Seal Team Seven 01 - Seal Team Seven

by Keith Douglass

  Yes! Those were no SEALS, not with dark gray wet suits and the bulky, steel cylinders of air tanks strapped to their backs. Evidently, they were checking Yuduki Maru's bottom, for one swam close to the hull, dragging his hand across the surface, while the other hung a few feet back. Both carried bangsticks, meter-long rods tipped with shotgun shells, weapons designed to kill sharks but equally effective against men.

  Murdock touched Jaybird to make sure he saw, then lunged forward with three hard kicks to his fins. Exploding out of the muck beneath the ship, he collided with the lead Iranian frogman, left hand blocking the other's bangstick hand, knife hand spearing for the throat. Jaybird hit the second diver an instant later, rolling him over and carrying him toward the bottom.

  Bubbles angrily hissed and gurgled in the water. Murdock's knife slashed the rubber of the Iranian's hood, then penetrated to the flesh below. Blood, ink-black in the almost nonexistent light formed an expanding cloud about both men. The bangstick slipped from the man's fingers, though he continued struggling in Murdock's grasp. Gradually, those struggles died away ... and then the frogman floated limp and unresisting in the water, just as Roselli and Higgins loomed out of the shadows from astern, knives at the ready.

  Murdock glanced up. Jaybird had killed his man as well, slitting the man's throat like an expert.

  Turning the bodies over, the SEALs closed the regulator valves shut, stopping the flow of air from the tanks. Men on the pier following the divers' progress by their tell-tale bubbles on the surface might wonder at having lost the bubbles ... but they would wonder a lot more if the rhythmic bubble patterns turned to two steady streams that no longer moved. The SEALs had just purchased a little more time while the people on the surface assumed that their divers had moved beneath the ship ... ten or fifteen minutes, perhaps. After that ...

  Damn, where were the guys off the SDVs?

  0116 hours (Zulu +3) Inside the Bandar Abbas shipyard harbor

  Coburn's breaths were coming in short, panting rasps now. The pain in his head was almost unendurable, and he had to stifle an urge to yawn inside his mask.

  Damn this Hell Week shit. Push a guy until he's so damned tired he doesn't know whether he's coming or going, until he's about to fall asleep on his feet. Maybe it's time to ring the fucking bell, to get out now while the getting's still good.

  Compass heading ... what was his heading? Holding the wrist compass up before his mask, he tried to focus on the numbers. Two-three-zero ... he needed a heading of two-three-zero. Damn! He was way off course! The next marker in the exercise was that way! How much time had he lost?

  He had to keep moving, keep working. He wasn't going to quit, wasn't going to ring the damned bell. But God, he was so sleepy! ...

  A hand descended on his arm, yanking him to one side. Angrily, Coburn turned to fend off this unexpected attack from behind. The other diver was much bigger than he, and stronger. Coburn reached for his knife ...

  ... and the move was expertly blocked. The other SEAL positioned himself so that his face mask was six inches from Coburn's. The SEAL captain found himself looking into MacKenzie's worried eyes.

  MacKenzie. What was he doing here? He was supposed to be in the Persian Gulf, going after that Japanese freighter.

  Then Coburn remembered where he was, and the realization was at once terrifying and embarrassing. He floated there in MacKenzie's grip, almost limp, as the SEAL master chief reached out and snagged another diver out of the gloom.

  Ellsworth, the platoon's corpsman. Coburn watched as MacKenzie signaled to Ellsworth with his free hand, forming a "C", an "O," then holding up two fingers.

  CO2. Coburn's symptoms of the past few minutes began to make some kind of sense. He'd been breathing awfully hard since they'd left the SDVs, partly because the long night swim was hard work, partly because--he made himself admit the fact now--he'd been excited. Maybe too excited. He'd started breathing so hard that he hadn't been ventilating his lungs properly ... or possibly he'd simply not been giving his rebreather's CO absorbent time to purge all of the carbon dioxide from his gas mix.

  He wanted to kick himself.

  MacKenzie pointed toward the surface and Doc nodded. The only treatment for carbon-dioxide poisoning was to abort the dive at once. Coburn felt MacKenzie handing him off to Ellsworth. Together, they started for the surface.

  0118 hours (Zulu +3) Beneath the freighter Yuduki Maru Bandar Abbas shipyard

  Murdock and the other three SEALs had dragged the bodies of the two Iranians to the bottom and wedged them securely among the broken concrete blocks and discarded rubber tires beneath the pier, then returned to their back-to-back watch position. How long before the bad guys topside decided to come looking for their missing frogmen?

  If the SDV team didn't show up damned quick, he would have to start thinking about what the four of them could do on their own.

  Not that they'd be able to do a hell of a lot. A four-man Rambo-type assault was a possibility, but not a good one. SEALs got results by working as a team according to a carefully worked-out plan, not by going in with guns blazing in some kind of wild, death-or-glory banzai charge. Besides, though they were armed, they had no grenades, no explosives, and once on board they would be outnumbered at least ten to one. Getting themselves shot would accomplish exactly nothing. The smart move would probably be to return to the Boghammer and try to raise Prairie Rome on the sat comm. Presumably, the air assault portion of Deadly Weapon was still under way, even if the SDV attack had been aborted.

  Or was it? It wouldn't be the first time that a nervous Pentagon or an indecisive Administration had gotten cold feet and called off a major attack at the last possible second. Maybe the SDV SEALs and the airborne assault had both been called off, but nobody had bothered to inform the four SEALs already in the harbor.

  It was a lonely thought.

  Then as if on cue, other divers materialized silently out of the inky water, familiar shadow-shapes in SEAL black gear vests and Mark XV SCUBAs. It was too dark to recognize features behind those full-face masks, but MacKenzie's big-boned lankiness was a welcome sight indeed.

  Murdock counted them as they gathered around, and realized with a small stirring of alarm that there were only ten men in the group. The last sat-comm transmission from Prairie Home had said that there would be twelve. Who was missing?

  There was no time to find out. With swift, silent efficiency, the SEALs parceled off into two groups. As in the first assault against the freighter, they would go aboard in two groups, both of them on the starboard side this time, to avoid being seen from the pier.

  Unpacking their gear from the cargo sled, the SDV SEALs extended their hooked painter's poles and unshipped their weapons. In moments, the first two SEALs were on their way up the Yuduki Maru's side.

  0121 hours (Zulu +3) Inside the Bandar Abbas shipyard harbor

  Doc Ellsworth broke surface close beneath a wood-and-concrete pier extending west from a massive stone jetty. Coburn surfaced a moment later, and Doc guided him to the algae-caked bulk of one of the pier's bollards.

  This appeared to be a fueling pier. A Combattante II-class patrol boat was tied up alongside, and the sailors aboard were passing fuel lines across from the jetty.

  The Combattante II was a French-made boat, about 155 feet long, weighing 249 tons, and carrying a complement of about thirty men. Originally equipped with harpoon missiles, the Iranian Combattantes were now armed only with one rapid-fire 76mm cannon in a turret forward and a 40mm antiaircraft gun aft. Doc was less worried about the patrol boat's armament than he was about the men working on her afterdeck.

  But Doc's first thought was for his patient. As Coburn clung gasping to the bollard, Ellsworth pulled off the SEAL's mask, then examined his face closely in the dim light. There was a lot of bloody mucus hanging in clots from Coburn's nose ... probably from a ruptured sinus. No froth at the nose or mouth, which was damned good because then Ellsworth would have to consider the possibilities of embolism or lung s
queeze. Chances were, Coburn had been breathing so hard he'd popped a sinus.

  Hard breathing almost certainly meant CO2 poisoning. The symptoms were subtle, but included drowsiness and loss of concentration, confused thinking, and sometimes the headache that might be associated with the dilation of the arteries in the victim's brain.

  "How do you feel?" he whispered in Coburn's ear, just loud enough to be heard above the lapping of the water at the pier and the voices of the working party nearby. "Head?"

  "Head hurt like a bastard for a while there," Coburn said. "It's better now."

  "Tingling in your hands? Nausea? Chest pains?"

  Coburn shook his head. "Negative."

  His speech was taut and coherent. MacKenzie had spotted Coburn's trouble in time. The insidious thing about CO2 poisoning was the way it crept up on you, robbing you of your concentration and mental clarity, while making you breathe harder ... which in turn made the condition worse. A two percent excess of C02 in the gas mix was enough to trigger harder breathing. Ten percent caused unconsciousness, while fifteen brought on spasms and rigidity. Death was usually from drowning.

  One thing was sure. They didn't dare risk letting Coburn dive again. Doc gestured toward the shore, where rocks and mud rose from the water at the point where the pier met the land. They could take shelter there, without having to worry about clinging to the bollard. They would also be able to unstrap their HKs and have them ready, just in case. "Let's get comfortable."

  Together, they started moving toward the shore, keeping to the shadows beneath the pier.

  0121 hours (Zulu +3) Freighter Yuduki Maru Bandar Abbas shipyard

  MacKenzie was first up the freighter's side, hauling himself from the water hand over hand along the painter's pole. The last time he'd done this had been at sea, safely shrouded by the anonymity of night. This time it was night ... but the glare of lights from the shipyard facilities ashore and from the work area on Yuduki Maru's forward deck was bright enough that he could imagine himself etched clearly against the ship's side.

  In fact, his combat blacks provided camouflage enough against the ship's black side, and the SEALs had chosen their approach carefully, coming in over the quarter where they were unlikely to be noticed by casual observers ashore. Still, guards in a passing patrol boat or sailors aboard one of the other ships in the harbor could easily look the wrong way at the wrong moment. They might assume that the divers emerging from the water were part of the "salvage work" going on aboard the Japanese freighter ... or they might sound an alarm. Security lay in moving swiftly, with no waste motion and no delays in the open.

  As he reached the top of his climb, hanging from the freighter's gunwale, he could hear voices coming from the deck above his head.

  "Dokokara kimashita ka?"

  "Ah, Osaka kara kimashita."

  Japanese. At least two of them.

  Clinging one-handed to the painter's pole, MacKenzie drew his Smith & Wesson Hush Puppy. The team wasn't bothering with laser sights this time; the gadgets were too sensitive to salt-water immersion.

  This one was going to have to be quick, crude, and dirty.

  0121 hours (Zulu +3) Fueling dock Bandar Abbas shipyard

  Doc helped Coburn in a clumsy side-kick as they made their way along from piling to piling, always staying in the shelter beneath the pier. As they passed beside the patrol boat, they could hear the voices of Iranians on the dock and aboard the vessel, calling to one another in Farsi. Doc concentrated on staying afloat. Both men were burdened with weapons and gear, and it was a struggle just keeping both of their heads above water. Moments later, they cleared the patrol boat. They were less than ten yards from the shore now.

  Across the water toward the north, less than one hundred yards away, the Yuduki Maru lay tied up to the construction pier, bathed in light from shore and from her own forward deck. As he moved through the water, Doc could see her aft starboard quarter ... and two tiny, black figures dangling against her hull near the fantail. Shit! If anyone on the fuel dock looked that way ...

  0121 hours (Zulu +3) Freighter Yuduki Maru Bandar Abbas shipyard

  Twelve feet to MacKenzie's left, Kosciuszko clung to the second painter's pole, pistol in hand. MacKenzie exchanged silent nods with the other SEAL, wordlessly counting down with a three ... two ... one ... now!

  Pulling themselves fully erect, MacKenzie and Kosciuszko reared over the freighter's fantail gunwale, balanced back against the gripper hooks at the tops of their poles, weapons tracking and firing in a blurred succession of rapidly triggered shots. The sound-suppressed gunfire sounded like a ragged chain of heavy blows, scarcely louder than the slaps and thuds of bullets striking flesh. The two Japanese guards were caught in intersecting lines of fire, struck again and again and again before they'd even had time to fall. Their assault rifles clattered onto the deck; one man crumpled where he stood; the other stumbled back three steps, half turned, and very nearly went over the rail before dropping to his knees, then collapsing onto his back, arms out-flung in a spreading pool of blood.

  MacKenzie swung himself over the rail and took a kneeling position, standing guard while Kos attached and unrolled two caving ladders. In seconds, two more SEALs were on the fantail ... then two more. Kosciuszko and Nicholson hauled away hand-over-hand at a line, dragging the platoon's heavy weapons up the ship's side. Moments later, MacKenzie had his M-60 machine gun, a one-hundred-round ammo box snapped onto its receiver and the first round already chambered. Kosciuszko too had a 60-gun, wielding the massive weapon in his huge hands like a carbine.

  As the other SEALs came aboard, they dispersed immediately, every man already briefed on his deployment. Fernandez and Garcia stopped long enough to draw their M-16/M203 combos from the heavy weapon pack, tuck some grenades into their pouches, and load up. Magic Brown picked up his M-21 rifle and nightscope, while Scotty Frazier grabbed a shotgun. Doc's beloved full-auto shotgun remained on the deck unclaimed.

  The rest of the SEALs carried their standard loadouts, HK MP5s with Smith & Wesson Hush Puppies as backups.

  Silently, MacKenzie willed the SEALs to move faster. They didn't have much time now at all.

  0122 hours (Zulu +3) Freighter Yuduki Maru Bandar Abbas shipyard

  Murdock dropped into a crouch at MacKenzie's side. "What's the word, Chief?" His whisper was scarcely audible above the soft scufflings of the moving SEALS.

  "Hey, L-T." It was the first time Murdock had been called that since joining SEAL Seven. "Welcome aboard."

  He looked around at the silently moving SEALS. "Who's OIC? DeWitt?"

  "You are, I guess. Coburn brought us in, but he's out of the game. Diving casualty."

  "Aw, shit! What happened?"

  "Maybe CO2 poisoning. I'm not sure. Doc's with him."

  DeWitt joined them, clutching his HK against his chest. "Hey, Lieutenant," he said. "I'm damned glad to see you."

  "Glad to see you. Mac tells me Coburn is scratched. I don't know the plan. You two'd better take the lead."

  MacKenzie considered this, then nodded. "I think so too." He glanced at DeWitt. "Lieutenant?"

  "Affirmative. But stay with me, L-T, huh? I'll feel a lot better with you at my back."

  Murdock grinned. "You'll do fine, 2IC. Where are you supposed to be?"

  "Bridge."

  Murdock nodded. "The bridge again. Okay, let's move it!"

  It took a few seconds more to sort out the last-minute details. Roselli and Higgins were posted on the fantail, guarding the SEALs' escape route, manning the sat comm, and providing the rest of the team with a ready reserve. Jaybird would partner with Murdock. Tactical radios were set to the proper frequencies. By the time Murdock was set, the rest of the platoon had already dispersed, leaving him, the three SEALs off Beluga, Lieutenant j.g. DeWitt, and Chucker Wilson on the fantail. DeWitt gestured forward. That way.

  0125 hours (Zulu +3) Bridge access ladder Freighter Yuduki Maru

  With his AKM slung over his shoulder, Kurebayashi was
on his way back up the ladder toward the bridge. After completing an inspecting tour of the freighter, he still felt uneasy. The atmosphere held that undefinable tension, a charge that was nearly electric in its intensity, that often presaged a storm.

  The air was dry, however, and the sky clear. Perhaps, Kurebayashi told himself, it was simply his nerves.

  For A long time now, he'd been questioning his own motives, and his future. What was it he wanted from the Ohtori? What did he expect to accomplish?

  Martyrdom, certainly ... but Kurebayashi questioned the popular idea that he and those with him would be transformed into stars if they successfully fulfilled their vow and brought low the American giant. Oblivion seemed a likelier fate, and Kurebayashi had found himself dreading that possibility. To be snuffed out, never to know whether all of his pain and sacrifice for the cause thus far had borne fruit ... the very idea was repellent now, even though he and his comrades had discussed the possibility countless times before.

  Or was it simply that he was afraid? The thought shamed him, burning more than the fear of oblivion as he turned the corner on the landing just below the bridge access corridor. He stopped for a moment, steeling himself. Perhaps if he spoke again with Takeda, he would feel better.

  At the top of the steps, two Iranian Pasdaran stood guard, lounging in the passageway, their red scarves much in evidence. One looked down at Kurebayashi, smirked, then said something in Farsi to his companion. The other laughed unpleasantly.

  Barbarians ...

  Silenced gunshots chuffed from some unseen source above and behind Kurebayashi's head. The laughing soldier's eyes bulged as crimson flowers blossomed at his throat, the bridge of his nose, his forehead. The other was still trying to raise his G-3 rifle when a trio of 9mm slugs punched a three-inch triangle through his chest, centered on the middle of his breastbone. His mouth gaped to shout a warning; three more hissing rounds slammed into his face in a wet spray of blood and bone.