Seal Team Seven #20: Attack Mode (23 page)

“It is. You’ll get them in 2005 or 2006.” He handed
the weapon to the Marine. The others gathered around looking at it.

“You can use it for air bursts off its laser sighting up to a thousand yards?” the sergeant asked.

“Can and do. Every foot soldier will soon have an artillery piece of his own. It’s going to change the way we do ground fighting.”

The crew chief signaled.

“Time to load up. Sergeant, bring your squad in the first bird with me. We have six extra Motorola radios. Three for each of your squads. You keep one. It’s instant communication among the squad. Let’s load.”

There was little talk during the flight. The first bird was heading for Rongrik.

“Take us about forty-seven minutes to get there,” Jay-bird shouted to Murdock. He nodded. Murdock showed the sergeant how to rig the Motorola, and he set up two of his squad the same way.

“Net check,” Murdock said on the radio. His five men checked in, then the three Marines called in.

“Vuylsteke, how do you read?”

“Good, sir. Even in here. Outside it will be great.”

“We have about forty-seven minutes for the flight. Relax while you can. We don’t know what we’re going to find out on that atoll. And when you talk to me, I’m either Murdock or Cap. Okay?”

“Yes s—Right, Cap. I can do that.”

Twenty minutes later the crew chief brought Murdock up to the pilot. “We’re running into a heavy squall. Rain and lightning. I’m going to have to detour around it. Don’t know how big it is. Could cause us all sorts of problems. We’re looking at at least another twenty to thirty minutes of flying time. I’ll keep you informed.”

The South Pacific

Near Rongrik Atoll

The helicopter edged around the worst of the furious clouds and lightning strikes but was still punished and battered by the raging winds. Murdock had checked his stopwatch, and after twenty minutes of buffeting around, he went back to the pilot.

“We should be out of the storm in five minutes, the eye in the sky tells me. He’s given me a new heading to get to Rongrik. The only change is we’ll be about a half hour behind our original ETA.”

Murdock groaned. “That puts us on the atoll about ten minutes behind the guys in the boat. Can we contact anyone on the atoll by radio?”

“Not sure, Commander. I’ll call the CIC and see if they can give us any kind of a frequency. There’s a chance.”

“How long until we land?”

“I’d say about twenty minutes. If we don’t hit another squall.”

Murdock watched out the cabin windows as the rain faded and the clouds scudded away to reveal the blue Pacific Ocean and a blue sky.

“More like it,” Murdock said.

The pilot grinned. “We’re ten minutes away now and should be sighting the speck of coral soon.” The pilot looked at a pad of notes. “Oh, Commander, CIC called the weather station out here on Rongrik. They had the right frequency, but couldn’t raise anyone. Somebody else on the circuit responded and said that the Rongrik weatherman
had been ill for a month now, so he wasn’t using the radio or giving any reports. Sorry.”

“We’re going in blind again,” Murdock said. “We should be getting used to it.”

He went back to the men and told them what was coming.

“There’s a chance that the small boat beat us to the atoll. If so, we find where it’s docked and start tracking the men and the plut. Shouldn’t be hard. Might not be more than a few dozen people on this atoll. Strangers will stick out like a hockey stick in a lunch box.”

“How can they hide the plut on a tiny little atoll like this one probably is?” Bradford asked.

“It all depends on the situation and terrain,” Murdock said. Half the SEALs and the Marines joined in the recitation of the old military truism. “It does depend. We recon and see what’s there, then ask a bunch of questions. We fan out and work the buildings if we don’t get any answers. We find them, or we draw fire from the bad guys.

“Now, if the boat had problems getting through the storm, it might not even be in the lagoon yet. Let’s hope we can meet it when it tries to dock. We should know that in a fly-over of the village.”

Murdock was hoarse from shouting his words to get them heard over the roar and clatter of the chopper. He went back to the cabin and watched.

Twelve minutes later they spotted the atoll, with a large lagoon inside coral reefs, a small plane landing strip with two T-hangars, and a minuscule dock next to a clutter of a dozen buildings that must be the downtown and suburb housing all mixed up in one place.

They did a fly-over of the dock and Murdock swore. “Looks like a fifty- or sixty-footer down there tied up,” he said. “Wonder how long she’s been there. I didn’t see any crates lashed to the deck. Set us down as near to the village as you can.”

It was a combination baseball field and soccer field fifty yards behind the main group of buildings. The SEALs and
Marines jumped out of the chopper, formed into a column of ducks, and took off for the dock at a swift jog. Murdock and Lam led them out. They passed a half dozen curious people who called and waved.

Murdock took them to the dock and went up to a short, fat Polynesian, who grinned and held out his hand.

“Damned in the morning, the U.S. Navy has landed. I saw the markings on the chopper. Nice-looking bird. Wish I had one. You looking at the boat over there?”

“I am,” Murdock said. He took the man’s hand and pumped it. “Lieutenant Commander Murdock, U.S. Navy SEALs. How long has this craft been docked?”

“Maybe an hour,” the man spit out the shell of some seed and nodded. “Yes indeed, I would say it’s been about an hour. Two men met them. Seen the two strangers around here for a month or so. Kept to themselves. Claimed they were hunting souvenirs from the old Jap tunnels they had on this chunk of coral. Oh yeah, big battle fought here during World War II.”

“Did they off-load two big crates from the boat?”

“Damn me, but you know it already. Yep. Two big crates. The two strangers who been living here brought down the only forklift on the atoll and carried the crates away. Don’t know where they took them. None of my business, right? My guess is that they went north along the main part of the atoll. Widest up there, and the Japs had it laced with tunnels and gun emplacements and hundreds of machine guns, so I’ve been told.”

“North?” Murdock asked. “They made two trips with the forklift?”

“Oh yeah. Them crates was heavy as sin.”

“Thanks,” the SEAL leader said. He turned his men around, and they quick-timed past several buildings and out a thin coral-topped road up the north prong of the fishhook-shaped atoll.

“He say how many men came on the boat?” Ken Ching asked on the Motorola.

“I didn’t ask.”

Lam jogged along beside Murdock. He looked over and
frowned. “These guys going to try to break down the crates into smaller boxes?”

“Doubt it. They would need another safe room. Doesn’t sound like they built one here. Maybe just a storage spot until they can sell the goods.”

“They must know that the Navy is hot on their tails. Did they think they could get lost down here in the South Pacific?”

“Been done before. Only back then they didn’t have the eyes in the sky to scan the whole bloody ocean.”

Murdock checked the ground. It was a typical atoll, nothing here more than fifteen, maybe twenty feet off the surfline. The finger of the atoll was a quarter of a mile wide, six hundred yards at the most. Lots of room for tunnels, bunkers, and gun emplacements. There was some scrub growth here, but no jungle, no trees, mostly a few clumps of brush and some vines.

A rifle shot cracked into the gentle breeze and the constant sound of the waves breaking on the ocean side of the atoll, away from the lagoon. The men dove for the ground.

“Anybody see a muzzle flash?” Murdock asked on the net.

“Yeah, I caught it,” one of the Marines said. “About one o’clock, just past that bunch of brush.”

“Hold fire,” Murdock said. He sighted in on the brush fifty yards away and fired the Bull Pup. The round hit the brush and detonated, stripping most of the leaves off the slender stalks of brush and showing a concrete entrance-way behind them. He fired again, putting the next round inside the opening. It detonated quickly and a billow of smoke came out the doorway.

“I want a line of skirmishers, twenty yards apart. Move it now,” Murdock bellowed into the radio. The men lifted off the dirt and coral and sprinted to form the line of fourteen men across the spit of land. They covered more than half of the center of the atoll but not to the sides, which showed beach sand.

“We’re looking for any opening, and anything that
moves,” Murdock said in his mike. “Marines, tell your people without radios. Let’s move out, slow and steady. Probe every spot of brush and weeds, every lump of coral. When we find something, everyone stops in line.”

The men moved forward at a slow walk, weapons pointing ahead and ready to fire. Twenty yards ahead, Bradford came on the net. “Cap, I’ve got a vent pipe, three-inch black iron.”

“Must be dozens of them along here,” Murdock said. “Drop a live grenade down it and move ahead.”

“Oh yeah. Just like in the
Dirty Dozen
movie.”

They didn’t hear the grenade go off. The line moved forward slowly. They were still thirty yards from the entranceway Murdock had fired into, when another call came.

“Cap, I’ve got a rat hole here,” Lam said. “Looks like the opening to a tunnel, maybe three feet wide on top. Goes down at an angle.”

“Throw in a WP and we’ll see if we can flush anybody out.”

“Roger that, Cap. One WP going down.” Nobody came out of the tunnel.

The line moved again, and Murdock angled over to come up on the concrete entrance. It was old construction. It showed only two feet above the ground, dropped down two feet, then steps went down with a five-foot overhead. Jaybird came up and checked it out.

“Want me to go down there, Cap?”

“Not yet. Put a WP down and see if anything happens. They must be somewhere else. There’s got to be a larger opening somewhere around here if they moved those crates inside. What are they, six foot square?”

“At least, Cap,” Jaybird said.

Twenty yards farther up the finger of the atoll they found a dozen air vents.

Lam came over to Murdock. “Cap, we’ve got to find the tire tracks. That forklift would make serious depressions in this loose coral and sand with that heavy a load. I had a few tracks back a ways, but I lost them. I need to
work ahead along this trail of a road and see where the forklift left the harder surface.”

“Go,” Murdock said. “Take a Marine with you for backup.”

Lam saw Marine Sergeant Vuylsteke point to one of his men and then at Lam, and the two of them jogged ahead down the hard-packed coral road. It lasted for another fifty yards, then showed signs of breaking up, with twenty or thirty yards of open sand and loose coral.

“Oh yeah,” Lam said at the first sandy spot. “Got him—three tracks, going and coming. He’s on up here somewhere, Cap. I’ve got about a half mile of this atoll left before we get wet again.”

“Go,” Murdock said. He scanned the atoll ahead. No peaks or valleys, almost flat, a gradual slope up to the twenty-foot ridge in the right quarter. No place to hide, except underground. They had to have a large bunker door to get that plutonium crate inside. Where in hell was it?

Ahead to the right, just past the small ridge, an automatic weapon pounded off ten rounds. The SEALs and Marines hit the dirt and returned fire.

“Cap, I’ve got a Marine down,” Marine Sergeant Vuylsteke said. “He took two of those slugs in his chest. He’s in a bad way.”

“Our medic isn’t with us, Sergeant. Do the best you can.”

Ahead, Lam and the Marine, called Willy, heard the automatic fire and hit the dirt, then got up and sprinted for the next sandy area of the old road.

“More tracks, Cap. We’re on his trail.”

“Roger that, Lam. Let’s move the line again, skirmishers. Return fire if we get shot at. Move out.”

Lam and Willy had just sprinted thirty yards forward to another stretch of sandy coral. Lam went down on one knee and Willy followed. Lam pointed. The tracks had dug in six inches as the rig moved off the old road into the loose sand. Then the tracks stopped. Lam could see where the forklift evidently had been backed up and turned, and had gone back to the road.

“Right there, somewhere,” Lam whispered to Willy. “But where the hell is the damn door?” Lam looked over the area again, viewing it a small section at a time. Then, just past the midway point he spotted something different. The sand and coral here had a smattering of brush around it, but now he noticed that one part of the brush formed a perfectly straight line. The tracks went almost to that spot and stopped.

Lam reported on the net what he had found.

“Hold there, Lam. I’m coming up with plenty of C-5.”

Lam studied the area again. Lots of loose sand and coral. No signs of recent construction. A slight depression and a bank about two feet high just in back of the straight line of inch-thick brush that went six feet high. Lam had to know. He went to all fours and, with his weapon tied over his back, crawled forward fifteen feet to the edge of the straight line of brush. He scooped sand and coral away from the edge of the brush.

Nothing.

He scraped lower, then higher, then lower again, until he was at the bottom of the two-foot mini bank. He pawed at the loose material, moving it sideways, not toward him. He had dug a trench a foot wide and six inches deep at the base of the bank when he felt something unusual. He checked it out with ultimate caution. Yes, what he had expected. He held a thin wire, stretched taut from one side of the brush to the other. A trip wire. If he had been pulling the material forward, he would have set it off. Some kind of antipersonnel mine, maybe a pair of Claymore mines with their two hundred pellets aimed at the center of the wall of brush. He eased back and checked the brush on both sides. Nowhere could he see any antipersonnel mines.

Murdock jogged up to the site and waved Lam back. The scout reported what he had found.