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 framing 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 toplay 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 beiow 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, 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 “communiques” 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, Horserace 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 Horserace 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-1 manpacks, which in Navyspeak 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 alt 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 the pilots nudged our C-130s up to the trailing file! 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 Ihe 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.
Furious, I started for the secure radio to call Paul and tell him this was just another in the series of games our command structure was playing on us. Halfway down the ladder I stopped. Dickie had a better idea. I’d play out this little charade as if I didn’t know any better and turn it into my own war game.
I probably had more unanswered questions than JSOC anyway. Like, how would my men perform during this complicated series of tasks? They were all good — but which ones would become great under the pressure of keeping to a tight combat schedule? Would any of them realize we weren’t doing this for real — and if they did, what would their reactions be?
I wanted to leam which of them I could order to do a job — even though it might mean their deaths. Being cannon fodder was part of the assignment. Every man who’d volunteered for SEAL Team Six knew he was expendable — from me, right down to the youngest kid on the team. This was an opportunity to test that resolve — to see which ones would play for keeps, and which ones would, at the last instant, hold back.
That’s what SEAL Team Six was all about, anyway — playing for keeps. Oh, sure, the goddamn technology of war was almost beyond comprehension — and it wasn’t just airrefueling or high-tech satellites either, anymore, but microburst transmitters and stealth aircraft and hundreds of billions of dollars invested in technotoys — laser-guided, shoulderfired missiles, computer-assisted antitank guns, “smart” bombs, and a whole collection of weapons that the assholes in the Pentagon were quick to tell you could think for themselves.
Today you could sit in a fighter, press a missile launch button, and kill an enemy twenty, thirty, forty miles over the horizon, watching his plane explode on a TV screen, Just like the video games my kids played.
And yet, what it really came down to, after all the bullshit and the computers and the video, was the very basic question embodied by the bullet in my hand. Could one of my men look another human being in the eyes, then pull the trigger and kill that person without hesitating for an instant?
In Vietnam, I’d discovered who could kill and who couldn’t in combat. But that was fifteen years ago, and less than half of SEAL Team Six had ever been in combat. So there was only one way to find out who’d pull the trigger, and who’d freeze — which was to play this thing out and see who did his job and who didn’t. War, after all, is not Nintendo. War is not about technology or toys. War is about killing.
Chapter 2
Ensign Indian Jew, the point man, signaled. He was half Yakima and half Brooklyn, hence the momker. I used to kid him about growing up spearing and smoking salmon up on the Columbia River — but never being able to find any bagels or cream cheese.
I squinted in the darkness, barely able to pick him out against the foliage in his tigerstripes and camouflage war paint.
But I’d seen him put his hand up, palm flat. Now he was clenching his fist. Enemy ahead. I moved up the line slow and easy, the MP5 in my hand. We’d covered about six hundred yards, making a hell of a lot more of a racket than I wanted to. If the bad guys had pickets out or they’d deployed electronic sensors, they’d surely know about us. That was something we hadn’t had a chance to work on — moving in large groups. Usually, SEALs operated in squads of seven, or in 14-man platoons. Frankly, I was uncomfortable at having to move so many men in one group because of the noise. But it couldn’t be helped. I felt lucky we hadn’t been observed so far.
I drew abreast of Jew and knelt next to him. He was one of the best I had — a former enlisted man whose capacity to learn fast was boundless. Jew epitomized the future of Navy Special Warfare — SpecWar in Navyspeak. He was big, smart, tough, too handsome for his own good, and ingeniously adroit When it came to the deadly arts.
I pulled my NV out. I took a look. The blackness became oscilloscope green; the foliage turned dark against the brightness. Two hundred feet ahead I could see a chain-link fence about eight feet high with a yard of barbed wire coiled on top. Beyond were two warehouses, as well as three other low, barracklike buildings. There were no lights- So much the better. The grounds were unkempt — a lot of cover for us to move behind. It looked just like the satellite picture that was folded in my pocket.
I mimed a man with a rifle to Jew. Any sentries?
He shook his head. No.
I gave him thumbs-up. I pointed at him. I snipped the air with index and middle finger. I mimed peering out.
He nodded. He’d cut through the wire and do a fast sneak and peek. We’d wait.
He slithered forward, moving with a slow, practiced crawl until he melted into the underbrush. Like so many of my guys he was perfectly at home in the jungle. He was too young to have served in Vietnam, but he’d adapted well to SEAL training in Panama and Florida and was-one of the best scouts the unit had.
That he was an ensign didn’t matter. In Six, officers and men were interchangeable. No caste system for us.
I edged back an
d signaled the men to drop. They disappeared into the darkness. I lay. back and stared at the sky, listening for anything out of the ordinary. I perceived nothing.
The silence was good. You could hear the jungle’s natural sounds — insects, birds, whatever, resuming their normal activities. I smashed something small and winged and sharp that had decided to take up residence on my eariobe. Moments passed.
Jew came back. “Nothing, Skipper,” he whispered. “A second perimeter line of wire fences by the barracks there.”
He pointed to the southwest. “And the warehouses east of the barracks, just like on the picture. I heard some noise— maybe they’re having a few cold ones.”
I punched him with my elbow. “Nice job.” I took a recon photo from my pocket. I motioned to PV and an officer I called Lieutenant Cheeks because his jowly face looked like a squirrel hoarding acorns. The three of us huddled over the picture as I illuminated it with a red-lensed pencil light. I showed them what I wanted done. They nodded and gave me thumbs-up.
I circled wagons with my index finger. “Let’s go to work.”
We would move in four 14-man platoons. PV would go south with two of them, work around the perimeter, and cut through the fence closest to the barracks. He’d lead one of his platoons and hit the storage area, where we believed the hostage to be. The other — Cheeks‘—would neutralize the barracks.
I’d take down the warehouse where the nuke was, with my platoon. The last platoon, split into two seven-man boat crews, would act as flankers. They’d sweep up any bad guys who got between us and the gate. As we withdrew, they’d join up with Cheeks platoon as the blocking force, shielding our escape north and east, back to the LZ.
I pulled the headset onto my head, securing it with a lightweight knit cap. Then I fitted the earpiece snugly inside my left ear, adjusted the filament microphone so it sat on my beard just below my lower lip, ran the wire down the back of my neck, passed it through a slit in the shirt, and plugged it into the Motorola, I pressed the transmit button for an instant and tsk-tsked twice into the mike — radio-talk for affirmative. I heard PV do the same thing. Then I heard Cheeks and Jew. We were all on line and ready to go. And if the bad guys had scanners on, we hadn’t given them very much to scan. At least not yet.
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