Echo Platoon by Richard Marcinko, John Weisman Read Free Book Online

our positions had changed. Nod, the breecher, stood opposite me. Duck Foot had taken up the rear-guard position. Boomerang and I would go through the doorway first, neutralizing any threats we found.
    I pressed my ear to the metal of the door and listened. I heard nothing. I drew back, and tsk-tsked into my lip mike. I wanted to know that Randy, Nigel, Gator,and Timex were in position—stacked just like we were, outside the modular housing unit’s front door. Again—no response.
    I do not like getting no response. Getting no response makes me uneasy. Perplexed. Apprehensive.
    I was somewhere between perplexed and apprehensive when I heard Rotten Randy’s low growl in my left ear. “Problem, Skipper.”
    Have I told you I do not like to hear about problems? Well, I was serious when I said it a while back, and I am serious now.
    I waited in silence. Randy’s voice continued: “There’s something nasty about the front door.”
    Without warning, the hair on the back of my neck stood straight up. This instinctive reaction to my surroundings has kept me alive for a long, long time. My body was telling me that something was very wrong here. Very extremely wrong.
    First off, I told Randy to shut up RIGHT NOW, and thought about WTF was going on. First of all, we were spending a lot more time on the radio than we should have been. You already know I don’t like to broadcast during ops. A couple of tsk-tsks, and we hit the motherfuckers is the way I work. But tonight, all of a sudden the situation has apparently deteriorated so much that my B-team leader has to exfuckingplain the new sit-rep in excruciating detail.
    When the light bulb went off, I had to blink, because it was so fucking bright it blinded me.
    They were monitoring our comms. They were listening to us. They knew we were here, and they thought they knew where we were. They were waiting in ambush.
    Of course they were. It was so fucking obvious. And, having discerned the fact that they were lying inwait for us, I understood in the depths of my Roguish soul how to defeat them. Once you know there is an ambush, you can overcome it. You can turn it around, and kill your enemy before he kills you.
    How? Watch, and learn, tadpoles.
    The first element is deception. You must make your enemy believe that he is still in control of the situation. And so, I got back on the radio.
    “Tell me about the front door problem, in detail,” I said.
    There was a pause. Randy’d never heard me ask for something like that in a situation like this. Then his voice came back at me five by five. “The goddamn thing’s electronic and it’s sophisticated, too.”
    “What’s your guestimate about defusing it?”
    “I dunno,” Randy’s voice buzzed in my ear. “It’s gonna take me like half an hour to bypass the fucking thing because I gotta make sure they didn’t screw with the interior side of the hatch as well as the exterior.”
    Of course, the folks monitoring my conversation knew we didn’t have half an hour. They knew we had to act—soon. Why? Because they’d just heard me say, “go-go-go,” and they knew I couldn’t call a halt to the action once I’d committed my troops. I pressed the transmit button. “Can you blow it and then hit from the front end?”
    “Not without causing a lot of casualties inside. The explosives are behind the hatch. If the hatch blows, the force of the charge goes inward—into the room. And my thermal tells me they’ve got folks in the front room.”
    “Good guys or tangos?”
    “HTF should I know, Skipper? Thermal can’t differentiate.”
    I already knew that blowing the door wasn’t an option. Hostage casualties couldn’t be tolerated. Not tonight. Not with the politics of this situation just as explosive as the tactical side. But I wanted to paint a certain picture for the bad guys, and so I played the scene out. “Okay—we switch plans. Can you bottle up the front of the unit?”
    “Can do.”
    “Then have Gator and Timex