Direct Action (2 page)

Since the military coup of June 1989, the Sudan had been ruled by a radical Islamic regime that opened its arms to every terrorist group in the region: the fundamentalists trying to overthrow the Egyptian government, the Islamic militants who had learned their trade fighting the Russians in Afghanistan and now worked against their home countries, Palestinian extremists opposed to any peace with Israel. Even the bombers of the World Trade Center in New York City had Sudanese links.

At Erkowit, sixty miles south of Port Sudan in the picturesque Red Sea hills, the Sudanese Government had taken over a luxury resort hotel and converted it to a terrorist training camp/rest center.

Israeli intelligence had picked up word that a four-man terrorist cell had finished training and was on its way to a bombing campaign against American targets in Europe. The cell was staying at a safe house on the Port Sudan waterfront,
waiting for the merchant ship that would take it out of the country. The Israeli Mossad had passed the information on to the CIA through normal liaison.

As he started to run up against the rocky bottom of the Port Sudan waterfront, Murdock took another GPS shot with the Mugger. He and Higgins were right on the button. Murdock headed for the surface, very slowly, since the microorganisms found in all tropical waters became phosphorescent when agitated. Not that any microorganisms could have survived the Port Sudan harbor muck anyway.

Murdock broke the surface, just for an instant. The nighttime air temperature was around ninety degrees. The water
smelled
like shit too. The target was directly in front of him, a two-story waterfront villa that dated back to the colonial period, when the British established Port Sudan to export cotton, sorghum, and sesame. The Sudan now had friendly relations only with the other outlaw states of the world, and even though the port was the country’s only import and export window to the world, international political isolation and economic mismanagement had slowed trade to a trickle.

The villa, once the showcase home of a managing director, was crumbling along with the rest of the city. It had once been white, and was now gray and peeling. The villa’s address was the Sharia Kabhashi Eissa, the waterfront road. The harbor was a perfect avenue of approach for Navy SEALs, but Murdock guessed that the terrorists weren’t very concerned. The West had always been reactive, moving only after a terrorist outrage occurred. Having the chance to finally do something proactive was making Murdock’s palms itch.

From the water, the rocky shore of the harbor swept up to a ten-foot-high seawall and the lawn of the villa behind it. A simple stone stairway provided access from the shore to the lawn. It met an ornate stone balustrade, about three feet high, which acted like a fence between the lawn and the seawall. The
balustrade tied into a seven-foot-high solid stone wall which boxed in the other three sides of the grounds.

The Israeli Mossad had prepared a target folder on the house in case their SEAL-equivalent Ha’Kommando Ha’Yami, or Naval Commandos, ever needed to make a nighttime visit. Just as well, from Murdock’s point of view, since the Israelis excelled in Special Operations intelligence, and the CIA did not.

According to the folder the stone stairway from the shore to the lawn was both alarmed and booby-trapped. A Kalashnikov-armed guard patrolled the lawn and balustrade, and another guard was stationed on a second-floor balcony that overlooked the lawn. The only way to enter the house from the lawn was through an inch-thick cast-iron door, always locked. The windows were covered with iron security grates and shut tight, except for the old and overworked air conditioners that rattled away in a few of them. The grounds were well lighted. The guards were not equipped with night-vision equipment, and if they had once been good, they were now casual and sloppy after endless days of unchanging routine.

Murdock had taken all that into account in his planning. Also the fact that in the tropics people did their living in the relative cool of the evening and their sleeping during the hot times of the day. The terrorists were no exception.

“They practically never sleep,” the CIA briefer had told him. “There’s always a couple of them up shooting the shit or screwing around.”

Murdock obviously couldn’t attack in the daytime. But he could during those golden hours between 1:00 and 5:00
AM
when the human brain was always at its worst.

He was going to go in fast and hard, and had picked his weapons accordingly. Normally in an enclosed-house and close-quarters battle situation such as this, the weapon of choice would be the German Heckler & Koch MP-5 9mm submachine gun—in this case the MP-5SD4 with an integral
sound suppressor. The model was customized for the Navy SEALs, with special stock, handgrip, safety, and tritium dots on the sights for night and low-light shooting. But the problem with the MP-5 was that the sound suppressor took a lot of velocity off the round. The effective range was less than fifty meters, and sometimes the rounds would even bounce off a car windshield. Even the non-suppressed MP-5 wasn’t much good past 150 meters.

In a house that wasn’t a problem, and the low-powered 9mm pistol round was ideal since it wouldn’t be punching through any walls and hitting any good guys. But if things went sour, you were at a disadvantage. The SEALs of Team Six discovered this while assaulting the Governor General’s mansion during the invasion of Grenada. They were quickly surrounded by enemy troops who had a great time shooting up the mansion with assault rifles and heavy machine guns. The majority of the SEALs, who were armed with MP-5’s, couldn’t shoot back because the enemy was too far away for their submachine guns to reach. Only continuous fire support from Air Force AC-130 Spectre gunships kept them from being overrun.

Murdock didn’t have a Spectre or any other support available, so he wasn’t going to make that mistake. The now-standard sixteen-man SEAL platoon could be broken down into two eight-man squads, First and Second. Each squad could be further broken down into two four-man fire teams. Murdock had armed his First Squad and one fire team of the Second, the assault element, with the short, sliding-stock carbine version of the M-16A2, the M-4A1. An older version had been called the CAR-15 in Vietnam. And each weapon had an M203 40mm grenade launcher mounted beneath the barrel. Because he still wanted to keep things quiet, Murdock added the Knight’s Armament Company M-16 sound suppressor, made expressly for the SEALs. It was a stainless-steel tube that screwed onto the flash-hider threads of all M-16-series rifles. It was just eight inches long and one and three-quarter inches in diameter,
self-draining after immersion in water, and unlike other suppressors, capable of handling full automatic fire without any damage or impairment in the noise reduction. The final accessory was the AN/PAQ-4 laser aiming light, which screwed underneath the M-16 carrying handle and projected a fine beam of laser light visible only through night-vision goggles.

What remained of Second Squad, commanded by Lieutenant j.g. Ed DeWitt, was the security and support element. Since they would have to weigh in with heavy firepower in the event of trouble, DeWitt and Chief Petty Officer “Kos” Kosciuszko were armed with the Heckler & Koch HK-21A1 machine gun in 7.62mm NATO. Murdock had taken advantage of his attachment to the CIA to dump his SEAL-standard M-60E3 machine guns. The latest M-60’s were flimsy, and needed to be almost completely rebuilt every ten thousand rounds to maintain their reliability. The HK-21, on the other hand, in use by SEAL Team Six since Grenada, was just as light as the SEAL chopped-barrel M-60. It was the Mercedes-Benz of machine guns. AT-4 antitank rockets and claymore antipersonnel mines completed their armament. The two snipers, Quartermaster 1st Class Martin “Magic” Brown, and Torpedoman’s Mate 2nd Class Red Nicholson, were packing some very special toys.

Each SEAL carried his equipment in a nylon mesh American Body Armor special operations vest. There were six two-magazine pouches across the chest for those armed with M-4’s, and large pouches for the drum-fed belts of the machine gunners. A radio pouch in back held an encrypted Motorola MX-300 walkie-talkie in a waterproof bag, and grenade pouches were on the web belt that secured the bottom part of the vest. Everyone’s backup weapon, the SIG-Sauer P-226 9mm pistol, rested in a strap-down nylon thigh holster.

They wore no body armor, no matter how much anyone would have liked it. You can’t swim in body armor.

Murdock and Higgins moved closer to the shore, and soon the water around them was filled with SEAL swim pairs,
brought to that exact point by their Mugger GPS sets. They linked up with Murdock and then spread out in a line facing the villa.

Finally the last pair checked in, and Murdock’s gut relaxed slightly. Any pair that couldn’t make it to the target by the designated cutoff time was supposed to head back out to sea for pickup. Murdock was glad it hadn’t been necessary. It was a complication his central nervous system didn’t need.

Murdock gave a signal down the line. While still breathing from the Draeger, he and everyone else unstrapped their units, weight belts, and swim fins. If things didn’t go right from the start, they’d have to move very quickly. He checked his dive watch. Murdock had a firm rule against attacking on the hour. A few more minutes and they’d go.

0308 hours

Port Sudan

Murdock signaled the man next to him. Magic Brown, the platoon’s best sniper, crabbed forward until he was almost out of the water. Brown slowly and carefully opened the bolt of his McMillan M89 sniper rifle to allow the water to drain from the barrel and chamber. The M89 was a purpose-built silent sniping rifle, 7.62mm NATO, with a shortened barrel and a fixed, factory-mounted sound suppressor. Firing subsonic ammunition, it was good for a head shot at 150 yards, which was the state of the art for a suppressed sniping rifle. It was about as loud as a Daisy BB gun.

Brown brought the weapon up into a good sitting position, with his elbows braced against his knees. He peered through the Litton M921 3-power starlight scope mounted on the weapon. Another good SEAL piece of gear. With a body made of hard Teflon, it was the only electronic night-vision sight in the world designed to be completely immersible in seawater to a depth of fifty meters.

Murdock was watching through his own Litton waterproof single-tube night-vision goggle. The small single eyepiece
covering only his right eye solved the main problem of night-vision goggles. If you were wearing NVGs and had to take them off for any reason, your night vision was gone for up to half an hour. And if a flare or light went off in front of you while wearing them, you were temporarily blinded by the flash of magnified light. But with one NVG tube on your shooting eye and the other eye clear, you were good to go in any situation.

Through the lime-green scene in Murdock’s NVG, he could see the lawn guard moving toward the balustrade. The guard was looking out at the harbor, though not down below the seawall. Murdock felt as much as heard the muffled pop beside him, and the guard on the second-floor balcony dropped with the spastic twitching that comes from a brain shot.

At the clattering sound of the body and rifle hitting the balcony, the lawn guard spun around to look. There was another pop farther off to Murdock’s right. Red Nicholson had fired his McMillan M89, putting a 7.62mm hollowpoint in the back of the guard’s head. The guard slumped to the grass without a sound. Magic Brown had already worked his bolt and was ready for a follow-up shot. It wasn’t needed. Not that SEALs were overly concerned about such things, but the hollowpoint bullets were perfectly legal. Contrary to popular belief, terrorists, guerrillas, and irregulars were not protected by the Geneva Conventions.

Several more pops came from Nicholson’s vicinity. Red was right in line with the gap between the villa and its neighbor. An electrical transformer stood in full view on a light pole, and Nicholson was quietly shooting the transformer casing full of holes with his McMillan. As the cooling oil leaked out of the transformer, the unit blew with a sizzling crack and haloed flash of blue light. All the lights in the neighborhood went out, everyone hopefully thinking that it was just another Port Sudan power outage.

Even though all the SEALs by now had their walkie-talkies,
earpieces, and microphones on, Murdock hadn’t needed to give any orders. Chief Petty Officer “Kos” Kosciuszko and Lieutenant j.g. Ed DeWitt swept out of the water, dropped their diving rigs on the shore, and began boosting the assault element over the seawall.

First over was Chief Petty Officer Tom Roselli, “Razor” to his friends. No one in the villa fell under that heading. Right behind him was Machinist’s Mate 2nd Class David “Jaybird” Sterling. They sprinted across the lawn directly toward the cast-iron door to the villa. It took them only seconds to apply a cutting charge of lead sheath explosive over each of the hinges of the door. This was a triangular strip of high-velocity explosive sheathed in metal. The point of the triangle focused a shape-charge effect. The sheath blew a linear cut only as wide as a pencil, but deep enough to slice a steel building girder in half. Once the sheaths were on, the SEALs hung air-mattress tubes that they’d filled with seawater over them. These would drastically muffle the sound of the explosions. The final touch was a tiny charge to the bottom of the door to flip it backward out of the way.

Murdock went over the wall right behind Razor and Jaybird. Chief Kosciuszko, who had the same approximate build as a mountain gorilla, almost threw him right over the balustrade. Following up after him were the rest of 1st Squad: Professor Higgins, Hospital Corpsman 2nd Class “Doc” Ellsworth, Minemen 2nd Class Scotty Frazier and Greg Johnson, and Gunner’s Mate 3rd Class Al Adams. Gunner’s Mate First Class Miguel Fernandez, Radioman 1st Class Ron Holt, and Seamen Joe Lampedusa and Ross Lincoln from 2nd Squad were also part of the assault element. There was no confusion or hesitation. After days and nights of intensive rehearsals on a mock-up, with every move choreographed like a Broadway musical, there had better not be.