RW03 - Green Team

by Richard Marcinko

  Angelotti poured himself another glass and drank it as if it were water. “He is a polite boy,” he said, indicating Tommy. “You have trained them well, Captain.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It is nothing.” He drank another glass of wine, tore the heel off the loaf of bread on the table, and used it to mop up some olive oil that remained in one of the antipasti dishes. This guy was unbelievable. “Now—you ask my assignment. Simple. I am the regional supply officer for all Italian Naval Specialized Forces.”

  I filled my own glass, touched the rim of his with mine, and drained the wine in a single gulp. “It is my very great and profound pleasure to meet you, too, Colonel,” I said, meaning each and every syllable.

  We left La Spezia thirty-two hours later with seven duffel bags stuffed with goodies, twenty-thousand pounds in fifty-pound notes, and seven world-class cases of heartburn. That man could eat. Not to mention the fact that he could soak up the grappa like a spugna.

  To play things safe we skirted the big cities and ran along the Adriatic coast through Ancona, Pescara, and Bari. Things went so smoothly I was beginning to worry. I shouldn’t have: Mr. Murphy caught up with us just as we reached Brindisi. We missed the ferry to Corfu by three-quarters of an hour. Since it was off-season, there wouldn’t be another for a day and a half. So we hunkered down at a one-star hotel and kept things low-key until we could make it through the cursory customs check, watch as our passports were stamped, then climb aboard and settle down on wood-slat benches for the seventeen-hour ferry ride to Kérkira. We left the Mercedes outside the hotel, but took the BMW bikes with us. I could probably barter them in exchange for a fishing-boat ride from Kassiópi or Nimfai to Albania, so we wouldn’t have to dogleg through Greece and go through another border check.

  I stood on the stern and watched the Italian coast fade in the mist behind the ferry’s wake. The diesels, running at a throaty growl, made the deck shudder slightly. It was gray, windy, and cold. A constant, soaking drizzle cut through to the bone.

  In the past half hour I had developed the same queasy feeling in my gut I do whenever I make a nighttime insertion into dangerous, unknown territory. God, I hate jumping blind.

  DELTA

  We arrived at karachi international without incident and took a couple of cabs the ten or so miles into the city for less than $2 each. Customs and immigration was a breeze. Hell—you could bring a nuclear-equipped Tomahawk missile into Pakistan and not disturb the customs officials, just as long as you had enough cash in hand for appropriate baksheesh. So, it was easy for seven men with mere combat packs, semiautomatic pistols, and five-hundred rounds of hollowpoint ammunition. Of course, we were the good guys!

  It was good to see Pakistan again. My favorite land of hot food, cold beer, and warm weather would be a terrific spot for a holiday. Except, of course—please don’t sweat the minor details—for the daily diet of car bombs, kidnappings, thugs, and thieves. Actually, it’s exactly the sort of place I like to go to have a good time. Some people like to go hunting wild boar in Arkansas, or Rocky Mountain sheep in Montana or Idaho. I prefer the kind of two-legged big game you can find in places like Sind Province or Karachi.

  We settled ourselves at the Karachi Sheraton, the spacious four-star where I’d stayed when I’d visited on behalf of GTI to retrieve their kidnapped engineers. It made an ideal temporary base of operations. The communications are better than many Paki government offices had. There is a big swimming pool so the boys could exercise their muscles. There are four restaurants, and even a jogging trail that meanders through a huge walled garden.

  While the men played tourist, I called Iqbal’s number. A dhaba-deli voice singsonged, “GlobalTec International, may I helping you please?” at me, and I asked for him.

  “Whom may I say is making the inquiry?”

  “An old friend.”

  There was a pause. Then Iqbal’s throaty growl came onto the line: “Retired inspector Shah.”

  “I know who the fuck you are, you miserable cockbreath porkchop-eating Muslim asshole,” I said by way of greeting. “The question is, do you know who I am?”

  He started to reply.

  “Don’t use names,” I warned. “Remember, the phones have ears.”

  “You are the one I used to call ‘uncircumcised vermin,’” he said without pausing. “He who uses his right hand both to eat his pappudom bread and to wipe his unworthy bottom-crack.”

  “The very same.”

  Iqbal roared with laughter. “Welcome, Vermin-Pasha to my homeland once again.”

  “I thank you for your graciousness, my camel-humping lard-lipped former-government-servant friend. But to be serious for a moment—do you remember where we shared our wonderful first lunch?”

  “‘Come on, ice cream,’ is what you said,” Iqbal chortled. “How could I ever forget?”

  That went for me, too. Not six hours after I’d first touched down in Karachi on behalf of GTI, Iqbal, who’d been assigned to me as a “minder,” had taken me to a local curry house as a form of immersion indoctrination to his culture. See, just as Mexicans like to strut their machismo by eating bowls of jalapeño peppers like candy and asking their unsuspecting yanqui guests to do the same, or Yemenites foist spoonfuls of harif on naive Anglit-speakers, the Pakis intimidate their newly arrived visitors by taking them to restaurants where the curry is so hot that the sauces have been known to eat through the aluminum bowls in which they’re served.

  The former policeman had taken me to just such a place—a hole-in-the-wall just off the Chundrigar Road. The curry had come in steaming bowls. It was hot—so hot my arms were bathed in sweat when I started spooning it up. But I knew something about my culinary history Iqbal did not. There is nothing I will not eat. When I served in Phnom Penh as the U.S. naval attaché in the midseventies, I was taken to a number of Cambodian cobra feasts by my Khmer kolleagues. A cobra feast is a five-course tasting menu built around cobra—the perfect meal for a Navy snake-eater. You start with cobra-skin salad, go on to cobra kabobs, cobra eggs, cobra blood, and then come to the pièce de résistance, le venin: the poison sac of the cobra itself, which has been preserved in cognac.

  But cobra is only one of the exotic dishes I’ve enjoyed over the past three-plus decades of First, Second, Third, and Fourth World cuisine. Roast ox penis? Delicious. Braised chicken beaks? Ate ’em by the bowl. Dog? Let me put it this way: the phrase How much is that doggie in the window? takes on a whole new meaning when it’s a restaurant you’re peering into. Raw monkey brains? Yup. Crocodile tail? I’ve ordered it roasted, baked, steamed, and salted. Fish eyes—they’re best fried, like sheep testicles.

  So Iqbal’s little mind game was no problem. As a matter of fact, he’d made it easy. First, he’d brought me to a world-class curry place. Second, there was nothing in the bowl I couldn’t identify. Not only did I finish two bowls, but I asked for extra chilies on the side and finished them, too.

  Iqbal had been impressed. I was the first gringo to have made it past a quarter of a bowl, and he told me as much.

  “I’m honored not to have flunked lunch,” I said after we’d finished, “but is there anyplace we can go for ice cream now?”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “That way, tomorrow morning, I can sit on the throne and scream, ‘Come on, ice cream.’”

  “Throne? Come on, ice cream?” He thought about what I’d said, his round, brown face all screwed up in contemplation. Then he broke out into a big, broad smile and laughed and laughed. “I get it—I get it,” he’d said proudly. “That was bathroom humor. Very British, too.”

  There was still laughter in his voice as he hit the punch line again. “Of course I remember.”

  “I’m glad you do, Iqbal. I can be there in fifteen minutes.”

  “I will be there in ten, waiting for you.”

  I drank beer, Iqbal drank tea. It was good to see him again. He’d aged. The mustache and beard, once luxuriously black, were now salt-and-pepper. His hand
s and feet were wrinkled like weathered leather in the hot climate. But he still had his bright smile, white teeth, and quick wit. And there was probably no one in the country who could expedite things as quickly and as well.

  Over vegetable curry hotter than I remembered it, I wiped perspiration from my face as I gave Iqbal the background for my visit. Well, as I’ve always believed, if you’re not sweating, you’re not eating. I didn’t tell him everything, of course. But I outlined the basic facts: we were in pursuit of someone named Ishmael, a Lord Brookfield from London, who had arrived three to five days ago, flying to Karachi in a private jet. I wanted to be able to find our target and shadow him without arousing suspicion. I wanted to be able to go anywhere he went. I needed housing, transportation, weapons, and intelligence. Iqbal nodded, his expression serious, as I told him what I wanted to do, and how.

  “It is possible, of course,” he said. “But it will cost money.”

  I extracted a precounted wad of fifty notes from the nylon bag I carried around my neck. “This should do for a start.”

  He felt the money between the first two fingers of his right hand. “Nine hundred English pounds.”

  “You haven’t lost the knack, have you? Close enough. It’s eight hundred fifty.”

  “That will open a lot of doors.”

  “Good. Now—we’ll need cars.”

  “That is no problem. I can lay my hands on two old Land Rovers.”

  I nodded. “Terrific. What about an airplane?”

  Iqbal wiped up the last of his curry with a wedge of flat Afghani bread. “I know of one. We use it sometimes. It is flown by an American.”

  “No way.” Most of the expats in this part of the world either worked for Christians in Action or were CIA alumni.

  “This American is different. He is an ex-Marine. GTI brought him in from California a year and a half ago to fly their engineers up to the coastal drilling sites. He was supposed to stay only six months. Then he met a local girl—a cousin of the Bhuttos—and he married. Now he lives in a big villa just behind police headquarters, owns his own plane, and flies only when he wants to.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Campbell. Richard Campbell.”

  “I’ll talk to him.” I wasn’t excited about the prospect of bringing an outsider into my merry band of marauders, or staging a mission in an airplane that was probably older than I. But I have an open mind in these matters. Besides, Campbell didn’t have to know what we were up to—he just had to fly the fucking plane where I wanted him to fly it. And if he had a problem with that, I wasn’t above tossing him out the hatch at fifteen-thousand feet. After all, Howie Kaluha could fly most anything that had propellers, and Tommy T was more than halfway to his pilot’s license.

  “What about weapons?”

  I knew the answer to that one already. Weapons weren’t going to be a problem, either. Not in Pakistan, the Land of the Rising Gun. After all, the CIA had spent hundreds of millions of dollars here in the eighties, arming the mujahideen to fight the Soviets across the border in Afghanistan. Those weapons were now filtering back into general circulation—everything from AKs the Israelis had captured in Lebanon back in ’82 and traded to the Agency in return for sophisticated missile-guidance systems, to three-hundred Stinger missiles that the Afghanis had “lost” somewhere between Kabul and Peshawar.

  And if I wasn’t interested in surplus, I could buy new. Twenty miles south of Peshawar, which sits thirty miles east of the mouth of the Khyber Pass, is the small town of Darra. There are six thousand people in Darra—half of them are weapon makers. All you can hear when you walk down the quarter-mile main drag is the sound of hammers hand-tooling guns, and the craaack of test-firing out in back of the hooches. I always think of Darra fondly because the whole place smells like cordite twenty-four hours a day. Visit there, and all you want to do is go to war.

  There are just under one hundred shops, and they’ll build you anything you want, from a working replica of an eighteenth-century dueling pistol to an M60 machine gun. RPGs, mortars, even cannons, can be found on Darra’s muddy streets. And the quality is good. Not as good as the SEAL Six armorers at DEVGRP, maybe—but better than most anything I’d ever seen in the Third World. So if we wanted AKs, M-16s, or anything in between, they could be had.

  Besides, I knew that Iqbal had his own private arsenal here in Karachi. We wouldn’t need SMGs—submachine guns—here. After all, we had our SAS Glocks, and I was interested in keeping our profile as low as possible. Still, Iqbal kept a small arsenal for visiting firemen. The ex-policeman had a huge gun safe at GTI headquarters. Inside were half a dozen aging Remington 870 Wingmaster pump-action shotguns, some old Chinese-contract Inglis High Powers, and a few Vietnam-era SKS automatic rifles. They’d be more than adequate for our immediate needs.

  Let me say a word or two about firearms and ammo here. I’m not one of those bulletheads who memorizes every fact about every fucking piece of equipment I carry. I really don’t give much of a rat’s ass what the fps of each goddamn load is, or what the fucking muzzle-energy batshit widget-foot-pound speed of a bullet may be. That’s important if you’re a sniper, or a hand-loader. I am neither.

  Doc Tremblay, for example, can recite loading tables, muzzle speeds, and foot-pounds the way priests say Mass, or sports-radio hosts reel off 1960s batting averages. He has to know those facts because he spends so much of his time squinting through a telescopic sight.

  Also—to be perfectly frank—I was never one of those sports dweebs who spent his adolescent hours memorizing the stats for the 1956 Dodgers, or the 1963 Baltimore Colts. I was too busy chasing pussy back then. My personality hasn’t changed in the ensuing years, either. For me, the bottom line is that I consider weapons the tools of my trade—not some fancy accoutrements to be fondled, collected, worshiped from afar.

  For example, I like my Emerson CQC6 folder because it, better than any other folding knife, does the jobs I want it to do. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a tool. Sure, I can cut myself out of a tight spot with it, but I have no problem using it to skewer a piece of meat over the fire, open my mail, or tighten a screw if there’s nothing else around to use. I prefer Heckler & Koch USPs, or, if they’re not available, Glocks, because those two are the most dependable off-the-shelf pistols one can buy. Screw all the space-age technology that went into R&D—I like ’em because I can bury ’em for a month, dig ’em up, rinse ’em off, and they’ll still shoot straight even though the action is caked with mud. That’s the same reason I use HK MP5s, while most of the SEAL teams have gone back to the CAR-15. The MP5 is the most reliable SMG made these days.

  But if I can’t get my hands on a Glock or an HK, then I’ll use whatever I can find—anything I can find. Same thing goes for ammo. If I can’t find the custom-made stuff I’m used to, then I’ll take Winchester or Federal off the shelf or buy reloads or find thirty-year-old government surplus, or whatever.

  Because the bottom line with weapons is that it doesn’t fucking matter what weapon you use—Glock, HK, Browning, or zip gun. And the ammo can be anything from Hydra-Shok, Black Talon, or Silvertip, to generic round-nose lead reloads. The bottom line is that you have to be able to hit the fucking target. And no gun is gonna do it for you. That’s your job. The gun is simply a tool. Thus endeth the lesson.

  Okay—transportation and weapons were easy. Intelligence, however, was going to be the most difficult element to achieve. Frankly, I wasn’t sure whether or not I’d be able to track Lord Brookfield here. It’s one thing to operate in Europe, where you look like most of the natives. Even places like Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia, or Vietnam are no problem—there are enough European tourists so that it’s possible to blend in easily.

  But here in Pakistan, which is basically a country under siege, my men and I stuck out. This is not a tourist center. You don’t come here to see the sights. It’s dangerous.

  You think I’m engaging in hyperbole? Let me quote to you from a recent Top Secret DIA Country S
urvey:

  A tidal wave of indiscriminate lawlessness and political violence is crashing across Pakistan, imperiling Pakistani and foreigner alike…. Only essential, seasoned personnel should reside in Pakistan, and they must keep security concerns in the forefront of their consciousness. The following areas are to be considered off-limits to all personnel: working-class areas of Karachi, the interiors of Sind, Baluchistan, and the entire North-West Frontier Province, Peshawar, where bombings are a daily occurrence, and Pakistani Kashmir.

  Now, so far as I was concerned, there wasn’t anyplace I wasn’t able to go. When I let my hair down and wore Pakistani clothing and thong sandals, I could go native—walk the alleys and marketplaces without attracting undue attention. But here, even though I could walk the streets without attracting attention, I couldn’t make conversation. Once I opened my mouth, my disguise was worthless. I can’t speak Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, or Pashto. As for the rest of us—we all looked like gringos with the exception of Howie Kaluha. But like me he, too, would be compromised the minute he opened his mouth.

  So sneaking and peeking would be difficult. Moreover, we’d be competing with thousands of informers, spies, agents, and just plain snitches who lived by selling snippets of information to each other on a daily, sometimes hourly basis. The Pakistani secret police have to deal with terrorism by Kashmiri separatists, Sikh militants, and WAD, the Afghanistani Intelligence Service. In Sind Province, dacoits—descendants of the original Thugees (from which we get the word thug)—kidnap and murder virtually at will. In the south, Shiite Muslims battle Sunni Muslims, and they all fight against the government, which is seen as too progressive and unfundamentally Islamic.

  That’s just the domestic scene. As for foreign intelligence, the Agency still maintains one station in the capital, Islamabad, one here in Karachi, and a third in Peshawar. Christians in Action beefed up its Pak presence when it was building the Afghan resistance movement. They maintain it today because Pakistan and Afghanistan share more than a thousand miles of border with Iran, the hub of Islamic fundamentalism. MI6, too, works Pakistan, because the Brits still consider it part of their sphere of influence. So does the former KGB, now metamorphosed as Russia’s State Intelligence Service, or SIS.