Firestorm

2

Lieutenant Blake Murdock held the Chinese agent in the chair after the tortured man slumped back unconscious.

"Doc, get over here," Murdock barked. "We've got a problem."

James "Doc" Ellsworth, Hospital Corpsman Second Class, appeared quickly at Murdock's elbow.

"Let's hope he just passed out," Doc said. The corpsman broke open smelling salts and waved them under the agent's nose half a dozen times, then gave him a longer whiff. The Chinese man coughed, snorted, and then roused. At first he was wary. Then he relaxed, softened, and nodded.

"Yes, the Americans are here. I am grateful. Sorry about the bad reception by my misguided countrymen."

"The papers?" Murdock asked, his voice soft and low.

"Do you have some papers to deliver to us?"

"Yes. I didn't tell them where I hid them. They asked me with much persuasion. You must take a look-" He stopped. His face glazed with pain and his eyes closed as he shivered and his whole body spasmed twice, then again.

He sagged against Doc, and for a moment he didn't breathe.

Then the wave of agonizing pain passed and he looked up at the medic. He growled low in his throat and shook his head. "Not yet. I'm not ready to die. No. The papers you want. They are outside in the roof, under a loose tile near the front door. Easy to find."

Murdock nodded at "Magic" Brown and Ron Holt, and they hurried out the front door.

"Let me lay you down and tend to these slashes," Doc said to the man.

The CIA agent shook his head and held out his hand.

"I am Hang Lee Chang, lately with the Company. I bring you the secret papers. They contain all that your people want to know. Now I must go back with you to your boat."

Doc looked at Murdock and slowly shook his head.

"You're too severely wounded to be moved, Mr. Hang," Murdock said. "We'll talk about that later. Why don't you lie down and let our medic help you."

"No. I must sit up. If I lie down, I'll die. If I stay in this house after you leave, I will be helpless and the first government man who sees me will capture me and the torture will start again. They know that I stole the plans. They didn't know about you coming." He gasped for breath and his face contorted with another spasm of pain. His eyes closed and he trembled twice. Then he gasped and his eyes opened again. "Now all is well, the Americans are here. You will take me back to your ship and then to Taiwan."

Brown and Holt came in with a roll of papers wrapped in heavy plastic. Hang looked at them and nodded.

"All there," he said. "Now we leave. You must take me with you. No other option. They will kill me the moment they find me. They will send troops here quickly if even one of them escaped your people."

Murdock looked over at Doc. The medic shook his head again. "Mr. Hang, you've lost far too much blood to risk a move. Your system is in deep shock. I don't have the equipment to help you recover. There isn't a chance that you could swim a mile through the ocean. It's simply impossible for you to come with us."

"My family is all on Taiwan. I taught English there to students. I must get back home. They will kill me if I stay here." His face contorted again. "I can't stand any more torture. I'm tired. I want to go home to my family in Taipei City."

Doc listened and reached into his kit. "I can give you a shot of morphine to ease the pain, Mr. Hang."

The Chinese CIA agent shook his head. "Must stay alert for the swim."

Murdock knelt down beside the Company man. "Mr. Hang, what our medic tells you is true. There's no chance we can take you with us. It's impossible. We're spending too much time here as it is. We're due to leave in thirty seconds.

Hang lifted his brows and nodded at them. "Understand. What is, must be. Old Chinese proverb. What must be, must be." He looked at the fighting knife on Doc's harness. "What a beautiful blade. I used to have one like it. Could I look at it?"

Murdock nodded at Doc. The medic took out the eight-inch blade with two sides and the point honed to perfection, and handed it to the agent.

Hang examined it a moment, touched the sharpness of it. Suddenly he turned the point toward his chest, gripped the heavy handle with both hands, and before either of the SEALS could prevent it, Hang drove the killing knife into his heart.

His head nodded once as the blade went in. Then his eyes rolled back showing only the whites and his hands fell away from the blade. The Chinese agent toppled lifeless to the floor.

"Damn," Murdock said. He looked at his men. "Time for E and E out of this dump. Let's move. Half out the front, rest out the side. Go, go, go!" Doc paused to pull his knife from the corpse, wiped it off, and pushed it back in its scabbard. Then he ran.

Murdock was the first one out the side door. He had flattened the roll of papers, stuffed it inside his wet suit next to his skin, and closed the suit up again. He went through the door at an angle and hit the dirt outside.

Holt went to ground on his right and Magic Brown on his left.

"Hear something?" Murdock asked.

"Trucks," Brown said. "Two, maybe three coming fast and they probably got us in their sights."

"Nicholson didn't nail that slant who got away," Holt said.

Murdock tapped his lip mike. "Got company this side 2IC. Your situation?"

"Yeah," Murdock heard in his earphones from Lieutenant Ed Dewitt, his second in command. "Company here too, coming down the side street."

"Join up here. Get those forties ready."

Rifle fire barked into the quiet of the Chinese night. Rounds slammed over the heads of the SEALS, who hugged the ground looking for targets.

The trucks stopped forty yards away, and the SEALS could see shadows melting from one house to another and moving closer.

Ed Dewitt, leader of the Second Squad, slid into the dust beside Murdock.

"Looks like a shit-pot full of them, L-T."

"Let's cut down the odds." Murdock brought up his MP-5 with a fresh clip and fired at the winking lights fifty yards in front of him.

The men with the M-4A1 carbines with the M-203 40mm grenade launchers opened up with deadly HE rounds. One round hit in front of one of the Chinese trucks, blowing the engine apart and rupturing the fuel line, which resulted in an explosion that tore the two-ton truck in half.

A Willy Peter round landed just behind the burning truck showering a Fourth of July spray of hotly burning white phosphorus into half-a-dozen Chinese troopers, who screamed as the globs of WP stuck to their uniforms and quickly burned through cloth, skin, tissue, and bone. The rifle fire slackened.

Murdock had been evaluating. He had one corridor, only four rifles firing along it, to the right front. He motioned, and Magic Brown laid down a deadly stream of 7.62 rounds into the area. Three high-explosive rounds from the launchers silenced the shooters. The SEALS heard screams, and one man rose firing a rifle, but was cut down by three rounds of NATO that tore into his chest and jolted him backwards.

Murdock came to his feet and waved his arm forward. The fifteen men behind him caught the sign and raced out of the yard, over the low fence, and down a short lane to safety behind a second house.

Four Chinese charged around the side of the house in the moonlight surprised to find an enemy waiting for them. Murdock took out the first man with a three-round burst that stitched up his throat and face. He spun and lost his AK-47 rifle crashing to the ground in front of the other three men.

The other Communist grunts never got a round off as the SEALS blasted them into instant communication with their ancestors with three-round bursts from the MP-5s.

Murdock made his plan in a heartbeat. They were now thirty yards from the beach. He heard Chinese troops approaching along the street just behind the house.

With hand signals he put Magic Brown on one side of the house and Gunner's Mate Second Class Miguel Fernandez on the other side. Both men had the Mcmillan M-89 sniper rifles.

"Hold them off two minutes, then regroup on the beach directly in front of us here," Murdock whispered to Magic.

Murdock signaled the others, and they lifted off the dirt and ran — low and fast — toward the beach and past two houses. They heard the coughing of the silenced M-89s behind them; then two M-40 grenades exploded courtesy of Gunner's Mate Third Class Al Adams, who had paused a moment with Fernandez and fired the rounds before he caught up with the group.

Red Nicholson beat them all to the beach. He paused to wait for the rest, and Murdock motioned them to go prone on the beach. He checked his men. All present except the two rear guards.

He waved at Harry "Horse" Ronson, Electrician's Mate Second Class, to bring up his machine gun. He spotted it just at the edge of some tall grass where a street ended and the beach began.

"Cover for the two rear guards," Murdock whispered.

Horse nodded, set up his bipod, and angled the weapon toward the houses in front of him.

Murdock waited. He heard firing from in front that covered up what must have been the silenced rounds from the two M-89s. Then two black shadows surged from beside the last house and charged the beach. As soon as they cleared the line of fire, Horse drilled a series of bursts from the MG alongside the house. The chatter of the machine gun shattered the sudden silence.

Murdock sent the two rear guards racing to the beach with the others and told them to tell the rest to put on their fins.

After the MG had chattered a half-dozen times more, Murdock touched Horse Ronson's shoulder. "Let's haul ass out of here."

By the time they got to the others, all were ready to swim. They all backed silently into the sea. None of the Chinese soldiers had come near the water to challenge them. They were sixteen dark shadows merging with the equally dark water.

Just before they slipped underwater, Murdock saw two Chinese fighters silhouetted against a searchlight they had driven up that was far too late. He slapped on his mask, ducked into a wave, cleared the mask, and swam into the dark water.

Murdock had tied his buddy line on to Holt just before they submerged, and now pulled up his attack board and angled directly away from shore and into the Taiwan Strait. They had a mile swim and plenty of time. Their radios had been stashed in waterproof pouches on their webbing, face masks and Draeger rebreathers positioned. Murdock sank fifteen feet below the surface and began the clockwork swim along his compass bearing.

He had the plans. Now if they were everything that the CIA thought they would be, it would be a good night's work.

Keeping his platoon together in the opaque darkness underwater was a problem for every SEAL commander. Not all of them could have attack boards. The buddy lines helped, but all sixteen couldn't be tied together.

There had been no chance to use their IBSS on this mission. They were too easy to spot, even at night. The Inflatable Boat, Small would hold eight SEALS, and with silenced motors helped the team move quickly and quietly. But not on this mission.

There could be no radio contact underwater. They had gone over the exfiltrate plans a dozen times in the submarine. Each SEAL had a waterproof wrist compass. Each man knew the correct azimuth to swim to, and with two men in each team reading the lighted devices, they should be able to rendezvous somewhere near the right spot.

Murdock checked his attack board again, made a slight change in direction, and swam forward at an even fifteen feet below the increased chop of the Taiwan Strait. He knew exactly how many minutes it would take him to swim a mile.

It was a little over a half hour later that Murdock and Holt surfaced in the rough waters. They looked around and saw no one else in the three-foot seas.

Holt let out and activated a tethered sonar signal ball that the submarine could home in on.

Murdock found the right flap in his gear and took out a heavy folded plastic package the size of a cell phone. He unfolded it, pressed a small trigger, and watched the plastic inflate with helium into a ball a foot in diameter. The inflation broke two chemicals inside the tough plastic and when they interacted, produced a fluorescent glow in the ball. A ten-foot-long monofilament line held the ball in tow. Murdock tied the mono to his webbing, and it rose to the end of the ten-foot line.

It was an SLVB, a Self Lighting Vue Ball, to serve as a guide at night on land or water with a visible signal locator device. It could be used in various ways, but always when there was no danger of enemy activity. This particular model could be seen for about half a mile when Murdock rode to the top of the swells. He and Holt settled down to wait for their chicks to come home.

It gave Murdock time to think about Mr. Hang, the CIA operative in Fuching. He had made his choice. Murdock could tell the man was terrified of falling back into Chinese Communist hands. They would continue the "death of a thousand slices" and find more ingenious ways to torture him until he at last could feel the release of death.

He had chosen not to face that kind of an ending. The heart thrust had been deliberate, skilled, and fatal. Mr. Hang knew exactly what he was doing.

So far, it had been a productive mission. They had the plans. Whether they were useless or earth-shaking was yet to be determined.

A pair of swimmers stroked in from the north. David "Jaybird" Sterling, Platoon Chief and machinist mate second class, waved and pushed his rebreather out of his mouth.

"This is a fucking mile? Somebody's stroke count has gone haywire. I wouldn't want to say whose it is, but there ain't many of us kicking shit here."

Murdock snorted. "Good to have you among the living, Chief. Where's the rest of your asshole crew?"

They heard splashing to the left and two more came in. Ten minutes later all but one team had joined the platoon leader.

"Missing?" Murdock asked the platoon chief. Jaybird had been keeping track.

"Lampedusa and Johnson."

"Mr. Dewitt, any intel on that?" Murdock asked.

"Lampedusa said he caught a ricochet back on the beach but it was nothing but a scratch."

"I should have looked at it," Doc said. "Why didn't I know?"

"Lampedusa and Johnson were the last ones off the beach," Dewitt said. "He assured me that he was fit for duty and would have no problem with a mile."

A hundred meters to the north, the sea foamed and a huge black hull rose out of the depths like some prehistoric sea monster. The nuclear submarine Dorchester flattened out and reversed engines, and came to a stop fifty meters away.

"Move out and board," Murdock said. He gave the vue ball to Holt and untied him from the buddy line. "Fasten this to the tower somewhere up high."

Murdock followed his men to the side of the sub, where they were helped on board. He stood on the deck watching the dark water around him. Where were they? He'd only lost one man on a mission and he didn't want to double that score now.

He scanned the waters on both sides a dozen times. A two-striper came out and paced with him.

"Two men short?" he asked.

"Right."

"We can give them a half hour. Then we move out."

"They'll be here," Murdock said. He spun on his heel and walked the other way down the sub's deck.

Five minutes later, Murdock heard a splash and looked starboard. Two figures moved slowly toward the big black fish. He soon saw that one man swam and one was being towed.

A half-dozen sailors jumped to the spot and helped get the SEALS on board.

Ten minutes later in the sick bay, Joe Lampedusa, Operations Specialist Third Class looked up at his skipper and shook his head.

"Damn it, L-T, I knew I could make it. Wasn't bleeding much at all. Just a nick on my upper arm."

Doc Ellsworth scowled. "You dumb-assed shit-for-brains stupid dry-humping moron. An arm wound always gets worse when you swim. I would have put you on a tow float from the git-go. Now pay attention while these Navy medics get some piss-blood back in you and take about twenty stitches in that little 'scratch' you got. Some damn scratch. I'm not losing anybody because of a fucking, somebitching, whore-chasing scratch."