Echo Platoon (35 page)

But being a SpecWarrior means that you always—yes, always—overcome your circumstances. Being a SpecWarrior means that you control your environment—not the other way around. Being a SpecWarrior means that you always—yes always—dominate the situation, no matter what the odds may be.

Besides, it’s not as if this kind of snatch op hadn’t been done before, and done textbook successfully.

When was that, you ask?

In mid-September of 1943, before most of you were probably born, is when.

That was when a noxious, nasty Nazi major named Otto Skorzeny led a unit of
Jagdverbanden
—hotsy-totsy-fucking Nazi commandos—into the Campo Imperatore Hotel, which was built on a mountainside about 120 miles northeast of Rome, and rescued Benito Mussolini, the F
3
(which stands for fat fascist fuck) known as Il Duce, from a bunch of anti-Fascist Italians. Skorzeny used a flight of gliders, which he crash-landed on the small plateau where the hotel was located. In the initial four minutes of the assault, Skorzeny and eight other commandos surprised a force of more than 250 Italian carabinieri and soldiers.
Within fifteen minutes, the Italians had been overrun, and surrendered. Skorzeny’s men took control of the hotel, commandeered the funicular, surprising the Italians at the base of the mountain by hitting ’em from behind, and then linked up with a heavily armed Kraut konvoy sent from Rome, and
ecco:
Mussolini the F
3
was rescued.

Now, I didn’t have gliders, and I certainly wasn’t going to exfil by convoy. No—the ambassador had her Dauphin-2 at Naryndzlar, and I knew that we could squeeze twenty-plus people in the aircraft, if we dispensed with such niceties as the seats and the VIP interior. But, just like Skorzeny, I could use surprise and speed to overcome superior odds, in order to achieve RS—relative superiority, and WIN. I could also use two major elements of Skorzeny’s plan.

     • The German had taken a carabinieri general with him because he knew that the sight of the Italian would confuse the carabinieri guards about the true intent of the mission. I would have Oleg Lapinov with me. Oleg knew the
lovrushniki
who were in charge of Naryndzlar’s security. They would recognize him—and they would hesitate before shooting.

     • Skorzeny’s main force arrived later than his initial assault team. That was good because the small number of men in the initial wave confused the Italians and allowed Skorzeny to overcome the POV—the point of vulnerability—quickly.

So, I would need two aircraft to make my assault: a small chopper that usually held no more than four
people. And a big aircraft to launch my main assault force. I’d cram six of us into the chopper, and the rest would HAHO from the aircraft and fly in, hitting from the hotel’s blind side a few minutes after I’d put the chopper down. They would disable the funicular, thus preventing any reinforcements from coming up the mountain before we achieved our Relative Superiority, and then we would overwhelm the guards, snatch the ambassador, and all of us would fly out on her chopper.

The potential goatfuck factor was high. As Oleg put it so genteelly, delicately, and accurately in Russkie SpecOps slang,
“Ya ve pidze,
Captain—we are about to be stuck in a very deep vagina.”

He was right, too. Consider just a few of the nasty DV Factors I had to think about.

DVF One: The winds at Naryndzlar were unpredictable. They shifted quickly, which could blow my secondary force off course. Shit—they could be blown onto the next ridge, and then I’d be left with a six-man assault force, all of us holding little but our limp
szebs
in our hairy Froggish palms.

DVF Two: The altitude itself made jumping a problem. We had no oxygen supplies with us and none were available. That meant jumping at twenty thousand feet or less—and even that altitude was pushing the edge of the envelope given the operational situation.

DVF Three: a HAHO approach can be hazardous to the health if you are spotted coming in, because you are literally hanging out there alone. You cannot shoot effectively and steer a parachute at the same time, and so a single man on the ground with a submachine gun can wreak havoc on an incoming assault team. There
were scores of bad guys with various kinds of automatic weapons at Naryndzlar.

DVF Four: we would have to jump during daylight hours, because the drop zone was U2 (unlighted and unfamiliar), and the Skorzeny ruse called for Oleg to make a Grand Entrance, something that could not be done at night.

DVF Five: We had no idea where within the huge Naryndzlar complex we would find Ambassador Madison. She could be in any of the fifty rooms. If we didn’t get to her within six minutes of our wheels down on the hotel grounds, the denouement of this book would come a shitload sooner, and it wouldn’t be a happy ending either.

But despite the depth of this particular tactical vagina, what I was planning was exactly the kind of keep it simple, stupid operation that defies the odds and succeeds. Why? Because in addition to being KISS, it was also BAD (Brilliant, Audacious, and Direct). Given those Roguish qualities, WE WOULD NOT FAIL.

T
HE TOUGHEST ELEMENT OF MY BIG
, BAD
PLAN WOULD
be getting our hands on two aircraft and a bunch of workable chutes. That responsibility fell to Oleg and Araz, who knew the place and the people a shitload better than yours truly. Oleg said he’d be able to cumshaw an old Aérospatiale LAMA. The LAMA sits three plus a pilot. It’s not much of a chopper, but it’s better than nothing.

As for a jump craft, well, Araz said he had an idea or two, but that every one of his ideas would cost money.

That didn’t bother me. I understand that nothing comes for free in this part of the world. Besides, I had the proverbial suitcase full of cash left over from my last op, and since none of it was taxpayer money, I didn’t give a shit how Araz spent it, except that he’d better come back with a plane. I got a Rogue-size wad of hundreds out of the box, counted out fifty, and gave them to Araz. “Will that help?”

He looked at the bills. “I thought you wanted an aircraft, Captain Dickie.”

“I do. Isn’t that enough?”

Araz raised his hands in mock surrender. “Enough? Enough? There is enough here to buy a whole air force,” he said earnestly.

I do so love the third and fourth world, where the almighty dollar still goes a long, long way. “Then you should be able to . . . expedite a decent plane, right?”

He grinned at my vocabulary, and saluted. “Abso
lut.”

Cash-enhanced, Araz and Oleg went off in one of Araz’s big trucks to scour the landscape. Me, I took the Russkie’s sketches and worked ’em over with the help of Randy, Boomerang, and Ashley.

Ashley? Yeah, Ashley. She was working as hard as anybody I’d ever seen. While I’d been working the Marybeth Madison problem, she’d gone to the mat with Defense Imaging Agency headquarters back at Bolling Air Force Base just outside Washington, and talked ’em into putting those supercomputers to
work
for a change, instead of just playing solitaire and minesweeper games.

First, she had the computer dweebs input all the stake diagrams I’d lifted from the FA camp in Iran into the Defense Imaging Agency’s computers. Then she had them try to match the outlines with the millions of surveillance photographs from satellites, U-2 over-flights, and HUMINT target assessment photos available online. Within six hours, she’d wrung a thick sheaf of computer-enhanced, correctly sized photographs out of the intel squirrels at the Agency, which is buried inconspicuously amongst the warehouses, barracks, and office buildings at Bolling Air Force Base. The squirrels had been able to use their computer magic to overlay the stake patterns I’d brought
out of Iran atop actual photographic images of buildings and installations. Once they sent us the results, it was like,
eureka
. We were now able to see just where Steve Sarkesian’s Fist of Allah tango allies were planning to strike.

And knowing what he planned to hit gave me the outline of Sarkesian’s overall scheme. Let’s see what you think. The American embassy in Baku was at the top of his list. Then came U.S. embassies in Qatar, Abu Dhabi, and London. His other targets included the corporate headquarters of Exxon, BP, and Shell, two Paris-based banks, and the Turkish Foreign Ministry. He also planned to hit the ARAMCO oil pumping station at AlHufüf, Saudi Arabia.

Can you connect the dots? I certainly could—and the key word here was going to be the late and unlamented Roscoe Grogan’s favorite squeaky-wheel-gets-the-grease word,
expedite
.

Steve Sarkesian’s diplomatic targets were also prime objectives of half a dozen state-supported transnational terrorist groups. He could hit ’em. But guess who’d be blamed: Islamic Jihad, or Hezb’allah, or one of Khaled Bin Sultan’s many fundamentalist allies, upset with the United States for sending Khaled on that one-way magic carpet ride to Allah’s side, courtesy of
moi
. But Steve was hitting our embassies because he wanted to send a not-so-subtle message back to Washington, i.e., that he was just as powerful as the United States, and he could hit us anytime and anyplace he wanted. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that he’d made contact at each of those diplomatic locations recently to offer his foundation’s services as a geopolitical “expediter.”

The corporate targets were being hit because they’d resisted Steve Sarkesian’s entreaties to use the Sirzhik Foundation to help them “expedite” matters in their oil-exploration programs in this part of the world. How did I know that? Because I’d heard it from Jim Wink (and so had you) when he’d briefed me about Steve Sarkesian and the Sirzhik Foundation. The French banks? They’d recently “bounced” Sarkesian’s checks by limiting his line of credit, and he wanted to get even.

And the Turkish foreign ministry? He was going after it because the Turks were allied with Israel (Oleg told me that the Mossad hit team coming after Steve Sarkesian had flown in from Ankara). The Turks also helped the Israelis keep an eye on Steve Sarkesian’s Armenian and Iranian allies, allowing them to use Turkish bases for their overflights and eavesdropping. Moreover, any strike against the Turks could conveniently be laid off on any one of half a dozen Kurdish nationalist terrorist groups.

That left the ARAMCO pumping station at AlHufüf, Saudi Arabia. Y’know what, friends? I believed that Steve-o was gonna hit it out of pure meanness. Either that, or maybe his Iranian friends had added it to the list without telling him. I say that because it was the one target that didn’t fit the pattern.

Time to get moving. Ashley made sure that her people at the Defense Intelligence Agency alerted the folks in the field, and the embassy here in Baku. And because I like redundant systems (less chance for Mister Murphy to show his ugly puss) I got on the secure cellular and made half a dozen phone calls to my own security network back in the States. I called my
copain
Jacques Lillis at DST in Paris to warn him
about the hits on the Frog banks. Then I got on the line to a longtime shoot-and-loot ally named Ricky Fewell, who was currently RSO in Abu Dhabi, told him to keep his eyes open, and told him to pass the word to Qatar and Riyadh. When I asked if he’d heard from anyone at Sirzhik, Ricky laughed and said that they’d made an offer to supply weekly strategic risk assessments at what he called a truly outrageous price. “It was a protection racket, pure and simple, Rotten Richard,” Ricky said. “I tossed their crooked asses out into the fuckin’ sand.”

Have I ever mentioned that it is bad karma to bet against da Rogue? Okay, now that the messages had been received and were being acted upon, I knew it wouldn’t take long for the FA to take on a whole new and improved organizational name. From here on out, they would be known to one and all as the Fucked Assholes.

Ashley had more to contribute. She’d heard Ambassador Madison describe the fancy accommodations she’d had during a weekend at Naryndzlar six or seven months before. Now that we all knew who she’d been spending her time with, I spent an hour and a half trying to drag as many ambassadorial details out of the major as she could recall.

Ashley remembered that Madison told her she’d had a wonderful view of the mountains. That would have put her on the north side of the hotel. She’d also mentioned that she’d had a corner suite, which allowed her to close the curtains against the morning sun but still have a great view of the mountains. That put her on the northernmost corner of the hotel. I looked at Oleg’s sketches. There was one corner suite on each floor.

Now, if you are anything like I am, when you stay at a hotel more than once, and you have loved the room in which you’ve stayed, you ask for it again. And if you are Steve Sarkesian, and you have the American ambassador in tow, you get that room. I made an executive decision that the ambassador would be in the corner suite on the north side of the hotel. And that point would be the focus of our initial assault.

Making it to that suite without getting ourselves killed was the problem. From the chopper pad to the hotel was 250 yards of open ground. The hotel itself had one main entrance—the old monastery. The two-story structure had been turned into a huge lobby and reception area. Directly at twelve o’clock was the hotel’s main dining room. The reception desk was at nine o’clock; the bar at three. We’d have to make it to the main desk, get past the guards in the lobby, take the two quick ninety-degree turns at flank speed, which would get us into the north wing. And we had to accomplish it all without raising anyone’s suspicions. Until it was too late, that is.

Rotten Randy came up with the solution. “Remember what the Israelis did at Entebbe?” he asked, massaging his sore knee.

Well, the Israelis had done a shitload at Entebbe, where they rescued a bunch of Israeli hostages from a hijacked Air France flight by flying more than three thousand miles in a flight of C-130s, to kill the terrorists and bring their hostages home. It was an almost perfectly planned and executed SpecOps mission.