RW04 - Task Force Blue

by Richard Marcinko

  SMG (submachine gun), 24–25

  snatch ops, 193

  SOAUS (Special Operations Association of the United States), 114, 117

  SOB (Small-Of-the-Back) holster, 166

  SOC (Special Operations Command), 126

  SOCOM (Special Operations Command), 219–20, 248

  Somalia, 341

  Soviet Union, 76

  Special Forces reserve units, 131

  SpecWarriors, 99, 110, 124–25, 131–33, 153, 158, 164, 248–49, 259, 261, 287, 304

  spooks, 206

  SRQ-44, 144

  S3 Systems, 205–07

  State Department, 58

  static vehicle ambush, 251

  Statue technique, 154

  stem-to-stern inspection, 239

  Stockholm syndrome, 33

  Stoner semiautomatic .308-caliber sniper rifle, 73

  Strawhouse, LC, 40, 70, 108–09, 110–13, 116, 121, 147, 202, 227, 246

  background of, 50–54

  distribution of weapons to tangos, 287–94

  meets Marcinko in Detroit, 128–36, 149–64

  murder of, 338–43

  at Rancho Mirage compound of, 297, 309–10, 318, 331–32, 335–36

  tango demands for meeting with, 18–19

  subclavian arteries, 277–79

  Sullivan, Aloysius Sean “Mugs,” 228, 234, 305, 307–08

  in countrywide sweep of tangos by local cops, 315, 318, 332–33, 345

  in Detroit, 139–41, 146, 165, 167–72, 181–82, 185–91, 199, 208–09, 212–14

  Sun Tzu, 154, 287, 338

  Sure Fire flashlight, 4

  surveillance op, 182

  SWAT unit, 10–11, 84, 122

  Sweat Hogs, 78

  Tabun, 144, 285, 317–18, 343

  Tactical Team, 122

  Tailhook scandal, 42

  Tampa, Florida, 219

  tangos, 132, 162–63, 193, 212, 215, 308, See also ADAM Group

  countrywide sweep of, 342, 344–45

  defined, 5

  female, 132–33

  in Key West hijacking, 15–34

  Tarpon City, Florida, 219

  Task Force Blue, 98–101

  terrorism, 67, 132, 214

  throat slitting, 277–78

  Time, 52

  Top Secrets, 58–59

  Tows, 287

  trap doors, 318

  *Tremblay, Doc, 73, 102–03, 107, 111–12

  in Ayn Diwar, Syria, 216–17

  in Detroit, 166–67, 172, 182, 199–202

  in Key West hijacking, 8–9, 26, 28, 29, 31–34

  in oil rig assault in Gulf of Mexico, 267–72, 286, 294

  in pursuit of the Helen G. Kelley, 241–44

  in Rancho Mirage, 296–97, 313, 316–19, 324, 329–36, 338–39, 342–43

  in Tampa, 226, 238

  triangular ambush, 251

  Trijicon night sights, 166

  TSB-12, 144

  Turkey, 215

  UDT Replacement Training, 139

  UDT (Underwater Demolition Teams)/SEAL, 137, 139

  UGS (Unmanned Ground Sensor), 206

  United States, 214

  UNODIR (UNless Otherwise DIRected), 46, 84, 158, 289

  U.S. Government Printing Office, 76

  USA Today, 54

  USP .45-caliber pistol, 3, 24, 29–30

  UT/RUS (Unconventional Taskings/Risks: United States), 6, 38–41, 47, 59, 84

  vehicle surveillance, 182–84

  VEPCO, 111

  Vietnam, 193, 250

  Vietnamese cuisine, 101–04

  violent fighting, 123

  vision principles, 195

  Waco, Texas fiasco, 292, 306

  Walker, Johnny, 42

  Walther PPK/S, 180

  war, 193

  Warrior’s Code, 328

  Washington, Rockne, 67

  Washington Navy Yard, 47, 59, 165–66, 212

  Washington Post, 51

  Waterproof tactical radio, 4, 23

  Way of the Warrior, 273

  West Wing One, 302

  *Whitehead, Wendell “Windy,” 41–42

  White House, 38, 58, 158–60, 302, 344

  White House chief of staff, 302

  Wilson, Sam, 304

  wire taps, 47

  *Wonder, Stevie, 103, 108–09, 111–13, 145–46, 327

  in Detroit, 165–69, 172, 182, 185–89, 190–92, 194–95, 196–97, 207, 208

  in Key West hijacking, 8, 22–27, 31–32

  in oil rig assault in Gulf of Mexico, 266, 269–72, 274–87, 290–95

  in pursuit of the Helen G. Kelley, 241–42, 246, 255, 258

  in Rancho Mirage, 297, 299, 303–08, 311, 313, 315, 318–23, 330–33, 342, 344

  role in breaking and entering FBI headquarters, 54–63, 69–72

  in Tampa, 221–27, 238–39

  World Trade Center bombing, 162

  written orders, 84–85

  Ybor City, Florida, 219

  Ypsilanti National Guard, 141–46

  Zodiacs, 231, 234, 238, 262

  Zulu Gangsta Princes, 67, 89, 112, 190–94, 198, 213

  POCKET BOOKS

  PROUDLY PRESENTS

  ROGUE WARRIOR: DESIGNATION GOLD

  Richard Marcinko

  and John Weisman

  Coming Soon

  in Hardcover

  from Pocket Books

  The following is a preview of Rogue Warrior: Designation Gold …

  Boris, looking like your everyday Russkie alien in his third-generation night-vision driving glasses, slowed the blacked-out Zhiguli to about thirty kliks an hour as we eased into the gentle curve.

  Misha, who had a similar pair strapped around the northern hemisphere of his ugly Ukrainian puss, raised his left arm like a proper jumpmaster. He half-swiveled his bull neck, licked his thick, droopy mustache, and stage-growled, “Ready, Dicky,” out of the corner of his mouth.

  He hadn’t needed to say anything. Even sans night-vision equipment, I could make out the rear of the old dacha through the windshield—a cedar-clad shadow among shadows, its crude shingle roof slightly concave in the cloud-obscured last-quarter moonlight, sitting squatly atop a low ridge a hundred or so yards west of the single lane, north-south gravel service road on which we were driving.

  Our car pulled abreast of the first gate, moving south, its tires scrunching on the packed crushed rock roadbed as Boris decelerated slightly. So far as I could see, there were no lights on inside the dacha. That was promising news—maybe they were all asleep, or drunk, or both. Less work for mother. That, of course, is as in mother … fucker.

  We passed even with the second gate. That was my cue. As the rough-hewn wood fence flashed by I began counting the telephone-pole-sized fenceposts, slapped Boris on the padded shoulder of his distressed black leather jacket, threw Misha the bird, put my shoulder against the rear left-hand door, cracked it open, and—twenty-seven posts, twenty-eight posts, twenty-nine posts, thirty—rolled out into the cool September night, at precisely the spot I’d circled on the high-resolution aerial surveillance photo Misha had taken less than eight hours ago from a borrowed Russian Navy Kamov “Hokum” chopper.

  But as I know from having traveled so many miles with Mr. Murphy of Murphy’s Law as a constant (and uninvited) companion, while every picture tells a story, it doesn’t necessarily tell the right story. No one, for example, had bothered to notify a certain stolid, solid, thick, and wholly unforgiving birch tree that grew uncomfortably close to the side of the road that I was coming and perhaps it should get out of the way. Nor was I aware of the tree’s precise location. So, with the first few bars of Ray Charles’s rendition of “Georgia on My Mind” playing in my brain, I tucked and rolled (expertly, I might add with justifiable pride), and was savoring this clandestine tactical infiltration triumph—even as my big, wide Slovak snout made forceful, emphatic, and painfully intense contact with the rough bark and dense wood of our aforementioned tree.

  My frien
ds, let me not go hyperbolic on you here— but geezus, that smarts. Of course, I didn’t have time to think about discomfort right then. The impact skewed my perfect tuck-and-roll, I careened to starboard and began to tumble uncontrollably. In the process, my right calf was snagged by a thicket of blackberry bushes. In case you didn’t know, the thorns on blackberry bushes are just as wire-lethal as razor or barbed when you roll into ’em at fifteen-or-so miles per hour.

  Okay okay, so shredded, faded jeans are all the vogue these days. But I ain’t no vogue rogue, bub— I like my jeans the old-fashioned way: dark indigo and in one piece. In any case, having completed a passable Br’er-Rabbit-tossed-through-the-briar-patch imitation, I spun along the shallow ditch that ran alongside the road, chipped a front tooth on something hard, slammed the point of my elbow against something else hard, bounced through another thicket of thorns into the woods, and finally came to a stop in the middle of what I hoped wasn’t a clump of poison anything.

  I lay there listening to my heart, which was pounding out a reasonable simulation of the el-oh-en-gee version of In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida—played at 78 RPM (or 160 pulse-beats a minute, take your pick), and took half a dozen d-e-e-p breaths.

  Now, those of you who already know me understand that I savor pain. I appreciate pain because it tells me that I am still alive. As that other old Frog Rogue, Descartes, might have said, “I hurt— therefore I am.”

  But friends, this kind of pain was fucking ridiculous. Talk about too much of a good thing. You want specifics? Okay, let me give you a little geography lesson. I currently resembled either a fucking rag-doll SEAL or a bowline knot, because my legs—still wrapped haphazardly in strands of blackberry thorns—were going east, while the rest of me was twisted in a more or less northwesterly direction. Blood from my newly mashed nose coursed southward into my mustache. Below the Equator of my tactical nylon belt, my nuts throbbed ka-boom, ka-boom, as tender as if they’d been flagrantly fondled by the fingers of a fucking feminist bodybuilder. Still farther south, there was more blood on my right leg— oozing down into the ankle-high Adidas GSG-9 tactical boot, whose guaranteed unbreakable lace had somehow disintegrated in the last thirty seconds or so.

  I untangled and dethorned myself, groaned, rolled onto my side, checked for broken body parts, and received some slight measure of welcome news as I pawed, probed, and poked my abused corpus. Dings there were aplenty. My ankle was going to be tender for a week. My nose—well, let’s just say I never had a pretty nose to begin with, I don’t have much time to smell da flowers, and my nostrils seem to get wider and flatter with age. My right knee was sore, my left elbow ached, and there was, I discovered, a knot the size of a chestnut blooming on my forehead, just above my Bolle SWAT goggles. But there was nothing broken—and like they always say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

  With nothing to fix I did a quick equipment check. The suppressed Heckler & Koch 9mm MP5-PDW submachine gun in the padded scabbard on my back had survived its rough landing—and mine. I eased it out, loaded a magazine, and—quietly as I could—let the bolt slip forward.

  Yes, I know that the good people at HK’s International Training Division recommend slapping the bolt down and forward avec panache, thus letting it slam into place with a satisfying ker-raacchhet! But what you can do on the range in Virginia, when you don’t give a rusty F-word who hears you lock and load, you can’t always do out here in the field, where sound counts.

  I unbuttoned my tactical jacket and adjusted the lightweight bulletproof vest I wore underneath. Then I inventoried the jacket pockets. The contents were all present and accounted for. I pulled a coil of black parachute line from my left breast pocket, cut thirty-six inches from it with a Spyderco folder, replaced the broken lace in my right boot and fastened it as tightly as I could to give me some extra support for my bruised ankle.

  I ran my hand along the butt of the USP 9mm pistol in its tactical thigh holster to ensure that neither it nor the mag had come loose during my roller-coaster descent. Next, I made sure I still had the two spare fifteen-round magazines I’d stowed in horizontal mag-sheaths on my belt. They were there—filled with the same SEAL Team Six formula hand-loaded 147-grain Hornady XTP bullets in a Plus-Plus-P configuration that have more stopping power than a forty-five caliber Silvertip hollowpoint. I rubbed my face and the backs of my hands to respread the dark camouflage cream. I retied the tiger-stripe “Do” rag around my head, the better to keep my French braid in place. Finally, my equipment check completed, it was time to move on out.

  I checked the black nonreflective Timex on my left wrist. There were nineteen minutes until OMON hit the front gate. I was six minutes behind the OPSKED—that’s SEALspeak for operational schedule—I kept in my head. But now was no time to rush. So I lay in the swale by the side of the road and waited, listening for anything untoward. My breathing slowed. My pulse did, too. I held my breath and opened my mouth slightly to help amplify the sounds in my ears.

  It was all quiet—only night sounds. That’s when you know it’s okay to move. Because when you can hear a chirp here, a falling something-or-other there, things are normal. When it’s all quiet, something is always wrong. Because the critters know better than you when it’s safe. With the forest sounding like a forest, it was time to go.

  Cautiously, I rolled to my right, came up into a low crouch, and crabbed across the road, the sharp gravel cutting into my hands and knees as I edged forward. It was slow going. At night, you can’t be quick. Since sight is all but lost, you have to rely on sound. So you have to take it low and slow. You move. You stop. You scan. You listen. That’s how you do it—if you want to stay alive. The technique had worked for me all over the world and I wasn’t about to rush things now just because I was a little behind schedule.

  My progress was counted in inches, not feet. And I was glad of it—because, as my night vision grew stronger, I could make out the sentries as they leaned against trees, perhaps thirty-five or forty yards from my position. There were three—no, four—no, five— of them.

  Doubly cautious now, I made my way across the road and up to the fence. It was made of rough wood boards, stained or painted black or dark brown. What I hadn’t seen in the darkness (nor picked up on the surveillance photo) was the heavy wire mesh affixed behind it. I thought about the pair of Navy-issue wirecutters sitting in their ballistic nylon tactical sheath that I’d left back in Moscow, rolled my eyes skyward, and cursed myself in six languages. My old shipmate Doc Tremblay is right: sometimes I do have fartbeans for brains.

  I did a quick inventory—and came up empty. Oh, sure, I could go over the top. The fence was only about six feet high. But I’d make a hell of a silhouette if I clambered athwart it. It would be like advertising. I rolled onto my back. Something hard prodded my kidneys as I did. I reached behind me—and felt the Gerber Multi-Plier that I habitually wore on my belt. I was so used to having it there that I’d forgotten about it. The Multi-Plier is a handy little gizmo. It’s got three screwdriver bits, a knife, a small file—even a can opener. Best of all, there are all-purpose pliers— with a tiny wire cutter placed just below the jaws.

  I pulled the tool out and quietly extended the plier head, slipped the cutters over the first strand of wire, and squeezed.

  One of the facts you should understand about the Multi-Plier is that while it is a handy all-purpose tool, it was not designed as a wirecutter. Its handles are small and narrow and hollow—the better to accommodate all those tools. And hence, they leave little room for error, especially if you have size-ten hands with size-twelve fingers, a genetic legacy from my thick-fingered, coal-mining forbears in Lansford, Pennsylvania. What I’m trying to tell you, my friends, is that every time I applied pressure to the jaws, the handles bit nastily into my hands.

  Yes, I was carrying gloves. No, I wasn’t wearing them. Why? Because they were leather gloves. Thick-as-your-tongue, regulation, by-the-book Russian Army leather gloves. There is a Naval Special Warfare technical term to describe such gloves
. Get out your pencils so you can write it down. The term is: useless.

  Have I told you about my special relationship with pain? Then you must realize that I was feeling very much alive by the time I cut a hole large enough for me to squeeze myself through. I was now twelve minutes behind schedule. But I was making progress.

  Now, you folks out there are probably asking WTF right now, right? Like what the hell is Dickie Marcinko, the old Rogue Warrior, radio handle Silver Bullet, doing outside a dacha forty-seven kliks west of Moscow in the first place. And how come he’s so friendly with a couple of Russkies named Boris Makarov and Misha Stroyev.

  Okay, before I head across the road to sneak & peek, snoop & poop, and then (I hope I hope I hope) commit the sort of murder & mayhem that gives me both professional satisfaction and emotional release, lemme give you a quick sit-rep.

  Our story begins three weeks ago, when my old friend and shipmate Paul Mahon was assassinated. Paul is—was—a one-star—that’s rear admiral (lower half)—submariner, an Annapolis grad (one of the few I’ve ever really liked and respected) who’d been assigned to Moscow as the defense attache. Now, I just told you that Paul was my shipmate. That is not literally true. By which I mean, Paul and I never served together in a ship of the line. But shipmatedom is a metaphysical state as well as a physical condition—it speaks of sharing risks, working together as a team, and achieving goals. In this particular case, our shipmate relationship goes back to the days when we were a couple of anonymous 0-4s—lieutenant commanders—working in the bowels of the Pentagon.

  That was when Paul and I were charged by our respective bosses, a pair of E-ring admirals (those are admirals with offices on the Pentagon’s E-ring, where the chief of naval operations, among others, has his 4-rms-riv-vu office suite) with one of the most difficult, sensitive, hazardous, and covert missions the U.S. Navy has ever devised. To wit: stealing the U.S. Army mascot, a mannequin dressed as a Special Forces master sergeant, from the grand foyer of the Pentagon’s Mall entrance the week before the Army-Navy football game.

  Anyhow, that escapade (which succeeded, I must add), made us friends, and we’ve stayed in touch over the years. Paul was one of the few officers who wrote me during my year in prison. In fact, not three weeks after my release from Petersburg Federal, when I was as depressed as I’ve ever been, Paul called to ask if I’d be willing to be his newborn son’s godfather. He didn’t have to do that—there were more than enough Mahon relatives around for the job. But he gave it to me because he thought I needed somebody to love and dote upon—which was absolutely correct. Not so very long ago he gave me a timely heads-up when the Secretary of the Navy tried to get me indicted for murder.