Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

Ricks knew these men had overwatch on the SEALs of Bravo squad as they came up the main deck toward the superstructure. He needed to be certain neither man was armed.

One of the men turned a little to the side as he lifted his Kalashnikov rifle. Its stock was folded closed, but Ricks could see a magazine in the weapon. The man pointed it toward the deck in front of him, and held it away from his body awkwardly.

In the span of two heartbeats Chief Ricks knew the man was no soldier, and he was unsure of what he was doing, but he was a threat to the men on the deck below nonetheless.

Ricks thumbed off the safety of his M4 and fired two lightning-quick semiautomatic rounds. Both struck the man in the back of his head. Through his thermal Ricks saw the black-hot signature of exploding brain matter, and then the silhouette dropped to the deck.

The second man in his scope did not appear to be armed, but Ricks saw the AK had fallen right in front of him. The man looked down to it, and the moment he did so a short burst of suppressed fire came from the chief’s right.

Greaser dropped the man within the weapon’s reach with a trio of bullets into the back, center mass, and a second later the four-man fire team once again began climbing the stairs.

—

Aminute later Ricks, Greaser, and Jones were in the dark but expansive bridge of the Emerald Endeavor . Elizondo was outside with Alpha’s other fire team, they had detained eight men who all appeared to be Malaysian or perhaps Indonesian, and they were in the process of zip-tying their wrists and arms behind their backs.

Bravo team was belowdecks now, ferreting out crew members and securing them with ties.

But Chief Ricks and the two men with him still had work to do. In front of them were two senior crewmen—again, Ricks thought they might be Filipino or Malaysian—and one North Korean captain. The two crewmen were compliant, they stood with their back to the helm and their hands high, but the gray-haired captain was shouting wildly and swinging a rigging knife with a four-inch blade back and forth, waving it at the armed men in the skull masks in front of him.

Ricks had given the order to hold fire unless absolutely necessary. He knew they needed the captain’s help to quickly inspect the cargo. Using the few Korean words he had learned he said, “Nuo!” —Lie down!—over and over, holding his carbine at the ready with one hand while making a downward gesture with his gloved left hand.

Ricks’s attempt at breaching the vast cultural divide here on the bridge was getting nowhere. Out of desperation he pulled down his mask, smiled and said, “Anneyong” —Hello—because it was just about the only nice thing he’d learned to say in the language. Still, he kept the muzzle of his Colt M4 directed at the man’s chest.

The captain continued swinging the knife around, and his panic remained.

“Nuo,” Ricks said again, imploring the man to lie down, but he could see it in the man’s eyes. He wasn’t going to lie down. He was psyching himself up for something.

Ricks kept his calm countenance going, but into his mike he said, “He takes two steps our way and we drop him.”

“Roger that,” came the call back from Greaser and Jones.

The captain took two steps, but backward, not forward, then he brought the rigging knife over his throat.

Ricks shouted, “Aniyo! Aniyo!” No! No!

The little gray-haired man screamed, then dragged the shiny blade across his throat. Blood appeared instantly, along with the gurgling sound of the breach of his airway.

Ricks watched in fascinated horror as the captain finished his deep cut, then he seemed to look down at the spurting blood coming from him.

“Fuck!” shouted Greaser, just behind Ricks, and he started to move forward.

“Stand fast,” shouted the chief. “Wait for him to—”

The knife fell from the captain’s hands and he crumpled back onto the deck between the helm and the pilot chair.

“Secure that blade!” Chief Ricks ordered now, and Greaser leapt forward, kicked the knife out of reach, and then he pinned the wounded captain down to the deck. He rolled him over and pulled out a zip tie from his load-bearing vest to tie the captain’s wrists.

Ricks turned to the medic of the squad, SO3 Joseph Jones. “Joe-Joe, do what you can for him.” Ricks said this even though he knew without a blood transfusion and surgery the captain didn’t have a prayer, and the chances of those happening here were zero.

The captain died quickly—even though the medic slid a tube into the wound to keep an airway going, there was no way to stop the blood loss in time to save the small man. Ricks stood over him the entire time, but his attention was split between the activity at his feet on the deck and the constant updates on his radio.

Bravo and fire team two of Alpha had rounded up the twelve surviving crew members on board. All of them had been searched and zipped, and put on the main deck just forward of the superstructure. They were all guarded by SEALs.

Jones covered the dead captain’s body with a body bag out of his pack.

Greaser stood next to Ricks and looked down at the dead man. “Chief, I’m going to go way out on a limb and say we’ve got ourselves some contraband on this ship.”

“Ya think?” Ricks replied. He called Takenaka, the radio man of the squad, and told him to get on the horn with the Freedom and tell them the ship was secure.

Hendriks, Elizondo, Parnell, and Stovall joined the others on the bridge, and they looked down at the body under the green plastic bag.

“You had to smoke him?” Hendriks asked.

Greaser answered for his chief. “He smoked himself. Slit his own fuckin’ throat.”

“Holy shit. Why’d he do that?”

Ricks answered matter-of-factly, “Because he didn’t want to defect to the evil West, and slitting his own throat was better than going back home. For his failure he would have fared even worse there.”

Parnell said, “There ain’t a lot worse than gagging on your own blood.”

Ricks looked up at Parnell, then at the rest of his men. “I read a thing a few months back. A DPRK major was suspected of giving intel to the South Koreans. He probably didn’t do it, but he was suspected. The government took him out and executed him.”

The men waited for the punch line. They were all pretty sure it wasn’t going to be funny.

Ricks said, “With a goddamned flamethrower. They tossed that poor son of a bitch into a dirt pit and barbecued his ass. Took their time with it, too.”

“Jesus Christ,” mumbled Stovall.

Ricks said, “On interdictions in these waters, we are engaging a uniquely motivated enemy. They are desperate men with their backs to the wall.”

Ricks fingered his skull-face balaclava and raised his Colt rifle. “We think we’re a bunch of terrifying motherfuckers, but don’t forget. We don’t scare anybody out here. They’ve seen worse.”

—

Two dozen Marines stationed on the USS Freedom arrived on the Emerald Endeavor within twenty minutes. Ricks figured these kids—their average age was about twenty—wished they’d had the chance to be involved in the raid, the shooting and scooting. In comparison, going through the cargo holds and containers of the big ship would be dull work, but at least it got them off the other boat for a few hours.

They found what they were looking for after ninety minutes. Cargo holds one through four all contained eighty-pound sacks of unrefined sugar with the markings of a Cuban agricultural entity. Hold seven contained the same thing. But holds five and six, just fore of the center of the ship, contained stacks of forty-foot containers. When the Marines broke open the doors of the locked containers, they saw they were piled high with various machine parts. The equipment looked like plumbing and air-conditioning equipment, and parts of an old boiler. It was all used and rusted and broken, certainly not equipment one would ship around the world. But after a half-hour of pulling out big hunks of metal equipment, the Marines came upon large aluminum tubes in fiberglass casing. There were no markings on the cases, but the tubes were some six and a half feet in diameter, and eighteen feet in length. The Marines found only two before the ship was brought into port in Inchon, but when inspected fully, a half-dozen precision aluminum tubes were found, along with sophisticated plastic crating containing precision-crafted O-rings and coupling bolts.