Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL (53 page)

My MAC-10 had jammed.

Not just jammed but jammed visibly. A textbook malfunction called a “stovepipe.” Everyone, SEAL and Arab, could see the unfired bullet sticking from the ejection port of my weapon.

I thought: Oh, fuck.

Then several things happened very quickly. One of the men in the middle of the boat yanked back at the canvas. I saw the red crescent-shaped magazine of an AK-47 rifle. He clutched at the weapon and jerked it upward.

Rudi saw it, too. He yelled, “GUN!”

I wasn’t thinking now. I was just acting. Pure physicality, deed without cognition or plan, a state in Zen Buddhism called “satori.” Right now “satori” might have translated into “shit sandwich.” In the fishing boat, they were going for their guns, and my weapon was jammed solid.

I did an amazingly stupid thing—and it probably saved my life. I jumped from the Zodiac into the fishing boat. Cheese, who was probably the second craziest bastard I ever met, jumped right in after me. My weapon was useless, and now I was dick to dick with one of the Speedo boys. He was turning toward me, trying to get the AK-47 above the gunwale and pointed at me. I smashed the MAC-10’s silencer forward and down, a neat, clean thrust straight at him, as though the silencer were a bayonet. My machine pistol was useful only as a club.

The muzzle of the silencer caught him right between the eyes. I smashed the bridge of his nose as hard as I could. There was a crunching sound, and his face split open. The man sprawled back, dropping the rifle and taking one of the other men down with him. They fell into the bottom of the boat, and Cheese was on them like a terrier. He clipped the second man under the chin with the butt of his M-14. Blood spattered and a tooth flew. I recocked my MAC-10 and shook the jammed cartridge from the chamber.

Rudi had leaped aboard. He had the M-60 stuck in the eyeball socket of the man at the tiller. He yelled, “THE MAN SAID ‘
PARE SU BARCO,’ BUNDEJO!
” Pure Miami Spanglish. And it worked.

The guy in the stern killed the engine. He raised his hands. There was general yelling in Arabic and English. The others put their hands up. Rudi covered the man in the stern, and Cheese and I herded the others into the bow.

“Who speaks English?” I shouted.

“I do,” sputtered the man with the smashed mouth.

“Stay in the bow. Don’t move,” I said.

My heart was pounding. Miraculously, no one had fired a shot. I could see two AK-47s lying in the bottom of the boat. I picked them up and tossed them into the Zodiac. “Check under the nets,” I said.

Cheese moved to the middle of the boat. He pulled up the nets, and we saw two sets of scuba tanks. Swim fins. Face masks. Next he lifted the canvas cover. There, in the sparkling sunlight, were two taped-together piles of Yugoslavian-made TNT. The explosives had been assembled into concave-shaped charges, each containing maybe ten pounds of TNT assembled around a two-pound chunk of Symtex. They were improvised limpet mines, and they had been improvised by someone who knew what he was doing. The TNT had been formed into an explosive “lens” capable of shaping the blast in a concentrated area. Fixed to the bottom of a ship, these charges were designed to punch three-foot holes into a steel hull. Both mines had fuses screwed into them. They were ready to go. These guys were combat swimmers, and Texas Pete had been their target.

The realization hit us like a bucket of ice water.

Cheese pointed his M-14 into the bow. “If you move,” he said, “I’ll kill you all.”

Luke and Stick roared up in the second Zodiac. True to his word, Luke had kept an eye on us. They’d seen us make the bust, and when they saw the rifles come up, they’d headed over to give us a hand. They crossed the bow of the fishing boat, thwart to bow, and stood with weapons pointed. Their guns now commanded the length of the fishing boat.

We quickly tied the prisoners’ hands with zip ties and blindfolded them with their shirts. Two of them were bleeding, one from the mouth and one from the face. Their blood soon soaked through the shirts and dripped into the bilges.

Each man was searched thoroughly. They had no additional weapons. Nor did they have wallets, ID papers, money, or pocket change. As Cheese covered the prisoners, we searched the boat inch by inch. By the outboard engine we found a folded nautical chart of the harbor with the position of the beachmasters and the anchorage of Texas Pete marked in pencil. Stuffed into the folded chart was an additional sheet of paper scrawled over in Arabic. The only Arabic I can read is numerals, in order to get the license plates of cars. The numbers are written right to left. The paper listed four-digit numbers: our radio frequencies. Also on the paper were the VHF frequencies used by the landing craft and the beachmasters. We searched for a radio but found nothing.

I bent down and studied the limpet mines. It didn’t appear that the timers had been set, though I couldn’t be sure. It wasn’t likely that these guys would arm the mines until they were placed against the hull of the ship. That was standard operational procedure for a maritime sabotage attack. But it was also standard operational procedure to make swimmer attacks at night. These guys had made their go in broad goddamn daylight. This was a wild-card operation, so dumb and ballsy that it might have worked. Just as the U.S.S.
Cole
bombing would prove a few years in the future, you couldn’t count on the bad guys to do things our way.

“What do you want to do about the mines?” Rudi asked.

“Nothing right now. We’ll have Steve make these things safe when we get ashore.” Our explosive ordnance disposal tech, Steve, was ashore with the trucks. What these things didn’t need was an amateur trying to take them apart. I recognized the clock detonators as Yugoslavian, and beyond that, I didn’t know squat. I knew that the safe and arming devices we used on our mines were automatically booby-trapped after the delay times were set. Any attempt to dislodge the mines or to remove the fuse would detonate the explosive.

We ran the fishing boat onto the sand in front of the beachmasters’ position. The prisoners were muscled over the side, and we sat them on the beach ten yards apart. The beachmasters and the allied troops had seen the punch-out on the fishing boat, and their radios were crackling. One of the allied officers waded into the water and pulled himself up on the gunwales of the fishing boat. His eyes got big when he saw the mines. He splashed back to his jeep and got on his radio. He sent his traffic in high-speed Arabic.

Standing with the beachmasters was a Pakistani-American marine lieutenant, a member of the shore party. I nodded to the Arab officer on the radio. “What’s he saying?” I asked.

“He’s calling his unit. He’s asking for a team from the security service to get down here.”

This would quickly turn into a pissing contest. I didn’t know who was going to wind up with custody of the prisoners, but I wanted local American input. I told the bosun in charge of the beachmaster detachment to call the ship. I got on the radio and talked to Texas Pete, actual. The “actual” postscript meant I was talking to the commanding officer in person. I told him we had four prisoners, mines, and weapons. I asked him to contact the embassy and have them send someone knowledgeable down here. “Someone knowledgeable” was a CIA officer. I was deferential to the captain but firm about what I wanted. SEALs may be assigned to do a job for someone, but we pull up short of working for anyone. We’d made a legit capture, and this was a SEAL gig now. Texas Pete’s commanding officer outranked me, but he did what I wanted done. The landing crafts were immediately recovered. The LCU was bigger, and recovering it would require Texas Pete to flood her well deck, an operation that took time. It was time to get the ship away from the beach.

In the real world, things don’t always happen like they happen in the movies. We’d wrapped up these jokers, but I didn’t know if they had backup or if they’d been merely a diversion. I thought there might well be more bad guys in play. I didn’t know if there was another boat packed with explosives waiting to ram the ship. I sent a Zodiac and four shooters to do a hull search of Texas Pete and the LCU to make sure nobody had managed to put a mine on them. Both were clean.

Texas Pete weighed anchor. I advised him to stay offshore and under way; we’d ferry the beachmasters out to the ship by Zodiac. The LCU would also stay under way, but closer to the beach. After we figured out who the players were, the LCU could land and pick up the four-wheel-drive forklifts.

We pulled everyone back from the fishing boat. Steve climbed in and rendered the mines safe. He handed the unfused explosives over, and I put the two charges on top of the Zodiacs.

In about an hour, a Mercedes sedan pulled up to the trucks. It was followed by a jeep driven by an Arab in a khaki uniform and a black beret. Close behind came a white Chevy Suburban with tinted windows, definitely an embassy ride. Out of the Mercedes came two Arabic men in suits. Out of the Suburban came a sandy-haired man and a thickset, red-haired marine gunnery sergeant. The sandy-haired man was wearing a safari jacket, a fashion statement usually tendered only by network journalists and CIA gumbies. All smiles, Mr. Safari Jacket shook hands with one of the suits. They walked down the beach toward us, the Arab’s shoes filling with sand.

One of the suits broke off and started talking to the senior allied officer, a major with a dark mustache. There was a lot of gesturing.

The guy in the safari jacket walked my way, his eyes on the explosives piled atop the Zodiac.

“From the embassy?” I asked.

“You must be Lieutenant Pfarrer.” He smiled. That the man knew my name was surprising. That he pronounced it correctly meant that he’d been on the radio, or that he spoke German. “This is Gunnery Sergeant Foster. He’s an Arabic speaker,” he went on.

“Lieutenant Malik speaks Arabic as well,” I said.

“Has he interrogated them?”

“Nobody’s talked to them.”

The sandy-haired man looked at the prisoners. “Why are they bleeding?”

“We had a little punch-up on the boat,” I said.

“Nobody shot?”

“No shots were fired,” I answered.

That seemed to make him happy. The gunnery sergeant and the lieutenant went around talking to the blindfolded men on the beach. Nobody answered. They sat in the sand and bled.

“Was there anything else in the boat?” the sandy-haired man asked.

“Two AKs and this.” I handed over the nautical chart and the frequencies. The man’s expression didn’t change. I didn’t know what to make of this guy. I wasn’t into asking questions he probably wouldn’t answer, so I said nothing.

We stood together silently as one of the suits walked over and said something to the man who had been on the tiller. From under his blindfold, the man spat something back in Arabic, and the guy in the suit kicked him hard in the mouth. I suspected this was going to get a lot uglier in private.

“Are you assuming responsibility for the prisoners?” I asked.

“No,” Mr. Safari Jacket answered.

I was about to say something, but one of the suits called to the major in English, “Put these men into our jeep.”

“Is that all right with you?” I asked Mr. Safari Jacket.

“Fine with me,” he said. “I’m going to need to take the explosives.”

I was getting over this whole thing. “Be my guest,” I said.

He walked over and lifted one of the TNT piles onto his shoulder, then hefted the second one onto his other shoulder, balancing them like two sacks of potatoes. It occurred to me that he either knew exactly what he was doing or had no goddamn idea. There was enough explosive stacked on his head to blow him into the rarest gas in the universe: Safari Jacket 225.

The prisoners were led up the beach, still blindfolded. Two were put into a jeep, one into the Mercedes, and one into another jeep. Everybody drove off.

Mr. Safari Jacket and the gunnery sergeant tossed the explosives into the back of their Suburban, slammed the doors, and started the engine. The allied officers and troops piled into their vehicles and followed the Mercedes and jeep away. The Suburban pilled onto the coast road, did a U-turn, and followed the convoy.

They were gone and it was over, just like that.

We stood there like idiots. The beachmasters looked at us. We looked at them.

“Is that it?” Rudi asked.

“That’s it.” I hadn’t expected a ticker-tape parade, exactly, but maybe something. The man hadn’t even asked why we went out to search the boat.

“What are we gonna do with the boat?” Luke asked.

“Fuck, I don’t know. Sink it.”

“What about the AKs?” Cheese asked.

I could see the wheels turning in his square Norwegian head: He expected to keep them as war booty. For a brief moment I imagined Cheese, home on liberty, deer-hunting with a Chinese-made assault rifle. No Bambi in the state of Wisconsin would be safe.

His face fell when I said, “Field-strip the rifles and toss them into the boat.”

The LCU came ashore and recovered the forklifts. The beachmasters and Lieutenant Malik decided to go on the LCU when they discovered that there was a hot lunch aboard. The LCU drew up its ramp, backed off the beach, and headed for Texas Pete, now hull down on the hazy horizon.

We towed the fishing boat a half mile offshore and tossed in a hand grenade, and the bottom ripped out of her with a
thump
. The boat went down by the stern and disappeared in an oily swirl of wood splinters and fish scales. Cheese’s AK-47s went down with it.

To this day I have no idea what happened to the men we captured. The choices run from summary execution to imprisonment and torture. If they were locals, it’s more likely that they were ransomed back to their families. Anyone of value wouldn’t go unexploited in this country. They were either terrorists or members of a hostile military. If they were terrorists, as far as I know, this was the first and only time a combat-swimmer operation had been attempted. Combat swimming is a craft that takes a lot of practice. Practice costs money. Governments train combat swimmers, not raggedy-ass Tangos.

Why they thought they could run an op in broad daylight, I still can’t figure out. Maybe they didn’t dare run it at night. Maybe they thought we’d buy the local-fisherman charade. A lot of maybes and a lot of never-gonna-knows.