Flashpoint sts-11

by Keith Douglass

  It had been three years this time. Chuck wouldn’t remember the last time, but Dobler was afraid that Helen would.

  “Your mother’s in the hospital and will be there for two or three days.” He told them when they both came home.

  “Why?” Chuck asked.

  “She hurt herself. She’ll recover and be just fine.”

  Helen looked at him, and when Chuck went to play with his computer, she asked him.

  “Again, Dad?”

  “Yes, but don’t tell Chuck. He doesn’t need to know.”

  “Why does she do it?”

  “I don’t know. If I knew, I’d figure out some way to keep her happy.”

  “Hey, Dad. Don’t even think about quitting the Navy. It’s not that. You said she did it twice back in high school. It’s not the Navy.”

  The kids were Navy. They adapted easily to new situations, new schools, new friends. They fit in nicely at the Fernandez place, and Maria and little Linda couldn’t have been nicer.

  That night, as Senior Chief Dobler tried to get to sleep back at his apartment, he wondered if his wife’s troubles really were his being in the Navy. The Navy was a jealous mistress. Almost always she won. If the time came just right, he might have a talk with Commander Murdock. That was an option he’d think about.

  He turned over and fluffed his pillow. Hell no, it couldn’t be the Navy. Still, he wondered.

  5

  NAVSPECWARGRUP-one

  Navy SEALs Training HQ

  Coronado, California

  All sixteen SEALs from Team Seven, Third Platoon, took turns with the Bull Pup rifle that afternoon at the pit down the Silver Strand toward Imperial Beach. The pit was where they used explosives in early Tadpole training and fired weapons there against the twenty-foot-high sand dune that bulldozers had piled up.

  Murdock fired the 5.56 barrel in two-shot bursts. He held the weapon away from him and looked it over again, then pounded off four rounds. He turned the Bull Pup and aimed it down the beach at a file of SEAL Tadpoles packing a twenty-foot-long telephone pole. He touched the laser and saw through the six-power scope where the red spot touched the first SEAL.

  “See the red spot?” DeWitt asked.

  Murdock said he did.

  “Right now, the chip is determining the range and figuring how many revolutions it takes the twenty-millimeters round to get to that point. Faster than we can say it, the device sets the fuze for an airburst before you would have had time to pull the trigger.”

  “Nice,” Murdock said. “Nice. I like it. How many Colt carbines we usually carry?”

  “Five, sometimes six.”

  “What would you think of trading in the Colts for five of these Bull Pups?”

  DeWitt frowned. “Maybe. I’d want to see how they hold up in the field. We need a good three-day exercise with them and with live ammo for the twenty.”

  “Good. We’ll also see what a little bit of rain and mud does to it. Remember how the first-issue M-16 rifles jammed? We don’t want this one if it does that, even once. A jam could mean a dead SEAL.”

  “Amen to that. I’ll give Stroh a call and see if he can shake loose that ammo any sooner.”

  “Go,” Murdock said. “You need the road work, anyway.”

  DeWitt grinned, turned away, and took off at a six-minute-per-mile pace, heading north along the wet sand toward the SEAL HQ.

  When all of the SEALs had fired the Bull Pup in the five-five-six mode, Murdock had them use the scope and the sights and the laser.

  “Damn, if that works out to a thousand yards, we can cut hell out of a lot of the bad guys,” Jaybird said. He handed the Bull Pup to the next man.

  “Yeah, I like the feel of him when he’s chunking off those two-round bursts,” Harry Ronson said. “Seems solid, like it can do the job and get me home.”

  Twenty minutes later, they headed back. Jaybird carried the Bull Pup.

  “This thing have an official name yet?” Ron Holt asked.

  “Only thing I saw in the literature that came with it was that the army put out bids for an ‘objective individual combat weapon,’ ” Murdock said. “They called it the OICW, which for sure isn’t what we’re going to call it. A writer in National Defense magazine called the weapon a Bull Pup, and the name might stick.”

  They slogged through the sand at a seven-minutes-to-the-mile pace on the three-mile run back to their quarters.

  DeWitt was on the phone when Murdock came into his office.

  “Yeah, sure, Don. We understand. We just want you to jack them boys up and send us some demo rounds so we can test this bird on more than the five-five-six NATO.”

  DeWitt listened for a minute.

  “That’s a roger, Don. Fact is, he just huffed and puffed in from a jog in the sand. Do you have an appointment?”

  DeWitt laughed and handed the set to Murdock.

  “Hey, slick, what’s happening?” Murdock asked.

  “Nothing right now, but we’ve got a move under way, and we want you and your platoon involved. Could be pretty hairy, and you better brush up on your Spanish.”

  “We can do that. What about the twenty-mike-mike?”

  “They want to do some testing themselves. I’ll see what I can do. How many rounds do you need?

  “A couple of thousand would be a good start.”

  “Sure, when elephants do the backstroke.”

  “Really. We like the weapon, but we can’t take it on a mission blind, hoping it works and have all five of them jam with the first twenty shots.”

  “All five?”

  “Oh, yeah, we need three more for the squad. Thinking of replacing the Colt fourteen.”

  “You know that weapon isn’t fully tested yet. There could be a lot of changes.”

  “We like what we’ve got. Get us three more of them if you have to sell the Pentagon to do it.”

  “Yeah, I’ll try. How is fishing?”

  “Wrong time of year to be good. Last time I checked, they were getting a few bonito, some barracuda, and lots of sand bass.”

  “Next time I’m out there and we have time, we’re going to hit Seaforth.”

  “What about this Spanish trip?”

  “Not sure just what your involvement will be. This one is so covert that I won’t even know about it until the day I call you.”

  “Gives you time to get those weapons and ammo to us.”

  “One-track mind. How is Ardith?”

  “Not sure. Haven’t seen her since we got back from across the pond.”

  “You probably will. So, brush up on your Spanish.”

  That night after chow, the men reported back to the day room for Spanish classes.

  “That’s right. A crash course in Spanish,” Murdock said. “Miguel and Ching are your instructors. You two take your squads in separate corners of the room and get moving. This is conversation Spanish. Do it.”

  For two hours they worked at it.

  “Buenos días,” Miguel said to Bravo Squad. They chanted the phrase right back at him.

  “That means good morning,” Miguel said. “Polite conversation. To thank someone, it’s gracias. If you need to fake it with some locals you can mutter, ¿Qùe pasa? That means what passes or how’s it going.”

  After he told them a word or a phrase, he had them say the words six times, then had each man repeat the word alone. Some picked up the words quickly. Others struggled.

  “Where is a key word we might need. Dónde. You could say, “Dónde es su casa.”

  Murdock sat in with Alpha Squad, and DeWitt chanted the phrases with the Bravo Squad men.

  They worked the Spanish classes for two hours every night along with their normal training schedule.

  The third day, a special delivery came from North Island, where it had just landed on board an F-18 from Minnesota. DeWitt opened the wooden box and cheered.

  “Five hundred rounds of HE twenty-mike-mike rounds. Let’s go do some shooting.”

  That afternoon they dr
ove thirty miles into east San Diego County into the bare hills to their unofficial long gun range. They had an agreement with the rancher who owned the property. He put up a signal to them when he was using this part of it for grazing. There was no signal this time. They went through the stretched barbed wire gate and drove into their range.

  “Unload those ten three-foot-square cardboard boxes and open them, then lock the tops and bottoms in place,” Senior Chief Dobler said. “We’ll spot five of them here forty yards apart, then bring the other five back to the five-hundred-yard range.”

  When the boxes were placed, the SEALs rode their rig back to the firing position. Ed DeWitt had both the Bull Pup weapons ready. DeWitt took the first shot. He’d studied up on the procedure again. He loaded a six-round magazine and chambered a round.

  He snapped on the laser sighting device and zeroed in through the six-power sight on one of the cardboard boxes at the thousand-yard range.

  “Oh yes, I have a red dot on that box,” DeWitt said. He pulled the trigger that worked both barrels. The 20mm round went off with a sharp report that none of them had ever heard before.

  “Sounds like half a dozen thirty-ought-six hunting rifles going off at the same time,” Jaybird said. A moment later, they heard the round explode in the air downrange. They could see the puff of smoke as the 20mm fragger detonated. DeWitt kept his prone position and checked through the scope.

  “Be damned,” DeWitt bellowed. “That box is shattered, ripped into half a dozen pieces. Jeeeeeze, but that’s a beauty.”

  Murdock sighted in on one of the boxes at 500 yards and fired. Both men checked the box through their scopes.

  Murdock came away from the scope smiling. “Hard to find any of that box left. The fuzing and trajectory is working just fine.”

  Ed nodded. “If these things are rugged enough to keep up with us, they’re going to make one hell of a difference in how we operate.”

  The rest of the men used the weapons then. Soon they were firing at chunks of cardboard. The last men in the squads had to pick out friendly rocks at the thousand-yard range to shoot at.

  “Let’s call it on the twenties,” Murdock said. “No use wasting what could be our operational ammo. Remember, those twenties cost thirty dollars a shot.”

  They switched to the five-five-six NATO rounds.

  “Won’t quite reach out five hundred,” Bradford said. “But I like the way it handles at three hundred yards.”

  They each fired a thirty-round magazine of rounds through the smaller barrel, then picked up their brass and policed the area. The owner of the land was never supposed to be able to find any evidence they had been there. That meant finding and grabbing all the pieces of the ten cardboard boxes.

  They arrived back at their HQ just after 2000, and Master Chief MacKenzie waited for them.

  “Commander, you’re to call Don Stroh whenever you get in. He said he’s at work, wherever that is.”

  “We getting employment?” Jaybird asked.

  “Maybe. Hard to tell with Don. Usually he’d beep me if he was in a rush.”

  The platoon waited for Murdock to make the call. Jaybird and DeWitt broke down, cleaned, and oiled the Bull Pups.

  “Two barrels to clean instead of one,” Jaybird snorted.

  Senior Chief Dobler paced the outer room. He wasn’t sure what to do. He tried to plan ahead. If it was a mission, how could he leave with Nancy just coming out of the hospital? Could she manage the kids while he was gone? Would his fourteen-year-old Helen have to carry the load?

  He heard Murdock contact Stroh and went up to the door to listen.

  “Oh, yeah, Don, we’re here. If I had a loudspeaker phone, the whole platoon would listen. What’s up?”

  “Remember I told you to brush up on your Spanish? You’re going to need it. Down in Columbia they had an election today. The bad guys dumped out ballot boxes, stuffed others, kept hundreds of thousands of voters away from the polls with threats, shot down one whole election staff at one polling place. They in effect stole the election by wide-open fraud and violence.

  “Tonight the winning presidential candidate has declared his victory. There was no international committee monitoring the election. One delegation from Germany and England went to Begotá but were kept prisoners in their rooms by armed men.”

  “So they can claim they have a legitimate government and nobody can rush in to save the country,” Murdock said.

  “Part of it. The rest is worse. The fraudulently winning president is Hector Luis Sanchez, known in this country as the second biggest drug cartel operator in Colombia.

  “This went down the way State said it probably would. Now it comes to us. You are authorized to go in within a week. You will have three objectives. One is to disrupt the cocaine production, processing, and shipment from all Colombian ports. The second mission is to disturb and reduce the corrupt officials starting with the top man and working down. You realize this is not an instruction to assassinate anyone. We don’t do that anymore. But if some of those illegally elected officials were caught in a crossfire by some drug traffickers, the U.S. could not be blamed.”

  “Hey, right. No blame on us. Is that’s all? What about the army? As I remember, they have about a hundred and fifty thousand troops. Which side did they take?”

  “Actually, they have a hundred and forty-three thousand men under arms. About two-thirds have stayed loyal to the new government and Sanchez. Mostly because Sanchez doubled their salary and paid them for two months in advance. The other third are centered in southern Colombia near the coast where the former President Manuel Ocampo has set up what he calls the real government of Colombia. Say he has about forty-eight thousand troops and half of the jet fighters and ten or twelve tanks.”

  “They have a navy?”

  “Not much of one. Two submarines, four corvettes, and about thirty-five coastal and river armed patrol craft. We don’t know where any of them are, but some should be in Buenaventura on the Pacific side. We expect most of the fleet is on the Caribbean Sea side. This is a two-ocean nation.”

  “How long do we have?”

  “We’re making contacts now with the former president to clear the way for your landing by sea with tons of supplies, ammo, and various other goodies. Probably we can get it all arranged within a week.”

  “We got your twenty-mike-mike rounds and like them. We’ll want those and three more over-and-under Bull Pups before we go and two thousand rounds.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Good enough. We’ll go back to Spanish classes. Ed is in good shape and will be going with us. How will we travel?”

  “You’ll go by air southeast from San Diego. Bogotá is almost directly due south of the D.C. parkway. We’ll have a carrier task force in the vicinity. It will be your floating base, and it will steam within twenty miles of your entry point.

  “I’ll download what we have on the two big cartels. You still at SEALsSeven@AOL.com?”

  “Right, that gets us here in my office. Works great.”

  “You’ll hear. The cartels are named after two large cities where they live: Cali, in the south, and Medellin, about in the middle of the country. Bogotá, the capital, is farther east in the mountains. Lots of mountains in Colombia.”

  “Okay, bwana. We’ll be ready when you give us the word. Keep in touch.”

  Murdock hung up the phone and looked at the scrawled notes he had taken as Stroh talked.

  “Get everyone together out there, Senior Chief, and I’ll tell you all I just heard about our next assignment.”

  He went through it all. Murdock had always felt that the more the men knew about an assignment, the better. When he finished, the SEALs had some questions, then put away their equipment and headed out. All of them lived off the base.

  Senior Chief Dobler tarried behind until everyone had left but Murdock. He went to the office door and knocked.

  “Senior Chief?”

  “Commander, do you have a few minutes? I’v
e got a problem.”

  6

  Miami, Florida

  The whole scene irritated him. He’d been in worse, but this armpit section of Miami was right out of a horror movie. Deserted buildings, empty wine bottles rolling on the street in the sudden gusts of angry wind. Newspapers flying. Tough Tony Mitrango ducked his head and motioned to the man with him.

  “That goddamned door is the one on the address. No lights. Where the hell is everyone?”

  His partner, the one carrying the sleek suitcase filled with one hundred dollar bills, shrugged. “Hail, Tony, we’ve worked with these gents before. Good old boys from Colombia. No sweat, man. They ain’t about to fuck us. We got clout with them now.” Angelo Puchini snorted. He’d been on a dozen buys like this. Why should the family pay some middleman just to haul the goods from Miami to New York? The family did it and saved 30 percent.

  Tony touched the door, turned the knob, and it opened. He thrust it inward and saw a dim light. He had his hand hovering over his belt where his old reliable Glock with seventeen rounds remained hidden.

  He stepped halfway into the room and stopped.

  “Ah, gentlemen. Good you have arrived.”

  Tony squinted. He saw a shape across the room. The sound of English with a stiff Spanish accent reminded him these were foreigners, assholes from Colombia. But they had the goods.

  “There are supposed to be two of you.” The same Spanish tilted words came sharply.

  Puchini stepped into the room. The lights came up, and the two Mafia men saw two dark-complexioned men standing beside a small table. Both wore expensive suits, colored shirts with loud ties, and shirt-matching handkerchiefs in the jacket top pockets.

  “Yeah, we’re here,” Puchini said. “Where the hell are the goods?”

  “No rush, plenty of time. First we be sure you are who said would come. Then we see the money, and then we show you the goods and make the exchange. Good for business. Good partners, yes?”

  Puchini wanted out of there. He wanted to make the exchange and get back to the car where he had two more soldiers. The Colombians said no more than two men on the exchange. The car was three blocks away, where two more Colombians waited with the Mafia car.