Task Force Blue - 04 by Richard Marcinko

Author:Richard Marcinko [Marcinko, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Thriller
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 1996-12-14T14:00:00+00:00

DUCK FOOT TOOK MY NIGHT VISION AND CREPT INTO THE ALLEY to set up a one-man OP (that, you’ll recall, is an Observation Post). Meanwhile, working very q-u-i-e-t-l-y, Nasty, Wonder, Cherry, and I removed the backseats of the rental cars, wormed our way into the trunks, and retrieved some of the lethal goodies we’d taken from the armory.

The Zulu Gangstas weren’t off-loading, which told me they were going to truck their booty elsewhere for distribution and/or sale. No they weren’t—not if I did my job right tonight.

To make doing my job right more difficult, they had posted two sentries in the alley—a pair of urban hip-hops wearing bulky padded cotton jackets, poor-boy caps turned backward, sweatpants, and the brightly colored, high-top cross-training athletic footwear that has come to be known as felony shoes. The pair fondled a couple of the stolen CAR-15s with 40-round magazines. Telltale bulges told me they were carrying pistols, too.

Let’s stop here while I explain to you about sentry duty. And don’t skip this part because you’re going to see it again. First, sentry duty is like PT—you don’t have to like it, you just have to do it. Moreover, it is tough work. It demands concentration, attention to detail, and unfailing vigilance. In the field, a good pair of sentries can mean the difference between life and death. Yes, I said a pair of sentries. Unlike all those war movies you’ve seen, in real life you almost never allow a sentry work alone—especially at night.

Most people, however, consider sentry duty the tactical equivalent of KP. They use it to do everything but keep watch. They don’t realize that war is 99 percent waiting, and one percent fighting. Sentries like that are inviting targets for people like me. It would have been easy to eliminate the hip-hops. But tonight, that wasn’t my job. I had to get in and get out without being spotted. So we’d simply wait ’em out.

The situation was tilted in my favor because the Zulu Gangsta sentries were unwilling participants—they didn’t like it, and they weren’t gonna do it. It was cold, it was damp, and it was boring. So, after just four or five minutes, they began shifting their feet. A few minutes later, the shifting turned to stomping. Then they began talking—losing their concentration. Soon they lit cigarettes—thus ruining their night vision. And after three-quarters of an hour in the cold, the pair decided they could watch things just as well from inside the building.

That, as they say, was our cue. You remember all those wonderful Warner Brothers cartoons where Zeke the Wolf or Wiley Coyote sneaks and peeks? Y’know—the character sneaks up behind a tree on tippy-toe, then suddenly peeks his nose out from behind an adjacent tree—which is twenty feet away across the field. Well that, friends, is how SEALs move, too. Except we don’t do it on our tiptoes like Wiley or Zeke, because our feets are too big and we have opposable fingers, and besides we have a harder time than they do breaking the laws of physics.

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