Seal Team Seven #19: Field of Fire (33 page)

“Let’s do it,” Murdock said. Now he wished that he’d put Gardner and Bravo Squad watching the back door. If he had, it probably would have all been over by now.

They worked up to the first street and two Israelis went down it. The next street Murdock and Lam took. They alternated SEALs and Israelis so the SEALs could contact the Israelis if they needed to get together or move or attack something.

Murdock and Lam jogged down the street. The first block they saw no military sedans. At an intersection they saw a Syrian Army jeep on a roving patrol. The driver and his passenger never even looked at them. The next block Lam held up his hand. Ahead fifty feet sat an olive drab military sedan. The left rear tire was flat. As they came up on it, Murdock could see three bullet holes in the rear panels. The car sat in front of a small store with a residence above it. There were steps leading up from the street. Murdock did a quick check inside the car and found bloodstains.

They took the stairs one step at a time, with feet placed on the very edge of each runner, near the wall so there would be no squeaking. At the top they found a small landing, with two doors leading off it. Murdock whispered to Lam, who stepped back out of sight. Murdock knocked on one door. He knocked again and the door came open slowly just a crack.

An old man stared out. Murdock asked him in English if he’d seen some Syrian soldiers. The old man’s eyes went wide and he nodded and pointed to the other door, then held up three fingers. He smiled, patted the weapon Murdock held, and then closed the door softly.

Murdock brought Lam up. He took two steps back then jumped at the door kicking hard with his right boot next to the knob. The door latch splintered open and the door slammed inward. Murdock and Lam went in right behind it. They found a large room with a man lying on a couch and two men bending over him. Two Syrian soldiers stood behind the couch. They had pulled up their submachine guns but they were too late. Murdock and Lam fired, killing both Syrian soldiers and making the men kneeling at the side of the couch duck down. They looked up in fear.

“Speak English?” Murdock asked.

“Yes, this man is wounded, hurt bad. I’m not a doctor but I know some first aid.”

Murdock moved up and looked at the man. He had a red face, black closely cropped hair, and looked to be about fifty. He wore a Syrian army blouse with major leaves on his shoulders.

“Do you know who this man is?”

The Israeli who spoke before nodded. He was about forty, with almost white hair and a long nose. He rubbed his face and bobbed his head. “Oh, yes. He’s been in town for a week, yelling at everyone. He had two of our people shot because they didn’t get out of the way of his car fast enough. He’s the big-shot Syrian general, the guy who led the attack on us. I don’t know why he has major’s insignia.”

“He’s hiding. How is he wounded?”

“A bullet through his back, lodged somewhere in his
chest. I’m no doctor for that kind of work.”

Murdock turned to Lam. “Call in the troops. Tell them we have him. Send most of them back to the beach. Meet downstairs with six of our people. Find the car keys in the pockets of one of the two bodies over there. We’ll take the general for a little ride.”

“We don’t have a hospital here,” the Israeli said.

“I wasn’t thinking of taking him to a hospital.”

It took them almost an hour to get the two Syrian soldiers’ bodies out of the apartment over the store. The owner of it said he was a pharmacist, that was why they brought the general to him. There was no doctor in the small town.

Diar was conscious, but not talking as they carried him down the steps. He took a swing at one of the SEALs, who promptly spit in his face.

They dumped him in the car’s backseat. Murdock sat guarding him while they drove the car back to the beach near the house he had taken over as his headquarters.

Gardner had called in the UH-60s a half hour before and both came whirling in and landed on the wet sand. The two helicopter gunships hovered nearby but had no targets.

They carried the general out to the chopper and told him where he was going.

“General, you wanted to get to Haifa, I’m told. The target of your invasion. Well, we’re going to make your dream come true. You’ll be in Haifa in about twenty minutes. But you’ll be in a hospital prison ward until the authorities have questioned you all they want to. Then I’d think a firing squad if you survive the Israeli bullet that’s in your chest. Sound like a good deal?”

Murdock had told him this in his not perfect Arabic, but the soldier got the idea. The choppers took off, the injured Captain Lansky in the first one with his troops, the SEALs in the second one with their prize prisoner.

“Hey, Skipper,” Canzoneri said. “I didn’t think we ever took prisoners.”

“For a two-star general, we’ll make an exception,” Murdock said. “Think what this is going to do to the invasion
forces once they learn that their commander has been captured and is in prison in Haifa.”

The chopper pilot must have told Haifa who the prisoner they had was, because when the birds set down on the chopper pads, twenty officers and six cars had pulled up to meet them. A stretcher came first and a gumey, then General Bildad talked to the hurting general a moment in Arabic before sending him to the hospital.

General Bildad came over to Murdock and his SEALs.

“Commander, you do good work. Never in my wildest dreams did I hope that you could capture him alive. Now we have a big bargaining chip to use with the Syrians. Their war is over. We’ll demand compensation for the war and for the economic hit we took when our electronics went down. Estimates are somewhere around fifty billion dollars in equipment alone, not counting the economic loss. Yes, Syria will remember this day for a long time in the future.”

Don Stroh met them in their quarters. He frowned. “Murdock, you lied to me. You said it was good fishing year round in the kelp off La Jolla. I talked to them at Seaforth today and they said they only had eleven fishermen on one half-day boat for twenty sculpin, six sand bass, and twelve mackerel. Now, that is not what I’d call good fishing.”

Murdock felt drained. He shrugged. “Hell, Stroh. Everybody knows fishing falls off a little December through February. So sue me.”

“I might. You’re done here. I got the word from the CNO while you were gone. You fly out tomorrow afternoon. So get some sleep. You earned it on this trip. Congratulations on bagging that general. I’d say that’s a first for you guys.”

Murdock nodded. “Yeah, a first,” he said, then headed for his bunk.

NAVSPECWARGRUP-ONE

Coronado, California

Lieutenant Commander Blake Murdock kicked back in his tiny office at Third Platoon of SEAL Team Seven and put his feet up on the small desk. He couldn’t remember how long it took them to get home from Israel. The Navy had been in a flat-out rush to get them over there, but coming home had been the opposite: from slow to stop. Most of the time they hitchhiked on military planes going their direction. They wound up at Miramar Marine Air Station north of San Diego, and Master Chief MacKenzie sent a Navy bus to bring them the last leg of the journey. That had been a 1000 arrival and Murdock had promptly given the men a three-day leave. It was nearly noon and he hadn’t been home yet. He figured that Ardith didn’t know when they were arriving. She had lost her Washington, DC, inside information pipeline. He’d surprise her when she got home from her new job. He knew that high on Ardith’s agenda would be looking for a different apartment. They had just started to search when his orders came to jet out to Israel.

Lam caught a ride with Jaybird as far as his apartment building.

“Hey, how about me taking your Hog out on a ride?”

“Never happen, boysan. Not until you get your biker’s driver license. You don’t have one.”

“Yeah, but we’re buddies. How about on some deserted parking lot somewhere?”

He had put off Jaybird and went directly to the small storage area in the parking garage where he had hidden his bike. He hadn’t thought a lot about the murder of the old store owner just before they left for Israel. He had fully expected the master chief to have a warrant for his arrest as soon as he came over the Quarterdeck that morning. He didn’t.

Lam unlocked the storage door and grinned when he looked at his Harley Hog. What a great machine. He’d wanted one for ten years. Now it was all his. And all paid for and insured. He sat on the bike but didn’t roll it out. He had a lot of thinking to do. Should he go to the police with the names of the three men who had killed the old man? He’d written them down that night of the killing just so he wouldn’t forget them. The three would at once implicate him and probably say he was the one who did the stomping. Three to one. Who would the cops believe? Then he’d be indicted, and a trial set and in jail and thrown out of the SEALs and probably discharged from the Navy as well. Damnit.

What had he told them? He said he was a SEAL. Okay, there were well over three hundred SEALs in NAVSPEC. How could they spot him out of three hundred? Yeah. That made him feel better. He polished the bike, then closed the storage door and locked it. He went toward his apartment. It was on the second floor with an outside access. As he passed the office, the manager waved at him and came outside. His name was Marion Jones and everyone called him Jonesy. He was the manager, not the owner of the thirty-six-unit building. Jonesy was about fifty, with a potbelly and a belt that got lost somewhere under it, graying hair, and he wore large black-rimmed glasses.

“Mr. Lampedusa, could I see you for a minute?” Jonesy called from the door of the small office.

“Yeah, sure. What’s up?”

“What’s up is exactly what I want to know. When I didn’t see you for a few days, I figured you were off on another of your trips. I still don’t understand where you go or what you do. But that’s not important. Three days after you left, your neighbors reported a lot of noise in
your apartment about three A.M. They told me about it the next day. I figured I should go and check. I hate to be the one to tell you, but the inside of your apartment has been ransacked, totally trashed. Almost everything you had in there has been smashed …”

Lam ran out the office and down to his steps and took them three at a time. He fumbled with his door key, and when he pushed the door open, he stopped. “Them sonsofbitches. How did the fuckers know where I live?” He didn’t even give them his last name, did he? He couldn’t remember. Yeah, figures he did. But how could they … He wasn’t listed in the phone book. They would have no way of knowing … There wasn’t any chance, no way they could have found out where he lived. But they did.

How in hell had they done it?

He tried to think as he stepped over what was left of his living room. His stereo had been smashed beyond repair. All of his CDs had been broken into pieces, the case that held them splintered. Even the pictures on the walls had been taken down and crushed, the books and bookcases splattered over that end of the room. His TV had the picture tube smashed and the guts inside pounded with a hammer into an electrical mine field. His one good sofa had been sliced and ripped to shreds, the small table broken, legs smashed off chairs. He didn’t have the willpower to look in the kitchen.

Jonesy stood at the door looking in. “My god, somebody must really hate you. An ex-wife or an ex-wife’s boyfriend?”

“Nothing like that.”

“Some enemy you made in the service?”

“Oh, no. These guys were civilians. I think I know who did it. I just don’t know what I can do about it.”

“You want me to call the police? They should know about this.”

“No. No police. I’ll take care of it myself.” Lam looked at the walls and the carpet. “Doesn’t look like they hurt the building itself much. Just my stuff.”

He looked into the kitchen, then the bedroom. The same all over. The kitchen was the worst, with dried milk, catsup,
and mayo splattered on everything that had been trashed. He doubted if there was an unbroken dish or bottle or jar in the place.

He’d bought the furniture on a rent-to-own deal going back two years. Most of it was paid off. He checked the bedroom closet. All of his clothes he had hung up had been slashed and ripped into small pieces. His one good suit, that he had bought for his sister’s wedding, was in at least twenty different shreds. Nobody would ever sleep again on the mattress that now rested on the floor where it had been dumped.

Lam wondered about his emergency fund. He had stashed two one-hundred-dollar bills in the bottom of a five-pound bag of sugar in the kitchen. He remembered: The sugar had been sifted over everything else when they were done. The sugar paper sack had been crumpled to one side. They had found the two hundred.

Lam went back to the front door. “I won’t be staying here tonight,” he said. “Not a chance. They break the lock to get in?”

“They did. A crowbar, I’d guess. I’ve seen it done before. Where will you be?”

“At a cheap motel. Then tomorrow I come back and see if I can clean up this mess. Could you have one of the trash bins moved close by so I won’t have to pack the trash so far?”

“Yes, seems the least.”

Lam thought to call Jaybird. He could bunk with him. When he looked for the phone he found it smashed into pieces and the wires pulled out of the wall.

At least his bike was safe. Lam frowned. But for how long would it be safe? The three of them probably took turns standing watch waiting for him to come back. One of them might be watching right at that moment. He nodded to Jonesy and hurried out. He’d get on his bike and ride over to Jaybird’s place and tell him what happened.

His hideout.

He went back into the far end of the living room where the books had scattered. He found the volume he wanted.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.
It had fallen
near the far wall. He picked it up, dusted off the top, and opened it. Most of the interior had been hollowed out, leaving room for a. 32-caliber automatic with eight rounds in the handle. He pushed it and a box of rounds into his pants pocket. He needed an ankle holster. He’d be armed from now on 24-7.