Echo Platoon (Rogue Warrior) - Softcover

Marcinko, Richard; Weisman, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671000748 ISBN 13: 9780671000745

Publisher: Pocket Books, 2001

Synopsis

In seven smash Rogue Warrior bestsellers, Richard Marcinko and John Weisman have delivered nonstop action and explosive thrills. Now the Rogue Warrior writes a new set of rules for the shadowy world of Black Ops....

Dangerous times require dangerous men. And there isn't a man alive more deadly than the Rogue Warrior. Captain Richard "NMN" Marcinko must uncover the truth behind recent attempts to destabilize Azerbaijan, the tiny former Soviet republic that holds the key to the oil-rich Caspian Sea. A pipeline to the West is planned, and both Russia and Iran want control. But there are hidden players, including billionaire Steve Sarkesian; just how he ties in with the Russkies and Arabs is unclear, but treachery is afoot to choke off America's black gold.

Enlisting his elite SEALs, Marcinko races to the heart of the Middle East, doing what he does best -- breaking rules and cracking heads until the only thing left standing is justice.

About this title

About the Author:

Richard Marcinko retired from the Navy as a full commander after more than thirty years of service. He currently lives in the Alexandria, Virginia, area, where he is CEO of SOS Temps Inc., his private security firm -- whose clients are governments and corporations; Richard Marcinko Inc., a motivational training and team-building company; and Red Cell International, Inc., which conducts vulnerability assessments of high-value properties and high-risk targets. He is the author of The Real Team; The Rogue Warrior's Strategy for Success: A Commando's Principles of Winning; and the four-month New York Times business bestseller Leadership Secrets of the Rogue Warrior: A Commando's Guide to Success. Rogue Warrior, his #1 New York Times bestselling autobiography, set the stage for his bestselling Rogue Warrior novels, eight of which were coauthored with John Weisman. Visit Richard Marcinko's website at www.dickmarcinko.com.

John Weisman is one of the select company of authors to have written both fiction and non-fiction New York Times best-sellers. In 1992 he wrote Rogue Warrior with Richard Marcinko. That book, Marcinko's autobiography and the story of the U.S. Navy's elite counterterrorism unit, SEAL Team Six, spent eight months on the Times best-seller list, including four weeks at number one. The sequels, Rogue Warrior: Red Cell, Rogue Warrior: Green Team, Rogue Warrior: Task Force Blue, Rogue Warrior: Designation Gold, and Rogue Warrior: Seal Force Alpha were all New York Times fiction-list best-sellers.

Weisman was appointed a Senior Fellow at the Annenberg Washington Program for Communications Policy Studies of Northwestern University in 1989. Prior to that, he wrote hundreds of articles for publications that run the gamut from the Columbia Journalism Review to Soldier of Fortune. He has lectured on media and writing at the National War College at Fort Leslie J. McNair, the American University, Cornell University, and Longwood College.

His books include the nonfiction best-seller Shadow Warrior, the life story of Felix Rodriguez, the CIA agent who captured Che Guevara, which was published by Simon and Schuster and was the subject of a 60 Minutes segment. His previous novels include Evidence, Watchdogs, and Blood Cries. His acclaimed CIA short story "There Are Monsterim" can be found in the current anthology Unusual Suspects.

Weisman was born in New York City in 1942. He attended the Birch Wathen School and Bard College. He divides his time between homes in the Washington, DC area and the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia.

He can be reached via email at jweisman@ix.netcom.com

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One

First things first. The time is currently 0230, and the situation is currently FUBAR. Now, having given you the complete (yet still Roguishly pithy) sit-rep, I can proceed with the confessional portion of this affair.

Here goes. I have often maintained that Getting There Is Half the Fun. But today, following the presidential example, I can finally admit the truth: I have misled you. It was all mendacity. Lies. Duplicity. Prevarication. After almost a decade of these books, here is the unvarnished, frank, candid, pellucid, and wholly unadulterated acronymic truth: GTINFFAA. Getting There Is No Fucking Fun At All. None. Nada. Bupkis. Zilch.

There is precious little merriment involved in jumping out of a perfectly stable fucking aircraft into minus-sixty-degree-Fahrenheit air, seven miles above the ground, so you can surprise some hostage-holding malefactors unaware. It is not blissful to leave a perfectly fucking sound rigid inflatable boat and insert by wallowing snout-first through several hundred yards of oozy, chest-deep mud, all the while fending off nasty, often lethal creepie-crawlies, so you can reconnoiter a village of no-goodniks and then withdraw without being seen. There is no ecstasy in humping several score miles across hundred-plus-degree desert carrying everything but the fucking kitchen sink on your back to blow up a motley crew of transnational tangos.

Indeed, the sorts of experiences I'm describing here can be summarized in a single, evocative, one-syllable word. I am talking, friends, about PAIN.

Not the cartoon pain of television dramas and Hollywood shoot-'em-ups, either. I mean the real thing. The kind of pain that hurts; hurts for days. The linger-ing agony of a badly hyperextended joint when you smack the water the wrong way at thirty miles an hour. The month of searing suffering when your chute malfunctions during free fall, a nylon line slaps you across the eyes, ripping your goggles off and tearing your cornea loose. The involuntary tightening of sphincter muscles as a ricochet from your own weapon caroms off a metal wall, bounces off the floor, comes hurtling back at you, and slices through your side, just below the brisket half an inch below where your bulletproof vest stops.

Now, let me say that all of the various varieties of pain encapsulated in the above activities: each and every ding, all the blisters, bruises, contusions, and concussions, the gashes, lacerations, and plain, no-frills smacks upside the head, all of them pale when compared with my current situation.

And what, precisely, was my current situation? All you Enquiring minds want to know, huh?

Let's put it this way: my current situation comes straight out of the BOHICA handbook. I mean, I've been cracked, smacked, whacked, and hacked; I've been thumped, dumped, bumped, and whumped; I've been ground, crowned, browned, and drowned. But until tonight, I've never experienced it while greased.

Yeah, greased. Like a cheap French fry. I mean as thickly coated with petroleum jelly as the Herndon Monument the day the plebes at the Naval Academy climb the fucking thing as the last act of their first year. I mean schmeared. Like a bagel. I mean daubed, as with lard. Like Gertrude Ederle on her first attempt to swim the English fucking Channel.

So okay, maybe if you're a Channel swimmer, and you're wearing a 1930s one-piece wool bathing suit, maybe it helps if you envelop yourself in pig fat, or Vaseline (or love-jelly or K-Y, for all I care). But me, I had a little more to carry than Gertrude did. I was wearing a wet suit, which was uncomfortably hot in the tepid water in which I was currently attempting to swim. Over the wet suit was a set of basic black BDUs, which as you all probably know after seven of these books, stands for the oxymoronic Battle Dress Uniform. I was also sporting the ever-popular Point Blank Class III-A Tactical bulletproof vest, with its six-pound ceramic chest plate Velcro'd directly over the ol' Rogue heart. Atop that, I wore my inflatable SEAL CQC vest -- and lucky I did, because with all this extra weight I'd have sunk faster than what my longtime Kraut komrade in arms, Brigadier General Fred Kohler, would refer to as ein Backstein.

Sink like a brick? Oh, yeah -- I was carrying almost seventy pounds of equipment tonight. Cinched around my waist was a tactical pistol belt. Descending from it, and attached to the Roguish right thigh, was a ballistic nylon holster that held my suppressed Heckler & Koch USP-9 and five spare fifteen-round magazines.

To balance things out, my left thigh supported six thirty-round submachine gun magazines loaded with 115-grain Winchester Silvertips. Strapped to my back was a scabbard holding HK's ubiquitous MP5 submachine gun in 9-mm, with a Knight wet-technology suppressor screwed onto the barrel, and a seventh full mag of Silvertips within easy reach. I had six DefTec No. 25 flashbangs in modular pouches Velcro'd to my CQC vest, along with a secure radio, lip mike, and earpiece, twenty feet of shaped linear ribbon charge on a wooden spool, primers, wire, and an electric detonator, a pair of eighteen-inch bolt cutters, an electrician's screwdriver, lineman's pliers, a short steel pry bar, and a first-aid kit. Since I am from the carry-the-coals-to-Newcastle school of SEALdom, I carried a pair of two-liter bladders of drinking water. My fanny pack contained a handful of nylon restraints, and a small roll of waterproof duct tape.

Strapped to my right calf I wore a Mad Dog Taiho combat knife with a nonmagnetic blade. Wound around my waist was twenty feet of caving ladder with modular, titanium rungs and stainless steel cable-rail.

With all that dreck attached to my body, swimming the thousand yards from my insertion point to the target would have been, shall we say, difficult, even under the best of conditions. But I had no choice. Besides, we were all similarly loaded down. After all, once we'd made the swim, there was no place to go for supplies. If there was a possibility we'd need to use something, either we schlepped it with us, or we'd have to do without when the time came.

Having just said all that, I must admit that tonight's conditions were, in the abstract, not intolerable toward me and my men. Many elements actually worked in our favor. The water was warm and calm, with a mere eight-to-ten-inch chop. The current flowed obligingly directly toward my target from our launch point. The cuticle-thin sliver of moon low in the east was intermittently obscured by high wispy clouds, which gave me and the eleven men swimming with me a certain degree of invisibility.

Which is why, I guess, Mister Murphy of Murphy's Law fame, decided that my task was too simple and my goal too easily reached. A twelve-man assault team, swimming roughly one thousand yards, should reach its objective in about forty minutes. We had gone about half that distance in less than twenty minutes -- and were therefore ahead of schedule.

And so, with his usual sense of the ironic, Mister Murphy came up with an additional element of difficulty to layer on the night's events. An unforeseen, unanticipated, and totally unappreciated oil slick coated the water through which I swam tonight. I hadn't seen it until I was six feet into it -- enough time to wave my guys off, but too late for me. We're not talking about a lot of crude here. The scum was perhaps a thirty-second of an inch at its thickest. But let me tell you something about crude oil: it doesn't take a lot to fuck you over, and that thirty-second of an inch of oil fucked me over good. The goddamn stuff stuck to me. It coated all my equipment with sticky, foul-smelling goo. And it weighed me down -- almost doubling the load I had to swim under.

Moreover, oil slicks come under the rubric of what the tree huggers at the Environmental Protection Agency refer to as HAZMATs, which of course stands for HAZardous MATerials. Indeed, according to the EPA's current Rules of Engagement (and I've read 'em), one must not come into contact with oil slicks unless one is wearing: 1: a set of EPA-approved HAZMAT coveralls; 2: an EPA-approved HAZMAT mask; 3: EPA-approved HAZMAT gloves; 4: HAZMAT footwear; and 5: an EPA-sanctioned hard hat (in visibility orange, or bright yellow only, please). Violators will be severely fined. Their names will be put down in The Book.

But since there wasn't an EPA tree hugger within six thousand miles, and since I have devoted my life to operating in spite of whatever mischief Mister Murphy or any of his relatives strews in my path, I just kept swimming. Shit, a few years ago, I took a dip in a fucking nuclear wastewater pool. I cured the resulting luminescence (I'm probably the only Richard whose dick has glowed in the dark) with Bombay Sapphire -- and I haven't noticed any incidences of lighted lizard syndrome since. So, if Bombay can treat the effects of a nuke ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Pocket Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0671000748
• ISBN 13: 9780671000745
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432