DON’T MISS
THE BLOOD-AND-GUTS ADVENTURES
IN THE ROGUE WARRIOR SERIES
BY #1 NEW YORK TIMES
BESTSELLING AUTHORS
RICHARD MARCINKO
and JOHN WEISMAN
ROGUE WARRIOR
ROGUE WARRIOR: RED CELL
ROGUE WARRIOR: GREEN TEAM
ROGUE WARRIOR: TASK FORCE BLUE
ALL AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK
FROM POCKET BOOKS
AND LOOK FOR ROGUE WARRIOR: DESIGNATION GOLD
COMING SOON IN HARDCOVER
FROM POCKET BOOKS
AND
LEADERSHIP SECRETS OF
THE ROGUE WARRIOR
BY
RICHARD MARCINKO
AVAILABLE IN HARDCOVER FROM
POCKET BOOKS
Acclaim for the
Rogue Warrior series
LEADERSHIP SECRETS
OF THE ROGUE WARRIOR
“Look out, Bill Gates….”
—USA Today
“Bracing, gutsy, tough-talking, empowering…. Should be required reading for managers who want to weed out prima donnas, transform the lazy, and motivate the troops.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Fun to read….”
—The Money Review
ROGUE WARRIOR: TASK FORCE BLUE
“Heart-pounding, white-knuckle, pure adrenaline action…. The fast-paced Mission: Impossible-style plot rockets along like a high-octane action movie…. a great book.”
—Beaumont Enterprise (TX)
“Extremely lively…. Not for the squeamish, politically correct, or saintly….”
—Lincoln Journal-Star
ROGUE WARRIOR: GREEN TEAM
“Marcinko gives new meaning to the word tough…. highly energetic…. A novel for those who like in-your-face four-letter action.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Marcinko … and his hard-bitten SEAL colleagues … come through, filling the memorably fast-paced yarn with vivid, hardware-laden detail.”
—Booklist
“Liberally sprinkled with raw language and graphic descriptions of mayhem, Rogue Warrior: Green Team is the literary equivalent of professional wrestling.”
—Detroit Free Press
ROGUE WARRIOR: RED CELL
“[A] bawdy action novel…. Rogue Warrior: Red Cell never stops to take a breath.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A chilling, blood-and-guts, no-nonsense look into clandestine military operations told like it should be told. It doesn’t come more powerful than this.”
—Clive Cussler
“Bull’s-eye! Right on target. It makes Tom Clancy’s stuff read like Bambi. It’s rude and crude, gutty and U.S.-Navy-SEAL bad.”
—Colonel David Hackworth, USA (Ret.), author of About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior
ROGUE WARRIOR
“Fascinating…. Marcinko … makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Little Lord Fauntleroy.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Blistering honesty…. Marcinko is one tough Navy commando.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Marcinko makes the Terminator look like Tiny Tim.”
—Virginian-Pilot and Ledger-Star
“Richard Marcinko’s bestselling autobiography reads like the plots for about six Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone movies.”
—Sacramento Bee
“Marcinko’s ornery and joyous aggression … brought him to grief and to brilliance in war…. Here, his accounts of riverine warfare…. are galvanic, detailed, and told with a rare craftsman’s love…. profane and asking no quarter: the real nitty-gritty, bloody and authentic.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Marcinko was too loose a cannon for the U.S. Navy…. Rogue Warrior is not a book for the faint of heart.”
—People
The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this “stripped book.”
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imaginations, or are used fictitiously. Operational details have been altered so as not to betray current SpecWar techniques.
Many of the Rogue Warrior’s weapons courtesy of Heckler & Koch, Inc., International Training Division, Sterling, Virginia
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Copyright © 1996 by Richard Marcinko and John Weisman
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First Pocket Books paperback printing February 1997
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Printed in the U.S.A.
Once again, to the shooters—fewer and fewer in number …
and to
Admiral James “Ace” Lyons, U.S. Navy (Ret.)
A Warrior’s Warrior
—Richard Marcinko
—John Weisman
The Rogue Warrior series by Richard Marcinko and John Weisman
Rogue Warrior
Rogue Warrior: Red Cell
Rogue Warrior: Green Team
Rogue Warrior: Task Force Blue
Also by John Weisman
Fiction
Blood Cries
Watchdogs
Evidence
Nonfiction
Shadow Warrior (with Felix Rodriguez)
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Politics are a lousy way to get things done.
—P. J. O’Rourke
THE ROGUE WARRIOR’S TEN COMMANDMENTS OF SPECWAR
I am the War Lord and the wrathful God of Combat and I will always lead you from the front, not the rear.
I will treat you all alike—just like shit.
Thou shalt do nothing I will not do first, and thus will you be created Warriors in My deadly image.
I shall punish thy bodies because the more thou sweatest in training, the less thou bleedest in combat.
Indeed, if thou hurteth in thy efforts and thou suffer painful dings, then thou art Doing It Right.
Thou hast not to like it—thou hast just to do it.
Thou shalt Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Thou shalt never assume.
Verily, thou art not paid for thy methods, but for thy results, by which meaneth thou shalt kill thine enemy by any means available before he killeth you.
Thou shalt, in thy Warrior’s Mind and Soul, always remember My ultimate and final Commandment: There are No Rules—Thou Shalt Win at All Cost.
Contents
Part One: BOHICA
Part Two: ESBAM
Glossary
Index
Part
One
BOHICA
IT HAS BEEN SAID THAT GETTING THERE IS HALF THE FUN. IF SO, IT must have been time to Get There already, because I was in real bad need of some fun. To help things along, I finished my quarter-mile, early-morning slog and emerged from the slimy-bottomed salt pond into the cool March Florida rain, looking, feeling, and (more significantly) smelling very much like your unfriendly Creature from the Black Lagoon.
I drained sour, brackish water from my ballistic goggles. I shook sediment from the HK USP .45-caliber pistol strapped to my right thigh in a nylon tactical holster. I squeezed as much moisture as I could from my French braid, retied the black cotton “Do” rag around my hair, slipped the rubber radio earpiece into my ear, and wrestled with the wire lip mike that ran from the earpiece around my face under my mustache (it wanted to take up residence inside my right nostril, not above my lip where it belonged). I pulled a soggy, fleece-lined Nomex balaclava over my head, and then adjusted the forty pounds of Class IIIA Plus Point Blank load-bearing body armor that had slowed me like a sea anchor while fording the pond, making me feel as if I’d been up to my seventeen-and-a-half-inch neck in deep you-know-what.
The armor itself comes in at less than ten pounds—even when it’s wet. The real weight was from the dozen or so modular, custom-made pouches filled with everything from my ever-present Emerson CQC6 titanium-framed combat folding knife, my waterproof tactical radio, miniature 100-lumen Sure Fire flashlight, and four DEF-TEC No. 25 flashbang distraction devices, to the two dozen Flexicuffs, the half-dozen door wedges, the roll of surgical tape, the fifty feet of climbing rope, the eight magazines filled with eighty rounds of MagSafe Plus-P frangible SWAT loads, the Mad Dog DSU-2 serrated-blade knife in its molded Kydex sheath, the lightweight surgical steel pry bar, the twenty feet of shaped ribbon charge and three electronic detonators, the—well, you get the idea. I was loaded like a fucking pack-SEAL.
Anyway, I got the goddamn thing shifted around to where it should have been, reattached the Velero flap as quietly as was possible (old-fashioned canvas web gear with all those buckles and laces does have a certain tactical advantage—in a word: silence), then began to crab forward, moving slowly, steadily, across the wet tarmac a few inches at a time, thinking all the while what an incredible batch of fucking fun I was having Getting There.
There was 150 yards away, at the very end of the taxiway where, almost invisible through the sheets of wind-whipped, driving rain that stung my face, a 727 containing eighty-three passengers and crew of seven that had been hijacked out of San Juan and landed here in Key West sat, an immobile shadow in the darkness. Its tires had been shot out by a Key West Police sniper, after the pilot had been ordered to take off for parts unknown and actually taxied the aircraft this far before anybody reacted. About an hour ago, the aft stairway had been lowered, and a lone terrorist armed with what we’d determined through our eightypower night-vision spotting scopes from our position 1,500 yards away was a new model Colt 633HB 9mm submachine gun, was standing wet and miserable sentry duty under the tail.
It was my nasty assignment (shades of Mission Impossible) to sneak up without being seen or heard, wrest control of the aircraft from the bad guys, rescue the passengers, pat the stews—excuse me, the flight attendants—on their lovely, firm behinds, then climb back on my stallion, the fearless white charger Cockbreath, and ride out of town while everybody’d look at one another and inquire, “Who the hell was that nasty-looking Slovak masked man with the ponytail and the bunch of renegade sidekicks, anyway?”
Yeah, I know, I know—you’re asking what the F-word is Demo Dickie Marcinko, Shark Man of the Delta, the old Rogue Warrior, radio handle Silver Bullet, doing here, up to his bad ass in slime and tangos (which is radio talk for terrorists for those of you who haven’t read our last three books), when he could be back at Rogue Manor, enjoying his two-hundred-plus acres, sitting in the outside Jacuzzi with a yard-wide smile and a yard-long hard-on, holding a huge tumbler of Dr. Bombay’s best Sapphire on the rocks, bookended by a couple of big-bazoomed hostesses from Hooters doing the bare-bottomed, wet-T-shirt thing in my ozone-filtered, 100-degree water.
Well, friends, the simple answer is that one of those eighty-three passengers on, well, let’s call it Pan World Airways Flight 1252, originating in Bogotá, Colombia, and continuing through San Juan, Puerto Rico, Atlanta, Georgia, Charlotte, North Carolina, and terminating in Washington, D.C., was the Honorable S. Lynn Crawford, a thirty-five-year-old registered Democrat and professional fund-raiser, and—as of twelve weeks ago—our most recently appointed secretary of the navy.
Among the other hostages was a pair (actually, currently he was operating solo, but more about that later) of what the descriptive memo writers might call highly qualified, welltrained Naval Investigative Service security agent personnel. In other words, a pair of pus-nutted shit-for-brained pencil-dicked no-load NIS assholes who go to the range twice a year, spend all their time writing memos, and tend to panic at the first sign of crisis.
Why had the Hon. S. Lynn gone to Bogotá in the first place? Who knew. More accurately, who cared. Such policy decisions are determined way beyond my pay grade—which is 0-6, or captain. The only fact that mattered to me was that SECNAV was now at the mercy of somewhere between six and who-knew-how-many nasties, armed to the teeth with bad-boy weapons and functional explosive devices, and that as the OIC—that’s officer in charge—of the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group subsidiary known as Unconventional Taskings/Risks, United States, acronymed UT/RUS (and pronounced, with obvious SEAL political correctness, as uterus), it was my unenviable job to extract her exalted, sub-cabinet-level butt out of there—preferably in one piece.
It might also occur to you to ask what the hell the SECNAV was doing flying tourist class on a cut-rate airline, when the Navy has all those perfectly good (not to mention reasonably secure) aircraft at its disposal. The answer—I guess I have time right now to explain, even though you’ve probably surmised the answer already because it’s so obvious—is politics.
See, back some months in this particular administration, some of the more self-important, unelected White House and Pentagon panjandrums took it upon themselves to requisition military aircraft for occasional golf outings, speechifying jaunts to such hardship posts as Florida, Europe, and Hawaii, pussy-chasing boondoggles to Barbados, and other sundry nonofficial voyages. First, the notorious journalist & junk-yard dog, Samuel Andrew Donaldson of ABC News, blew the whistle on his Prime Time Live show—a tough, sardonic piece he called “Four-Star Airlines.” Within twenty-four hours, the rest of the national press, the tabloid TV shows, and the weekly news magazines followed along, gang-banging the subject with weeks of derogatory, disparaging, carping, supercritical coverage. For its part, the White House responded by doing what it does best: it overreacted.
And so, a polysyllabic dictum was depth-charged from on high. It caromed around the West Wing, through the Old Executive Office Building, and finally detonated right in the middle of the Pentagon, creating the kind of ego devastation not seen in Washington since Jimmy Carter was president.
When the decree had finally been ground down into the sort of one-and-two-syllable gist I understand, I took note. Let me give you said gist in translation: “No More Fucking Riding on Fucking MILCRAFT that’s MILitary airCRAFT in Pentagonspeak, unless, that is, the fucking travel orders have been fucking signed by the fucking supreme commander in fucking chief and leader of the Free fucking World himself.”
This new and immutable guideline has left the service secretaries, their deputies, their deputies’ deputies, their military assistants, and other assorted bureaucrats—not to mention scores of two-, three-, and four-starred brass—to the untender mercies of commercial air travel. There are no more choppers idling on the Pentagon landing pad for the seven-minute flight to Andrews Air Force Base, where they land one hundred yards from an Air Farce JetStar or Navy C-9 for a quick, efficient, nonstop flight to said panjandrum’s destination. Nope. That ki
nd of efficiency is gone forever.
Today, everyone from the chief of naval operations to the head of military intelligence hails a Farsi-speaking cabby driving a farce of a cab at the Pentagon’s Mall entrance, or descends into the crowded Washington Metro to ride the three stops to National along with the panhandlers and buskers. That trip is followed by interminable waiting and the high probability of a canceled flight.
Now, I’m not a big believer in perks, especially for political appointees. But if you were to ask me, rankcertainly someone who has been appointed SECNAV—should have a bit of privilege every now and then. Especially when security is concerned—and flights into and out of Colombia, where Coke Is It, certainly seem to fit that category.
But then, nobody ever asks my opinion. I’d never even seen a picture of the goddamn SECNAV before they handed me a faxed publicity photo five, maybe six hours ago, and I wouldn’t know a panjandrum if I bumped into one. The only time my phone rings and my cage door gets opened is when clusterfucks like this happen, and they need someone to quickee-quickee makee-makee all better.
Which is why I was currently dressed in my workaday party-time outfit of basic black sans pearls: the always popular ensemble of Nomex balaclava, rip-stop BDUs, and body armor, not to mention the ever-fashionable high-top, currently squishy, black Reebok aerobic shoes. It also is why I was in my normal condition: cold, wet, uncomfortable, and dinging various extremities on rough macadam.
I stopped to listen for anything untoward. Nothing. I resumed my crawl. So far, the mission was going perfectly. Of course, we’d been at it for less than a minute since we’d emerged from the salt pond.
The rain drummed steadily, whipped into stinging ball bearings by the twenty-mile-per-hour winds. That was good news and bad news. The good news: it meant that the fifty or so TV cameras atop their microwave trucks just outside the airport perimeter fence would have a hard time catching any of this early-morning action. The rain also would help stifle any ambient sound we made as we approached the plane.
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