Ambush

1

Lieutenant Commander Blake Murdock stared into blackness of night as rain wind-whipped into his face. He had been uneasy about this mission from the start. First, it had taken them ten minutes longer than planned to launch the two rubber ducks from the submarine deck. Now, as the two small craft powered toward the Libyan coast three miles away, his unease grew.

All sixteen SEALs from Third Platoon of SEAL Team Seven were crouched in the two fifteen-foot-long Zodiac-type IBSs (Inflatable Boat Small), each IBS powered by a fifty-five-horsepower outboard. In decent weather they could make eighteen knots. Not with the current four-foot seas and gusting wind.

The two craft were tied together by a thirty-foot line, and they had trouble staying that close to each other. Murdock, in his boat, and Lieutenant (j.g.) Ed DeWitt, in his, both had their Motorola personal radios out. The rest of the platoon kept their radios in the usual watertight compartments.

Murdock’s radio sputtered.

“Skipper, we’ve got some trouble coming up on the port side. Sounds like a coastal patrol craft. No idea how big. He might miss us. He has a searchlight probing around.”

“Roger that, Ed. Keep watching him. Yeah, I see him now. Unless he turns, we should be okay.”

As soon as Murdock said it, the ghostly lighted craft, not more than seventy-five yards off, turned and headed directly toward them.

“Lam, get the EAR out now,” Murdock whispered just loud enough so his lead scout could hear. Joe Lampedusa, Operations Specialist Third Class, lifted a strange-looking weapon from under his poncho.

“Fully charged, Skipper,” Lam said. He raised the Enhanced Audio Rifle, and aimed it at the oncoming patrol craft.

“If he spots us, give him two shots,” Murdock whispered.

Lam nodded in the darkness.

They watched the sweep of the powerful searchlight as it skipped across the whitecaps of the Mediterranean Sea. It almost touched them once, then rotated back the other way. The next time it came around, the craft itself was not more than twenty-five yards shoreward, and the light touched DeWitt’s boat first.

“Fire,” Murdock said. Lam aimed and pulled the trigger. The sound that came from the EAR was not an explosion; it was more like a whooshing of air. Half a second later the audio blast hit the patrol boat and the three crewmen on the small bridge had no time to react. They slumped over and fell to the deck. The craft’s engines kept going at the set speed, but with no one on the wheel, it cut a slow-arc course away from land.

Lam spotted two more sailors rushing toward the bridge. He fired again. The EAR weapon had had the required ten seconds between shots to recharge itself. The second blast hit the patrol ship and the last two men on board fell as if sleeping. They would be unconscious for four to six hours, and wake up with no physical harm. Their only problem would be explaining to their commanding officer what had happened.

“Good shooting, Lam,” Murdock said. He stared toward the shore now, and could see that the lights they had been keying on were closer. “Steady as she goes, Mr. DeWitt. We should still be on course. Let’s move the throttles up so we can make ten knots. Nobody is going to hear us in this storm.”

Murdock mulled over the mission. Every man in the platoon knew the details. That was the way the SEALs operated. They were to land on what was supposed to be a deserted stretch of beach near the small town of Al Hamim, which was west of Tubruq. If matters went to the worst scenario, the friendly border of Egypt was only sixty miles to the east.

First they would land, then hide the boats and move seven miles inland to a village called Bani Qatrun. Murdock watched the lights. They appeared to be closer. The small boats fought an outgoing tide as well as the weather. The rain kept falling. It would help shield their entry and, hopefully, their exit. The submarine would hold just off the east coast of Libya, and surface for a five A.M. pickup. If all went well.

Murdock had argued about this mission. He felt that risking the lives of sixteen men to recover one man was not good strategy. Then they’d explained who the one man was, a top CIA field agent who had been compromised and captured. He had been in custody only two days, and might not have leaked any of the vast amounts of special knowledge that he had. Clive Ambrose Cullhagen was not an ordinary CIA agent. He’d been instrumental in establishing the CIA’s newest world-events-evaluation center. He was a living storehouse of U.S. plans and secrets and those of half of our allies who used the center.

He had to come out.

The CIA director had emphasized that Cullhagen had to come out dead or alive. A top-security phone call had involved four men on a conference call. Murdock had been one; the CIA director, the Secretary of State, and the President of the United States had been the others. They had talked it over for almost an hour; then the CIA director had called the Chief of Naval Operations and the wheels had turned.

“I can hear the surf ahead,” the Motorola speaker in Murdock’s ear reported.

“Yes, I’ve got it,” Murdock said. “With the first breaker we cut the tie rope.”

“Roger that, Skipper,” DeWitt said.

Murdock took the tiller then and directed the small craft exactly where he wanted it, angling the motor, adjusting the direction. The breakers were not as severe as they could be. He heard the crash of the water against sand. Then they were there. Jaybird cut the tie line, and Murdock rammed the throttle forward to catch the surge of water that would develop into a breaker. He wanted to surf along the top and at the last minute race down the slope of the wall of water.

It didn’t happen that way.

A larger swell came in at a forty-five-degree angle and ate up Murdock’s surge. It battered the rubber duck, threatened to flip it over, then slammed it sideways toward the beach and the sand that came up suddenly. The rubber duck danced on the second surge for a moment, then righted itself and slid down the front of the breaker like a surfer avoiding the crashing water.

When the small craft nosed inward and then glided on shallow water toward the beach, Luke Howard, Gunner’s Mate Second Class, and Machinist’s Mate Second Class Jaybird Sterling jumped out, grabbed the pull ropes, and tugged the rubber craft higher on the beach on the thin flow of the receding breaker.

Four SEALs ran up the twenty yards of sand to the dry area and dropped to a prone position with their weapons covering the shoreline ahead of them. The rest of the SEALs crouched in the boats until they saw a signal from the scouts onshore. Then they left the rubber ducks and charged inland forty yards to a brushy area. They quickly secured the spot, posted lookouts; then men picked up the 265-pound rubber boats and ran with them to the brush, where the boats were hidden and camouflaged with branches.

Murdock stared out of the copse of stunted juniper and lentisk trees. They were growing only because of the moist influences of the Mediterranean Sea. He knew that the rest of Libya was dry; ninety-nine percent of the nation was classified as a desert with less than six inches of rainfall a year.

Murdock went over the images in his mind of the maps he had memorized. The village they needed was inland about seven miles, in a desert resort where water percolated up through the sand to create a true oasis. He checked his watch: ten minutes after midnight. If they stole a truck, they could be discovered. They had to stay as silent and unseen as possible until the attack on the house. The decision had been made to hike through the desert to the site. The men were traveling comparatively light with about sixty pounds of gear, weapons, ammo, and explosives. They wore their desert cammies and most had floppy hats, kerchiefs, or watch caps for headgear.

The men quickly took out their Motorolas and attached them with the lip mikes. Murdock called for a platoon radio check, and the seven men in his squad reported in the correct order. Then Bravo Squad came on. All accounted for.

“We have a fringe of developed land along the coast, maybe three miles deep,” Murdock said into his mike. “We get through that into the increasingly dry desert, until within five miles we’re in the heart of the Sahara with sand built on sand. We find a highway to the site and follow it. This time we hike. We don’t want to ring an alarm by stealing a vehicle. Maybe on the way back. It’s only seven miles. About an hour out. Let’s chogie.”

Joe “Ricochet” Lampedusa took the point as scout as usual, moving out fifty yards as the others waited in the brush. Lam crossed a blacktopped road and scurried to a ditch on the other side as two cars whipped past. Ahead lay the outskirts of the coastal village. Two houses and a pair of sheds. Lam worked around them, saw no lights on, and waved the platoon forward.

Murdock took his Alpha Squad out first. Here they were in a single-file combat mode, five yards apart. They jogged across the road when it was clear, and then moved silently past the houses into an irrigated field. It had been harvested, and Murdock figured the crop was a grain of some kind. The coastal plain here was irrigated from wells and some small oasis spots where water bubbled up from the underground water table. His intelligence reports said that at this spot along the coast the arable land extended only three miles inland.

Once across the irrigated field, Lam angled to the west, where he heard traffic. The reports said there would be little vehicular use of the roadway into the maximum-security facility.

For once Murdock had been given exacting information about their target. It was a former European-owned estate house, with a fenced compound, guards outside and in the main house. There were two other buildings on the site, one a barracks for the military guards, and another that was formerly a garage, now used for supply and storage. No dogs were reported inside the wire. The SEALs had worked out an attack plan, but situations often changed when the platoon came to the actual target.

The irrigated fields lasted for three miles inland, with an occasional house and a few buildings where the owner of the land lived. Background on the area advised Murdock that most of the parcels were small, some only five or six acres, and they were highly prized because of the shortage of arable land.

Sand and clumps of saltwort and spurge flax began to invade the area as the SEALs moved south toward the desert. The clump grasses would soon take over the land in the area that couldn’t be irrigated.

Up front, Lam had located the roadway south and had paralleled it three hundred yards off. There had been some truck traffic, and now there was a sedan or two, all painted military dull-green. Once past the cultivated fields, Lam found what he figured were off-road vehicle trails. Some had metal tracks; others had low-pressure tires to bigfoot on the softer sandy areas. He stopped and listened, but heard only one sedan on the highway. He moved ahead.

“Some strange tracks, Skipper,” Lam reported on the radio. “Not sure what they are, but they ain’t here now.”

“Roger that. Keep your ears open.”

They moved ahead. Five minutes later the third platoon went to ground as a roaring, clattering armored personnel carrier stormed out of a wadi to the left and charged into the center of their line of march.

The desert-cammy-clad men dove into the sand and watched the machine storm toward them. It had no forward lights, but the Libyan moon was full, giving reasonable night vision. Tran Khai, Torpedoman Second Class, and Jack Mahanani, Hospital Corpsman First Class, had to surge up from the sand and sprint ten yards to get out of the direct path of the growling giant.

There was no reaction from the men in the armored carrier. Either they didn’t see any of the SEALs, or they discounted them as a friendly patrol. The rig continued in a straight line to the highway, then turned and headed south along the road.

“Radio check, Bravo,” the JG whispered into his mike. All seven men responded. “Okay here, Skipper,” DeWitt reported.

“The driver wasn’t using night vision goggles or he would have spotted those two runners. We lucked out on that one. But it could mean tighter security around this special facility than we figured.”

A half-mile march farther into the desert, they came to shifting sand and dunes twenty feet high. Lam moved the men closer to the road, but kept a hundred yards away.

Murdock figured they were still two miles from the facility when Lam called.

“Skip, we’ve got some trouble. Better come up and take a gander. I’d guess it’s a blocking force up front.”

Five minutes later, Murdock and Lam bellied up the side of a sand dune and peered over the top. They had heard voices, metal on metal, and even Murdock could smell the spicy aroma of food.

“Lunchtime for a twelve-hour shift,” Lam said.

In a small wadi near the road, a field kitchen had been set up, complete with mess tent and a cook tent. Still in line at the serving table were a dozen troops in field gear and with weapons slung over their shoulders. They all wore steel helmets.

“How many?” Murdock asked.

Both men stared through their NVGs, which turned the night into a green dusk.

“Thirty, maybe thirty-five, depending how many are in the mess tent,” Lam said.

“Agreed. If they’re eating, they won’t be on patrol. Might be a good time for us to move.”

As he said it, an armored personnel carrier roared up thirty yards downwind from the kitchen, and a dozen men poured out of the rig. They yelled and shouted and raced each other to the chow line. None carried mess kits. They would eat off metal trays.

On the way back to the rest of the troops, Lam and Murdock worked out their plan. They would move a half mile to the side of the eatery, and pound past as quickly as they could, then swing back toward the highway.

It took twenty minutes for the maneuver; then they worked south again five hundred yards off the highway. They were in their usual field formation, a diamond for each squad, with Lam out in front of Alpha Squad.

There was no warning. They were marching along, knowing they were coming closer, when three white flares burst over their heads turning the black night into midday bright. At once rifle fire stuttered from the darkness in front of them.

At the first crack of the flares high overhead, the SEALs dove for the ground hunting any cover they could find. There was none. No orders were needed. The SEALs automatically returned fire. Four men with Bull Pups aimed the 20mm lasered airburst rounds at the muzzle flashes in the darkness. Four seconds after the first rifle fire aimed at them, the SEALs had returned the first shots. Two seconds later four more 20mm airbursts thundered into the dark of the Libyan desert. Only one enemy rifle fired after that. The flare continued to burn for thirty seconds, which seemed to be a lifetime.

The SEALs had stopped firing when the enemy guns went silent.

“Hold for the flare, then we move up to where those guns fired from,” Murdock ordered in his mike.

The flares fizzled out and glorious darkness reigned again.

“Let’s go check our work,” Murdock said. The SEALs lifted off the sand, formed into a line of skirmishers, and with weapons trained to the front, walked forward. The squad of Libyan soldiers lay sprawled in a wadi only two feet deep, but usually enough to offer total cover for the men. They didn’t count on the airbursts.

One Libyan was still alive. Colt Franklin, Yeoman Second Class, grabbed the man and spoke gently to him in Arabic. Murdock hurried up. “Ask him why all the security.”

Franklin did, and the man shook his head. “Said he has no idea. He just does what the officers tell him.”

“Ask if he knows what is in the large house a few miles south.”

Again the Libyan shook his head. “He says some important people but he doesn’t know who.”

They went on questioning the man, who was badly wounded. He told them about the defenses, where the most troops were, and how the fence was electrified in some sections.

The man cried out in sudden pain; then his whole body shook for a moment before his head rolled back and both hands fell to his sides.

“He’s gone,” Murdock said. “Check the weapons, bring along anything that might help us. Should be some Kalashnikovs here. Sounded like them when they were firing. Then we haul ass before somebody else shows up.”

They looked around in the darkness, found six rifles that looked new enough to take — they were the older AK47, but potent and with a better range than the MP-5’s some of the SEALs carried.

Murdock put the men on a jog for a mile on south from the point of contact, and they soon heard a chopper swing over the area of the fight and land.

“A chopper out here means trouble,” DeWitt said on the radio.

“True, and we’ll see if we can give it some trouble as soon as we see it up close,” Murdock said.

Another half mile through the sand along the roadway, and Lam called a halt and showed Murdock the lights ahead.

“Must be it,” Lam said. “Lit up like a call girl’s switchboard.”

“Lights we can turn off,” Murdock said. “They already know somebody is coming to visit. Hope they didn’t kill the prisoner when they heard the firefight.

“We’ll do it the way we laid it out,” Murdock told the net. “Bravo will be the main assault force on the west side. Alpha will do the diversionary attack on the east side and hopefully draw off the firepower that way. We need to get close enough to blow the gate on the west side, or the fence nearby for access. Any questions?”

“How do the twenties come in?” Lam asked. They were all in a line, looking over the top of a sand dune a quarter of a mile from the compound.

Ed De Witt spoke up. “Bravo will take out the gate guards and the gate itself with the twenties from two hundred yards. Then we move up half our squad, with the other half working the twenties on any force that appears to challenge us. Once we’re inside, the twenty-shooters charge forward and join us.”

“On the other side of the compound, Alpha Squad will be shooting up the fence and that side of the big house,” Murdock said. “We’ll use our twenties on anything that moves over there. Probably can’t get through the fence with the twenties, but we’ll use charges and blow a hole big enough for ingress.”

“Questions?” DeWitt asked the radio net.

“How do we find the guy once we’re inside?” Fernandez asked.

“We have two Arabic speakers,” DeWitt said. “They will question anyone we find alive. He’s in the big house somewhere. It can’t have more than twenty rooms according to the blueprints we saw. Two stories, no basement.”

“We don’t use the EARs?” Jaybird asked.

“No, we don’t want to knock out our CIA man and have to carry him back to the water,” DeWitt said.

“Let’s do it,” Murdock said. “Alpha on me. We have fifteen minutes to get into position and start our diversion. Five minutes after our first shot, Bravo will attack. Let’s move.”

It took Alpha twenty minutes to get to the other side of the fortified house and to set up for their ambush. They settled in ten yards apart. They had three of the Bull Pups for this mission, and Bravo had four. Murdock checked the perimeter fence with his NVGs and then gave the word to fire. They hit the fence and caught one interior guard walking his post. The twenties boomed in the night and exploded on contact. Murdock’s first shot blew the side door off the house. A jeep rolled around the corner, then retreated behind the safety of the house. The SEALs didn’t aim at any windows to keep from hitting the prisoner inside.

Half a dozen rifles began returning fire, but the SEALs had set up in a gully three feet deep for top protection. The jeep driver decided to try to get from the house to the storage shed. It was halfway there when a 20mm round blew the vehicle off its wheels and dumped it upside down against the building.

A moment later Ed DeWitt opened fire on the main gate. The first round knocked out the guard post there; the next three hit the rollback electrically operated gate and closed a circuit somewhere. The heavy gate rolled open and stayed there. A squad of six men ran around the barracks, and was cut down by shrapnel from a pair of exploding twenties on the front of the barracks itself. One man limped away, but was dumped into the dirt by a sniper rifle shot. For a moment all was quiet at the front of the place. DeWitt could hear firing at the other side.

Then an engine roared and an armored personnel carrier stormed around the barracks, headed for the main gate. It slued to a stop, then straightened itself until its big automatic cannon swung out toward the gun flashes.

“Kill the lights,” DeWitt told his radio mike. Miguel Fernandez, Gunner’s Mate First Class, swung his H & K 7.62 sniper rifle around and began taking down the searchlights one by one.

“Franklin, put enough WP in front of that tank to blind him. Now. Six, eight rounds, and let’s hope there isn’t a lot of wind.”

The first 40mm grenade from the Colt M-4A1 landed beside the tank, exploded with a spray of white phosphorus that turned into a dense smoke. The second and third rounds hit in front of the armored personnel carrier. It was like the heavy hitter had gone away, until they heard the sound of the cannon going off and three rounds slammed into the ground twenty feet behind them, spraying deadly shrapnel the wrong way to hurt the SEALs.

DeWitt used his 5.56mm rounds from his Bull Pup to kill two more lights, and the whole front of the compound went dark.

“Let’s move up,” DeWitt said on his mike. “Split and half go up on each side of the gate. Leave forty yards between us for the big gun to shoot into. Move it. Now.”

They went forward at a trot, weapons on their hips ready to fire. Sporadic shots came through the front gate aimed where the SEALs used to be. They didn’t fire now so they wouldn’t give away their location. They went a hundred yards; then the smoke eased away from the armored personnel carrier.

“More smoke,” DeWitt said on the net. “Both of you, three rounds each.”

Franklin and Ostercamp both fired, and the personnel carrier rapidly vanished again. The SEALs were running now, flat out for the front gate.

“Assault fire,” DeWitt called, and the eight weapons opened up. The twenties fired, the sniper rifle, the G-11 with caseless rounds, and then the 5.56’s on the Bull Pups chattered. There was little return fire. No SEAL was hit.

They stormed toward the gate with the smoke covering it, and jolted through. DeWitt had been making a bomb with a quarter pound of TNAZ as he ran. He inserted a timer and set it for five seconds. The armored machine leaped out of the smoke at them suddenly, and DeWitt raced the twenty feet to the side. He pushed the bomb into the tread of the machine and pressed the activator on the five-second timer. Then he ran forward.

Five seconds on these timers could be tricky. Sometimes they went off at four and even three, sometimes seven or eight. This one blasted on four seconds, and the last of the SEALs through the gate had just cleared the machine when the TNAZ exploded. It blew the tread all the way off the vehicle and dumped it on its side.

A squad of three Libyan soldiers surged around the far end of the house, their rifles up. Tran Khai, Torpedoman Second Class, splattered the trio with a dozen rounds from his G-11 submachine gun, and they spun away dead before they hit the ground.

“Front door,” DeWitt said on the radio.

Canzoneri got there first. He had two TNAZ bombs ready, and pasted one on each side of the door lock, activated ten-second timers, and rushed away to the side of the building.

The explosion blasted large sections of the door inward, leaving a gaping hole where it had been, and also blew away two feet of the front wall.

As planned, DeWitt went in first, diving to the left. Fernandez dove in to the right a moment later. Lights were still on in the house.

“Clear, right,” Fernandez said.

“Here too,” DeWitt said.

Two more SEALs charged through the door and down the hall they knew was there. Two enemy riflemen came into the far end of the corridor, only to be met with a hail of SEAL lead that put them down and crawling back around the corner. DeWitt guessed that the prisoner would be held on the second floor. The stairs were in the center of the house off the hallway. He and Fernandez rushed past doors the others would clear, made it to the stairs, and started up. A stutter of a submachine gun came from the top of the steps.

DeWitt took a round to his left arm, and jerked back out of sight. Fernandez hadn’t started up the steps yet; now he undid a fragger hand grenade from his webbing, pulled the pin, and leaned around the wall far enough to throw the bomb to the top of the steps. It hit, bounced once against the top wall, and exploded.

The two SEALS stormed up the stairs, their weapons aimed ahead and fingers on triggers. There was no response. At the top of the steps they found two soldiers dying of their wounds. They kicked away their weapons and charged to the first door along a hall that had four. DeWitt kicked in the door. The room was empty.

Fernandez took the next room, tried the doorknob. Locked. He rapped on the door, standing to the side against the wall. Four rounds blasted through the light door. Fernandez stepped back, unpinned a grenade, and held it ready. Then he kicked in the door and threw in the grenade in one move, and dodged behind the hall wall again.

When the shrapnel from the grenade stopped flying, DeWitt charged into the room. His Bull Pup chattered off two three-round bursts; then Fernandez ran into the room and found it clear, with two officers who must have just been getting up from their beds. They wouldn’t have to worry about sleeping ever again.

The two SEALs rushed out of the room and to the next door. Before they could try for it, a dozen rounds blasted through the door. “Might be our man inside,” DeWitt said. “No grenade.” The door was locked. DeWitt kicked in the door and leaped to the safety of the wall. Twenty rounds whistled through the opening and into the wall opposite it. DeWitt checked around the door jamb from the floor level. Just one man in the small room. He had his officer’s jacket neatly hung on a chair back with the gold star on the shoulder boards polished bright.

DeWitt flipped in a grenade and when it exploded, the two SEALs moved to the last door on the hallway. It was double and had a nameplate on it they couldn’t read.

No response from inside. Fernandez kicked in the door and barely got out of the way to the wall, but no gunfire came from the room. Fernandez checked the room from the floor level. He grunted, stood, and walked into the room.

There were three civilians standing there, all holding their hands in the air. On a chair facing them sat a man in a rumpled business suit. On the dresser lay a medical kit with six syringes and a dozen small vials of fluid.

The man in a white doctor’s coat said something, and indicated the man sitting in the chair.

“Franklin, get your ass up to the second floor, last room, we need your Arabic,” DeWitt said on the radio.

DeWitt stepped forward and looked at the man in the chair. It was Cullhagen; he’d seen the man’s picture. He was a bear, almost six feet four and 250 pounds. Dark curly hair spilled down into his eyes and he had a three-day beard. He seemed to be dazed, probably drugged. Franklin ran in a few moments later before DeWitt could talk to the man.

“Ask them what they’ve done to this man,” DeWitt said.

The doctor looked up at the Arabic question and responded briefly. “He says questioning him, that’s all.”

“What drugs did they use?”

In response to that question, the doctor hesitated, then pointed to the tray and showed them one vial. Franklin looked at the label, and shook his head. “No idea what it is.”

“Ask him how long for the man to recover from the drug.”

The doctor held up his hands and said he didn’t know. DeWitt hit the man in the jaw with his fist, jolting him backward against the wall. “Ask him again.”

Franklin did. The doctor cowered back and mumbled an answer.

“He said about four more hours.”

“We don’t have four hours. There will be choppers and troops all over this place within an hour.” DeWitt looked at the vials on the dresser. “Ask him which one of these drugs will bring him out of the other drug state.”

Franklin did, and the doctor lifted his brows.

“Tell him if he tries to use the wrong one to kill the prisoner, I’ll tear his tongue off, gouge out his eyes, rip off his balls, and make him eat them. Tell him that exactly.”

As Franklin repeated the words to the Libyan doctor, the man’s frozen smile faded and a look of stark terror replaced it. He began to tremble, then sagged against the wall.

“Search all three,” DeWitt bellowed. They found a small automatic, three small knives, and two pills.

The doctor motioned to the box of drugs. “He says the one with the blue label will bring the prisoner around in ten minutes, and leave no harmful effects.”

“DeWitt, you have the subject, can he travel?” Murdock asked on the radio.

“Not yet, maybe in ten minutes. Your situation?”

“We’re through the fence, mopping up. Found half a dozen more guards. Most of the others seem to be out in blocking positions. We control the area. You really smashed that personnel carrier.”

“Good old TNAZ.”

De Witt looked back at the doctor. “Tell him to do it now. Any problem and he’s a dead man, very slowly and painfully a dead man.”

Fernandez had tied the other two civilians’ arms behind them with plastic strips and sat them down along the far wall. The doctor picked up the medication, put it in a syringe, and went toward Cullhagen. DeWitt grabbed his hand.

“Do it right or you’re dead.” He put the Bull Pup muzzle against his head and said, “Bang.” The doctor almost fainted. He nodded, pushed the needle into Cullhagen’s arm, and injected the drug.

Two minutes later the CIA man began to recover. Five minutes and he looked around, scowled, and started talking, but they couldn’t understand him.

DeWitt frowned and called Murdock to come up. They watched Cullhagen and whispered to each other.

“Is he going to be lucid enough to travel with us?” DeWitt asked.

“Or do we put him down?” Murdock asked.

“I didn’t want to make that decision myself,” DeWitt said.

Twelve minutes after the injection, Cullhagen coughed, looked up, and blinked. He rubbed one hand over his face and stared at the doctor standing in front of him.

“Like I told you, you sonofabitch, I’m not going to tell you a damn thing. I don’t know anything. I’m a fucking driver who got pulled into this assignment because our regular guy got the — do you believed it — mumps.” He looked around, grinned when he saw the SEALs. “Well, different uniforms. Our side, I hope.” He held out his hand to DeWitt. “Cullhagen here. When the hell does the chopper get here to take us out of this pigsty of a rat fucking hole?”

“Sir, as soon as you can walk and carry an AK47 rifle and forty rounds.”

Cullhagen blinked, shook his head. “Damn glad to see you guys. Let me walk around a little. Don’t hurt these guys, they weren’t half bad. They had an Army interrogator coming in. He’d have pulled my asshole right out my nose before he was done with me. Let’s get moving.”

“It’s seven miles through the sand,” Murdock said.

“Hell, I did two tours in Nam. I can hike fifty miles with a fifty-pound pack. Let’s go.”

They went down the stairs and out to the front of the house. Half a dozen soldiers lay on the ground where they had been tied up after capture. They would live. Jaybird ran up waving his arms. “Found a truck at the side of the barracks. Old, but it runs. Might beat walking.”

Murdock had watched Cullhagen walk down the stairs and then out of the house. There was no chance that he could do seven miles even without a rifle.

“Can we all get inside?” DeWitt asked.

“It’s a flatbed with stakes on the sides and back. Room for everyone.”

“Get it over here,” Murdock said. “We run into the patrols this way and any blocking force, we use the EAR on them so they don’t warn anyone ahead we’re coming. Let’s do it.”

Ten minutes later they left the front gate. They had to nudge the toppled personnel carrier out of the way, then rolled down the gravel road. The old truck would do thirty miles an hour top speed. That was five times what they could do walking.

A mile down the road they saw lights and slowed. The two men with the EAR weapons aimed them over the top of the cab and waited. It was a blocking force of troops, about fifty, Murdock decided. Two vehicles lit up the sides of the road. Two men stood in the road waving for them to stop. At two hundred yards, the pair of EAR weapons fired. The effect was immediate. Almost all of the men in the roadway collapsed unconscious. The EARs fired again ten seconds later, one at each side of the road. Most of the rest of the surprised soldiers went down unconscious. Half a dozen men survived the effects of the enhanced audio and ran into the desert.

At the block itself, the truck stopped, SEALs jumped out, and dragged enough unconscious soldiers out of the way so the truck could drive through without crushing anyone.

“One of our more humane days,” Murdock told Cullhagen. “Don’t count on that happening too often.”

The CIA man was fascinated by the EAR weapon. “Heard we had something like that on the shelf. Didn’t know it was operational.”

“It isn’t yet, but we snagged a few for field testing,” Murdock said. “Works damn well for silent attacks.”

Once in the truck, Mahanani heard about DeWitt’s shot arm, and peeled up his shirt sleeve and checked it. “An in-and-out, j.g. No big deal. Might slow down your left-handed drinking, but that’s about all.” He sterilized the areas with alcohol wipe pads, then put some medication on the two wounds, and wrapped them securely to stop any more bleeding. “Good as new, j.g., but no Purple Heart, since we were never here and this mission never happened.”

Five minutes later, a pair of headlights showed down the road coming at them. They let it come, and crouched down in the truck bed, hoping not to attract the attention of those in the oncoming rig. It turned out to be a sedan that slammed past them at maximum speed and continued on without backward glance from the driver.

Jaybird turned the rig right when they came to the paved road along the beach, and a half mile down he turned toward the coast. It was less than two hundred yards away.

“Let’s find our little bunch of trees and get out of here,” Murdock said. Lampedusa found the right trees, and the rubber boats were still there.

“Good,” DeWitt told Cullhagen. “You won’t have to swim out.”

Cullhagen was showing signs of exhaustion. “No sleep or food or water for three days,” he said. The SEALs gave him water, then some of their emergency food bars.

“So damn hungry I can’t even taste them,” he said.

Ten minutes later the rubber ducks were in the water and the SEALs and Cullhagen loaded on board. The storm was over, and the Mediterranean Sea looked like a big pond, it was so calm. The time was almost 0400. Two hours of darkness left if they were lucky.

Murdock made a call with the Motorola, but got no response. He kept trying as they motored slowly due north. The submarine was supposed to be on the surface from 0400 to 0600. When they were a mile offshore, the sub answered on a Motorola the SEALs had left on board. The sub was waiting. Murdock stood high in the IBS and waved three light sticks. His radio spoke again.

“Floaters, I have your signal. Red light sticks. You’re dead ahead and we’ll make contact.”

“Oh, yeah,” Vinnie Van Dyke said. “A whole fucking mission and we didn’t even get wet.”

Twenty minutes later they made a safe transfer to the sub, collapsed the IBS craft as far as they would go, and pushed them into the boat. Once inside the submarine, Cullhagen asked for an encrypted radio and sent a message to Washington.

The SEALs found bunks and sacked out. Murdock didn’t sleep much. He still had to integrate totally two new men in the platoon into the operation. That would take some doing.