The bad news was that it would make our assault highly goatfuck prone because everything we carried, touched, or assaulted was going to be as wet and slippery as a horny eighteen-year-old cheerleader’s pussy on homecoming weekend. From the wings we’d have to traverse, to the ladders we’d be climbing, to the emergency handles we’d have to ease open without alerting the tangos inside, this was one big clusterfuck waiting to happen.
Two yards behind me, Machinist Mate First Class Stevie Wonder’s lean, mean body inched forward as armed and dangerous he wormed his way across the black taxiway. Ever the fashionable dirtbag, he was dressed to kill. Literally. I turned to make sure he was keeping up. When he threw me a one-fingered salute I knew everything was okeydoke. Hot on Wonder’s tail (and joined by the ladder they carried between them), Doc Tremblay, master chief hospitalman and sniper, slithered steadily in the darkness, his long handlebar mustache moving like antennae as he crawled on padded knees and elbows, a suppressed HK slung over his back.
Behind Doc and Wonder, seven more shooters completed my lethal contingent. Senior Chief Nasty Nicky Grundle was rear security, protecting our six with his omnipresent Heckler & Koch MP5-PDW suppressed submachine gun. In front of him crawled Duck Foot Dewey, Cherry Enders, Half Pint Harris, Piccolo Mead, Gator Shepard, and the Rodent. Each pair of my UT/RUS swim buddies was responsible for carrying one of our four padded assault ladders.
I would have liked another seven men for the assault, but like the thin gent sings, ya cain’t always git whatcha wont, and I didn’t have another seven men. So we’d simply do the job with the shooters on scene. We’d had enough time to rehearse on a 727—albeit a 727-200, not the older 727-100 sitting out here in the rain—that was stowed inside a hangar we’d commandeered as our HQ. That way we’d been able to refresh our beer-sodden, pussy-whipped memories about how to open the exit windows and doors, ease onto the wings without shaking the fuselage, and get inside the cabin without tripping over all the assorted ratshits, batshits, catshits, widgets, midgets, and other miscellaneous paraphernalia that’s normally stuffed, tied, gorged, screwed, crammed, bolted, wedged, and taped inside airplane cabins.
The one question that nagged me most since I’d arrived was precisely how many tangos we’d encounter. There had been no intelligence about that most crucial element of hostage rescue since the plane had landed on Key West International’s single runway just over fifteen hours ago.
Okay, then, what did I know? Well, I knew very little more than what the rest of the world knew: PWA 1252 had left Bogotá at 0710, arrived in San Juan two and a half hours later, departed for Atlanta at 1100 hours, and was hijacked nineteen minutes later, just north of the Dominican Republic.
I’d listened to a tape of the pilot’s initial transmission. It had been brief and to the point: “San Juan center, this is PWA 1252 November. We have half a dozen or so fellas here who want me to divert to Key West. Since they’ve got guns and bombs, we’re gonna do exactly what they want us to do.”
Since PWA 1252 had touched down here, there had been only half a dozen conversations with the plane. None had lasted longer than a minute. Each had been initiated by the pilot. None contained any further information—even oblique references—about the number of hostage takers, or their weapons. And those pieces of intel are absolutely critical for a successful aircraft takedown, believe me.
Let me digress here just long enough—I am cold and wet, after all, and in the middle of work—to give you a short course in aircraft hostage rescue philosophy and tactics, and a primer on the physical characteristics of the Boeing 727100 aircraft, so you’ll understand what I was up against.
The philosophy and tactics are simple enough: the key to success in any aircraft hostage rescue is surprise. Surprise. Remember that word—you will see the material again. The entry team must be totally dynamic—that is, they have to swarm the aircraft in less than six seconds, or they will probably lose hostages. If they fail to hit at the same instant, or they take too much time, or if Mr. Murphy of Murphy’s Law fame is along for the ride, innocent people will die. It’s as simple as that.
So what’s so hard, you ask? Go storm the fucking plane.
Well, friends, it’s like this. Take our current situation. (Pul-eeze take it. It’s yours for the asking.) We were ten men out on the wet macadam. The 727-100 aircraft has nine possible entry points. You do the arithmetic.
Ideally, it takes seventeen shooters to storm a 727. (If the plane’s a wide-fuselage model like a 767, an A340 Airbus, or a big old 747, you might need upwards of two dozen in the initial assault team, with another two dozen in the second wave to control passengers, sort the good guys from the bad guys, and generally make sense of the situation.)
Now, to be honest, there were other shooters available tonight. While the FBI’s Quantico-based, national HRT—the Hostage Rescue Team—was stretched past the limit (it was dealing with a prison riot going full blast at Leavenworth, a white supremacist and six hostages barricaded behind barbed wire in Oregon, and a disgruntled commuter who with the help of a hand grenade had commandeered a puddle jumper somewhere in California), the Bureau had, nonetheless, managed to scramble a twelve-agent SWAT team out of Miami. It had arrived here three hours after me and mine, and set up its own perimeter. But that was all it had done so far.
Why? Slight problem: three weeks ago, the attorney general’s office put out a Department of Justice Executive Directive. It said that forthwith and immediately, all local FBI offices and the units attached thereto, “Shall make every possible effort to reflect the cultural, ethnic, sociological, and gender diversity common to the location of the office.”
You people think we’re making this stuff up, don’t you? Well guess what, folks—this crapola is real. I’ve even seen a copy of the goddamn thing, because it was faxed to my office anonymously by somebody at the Hard Glock Cafe—that’s shooter slang for the FBI’s Quantico HRT headquarters—who wanted to make me spit my coffee through a nostril.
Anyway, the twelve-person SWAT unit that showed up included seven females (one of whom had bigger pecs than Nasty, and he presses four-hundred pounds), six Hispanics, three African-Americans, two conspicuous representatives of what might be called in Bureauspeak, single-sex relationships, one Asian, one Native American, and one lonely, white WASP male. They sure were diverse. The only problem was that they hadn’t ever trained together. They’d probably all been too busy going to EEO—that’s Equal Employment Opportunity—classes to bother with unimportant details like learning how to shoot, loot, and function as a team. Well, I have my own form of EEO, too—I treat everybody alike: just like shit.
But enough about me. Let me tell you about them. They were led by the Special Agent in Charge of the Miami FBI field office, a red-haired, five-foot-two, eyes of black pedigreed bitch Latina—Cuban, to be precise—named Esmeralda Lopez-Reyes. I immediately dubbed her La Muchacha. Incredibly, she’d appeared on scene as if she’d come straight from a dinner party, clad in a dress that probably cost more than a chief makes in a month, shoes that were equally expensive, and a Chanel clutch purse. Where she stowed her regulation, FBI-issue firearm I hadn’t the foggiest. Actually, I had an inkling—and: (1) she must have been real uncomfortable, and: (2) her quick draw must be a sight truly to behold.
Her attitude—if you could call it that—was infuriating. Obviously, she hadn’t been told that my team and I were coming—and when she arrived to find us already in place, she treated us like campesinos.
To make matters more interesting, about an hour after we’d arrived, five deputies from the Marathon Key Po-lice arrived. They were led by a potbellied, Pancho Villamustached, snaggle-toothed, paint-by-the-numbers, orderbarking sergeant named Bob. They were all decked out in matching starched camouflage fatigues, hobnail-soled Cochran jump boots squeaky fresh from the mail order catalog, and they carried enough brand-new automatic weaponry to wage a six-month guerrilla war. They traveled in a big white Ford step van with MARATHON KEY SWAT TEAM magn
et-signed in foot-high letters on the side. Sergeant Bob tapped the sy-reen twice, climbed out (leaving the lights flashing), twirled his mustache, chawed, spat into a handy Styrofoam cup, and volunteered to lead us all to victory.
Thanks but no thanks, fellas. See, the problem, folks, is this: dynamic entry—read surprise—demands not only good intelligence, but also great teamwork. Your shooters must not only have some idea where the bad guys are (that way they won’t shoot the passengers), they must also function as one. Timing is everything. Indeed, so far as I’m concerned, the absolute essence of hostage rescue—the core, the basis, the nucleus of every other element—is unit integrity.
And what is that? To me, it has always translated as a bunch of assholes who care enough about each other to eat, sleep, work, and party—all of it together, as a group. A bunch of men who know how each of the others thinks; a unit that can read one another’s minds; men who react to one another without having to stop and think about it.
Bottom line? You simply cannot assemble a patchwork quilt of shooters, no matter how talented they may be individually, and expect them to function as a team without having worked together. They won’t function as a team—and hostages will get killed.
I expressed this point of view in my usual shall we say blunt style. Marathon Bob chewed on his mustache, spat tobacco juice into his empty coffee cup—and finally, grudgingly, agreed with me. But, if it was okay, he added, he’d sure like to stick around and help out. That was all right with me. I had a gut feeling that oP Bob and his boys would turn out to be just fine under pressure. And besides, they, at least, had trained together as a unit, which was more than could be said for the FBI’s personnel.
But similar persuasion didn’t work with La Muchacha. She had twelve shooters to my ten, which, she insisted, gave her tactical superiority. The airport—a civilian site, she stated somewhat pedantically—came under her, not my, jurisdiction. Thus, it would be her team, not mine, on the line.
Okay—if the only way to sort this chain-of-command crap out was to give her people a chance, then I was willing to give her people a chance. After all, what was at stake here was the lives of the hostages—and if that didn’t bother La Muchacha, who was I to worry? We all repaired to a nearby hangar where I’d had a 727 towed so that we could practice our assault sequence. I handed La Muchacha my stopwatch, let her borrow my assault ladders, then stood back and let her people demonstrate how well they could do.
It took them four minutes and forty-five seconds to get inside the damn plane—and they didn’t open all the hatches. That, friends, is just over four minutes too long. You know as well as I do that by the time they got inside, the hostages would all be DOA.
Well, she said, that was the first time—so it doesn’t count. Let us try again.
Oh, I’d heard that song before—and the music was just as unacceptable now as then. Back when I was CO of SEAL Team Six, I’d run a joint training exercise with the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment—Delta, otherwise known as Delta Force. Delta’s CO back then was an asshole spit-and-polish colonel named Elwood Dawkins—known as Dawg’ to the troops. Well, Dawg’s mutts charliefoxtrotted up their portion of the exercise, and he demanded that we do it all over again, too.
I told the SAC what I’d told Dawg. “No fucking way. You get one shot at a hostage rescue—and if you screw up, it’s all over.”
Then it was our turn. I put my boys on the line. We took twenty-six seconds from the “go” signal to get our ladders in place, and break into the plane. Marathon Bob spat chaw juice into his cup and gave me a big, snaggle-toothed grin. “Sweet Jesus,” he said, “it was like watching poetry in damn motion. Can we come north and go to school with you boys?”
La Muchacha was not as impressed as Bob. In fact, when I asked her to join him as the backup force, she refused. FBI agents, she said, did not play support roles. Then she threw a handful of bureaucratic chaff in my direction. The Federal Aviation Administration, she announced, had not a week ago issued a new batch of hard and specific rules of engagement that had to be followed to the letter when storming an aircraft at a domestic location, and until I had read those ROEs and signed a copy, she insisted that it would be impossible for me to take any action.
Now I knew that she was either shitting me, or ignorant of the facts. See, friends, the FAA’s authority in hijack situations ends when the plane’s door opens. Once that happens, all responsibility shifts to the ground force commander. And in this case, I considered myself the GFC.
La Muchacha, however, held the opposite opinion. She insisted that she, not I, was in charge. Moreover, she added, it was her understanding that, since I commanded a military unit and held no sworn police powers, I could not legally act until I received direct authority from the National Command Authority—which translates as either the president, or the secretary of defense. Period. Full stop. End of story.
Friends, I’m not an unreasonable man. So we agreed to disagree until everyone checked with his/her/its superiors in Washington.
I punched the secretary of defense’s command center number into my secure Motorola cellular. Would you believe I got a busy signal? What the hell were they doing, ordering pizza?
And now, having brought you more or less up to speed, let us return to the model 727-100 aircraft and its nine entrances. We’ll begin at the starboard bow (I know the 727’s a plane and I’m using nautical terminology here, but geez, folks, I’m a sailor). Okay, the copilot’s window can be released by pulling on a gizmo that sits just below the window itself. Goatfuck factor? In this particular case, it was high.
Why? Because you need at least two men to use this entry: one to climb the ladder and release the window, the other to steady the ladder, then pop up and wax any tangos inside the cockpit. I didn’t have two men to spare.
Working toward the stern, there is a galley access door just fore of the wings. Goatfuck factor? Tonight it was also very high.
Why? Let me explain. We had a ladder that was approximately the right height, which would allow one man to go up, and ever so gently swing the handle that releases and opens the door. But the galley door is extremely heavy and it swings very wide—all the better to allow big fooddelivery trucks to back right up to the plane and offload all those delicious gourmet in-flight meals you get served. So man Number 1 generally gets to ride the door as it swings open, while men Numbers 2 and 3 swarm the aircraft. First of all, I didn’t have three men for the galley door tonight. I’d have to make do with two. Second, tangos like to hang out in the galley and sip coffee, tea, coke, or anything else with caffeine so they can stay awake. That makes the galley door a PDFL—that’s Pretty Dangerous Fucking Location—and usually, I put my cannon-fodder troops there—by that I mean the newest and most inexperienced men. Not that I like losing anybody—I don’t. But I’d rather lose a greenhorn than someone who’s had a decade’s worth of training. Tonight, the point was moot: I didn’t have any cannon fodder available anyway.
Next, there are two overwing windows that can be sprung from the outside. They are adjacent to seats 11F and 14F. Goatfuck potential? Medium to high.
On the positive side, we’d had a lot of practice sneaking onto aircraft wings—it was something we did as part of our normal hostage-rescue training regimen. Duck Foot Dewey, Cherry Enders, Rodent, and Gator Shepard were as stealthy as ninjas. They could move from their ladders onto the wing, creep up and release the windows without the slightest bit of noise or vibration, even when the wings were as wet as they’d be tonight.
On the negative side, the overwing windows are small, and all that equipment you’re carrying—submachine guns, bulletproof vests, flashbang devices and other sundries—tends to get hung up as you move through ‘em. Well, getting hung up wastes time. And time, as I’ve said above, is absofuckinglutely crucial to success. The solution is for my over-the-wing guys to carry less equipment. That, however, means they can become vulnerable.
Moving astern, we come to the aft stairs. The
se are hydraulically controlled, and can be lowered from either inside or outside the plane. The goatfuck factor is medium to high.
To accentuate the positive, the stairs stabilize the plane. So if they are lowered, it becomes harder for tangos to sense the assault force climbing onto the wings, placing ladders against the fuselage, and so on. The stairway is also wide enough so that your equipment doesn’t get hung up. On the negative side, you can get only one man at a time up the stairs, and each has to go through a doorway at the top—a door that can easily be secured from the inside, which leaves you standing at the top of the stairs primed, pumped, and ready to go, holding your limp lagarto in your hand.
Tonight, the problem was compounded because the tangos had posted a sentry on the ground. If he saw us before we got close enough to eliminate him, we’d be screwed. Under normal circumstances (in other words, during our full-mission-profile rehearsals for situations like this one), I’d have positioned a sniper to take him out. But this was Key West—single runway, single tower, no tall buildings, and the plane was positioned so that it was five-hundred yards from any decent sniper position. Besides, it was blowing like a banshee, raining like a son of a bitch, and wind and water have the bad habit of deflecting bullets at long range. Nope—it would be easier and more efficient to take him out at close range. In fact, given my current mood and my desire for … fun, dispatching said tango in a slow and painful manner was an assignment I’d have liked to perform personally.
Okay—now we move back up the port side of the aircraft toward the bow. There are two overwing windows at seats 11A and 14A, and the main cabin entrance just aft of the cockpit door. Goatfuck factor for the port windows is the same as starboard. And the main hatch has its own problems. The tangos had not allowed a mobile stairway to be rolled up against the plane. Good for them, bad for me. Why? Bad because that stairway is a wide one, and I could get four men up it in less than a second and a half to blow the hatch open. Now, I was going to have to use a ladder, ease the door open, then send two men in. One would have to clear the cockpit, the other would chock the bathroom door so no one inside could get out, then quickly move aft into the first-class cabin.
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