Seal Team Seven (9 page)

Which, of course, was exactly the way they preferred it. When their C-130 had touched down at NAS Oceana on Wednesday, there'd been no one waiting to meet the grim coterie of commandos as they filed off the transport, a thirteen-man honor guard to a lone, flag-draped coffin. No press, no cheering crowds, no speeches.

And that was as it should be.

Sometimes, though, that could be cold for the families who'd been waiting back in the world of bridge clubs and shopping malls, of the formal functions and the politics of naval social life.

How many times had he been over at the Cotters', barbecuing ribs on Vince's backyard grill, drinking beer and swapping stories with SEALs and SEAL wives. The formal gulf between officers and enlisted that existed through most of the rest of the Navy was all but nonexistent in the Teams. Vince and Donna Cotter were his friends. Damn, he
couldn't
lie to her, not about this.

And he couldn't tell her the truth either.

“Donna,” he said, choosing his next words carefully. “If the munchkins say he died in a training accident, then as far as I'm concerned that's exactly what happened. But I can also tell you that Vince was the best warrior, the best leader, the best officer, the best
friend
I've ever known. He was a hero, and I'm proud to have known him.”

The woman started to say something, then stopped, her face creasing with iron-held grief that could no longer be denied. “Oh, Mac, Mac, what am I going to do without him?”

MacKenzie opened his arms and enfolded her in an embrace, holding her close as she sobbed, the flag, Vince's flag, trapped between them. After a while, June came up and put her arm around Donna's shoulders, leading her away up the hill.

MacKenzie turned his back on the tombstones and spent a long time after that just standing there on the grass, staring at the Washington skyline.

Damn. Third Platoon would
never
get another CO as good as the Skipper. DeWitt might pass inspection, but he didn't have enough time in grade for promotion to full lieutenant. That meant they'd bring in someone else, an outsider.

He wondered who the newbie was going to be.

Hell Week had begun that morning at precisely 0001 hours—one minute past midnight—and the men of BUD/S First Platoon, class 1420, were running. The sun was just beginning to cut through the chill that had lingered over the Silver Strand throughout the predawn hours, and the surf was breaking in long, emerald-green rollers that sparkled enchantingly in the morning light. First Platoon was less interested in the picturesque beauty of the ocean, however, than in remaining upright.

Organized into six boat teams of seven men each, the platoon numbered forty-two men, and they were running along the beach through soft sand that shifted unpredictably beneath their boondockers. Each team carried an IBS—an Inflatable Boat, Small—balanced on their heads, a black rubber craft that had long been a mainstay of both the SEALs and the old UDTs. Twelve feet long and six feet in the beam, the boat could carry seven men and one thousand pounds of gear. Fully equipped, as they were now with everything save motors, each weighed 289 pounds.

Each boat crew struggled to run together, supporting the balky mass of its IBS on their heads, bracing the boat unsteadily with arms aching from endlessly repeated push-ups earlier that morning. The shorter men in each team held empty coffee cans wedged between their heads and their boat so that they could carry their share of the load. The exercise appeared to be mindless harassment, but it had the positive benefit of providing yet another excuse for the recruits to learn to work together . . . or else.

As did nearly every other aspect of BUD/S training.

Lieutenant Blake Murdock trotted easily alongside the lead boat crew. Tall, lean, powerfully muscled, he paced the recruits with an easy gait in deliberate contrast to their exhausted stumblings. In a malicious addition of insult to injury, while the recruits wore shorts and white T-shirts already drenched with sweat, Murdock wore a khaki uniform, flawlessly, crisply pressed and creased, the railroad tracks of his rank gleaming in highly polished gold on his collar, his eagle-trident-pistol badge shining above two rows of colorful ribbons. The only concession he'd made to the morning's workout was his boondockers, identical to the footgear worn by the recruits. Dress shoes did not stand up well to sand and salt water, nor was it a good idea to run in them. The boondockers were spit-shined, however, until they shone like dress Corfams. Murdock had made a point of running with the trainees throughout the past weeks, effortlessly pacing them without showing a wrinkle, without showing even a single stain of sweat in his uniform as the recruits struggled to match his pace.

The other instructors wore blue staff T-shirts and olive drab shorts as they harried the trainees.
“Get in step there! Hup! Two! Three! Four! Pick up your feet, you tadpoles! Come on
,
come on! Get together!”

Tomorrow, the boat crews would start running with their instructors as passengers in the rubber boats, paddling the air as they shouted “encouragement,” standing up, moving around, and in general doing everything they could to upset the crews' physical and mental equilibrium.

Keeping the recruits off balance was a key part of the program. Reveille that morning had been a dark, smoky, and piercingly noisy chaos of automatic gunfire, smoke grenades, and flash-bangs detonating outside the barracks windows as the instructors screamed confusing, often contradictory orders into the ears of the dazed recruits.
“Fire! Fire on the quarterdeck! Fire party
lay
to the quarterdeck! Down on the deck! Give
me one hundred! Outside! Outside, you pussies! Get wet! Into the surf! Fall in on the grinder in boondockers and jockstrap! Move! Move! Movemove
move
!
” They'd stampeded from the barracks into the night, most of them half dressed, as a SEAL chief petty officer fired bursts from his M-60 over their heads.

For these recruits, those able to stick it out anyway, the next five days would be an endless and agonizing round of mud, exhaustion, pain, and humiliation, a grueling trial of fitness and stamina during which they would be lucky to get a total of four hours' sleep.

Hell Week. This was the end of BUD/S Phase 1 training, the culmination of weeks of running, boat drills, running, push-ups, running, swimming, more swimming, and running, running, and more running. Phase 1 was partly for physical conditioning, of course, but far more than that it was deliberately designed to eliminate the quitters, to weed out that seventy percent or more of each SEAL class that did not have the peculiar twist of mental conditioning, stamina, and determination that was vital for service with the Teams. It had been suggested more than once that BUD/S training was two-percent physical and ninety-eight-percent mental.

“Ladies,” Murdock had told the class during formation the evening before, “the next five days and nights have been lovingly crafted to make you do just three things: quit, quit, and
quit!
We are going to do our level best to make all of you see the error of your ways and give up this crazy idea you have that you could actually become SEALs. We've lost a few people already, but hey, we were just getting warmed up with them. They were the lucky ones, sweethearts, the guys who looked deep down inside their souls and realized that they just didn't have what it takes to be a Navy SEAL.

“I can promise you that we're going to lose a hell of a lot more of you before this week of fun and games is over. The United States Navy invests something like eighty thousand dollars in each and every man who finally pins on the trident-and-pistols.” For emphasis, he'd tapped his own SEAL pin as he walked down the line of young, skin-headed recruits standing rigidly in their underwear in front of their racks.

“It is our solemn duty to ensure that all those taxpayer dollars are not wasted in this new era of government fiscal responsibility,” he'd continued, “that those of you who finish this course—
if
any of you finish this course—are truly the elite, the very best men in body and spirit we can produce. In short, ladies,
SEALs.

“Of course, I very much doubt that any of you have what it takes to be SEALs. . . .”

It was a canned speech, one that Murdock had delivered numberless times before to numberless SEAL recruits. He'd been stationed with the Training Division at Coronado for almost two years now.

When, he wondered, was he going to get his transfer? He wanted a combat platoon, had been applying for one for the past six months. He strongly suspected that the dread hand of his father was somehow involved.

Blake Murdock had been a SEAL for five years now, but he was one of the unlikeliest SEALs in the Teams. Eldest son of a wealthy Virginia family that had gone into politics three generations ago, he'd long since grown tired of the questions leveled at him almost every time he came aboard a new duty station. “Murdock? Are you any relation to
Charles
Murdock?”

“Yes,” he would always answer, a little wearily when he admitted to it at all. “He's my father.”

Blake had grown up on the rambling Murdock estate outside Front Royal, half a mile from the banks of the slow-flowing Shenandoah. He'd attended local private schools, then Exeter, with the clear expectation that he would go on to Harvard, followed by a career in law or politics. Indeed, from the very beginning he'd had the feeling that his entire future, from school to marriage to career to internment in the St. John's Episcopal family vaults, all had been carefully planned out with all the care and attention to detail of a well-crafted military campaign.

Murdock knew exactly when he'd begun wanting more,
needing
more than the stuffy wood paneling and elitist snobbery of Exeter's hallowed halls. It had been during the summer before his senior year, when he'd somehow ended up in the mountains of Colorado with an Outward Bound group. At school he'd been a star track and field man, as well as making first string on the football team, and he'd thought he was in pretty good shape, but a summer of long hikes, rugged climbing, and orienteering through the Rockies had convinced him otherwise.

And, of course, that was where he'd met Susan.

His parents had never quite accepted her. She'd been Jewish, for one thing, and for another she came from a military family. Her girlhood had been spent growing up in such diverse places as Yokosuka, Subic Bay, and Pearl Harbor; her father had been a Marine gunnery sergeant who'd lost a leg at Da Nang, her oldest brother a Navy chief stationed aboard an attack sub.

Not exactly the sort of people the Murdocks could easily seat at a dinner party with the landed gentry of Warren County at their Front Royal estate, or worse, at the Chevy Chase Country Club inside the Washington Beltway.

By the time he'd graduated from Exeter, he'd decided that he didn't want any part of Harvard, and Susan had had a lot to do with that decision. Certainly, Outward Bound had generated in Blake a fierce and burning need to keep proving himself physically, and in more challenging ways than joining Harvard's football or track teams.

His parents had not been happy with his decision to join the Marines. There'd been considerable discussion on the matter, ending at last, in the best tradition of Washington politics, in compromise. Blake would attend Annapolis and become an officer in the U.S. Navy.

That would never have been possible, of course, without the direct intervention of his father, Congressman Charles Fitzhugh Murdock, former Virginia state legislator and a three-term member of the House of Representatives. A member of the House Military Affairs Committee, the elder Murdock had considerable leverage both on Capitol Hill and among the higher echelons of the Navy establishment. He'd all but guaranteed Blake a comfortable and promising military career, as a line officer in the fleet, as a Pentagon staff officer, even one day, possibly, as a military liaison officer to Congress.

“We want nothing but the best for you, Blake,
” his mother had told him the day he'd left for Annapolis.
“The Navy's lucky to get you. Why shouldn't your father pull a few strings to help smooth the way?”

Why not indeed?

All Blake Murdock knew was that suddenly, somehow, his life was being planned for him again.

Turning sharply away from the surf, the platoon trotted inland, struggling over the crest of a dune, rubber boats still balanced on their heads. Over the top, they descended onto a muddy flat, where a number of logs lay in ominous rows. Each was a section of telephone pole, soaked in creosote and weighing three hundred pounds.

At an instructor's bellowed orders, each boat crew lowered its IBS to the sand, then filed into line behind one of the logs. They'd begun this exercise during the first week of Phase 1, and all the men knew the drill by now.

“Okay, ladies,” Murdock shouted. “I think some of you are still a bit sleepy. You need some warm-up exercise to make the day go right. One!”

At each log, seven men in line stopped and seized it.

“Two!”

As a unit—more or less—each team straightened upright, hoisting the log to waist level.

“Three! ”

Up the log went to shoulder level.

“Four!”

Muscles bulging, backs straining, teeth gritted in seven-times-repeated agony and concentration, the team shoved the log aloft. There was some wavering, but no one collapsed. No one gave up.

“Three!”

The logs dropped back to shoulder level.

two!”

Waist level.