RW13 - Holy Terror Read online

  “IN A FIELD OF WANNA-BES,

  MARCINKO IS THE REAL THING.”

  —The Washington Times

  Acclaim for Richard Marcinko

  and the Rogue Warrior® Series

  ROGUE WARRIOR: HOLY TERROR

  “Another high-octane entry…. The action…continu[es] almost nonstop to the final climax…. Marcinko’s iconoclastic hero takes no prisoners while kicking terrorist butt in this breezy techno thriller.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A gripping thriller…. The usual felicitous, fun Rogue Warrior combo of fast action, high-tech weapons, and some real insights into counterterrorist tactics.”

  —Booklist

  ROGUE WARRIOR: VENGEANCE

  “The action is tight…with an exciting showdown at the Las Vegas Sands. Marcinko’s highly profane first person remains as funny and charming as ever.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A knock-down-drag-out against terrorists…. A hard-boiled thriller.”

  —Booklist

  “A can’t-put-down read filled with insider detail.”

  —Vince Flynn, New York Times

  bestselling author of Act of Treason

  ROGUE WARRIOR:

  VIOLENCE OF ACTION

  “Authentic descriptions of cutting-edge high-tech weapons and vivid action-packed scenes of engagement.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  ROGUE WARRIOR:

  DETACHMENT BRAVO

  “Cuts [a] swath through posturing bureaucrats and waffling military brass.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  ROGUE WARRIOR: ECHO PLATOON

  “Mouth-drying, palm-moistening, exceptionally informative…. Hardened fans will salute and read.”

  —Booklist

  ROGUE WARRIOR: OPTION DELTA

  “A classic crowd pleaser…. Great fun, more intelligent than you may think…. 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

  ROGUE WARRIOR: DESIGNATION GOLD

  “Half the fun is Marcinko’s erudite commentary on…the manly art of protecting your ass.”

  —Playboy

  ROGUE WARRIOR: TASK FORCE BLUE

  “Heart-pounding, white-knuckle, pure adrenaline action…. A great book.”

  —The Beaumont Enterprise (TX)

  ROGUE WARRIOR: GREEN TEAM

  “[A] fast-paced yarn with vivid, hardware-laden detail.”

  —Booklist

  ROGUE WARRIOR: RED CELL

  “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

  Acclaim for Richard Marcinko’s

  explosive autobiography—

  the #1 New York Times bestseller!

  ROGUE WARRIOR®

  “Rogue Warrior leaves Tom Clancy waxed and booby-trapped.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Fascinating.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Profane and asking no quarter: the real nitty-gritty, bloody and authentic.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Other books in the Rogue Warrior® series:

  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

  Rogue Warrior: Detachment Bravo

  Rogue Warrior: Violence of Action

  Rogue Warrior: Vengeance

  Also by Richard Marcinko:

  Leadership Secrets of the Rogue Warrior

  The Rogue Warrior’s Strategy for Success

  The Real Team

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2006 by Richard Marcinko

  Originally published in hardcover in 2006 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-13: 978-0-7434-4008-0

  ISBN-10: 0-7434-4008-0

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

  ROGUE WARRIOR is a registered trademark of Richard Marcinko.

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  Dedicated to the many first responders who

  left their families and loved ones to aggressively

  attack the “War on Terror” in Iraq and Afghanistan

  and then had to come home to attack the

  demise left by Hurricane Katrina

  Part One

  Italian Holiday

  If we wish to be free—if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending—if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained—we must fight! I repeat it, sir, we must fight! An appeal to arms and to the God of hosts is all that is left us!

  —PATRICK HENRY

  1

  A piece of advice in case you ever find yourself on top of the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City—watch out for the cross at the very top of the spire. It is a hell of a lot sharper than you’d think.

  The roof tiles are pretty slippery, too, particularly the ones with the pigeon shit on them.

  On the other hand, the view is to die for. Especially if you’re up there with a maniac who’s waving a Beretta Model 12S 9mm submachine gun in your face.

  Yeah, I know what you’re thinking: That Beretta’s a great gun, but the frame tends to crack under the weight of too many hot rounds. The maniac would have been much better off with an H&K MP5; a lot less chance of a misfire.

  I would have pointed this out myself, but he didn’t seem in the mood for constructive criticism. He had a shitass grin on his face, the sort that says, ­­­Eat lead and die, Marcinko.”

  The tips of my fingers started to sweat. They say the dome over St. Peter’s is the biggest in the world, but at that moment it felt extremely small. When he swung the business end of the 12S toward me, it felt absolutely claustrophobic.

  My own weapon lay on the roof below, out of ammo. It looked like I had two options—throw myself at him in the vain hope of somehow wrestling the gun from his paws before he managed to kill me, or…

  I couldn’t think of an or, actually.

  But maybe I should explain how I came to be in such an exalted position in the first place. It’s not every day that you get a private tour of the most famous rooftop in Christendom. And what got me out into the Roman sunshine wasn’t your typical goatfuck…it was a truly artistic one, the sort of thing that would have made Michelangelo proud. So let’s go back to the beginning….

  This particular adventure began with
a fax that arrived at Rogue Manor on Christmas Eve a few months before. The sheet was blank except for a Web address in the middle of the page. It was a bit past 10 p.m., and Rogue Manor was empty except for yours truly. With nothing else to do but await the arrival of Ol’ St. Nick, I turned on the computer and typed in the address, which mostly consisted of numbers and backslashes. I vaguely recall thinking I’d see a picture of Santa and one of his elves in a compromising position. Instead, I found myself looking at a page filled with type so small I had to hit the magnifier button three times. It turned out to be a turgid dissertation on the coming end of the “Crusader Epoch,” the inevitable clash of “a great civilization with a decript [sic] one,” and the unstoppable rise of the True People of the Book. Clement Moore, or whoever wrote “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” has nothing to worry about.

  We get tons of emails, faxes, and letters from whacko crazies at Rogue Manor, and this one probably would have faded into the hazy recesses of my mental round file except for the signature at the bottom of the Web page. The “communiqué of fervor” had been signed with the name “Saladin.”

  In case obscure, failed world leaders doesn’t happen to be your favorite Jeopardy! category, here’s a quick info dump on Saladin: Also known as Salah al-Din and a half-dozen similar variations, Saladin was a twelfth-century Egyptian warrior who took Jerusalem from the crusaders. He built the wall that surrounds the old city and was the first pan-Arab to try to consolidate all Arab people under the green banner of Muhammad. He failed—not for want of trying or low body count—but has remained a source of inspiration ever since. Many an Arab leader has used him as a role model, reinterpreting history and the legend through his own distorted glasses. Nasser, Saddam Hussein, even the Shah of Iran viewed him as an inspiration. Osama bite-my-butt Laden didn’t use the name, but it isn’t hard to see parallels between his aims and Saladin’s goal of a pan-Arab empire.

  Over the years I’ve had various encounters with would-be Saladins, some of whom were actually credible opponents. Probably the most notable was in Cairo during the 1990s. I won’t bore you with more backstory* than necessary here; suffice to say that the name piqued my interest. The Web page was on a site that belonged to an international drug company. Clearly, it had been hacked into. When my computer guy checked with the firm the day after Christmas, they expressed complete surprise.

  At least that’s how he interpreted the words, “Holy shitfuck—what the hell is this?”

  (My self-anointed “computer dude” and all-around tech expert is a tech-head wop dweeb named Paul Guido Falcone, a wiseass known to us as “Shunt.” Shunt has shunts in his head. They’re some sort of metal inserts placed into his skull because he was born with water in his skull; I think of them as brain gutters. He’s loads of fun with metal detectors.)

  A few days later, another fax arrived with a new Web address. Here was posted a new dissertation repeating the main points of the first—history was on the side of the schizophrenics, etc. It concluded by making some predictions: A new leader would arise to knit together the worldwide network of murdering assholes, and his name was—guess now—Saladin.

  And by the way, as a display of the new leader’s power, a small incident would occur the next day as a signal to the brothers of faith and insanity that the time for war would begin.

  The time was given as 00:00:01, but no place was specified. Even though it was an open-ended and nonspecific threat, I reported it anyway, filing the information with both Homeland Security and the CIA (also known as the Christians In Action). I also forwarded a bunch of heads-ups to a number of friends and acquaintances in the terrorist threat business, figuring one more wild-goose chase would just make the holiday season that much more enjoyable.

  At roughly the same time I was burning up the phone lines, a fax similar to mine arrived at al-Jazeera, the mouthpiece long favored by crazies and psychos wrapping themselves in the word of Muhammad, blessed be his name. The fax was turned over to the reporter in charge of whacko ramblings, who dutifully plugged the address into his browser and began reading Saladin’s communiqué, which in this case was written in Arabic. While most of the rant was familiar—war of civilizations, death to the crusaders, etc.—this one contained more specific predictions relating to mayhem, promising uprisings across the globe, especially in that holy wasteland known as Afghanistan. It also mentioned that a certain liquefied gas ship on its way from Malaysia to a new port in China would be blown up to start the new millennium of Allah’s Paradise. Once more the time was given as 00:00:01.

  The reporter considered the matter, then decided to report it, only to find that the ship had been blown up. He subsequently determined that the time of the explosion was correct or at least close enough to count—assuming your watch was set to the time in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, arguably the center of the worldly universe if you’re Muslim. The reporter wrote a story, and for maybe twenty-four hours the world’s intelligence agencies spent considerable resources trying to profile Saladin. I received not one, not two, but three separate calls from analysts at the Christians In Action about Saladin, the Web pages, and the faxes. I told them everything I knew, which wasn’t much. The NSA—“No Such Agency,” the ultrasecret eavesdropping and electronic snoops over at Fort Meade—did a frantic search through its archives to see what it had snooped out on Saladin without knowing who he was. The Chinese loaded a group of special agents aboard a destroyer and shipped them over to interview the survivors. Forensics specialists from six or seven countries flew out to the wreckage, most of which was at the bottom of the Pacific and out of reach.

  The sum total of all this work was a big fat zero. Nothing that the crew members said proved conclusively that a bomb had caused the explosion. The safety record of the company involved was rather lackluster, and while it would have taken extraordinary incompetence to cause an accidental explosion—well, let’s just say that extraordinary incompetence was not in short supply.

  The experts concluded that the explosion had occurred before the faxes were sent. Because of this, they decided, it was possible that Saladin had heard of the disaster and was trying to take credit for it to boost his own standing in the community of crazies. This especially made sense given that they could find no other evidence of his existence before the fax I received. And in fact there was almost no evidence that he did exist, except for the faxes and Web site.

  I agreed to let the NSA babysit my fax line for a few days; nothing came in other than some long-shot predictions on the Super Bowl. Saladin quickly slipped off their radarscope.

  And mine. The lack of follow-up over the next few days convinced me that this was just one more Osama wannabe looking to become caliph on the cheap. Any asshole with a computer and some rudimentary knowledge can hack his way into most corporate systems, and visions of grandeur are as common among Muslims as they are in the rest of the world’s population.

  It wasn’t as if I didn’t have other things to do. Red Cell International—my security consulting firm, a successor of sorts to SOS Temps—had been awarded several contracts the previous summer and fall. While we continued to do some training for Homeland Insecurity and the Defense Department, more and more of our business was with private industry. Most of these were very straightforward assessment gigs, where yours truly and his various minions earned big bucks telling corporate security types why their procedures weren’t worth the paper they weren’t written on. The best jobs involved simulating terrorist and corporate espionage attacks against the conglomerates. Not only did these pay absurdly well, but they were a hell of a lot of fun. One of our favorite ploys involved kidnapping the company CEO the day before our assignment was supposed to officially begin. We’d take him to the fanciest restaurant in town while his head of security frantically searched for him, enjoying a ten-course dinner while keeping tabs on the Keystone Kop response via video and audio bugs we’d planted at corporate HQ. The only downside was that most of these corporate fat cats were embarrassingly small ti
ppers; it got so I had to intercept the bill and add the amount myself before having them sign. Otherwise the waitstaff never would have served my team if we returned.

  These domestic assignments led to additional work overseas, training and in a few cases providing choirboy services in foreign pleasure resorts, like beautiful Kandahar and lovely Baghdad. We sang, we hummed, we disposed of the garbage when necessary. Our standard contracts include nondisclosure clauses about as long as this book; the lawyers say they mean I can neither name the companies we work for nor say what we did. The lawyers can suck turds as far as I’m concerned, but since a lot of these assignments are ongoing, in the interests of protecting my people I’d prefer to keep discussion of methods and means to a minimum. Suffice it to say that we did what had to be done, reaping the appropriate rewards but also occasionally suffering the sort of hits that made such rewards a necessary incentive.

  As far as this particular yarn is concerned, the most important contracts were in Afghanistan, where three different Western companies required our assistance to varying degrees. Sometime that February—weeks after Saladin’s faxes had begun to fade and curl at the edges—we noticed an uptick in operations directed at the companies we were working with. And, eventually, at Red Cell International itself. There wasn’t a pattern that we could put our fingers on, but we were interested enough to call a company-wide conference to discuss it. For various reasons, including the quality of the beer, we picked a date in March in Germany.

  Which fit in nicely with my own schedule, as I was supposed to be in Italy right around the same time to address an annual NATO meeting on the new realities of terrorism.