Chapter
1

It was your basic freight train: big, slow, and ugly, springs squealing like a pig in a Missouri hog pen. The sound didn't make any difference to the fine, upstanding middle-class citizens of Lenaza, a few miles outside of Kansas City. Hell, nothing made much difference to most of them, because they were snoring in their beds. The train had crept into their dreams forever: it rolled through every night at two A.M., give or take.

Tonight, it was a bit on the take side. But me and my guys were about to even the ledger out.

Guys and gals. Never let me forget Trace Dahlgren. At that exact moment she was leaning off the side of an AH-6 Little Bird helicopter as it swooped down toward the freight train in question. I was leaning off the other side, doing my best to pretend I was the patient type. This was necessary because the helo pilot had a hell of a time matching the speed of the train, a useful prerequisite to our immediate goal: disembarking from the aircraft onto the roof of one of the diesels. The train had picked up speed as it started downhill, and to complicate things just a little, the weatherman had screwed up again, and the calm, clear night I'd ordered had turned windier than hell and misty to boot. I swore to myself that next time I'd play hobo and hop on the damn thing if I wanted a ride.

"Can we at least get over the damn train?" groused Trace. "All I see here is dirt." Normally dependable and crystal clear, even the discrete-burst communications system we used was having a hard time of it; it croaked and crackled, distorting her voice.

The helo rocked hard right and we zipped over the train—but instead of hovering over the engines, we were above one of the chemical tankers. Jumping off onto the car wasn't particularly convenient—if you can't figure out why, find one of those mega culvert pipes and spread your legs over it. Our pilot had flown with the 160th SOAR once, the Army's dedicated special operations airborne taxi squad, but either once was a long time ago or this just wasn't his night.

The tankers were the reason we were here. They happened to be all filled with the same basic ingredient: cyanide gas, or more technically speaking, Chlorcyan, another name for cyanogen chloride. Left alone, Chlorcyan is "simply" riot gas: beats shit out of your eyes and chokes you, maybe to death, maybe not. Heat it so it starts to break down and let some of it come into contact with water and you get hydrogen cyanide, which is best known as the gas used by the Nazis in their quest to exterminate a good hunk of the human race.

The exact effect of blowing up a dozen cars of the stuff would depend slightly on luck; if the charges were placed willy-nilly, all you'd get was really wretched smog and an ecological disaster unmatched since Chernobyl. If you knew what you were doing when you blew them up, you could kill half the population in the state.

My goal wasn't to blow them up, not really. The train was starring in a little Red Cell II exercise I'd worked up to test the procedures of the regional Homeland Security alert system and its various dependent and not-so-dependent agencies. The train was supposed to be under their guard and jurisdiction, well protected from terrorists and maniacs, to say nothing of airborne hobos with improvised explosive devices and attitudes to match.

"We need to be over that front locomotive," I told the pilot. "Before the tunnel."

"I'm trying, Skipper."

"Try harder."

Finally the helo flitted forward and a relatively flat stretch of diesel engine appeared below my boot. I clicked the fancy French snap on my safety harness and stepped off as naturally and easily as if I were hopping off the last step of a mall escalator.

And if you believe it was that easy, I have some swamp-land for you to take a look at.

I felt like a cat pouncing onto the seat of a wet motorcycle moving about sixty miles an hour as I stepped off. My feet started to slide out from under me, but I managed to grab the edge of the roof I'd landed on. Trace came off just like the lady she is. Catlike and nimble, she stepped, twirled, and gave me a look that seemed to say, So what's the big deal?

There were three diesels, all facing forward. Trace and I were on the first, both of us just ahead of the dynamic brake fan, which is the large cooling area in the center of the locomotive. As a general rule, the people who design locomotives don't give a hell of a lot of thought to people riding on the top of them, which means moving across them and getting down while the train is doing sixty or so is not particularly easy. The fact that the top of the engine had been slicked with the rain made it even more interesting. Trace slipped and fell spread-eagled out across the top. Instead of gloating as I probably should have, I grabbed her leg to save her sorry butt and slipped myself. All I could find for a handhold was the side of the engine. I managed to grab it just as we roared into the tunnel.

If I hadn't been hanging on to Trace by a couple of fingernails, the rest would have been easy: a quick slide around and I'd have plopped down on two feet onto the catwalk outside the engine cab. But between Trace and the wind of the tunnel and the slippery slime of the moistened grit I was perched on, I found it possible to slide in every direction but the one I wanted. If you've ever tried to catch a greased pig in the middle of a mud flat while a hurricane rolled through, you'll know what I mean. Trace suddenly slid over the side. Thinking she was falling, I threw my other arm out to grab her and flew off the side of the top of the locomotive.

I expect most of you reading this book know who the hell I am better than I do, but let's do a quick review for the nuggets among us who have wandered into The World According to the Rogue Warrior without a map or the proverbial pot to shit in, and more important without having read the books that should be on everyone's MUST READ NOW list, starting with Rogue Warrior and ending with Violence of Action.

Yesterday—well, it seems like yesterday—I kicked commie slimebag butts and slit throats in the jungles of Vietnam. Pretty little hellhole there, as detailed in Rogue Warrior. Fast-forward through mountains of shit and red tape and you get to the part where I started SEAL Team Six, the Navy's preeminent counterterrorism force—Delta Force with fins and finesse. After three years as CO on Six, I finally pissed enough people off that the powers-that-were found a way to shaft me off to the sidelines. Not that I stayed shafted too long—I managed to really irritate people with a little operation called Red Cell. This was conceived as an exercise in kicking the Navy in the pants—alerting the brass, swabs, ship drivers, and everybody else top to bottom to the very real danger terrorists posed. Today it's damn obvious what terrorism can do, but in 1984, very few people understood the danger posed by maniacal slimebags who believe religion greenlights murder and mayhem. Not that knowing any better has helped all that much in terms of improving security, but that's a topic for another day.

Red Cell got attention for a couple of reasons—"blowing up" nuclear submarines and Air Force One were just the start. All of this attention led inevitably to the ultimate revenge of the nerds: I got railroaded on a set of trumped up charges into a federal home for the absurdly unappreciated.

And then things got really interesting. It turned out that, once I was officially out of favor, my services were indispensable. I guess the secret to getting ahead is to get screwed by the right people in life.

Bullshit on that. I took no prisoners and gave no quarter; the secret to my success was the good ol' American secret to success: work twice as hard as everyone else. But I go into all this stuff in my other books, so we'll just skip up to the very recent past, say the three weeks that brought me to Lenaza.

Copyright © 2005 by Richard Marcinko