Battleground (9 page)

Quinley had almost gotten there when a rifle poked out
the second door and slammed off six rounds well over his head. Most dug into the walls. Nobody got hurt. Quinley surged ahead before the door could be closed, and let the arming handle pop off a grenade, held it two seconds, then threw it into the second room.

The explosion came almost at once. Quinley jolted forward, came to his feet, and surged into the room with his MP-5 chattering. A few seconds later, he waved out the door with a thumbs-up. Three SEALs used assault fire and stormed down the hallway to the second door and rushed inside.

Lincoln led them. Now he checked the hall. They weren’t sure which door the second sniper had used. DeWitt had cleared the first room, and Yates and Lampedusa cleared the third room. They had three ahead of them.

“It was either the fourth or fifth door,” Quinley said. “Sure as hell wasn’t the last one. All that’s left is four and five.”

“One man on each side of the hall,” Lincoln said. “Same procedure. I’m on one side, Willy Bishop on the other. Same thing Quinley did. Give us some cover.”

Two more SEALs ran into room two, and were ready for support fire. Lincoln nodded and dove to the far wall, and Lincoln took the near one. The SEALs laid down the covering fire. One weapon poked out of door four, but jerked back in when the fire concentrated there.

Lincoln had that side. By the time he got there the door was closed tightly. He fired three rounds into the locking area, kicked the door open, and sprayed the inside of the room with 9mm whizzers.

Return fire blasted through the door. Lincoln had fired from low and to one side. He tossed in a fragger grenade, and when it went off, he was up and charged inside. No shots came from the room.

DeWitt and the others cleared the last two rooms, and they relaxed.

“Second floor clear,” DeWitt said into his mike.

“Nobody exited the joint,” Murdock said. “Good work. You moving downstairs for the first floor?”

“Roger that.”

The Second Squad went down the far steps quietly and with caution. They cleared three doors and found no one home. They went through the kitchen, the infirmary, a library, and six more offices. There were no more Kenyan rangers in the compound.

“Clear all,” DeWitt said. “Where the hell are the hostages?”

“We found a door with stairs leading down,” Willy Bishop said.

“Let’s do it,” DeWitt said.

The stairs were clear. In the basement they saw two small rooms had doors standing open. Big locked double doors led to what must be a larger room just beyond the smaller ones.

DeWitt tapped on the steel door with the butt of his MP-5. He waited. Three taps came back. DeWitt tapped again, three quick raps, then three slow ones, then three fast ones. Dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot. SOS in Morse code. They heard a cheer from inside. More noises came as the doors were evidently being freed so they could be opened. One door swung open slowly, and a lone man stood there with a bandaged left arm.

“Lieutenant (j.g.) DeWitt at your service, Mr. Ambassador.”

First Secretary Frank Underhill let the tears roll down his cheeks. “Thank God,” he whispered, then pulled both doors open wide. “Thank God for the United States military forces.”

“Hostages freed,” DeWitt said in his mike. “Call in the choppers, Murdock. Time’s a-wasting.”

The SEALs had never received a warmer welcome. Every one of the hostages hugged the SEALS, and the women kissed them on the cheeks and didn’t want to let go of them.

“The two women Colonel Maleceia took away?” Underhill asked. DeWitt took him aside and told him what they had found.

“The redheaded woman was our CIA agent. I’m sure she put up a fight. She’d know the time to pick. Damned shame.
Both fine women, both of them.” He paused a moment. “We’re taking out our dead, of course.”

DeWitt shook his head. “Sorry, but we don’t have the capacity on our aircraft. We’ll be back soon to claim them. We won’t leave them here for long. You have the U.S. Navy’s word on that.”

The wounded were led up first. DeWitt picked out twenty people, including the wounded and the distraught, and kept them inside on the first floor until the big Seahawk chopper landed and the dust cloud blew away.

The SEALs spread out as security around the landed Seahawk as the civilians ran to it and climbed on board. Underhill declined to go on the first bird.

Just as the first Seahawk took off, Holt ran to Murdock. “Better listen to this, L-T. I switched to the pilot’s frequency.”

“Roger that, Sweepers. You have two incoming blips about eighty miles out.”

“Slowboy, we figure they’re Kenyan jets. Arms unknown.”

“Sweepers, just lifting off number-one Slowboy. Suggest you splash the bogies if they don’t ID.”

“Just had clearance from Home Plate to do that. No change in their course or speed.”

Murdock frowned. Eighty miles. In the age of jet interceptors that was like bayonet fighting. Say the Kenyan jets were old, could only do only a thousand miles an hour. That was still seventeen miles a minute. In five minutes they would be here. He needed probably fifteen minutes to land, load, and launch each of the last two choppers.

DeWitt’s voice came over the Motorola. “Hey, Boss, we’ve got three bad-guy weapons carriers heading our way. Not more than two blocks down the street. Can’t be sure, but looks like they have fifty-calibers mounted on top.”

0353 hours

U.S. Embassy compound

Nairobi, Kenya

Radar Intercept Officer Lieutenant Satterlee checked his screens in the back seat of the Tomcat high over Nairobi. “Cap, we’re tracking on both the targets. We have a weapons-free order yet?”

“Soon, my boy, soon. Stay on the first target.” That was the front-seat jockey of the Grumman F-14D Tomcat, Lieutenant Commander Harley Allison.

“Still tracking,” RIO Satterlee said. “Range sixty-five miles. We’ll go with a Phoenix launch if we get a chance. The bogie might turn tail and run when his radar picks us up.”

“A chance, but we hope he doesn’t.”

The AIM-54-C Phoenix is unique in U.S. armaments. It’s a 985-pound missile with a range of over 120 miles and a speed of just over Mach 5. In the U.S. arsenal it can be fired only by the F-14 Tomcat with its advanced AWG-9 radar-guidance system. The Tomcat’s radar was a set-to-track-while-scanning system, and could lock onto six separate targets and guide missiles simultaneously to all six locations.

“Range fifty miles, Cap. I see no indication of enemy radar locking on us.”

“Just got a weapons-free signal from Home Plate. Sat, let one fly.”

“That’s a fox three from Eagle One,” Satterlee said, giving the aviator’s code words for a Phoenix launch and his own ship’s ID.

Satterlee hit the launch button, and the Tomcat bounced higher as it dropped the half ton of missile from its belly. The Phoenix ignited at once under the Tomcat, and jolted forward at more than three times the speed of the Tomcat, leaving a contrail streaming after it.

“Missile away,” Allison said. He brought the Tomcat into a hard climbing turn, then pushed the wheel forward, slamming his bird downward toward the Kenyan country-side below. It was a maneuver designed to shake an enemy missile if one had been coming at them.

Then Allison put the bird in a hard climb.

On the ground, Murdock took the mike from Holt. “Sweepers, this is Ground. We could use some help down here. Anybody listening?”

“Eagle Two, I’m with you, Ground.”

“We’ve got three half-track weapons carriers coming up from the north toward the compound. You won’t be able to see them, but they’re about a block out along that north-south street that runs right along the compound. Welcome them if you can. We need another twenty minutes here minimum.”

The second Seahawk had set down in the compound, and Murdock fought the cloud of dust. He wiped his eyes and spat twice.

“Eagle Two, you copy?”

“Roger that, Ground. Yes, I have the road. I’ll make my run away from the compound. Don’t expect any miracles with the twenties.”

Almost before the transmission ended, Murdock heard the jet coming in. Most of the sound on a jet goes out the rear burners, but they give off a sound wave in front as well as they rip through the air at an operational speed of 1,342 knots per hour. The Tomcat flashed over the compound at
less than a hundred feet, firing repeatedly at the vehicles a block away. Then it swept up, vanishing in the night sky.

“DeWitt, that do any good?” Murdock asked on his Motorola.

“Scared two fucking months’ growth out of me,” DeWitt answered. “Looks like one of the rigs is dead in the water, the second one is wounded. Here comes the third one. Wish we had our own fifty.”

DeWitt brought three of his men up with the M-4A1’s, and had them start lobbing HE 40mm grenades out of the M203 launchers under the barrels.

Ted Yates set up his H&K-21A1 on top of the wall, and began blasting the confused half-track men with the 7.62mm rounds from the machine gun. Six men went down before the rest ran for cover in neighboring houses and stores. The third weapons carrier turned forward, and the .50-caliber machine gun stuttered, slamming the big rounds into the block wall.

Yates slid off the top of the wall and hunted for a better-protected spot. Adams, Bishop, and Lampedusa all worked their .40mm grenades on the half-track. They switched to Willy Peter, and the white phosphorus blazed white trails across the top of the carrier, and brought some wails of anguish as the intensely burning phosphorus burned straight through wood, leather, canvas, and human flesh.

When the dust cloud eased, Jaybird Sterling had the last twenty-one hostages waiting to run from the front door to the Seahawk. The last one on board was Underhill. When he was sure all of his people were safely inside the bird, he stepped in, and the craft jolted into the air and raced toward the coast.

The next Seahawk came down almost immediately. The dust from the takeoff hadn’t even cleared.

Murdock was on the Motorola. “DeWitt, get your men up here. We’ve got transport. I say again. We have transport. Fall back to my position south of the main building to our LZ. Move, move, move.”

All the men in the Second Squad heard it. Bishop got off one more shot, and saw his WP land just in front of the
slowly moving half-track and spray the engine, cab, and body with the burning chemical. Then he ran for the side of the main embassy building, and down to where he could see the Seahawk with its big top rotor swinging around.

“Twelve, thirteen, fourteen,” Murdock counted. “Where are the last two?”

“We need Jaybird and Magic Brown,” DeWitt said between gasps for air. He’d sprinted 150 yards, and the last batch of air had been loaded with dust.

Jaybird materialized out of the dust helping Magic Brown, who limped badly. Eager hands pulled both on board.

“Go, go, go,” Murdock bellowed. A crewman slammed the side door shut, and the bird jumped off the ground like a frightened deer.

“You still set for the flyboys?” Murdock asked Holt, who sat on the floor of the chopper beside the L-T.

Holt nodded, and handed Murdock the mike.

“Eagle Two, this is Ground.”

“Have you, Ground. Is your last Slowboy off the deck?”

“Roger that, Eagle Two. Off and moving. Thanks for the twenties down the road. You saved our bones back there. That last weapons carrier was bearing down on us.”

“All in a night’s work.”

“What happened to the two jets coming in?”

“Eagle One splashed one out about sixty miles. His buddy turned his afterburner on and gunned back the way he came. We have no IFF on them. They didn’t respond to our friendly signal, so we know they weren’t the good guys.”

“Thanks again. You going home?”

“Going to do a little cover work until you get wet; then we’ll break it off.”

Murdock gave the mike back to Holt, and moved among his men checking them. They had some scrapes and gouges. Nothing Band-Aids wouldn’t cure. Then he looked at Magic Brown. The corpsman on the chopper worked on Brown’s leg.

“Sir, this man took a round through his thigh. I don’t know how he even walked, let alone ran. Said he got it early
on. Don’t think it hit a bone, but the doctors will tell us that for sure. He’s going to be resting up for a week or so.”

Magic Brown snorted. “Hell, little scratch like that won’t slow me down none. Got me some work to do. We still got to get that fucking ship back in U.S. hands.”

The corpsman grinned.

Murdock shrugged. “Hey, he’s not your ordinary sailor. This man’s a SEAL. Usually bullets bounce off Brown. Don’t know what happened this time.”

Magic Brown gave Murdock a thumbs-up. Then the morphine worked its magic and he dozed.

In the middle chopper, a corpsman looked over two slightly wounded embassy people. Nothing serious. Then he checked Underhill’s arm.

“Sir, have you had any medication?”

“No. None available.”

“I’ll give you a shot of morphine. That’s a serious arm wound. We’ll have the doctors ready for you when we get in. A little under two hours and we’ll have you on board the carrier. Your other people are all in good shape. About half of them are sleeping.”

First Secretary and Acting Ambassador to Kenya Frank Underhill nodded wearily. He hardly felt the injection. So many of the embassy people had died. They had to go back and get them. Had to. They just had to. America didn’t leave its dead for the butchers to desecrate. Had to go back and get them.

Then he slept.

0628 hours

USS
Monroe,
CVN 81

Indian Ocean off Kenya

Six of the hostages needed medical attention, but First Secretary Frank Underhill was not among them. He was in the Carrier Intelligence Center talking by SATCOM to the State Department in Washington. He told them what had happened, and how the Ambassador had been murdered. He asked for instructions.

Below in the hospital, Murdock watched the doctor treat Magic Brown’s leg wound.