Echo Platoon (36 page)

But what Randy was talking about was the deception. To cause confusion among the Palestinian and
Baader-Meinhof tangos and their Ugandan allies, the first Israelis on the ground were dressed in Ugandan uniforms. And they had with them a Mercedes limo very much like the one Ugandan president Idi Amin drove around in, and a couple of jeeps, just like Idi-baby used as his escort vehicles.

The C-130 flight leader, a lieutenant colonel nicknamed Shiki, landed sans lights and dropped his ramp. The Mercedes and the jeeps, filled with Israeli shooters, drove straight up to the terminal where the hostages were being held. The commandos used suppressed weapons to wax the confused Ugandan guards before they could react. Then the Israelis stormed the terminal, killed most of the tangos (and took the others prisoner), and freed their countrymen, with the loss of only one commando and three hostages.

“We’ll need some Russkie uniforms,” Randy said. “And some Russkie weapons.”

That made great sense, and I liked his way of thinking. I looked at Randy. “Handle it.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Ashley said, “It’s almost workable.”

“What do you mean ‘almost?’ ”

“It’s still a straight assault,” she said. “The deception will only last until you get close to the hotel. And if someone starts barking Russian or Armenian at your guys, it’s all going to turn to you-know-what real fast.”

I looked at her. I hadn’t known Ashley very long, but I knew her pretty well by now. “What’s your point?”

“The point is that you need one more element of deception.”

“And that would be?”

“That would be me,” she said.

I gave her my answer quickly and succinctly. “No fucking way,” is what I told her.

“You haven’t heard me out.”

“You haven’t heard
me
out. No fucking way.”

“You’re being redundant.”

“I’m being realistic. The only chopper we can lay our hands on is built for four—three passengers and a pilot. I’m going to try to cram six people inside and still fly the fucking aircraft at a higher goddam altitude than it was built to take with that kind of pay-load. This is not a male/female thing, Ashley, there is simply no room for you because I need all the fucking firepower I can get.”

“Bullshit.” She gave me a dirty look. “I know Pick and Nigel can both fly helicopters,” she said. “So don’t try to tell me you won’t have enough shooters, because even your pilot’ll be a shooter. Besides, if Oleg shows up with
me,
they’ll be paying more attention to my tits and my ass than they will to you and your frigging SEALs.” Ashley crossed her arms. “You know I’m right,” she said. “Women make great distractions.”

No argument there. Some of the world’s most effective terrorist operations used women to achieve distraction. And in the realm of world-class villains, Leila Khaled, the PLO tango, is right up atop the list with Abu Nidal, George Habash, and Carlos da Jackal. I thought about it for maybe a minute. I did some mental arithmetic. I looked at Ashley. “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe. First I gotta see what kind of chopper Oleg came up with.”

“You said he had a LAMA.”

Fuck, but she had a good memory. “That’s what he said,” I parried. “But I haven’t seen it yet, so I can’t
assume it is a LAMA. For all I know it could be a baby Bell, and we’d be crammed inside like fucking fraternity dweebs in a phone booth.”

Ashley was having none of my argument. “You know I’m right, Dick. So cut the crap. I want in.”

“I said ‘maybe.’ I meant ‘maybe.’ Let’s see what Oleg comes up with.”

I see you all out there. You’re thinking, like this is the fuckin’ Rogue and he’s gone politically correct on us. Next thing you know he’s gonna tell us there should be lady SEALs and Rangerettes.

Hey, assholes, fuck you. When you wear the Budweiser or the Tab, you can talk the talk. Until then, keep your fuckin’ mouths shut. Women can do a lot in the military. No, not as SEALs or Rangers. Let’s leave that to bad Hollywood movies. But they can work the begeezus out of intelligence assignments. They can serve as military attachés. They can do almost anything except fight as a part of elite and combat units.

The problem is that today’s military sees itself as a social, not a fighting, organization. So we end up with situations like the Navy does, in which 18 percent of all females serving at sea get pregnant, and cannot perform their duties. That is no way to make war. And believe me, if we had to go to war with all those pregnant sailorettes aboard, their mommies and daddies would be screaming at their congressmen and senators to get their daughters out of the line of fire.

One way to begin to solve the problem would be to follow the Marine Corps example of keeping men and women separated. If that practice were followed in the Army, Navy, and Air Farce, there would be far fewer
problems. But that is unlikely to happen with the current Pentagon mind-set, which is the product of leaders who have never had to shoulder the responsibility of leading other men into battle. Indeed, the majority of our leaders, both in the administration and in Congress, have never served in the military, and therefore see it as an alien culture, something to be mistrusted.

Okay, enough with the sermons. There was work to be done.

Araz reported back. He’d found a plane. It was an Arava, which is a short, squat Israeli STOL aircraft, perfect for HAHO operations and SpecWar insertions. He told me that even as we were speaking, he had a mechanic checking the aircraft out. Then, he’d managed to commandeer us some parachutes. He dug in his pocket and brought out a baker’s dozen hundred-dollar bills. “Here’s your exchange,” he said. “I told you—too much monies.”

Meanwhile, he said, Oleg had gone off looking for something or other—he didn’t know. That made me nervous. I still didn’t trust the Ivan motherfucker, and the thought of Oleg out there prowling and growling with no one watching him was vaguely disturbing.

But there was nothing I could do about it right then, so I forgot about it and worried about more important things. Like trying to work out the HAHO HARP—high altitude release point—for the jumpers by using my Magellan GPS and overlaying the routing on my Defense Mapping Agency pilotage chart. Of course, I was doing all this planning totally blind. I had no idea, for example, about the wind conditions on the mountain. Under normal conditions, winds flow upslope on warm days in mountainous terrain.
But there are also what’s known as unpredictable “valley breezes,” which create wind shears, violent updrafts, and unpredictable turbulence. Between the physical conditions and the fact that we were going to be jumping blind, my shooters were going to have to overcome a high DVF to reach the target on time, and en masse.

Now, if this were the Normandy landings, there’d be no questions about whether or not to go. Everyone would go. But this was different. This was a rogue mission. It wasn’t officially sanctioned—and hence it could cause deleterious effects on the FITREPS of all concerned. So, I called a team meeting in my room. I laid out the mission parameters. I explained that we were operating UNODIR once again—and that going along could have serious repercussions on their careers. I told the guys we’d be working a lot more seat-of-the-pants than I like to work. And I added that there’d be no consequences if anybody wanted to sit this one out.

Nod stood up. Eddie DiCarlo doesn’t say much, and I was surprised to see him want to talk first. “Skipper,” Nod said, “I don’t think that was necessary.” And then he sat down.

Boomerang uncurled himself from the armchair in which he’d stowed his lanky frame and maneuvered onto his feet. Brian (that’s his real name) looked around the room at his shipmates. “We’ve been through a shit-load together,” he said. “Some of it good, and a lot of it not so good. But we’ve always worked as a team.”

“Amen, bro.” That was Gator.

“So,” Boomerang continued, addressing himself to me, “why the fuck do you think we’d do anything to break up the team, Skipper? I mean, this is who we
are. And what we do is break things and kill people.” He scanned the room. “No one here just showed up, y’know? We all volunteered. We volunteered for BUD/S because we wanted to be the meanest, baddest killers on the face of the earth. We didn’t volunteer for peacekeeping missions; we volunteered to make WAR. We didn’t volunteer to be Boy Scouts, or traffic cops, or social workers. We volunteered because we wanted to become the best warriors on the face of this fuckin’ earth. And that is exactly what we’ve become.”

He looked at me, his eyes blazing. “So, listen, Boss Dude, don’t dis us by giving us that shit about no consequences, and this mission is bad for our careers. I’ll tell ya, man, if I was interested in my career I’d be a fucking cake-eating civilian NFL football player with fuckin’ Denver, because that’s what the pro scouts offered me. Shit, I was a second-round draft pick. But I became a SEAL instead. Because there’s no fucking comparison between sacking a fucking quarterback, and sending some fucking tango on the magic carpet ride to Allah. This is real job satisfaction. But we do it together. Not on some fuckin’ pick-and-choose basis. We all go . . . or we don’t go.” He 20/20’d the room. “Now,
I
say we all go.” And then he sat down, to silence.

I have to tell you that I had tears in my eyes right then. If one is a Naval officer, one cannot receive a greater gift from God than to be given men like this to lead into battle. It is the ultimate experience. And I was honored, and humbled, by what had just happened in this place.

So, there was nothing to say but “Fuck each and
every one of you cockbreaths very much, strong message follows,” and get down to business.

I wanted to hit the hotel at 0900. Why? Because at 0900, the sun would work in my favor, blinding anyone looking directly eastward. And eastward is the direction from which my HAHO shooters would be coming. I looked at my watch. It was currently 1752, and my tick-tock was ticking away. I wasn’t altogether sure we’d be able to make the hit on time, because there was a shitload left to do, and not a lot of time in which to do shit.

1825. Randy showed up with two dozen Russkie uniforms. He’d bought them on the street. There were three officer’s Class-A ensembles, and the rest were camouflage, fatigue-type blouses and trousers, along with belts and web gear. Perfect? No. But plenty good enough for government work.

1840. Oleg returned, in a Russkie major general’s uniform, a canvas document case slung over his shoulder. I plucked Araz from in front of the TV, where he was drooling over some CNN screen candy. The three of us, along with Nigel and Pick, my pilots, drove out to the airport to inspect the aircraft.

1925. The Arava was in good condition. It was an Azeri government plane, well maintained and shipshape. Pick did the walk-around, and pronounced it ready to go. Araz had already had it towed to a remote corner of the airfield, and set it next to an APU, just in case it had problems starting. It had been fueled and topped off. Three of Araz’s men stood guard so no one would mess with it. All we’d have to do was climb aboard and take off.

1955. The LAMA was a piece of shit, and I’m being
charitable. It belonged to the Azeri oil consortium, and had been used (and used, and used) to fly people out to the drilling platform at the drilling and pumping complex known as Oily Rocks, which comprises 125 miles of crumbling roadways, streets, drilling rigs, derricks, and stowage tanks, all atop decaying pylons sunk onto the Caspian bed, sitting sixteen miles offshore of Baku. The LAMA was in worse shape than Oily Rocks. It was a late 1960s model that had been neglected until it became a rusted hulk, with a wheezing engine that wouldn’t start, Plexiglas hatches that didn’t close, a cracked windscreen, and rotted seats. There were mouse turds on the deck, pieces of the floorboards were missing, and the bolts that held the airframe together looked as if they were about to separate. Once upon a time it had been painted turquoise blue. Now, between the orange rust stains and the faded paint, I was back in the HoJo Zone again (and I thought that once a book was enough).

I used RUT to tell Oleg what I thought. He grunted, and said, “We can clean. We can paint. We can change oil and adjust engine timing.”

I looked at him, my expression somewhere between bemusement and numbed shock. “As if that would do anything. Can’t you find a better chopper, Oleg?”

He looked at me in the way generals look at junior officers who speak out of turn. Then he shrugged, and said, simply,
“Nyet.”

If this was what the Russkie had come up with for transportation, I didn’t even want to begin to think about the chutes we’d find in this part of the world.

2020. We careened around the ten o’clock side of the airport, to a small hangar that had some undecipherable
Cyrillic above the door, and two Azeri shooters posted outside, their subguns locked and loaded.

Oleg and Araz stood aside so I could be first in. I pushed through and flicked on the lights. Holy shit, I was in a real rigger’s loft. The ceiling was high and unobstructed. There were five long tables for packing chutes. There were hardware boxes, and sewing supplies—all the goodies.

Araz beamed when he saw my expression. “The Baku Sport Jumping Club, Captain Dickie,” he explained. “We built this to train during the transition period when we weren’t sure”—he jerked a thumb in Oleg’s direction—“if they were coming back. So we did it civilian. Now, some of the oil workers brought their own gear, and they jump regular.”

He grinned, held his right hand up in front of his nose, and rubbed his thumb against his forefinger, making the universal sign for greasing palms with cash. “I have just . . . expedited.”

Frankly I didn’t give a shit how, or why, or how much. I was just happy to see this setup in place where I could use it.

“Let’s look at the chutes,” I said.

2055. There were three Vector tandems, six Ram-Airs, and half a dozen Russkie military chutes that sorta resembled the old round MC-3s we used when Christ was a mess cook and HAHO hadn’t been invented.

I hefted the closest Ram-Air onto a rigging table. “Let’s get to work.”

2122. GNBN. The GN was that the three tandems were in pretty good shape. But one Ram-Air was
totally unusable—a fair portion of the silk
72
in the right stabilizer was rotted. The chute would not be steerable. Worse, the harness had been eaten through in half a dozen places by mice. A second Ram-Air had also been used as dinner by Mickey Murphy, Minnie Murphy, or some suitable squeaking fucking facsimile thereof. A third had minor rips in the parasail. It could be sewn.