“What?” I wondered how he’d managed to get an eye in the sky so quickly. Changing a satellite’s course can take days.
He explained that there had been a SPOT satellite in the area, and it had been programmed to seek data on the Portsmouth area.
Great. SPOTs are commercial imaging satellites. French commercial imaging satellites to boot. And their resolution was a mere five meters—in other words, they could make out nothing that wasn’t at least 16 feet in length.
How the hell that would help, I had no idea. I’m used to VELA graphics, which give me six-inch resolution from twenty-two thousand miles in space. And, I asked, what about tactical info? Like, how thick was the roof—would it support an assault force? What kind of doors led to the stairwells, and were the hinges on the inside or the outside? Could they be jimmied or did they have to be blown with shotguns or shaped charges?
Geoff didn’t quite have the answers. Those problems would sort themselves out when the team hit, he assured me.
He explained that Lord Brookfield had helped develop the intelligence package, and he—just like Sir Aubrey, he emphasized—had complete faith in Lord B’s abilities, I asked whether he’d determined if the Sons of Gornji Vakuf had additional missions planned. I asked if he knew how they were armed—with what—and what types of communications they were capable of.
He said that those sorts of details were secondary to the necessity of hitting the tangos immediately. He pointed at a rectangular outline on the map. The terrorists were in this warehouse, he said. He was sure of it. Accordingly, by using a superior force to overcome all obstacles, he had decided to stage a frontal assault tonight. Storm the warehouse, root out the tangos, and take at least one prisoner for intelligence purposes.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. He didn’t even know how many T’s his men would face. This op had goatfuck written all over it.
“What about the locals? Any word about recent developments from the wharf rats?” Shit—I’d have sent my men out to work the pubs.
“Mere enlisted men conducting independent intelligence ops, Captain? Be serious,” Lyondale snorted derisively. His intel weenies added they hadn’t bothered to interview any of the locals because they didn’t want to compromise operational security.
“You’re probably already compromised, Geoff old man,” I said.
Lyondale’s eyebrows arched. “How, old chap? Our chatter was encoded.”
“Sure, your transmissions were scrambled, but they use energy. You don’t need million-dollar equipment to eavesdrop. Shit—I can use a fucking television as an earlywarning system.”
“Impossible.”
“Listen, Geoff, old cock, whenever there’s heavy radio chatter, TV sets develop interference. Flickering. Snow. You don’t need to buy high-frequency scanners—one man watching a cheap TV’ll do the same thing.”
“I doubt that very much,” Lyondale pronounced. “I’ve never heard of it.”
The cockbreath was about to commit suicide. Except, he wasn’t going to be the one cut into ribbons—it was his men who’d die, while he looked on and sipped his fucking cuppa.
Maybe there was some way to improve a bad situation. I asked if his decision to assault was irrevocable. It was, he said. Okay, I suggested, what about going from the top down, instead of the bottom up? It’s easier and more effective and allows you to flush the bad guys into a prearranged ambush.
Lyondale thought about that for a while and finally agreed that a chopper assault via fastrope was not a bad idea. “Good video, too,” he added.
“What?” He couldn’t be serious.
He was serious. “Video. I’m planning to invite a CNN camera crew to join us. Of course we’ll embargo the tape until it’s all over. But we need the publicity—budget cuts and all that, y’know.”
He was a bigger asshole than I’d imagined. I looked at Tommy, who rolled his eyes in disbelief. “Whatever you say, Geoff.” Now, I was more than willing to accept Green Team’s support role. I didn’t want anything to do with this incipient debacle.
By midmorning I’d worn Geoff down enough so that he relented, passed out a dozen of his precious MP5s and three thousand rounds of ammo, and allowed me and my men to use the kill-house. We worked in seven-man squads, each squad paired with an equal number of SBS troopers, so we could learn how we all worked. When I commanded SEAL Team Six, I insisted that we cross-train with as many CT units as possible so that joint operations wouldn’t deteriorate into joint clusterfucks.
SBS, for example, clears rooms in the classic British manner pioneered by SAS—which is, to throw a crash-bang grenade inside, then immediately enter the room with bullet and bayonet. The philosophy is that if you use enough bullets, bayonets won’t be necessary. So the room clearers come in blasting, firing through doors into closets, cup-boards, and other likely hiding places. They shoot into the ceilings and floors, too. It’s effective, but it can be detrimental to ornamental architecture.
We work differently. We scope the area with thermal and audio imaging, then stack seven men outside the door in what’s known as a train. To the right of the door is a point man and a breacher. To the left are the room clearers and rear security man.
When the team is ready, the last man in the stack—the rear security man—squeezes the shoulder of the man in front of him, which indicates that he’s fully prepped and ready to shoot and loot. Each man in turn squeezes the shoulder of the man in front of him, so that by the time the number one man’s shoulder is squeezed, he knows that everyone in the stack is locked, loaded, and ready to go.
The number one man then makes eye contact with the breacher and nods three times. The breacher then blows the door, and the two room clearers move in. Number one man goes left, number two man goes right. They sweep left-right and right-left until their fields of fire converge, but unlike the Brits, we do not shoot unless we make visual contact with the enemy. In this, our technique is closer to the German CT unit, Grenzschutzgruppe-9 (GSG-9), or Israel’s General Staff Reconnaissance Unit 269, Say’eret Maktal, known colloquially as The Boys.
If you’re operating jointly, you’d better know where the other guy’s field of fire lies, because if you don’t, you can easily kill each other. Believe me, there’s enough of Mr. Murphy’s Law to go around, and every little thing that can be done to frustrate him should be done.
In any case, I was glad to see that despite the lack of leadership, the SBS troopers were the same gung ho lot they’d always been. At lunch, we managed to sneak a few of the noncoms off the reservation long enough to enjoy a bull session and several dozen pints of Courage bitter at the Rose & Thistle, half a mile from the barracks gate.
Assholes like Geoff believe in the old-fashioned military caste system that separates the officers from enlisted men and noncoms. They lead from behind and treat their men as if they’re idiots. I’ve always believed in unit integrity. And I create it from the top down. I eat, drink, piss, shit, and fuck with my men. I ask nothing of them that I haven’t done first.
Story. My sea daddy, Lieutenant Commander Roy Boehm, the kick-ass ex-boatswain’s mate godfather of all SEALs, commissioned SEAL Team Two on January 2, 1962. At that time the unit was so top secret that almost no one in the Navy knew of its existence, which had made its creation a virtually impossible task. Of course, to Roy, the word impossible never existed.
After he’d made his final selection, he assembled his new unit for its first briefing. The men were sworn to secrecy, too. They were warned on pain of death—and Roy was patently capable of carrying out that threat only too well—not to explain who they were or what they did to anyone. Well, that very day, one of the SEAL Team Two plank owners, Jim Watson (who would later become my first point man in Vietnam), got himself tossed in jail for being … himself. He called Roy from the lockup. Roy came down and retrieved him.
From his cell, Watson could hear Roy talking to the cops. “Turn him over to me,” Roy said. “I’m his commanding officer, and I’l
l fucking kill this young puke sailor.” Watson listened as Roy explained how he’d rip him a new asshole. He’d kick his no-account dipshit pus-nutted butt so hard Watson would be licking the fucking toe of Roy’s goddamn boondocker. He’d keelhaul the son of a bitch.
The cops turned Jim over, and Roy escorted him out of the station house by the scruff of the neck. Watson was scared shitless. “Come with me you worthless shit-for-brains asshole,” said Boehm. Then, once they were outside, Roy told Jim, “Let’s go grab a goddamn drink someplace.”
“What about all those things you said inside?” Watson asked.
“Shit, son, that was an act so they’d release you into my custody. I can’t get mad at you for doing the same things I’ve been doing for years. But I’ll tell you something—if you ever try to do anything I haven’t done first, I’ll kick your ass into next fucking year.”
After that, there was no place on the face of the earth—or anywhere else—that Jim Watson wouldn’t have followed Roy Boehm.
Roy, God bless him, passed a lot of his wisdom on to me when I became a SEAL. I’d already realized that leading from the front was the only way to go. But Roy helped me hone my leadership capabilities in such areas as using alcohol as a tool. Yes, alcohol can become a tool. In fact, a CO can learn a lot by drinking with his men. You can see how they respond to outside stimuli, discover how they react to stress, even expose character flaws (for example, a guy who becomes easily provoked after a couple of drinks will not be a great undercover operator—he’ll draw attention to himself and threaten the mission). Booze is also a leveler. It is one of the elements I use to create unit integrity.
And, in situations like the current one I was in, an hour or so of shared pints in a pub gave us SEALs a month’s worth of guidance about Geoff that might have taken a week to pry from the normally closemouthed SBS noncoms under nonalcoholic conditions. In any case, at about 1400, suitably fortified by Courage and conversation against BS, the combined unit snuck back to the reservation for the formal briefings, which were conducted in the same nonsecure room as our early-morning session.
I wondered if the tangos had any ELINT—Electronic INTelligence—capabilities. If they had, we were letting them in on all of our secrets.
Actually, it wouldn’t have mattered very much. The briefings were drawn straight from the British Urban Warfare manual, which opines that occupying forces have everything on their side—cover, confusion, booby traps, fortified buildings—and the assault force has no choice except to expose itself.
I do not agree with that point of view. I have always believed that, with good intelligence, an aggressive and unconventional force can stage urban assaults with limited casualties to the assaulters, and heavy ones to the tangos.
But my point of view didn’t count for horsepiss today. Here, I was a supporting player—just another spear carrier. Of course, given Geoffrey’s bright idea of inviting the media to come along, I was frankly delighted to leave things that way.
The target Geoffrey had selected was a warehouse that had been converted to an office building. The revised scenario was almost reasonable. The place would be cleared by seven-man teams of SBS Marines. Some would drop from a pair of Puma choppers, fastrope onto the roof, and work their way down. Others would assault from the ground. Each team would commence work on a specific portion of the building, clearing the office and storage spaces one by one.
They would either kill the tangos on the spot or drive them down to the building’s three exits, where forces that had slipped into the area prior to the assault—including my SEALs—would be waiting in ambush. If at all possible, we’d capture some of the tangos alive so we could interrogate them.
There was nothing basically wrong with the concept. It was the problems of execution that bothered me.
Let me explain. Basically, effective clearance—whether it is room, passageway, stairwell, or building clearance—depends on what Everett E. Barrett, chief gunner’s mate/ guns, UDT-21, used to call the Law of the Seven Ps. Proper Previous Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance, is how Ev put it.
When I commanded SEAL Team Six, we spent months and months perfecting our room-clearing technique. Basically, it is a choreographed exercise that combines unambiguous leadership from the front, thorough planning, efficient, decisive movement, and full use of concentrated fire and violence of action. There is also one paramount factor without which everything else is redundant: audacious fighting spirit.
Let me repeat that. Audacious fighting spirit.
According to the figures on my mental tote board, SBS was about to be ground into sausage. Sure, the unit had audacious fighting spirit and violence of action, but Earl Geoff wasn’t about to allow them the sort of free rein that would unleash those lethal, noble qualities. He was the kind of officer who got queasy when he cut himself shaving.
Unambiguous leadership from the front? Don’t make me laugh.
Thorough planning? Do the phrases seat of the pants and off the cuff mean anything to you? We had no structural photos—only the 5-meter SPOT images, which gave us only the building’s most basic outlines.
Efficient and decisive movement? Let me put it this way: there were no plans for the inside of the building. And no one seemed to know where to obtain them.
Obviously, Geoffrey Lyondale had never met Ev Barrett, because he violated the Law of the Seven Ps word by word.
We grabbed three hours of rest. Then, at 2100, we began our preassault checkout. There’s more than meets the eye here. Radio frequencies have to be coordinated. Hand signals, too—you don’t want someone getting killed because he thinks you’re saying “drop” when you’re actually signaling him to shoot the son of a bitch behind him. To add to our enjoyment, Lieutenant Commander Randy Rayman arrived in his dress blues, looking like a fucking recruiting poster.
I greeted him in blackface. We’d applied dark cammie cream to all exposed skin surfaces. And, thanks to a meeting of the minds between Squadron Sergeant Harvey and my SFC Rodent, we’d received assault kits—Nomex flight suits, assault vests, tactical web gear, and balaclavas. I’d also made sure that my men had enough lethal supplies to protect themselves.
I offered Randy my tube of war paint. “Want to suit up?”
He looked at me as if I were crazy. “I’m not here to play cowboys and Indians, Dick. I’m here to observe and report back to the admiral.”
“Well, you can tell Pinky it’s cold as a witch’s tit, and I’m sore as hell and I’m wet, and if I don’t kill somebody soon I’m gonna bust.” I dabbed a blackened fingertip on the end of Randy’s nose. “Now, maybe you better run along, cockbreath, before I start picking on you.”
0215. The choppers were scheduled to pick up the assault element at 0445, for a twenty-five-minute flight to Portsmouth. The rest of us—my shooters, Geoffrey, and his C3I—that’s Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence unit—would lorry in a convoy the fifty-two miles from Poole to Portsmouth.
Geoff had allocated one hour for our trip. “Isn’t that cutting it kind of close?” I asked.
He explained that we’d have a police escort. Exactly what every surprise attack needs. Tommy shook his head. The goatfuck factor had now increased by another 100 percent.
Fortunately, I was able to secrete my shooters in one of the lorries by the time the CNN camera crew and correspondent arrived. I could hear them as they did a stand-up interview with Geoff and Randy Rayman.
Geoff extolled the competence of his men and explained how the mission was going to go off like clockwork. Randy prattled on about his experience in Special Operations and went on to express his total trust in SBS’s ability to avenge the death of our CNO.
0315. On the road. The fucking wind and rain whistled through the ragged tarp that draped the lorry. After fifteen minutes or so we dropped off the bench seats and huddled together on the floor the better to keep ourselves warm and our weapons dry.
A bright light illuminated our lorry. I snuck a peek from unde
r the tarp. It was the goddamn CNN crew, camera wrapped in a plastic garbage bag, shooting through the sunroof of their Mercedes, cruising past us. In-fucking-credible.
0344. The convoy got lost. We stopped dead in the water for twenty-five minutes. I could hear Geoff on the radio, berating the police driver for not having the right maps. He was screaming at him on an open channel, too—the better for everyone in the neighborhood to hear him rant and rave.
0409. Back on track, rumbling toward Portsmouth. We hunkered in silence, each man lost in his own thoughts. It was now that the uncertainties of what we were about to face began to sink in and gnaw at us. Indeed, this was always the hardest part—that long flight, seemingly endless boat trip, or whatever, before the final assault.
It is at that time you become one with every warrior who ever lived. Hunkered in the wetness of that hard truck bed, we were no different from Alexander’s Macedonians, Caesar’s legions, the Light Brigade, General Pickett’s infantry at Gettysburg, the Marines in their landing craft pounding toward Tarawa, the Canadians about to land at Dieppe, the GIs assaulting Omaha Beach, or my SEALs from Eighth Platoon on a parakeet op in Vietnam.
We, like they, were about to commit ourselves totally, to put our lives on the line.
And the only way to do that is to give your body and soul completely to the God of War. I looked at my men. Their faces showed the kind of warrior’s resolve that told me they were ready to fight and to kill.
0502. Portsmouth. We slowed to a crawl as we made our way through the darkened, slick streets. A heavy ground fog gave everything a surreal, almost theatrical quality. We reached a police roadblock and pulled through it. The lorry finally ground to a halt, and we piled out, illuminated by the flashing blue and yellow roadblock lights. I wondered whether the cops were using secure tactical frequencies or whether their chatter was open mike. Because police scanners are illegal in places like England, the cops often forget that bad guys don’t care about the niceties of law and use ’em anyway.
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