Seal Team Seven #19: Field of Fire (3 page)

Two SEALs fired the 20mm rifles immediately. They made a different sound than the troops had been used to. Both the first two rounds exploded in airbursts directly over the snag. The next four came close enough for a killing spray of the highly dangerous airburst that showered everything below it with deadly shrapnel.

The men changed places as they finished their rounds, and soon all sixteen men, including the two officers, had taken their shots at the old snag.

“Back in squad order,” Gardner called. “I want a skirmish line by squads. Every other man prone and ready to fire his TO weapon. The men standing will charge forward twenty yards and go prone. As soon as the forward man starts firing, the prone man will come to his feet and surge to his partner and then twenty yards forward. Keep your five yards distance at all times and let’s try not to kill anybody in our platoon this afternoon. Basic fire and cover, advancing on an objective. You men with the twenties, use the 5.56 configuration. Let’s do it. Commander Murdock will hold the far end of the line; I’ll be on this end. Keep your twenty-yard runs as even as possible with the other half of your squad and the other squad. Any questions?”

“What happens if my partner slants out of his lane and gets close to my line of fire?”

“You kill the bastard,” Machinist Mate First Class David “Jaybird” Sterling cracked.

“You do and you carry the body on your back for the next week of training,” Gardner gunned back. Everyone roared. Murdock stood back and watched. So far he had been pleased with the way Gardner had eased into his role as second in the platoon. He was handling it just right. He didn’t have a lot of field experience under fire, but that would be solved soon enough.

Murdock took his position with Alpha Squad, teaming with Lam, who walked right ahead of him in most combat patrol situations. They understood each other, had been in tough firefights more times than they could remember in the past three years. Men with the Bull Pups fired the 5.56 second barrel on the weapon that was located right under the 20mm top tube. Even with the laser sight and the telescopic sight, the Bull Pup was easy to carry and to fire.

Gardner checked the lineup, then fired three rounds from his 5.56 barrel and the men began to fire. In combat they would key on the leader’s weapon. When he fired, they fired. Murdock was prone as Lam rushed ahead for twenty yards. Murdock’s rounds slammed across the windswept, dry mountainous terrain five yards from Lam. When the lead scout hit the deck and began firing, Murdock moved up, went past him twenty yards, and bellied down with his Bull Pup out front spitting the 5.56 rounds forward.

When each man had fired and supported four times, Gardner blew his whistle. He grinned. “Got your attention, right? I won’t use it in a combat situation. But there you’ll have one eye on me or Commander Murdock and get an arm signal to cease fire. Any questions?” There were none. “Okay, you guys. Find a rock and break out your MREs. If you didn’t bring one this morning from the bus, you’re out of luck. We have twenty minutes to chow down. These are the new MREs with the heat pouch, so we can all get a hot meal. Most of them are pretty good. No lima beans or corned beef hash here.”

“What were they?” Hospital Corpsman First Class Jack Mahanani asked.

“During WW two and Korea they had the old C rations that came in cans. Ham and lima beans and corned beef hash were the dogs of the trading table. Beans and franks were the top of the heap. Some guys actually liked the hash. We have eighteen minutes more.”

Murdock heated up his entree in the heat pouch, some kind of chemical combination that produced heat and did away with the little stoves they used to have in C rations.
The new MREs were much better than the old ones. They still had all the small goodies in them such as Tabasco sauce, peanut butter, cocoa powder, cold beverage powder, crackers, salt, sugar, creamer, moist towelette, instant coffee, a matchbook, salt pills, and a plastic spoon. Murdock finished his, stuffed the residue and unopened parts back into his backpack, and watched his second.

JG Gardner stood up on cue and looked around. “We move in two minutes. If I see a scrap of any litter on the deck, there will be a twenty-mile run this afternoon with full field equipment.”

It was one warning the JG didn’t have to make. The platoon had never left a mess in its wake. In combat a scrap from an MRE could be enough to identify them and track them in some foreign country. The President and the chief of naval operations didn’t like that to happen on a covert mission.

They moved into combat patrol formation, two large eight-man diamonds with Lam out in front of the first one as lead scout, Murdock leading Alpha Squad behind him and the JG with his diamond formation a hundred yards behind Murdock’s squad.

They headed generally back toward the bus. After two miles, the JG called that an attack had hit them from their right flank. He ordered the men to swing to the right in a line of skirmishers and go to ground. When the SEALs were in place he fired three rounds to the front, and the fifteen men joined in live firing with their personal weapons. After twenty seconds he called it off with hand signals. Only one man missed the hand signal and he fired two bursts after everyone else stopped.

“So, Signalman Donegan, didn’t you get the signal? Keep one eye on me or on the man beside you. Those two extra bursts might have cut down some friendlies you didn’t even know about.”

“Aye, aye, JG. I got it.”

The JG looked at his watch. “A little after fourteen hundred. We have a demo scheduled at the bus at fourteen-thirty. A mediocre marathon runner can do a
mile in five minutes all day long. We’re how far from the bus?”

“About six miles, JG,” Lam said.

“Close enough. If we did a six-minute mile we could be at the bus nearly on time.”

“Never happen,” Jaybird said. “We’re downhill on loose rock and gravel. If we run we have a high probability of some sprained or broken ankles. I’d opt for an eight-minute mile and come in a little late.”

“Any other bids?” the JG asked.

Nobody spoke up. The JG grinned. “Hell, I was thinking more like a ten-minute pace, but if you really want to hit the eight-minute one …”

He was shouted down and Gardner grinned. “On your feet, single-file patrol formation. Lam in front and set it at ten minutes to the mile. The demo at the bus can wait a half hour, since our very own Commander Murdock is going to be making the presentation.”

Lam fudged a little and moved them out at near a nine-minutes-to-the-mile pace and brought the troops into the bus where they always parked it in just over fifty-one minutes. It was August and the mountain was hot and dry. The area was in a one-hundred-day run without a one-hundredth of an inch or more of rain. The SEALs took off their floppy hats and shrugged out of packs and hit their canteens. There was no water control. If you drank too much and ran out, it was your problem.

Murdock went into the bus and brought back a folding card table and two boxes. He took out of one of them a stack of papers that he anchored on the table with a magazine from his Bull Pup. The second box held a plastic-wrapped item he lay on the table and beside it he put a series of long tube-like devices of different diameters.

“Okay, men, gather round and relax,” Murdock said. “What I have to show you here today, some of you won’t believe. But it is true. What’s the fastest gun in the world?”

“The AK-47 will go six hundred rounds per minute,” Bill Bradford said.

“The M-16 cranks out seven hundred and fifty per minute,” Miguel Fernandez said.

“Any other bidders?” Murdock asked.

“The Colt Commando will go from six hundred to one thousand rounds depending on the ammo,” Paul Jefferson threw in.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Murdock said. “I thought you guys knew weapons. What about the good old Armalite AR-18? No takers? It will do eight hundred rpm. Then the Famas from France will spit them out at nine hundred and fifty rounds a minute. Not bad.” He picked up the padded plastic-covered item from the table. “Here we have a little item that puts all those submachine guns to shame. Yeah, this is a handgun, a little bigger and heavier than you’re used to, but it’s the fastest gun in the Old West or the new east or anywhere in the world.”

Murdock slowly unwrapped the weapon from the concealing covers. It showed up about twice the size of a Colt. 45, all black and what looked like six barrels coming out of an oblong shielded muzzle.

“A handgun?” somebody asked.

“Yep, just a handgun. This little dandy can fire a hundred and eighty rounds in less than one-hundredth of a second. For those of you who were not math majors, that’s eighteen thousand rounds in a second. Jaybird, how many would that be fired in a minute?”

Jaybird frowned a moment. “Hell, Commander, that would be well over a million rounds a minute.”

“Told you it was fast. The only problem is you couldn’t load that many rounds in a weapon this size. But look at the muzzle. There are seven barrels inside that housing. One is a forty-five-caliber, one is a thirty-eight-caliber, two are nine-millimeter and the other three are twenty-two-caliber.”

“Yeah, but how can it shoot so damned fast?” Omar Rafii asked.

“I’ve been hoping somebody would ask that. The rounds are held together with small wads of propellant. No casing, no primer, nothing but the round and the propellant and they are jammed together in one long connection
that is inserted into the barrel. Then, when triggered, the rounds are fired electronically. No moving parts, not a damn one. That’s why they can be fired so fast. Now, this weapon is not ready for combat yet, even on a trial basis.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t stop us from taking one along,” Jaybird chirped. They all laughed thinking about the other “experimental” weapons they had tested in combat situations in the past two years.

“This model will be the O’Dwyer VLE, which stands for Variable Lethality Law Enforcement. It’s a handgun. Mike O’Dwyer, an Australian, is the inventor through his company there. This model aimed for police and military use has a selector on the hand grip for the barrel you want to fire, and has a fingerprint user ID system to limit the use of the weapon to a single person or to two, three, or five people.

“Right now the weapon is set up to fire fifteen rounds faster than you can spit. The only rounds we have for it are the nine-millimeter. They have been slightly altered to fit the bore, so not any nine-millimeter would work. The stacked rounds are loaded from the rear of the weapon. No three-round burst here. You touch the trigger and all fifteen rounds spurt out faster than you can blink.”

“Will this one fire?” Ken Ching asked.

“Yes. We have six tubes of rounds, so just six of you get to use it. The JG and I fired it last night, and we strongly suggest that you use a two-handed grip and don’t touch the trigger until you’re ready to kill off a few terrs. Rank has no privilege here. You six guys on this end of the group will fire. Step right up.”

Jaybird Sterling was first in line. He hefted the weapon, held it in one hand, then used two hands with a wide-open stance. He looked at Murdock. “Is it loaded and ready to go?”

“Yes. I’ve touched the button for the right barrel. All you have to do is try not to shoot your foot off as those fifteen rounds come screaming out of the muzzle.”

“What about the range?” Jaybird asked.

“I have no idea. We fired out to sea last night. See that
whitish rock out there about a hundred? Take a shot at it.”

Jaybird held the weapon in his right hand, then brought up his left hand gripping his right in the best police stance. He aimed through the groove in the rear sight to the tall sight on the front of the top housing-and touched the trigger.

The sound came in a splat, a jolting, instantaneous, lightning-crack blast of fifteen 9mm rounds going off at once. The sound billowed out and then quieted in an instant. Only the echoes rolling through the hills lasted more than a microsecond. Then they were gone and Jaybird stared at the white rock. Fifteen spurts of dirt and rocks kicked up below and to the right. Jaybird wet his thumb and first finger in his mouth, then reached out and washed down the front sight. “Goddamn,” he whispered. “Looks like this weapon fires a little low and to the right.”

Murdock took the handgun, opened the rear of it, inserted another fifteen stacked rounds, and passed the O’Dwyer to the next man, Luke Howard. The gunner’s mate second class looked it over, then lifted it and fired it with his big right hand. As the same sound belched from the muzzle of the weapon, it climbed to a forty-five-degree angle, and Howard snorted. “Yep, this is a two-fisted little pecker head, no doubt about it.”

“Remember this weapon isn’t perfected yet. Police are starting to take notice. They could load it with special rounds that wouldn’t penetrate a body for a second kill. They could use nonlethal rounds such as pepper balls or even paint balls. The thinking here is that with seven barrels, you have a lot of shots before reloading. Say you wasted your first shot with the forty-fives and missed. You work to the nine-millimeter and give it a try. You still have two barrels of thirty-eight rounds and three of twenty-two. The smaller rounds would have more slugs per tube. Maybe twenty-five in the twenty-two-caliber barrels.

“Yeah,” Canzoneri said. “But you still have only seven shots out of the seven barrels.”

“The talk now is that this can be modified to shoot in
groups of three or five. Which would give you up to five or six times as many tries per barrel.”

“I’ll take two,” Mahanani said. “One for me and one for my uncle who has a pineapple stand out on Oahu.”

The rest of the men fired and praised the weapon, then Murdock closed up his dog and pony show. “I’m through here, JG. You have the con.”

Lieutenant (j.g.) Gardner looked up at the sun, then down at his watch. “Remember that one-mile measured course we laid out down along the road to the highway?”

The SEALs groaned knowing what came next.

“You’re right. Time we had some time trials on this picnic. Strip off your equipment. I only want to see cammie shirts, pants, and boots. This will go on your record. You’ll be timed on this one. First man back gets a case of beer. Start stripping.”