Bloodstorm

29

Murdock came to rest prone in the weeds of the ditch as he looked at the lighted target. DeWitt landed beside him, and made a futile gesture to his superior. Murdock shook his head and pointed back at DeWitt.

The J.G. took his field glasses and stared at the target. He shouldn’t have shown any indecision. Damnit! What was the matter with him? It was a target, like any other. He’d find a way. He checked the near side of the chain-link fence through the glasses. At the corner he saw what looked to be a hole, or at least a section of the stiff fencing that could be bent back.

He grinned. Soldiers would be boys. When they wanted out without a pass, they could find a way. He used the Motorola.

“Looks like an entry point near the corner of the fence. Ostercamp, check it out. The rest of us will move up to fifty yards from the corner. Move, now.”

Murdock had told Yasmin to stay right beside DeWitt. “You don’t dare fire your weapon unless he does. When he does, it’s a signal to the platoon also to open fire. Don’t get excited and try to get the scalp on your belt before it’s time. You could destroy the whole mission.”

“I understand,” she said.

Now she ran when DeWitt did, flopped on the ground when he did, always protecting her Uzi and her ammunition, kept in a shoulder bag slung at her back. All she wanted was one or two good shots at the enemy, at the soldiers who had killed her beloved.

Kat held close to Murdock. She carried an MP-5 and enough magazines of ammo to sink a battleship. This was crazy. What was she doing out here with these professional strike team guys? What was she trying to prove? Then she grinned in the dark. She had proved it already. Now she was just doing what her president had ordered her to do. Yeah, that was it.

Ostercamp’s voice came on the radio. “Yeah, J.G., hole big enough for Mahanani to crawl through. Been used quite a bit. Don’t see any kind of security on the other side of the fence where I am. Come on up.”

“Let’s go,” DeWitt said into his mike, and the ten dark figures lifted off the ground and ran, bent over, toward the fence, then through the hole one at a time. Murdock and Kat went through last.

“Ostercamp?” DeWitt asked.

“Out front about fifty, J.G. There’s a fucking track through the light grass and weeds where the AWOL guys have been walking. No guards, no rovers that I can see. Lights are another two hundred yards ahead.”

“Go slow, watch on all sides, and keep moving up,” J.G. told Ostercamp. Then he moved his squad forward.

Ten minutes later, DeWitt lay in the grass and weeds just outside the flare of the floodlights. The nearest building was open on the back and looked like a maintenance structure. They all hugged the ground as a small utility vehicle growled around the building, slowed as two men in the rig looked the area over, then speeded up, and went around the near side and toward the next building. A small-caliber machine gun was mounted on a pedestal between the seats.

The soldiers wore camouflaged fatigues much like those the SEALs had on. Their hats were different. De Witt called Franklin up, and told him what he wanted him to do. Franklin grinned, and crawled back to Canzoneri and Ostercamp.

“We’re gonna play soldier,” he told them. “This is a Special Forces training area. Those guys must be running all over here on practice missions. We’re gonna be one bunch of them. Follow my lead. If we hit any live Syrians out there, I’ll do the talking. We’ll go sneaky wherever we move. Now.”

The three men lifted up and ran, bent half over, toward the first building. No one challenged them. They flattened out against the building, checked inside, then went around the near side and out of sight toward the next structure.

Franklin snorted as he saw how easy it was. Nobody around. Why no guards if this place was so damned important? He and his two men rested against the second building. At least the doors were closed. He read the sign over the small door. “Packing, Shipping.” Not what he wanted. “Second building a dud,” he said on the Motorola, and led the men toward the third one. All buildings were well lighted, and yet he saw no guards. Strange.

They had just come around the third building, which had a sign saying it was used to manufacture small arms, when a pair of soldiers came toward them. They walked with rifles on their shoulders as if on an interior guard post. The soldiers stared at the three SEALs, nodded and waved, and went on past.

The fourth building looked more promising to Franklin. About time they turned up something. His gut was tightening up the way it always did when he was in action. He held up his hand, and his men stopped behind a truck parked in front of the place. Two armed guards stood near a small man-sized door. Two large truck doors at the left were closed.

One of the guards said something to the other one, but Franklin couldn’t hear what it was. One guard looked around carefully, then lit a cigarette and held it hidden in one hand.

“We go at them head-on like it was a target,” Franklin said. “If we’re lucky they’ll only yell at us.”

The three SEALs came out from behind the truck, held their weapons in front of them with both hands, and ran flat out toward the two guards twenty yards away.

“Hey, stop, you stupid assholes,” one of the guards yelled in Arabic. The SEALs kept going until they were ten feet from the guards, who were fumbling with their weapons.

“You’re both dead,” Franklin shouted in Arabic. “We gunned you down while you were smoking.”

“Damned goat-fuckers, this building is off limits to your playacting. Go somewhere else and leave us alone. You don’t even have real bullets, but we do. You get out of here.”

“You’re camel-shit stupid,” Franklin shouted. He waved the SEALs to one side, and they ran behind another building. In the shadow of the overhang, Franklin used his radio.

“Might have something, J.G. Two real guards outside a building, fourth one in. Looks sealed up. Not as large as the others. No windows. Two truck doors, closed. Want us to take out the guards and check inside?”

“No, we’re coming in. They believed you were Special Forces on maneuvers?”

“Worked well, J.G.”

“Good. We’ll use the same tactic if we are spotted. We’ll have Khai out front if we need his Arabic. Stay out of sight. We should be there in about five.”

DeWitt led his squad directly at the nearest building, swung around it, and headed for the second one. Well ahead he could see the smaller structure Franklin had described. They ran in spurts, then hid behind the wooden buildings. They had just rounded the corner of the third one when Khai stopped and lifted his Bull Pup. J.G. DeWitt nearly bumped into Khai, then saw the problem.

Directly ahead of them, no more than twenty feet, stood a squad of ten Syrian Special Forces troops, dressed in desert cammy uniforms and floppy hats. They had various kinds of weapons, and a young officer in front of them stared hard at the SEALs.

“We declare your unit captured or killed,” Khai screeched in Arabic. “You are out of the maneuver. Sit down and take off your hats as a sign of surrender.”

The officer leading the Syrians shook his head. “This isn’t even your sector. You can’t capture us. The referee will agree with us. I’m Captain Palmyra. I order you to return to your own sector.”

“Call yourself a major,” DeWitt whispered.

“I am Major Al Saad, with the division. I order you to sit down and remove the magazines from your weapons. You are hereby captured. I’ll remember your name, Captain. Now we have to go capture our primary objective. Sit down!” The last command came as a thundering bellow, and the Syrian officer gave a quiet order and his men sat down, took off their caps, and took the magazines out of their weapons.

Khai nodded and waved his troops forward at a trot, past the surprised Syrians and on toward the fourth building.

“Nice work, Major,” DeWitt said.

Khai grinned in the pale moonlight. “Hey, at least we’re still alive. Good thing they had an exercise on.”

Khai heard the roving jeep a moment later, and the SEALs slid into the deep moon shade next to a building and waited for the rig to pass. It turned and went around another building, and he took the men on toward the next structure.

Franklin and his detail came out of the night and met them. They could see the small target building fifty yards ahead. It was lit like the rest of them, and now there were three guards in front. One evidently was talking with the other two. They saluted him and he walked away into the night.

“Ostercamp, have you been around the building yet?”

“No, sir.”

“Take a run, see if there are any other doors or any windows.”

Ostercamp took off at a run to the end of the building that covered them. He looked around the corner, waved at them, then vanished.

“We need to keep this a quiet mission for as long as possible,” DeWitt said in his mike. “If there are no other entrances, we’ll charge forward in a no-shoot assault and capture the two guards as part of the maneuver games. It should work again.”

The J.G. paused, then nodded to himself. “Any other bright ideas?” he asked the net.

Nobody had any.

“Murdock, any thoughts?”

“Sounds like a good move. We hustle the guards inside, replace them with Franklin and Khai with the Syrian weapons, and we see what they are protecting.”

“Good.”

Ostercamp was back five minutes later. “No back door, no windows anywhere.”

“Let’s move out at a trot. Then when we see the two Syrians, we sprint for them with weapons at port arms. Let’s do it.”

The nine SEALs, with Kat and Yasmin in the middle, charged the unsuspecting Syrians and overwhelmed them.

“Stop, stop,” the Syrians shouted, but by then Khai had hit one with a shoulder block and slammed him to the ground. Mahanani put the second one in a bear hug and powered him backward three steps against the building. Their weapons were stripped away and Ostercamp worked on the door. The lock was too good. DeWitt fired twice with his silenced MP-5 into the lock, and the door jiggled open.

He went in first, fast and low, followed by the rest of the SEALs except for Khai and Franklin, who took the new Kalashnikov 74’s and stood guard where the Syrians had been. The Syrians were hurried inside, then gagged and plastic bands cinched on their ankles and wrists.

Inside the lighted building, the SEALs found a short assembly line where large bombs were evidently loaded with their powder charge and the fuses attached. In the far corner, steps led downward. Ed DeWitt and Murdock charged down the steps with their flashlights on. Down ten steps they came to a concrete wall with a steel door firmly in place. It had a time lock on it.

“Fernandez, get down the steps with some primer cord, now,” DeWitt said to his mike.

Fernandez arrived a few moments later, saw the problem, and unrolled two one-foot-long strings of the quarter-of-an-inch-thick pliable C-4 explosive. He pasted one strip against the door circling the lock, and then put an X across the lock itself with the other strip. He inserted a timer/detonator into the cord.

“Three minutes?” he asked, and looked at DeWitt. The officer nodded, and Fernandez activated the timer. All three SEALs ran up the steps and to the side, out of the way of the back-blast that would funnel up the steps.

The rest of the SEALs heard the talk, and faded to the sides away from the steps. The blast came on time with a muffled roar; the near side of the building next to the steps shook for a moment, but didn’t come down.

Murdock and DeWitt hurried into the smoke down the stairs. They came right back up coughing and wiping their eyes.

“Check with the guards in front to see if there was any reaction outside,” DeWitt said. Canzoneri slipped out the front door, and came back a moment later.

“No reaction,” Canzoneri said on mike. “Our guys heard the blast, but didn’t think the noise traveled far.”

It was four minutes later before the SEALs could penetrate the fading smoke and get to the door. The lock had been blown right through the metal door, and it sagged outward on bent hinges. It took both men to pull the door open enough so they could get inside. There were no lights. Their flashes served as they checked the twenty-foot-square room.

In the middle stood a table with a sealed container on it.

“We’ve got our warhead,” DeWitt radioed. “Kat, get down here with your kit of tools.”

Kat came through the door with her kit and two flashlights she had borrowed from SEALs. She looked at the sealed container, and took out her issue fighting knife and began ripping it apart. It was made of hard and soft plastic, and soon she found the key and opened one seal that held the two halves together. She lifted the top half and looked inside.

“Yes, the same warhead as the one in Libya,” she said. “Help me lift it out of there and then I can get to work.”

They pulled it out, cut off the rest of the plastic, and Kat began to work.

“Jefferson,” DeWitt said on mike. “Find Yasmin and stay with her. We don’t want her doing anything weird.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Jefferson said.

Murdock sent two more men downstairs to hold flashlights while Kat worked. They began to sweat when Kat did as she began the delicate operation to make sure the trigger device could not possibly work to set off the nuclear bomb.

“This one is different,” Kat said. “No way I can kill this one without some radiation.”

DeWitt checked with Murdock, who was topside.

“Do it,” Murdock said. “Sometimes we have to crack a few eggs to get the job done.”

“Hey, Cap, we’ve got trouble up here,” Franklin said from the front of the building. “The damn patrol rig is coming up. What do we do?”

“If they get too curious, waste them and get the jeep out of sight around back somewhere. Keep it silent as possible.”

“Got it,” Franklin said.

In front of the building, Franklin watched the jeeplike rig come closer, turn away, then make a U-turn and come back straight for them. He was going to make a social call. Damn, Franklin thought. It might be the last U-turn that driver ever made. He lifted the AK-74 and wished to hell that he had his silenced H & K MP-5. Shit. A SEAL had to do what a SEAL had to do.