Echo Platoon (26 page)

I called the U.S. embassy for a sit-rep. Yes, I know I am persona non grata there. But I didn’t call the RSO, or
the ambassador’s office, or even Ashley. I called the gunny at the Marine Security Detail’s Post Number One, identified myself, and asked if there was anything he knew about the explosion we’d both just heard.

There was a slight pause as the name recognition hit. Then, because he was a Marine gunny, and he was more concerned about solving problems than he was about playing politics, he told me the answer was no, sir. Then he said, “Wait just a second, please, sir,” and put me on hold. Two minutes later he came back on the line and said that according to his scanner, there had just been an incident involving an Israeli diplomat, and he had to go right now, because his boss, the detail’s master gunnery sergeant, was about to ratchet the embassy’s security profile up one notch, to Threatcon Charlie.

I’d just dropped the receiver on the cradle when it rang again. “Marcinko.”

“Dick, it’s Ashley.”

“What’s up.”

“Are you okay?”

“Sure. Why?”

“Your friend—”

I had only one friend in Baku, and it wasn’t Steve Sarkesian. “Avi.”

“Avi. I’ve just received a report that says his car was ambushed as it left his flat on the way to the Israeli embassy.”

Oh, that was not good news. “Did they get him?”

“We don’t know. It’s pretty crazy out there. The Israeli embassy’s buttoning up, and so are we.”

“What’s the location of the bombing?”

She told me. I hung up before she could say anything else, grabbed a pistol and a flak vest, and launched toward the door.

I had it open when I realized I still had eleven pages to fax.

There are times when doing your duty is painful—and this was one of them. But life is made up of priorities, and getting my material to the Chairman took precedence over everything else.

I finished transmitting, and was securing the documents in the lockbox when the phone rang again. I reached out and grabbed the receiver.

“Dick—this is Avi.”

I can tell you, my friends, that I have seldom, in a life of War, destruction, and death, been happier to hear a voice. “Avi, what happened? They said—”

“I’m okay, I’m okay” his voice came back shaken but steady. “But my driver is dead and Mikki needs medical attention. Needs it badly.”

Oh, fuck, oh, shit, oh Goddammit. “What happened?”

“Some
b’nai zonim
62
put explosives in a car half a block down from our flat. We live on Abbas Sikhat Street, which runs one way, so we can’t make a turn until we come to the Azadiyg Prospekt. That’s the only part of the route to the embassy I can’t vary. They detonated as we drove up to the intersection. There’s a big wall right there on the left side of the street—some big corporate estate—and the wall amplified the blast.”

He took a deep breath. “They knew what they were doing, Dick. It was as good an op as we ever ran in Lebanon against Hezb’allah.” The Israeli gulped for
more air. “But Mikki was with me this morning—she wanted to buy groceries at the embassy commissary, and she was sitting on the left side of the car.” He paused. “That was the side that took the brunt of the blast.” His voice started to waver. “She’s not in good shape, Dick. Not in good shape at all.”

“What can I do? Where do you need me to be?”

He heaved a huge sigh, then started talking in rapid-fire bursts. “Okay, I need you to keep going on what we’ve discussed between us. The . . . vatchamacallit . . . thing down south. I am convinced what happened today and last night are interrelated. You remember last night? You know what I’m speaking about?”

He was referring to what I’d done at the Sirzhik Foundation. “I do, Avi, I do—take it easy.”

“I never got the materials, Dick. You keep them until I get back.” He stopped as suddenly as if he’d been switched off, and I heard him consciously trying to wrestle himself under control. When he’d calmed himself, he breathed deeply, then continued: “Look, there’s an El Al flight to Tel Aviv in two hours, and if the damn
fürshtunken
doctor who’s working on her manages to get her stabilized by then, we’ll be on it. I’ll commandeer first class and use it as a sick bay. Damn it, Dick, twenty-eight years without a scratch, and now this. This . . . This . . .” The energy drained from him, and suddenly he became exhausted. Drained. Empty.

Not surprising. He was in shock and running on adrenaline, and his adrenaline had just stopped pumping. Now it was as if he could barely summon the power to whisper. “Dick, she needs the kind of attention she can only get at home. I have to take her home. Have to take her home.”

There are times when words won’t do. This was one of ’em. I thought about what I’d just been thinking about collateral damage, and suddenly realized there are two sides to that coin: the sending side, on which I usually find myself, and the receiving side, which is where I was now. It is not fun to be on the receiving side. And that is a colossal understatement. “Avi—”

“I know, Dick,” he said, cutting me off. “I know. B’bye, Dick, b’bye. Keep me vatchamacallit, up-to-date. You have the number in Herzliyya.” And then the phone went dead.

Now, callous as it may appear, I didn’t sit around and daydream about all the good times I’d had with Avi and Mikki Ben Gal. Instead, I went to work with the kind of vengeance-driven energy that I can summon up in times of stress. I put together lists containing the essential elements of information our covert strikes would need; I did target assessments. I pored over the satellite pictures that Pepperman had faxed me on the secure fax. I calculated distances using a Magellan GPS unit and the file of Defense Mapping Agency aeronautic maps I carry with me. And I used a magnifying glass to examine the minute details of the blueprints of the place we’d be going, blueprints Jim Wink had dug out of the CIA’s archives and faxed to me.

And fourteen hours later, give or take a few minutes, I’d come up with what I thought was an effective and reasonably Murphy-resistant mission profile. I handed my pages over to Boomerang, Duck Foot, Nod, and Rotten Randy for their input, because in that quartet of senior noncoms lies decades of real-world
combat experience. I watched as they attacked my op-plan, trying to poke holes in it, find the weaknesses, and make it better and more deadly. I opened the minibar, drank a single beer, then walked into the bedroom, lay down atop the bedcovers, and closed my eyes for a short combat nap.

I was roused by the phone
bring-bringing
next to my left ear. I rubbed at my eyes, and looked at the luminescent dial on my watch. 0412. I’d been asleep for six and a half hours. The loud music coming from the suite’s living room told me that my senior noncoms were still working on the op-plan.

I rolled over and grabbed the receiver. “Marcinko.” I heard my voice reverbing on the line, as if I were in an echo chamber.

“Dick, this is Avi, can you hear me?”

I could—in fact I told him there were about half a dozen of him. “How’s Mikki.”

He got straight to the point. “She died two hours ago, Dick. There was nothing anybody could do.”

I started to say something, but Avi cut me off. “Look,” he said, “I know how you feel, and that is great comfort to me right now. But we have to put her in the ground before sundown tonight, and then I am here for thirty days of mourning.”

“I’ll be on a plane to be with you even if I have to fly the fucking thing myself, Avi.”

“No,” he said. “You stay where you are. You do the work you began. That is most critical. I’ll take care of the sons of bitches who killed her. I can handle that. I know who they are, and I will deal with them.”

“Dammit, Avi—”

“Do your job, Dick,” he said. “You finish your work—I’ll finish mine,” he said. And then he hung up.

I sat on the edge of the bed, staring blankly at the window for I don’t know how long. I have known Miriam Ben Gal for almost two decades now. I watched her children grow up, marry, and have their own kids. I have fallen asleep on the couch in her home and awakened, covered in a hand-knit comforter that she laid over me. We have laughed together. And now some anonymous tango had detonated a car filled with high explosive and ended her life.

Except, the TIQ wasn’t anonymous at all, so far as I was concerned. I’d seen the homicidal look on Steve Sarkesian’s face as Mikki and Avi and Ashley and I left the Sirzhik Foundation reception. I knew I’d provoked him. And I knew, deep in my soul, that no matter what his alibi might be, he’d uttered the words that had set the plan for this . . . incident in motion. Whether he’d said them to Ali Sherafi, or Oleg Lapinov, or another of his TOCs, none of that mattered. All I knew was he’d given a command that had left Miriam Ben Gal dead.

And so, despite what Avi had said, his name went onto the execution list I carry in my head.

But, for the moment, that was all. One of the critical elements of Warriordom is carrying on. If your swim buddy gets killed, you carry on. You do not sit about and mope, or snivel, or get all touchie-feelie and weepy. You take your revenge for his death out on your enemies. You kill them. And the more of them you kill, the more you avenge your swim buddy’s Warrior spirit. Killing is what he would do for you. Killing is what Avi wanted me to do for him. And so, killing is what would happen. The white heat of my rage would radiate toward my enemies, the scum who’d murdered Mikki Ben Gal. I WOULD NOT FAIL: I would kill them all.

W
E SLIPPED OUT OF
B
AKU AT
Z
ERO
D
ARK
H
UNDRED
, using Araz’s wheezing trucks to hide our presence. I’d waited all day to hear General Crocker’s reaction to my messages, and get new instructions. But I received not a word from him—nothing. I tried his private number, but was told by some officious-sounding aide that he was in meetings and could not be interrupted. By midafternoon I began to feel that I was getting the runaround. And so, shortly before we pulled out, I sent him an UNODIR message, explaining in terse language that I was going to reconnoiter a possible tango-staging area that presented a clear and present threat to me and my men. I explained that the operation would take between two and three days. I closed by letting him know it would be impossible to get hold of us, but that I would make contact as soon as I got back, so he could tell me how he wanted me to deal with the materials I’d sent.

As I went out the door, there were five messages from Ashley Evans, all marked “urgent,” sitting shredded in the wastebasket. I hadn’t returned her calls. I didn’t want her to know what we were doing, and didn’t want to have to lie. The less she knew
about what I was up to, the better it would be for her career.

We were able to travel light because Boomerang and Nod had already overseen the prepositioning of our equipment in a dense, ten-acre patch of thorny overgrowth convenient to the highway, on the Azeri side of the Iranian border. The border itself was fortified. There were both passive and active sensors, and while sensors can be penetrated, we’d take the path of least resistance and do the infil by water. My guys had been teaching Araz’s shooters the basics of waterborne operations, and so two RIBs lay beached on the oily sand, three kliks north of the Azeri port of Astara.

Thanks to the surveillance pictures that Pepperman provided, and the blueprints of the old CIA listening post I’d received from Jim Wink, I’d been able to construct the following mission plan.

     • We’d use the RIBs to take us around Astara. Five kliks south of the town, we’d make our way ashore just south of a line of tall electrical towers. Pick and Butch would then exfil and make their way back to the Azeri side of the border, where they’d wait at a little roadhouse run by a friendly Azeri named Mahmoud on the outskirts of the seaside town of Shakhagach. We’d discovered the place during our training sessions with Araz and it had become our unofficial living room. We provided Mahmoud with copious amounts of American greenbacks, and Mahmoud provided us with plates of kebab and pilaf, cases of cold beer, gallons of hot coffee,
and a couple of cots where we could grab combat naps.

     • Meanwhile, the fourteen-man strike force would move inland through the thick scrub on the dunes, then climb from sea level up, making our way parallel to a winding stream, into the hills the Iranians called the Kuhe Asbinasi.

     • We’d set up a covert observation post before daylight, and watch the bad guys all day. We’d count them, make note of their activities, check their weaponry, and learn their behavior patterns.

     • Then when it got dark, we’d slip inside the camp, cut their throats, fingerprint and photograph ’em so we could trace their identities, grab all the intel we could carry, and set explosive charges to vaporize the place. Then I’d call up the boats to come across the border, and we’d exfil down the foothills a lot more quickly than we’d made it up ’em, extract off the beach before sunrise, and return to Baku just in time for a long, hot shower, and a hearty Cajun breakfast at the hotel restaurant.

I was somewhat uneasy about running this mission in two stages, with that fourteen-hour hole-up during the daylight hours. I don’t like stop-and-go ops. I believe that operations should flow, like a single knockout punch. One single, powerful, decisive, kinetic motion from start to finish. But here I had no choice. The old CIA station was eighteen kliks inland—just under eleven miles—and all of it was uphill, through some of the roughest landscape God (and/or Allah) had ever created. And so, I’d built a fair amount of
Murphy time into the op-plan, and my senior guys had seconded the opinion, because they knew we’d need every second we could get.

The reason you want your senior noncoms to work on your op-plan is because most of ’em, if they’re worth anything, have BTDT many more times than any wet-behind-the-balls junior officer. All of my senior chiefs have been blooded in battle. And there isn’t a terrain on which they haven’t fought. So they looked at the maps, and pored over the surveillance pictures, and understood immediately that the old listening post sat at an altitude of eighteen hundred feet, in a two-hundred-by-two-hundred-yard earthen pocket that had been bulldozed clear of boulders. They saw the camp was shielded to the west by a ridge that climbed as high as three thousand feet in some places. They knew that to the north lay a series of jagged, three-hundred-foot cliffs that would make an approach from that direction much too time-consuming, given the operational constraints and the amount of gear we’d be carrying.