Seal Team Seven #20: Attack Mode (18 page)

“That either.”

“Can I at least look at it?”

“Sure, you betcha, as my local friends say.” He tossed the leather bag to Stroh, who caught it and leaned against the rail.

He opened it and laughed. “Holy shit, look at that.” He stared at Murdock. “Is it real?”

“You’re the government spy, not me.”

Stroh took one bill off a stack and held it up to the light. He grinned. “Yep, there are all those lines and doodads just where they are supposed to be. Can’t fake that. Real, all right. A hundred and fifty thousand?”

“If all the stacks have a hundred bills. They might have spent some off one of them. I spent two to the guy who brought in the plut. I figured he earned it. Then another
hundred for burial expenses with the local cops.”

“Yeah, right. Okay. As soon as we get back to the carrier, we’ll have the ship’s payroll department count the loot for us, and they will certify it and then I’ll give you a receipt for it, and get an email from my boss, and eventually I’ll turn it over to him.”

“I don’t want to get a statement of charges for a hundred and fifty thousand from the Navy,” Murdock said.

“You won’t. Now, what about those three other boats? Where are they and what do we know about them?”

“We’ll have to wait and talk to the CAG about that. When is the next chopper due on this milk run?”

“I can have one here in fifteen minutes.”

“Good. Call him, and I’ll get my platoon ready. Where have they been landing, on the aft deck?”

“Right.”

It was a little more than an hour later that Murdock put his combat vest and his Bull Pup in the locker in his four-man compartment and went to see the CAG.

“We found all three and have been shadowing them with choppers out as far as we can. The Hawkeye put us on them. If the choppers get outdistanced, we’ll use F-18s to track them. Looks like two of them are heading southwest down the chain of islands and atolls toward Majuro.”

They went to a blown-up map of the Marshall Islands on a screen in the CIC. It showed the northern islands.

“Here we are south of Utrik. From here to Ailuk Atoll it’s only about sixty miles. The boat heading for that one is making no more than ten knots and wallowing a little. Our chopper pilots say it looks like she’s overloaded and sluggish. She’s been gone from here now we figure for about five hours and could have a landfall in another hour. Or they might already have landed on that first atoll.”

“We can’t shoot it up,” Murdock said. “We might sink her. We’re still short seven crates of plutonium 239. Each of those three tubs could be hauling part or all of them.”

“We can get there in twenty minutes if we decide that,” Captain Olenowski said. He rubbed his face and scowled.
“Can your boys be ready in twenty minutes to take your Sixties down to that atoll and see if that boat has landed there?”

“First we need some chow—box lunches, whatever. Two per man. Then we resupply our ammo and get out of here. The other two boats going on longer cruises?”

“Looks that way. This close atoll is the hot problem.”

Murdock used his Motorola. He found that the signal carried well on board the big ship.

“SEALs, get your vests filled up with normal ammo loads. We’ll be heading out in about twenty. Box lunches on board. We’ve got another port of call sixty miles south.”

“What about the cash?” Jaybird asked.

“I’m asking Captain Olenowski to stand in as our proxy on the count. I think we can trust him.”

The CAG grinned.

“Get your asses moving, SEALs. We now have eighteen minutes to takeoff.”

“Another night problem?” Lam asked.

“It’s sure as hell night; I hope it won’t be a problem,” Murdock said.

Murdock and his thirteen SEALs arrived at Ailuk Atoll twenty-one minutes after takeoff. It was 0135. The island was a dark blob in the sea, except for lights round the boat dock. This atoll had a wide and long lagoon and two docks, both full of forty- to sixty-footers.

The lead chopper, with Murdock, circled the docks from three hundred feet.

“How do we know the bad guys?” Jaybird asked on the radio.

“Usually they are the ones shooting at us,” Murdock said.

They saw a man run out of one boat to the dock, shield his eyes from the dock lights, and look into the sky. Another man came out from a second boat. He carried something in both hands. Murdock put his NVG on him and yelled at the pilot.

“He’s got an RPG. Get out of here.” The pilot had his Motorola, and the chopper took a sudden turn to the left and dropped fifty feet, then slammed the other direction in a maneuver to outguess the rocket-propelled grenade shooter below. The man fired, but the rocket, trailing a plume of gray smoke, slanted through the air thirty yards from the bird and detonated in the lagoon.

Well out of RPG range, Murdock told his sniper to put six rounds into the second boat from the end. That was the one the RPG man had come from.

“Now, get us set down somewhere close to the dock,” Murdock told the pilot.

“A play field, right behind what could be a school,” the
pilot said. “Maybe two hundred yards from the dock.”

“Go,” Murdock said, and the pilot swung that way. The second bird trailed him.

As soon as the wheels touched down, the SEALs jumped out of the chopper and charged across the softball diamond to the street, beyond heading for the dock.

“Lam, get out front. I want to know if the men on the boat are going to fight or run.” Lam darted ahead in the darkness, past a store and across a street and then past one more store to where he could see the second boat on the dock.

The rest of the SEALs moved up cautiously, spreading out along the street, pausing in the deep shadows of the last three buildings so they could see the boats.

“No movement on board that boat,” Lam reported. “No lights on inside. I don’t hear anything. I’m moving up. Cover me if they start shooting.”

Lam scurried from the side of the building to an old car across the street and slid in behind it. Now he was just across a ten-foot wooden pier from the boat. He listened, heard some movement. One man, maybe two. Lam lay behind a fifty-five-gallon steel barrel. He stood, edged around it and without a sound crossed the planks to the edge of the dock, right beside the sixty-foot boat, and listened. Yes, sounds, movement inside. Then he heard what he figured had to be boots going up steps. Someone was coming out. He charged back behind the barrel and waited. A hand pushed back a canvas drape and a shadowed face looked out of the cabin. The man paused, then he pushed the drape aside and stepped onto the deck, went across to the gap in the rail, then down the portable steps placed next to the boat.

The man looked dark. Murdock could see in the faint dock lights that he had a beard. He wore dark clothes and a watch cap. After checking both ways along the dock, he ran lightly across the planks and up the street that led back into the tiny town.

“I’m on a runner,” Lam whispered on the Motorola. “I think the boat is empty. Somebody check it out. Figure
we should know where this guy is going. He is probably the guy who shot the RPG at us. He may be forting up and getting with his friends.”

“Roger that, Lam,” Murdock said. “Fernandez, check out the boat, and be careful. Try to tease anybody on board to come out.”

Lam faded from one dark building to the next. Then he was out of structures. The man jogged ahead down the hard-packed coral road. He was moving south. This side of the atoll was less than a quarter of a mile wide, with the large lagoon to the right and then the string of outer coral reefs protecting the lagoon beyond that. It would be a pretty spot if he had time to look at it, Lam figured. The man ahead stopped and turned, looking behind him. Lam caught his move and was flat on the ground by the time the man stared to his rear. Lam let the man get a little farther ahead, just so he could spot the runner in the night darkness.

They passed a grove of trees and brush, then a barren strip that looked to be mostly coral or maybe some type of volcanic rock. Just beyond the rocky place Lam came to an airstrip. It was much smaller than the others he had seen on the atolls. This one was not more than a third of a mile long. Small planes only could land here. He saw two tied down near a T-hangar, and one more to the side.

The runner kept up his jogging along the road, past the airport and beyond another group of trees. Here the land surged upward to the highest point on the atoll. Lam figured it might be fifty feet high. Then the runner vanished. He stepped into a copse of trees and then he was gone. Lam pulled back twenty yards and nestled into some trees and brush, from which he could see the area where the jogger had vanished.

“Cap, I lost him.”

“Lost him on a postage-stamp island this size?”

“True, Cap. I’m south of the airstrip. Just light planes can land here, on a short runway. Then beyond that are more trees and a small hill maybe fifty feet high. He just vanished at the edge of the trees. I don’t know where he
went. I’m hidden in a spot where I can see the area. We might have to wait for daylight.”

“If we have time. We checked out the boat. No one on board, and no crates of plut. If we had a Geiger we could check to see if the plut had been there. That stuff is so strong it has to give off some rads. You hold there. I’m going to find the mayor of this island.”

Murdock found one boat with some lights on. He pounded on the side until a sleepy-eyed woman came to the cabin door and poked her head out.

“What the hell do you want? It’s almost three o’clock in the morning.”

“Sorry, ma’am. I’m new in town. What can you tell me about that second boat on the dock down there?”

“Nothing. Look, come back in the morning. I’ll probably never get to sleep again. Who the hell are you, anyway?”

“I’m a United States Navy SEAL, ma’am.”

“Damn, you say. Hey, don’t shoot me. That second boat. Came in about three hours ago. Had a truck and a fancy backhoe that lifted something damn heavy off the deck and drove it away. Near as I remember they did that six or seven times. The truck wasn’t gone long, so they didn’t go far.” She giggled. “Hell, not far to go any direction on this fucking tiny island.”

“Thank you, ma’am. Can you tell me where the mayor lives? The head government man in town.”

“You call this a town? You must not get out much. Oh, hell yes, I can tell you. See that small building over there with the flag flying? That’s the post office. Two houses down the street is the mayor of the whole fucking island.” She yawned. “That do it? I’m going back to bed.”

From inside the boat Murdock heard a man’s wild laugh. “Better hurry up, woman. I can’t maintain this thing forever.”

She giggled and closed the door.

Murdock chuckled and took Jaybird with him and ran across the dock and up the street to the mayor’s house. There were no lights on. He knocked a half dozen times
and at last a light flashed through an upstairs window. It opened.

“Who the hell is down there and what the hell do you want?” The voice came raspy and angry.

“Commander Blake Murdock, Mr. Mayor, U.S. Navy. I have some important business that can’t wait for daylight. I need to talk to you about a tremendous threat to your whole atoll.”

“You shitting me, mister? Ain’t no U.S. Navy on this rock.”

“Didn’t you hear the two helicopters land about a half hour ago? That was us. I really need to talk to you. There is a huge problem we need to help you solve.”

“You serious, son? Get me out of a cool bed just to come yammer away with you?”

“Exceedingly serious, sir. It concerns radioactivity.”

“Radio. …” The raspy voice cut off. “Be down in about a minute. Let me get my pants on.”

Two minutes later the mayor let the two SEALs into his front room. He stared at their weapons.

“Hope there won’t be any gunfire. We don’t allow many guns on the atoll. Vote of the people. Now, you say radioactivity?” The mayor was short and thin, with wispy gray hair, a potbelly, and arms that were corded with muscle. His eyes were clear, blue, and full of questions.

“Yes, sir, radioactivity. Have you had any strangers coming to your atoll in the past few days or weeks?”

“Not lately. But about three months ago we had a batch of them. One gent came and talked to me and showed me a badge and a bunch of official stationery and papers and such. Said he had a secret mission here on the atoll, and wanted to set up a small lab on our little hill, down on the southern end. He paid a permit fee of ten thousand dollars and I said go ahead.

“For the next month they worked down there. Bulldozers and drag lines and concrete mixers and the whole thing. Brought in all their own workers, and when they was done, everybody but about ten men up and shipped
out on the transport that brought in all of the equipment and materials.”

“He didn’t say which government agency?”

“He said not to tell anybody and I promised I wouldn’t.”

“So what have they been doing since then?”

“Not a lot. Said they were waiting for a shipment.”

“A shipment of what?”

“He wouldn’t say and made me promise not to ask.”

“How many men there now?”

“Four of them left by boat one day. We have a kind of irregular ferry service between the atolls. They headed for Majuro.”

“Mr. Mayor. We’ve been tracking some hijackers who grabbed a whole freighter and sailed her this way.”

“Whole damn freighter. Must have had something valuable on board.”

“She did. On the open market the goods were worth about ten billion dollars.”

“Now, that is a bunch. What was it?”

“It was, and still is, plutonium 239, one of the most dangerous radioactive substances known to man.”

“Plutonium? Isn’t that the stuff they use to make nuclear bombs?”

“Yes, sir. One of the boats at your dock brought several large crates to your atoll today, probably came after dark. Did you see them?”

“No, stayed in mostly. Heard the truck going back and forth. Know the sound of that project truck down there south of the airstrip.” The mayor stopped. “Hey, you trying to tell me that them government agents dug themselves a hole in my atoll and now it has a bunch of that plutonium 239 inside it?”