Los Angeles Class

5

"Time to get the hell out of Dodge," Randall said as he reached the southern rampart and crouched beside the head-shattered body of a Hezbollah militiaman, weapon at the ready.

"I could live with that, sir," GM2 Neubauer told him. Together, they dropped over the southern wall of the fortress and onto the rocky ground outside as red-and-yellow tracers flashed across the night, and the sky lit up with explosions, and the rest of Second Squad followed close behind. Randall and Neubauer dropped to the ground twenty meters from the loom of the fortress wall, aiming their weapons at it as the rest of Second Squad filed south between them, crouched low and moving fast.

QM1 Goddard and ET3 McKenna paired off and took up an overwatch position twenty meters farther south.

"Set!" McKenna called over the tactical channel. "Go!"

"Moving," Randall replied, and he and Neubauer rose from the ground and made a low-stooped run to the south, passing Goddard's and McKenna's positions just as McKenna loosed a pair of quick, sharp, three-round bursts at bad guys coming over the wall. Someone screamed in the night, the sound much larger than the thuttering hiss of McKenna's sound-suppressed MP5SD.

With a close-knit and practiced coordination reminiscent of a meticulously choreographed dance, the SEALs leapfrogged back into the valley south of the fortress, then worked their way down the valley, always careful that at each moment, at least two of them were covering the withdrawal of the others. Once, a pair of Hezbollah gunmen tried rushing the group, shouting in Arabic as they bounced down the valley wall. Goddard and McKenna were on guard at the time, catching the men with a pair of hissing, three-round bursts that tripped both attackers and sent them tumbling heels-over-head all the way to the valley floor.

Clear of hostile pursuit, they reached Point Tucson, their first E&E waypoint, a tangle of boulders where the valley opened onto a broad, sloping plain. They dropped into a defensive perimeter, holding their position until First Squad could join them. Minutes dragged past, an agony of waiting, while gunfire continued to bang and thunder from the direction of the fortress.

Abruptly, the voice of Chief Matthew Anderson came over the tactical channel. "Man down, we have a man down!"

"Alfa, Starbase. Please clarify," the nasal voice said.

"Alfa Two, Alfa One," Anderson said, ignoring the call from Starbase. "The Wheel is down, I say again, the Wheel is down!"

"The Wheel" was SEAL slang for the head honcho, the man in charge. Lieutenant Gallagher had been hit.

"Alfa One, this is Two," Randall said after a moment, when no further information was forthcoming. "One, this is Two. Do you copy? Over."

Still there was no answer, and he had to repeat the call.

"Two, One!" Anderson's voice came back, a bit shrill with excitement, or something worse. "We've got a problem."

In clipped, tight tones, Anderson described the situation. The five men of First Squad had cleared the fortress moments after Second, but a sudden rush of Syrian troops and Hezbollah militia had cut them off, forcing them to move northeast up the valley, instead of southwest. They'd reached a road, where more Syrians had cut them off, blocking their planned escape over the south ridge and back toward Waypoint Tucson. Gallagher had been hit by machine-gun fire from the back of a small truck as they'd tried to move south across the road.

"We have two men down, now," Anderson continued. "Spiney took a round in the side. We're pinned in a culvert and can't move. Ammo critical. Over!"

Randall chewed that one over for a moment. He was responsible for Second Squad, for getting them clear of the AO and safely to LZ Bravo for the rendezvous with Sea-hawk One and an emergency dust-off.

Essentially he had three choices. He could lead Second Squad to Bravo and pray to hell First Squad made it clear, possibly with intervention from Starbase and the Navy assets offshore. Or he could send a couple of men to help, while leading the rest to Bravo.

Or he could go back and help First Squad himself, possibly with one volunteer… scratch that, definitely with one volunteer, so they could watch each other's backs.

His first responsibility was to the men of Second Squad, the men under his command. But they were clear of the Area of Operations, now, and it didn't look like the bad guys had their scent. Not yet, anyway.

A quick call over the tactical channel verified that Lederer and Hernendez were already clear of the combat area and were well on their way to LZ Bravo. That left five men in First Squad trapped by the road, two of them wounded.

"I need someone to come with me to give First a hand," he told the others. Six hands went up, green in the glow of his night optics.

"McKenna," he said. ET3 James McKenna spoke excellent Arabic, better than Randall's own. "Chief?"

"Sir," Chief Hughes said.

"Get 'em all to Bravo. You've got the maps and the glow sticks." Chemical light sticks would guide the Navy choppers in for the dust-off.

"Aye aye, sir," Chief Hughes replied. "What about you?"

"We'll join you if we can… but don't hold up the show for us. If the choppers come in, you mount up and get the hell out. There's more than one way out of this damned country." He was thinking of slipping south — just a few miles — across the border. They'd have to be damned careful about drawing fire; Israeli sentries were notoriously trigger-happy. Still, the day a team of Navy SEALs couldn't invisibly slip across just about any border in the world was the day to pack it in for Navy Special Warfare.

"One, Two," he called on tactical. "Hang tight. Help is on the way."

"Roger that, Two. We'll be here."

"Alfa Two, this is Starbase," he heard in his headset. "Two, Starbase. Please advise of your intentions, over."

He ignored the voice. "Let's move out, Chief."

"Aye aye, sir!"

Keeping low, Randall and McKenna slipped off into the night.

"Damn it!" General Childess, one of the senior Army officers, said. "What the hell are they doing?"

"Splitting up, looks like," Rafferty replied. He sounded excited, as though he were watching an especially thrilling ball game. "Two men going north to help First Squad, the rest hightailing it for LZ Bravo."

"That's suicide. Call them back!"

You're the one who decided not to send in the air cover, asshole, Gordon thought with a viciously savored righteousness.

"I don't think that's practical," Colonel North said. "We have to let our people on the ground decide how best to handle this."

"Not when we have the technology," Childess said. "Not when we know what's best." Somehow, though, he didn't sound entirely convinced.

"The first rule of the SEALs, sir," Gordon said quietly. He'd known SEALs, had worked with them aboard the Bluefin.

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"The SEALs never leave their own behind. Not alive. Not dead. I think your 2IC just made the best choice out of a handful of bad ones. He's going back to help the guys who're pinned down."

"They don't have that option. They need to stick with the plan, dammit!"

"You going to go down there and tell them that?" Captain Rafferty asked.

Then he grinned at Gordon and winked.

Randall could see them now, a group of eight Hezbollah militiamen in and around a rust-bodied pickup truck with a

Russian-made PKM, a 7.62mm heavy machine gun pintel-mounted above the cab. The two in the truck were aiming the heavy weapon off toward the north, squeezing off long, rattling blasts of thunder, spraying the night with bright red tracers.

He and McKenna had made their way up the South Ridge, then hurried northeast, staying just below the ridge crest as they moved to avoid showing giveaway silhouettes against the sky. A five-minute jog over loose gravel and a steep, crumbling slope brought them to a spot above and behind the enemy gunners.

The Hezbollah truck was well positioned, able to sweep the culvert on the far side of the road and force the SEALs concealed there to keep under cover. Other men, including Syrian Army troops, were moving in the darkness farther north, and to the south as well, spilling into the valley behind the fortress and closing on the ambush site with appalling speed. It didn't take a Napoleon, Randall decided, to see that if something didn't happen in the next couple of minutes, it just wasn't going to happen. Waiting for air cover from the Nimitz was clearly a hopeless cause. He had to do something now.

"Alfa One, Alfa Two," he called over the tactical channel. "We see your problem. Wait one."

"Two, One. Glad you could make the party."

"Roger that." He took a deep breath. "Let's take 'em," he told McKenna. Snapping a fresh magazine into his H&K, he brought the weapon to his shoulder and took aim at the two men in the truck, their backs to him as they worked the PKM.

He triggered a pair of three-round bursts, knocking the machine-gunners down and silencing the heavy weapon. McKenna fired at the same instant, taking out one of the militiamen standing next to the truck.

The fusillade was so sudden, so death-silent that the other militiamen didn't realize at first that anything was wrong. One called to the men in the back of the truck, then pitched back onto the ground as Randall shifted targets and took him down. The others looked confused, some calling out, some simply standing with their weapons at their sides as they searched the darkness for the source of the gallingly accurate fire. Two more went down, then two more. The last militiaman broke and ran, desperately trying to flee the killing zone, but covering only a few yards before McKenna cut his legs out from under him and sent him rolling in the dust.

Randall leaped from cover and raced across open ground toward the truck. The driver was still in the cab, groping for a pistol when Randall put a single 9mm round through his skull, yanked open the door, and dragged him out onto the ground. "Truck's clear!" he called over the tac channel. "First Squad! Get up here!"

Unsuppressed fire barked in the night, but without clear targets or focus. McKenna loosed a burst at a nearby muzzle flash, then ran toward the truck as the flash was cut off with a sharp, short scream. Several strangely shaped, hulking figures emerged from the shadows of the culvert ditch across the broad, dirt road. HM1 Payton came first, supporting a limping, sagging Spinelli. MM1 Bowman followed, with Lieutenant Gallagher over his broad shoulders in a fireman's carry. Chief Anderson brought up the rear, covering the squad's six.

They lowered Spinelli onto the truck's flatbed. Blood, jet-black in the greens of Randall's LI goggles, soaked his right side. Someone had removed his combat harness and vest and cut his blouse open in order to pack the wound with a sterile dressing, but the dressing itself was already nearly soaked through.

Gerald Gallagher was dead, a neat, round hole just above his left eye, and most of the back of his skull completely gone.

But there was no time to mourn fallen comrades. That would come later, if, when the team made it back to the world. What was important now was to put as much distance between the hornet-mad local troops coming up the valley from the southwest… and the cold, grim knowledge that SEALs never left behind their own. Not even their dead.

The bodies of the Hezbollah gunmen in the back of the truck were unceremoniously dumped overboard. Bowman, McKenna, and Payton began stripping headgear, jackets, weapons, and ammo from the dead militiamen and dragging the bodies away to a spill of massive boulders, where they would remain undiscovered for a time. With the hills crawling with hostiles, there was no way in hell the six SEALs were going to make the rendezvous with Seahawk One at the LZ.

But Randall was pretty sure they could make it out another way.

"We've lost them," the technician said. "Eagle Eye reports they're widening the search."

"Eagle Eye," Gordon thought, must be the you-don't-want-to-know intelligence asset circling high above the Lebanese frontier. The images on the big display showed only disappointingly empty stretches of rock-strewn dirt and scrub brush.

"Switch back to Second Squad," General Childess ordered.

"Yes, sir."

Tactical imaging for the dust-off at LZ Bravo had been handed off to another reconnaissance asset — probably a KH-12 satellite, Gordon thought, since the picture had less resolution than the images from the recon aircraft, and was drifting across the target zone fairly quickly.

That was the trouble with low-orbit spysats. A satellite could be parked at geosynch so that it remained above a particular spot on the Earth's surface as it circled the globe once each twenty-four hours, matching the planet's rotation, but the geosynchronous point was over 22,000 miles out, good for weather and communications satellites, but not up-close-and-personal reconnaissance imaging. Spy satellites were usually placed in lower, eccentric orbits, their apogees placed above the spot that needed coverage to allow a longer targeting window, but still limited by their own orbital movement to relatively brief observation periods.

The view of LZ One was already growing hard to interpret as the satellite neared the horizon, but Gordon could see a flat stretch of terrain marked by the bright glow of chemical light sticks, and the dimmer glows of human bodies crouched under cover nearby. A brief radio exchange confirmed that five SEALs from Alfa Platoon's Second Squad had made it to the LZ, along with two men — the sniper and his spotter — from First Squad.

There was no sign of the two Second Squad men, or the five from First Squad trapped south of the fortress.

"Seahawk is inbound," the technician said. "ETA ten minutes."

"First Squad isn't going to make it," North said. "Damn!"

"We knew they wouldn't," Childess said. "That j.g. is asking for a military court, haring off that way."

"I don't see it that way, General," the captain said. "He made the best call he could in a tough situation."

"SEALs don't leave their own behind," Goldman said. "Not ever."

"They're leaving," Childess said, indicating the soft-glowing figures on the screen.

"Let's see how it plays out, General," Goldman replied.

"Alfa Two, this is Alfa One," sounded from the overhead speaker, harsh with static. "Situation resolved. We're moving."

"Roger that," another voice replied. "Want us to hold the LZ down for you?"

"Negative, negative, Alfa Two. Follow the plan. We're taking another way out."

"Copy, Alfa One. See you back aboard."

"Roger that, Two. And good luck! Alfa One out!"

"What other way?" Childess demanded. "What are they doing?"

"Not compromising their plans by broadcasting them," North replied, "even on a scrambled channel. We'll just have to wait them out."

Minutes dragged past. To Gordon, the small basement room was becoming close and stifling, ripe with the smell of sweat and aftershave. The tension was palpable, a thickness in the hot air.

"We're going to lose the satellite feed pretty soon," the technician said, glancing up at a large, LED time readout.

"Ah, but here comes the cavalry," North said, pointing. Three helicopters, their images ghostly, but their engine exhausts white-hot in the spy satellite's IR-imaging lens, were approaching at treetop altitude from the left. They could hear the clipped conversation over the tactical radio net. "Free Sanction, Free Sanction, this is Seahawk One. I see four lights, two green, two blue, over."

"Seahawk, Free Sanction. Confirmed, two green lights, two blue lights. Come on in. Over!"

"Copy, Free Sanction. Coming in now."

"Hawk One, this is Hawk Three," another voice interrupted. "I'm taking ground fire, repeat, taking ground fire, three o'clock!"

In the Pentagon bunker, they could hear the distant hammer of automatic weapons fire, could see the muzzle flashes on the television monitor. The details were too fuzzy to tell whether the attackers were Hezbollah or Syrian.

"Starbase, Hawk One! The LZ is hot, repeat, LZ is hot!"

"Shit, shit, shit," Childess said, a monotone litany.

"It happens, sir," the colonel added.

"Hawk Three, this is Hawk Two. I've got the hostiles. Watch my LOF."

One of the helicopters suddenly spat a dazzling, stabbing spear thrust of light, accompanied by the shrill whine of a high-speed multibarreled autocannon. The M134 minigun, mounted in Seahawk Two's main door, flooded the target with high-velocity rounds as the other two helicopters settled toward the ground. The SEALs were already moving from cover and sprinting toward the waiting helos.

"Starbase, Seahawk. We have five packages, all secure. We're out of here."

"Copy that, Seahawk," the technician said. "RTB."

On the screen, the two grounded helos lifted off and swung clear of the LZ. The third hovered a moment, continuing to lay down a devastating spray of high-velocity mini-gun rounds, before it, too, swung away and accelerated clear. Seconds later, the televised image broke into a flickering ripple of pixellations, then went black.

"Satellite just went below the horizon, sir," the technician said. "Next window will be for Sierra Echo Four in twenty-seven minutes."

"We need to get an image on Alfa One," Childess said. "Raise 'em on the horn. Let's see if we can talk them out of there."

"That could be a problem, General," the technician said. "Why?"

"We've lost their signal."

"Well… get it back!"

"Sir, the ground team is equipped with tactical radio gear, but they don't have any long-range equipment. The only reason we can listen in and kibitz when necessary is we have Eagle Eye in the area to pick up their transmissions."

"So?"

"We don't know exactly where they are now, but we know they're moving. That's pretty rugged terrain back there, and their transmissions, if they're making any, are being blocked by the mountains."

"So how do we reestablish contact?"

"We wait, sir, and listen. And hope to hell we're close enough to pick them up when they come out from under cover."

"Suggestion, General?" Goldman said.

"What." It was a demand, not a question.

"Let them work it out themselves. They'll find a way to yell if they need us."

Childess scowled, but, after a moment's hesitation, nodded. "We can't help if we can't see them. But, damn it, the waiting is hell."

And the waiting was bad. Gordon found a chair and sat down after his boss had done the same. He was only now beginning to realize the enormity of what had happened, of what he had brought to pass.

At the moment, he was remembering a suggestion he'd made in his original report, that the ground team wouldn't need to pack ground-to-space communications equipment if an aircraft such as a Navy Hawkeye or Air Force AWACS was orbiting in the area, say, over Israel, or just off the coast. The possibility that part of the team might become cut off from the main body and fall out of communications with headquarters simply hadn't occurred to him… and apparently it hadn't occurred to anyone else.

Those men were cut off deep in hostile territory, and the responsibility, at least in part, was his.

Ten minutes later, the helicopters reported going feet wet — passing the beach five miles south of Tyre and flying west out over the Med. Twenty-five minutes after that, they reported their approach to the USS Nimitz, steaming slowly south with her battle group thirty miles off the coast.

But there was no further word from Alfa Platoon's First Squad, left behind in the Bekaa Valley.

He looked at his watch. Rebecca was going to be furious, but there was no way he could leave now. Not yet. Not until he knew the people he had put out there were safe.

It was just a half hour before sunrise, and the sky was already bright with the twilight, clear and crystal blue. Trailing a plume of dust, the truck descended the gray-brown bareness of the Jabal Lubnan, the Lebanon Mountains, approaching the coast on the winding road. To the west, the Mediterranean stretched to the horizon, mirror-smooth and ultramarine black, the "wine-dark sea" of Homer.

For the past two hours, they'd been racing along the mountain-twisted roads of southern Lebanon, moving south down the Bekaa Valley with the snowcapped bulk of Mt. Hermon, traditional site of Christ's transfiguration, looming huge against the stars on their left. They'd removed their LI gear, harnesses, and vests and used gasoline-soaked rags to wipe most of the camo blacking from their faces before donning the fragmentary uniforms and mismatched headgear they'd taken from the dead militiamen. Armed now with AK-47 assault rifles, they looked the part of a band of Hezbollah militia, patrolling the roads north of the Israeli frontier. They couldn't permit too close an examination, of course, not with face blacking playing the role of the ubiquitous Hezbollah mustaches and beards, but they looked convincing enough from a distance, and in the dark.

They'd hoped to cross into Israel at Metulla, but a large and heavily armed force had challenged them at Marj'Uyun. After a brief, sharp firefight at a roadblock, they'd been forced to swing right, heading west, then north along the spine of the Lebanon Mountains. Twice more they were challenged at roadblocks. The first time they managed to bluff their way through by waving their rifles above their heads and shouting Allah akbar … God is great. The second time they were stopped with gunshots, and smashed their way through by loosing their last LAW into the side of a Syrian BDRM. The Syrian Army, it seemed, was harder to bluff than the enthusiastic bands of half-trained militia roving like gangs across the dusty Lebanese landscape.

The Israelis were hard to bluff, too. Alerted, perhaps, by the gunfire, the artillery rounds had rumbled in from the south like incoming freight trains, detonating among the hills with earthquake thunders. That had been when Randall had decided that they would have to make for the sea.

Every SEAL is taught to think of the water as an asset, as a friend. Few enemies would pursue a man into the water, especially if that man's training rendered him deadly in the alien world of the sea. During BUD/S, the basic training all SEAL trainees underwent before winning their coveted Budweiser SEAL badges, they survived a series of ordeals casually referred to as "drownproofing," which included maneuvers in a deep swimming pool, with hands and feet tied.

The water was something to be used, an ally, a weapon, even.

And out there beyond that dark, western horizon lay an American aircraft carrier battle group, the Nimitz and eight or ten lesser vessels in support.

But first they would have to reach the sea, still ten miles away… and it was swiftly growing light. They would need to find a place to stay out of sight until after nightfall.

And there was the matter of communications. Starbase had been able to eavesdrop on Free Sanction's tactical radio broadcasts through the agency of the unseen reconnaissance aircraft circling above the Bekaa Valley. They didn't have a satellite uplink or dish antenna, and so their communications right now were limited to the line-of-sight range of their Motorolas. They all carried emergency homing beacons, of course, but the Syrians could home in on those as easily as could American rescue forces. Until an American aircraft flew overhead, they were totally and completely on their own.

Randall found he rather preferred it that way.