SEAL FORCE ALPHA - Softcover

Richard Marcinko; John Weisman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671000721 ISBN 13: 9780671000721

Publisher: Pocket Star, 1999

Synopsis

AS A U.S. NAVY SEAL, RICHARD MARCINKO KNEW NO LIMITS -- AS THE ROGUE WARRIOR, HE OBEYS NO RULES!

SpecWar master Richard Marcinko has revealed classified, kill-or-be-killed operations in a series of New York Times bestsellers: Rogue Warrior, his #1 blockbuster autobiography, and four scorching Rogue Warrior novels. Now in an electrifying new adventure, the Rogue Warrior battles an ultra-secret, ultra-lethal military plot.

The Rogue Warrior's taking a flying leap -- a high-altitude jump over the South China Sea. His mission: scuttle a Chinese freighter's cargo of nuclear hardware and its crack crew of naval commandos. It's a leave-no-tracks, take-no-prisoners operation -- in short, business as usual. But on board Marcinko makes a chilling discovery: a cache of state-of-the-art command and control equipment, all made in the U.S.A. -- and primed for America's destruction!

Marcinko takes his findings back to Washington, where he runs into a wall of doublespeak and double deals. But not everyone wants to see America go down the drain. General Tom Crocker, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, unleashes the SEALs of war -- Marcinko and a Pentagon-based unit, SEAL Force Alpha -- to neutralize a global maze of political deceit that begins all too close to home.

The Chinese sense victory. They have a mole in the White House, and five thousand years of military strategy on their side. But neither the traitor nor all the wisdom of Sun Tzu are prepared for Marcinko and his men. They, after all, live by the Rogue Warrior's Tenth Commandment of SpecWar: "There Are No Rules -- Thou Shalt Win At All Cost."

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.

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

Chapter One

The pilot, whose name was Arch Kielly, blinked the cargo bay lights twice, then twice again, to signal he was descending to thirty thousand. Once there, he'd crack a hatch, depressurize, then lower the C-130's ramp. That was so we could jump at twenty-nine thousand five hundred -- the minimum height we'd need to carry us to within striking distance of our target.

I was so preoccupied with checking the cargo straps on the assault craft (it was tied down astride the double-tracked rollers) that I got caught pants-down inattentive when Arch turned the interior lights off. He did that for a perfectly good tactical reason: so no one would be able to see anything untoward from the western shore of Borneo, five and a half miles below, just in case anybody happened to be looking in our direction, which was, of course, up.

So, I was blindsided (literally) by the sudden blackout. Then Arch the fucking pilot did something else I hadn't remembered he was going to do (although he'd told it to me in simple declarative sentences during the preflight briefing): he banked sharply to starboard as he brought the plane onto a due north heading. Surprise. Doom on Dickie. Which is a polite way of saying in Vietnamese that I was being fuckee-fuckeed. One second I was checking the quick release harness on the ICRRC, an acronym that stands for Improved Combat Rubber Raiding Craft for those of you who aren't familiar with SpecWarspeak. The next, I'd lost sight of everything and everybody else as the plane's interior went completely lightless. It was like, WTF?

Then he plunged the nose earthward, dropped the right wing about forty-five degrees, and knocked me completely off balance. I rolled around in the dark like a fucking pinball SEAL, caromed off a bulkhead, got turned around the wrong way (is there any right way in these situations?), tripped over the rollers, lost my balance, and went skidding face first into one of the hard-cast, H-shaped, reinforced aluminum mounting beams that support the plane's forward seating module. It was like, slip, s-l-i-d-e, SMACK -- whaap.

Oh, that smarted. Belay that. It fucking hurt. Instant agony. My oxygen mask was knocked askew. My goggles were spun halfway round my head. My helmet strap cut off my air. Now, those of you who know me at all, know that I have a unique relationship with pain. In actual point of fact, I have an existential relationship with pain. By this, I mean that I see pain not as a vague, generalized physiological concept to be explored; not as a cryptic, enigmatic problem to be analyzed; but as a real-time, essential, individual challenge; a subjective, personal confrontational experience.

Pain is an ordeal; a physical encounter to be lived through, relished, and explored, crack by smack by whaap. My pain exists so I can demonstrate to you, my constant and gentle readers out there, that I am inexorably...alive.

Which is probably why that precise, painful, and even Heideggerian instant was exactly the second the C-130's crew chief -- who was waiting for his cue -- received said signal from the pilot and cracked open the port side hatch. I heard a Perot-size giant sucking sound, and felt the accompanying tremor as the Hercules lost pressure and its interior temperature dropped about 106 degrees in four and a half seconds. Oh, fuck me very much one more time! Was I ever inexorably, existentially, alive.

I struggled to readjust my helmet, mask, and goggles, but the environment wasn't making things easy for me. One problem: it was dark, remember? Another problem: I was wearing a shitload of equipment, and it was difficult to move quickly since I kept catching my straps, loops, lashes, or laces on one of the 130's numerous interior hooks, hangers, pylons, or braces every time I tried to shift my body position.

You do not, after all, jump out of an aircraft at twenty-nine point five thousand feet to go kill bad guys wearing nothing but skivvies, sneakers, and a K-Bar knife. Everything you plan to use, you must carry with you. And when your operational plan calls for a thirty-mile parachute ride followed by a ten-to-fifteen-mile boat ride, followed by who-the-hell-knows-what, you have to carry enough for contingencies. Contingencies, hell -- there's the omnipresent Mr. Murphy to worry about, so you have to go out of the plane loaded down with more junk than you'll find in the Brigade fucking Quartermaster catalog. And things get even more knotty, intricate, complex, when you are operating, like I am, in the black. (No pun intended. What I'm talking about right now are black -- as in untraceable -- ops.)

Which is why I wore a wet suit (generic, French-made) covered by your basic black Nomex flight coveralls (German manufacture). Over those sat a UDT-style life vest (also in basic black), as well as a Brit Royal Marine CQC (that's Close Quarters Combat) vest equipped with class-III body armor and a flotation bladder, not to mention pockets that held twenty or so pounds of lethal goodies that ran the gamut from plastique (in this case an RDX-rich Czech Semtex) and Bulgarian pencil detonators to a point-and-shoot digital electronic camera, (it produces bits-and-bytes computer images on a three-and-a-half-inch disk ratherthan using conventional film), and half a dozen extra magazines for my pistol, each of which contained vintage East German-manufactured frangible Plus-P load ammo.

From the starboard side of the padded pistol belt around my waist was suspended the ever-fashionable ballistic nylon tactical thigh holster containing a Portuguese knockoff of a Heckler & Koch USP 9mm semiauto pistol. The compartment usually reserved for a spare magazine held a suppressor for the pistol. Suspended from my waist's port side and cinched around my left thigh sat a ballistic nylon mag-holder for six thirty-round magazines (filled with the same Kraut ammo that was inside my pistol mags), so I could reload the suppressed HK MP5-PDW I would be carrying. My belt also held a canteen of water, a pouch holding a pair of small but powerful bolt cutters (British), my first-aid kit (also French), and a K-Bar assault knife in a Kydex sheath. I've already told you about the oxygen mask (Japanese) and helmet (Israeli). I don't think I mentioned the O2 bottle, navigational chest-pack, and radio.

My normal weight is in the 220-pound area. If there'd been a scale on this flight, I'd have weighed somewhere in the 270 range. And I wasn't even three-quarters loaded up yet. The point of all this inventory description is to illustrate that there were a lot of possibilities when it came to the "materials that catch on protuberances" category.

I noticed that my fingers were going numb under the Nomex gloves. Now, I don't care whether you've jumped from thirty thousand feet once, or whether you've done it a couple of hundred times like I have: when they depressurize the fucking plane, it gets real goddamn cold, real goddamn fast. Even with the coveralls and the quarter-inch-thick neoprene foam wet suits below 'em, we were suddenly in a d-d-d-deep freeze.

I could sense my guaranteed fog-proof Bolle combat goggles frosting over on the outside, which would have made it hard to see the O2 connector in front of my nose -- if I could have seen anything in the blackness. I stumbled through the plane until I found an oxygen outlet. I identified it by Braille, fondled the nozzle, shoved it sans foreplay into the female connector, and (unlike the president) inhaled as deeply as I could.

Nothing happened. I sucked again. Nada. I tried a third time. Bupkis. This particular oxygen outlet wasn't working. But no O2 at thirty thousand feet is a course of action frowned upon in every one of the military's field manuals and instructional course materials -- not to mention the long list of personal do's and don'ts I carry in my Slovak brain.

So I fought my way aft in the darkness, found a second nozzle, and rapid-switched. Of course, that one was screwed up too. It was right then I realized that my old and constantly consistent nemesis, Mr. Murphy of Murphy's Law fame, had stowed away for the ride.

I yanked the tube connector out of the plane's oxygen supply and shoved it into the O2 bottle strapped to my chest along with the altimeter, compass, large digital readout watch, Magellan GPS module, and secure radio. I inhaled, and was rewarded with a lungful of oxygen. At least I'd be breathing when we went off the ramp. Of course, after that, things might get sticky. There were twenty minutes' worth of air in the bottle strapped to my chest. We were jumping at twenty-nine-thou five hundred. The estimated descent rate given the air temperature, crosswinds, humidity, and load, was eighteen feet per second. You need oxygen until you pass below ten thousand feet. Well -- this was combat, and in combat we might get away with a twelve thou ceiling.

Okay, you do the math. Twenty-nine five thou minus twelve thou, divided by eighteen feet per second, gives us approx 972 seconds (I'm talking fast because I'm using up oxygen) which, divided by sixty, comes to just over sixteen minutes of air. So if we jumped in the next three minutes, I'd be hunky-dory. If not? Sayonara, Dickie -- it would be hypoxia city.

You say you don't know about hypoxia? Well, lemme explain. The condition is a manifestation of pulmonary insufficiency. That's a twenty-dollar way of saying that your blood ain't gettin' enough oxygen. The manifestations include cerebral vasodilation, and changes in sensorum ranging from confusion to narcosis. In the kind of two-bit plain English I understand, this polysyllabic soufflé means that if I jump from too high an altitude I don't get enough oxygen in my brain (that's the cerebral vasodilation stuff), and I can also experience (here come the sensorum goodies): confusion, drowsiness, sluggish reaction time, loss of muscle control, blurred vision and a confused, almost drunken thought process. Bottom line -- if something goes wrong, I can...

About this edition

• Publisher: Pocket Star
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0671000721
• ISBN 13: 9780671000721
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 432