As Murdock watched Roselli climb, he unslung his HK subgun, then strapped it into position on the front of his combat web gear. He pulled the mud plug from the muzzle and breach, then racked back the charging lever to chamber the first round. One way or another, the issue was about to be settled.
2311 hours (Zulu +3) Freighter Yuduki Maru
Step by step, Roselli ascended the side of the Yuduki Maru, a human fly walking the sheer black cliff of the Japanese freighter.
His position was precarious, for the freighter's side bulged out over the raft, and as Roselli climbed the rigid extension pole, he was actually slightly head-down for part of the trip. Water slapped and boiled along the ship's side beneath him, and the first few feet were treacherously slick with a layer of slime. Once he was onto the part of the hull high enough above the water to be more or less dry, he still had to watch each step, for the steel plates were studded with rivets and made dizzyingly uncertain by the rise and fall of the vessel itself. Fortunately, the huge ship's motion in the water was far less than that of the raft at its side. Had the sea been much rougher, however, they would have been forced to come in by helicopter, as he had suggested back at Little Creek. An assault from the sea would have been out of the question.
All in all, however, Roselli had made more difficult climbs during training, scrambling hand-over-hand up dangling lines as instructors and other trainees played blasts of water from fire-hoses at him. Reaching the freighter's afterdeck, he paused to snap a hook attached to his web-gear harness to the stanchion rising just above his head. Then, swinging freely at the vessel's scuppers, he was able to use his hands to grab the edge and chin himself up.
As the new lieutenant had feared, there was a guard on the freighter's fantail ... no, two guards. They carried AKM assault rifles, and leaning against the superstructure but within easy reach was the long, twin-handled tube of an RPG rocket launcher. There was light enough from the superstructure at their backs to illuminate both men. They were swarthy, one with a bushy, black beard, the other with at least a week's stubble showing on his face. They were wearing uniforms of some sort, nondescript brown or olive-drab clothing that could have belonged to almost any army in the world. One thing was clear. These two were not Japanese, which could only mean they had arrived off the Hormuz.
One, evidently, had just reached the fantail. Unslinging his AKM, he set it against the bench on which the other man was sitting. "Salaam," the first man said. He reached for his left breast pocket. "Segar mayl dareed?"
"Teshakor meekonam," the seated man replied. He accepted a cigarette from the other. "Kebreet dareed?"
"Baleh. Eenjaw."
Roselli felt a small, inner chill. If they'd made their approach by helicopter, the bad guys would have been waiting for them. A single RPG round would have blown a helo right out of the sky as easily, as efficiently, as an American Stinger surface-to-air missile.
Not for the first time, Roselli wished he spoke Arabic ... no, not Arabic. These men were Iranians and would be speaking Farsi. Whatever they were saying, it sounded like small talk. They appeared relaxed and slightly bored as they smoked and chatted, though both from time to time cast glances out beyond the railing and stanchions that circled the fantail. Once the seated man seemed to stare straight at Roselli, but the SEAL's blackened face and black balaclava, his eyes narrowed to slits to hide the whites and his motionlessness as he clung to the harness strap, all served to cloak him in invisibility.
He was careful not to meet the Iranian's eyes, however, even through narrowed eyes. The phenomenon had never been accepted by science, but Roselli, a combat veteran, was well aware that people could often feel, with what could only be described as a sixth sense, when another person was staring at them. Roselli had no idea whether or not this represented some kind of awareness beyond the usual five senses, or was simply a stress-induced heightening of hearing or smell to a near-magical degree, but he'd experienced it more than once himself. After his first quick appraisal, he kept his eyes lowered, staring at the deck close to the Iranians' feet rather than at the soldiers themselves.
He was not seen. The night-blind Iranians continued their conversation, puffing away at cigarettes that stank as powerfully as the mingled bilge-water stench and diesel fumes rising from the Yuduki Maru's vents.
With one hand still clinging to the belaying strap, he used the other to unholster his sound-suppressed Hush Puppy pistol. Bracing the long barrel on the edge of the deck, he aimed carefully at the standing man first, then squeezed the trigger three times in rapid succession.
The chuff-chuff-chuff of the weapon, barely audible above the rumble of the engines, stuttered as sharply as a burst of full-auto fire, and the triplet of 9mm slugs caught the Iranian with a closely grouped volley that tore open his throat and crushed his skull, pitching him back and to the side as a startling pinwheel of scarlet arced from his head. Without pausing to confirm the first kill, Roselli shifted aim to the other man, who remained seated, the lit cigarette dangling from half-open lips, his expression still blank and uncomprehending. The SEAL fired three more rounds, and these were mingled with a trio of silenced shots from the Yuduki Maru's starboard side.
The Iranian, pinned between volleys from opposite directions, lurched up high on his toes, groped with one clawed hand for the face that had vanished in a raw mask of blood, then crumpled to the deck a scant second after the first. An AKM clattered beside the bodies, then skidded to a halt. For a long second, there was neither movement nor sound beyond the throb of the freighter's engines.
Holstering his Hush Puppy, Roselli unsnapped a pouch at his belt, extracting a three-pronged grappling hook attached to a tightly rolled caving ladder. Securing the hook to another stanchion, he let the caving ladder unroll into the darkness below.
In a moment, he sensed the tug of someone climbing the ladder and knew the others in the CRRC were on their way up to join him.
2315 hours (1515 hours Zulu -5) Joint Special Operations Command Center The Pentagon
In Washington it was mid-afternoon, but the overhead lights in JSOCCOMCENT had been turned off, giving the windowless room the feel of night. The only illumination came from the green-glowing phosphorescence of a large television monitor.
Congressman Charles Fitzhugh Murdock leaned forward, studying the monitor with keen interest. The image on the screen, an oblique view of the Japanese freighter Yuduki Maru glowing in pale, green-white light, was real-time, an infrared image transmitted from a satellite passing south over the Indian Ocean. The camera angle slowly changed as he watched.
"What is it?" he asked. Ten other men were in the room, civilians and high-ranking officers of several military services, clustered with him about the monitor. "What did I just see?"
A slender civilian first introduced to Murdock only as "Mr. Carter" pointed at ghost figures now slipping over the Yuduki Maru's taffrail. "Those tiny flashes of light were gunshots, Mr. Congressman," he said. He was holding a telephone receiver in his hand and had been whispering into the mouthpiece at intervals ever since the drama had begun unfolding.
"Two terrs are down," a Navy captain, Paul Mason, said. "The rest of our people are climbing on board now."
Murdock suppressed the churn of acid fear in his belly those words raised. It was a lot worse standing in this room ten thousand miles away, watching the action unfold on a television screen like the make-believe gunplay of some computer game.
General Bradley, the big, bluff Air Force officer who appeared to be in charge of this room, pointed at the screen. "Damn," he said, chewing on the end of an unlit cigar. "Can't we get a better view on this thing?"
Carter spoke quietly into a telephone, and Congressman Murdock realized he must be in direct communication with whoever was controlling the spy satellite. A moment later, the image of the ship expanded, the view zeroing in on the aft third of the ship. The glowing ghost figures of nine men, two of them prone on the deck, were barely distinguishable against the heat-glow of the s
hip itself. The imagery remained clear, but the satellite's motion was more apparent. The view kept slipping to the right, forcing the unseen controller to shift the camera angle left in compensation.
It had, Murdock reflected, taken all but an act of Congress to get him here, into this shielded, buried room within the Pentagon labyrinth, impregnable behind four separate security checkpoints. Captain Granger had been his passport into this underground shadow-world, and he'd had to do a fair amount of arm-twisting to pull it off. "Look," he'd told Granger the day before. "The SEALs need a friend on the HMAC, someone who's willing to slug it out with Farnum and his kill-the-military cronies, and I'm it! But damn it, you've got to give me some cooperation on this. Let me see what it is I'm supposed to be defending."
Even yet, Murdock wasn't certain what strings Granger had had to pull to get him into this room. The very existence of this type of high-detail, real-time satellite imagery was still, three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a jealously guarded secret, one that most members of Congress were not privy to. The pictures were like magic, the freighter a ghost ship of green and white light, illuminated by her own heat. Moments before, he'd watched the approach of two tiny rafts to their far larger target, the heat from their laboring engines shining in the infrared image like tiny stars.
My son's down there, he thought, feeling as though he were watching from the satellite's vantage point hundreds of miles overhead. My son's in one of those rafts, and I can't do a damned thing about it.
He wasn't even certain that his son was leading this raid. Admiral Bainbridge had refused point-blank to disclose the names of the men assigned to the raid, and the source of his information, a mid-level staffer on NAVSPECWARGRU-Two's planning staff, had been unable to provide confirmation. When he'd confronted Blake, two days ago at the SEAL base in Little Creek, he'd been bluffing, hoping to get his son to admit to things the congressman had heard but been unable to verify.
But somehow, it was easier for him to assume that Blake was aboard one of those rafts. It was the uncertainty, the not knowing, that made the waiting hell.
He turned to Captain Granger, stiff and starched in his Navy dress whites. "I just want you to know, Ben, that whatever happens now, I'm grateful."
Granger glanced at him but said nothing, and Murdock sensed the resentment the former SEAL must still feel at the strong-arm tactics the congressman had employed to gain entrance to this inner sanctum. Granger, no doubt, had been forced to spend some political capital of his own to win this privilege for a mere congressional VIP. I really called in all my markers on this one, Murdock thought. I just hope I can provide value for value next week when it comes time for the HMAC's vote.
An electronic peep sounded from a speaker somewhere in the room's ceiling, startling in its intensity. "Foreman, Hammer Alfa," a voice whispered, and Murdock had his confirmation. Even through the hiss of static, he recognized his son's voice. "Sierra-Charlie. Moving."
"They're all aboard," Mason said, probably for Murdock's benefit since everyone else in the room apparently knew what was going on. "We're Foreman. Hammer Alfa is the Yuduki Maru strike team. Sierra-Charlie is the code phrase meaning everything's on sched."
"How much longer we got on this bird?" Bradley asked.
"Three minutes, General," Carter replied. "It's going to be damned tight."
"KH-twelve-slash-nine will be over the horizon in fourteen minutes," a technician added. "There'll only be an eleven-minute hole in the coverage."
"Maybe so," Mason said. "But a hell of a lot can happen in eleven minutes."
"We'll still have voice communications, through our AWACS Sentry," Admiral Bainbridge said. He cast a hard glance at Murdock, then looked away. "Being able to see wouldn't help that much anyway."
He resents me, too, Murdock thought. The hell with him. The hell with all of them. I just want my son to come out of this alive. He turned his full attention to the video-game action unfolding on the screen.
2316 hours (Zulu +3) Freighter Yuduki Maru
Lieutenant Blake Murdock unhooked his harness, then chinned himself gently over the edge of the deck. Shadows moved on the starboard side of the fantail, forty feet away. MacKenzie materialized like a shadow out of darkness, an HK MP5 clenched in black-gloved hands. Murdock signaled with a thumbs up, then unharnessed his own subgun. He could hear voices in the distance coming from somewhere forward, and a harsh bark of laughter. From elsewhere, higher up, came the metallic rattle of booted feet descending a ship's ladder, then the clump of a fast walk across a steel deck. "Hajibaba! Kojaw meetavawnam jak paydaw konam?"
Still, no excitement in the other voices, no sign that the SEALs had been spotted yet.
The two bodies and their weapons went over the stern, the splashes lost in the churning of the freighter's wake. Blood streaked the deck, but in the near-darkness it looked black, like grease or spilled coffee.
Murdock crouched alongside the superstructure, his HK aiming up the covered port-side walkway that led past the bridge superstructure and toward the forward deck. More shadows slipped onto the deck alongside; Magic, Doc, and Roselli. MacKenzie, the Professor, and Boomer were all aboard to starboard.
Lightly, Murdock touched Roselli's shoulder and gestured toward the ship's bow. Weapon at the ready, Roselli nodded, then started forward along the walkway.
2317 hours (Zulu +3) Oiler Hormuz
Jaybird rose above the sentry, a K-bar knife gleaming scarlet-black in the half-light, the guard lying on the deck with a six-inch gash through throat and windpipe, jugular and carotid. There was a very great deal of blood, but no one could have heard the man's muffled gurglings as Jaybird had lowered him to the deck.
The SEAL felt the first tremors of reaction and viciously suppressed them. With all his training, with all his mental preparation, the Iranian lying at his feet was the first man he'd ever killed, and for a trembling moment, the shock threatened to overwhelm him.
Then training reasserted itself. The man was an enemy who would have sounded the alarm if he'd heard Jaybird's stealthy approach from behind. Now he was a dead enemy; Jaybird's long hours of hand-to-hand had made the stealthy approach, the snatch, reach, and slash, almost instinctive. The SEAL wiped his K-bar on the man's pants leg and sheathed it. Behind him, Kosciuszko and Nicholson slithered over the ship's gunwales and onto her rusty deck.
The first thing Jaybird noticed about the ship was her stench. The Hormuz stank, a repulsive mix of diesel oil, dead fish vomit, and unwashed bodies. Next he noticed the peculiar twist to her motion underfoot. Jaybird wondered if the ancient vessel's owners had really spent much effort making her seaworthy. The old, low-slung tanker wallowed in the worsening seas, and each swell threatened to break over the exposed quarterdeck and swamp her.
Gold Squad had approached Hormuz according to plan, with a length of lightweight wire rope snagging the vessel's prow and drawing the two CRRCs together roughly amidships. Now they were aboard, facing an unknown number of Iranian troops, possibly army, possibly navshurawn, as their marines were called. "Hammer Bravo," Lieutenant DeWitt's voice whispered over his radio headset. "Go!"
That was the signal for the Hormuz assault team to move out. Holding his HK shoulder-high and probing the darkness to his front, Jaybird moved with cautious, toe-first steps, flowing like a shadow against the rust streaks and flaking paint of the tanker's superstructure. Thirty steps forward took him to a safety-roped monkey-walk and the top of a ladder. Below was the Hormuz's well deck, picturesquely called no-man's-land aboard a merchantman because its low freeboard shipped water in heavy weather. The area was cluttered with carelessly piled hills of hempen rope, rusty cable, a sloppily stowed derrick, and cargo pallets and crates. Hatches in the deck were propped open, revealing shafts of oily light from below; to his right, the railed walkway ran across the front of the ship's superstructure. A soldier in fatigues and a helmet leaned against the railing, staring across the well deck, his AKM slung muzzle-down across his back.
&n
bsp; "Hammer Bravo-six, this is Bravo-three," he whispered into his lip mike, drawing back behind the corner of the superstructure. "One tango, 0-1 deck forward."
"Take him down," came the answer.
"Rog."
Bracing the HK high, Jaybird took a deep breath, then swung sharply around the corner of the superstructure, drawing down on the target's center of mass and squeezing the trigger simultaneously.
He'd deliberately set the weapon for semi-automatic fire; the sound-suppressed weapon hissed and spat with each tug of the trigger, slamming round after round into the Iranian, who staggered back a step, reached for his assault rifle, then collapsed onto the deck. His helmet hit the superstructure with a metallic clunk. Jaybird held his position, scanning left and right, watching for some reaction to the sudden sound.
Nothing. "Three," he snapped, identifying himself. "Clear. Moving."
A door in the superstructure four feet from the body opened onto a companionway with ladders leading up and down. Jaybird took the steps leading up, treading softly to the next deck ... then continued beyond to the deck above that. The squad's meticulous studies of Hormuz's deck plans back in Little Creek were paying off. Jaybird knew precisely where this companionway led, and what lay beyond it. At his back, Nicholson followed him up, covering his advance up the ladder.
At the 0-3 deck, three levels above the main deck, the ladder ended at a passageway and a door leading forward. Jaybird was still halfway up the companionway when the door opened and a bearded man stepped through.
He was not wearing an army uniform, but a blue jacket over a striped T-shirt. He took two steps into the passageway and then saw Jaybird.
The SEAL's appearance--black-clad, with a dark bandana tight over his head and his face a horror of cold eyes staring from mingled green and black paint--bought Jaybird a full second of gape-mouthed silence. The Iranian's eyes widened, his mouth hung open ...
Seal Team Seven 01 - Seal Team Seven Page 17