Seal Team Seven (7 page)

“Outa my way, Chief!” Doc Ellsworth was there, shoving him aside. Roselli didn't want to leave. “Damn it, Chief, out of the way! I've got him!”

Turning, Roselli stared up at the control tower. The large, slanted windows had been blown out, and one side looked as though a giant had taken a hungry bite out of it. “Two-IC!” he yelled over the tactical channel. “This is Roselli!”

“DeWitt here,” he heard. “Go ahead.”

“The L-T's down! Damn it, I thought you said that fuckin' tower was fuckin'
clear
!
”

“Okay, Razor. Chill out.” He heard a click as DeWitt changed channels. “Platoon, this is Two-IC. The Lieutenant's down. I've got command. Acknowledge!”

“I hear you,” MacKenzie's voice replied. “Blue copies.”

“Acknowledged, Lieutenant,” Chief Kosciuszko's voice added. “Gold copies!”

The man Cotter had knocked down was sitting up nearby, cradling his arm and rocking back and forth. “I'm hit! I'm hit! God, I'm hit!”

Roselli crouched beside him. It looked like a round had punched through the guy's safari jacket sleeve, bloodying his arm. A graze, nothing more. “You'll live,” he said bluntly. “Hold still.” He popped open one of his pouches, pulled out a roll of gauze, and quickly wrapped the man's arm.

“My attaché case. Where's my attaché case?”

Roselli retrieved it. “Here. Now get the fuck back with the rest of your people.”

“But—”

“
Move
it, you numb-nuts dumb-ass son of a bitch!” The UN man blinked at him in shock, then scrambled away, clutching his briefcase to his chest. Roselli turned back to Ellsworth.

“How's the L-T, Doc? Just a shoulder, right?”

“Shut up, Razor.” Something in his voice, the intensity of his expression as he lifted Cotter's arm and probed his side with bloody fingers, told Roselli that it was more than a flesh wound. He could see the blood welling up beneath the Lieutenant's bullet-proof vest, coming through the vest's armhole just beneath his arm. Ellsworth started packing the space with whole rolls of gauze.

Cotter's head rolled to one side. “Doc . . .”

“You lay still, Skipper. You took a round in the side.”

“Can't . . . feel m'legs.”

“Shit.” Ellsworth looked at Roselli. “Damn it, Razor, make yourself useful! Get me a Stokes from the helo!”

“Right, Doc.”

The UN people had finished off-loading the cardboard boxes from the two Land Rovers onto the first Sea Stallion, then pulled back as the pilot fed power to the rotors and lifted from the tarmac with shrill thunder. Seconds later, the number-two Sea Stallion touched down in the beacon-lit spot evacuated by the first. As the crew chief lowered the rear ramp, Roselli ran up and jumped aboard. “We got a man down!” he yelled. “Gimme a Stokes!”

The crew chief pulled a Stokes stretcher off the bulkhead, a lightweight, open coffin-shape of wire mesh and white canvas straps used for transporting wounded. Roselli carried it back to Ellsworth on the double, then helped the corpsman gently lift Cotter into the basket.

“He took a round right through the armhole in his vest,” Ellsworth said as they strapped him down securely. He spoke rapidly, and Roselli had the impression that he wasn't even speaking directly to him. “Collapsed his right lung and I think it went out through his spine! Damned, damned bad luck the Kevlar didn't catch it! Shit! Shit! Friggin' blood loss. Did it nick the post-caval? Gotta get him BVEs, stat.” Doc looked up at Roselli suddenly. “C'mon! Help me with him. Easy now.”

Wildly, fragments of first-aid training flitted through Roselli's mind.
Don't move a victim with a back injury!
Except when leaving him where he was would be more dangerous.

The second Sea Stallion was loading now, the rescued UN inspectors and Hercules crewmen filing aboard between two SEALs standing guard. Among them, Roselli glimpsed the man Cotter had saved, marked by the white bandages on his arm, his briefcase clutched to his chest like a shield. Good riddance to the bastard. If the L-T hadn't been trying to save his ass . . .

Commands crackled over Roselli's radio, but none included his call sign and he ignored them. The SEAL platoon was starting to pull back from the airport buildings. The Sea Stallion was loaded, its ramp closing like the jaw of some gape-mouthed fish. The helo rose from the tarmac in a whirlwind of noise and dust, then swung low across the runway, angling toward the west and vanishing into night. One of the SuperCobras paced it.

Ellsworth and Roselli positioned themselves on either side of Cotter's Stokes, grabbed the carry straps, and lugged him toward the LZ where the third transport chopper was just touching down. Together, with an assist from the Marine crew chief, they hoisted him onto the Sea Stallion before the rear ramp was all the way down, then scrambled aboard themselves. Two by two, the rest of the SEALs followed. Three savage explosions ripped through the night as the trucks parked next to the terminal exploded one after the other. Garcia and Frazier, Gold Squad's demo man, had been busy setting charges while the rest of the SEALs covered the perimeter.

That perimeter was shrinking now as more and more of the SEALs climbed up the Sea Stallion's ramp. MacKenzie and Lieutenant j.g. DeWitt were the last two men aboard.

“Let's go!” DeWitt yelled, holding his microphone to his lips, making a circling motion with his free hand. “All aboard! Haul ass!”

With a roar, the Sea Stallion lifted into the night sky, turning toward the west. As Roselli stared out the still-open rear doors, he watched the C-130 parked in front of the Shuaba terminal, kept watching as the Hercules crumpled, an orange flower blossoming from the root of its port wing. Then the fuel tanks touched off, and in seconds the UN C-130 was a single sheet of flame, its fuselage and wings a wire-work skeleton half glimpsed through the raging, hungry blaze. Smaller explosions took out the two Land Rovers an instant later, tearing out their guts and scattering smoking bits of engine across the runway. When the Iraqis returned with the dawn to reclaim their airport, they would find not one vehicle, not one piece of American equipment left behind intact for them to claim as spoils of war. With a whine, the ramp slid up and the rear doors clamped shut, cutting off Roselli's view of Shuaba.

He turned back to Ellsworth, who was still working on the L-T. The Stokes was lying in the center of the chopper's cargo deck, and a clear plastic oxygen mask had been strapped over Cotter's paint-blacked face. There were bubbles of blood clustered around the Lieutenant's nostrils, and more blood at the corner of his mouth. His breathing beneath the mask was rasping and labored, audible even over the roar of the Sea Stallion's rotors. MacKenzie was kneeling beside the Stokes, holding a plastic bottle filled with clear liquid aloft as the Doc threaded a thick needle into a vein in Cotter's left inside elbow. The other SEALs of Third Platoon, along with the helo's Marine crew chief, watched from a circle about the tableau, impassive. They all knew that if Doc couldn't save the Skipper, nobody could.

“Shit,” Doc said, rocking back on his heels. His arms were bloody, clear to his elbows. He pried up one of Cotter's eyelids, staring at the pupil. “How long to Kuwait?”

“It's almost a hundred miles to Kuwait City,” the Marine crew chief said. “Call it thirty minutes.”

“Shit, shit,
shit
!” Doc started unzipping and unhooking the L-T's combat gear and discarding it on the helo's deck, using a pair of blunt-tipped bandage scissors to cut away his fatigue shirt. Roselli helped, as MacKenzie continued to hold the IV bottle in the air. By the light of the helo's battle lanterns, the L-T's skin looked death-pale where it wasn't crusted with blood.

Roselli felt a creeping, nightmare presentiment. He'd seen death before.

He'd had been in the Navy for twelve years and in the Teams for seven. His first time under fire had been in Panama, where he'd been wounded in the assault at Paitilla Airfield. Four of his squad mates had been the very first American fatalities of Operation Just Cause, four good friends killed in a clusterfuck where elite SEALs had been thrown like cannon fodder against barricaded defenders with machine guns, then ordered to hold the position all night for reinforcements that were late in arriving.

The bond between members of a SEAL platoon is close, closer than any other human relationship Roselli could imagine. Though he wasn't married, he knew SEALs who were . . . and to a man they seemed to value the camaraderie of their fellow SEALs and swim buddies more than they did their own wives.

Thinking of wives reminded Roselli of Donna, Cotter's wife. And they had a kid. Oh, damn . . .
damn!

Cotter awoke, aware of faces bending over him, fuzzy against the glare of lights. Pain . . . he felt pain . . . but it wasn't as bad as he'd thought it would be. Funny, he couldn't feel a thing below his diaphragm.

“Where? . . .”

Was that Doc's face peering down into his? Hard to tell. “We're aboard the helo, L-T,” Doc's voice said. “You just rest easy.”

“The . . . men?” It was hard to speak, hard to make himself heard. Each breath was a small agony, and he wasn't sure Doc could hear above the background roar of the rotors.

Doc's face dipped lower, turning. “What was that, sir?”

“The . . . the men. Get them . . . out. . . . ”

“Everybody got out, Skipper. You're the only one who stopped a bullet. Why the friggin' hell didn't you duck?” Doc's voice was light, bantering, but Cotter could hear the tightness behind the words. “Damn it, what kind of example is that for you to set for your men?”

“Mission? . . .”

“All three helos made it out, Skipper. Everybody made it out. Mission complete. Now shut the hell up and let me work. You've got a hole in your side and you're losing blood. Understand me? Skipper? Do you hear me?”

Cotter heard, though the faces and lights had blurred to a soft and indistinguishable white haze. Was he dying? His thoughts touched lightly on Donna and Vickie, but they slipped away. Somehow, he couldn't hold onto the memory of their faces, and that raised a small stab of guilt. He tried to draw a breath, bracing against the pain . . . but nothing would come. He tasted blood, hot and thick and choking, weighing down his throat and chest. Couldn't breathe. . . .

His boys were all out safe. That was good. And the mission a success . . . what had it been? He tried to think, couldn't remember. Oh, yeah. Training mission, working with the Marines at Vieques, the big island east of Puerto Rico. It was nice there, a tropical paradise. Sunny beaches. Warm water. He loved Puerto Rico. Training session. How had he been hurt? Accidents happened, even in training . . . especially in SEAL training.

Goddamn, he was proud of his boys, every one of them. The best warriors, the best men in the whole God damned world.

The white haze was turning dark around the outside, like a tunnel. Funny. He couldn't even remember Donna's face, but he could see the SEALs he'd worked with and commanded over the years, every one of them, like they were right there with him.

“Proud . . . of . . . you,” he said.

Damn
he was proud of his boys. . . .

“Lieutenant!” Ellsworth was kneeling over the Stokes, both hands on the center of Cotter's chest, pumping down on a heart that stubbornly refused to beat. “God damn it, don't you die on me! Lieutenant!”

Roselli, at the L-T's head, had pulled off the O
₂
mask at Doc's instructions and was holding an AMBU mask over Cotter's bloody nose and mouth, squeezing the inflated bag to ventilate the Skipper's lungs.

Doc kept pumping at the Skipper's chest. “L-T! SEALs don't quit! They don't know
how
to quit! They're too
stupid
to quit! Lieutenant!”

At last, though, Ellsworth slumped back on his haunches, a stricken look on his face. “Goddamnit,” he said, his voice empty. “God damn it to
hell
!”

“You did what you could, Doc,” MacKenzie said.

Roselli stared at the L-T's face, stunned. The Lieutenant
couldn't
be dead . . . he couldn't!

Abruptly, Ellsworth shook off Mac's hand and resumed pumping at Cotter's heart, but Roselli already knew it was too late. They would keep working at him until they got him aboard a medevac at K-City, but it wasn't going to do one damned bit of good.

The Skipper was dead.
Dead.
Blown away by some half-assed rag-head who probably barely knew one end of a rifle from the other.

Roselli felt like he wanted to cry.

It was an informal hearing, though the two naval officers and one senior enlisted man sitting at the panel flanked by the U.S. and U.S. Navy flags gave the proceedings the air of a court-martial. Captain Coburn sat at the folding table between his Exec, Commander Monroe, and Senior Chief Hawkins. Morning sunlight filtered through the venetian blinds drawn over the windows. Chief Roselli stood in front of them at parade rest, feet braced apart and hands behind his back, but otherwise as rigid as if he'd been at attention.

“But when Lieutenant Cotter was hit,” Coburn said, “it was your impression that the terminal building had already been cleared, was it not, Chief?”

“I don't know, sir. Things were kind of confused there for a bit.”