Lieutenant Commander Blake Murdock felt the salt spray in his face from the light chop in the Yellow Sea as the Pegasus class eighty-two-foot insertion boat slammed through the dark water just after midnight. He judged the distance to the Korean shore and signaled the coxswain to drop his speed to three knots. The boat slowed to a crawl as it moved almost silently toward the Korean coast a mile away.
Murdock and his Third Platoon of SEAL Team Seven were on a silent mission to the Korean coast. They crouched low in the slender boat awaiting their time to drop into the sea. His platoon worked with a man short, since Fred Washington lay in sick bay on the aircraft carrier USS Monroe. CVN 81, ten miles at sea behind them. Washington had taken a serious wound in the last mission on the Kuril Islands. There had been no time to get a replacement.
The SEALs wore their full black neoprene wet suits including gloves, boots, flippers, and floppy hats, but no masks or rebreathers. It was a short surface swim. They had their full combat gear and weapons.
When they were a half mile off the breakers, Murdock gave the coxswain a cut signal across his throat, and the soft purr of the engine died.
Murdock whispered last-second instructions. "You know what we have to do. Let's get in and blow it, then shoot and scoot. DeWitt, take your Bravo Squad in first."
The SEALs slid soundlessly into the water, tied their six-foot buddy cords onto their partners, and began a quiet swim the last half mile to shore. Murdock and his Alpha Squad brought up the rear.
It was a simple mission. They would come out of the surf, take down any sentries or beach watch patrols they ran into, penetrate quietly a quarter of a mile inland, and blow up a small building that had been the center of enemy activity. Then they would work their way back to the beach, go in the water, and be picked up by the same boat that had brought them. They had done it a hundred times in training and on hot-fire missions.
Murdock stroked silently through the chop of the Yellow Sea. His weapon was tied across his back with a length of black rubber tubing. He was thirty-two years old, stood six-two, and weighed 210 pounds. He had been in the SEALs for six years, the last two commanding the Third Platoon.
His buddy on the swim was Radioman First Class Ron Holt, a twenty-two-year-old in his third year as a SEAL.
Murdock took a long look at the shoreline. Less than a hundred yards away, it looked peaceful. He could spot no guards, or any roving patrols. This was a vital area and should be protected better than this. Their loss, his gain.
Lieutenant (j.g.) Ed DeWitt led his Bravo Squad into the surf, where the black figures lay in the wet sand with waves and foam washing over them. DeWitt watched the beach both ways, then signaled two men to sprint out of the water through the dry sand to the sparse growth twenty yards inland.
Both made it without drawing any notice. Once in the brush, Miguel Fernandez, Gunner's Mate First Class, fro ze in place. Directly ahead of him a Korean soldier walked along a path heading for the beach. Fernandez waited until he was less than three feet away, then lunged out, slammed into the slight Korean, and rammed him to the ground. Fernandez grabbed the frightened man's mouth so he couldn't scream.
Guns Franklin, Yeoman Second Class, sprinted over from twenty feet away to hold down the struggling Korean while they gagged him and tied his hands behind him with plastic cinch cuffs like those used by cops.
By the time the man was tied, Bravo Squad had crossed the beach undetected. DeWitt gave Fernandez a thumbs-up sign, and they spread out in a defensive line facing inward.
Less than a minute later, Alpha Squad with Commander Murdock joined them. The two officers whispered for a moment, then Murdock took his squad and moved up the faint trail heading inland.
Alpha Squad was in its normal formation, with the scout, Joe "Ricochet" Lampedusa, out in front of the group thirty yards. Murdock followed with his radioman, Holt, next in line. Then came Bill Bradford, Quartermaster's Mate First Class, with his H&K PSG1 7.62 NATO sniper rifle.
Ken Ching, Quartermaster's Mate First Class, was next in line, with Harry Ronson, Electrician's Mate Second Class, following him. James "Doc" Ellsworth, the platoon medic and a Hospital Corpsman First Class, was next to last, with David "Jaybird" Sterling holding down the tail-end Charlie spot.
Lampedusa dropped to the ground. Murdock followed suit, as did the rest of Alpha Squad. Murdock lifted up to a crouch and ran up to his scout.
Lampedusa pointed ahead. "Mounted patrol, Skipper. Truck and four men. Road is about fifty yards to the left."
"Parked," Murdock whispered. "We've got to keep to our time sked."
"Wish we had an EAR," Lampedusa said.
Murdock wished for a pair of them. They were Enhanced Acoustic Rifles, a non-lethal weapon that could put a target down and unconscious for four hours without harming him.
"Diversion," Murdock said. "You have any WP?"
Lampedusa grinned, and brought up his Colt M-4A1 with the grenade launcher under the barrel. He dug a 40mm white-phosphorus grenade out of his combat vest and loaded it. He angled the round to the left, away from their route.
The sound of the grenade firing brought one of the Korean soldiers on the truck up from where he had been napping. He stared in their direction, then reacted quickly when the grenade exploded two hundred yards down the road in a brilliant starburst of hotly burning and smoking phosphorus. The Korean soldiers on the truck yelled, started the rig, and spun the wheels as they raced the truck toward the fire.
Murdock waved the SEALs forward on double time. All fifteen men cleared the road where the truck had been, and plunged into the brush and trees as they moved inland.
Lampedusa worked fifty yards ahead now in the lighter woodland. They had seen no Korean soldiers for the past ten minutes. Lam dropped into the weeds and grass, and the rest of the platoon went down like dominoes behind him. Murdock and Jaybird Sterling slid to the ground beside Lam.
"Fucking lousy way to run a war," Jaybird said.
"Not a war, not yet," Murdock said. "You get the big bucks so you follow orders. What have we here, Lam?"
"Our objective. They have three guards, walking around the place like it's a gold mine."
"It may be," Murdock said. "How close can we get to it without being seen?"
"Twenty yards on this side. Let me do a run around it and see if there's a closer spot."
Lam melted into the woods without stirring a leaf or branch.
Murdock signaled the others behind him to wait, and he and Jaybird watched to the front.
"We got any more of these shit details?" Jaybird asked.
"Two, from what I hear."
"When the hell are they sending us home?" Jaybird asked with a touch of a whine. "We creamed that little Jap general in the Kurils, now we're stuck on the fucking carrier for a month. Nothing is happening over here. Why don't they send us home so I can get in some snowboarding up at Big Bear?"
"You'd break your damn neck. Jaybird. Face it, you love all this shit. Don Stroh says we got to hang tough. If nothing pops in another month, the CIA agent boss man says he'll get our asses back to Coronado."
"Him and his promises. Does that CIA jerk ever treat us right? He's hung us out to dry too many times."
"True, like in Iraq," Murdock agreed.
"Hey, WESTPAC has two SEAL platoons jerking off in Hawaii. Why can't one of them replace us here?"
They both grinned in the dark. Jaybird beat the commander to it. "Because none of them motherfuckers can replace us, nobody in the whole shit-assed Navy can come anywhere near to replacing us."
The SEALs laughed softly. Their platoon had been handpicked by the CIA to be "on call" for the intelligence agency to do its dirty work around the globe. Whenever the CIA wanted some covert action, they called on Murdock and his Third Platoon out of SEAL Team Seven at Coronado, California. His platoon had even been taken out of the command of NAVSPECWARGRUP-ONE. That was the mother hen of the SEALs on the West Coast. That made the commander of the unit furious. But the Chief of Naval Operations himself had approved the move, so it was done.
Lam appeared as silently as he had left. Murdock swore the kid was half Apache.
"Other side," Lam said. "A place where the woods and brush grow to within ten feet of the buildings and the guards move around there every three minutes. I timed them."
"Go," Murdock said. He gave a moving-out arm swing, and the SEALs caught it back down the line and were on the march silently.
Five minutes later, Murdock settled in just in back of the brush that came close to the target building. Now they could see that the structure had no windows, was two stones high and made of wood.
A Korean guard with rifle slung over his shoulder muzzle down walked his post around the building. As he came opposite the brush, Kenneth Ching whispered something in Korean. The man stopped and turned, evidently curious.
Harry Ronson charged out of the brush and hit the soldier with a solid body tackle right on the numbers, and they both went down. Ching moved in and clamped his hand over the Korean's mouth. The two SEALs hauled the terrified Korean into the brush, gagged him, and tied his hands behind him with plastic cuffs.
The same pattern held for the other two exterior guards. When all three were stashed a safe distance from the building. Ken Ching and Murdock positioned themselves on either side of the door. Ching jerked the door open and Murdock threw a flashbang grenade into the room. Ching grabbed a surprised Korean soldier who had started out the door and pushed him inside and slammed the door shut.
The six thunderous explosions of the flashbang tore through the enclosed structure, immediately followed by six shatteringly brilliant strobe lights. The sound and light were designed to make the soldiers inside temporarily blind and deaf, but not to injure them.
With the last strobe of light, Murdock, Ching, and Ronson raced through the door into the brightly lighted room. They found four more guards. Two had been sleeping, two others eating. Now all were on the floor holding hands over their ears and with their eyes tightly closed.
It took four minutes to get the Koreans on their feet and propelled outside, where they were bound by their wrists and taken away from the building.
As this took place, Joe Douglas and Bill Bradley had planted four heavy charges of TNAZ explosive in four vital parts of the building. Murdock liked TNAZ because it was fifteen percent more powerful than plastic explosive C-5, and it weighed twenty percent less.
Douglas came around the building and gave Murdock a thumbs-up. Murdock had told him to set the timers for ten minutes. They were ticking away.
"Let's get the hell out of Dodge," Murdock said into his lip mike. The SEALs left their captives in the brush and began to double-time back the way they had come.
About eighty yards away from the structure, Murdock stopped the men and they turned to watch behind them.
The explosives went off within a few seconds of each other, and the two-story building erupted in a roaring, blasting explosion that sent wood soaring into the sky and a huge fireball that surged upward over the treetops. Then all they could hear was the sound of the flames consuming what was left of the building.
To the left and the right they heard truck engines start, and the rigs converged on the fire. Murdock motioned to three of the men with grenade launchers. They each fired two rounds out as far as they would go back beyond the burning building. The first to hit were HP, the next WP.
At once they heard the trucks racing in the new direction.
"Moving," Murdock said into his Motorola. Each SEAL had a personal communication radio with lip mike and earpiece. A transceiver was fastened to each SEAL's belt.
The fifteen men hiked toward the beach. A hundred yards from the sand, Murdock found Lam standing behind a tree. He pointed ahead. A line of ten Korean soldiers, all with rifles at the ready, were positioned across the beach and facing shoreward.
Murdock gave a sigh. He'd hoped that this one was about over. He whispered in his lip mike. "A line of skirmishers up here in the brush. We have ten Koreans out front. Fire between them. Make damn sure you don't hit anybody. Five rounds between them and we'll see what happens."
It took the SEALs three minutes to get into position. Murdock asked for a platoon check. All fourteen men reported ready on the radio.
"On mine," Murdock said, pushing the safety off his H&K MP-5SD submachine gun. He lifted the weapon and aimed between the two nearest Koreans. They stood ten yards apart. He fired three rounds and before the last one was out of the barrel, the other fourteen SEALs opened fire.
Five seconds after the last SEAL weapon fired, the ten Korean soldiers on the beach were screaming in surprise. Some ran to the left, others to the right. In half a minute none of the Korean GIs could be seen.
"Let's take a swim," Murdock said into his Motorola. Then he pulled off the components of his radio and stowed them in the waterproof pouch on his combat vest. He slung the submachine gun over his back and ran toward the dark waters of the Yellow Sea.
After a quarter-of-a-mile swim off the point of land, they made contact with the Pegasas that had been waiting for them.
"About time," the coxswain called. "Figured you guys were gonna hang around for breakfast in there."
The SEALs climbed on board the boat and Murdock fired a green flare. A few minutes later a South Korean patrol craft surged alongside the long, slim boat and stopped. She was the Sea Dolphin 292, a craft that Murdock had been on before. Murdock and DeWitt climbed a ladder for a conference on board the South Korean boat.
'That's my report, Colonel. From a security standpoint, there was little or no coverage of the beach. We swam up, ran across the beach, then surprised one sentry who came strolling along. The security inland was worse. The mounted patrol was decoyed off its station and the guards around the 'prize' building were lax, casual, and ineffective."
The South Korean Army colonel scowled in the dim lights of the boat. "Did you use live ammunition, Commander?"
"We fired between the guards they had put on the beach. None was hit, all were frightened out of their skins. They ran away as fast as they could." Murdock paused.
"Colonel, these troops have never been under fire before. They need a firm hand. But if I were grading them on their defense of this sector and their security of the building, it would be a dismal failure."
The colonel nodded. "It is true. Our men need better training. We may ask your captain if you could do some of that training for us."
Murdock smiled. "Colonel, I always follow orders."
The South Korean colonel nodded, turned sharply, and walked to the bow of the ship.
Murdock and DeWitt stood there a moment, then hurried to the ladder to get back in their taxi for a quick ride out to the carrier.
"Glad that's over," DeWitt said as they settled into the Pegasus. "How many of these test situations have we done now in the past three weeks?"
"That's the seventh or eighth, I can't remember. If I thought it was doing any good, it wouldn't be so bad."
"Hey, could be worse. Better this than the bad guys shooting at us."
Twenty minutes later, Don Stroh met them as they walked into their assembly room on the carrier. The SEALs were not happy.
"Hey, Stroh. When the hell we get off this tub and go home?" Les Quinley, Torpedoman Third Class, yelled.
"Can't tell. Not yet. Hear you kicked ass out there again tonight. The ROKs are gonna be glad to see you go… anywhere." He laughed at his own joke as the SEALs stripped out of their wet combat gear and wet suits. He held his fist in the air, and the room went silent in a second.
It was a holdover sign from the BUD/S training in Coronado, and still served a good purpose.
"Fact is, I wanted to talk to all of your about that. Things are heating up in Panmunjom. I'm going over there tomorrow morning for a big conflab. The second-highest-ranking North Korean general, Soo Chung Chi, is going to be at the table. On our side will be Vice President Wilson Chambers. We're rolling out our big guns for this talk, and I want to be there. I want to hear what both sides have to say."
"If those two guys kiss and make up, we'll all go home," Jack Mahanani, Hospital Corpsman first Class, roared. Everyone laughed.
Might not be quite that easy," Stroh said. "What happens tomorrow is going to have a huge bearing on whether you go home or not. Thanks for the last training bit. The South Koreans could stand a lot more work, but I don't know who is going to teach them. Now, you guys get some sleep. I've got to get ashore and be ready for the big yahoo tomorrow."
Murdock walked Stroh to the deck, where he would catch his helo.
"Is there really going to be a chance to work things out tomorrow with the North guys?"
Stroh shook his head. "Don't think so. The Vice President has a lot of packages for the North, if they'll take them. I just can't read the Korean faces, on either side." Stroh shrugged. "Hell, we'll just have to wait and see what goes down tomorrow."
Murdock watched Stroh take off. His men were rested after the hard mission in the Kuril Islands. They were ready. He'd been a SEAL for six years now, commander of this platoon for the past two. He'd wet nursed some of them, come down hard on others. They were SEALs, the best trained special operations fighting men in the world. Quick Response was their middle name. He and his men would be ready, no matter what happened at that conference table tomorrow.