Direct Action

43

Murdock and Razor crept slowly along the rocks. The mortar fire was still dropping up near the road, but at a much slower rate.

The wind was whipping; it was bitterly cold. Murdock guessed that the temperature was in the teens and dropping, with the wind chill making it much worse. Their pace wasn’t fast enough to keep them warm. Murdock thought about sitting in the ocean at Coronado during Hell Week, the surf washing over him and the instructors saying that they couldn’t come out until someone quit. He hadn’t quit then. He told himself that it had been much colder then than now.

He and Razor reached the dome of rock that had been so much trouble to cross earlier. Then the mortar fire stopped suddenly, and all they could hear was the wind.

Murdock turned to look at Razor through his NVG. Razor nodded. The mortars had ceased fire because the Syrian commandos had reached the road.

The dome was a handy obstacle. The SEALs unscrewed the fuses from two Russian M75 frag grenades and replaced them with two push-pull instantaneous booby-trap fuses. While no handyman worth his salt would ever be without duct tape, no SEAL would be caught dead without the military equivalent: olive-green ordnance tape, also known as hundred-mile-an-hour tape.

With Murdock holding onto him, Razor edged out onto the dome. When he came to the limit of Murdock’s reach, he locked his legs, bent over, and taped a grenade to a smooth, dry portion of the rock surface.

Murdock pulled him in, and Razor taped the second grenade a little closer to the edge. As they backed away from the dome, Razor carefully unspooled the hundred-pound test fishing line he’d attached to the pull rings of the fuses. Murdock took one line, Razor the other.

They spread out among the rocks and settled down to wait.