Firestorm

1

Lieutenant Blake Murdock, a ring-knocker and commander of the Third Platoon of SEAL Team Seven, stroked evenly through the chilly water of the Taiwan Strait between Mainland China and Taiwan. He and his platoon swam the chilly waters a mile off the coastal Chinese town of Fuching.

"That's Mainland China, you shit-bird," Murdock had crowed when he first looked at his orders. "Those fucking Chinese don't like anybody messing in their rice bowl over there."

Murdock was now more determined than ever to get in and out, to scoot and shoot, and not even let the Chinese Mainlanders know he and his men had been there. If he and his team could pull it off. That was the best possible scenario, but like most covert operations by the Navy SEALS, the best possible seldom happened. There were too many loopholes, too many factors that he and his men didn't control, and too many cluster-fuck problems that could leap up courtesy of Dr. Murphy and his law of potential disasters.

Murdock felt the gentle tug of the six-foot-long buddy line that connected him to his shadow, Radioman First Class Ron Holt. He handled the commo work for the platoon, and stuck next to Murdock whenever possible.

Murdock sensed that he was moving on schedule. He knew exactly how many strokes he needed to swim a hundred meters even when confronted with a two-knot current. Now and again he checked the attack board to make sure he was on the right line to the target.

They had been dropped a mile offshore by a submarine and told to be back before dawn. It wasn't healthy for a U.S. boat to be caught on the surface in daylight this close to the Chinese mainland.

The CIA had called on Third Platoon again to pull their spy stuff out of the fire. It was a simple mission to meet a half-blown CIA Chinese agent on the coast and receive some high-level military plans the agent had obtained.

There was a chance he had been fully compromised, so a SEAL platoon was assigned to go in and be ready for any type of reception. It might be a walk in the park, a picnic on the beach, or it could be slaughterhouse row with ranks of the People's Republic of China soldiers waiting for them. One way or the other.

The sixteen men of the Third Platoon of SEAL Team Seven had stepped into the sea with full attack swimming gear. They were paired into eight teams, two-man units.

There was a slight chop on the surface of the chilly Taiwan Strait, but Murdock and his men swam fifteen feet under the surface. He checked the attack board again. It was a chunk of plastic with two handgrips. In the middle was a bubble compass along with a digital depth gauge and clock. The dials were luminous, but at night the dark seas quickly blotted out their meager light.

The attack board compensated for this problem with a Cyalume chemical light stick with a knob to increase or decrease the amount of light so the operator could read the instructions fifteen feet underwater at midnight.

Murdock checked the compass and saw that he was a fraction of a degree off course. He corrected and kept kicking. They had been swimming long enough for the chill of the water to reach through their wet suits. Murdock shook his head. He'd been a lot colder than this in his mother's living room. This was nothing compared to the training all SEALS go through at the Budweiser in Coronado, California — BUD/S for short, the Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL course.

Murdock and all of his men wore the Enhanced Draeger LAR-V underwater breathing devices. They were rebreathers using pure oxygen that recycled the exhaled air so there was no telltale trail of bubbles for an enemy to spot and follow directly to the swimmer.

The new models were worn in front and had 30 larger oxygen bottles for longer underwater swims. The weapons usually on the SEAL swimmers' chest were now tied down on their backs.

Murdock looked around, but couldn't see any of the other men. They were there, moving toward the target. Even with a good moon out, he could see no more than six or eight feet through the Far Eastern sea. All of his men would get to the target. He needed them there.

He settled down and kept up his rhythmic stroke through the salty sea.

Ten minutes later he felt a hand on his shoulder, and looked around at Ron Holt. The hefty young man pointed upward. Against the soft moonlight bathing the water above, Murdock saw two shadows. They were not seals or sharks — he could tell by the shape. Then he saw the shadows kicking, and he swore he could see swim fins.

What the hell? Swimmers out here? A human frogman defense line?

China had enough bodies. A damn complication. None of his men would be that close to the surface. Murdock let the attack board drop on its short cord tied to his vest, and reached for his K-Bar in its sheath on his leg. Holt had already drawn his combat knife. Murdock gave a thumb-upward motion, and they moved slowly toward the shadows above them. Murdock cut the buddy line to give them maneuvering room.

The forms above stopped, and Murdock saw wet-suited legs drop downward. The swimmers were on the surface. They weren't SEALS. The two men had been swimming parallel to the shoreline. Murdock and his men were moving directly toward the beach.

The pair above faced each other. Murdock decided they were resting or observing. They had to be Chinese frogmen patrolling out there. Who else could it be? This house onshore must be more important than the Navy stars and CIA back in Washington thought. Security out here on the water? A waste of manpower. He wondered if there were more of the frogmen along this beachfront.

Murdock was six feet under the surface treading water easily with his fins. He made up his mind to attack. He used hand signs to tell Holt which Chinese he would take. Then on signal, both surged upward, caught the frogmen by the waist, and tugged them downward.

Murdock grabbed the threshing swimmer by the chest and jerked off his face mask and breathing mouthpiece. The man flailed in panic. The Chinese frogman desperately struggled to get at his knife. Murdock pulled the weapon out of the scabbard and dropped it. He forced the Chinese downward again, and then Murdock wrapped his left arm around the enemy's throat. The SEAL leader saw crazed eyes through the dark water. Murdock's blade drove deeply into the enemy's side. The blade sliced through intestines and into one lung. Blood poured from the wounded man's mouth.

The man's body contorted in one frantic effort. Then his held-in air bubbled from his mouth and his body went limp. The Chinese frogman struggled again for a moment with one last dying effort, but it was too late. He had been caught by surprise. Another long burst of air bubbles streamed from the dead man's mouth.

Murdock held his man until he was sure he was dead. His body remained limp and his eyes stared sightless through the dark water. The platoon leader pushed him downward and looked for Ron Holt. Holt and his adversary faced each other, both with knives out. They were only ten feet away through the moonlit water near the surface. Murdock put on a burst of swimming speed, holding his K-Bar straight in front of him with his arm stiff. He came from the side and slightly behind the enemy frogman.

The victim must have sensed someone nearby, and turned toward Murdock spoiling a quick kill. The Chinese swimmer surged to the side away from Murdock, and slashed at him with a long knife as he passed. The blade grazed Murdock's shoulder. He wondered if it had sliced through his wet suit and into his flesh.

Holt powered forward with a hard kick, forcing the Chinese swimmer to turn toward him again. Murdock swam fast at the target. The Chinese frogman faced Holt, his knife high. Fighting underwater to Murdock was like wallowing in molasses. Every move an effort, each attack slow and easy to counter.

Now the Chinese thrust at Holt, then backed away. Murdock held his blade at arm's length and drove forward again, coming at the man at the side. The Chinese man turned his head toward Murdock just in time to see the long blade jolt through fabric and stab deeply into his side. The heavy knife point slanted upward past ribs and through a part of his lung, and sliced through the Chinese sailor's heart.

He looked at Murdock in surprise, his silent cry of terror shown in his tortured expression through his face mask.

He dropped his fighting knife, his arms floating uselessly, his body collapsing. Murdock jerked his K-Bar free of the man and let him drift down and away from them with the slight current.

Murdock pointed to Holt, who caught the trailing buddy line and retied it to his skipper.

The lieutenant took out his MUGR (Miniature Underwater GPS Receiver). It was no larger than two packs of cigarettes and totally waterproof. Murdock pulled free a small floating antenna that drifted to the surface only a few feet above, with a wire attached to the MUGR. There it went into action picking up signals from the nearest three Global Positioning Satellites. The triangulation from the satellites pinpointed his location. A readout on the MUGR reported his position within plus or minus ten feet.

He hit the button marked POS, and looked hard at the line of alphanumerics displayed on the instrument's small, lighted screen. The coordinates showed that the team was less than seventy meters off target course. Great.

Murdock bobbed his head. He and Holt were off line due to their small unpleasantness with the two Chinese swimmers. He pointed, and he and Holt shifted their direction and swam again.

Twenty minutes later they could hear the roar of surf ahead of them. Murdock pulled on the buddy line and when Holt looked at him, the Platoon Leader motioned upward with his thumb. They broke the surface just enough for a sneak and peek. They were still fifty meters off the beach, and in thirty meters the swells turned into breakers rolling up on a dark-looking shore. It didn't show white or even gray in the moonlight. He remembered the briefing. The beach here was about twenty meters wide at high tide when they arrived, and was covered with medium-sized stones and pebbles. No sand.

Rendezvous time. Murdock treaded water and watched the sea around him. Two men popped up twenty meters away, then two more on the other side. He needed ten more men. Three teams came up almost at the same time, then the fourth. All were within thirty meters of him. He was still one team short. Concern shadowed his face. There was always the possibility of a team getting lost or taken out by some enemy on a mission like this. He scanned the water around him again.

On any operation, when a SEAL or a team became lost or wasn't able to reach the rendezvous or continue the mission, standing orders were to return to the drop-off point and call for or wait for pickup. It had only happened to Murdock once, and he didn't want to do it again. As he thought about the chances, the last team surfaced. The men moved into their proper order, in the First and Second Squads, and removed the buddy lines. Murdock checked his watch. It was 0218. Good. He hated to start any attack on the hour.

Their briefing and planning had been detailed and specific. The house onshore in front of them had once been owned by a local strongman who had worked closely with the Communists, but had also maintained his own local power base. Two years ago he had lost favor with the central government in Beijing and had been arrested. A year ago he suddenly became ill and died in prison. His house was immediately taken over by the local party officials. Later it had been given to a wealthy manufacturer of the new Hoy-25 machine gun.

Tonight this house was the contact point for the SEALS and a Chinese "Christians in Action" CIA agent who had information so valuable that this SEAL operation was set up. Murdock hesitated. Why had there been Chinese frogmen patrolling this insignificant stretch of beach? Had their Chinese agent been broken and had the SEALS been lured into a well-armed killing field? Was there a welcoming committee of Chinese regulars with plenty of firepower to overwhelm sixteen SEALS? Murdock worried for a moment. There was only one way now to find out.

He went over his selection of weaponry. Half of the assault force carried the old standby, the Heckler and Koch German-made MP-5, a submachine gun spewing out 9mm messengers. The SEALS used the MP-5SD4 with its integral sound suppresser. That's a fancy word for a silencer, which doesn't really silence but cuts the sound down to a minimum.

The model had been especially crafted for the SEALS with a unique handgrip, safety, and stock. The tritium dots on the sights were for night shooting. There had been some problems with the sound-suppressed models because when you dampen the sound, you also cut down on the range and power of the weapon. The effective range of the muffled MP-5 was only fifty meters.

That was fine for house-to-house work and clearing rooms. Murdock liked them for that because the rounds wouldn't jolt all the way through a body and kill a civilian or a hostage. One of his four-man fire teams held the HK MP-5SD4's.

The other four-man team used the M-4A 1, once called the CAR-15. It had a short, sliding stock. These also had attached sound suppressers that were only eight inches long and screwed onto the flash hider. These shooters spouted.223 stingers at high velocity. Each of the M-4A1's had a M-203 40mm grenade launcher mounted beneath the barrel the way the M-16 did. To top off the weapon it had a laser aiming light, an AN/PAQ-4 that shot out a small beam of laser light that you could see with night-vision goggles. Even though muffled, these weapons had a much longer range than the MP-5.

Magic Brown in the First Squad carried his sniper rifle, a bolt-action Mcmillan M-89 shooting the 7.62 NATO round. The weapon had a shortened barrel and a fixed sound suppresser. It had attached a Litton M921 3-power Starlight Scope.

Harry "Horse" Ronson, one of the new men in the First Squad, gave them firepower with his Heckler and Koch 21A1 machine gun spouting 7.62 NATO rounds.

Every one of the sixteen men had a backup weapon, a standard-issue Sig-Sauer P-226 9mm pistol in a tied-down thigh holster.

The troops had spread out ten yards apart in their preplanned attack positions. Each man knew exactly what his job was on this mission and what he had to do.

Murdock could see the target house. There were other houses around it, but this one stood on a small point of land that lifted it half a story above the others. They could see two lights still burning in the house.

Murdock signaled the men to move forward. They swam another twenty yards, then moved in with the breakers until they were prone on the black rocks with an occasional wave washing over them.

Now they saw the house clearly. It had a two-foot-high wooden fence between it and the sea. Three slender and wind-whipped trees grew near the fence. The house looked as if it were plastered on the outside, and had some metal sheets on the roof and some wooden panels. A brick chimney extended from the far side of the roof.

One three-foot-wide window showed toward the sea. It was dark. A line at the side of the house held flapping laundry. The structure was one story high and had a door on the front and one on the side, just as they had been briefed. They would ignore the front door and use the side one. It wasn't a palace, Murdock decided, but maybe by Chinese standards it was upper-class. Due to the tight security in China, the SEALS did not have a floor plan of the house. Once inside, they would play it by ear using their much-rehearsed Kill House techniques.

The Kill House was their name for a mock-up house in the California Desert where they practiced attacking a room with dummy bad guys and hostages placed inside. They had to identify the bad guys from the hostages and use live rounds to shoot them. The SEALS trained in the facility dozens of times a year.

Now the platoon lay on a dark beach of smooth black rocks. The color blended in well with their all-black wet suits and gear. Their faces were blackened and they wore dark Nomex flight gloves to protect and hide their hands.

Murdock took the M-89 from Magic Brown and checked the layout with the Starlight Scope. He saw three men who were trying to hide themselves near the side and front of the house. None was looking at the sea. They seemed concerned with a street on the far side of the house.

He gave the weapon back to Magic and hand-signaled that there were three guards. Magic found them quickly. The M-89 coughed. Murdock watched through his one-lens night-vision goggles and saw the man in front of the house slam backwards and lay still.

Down the line the other M-89, in the Second Squad, coughed and the guard on the far right of the house tried to rise, then collapsed into a heap.

Magic drilled the third guard with a silenced shot. The man had seen the second lookout wounded and tried to go to him. Then all was quiet.

Murdock gave a hand signal that was passed down the line. The men took off their swim fins and tied them to their equipment vests. They kept on their Draeger breathing units. If anything went wrong they might have to leave in a rush and there wouldn't be time to put on the breathing apparatus. They could live without fins, but it would be a dangerous swim without the underwater rebreathers.

After that, Murdock didn't have to give any orders. The assault team with the MP-5s rushed up the beach to the house. They cleared the yard and knelt near the side door. Six more men raced silently to the front of the house. Four men spread out at the sides of the lot for security.

Murdock came up to the side door. He brought down his NVG (night-vision goggles), checked the troops, then lifted his MP-5 and kicked in the door. Holt pitched a flash-bang grenade inside and then flattened against the outside wall.

The flash-bang grenade is designed to render both blind and deaf anyone in the same room with the non-lethal device. The explosion is a series of ear-shattering blasts accompanied by a string of strobing light pulses so brilliant that anyone not covering his eyes is temporarily blinded.

When the last strobe of light from the grenade stabbed into the night through the opening, Murdock charged past the kicked-in door cutting to the right, watching for any movement or sound inside the room. From many hours of practice in the Kill House, he and his men knew exactly what to do. Murdock's sector was the right half of the room and he swept his MP-5 that direction looking for tangos. No, they weren't terrorists this time, just Chinese soldiers.

Murdock saw movement through his green-field NVG on his side and spewed a three-round burst of 9mm greeters at a man who raised a pistol. Holt fired two three-round bursts on his side of the room, the suppressed sub-machine gun coughing quietly. In a small window of silence, Murdock heard a long death rattle.

Enough light came through a door to the next room that Murdock could now see the three men down and dead, two with chest shots and one a pair of head hits. He flipped up his NVG. "Clear," Murdock said into his mike.

"Clear," Holt echoed.

Two more of the assault squad charged through that room to the next and more firing erupted. Murdock rushed to the door behind them. A lightbulb burned in the middle of the room on a cord from the ceiling. A blood-smeared Chinese man sat in a chair bound by his chest, legs, and ankles. His mouth and face had been beaten bloody and raw. His chest and arms showed dozens of knife slices that bled continuously. One eye was closed, and the lid had been smashed or cut off the other eye.

Two Chinese men in civilian clothes, warned by the flash-bang, had put up a fight. Both had handguns out, but they were no match for the MP-5s. A third man tried for the back door, but died before he got to it with six slugs in his side and back. The same two assaulters rushed into the next room and Murdock jolted forward to the doorway. He heard more firing from the suppressed sub-machine guns, then silence.

Machinist's Mate Second Class David "Jaybird" Sterling crashed into his Platoon Leader at the doorway.

"Some dip-shit tore out the backdoor," Sterling said. "Red is on his tail. He'll have him down and dirty within a block."

Torpedoman's Mate Second Class Eric "Red" Nicholson was lean and fast. If any of the squad could catch a running man, Red could. Murdock heard the "clear" calls from the other men, then went back to the prisoner bound to the chair.

There was no way this could be a setup, a plant. The Chinese might have known that this man was a CIA operative, but they must not have known what was happening tonight. Murdock seriously doubted they knew there would be foreign visitors who would hold a beach party.

Murdock looked at the tied-up man. His hands were behind his back. He was naked to the waist. His head hung down. Now he struggled to bring it up to look at these new men. When he opened his mouth, Murdock saw the jagged, smashed-out remains of his front teeth.

"Please, water?" the Chinese man whispered in English, his words slurred. His chest and arms had been sliced many times. It was the old Chinese torture of a thousand cuts. No one slice will kill you, but after a few hundred you will bleed to death.

"Untie him," Murdock said to Holt. The radioman cut the heavy cords that bound the man to the chair, and the tortured Chinese agent almost fell off. Murdock caught him, then knelt beside him and steadied him. Murdock lifted a canteen to the CIA man's mouth and he drank.

"You are Americans," the Chinese man said. "I have what you came for." Then he tried to smile. A moment later he passed out.