Echo Platoon by Richard Marcinko, John Weisman

using short pieces of duct tape. Then I inserted one of the pencil primers through the lead sheath into the PETN explosive inside, attached a six-foot length of electrical wire to the primer, then ran the wire to the pocket detonator I’d been carrying all night.
    I took the big, black plastic garbage bag I’d been carrying and carefully laid it atop the shaped charge. When it was exactly where I thought it should be, my eyes told Boomerang to turn the water on.
    He put the hose nozzle in the garbage bag, and twisted the tip gently. We watched as the bag filled with water. I hoped that the fucking thing would hold and not burst under the weight and pressure, because I didn’t have a second fucking bag. There was GNBN. 12 The GN was that I didn’t need much water—about four inches would do it. I watched as the bag expanded as it filled and caught the BN, which was that there were a couple of tiny leaks, and I didn’t want ’em expanding. But I had to wait until the water-filled bag covered the entire outline of the shaped charge I’d taped to the roof. As soon as it did, I drew my finger across my neck, and Boomerang shut the water off.
    Show Time. I hand-signaled Randy, Nigel, and Boomerang, then pressed the transmit button on my radio. “Hit on my signal.”
    A chorus of tsk-tsks told me everyone else had gottenthe message. I put two fingers to my eyes, and tightened the straps to my night-vision goggles, which would allow me to see in the darkened unit below. The goggles in place, I watched as my phosphorescent shooters did the same. I flipped the safety off my MP5, double-checked to ensure I had a mag in place. I watched as Boomerang, Randy, and Nigel mimicked my actions. When they were locked and loaded, I extracted a DefTec distraction device from its pouch on my chest, pulled the pin, and held the spoon firmly in place with my size-Rogue paw. With my eyes, hands, and elbows I made the assignments. Randy and Nigel would go toward the front door; Boomerang and I would go toward the back door.
    Time to do the dirty deed. I gave my men a wide-grinned nod and a big, fat finger, just as if we were about to launch ourselves off the greasy deck of a C-130 at twenty-five thousand feet.
    Nigel’s raised middle finger told me I was number one with him too. Boomerang and Randy mimicked the nasty “ready to go” signal. And so, with nothing left to do except ACT, I twisted the handle of the detonator.
    If you haven’t figured it out by now, what I’d just done was build an IED 13 roughly patterned after what the late Arleigh McRae, that genius explosives expert from the Los Angeles Police Department, used to call his Arleigh-gram. He designed the fucking thing using an inner tube and flexible charge to blow holes in the roofs of crack houses, so his SWAT officers could literally drop in on drug dealers.
    Well, tonight I didn’t have any fucking inner tubes handy—but let me tell you that the goddam garbage bag had done its job. A clean, manhole-cover-size hole had been blown in the roof of the modular structure. And I didn’t waste a millisecond of time. I tossed the flashbang into the hole, then dove through myself—just as the fucking thing exploded.
    DefTec No. 25 distraction devices explode at 188 decibels, with a flash factor of just under two million lumens. To put it in nontechnical terms for you, they are FUCKING LOUD and FUCKING BRIGHT. Which is as it should be, because they have been designed to distract bad guys in life-and-death situations.
    There is a downside, however. It is this: if you, the hostage rescue guy, are too close to the fucking thing when it goes off, you end up almost as distracted as the tango you’re trying to throw off balance. That is why we train as follows:
        • Step One. Gently toss the flashbang into the center, or toward the far side, of the space you want to occupy. DO NOT simply drop it in the doorway.
         • Step Two. AFTER IT EXPLODES, make entry.
    Tonight,