Frontal Assault sts-10

by Keith Douglass

  Murdock looked around the lighted area. Two vehicles. Three men with weapons holding Ed DeWitt, three other SEALs, and the driver. Murdock didn’t have the Motorola on. He relied on Jaybird to know what he was doing. He sighted in on the first guard holding the SEAL equipment and squeezed the trigger. The silenced round took the road guard in the upper chest, punched him back a step, then he let out a small cry and crumpled forward.

  Just after he fell, the second guard caught two of a three-round burst from Jaybird’s weapon. Murdock targeted the third guard and used three rounds to put him into the dirt of the roadway.

  Ed Dewitt leaped forward, his K-bar out, and provided the proof that the three men were dead. He and the SEALs dragged the bodies off the road and into the desert fifty yards. They returned and drove the two patrol rigs forward the way their car was headed. When the car’s lights turned, Murdock heard their car approaching.

  He and Jaybird jumped in the Citroën, and they drove forward.

  “A small problem that has been solved,” he told the driver and the others.

  “Yeah, damn small,” Jaybird said and took the magazine from his subgun and refilled it with fresh rounds.

  Five miles down the track, the SEALs drove the Iraqi cars into the desert, then ran back and got on board their transport, and the convoy moved on.

  An hour later, Murdock asked the driver how much farther.

  “Depends how close we can get to Basra,” the driver said. “They have more guards out now. I don’t know why. Two, maybe three miles from the naval base.”

  “That will be fine,” Murdock said. “Can you take back roads so we don’t hit any more roadblocks?”

  “Not here. One road. Must take. Road goes along river. It’s a half mile to the right. We drive up the road as far as we can. Easier than swim upstream.”

  Murdock nodded. They were passing houses now, strange brick and stone structures, then more of them. The road angled toward the river, and ahead they could see a blaze of lights again. The four cars still were not using headlights. Two hundred yards up the road, they came on the lead car stopped. The second one stopped as well. The driver of the first rig came back.

  “Big roadblock ahead. Many men and guns. Best to go by foot now. Maybe along river in trees, most of the way to the naval base on this side of the town.”

  The eight SEALs crawled out of the two cars. The last two sedans rolled up, and the rest of the men slid out.

  “Let’s saddle up,” Murdock said. “Get on the vests and bring your bags of goodies. We’re infantry for a while. Beats swimming upstream. Lam, get out front twenty-five. River is to the right. Let’s stay in any concealment we can find. Let’s choggie.”

  Alpha Squad fell in behind Lam and Murdock, and they headed for the brush along the river. Murdock had never seen the Euphrates, one of the fabled and historic rivers of the earliest of civilizations. Some say the Euphrates provided life-giving irrigation to the early city of Ur as far back as the twenty-ninth century B.C. That period of the Mesopotamians fascinated Murdock. The river itself began l,700 miles upstream in Turkey, came across Syria, and then through Iraq, before it joined the equally historic Tigris River to form the Shatt al-Arab.

  Murdock pulled his thoughts back to the present. He was going to be up close and intensely personal with the river before long. They had decided to leave their rebreathers at the base. They wouldn’t need them for long, and they would be a hold-back if things got sticky on the way in or the way out. The closer they could hike to the ships, the less surface swimming they would have to do.

  Lam dropped to one knee. The men behind him stopped, watching in all directions. Lam pointed toward the river, which was less than twenty yards away. Then the rest heard it: the single chugging of a small boat’s motor as it worked its way swiftly down the current of the river. None of them saw the boat.

  After a brief pause, Lam moved ahead again. Ten minutes later, they could see lights ahead. Lam came back.

  “Looks like security lights,” he told Murdock. “This must be the lower end of the naval base.”

  “Check to see what kind of fences and guards they have.”

  Lam faded into the night.

  Murdock waved the men down.

  Ten minutes later, Lam came back.

  “Three sets of fences, lights, and walking patrols on the land. I saw no security of any kind in the water.”

  “Let’s get as close as we can, then get wet,” Murdock told Lam. They moved ahead another fifty yards, then Lam angled toward the water. The river was wide and deep here. The Tigris came into it a short way above Basra.

  The SEALs knew the routine. They would swim just under the surface, break water to breathe, then swim underwater again. When they passed the edge of the naval base, they would keep under the surface for as long as possible. Some of the lights splashed over into the water. Any guard worth his rifle would be checking the lighted water as well as the land.

  They strapped their weapons over their backs, adjusted the tied-on waterproof sacks of explosives and timer/detonators, and moved into the water without a splash.

  Murdock led the SEALs now. Lam was right behind him. They swam to the light, went underwater and swam as far as they could, surfaced for a quick breath, and went back down. They had only forty yards to go this way before the lights faded and the river opened up into a body of water to the left that had to be the Iraqi naval base.

  They swam inside, found a deserted pier, which they swam under, and rested on the muddy bank. Murdock, Lam, and Mahanani made the scouting trip. They were back in a half hour.

  Murdock gave them the intel. “The frigate is three-quarters submerged and rotting. Not worth wasting a charge on. There are two Corvettes. One has lights on and a crew. It looks operational. The second Corvette is listing. We’ll blow both of them. We didn’t see any operational patrol boats a hundred feet long. There are two that are hulks, look like they have been used for spare parts. We’ll blow all three of them.

  “The replenishment tanker at four hundred feet is not in the basin. We saw about twenty ten- to twenty-meter patrol craft. We’ll try to blow them so fuel tanks will explode and we’ll have a wonderful pier-side fire.” He looked at the men clustered around him.

  “Lam, Adams, Franklin. Are your wounds holding you up any? Are you ready for this duty?”

  All responded that they were fit for duty.

  “Okay. Bravo Squad, take the two Corvettes. Both are bow into the dock. Try to blow the whole ass end off both of them so they’ll settle into the muck.

  “Alpha Squad will do the patrol boats and figure out something for the twenty-meter jobs. We’ll set the timers for thirty minutes. After setting the timers, we all should be back here in fifteen minutes. Then we’ll kick out for our meet-up with that Pegasus taxi. Now, gentlemen, let’s go blow up the last dregs of Saddam Hussein’s navy.”

  13

  Basra Naval Base

  Basra, Iraq

  Lieutenant (j.g.) Ed DeWitt led out his Bravo Squad, moving silently through the dark waters of the bay, angling for the pair of Corvettes berthed end to end along the pier. They had decided to use four charges of TNAZ on each side of the sterns of each ship. They would do the dark and unmanned ship first.

  Jack Mahanani led the way to the silent vessel with Quinley, Ostercamp, and Jefferson. They all had rigged the charges with magnets so they would clamp solidly on the steel hull wherever they wanted them. Ostercamp and Quinley planted their two charges each at the ship’s waterline thirty feet in back of the stern on the port side next to the dock. They dropped below the surface just as two sentries walked by on the pier.

  Mahanani and Jefferson put all four of their charges at the waterline and about twenty feet back from the stern. They would plant the charges, gather at the stern of the dark ship, and when all were ready, would go back, insert the timer detonators, and start the timers.

  DeWitt, Adams, Fernandez, and Franklin moved quietly toward the lighted Corvette.
Three sailors moved on the deck. The SEALs went underwater and came up against her hull. They surfaced without a sound. Two went on each side of the stern of the ship and planted their TNAZ bombs at the waterline. Just as DeWitt checked the ship, he found a sailor looking down at him.

  In the stern of the Corvette under the chopper landing pad, there was no more than five feet of freeboard. The sailor leaned down. DeWitt surged upward out of the water, reached up, grabbed the Iraqi sailor’s arm, and jerked him over the side before he could cry out. When the two splashed back into the water, it made more noise than DeWitt wished for. Then he was underwater with the wiry Arab, trying for a choke hold, then simply holding the man under the water until he began gulping in mouthfuls of water, probably hoping that it was air.

  DeWitt’s experience holding his breath underwater made the difference. He came up with his nose and mouth barely out of water and gulped in glorious air, then went back down and dove with the body of the dead seaman deep under the hull, where he snagged his clothing on the propeller.

  He surfaced, gasping, directly beside the stern. The other SEALs watched him. He gave them a thumbs up and they swam quietly back to the stern of the dark Corvette.

  “Everyone here?” DeWitt whispered. He counted seven heads. “Okay, let’s go and set the timers for thirty-five minutes and then get back to that unused pier. Murdock may need a little more time with his targets.”

  Murdock had split his squad into three teams. Dobler and Holt would do one of the old patrol boats, Sterling and Bradford would take out the second patrol boat hulk. Murdock, Lam, Ching, and Ronson would work on the thirty small patrol boats.

  They had a longer swim to the old patrol craft. The teams set the charges on the hulks and waited for Murdock to come back to them.

  Murdock and his three men swam another hundred yards to the small docks that moored the patrol boats. There were fifteen in a row on one side of a wooden dock and fifteen on the other. He could see no sentries or guards.

  Then a soldier on a bicycle rode down the dock, looked out over the water for a moment, then rode back and disappeared. They had decided to put half of the quarter-pound chunks of TNAZ on the fuel tanks of twelve of the small boats. They picked ones spread out through the group. Once pasted to the fuel tanks, Murdock told them to set the timers to thirty minutes and activate them. They did and swam back to the patrol boat hulks. Their men came out of the shadows of the ships.

  “Timers set when we saw you coming,” Dobler whispered to Murdock. The eight men swam silently back to the deserted pier. As they passed the manned Corvette, they heard sounds on board. They couldn’t understand the words, but it was evident that a search was under way. By the time they were past the ship, it blossomed with all lights available and a dozen men scurried around the ship, seemingly searching for something.

  Murdock and his men made it back to the pier, met with Ed and his squad, and talked it over.

  “Lots of activity on that Corvette,” Murdock said.

  “I got spotted by a sailor, but I pulled him overboard,” DeWitt said. “They probably missed him and are searching. Maybe it’s time we get out of here.”

  Murdock nodded, and the platoon took to the water. When they hit the current of the river, they grinned in the darkness.

  “That’s a five-knot current,” Murdock said as they floated down the river.

  DeWitt swam alongside him. “You still have your watertight Motorola?”

  “Safe and sound. We get down a couple of miles, we’ll hit the shore and give them a try. Can’t hurt.”

  Just then, a machine gun from the near shore slammed bursts of five rounds of hot lead into the river. The bullets zapped into the water just behind the swimmers, and they dove underwater and swam forward faster.

  When they surfaced, they heard the machine gun firing, but now well behind them.

  “Somebody getting nervous, or did they see us?” Senior Chief Dobler asked Murdock.

  “My guess is the nervous gidgets, a bunch of rookies who have never been in a fight before. Now they get nervous and think they see something.”

  They heard the first blast behind them, a resounding explosion that reverberated through the night air. Murdock could imagine the Corvette losing its stern and sinking into the bay. Then, in rapid succession, they heard eight or ten more blasts through the silent Iraqi night. The men gave a soft cheer. If everything went right, Iraq had no more navy.

  Just another day at the office. They moved on down the river. Murdock swam hard until he figured he was ahead of the rest of the men; then, as they came up to him, he waved them ashore on a sand bar that had some trees just behind it.

  When the last man hit the beach, Murdock counted. Yeah, all there. He unzipped the waterproof pouch and pulled out his Motorola radio.

  “Swimmers calling Pegasus. Swimmers in the wet looking for Pegasus.”

  He repeated the call two minutes later but had no response.

  The SEALs went back in the water. Murdock stayed at the front, and what he guessed were two miles on downstream, he went ashore with the men and tried the radio again. This time he had a response.

  “Yes, swimmers, glad you’re coming. Pegasus here. We’ve run into a bit of a problem. Some assholes onshore with a machine gun and a searchlight have got us at a standstill on the far bank. They can’t get their light over this far. If you read this, you’re no more than three miles upstream.”

  “Pegasus, our meat. We’ll move down and check out your buddies with the searchlight. Makes them easy to find. Hang tough.”

  Murdock put the radio away. “You guys heard him. We’ve got some work to do downstream. Let’s move.”

  Back in the water, they swam with a faster stroke now to help the current.

  Sometime later, they rounded a curve in the river and could see a searchlight ahead, probing the water and then moving toward the far shore. The river here was too wide to let the searchlight beam hit the far shore. The far side of the river had trees growing down right to the water. Murdock wondered if the Pegasus was under the screen of branches.

  Murdock waved the SEALs onshore. They cleared the water out of their weapons, charged them, and made ready to fight. Lam led out the Third Platoon. Murdock figured they were about 500 yards from the light. He wasn’t sure if it was on a boat or on the shore. If it was mounted on a boat, surely they would be on the water moving their light so they could pick up the enemy boat.

  The SEALs moved for five minutes along the shore, then Lam went down, and the SEALs followed. Murdock slid into the grass beside his scout.

  “Not more than fifty yards, Skip. Looks like a shore setup. A searchlight, small generator, a vehicle, and a fifty-caliber MG. How do we play it?”

  Murdock waved the rest of the platoon up. He told them what they had ahead. “Alpha Squad will move up and take them down. Bravo, cover our rear. Let’s go.”

  Murdock and his seven men worked forward, cautiously watching for security. He guessed there would be none. They had their weapons fitted with the suppressors and ready to fire.

  Lam edged around a tree. Two men on the searchlight sat waiting in the glow of two bare bulbs. One man on the machine gun and a loader leaned against the small truck the MG was mounted on. Two more men sat against the rig, evidently eating.

  Murdock brought the men up in a rough line of skirmishers. They were forty yards from the truck. Silently, Murdock assigned the targets to the men. As usual, they would open fire when his own MG pounded out three rounds.

  One of the Iraqi men moved.

  Murdock waited. The Arab soldier relieved himself in the darkness, then went back to the searchlight. Murdock sighted in on him, pushed off the safety on the subgun, and spat out three rounds.

  At once the other silenced weapons spoke. The searchlight went out first as three rounds hit it and the glass shattered. The two men on the machine gun went down next, with rounds in their chests and head. One man, who had been eating, came up on his knees and reached
for his weapon before two 7.62 NATO rounds slammed into his chest, mashing his heart into a froth of bubbles and spurting blood.

  The other man who was eating lifted his spoon and turned toward his buddy before he slammed sideways with four rounds in his chest and side that punctured his heart and both lungs. The other man on the searchlight never got off his chair. He took three rounds and slumped over, one hand clawing at the light before he died.

  The firing stopped. Then the door of the truck opened and a man came out, diving and rolling. He got almost to the cover of a huge tree before two rounds caught up with him and rolled him into instant communication with Allah.

  They waited two minutes. Murdock waved the squad forward. “Make sure,” he said. He heard seven silenced rounds as the Iraqis received the classic coup de grace in the back of the head.

  Murdock had out his Motorola. “Pegasus, come on to where the searchlight is and pick us up. We need a ride home. This bit of Iraqi soil is solidly in our hands. The bad guys are no longer with us.”

  “Hey, SEALs, thanks. That’s a roger. We’ve moving.”

  They could hear the soft growl of the big engines as the Pegasus came out from a screen of trees. In its black coat of paint, the low, sleek boat slid upstream against the current until it was halfway across the river. It turned with the current and slanted in to the shore where the searchlight still stood, now blank-eyed and dark.

  The craft eased up within a dozen feet of the shore, and two SEALs grabbed the stern and pulled it in closer and held it. The other men stepped into the craft and moved into the covered cabin on the eighty-two-foot-long speedster.

  Murdock was the last man on board. He looked at the ensign and smiled. “Nice to have you come fetch us,” Murdock said. “Let’s get the hell out of Dodge.”

  The ensign frowned in the half-light from the ship. “I beg your pardon, Commander?”

  “Let’s go home, sailor. I’m hungry and could use a huge steak dinner with all the trimmings.”