Tropical Terror

29

At the SEAL Team Seven headquarters and SEAL BUD/S training command, just south of Hotel Del Coronado on the Pacific Ocean, Lieutenant (j.g.) Ed DeWitt sat in the commander’s chair at Third Platoon’s HQ and reviewed the past week. They had been pulled out of Hawaii and the co-op training with the British and Aussies and sent home to recuperate. He still had three men in the hospital and two more recovering from gunshot wounds.

Jaybird was at Balboa Hospital with the other two. He was still in the worst shape. They had done a second operation to repair damage to his large intestine. He had been responding well, but had a relapse and been critical for a day or two. Now he was doing better, and the doctors said he should be fit to return to duty, but not for at least three months.

Harry Ronson was doing better. He would be discharged in another week. His chest shot had missed his lung. Took out an artery that had been patched up. He would be on Navy light duty for a month, then available for return to active duty with his SEAL unit.

Commander Murdock waited at Balboa for the day he could be released. The doctors there had checked the surgery and pronounced it sound. The MRI showed that the tendon repair had been correct and would heal in time.

“They got me on this damn pulley thing that I know is tearing my arm apart,” Murdock brayed. “They say I have to use this for one minute every hour I’m awake. Ripping me into small pieces. I have to try to get my hand as high over my head as I can. Told them I can get it all the way up. Had to prove it to them. They said, good, now keep getting it up there sixteen times a day for a minute each rotation. That’s about forty damn times up and down.

“I’m supposed to be out of here in two more days. Hell, in civilian hospitals they do this same operation, only tougher, as an outpatient procedure.”

The two doctors talked with DeWitt outside. “The commander is going to need physical therapy in another four weeks. He’s a SEAL, right? He won’t be back to lifting those logs or swimming twenty miles for at least three months. He’ll think he can. If he gets too active, he can tear the tendon apart again and we’ll have to start all over.”

“Understood, sir. We’ll baby him. Well, we’ll try. The commander has a mind of his own.”

“Might be, but right now his body belongs to us.”

“I’ll remind him of that, Doctor.”

DeWitt had been placed in temporary command of the Third Platoon. Which didn’t mean a lot. He did wrangle seven days of liberty for the men. Most of them scattered all over the country. He had laid out a three-day trip for himself. Milly had wanted to go north again, up into the wine country. They would leave tomorrow.

Master Chief Gordon MacKenzie had helped him over the rough spots the first few days. DeWitt had done the after-action report and filed copies with Admiral Bennington in Pearl and with his own CO here on base. Master Chief MacKenzie had hovered over DeWitt for three days until DeWitt told him to get back to his own office.

DeWitt had planned the usual fish fry for the first evening after all the troops were home from liberty and when at least Murdock and Ronson would be out of Balboa. His specialty was grill-fried salmon. But that was next week.

He closed up and drove home to his apartment, where Milly waited for him. She had taken the week off from her computer work.

“This week I’m forgetting about computer problems and networking and all that,” she had told him the first day he came home. “I’m devoting this week to you and saying a quick little prayer of thanks for your safe return. Sometimes I think I’m like one of those women in New England harbors who paced the skywalk on top of their houses where they could look out to sea. They walked every evening until sundown hoping they could spot the incoming sails of their husbands’ ships.”

“Glad you saw my sails coming in this time,” he’d said.

Now he watched her from the bed as she undressed. Damn, what a woman. She knew exactly what excited him. A slow striptease was one of them. It had been a long, tough day and he thought he might be too tired. But he wasn’t. Then she revived him an hour later, and again at three in the morning. He swore she had set an alarm clock.

“Not true,” Milly said. “I couldn’t sleep. I just lay there watching you. Then when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I woke you up. I hope you didn’t mind.”

He grinned and kissed her again.

The next morning they began their drive up the coast. They used her two-year-old Mercury Grand Marquis. It was a much better road car than his little Ford. He loved to drive it. They wound up the coast, then through Oakland to get around San Francisco and into the wine country. Napa, Sonoma, and Mendocino. They never got past Napa.

The small bed-and-breakfast was right near a winery. “Brothers Wines, since l842.” He doubted the heritage date, but the wines were pleasant and they bought several bottles to take with them.

“At least this time I know where you were,” Milly said. “The Chinese invasion of Hawaii. They were idiots to think they could wade ashore on the foremost bastion of U.S. Naval power in the whole Pacific.”

“Did I say I was in Hawaii?”

She laughed. “You didn’t have to. You brought me that matching Hawaiian shirt and the flowered muumuu. I know I’m not a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon, but even I could figure that one out.”

She sobered. They lay in bed in another bed-and-breakfast, watching the countryside out the window. It was two hours before dusk and they hadn’t dressed since their last love-making.

“Hey, sailor. You’ve been a SEAL for three years now, right?”

“Three years, and almost a half.”

“Good. Just wanted to remind you that anytime you’ve had enough of getting shot at and stabbed and blown apart, I’ll be willing to take in your shattered body and help you move out of SEAL fieldwork.” He started to say something, and she shushed him.

“No, wait a minute. Everytime you go out there and put your life on the line for your country, I keep thinking and hoping that this will be the last time. So, nobody was killed on this mission. Great. One sailor in a couple of hundred thousand a year gets killed in the regular Navy. The SEAL death and injury rate is the highest in the Navy. I don’t have to ask anyone to know that. How many of your men have died in the platoon since you became the second in command?”

He frowned. “Not sure. Maybe eight or ten in the last three years. A hell of a lot too many.”

“One of those ten could have been you. Or might be you on the next two or three missions. We’re playing the odds here. Usually your men don’t get killed because they foul up or do something wrong. They are just in the wrong place at the wrong time when that bullet slams through….” She stopped. Tears flowed down her cheeks. She grabbed him and held him so tightly, she almost cut off his breath.

When her head came up where he could see it, he kissed her tears away, then kissed her eyes and rolled over on top of her.

“Oh, damn,” Milly said. “I did it again. I promised myself that I wouldn’t do it this time. When Maria Fernandez and Nancy Dobler and I had our weekly gab session at the restaurant, we promised ourselves that we wouldn’t talk about our men getting out of the SEALs. That’s a great support group we have. We’re good friends now.”

“I’m glad. How is Maria doing?”

“She’s better. She usually calls me once a week at night when you guys are gone. We talked almost two hours the last time. I think it helped.”

“She likes you.”

“I like her. Oh, did I tell you that Ardith Manchester called me two days before you came home? She said you were scheduled to return. Not sure how she knew. I phoned the other two girls. It’s great to have her on our side.”

“She’s on both sides. She probably knows more state secrets and hush-hush things than anyone in Washington.”

“She’ll be here as soon as Murdock gets out of Balboa.”

“I bet she will. They ever going to get married?”

She kissed him and grinned. “Are we ever going to get married?”

He watched her. She was serious. “I didn’t know that you were all that interested in…”

Her look stopped him. “Maybe not a year ago,” she said. “Now I am. I’m tired of being thought of as a fallen woman.”

“Who would even think that these days?”

“Lots of women. My mother’s friends in Boston are the case in point. They don’t think the sixties ever existed. They think that marriage is the only way to have sex.”

“We sure proved them wrong on that point.”

She didn’t laugh. Still serious.

“Hey, it takes three days to get married,” he said. “We only have one day left on our trip.”

“So go AWOL.” She sighed and shook her head. “Forget that last crack. I’m getting bitchy. That time of the millennium. Hey, right now it’s your call. I’m ready, willing, and able to tie the knot at any time or place you pick. How is that for a proposal?”

“Best one I’ve ever had.”

She hit him on the shoulder. “Nobody has ever asked you to marry her. You would have told me.”

“Mary Beth, an Atlanta girl with fine Southern charm and upbringing who was fantastic in bed.” He stopped. “Strike that last statement.”

“Better than me?” Milly asked.

He laughed. “I can’t answer that question on grounds that it could tend to get me in really, really big trouble.” She pushed him off her and got up on her hands and knees.

“Come over here, lover. I’ve been reading my Joy of Sex, Book Three. Have I got some surprises for you. Now don’t beg, you asked for it with that crack about Mary Beth. Just be good, do what I tell you to do, and take your punishment.”

He did.

Somehow they missed dinner. Then it was midnight and they tried for some takeout, but nobody delivered that late in the small Napa Valley town.

A week after the SEALs returned from Hawaii, Murdock was released from the Balboa Naval Hospital in San Diego, with a visit scheduled for five days later to take out the stitches on his shoulder. He had his right arm in a cloth sling with a strap around his neck, and hated it.

“Nothing like a sling on my right arm to increase and magnify my command presence with the men,” he fumed to Master Chief MacKenzie as he stepped over the quarterdeck that Thursday morning.

“Looks quite chipper to me, Commander. Haven’t seen one of those around here for two or three years.”

“Lieutenant MacCarthy had to wear one after a shoulder wound. You remember it. You teased him until he nearly called you up on charges.”

“Always a bit testy, that MacCarthy. Glad you’re back with us, lad. Been a bit quiet around here. Will you be needing any new men?”

“No. I have two wounded who should be back on partial duty in two to three weeks. You tell Don Stroh to blow it out his ass if he has any thoughts of an assignment for us in the next three months.”

“But, Commander, if the President asks for your platoon…”

“Tell the President to blow it out his Presidential ass.” Murdock waved and continued on to the Third Platoon headquarters office. He was first one on duty that morning, and glad. He could see what Ed DeWitt had done to keep the platoon together.

Four new file folders lay on his desk, each with a neatly designated title. The first was messages. He flipped through them quickly. Some glad-you’re-back types, and then one in the master chief’s individualistic uphill handwriting.

It was dated that morning from Washington, D.C. “Phone call from D.C., woman’s voice, left no message. Will call again.” That would be Ardith Jane Manchester. He leaned back and smiled. He had been thinking of her every day. She had known through her spy system and her own private operators that he’d come home and been in the hospital. Fact is, he had called her the third day and they’d talked for an hour. Now she must know he was out. He thought of calling her, but instead decided she was already on a plane and would be there that afternoon.

With that good thought he tore through the rest of the files, pushing two aside for later study, including one on a new British-developed Stealth Diving Suit. The British Ministry of Defense had taken delivery of thirty of the new devices. They looked long and bulky, with exposed tubing and fully enclosed face mask.

The material in the file said the new system had a computer-controlled mixture of oxygen and other gases in its delivery system. The computer automatically adjusted the mix of the gases to provide for the most rapid descent or ascent and decompression that the diver’s body could tolerate.

It was fully enclosed without bubbles. A unit like that would have let them dive to 150 feet with the enclosed system. They could have used three or four of them in Hawaii to go get that live nuclear bomb. He marked it for action. He wanted to order at least six of the suits from the Divex Company of Scotland.

He checked the roster. Jaybird was the critical one. He was still at Balboa. The doctors said they didn’t know how long it would take for his intestine to heal enough for strenuous duty. Ronson was released yesterday, should report in today. Light duty for him for at least a month.

Then there was the CO of this outfit. How long would it be before he could do the rope climb? That was the big one. His shoulder hurt, but not enough to use the pain medication they gave him. They said it was addictive and he shouldn’t use it for more than a week. No problem there. His arm hurt only when he moved it in certain ways or tried to lift his hand upward halfway to his shoulder.

He had full use of his fingers, wrists, and elbow. But none of them would help him run the OC in his usual good time. He swore softly, and answered the phone.

“Good work out there in Lotus Land,” Don Stroh said.

“At least nobody refused to come pull us out of harm’s way this time. Stroh, you never did see us in Hawaii.”

“We had a whole damn war to fight.”

“A short one.”

“True. How is the shoulder?”

“Great. Want to arm wrestle?”

“Not by long distance. Just wanted to check in. We know your group had itself shot up some. Nothing looks imminent back here right now.”

“If it does, go for another platoon. Ours won’t be ready for combat action for three months.”

“A lot might happen in three months, Murdock.”

“Call another fireman. Our fire extinguishers need refilling.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

A buzzer sounded on Murdock’s desk.

Murdock grinned. Saved by the bell. “Hey, just got a summons to the boss’s office. I’ll get back to you… in about three months.” He hung up and waited three beats. When he picked up the phone, Stroh was gone. He dialed the quarterdeck.

“Murdock here. You buzzed.”

“Yes, sir, you have a call on line two. I’ll put it through.”

“Hello?”

“Oh, good, Murdock. I was wondering about lunch at your place. I’m putting together a fancy tomato, bacon, and lettuce sandwich I think you’ll like.”

“Ardith, how in hell?”

“Connections. I phoned earlier from the plane. Can you struggle and get away early today, like about now? I bet you have some leave time coming.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am. I’m on my way. What kind of a sandwich was that again?” It was a private joke.

“You’ll have to wait and see. Now hurry home.”