Echo Platoon (9 page)

Let me add that General Crocker had been very specific about my ROEs. First, I was not to ruffle the embassy’s feathers. I was to keep it smooth and quiet. Second, I was to tread very carefully when it came to Ivans. “Azerbaijan,” he reminded me, “used to be a part of the Soviet Union, and despite the current situation the Russians still have very proprietary feelings about the place. Moreover, we are engaged in some very delicate political moves with Moscow right now and I do not want things to go awry.” So, third, I was to watch, and to look, and to listen. But I was not to act. “This is an information-gathering mission, Dick,” he reminded me. “Keep it that way.”

There was something odd about the Chairman’s orders. I’d never known him to shy away from a fight.
And we both knew that the Azeris were being meddled with. But he wore all the stars, while all I wore were scars, and so I saluted, and said, “Aye, aye, sir,” and meant every word of it.

But as we all know, situations change. And
since
my cover had been blown before we’d even wheels-downed, and
since
the embassy was already pissed, and
since
I’d managed to kill one Ivan and seven Iranians, and I hadn’t even been in-country two days yet, all the Chairman’s well-meaning ROEs had been shattered. I had the unsettling feeling that I’d probably have to muscle my way through the rest of this mission. Which of course meant I would not be as stealthy in the sneaking & peeking department as General Crocker might have liked (and was
that
ever an understatement).

But as all of us—even a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—must realize, life doesn’t always go according to the plan you’ve made. You want an example? Take Bosnia. Take Kosovo. Take Mogadishu. And, when plans don’t work out, one has to adapt. My way of adapting is to become aggressive. Very, very aggressive.

So much for ruminations. Let’s get on with the story. The fact that I’d just discovered a dead Ivan along with a bunch of Iranian tangos told me that the Russkies—at least some Russkies—were working alongside the mullahs. I went over his body with the proverbial fine tooth comb. He had a wad of notebook paper with Cyrillic writing on it in the pocket of his Russkie-issue utility blouse. I took the papers and shoved ’em in my fanny pack. I’d deal with whatever they were later.

Randy and I wrapped the Russian corpse in twenty yards of chain and dumped him over the blind side of
the rig. I didn’t want anyone—especially the Azeris—discovering him. The fact that there’d been a Russkie in this assault was going to be my little secret.

The other question mark I was left with, was who the Ivan had been talking to. He’d been using the rig’s radio. It was tuned to the frequency used by the security detail at the American Embassy. Why? Obviously, I didn’t know. But my guess was that he was listening to the chatter to see how the embassy was reacting to the incident.

But he hadn’t been broadcasting. Let me rephrase that. He hadn’t been talking on the rig radio. I knew that because the microphone wasn’t even plugged into the system. But he had been talking to someone. He’d been chatting on a Russian-made, latest generation cellular phone ripped off (the Russkies like to rip off American technology) from the Motorola Star Tac. In fact, he’d been in the middle of a conversation just as Rodent and Half Pint got close to him. Then, the s.o.b. must have heard something, because he grabbed his AK, and fired half a mag in their direction.

They waxed his ass
sans pitié.
But in doing so, they also shot the hell out of the little cell phone on which he’d been chatting. And, since the Star Tac knockoff was nothing but plastic shreds and wires right now, the phone number (and the party attached thereto) to whom he’d been speaking just prior to his untimely demise remained a mystery.

But if that single unanswered question was the only wrinkle to the night’s events, I was ready to take “yes” for an answer and haul ass back to shore. The hostages were all alive and well. I had one destroyed Russkie cell phone, and a workable state-of-the-art Russkie scanner to add to my inventory of souvenirs
to turn over to Tony Mercaldi at DIA when we got home. And aside from the usual minor dings, pings, and scratches, my guys and I had come through unscathed.

We towed the tangos’ Zodiacs behind the tender. Just offshore of Glinyannyy Island (Ostrov Glinyannyy to those of you who speak Russkie), I asked the Azeri captain to full stop the engines. I scanned the shoreline with Hammer’s long-range night vision. Yup—just as I thought. The whole goddam dock was brimming with people. There were TV lights and camera crews. There was a fucking three-car convoy of big Mercedes limos, each bearing magnetic signs on the rear doors showing the CenTex map-of-Texas-and-awl-rig-in-a-big-white-circle logo. At the end of the quay, bathed in halogen security lights, was a white Aérospatiale Dauphin-2 with civilian numbers and small American and Azeri flag emblems painted next to the cockpit.

WTF. I’d been told that there wasn’t a goddam chopper capable of holding more than three people in the whole country. Listen, the Dauphin-2 can carry twenty-two shooters—even a couple more if they don’t mind a little intimacy—for hundreds of miles. I wondered whose it was.

I’d find out, but later. For now, it was time to pull a disappearing act. I took my guys, and all of our equipment, dropped into the inflatables, and headed toward the shelter of the island, so that the Azeris could ferry the hostages the rest of the way to the quay at Alät.

Why, you ask, did I do that?

The answer is simple. First, I didn’t want a repeat of the Mogadishu landings, where the fucking Marines were outnumbered by the fucking photo-dogs ten to
one. Second, our job wasn’t to look good on camera, or give chatty one-liners to the reporters on scene. Our job was to kill terrorists. Which is exactly what we’d done. Moreover, as you already know, while I’m not shy about taking credit for creating Warriors in my own image, I don’t give a shit about puffing out my chest and looking good on the nightly news. That’s not part of my job description.

So we stayed behind, and watched from the wings, as they say in the the-
ater.
And when I saw the TV lights go out, and the chopper lift off, and the motorcade of limos depart, we gunned the motors, and tally-ho’d toward the dock.

0614. I hoisted myself over the edge of the empty quay, received the line from Mustang, and made us fast to a heavy cleat. The sun wasn’t even up yet, and it was already close to a hundred degrees.

“Captain Dickie—”

I turned at the sound of my name. A tall, mustached officer in a sweat-stained, dust-streaked uniform came around the corner of a two-story concrete warehouse, his arms outstretched to give me what my Cuban friends call
un gran abrazo.

I was enveloped in an Azeri bear hug and the odor of stale tobacco and alcohol. I squeezed back. “Araz. Good to see you.” Araz Kurbanov, the field-wise officer who’d helped me set up the hit on 16-Bravo, was the titular head of Azeri special forces. We both knew
that
was an oxymoron. The Azeris have no special forces—except on paper. That’s why we’d been sent here: to give Araz’s company-size unit some basic training, so they could operate in crisis mode and not get themselves—or the hostages they’d be trying to rescue—killed.

“God, you SEALs really do like all that touchie-feelie stuff, despite all the macho psychobabble you sell the public, don’t you?”

I released Araz, stepped back, and turned toward the sound. A tall, lean, redheaded Jarhead major in well-worn green cammie BDUs and spit-shined boondockers, carrying a black ballistic nylon briefcase and a holstered sidearm on a lanyard stepped warily around a pile of dry donkey dung. “Out a little early, ain’t we, Major Evans?”

“Hell, Captain Marcinko, I’m a diplomat—and dontcha know, we diplomats work the regulation United States Marine Corps twenty-four-hour day, twenty-four hours the day, seven days the week, three-hundred sixty-five days the year. We diplomats are very dedicated to our work.”

The major smiled, brightening the dusty morning with her perfect teeth. “Besides, the ambassador ordered me to keep an eye on you people and make sure y’all stay out of trouble.” She wrinkled her nose as she drew within arm’s length of
moi
. “Geez, Dick, you’re pretty ripe. Maybe I should do my watching through binoculars.”

“Ripe? Hell—this is the real smell of battle. You’ve been living the soft life too long, Major. All those mess-dress dinners. Receptions. Cocktail parties. What you need is a good, long deployment to someplace like Lagos.”

She shook her head. “Negatory, Dick. BTDT. Been there, done that.”

Actually, there wasn’t too much that Major Ashley Evans, USMC, hadn’t done. She’d grown up in Tennessee, then gone to the U.S. Naval Academy, where she’d won a varsity letter in small-bore rifle. As a Marine
intelligence specialist she’d come under fire in Somalia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone; she’d survived a chopper crash in the mountains behind Split, Croatia. And she’d run interference for the plain-speaking, pocket rocket commandant of the Marine Corps as a congressional liaison. These days she worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency, as one of two assistant defense attachés here in Azerbaijan.

As such, she (like all attachés) came under the ambassador’s chain of command. And the boss had ordered her to make sure I didn’t commit AFR, which as y’all can probably gather, stands for Any Fucking Roguery.

But luckily for me—and for this book—Ashley Evans was imbued with the Warrior Spirit. She’d let me know that she was on our side as soon as we’d met back at the airport when I was still a sweet-smelling SEAL. She’d quietly gathered as much tactical intel as she was able to and passed it in my direction. She’d funneled telephone numbers, whispered answers to logistical questions, and made sure I knew that Araz Kurbanov was one of the few Good Guys I could count on out here in the Azeri hinterlands.

Within minutes of our first handshake, she’d also made sure I understood—with a series of nods, hitches of shoulder, and other miscellaneous body language—that any working relationship we might enjoy had to be clandestine in nature. I grasped her point instinctively. I know from personal experience (I may not seem the type, but I was actually a naval attaché once) that while attachés are detailed by the Defense Intelligence Agency, they work for the ambassador, and if an ambassador gets pissed off at an attaché, the attaché’s work can become hard, even impossible to
do. And while I didn’t mind Ambassador Madison’s looking to put
my
pigtail on a platter, it did me no good if she saw one of her staffers as a turncoat.

So much for what we in the literary profession call backstory. Let’s get on with it. “What do you know, Ashley?”

“Not a hell of a lot. I drove down with Grogan. Geez, that was real hardship duty. If that sleazebag tries to grope me one more time, I’m going to break his fingers in six places.”

We all watched as the second Zodiac tied up. Then Araz put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. Half a dozen soldiers, in uniforms even more sweat-stained and dusty than his, double-timed around the corner. The Azeri barked at them in his native tongue, and they set about helping my guys unload the boats.

He joined Ashley and me as we stood up close to the warehouse. “You missed the beeg three-rings circus show,” he said in heavily accented English. “Big times show. CNN alive broadcast and the whole nineteen yards.”

“We didn’t need our faces all over the TV.”

He shook his head in agreement. “I understand.” He paused. “Besides, that
tolkatch da’ma’ak
24
from the oil company. He was giving all the . . .” There was another pause as he searched for the right word in English. “The . . . the in-ter-
views,
and taking authority for the whole things, and of course, the ambassador too.” Araz spat through his thick, Stalinesque mustache onto the dusty concrete of the dock to show
what he thought of Grogan’s performance. “He is saying that if he had been allowed to do things his way, through Sirzhik Foundation”—Araz spat once again, letting me know what he thought of that organization, too—“then all the how you say hostage takers they would have surrendered peacefully and no need for you for making such nasty violence.”

Of course. It figured. Grogan was the type of executive who elbowed his subordinates out of the way to take credit for anything that went right, couldn’t be found within miles when things went sour, and spent all his spare time second-guessing. I’m surprised he wasn’t a retired four-star admiral instead of a retired FBI Special Agent in Charge.

“Whose chopper was that, Grogan’s?” It would have been in character for him to stiff me.

The colonel’s dark eyes scanned the pale sky, which was growing lighter by the minute, to the north. “Ah—the Dauphin,” he said longingly.
“Pokh
25
—I’d give my
Yaytz naprávo
for it,” he said, tapping the right side of his fatigue-trouser crotch by way of simultaneous translation. Araz noted my smile, and the color on Ashley’s cheeks. He withdrew a pack of cigarettes from the breast pocket of his uniform, tamped it on his palm, then pulled a half inch of a yellow-papered cigarette made of black tobacco out of the pack and offered it in my direction.

I faced my palms toward him.
“Hem cnacu
o
—no thanks.”