Battleground (4 page)

There is one officer-related requirement. Any officer in any SEAL trainee class is expected to test better than the rest of the class. All this helps mold a strong bond between enlisted, and their SEAL officers, and to a large degree breaks down the “officer country” psychology of the military. A lot of regular Navy officers don’t like this aspect of SEAL operations.

SEAL officers say when you’re trusting your life to the SEAL behind you in a life-or-death firefight operation, it doesn’t matter what rank or rate he has. All that matters is that he can do his job, protect your back, and run a successful mission.

One thing about SEALs that Murdock had always questioned. The SEALs, like all enlisted men and women in the Navy, carry a rating, a work specialty like Hull Technician or Machinist’s Mate. These ratings simply don’t apply in the SEALs’ operations. They have an entirely different kind of job and specialty.

To the Navy, however, these men still must study their manuals and take tests twice a year for promotion in that job specialty. This also bugs most of the SEALs.

In training and after it, most SEALs move toward a combat specialty that interests them and suits their talents. One man may be an expert on weapons, another communications, one parachute rigging, and somebody else electronics. All are slotted in where they can do the most good and still maintain their basic job: hitting hard with maximum firepower, killing the enemy, capturing the objective, and getting out without the loss of any men.

Losses. Six men from SEAL Team Seven, Third Platoon, had been wounded and one killed in the
Firestorm
mission.

Murdock had taken a bad arm wound. Now all but one of the wounded had recovered during the two-month training period, and were back in service. One man was still in the hospital, and Greg Johnson had died of his wounds and was brought home.

That meant two new men who were qualified SEALs had been needed in the mix, and had had to learn to work with their new buddies. Murdock had brought in Torpedoman’s Mate Third Class Les Quinley the first week back from China to replace Johnson. Quinley’s explosive talents would come in handy.

Murdock wasn’t sure when or even if Scotty Frazier would be out of the hospital and fit for duty. He’d waited a month. Frazier’s “slight side wound” had turned ugly before he got to Balboa Park Naval Hospital in San Diego, and he’d been on the critical list for a week. After a month, Murdock talked to Frazier’s doctor, crossed Frazier’s name off the roster, and brought in a new man.

He’d picked Ted Yates off the available list. Yates already had his Trident, the badge of honor of the proven and tested SEALs who had seen covert-operations duty. He was twenty-four and a Bos’n’s Mate Second Class. He would help lend a little maturity to the Second Platoon.

Now the men had trained together for a solid month, including an interminable week at the Chocolate Mountains gunnery range out near Niland. They’d slept on the ground and lived on MREs, Meals Ready to Eat, for six days.

It had been almost as bad as Hell Week during BUD/S training, when the new men were up continuously for four days and got only four hours of sleep. It was right after that tough week that a lot of the trainees laid their green SEAL helmet liners with the class number on them next to the quitting-bell post on the “grinder.” They then were out of the program and went back to the regular Navy. Many times half a beginning class washed out. One famous class had had every man quit before the six months were up.

Sixty-eight miles south of Tijuana along the Baja California, Mexico, coastline, Eric “Red” Nicholson, Torpedoman’s Mate Second Class, hooked a fish and let out a rebel yell.

“Hell of a good bite,” Red brayed. “Took that anchovy and dove straight down. Fucker is still taking out line.”

“Not a yellowtail then,” Martin “Magic” Brown, Quartermaster’s Mate First Class, said. “Yellows don’t sound that way. Bet you twenty bucks it’s a bluefin tuna.”

“No bluefins in the Ensenada Bay this time of year,” Red said. He had his six-foot fighting pole lifted to an eighty-degree angle, and the bend was tiring out the fish below. A moment later, the line stopped whining off the spool.

Red grinned and lowered the rod slowly, reeling in as he went. Then he pumped up the pole gently and reeled down again.

“Gonna take you all day that way, Red. Hell, horse him in.”

“You black guys don’t know shit about fishing. I got it on a twenty-pound line, man. You playing with thirty. I got me enough yellowtail here to feed me for a month.”

“Bluefin, dumb-assed honky, which is better eating anyway,” Magic said. He changed bait, cast out into the bay, and let the six-inch-long anchovy run as far as he’d go before he tired. Every ninety seconds, Magic changed bait. They’d been doing that since dawn and had only two fish.

Magic saw the skiff coming out from shore. More fishermen. Maybe they would help chum up some good-sized blues. The skiff came straight at them, and Magic put his hand on a new toy he’d just bought, a new Para Ordinance P12-45. It held only ten rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber, but it had a smooth, easy feel. Handguns for civilians are strictly illegal in Mexico, but he wasn’t about to cross the border without some protection. He’d heard too many stories about Mexican banditos ambushing unwary gringos.

Red kept working the fish.

“I’m getting him up,” Red shouted. “You got that gaff?”

“You said we wouldn’t need one,” Magic shot back.

The skiff came straight on and was fifty yards away. The voice came over the water clearly.

“Señor Brown. I have urgent message for you from a Mr. Blake.”

“Oh, hell,” Red said.

“Shit, there goes the fishing.”

Red had the fish showing color by then, and he got it close enough to the boat to identify.

“Yeah, a bluefin,” Magic chortled.

Just then the frantic fish made one last surge for the bottom, and broke the line. “Oh, damn, Peter Pan,” Red bellowed. “Knew I shouldn’t have tightened up on that drag.”

The skiff came alongside. An Indian-dark Mexican man in his twenties grinned at them. His English was better than most down that way.

“Sorry to hurt fishing. The man said you come home right away. Mr. Blake said you give me ten dollar.”

Brown laughed. Sounded just like Lieutenant Blake Murdock, their ever-generous leader.

“What’s the message?” Red said, handing the man a ten-dollar bill.

“He say get your ass back to base now. Big fly time tonight at eight bells. No, he say sixteen hundred,
Sí
, sixteen hundred. What time that?”

“Not much time left is what it is,” Magic Brown snapped. “Get that motor started there, sailor, and let’s head for shore. We must have ourselves a piece of the action some damned place out there in the big fat world.”

Jaybird dug Ross Lincoln out of McP’s Bar in Coronado, which was run by an ex-Navy corpsman who had served in Nam. He was better at telling stories than he was at serving beer. Lincoln was in a bullshitting contest with him, and the loser on every head-to-head story had to chugalug a mug of beer without breathing or stopping. Lincoln had lost six times in a row. It took them two hours to sober him up, and by that time they had his gear and his weapons packed for him.

“That leaves Holt and Adams,” Jaybird said at 1200. “Holt took off Friday night solo. No idea where he is.”

Lincoln looked up, holding his head. “Holt? Said some-thing about a weekend with that bimbo he met at the Too
Late Club. Francine, something like that. Said he gave her phone number and address as his next of kin.”

Jaybird snapped his fingers and went to see Lieutenant (j.g.) DeWitt. He’d have the next-of-kin data for all his men.

Holt showed up an hour later. He couldn’t walk. Two men from his squad had to go bring him in from the taxi. He’d be lucky to be sober by the time the plane took off.

Nobody knew anything about Adams. He lived off base the way the rest of the platoon did, and nobody had been to his digs.

“Isn’t Adams the one who’s always listening to those old songs from the fifties and sixties on KJOY?” Murdock asked.

Lieutenant (j.g.) DeWitt nodded. “Yeah, Adams is a bigbands nut. Always listens to that station.”

“Isn’t there a DJ on there who used to be a SEAL? Loudmouth Larry?” Murdock asked.

DeWitt checked his watch. “Yeah, he’s the one Adams talks about. Don’t know when his shift is, but I’ll see what I can do.” The officer vanished to a phone, and came back five minutes later.

“Loudmouth wasn’t there, but I talked to another guy, Sawtooth, and explained the delicate situation. He said he can cover us. He’ll do a dedication and tell baby-chick Adams to head back to the nest. If Adams hasn’t passed out, he should hear it.”

An hour later, they heard from Adams. He was on his way in.

Lieutenant Blake Murdock checked every man before the platoon boarded a truck for a run through Coronado and out to the U.S. Naval Air Station North Island. He’d read the six pages of background on the Kenya situation that had come faxed from Don Stroh and his buddies at the CIA in Washington, D.C. He didn’t understand much more than what Stroh had told him on the phone. He put it simply to the men as they waited on the flight line for the long-range Air Force Starlifter transport jet to have its final preflight check.

“We’re going to Kenya, about halfway down on the
Indian Ocean side of Africa. They’ve had an elected government there since they gained their freedom from British rule back in 1963.

“This is the land of Jomo Kenyatta and the famous Mau Mau uprising and slaughter of whites. Two days ago an Army colonel took over the country and has declared himself dictator. Army strength there is set at about twenty-six thousand, but with little airpower and not much of a Navy.

“We go in and recapture a frigate that the colonel hijacked about twenty-four hours ago. Our target is in Mombasa, the country’s only port. We recapture the ship, free the crew, and get the hulk back to sea. Sounds like a walk in the park.”

“Them Mau Mau were prime-assed killers in their day,” Magic Brown said. “Hey, I’m no relation.”

“Where we get supplied?” Jaybird asked.

“We’ll land on a carrier that, with its task force, is steaming down that direction right now. We can get all the firepower we need from the carrier. We’re taking four folded IBSs with us just in case. Everything else we get from the carrier’s supplies and armory.”

“How do you rescue a four-hundred-fifty-three-foot-long ship?” Kenneth Ching, Quartermaster’s Mate First Class, asked.

“We’ll be talking about that on the way over,” Murdock said. “Looks like we’re cleared to board. Let’s move.”

Ten minutes later, they had settled into the spartan facilities of the Air Force Starlifter strategic jet transport plane, the C-141. It had a top airspeed of 556 miles per hour, and four big Pratt & Whitney TF33-P-7 turbofan engines to do the job. It could also be refueled air-to-air if needed.

The big plane had a crew of five, and could haul 155 paratroopers or two hundred non-jumpers. That meant the sixteen SEALs were rattling around in the big plane. Most of them sacked out on the floor and on their equipment packs.

“You sure they got us a big enough plane?” Jaybird asked.

“They wanted to be positive we had room enough for all of your ego, Jaybird,” Lincoln jibed.

“Speed is the factor, guys,” Murdock said. “We can go almost three thousand miles in this bucket without stopping at your local Texaco station.”

Murdock watched his men. He was a career Navy man. Annapolis, a ring-knocker, single, and thirty years old. He stood six-two and kept his weight at a solid 200 pounds. He’d done some Gulf War work, been a SEAL for six years, and had been leader of the Third Platoon of SEAL Team Seven for just over two years. In that time they’d completed five major missions.

Murdock was the son of Congressman Charles Murdock, longtime member of the House Military Affairs Committee. He grew up in posh Fort Royal, Virginia. He went to Exeter, and then to Annapolis over his father’s objections. His dad wanted him to go to Harvard, get into government service, and then run for his own congressional seat from Virginia when the old man finally decided to give it up.

Murdock wouldn’t go for it, and earned his appointment to Annapolis instead. He almost got married once. Her name was Susan, a bright, vibrant girl who was Jewish, much to his father’s discomfort. She was killed three days before the wedding that was to take place right after his Annapolis graduation. It happened in a car accident as she was on her way to see him.

Now the SEALs were his life. He grinned. He had met a girl a few months ago in Washington, D.C., who had made him stop and think about getting serious again. But they had put it on hold. She’d hoped that in a year he’d have his fill of the SEAL excitement and be ready to settle down at some posh military job at the Pentagon. He snorted. Fat chance.

Murdock called his men together.

“At least we know our route. We’ll be going over the Pole and drop in on London. From there we touch down at Cairo, probably for more fly juice, then on to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Don’t ask me about which countries we can fly over and which ones we detour around. Not my problem.

“In Saudi Arabia we’ll pick up our old friend Don Stroh,
who is our CIA control on these pleasure cruises. For you two new men to our little family here, we are currently on a string for the CIA. Any dirty little job they don’t want anyone to know that the U.S. has a hand in, they give to us. Not sure that this one will be all that covert, since CNN had the story of the hijacking all over the airwaves about six hours after it happened.

“We’ll be getting more details on the harbor at Mombasa, which I hear is a good one and over three miles long. Plenty of dock space courtesy of our British friends, who built up the port in the fifties and sixties.

“From Saudi Arabia we’ll be changing planes into the more familiar C-2A Navy Greyhound, our old reliable COD Navy turboprop transport. The Greyhound will land us on our home base, some carrier now steaming south just off the Somali Republic coastline heading for the waters off Kenya. As usual, the carrier has its normal protective task force. Any questions?”