Seal Team Seven #19: Field of Fire (13 page)

Murdock hung up the handset and slammed his palm into the ground.

“He did it again,” Jaybird said.

“Big time. Wait until I get my hands on him.” Murdock looked over to where Barbara sat. “Bradford, take a look at the lady’s shoulder. Do anything for it you can. Rob the other first-aid packets.”

“So we wait?” Lam said.

“Yeah, we wait. We have six hours to dark. We better find some kind of cover. Lam, check out that line of brush over there and see if it’s thick enough to hide us. Some of the natives might be wondering why seven people are suddenly in one of their fields.”

Lam came back in ten minutes with an affirmative and the SEALs and Barbara moved as inconspicuously as possible to the brush and pushed into it. There had been a small stream there but evidently it ran only during a rainy season.

“Get as comfortable as possible,” Murdock told the group. “I’m on first guard duty, the rest of you can flake out, sleep, or play tiddlywinks. Quiet is the byword.” Murdock moved to the front of the brush and built himself a small OP, where he could see out but nobody out there could see him. He watched the road, and two buildings about half a mile away. He saw no one. Good. Murdock settled down to a two-hour stint of guard duty.

Five Miles at Sea

Off Haifa, Israel

Captain Hassan Khadar did not like boats or the Mediter-ranean Sea. He was halfway seasick in the chugging small diesel boat that moved ever closer to the hated land of Israel. He had a job to do and he swore on his own grave that he would do it or die trying. He twisted his bearded face as he remembered that General Diar said that dying wasn’t enough. He must complete his mission, then if he died it wouldn’t matter. He judged the coastline barely visible through the early morning mists. It was 0540 and
not yet fully light. Still twenty minutes before the event was supposed to take place. He went to the stern of the small boat and signaled for the pilot to stop. He and a crewman pushed into the water a small rubber boat with an outboard engine. Securely tied on top of it was a six-foot-long device that the general had called the super bomb.

“Don’t worry, it won’t kill you even up close,” General Diar told him. “Just put the rubber boat in the water. The engine is set to aim the craft at the coast. Start the engine and head it on its way. Then at precisely oh-six-hundred push both red buttons on this small black box.”

Captain Khadar remembered the instructions. He made sure the six-foot-long cylinder was tied firmly to the rubber boat; then he started the engine and pushed it toward shore. It angled slightly forward, picked up on the morning tidal flow, and sailed toward the Israeli shore and the city of Haifa.

Captain Khadar waited, checking his watch. They followed the small craft shoreward. Now they were less than four miles from the coast. Soon the Israeli patrol boats would be working the area just off shore. The mists lifted and they saw the rubber boat ahead of them a quarter of a mile.

“It’s oh-six-hundred,” the boatman said.

Khadar jumped, checked his watch, took out the black box, and rested his thumbs on both red buttons. The pilot of the small diesel boat nodded. He had been given a thousand pounds to make this trip. It had to be successful.

Captain Khadar took a deep breath, watched the rubber boat hypnotically, and pushed both the red buttons. Ahead there was a sharp crack like a lightning strike. The rubber boat and the aluminum cylinder vanished in a small explosion. That was it.

Khadar looked at the boatman. “Is that all there is to it?” he asked. The sailor shook his head. The pilot of the small diesel-powered boat grinned, turned the craft north, and pushed the throttles to full. He wanted to get away from Israeli territorial waters as soon as he could.

* * *

In the city of Haifa, the early morning streetlights sputtered and then went out. The radio stations and the four television stations cracked and zapped and went off the air. Every traffic signal in a distance forty-five miles inland went blind. Thousands of cars on the highways and streets around Haifa and the entire northern part of Israel sputtered and died. Drivers ground the starters but the engines would not start.

A British Airways passenger liner, about to land at the Haifa airport, suddenly lost power fifty feet from the runway and came down hard. It fell fifty feet to the tarmac, smashing the landing gear and sending the big plane into a ground loop that tore off one wing and engulfed the whole craft in a jet fuel-fed inferno.

Two Israeli jets flying CAP over Haifa at twenty thousand feet suddenly lost all radio contact with the ground and with each other. Both craft flamed out as all electronic components on them failed in a smoking mass. With little lift in their short stubby wings, the planes dropped toward the ground with a hard-won glide path that topped out at forty percent. The pilots tried to restart their engines, but nothing worked. Not even the altimeter functioned, and the pilots desperately made their last move. They hugged their arms to their sides and pulled the ejection handle. The shotgun-shell-like devices exploded, which set off the solid fuel rockets that blasted the ejection seats high away from the doomed F-14 Tomcat fighters. The parachutes opened and the pilots drifted down toward Israel having no idea why their planes failed.

All over the city of Haifa and the surrounding forty-five miles inland, all telephone service failed, more than half of the electrical transmission lines were shorted out or had become masses of melted wiring. Every computer in the whole area was blown out of operation, many melting down from the cabinet to the mother boards.

Police were shocked and impotent. Gradually they found a half dozen diesel-powered cars that worked, but the streets were jammed with gasoline cars with electronic ignitions that wouldn’t budge.

The police helicopters were all out of service. One news
reporting helicopter had been zapped in flight and the pilot and reporter had plunged over a thousand feet into a rest home, killing the flyers and six elderly residents.

At the Rahat Air Base just outside of Haifa, the lock-down from the previous night was forgotten as the base radio network fried in an instant and every radio and computer on the base was rendered useless. The base commander used runners to summon his top officers and they talked about the problem. A skinny young second lieutenant, usually teased as being an egghead, lifted his hand.

“General, sir. I think I know what happened here.” The rest of the officers looked at him astonished.

“What, Lieutenant Baran? What has happened?”

“We’ve been hit with an EMP bomb. An electromagnetic pulse bomb of some kind. I’ve been researching them and some say they are simple and cheap to build. They spit out a stream of gamma rays that upon striking the oxygen and nitrogen in the atmosphere release a tsunami of electrons that can spread for a hundred miles. They will blow out every electronic device within the diameter of the effect.”

General Menuhin scowled. “I’ve heard of the theory. Has it happened here?”

“It looks like it, General. We have no radio, no computers, no ignitions on our autos, no telephone, no radios. Nothing electronic works.”

“Everything, Baran?”

“Well, most nonelectronic diesel engines still work. That would be diesel trucks and cars.”

“Even if we have any, they can’t get through traffic that is clogged all over the metro area,” General Menuhin said.

“Sir, some ATVs-those four-wheel-drive recreation vehicles-are diesel. They could drive on sidewalks, around the traffic. If we sent out a dozen of them to out-lying bases and had them dig up all the diesel trucks and pickups and cars they could find, we could have enough perhaps to establish some kind of a messenger service between the military bases.”

“Right.” The general pointed to two aids. “You and
you, go with Baran here and get this into motion. Do it now. We could have an invasion at any moment. Why disable us if somebody didn’t want to invade us? We have no air power in this area. No way to tell the rest of the military our problem. Baran, send the first diesel car you find racing south to the nearest telephone that works, or the nearest base with a radio, and inform our main defense headquarters in Tel Aviv of our problem. That has to be first. Get moving on it.”

In one of the officers’ quarters, Don Stroh broke out his SATCOM and aimed the antenna through a window where the satellite should be. When he plugged the antenna wire into the socket on the set, he noticed that the whole black box was warm to the touch. All the switches were off. He frowned, then turned on the three basic switches. No green lights showed. Nothing happened. He jiggled them, then felt the set again. It was too warm. Something had happened to his SATCOM. Now how was he going to get in touch with Murdock? He frowned. The pilots who flew him in knew where he was. All they had to do was fly in there after the eight o’clock end of the lockdown. Yes, that would work. He went into the bathroom and flipped on the light switch. No light came on. He tried the switches in the rest of the three rooms. Nothing. Must have blown a fuse. He plugged in his electric razor, but it wouldn’t work.

Stroh dressed and hurried out the door and toward the headquarters building. He saw men running all over. A dozen more rode bicycles. He didn’t see a car or truck in motion anywhere. At the first street he saw six cars with their hoods up and curious drivers trying to figure out why they’d stopped. The farther he ran the more one fact piled upon another. No lights, no engines running, no radio. Haifa had been hit with a EMP bomb. If it were true, Murdock and friends would have to find their own way out of Syria. Nobody from this part of Israel was going to be able to help them for several days, maybe weeks.

Nawa, Syria

Murdock had taken his turn at guard around the sleeping band of SEALs and the CIA agent Barbara. Several of the men had given extra shirts they had in their packs to serve as blankets and a pillow for her. It was a chilly but uneventful night. Murdock had feared that the Syrian army would spread out through the area searching for any-one who didn’t belong there.

He let the men sleep in after his six o’clock stint was over. By eight that morning he would call Stroh and the emergency would be over at the airfield in Haifa and their chopper would be on the way moments later. Then well before noon they should be back in their quarters in Haifa and Barbara well taken care of at the base hospital.

They hadn’t planned on a long trip. Some of the men routinely carried energy bars with them. That would have to be enough for breakfast. He checked Barbara. She was sleeping under a half dozen shirts. He had given her a shot of morphine when she woke up about three
A.M.

He went to his lookout nest and checked the surrounding area. No movement. He neither saw nor heard any vehicles. Just a quiet rural area that he hoped would stay that way.

By 0800 the sun was up and warmly greeting them. Murdock roused Bradford and had him set up the SATCOM. When it was ready Murdock took the handset and made the call.

“Golden Boy, this is grounded, do you read me?”

He let up on the transmit button and waited. There was
no response. He made the call four times. A frown crept over Murdock’s face. What in hell was going on? Stroh promised on a stack of promotion papers that he would be there at 0800. He couldn’t have slept in.

Twice more Murdock turned on the set and made the call to Stroh in Haifa. Nothing. Maybe the SATCOM was broken or the frequency had been jolted off. He had Bradford check.

“Frequency shows it’s right on the button,” Bradford said. “Maybe we should try another frequency to make sure that we’re transmitting.”

“Pick a frequency.”

“Go.”

“C Q, C Q. This is Murdock in trouble making a confirmation call that I’m transmitting. Can anyone receive me? Please respond. Over.”

They heard some static and a faint call but couldn’t understand it. Murdock made the call again. This time the answer came back quick and strong.

“Murdock, you are transmitting. You are encrypted. This is Company One. You didn’t hear what happened?”

“Company One, I haven’t heard anything. We’re at Nawa where we’re supposed to be. Where is our chopper?”

“At oh-six-hundred your time, Haifa was hit by an EMP bomb. All of the communications and electronics within a fifty-mile radius of Haifa have been knocked out. No radio, no phones, no aircraft can fly. Israel expects a land attack to follow the pulse bomb. Their military has no communications. We can expect no help from Israel in getting you out of there.”

“So do we walk?”

“Hold on, we have some assets in the area. Let me check. I’ll get back to you on this frequency. Don’t change it. Out.”

“So what the hell is a pulse bomb?” Bradford asked.

“New. It kills nothing, just knocks out all electronics. That’s computers, telephone, radio, everything that has electronics in it including auto engines, fighters, airliners, even navy navigation and gun sighting equipment.”

“Didn’t hit our radio,” Bradford said.

“Then we must be more than fifty miles from Haifa. As I remember the pilot said we were about sixty miles from his air base.”

Jaybird had come up and listened. “So what the fuck are we supposed to do now, climb the Golan Heights, then swim the Sea of Galilee and hike on into Haifa?”

“Probably. Get everyone up and ready. We may have to move out of here to a better defensive position.”

“Company One calling Murdock.”

He grabbed the mike and responded.

“Yes, we have the guided missile cruiser
Shiloh
about fifty miles off Lebanon. They have no electronic problems so evidently they were outside the range of the pulse. They have two SH-60B Seahawks on board and are well within range of your position. I’ve talked to the
Shiloh
’s skipper and the bird will be taking off in fifteen. After that you can contact him on TAC 4. Nawa, a village almost due east of Haifa and across from the Golan Heights. Correct?”

“Yes, not more than ten miles from the Heights.”