“Lay down your arms and hands on your heads. SEALs come on up,” Murdock said to his shoulder mike.
They both came in with weapons leveled.
Murdock had moved up to within six feet of the sergeant.
“Prove to me you’re who you say you are. An ID card?”
The sergeant slowly lowered one hand, took a folder from his shirt pocket, and extracted two cards. One was a Sierra Leone Army Identification Card. The other a credit card. The name was the same on both.
Murdock nodded and lowered his weapon.
“Good. We have a wounded man. Do you have a medic here?”
A man stepped forward with an over-the-shoulder medical kit. He went to Lam and nodded. He put him down on some grass and using a flashlight, began treating both wounds and bandaging them.
“You have any transport?” asked Murdock.
“No, sir.”
“Any communications with your main body?”
“Yes, sir. Radio.” He took a handie-talkie-size radio off a holder at his side.
“Get a jeep up here as soon as you can. Tell them that we’re part of the force that brought in the munitions.”
Twenty minutes later, the SEALs sat in a large tent on a solid piece of ground beside a blacktopped road.
Colonel Limba smiled as he gave his guests a breakfast and cans of Coca-Cola. “We are glad to know that you destroyed most of the weapons and ammunition. We will have trouble enough salvaging what is left. The rebels have an amazing network of spies and methods of travel in the swampy area. They knew you were coming, where the goods would be unloaded, and how to block us from getting to it. Sometimes their intelligence is better than ours.”
“Can you help us get back to our ship, or at least communicate with the carrier off your coast?”
“It has been done already, Commander. As soon as it’s light and we have total security, we will send you to Freetown, where a Navy helicopter is waiting for you. Within two hours you should be back on board the carrier.”
3
NAVSPECWARGRUP-ONE
Coronado, California
Lieutenant Commander Blake Murdock settled behind his desk at Third Platoon, SEAL Team Seven, and tried to relax. It had been a week since they had returned from the ammo delivery mission into Sierra Leone, and he still wasn’t sure what the final outcome was. From what Don Stroh told him, the government forces had charged up the road the next morning, blasted through the weak force at the roadblock, retaken the landing field, and recovered about half of what had been sent to them.
At first the government forces had been furious that so much of the equipment and ammo had been destroyed. Then their field commanders explained to them that the rebel truck would have hauled away all of the weapons and ammo and shipped it out on small boats through the maze of waterways in the swamp by morning.
When the SEALs burned down the rebels’ truck, they’d stopped the looting of the goods. The SEALs had had no way of knowing what other transport the rebels might have had. As near as anyone knew now, the government army got half of the shipment, the rebels about an eighth, and the rest was blown up. Also, Uncle Sam lost one Osprey aircraft, two pilots, and a crew chief. A copilot on another of the Ospreys was wounded in the shoulder. Third Platoon had only one wounded. Lam was clamoring to get out of Balboa Naval Hospital over in San Diego. He wanted to get back with the platoon. The doctors had not been kind. They told him he’d be there for two weeks and then on limited duty. Turned out the bullet in his leg had been a ricochet and had done little damage, but they wanted to watch it. One of the doctors told Murdock when he was visiting that they routinely kept SEALs in the hospital longer than usual so they wouldn’t try to get back on duty too quickly and hurt themselves further.
Ed DeWitt had worked out a new training schedule, and now on Monday morning when Murdock looked it over at 0630 in his office, it seemed about right. They had to totally integrate the two new men. Frank Victor had performed well on the shoot-out at the Osprey drop. The other new man, Tracy Donegan, hadn’t been as involved, but had done nothing to hurt his position. Training was what they needed. More conditioning, more live firing in the hills, and more all-night problems all aimed at teamwork, each SEAL supporting and protecting every other SEAL.
He looked at the schedule again. Monday, they would start with a run through the “O” course with their times recorded. Then they would take a six-mile swim underwater with full combat gear. When they got back it would be rubber-duck time, with each squad in a duck working on surfing in to the beach. Too often they had to come in through high surf on foreign shores so they could hit the beach at the exact place they needed. It was a fine art to time the wave exactly right. He’d have his best surfboard riders working the boats today. They had the right feel for the Southern California waves, and could tell when they were washing out or breaking up. Last year on a similar training workout, one boat had flipped and knocked out one of the SEALs. They’d found him just in time to keep him from drowning.
“Morning, Skipper,” Senior Chief Petty Officer Timothy Sadler said. He slid into a chair across the desk from his boss and sipped at a cup of store-bought coffee. Sadler was the top EM in the platoon, and at six-two and 220 had the size to do the job.
“My guess the workouts get tougher today,” Sadler said.
“You win the million dollars, Senior Chief. We need to get that edge again. We had it before Sierra Leone. We need to sharpen it up and push the men.”
“Aye, sir. Can I see the schedule for today?”
Murdock handed over the write/wipe board that had the day’s schedule on it in green ink.
“Yes, sir, looks good. Only, before the O course, let’s start with fifty sit and push.”
Murdock looked up and nodded. “Easing them into it?”
“Yes, sir, but we’ll soon be at a hundred three times a day. Sharpens the muscles and the mind.” Damn yes, they can do it, Sadler sniped at himself. He was the oldest guy on the platoon. If he could handle it, the rest of the kids could too. They did or they got the hook back to the regular Navy.
Lieutenant Ed DeWitt came in and dropped into the chair that the senior chief quickly vacated.
“Where’s the coffee?” Dewitt growled.
“And a good morning to you too, Ed. Sounds like you got up on the wrong side of a minefield this morning.”
“You should see it from inside my eyeballs,” Ed said, scowling. “I’m never civil until after 1100. How do you like the training sked?”
“Looks good for a start,” Murdock said. Ed could be a slow starter when he wanted to be. They’d handled the platoon together now for going on three years. A long time for the officer team in the platoons. Ed had married his lady, Milly, and he had mellowed out a little this past year. “How’s my favorite married lady?”
“Milly has had another job offer out at Deltron Electronics. Some hyperfink wants to raise her salary to sixty-five thousand and send her up to Silicone Valley. She asked me about it, and after Milly unglued me from the ceiling, she said she’d already turned down the job.”
“She’s a classy lady, DeWitt, and twice as smart as all three of us put together.” Murdock looked at the senior chief. “Milly is way up there high in the computer stratosphere,” Murdock said. DeWitt grinned at the compliment to his lady. Then Murdock turned to his top EM.
“Senior Chief, is there any reason we should continue to use the Colt M4Al carbine?” Murdock asked.
“The Colt?” Sadler asked. “Well, what we use it mostly for now is the forty-mike-mike, smoke, and HE. Hell, we’ve got both of them now on the Bull Pup. Like we saw in Sierra Leone, the smoke from the twenties isn’t as much as you get from a forty grenade. But you can put two or three WP twenties into the target and get the same result.” He furrowed his forehead a moment and wiped one hand across his face.
“Then too, Cap, we can use the smoke now out to a thousand yards with the Bull Pup,” DeWitt said. “I’d think we can phase the Col
t right into the armory.”
“The only problem is getting enough of the Bull Pups,” Murdock said. “It isn’t fully developed yet to the manufacturing stage. The military won’t be issued any until 2006. How many do we have on hand now, JG?”
“I’m not sure. Seven that I can think of. I’ll talk to my men and our armorer and get an exact count.”
“If we don’t have enough, we’ll fill in with the MP-5’s,” Murdock said. “Let’s get the new look in weapons as soon as possible. Only Lam and Ching have the Colt in Alpha.”
“Did I hear something about a new vehicle we were going to be able to test?” Sadler asked.
“News travels fast,” DeWitt said. “Fact is, Senior Chief, we’re going to check it out this afternoon. It’s called the Turtle right now. The Defense Department calls it their Combat Entry Attack Vehicle, or CEAV. Somebody called it a Humvee with fins, but it’s more than that. I saw it this morning for about five minutes. Three company engineers are with it and they said they’ll give us a ride. Basically it’s an amphibian, something like the old ducks of World War II. Only small enough to be inconspicuous, a true amphib that holds eight men and can make fifteen knots in water and do up to forty miles an hour on land.”
“This I got to see,” Sadler said. He shook his head and chuckled. “You know, this could knock the IBS in the head. If she’s small enough to get on an Osprey…”
“Doubt that, Senior Chief,” Murdock said. “Get me a final count on how many Colts we have and who uses them in Ed’s squad.”
Promptly at 0800 Murdock heard a whistle blast in the assembly room outside his office. He took a look out the door.
“Fall in, you tadpoles, do it by squads, let’s have an official roll-call count this morning,” Senior Chief Sadler barked.
The twelve enlisted SEALs grumbled and scurried to the two squads facing the senior chief.
“Alpha Squad all present or accounted for,” Jaybird bellowed.
“Bravo Squad all present or accounted for,” Miguel Fernandez shouted.
Sadler looked over at Murdock and saluted. “Third Platoon all present or accounted for, sir,” he barked.
“Carry on, Chief,” Murdock said, returning the salute. He turned to DeWitt, who had been watching out the door as well. “Starting to sound like the regular fucking Navy around here.”
Sadler looked at his team. “At ease. Can anyone tell me why the hell we’re still packing along the old Colt M-4Al?”
“Shit, we shoot it,” Jaybird shouted, and the squads laughed.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. This is my rifle, this is my gun. This is for shooting, this is for fun. Besides that, what can the Colt do that the rest of our weapons can’t?”
“Fire the forty-millimeter grenade,” Fernandez said.
“Right, give that man a cigar. So can we replace that forty in any way?”
“Hail, yes, Senior Chief,” Signalman Second Class Tracy Donegan said. “We put two, maybe three of the twenty-mike-mike smoke rounds in there and that takes the place of the forty.”
“Another cigar,” Sadler yelped. “True. And we can kick that smoke out a thousand yards, not two hundred. As of today the Colt is remanded to the armory. Anybody packing one should get it turned in. If we don’t have enough Bull Pups to go around, which we don’t, you’ll be drawing an MP-5 sub gun. Any questions?”
“Yeah, when do we get more of the Bull Pups?” Kenneth Ching, quartermaster first class, asked.
“Soon as we can. We’ll evaluate any future missions. If it looks like we’ll need more long guns instead of sub guns, we’ll go back to the Colt. Okay, spread out a little, we’ll get the day started off right. Drop and give me fifty good ones, and I mean the chest hitting the fucking floor. Do it.”
The chief did it, as well as Murdock and DeWitt, who had come up to the formation. Sadler liked that the officers did all of the training and physical workouts that the EMs did. That absolutely cemented unit loyalty.
Sadler wasn’t the first finished with the fifty. When he did finish, he stood and watched the ones slower than he was. “Stand when you’re done. The last man finishing gets to do another fifty.”
Jaybird caught the honor, and shouted a different swear word between each push-up.
When he was done, he stayed on the deck.
“Next, ladies, we do fifty bent-knee sit-ups. Let’s go, now.” Sadler dropped to the floor and started the gut-tightening exercise that had always been hard for him. He had to push to beat half of the platoon.
He watched the last ones finish. “Not bad. I beat two more of you than normal. Means we have to do more workouts. We’re moving up to a hundred of the big three soon, so you might want to do a little extra training on your own.” He looked at the two officers, who had finished their sit-ups.
“Ready, sir?”
“Lead out, Senior Chief.”
Sadler led them at a steady trot out of the building and past some structures to the O course. Obstacles at about twenty stations were situated in a square plot of sand. They all knew the spot well.
“Lieutenant, sir, you will be timer at the end, and Commander, you start Alpha Squad off at thirty-second intervals. We haven’t been here for a while, but anything over nine minutes will get you another try. Alpha Squad lead out.” Sadler watched the men go. He figured it was the toughest obstacle course in the world. If there was a worse one, he hadn’t seen it.
This one had a course record of four minutes and thirty seconds. BUD/S trainees had to do the course in ten minutes or they didn’t move onto the next step to becoming a SEAL. Most of his men could do it in from six to eight minutes, Sadler guessed. The course began with the parallel bars, the stump jump, and the low wall. Then came the rope climb and the high wall to go up and over. Next the thirty-foot-long barbed-wire crawl with the wire down to three inches off the sand at one point, the five-story cargo-net climb, the balance logs, the log stack, the rope transfer, and the two consecutive hurdles five and ten feet high. That was the toughest one. The men had to jump for the top of the five-foot hurdle and land on their belly on the crossbar, then muscle up until they stood on the five-foot bar, then lunge for the top of the ten-foot bar four feet away. There were more obstacles, but Sadler figured he’d know them when he saw them this time.
Long ago Sadler had learned that this course ate up upper-body strength for a snack. The best way was to attack each obstacle using as many muscle groups as possible to spread the workload. Those who tried to simply muscle their way through usually didn’t finish.
The men groaned, sweated, ran, and climbed. Sadler went after the last man in Alpha Squad, and came out the other end with a time of eight minutes and thirty-two seconds. He would have the times of each man, and hoped that he wouldn’t be the slowest. He took over the timing from the lieutenant, and the officer hurried out to take his turn through the course monster.
As each SEAL finished the course he dropped and did twenty-five push-ups, then rolled over and tried to relax.
Sadler checked the men’s times. So far Jaybird was the fastest with six minutes and ten seconds. When it ended, Sadler found two of the platoon members were over nine minutes. He’d have a talk with them and suggest they do the course every day for a week on their own time.
Ed DeWitt came boiling in as the last man through, and checked his time. Seven minutes and forty-two seconds. He grunted in surprise and turned away. The O course played no favorites.
Sadler walked over to where most of the SEALs sat on the sand. “On me. I want a column of ducks by squads, let’s move it. Yesterday was the only easy day.”
“Hoo-ha!” the men bellowed in unison.
The senior chief led them back to the platoon area at a six-minutes-to-the-mile run through the sand. At the home base he barked out the new orders.
“We’re going on a little swim. Water’s warm, so we’ll use only our cammies and the new Draegr Auto-Mix units. I want full combat vests and with the usual ammo and your assigned weapon. Let�
��s do it. In ten minutes we have to be in the water.”
The swim with combat gear to the tip of the North Island Navy Air Station went as planned, with Ed DeWitt leading them with the plastic compass board to give them the right direction. They went down to fifteen feet and using visual contact, and two-man buddy lines, the platoon swam at the lieutenant’s direction toward the end point. They came up once at the two-mile mark, barely letting their eyes break the surface of the blue Pacific Ocean to check on their angle. DeWitt adjusted his azimuth, and went down and swam the rest of the way to the marker buoy.
They surfaced and gathered around the JG. “Moving back, we’ll put Donegan on the board. Donegan, I want you to take us down to forty feet and lead us back to the BUD/S beach. It’ll be a good check on the new automatic control Draegr we’re breaking in. If anyone has any trouble, yank your buddy’s tie-line and get to the surface at once. Everyone understand?”
When no one objected, DeWitt handed the compass board to Donegan, the newest member of the platoon. He and his buddy on the tie-cord swam to the head of the line and promptly duck-dived, and the rest of the platoon followed. The senior chief knew the new rebreather was supposed to calibrate the right amount of oxygen and nitrogen mix in the rebreathed air. If they went to a hundred feet, the computer in the Draegr compensated with more nitrogen. When they came back up to fifteen feet, the mix had the required amount of oxygen. This would be their first full-scale, combat-simulated check on the deeper swim.
The Draegr worked fine at forty feet and the SEALs were pleased with it. When they came up on the home beach, they attacked it in the usual fashion. Two men charged in swimming hard and using a wave to surf in the last few feet, then lay log-still in the surf and sand watching the beach for any enemy activity. When they were sure it was clear, they charged into the dry sand and went into a defensive position with their weapons pointing shoreward. Then the rest of Alpha Squad stormed into the beach the same way, followed by a line of SEALs from Bravo Squad.
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