Echo Platoon (7 page)

I secured the ribbon charge to the roof using short pieces of duct tape. Then I inserted one of the pencil primers through the lead sheath into the PETN explosive inside, attached a six-foot length of electrical wire to the primer, then ran the wire to the pocket detonator I’d been carrying all night.

I took the big, black plastic garbage bag I’d been carrying and carefully laid it atop the shaped charge. When it was exactly where I thought it should be, my eyes told Boomerang to turn the water on.

He put the hose nozzle in the garbage bag, and twisted the tip gently. We watched as the bag filled with water. I hoped that the fucking thing would hold and not burst under the weight and pressure, because I didn’t have a second fucking bag. There was GNBN.
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The GN was that I didn’t need much water—about four inches would do it. I watched as the bag expanded as it filled and caught the BN, which was that there were a couple of tiny leaks, and I didn’t want ’em expanding. But I had to wait until the water-filled bag covered the entire outline of the shaped charge I’d taped to the roof. As soon as it did, I drew my finger across my neck, and Boomerang shut the water off.

Show Time. I hand-signaled Randy, Nigel, and Boomerang, then pressed the transmit button on my radio. “Hit on my signal.”

A chorus of
tsk-tsks
told me everyone else had gotten
the message. I put two fingers to my eyes, and tightened the straps to my night-vision goggles, which would allow me to see in the darkened unit below. The goggles in place, I watched as my phosphorescent shooters did the same. I flipped the safety off my MP5, double-checked to ensure I had a mag in place. I watched as Boomerang, Randy, and Nigel mimicked my actions. When they were locked and loaded, I extracted a DefTec distraction device from its pouch on my chest, pulled the pin, and held the spoon firmly in place with my size-Rogue paw. With my eyes, hands, and elbows I made the assignments. Randy and Nigel would go toward the front door; Boomerang and I would go toward the back door.

Time to do the dirty deed. I gave my men a wide-grinned nod and a big, fat finger, just as if we were about to launch ourselves off the greasy deck of a C-130 at twenty-five thousand feet.

Nigel’s raised middle finger told me I was number one with him too. Boomerang and Randy mimicked the nasty “ready to go” signal. And so, with nothing left to do except ACT, I twisted the handle of the detonator.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, what I’d just done was build an IED
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roughly patterned after what the late Arleigh McRae, that genius explosives expert from the Los Angeles Police Department, used to call his Arleigh-gram. He designed the fucking thing using an inner tube and flexible charge to blow holes in the roofs of crack houses, so his SWAT officers could literally drop in on drug dealers.

Well, tonight I didn’t have any fucking inner tubes handy—but let me tell you that the goddam garbage bag had done its job. A clean, manhole-cover-size hole had been blown in the roof of the modular structure. And I didn’t waste a millisecond of time. I tossed the flashbang into the hole, then dove through myself—just as the fucking thing exploded.

DefTec No. 25 distraction devices explode at 188 decibels, with a flash factor of just under two million lumens. To put it in nontechnical terms for you, they are FUCKING LOUD and FUCKING BRIGHT. Which is as it should be, because they have been designed to distract bad guys in life-and-death situations.

There is a downside, however. It is this: if you, the hostage rescue guy, are too close to the fucking thing when it goes off, you end up almost as distracted as the tango you’re trying to throw off balance. That is why we train as follows:

    • Step One. Gently toss the flashbang into the center, or toward the far side, of the space you want to occupy. DO NOT simply drop it in the doorway.

     • Step Two. AFTER IT EXPLODES, make entry.

Tonight, for reasons that will go unexplained right now, I forgot the two basic rules of flashbangery outlined above.

The DefTec No. 25 has a one-point-five-second fuse. But I was so wrapped up with getting me and my guys down into the unit below and swarming the nasties, that I didn’t toss it in at an angle, and I didn’t wait until it went off to make entry.

Not me. Not Dickie. Not tonight. I simply dropped
the fucking thing down the hole, then jumped after it into the darkness below. Well, not right quite. I guess I waited about seven-eighths of a second to make my descent. Because the fucking flashbang went off in all its 1.8 million candlepower and 188 decibel glory as I was about four feet off the deck, in midair, falling directly atop the goddam thing.

The concussion blew me off course by about six feet. My umpteenth generation, state-of-the-art lightweight, all-season, wide-angle night-vision goggles skewed, dropped, and fell away on their retaining lanyard, I crashed into a wall, tumbled to the deck, and landed in a goddam heap, my right leg wrapped behind my shoulder like some fucking diagram in a book of esoteric Tantric positions, blinded and deafened by my own Roguish hand. All I saw were spots. All I heard was ringing.

Which, of course, is when one of the tangos decided that I was having too much fun and it was his job to add a note of solemnity to my evening’s labors.

I didn’t hear the shots (I was still too deafened), but I was finally able to pick out the muzzle flash of whatever the fuck he was shooting at me through the green and white spots in front of my eyes. Let me say that I am not overly fond of CQC, or close-quarters combat. It is dangerous and precarious work. If you are careless, you, the hostages, and your own men will die. But as the SpecWar commandment dictates, I didn’t have to like it—I just had to fucking do it. In CQC, you neutralize the most immediate threat first. In my case, that would be the aforementioned asshole, who was shooting at me from a distance of less than three yards. I rolled right, kept going (you NEVER want to stop moving in situations like this one), jarred my leg loose from behind my
neck, and wasted no time trying to sight-acquire-return-the-fire in the direction of the muzzle flashes.
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Off to my left, another DefTec exploded, its concussion literally lifting me off the deck. By luck, I averted my eyes as it went off and didn’t get caught by the flash. My target wasn’t so lucky. The fucking thing caught him unaware. He whirled—I saw the silhouette as he turned—and I was able to stitch him with three two-round bursts. He went down.

I crawled over to him and made sure he was who I thought he was. Then I finished him off with a pair of quick shots to the head.

You say that sounds brutal? Fuck you—I didn’t want him coming back to haunt me once I thought I’d finished with him.

Millisecond by millisecond I was regaining my faculties. I set my goggles back where they belonged, pulled the night vision’s straps around my head, and yanked ’em tight. Now I could see. I started yelling for the hostages to get down-down-down. You don’t want them popping their heads up and getting shot.

Behind me, Randy and Nigel had begun to clear the great room. Their firing was suppressed. But I could hear ’em shouting,
“Get down get down get down.”

By the time Boomerang and I linked up and galumphed toward the short, L-shaped corridor leading to the eight bunk rooms and the back doorway, Nigel had shouted, “Clear-clear-clear!” on the radio and I knew the great room was secure.

No time to waste. I kicked the door in. Or tried to. It was a hollow door, remember? So I kicked—and buried my right leg, up to the knee, in eighth-inch plywood.

Fuck. Shit. Doom on Dickie. To hell with it—I just punched through the fucking door, ripped it off its hinges, and shook it loose. Not an instant to spare, I cut the pie of the short side of the L, swung my MP5 up, and—motherfucker—two threats hunkered at twelve o’clock, back to back in the six-foot-long, three-foot-wide corridor.

The closest had a machine pistol with a tactical flashlight on its forearm. He screamed, jumped up, and turned the light on me.

The cockbreath would have blinded me if I hadn’t been wearing my night vision. But this generation of NV irises down fifty times faster than the human eye can.
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He was obviously surprised that I didn’t freeze
like a jacklighted deer—and so, he was the one who fucking froze.

April fool, motherfucker. Before he could do it to me, I did it to him. I caught him with a two-round burst and he fell back, toward his partner in crime. I charged over the sonofabitch, leaving Boomerang to head-shoot him, and rough-and-tumbled the second tango, whose attention had been turned toward the commotion in the back hallway (that’s where Duck Foot and Nod had breached the door and started tossing flashbangs down the hall).

I got some good purchase on the rugged floor and tackled tango two as he spun around, catching him with my shoulder and knocking the muzzle of his AK-74 away from me. That didn’t stop the asshole from pulling the trigger, however—letting loose a full mag (or so it seemed) of damn loud and damn lethal 5.45-×-39mm steel-core bullets about three inches from my right ear. They punched through the ceiling like the proverbial HKTB.
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T2 decided I was much too close for his safety and comfort. He slipped out of my grasp while trying to rake my face with the front sight of his AK. I blocked the stroke with my left hand, slapped the muzzle down, reversed, caught him with a forearm to the side of the head, and rocked him sideways.

I’ve got to say he was a persistent little motherfucker. He lost his grip on the AK, but with both hands free, he launched himself at me and managed to knock my night vision off. That’s all right, asshole—I can fight in Braille if I have to. I caught his
hands in mine, wrapped him up, bear-hugged him, took his feet off the ground, and using him like a battering ram, I took us both through the fucking lightweight wall.

We crashed—him on the bottom—into one of the heads. The impact knocked a fucking sink off the wall and it went smashing onto the floor, severing the pipe and showering both me and Mr. T2 with water. Even sans lights, I was able to catch a faint glimpse of the room in the ambient light of the flashbangs my guys were throwing—pissers and shitters to my left, showers to the right. Damn—the disinfectant reeked even more than the cordite. But frankly, there was no time at all to admire either the decor, or the smell.

Why? Because T2 broke contact, coiled back, and caught me upside the head with a roundhouse kick. The blow broke the lanyard on my NVGs and sent ’em flying—we’d see how shockproof they really were later. I staggered back, hit the wall, and bounced off, back toward the motherfucker. He tried the kick routine again, but I caught his foot, twisted it until he screamed, then shifted north and popped him twice in the knee, hyperextending it. He must have realized he was in trouble, because he tried to get away. But he couldn’t. Because by now I had the little
sik
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by the straps on his bulletproof vest, and he wasn’t going anywhere.

He was a wiry little asshole and he’d been eating garlic and
fül
beans and who knows what else, because when I kneed him in the balls just to show how much I cared, he let go a fart so potent that it had
to have been on the UNSCOM
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CW warning list. We’re talking maggot-gagging lethal green cloud here, folks. It was bad enough that even
moi,
the puke-snorting, snot-eating Rogue geek, got knocked ass over teakettle from the stench.

But here’s the difference between Warriors and wannabes: Warriors keep going no matter how bad it gets. And so, I took a big deep gulp o’ stink, choked the cloud down, and body-dropped T2 onto the floor.

The scream he emitted told me I’d hurt the sumbitch. I jumped on top of him—and discovered I’d dumped him atop the sink we’d broken off the wall. Less work for me. But like I said he was a wiry asshole—and he fought back like a fucking dervish even though he was hurt. He never stopped. He bit my arm. He raked my face. He tried to claw my eyes out. I finally pulled a hand free and hammered him in the nose—which is harder to accomplish than you might think, given all the equipment I was wearing, not to mention the fact that my MP5 was suspended around my neck, and kept getting in the way as I tried my best to kill the tango.

He snorted blood or snot or both and let go of my head—only to grab my French braid with both hands, growl
“Bilach, Bilach”
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in my ear while he tried to use it to haul himself onto his feet. My neck snapped forward as if I’d been rear-ended—I could hear the cartilage popping in my neck. My nose hit the butt of my
MP5 hard enough to make my eyes water. This nonsense had to stop—soon.

The old Zen masters will tell you that you can fight in absolute dark if you “see” your enemy in your head, conceptualize where he is, and strike. Yeah—right. Let me tell you how it happens in real life: I head-butted the sonofabitch to make him let go of my braid.

Big mistake. Head-butting is something that you should not attempt in total darkness, no matter what the Zen masters tell you. I missed him completely—maybe he rolled out of the way, maybe I just fucked up. Either way, I scored a perfect ten for Mister Murphy, slamming my thick Slovak forehead straight onto the broken sink.

It was then I realized I wasn’t on a fucking oil rig at all (or, at awl). Uh-huh. I was at the Academy fucking Awards. And
why
was I at the Academy fucking Awards? Because all I fucking saw was stars. Big stars. Lots of stars.

I guess I was distracted, because T2 wriggled out of my grasp. He rolled over and smacked my head between his hands, sending shock waves down to my toes, and making my ears ring louder than Big fucking Ben. I fell back. He seized the advantage, grabbing at the sink so he could pick it up and smash me with it.

No fucking way. I jerked out of the way, rolled, and caught him with a lucky kick to the face—heard the blow connect, and the nasty snap of his neck. That was a good sound—but I’d put myself in an awkward position. I was stretched out and vulnerable, and whether or not I’d hurt the motherfucker, he realized it.