Seal Team Seven #20: Attack Mode (30 page)

“Two destroyers in the three-hundred-seventy-five-foot class, with plenty of missiles and weapons,” Jaybird said. “Also some frigates and a whole pot full of good-sized coastal patrol craft. Hope to hell we don’t run into any of them.”

The truck stopped just outside of Diba al Hisn and
Stroh set up his SATCOM antenna on the hood and positioned it. He made a call to the embassy in Oman and a moment later turned to Murdock, his face drawn and troubled.

“I just had word from our embassy here. Lila, the woman agent you were to meet in Kangan, was killed this morning in a shootout with Iranian Secret Police.”

Kangan, Oman

“Great timing,” Murdock said.

“She must have been getting too close to the place they have the plut, or the Secret Police were on to her all the time,” Stroh said. “We have a backup, but he doesn’t have the connections she had. I’ll get him, and tell him to find you just south of the town.”

“Let’s get to the dock and into that Oman Navy boat,” Murdock said. “This trip is not starting out the best”

Twenty minutes later they attracted little attention as they boarded a sixty-foot patrol boat that was longer and narrower than most patrol boats. The design shrieked of speed. The SEALs wore their combat vests under the loose-fitting Iranian civilian-type shirts that were open at the bottom. Each man had a drag bag for two weapons, ammo, and other essential fighting gear.

They crowded below in a small cabin. An Oman naval officer came in and talked with Rafii a moment, then the boat moved out into the small bay and then into the strait. At once they could feel the power as the heavy engines drove the sleek craft through the water.

“Hell of a lot better than twelve hours in a sampan,” Prescott said. Then the speed picked up and the boat began battering through the light chop of the unruly waters between the two continents.

They had been on the water for an hour when the boat powered down to a crawl.

“Must have company,” Murdock said. He sent Rafii up
to the cockpit. The Saudi Arabian native returned a moment later.

“The lieutenant says there is an Iranian Corvette sweeping the area about half a mile ahead. He doesn’t think the low profile of this boat will show on the big ship’s radar. We’re drifting with a slight current, and the lieutenant hopes we can avoid the ship with the big guns.”

They settled in to wait.

Ten minutes dragged by, then the boat’s engines picked up with a throaty roar and the craft moved ahead, then slammed into the swells and powered forward at close to its maximum speed of thirty knots.

“I guess we missed him,” Jaybird said.

“Damn good thing,” Gardner said. “That Corvette would outgun us a hundred to one.”

Just under two hours later they nosed up to a rickety fishing boat dock five miles below Kangan on the southern Iranian coast.

“Move, move, move,” Murdock whispered as the SEALs left the boat and raced across the rickety dock into some trees and brush just beyond a dirt road. The last SEAL hit the brush, and they watched as the blacked-out Oman Navy craft eased away from the dock and purred quietly west, headed back for Oman.

Murdock had surveyed the place as well as he could in the dark. He waved forward. “Up this road we’ll find the coast highway in about fifty yards. We turn north, stay five yards apart, and keep it quiet. Lam out front two hundred. Moving.”

Lam hiked along the track of a road that seemed to go only to the fishing dock. Then it met a blacktopped two-lane highway in good shape. He turned north. Lam saw no houses, no places that could be fanned in the hilly, swampy region. A mile up the road he used the radio. “Cap, I have something for you to take a look at. Not sure exactly what it is.”

Murdock hurried up beside his scout and looked past a light cover of brush down the road.

“Sure as hell isn’t a roadblock,” Murdock said. “I don’t see any men around it at all.”

“Looks like a hayrack that my granddad used to work with on his farm in Nebraska. Only I don’t see the horses that would pull it.”

“Broken down?”

“Could be,” Lam said. Murdock gave the hand signal for both of them to advance, and they worked their way quietly forward until they could almost touch the wooden frame. Inside was hay covering half of the rack. Murdock stopped and held his breath. Then he grinned. Someone snored up a storm inside the hayrack. They went to the front of the rig and found that one wheel had come off and the whole rig tilted toward the right.

Murdock and Lam went past fifty feet, then he called for the rest of the men to move up. “Just don’t make any noise and wake up our snoring friend,” Murdock said.

Four miles later up the road, they began to find houses and some small fields under cultivation. Although it was now past midnight, they still had to jolt off the road now and then for a stray car or light truck to go past. Most of the traffic was heading north.

Lam called Murdock again. “Check out the taillights up there,” the scout said.

Murdock watched the twin red lights three hundred yards up the road. They stopped, then started again.

“Morse code,” Lam said.

Murdock concentrated on the lights. Dot, dot, dot That was an S. He watched the rest of the dots and dashes and grinned. “That taillight just spelled out SEALs in Morse code, little buddy. I think we’ve found our contact.”

Lam moved up at the side of the road in some thin cover. As he approached, a man got out of the rig that Lam saw was a van. The guy leaned against the rear doors. He folded his arms and whistled a sad little tune.

Lam worked just past the van without a sound, came back to the road, and ghosted round until he was two feet from the man’s elbow.

“Nice night out, isn’t it?” Lam asked in English.

The man leaning against the van jolted straight up and spun around, his hand clawing for a pistol in his belt holster. Lam’s MP-5’s muzzle pressed against the watcher’s chest.

“Easy, easy, we could be friends.”

The watcher’s eyes were still wide white beacons in the night. He gasped for breath, held up his hands, and his voice came through the gasping breath ragged and hard to understand.

“Hope to hell you’re a U.S. Navy SEAL.”

“Hope to hell you’re a deep undercover CIA agent.”

“Oh yeah. Tell Don Stroh I’ll get even. Lila got caught in the middle. They proved to her they knew she was CIA and what she’d been doing, and tried to turn her into a double agent. She wouldn’t turn, so they killed her. Bastards.”

“Murdock, you can come in now, the water is friendly.”

Murdock had been only ten yards out, now he jogged up to the van. He held out his hand. “Lieutenant Commander Murdock, Navy SEALs. Glad you know Morse code.”

“From a long time ago. I almost went with an SOS. Oh, I’m Izzat Al-Jaafar. Yes, I’m Iranian. Grew up in the States from three to twenty-three. Went with the State Department and they shifted me into the CIA. I took my training and then came over here four years ago to be deep in the life of the city. You should call me Izzy.”

“Good. Izzy it is. Hope Lam didn’t shake you up too much with his elbow approach. He’s going to give somebody a heart attack one of these days.”

“How did he do that? I thought I was watching everywhere.”

“You were. I was lucky.”

“How many bodies?”

“Twelve, as advertised. How did you get here so fast?”

“I was halfway down the coast road when I got the message on my SATCOM. Had a lead where they might have taken the plutonium 239. Four hundred pounds of
it.” He shook his head in disbelief. “That’s enough to build at least forty nukes.”

“Not if we get there first. Where are we heading?”

“We don’t have to go into Abbas. That’s where they have a lot of hotshot secret police. About halfway between here and Abbas is a little town called Sirik. No roads show on the map, but I’ve heard that a new road was cut through to the other road coming north over east about twenty miles. Beyond that the new road continues into an arid region where there are no roads and probably no people as well. A few goat herders, maybe, but not much else. Baghdad will risk a few goat herders, but not anywhere that there is a city of any size. My information is that somewhere over in there is where they plan to break down the plutonium into ten-pound lead boxes and seal it up radiation-leak-proof and ready for sale.”

“Can we get from here to there?”

“Not without a lot of persuasion. Yes, I stopped at the new road and checked it out on my way past. Looks like only military rigs on it. Which complicates matters some.”

“So we grab an army truck and use it,” Jaybird said.

“This is Jaybird; he has a lot of ideas,” Lam said. “You’ll get used to him.”

“We should load up and get into a less obvious place to do our planning. I have a SATCOM that’s wired to explode on command. We don’t want the Iranians getting one.”

“Inside, everyone,” Murdock said. “Tight squeeze, but it’s quicker than hiking for fifty miles.” Murdock and Rafii rode up front. The two Arabs spoke in Arabic for a while, then switched to English.

“Are those weapons loaded?” Izzy asked.

“Not much good using them as clubs,” Rafii said.

“Any roadblocks down this way?” Murdock asked.

“None when I came down, but they shift them around. You can’t be sure. We’ll use the soccer match ploy. There were four games down in Kangan yesterday. Several teams should be going home north on this road. Usually works.”

“Your van?” Rafii asked.

“Not really. A company van. They paid for it. It’s in the name of a man who died a few weeks ago. Records take a long time to get checked out here. Life isn’t worth much in Iran today—unless it belongs to you, of course.”

They followed the strait on their left as they worked north. Now and then they met a car or small truck. Twice cars passed them. They were big, heavy sedans.

“Government employees or police,” Izzy said. “They are the only ones who can afford such cars. Petrol to go in them is amazingly expensive.”

“We have plenty of cash, rials,” Murdock said.

“Two to one, in case you do any bargaining or buying. Two rials equal about a buck.”

They spotted a roadblock more than a mile ahead. It had been poorly placed in the flatness and with no turns in sight. “We try to run it with the soccer team ploy?” Murdock asked.

Izzy scowled, then slowly shook his head. “No, too big a risk. We might hit some angry officer or hotheaded enlisted man who would insist on talking to each man, asking where he was born, what he does for a living.”

Izzy slowed the van but kept moving. “I’ll go through with Rafii. He can fake it The rest of you drop out of the van and move into the countryside a half mile. Then walk past the roadblock, and I’ll pick you up on the other side about a mile, where I’ll be having some engine trouble.”

“Roger that,” Murdock said. He went on the net. “Wake up, you guys, we’re taking a hike. Roadblock ahead. Out and around, you know the drill. Open that side door and we drop out at five miles an hour. Remember, we’re moving.”

Lam was first out the door. He jogged directly away from the highway, then angled to the north to pick up the others. They all went on the same side. Lam didn’t like the landscape at half a mile, and went another quarter, into some small mounds and hills, then turned north and started jogging.

When they were well past the lighted roadblock made
of three two-ton trucks angled across the road and ditches, Lam turned them back toward the highway. They spotted the van, and after Lam checked it out to be sure it was the same one, they climbed in and slid the door shut.

“Any problems back there?” Murdock asked.

“No. My usual cover is that I do surveying. Have an old transit and some chains in back. They insisted on talking with both of us, so it’s a good thing we didn’t try the other routine. Should be clear sailing now. They said about twenty miles on into town.”

“We have any other assets in this area we can use?” Murdock asked.

“Not for this type of an operation. We didn’t know it was coming until three days ago. Lila had something working, but she didn’t tell me what it was. She knew about me, but we seldom met or talked. Quite a bit of army around this place from what I’ve seen on the road. We’ll have to borrow some goods from the army guys.”

“Might work at that,” Rafii said. “But once we get the plut, what can we do with it? We don’t have any radiation material to mix it with. We could pour it down a deep well, but the Iranians would figure that out and dig out a dozen wells if there are any out here.”

“No oil out here,” Izzy said.

“We’ll get it, then figure out what to do with it,” Murdock said. “We could always call in an air strike and scatter it over a hundred acres.”

“Not too neat,” Rafii said. “The environmentalists would shit their pants. Ours, too.”

They started seeing houses, some fields. Soon there were more cars on the road. Streets branched off. The town came up suddenly around a corner.

“We have a safehouse here if your men need a break,” Izzy said. “We could hang out the rest of the night and then tomorrow night make a try for an army truck.”

“No, we need to get with it tonight,” Murdock said. “We need to get as close as possible to the center where they’re going to break down the plut into the smaller boxes. Any idea how far it is down this special road?”

“Twenty miles to the other norm-south highway, then it’s a guess how far into the desert. Ten, maybe twenty miles.”

“How do we get an army truck?” Murdock asked.

“When I came through, I drove around some. Found the army’s motor pool about a mile out of town. Looks possible.”

“Drive past it and let’s have a look,” Murdock said. “Then we’ll try to get in a back gate or under a fence and put some guards to sleep for a while. One good two-ton truck with a cover would be great.”

They left town on the highway and a mile north saw the motor pool. It had floodlights on, a guard at the closed front gate, and only one interior guard that Murdock saw. They pulled off the road a mile past the army trucks. Murdock filled the men in on the operation. “We’ll hike up to the fence, look for a spot to get over or under and take down the guards with silenced shots. Then we grab the truck we want and motor right out the front gate.”