull-upped onto the lip, found another four inches of finger purchase, raised myself high enough to get a leg up, pulled myself onto the outside of the railing, then slung myself over the rail—keeping low and quiet so as not to create any telltale silhouettes or embarrassing noises just in case there was somebody sleeping inside the room whose balcony I was on—rolled over onto the balcony, crawled away from the window to the outer edge of the balcony, then stood up, climbed onto the railing, reached up to the balcony above, and repeated the process all over again.
And where did I first learn to climb buildings, you ask. At Red Cell, I respond. After all, we SpecWarriors have been coming through the back door for years—that’s what effective shoot-and-looting is all about, isn’t it? Unconventional warfare means coming from where they least expect you.
So, ever after, as I commanded my unit of tango killers, it made perfect sense to me that if we were to kill terrorists the way terrorists should be killed—i.e., stone cold dead— we should do it the way they did: by making our approach from a direction no one was guarding. At one tango camp in Libya, we worked our way through the minefields—they never thought to defend those approaches. Who’d be crazy enough to come that way? At another—this one was in Sudan—we slithered through drainage pipes. In the Philippines, we crawled through mud flats and floated down the rivers. In France we swam in. In Panama, our quarry was tucked in an impenetrable high-rise with guards and locked doors and secure elevators. So at zero dark hundred we simply scaled the fucking building from the outside and took him down that way. It’s not surprising to learn that almost no one locks a fifteenth-floor window.
We would practice these assaults whenever we were on the road—which was often. I made a rule of reserving our rooms on the top (or second-from-the-top) floors of hotels, then ordering my guys to get to them by going up the outside of the building. We used to make a race of it—two-man teams clambering up the outside, with a case of beer as the stakes.
We got damn good at it, too. So good that Duck Foot Dewey (God, I do miss the conniving, mischievous little sonofabitch) started coming and going from his own South Arlington apartment by the window instead of the door. Shocked the hell out of the neighbors he’d wave at on the way up or down—not to mention the shoppers in the Safeway parking lot across Lee Highway who’d watch, transfixed as he did his Spider-man act.
I halted on the third level above the street and beckoned for Avi to follow. What the
fuck was he waiting for? He took a deep breath—like a kid about to make his first climb onto the sliding pond—and followed. Well, let me not overstate things. Avi tried to follow. But Avi is an intel operator—not a SEAL. What does that mean? It means he doesn’t have the same kind of upper-body strength we do. In point of fact, he has what I’d call normal upper-body strength, which means he doesn’t have very much at all. A deficiency that makes climbing such things as drainpipes impossible. He’d huff and puff himself six or seven feet off the ground, then slowly slide back groundward.
The situation was quickly passing directly from SNAFU to FUBAR. That was no good at all. I mean, we’d been fucking lucky so far. We were exposed here, but the street had remained deserted: no vehicular traffic, and no pedestrians—yet. But I couldn’t count on that forever.
After three abortive attempts by Avi, I descended to the second level, lowered the rope I was carrying, and with Wonder pushing and me pulling, we managed to haul him up to the first-floor balcony. I climbed back up one more floor, lowered the rope, and we repeated the exercise. Then we did it again. Seventeen minutes later, Avi, sweating clear through all his clothes and feeling the cold, stood on the fourth-level balcony.
I looked at the diminutive Israeli. “I see you don’t mind heights,” I whispered.
He smiled gamely but I could see from the way he held the rail that he was your basic white-knuckle pipe climber and balcony walker. Well, that was all right. By making the climb at all, Avi had just gone through a kind of SpecWar bar mitzvah. Today (tonight, actually) he’d become a Rogue Warrior. He’d even learned a new Commandment: that he didn’t have to like it—he just had to do it.
You will recall (this was first explained in Rogue Warrior: Green Team) that there are four Joint Chiefs of Staff terrorist Threat Conditions, or Threatcons: Alpha. Bravo, Charlie, and Delta. Alpha is the least demanding—it is in effect at most overseas installations on an ongoing basis. Threatcon Charlie applies, according to the secret/sensitive JCS memo quoted in the book, “when an incident occurs or when intelligence is received indicating that some form of terrorist action against installations and personnel is imminent.”
Chapter 17
0331. WE BEGAN OUR SLOW, DELIBERATE CREEP. I WORKED around flowerpots and window boxes, slithered underneath a cracked-open window, cursing silently as puddled water was sponged up by my jeans. At the end of the first balcony, there was a gap of perhaps two feet between the railings.
We all crossed easily. The second balcony was smooth: no plants, potted trees, or other obstacles. We traversed the ten or so yards in virtually no time. That was when we hit our first real hurdle. I mean, a literal hurdle: a four, maybe four-and-a-half-foot gap between the balcony we were on, and the one we had to get to.
I straddled the rail, then brought my trailing foot over and onto the outer lip, paused, then sprang, catching the outer lip of the balcony with my toes as my fingers closed around the wrought iron. As I sprang, there was an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. It was the same sensation I had when I used to run the Dirty Name, which is what we called the obstacle course at the Little Creek, Virginia, amphibious base.
The Dirty Name was a series of stumps, logs, and telephone pole sections of various heights and diameters that had been planted in the ground. The objective was to make your way from one to the other without tripping, falling, or busting your head. But the enterprising gremlins—which is a fifteen-dollar way of saying the UDT chiefs—who’d designed the Dirty Name long before I even joined the Navy had been devilishly ingenious. The wood was placed so that if you could make the jump from point A to point B easily, the height differential would make it virtually impossible without a lot of extra effort. When the height differential was easy, the space between poles was just enough to make your jump, well, challenging. If you misjudged, you’d either jump short—and crack your chin or face on the log, or you’d overshoot, go long—and catch one of the long splinters that felt oh, so good in your arms and legs as you tried to scramble back before you toppled to the sand below.
Now, you are probably asking why the fuck did the chiefs do this to us. To be honest, friends, I remember asking that very same question—although not phrased quite so gently—many times during my training cycle. Well, as you’re probably well aware, the reasoning behind their crude, rude inculcation has become obvious in the real world.
So, taking a lesson from the old chiefs, I built my own Dirty Name at Rogue Manor. Each and every one of my men works out on it regularly—as do I. Now, every time I have a gap to jump, my body knows how to react, and what to anticipate. I have done it all before—and often. I do not, therefore, stutter-step, or falter. I do not hesitate, fumble, flounder, or vacillate. I move decisively. Unambiguously, Forcefully.
So, springing like the roguish panther I’ve taught myself to be, the ball of my right foot caught the balcony lip. Ditto my left. Then both my hands grasped the rail lip. Which separated at the corner seam.
Have you ever taken hold of something—a stair railing or deck post, perhaps—that suddenly gives way and catches you off balance? If you have, then you know that the common reaction at such time is to grip tighter and pull the errant object toward your body.
Big mistake. Do that and you will take the goddamn thing with you as you fall.
I let go of the railing before its weight moved my center of gravity irretrievably off center, simultaneously leaned forward—in, toward the collapsing rail, and toe-sprang, somersaulting over it. I flipped in midair, then landed shoulder first in a tuck-and-roll. It wasn’t graceful, fluid, or smooth. But it kept me from falling backward, ripping the railing, and making a lot of fucking noise as it (and I) clattered onto the sidewalk some thirty-five feet below.
I lay on my back and caught my breath, waiting to hear if anything I’d done had attracted undue attention. After fifteen seconds of silence I rolled over onto my hands and knees, and crawled to examine the damaged railing. The wrought iron was rotted through—although it had about twelve fucking coats of enamel on it—all that had been holding the corner joint together was paint. I looked and saw where it had separated. I seesawed the railing back and forth, watched the play, scanned the four feet between balconies, and realized that Avi Ben Gal wasn’t going to like that which he was about to do. Nope. Not at all.
Of course, Avi is a trooper—so he didn’t complain as Wonder rigged the rope under his armpits and tossed me the other end. I took it and secured it around my own waist with a bowline. Avi didn’t weigh more than 135, maybe 140 pounds. I am a bulky sonofabitch—a hair under 220 pounds—and most of it is muscle meat. Avi knew I’d play the role of sea anchor well.
Even so, he looked at me with inquisitive puppy eyes as Boy Wonder rigged him for action.
“Don’t worry,” I stage-whispered. “This is gonna be easy.”
His expression told me that he wasn’t as sure as I was about that.
I took up some tension of the rope as if I was ready to help Avi across, then nodded imperceptibly to Wonder, who had eased up directly behind him. As you can probably guess, Wonder and I have performed this little maneuver before.
Wonder simply picked the Israeli up by the belt and the yoke of his shirt, and—before he had any time to react—tossed him across the opening to me as if he were a sack of concrete. I dropped the rope (never any need for it anyway) in time to appreciate the look of incontrovertible, pure terror on Avi’s face as he was in flight (for all of a second and a half). That expression, which combined consternation, shock, and horror was alone worth the price of his whomping, flailing impact on my chest as he came in for a landing. I caught him, wrapped him up, and brought him gently to the ground.
He lay there, hyperventilating, for some seconds. “I really wish, Dick—” he began.
I cut him off. “Listen, asshole, any flight you walk away from is a good flight. Besides, you’re about to get all kinds of bonus miles on that one, so take yes for an answer, brush yourself off, and let’s get the f
uck to work.”
0336. We formed up single file, and I moved out front by a couple of body lengths to begin a slow recon of this next ten or so yards of territory. I’d progressed five or six of them along the balcony when, directly in front of me, a light came on through the window.
I stopped and pressed myself up against the wall to hide any possible silhouette. I waited. The light stayed on.
At times like these, all you can think about are the possible goatfuck factors. I mean, all I needed now was somebody who couldn’t get back to sleep, threw open their window to get a breath of fresh air, saw us creepy-crawling on their balcony, and screamed.
Or a dog. The French love dogs. There are probably more dogs per capita in Paris than any other city in Europe. All I needed was for some light-snoozing pup to sniff-sniff us three intruders outside and go bark-bark-barking to tell the master.
Or—well, you get the idea. There are a lot of things that can go wrong at times like this one—and I must admit, I thought about most of ’em.
I gandered the Timex on my left wrist. It had been six minutes and the fucking light was still on. If this was a nighttime piss break—un piss soir in French—it was a goddamn long one. I edged closer to the window, moving in inch-by-inch increments. Pressed my nose against the casing and slowly, slowly, swiveled so that I could just peer inside through the sheer curtain.
From the sofa, overstaffed chairs and the big coffee table, I could tell I was looking into someone’s living room. The light was coming from a floor lamp that sat, incongruously, in the dead center of the room. My eyes followed the electrical cord, which had been augmented with an extension cord, which in turn led to an outlet that had been equipped with—eureka!—a timer. These folks were out of town. One less thing to worry about. I dropped low, signaled Avi and Wonder to move up, and continued my crawl.
0344. We positioned ourselves on the balcony directly above Lantos & Cie’s French windows. The next move was going to be tricky. As you should remember, there are television cameras suspended from the Lantos balcony. If we made too much of a commotion, those cameras would jiggle—and whoever was watching the screen would, if he was even half awake, realize that something was awry. So we had to be v-e-r-y careful lowering ourselves these last eight feet.
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