RW03 - Green Team

by Richard Marcinko

  And if the tangos weren’t carrying detasheet explosives—ten-by-twenty-inch sheets of plastic explosive, which you can precut for use on door hinges, locks, and bolts—it might take them hours to get past the heavy steel doors of the CINCUSNAVEUR communications center. By which time the men inside could use the saws and bolt-cutters cached inside to cut through the heavy bars on their windows, climb up to the roof, and escape by coming over to the Marriott.

  It was time to divvy up the responsibilities. Working with Mick Owen made that job easy. As big a C2CO as Geoff Lyondale had been, Mick was efficient, and we worked together seamlessly. He knew that the most important thing was a successful op. Everything else—ego, rank, glory—was forgotten.

  Okay, we’d need communications in the operations center. Mick took care of that. And we’d need an intelligence-slash-negotiation team. I assigned Tommy Tanaka to lead it. And we’d need an assault team. That would be my responsibility.

  That was the one thing Mick and I argued about. His view was that I’d be best used in the command post, playing orchestra conductor to this band of lethal instrumentalists.

  I disagreed. First, I knew the building as well as any man alive. That gave me a great tactical advantage. Second, my team—Green Team—was built around my lead-from-the-front style. I’d trained with my men. I’d forged the unit integrity that allowed us to act as one. No way was I going to let my shooters ever go over the rail without being there myself.

  In any hostage situation, the primary issue is intelligence. My three primary questions were, how many friendlies were in the building, how many tangos, and—most significant—where the hell was the fucking container of BWR. Sure, we’d want to know where the friendlies were being held and how we could get to them. Sure, we’d want to know the number of tangos. But the primary goal was to isolate the BA-PP3/I and neutralize it before they could set it off.

  Determining the answers to those questions was the hard part. Once we had the facts in hand, assault wasn’t going to be much of a problem. Getting in would be easy. I had a number of choices. I could tunnel from the sewer lines that ran parallel to CINCUSNAVEUR along North Audley Street. I could cut through the roof. Or I could abseil down and come in on the first, second, third, or fourth floors.

  Since time was crucial (get the bad guys before they blow the BWR), my initial instinct was to send four teams at once. Alpha would go through the sewer. It would blast a four-by-four-foot hole through a foot and a half of basement wall with a series of ribbon charges and work its way upstairs. Responsibilities: basement levels one and two, and the ground floor. Bravo would cut through the roof, drop into the comm center, and work its way down. Responsibilities: fifth and sixth floors. Charlie and Delta would abseil down opposite ends of the building, bust through the unbarred fourth-floor windows, and work their way down to the first floor, sweeping tangos as they went. First priority for each team was the BWR canister. Once we discovered where it was, we’d realign the assignments.

  My guesstimation was that the assault could be completed in less than six minutes. That was critical—especially in light of the anthrax. Back in 1980, it had taken Mick’s Pagoda Troop eleven minutes to clear the Iranian embassy at Princes Gate because of Murphy fuckups and missed timing—and they hadn’t been worried about a goddam canister of BWR that could kill half the population of London.

  Something else had occurred to me as well, although I didn’t mention it to anyone. It was this: these tangos had staged a complicated hostage-taking operation on North Audley Street when all they really had to do to bring the city to its knees was camouflage the BWR in a box from an Oxford Street store, drop it off at the cloakroom of the Marriott or the message desk at CINCUSNAVEUR, then explode it by remote control. There was an element or two missing here, and if there’d been time, I would have head-shedded the subject. But there was, as usual, no time.

  I ran my assault plan past Mick, who liked what he heard. He simply nodded and said, “Building blueprints?” He wasn’t one to mince words when time was a factor.

  “On their way.”

  “Video?”

  “Ten minutes.” We had the embassy communicators working on it.

  He nodded. “Good.”

  We’d appropriated the Marriott’s dining room as our ops center. The dining tables had been pushed together to make work areas. Tommy T’s intel work group had taken over the corner of the room. Tommy, wearing a headset, was working the phones. An SAS Mike the Psych—that’s a combatqualified shrink—worked with him, trying to glean a psychological profile of the bad guys. Communications took up the opposite corner. In hostage rescue, communications is as important as intel. You have to be able to speak to everyone—whether to give a sniper the green light or talk to your breaching teams as they go through the doors or—well, you get the idea.

  Duck Foot and Rodent were downstairs, busy making demolition charges. SAS supplied the raw materials, but they didn’t have the recipes I’d need here.

  To cut through the roof, I’d use an Arleighgram, a trick I’d learned from Arleigh MacRae, the legendary Los Angeles Police Department demolitions man who’d designed hundreds of charges—from the ones LAPD teams used to break into crack houses to sophisticated explosives that could take a door off its hinges without disturbing the frame.

  Arleigh had once been asked to design something to go through a flat, metal-reinforced roof so that an LAPD SWAT team could drop in on some hostage takers. He’d devised a wonderful entry tool, which SEAL Team Six had named the Arleighgram in his honor. It used the same kind of threehundred-grain flexible charge—PETN plastic explosive contained inside a seamless, L-shaped (or inverted-V) lead sheath—used by SEALs and Frogmen for years. This kind of charge will penetrate two-inch-thick steel plate if it’s used right.

  What Arleigh had done was focus the explosion by taping the charge to an inner tube filled with water. It was so KISS simple I’d kicked myself for not having thought of it first. You placed the charge against the target. When it exploded, the water served as a tamping agent, which resulted in an explosion that blew a neat circular hole the size of a manhole cover into the target.

  We’d use the Arleighgram to blow a hatch in the roof, then we’d drop straight down and wreak our havoc. Doom on you, Mr. Bad Guy.

  For the basement, we’d employ the same kind of flexible explosive, but set it up as a ribbon charge. Here’s how. You lay out the size of the hole you need to blow. In our case it was four by four. Then you find a piece of Styrofoam insulation sheet half an inch thick. Using the foam as a template, you tape the charge to the foam and attach all your blasting devices. That way you don’t stand around wasting time while a couple of your guys place the charge, tape it to the target wall, set the detonators, and ignite the fuse, while the bad guys stand around and shoot at you.

  Hostage rescue cannot take a lot of time. So what you do is prepare everything beforehand. That way, when you’re ready to go, you slam the Styrofoam template into position, blow the fucking thing, go wham through the hole, and shoot the bad guys. Keep It Simple, Stupid.

  1603. We had video. We gathered around the screens and punched up the pictures floor by floor. The situation was about what I’d expected. Empty hallways and stairwells. Office doors open. The subbasement was cleared. Good. No one in the holding cell. The cafeteria was empty. They’d moved everyone upstairs. That also was in our favor. Ground floor. The doors were barricaded and boobytrapped—rectangles of C-4 taped to them. That was okay, because we had no intention of staging a frontal assault.

  Some of the hostages had been secured in the big secondfloor conference room. We couldn’t see everything, but it appeared as if there were about forty of’em there, hunkered on the floor, hands behind heads.

  I could make out Pinky Prescott because he was in the front row. From the look of it—he was sitting by himself; the closest hostages had scrunched themselves as far away from him as they could—he’d peed in his pants. Typical.

  There
was one camera in the basement hallway opposite the cafeteria. I could see a bunch of hostages there, too. That would be a hard target because there were no windows and only one approach: straight up the middle of the road. Damn. We punched up the upper floors. The fifth-floor ops center had been breached—the door was open. But the hallways to the sixth-floor comm center were empty and the heavy steel doors were closed.

  We called in on the comm center’s secure line and got an answer from a very scared but coherent petty officer first class radioman named Steve Werner, who told us the six guys up there were secure for the time being, that all the classified paper was being shredded as fast as they could do it, and they had the code machines wired to self-destruct.

  That was impressive. They could have spent their time trying to escape—cutting their way onto the roof or out through one of the barred windows. Instead, they were doing the job. I let Petty Officer First Class Werner know it.

  “Shit, sir, that’s what we’re trained to do.”

  It was nice to see that in this new, see-me, feel-me, touch-me, heal-me Navy, there were some old-fashioned fleet sailors left. I told Werner to hang on—that the cavalry would be coming soon. It was a lie, of course—we were in no way ready to stage our assault. But it was important to keep the kid’s spirits up.

  I saw something in the hallway. “You guys have any weapons up there?”

  I heard a verbal shrug. “Well, there’s supposed to be a forty-five somewhere—but I never saw it.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Why’s that, sir?”

  “Because you’re about to have visitors.” I squinted at the six-inch monitor to the left of my nose. There was indisputable movement in the sixth-floor hallway. A figure in a gas mask and flak jacket was making its way to the thick steel door. “You’ve got hostiles outside, Werner.”

  There was a pause on the line, then his voice came back at me. “Roger that, Captain. I can hear ’em.”

  Now a second and third figure came down the hallway. They were carrying duffel bags. As soon as they set the bags down and started to unload, I saw what they were up to. “Werner—get away from the door.”

  The tallest of the three men outside unrolled a length of flexible explosive from a spool. He ran it around the perimeter of the steel doorframe and taped it into position—shit, there was enough explosive there to take the fucking roof off. The second man attached a pair of ten-by-twenty-inch pieces of detasheet to the surface of the door. The third, moving efficiently, attached pencil-shaped electronic detonators to the two explosive charges and set their timing devices. The job was completed in less than 10 seconds, and the trio withdrew rapidly—scampering down the hall out of camera range.

  They reappeared in the fifth-floor stairwell and hunkered down. Two explosions erupted one right atop the other.

  The line went dead and the screen in front of me went blank, obscured by the thick, opaque ball of smoke that now filled the sixth-floor hallway. In my earpiece, I heard one of the sniper teams tell me that the windows on the sixth floor north side had just exploded outward.

  Two of the sixth-floor cameras were out of commission—nothing but snow on the screens. The one that was left gave me a long shot down the hallway, looking toward the blasted door from above the fire stairs. It was through that lens I saw the assault team again as it crossed below the camera and made its way toward the comm center.

  They were wearing their gas masks. Instead of duffel bags they carried submachine guns. They worked their way through the smoke to what had been the comm center door. The heavy steel must have been blown five yards inside the room from the look of things.

  As the smoke was exhausted by what was left of the efficient ventilation system, I was able to see what had happened even though the camera angle was bad. What I could make out wasn’t pretty. In fact, it looked like the fucking number two turret of the Iowa after the accident that killed forty-seven sailors.

  The power of high explosive is enhanced when it’s set off in a contained area. CINCUSNAVEUR’s comm center was, in effect, the equivalent of a steel safe built inside a brick building. So when the door was blown inward and then the second—killing—charge went off, the energy caromed around the room, just as the explosion aboard the Iowa had devastated the inside of the steel gun turret. And just like aboard the Iowa, the possibility of survivors here was nil, too.

  Six more brave Americans had been sacrificed while doing their duty. The three perpetrators were dead men so far as I was concerned. We watched silently as the trio advanced into the comm center, their guns at the ready. One must have seen movement because we could see him swing his MP5 around and squeeze off a burst.

  The feeling of impotent helplessness was absolutely overpowering. I wanted to do something—now.

  Mick squeezed my upper arm. “We’ll have our chance,” he said, his face grim.

  1822. The strange thing was, they were making no demands. That really concerned me. For one thing, all the tangos we’d killed back in Afghanistan had lists of demands. For another, terrorists are always making demands—release their buddies from prison or they’ll kill hostages. Get them a plane or a bus or a car or they’ll drop a pregnant woman out a window. Get them $2 million in cash or they’ll send you a body part. Put their demands on the TV news or they’ll maim somebody. But not these guys. From them, not a word. It made me real uneasy. I wondered what they were waiting for.

  We could see them go about their business with grim efficiency—clearing the floors, dividing the hostages between the big second-floor conference room and the basement cafeteria. We were able to identify ten of them—I’d been right that they needed more than four to secure a building the size of CINCUSNAVEUR. The tangos all dressed alike: Nomex hoods, coveralls, and flak jackets in your basic dark color.

  1900. Somebody up there got smart. Floor by floor, the TV cameras went dark. They were cutting the transmission cables on all the interior cameras, leaving only the outside perimeter on-line. I looked at the snow on my TV screens. Well, it had been fun while it lasted. It was time to fall back on plan B. In minutes, we’d assigned six teams of SAS “moles” to place audio sensors so we could try to keep tabs on our T’s.

  Meanwhile, we stayed silent, too. We busied ourselves with tactics and strategy. Hostage situations are all alike, and all different. You can use the same dynamics, but the tactics must shift with the territory. Planes are easy because they are all alike. Structure, door placement, cockpits, don’t change much from, say, a 747B to a 747E. Buildings, however, are all unique. Each one has a different plan, a new layout. Most of the time in situations like this one you go in essentially blind—operating from plans that are outdated, or nonexistent. We were lucky. I knew CINCUSNAVEUR well. And we had the up-to-date plans.

  So, with the bad guys bottled up and quiet, we head-shedded, drew diagrams, and problem-solved. We also cleaned and oiled our weapons one last time. We’d all use Heckler & Koch’s MP5 submachine guns as our roomclearing brooms. The handguns were another story. When it comes to CQB—Close Quarters Battle—SAS uses the Browning High Power 9mm pistol, a single-action, virtually foolproof design that’s more than half a century old.

  We SEALs, however, train with double-action semiautos. To make sure we didn’t operate at a disadvantage, Mick supplied us with his newest gadget: 9mm Glock 19s, equipped with both Trijicon combat night sights, and Crimson Trace laser sights. I’d always been leery of laser sights because they had to be bolted, strapped, or snapped onto a gun, which meant—Murphy’s Law working at its usual 100 percent efficiency—that they’d come off when you needed them most.

  These Crimson Trace sights were unlike any I’d ever seen before. They’d been tooled especially for Glock frames by a Portland, Oregon, aerospace company. The sights fit flush into the frame, allowing us to shoot with our normal two-handed combat grip, instead of trying to wrap our hands around something cumbersome attached to the trigger guard. The brilliant red five-milliwatt laser beam made snap
shooting easy—cutting through smoke and darkness like the proverbial knife. I wish he’d had similar sights for the MP5s, but nothing’s ever perfect.

  We loaded dozens of magazines with SAS’s hostage-rescue rounds: CBX’s frangible low-penetration ammunition. It’s a SWAT-type load that brings a man down but won’t pass through his body and hit the hostage behind him. And we checked and double-checked our equipment to make sure it was in good order. There’d be enough Murphy when we went in. I didn’t want to worry about whether or not the ropes would hold or the breaching charges were wired correctly.

  I’d had floor-by-floor scale models of CINCUSNAVEUR constructed in the Marriott’s bar. The entry teams went over them again and again. My guys knew the building. But Mick’s SAS troopers did not. There couldn’t be any mistakes. We’d hit in four six-man teams, augmented by the sniper units. The normal MO in an SAS hostage rescue is to pump scores of CS tear-gas canisters through every window at the instant the rescue goes down, then send six or eight two-man teams in to clear the target room by room. Here, gas would not do us any good because the bad guys were wearing gas masks (we could still try to disorient them using flash-bang grenades, however). And two-man teams were insufficient to work through such a large building with the speed we’d need.

  So I’d revised my plan. My first thought had been to cut through the roof with an Arleighgram and work my way down, clearing the top two floors as I went. Now, with the comm center devastated, I reworked the scenario. I’d still go through the roof. But instead of wasting time on the top two floors, I’d lead my men straight down to the conference room, where the majority of the hostages were being held.

  The fact that the bad guys had put all of their hostage “eggs” in two baskets—or in this case, one conference room and one cafeteria—was both good news and bad news. The good news was that we knew where the Americans were being held. The bad news was that if they were wired with explosives, we could lose the whole batch the instant the first flash-bangs came through the windows. I mean, Pinky was expendable—but what about all those valuable enlisted men who actually worked for a living?