Deathrace

1

Lieutenant Blake Murdock rubbed the stinging sand out of his eyes, and watched the target ahead. Nothing moved. Good. He glanced to his right and saw the first two men in his Third Platoon flat on their bellies in the hot rocks and dirt. Their weapons were up and ready. They both wore full combat gear. Their faces were daubed with black and brown paint.

Their desert cammies showed the grime of a long crawl two hundred yards up to this vantage point. Murdock nodded sharply at the first two men. David "Jaybird" Sterling, Machinist Mate Second Class, and platoon chief, surged off the ground into a crouching run and charged the squat building directly in front, twenty yards away. He held his HK MP-5SD submachine gun ready, his finger on the trigger set for three round bursts. Right behind him, Ron Holt, Radioman First Class and the platoon's communications man, jolted to his feet and charged the low building. He carried a Remington 870 shotgun with no stock, a pistol grip, and virtually no barrel. The pump-action weapon earned five 12-gauge rounds.

Sterling hit the door first, kicked it open, and darted inside. Ron Holt went in right behind him.

From long practice, Sterling took the right-hand side of the room. Two terrorists stood over a woman tied to a chair. Sterling put three-round bursts into each of the terrs, and looked for more.

As he did, Holt dove through the door covering the left-hand side of the room. One terr held a knife, and was about to move toward a captive tied to a table.

One round from the shotgun cut the terr in half.

The sound of the shots in the small room were like 155 howitzers going off in a cave. Both men wore earplugs, but still the sound rattled around in their heads.

"Clear right," Sterling said into his Motorola MX-300 personal communication radio. To his left, Holt heard the words through a small speaker in his left ear.

"Clear left," Holt said. They looked at each other through the dimness of the room, then charged through the door eight feet away, into the second room.

This time Holt went first. He scanned the inside of the room but found no terrorists.

Sterling came right behind him, his submachine gun searching for any terrs in his zone. Suddenly one popped up from behind a table. Sterling riddled him with three rounds, and kept scanning.

Holt checked his section again, and saw a form with a weapon leap up from behind a couch. Holt had pumped a new round into his shotgun as soon as he shot the first time. Now he jerked the Remington around and triggered off a round. The terr was blasted against the back of the room and dropped to the floor.

"Clear left," Holt said.

"Clear right," Sterling said. They nodded, and ran hard through the last door in the room, and out into the sunshine.

They trotted fifty yards to the left and bellied down in a shallow irrigation ditch near the rest of the platoon.

Back in front of the low building, Lieutenant Murdock looked to his left. He pointed to the first two men in line there, and they both scrambled to their feet and charged the structure.

Martin "Magic" Brown, a black man carrying one of the new HK G-11 automatic rifles, hit the door first. He had put aside his usual sniper rifle to try out the new weapon, which had rounds without casings. He kicked open the door and charged inside, taking the right-hand section. Two terrs showed themselves and he fired, pouring twelve rounds into the two of them before he got his finger off the trigger.

"Holy shit," Magic growled. "Clear right."

Behind him Joe "Ricochet" Lampedusa, the platoon lead scout, had hosed down one terr with a three-round burst from his Colt M-4A1 carbine.

"Clear left," Joe said. "Sure you got him?"

Magic grinned in the room's dimness, and waved them forward.

They charged into the next room where the G-11 blasted again, this time set on three-round bursts.

Out in front of the Kill House, Lieutenant Murdock made a double check. He pointed at Kenneth Ching and Harry "Horse" Ronson, sending them into the small building, where they practiced room clearing with surprise dummy targets — some stationary, some jolting upward from behind furniture.

Murdock watched the two burst into the Kill House, then turned, hearing a new sound in the desert land not far from the small town of Niland, California, in the near edge of the Navy's Chocolate Mountain Gunnery Range.

The foreign sound turned out to be a new Buick easing up to the twenty-four-man bus with Navy markings. The rig had been home, and chow hall, for the Third Platoon of the U.S. Navy SEALs from SEAL Team Seven, now in the third and last day of a training session to sharpen their weapons skills.

Murdock had three new men in the platoon since the last walk in the park down in Kenya, and he wanted all the live firing time he could wring out to be sure the new men blended in, meshed, with the thirteen other men in his command.

He watched the car come to a stop. A familiar figure stepped out and waved.

Big news coming, Murdock knew. He wasn't sure if it would be good news, or bad, or something in between. Whenever the platoon's contact with the CIA showed up, there was a damn good reason.

Murdock waited until the last two men had stormed through the Kill House. He didn't do a critique. The men knew what they had done right and what wrong, and how to correct the mistakes. They would learn from them.

He stood, but didn't bother brushing the desert dirt off his cammies. He cradled the HK G11, and waited for Don Stroh to come to him. The CIA man had flown over three thousand miles to get there; another hundred yards wouldn't hurt him.

Stroh was their boss, the next step up in a new chain of command, their pipeline to the CIA. A year ago the Third Platoon of SEAL Team Seven had been placed under the direct control, and command, of the Central Intelligence Agency, with Stroh as their contact. Since then Third Platoon had undertaken some ultra-secret, clandestine operations, usually on the direct orders of the President.

Anytime Stroh showed up, something was afoot.

Two months ago, in a phone call to Murdock in Washington, D.C., Stroh had indicated something big was brewing, but it wasn't quite time to move on it. Now must be the time.

Murdock held out his hand as Stroh walked up. He'd left his suit coat in the car, stripped off his tie, and was unbuttoning his shirt.

In October the California desert could still throw up a heat wave. Some said September and October were the hottest months in Southern California. The desert went along with the plan.

Stroh grinned. "Nice little frying pan you have here."

"Not bad today. You shoulda been here yesterday."

"Come back to my office. We need to talk."

Murdock looked over to where Lieutenant (j.g.) Ed DeWitt stood in front of the platoon. He gave two curt hand signals. DeWitt signaled back and got the men up to take the planned five-mile hike at double time.

"Your office?" Murdock said.

"The car. It's got air-conditioning."

Five minutes later, they sipped ice-cold Cokes from Stroh's cooler. He never forgot the Navy's strict code about no alcohol on base.

"It's about ready to go down. Two months ago I told you something was brewing. We've got word from some of our people that the pace has quickened and it's time for us to move."

"Stroh, you sound like you're running for office. How about some specifics, some facts."

"In the near east, one of our not-so-friendly nations is about ready to build one or more nuclear devices. We don't want them to do that. You and your platoon are going to stop them."

"You make it sound simple. When and where?"

"Murdock, you're hard to figure. I thought you'd yell or groan. You've never been up against anything like this before."

"What about the North Atlantic and that oil drilling platform? We had a nuke there. The Arabs were bound to get a nuke put together sooner or later. We've been talking about it. Hell, what else in the world can go south? Now some specifics."

"First breakfast. We're going back to the huge town of Niland. They have one air-conditioned cafe I saw, and I haven't had breakfast. I'm ugly before I get my coffee and flapjacks."

"I've got more training operations this morning."

"I saw you tell Ed to continue the program. They'll be just fine. You can wash your hands and comb your hair in town."

Twenty minutes later, they were served breakfast. Murdock had a cup of coffee.

Stroh started talking as soon as he finished eating.

They were in a corner booth with no one else around them. The cafe was deserted except for one woman in the end booth.

"So, it's a nuclear problem in an Arab country, Iran to be exact. We have a simple job. To insert your platoon into the country, find the nuclear device assembly complex, destroy it and all of the nuclear components. Then you have to deal with the plutonium without causing a five-hundred-mile death zone across Iran."

"Did you say 'find the assembly complex'? You don't know where it is?"

"We've got two good men on it right now in Tehran. As soon as they tie it down, we move you and your men."

"Good to know where we're going. But you realize my platoon hasn't been cleared for combat duty yet. I had five men shot up in that Kenya picnic, and I have three new men I'm integrating into the team."

"You've had two months. I thought your guys were fast learners."

"They are, Stroh. But when you're staking your life on the guy behind you, you want to be fucking certain he knows the ropes, and the routines, and what to do and when to do it."

"Granted. The President says he wants you ready to fly out of North Island in a week."

"We can't do it. Some of my men are still hurting. We still need the platoon exercises to get everyone integrated. We're probably two weeks away from being ready for duty."

"Not a chance, Cowboy. When the President says a week…"

Murdock grunted. "You've got something else to spring on me. I can see it in those little blue eyes of yours. What is it?"

"How are you at dismantling nuclear warheads and stand-alone nuclear bombs?"

"Piss-poor, to coin a phrase. My best idea is to drop them down a mile-deep oil well and let them rot away for the thirty-five thousand years of plutonium's half-life."

"So you know something about plutonium."

"Enough to stay as far away from it as possible."

"So how are you going to dismantle those half-made nukes and dispose of the plutonium?"

"Have to study up on that. I still like the drop-the-plutonium-down-a-well idea."

"Fact is, Murdock, not even you and your crew can handle those nukes. We'd like to take in a NEST team. That's Nuclear Emergency Security Team. Let them handle the hot stuff. But we can't do that. DOD has no one who has a military background who can go in and do the dismantling. So, we're calling on a civilian expert who will go in with you, and do the dirty work once you get on site. You'll be protection, guard dogs, and exfiltration experts."

Murdock slammed his palm down on the table. "A civilian? Not a chance. We can't accept a civilian on a mission. We'd be slowed down, compromised, lose some people right off. What civilian?"

"An expert on dismantling nuclear weapons. Be handy to have somebody like that around, wouldn't it?"

"Yes. But your expert first has to make it into the target. We'd have to guarantee that, right? I could lose four or five men protecting a damned civilian. What if we have a five-mile underwater swim or a HALO jump? How can a civilian keep up with SEALS? It just won't work."

"The President says it will work, Murdock. So it's up to you to make it work instead of bitching. You think about that for a minute. I'll be right back."

Murdock watched Stroh walk away, then stared at his coffee. A mission, fine, Any mission. But taking a civilian along into Iran? He'd been in Arab countries before. No damn fun. He looked up as Stroh came back.

"Murdock. I saw an old friend down the way. Lieutenant Blake Murdock, this is Katherine 'Kat' Garnet. Kat, Murdock."

She reached out her hand. Murdock fumbled his way out of the booth to stand, and took her hand. She had a surprisingly firm grip.

"Pleased to meet you, Miss Garnet. Stroh usually doesn't have such attractive friends."

"Murdock, Kat is the civilian we're sending along with you to take care of those small toys we talked about."

Murdock's eyes went wide; his frown came at once. He shook his head. "Stroh, you've got to be joking."

"No joke, Lieutenant. The President has cleared it. It's a done deal. Kat goes with you. Last time I looked, the President was still the Commander in Chief. That would mean he outranks you, and is your boss. Right?"

Murdock sat down quickly. "Yeah, Stroh, right."

Kat Garnet grinned, and slid into the booth beside Stroh.