Seal Team Seven #19: Field of Fire (32 page)

Then the ground rushed up at him and he pounded his boots on the field in a run that countered the forward motion of the chute. He stopped and pulled the chute down and unsnapped the harness.

“Down, SEALs, have a blue color tube on. Anybody see it?”

“Got ya,” Jaybird said.

“Coming,” Mahanani said.

“Captain, are you down and can you read me?”

Murdock had given the Israeli one of the spare Motorolas to keep in touch.

“Down, but I’m afraid I have a small problem, Commander.”

“Where are you? Can you see my light stick?”

“Yes, you’re to the west of me. I broke my leg. Four hundred jumps and not a scratch, now this.”

“We’ll find you, Captain. Hold tight.”

Murdock gathered up his men as they moved east. They found the white blobs of parachutes on a cultivated field. Soon Lam spotted the captain and some of his men.

It took them a half hour to gather up all of the men.

“Who is your second?” Murdock asked Captain Lansky.

“Sergeant Lot. A good man.”

“Sergeant Lot, front and center,” Murdock called.

The man ran up and saluted. “Lot here, sir.”

“I’m Murdock. No more saluting. You have the command of your men. First, detail two to carry the captain
with us. Our medic has checked his leg and splinted it and given him a shot of morphine. We’ll be moving up now. Keep your men spread out at ten-yard intervals.”

Murdock turned to his radio. “Lam, what’s ahead?”

“All clear. I’m out about three hundred. Don’t see any Syrian troops at all. Looks like we’re about a mile from the lights.”

“Captain, give the sergeant the Motorola. Jaybird, rig it on him so he can use it. We’re moving, troops.”

They went in diamond formations forward, with the Israelis in the middle and slowing them with the aid to the captain.

After a half mile, Murdock called. “Lam, what’s out front?”

“I’ve got a road, not much traffic. We have to cross it. Fields on the other side. We’re nearer the coast now. I saw a jeep down on the hard sand. Don’t know where it went.”

“Find a spot to leave the captain and a guard. We’re behind schedule.”

Mahanani had been watching the captain. “He’s hurting, Skipper. Not much more we can do. No more morphine for another hour.”

“Watch him. We’re almost there.”

They went across the road in two bunches. They missed a military jeep by a hundred yards, then hit the dirt and didn’t move for five minutes.

“Clear,” Murdock said. “Let’s get to the target.”

A quarter of a mile later, they went up a small rise where Lam waited for them. “Better take a look, Cap.”

They bellied down in the grass at the top of the rise as they had done so many times in the past. Murdock grunted as he stared downhill forty yards.

Outside the target house there had been set up a twenty-man wall tent. A jeep and a six-by sat in front of it. More than a dozen soldiers idled around the tent and the trucks.

“Where the hell did they come from?”

“More protection for the general,” Senior Chief Sadler said.

“Okay, get spread out at ten. Sergeant Lot, put your
men along the top of the hill on the reverse slope. We’ve got at least a dozen men below. We’ll take out the trucks with our twenties. Then everybody cuts down anybody who moves.”

“That’s a roger, Commander.”

“Move up.”

Murdock called on Howard to do the jeep; he would take out the truck with an engine shot.

“As soon as the twenties go, work your single shots on the troops. Watch out for the house windows. When you’re ready, Howard.”

The two 20mm rounds fired at almost the same time and exploded on target half a second later. The truck sprouted a flame that burned through the engine and then the fuel tank blew, showering parts of the truck on the house roof only twenty yards away. The jeep disintegrated.

Silenced shots and unmuffled ones cracked in the stillness after the original explosions. Rafii tracked one running Syrian and dropped him with a lead shot. Canzoneri drilled two surprised soldiers before they could move from the front of the tent. The tent caught fire from the exploding gas tank and revealed a dozen cots inside with blankets that quickly caught fire.

Three men ran for the house. Jaybird cut down one of them and Bill Bradford nailed the other two with his sniper rifle. The whole firefight lasted less than fifteen seconds from when the twenties fired. The Israelis worked the far end of the tent and dropped three men trying to slip out of the flaming canvas.

“Sergeant Lot, take your men and run around to the front of the house and don’t let anybody come out and stay alive. Move!”

“Roger, moving.”

Murdock checked the scene below. One man crawled toward protection. A silent round stopped him dead in his crawl. The rear door to the house had a small porch. Murdock figured the place was no mansion, maybe twelve rooms, around four thousand square feet.

“Gardner, cover us, we’re going down. Alpha, move it.
Half on each side of that door. Gardner, fire at anyone who fires from the windows at us. Let’s go.”

Alpha Squad lifted up and charged down the hill. Murdock and Jaybird were ahead. Murdock pasted himself at the left-hand side of the rear door. Jaybird was on the right.

Murdock took out a flash-bang grenade and showed it to Jaybird who nodded. Jaybird, reached for the knob and tried it. Unlocked. He looked at Murdock, who nodded. Jaybird opened the door six inches; Murdock rolled the grenade through the door. Jaybird pulled the door shut and covered his ears with his hands.

The pulsating sounds jolted through the house and splattered out the windows and walls, then the piercing, blinding strobes of light put lightning to shame as they tore through the house.

When the last light faded, Murdock kicked open the door and raced inside taking the left hand half of the room. It was large, with tables, supplies, and two soldiers writhing on the floor. Murdock shot one in the head and Jaybird hit the other one with a heart shot, and the SEALs ran ahead ten feet to the next door. It was closed. As Jaybird turned the knob, two rounds jolted through the thin wood. Murdock slammed three rounds of 5.56 through the same door, then Jaybird unlatched the panel and jammed it forward.

A huge black dog the size of a small pony, with a wide-open mouth, lunged through the door directly at Jaybird. Murdock reversed his grip on the Bull Pup and swung it like a club, mashing the heavy stock into the dog’s head. The blow jolted the animal’s large head backward, snapping his neck and leaving him dead as he slammed into Jaybird, knocking him down. Jaybird crawled from under the spasming dog’s body and found his MP-5.

Both men looked around the door into the room. A naked woman stood in the center of a living room, wearing only a thin veil over her lower face. She held a submachine gun with her finger on the trigger. The weapon centered on Jaybird. He swung up the MP-5 and hesitated a fraction of a second. Murdock put three rounds from
the 5.56 barrel into the woman’s chest, one through her left breast, the other two in her heart.

“Come on,” Murdock said and Jaybird snapped out of his trance and cleared the rest of the room. “Clear one and two,” he said for those SEALs behind him. The men darted to the next opening that led into a hall. Murdock pointed to the left and to Jaybird. He had three doors on his side of the hall. Murdock had three on his side.

They were about to open the first doors when the next door ten feet down the hall opened, and a hand reached out and tossed a hand grenade toward them. There was nowhere to run. There was nowhere to hide. The deadly grenade bounced on the wooden floor and came a foot off the deck and straight at Jaybird.

Jaybird’s eyes went wide in the milliseconds he had between the grenade bouncing toward him and his decision. Then he took half a step and kicked. His right boot hit the grenade in the center and pounded it down the hall in the other direction almost to the end of the forty-foot-long corridor. As soon as he kicked it, he and Murdock dropped flat on the floor. The grenade exploded just before it hit the far wall and stabbed hundreds of shards of steel into the walls, ceiling, and floor. Only a few came as far as Murdock and Jaybird and they dropped harmlessly to the floor.

The same door opened and a head peered out. Jaybird had been waiting. He put a round through the surprised man’s forehead and he slammed backward and out of sight. Murdock eased up to the first door on the left and pushed it open. No reaction. From floor level, he peered into the room. A bedroom, with luxurious furniture and a four-poster bed. Nobody there. He moved to the second door. Jaybird checked past the dead man. A luxury bedroom with no one else in it.

The third and fourth rooms on each side held no one. By the time they retraced their steps to the living room, Gardner had sent two men up the stairway to the left. It was half-open, vanishing partway up toward the ten-foot ceiling. Rafii was in front, with Fernandez covering for him. Rafii made it to the top and looked over the carpet on the short hall. He shook his head, flattened on the floor, and slid down to the first door on his left. Before he got there two men with submachine guns jumped out of the
end room and began firing. He fired back, the rounds from his MP-5 cutting one man nearly in half and knocking down the other one. When neither man moved, Rafii opened the door to the room. It was an office with computer and bookcases and a big desk. No one there.

On the lower floor, Murdock and Lam investigated the wing to the left. It was only one story. Murdock heard firing at the front of the house, then a machine gun chattered off six bursts of ten rounds.

Lam pushed open the first door and waited. No reaction. He looked inside. It was a den, with a fireplace, carpet, weapons on the wall, a large TV set, a pair of soft chairs, and a long sofa. A man sat in one of the soft chairs, holding a pistol aimed at the side of his head.

“I am General Diar. I demand to see your commander.”

Lam kept him under his MP-5 and called Murdock. The man had two stars on his shirt’s shoulder. He was cleanshaven except for a thick mustache.

“I demand to see your commander,” the man said in Arabic.

Murdock edged into the room and heard him. “I’m the commander of this group. Who are you?”

“I am General Mahdi Diar, commander of all Syrian forces. I wish to surrender.”

Murdock heard more firing from the front of the house. He stared at the man. He had no way of being sure this man was who he said he was. “Put down the pistol and we’ll talk,” Murdock said in Arabic.

The man shook his head. “Then you will kill me. This way you won’t kill me, because I might shoot one of you, and you want to question me.”

“You are not Diar. He has a red face, a big nose, and a close-cropped military haircut. You are thin, light-skinned, and with a short nose and hair too long to be a general.”

“No, I am General Diar. I planned the attack. I had the pulse bomb built in the desert. I almost won. I didn’t count on such good Israeli pilots.”

“If you are General Diar, where are your body guards? You had twenty-five men protecting you.”

The man in the chair waved one hand. “They ran away. What could I do?” He waved the pistol and then brought it down and tried to fire at Murdock. Murdock jumped to the side when he saw the weapon coming. He fired two shots before the man in the chair could pull the trigger. Both rounds hit the man in the chest and he died before the dropped pistol hit the carpet.

“He’s not General Diar,” Murdock said. Murdock frowned as he heard more gunfire from the front of the house. He headed that way.

Sergeant Lot had taken his fourteen men around to the front of the big house, keeping back thirty yards. He found protection for his men, then settled in. He thought he heard shots inside the house, then it was quiet. A moment later one of his men cried out. “I’ve been shot-shoulder.”

Sergeant Lot had not heard a weapon fire. “Silenced shots-stay under cover. Watch the windows. Return fire if you see any movement in the windows.” Lot checked the area again. A military sedan sat ten feet from the back of the ground-floor door. He could see no one in it. A road of sorts ran from the back of the house to the street half a block over, and another track led toward the beach fifty yards to the right.

He lifted up a moment from the large boulder he had hidden behind. A fraction of a second later a rifle slug zinged off the rock and ricocheted away. Another silent round. Now he could see that the rear door was open to the inside. A screen door hung on the outside. He lifted his Uzi and drilled three rounds through the screen.

A moment later two hand grenades were lofted toward Lot’s squad, but didn’t get to them. At the same time the blasts came, three figures dashed from the rear door into the sedan. It started and raced away. Ten Israeli guns slammed rounds at the sedan and the tires. One rear tire went flat but the car kept going fifty yards to the beach, then made a hard turn south and soon raced out of sight behind a stand of trees that screened the ocean.

“Three men just ran out the back and left in a sedan,” Lot said on his radio. “They went down to the beach.”

“Chase them,” Murdock said on his radio. “Follow them. We’re clear in here. Go get them. We’re right behind you.”

Murdock and the rest of the SEALs charged out of the empty house and down the trail to the beach. They could see some of the Israelis forty yards ahead. Nowhere did they see a sedan.

The Israelis had grouped at a street that ran up from the beach to the rest of the streets. Murdock and his men came up to them.

“Gone,” Lot said.

“Maybe not,” Lam said. He took his penlight and shone it on the wet sand where it met the pavement. “Look at the tire tracks in the wet sand. That’s tread like I’ve never seen before. Memorize the pattern. I’ll make a sketch.” He did.

“This isn’t a big town,” Lot said. “Maybe two hundred people. We scatter, and hunt for a military van with olive drab paint and tires that look like this and one flat tire. It’s plenty dark enough that our uniforms won’t look that much different from any Syrians if we see any soldiers.”