“They are,” I answered, “but we’ve taken a beating and, for the final push, I want operators who I fucking know and who fucking know me. Blanchard has his shooters with him and it’s making all the difference in the world right now. They are thinking and moving and fighting as a unit. It’s an edge I don’t have. HRT is shit hot and I love the bastards to death, but if I’m gonna get a shot at Blanchard it’s going to be up close and very personal. I need SEALs to back our play and I need the best fucking SEALs in the Teams and that’s SIX. Can you make it happen?”
There was a pause at the other end. I heard a muffled whisper, then someone in the background talking. Suddenly Karen was back. “Dick, Clay just called his contact at the Navy. They don’t like it but he used the president’s authority and explained to them that anything less than immediate and total cooperation would see court martial proceedings initiated regardless of rank. You’ll have your shooters. There’s a couple of boat crews up in Bremerton that have been doing some training at the base there. I’ll have the Air Force chop the fastest plane or chopper they’ve got at McChord over to Bremerton and then down to you. Will that do it?”
What a fucking gal! “Yeah, and tell Mulcahy I owe him one.”
I heard Karen pass along my kudos. “He says you just need to do your fucking job, Dick. He’s doing his.”
“That’s a hardass motherfucker you’ve got working for you, lady. I’m on it.”
“I’m so sorry to hear about George. He was such a brilliant man. And a kind one. Gates will be furious when he hears this.”
“All I can tell you is that it was quick,” I said. “Wasn’t pretty, but at least he never knew what him him. Karen, I gotta go. Lassiter’s chopper is coming in and we’ve still got to disarm the fucking computer and get a secure spot for the Feds to interrogate the miserable bastard. Will you call Danny and tell him when the egghead is going to arrive? And let him know we’ve got shooters coming in. He’ll handle the arrangements. Out here!”
I tossed the cell to the nearest air cop and jogged down the steps and out onto the tarmac. No tearful farewells with my new buddies who almost blew my fucking head off. Fire and medical crews were cleaning up the wrecked Op-Center. I could see the outline of several full body bags under the harsh glare of the banks of emergency lights that had been set up all around the building. Despite all this, I was once again feeling confident. Like Clay said, all I had to do was my job. If Blanchard punched our tickets right now it wouldn’t matter, just as long as I went out trying my very goddamned best. And for me to be able to do my best, I needed to know I was surrounded by the best.
When Karen asked why I had to have SEAL Team SIX join this party, I told her the truth—but only part of it. Full disclosure, it was a lot more personal than I’d wanted her to know. If this was the most important mission of my career, then I damn well wanted to carry it out with the support of the team I’d created out of my own sweat and blood. HRT might have been just as skilled in the mechanics of waging war, but I couldn’t know with absolute certainty how they’d respond in any and all situations. I knew SIX—because, in a lot of ways, I am SIX and SIX is me.
When the green light was given for me to commission a naval counter-terrorist SEAL team, the word came down from the chief of Naval Operations that I had carte blanche to get the job done. And to accomplish my mission I had to think—and act—outside the standard issue Navy box I’d been brought up in. The creation, training, and fielding of such a force had never been done before, so there were no standards to adhere to and no previous efforts to guide me. It was like walking off the ramp of a C-130 at 25,000 feet above the earth at midnight. You just take a deep breath and do it, and hope the landing is a good one.
I had Chargin’ Charlie Beckwith, founder and first commanding officer of the Army’s elite DELTA team, to bounce ideas and experiences off. As a young Green Beret officer, Beckwith enjoyed the advantage of having been an exchange officer with the British Special Air Service, or SAS, England’s topnotch counterterrorist force. He’d participated in their rigorous selection course and been tabbed after successfully completing it. He built DELTA along the same lines as SAS. Beckwith was also able to draft off the already existing fifth Special Forces Group’s in-house CT unit. Called Blue Light, it was an organic, in-house Special Forces response to terrorism made up of a number of highly qualified and blooded Green Berets with Vietnam special projects experience and know-how. But for your old friend Demo Dick Marcinko, the waters were less well charted.
When it began, SEAL Team SIX had no formal program of instruction, so we made one up. There was no existing CT operator course, so we taught ourselves. If we wanted to learn the best way of scaling the outside of a ninety-story building, I’d assign an operator to become the subject matter expert for that block of instruction. That’s why I required creative, independent, intelligent SEALs on SIX. They had to be both instructors and students to get the Team off the ground.
The first thing I needed was someone I could count on one hundred percent to handle details and watch my six as the new Team was launched. I pulled in Norm Carley, an Academy graduate, who’d trained with Britain’s elite Special Boat Service. Norm had stood up MOB 6 at SEAL Team 2 and his shooters came closest at the time to a naval CT asset. Carley had participated in a number of maritime ship takedowns with the SBS and I knew he was a rock-solid, smart, loyal teammate. He was the right man for the job.
Command Master Chief Ken MacDonald came next. Ken had been my swim buddy in UDTR Training Class 26 and had done a two-year exchange tour with the SBS. MacDonald was a no-nonsense, hard-chargin’ senior enlisted SEAL who knew all the ropes and many of the men we’d need to make SIX go. Between me, Carley, and MacDonald, the foundation was laid and the seriously hard work began.
In the Navy, the captain’s ultimate responsibility is to prepare his people for war and to take them there when they are needed. As the founder and commander of SIX, this was my primary objective. We were setting the standards and there was no one qualified or knowledgeable enough in the Navy to give us a blessing—or withhold one. I was on my own. Brigadier General Dick Scholtes, then the commanding general of the Joint Special Operations Command, was aware of my unique spot. When he heard the Navy was going along with my approach—as had been made loud and clear by the CNO—he gave me my lead and helped guide me whenever he could with such thorny issues as unit interoperability. More than anyone, Scholtes got that I was one helluva brain surgeon but that my bedside manner sucked! (Okay, maybe it’s still not perfect.) But I wasn’t the lead dog for SIX because I was good at shining brass and kissing ass. I was there because I had the vision and the will to make things happen, and to do so with immediate, verifiable results.
I was also there because I wasn’t interested in punching my ticket to make admiral. SIX required—demanded—a commander who would fully commit to the mission, operators, and the unit. A commander who would seek first and foremost the welfare of his men as opposed to the welfare of his career. I was willing to go into the trenches with my teammates, as opposed to the hallowed halls of command. The shooters building SIX needed to know they could depend on me at all times. If we were to succeed, they needed to see me shoulder to shoulder with them every day.
Take a fucking note! Too much bullshit has been spewed over the years about how and where my operators and I spent the little downtime we had, doing what we wanted to. The short version is this. I recognized early on that the rigorous demands I made on SIX’s operators would soon burn them out. Every second they were on duty, they had to maintain a state of extraordinarily high operational readiness in case a mission came down without notice. There has to be time to relax, to decompress, to come down from hour after hour of adrenalin pumping through your body like water through a high-pressure hose. When we partied, we partied hard. Period. When we worked, we worked harder, longer, and at levels more demanding than anyone else in either the Navy or existing SEAL teams could conceive of, much less match. Peri
od. In my mind those who bitch about SEAL Team SIX outfighting, outdrinking, and outfucking all the other kids on the block are really saying they didn’t have what it took to earn the right to run with the best in the business to begin with. I make no apologies and I make no excuses. Like Clint Eastwood says, a man needs to know his limitations.
Following the example set by the legendary Admiral Rickover, father of the Navy’s modern nuclear submarine service, I made the first selection of SIX shooters personally. My criteria were simple. First, I was looking for a specific personality type. For the assaulters, the SEALs who would actually kick the doors down to get at the Tangos, I wanted supercharged, type-A personalities. These were primarily younger guys, the kind who would spend hours in the gym pumping iron and then run countless miles to attain an extreme state of physical conditioning. They were super-aggressive types and they had to be since they had the job of actually taking it to the terrorists at any time, from any place, using any means possible. Then I looked for some more standard type-A personalities to provide a balance to the Super-A operators and form the main body of the Team. Finally, I looked for the borderline-A personality, or the Super-B. These were often the older, more mature SEALs who made excellent snipers and senior technicians. They had all been combat tested; they had all felt a bullet with their name on it go right past their ear. These were the “War Dogs!”
Everyone on SIX had to be trainable, and that meant they needed to possess the ability to adapt, to change their way of thinking and doing things. Everyone on SIX also needed to be fully capable of “going over the railing” as operators regardless of their positions within the Team. No purely backroom talent here. I wanted and needed exceptional dedication to the mission and a level of loyalty to the Team from my operators that was unheard of in the regular Navy. If SIX was going to be writing the book on naval counterterrorism, then each operator, regardless of rank, needed to share the responsibility of making the program work.
I personally interviewed all SEAL candidates for selection to the Team. Had the operator deployed at least once with a SEAL platoon? Had he seen combat? How had he performed under fire? Did he have any apprentice union trade skills? Foreign language capability? Was he married? Shacked up? A single guy on the prowl? What were his career goals? Was he flexible in his thinking? I ran the ratline to all those hairy-assed UDT and SEAL chiefs and put the names to them. Who was this guy? Did he have what it would take to be a shooter and looter on the hardest, meanest SEAL Team ever stood up? Would you go to war with him? After I’d checked each hopeful operator or officer out as completely I could, it was decision time. Some made it, some didn’t. I pissed off the overall SEAL community big-time. They saw me as having a blank check and the heretofore unheard of opportunity to skim off the pick of the litter when it came to standing up and staffing a brand new shiny SEAL Team. They were right. I did. Those were my orders and that was my mission. Straight from the CNO himself. Seemed pretty clear to me. They didn’t have to like it, the new Team, or me.
They just had to do it.
And they paid it all back to me in spades when they finally succeeded in taking my command of SIX away from me. Of all the bullshit the Navy and my detractors in the SEAL community could have pulled, this was the worst. I loved each of my operators like a son. I loved commanding the roughest, toughest, baddest, and most capable SEALs ever to walk the face of the earth. I loved leading from the front rather than from behind a desk. I loved knowing that if the call came we would whip our enemies like they’d never been whipped before. SIX was my vision. It did not exist until I created it in my mind and then birthed it with as much pain and love as a mother does a newborn child. When it was taken from me for no other reason than petty jealousy and stupidity, it was as if they’d driven a steel rod through my roguish heart. Think outside the box? We did it better than anyone. Operate faster, farther, deeper, and meaner than anyone had ever gone before? Call on SIX. However, the Navy in all its vindictive pettiness and mindless worship of the conventional saw fit to separate me from what I so carefully and skillfully had built up.
But in the end it did them no good. Men—real men—will only go past the Gates of Hell and into the lair of Satan himself with a leader who has trained beside them and who they know is willing to shed his blood alongside theirs in battle.
Yes, I rewrote the rulebook by declaring there were no rules—just my rules—in the business of identifying, hunting down, and bringing to justice the jackals who too often called themselves “freedom fighters” and “holy warriors.” And now I was back in the saddle and hunting a renegade Special Forces colonel and the ball-busting weapons-grade atomic suitcase he’d bagged from our own tactical nuclear weapons arsenal.
Now you know why I’d insisted that SIX join in for the final run at Blanchard. It was sweet fucking satisfaction to get back what I thought of as my own team. Murphy, that rat-bastard, must have decided to fuck with the Navy more than me for once. I liked his style. Someone wearing whites back on the East Coast had to be spinning like a fucking top over this turn of events. There is justice, and when it comes my way I drink it in with as much pleasure as a tall glass of Dr. Bombay’s finest Sapphire on the rocks, no salad, no perfume. Ahhhh!
In my gut, I had the feeling that the tide of this battle might just be turning a little bit in my favor. I had a live prisoner and his commo gear intact. I had another egghead inbound—and I’d ensure this one didn’t get blown up while doing his job. I had a platoon of fucking hairy-assed, name-taking, skull-crushing shooters from the finest counterterrorist team in the world now under my command again. And I had Karen talking to me like the shit with Karras had never fucking happened.
It occurred to me that maybe I could get laid after all this was over. That idea alone was enough to put a new bounce in my roguish step as I went looking for my team.
Chapter
16
“They were allowed a degree of personal freedom and initiative unheard of in the military, particularly in battle. The price they paid for this, of course, was that they lived with danger and were expected to do what normal soldiers could not.”
MARK BOWDEN, Black Hawk Down
“We’re expected to think outside the box…to make things work even when they’re not supposed to work.”
Unidentified SEAL petty officer in Afghanistan, “Commandos’ Fight Abroad Also a Hit at Home,” Gregg Zoryoa, USA Today
“The FBI just finished with Lassiter,” Paul told me. “All they got was Yahweh this and Yahweh that from him. A bomb tech from the Portland Police Bureau deactivated the laptop’s IED and the computer geek is cracking the firewalls now. If there’s anything useful on the hard drive we’ll have it any minute. Whaddaya want to do with this asshole?”
Like me, Paul was dressed in new camouflage fatigues. His combat harness was heavy laden with full thirty-round magazines and forty-mike high-explosive grenades for his Colt M4A1 modular assault rifle system, complete with visible and infrared laser aiming devices, sound suppressor, day and night optics, and even a handy-dandy little flashlight. Hanging off me by its Tactical Tailor three-point combat sling was a new Modular Weapon System assault rifle with the recently introduced Rail Adapter System. The compact 5.56 Colt rifle featured an improved butt stock and M203 grenade launcher capability. The rail adapter system, or RAS, allowed me to quickly enhance the rifle’s capabilities to include state-of-the-art day and night optics as well as thermal imaging and laser aiming devices. I’d ordered all assaulters to leave the MP-5s and any other sub-guns they’d brought behind. Pistol ammunition does not penetrate SOF body armor and SOF body armor was what Blanchard and Nemesis were no doubt living in at this moment. I knew from firing thousands of rounds of 5.56 ball ammo through every available model of lightweight ballistic vest that assault rifles were what we’d want on deck once we made contact with Nemesis. We’d use our handguns for head and lower body shots, if offered or necessary. The grenade launchers would come in handy if we needed to blast ou
r way into or through anything. I wasn’t worried about accidentally setting off the SADM during the course of a firefight. Small arms fire wouldn’t affect the device one way or another given its construction. High velocity, high rate of firepower weapons systems were the order of the day when it came to taking out its hijackers.
“Where are Trace and Danny?” I asked.
Kossens adjusted his rifle’s harness so the weapon now hung straight up and down from his chest. His right hand was wrapped lightly around the weapon’s hard plastic pistol grip. His trigger finger lay along the M4’s lower receiver just above the trigger guard. His every movement proved he’d been well trained in weapons handling. “They’re hanging out at the new operations center, which is co-located with the PJs now. The bomb that killed Mr. Moore blew the shit outta the old Op-Center. Pretty intense structure damage. Base commander sealed it off and moved his staff and everybody else involved across base into the PJs’ building.”
“Lassiter?”
“Feds got him over at the aviation shack. They used the pilots’ lounge to interrogate him. Danny told the agents to stand by until we found out if you wanted to see the little prick before they haul his ass outta here and back to D.C. for further questioning.”
Fuck! I needed whatever the techno-geek could get off the laptop and I needed a face-to-face with Lassiter before the Feds scooted him off to an isolated cell for the duration. “Find Trace and Danny. They’re riding shotgun on the ’hawks when we launch. Dahlgren is too shot up to move as fast as we’ll need to once we’re on the ground, and I need Danny as Command & Control of the helos once this party gets going.
“Get with the platoon commander and have him break his people down into two groups. I want his best assaulters going in. I want a six-man team standing by on the CH-47 to either come in hot to bail us out, or to recover the device and us once we’ve made the hit. Load a Zodiac, too. No snipers this time around. We’ll be moving too fucking fast to use them properly and I want everyone on the assault team, including your young ass! Clear?”
RW11 - Violence of Action Page 18