Frontal Assault sts-10

by Keith Douglass

  “We’ll wait them out and see,” Murdock said. “Might put up a white flare out there just to see what’s going on. We’ll do it from here. Keep watch.”

  Murdock had Ching fire a flare, and they watched the front. Some of the wounded who had been moving stopped. Other attackers dropped to the ground and played dead.

  “Hold fire,” Murdock said. “Just checking them out.”

  Guns Franklin came on the net. “Skipper, these locals didn’t fire at the attackers. I tried to get them to, but they said no. After it was over, I asked them why. They said nobody ordered them to fire.”

  Murdock remembered that Franklin could speak Arabic. “Franklin, I’m going to ask the colonel the same thing. Let’s keep watch.”

  It was more than a half hour later when Murdock heard the engine sounds beyond the wall. They put a white flare out front and saw the vehicle, an older half-track that once was known as a personnel carrier. It had a 50-caliber machine gun mounted on top, round tires in front, and tracks holding up the back half of the rig.

  “Let’s take him,” Murdock said on the net and began firing his subgun with the suppressor off for better range. In the glare of the flare, the rig rolled ahead fifty yards and stopped. As the flare faded, Murdock could see men come out from behind the rig. They held something he couldn’t identify.

  A second later he knew. Two RPGs blasted into action and slanted toward the wall. One hit the wall near Murdock and didn’t dent it. The second exploded on the barbed wire fence under the wall near Jaybird.

  “Machine guns, work that rig’s front tires,” Murdock said on the net. “You guys with forty mikes, let’s stop him. We need a damn close near miss or a direct hit.”

  Murdock tried for the driver. The windshield was not protected, and he soon had it shot into a thousand granules of glass. The rig kept rolling forward at eight or ten miles an hour.

  Ronson blasted the front tires, flattening both, but the rig kept coming, now at half the speed. The forty-mike grenades dropped in closer, but none had a killing effect.

  Then Murdock saw a fiery trail of an RPG that lanced through the air from this side of the wall. It hit the slow-moving vehicle right through the blown-out windshield. The explosion shattered the night and lit up the landscape for a hundred yards. Murdock’s gunners and snipers picked off a dozen men in the light while the half-track burned.

  “Who had the RPG?” Murdock asked on the Motorola.

  A laugh came first, then Jaybird’s voice cut in. “Dang me if I didn’t hit a bull’s-eye. The bastard locals wouldn’t fire, so I ripped this RPG out of the hands one of them and nailed the sucker. You guys owe me free beer for a month.”

  “You’re on,” Murdock said. “How is the barbed wire under that wall?”

  “Gone, blown to hell. A wide-open invite inside. Be a damn nice spot for a couple of claymores. We bring any?”

  “Should have two somewhere,” Murdock said. “Who has the claymores?”

  Ching had one, Quinley the other. “Get them over to that hole in the fence; you’ve all seen it,” Murdock said. “Move it now.”

  Every fifteen minutes for the next hour, Murdock had one of his men fire a white flare over the suspected attack area where the troops had come before. He brought the other machine gun over and had Bradford bring around the 50-caliber sniping rifle. Now Murdock felt more ready.

  It was nearly 0400 before the attack came. Six RPGs blasted into the wall, and two went over it. Machine guns from the darkness raked the wall and the firing ports. When the MGs stopped, Murdock fired two white flares. The attackers were running toward them. Everyone on the SEALs’ side of the wall began to fire. The machine guns cut chunks out of the hundred men coming at them. HE 40mm rounds jolted into the running mass and chopped down another dozen.

  But for the eight guns on that side, there were too many of them. Twenty of the uniformed men charged straight at the hole under the fence. The first one dove under where the barbed wire had been and triggered the trip wire. Three hundred .38-caliber-sized ball bearings exploded out of the claymore, all aimed directly away from the wall and into the path of the shouting soldiers. Eighteen of them fell, mortally wounded.

  All along that stretch of the wall, enemy soldiers made it to the wall. Some tried to climb over. Murdock and his men used up their hand grenade supply when the enemies were close to the wall.

  Murdock picked off one man who tried to lever over the top of the wall through the razor wire. He took two rounds and fell outside.

  “We’ve got two over the wall here,” Jaybird called in the net. “Who’s got them?”

  “One down and out,” Quinley said.

  “I’ve got the other one,” Ostercamp called. “Hey, he’s just a kid, no more than fifteen.”

  “Save the next one for questioning,” Murdock said.

  “Mine is still alive but hurting,” Ostercamp said. “I’ll save him.”

  Four more RPGs came over the wall and exploded against buildings in back. Murdock sent another flare up and checked out the port. It showed few of the attackers still in sight. “Next to the wall or gone into the hills,” Murdock said. “How’s our ammo?”

  “Half gone,” a voice said. “Damn near empty,” another voice reported.

  “So conserve and share,” Ed DeWitt said. “That might have been their final hoorah for tonight.”

  “Stay alert on the other sides,” Murdock said. “They might think they pulled us all over here and hit at another spot. A flare now and again all around the perimeter wouldn’t hurt.”

  The solid, nasty snarl of an AK-47 drilled through the night.

  “One of them got inside,” Senior Chief Dobler said. “He’s down on my end. We’re hunting him.”

  Two more shots blasted into the night, then silence. The war outside was over for the time being. Murdock wanted to rush down to where Dobler was, but he didn’t want to run into friendly fire. He hunkered down and waited.

  “No, not there,” Dobler’s voice came.

  “Yeah, right. I see him.”

  Murdock recognized Fernandez’s voice.

  A few seconds later, the H & G sniper rifle snarled three times, then an MP-5 slashed in with more than a dozen rounds on full auto.

  Silence.

  “Yeah, clear to the south,” Dobler said.

  “Back to your positions,” Murdock said. “I want a casualty report.”

  “Yo,” Franklin said. “Picked up a scratch from one of them damn RPGs. Nothing serious.”

  “Doc, find him. Where are you, Franklin?”

  “West side, south of the fence gully. No big deal.”

  Ten minutes later, Doc Mahanani reported to Murdock.

  “Skipper, Franklin has a nasty on his left leg. I’m taking him back to the room and get a good look at it.”

  “Go, Doc,” Murdock said.

  They waited out the rest of the night. Dawn came rolling across the deserted landscape about six. They could see no wounded or dead in front of the wall. All had been carried away. The dead half-track smoldered.

  Murdock asked Ostercamp if he still had the prisoner.

  “Yeah, and he’s hurting. I wrapped up his shot leg, but he’s a nasty little character. He must be near twenty years old.”

  “Let’s take him back to the colonel and see what he makes of him.”

  Colonel Khalof was not in his office. An aide said he was in the bunker. He led them to an underground safe house protected with reinforced concrete and double steel doors. The aide rang a bell twice, then twice more. Slowly, the first steel door swung out. The aide rang the bell once, then twice, then once. The inside steel door slid back into the side of the wall.

  Inside, Colonel Khalof sat at a desk. He appeared to just have awoken. He turned and stared at Murdock.

  “I heard the alarms and the shooting. This is my battle command post, but all of my communications went out. How did it go?”

  “None of your troops fired a shot, Colonel.”

>   “What? They had specific orders.”

  “They said they received no orders,” Murdock said. “My men beat back the attackers and captured one. We thought you might want to question him.”

  The colonel smiled and rose. He adjusted his uniform, put on his garrison-type hat, and strode out of the bunker. They returned to the colonel’s office, where he called in two guards.

  “Take this man and interrogate him,” the colonel said. “I want to know what unit he was with, who their leader is, and what their objective was last night in the attack.”

  The guards nodded and took the captured man out the door. He screamed something at them in Arabic. Murdock looked at the colonel. He waved it aside.

  “He said he would die before he told them a thing. This is not true. My men have many ways to make a prisoner talk.”

  That morning, three companies of infantry set up a bivouac in the area where the fighting had taken place the night before. There were three more companies on the other open two sides of the palace.

  Just after the noon meal, Murdock was called to the colonel’s office.

  “We have obtained a great deal of information from the prisoner. Unfortunately, his wounds suffered in battle resulted in his death. We learned that the attackers were a renegade company of my army. My elite guard has tracked down the survivors of the attack and captured or killed them all. They will not be a problem anymore.

  “I have reworked my communications system and given all units on guard the freedom to return fire anytime they are attacked.”

  “Who was behind the fracas last night?”

  “Our intelligence operation has linked that renegade company and its captain to a group of foreign agents who are trying to kill the sultan and overthrow his rule here. We have known about them for some time, but this is the first time they have made a direct attack on the sultan. We have rooted out the leaders of the group, and they will be executed tomorrow, the old way. We will chop off the heads of seven men in a public execution with ten thousand of our people watching and cheering.”

  “One way to take care of the opposition.”

  “We find it most effective. Almost as good as the way your men killed the captain who led the insurgents last night. He died in the half-track when it was hit by the RPG.”

  Murdock nodded. “Then would you say our mission here is completed?”

  “I would think so. I will contact your superiors and talk with them.”

  “Thank you, Colonel Khalof.” Murdock came to attention, nodded curtly, did an about face, and marched out of the office.

  Two hours later, the word came from Don Stroh on the SATCOM.

  “Get your rear ends in gear, SEALs. A Greyhound has just left the Enterprise. It should touch down there in just a little under an hour, so get yourselves out to the airport. This whole damn Persian Gulf region is going to hell in a shit can. Trying to figure out which of three places to send you next. Now move.”

  The SEALs moved.

  9

  Near the Presidential Palace

  Damascus, Syria

  Abou Zawr lay in the shrubbery within sight of the gates that led into the highly guarded Presidential Palace. He had been there for ten hours, since just before dawn when he had slipped in through a row of small trees and brush and hid in the dark of the waning moon.

  Now he stretched and touched his companion, a shoulder-fired rocket propelled grenade that had the blasting power of a quarter pound of plastique explosive.

  Zawr waited. He was an expert at waiting. He had been in that mode for the last four years, expecting some softening of the rule of the president, Meyadin al-Assad. Zawr knew that al-Assad was little more than a figurehead, taking his orders from the actual rulers of his land, the army generals who made the decisions and backed them up with a harsh justice that every Syrian knew and feared.

  There was little freedom, little incentive. That all must change. He had been assured that when al-Assad was eliminated, there would be a surge of political power and military help from a neighbor that would sweep the generals and their front men out of the country. Then the people would take over the government and their country with the help from their good friends in Iraq.

  Syria’s sixteen million people would rise up and overthrow the last of the old regime. Then there would be a new day, a new government, a democracy, and a freedom the Syrian people had not known for generations.

  He blinked. Even though the day had been long, he had not slept. He was waiting for the precise moment. The big car the president rode in was a stretch limousine, but it was not armored. The president was not considered important enough by the generals to give him an armored limo of the kind they used every day.

  The RPG would penetrate the shell of the car and explode inside it and instantly kill everyone in the vehicle. Yes. Now all he had to do was wait for the exact moment.

  He blinked.

  Yes. The gates were opening. As was his usual practice, the president always paused at the gate to speak with the guards there. He was a good man, but had been twisted and turned and convoluted by the generals and their payments to him. He was one of them now.

  Zawr shook his head to be certain. Yes, the long, black, extended Lincoln came around a slight curve to the guard gate.

  Zawr brought up the RPG, made certain it was ready to fire, and aimed it at the gate. The limo stopped. Zawr refined his sight and fired.

  The round flew through the air, trailing wisps of smoke. No one at the target saw it coming. It struck the driver’s-side door of the limo, penetrated, and detonated. At once the gas tank exploded as well, and the resulting fireball enveloped the guardhouse, the two armed guards, and the gate, reducing everything to flaming rubble and incinerating bodies.

  Sirens wailed on the palace grounds. Zawr left the firing section of the RPG on the ground, stood, stretched his aching muscles, and walked away, hidden from sight by the slight growth of trees and brush that flanked the highway. He had only to move a quarter of a kilometer, and he would be well beyond the sight of the army guards who even now must be converging on the south gate.

  Should he run? No, that would attract attention. He paused and looked behind him. All he could see was the boiling, rising column of black smoke from the burning car. There was no wind, and the column built higher and higher into the sky.

  Abou Zawr kept walking. He had done it. He had struck a solid stroke for liberty and freedom. No one would ever know, but he had brought his beloved country a huge step closer to becoming one of the great free republics of the world.

  He felt his heart singing as he left the brush and stepped onto a dirt road that led away from the highway and angled into the low hills. He was only twenty meters up the roadway when he looked up and saw a trio of army guards facing him.

  “What are you doing here?” one of the men barked. “This is a restricted area. No one is allowed here under penalty of death.”

  “I… I didn’t know. I was out for a walk. I walk three kilometers every day to help strengthen my heart.”

  Two of the soldiers had their weapons pointed at him. The third used a handheld radio. He spoke softly into the radio and then smiled and put the radio on his belt. He lifted his automatic rifle, covering Zawr.

  “There has been trouble at the gate. We are to return you to the palace grounds so you can be questioned.”

  “I am simply on an innocent walk for my health,” Zawr said.

  “Then a little more walk to the palace gate should be beneficial,” the sergeant with the radio said. It seemed to Zawr that the sergeant’s smile was a bit too grim and smug at the same time.

  They knew he had fired the RPG.

  Someone had seen him walking away.

  They would find the launcher and get his fingerprints off it.

  Why didn’t he wear gloves as the others in his group had suggested?

  “I would like to go with you, but my wife is waiting for me. She’ll worry if I’m late.”

 
“We’ll worry if you don’t come with us,” the sergeant said. “I’m sure it will only take a few minutes to clear you, and you’ll be on your way.”

  No, no. The man’s smile was too smug. They knew. They must know. Zwar nodded and took two steps toward the soldiers. Then he changed directions, sprinted toward the edge of the road and the drop-off to the canyon below.

  The soldiers fired.

  The three automatic rifles chattered off five-round bursts. Eight of the slugs hit his body. The first ones hurt terribly. The next two hit so quickly he didn’t have time to scream. The last three ripped up his spine and into the back of his head.

  He dove down the embankment, dead before he hit the dirt. The three Syrian soldiers stood above, looking down. The sergeant took out his radio.

  “We had a runner here, Captain. It may have been the man with the RPG. Send out a vehicle, and we’ll bring him back to the guard room for fingerprinting.”

  The King’s Palace

  Amman, Jordan

  Marilyn Kabariti lounged in the second waiting room of the newly crowned young king, Hussein II. The young man was popular, only twenty-eight, had studied in America, and had many Western ways that irritated many of his advisers and top aides. He brushed them all away and did exactly what he wanted to do.

  Marilyn wasn’t her real name. She was slender, seductively curved, with breasts that enticed and thrilled the young king. She knew he was power driven, knew that he had a tremendous ego, and that was what also triggered his continual need for sexual conquest. The first time he met her, he said she would be his little blond kitten. He had made her bleach her hair and eyebrows.

  Marilyn knew she wouldn’t be around the king long. He would tire of her as he had every other woman he kept in the palace. The four and half million Jordanians never knew of his women. He was scheduled to be married in another six months to a proper woman who would be queen. Marilyn knew that after his marriage, he would continue to gather in women the way he did now.