Seal Team Seven #19: Field of Fire (9 page)

They stopped again at test sites at twenty, thirty, and fifty miles. All of the electronic devices were burned up. None of the cars with electronic ignition would start. A diesel-powered BMW at thirty miles started on the first try.

At sixty miles two of the gas-powered electronic ignition cars started and two didn’t. At sixty-five miles out, all three cars started and the laptops and other electronic devices all worked. Jabrin picked up one of the handheld radios and made a call. He had an instant response.

“Jabrin here. The test is a total success. Bring back to the lab all of our electronic gear. We can get back into
production.” The manager of the project looked at the general. “So, we have a total success. You have the only other complete device in a safe storage area outside of Damascus. What else do you need from us?”

“I need you to finish those next four flux bombs as quickly as you can. We may need them for backup, or for additional strikes. Now I must get back to my headquarters and get the final step of the plan in motion. Your country thanks you for what you have accomplished here. You’ll go down in the history books. Finish those other four as quickly as you can, then get four more on the benches. No telling how many we might need in the next few months.”

Riding back to his headquarters outside of Damascus, General Diar celebrated the success of the weapon with more lemonade. This time he doubled the vodka. Tonight he would give the order. Tomorrow the preparations would begin. Day after tomorrow the bomb would be planted and then the attack on the hated Israeli state would start. Syria’s success in the first fast push would gain quick approval by the other Arab nations, who would rush to Syria with aid, and those Arab states on Israel’s borders would also attack in the big push to shove the Israelis into the sea. Yes. It would happen, and soon.

Rahat Air Base

Near Haifa, Israel

The Gulfstream II VC-11 landed at Rahat Air Base just after 1230 local time. Murdock had set his watch so many times on the zone changes that he had no idea how long they had been flying. He knew they had stopped twice for fuel, but he wasn’t sure just where. Murdock stood and yawned. He figured he’d had seven or eight hours sleep on the trip.

“On your feet, SEALs. Time to rise and shine. It’s just after noon and we have some work to do. Gather up your gear, your weapons and packs, and we’re moving.”

A new crew chief lowered the steps and the men straggled out. A lieutenant colonel in a jeep sat on the tarmac waiting for them. Murdock stepped in front of his men
and saluted. “Sir, Lieutenant Commander Blake Murdock, U.S. Navy SEALs, reporting as ordered.”

The colonel returned the salute and stepped out of the jeep.

“Commander, good to have you on board. We don’t have a lot of time to waste. You’ll meet two of your countrymen soon. We need to swing by ordnance and outfit you with anything else you need. I understand you’ll want C-5 and primer cord. We’re well stocked. You have your weapons and ammo. I see you have on the uniform of the day, for Damascus.”

A pickup pulled up to the spot. “It’s a short ride. Get your men in the pickup and we’ll be moving.”

An hour later they sat in a small hangar at the edge of the huge airfield. Two CIA agents were there and would be going into Syria with them.

“Hi, I’m Al Trenton, with the Company. My buddy here is Mark Haddad. We’re pretend Syrians, but Mark is the real item. Born and raised there and spent twenty years before he got out. We’ll be hitchhiking into Syria with you. Did they tell you how we’re going to get in?”

“Not a word,” Murdock said. “I don’t think they had decided before we left. I hope you men know.”

“We do,” Haddad said. “We’ll go in two choppers over the Sea of Galilee down on the south end, then up and over the Golan Heights. Not a lot of action down that way. We’ll drop in on a small village called Nawa. That’s about ten miles from the main north-south highway.”

“No border troops, spotter planes, radar?” Murdock asked. “Is that border that open that we can just fly in?”

“We’ll be in low-flying birds grazing the ground, hopefully well below the radar. It’s not an easy area to protect, but usually there is little risk down there. If we run into anything military, we’ll try to avoid it and hide from it. If we can’t, then we’re authorized to use our weapons. But that will open a whole can of unhappy snakes we don’t want to get involved with.”

“Say we make it in with no problem,” Jaybird asked. “What happens then?”

“Two of our locals are supposed to meet us at Nawa.
One will be in an old Chevy station wagon, and the other man has a small panel truck with no windows. The problem is, you don’t see ten men of our age in a group taking a pleasure ride in Syria. Even the local cops would get their noses out of joint. So we split up and move north. Two in the Chevy and seven of us in the van.”

“Do we have a location yet on the lab where they are working?” Lam asked.

“Not for certain. We have two possible locations. Our agents in Damascus have promised we’ll have the firm location before we fly out today as soon as it gets dusk.”

“How far do we move?” Bradford asked.

Haddad took the question. “Remember this isn’t Texas. We’re small countries over here. From the sea to the eastern Israeli border here it’s only about forty miles. From the Syrian border into Nawa it’s only another twenty miles. Then moving north to the capital it’s another fifty miles. I know, Los Angeles is larger than this whole area. It’s what we have to work with.”

“Closer the better,” Fernandez said.

“What’s next?” Murdock asked.

“We’ve arranged an early chow call,” Trenton said. “They promised me steaks and mashed potatoes and veggies and all the coffee we can drink.”

The food was good and then they hurried back to the small hangar where they had left their equipment, weapons, and explosives. A guard on the door guaranteed everything was still there.

A half hour later, two Israeli choppers came in. They had different markings but Jaybird promptly labeled them as H-19 Chickasaws. “We use them a lot for anti-sub duty,” Jaybird said. “Seat twelve, so we can have a gunner at both doors. They’re not barn burners but they can do a hundred mph flat out, and move over four hundred miles without a drink of petrol.”

Don Stroh and the Israeli Air Force light colonel who had met them the first day drove up in a car.

“Hey, Stroh, we get in on the choppers, how do we get back?” Jaybird called.

Stroh looked at the colonel, who shrugged. He faced the SEALs and two CIA agents.

“You have a SATCOM. Mine will be on twenty-four hours a day and monitored. When you’re ready to come out, give me a call. We can’t penetrate into Syrian airspace any farther than you’ll be in tonight. So get near the border somewhere.”

Murdock frowned. “You remember a time or two before we’ve had promises like this.”

“I know, I know. Those were extraordinary circumstances. This time there’s no problem. Israel will bail you out when it’s time. How long will it take?”

“If we spend more than forty-eight hours in Syria, I’d be surprised,” Murdock said. “All we need is that firm location and we just go in and do the job and get out.”

“How long to lift off?” Lam asked.

The colonel looked at his watch. “Usually it’s near dark here by eighteen-thirty. We’ve got a half hour.”

“No machine gun in the door?” Rafii asked.

“You probably won’t even see any Syrian military, let alone get in a shoot-out when you land. Their troops are scattered pretty thin down in this region.”

Murdock used the time to check every man. He went over the equipment, clothing, and ammo. They each had an ammo bag they would take with them as long as possible. He checked the names on the I.D. and made each man repeat his Syrian name ten times.

“Don’t forget those names. It could be your ticket out of Syria, or seat of honor on a funeral pyre.”

They loaded on ten minutes later and the birds lifted off. Both the CIA men had the small Peruvian submachine guns. Trenton was anxious to get back.

“I was undercover here for two years, then they pulled me out. It will be good to get back and see the changes they’ve made. None for the better, I’m sure.”

Murdock watched out the open door as the choppers flew as close to the ground as practical. Seldom were they more than a hundred feet over the landscape. Then they buzzed the Sea of Galilee and lifted up to go over the Golan Heights. When they dropped down on the other
side they were really in Syria and almost to their destination.

The birds went single file. Murdock was in the first. They landed five hundred yards from a small cluster of lights that he figured was Nawa. When the second chopper lifted off, Murdock gathered the men together.

“What now, Trenton?” Murdock asked. The CIA agent had dropped to the ground and stared toward the lights in the distance. Then they all saw it, a blinking light. Once, twice, three times. Before Murdock could stop him, Trenton used a pencil light and flashed back three times.

“That could get us killed,” Murdock whispered.

“No sweat, it’s the way we always signal in here. The way the blinks came, this has to be Kayf. Only name I’ve ever known him by. He’s Syrian and a schoolteacher by day. We should go meet him halfway.”

They did. Kayf was a small man, five-two, thin and wiry-looking in the pale half moonlight. He and Trenton chattered in Arabic. Murdock caught most of it. Long time no see. What the hell you been doing? How’s the wife and daughter? Then, where the hell is the car and truck?

They left quickly hiking across a field that had been cultivated, but Murdock couldn’t tell what had been grown. They came to a dirt road and found a sedan, more like a French Citron than a Chevy, and a panel truck that looked ready for the junkyard. “Jaybird and Fernandez in the sedan,” Murdock said. “The rest of us in the van. Let’s move it. Trenton, we have a positive location on our target?”

“Yes, we do. I’ll be in the van with you. We don’t go toward Damascus. Instead we take the road out of Nawa east to a village called As Suwayda’. From there we turn north on a secondary road that runs to Suwayda’. Secondary in this country usually means gravel or dirt and not in good condition. Up the road twelve miles from As Suwayda’ is a turnoff without markings that wanders to the east again into some low hills. The laboratory is down that dirt lane about three miles and can’t be seen from the road.”

“Let’s do it,” Murdock said.

The van passed through the sleeping town of Nawa a little after 2000. Murdock was glad for the empty streets. The van kept a half mile behind the sedan so it didn’t look like a caravan. They met only three cars going through the village. Murdock figured it had no more than a hundred residents.

At the next town, Lzra’, they went across a four-lane roadway that angled north and south. “The main drag into Damascus,” Trenton said. He paused, then held his hands over his ears. “Yes. Yes, I receive. Will do.” He turned to Murdock. “A small change in plans. Up to yesterday the lab had been unprotected. Today they put up a fifty-man army unit surrounding the site. We couldn’t get in there with a crowbar tonight. We have been diverted to the next town, As Suwayda’, to wait out the night and work out new plans for tomorrow or tomorrow night. We have an agent there, a woman who had been married to a Syrian. She married him in the States, then went back to Syria when he returned to run his family business in Damascus. Her husband died in a car crash three years ago and she stayed to run the firm. It’s doing quite well. We recruited her two years ago. She’s good, has connections, and is a solid favorite of some of the top men in the government.”

“You have a safe house where we won’t be noticed?”

“We do. It’ll give us time to recon the lab and see what additional help we might need.”

“If we had the Bull Pups with us, we could handle fifty men with no trouble. Not with our two sniper rifles and our AK-47s.”

The road turned worse, and travel speed dropped to an average of 25mph. It took them over two hours to make the twenty-five miles from the last town to their hold point.

The town was larger, had a business section and houses around the center. Most of the buildings were stone or stucco. The van went past the middle of town and up a dark street, then turned in a driveway and parked behind a two-story structure.

“Bring all your gear, ammo, and weapons,” Trenton
whispered. “Somebody may check out the van. The car we left on the street two blocks down. Don’t make a sound. We go in a back courtyard and up steps to the second floor. Absolute quiet.”

Jaybird had charged a round into his sub-gun, and now he loaded up his gear and ammo, then pushed off the safety. They moved out of the van and up the stairs like dark ghosts. Once on the second floor, they went into two different rooms. Mattresses covered half the floor of each.

“Okay, get some sleep,” Murdock said. “Hard telling when we might get much more. We might get into action tomorrow and we might not. I’m going to check with the brass.”

He found Trenton in the hall and they went downstairs to the house’s living room. It was well furnished. A woman rose from a sofa as they came in. Murdock sucked in a sudden breath. She was tall, dark, with waist-length hair and the most perfect face he’d ever seen. He kept thinking of a twenty-year-old Elizabeth Taylor. She was striking, no makeup, and smiling.

“Good evening, Commander Murdock, and welcome back, Al. I’m Barbara Salman. Welcome to my friend’s home. For tonight it’s my little corner of the world. Some-thing big is going on out at that lab, and I don’t have a hint of what it is.”

“We know,” Murdock said. Then he told her about the EMP principle and the FCG bomb that the Syrians were building.

“I had no idea. My control here in Syria didn’t think I needed to know. Wait until I see him again.” She smiled. “Can I get you something to drink? I know this is a dry nation, but there is all sorts of booze available if you know the right people and the right places and have enough money. Fortunately I have all three.”

“A beer would be good,” Murdock said. She left the room and Murdock and Trenton watched her walk away. It was a lesson in anatomy and of a body in motion.