Counterfire

20

At the last minute they decided not to wear wet suits.

“Won’t be in the wet long enough to make them worthwhile,” Lieutenant Ed DeWitt said. “That water is warm anyway if we do get damp.”

They would take no rebreathers either, just their cammies and a full load of combat gear and ammo. Two men carried ammo “collars,” the rigs that packed goods in pouches front and back with a hole in the middle to push your head through.

They had modified their weapons stance a little. Vinnie Van Dyke would keep his H & K 21-E machine gun, and Fernandez would take along his PSG1 71.62mm NATO round sniper rifle. They would take two Bull Pups, and the rest would handle the familiar MP-5 submachine gun.

“Gives a better balance in case we run into some long-range problems before we actually get into the town,” Murdock said. “There’s a road that hugs the west bank of the Dead Sea, but we don’t know how close. We don’t want to get into any confrontations down there fifteen miles from the target. We’ll make every attempt to stay out of any trouble before we hit the palace.”

They were suited up and all set to go, waiting in a ready room near the small airfield at the Rama Army Base. The helicopter had been loaded with the two IBSs and two drag bags with extra ammo and explosives.

“Just saw the bird again,” Jaybird said. “She’s a converted U.S. forty-six. Looks like she’s been updated all the way and has a spit and polish on her that shows the Israeli thoroughness. No worry about this old bird not making the round trip.”

DeWitt nodded. “Good.” He turned to Lieutenant Ebenezer, who now wore cammies and rubber boots like the rest of them. He had told them to call him Eb. “What do we know about the inside of the palace or the grounds?”

“Nothing. We have aerial shots of it, which you’ve seen. The general layout, but we don’t know what or who are in which of the buildings. On that score we’ll have to play it by ear.”

An Israeli Air Force officer looked into the room. “Time to load up, gentlemen. This way.”

They followed him, looking a little like overloaded mountain climbers. The troops stepped into the familiar form of the forty-six and settled against the sides. The two fully inflated IBS boats were wedged into holders at the aft end of the craft, just in front of where the hatch would swing down for their quick departure.

“Same deluxe seating arrangement, I see,” Lampedusa cracked as he settled down on the cold metal floor.

“A fuck and a half better than walking,” Bradford said.

“Was the half that floozy blonde we saw you with a couple of weeks ago, Bradford?” Jaybird yelled.

“Hell, no, that was no floozy blonde, that was his own dear mommy,” Mahanani said. That brought a laugh.

Murdock had been first on, and he enjoyed the banter among the men. It showed him that they were loose and ready, sharp and set to put everything on the line to accomplish their mission. He looked over at DeWitt, who nodded. Yes, everyone was ready. They had an even sixteen men again with Franklin out of action and Eb taking his place. It should work.

The chopper’s crew chief came into the big belly of the craft. “We have a flight time of twenty-two minutes depending on what kind of winds we run into. There almost for sure will not be any enemy ground fire directed against us. We’ll land about fifty yards from the water to be sure we have a firm footing. The captain asks that you check your radio with him now, and again just after you get on the ground and away from the aircraft.”

Murdock keyed in his handheld radio.

“Grounded One calling Bird One.”

“This is Bird One. Read you loud and clear. Grounded Two?”

DeWitt had given the other Israeli radio to Eb, who responded.

“Grounded Two to Bird One, over.”

“Yes, loud and clear. Check again once we’re parted.”

The top rotor picked up speed, and soon they could hear little except the engines and rotors. The SEALs, used to this excess noise, settled down for a short rest before they moved into action.

Jack Mahanani eased back against the side of the chopper with a resignation that he had developed early in his life on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands. He was a hospital corpsman first class, but didn’t come to the SEALs as a corpsman, rather as a SEAL. The six-month training had been easier for him than most, since he had lived in the water since he was old enough to breathe.

He thought back to the islands as he often did when there was a hint of stress. He mellowed out this way, got ready for what was coming. This one was a mystery. Nobody was quite sure where the man they wanted was, or even if he was in his Dead Sea palace. Usually they had better intel than that. Still, a strike at his HQ would be productive whether they nailed the top man or not.

Mahanani had been good in school. High grades came easy for him, and that left more time to swim and fish and surf. He did a lot of all three, and specialized in free diving with his spear gun. He told his classmates they could order the type of fish they wanted for dinner and he’d go and dive and bring it back to them squirming on his spear.

His senior year in high school had almost undone him. She was sleek and slender, attractive but not beautiful, and had a smile that turned Mahanani into mush. He had first met her when she sat behind him in American history. After that he began spending less time in the water and more hours in the library and in study halls. Almost always she would be there, Betty Yakamora. Her soft voice and Asian eyes captivated him.

He had been captain of the basketball team that year, and they won the state championship. Betty came to every game. Raging hormones combined in them one night on a moonlit beach, and they made love furiously, then gently, and now Mahanani was really hooked.

Two months later they found out she was pregnant. Mahanani told her that he would marry her as soon as they were out of school and he had a job. But Betty had other plans. She told him she wasn’t ready to be a mother. She had applied to go to the University of Hawaii and had been accepted for the fall. She had no room in her life right then for a child. They stormed and argued and screamed at each other for a month; then one day she told him that she had aborted the child and that he didn’t have to marry her.

Jack had been the furious one. Family was important to him, and to have his child suddenly yanked away from him was a monstrous affront. Mahanani never saw her again. He joined the Navy and left a week before graduation. He put Betty behind him and stormed through boot in San Diego at the Naval Recruit Training Station, and then applied to be hospital corpsman and went for his training in San Diego at the old Balboa Naval Hospital in Balboa Park.

He’d been in the Navy three years and had made second class when he was assigned as a backup corpsman at a SEAL exhibition on San Diego Bay and Harbor Island. What he saw the SEALs do that day caught his imagination: the rope airlifts, the fast boats, the parachuting, the chopper insertions, and the fast-boat pickups from the water.

The next day he applied to transfer to the SEALs. It was a year and three tries later when he was accepted as a SEAL tadpole and began his six-month training. Murdock had grabbed him as soon as he’d interviewed him for an opening in what the rest of the SEALs considered to be the most active of the platoons in all of the SEAL Teams.

Now Mahanani did double duty as a SEAL while also packing the regular corpsman’s gear. He had fallen into the job by accident when the platoon’s regular medic was wounded and went down. Murdock had not applied for a new corpsman, and nobody upstairs had thought to ask how the platoon got along without a corpsman of record. Mahanani shrugged. It wasn’t that much more work, and if he could take care of both jobs, he was happy.

Mahanani looked up through the dim light of the chopper. He felt more than heard the men moving.

“Red light,” Murdock bellowed so he could be heard. “Land in five minutes. Final check on gear now.”

The men went into the patrol order and each man inspected the man ahead of him, then turned around and checked the man behind him.

They could hear the chopper’s engines take on a new tone as the big bird came around and lost altitude.

Murdock looked out the side entrance door. Absolutely black. Not even a campfire or a taillight. Black on black. He could paint a picture on it.

They felt a small bump as the big bird settled on its landing gear and the red light on the rear hatch went to green. The big hatch swung down and hit the ground.

The two men assigned to the job quickly untied the IBSs and pushed them out the rear hatch. The two squads exited by the side hatches, and grabbed the boats and ran them toward the water that they could see twenty-five yards away.

Murdock ran with them, checking his long-range radio at the time. He could hear and be heard. He put the radio in a waterproof package and tied it to his combat vest.

The shoreline here was a little mushy as they carried the rubber boats down to the water. Bravo Squad loaded in the first boat, and Alpha took up the second one. Before they pushed off there was a check of equipment.

“Two drag bags?” Senior Chief Sadler whispered. Two ayes came back. “Eight men per boat?” Murdock and DeWitt answered aye. Two men in each squad had out their Motorolas. They would be the contacts as the SEALs moved through the Dead Sea to the north. If they did get wet for any reason, there would be plenty of reserve units in waterproof pouches.

“Let’s move,” Murdock said. He heard the chopper’s engines gear up, and the big craft lifted off and vanished into the night. Then there was no sound, no lights, only blackness and the Dead Sea.

“Start motors,” DeWitt said on his Motorola. The motors caught on the second pull and the two boats, latched together with a sixty-foot buddy cord, angled north up the blackness of the Dead Sea.

Murdock studied the area. The pilot had told him they would land eighteen miles from the target and that there were no settlements of any kind between there and the target. He also said the road along there was near the water, but usually forty to fifty yards away. They might see the headlights of an occasional car or truck on the road, but the sound of the IBS motors would be no problem.

The Zodiacs revved up to eighteen knots and slid through the salt-brine sea with little effort. The men on the engines and tillers soon felt the difference in the much more buoyant water. They had to slow down a little to help maintain control.

When they left on the boats, Murdock had checked his watch. The luminous dial had shown him it was 2010. With any luck they would have ten hours of darkness. By the end of that time, the plan was that his SEALs would have completed their mission, returned eighteen miles south along the west coast of the Dead Sea, and be ready for pickup. Murdock hoped that it went exactly that way.

“Cap, I hear something,” Lam said.

Murdock used his Motorola. “Let’s go dead in the water. Turn off both engines now.”

A moment later the silence overwhelmed them. Lam stood in the second boat looking north, then toward shore, then back to the north again.

“Can’t be sure, Cap, but if I was a betting man, I’d say there is a motorboat coming this way. Okay, I am a betting man. I’ll put a thousand up that there’s a boat headed our way, not fast, maybe fifteen knots.”

Murdock tried to listen, turned so his ear was open to the north. He didn’t hear a thing other than a gentle slapping of the water against the sides of the rubber ducks.

“I want one star shell loaded and ready to fire,” Murdock said. “Two Bull Pups at the ready with impact rounds. If this is a patrol boat, we want to take it out fast before they can radio. Star shell, bang, bang, they’re dead.”

“Ready with the star,” Fernandez said.

“Ready with a Bull Pup,” Jaybird added.

“I’ll be the other Bull Pup,” Murdock said. “We wait.” He turned to Lam. “Anything new?”

“No, just a continual sound coming from them. Getting louder. On the water sound travels twice as fast. I’d put them at no more than two miles and closing.”

They waited. Another two minutes.

“Oh, yes, I can hear it now,” Murdock said. “Try to nail him at two hundred yards, Fernandez. You might need two or three flares. Once one goes, we’re committed and we have to take him out. There’s no commercial traffic on this Dead Sea, so it has to be a Palestinian Authority patrol boat. Hold steady, Fernandez, don’t fire until I give you weapons free.”

“Roger, Cap.”

They waited. There was almost no noise from the water, no waves, no wind, just dead all around them — the Dead Sea. Murdock frowned and looked north. Did he see running lights?

“Yeah, Cap, running lights. Sometimes the chemicals on the water give off a kind of fog that sloshes around and confuses the visual. So our look at him may come and go. But that is the bad guy up there.”

“How far?”

“Six hundred yards and closing about ten knots.”

“Radar?”

“Probably,” Lam said. “Depending who they bought it from. Most patrol boats these days have radar as a given.”

They waited.

“Three hundred yards tops,” Lam said.

“Fernandez, can you see the lights?”

“Oh, yes, I’d say maybe three-fifty.”

“Good, Fernandez. In twenty seconds I want you to fire one and have a second ready immediately.”

“That’s a roger, sir.”

A few moments later, the sound of a shot came. “Firing one, Commander. One round off and away.”

“Everyone down. Bull Pups fire as soon as we get a target. We’re committed now, people. Let’s make this count.”