Seal Team Seven #20: Attack Mode (9 page)

On board the
Carl Vinson CVN 70

“Skycap calling Home Base.”

“Go, Skycap.”

“We’ve got a positive on a freighter at the Sibylla Island. It’s up here at five hundred. You better put a nursemaid in the air. We’re not going to make it back to the ship without a drink of juice. We’ve stayed at fifteen and made a positive ID on the type of freighter. Same onboard crane amidships and that crazy looking house just in back of the crane. She’s at anchor and I don’t think anyone on board knows that we’re up here. Want us to fly CAP on her or head home for drink about halfway?”

“No CAP, we don’t want him to get lucky. Come back for some fuel and then set down. We’re changing course for that island. The helm tells me we’re only three hundred miles due east of there. Good work. Come home.”

“What’s next?” Murdock asked.

“We’ll switch one of our Hawkeyes to circle the area up at least twenty thousand, and keep us informed about her position. If she moves, we’ll know it. What’s next for you and the SEALs?”

Murdock looked at his watch. “Hey, it’s oh-six-thirty-two. I almost missed breakfast. Then we get the SEAL heads together and figure out the best way to take down this ship.”

After morning chow, the SEALs gathered in their quarters and began kicking around ideas.

“We know these hijackers went on board as seamen, so they probably don’t have any long guns or machine guns,” Senior Chief Sadler said. “Might be a pistol for each of them, so maybe the best way would be to rope down from a chopper to the deck.”

“No way,” Jaybird said. “They went to all the trouble and planning to get on board, my bet is that they sneaked on board at least five or six Ingrams or maybe taken-apart Uzis. Roping down is just too risky. We’d be perfect targets. Besides, by now they must have found the ship’s gun locker. Don’t most freighters carry a few rifles on board?” Nobody knew.

Murdock doodled on a pad of paper. He wrote “rope down” then crossed it out.

“Then we go in with Rubber Ducks and climb up the side,” Lam said. “That freighter can’t have a rail more than forty feet off the water.”

“Done that before,” Canzoneri said. “Maybe they’ll have a pair of men on watch with rifles. We’ll be damn easy targets.”

“How about having the Tomcats blast the whole damn thing with twenty millimeters and then we rope down,” Bradford said. “I like going down better than up.”

“It’s anchored now; what if it starts to move?” Murdock asked.

“No difference,” Mahanani said. “We can do any of our plans with it making twelve knots or anchored.”

“Let’s use the Turtle,” Jefferson said. “Hey, that’s what we got her for. She’s quiet. We do a silent approach and up the side, take out any deck watch with silenced shots, and we’re halfway home.”

“We can only move eight men in the Turtle,” Lam said. “For this one we need all of us.”

“How big is the deck?” Omar Rafii asked. “We could drop in six men in chutes, have them secure the deck and then bring in the rest of the men by Rubber Duck.”

Murdock kept making his list and circling or crossing off items as they went.

“JG, what do you think?” he asked.

Chris Gardner frowned and rubbed his face. “We don’t have a lot of options. We need to take her down as quickly as possible, before she knows we’re on to her. Has to be a night mission, at first dark I’d guess, maybe twenty hundred. I’d use the Rubber Ducks and go in with one boat on each side and go up in a coordinated move.”

“No jumpers to secure the deck?” Murdock asked.

“That’s a small target, at night, and we don’t know about the winds down here. Too dangerous for the benefits.”

Murdock looked at his men. The brightest ones had spoken up. He stood from the bunk he’d been sitting on. “Jaybird, Senior Chief, JG, we’ll have a meet with the CAG and some of his people and see their reaction. First we’ll have to get within ten miles of her to use the Ducks. I’ll see when we can have a meeting.”

Murdock found the closest phone and contacted the CAG. Captain Olenowski reported that the freighter was still anchored and the Hawkeye was watching her.

“When can we set up a meeting? We need a plan to use to go in and grab the freighter.”

“Make it in an hour, in a room just off the CIC.”

“Be four of us. We’re looking to hit the freighter an hour after first dark.”

“Sooner the better. We don’t know what she’s doing there or when she might move.”

The meeting went quickly. Murdock outlined the plan
to use the choppers to take them within ten miles of the freighter. “Then we’d go the rest of the way by the IBS. You do have a pair of IBS craft in your fleet, don’t you?”

“I’ll check,” a captain who wasn’t introduced said. “We usually have a dozen. After you get to her, you go up the sides and take down the pirates?”

“Yes, sir. We’ve done this type of attack more than a dozen times under fire. We’ve only had to back down once, when they saw us coming and sprayed us with machine-gun fire.”

“You don’t expect any heavy weapons on this boat?” the CAG asked.

“No, sir. It would have been hard to get them on board in Honolulu or on the atoll.”

“So you’ll need two Sixties stripped down, one for each squad,” Captain Olenowski said.

“Yes, sir,” Gardner said. “The distance should be no problem. The Sixties have plenty of range.”

“We’ll get to her well before dark,” the CAG said. “We’ll stand off twenty miles and be ready to give any assistance.”

“Might be a good idea to have a pair of Tomcats with a full load of twenty-millimeter rounds flying CAP, just in case we need them,” Murdock suggested.

“You’ve got them,” Captain Olenowski said. “Let’s set up the takeoff time. Your men need any supplies, ammo, weapons?”

“We’re combat loaded at the moment. Depending on the action here, we’ll be looking for some ammo later.”

“Take off at twenty-two hundred, Commander?”

“Fine. We’ll be ready.”

On board the
Willowwind

Jomo Shigahara scowled at the engineering officer. “You mean he hasn’t got it fixed yet? You said it would be an hour and that was three hours ago.”

“The program Schafer put in nearly worked, but the virus was worse than he figured. He says another hour and he should have it.”

“If he doesn’t, I’m going to cut off the little finger on his right hand. You tell the bastard that. Also, if it isn’t done in an hour, he doesn’t get the other five thousand dollars. Go tell him.”

Shigahara watched the engineering officer leave the bridge. So far this was not going the way he had hoped it would. He turned as one of his men came up. He’d been on the radio.

“Message just came in, Captain,” Socha said.

“Better be good news.”

“You’ll like it,” Socha said and handed him a sheet of paper. Shigahara read it and grinned.

“Yes, good news. Get that middle hatch open and warm up the crane. We’re back in business. Glad you recovered, Socha.”

They watched from the big ship as men at the far side of the lagoon took camouflage off a boat. She was a sixty-footer and looked fast to Shigahara. The men backed her out of the small concealed dock and worked her gently out through the coral heads in a channel that couldn’t have been more than thirty feet wide.

The boat came alongside and hailed them. The crew put down a rope ladder and a man swung off the small boat, grabbed the ladder between swells, and climbed on board. The visitor was short and tough looking. A Micronesian with soft brown skin, black hair, and piercing dark eyes. He wore shorts and no shirt.

“You were supposed to be gone from here. You’re not, so the plans have been changed. We’ll take one package now. Get it over the side and into our boat. I’ll have a briefcase roped up as soon as the package is on board.”

“You know how heavy this package is?”

“I’ve heard. Two hundred pounds of plutonium inside a lead tank that weighs over a thousand pounds. Yes, my boat can handle it. A crane also will move it at the destination.”

The two men watched the onboard crane move the hatch covers, then lower its cables into the hold. A few moments later the hooks had been attached to the rings
on the sturdy box surrounding the plutonium.

One of Shigahara’s men ran the crane. He was an expert. They didn’t want the package dropped into the ocean or dumped on deck and the lead tank smashed open. Shigahara felt sweat beading his forehead as the large wooden crate came out of the hold, swung over the side, and began to descend into the ship bobbing on the waves below. Two men on the ship guided the box into a cushion of Styrofoam that flattened as the full weight came on it. They had a moment when the case almost tilted the wrong way, then it swung into place on the open deck of the ship and was quickly lashed down with cables and heavy ropes.

Shigahara had one of his men let down a quarter-inch line and below one man tied the rope to a briefcase and signaled. The deckhand pulled up the briefcase and gave it to Shigahara.

“Look inside,” the native man said. “No misunderstandings, no problems. There it is—three million in cash, all one-hundred-dollar bills. As soon as we are safely away from the island, we’ll radio that we have made the transfer and your people will receive the electronic transfer of twelve million dollars. Agreed?”

The short man held out his hand. Shigahara shook it and watched the native ease over the rail and go down the rope ladder like it was a walk in the park. At the bottom he waited for the swell to bring the boat within two feet of the side of the freighter, then he dropped three feet to the deck and let go of the rope ladder. At once the boat turned and worked its way past the big ship and around the coral. It didn’t return to the small lagoon, rather it headed away from it. From here it could go anywhere. Shigahara guessed that this one would go to Majuro. The airport there was large enough to land a transport needed to lift the heavy package into the air. Shigahara touched the hundred-dollar bills, then grabbed a handful. This was his first partial payment. He was a fucking millionaire. A huge smile flooded over his face and he closed the briefcase and hurried back to the bridge.
He had to find a good hiding place for it. He was certain that any one of his four fellow hijackers would kill him for the money if he thought he could get away from the boat and back to civilization. Shigahara wouldn’t give them the chance.

On board the
Carl Vinson CVN 70

Captain Olenowski took the message from the Hawkeye and closed his eyes for a minute. Then he called Murdock.

“Better come down to CIC right away. We’ve had a breakout. A small boat has just taken a package off the
Willowwind
and is heading south, the Hawkeye tells us. Might be going to Majuro. Bring Don Stroh with you. We’ve got new problems.”

Murdock and Jaybird came into the CIC four minutes later. Don Stroh wasn’t in his cabin, but two sailors tracked him down and he came in puffing.

“I’m getting too old for all this fun,” he said. “I hear we have a breakout of one of the packages?”

“We can’t be sure, but the small boat was alongside the freighter for about twenty minutes,” the CAG said. “The Hawkeye said their radar showed something being off-loaded. Now the boat is moving south, heading in the direction of Majuro.”

“Where there is a large-sized airport with planes big enough to hoist one of those lead bottles into the air,” Murdock said.

“Stop him,” Stroh said.

“We can’t shoot him out of the water,” Olenowski said. “That would dump the plutonium into the ocean and could cause a horrendous dead zone.”

“Shoot the twenty-millimeter in front of him and order him to stop,” Stroh said.

“If he has the plutonium, the man in the boat knows that we won’t sink him, so a bluff over his bow wouldn’t stop him,” Murdock said.

“Why not shoot off his rudder with those twenty-millimeter rounds?” Stroh asked.

“Possible, but at nine hundred miles an hour there’s no
guarantee of pinpoint accuracy from the Tomcat’s guns,” the CAG said. “We might end up sinking him. Not an option.”

“Send out a chopper and four of us will rope down on his deck and take over the boat,” Jaybird said. “We can spray the cabin with MP-5 automatic fire on our way down and not endanger the cargo.”

The CAG looked at Murdock, who nodded. “We can do it. Leave two men in the chopper door to give covering fire as we go down. Swing us on board and we drop off the ropes and take over.”

The CAG looked at a paper. “He’s making eighteen knots. Take him a long time to get to Majuro, over five hundred miles away.”

“I’ve been checking with the office,” Stroh said. “Twenty-five of these atolls in the Marshalls have airfields. Don’t know how big any of them are. Most of them are probably for small private planes. What’s the closest atoll to the one he left?”

The CAG looked at one of his men at the maps.

“That would be Bikar, sir. She’s about a hundred and eighty miles southeast from Sibylla.”

The Navy captain looked at Murdock, then at Stroh. “Sounds like the best plan. We’ll send two Sixties. You can have cover-fire men in one, your ropers in the other. We have some two-inch line which should be like the ones that you use.”

“Sounds like they should work,” Murdock said. “Let’s get mounted up. We should be taking off in the birds in thirty minutes.”

“I’ll get somebody to find the ropes and give them to you at the choppers,” the CAG said.

Murdock and Jaybird trotted back to the compartment. On the way Jaybird asked the question. “Who’s on the ropes?”

“You, me, Bradford, and Ching. Put our snipers in the other bird—Claymore, Canzoneri, and Fernandez—all shooting out one door as the bird circles the boat.”

…

Twenty minutes later the SEALs were on board the two choppers waiting on the flight deck. The heavy ropes had been found and one end was wired tightly to the top of each of the chopper door posts. They were fifty feet long and neatly coiled so they could be kicked out at a moment’s notice.

The four SEALs on the ropes all had H & K MP-5 submachine guns strapped on their backs with plastic tubing. One yank and they’d be ready to use. The four SEALs had heavy gloves designed to act as brakes as the men slid down the heavy rope.