Seal Team Seven (44 page)

“Right, L-T.”

“Razor.”

“Here, L-T.”

“Where's ‘here'?”

“On the fantail, L-T. With Prof.”

“Head on down to the engine room. I'll have Mac meet you there. I want you two to go over the engines of this tub. Find out if we can get her under way again.”

“Roger that, L-T. On my way.”

“Mac, you hear that?”

“Sure did, Skipper.” The big Texan somewhat reluctantly yielded his M-60 to Holt, who'd done all he could for the wounded Chucker. Roselli's original rating before he'd joined the SEALs had been a machinist's mate, while MacKenzie was a master chief engineman. He wanted his two best snipes in the freighter's engine room before he even thought about backing off from the Bandar Abbas dock.

“Jaybird?”

“Yeah, L-T.”

“You take Mac's pig for him. Holt, you're with me. I want to check out the ship's con before we try moving her.”

“Aye, aye, Skipper.”

“Right, L-T.”

They had a busy several minutes ahead of them now.

Cautiously, Doc peered past a stack of crates toward a vast and well-lit expanse of concrete fronting a row of machine shops and storage buildings. Coburn knelt beside him, his face still a nightmarish mix of blood and greasepaint.

“What's the word, Doc?”

“I don't like it, Captain. Too open.”

Another explosion boomed in the night at their backs. The fueling dock was still burning furiously, the livid orange flames adding to the light bathing the waterfront strip. Hundreds of Iranians had descended on the area and were fighting the blaze now. Doc and Coburn had hidden behind a pile of concrete pipe sections as the fire trucks and soldiers hurried past, then slipped deeper into the shipyard, putting as much distance between themselves and their handiwork as they could.

Now they were about eighty yards from the water, and still some two hundred yards or more from the
Yuduki Maru's
pier. Doc could see the forward half of the Japanese freighter, revealed in the gap between two small buildings. The fires on her deck appeared to have died down.

Damn! The ship was still too far for the short reach of their tactical radios. Each time Doc tried, he heard only garbled bursts of noise and static.

Coburn pointed to a line of military vehicles parked beside a storehouse, apparently untended. “There's transport.”

“Yeah. . . .” Doc's voice sounded less than certain.

“We've got to get to the
Maru'
s pier,” Coburn said. “In a jeep we can just drive up to the dock like we own the place.”

“And maybe get nailed by our own guys when they think we're the Iranian cavalry.” But Doc had to agree that riding would get them where they needed to go faster than by shank's mare. And though he'd said nothing to the patient about it, Coburn was not in good shape. The immediate effects of the CO
₂
poisoning had been banished by getting rid of the rebreather, but the SEAL Seven commander could well have internal injuries. Doc wouldn't be able to know that for sure, though, until he had Coburn back aboard the
Nassau.
Where other ships had a sick bay, the LHA had no less than three well-equipped hospitals with a total of six hundred beds and all the high-tech medical wonder gadgets you could ask for.

But for any of that to do any good, Doc had to get his patient off the beach and aboard the
Nassau.
“Okay,” he said at last. “We'll give it a try.”

Ellsworth and Coburn moved together, sticking to the shadows at the perimeter of the field, circling the well-lighted part until they reached what appeared to be a small motor pool. Doc selected a vehicle, a military jeep of obvious American manufacture, handed Coburn his H&K, and slid in behind the wheel.

“No keys,” Coburn said.

“No problem,” Doc replied. Drawing his knife, he used the hilt to smash the face plate off the ignition block assembly. Selecting two wires, he cut and stripped them with his knife, then brought the bare ends together. The engine ground, then caught as Doc pumped the gas.

Coburn watched the process, which took less than five seconds, dubiously. “Your record says you're a country boy, Doc.”

“Yup, that's me. Just a sweet, simple country boy—”

“—trying to get along in the big city, yeah,” Coburn said, finishing the old line for him. “I've heard that one before. Remind me never to trust you with my car.”

Doc gunned the engine once, put the jeep in gear, and pulled out of the motor pool area. “Hey, I'm just a laid-back kind of guy,” Doc replied easily. “You can trust me with your car, your money, your girl—”

“Yeah, you're laid back like a rattlesnake. I don't know if . . . watch it!”

Doc had seen the danger at the same instant, a line of Iranian soldiers moving along the catwalk atop a massive, concrete structure that looked like a dry dock crib. He increased the jeep's speed slightly. “Don't sweat it, Captain. We're Iranians too, remember? This here is an oh-ficial Iranian government vehicle.”

But the men on the catwalk evidently were not convinced. Muzzle flashes popped and stuttered as the Pasdaran infantry opened fire. Bullets sparked off the pavement and slammed into the jeep's side.

“Right,” Coburn said. Twisting in his seat, he aimed his H&K and loosed a long, full-auto burst. “Unauthorized use subject to heavy penalty!”

Doc spun the jeep's wheel, sending the vehicle hurtling down a narrow alley between two warehouses. They emerged on the waterfront, driving along a broad, concrete wharf. Startled Iranian soldiers and dock workers dove left and right, scattering from the jeep's path.

“I hope you're a better corpsman than you are a driver,” Coburn yelled. Then a burst of machine-gun fire slammed into the jeep from the front, shattering the windshield and shredding the right front tire. Doc felt the jeep going out of control, the rear skidding wildly to the left, and he fought to keep the vehicle from flipping over. Smoke exploded from beneath the hood, and the engine died. Still spinning now, they skidded another ten feet and slammed hard into a bollard rising from the water's edge.

“Damn, the pedestrians are getting worse every—” He stopped. Coburn was slumped over in the passenger's seat, fresh blood bright against his scalp. “Shit!”

Half standing in the wrecked jeep, Doc grabbed his H&K from the back seat, thumbed the selector to full auto, and cut loose at a squad of advancing Pasdaran. Two collapsed on the pavement and the others scattered. Doc glanced back over his shoulder; the
Yuduki Maru
was still a good fifty yards away.

“The sea is your friend,” Doc said. He'd meant the words, drilled into SEAL recruits throughout their BUD/S training, to be ironic, but right now he was well aware of the truth behind them. He checked Coburn, finding a strong pulse. It looked like a round might have grazed his scalp, knocking him unconscious, though Doc wanted to give him a thorough look-over.

There was no time for that now, though. Another bullet slammed into the side of the jeep. “C'mon, Captain,” he said, dragging Coburn's limp body from the passenger's seat and draping him over his back in an awkward fireman's carry. “Let's us go for a swim!”

With Coburn still over his shoulders, Doc leaped off the wharf and into the cold, dark embrace of the harbor once more.

The helicopters had launched nearly an hour earlier, but they'd been orbiting over the Gulf since that time, well out in international waters. Devil Dog Flight consisted of six UH-1 Hueys, “Slicks” off the
Nassau
and the
Iwo Jima.
Each carried a Blue/Green Team, a joint SEAL/Marine Recon boarding party of fourteen men, and they came in low and fast, close behind a flight of two Marine SuperCobras. The Cobras clattered across the
Yuduki Maru's
deck, less than twenty feet above her steel deck, then wheeled across the dockyards and waterfront buildings beyond.

Automatic gunfire chattered from a dry dock; there was a rippling flash, and then a bundle of living flames slashed from the lead Cobra, lighting the sky with their contrails. The rocket barrage struck a catwalk running along the side of the dry dock, flinging shards of metal and fragments of bodies far across the compound.

By now, the entire shipyard was in chaos. A siren wailed its mournful ululation against the crump and rumble of exploding ordnance. Somewhere in the distance, antiaircraft batteries were going off with a stolid-sounding
crump-crump-crump,
apparently at random and apparently without actually bothering to aim at anything. Green tracers drifted across the sky above the horizon.

Over the shipyard, however, the American forces appeared to have won a momentary control. Flames continued to boil into the sky from the fuel dock, which was now blazing from one end to the other. The fire had spread to the patrol boat as well, and fresh explosions continued to rack the sadly listing vessel's frame as fuel and ammo stores detonated. Ashore, men were running everywhere, some armed and moving with purpose, but most scattering in desperate bids to find shelter or simply to
leave,
as quickly as possible. Very few stood their ground and attempted to duel with the circling Cobras. Those who did were cut down almost at once, by rocket salvos, or by ratcheting fusillades of 7.62mm minigun rounds, sprayed from the helos' chin turrets so quickly the tri-barreled cannons sounded like chain saws.

The lead Huey, meanwhile, circled the
Yuduki Maru
once, trying to draw fire from her deck or from the pier alongside. When no one accepted the offer, the Slick came in at a hover, twenty feet above the forward deck, tail low; from its open cargo doors, ropes and black-faced men descended with stomach-wrenching drops.

The technique was called “fast roping,” and it was a quick way of getting from an airborne chopper to the ground . . . or to the deck of a ship. The first men thumped onto the deck and moved clear, H&Ks held at the ready. More men followed, sliding down the rope on gloved hands.

The men hitting
Yuduki Maru's
deck now were drawn from Marine Force Recon and SEAL Seven, First Platoon, and were part of the Maritime Special Purpose Force, or MSPF. Designed, in the language of the Pentagon, “to optimize forces available to conduct highly sensitive and complex special missions,” the MSPF was trained to conduct raids deep in enemy territory, to reinforce U.S. embassies or other facilities at need, to extract important people or documents, and to conduct hostage rescues. The theory was that, more often than not, when a crisis situation went down it would take two or more days to move the Army's Delta Force into position, but the U.S. Navy and the Marines nearly always had units positioned somewhere close by, allowing MSPF insertion at virtually a moment's notice.

SEALs and Recon Marines had been practicing joint MSPF exercises for a number of years now, and though the traditional Navy-Marine rivalry continued to run deep, this particular collaboration had been used with outstanding success on a number of occasions.

As soon as the first fourteen men were down, the Huey cast off the ropes, dropped its nose, and roared off into the darkness as its prop wash lashed the water below. The second Huey came in right behind the first, and fourteen more men roped their way to the freighter's deck.

The other Hueys deposited their loads of Blue/Green commandos ashore, dropping them into open areas that blocked avenues of approach to the pier from inland. Other helos clattered overhead, big Marine Super Stallions, each loaded with fifty-five combat troops and their gear, bound for LZs along the roads leading from the shipyard to Bandar-é Abbas and other coastal towns. They were protected by AV-8 Harrier jumpjets, wondrous aircraft that swooped and stooped like great birds of prey or slowed to a magical, helicopter-like hover. An Iranian armored battalion was reported to be somewhere near Bandar, and the MEF's Marine Air contingent was committed to stopping those tanks from reaching the shipyard. Meanwhile, Harriers and SuperCobras staged a surprise raid at the Bandar-é Abbas airport, turning a dozen military planes into twisted, blackened skeletons, and savaging twenty more with shrapnel and machine-gun fire. More air support was already on the way, a flight of Marine F/A-18 Hornets off the
Iwo Jima,
rigged for their role as close ground support with cluster bombs and laser-guided ordnance.

Soon, the
Yuduki Maru
was an eye of relative peace in an expanding storm of violence.

Murdock crossed the steel deck to where one of the newcomers was giving orders to his men. There was no easy way to separate the Marines from the SEALs in the MSPF. All wore black gear with full assault loadouts; all wore full-head safety helmets and had their faces heavily blacked. Most carried H&K subguns, though a few varied the routine with M-16/M203 combos, or with combat shotguns. The only real outward difference was in their backup weapons; SEALs carried 9mm handguns, while Marines favored the venerable .45 Colt.

Watching them as he approached, Murdock could tell that they were working as a well-rehearsed, well-practiced team.

The officer in charge of the unit turned toward Murdock. “Captain Cavanaugh,” he said, extending a gloved hand. He didn't salute, not when enemy snipers could be watching the scene from the buildings in the distance. “U.S. Marine Corps.”

“Semper Fi, ””
Murdock replied, taking the Marine's hand and firmly shaking it. The rank of captain in the Marines was equivalent to Murdock's rank of Navy lieutenant. ”Welcome aboard!”