Direct Action (23 page)

Doc was already up, and he saw what was on the way. He grabbed Magic by the webbing harness and pulled him over to the side of the road. After the first tug Magic rolled back onto his feet. They got off the road just as a second HOT missile exploded with an earsplitting roar. Right where they had been.

Doc shook his head to clear it. Talk about trying to kill mice with a howitzer.

Magic saw Higgins, Razor, and DeWitt sprint across the road higher up and start climbing up the rocks. Well, at least they knew where to go. He got Doc’s attention and pointed; both of them were still pretty deaf from the blast. Doc gave him a thumbs-up. They headed up across the slope, staying well below the surface of the road. They had to get past the destroyed BMP, which was still spitting flame and small explosions.

Murdock had heard the second HOT explode. It sounded as if it had been guided onto the road to try to take out some SEALs with the blast. He had no idea where the others were. He sprang up from the rocks to try to see what was happening, and immediately had his wind knocked out when Professor Higgins came sailing over and landed right on top of him. Murdock curled up into a ball and fought that terrible feeling of really needing to breathe air and not being able to.

Jaybird, meanwhile, was leaning over the rocks bellowing, “Up here, up here, on me, on me.”

While Murdock wheezed around in the dirt, people began climbing over the rocks.

He was grabbed and turned over. Ed DeWitt’s imperturbable face appeared before him. “You okay, Blake?”

Murdock only nodded. He’d just regained the ability to draw breath, and was fully occupied doing that.

“What the fuck happened to him?” he heard DeWitt demanding.

“I did it,” Higgins admitted. “I landed on him.”

“
You
fucked up the lieutenant, Higgo?” DeWitt asked, bewildered.

“Sure,” Jaybird broke in. “Did you think it was the Syrians?”

“Fuck you, Jaybird,” said Higgins.

“No, fuck
you
,” Jaybird replied.

“Shut up and spread out!” Razor Roselli screamed. “Get those long rifles broken out.”

Magic and Doc made it across the slope and past the BMP. Doc gave Magic a hand signal: “You first, and I’ll follow.” You had to stay spread out, so if you had a misfortune the other guy wouldn’t get sucked in too.

Magic signaled OK, and sprinted across the road. He reached the rock and started climbing. Hands reached over the top to grab him. Doc showed up a few moments later.

“About time,” said Jaybird.

Doc, panting hard, fought off the urge to shoot him.

Razor got everyone positioned and then came over to check on Murdock.

“Have we got everyone?” Murdock demanded between gasps.

“Yeah, Boss.” Razor was talking fast, as he always did when he was excited. “We were watching through the periscope in back. We saw that helo turning around, and while you were still yelling me and the boys were blowing out of every hole in that BMP like shit through a goose. We just had to wait a bit; couldn’t head up the road until the ammo finished cooking off.”

“Anyone hurt?” Murdock demanded.

“A little shrapnel, a few burns. Just made us run faster. I think we broke the Iraqi Army’s world record for un-assing an armored vehicle under fire. Chicken-shit son of a bitch launched from max range. If he had the balls to get in close we’d all be ashes right now.”

“Shouldn’t have said that so loud, Chief,” Jaybird called out. “He’s coming in.”

1625 hours

North central Lebanese mountains

While his fellow SEALs were scrambling among the rocks, Magic Brown was removing his massive rifle from the drag bag.

The McMillan M88 was a highly tuned bolt-action sniper rifle, scaled up in size to handle the huge .50-caliber machine-gun cartridge. It was fifty-three inches long, with a bulbous muzzle brake on the end of the barrel, an adjustable bipod, and a fixed five-round magazine. To make that great length more manageable, the black fiberglass stock broke down at a joint just behind the trigger group. The rifle weighed twenty-five pounds, including the Leupold Ultra Mk 4 16-power telescopic sight. Magic had screwed a 2-power converter onto the end of the scope to bring the total magnification up to 32-power. That much magnification threw up a lot of haze and mirage in the field of view, but was necessary for a rifle designed to shoot accurately beyond two thousand yards.

Although McMillan rifles were close to being a SEAL trademark, the M88 had been brought along on the mission because a great many had been sold around the world.
Particularly to the French, who used them for countersniping in Bosnia. Magic had been careful to bring along the M88 instead of the similar but lighter and improved McMillan M93, which was almost exclusively in the SEAL inventory.

There was no flat place to set the rifle on its bipod, so Magic threw the empty padded drag bag over a rock and used it as a rifle rest.

Now that the BMP and its cannon and machine guns had been destroyed, the pilot of the Gazelle felt more comfortable about moving in close. He intended to use the high-magnification HOT sight to pick out the enemy in the rocks. His remaining missiles would blow them to bits. A range of one thousand meters ought to do just fine.

Razor Roselli was beside Magic acting as spotter. But the compact laser range finder the size of a small pair of binoculars wouldn’t be much use. The Gazelle’s range was changing every second. It was all going to be up to Magic.

Quartermaster First Class Martin “Magic” Brown was a black man who had grown up in the Chicago projects. His fiercely protective mother had made sure he maintained the clean police record that allowed him to escape into the Navy.

At boot camp in Great Lakes he’d watched the SEAL recruiting film and decided that was for him, even though at the time he could barely dog-paddle across the pool. Swimming pools and swimming lessons were hard to come by in the projects, one reason why there were proportionately few minority SEALs. But you didn’t need to be an Olympic swimmer to be a SEAL. You just needed to be determined. Martin Brown was determined.

Because nothing came easy, Magic got in the habit of listening carefully and doing things exactly the way he was taught. Not only was this the right formula for making it as a SEAL, it also happened to be the characteristic of a great rifle shot. After he pinned on the Budweiser, a smart platoon chief sent Seaman Brown through the SEAL sniper course. He later
went on to Marine Corps Scout Sniper Instructor School, and the Army Special Operations Target Interdiction Course. A kid who had barely made it through basic-level high school math now did ballistic trajectories, windage compensations, and moving target computations for a range of ammunition loadings—in his head, and in minutes of angle. Magic liked to say he just needed a practical application for those numbers.

The McMillan was capable of Minute of Angle accuracy, which meant a group of rounds would fall in a one-inch circle at one-hundred yards, a ten-inch circle at one thousand yards, and a twenty-inch circle at two thousand yards. With the right ammunition it could do better than that. No matter how good the rifle was, most men couldn’t shoot Minute of Angle. Custom-built sniping weapons in the conventional rifle calibers could produce ½ Minute of Angle. Magic Brown could shoot ½ Minute of Angle.

Magic worked the heavy bolt and racked a round into the chamber. The Gazelle was approaching leisurely; it was bright and clear in the fine black crosshairs of his scope. Magic watched the clouds to see which way the wind was blowing and how fast. His brain was working on the math, and the compensation for the difference in altitude from the Chocolate Mountains, where he’d last zeroed the scope. Long-range marksmanship was both art and science. Magic Brown was both artist and scientist, and, as the platoon liked to say in frequent awe at the results, part magician.

Magic didn’t aim at the helicopter. He practiced the sniper’s trick of aiming at a particular spot on the target, in this case a square of windscreen. He clicked the elevation drum of the telescopic sight to fifteen hundred meters.

The Gazelle gunner was scanning the rocks through his own crosshairs, looking for signs of life. His finger was on the firing button.

In order to shoot Magic had to be exposed. The gunner picked him up.

Magic fired. The time of flight for a .50-caliber slug at fifteen hundred meters was 2.4 seconds. Plenty of time for a helicopter to move.

“Miss, low,” said Razor.

Magic had already worked the bolt and made a new set of calculations. The SEALs in the rocks were silent, like any appreciative audience. But that made no difference. No matter what the noise or distractions, there was only Magic, the rifle locked against his body, and the helicopter.

At that range the Gazelle crew had no idea they were being fired at. Now the gunner had
his
crosshairs on Magic, and unlike a sniper’s bullet, a HOT missile could be continuously guided to its target. The pilot was hovering now. The gunner pressed his firing button.

Magic fired again. What he fired was an armor-piercing explosive round. Explosive rounds in .50 caliber had previously been unavailable because no one could make a fuse small enough to fit in the round with enough room for the charge. This one was made by Raufoss of Norway, so of course the SEALs called it a Rufus round.

It hit the plexiglass windscreen of the Gazelle and passed between the pilot and copilot. Even if the pilot hadn’t lost control when the windshield shattered—it was the last thing in the world he was expecting—the round slammed into the engine compartment behind them and exploded.

“That looked like a hit,” said Razor.

The helicopter wobbled in midair, then rolled upside down and headed for the earth.

The copilot grabbed the controls and kicked the foot pedals, trying to coax the rotors into auto-rotation. But the helicopter was already aerodynamically unstable. It crashed into the base of the mountains and exploded.

The SEALs acknowledged Magic Brown with a round of subdued golf claps, as if they were the gallery and he had just
two-putted the ninth hole at Augusta. Magic turned around and grinned at his audience.

But he quickly got back behind the rifle when Razor informed them, “Two more Gazelles coming up from the valley.”

Magic peered through the scope. “No missiles on these, just 20-millimeter gun-packs.”

“Terrific,” came Jaybird’s voice from the rocks. “
Just
20-millimeter cannons.”

“Are you starting up with those negative thoughts again?” Doc Ellsworth shouted angrily.

The rest of the SEALs actually began chuckling. Jaybird found the wisdom to remain silent.

“Everyone get some cover,” Magic said helpfully. “We may end up taking a little incoming.” He pressed two fresh rounds, both as long as his entire hand, into the magazine.

Murdock and Razor set up their MSG-90 rifles. Doc had left the third MSG-90 behind in the BMP, choosing to save his medical pack instead. Doc had made the right choice, but Murdock wouldn’t have blamed him even if he’d left everything behind. If it came down to your ass or some gear, you had to go with your ass. No sense in losing both.

Murdock knew his MSG-90 wouldn’t do much good in the present situation. He was a good shot, but unlike Magic, not a one-thousand-yard shot. Eight hundred yards was the limit of his skills. It was all in Magic’s hands.

The pair of Gazelles didn’t know what had happened to the first one, but their tactics were a little better. One made a run straight at the rocks where the SEALs were hiding, but zigzagging this time. The other split off and came at them up the long axis of the mountain range.

Magic decided on the Gazelle coming right at them. It was zigzagging, but in the most regular back-and-forth pattern imaginable. The French 20mm cannon had an effective range of about two thousand yards, but in the absence of the
high-powered optics of the HOT system, it would have to get in closer to identify targets.

The Gazelle wasn’t sure where the SEALs were. It opened fire at max range and worked bursts up the road, trying to flush them out.

Magic Brown fired.

“Miss, right,” said Razor.

The cannon rounds splattered up the road.

Magic Brown fired again.

“Miss,” said Razor. “Wait for it, he’s going to have to stop juking once he gets on target.”

The only problem with that, Murdock was thinking, was that
they
were the target.

Magic fired again.

The round hit the Gazelle low, and took the copilot’s left leg off at the knee. It exploded behind his seat.

Despite the screams of the copilot and the arterial blood spraying around the cabin, the pilot kept control of the Gazelle and yanked it into a hard right turn, quitting the fight.

The SEALs heard the
boom-boom-boom
of the other cannon, and knowing what was coming, Magic grabbed his rifle and dropped beneath the cover of the rocks. The rest followed suit.

The high-explosive cannon shells exploded among the rocks like small grenades.

Just as they’d taught him in the demo pit during Hell Week, Murdock clapped his hands over his ears and kept his mouth open.

The shells would come in breaking the sound barrier, followed by the explosions, then tiny pieces of fragmentation and rock splinters singing by.

Then the Gazelle pilot did a very foolish thing. Perhaps he was overconfident, perhaps he was used to targets that didn’t shoot back. Instead of standing off and pouring cannon fire into the rocks, he continued his gun run and made a high-speed pass
overhead. Murdock had seen Marine Corps Cobra pilots do the same thing. Maybe the pilot planned on making a quick turn and then shooting straight down on them.

As the Gazelle passed overhead the SEALs all rose up shooting. They used the old Viet Cong technique of picking a spot in the sky ahead and letting the helicopter run into the fire.

The Gazelle shuddered and then sped off to the east, trailing smoke.