Six

by Charles W. Sasser

  Caulder recovered first. He laid a hand on Taggart’s shoulder. “Jesus! Get it together, man.”

  Suddenly, a false wall crashed down. It had been so well-concealed that the SEALs overlooked it in their sweep of the bedroom. A fighter broke from behind the crumbling wall and made a mad dash across the room and dived headfirst out the second floor window, vanishing into the darkness.

  “Got a squirter!” Ortiz exclaimed.

  “That’s gotta be Muttaqi.” Taggart tossed the bloody scalp aside, exchanging it for his radio. “Two-Two, this is Delta One. We’ve got a squirter. Could be our HVT.”

  The backup team chief came up on the air immediately. “Delta One, this is Two-Two. Stand by …”

  A long minute ensued while the team waited.

  “Delta One. Reaper has eyes on. Squirter moving northwest. Reaper One-One has sparkles. He’ll take care of it.”

  Taggart headed for the hallway. “Let’s go.”

  Lights were coming on in houses all over the village. There hadn’t been a blackout after all, merely frugal homeowners conserving energy late at night. The team had poked a sleeping hornets’ nest—and al-Muttaqi remained at large and on the run.

  Buckley with his machine gun rejoined the team as it cleared the target area and pushed down-village in the direction the squirter had fled. The SEALs moved rapidly but cautiously in the “low-ready” position, rifles stuck to their shoulders, index fingers close to triggers but not on them, thumbs brushing weapon safeties, ready to bring weapons to life. Muscles tensed as the operators scanned from side to side and slipped along cement-block walls that surrounded many of the houses.

  Suddenly, someone out ahead among the houses shouted something in Pashtu over a megaphone. That produced enemy contact in a sudden eruption of close-by gunfire. The SEALs went to “shoot, move, and communicate” as they methodically fanned out to cover the battlefield. Red AK tracer rounds streaked through the night, seeking flesh.

  An RPG exploded nearby, seeming to split open the universe. It exposed the SEALs for an instant in white light as they advanced using available cover. Their lasers created an eerie light show visible only through NVGs as they probed and danced in a pincushion of white that hunted targets, and found them.

  Enemy Taliban fighters seemed to have occupied the village and were now attacking in full force. They were everywhere, like a hill of disturbed ants.

  Caulder plopped to his belly behind a woodpile while he methodically picked out targets through his NVGs and eliminated them one by one.

  Bear Graves took a look around the corner of a concrete wall and spotted a hajji darting across the street ahead, firing as he ran. Graves’s laser red-dotted him. He squeezed and the guy went down and skidded on his face in the narrow dirt street. It was like shooting a jackrabbit in Texas.

  From farther up the road came the gunning roar of a truck engine and the grinding squall of worn-out brake pads as the truck skidded to a halt. A machine gunner in the bed of the small Toyota truck opened up with the heavy-throated, rhythmic coughing of a DShK antiaircraft gun belting out two-inch-long slugs. A burst chewed across Graves’s concrete wall, stinging his face with shattered sand and gravel. He dropped to his belly to make a smaller target of himself while he returned fire.

  Nearby, Buckley joined in with his heavy machine gun, but the truck had stopped among trees and partly behind the end of a compound wall, making for a bad angle to target it. The big gun kept chugging out death and destruction, its muzzle shooting fire like from a flame thrower.

  That sonofabitch has to go—or we’re all chopped steak.

  Graves linked with Caulder and Buddha Ortiz to take out the gun. They skirted down Bear’s wall and the house it enclosed in order to flank the enemy weapon. Caulder took point.

  “Tell Buck to hold his fire,” he said.

  Ortiz relayed the message via helmet radio. Buck’s MG fell silent. Caulder and his little band spotted the partially concealed truck in trees on the other side of a narrow village street. The Toyota pickup, called a technical, bounced and squatted on its shocks as the big AA gun continued firing up-street past Graves and his group toward Taggart and Buck. The overheated machine gun barrel glowed red in the dark.

  Caulder nudged Bear. Before Bear could stop him, the impatient member of the team bolted across the street to rush the enemy machine gun from its blind side. By the time the enemy soldiers spotted him, they were too late to swivel their gun to face the threat. Caulder was upon them, his H&K spitting death. He took both gunners out of commission. One of the guys sprawled alive but dying alongside the Toyota. The other was already dead and draped over the side of the pickup, blood dripping. Caulder stopped to catch his breath, gasping as he burned off adrenaline. The wounded guy stopped thrashing about and gave up the ghost.

  Graves, followed by Ortiz and then Taggart, ran up to him. “Really, Caulder?” Bear said.

  Caulder managed a weak grin.

  “Gonna blow it,” Buddha warned, indicating the AA gun and producing a thermobaric grenade.

  Graves and Caulder trotted on down the AO while Taggart remained behind with Buddha. The din of battle was rapidly dwindling throughout the village. The fight, what there was of it, was a typical Taliban operation in which the Taliban dusted up things for a few minutes and then got the hell out of Dodge.

  A voice from the circling AC-130 Gunship crackled over the command radio: “Foxtrot Delta One, Reaper One-One. We have two squirters 150 meters out. Maneuvering toward the northwest gate.”

  “Reaper One-One, we copy that,” Graves acknowledged. “Request containment.”

  An infrared spotlight, invisible except through NVGs, beamed down from high out of the black sky. A cone of greenish light tracked a pair of enemy fighters skulking through the village intent on making their escape. Ahead of them rose the rustic village gate, and through that and beyond lay refuge in the mountains.

  “Thermobaric out!” Taggart’s voice intruded into the net moments before Ortiz’s grenade detonated in a savage blast of fire that consumed the Toyota, the DShK, and the two bodies.

  Reverberations from the blast still echoed through the village when Caulder and Graves glimpsed two fleeing IR-illuminated figures darting across the street ahead on their way to the arch and escape. At the same instant, Reaper’s 40mm Bofor cannon opened up with a high much-magnified crackle of doom. There was nothing invisible about the stream of heavy-caliber tracers that all but disintegrated the village archway and sent the fleeing fugitives scurrying into hiding. Graves lost sight of them among some parked or abandoned cars on the roadside.

  “Squirters are static at this time,” the unemotional voice from the sky informed the SEALs.

  With hostile fire having all but ceased, Taggart and the rest of the team joined Graves and Caulder and fanned out to advance on the gate and the two men who had gone to ground somewhere in the vicinity. Chances were that one of them might be al-Muttaqi.

  Through his NVGs, Caulder detected a fighter crouched in a residential alcove off to the right flank drawing a bead on Graves, the nearest SEAL to him. Caulder pivoted and fired just in time to drop the hajji.

  Graves nodded his thanks.

  The pair proceeded, scanning the area ahead. Graves spotted movement behind a parked car.

  “Got ’em,” he radioed.

  “He armed?” Caulder responded.

  “Yeah. He has something in his hand.”

  Bear planted his IR spot on a piece of the enemy visible behind the car. He pulled. Take chances and he wasn’t going home to Mama and Sarah. The silenced rifle spat a Thump! into flesh. The fighter screamed in pain and fell.

  A second fighter wearing traditional shepherd pants and a long shirt appeared and rushed to the aid of his comrade, who lay squirming in the dirt clutching his thigh and howling in agony. He might have been dead before he made two steps in the open had not his entrance been preceded by a cascade of English from the wounded fighter.

  “Wait! Wait!
I’m an American.”

  What the fuck!

  The terrified young fighter on the ground thrust his empty hands into the air while his buddy froze in place. The wounded man couldn’t seem to get out his bona fides fast enough. He sounded desperate.

  “I’m from Michigan, man. Fucking Michigan. What about you guys? I know I should like the Pistons, but I’m a Lakers fan. I love Kobe. A lot of people don’t, but I do. Haters gonna hate, right?”

  The man appeared to be in his late teens, early twenties. He continued his urgent patter as Caulder and Graves rolled up their prisoners and patted them down for weapons. Graves shoved the uninjured man to his knees in the dirt next to his wounded comrade and forced both to clamp their hands behind their heads. Blood soaked the wounded one’s trousers. Tears rolled down his cheeks as Caulder checked their faces against his photograph of al-Muttaqi.

  “Not him. Not this one either.”

  He gestured at the uninjured fighter who so far had not uttered a word. “What about him?” he asked the chatty wounded one, indicating his frightened comrade. “He a Pistons fan?”

  “Him? He’s just a raghead driver. Don’t speak English.”

  “Where’s Muttaqi?” Graves asked him in a threatening manner.

  “I don’t know, man. They don’t tell me anything. He was supposed to be here. Maybe he heard you guys coming.”

  “You the one that killed those kids?”

  “No, man, not me. It was Abdul. Something personal. You know how these hajjis are. Hey, my leg’s hurt bad. Where’s a medic?”

  He wept full-bore in a combination of pain and fear.

  “So why’d you run?” Caulder asked him.

  “I was scared. Your guy, he went all Geronimo in there.”

  So this was the one who busted through the fake wall and jumped out the window?

  “You saw what he did. Man, I just want to go home. Please? Please?”

  Pure terror. Like he thought he might be scalped next.

  His eyes shifted and widened as the rest of the SEAL team caught up. “No! Wait!” he shrieked.

  The double tap of a silenced H&K416 splattered Graves’s face with blood as two holes spotted the crying young fighter’s forehead. His head jerked back violently while his body crumpled forward to the street. Taggart’s rifle shifted to the other fighter, the laser beam spotting his forehead. The man glared back at Taggart, unflinching, his face twisted with hatred.

  Caulder sprang between the two of them. “What the fuck?” he demanded.

  Taggart calmly pushed his NVGs up onto his helmet, revealing his face in the crackling firelight from the village gate.

  “He was a threat.”

  The surviving prisoner continued to glare at the deadly American as though consigning every feature of the lean face to memory.

  “He surrendered, Rip,” Caulder objected. “He’s an American.”

  “No. He’s not.”

  Buddha Ortiz intervened in the standoff by moving between them. “Let’s take this one in.”

  “Won’t make a damned bit of difference,” Taggart growled. “He’ll be out in two weeks.”

  Caulder held his ground. Something is wrong with Rip. Really wrong.

  “This is so fucked,” Taggart said, turning away and stepping nonchalantly over the fresh corpse.

  Caulder wasn’t ready to let it go. “Bear, you saw that. You—”

  “Rip’s right,” Bear retorted. “He was a threat.”

  That was the way it was, the way it would be reflected in After Action Reports. You never left a brother behind, and you took care of each other. You were the team. It was the team against the uncivilized world.

  That settled, Fishbait Khan came up and broke out his digital camera to capture the scene for intel purposes. SOP—standard operating procedure. The prisoner wasn’t al-Muttaqi, but he would have to do. After Fishbait took all the pictures he needed, he pulled a black bag over the prisoner’s head to blind him and zip-tied his wrists behind his back. He lifted the captive to his feet and joined the team around Taggart as they headed, still alert, through the village arch and to a pickup by Blackhawks up in the pass.

  Alex Caulder remained behind alone with the dead fighter for a few moments, standing over the body, staring down at it.

  Chapter Six

  SEAL Command, Virginia Beach

  Three heads broke the gentle morning lap of the Atlantic against the beaches of Dam Neck Naval Base about five miles south of the downtown resort of Virginia Beach, Virginia. Virginia Beach was home to the navy’s Fleet Combat Training Center and SEAL Team Six—1,700 acres of marshes, coastal beaches, and sand dunes, with 3.2 miles of some of the most stunning beachfront on the east coast. The heads in the brine, each encased in black rubber and wearing swim goggles, seemed to stare out at the land, like the first would-be amphibians struggling to emerge from the primordial muck.

  Something about the ocean, the “cradle of life,” attracted a certain breed of man. Back during the era of JFK, the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, crusty old Roy Boehm, the first commander of newly commissioned SEAL Team Two, and therefore the First SEAL, used to ask the rhetorical question, “Why did God have to put the land so near the water?”

  The swimmers in the Atlantic sank out of sight as smoothly as dolphins, leaving no trace on the surface, not even bubbles from their re-breather air tanks. Moments later, they reappeared in shallow surf and removed fins and goggles before stalking ashore in glistening black wet suits, laughing and poking at one another as brothers will who have been together a long time and survived both wars and each other.

  Ahead of them, another group of SEALs completing their morning swim looked back. One of them playfully snatched up a handful of sand and chunked it back at the others. That resulted in a brief sand fight between the two forces before the aggressors broke off and fled for safety, whooping and bursting with laughter.

  Bear Graves, Buddha Ortiz, and Alex Caulder, carrying their fins and tanks, continued up the sand toward the cluster of the SEAL base. Harder lines in their faces made them appear older than they had that night in Kunar Province when Senior Chief Rip Taggart … But none of the team ever talked about that. What happened had happened, and it was over.

  Ortiz ribbed Caulder good-naturedly, as though taking up a previous conversation. “That time in Mosul, we gave those talks on something we thought was important. Bear, you did the new NVGs, I did ten ways to use Tabasco on MREs, and Caulder—”

  He broke up at the recollection. Graves took over in his dry voice, sotto voce. “He did Why Are We Here? And you still don’t know. You are such a fricking hippie, Caulder.”

  “I wasn’t asking to get an answer,” Caulder defended, wearing his mischief like Dennis the Menace. All he needed was a cowlick to complete the transformation. “See, the problem is, you don’t think out of the box. That’s why every time we go fishing you never catch anything. You think like a fisherman. You need to think like a fish.”

  Graves fake-punched Caulder on the arm. “You think like a fish,” he said. “Look where it’s got you.”

  “Brother, where I am is right where I need to be.”

  “Whatever that means.”

  Caulder grinned and trotted up a dune to stare back at the ocean. Ortiz followed. The PT formation ran on past. Waves lapped at the shore. The eye of the fresh sun gave its approval to the ocean by sprinkling it with sparkles.

  “The ocean, man,” Caulder approved. “It’s the same content as amniotic fluid. We come out here, it’s like going back to the womb.”

  Ortiz nodded. “I’m going to miss this,” he said cryptically.

  Caulder shot him a look. What’s that mean? But he said, “Right on. We don’t want to miss this.”

  He glanced back at Graves. “Bear, stop with the busy shit. Look around you.”

  Graves finished peeling off his wet suit top. He shook sand from it and joined his fellow swimmers on the dune.

  Men like them were the p
roduct of worldwide turmoil and constant warfare against terrorism. The rise of Islamic radicalism in the Middle East and the Iran Hostage Crisis in 1980 had provided the catalyst for the creation of the navy’s own elite counterterrorism force. SEAL Team Six was the navy’s answer to army’s Delta Force. “Let the pussy army have Delta,” rumbled Commander Dick Marcinko, who built, trained, and commanded the original Team Six. “We’ll target maritime objectives—tankers, cruise ships, military assets like navy yards, aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines …”

  Since then, Six had become a multifunctional SpecOps force with roles that included high-risk personnel and hostage extractions and other specialized missions, not all of which included water. In fact, most missions were so far from salt air that the only time SEALs tasted ocean water was when they stood down at Dam Neck for up-training. Marcinko’s “maritime environment” had evolved into a new definition: “A maritime environment is anywhere we have water in our canteens.”

  Caulder on the dune was in one of his Bohemian surfer phases when he was enthralled by sun on water and the taste of the breeze from the Atlantic. “If I didn’t know better,” he mused, “it’d almost be enough to make me believe in God.”

  “God has to love you whether you believe in Him or not,” Graves said, his tone tinged by a slight bitterness. He turned away. “And it’s the ocean. It’s not going anywhere.”

  “You’ll be praying for me, though, right?” Caulder said. “I’ll take whatever voodoo I can get.”

  Ortiz snorted, amused. “You two are like moscas, you know. Flies on shit. Never gonna change.”

  He followed Graves off the beach. So did Caulder after a moment and a last glance back at the Atlantic.

  SEAL Team Six was officially commissioned in October 1980 and set up shop in two “chicken coops” located fifteen yards behind SEAL Team Two headquarters. Both buildings were WWII-era wooden structures, forty feet wide and eighty feet long, built on concrete slabs. They had previously been used as a Navy Wives Club and a Cub Scout den.

  Six HQ had been structurally improved since then, but it was still basically the same as always. Six remained out of public sight and mind until Uncle Sam needed a specialized job done that no one else in the military could handle—terrorists hijacking a cruise ship in the Med, Americans kidnapped in Somalia, a commandeered nuclear device in Europe …