Los Angeles Class

4

Randall was getting a distinctly bad feeling about this situation. He'd been on field ops often enough in his SEAL career to learn to trust instinct, that eerie sixth sense combat vets developed which told them when things were going down smooth, and when the op was turning into a cluster fuck. The rest of Second Squad had boosted one another up the ten-foot stone wall, and after taking out the sentry on the parapet, they'd slipped down into the enclosed courtyard beyond.

At the southeast corner of the compound, a ramshackle tower of tree trunks and planks rose twenty feet above the top of the wall. A Hezbollah gunman stood there, staring with a most unmilitary lack of interest off toward the east, cradling his AK-47. He'd taken no notice of the SEALs slipping over the wall almost literally under his nose, but it was time to guarantee that he remain oblivious to the stealthy infiltration. "Longarm, Alfa Two," Randall called, switching channels. "Gunman in the south tower. Time to reach out and touch someone."

"Copy, Alfa Two," GM2 Hernendez said. "On the way."

Hernendez and ET3 Lederer, the two remaining members of First Squad, were posted atop a hillside nearly a mile to the south. Hernendez was the platoon sniper, armed with a Barrett .50 and a light-intensifier scope that let him look into a target's eyes at two thousand yards. At that range, they never heard the shot when it was fired, save for the short, sharp crack of the bullet's sonic boom. It sounded like a falling rock or a bottle breaking against stone, not like a gunshot at all. The tower sentry's chest simply exploded suddenly in a spray of black, and the man's body slumped out of sight.

A Hezbollah guerrilla emerged from a warehouse, looking about as though searching for the source of the unusual sound. "Youssef!" he called. "Youssef, en—!" Neubauer took aim with his .45 and softly double-tapped the man down.

The SEALs rushed forward, cutting down three more men along the way. Four checked inside the warehouse while the other three stood guard outside. "Warehouse clear!" Kyzinski called, emerging a moment later. "Two more tangos down. Moving!"

"Alfa Two, Alfa One," Gallagher's voice said. "Front gate secure. Three down."

"Alfa, Starbase," another voice, the annoying one, said. "Walls and courtyard are clear. Alfa Two proceed to Objective Texas."

"Copy. Two moving."

A number of buildings and structures were scattered about the fortress courtyard, from the warehouse to canvas tents. Objective Texas was a large, two-story building growing out of the western wall, its roof stripped away by a recent air strike. The assumption was that the local Hezbollah militia had their headquarters here … and that there would be a basement or secure rooms inside where captives might be safely held.

"Alfa Two, Starbase. We have what looks like four guards in the big room behind the front door of Objective Texas. Suggest you check there for the cellar entrance."

"Copy, Starbase."

A swarthy, bearded man in crisp fatigues and a black beret stepped out of the front door and onto the building's front veranda, his eyes widening as he saw four black-garbed figures rushing toward him across the dimly lit courtyard. "Allah! " he cried… and then the word caught in his throat as a volley of sound-suppressed .45 rounds ripped into his body.

Randall holstered his pistol and slid his primary weapon off his shoulder. Holding the H&K SD5 high on his shoulder, he advanced up the steps and past the body of the fallen officer, keeping the heavy sound-suppressor muzzle aimed at the screen door.

A part of his mind noted that the dead man wore a more formal uniform than most of the Hezbollah guerrillas, and the silver badge on his beret. Syrian army, almost certainly… and that was not good.

Uniform details would not be visible to the airborne IR cameras transmitting the scene to Starbase. Randall wasn't going to tell them, not now. All the SEALs needed was an abort order from nervous Pentagon REMFs.

Don Hughes — "Runcible" — pulled the door open and Sid James and Goddard rolled through, SD5s held high, tight, and ready. Randall heard the fast-triggered semiauto bursts from their weapons as he followed, entering the big, stonewalled entryway as three more Syrians, soldiers in fatigues and berets like the officers outside, were still falling. Two flanked a massive wooden door at the far side of the room, collapsing in bloodied, choking heaps. Weapons ready, Randall and Kyzinski moved forward….

"Are you sure we're just dealing with Hezbollah here?" Gordon asked, watching as the green-lit figures of the SEALs spilled through the main door to the big house. "The Syrians have been keeping a pretty strong presence throughout the Bekaa Valley lately."

"The nearest Syrian encampment is ten miles up the road, toward Rashayya," Goldman said. "There might be Syrian observers or liaisons at the objective, sure, but our intelligence sources on the ground say no. The guerrillas have been working on their own."

"The Syrians don't want to be linked to Hezbollah, remember," Colonel North said. "They were brought in to control the guerrillas in the first place."

"Yeah," Goldman said. "That's their story, and they're sticking with it."

Civil war had been raging in Lebanon for ten years. By now, dozens of factions were going at one another, though the main struggle was between the Christian right-wing militia and the Shi'ite fundamentalist guerrillas of the Party of God.

Within the Bekaa Valley of southeastern Lebanon, though, it was the Syrians who were most powerful, at least on the ground. They'd been invited in, at least in a theoretical sense, by the Christian government in Beirut, though everyone accepted that the Syrians had all but ordered the Lebanese parliament to send the request in the first place. Obviously, the Syrians were concerned about a major war on their southwestern border; historically, Lebanon had always been within their political sphere of influence.

A major concern among Western intelligence agencies, though, was whether the Syrians were suppressing the Hezbollah factions in the territory under their control… or cooperating with them. Certainly, the Syrians hadn't been able to help with finding the hostages held by the fundamentalist militias. The question was whether they were even trying.

"The Hezbollans are Shi'ite, remember," the colonel said. "The Syrians are Sunni, and the government is secular. The militia would never cooperate with them."

Gordon had his own thoughts about that, but kept them to himself. People were people, not machines and not ciphers, and the most fanatic of Shi'ite fundamentalists could be pragmatic when the situation called for it.

"Uh-oh," a technician at a nearby console said. "Colonel? Zoom back to check the north road."

The moving green figures on the screen dwindled to dots as the view expanded to take in not only the rectilinear shape of the fortress, but the rugged hills and the narrow, S-curve of a dirt road leading to the front gate. A line of vehicles, engine blocks glowing white-hot under infrared, was coming up that road. Gordon could make out the distinctive shape of a Russian-made BDRM, leading two pickup trucks, a flatbed piled high with troops, and a pair of canvas-covered deuce-and-a-halfs.

"Alfa, Alfa, this is Starbase," the technician said. "You have company on the way, north road. ETA … five minutes."

"Copy." The reply was flat, without emotion. Things were starting to go to hell now with startling speed.

"Estimate sixty troops and one piece of wheeled armor. Looks like a BDRM-60."

"Starbase, Alfa. You people are just full of good—"

The voice was cut off by a sudden, ripping blast of sound, as unsilenced machine guns opened up….

Randall heard the sudden burst of automatic gunfire from somewhere outside.

"Alfa Two, Starbase!" the voice called over the tactical channel. "Alfa One is compromised! Abort the mission! I say again, abort the mission!"

"Like fuck," Randall said. He slammed back to the wall next to the basement door. "Kizzy!" He shouted, pulling a flashbang from a combat-vest pouch. "Locked door! Let's have your Masterkey!"

Micromanagement. It was the bane of military operations, especially within the highly technical, highly specialized world of covert operations.

In World War II, a general would send his battalions in, following a plan outlined through meticulously written battle orders, but the maxim that no plan survived contact with the enemy still held true. As the battle gelled, as friendly forces blundered into those of the enemy, plans might be adjusted, with contingency plans called into play or reserves shifted to meet an unexpected enemy deployment, but battlefield communications were still in their infancy. All frontline communications depended on primitive radio equipment with a range of only a few miles and subject to enemy jamming or atmospheric interference, or on telephone lines vulnerable to enemy patrols or random artillery hits.

The older SEALs, the retired members of the Teams, especially, still talked about Vietnam, when SEALs operated with almost complete independence… and how when they ran into official red tape, they'd pulled an UNODIR.

When they'd decided they needed to pull a particularly risky op — gather some vital intelligence in a VC-infested area, say — and there was a real possibility that some REMF farther up the chain of command would say no, some of the SEALs had taken to writing up their plans headed up by the words UNLESS OTHERWISE DIRECTED… "UN-ODIR." The plan would then be sent to HQ, but too late for a refusal to come back down the chain. Some SEALs would have gone out, pulled off the op, and returned before their more cautious superiors could even draft a reply.

That sort of shoot-from-the-hip operating just didn't fly these days. Communications had improved dramatically in the decade and a half since Vietnam. The SEALs not only had headset radio communications with everyone in the field unit, they had a satcom link to assets offshore that could launch air strikes, call in a battleship salvo, or send in rescue helicopters. And on some ops, the sensitive and high-risk missions like this one, a special channel had been set up to allow Washington not only to eavesdrop, but to kibitz.

The debacle at Desert One, during the attempt to rescue American hostages held in Tehran, was still discussed by field operators, sometimes in hushed tones. That had been the night when General Charlie Beckwith, commanding the rescue force code-named Eagle's Claw, had pretended that he was having radio trouble so that he could make his own decision based on what he was experiencing at the site. On the other end of that "malfunctioning" communications link had been members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the commander in chief himself, President Carter.

In a sense, General Beckwith's actions had been a replay of Nelson's, at the Battle of Copenhagen almost two centuries before. When Sir Hyde Parker, Nelson's commanding officer at Copenhagen, had used signal flags to order him to break off in the middle of the fight, he'd held his telescope to his blind eye and calmly stated that he saw no signal….

Sometimes, the guy on the ground at the knife's point was the only one who could call it, and he didn't need second-guessing by swivel-chair REMFs.

Kyzinski hurried up to the locked door. His primary weapon was an M-4 carbine — smaller cousin of the M-16— with a highly modified Remington 860 shotgun mounted underneath the carbine's barrel ahead of the curved, banana-clip magazine. He pointed the weapon at the door's lock and squeezed the trigger. The shotgun blast rang off the stone walls; the sixteen-ounce slug smashed through lock and doorknob, splintering the wood beneath. The door flew open and Randall tossed the flashbang through. Both SEALs turned away as the basement beyond flared and dazzled, for an instant brighter than the sun, and a chain of seven deafening explosions thundered from below.

Randall was first down the stone steps. A Hezbollah guerrilla groped blindly on hands and knees. The SEAL put two rounds through his skull, then scanned the rest of the basement. It was filled with crates, barrels, and piles of canvas, but two more solid-looking doors sat side by side in the west wall.

Kyzinski racked the slide on his Masterkey shotgun and took out the lock on the door to the left. Randall banged through the door into the tiny room beyond….

Empty. Horrifyingly, disappointingly, infuriatingly empty.

A single straight-backed chair lay on its side in the middle of the bare stone floor. In one corner was a doubled-over mattress, large rents leaking white ticking, and a glazed stoneware jar, a honeypot, possibly, rested in one corner. A naked bulb dangled from the high ceiling. The bare, windowless room reeked of urine, sweat, and vomit.

He could feel the room's last occupants, but there was no one there now.

Another shotgun blast echoed from next door. An instant later, Kyzinski joined him. "Dry hole, sir. Someone was being held here, and not too long ago, either…. "

"So I see." Kneeling by the wall, he reached out and lightly touched some crude scratch marks on the stone. Someone had used a small chunk of rock, or an eating utensil, possibly, to scratch a terse handful of numerals and letters.

"Let's get the hell out of here, Kizzy. There's no one home. No one we want to meet, anyway."

"Aye aye, sir!"

They pounded back up the stairs, then out the front door, ducking low as they emerged into the night.

Gunfire stuttered and cracked, as muzzle flashes stabbed from the darkness. "Alfa Two, Alfa One!" Gallagher called over the tactical channel. "We've got tangos coming from the west buildings!"

"Alfa Leader, this is Alfa Two," Randall called over the command channel, now that his Motorola was out of the stone-bound basement. "Dry hole. The packages are not here, repeat, not here."

"Copy, Alfa Two," Gallagher replied. "Rendezvous at Objective Kentucky."

Kentucky was the front gate, but that was going to be a problem. More and more guerrillas were emerging from cover, laying down a steady, vicious fire that swept the open courtyard. A green-lit figure moved behind a pile of wooden crates twelve meters away, trying to get a good position under cover from which to open fire. Randall flicked the selector on his H&K to full auto and hosed the crates, sending splinters and fragments hurtling as near-silent 9mm rounds sliced through them. AK-47 rifles, still wrapped in plastic and Cosmoline, spilled onto the ground, as the lurking Hezbollah gunman toppled out from behind his less-than-adequate shelter and lay shrieking on the ground.

Randall tapped a mercy round into the man's head as he ran past.

"Alfa, Starbase," the command channel voice called. "You've got shooters on the wall, shooters on the wall to the west!"

"Tell us something we don't know," Kyzinski replied. "Damn it, Starbase, talk to us when we're not busy," Gallagher added. An explosion lit up the darkness.

Randall zigzagged across the courtyard toward the front gate, dropping to cover behind a stack of oil drums as bullets snapped and sang above his head. Rising, he aimed at a muzzle flash on the west wall and sent a burst winging toward it. "Come on, Ski!" he called over the tactical channel.

"Cover fire!" Kyzinski called back. "Moving!"

Kyzinski dashed across the courtyard as Randall put down a covering fire, driving two tango gunmen in the west to the ground. On the south wall, a Hezbollah tango suddenly stood on tiptoe, then toppled over, cut down by an unheard bullet. Hernendez and Lederer were still on guard, picking off tangos when they could get a clear shot.

At the front gate, at his back, he heard the loud, shrill whoosh of a LAW being fired, followed an instant later by a loud explosion. Glancing back, he saw the fireball, dazzling against the night, momentarily overwhelming his night-sight optics. The tango convoy with the BDRM-60 must have reached the top of the hill; QM2 Van Dorn had just taken it out with his Light Antitank Weapon, a single-shot, shoulder-launched weapon effective against all but the heaviest armor.

He turned back as Kyzinski dropped to cover behind the oil drums. "Getting a mite hot out tonight," Ski observed, dropping a dry magazine and snapping home a fresh one.

"Just a bit." Randall loosed a string of three-round bursts at muzzle flashes and green shadows. Some of the tangos were using red tracer ball ammunition, which helped pinpoint their positions.

It also confirmed how damned many there were of them. Where were all these people coming from? Still firing, he began backing toward the fortress's main gate. Kyzinski and Hughes covered him.

"Starbase, Alfa leader," Gallagher's voice called. "It's a trap! There are no packages, repeat, no packages for pickup, and we are encountering heavy force!"

"Alfa, Starbase. Copy. Abort the mission. Proceed to primary extraction point for pickup and evacuation."

Randall reached Gallagher's position, sheltered behind a pile of rubble and sandbags. The gate was wide-open, the BDRM and a canvas-covered truck burning wildly in the night outside.

"Ah, that's negative on primary LZ, Starbase." Gallagher was shouting now, as a heavy machine gun opened up somewhere out there in the night. "We have Sierra Alfas crawling all over it! We are falling back to secondary LZ for extraction. I say again, we are proceeding to LZ Sacramento for pick-up. Over!"

"Copy that, Alfa Leader. Disengage and evade to LZ Sacramento for extraction."

The primary LZ, designated LZ Green Bay and designed to facilitate pickup with rescued hostages in tow, was only a few hundred yards north of the fort, on a level area partway down the hill, but Randall could see what Gallagher had been talking about. The whole north side of the hill was alive with muzzle flashes and moving figures.

Sierra Alfas. That was the phonetic code name for Syrian Army troops. They were going to just love that back in Washington.

"We need air cover here," Gallagher went on, consulting a small, plastic map pulled from his pocket. "Coordinates one-seven-three-five-five by two-zero-zero-seven-one-niner!"

"Roger that, Alfa. We'll pass it up the line."

Pass it up the line. Meaning that the Pentagon REMFs would be chewing over the SEALs' request for an air strike.

An explosion detonated just outside the gate… probably a rocket-propelled grenade.

"We're not getting out that way," Gallagher said, "and we'd better not sit on our asses waiting for the folks back home to bail us out."

"Over the wall?" Randall asked.

"That's a roger. Same way we came in." Gallagher touched his microphone. "Alfa Team, Alfa Leader! We're going over the south wall! First Squad provide cover. Second Squad, go! Rendezvous at LZ Sacramento! Let's do it!"

"Let's go, Alfa Two," Randall added. "South wall. Watch your fire, Longarm, we're coming over the top."

"Copy, Alfa Two," Hernendez replied. "We're watching for you."

SEAL extraction tactics had been worked out through years of experience, and constant training, and they began putting those lessons into practice now.

"A dry hole!" Captain Rafferty exclaimed. "How the hell did that happen?"

"Bad intel," North suggested. "Wouldn't be the first time."

"We didn't pull all of this together for another Son Tay, damn it!" an Army general exclaimed.

Son Tay was the prison camp north of Hanoi raided by Army Special Forces in 1972 in order to free American POWs being held there. The raid was a brilliant and unqualified success. The only problem was that the prisoners weren't there; they'd been moved not long before, possibly because someone in Saigon had talked.

"Well you don't need to blame Intelligence," a man in a dark, civilian suit said, sounding angry. "We had good solid intel on this one. One-A! The best there is!"

"Yeah," another suit said. "Maybe it's the conception and planning this time."

"Did you hear that guy, Dean?" the general said. "Sierra Alfas. That's Syrian regular Army, goddammit! They weren't supposed to be within ten kilometers of the objective! What the hell went wrong?"

"Gentlemen," Admiral Goldman said, "I think we can defer the traditional postop recriminations until after we get our people out of there."

"What about their air cover request, sir?" Captain Rafferty wanted to know. "They're standing by with a full alfa strike on the Nimitz, hot and ready to go!" An "alfa strike" was the general term for a full carrier-borne attack against any shore target.

"That really isn't advisable at this juncture," the first civilian said. "If we needed to protect our helicopters coming out, yes… but we can't afford to have this come out now, and an air strike would guarantee that it would come out."

The general chuckled, a grim and humorless sound. "It's a little late to worry about ass covering now, isn't it, Dean?"

"It's not ass covering. We have to think of the hostages. A failed rescue attempt is bad enough. If we bomb them, they're just liable to take it out on our people."

And wouldn't they have done the same if we'd been successful? Gordon wondered. Does this make any sense at all?

But he said nothing. Right now, the men in that Pentagon basement room were more concerned about fixing blame, salvaging careers, and controlling damage than they were about the SEALs now fighting for their lives in southern Lebanon.

"We've got to do something about those SEALs, though," North said, his boyish face creased with worry. "Damage control later. We've got to get them out now!"

Rafferty shrugged. "We're doing all that can be done, Colonel. We'll dispatch choppers off the Nimitz to pick them up at the secondary extraction site. But it's going to be up to them to get there."

"That might be a bit easier if you give them the air strike they called for," Gordon said, breaking his silence.

"Eh?" the captain asked, turning to look at him. "What's that?"

"Send in that air strike, sir. That'll keep the bad guys off their backs long enough for them to get to where they need to go."

"I don't believe we asked for your opinion, Commander," the general said.

"He's right," Goldman said. "Damn it, you can't abandon those people."

"The political risks are unacceptable."

"So how did you get the SEALs in?" Gordon asked Goldman, whispering.

"We took advantage of the unstable politics in the region, actually. The Israelis hold undisputed control of the airspace over southern Lebanon, from their border all the way to Beirut, sixty miles up the coast. Their troops held a southern strip of Lebanon as well, a security zone designed to keep Palestinian terrorists from shelling Israeli towns and kibbutzim from across the border. We made an under-the-table deal with Israeli intelligence to fly three Sea Kings into the Bekaa Valley at hedge-clipping height. The locals will assume the helos are Israeli."

"Cute. And they get the blame for the firefight and any breakage?"

"Exactly. That sort of skirmishing goes on all the time in there."

"But an air strike off the Nimitz would give the game away. Shit."

"As you say, Commander. Shit."

Gordon watched the fight on the big display, as running green figures moved among white flashes in an eerie silence punctuated by bursts of radio transmissions.

"Alfa Team, Alfa Leader! We're going over the south wall! First Squad provide cover. Second Squad, go! Rendezvous at LZ Sacramento! Let's do it!"

"Let's go, Alfa Two. South wall. Watch your fire, Long-arm, we're coming over the top."

"Copy, Alfa Two. We're watching for you."

How long, Gordon wondered, before the Syrians sent in reinforcements and the game really got hot?