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  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.

  “In a field of wanna-bes, Marcinko is the real thing: combat veteran, killer SEAL, specialist in unconventional warfare.”

  —The Washington Times

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  “Dick Marcinko is the real McCoy, a warrior who has lived it.”

  —Stephen Coonts

  PRAISE FOR RICHARD MARCINKO AND JOHN WEISMAN AND THE ROGUE WARRIOR® SERIES

  ROGUE WARRIOR: OPTION DELTA

  “Marcinko knows the gritty reality of fighting it out in the trenches while watching your back. You will, too, after reading Option Delta.”

  —C.A. Mobley, bestselling author of

  Rites of War and Rules of Command

  “Great fun. . . . This classic crowd-pleaser offers insight into the psychology of special and covert operations and fight scenes choreographed by one who has actually done them. . . . Marcinko’s Rogue Warrior yarns . . . are the purest kind of thriller around, with action, pacing, and hardware galore.”

  —Booklist

  ROGUE WARRIOR: SEAL FORCE ALPHA

  “Entertaining. . . . Marcinko and his team handle, with gusto, both enemies without and traitors within, using their wits, a staggering array of weapons, and an obvious appetite for violence.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Authentic. . . . This action-filled novel is a genuine thriller, one that keeps the reader in suspense throughout.”

  —The Free Lance-Star (Fredericksburg, VA)

  ROGUE WARRIOR: DESIGNATION GOLD

  “Marcinko and Weisman add new plot ingredients and push them to the limits of military technology. . . . Half the fun is Marcinko’s erudite commentary on the incompetence of U.S. military services, the complex and ultimately frustrating mechanics of international politics, and the manly art of protecting your ass.”

  —Playboy

  “The salty soldier of fortune raises enough homicidal hell to get himself expelled from Russia. . . . Hard-hitting.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  ROGUE WARRIOR: TASK FORCE BLUE

  “Heart-pounding, white-knuckle, pure adrenaline action. . . . The fast-paced Mission: Impossible–style plot rockets along like a high-octane action movie. . . . A great book.”

  —Beaumont Enterprise (TX)

  ROGUE WARRIOR: GREEN TEAM

  “Liberally sprinkled with raw language and graphic descriptions of mayhem . . . the literary equivalent of professional wrestling.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  ROGUE WARRIOR: RED CELL

  “[A] bawdy action novel. . . . Rogue Warrior: Red Cell never stops to take a breath.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A chilling, blood and guts, no-nonsense look into clandestine military operations told like it should be told. It doesn’t come more powerful than this.”

  —Clive Cussler

  ROGUE WARRIOR

  “For sheer readability, Rogue Warrior leaves Tom Clancy waxed and booby-trapped.”

  —Robert Lipsyte, Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Marcinko . . . makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Little Lord Fauntleroy.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Blistering honesty. . . . Marcinko is one tough Navy commando.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Marcinko was too loose a cannon for the U.S. Navy. . . . Rogue Warrior is not a book for the faint of heart.”

  —People

  THE ROGUE WARRIOR’S STRATEGY FOR SUCCESS

  “Picture Rambo in pinstripes. . . . Marcinko’s style is inspirational; his (literal) war stories are entertaining; and sprinkled throughout are useful business insights.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  LEADERSHIP SECRETS OF THE ROGUE WARRIOR

  “Look out, Bill Gates.”

  —USA Today

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the authors’ imaginations, or are used fictitiously. Operational details have been altered so as not to betray current SpecWar techniques.

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 2000 by Richard Marcinko and John Weisman

  Originally published in hardcover in 2000 by Atria Books

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN: 0-671-00074-8

  ISBN: 978-1-4391-4095-6(eBook)

  First Atria Books paperback printing February 2001

  ATRIA BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Front cover design and illustration by James Wang Photo by Kelly Campbell

  ROGUE WARRIOR is a registered trademark of Richard Marcinko

  In memory of Bently Toxvard Master Gunsmith, Warrior, and Patriot

  The Rogue Warrior® Series

  by Richard Marcinko and John Weisman

  Rogue Warrior

  Rogue Warrior: Red Cell

  Rogue Warrior: Green Team

  Rogue Warrior: Task Force Blue

  Rogue Warrior: Designation Gold

  Rogue Warrior: SEAL Force Alpha

  Rogue Warrior: Option Delta

  Rogue Warrior: Echo Platoon

  Also by Richard Marcinko

  Leadership Secrets of the Rogue Warrior

  The Rogue Warrior’s Strategy for Success

  The Real Team

  Also by John Weisman

  Fiction

  Blood Cries

  Watchdogs

  Evidence

  Nonfiction

  Shadow Warrior (with Felix Rodriguez)

  Anthologies

  Unusual Suspects (edited by James Grady)

  The Best American Mystery Stories of 1997 (edited by Robert B. Parker)

  The friend of my enemy, he is my enemy;

  The enemy of my friend, he is my enemy;

  But the enemy of my enemy, he is my friend.

  —OLD AZERI PROVERB

  THE ROGUE WARRIOR’S

  TEN COMMANDMENTS OF SPECWAR

  • I am the War Lord and the wrathful God of Combat and I will always lead you from the front, not the rear.

  • I will treat you all alike—just like shit.

  • Thou shalt do nothing I will not
do first, and thus will you be created Warriors in My deadly image.

  • I shall punish thy bodies because the more thou sweatest in training, the less thou bleedest in combat.

  • Indeed, if thou hurteth in thy efforts and thou suffer painful dings, then thou art Doing It Right.

  • Thou hast not to like it—thou hast just to do it.

  • Thou shalt Keep It Simple, Stupid.

  • Thou shalt never assume.

  • Verily, thou art not paid for thy methods, but for thy results, by which meaneth thou shalt kill thine enemy by any means available before he killeth you.

  • Thou shalt, in thy Warrior’s Mind and Soul, always remember My ultimate and final Commandment. There Are No Rules—Thou Shalt Win at All Cost.

  Contents

  Part One: The Friend of My Enemy

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part Two: The Enemy of My Friend

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Three: The Enemy of My Enemy

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Glossary

  Index

  Endnotes

  Part One

  THE FRIEND OF MY ENEMY

  1

  FIRST THINGS FIRST. THE TIME IS CURRENTLY 0230, AND the situation is currently FUBAR.1 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 lingering 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 BOHICA2 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.3 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 CQC4 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.5 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 wastewater pool, I had no reason to think a dollop or two (or three, or four), after this little exercise wouldn’t do the trick, too.