Doc was the closest target. Treading water, he held his left arm above his head. As the Grand Banks went by, Doc kicked high, but Half Pint ignored his outstretched arm, one-handed him by the throat, and tossed him kicking and streaming aboard the Zodiac. Doc was heaved nose first over the gunwale. He bounced once off the wood floor-plate, careened mustache first into the heavy plywood stern transom, then disappeared. If the son of a bitch was knocked cold it served him right.
But Doc’s as resilient as any other cartoon character. So, he recovered quick enough when Half Pint dumped a coffee can of water over him. Holding his head like a man with a bad hangover, he crawled to the bow on his knees, grasped the tow line, worked his way over the gunwale, hooked his legs securely around the line and, pulling himself hand over hand while hanging upside down, worked his way to the Grand Banks and struggled over the stern diving platform, arms and legs working to keep himself away from the screws.
That was the first pass. Grose figure-eighted and came back for the rest of us. Half Pint snared Wonder and Gator with ease. Gator managed to make the precarious trip back to the Grand Banks dunking himself only half a dozen times. Wonder wasn’t that lucky. The line went slack, and the goofy-looking ex-Marine was dragged underwater for about two hundred yards before he finally hauled his body over the rail and collapsed in the stern, spitting water.
Now it was my turn. Grose circled again, skewing the Zodiac wide, then bringing it back on track. Just to make things interesting, he gave the Grand Banks some throttle. I saw Half Pint’s paw, stubby strong fingers poised to clamp my throat, coming at me six inches above the surface.
No way. I like my Adam’s apple and I want to keep it uncrushed. I snapped my head back, put my left arm up, grabbed his hand with my own, and flipped him backward. He wasn’t expecting that. He’d been poised to lift and fling, except he was the one who was being lifted and flung.
Half Pint may have had the footing, but I had the weight. My body acted like a fucking sea anchor and dragged the poor asshole along the length of the Zodiac, smacked him against the stern transom, jerked him over the outboard (whose rudder handle, of course, caught him square in the nuts), and pulled him into the water.
Grose eased up on the twin throttles and the Grand Banks finally slowed, then stopped some two hundred yards away and wallowed in the gentle swells. I struck out for it, side-stroking through the water. Half Pint, sputtering and muttering unintelligible sweet nothings to himself—rude imprecations about my ancestors, no doubt—followed in my wake.
* * *
Our exercise session and playtime for the day finally over, we dried off, chowed down, and settled in to do some serious head-shedding. Now, if you are a careful and retentive reader, you will recall that, some pages back, I mentioned certain ESBAM conditions under which our old friends LC Strawhouse and Dawg Dawkins were operating. I want you to think back to ESBAM One.
If you want, check the Index under ESBAM, then go and look at the section. Okay, okay—you’re lazy. Like the chief says to the dew-balled ensign, “Oh, please allow me to fill you in, sir.” (In case you didn’t realize it—the ensign never does—the chief is spelling sir here with a c and a u.)
ESBAM One is that while the bad guys want to waste me, they have to do it quietly and/or privately.
And now, gentle readers, having set the stage, allow me to bring you along with me and my thought processes as we quaffed our Coors and talked things over.
First, we’d had a real easy time shadowing our quarry all the way from Motown down to Tampa, hadn’t we? I mean, Mr. Murphy’d hardly been along for the ride. But Mr. Murphy, as we all know, is always along for the ride. Hmmm.
Coincidence? Happenstance? What do you think? Second, the Helen G. Kelley, which chugged fifteen thousand yards ahead of us, was strangely silent. No chatter on the radio, reported Grose, who’d been monitoring shortwave, long-wave, and medium-wave, plus the whole spectrum of UHF and VHF transmissions on his digitized, midgetized, police-band, aircraft-band, marine-band, weather-band, and fucking brass band radio scanner.
That, too was strange. After all, experience has shown me that sailors are a loquacious bunch, and especially when the ship-to-shore airwaves are free, they like to flap lip. But not here. Hmmm.
Coincidence? Happenstance? What do you think? Third. Think of a perfect location in which to dispose once and for all of that nettlesome, aggravating problem yclept Marcinko. I mean, purge. Get rid of. Deep six. E-liminate. Dis-a-ssemble.
Here are three choices for you to ponder: One, a busy, public interstate highway. Two, the middle of a crowded city. Three, two hundred miles out to sea, aboard an oil rig that you know well, and I don’t know at all. Hmmm.
Coincidence? Happenstance? What do you think? Yeah. Right. Me, too.
GOING INTO COMBAT HAS ALWAYS MEANT SOMETHING SPECIAL TO me. Combat is, you see, what I truly believe I was born to do—to hunt and to kill other men. But combat (just like marriage) is a state into which one should not enter lightly. The battle itself is not the thing. The battle is inhumane, chaotic, bloody—a frenzied, messy affair. But the battle is only the means. The end—winning—is what combat is all about. And so, as we sailed westward, a crepuscular moon peeking through the high clouds overhead, my mind focused on the mission ahead—and to what I’d have to do to make it successful. After all, they were out there, somewhere, setting an ambush for us—whoever they were. Their objective was to kill me.
Well, just knowing that fact gave me the advantage.
According to the current SpecWar field manual issued by SOCOM at MacDill Air Force Base—this is the bible on operations that is given to all SEAL pups and baby Blanket-heads so they will learn what the military expects of them—ambush is defined as (and I am quoting precisely to you here): “Aggressive actions, usually mounted by surprise and generally initiated from concealment, which, when approved by the proper chain of command, can be used against both moving and stationary targets.”
Have you ever heard such incredibly mealy-mouthed crap? I mean, I couldn’t make shit like this up if I tried. But this sort of spineless, obfuscatory crap, my friends, is what you get when your fucking field manual is written by a committee of pussy-ass can’t cunts, and edited by some goddamn pen-pushing bureaucrat apparatchik manager puke, to whom killing is a dirty word that might offend someone, and attack is a politically unacceptable deed performed by murderers. Am I making myself clear yet, or am I still being wishy-washy on the subject?
Y’know, friends, today’s SEALS are better trained, equipped, and educated than any SpecWarriors in history. They are, most of ’em, potentially first-rate shooters. And yet, the overall morale of today’s SEALS is at an all-time low. You know why? The reason is because they are overseen by managers, not led by warriors. Oh, they have lots of intramural sports. They have beacoup creature comforts. They go through dozens of wonderful, Outward Bound-like training cycles all over the world.
But if they ever have one beer too many, get pulled over by some wanna-be cop, and receive a DUI, they are shit-canned. If they say fuck too often in public, they are shit-canned. If they are too loud, too boisterous, and too SEAL-like, they get shit-canned. Image is the topmost word in the current crop of officers’ lexicons. Training—realistic, dangerous exercises in which SEALS can get themselves killed, has all but quitter le droit chemin—which means fallen by the ol’ wayside in the Foreign Legion.
They want to train past the edge of the envelope—to get as close to combat as possible. But their requests are denied (and those promising junior officers who ask are told that their career tracks will be jeopardized if they make any more waves). The C2S—that’s can’t cunts—in charge do not want anybody hurt. Why? Because it would screw up their chances for promotion to O-6—captain—and then selection to flag rank.
That is just plain wrong. SEALS, my friends, were created to be killers, not saints or social workers. I know this firsthand, because the mustang son of a bitch sea daddy of mine who created th
em, Roy Boehm, himself a shooter and a looter and a confirmed killer of men, told me he’d created SEALS in his own fierce, ruthless, savage Old Testament image.
So purge the bureaucratic crap you read above from your mind and let me give it to you straight. Ambush, gentle reader, is derived from the Middle French word embuschier, literally “to set in the woods.” So, when from hiding you use a huge amount of well-directed firepower over an extremely short period of time to decimate-cum-exterminate-cum-annhiliate an unsuspecting enemy force, you ambush them. In the sort of plain English I understand, you kill the motherfuckers. You kill them fast and without mercy. And when you’re finished, if there is time, you booby-trap their corpses, so that when enemy reinforcements arrive, they, too, will become your victims.
There are two general types of ambushes. The small-unit ambush can be conducted by groups as small as a single squad. Generally, the kill zone of a small-unit ambush is no more than seventy-five yards, and most of the killing is actually accomplished by a series of Claymore mines with overlapping fields of fire. Mopping up is done with CAR-15s or your assault weapon of choice.
The large-unit ambush can have a kill zone as wide as 250 yards—that’s two-and-a-half football fields of corpses if you’re good. For these sorts of ambushes, which were originally designed and implemented by Special Forces A Teams in Vietnam, using Montagnards, Nungs, or other indigenous troops, heavy machine guns augment the Claymores, and the thirty to forty ambushers can call in artillery and chopper gunships once the ambush has been initiated.
There are any number of ambush forms—actually, there are as many as there are shooters with imagination. In class, however, half a dozen variations are generally taught. There is the section linear ambush, in which you line up along a trail, road, or stream used by the enemy and concentrate firepower in a lateral, or hosing motion as they pass by. There are “T” and “Triangular” ambushes, which are effective when used against regularly traveled enemy routes. In each of these you must be careful to place security elements on your perimeters and at your six o’clock, so that the enemy does not follow Robert Roger’s rule, circle around, and hit you from your blind side.
Other ambush techniques include static vehicle ambushes, which employ roadblocks or explosives on the road to disable trucks or tracked vehicles. They were used to great advantage by the Afghan mujahideen against Soviet armored convoys. During the Gulf War, SEALS used maritime ambush techniques—in plain language, clandestine boarding followed by shooting and looting, or assaults with limpet mines—against Iraqi shipping.
Now, you, like our editor, are probably wondering why I am telling you all of this, when we were sitting in the middle of the goddamn Gulf of Mexico on a forty-two-foot Grand Banks trawler, there isn’t a Claymore or a limpet in miles, and we weren’t setting up an ambush but chugging into one. An ambush, I might add, that was to be executed atop an oil-rig platform.
And how do I know they’ll try to ambush us on the rig and not aboard Grose’s trawler?
Because it’s easier, Tadpole. To ambush us aboard the FYVM, they’d have to sneak up on us first. That’s hard to do in the open sea.
But it’s not impossible, is it? Master Marcinko-san?
No, Tadpole, nothing is impossible. But hear me out. Let me explain the basics, and you will understand. See, whether large unit or small, whether land-based, or maritime, the success of all ambushes is based on a trio of common principles.
Oh, Master Marcinko-san, I can’t find this material anywhere in the current field manual.
Of course not, Tadpole. I learned this shit by doing, not by reading. See all those scars? Now S2 and listen.
Okay—the first of these principles is intelligence. Ambushes do not just happen—they are designed, created, set up. To do this properly, you have to know where your enemy is coming from, approximately how many he will be, and how he is likely to be armed. If you know these things, a small force of ambushers will be able to decimate a large number of ambushees. Back in 1987, six of us shoot-and-looters were able to exterminate seventy-five Islamic Jihad tangos as they made their way across the Syrian border into the Bekkáa Valley near a Lebanese town appropriately named An Nabi Shit which, in Arabic, means An Nabi Shit.
We’d tracked them by satellite and were set up above the wadi they’d been using for months to go back and forth. We knew they had AKs and RPGs. Big deal—we did, too. We also had Soviet Claymores, Vietnam War-era Bouncing Betty land mines, and shaped Semtex charges. It took less than six minutes to cut the bastards into ribbons, after which we booby-trapped the bodies, and skedaddled out of Shit. And y’know the best part of all, it was the Israelis who got blamed.
Second, ambushes often take both patience and timing. In El Salvador, we taught General Juan Bustillo’s special forces rangers how to line a trail with Claymores, then dig in and wait for the FMLN tangos to make their move. At first, the rangers resisted burying themselves in camouflaged ambush positions—they were used to more conventional means of assault. Then we had to convince them not to fire the detonators and exhaust all their ammo as soon as they saw the first guerrilla wending his way up the trail. “Incorrecto,” I told them. “You have to wait until the entire enemy force is contained within your killing field—that’s when you wax the suckers.”
But you can’t wait too long. Because if you delay, and your opponent is a warrior, too, he will recognize the signs of ambush, counterattack, and kill you.
Which brings me to my third principle. Ambushes must be executed quickly and mercilessly. There must be no time for the enemy to regroup, or they will mount a counter-ambush—which could prove devastating to your small force if you have not made provision for hauling balls. I always create a back door out of which I can slip if things get hairy, and a back door “lock” (usually made of Claymores or other lethal supplies) that will make it hard for my enemy to follow me.
The most common image I use when I teach the art of the ambush is that of hammer and anvil. Your strike force is the hammer. You build your anvil using the terrain and your Claymores, and then, with your firepower and surprise, you hammer the enemy against the anvil until he is decimated. There is also, says Roy Boehm, the godfather of SEALS, a lubricant that is used during these hammer-and-anvil exercises.
That lubricant is your enemy’s blood.
Now, let’s go back to the statement I made above—the one in which I said I, not my enemy, currently held the tactical advantage. My reasoning was simple: I did not believe that any of the above conditions had been met by the bad guys. They could not take the offense and attack me on the open sea, because there was no way for them to approach my position by stealth—no matter how they tried, I would be able to defend and decimate. That left the oil rig.
Okay, let’s go over the various peregrinations. They knew I was coming—and that I would probably come by sea. But they had no idea precisely how many were in my force. Neither did they know how I would make my approach.
Yes, they controlled the location, and the terrain. Yes, the choice of weapons and tactics was theirs. But they could not pick the time of the ambush—the time depended on me. To me, that meant that no matter what they might be thinking about their tactical situation, they were the ones who’d be on the defensive, not me. It was they who would have to be constantly vigilant while I could afford to rest and bide my time. It was they who would become antsy, jittery, fretful, irritated, while I sat quietly, making plans and sipping Coors.
The bottom line? Easy. This was going to be my ambush—not theirs.
The evening and the morning of the second day, as they say in the Old Testament, was spent mostly in quiet time. Wonder plugged his computer into Grose’s cellular phone and grazed the Intelink for intel nuggets.
There wasn’t much on-line, so Wonder signed off and plugged into the Internet. We cruised the bulletin boards, checking Cyberspace for any new information we could find on the rogue militias. There was a bunch of it since we’d last looked. Most was off
-the-wall stuff—conspiracy theories about Waco, Oklahoma City, and Key West. But there was a lot of new traffic as well—messages to and from right-wing crazies and white-supremacist groups. It was a crescendo of hate mail, directed at local, state, and federal officials.
We pulled some of it down and showed it to Grose. He read it, then balled the paper up and tossed it overboard. “What assholes,” he said. “Fuckers deserve to be shot.”
Wonder came up to the flying bridge waving a sheet of paper. “Yo, Dickhead, check this out—”
I looked. He’d somehow pulled a list of all the Pajar oil platforms registered in Louisiana off the Internet.
“How the fuck—”
Wonder grinned and swiveled his head left-right-left. “It’s simple. Oil companies all have to file the locations of their rigs with the state that has jurisdiction over ’em. It’s public information, too. All you have to do is plug into a state’s utilities bulletin board, ask the right questions, and bingo.”
“Can you get precise locations of all LC’s rigs?”
“Don’t see why not—I just need to query each state on the Gulf.”
“What other information can you dredge up?”
“Don’t actually know,” Wonder admitted. “But let me see.”
The guys sacked out, worked over their weapons one more time, checked gear, and kept themselves busy. I sat in the wheelhouse with Grose, looking at charts and keeping an eye on the radar systems. I punched the ON switch of the satellite position finder that sat on the wood console next to the radio and below the radar screen, peered at the readout, and plotted the position on Grose’s chart. We were 217 miles off the coast of Mobile, Alabama, sailing in a westerly direction.
We’d identified the first of the oil rigs at 0620 that morning—a cluster of five showed up on the radar, thirty-five miles north and west of us, shrouded in the early-morning mist. Seventeen minutes later, we picked up a second cluster. Soon after that, we’d detected a third, then a fourth. I knew that between here and the Texas coast, there were hundreds more. I’d nudged Grose. He nodded in the affirmative, nudged the throttle levers, and closed the distance between us and our target from fifteen thousand yards to about nine thousand—just over five miles. He didn’t want to lose the Helen G. Kelley in a cluster of rigs.
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