Echo Platoon (8 page)

He struck out at me blindly, catching my coccyx
with his knee and sending a paroxysm of pure, unadulterated pain up my spine and into my brain. Oh,
that
fucking
hurt
.

I struggled to turn myself over so I could get hold of him again, but he understood by now that the closer I got to him, the worse off he’d be. We grappled some more, and he head-butted, and kicked, and twisted, and wrenched this way and that, but in the end I managed to crawl on top of the little cocksucker, and immediately latched on to his bulletproof vest.

Now here’s the truth: I am a big, bad motherfucker. I weigh more than two hundred pounds. I can do five hundred fingertip push-ups, and a thousand ab crunches without breaking much of a sweat. I also lift a huge pile of weights every day at Rogue Manor, my two hundred-plus acres of snakes and lakes that abuts the Marine base just outside Quantico, Virginia. All of the above makes me, in addition to being big and bad, a v-e-r-y strong motherfucker.

So, once I’d laid my hands on him there was no fucking way he was gonna get away from me—until I decided to let go of his corpse. Uh-huh. No way at all. Oh, he struggled and wrestled, kicked and bit, and screamed a bunch of rude imprecations at me in a language I couldn’t understand.

But I didn’t give a shit about any of that. See—I knew something. I knew it was time for him to die. Time for Mr. T2 to take that magic carpet ride to the Tango’s Valhalla—the place you and I call HELL.

I pulled him close.
“Kuz Emeq,”
I whispered to him. “Fuck your mother’s hole.” And then, to show him how I really felt, I bit about half his ear off.

He screamed like crazy when I did my Mike Tyson imitation. Didn’t like it at all.

C’est dommage.
Too fucking bad. I spat the gristly chunk and its attached earwax out. Hadn’t this cock-breath ever heard of Q-Tips? Shit, it was gonna take a gallon of Dr. Bombay Sapphire to get
that
taste out of my mouth.

Au revoir,
motherfucker. I took his head in my size-ten paws, and wrenched it clean around. All the way. Three hundred and sixty degrees. I could hear his neck bones snap, a uniquely satisfying sound. At least
I
thought so.

I dropped him on the puddled linoleum. As I did, I heard Boomerang shout, “Clear-clear-clear.” That was followed by Duck Foot and Randy, calling loud enough for me to hear through my ring-a-ding-dinging ears: “Hostages secure.”

That was when the lights started to come on, one by one, and I realized that (as usual) I’d spent the last couple of minutes rolling around some fucking shitter chasing a piece of anonymous shit, and I’d missed all the fun.

0332. W
E SECURED THE RIG.
A
ND DISCOVERED HOW
lucky we’d actually been. Oh, my plan had worked just the way I knew it would. The Arleigh-gram allowed us to surprise the bad guys, spoil their ambush, and take ’em from behind. Nigel and Rotten Randy had cleared the front room—it was empty—then came around and backed up Boomerang. Nod and Duck Foot breached the rear door, and were able to kill the pair of tangos guarding the hostages before they’d had a chance to do any damage to ’em.

And Half Pint, Pick, Digger, and Rodent had taken out the lone tango hunkered in the commo shed right in the middle of his transmission. That made eight—which was the night’s bag limit.

The surprise came when we tracked the wiring from the detonator on the monkey board. I’d assumed (a mistake right there) that the tangos had set the explosives to ambush us. I had been wrong. We went over the rig top to bottom. They hadn’t set any antipersonnel charges at all. Nowhere. Instead, they’d run the wires back into the modular dwelling unit. There were three kilos of Semtex in the bunk room where the hostages lay hog-tied. If Goober had missed that first
shot, and the bad guy had managed to turn the handle on the detonator, the hostages—hostages hell, the whole fucking modular dwelling unit—would have been vaporized.

Goober and Hammer, who’d arrived on the tender, hoisted themselves onto the roof of the doghouse and checked the corpse of target number one. Hammer was happy to see that he’d made a clean kill—entry just behind the ear and the entire opposite side of the sphincter’s skull blown away. Not bad for government work, especially at about a thousand meters. Then they climbed up the derrick to the monkey board and examined Goober’s handiwork. Goober had made an eye shot, exploding the tango’s head like a fucking melon. I can and do recommend the Hornady 750-grain projectile and the 50-caliber sniper’s rifle when a target absofuckingposilutely has to be disintegrated on time.

Then they unwired the detonator, brought it back down to the deck, and dropped it into my calloused palm. “I’m glad you didn’t tell me about where this led, Skipper,” Goober said, jerking his thumb toward the hostages. “That would have been a lot of pressure to handle.”

I examined the device. It was the current Russkie SpecOps model—the one currently used by Spetsnaz maritime units. “Yeah, well twixt thee and me I
would
have told you—if I’d known.” You bet I would have. After all, Goober is paid all that big money to take heavyweight pressure, isn’t he? (I’m being ironic here. Chiefs, who make life-and-death decisions on a daily basis, who run and oversee billions of dollars’ worth of high-tech equipment, make a paltry salary—less than half of your first-year law firm associate.)

I detailed Nod, Goober, Randy, and Mustang to collect intel. I wanted everything the tangos had on ’em bagged and tagged. We didn’t get much. These guys had emptied their pockets before they’d launched. But we got all their fingerprints, and took their photos with the digital camera we’d carried in a waterproof bag. Surprising what the well-equipped CT unit will carry these days, huh?

The rest of us spent just over an hour debriefing the roustabouts before we loaded everyone aboard our tender and headed for shore. It’s important to debrief ASAP after an incident. You want to know everything you can about your enemies, and hostages can often supply crucial information. They may not think it’s important—but it can be crucial. And so, we cracked open the beer locker, sat the oil-rig crew down, and took the time to talk.

I discovered that the tangos who’d taken over 16-Bravo spoke Azeri, Russian, and English in addition to their native Farsi. They came aboard with engineer’s diagrams of the rig. That meant they had an inside source somewhere. They’d secured the crew up with the same kind of nylon restraints and duct tape that I carried. And they didn’t do any talking in front of the hostages. Indeed, they’d TTS’d ’em,
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wired them with explosives in the bunk room where they were being held, and left ’em alone to die. All of the above told me the nasties we’d sent to Allah weren’t your everyday tango cannon fodder, but an elite crew who’d been sent to do a specific job.

That fact became even more clear to me as I sorted
through the equipment they had brought with them. It was all high-tech stuff. You already know the bullet-proof vests were current Russian Army issue. So were the AK-74s, which are to AK-47s what the CAR-15 is to the M-16.
21
Their comms were better than ours—secure, digital French-manufactured satellite phones. And the tango atop the doghouse had been equipped with a state-of-the-art portable scanner/unscrambler that had allowed him to listen in on everything we’d said. He might have caused us a lot of problems, too, if Hammer hadn’t put a bullet through his head.

Indeed, the only precautions the bad guys hadn’t taken were countermeasures against extra-long-range sniping. But that was to be expected. It was more than a thousand meters from 16-Bravo to the closest platform, and I guess they assumed it highly unlikely that anyone could make a first-shot kill that long at night. Well, April fool, motherfuckers—you should have known about my SpecWar Commandment on the subject of assuming.

And oh, yes, there was a significant fact about the dead tango in the commo shed that I guess I should pass on to you. The TIQ was blond. He had gray eyes rolled back in what was left of his skull. He had a Spetsnaz Afghanistan tattoo on his right shoulder.

That was significant. Belay that. It was a lot more than significant, especially in light of the secret mission I’d been given here in Azerbaijan.

You say you don’t know anything about any secret mission? You say you thought I’d been sent here simply
to teach counterterrorism to the Azeris. Well, you weren’t cleared, you assholes—no one was, including, obviously, Ambassador Marybeth Madison. But since she’s nowhere close, I guess I can explain, if you’ll raise your right hands and swear you won’t tell anybody.

Since this book began with one confession, I guess it’s time for a second soulful, Roguish revelation. Here goes: my JCET mission to Baku was a cover for a more substantial and altogether clandestine assignment. I was sent here to appraise what the Pentagon calls the politico-military situation in Azerbaijan. I was to scope the place out, see which of the political alpha males had the best shot of becoming the china-shop bull in the new millennium, and try to target a few Azeri military types who the United States could count on in the future. See, we sometimes actually can and do learn from experience. When we had all those problems with the Serbs marauding in Kosovo back in 1999, the United States basically had to operate blind. The CIA had no agents on the ground in Kosovo, or any recruited from within the Serb military. The State Department had no accurate assessments of the Kosovar leaders. So, when the ethnic cleansing started in earnest and large gobs of
merde
hit the
ventilateur,
we were totally unprepared. We had no contingency plans, and so we fucked things up a lot more than we had to.

Why did things go from SNAFU to TARFU to FUBAR? Because the politicians running the show and the generals working for them all forgot (or more likely had never heard) the old Navy Chief’s P
RECEPT OF THE
S
EVEN
Ps. Which goes: “Proper Previous Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance.”

That’s really why I was in Baku: to make sure that all our Ps would be covered. That way, if things ever went sour here in the Caucasus, we’d understand the dynamics of the place—and have some idea about who to deal with. That was Part One of my assignment.

Part Two was to assess the degree of overt/covert Iranian and Russian meddling in Azeri affairs. Oh, we know that the Russians are working a two-pronged approach. They have been trying to undermine the Azeris for years by supporting the Armenians, and running provocative naval exercises in the Caspian Sea, while simultaneously engaging in joint ventures with the Azeri oil consortium. And we know that Iranians look at Azerbaijan the way Saddam Hussein looks at Kuwait, which is, as a province that needs to be recaptured. And to help make that dream a reality, they’ve been supporting fundamental Islam in the crescent surrounding Azerbaijan. But because we’re going to have to make a final decision soon about how we ship all that Azeri oil to the West, there have been lots of questions lately about what the Ivans and the Mullahs are
really
up to in this part of the world, and no one seems to be answering them, at least answering them to SECDEF’s satisfaction.

The CIA just shrugs and says, “We dunno.” Well, it should shrug. I checked with my best contact at Christians In Action, Jim Wink,
22
two weeks before I left for Baku. He rolled his eyes, groaned, and said that this administration’s handling of intel matters couldn’t have been worse if Russian or Chinese agents
had actually been put in charge of the American intelligence apparatus—something he didn’t consider completely out of the realm of possibility.

Oh, we still kept more or less abreast of the Ivans’ overt moves. Like the S-300 ground-to-air missiles they deployed to Armenia last year. Or the fact that they upgraded the Russian air arm stationed in Yerevan from MiG-23s to MiG-29s. But as for their long-term goals, Wink told me—incredibly—Washington had nary a clue. “Sure, we know that the Russians want to expand their sphere of influence, ever since the Azeris canceled the bilateral defense agreement with Moscow back in ninety-nine,” he said. “And so, we track the military stuff, and we try to follow who’s doing what to whom. Same thing for Iran. We use overhead, and No Such Agency
23
sends me reams of intercepts. But it’s getting almost impossible to find people on the ground who can report good, solid, inside information to us.”

“You’re not serious,” I said.

He wagged his head to say, yes, he
was
serious, drained his Corona, looked at the bottle as if he was seriously considering sucking the lime out, then gave me a sad, Huckleberry Hound look.

As if Wink’s information wasn’t already depressing enough, the three monkeys I spoke to at the State Department (because of the libel laws I will refer to them as Seeno, Hearno, and Speakno) refused to admit there was any problem whatsoever in the Caucasus. Seeno actually said, “So far as we know it’s all hunky-dory over there.” He really used those words.

And as for the rest of the Cabinet agencies, well, they didn’t know fuck-all either. One twentysomething assistant secretary at Energy (and you have to go through Senate confirmation to become an assistant secretary, but of course this was the current Administration) had no idea where Azerbaijan even was. He thought it was somewhere in the Gulf States. “Isn’t that next to Qatar, maybe—or is that Onan?”

Jerk-offs aside, how the hell you make policy when you are in an info-vacuum, I don’t know, and I guess neither do SECDEF and the Chairman. Which is why, to get a little real-world input, they sent
moi
here to do what SEALs do best, e.g., sneak & peek and snoop & poop, without making even a tiny ripple as I did so. And when I’d finished with the sneaking and the snooping, I’d submit a full report to the Chairman, giving him a no-shitter sit-rep about WTF is going on here in Azerbaijan—who is doing what, and to whom, and why.