Seal Team Seven #20: Attack Mode (10 page)

Stroh walked back and forth in front of the birds, like an expectant father. Captain Olenowski came out and talked to Murdock.

“We’ve got a go from the Task Force commander and from Stroh’s boss for this operation. Then we worry about the freighter. Good luck out there, and bring everybody back.”

“What do we do with the ship and cargo when we have it secured?”

“You signal the chopper you have control and we’ll send out a heavy lift bird to pick up the package and move it into our radiation proof vaults. Go.”

Murdock stepped into the SH-60 Seahawk and waved at the crewman he was ready to take off.

Jaybird wrote on a pad of paper and gave it to Murdock.

“We’re about a hundred miles from the boat Take us about thirty minutes to get there at two-oh-seven mph.”

Murdock nodded. He checked out the open door and saw the twin SH-60 fifty yards to their right.

Murdock went up to talk to the pilot

“When we get to the boat the other bird will circle it and our men there will use covering fire on the cabin and pilot house. Then we move in. Come in straight for the stern. As soon as you’re over the stern, slow down and match his speed. Then edge forward twenty feet and we’ll kick out the ropes and go down. When we have the boat secured we’ll signal you by holding a weapon over our
heads with both hands. Then you call the CAG and tell him we have control.”

Murdock realized he’d been shouting to make himself heard. The pilot grinned, nodded, and gave Murdock a thumbs-up.

In the other chopper, Claymore, Canzoneri, and Fernandez checked their guns. Fernandez had his H & K PSG sniper rifle. The other two had MP-5s for spraying the boat with 9mm lead.

“What if we don’t see anybody?” Canzoneri asked.

“We spray where they should be,” Claymore said. “Fernandez will put some 7.62 hot lead through the cabin and pilot house. We’ll get their attention and keep their heads down. Then we pull off and watch for trouble as our guys go down. Fernandez will get the call then if anybody shows up shooting at our guys.”

They waited.

Twenty-nine minutes after takeoff, Fernandez yelled. “Hey, I’ve got the boat. It’s blue and has a big square crate on the rear deck. Takes up half the boat.”

Fernandez used his Motorola personal radio. “Hey, Cap, looks like we’re here. Do we have a definite confirm on the ID on the boat?”

“Fernandez, we see the crate. I give a firm ID on the target. Move in.”

Fernandez waved at the crewman, who told the pilot to drop down to a hundred feet and circle the fast-moving boat. He did.

Fernandez fired first when they were coming into position. He put three rounds through the small pilothouse at the front of the craft and saw splinters fly. Then they were in a tight circle fifty yards from the craft and all three men opened up with their weapons, all firing out the same side door.

“Don’t see no fuckers,” Claymore yelled. They sprayed the small cabin forward and the pilothouse and then stopped. A moment later a head popped out of the cabin door and looked at the birds. Claymore hosed a dozen rounds at the spot, but the man had already jerked his
head back. They waited but saw no more men on the boat Canzoneri waved at the crewman, who told the pilot to ease away.

The other chopper wheeled into position behind the boat’s wake. Murdock and Jaybird stood in the doors, heavy gloves on, one foot poised beside the coil of rope. The Sixty edged closer to the boat. Murdock saw no one on deck. Another minute passed and the Sixty was in position over the stern.

“Now,” Murdock called. The two men kicked the heavy coils of rope out, and they unrolled as they fell, the end barely off the boat’s deck. At once the two SEALS grabbed the heavy rope and began sliding down. Heat pounded through the gloves into hands, stinging them. Before the first two were halfway down, Bradford and Ching grabbed the heavy ropes and began their slide. The first two SEALs hit the boat’s deck and raced forward around the plutonium crate, toward the small pilothouse and the cabin.

Murdock slid to a stop just outside the cabin. He discarded the heavy gloves and edged around and took a quick look inside, then jerked back. Two rounds from what he thought was a pistol sounded, and bullets flew through the opening. Ching skidded to a stop on the other side of the cabin door. Murdock pushed the MP-5 around the hatch and fired three three-round bursts, hosing down the inside. He waited ten seconds. There was no sound inside. Ching pulled out a flashbang grenade and waved it at Murdock. The commander nodded. Ching threw in the flashbang. Both SEALs covered their ears with their hands. The moment the shrieking pulses of sound finished and the blinding strobes of light ended, Ching charged into the cabin. He found two men, one dead with three bullet holes in his chest, and a second writhing on the floor, holding his hands over his ears. He had only a shoulder wound. Murdock tied his hands and feet with plastic strips, then the two SEALs went outside.

“Clear cabin,” he called in his Motorola.

“We have us some trouble up in the little pilothouse,”
Jaybird said. “Two of them in there behind some kind of protection. A frag or a flashbang?”

“Use the flash; the protection might save them from the frag. Go.”

Bradford pulled a flashbang from his vest and looked at Jaybird. Both nodded. They had discarded the heavy gloves the moment they hit the deck. Now Bradford jerked the safety pin out of the grenade and flipped it inside the pilothouse. It went off with the usual blinding, ear-bending results. Bradford and Jaybird charged into the pilothouse and found the two men, both with automatic rifles, lying behind a steel tabletop. Both were groaning and holding their ears.

Two minutes later they had three prisoners and one dead man. The boat’s engine had been throttled back to five knots to keep it from rolling in the swells. Next they checked the engine compartment and what had once been a hold to freeze fish. There were no men hiding in either spot. Murdock looked at Ching. “Anywhere else on this tub anyone could hide?” They both grinned at the same time, ran up toward the bow, and kicked open the head. No one was hiding there either. Murdock used his Motorola.

“Fernandez, you read?”

“Read you, Cap.”

“Tell your pilot to advise the CAG we have command of the boat and the package.”

“Will do.”

The SEALs checked out the heavy crating around the plutonium. It was two-inch-thick pine. Their bullets wouldn’t go halfway through it.

“Cap, Fernandez,” the Motorolas chirped.

“Go.”

“The CAG reports to our pilot that he has a destroyer that was riding herd on this flank that is now pounding its way to this spot at top speed. What’s that about thirty-five knots?”

“More like twenty-nine on a good day.”

“CAG says one chopper should stand by CAP for you
until the destroyer gets here and gives this boat a tow. Then we won’t risk dropping the package into the drink.”

“That’s a roger, Fernandez. You staying?”

“Right. The other bird has already flown the coop.”

“Fernandez, we’ll check out this tub and see if they wrote anything down about the final destination of the plut.”

“Roger that.”

Murdock and Jaybird went over the papers in the pilothouse and found nothing that even hinted at where the package might be headed. Nor did they find any clue about where the boat itself was going.

Bradford and Ching worked every piece of paper they found in the cabin but found nothing about the destination of the boat or of the plutonium package. Then the radios came on.

“Cap, this is Fernandez. Just got word from the CAG. He says the
Willowwind
is moving. It hoisted anchor and moved out about ten minutes ago. Nothing to indicate they know that we’re near them. Oh, that first radio message we got from the freighter on the international hailing frequency—the talker said he knew Don Stroh. The CAG hadn’t told the spook about it until an hour ago. Stroh reacted strongly and got on his SATCOM. Turns out the CIA has a man on board the plutonium-packing freighter. He must be the one who sent the message. So we need to be careful about keeping him alive when we attack.”

Murdock and his three men rode the sixty-foot boat behind the tow of the destroyer. Even before the destroyer arrived, the wind had picked up and the sea turned choppy. Then the storm clouds moved in from the west, and ten minutes later a drenching squall dropped sheets of rain on the boat.

The SEALs took cover in the cabin. “Not a chance we can go after that freighter tonight,” Murdock said. “Not unless this storm blows over and out of here before midnight.”

“Looks like it’s settled in for a two day blow,” Jaybird said. “You guys forgot I’m a weatherman, too.”

“Any idea where the freighter is headed?” Ching asked.

“When they called, they weren’t sure,” Murdock said. “There are a couple of atolls within two hundred miles. It could be going for any of them. I’d bet on one with a good-sized airport.”

“So we’re thinking here that the air escape is the best for those packages of plutonium,” Bradford said. “If they get them in the air, it’s gonna be damn tough to track them.”

“Yeah, especially if they fly out with four or five of them at the same time,” Jaybird said.

“Is anybody checking those airfields?” Ching asked.

Murdock shook his head. “Not yet. As soon as we get off this bobbing cork, we’ll talk to the CAG. Right now I just hope that the seas don’t get so rough that the destroyer has to cut us loose.”

Two hours later, the destroyer came close enough to
the carrier that they sent over a chopper to pick the men off the sixty-foot boat with winches. When the SEALs and the dead man and his three hijackers were all on the carrier, Murdock went to talk to the CAG and the carrier captain.

“The last heading we had on the
Willowwind
showed that she was sailing for Bikar Atoll. That’s about a hundred and eighty miles from where she was at the first atoll. That’s a big guess. There is a string of six or eight more atolls moving on southeast. He could be looking for any one of them.”

“Which has the largest airport?” Murdock asked.

“I don’t know,” the CAG said. “I’ll get in touch with the people on Majuro and find out. Yes, they might try to get a plane that would take out one or two of the boxes. Wouldn’t take a huge plane to do that. What did you figure those crates weigh?”

“From twelve to fifteen hundred pounds. Most of the weight is in the lead bottle.”

“What about a helicopter airlift?” Captain Walton asked. He was the top man on the carrier.

“Sir, wouldn’t take a big chopper to lift one of those packages off the deck of the freighter,” Murdock said. “Majuro would be the best place to find one for the job. Right now they’re outside most of those choppers’ radius range.”

The CAG rubbed his right knee. An old wound still gave him some trouble now and then. “How far are we from that second atoll, Bikar?” He looked at one of his aides in the small room, and he left at once. “What I’m thinking is we could send a pair of Tomcats out there and see if it has an airstrip and any air facilities.”

“How much runway does a Tomcat need to land?” Murdock asked.

“I almost always landed on the deck,” the CAG said. “Don’t know for sure, half mile, three quarters—whatever it is it’s got to be a hell of a lot more than these tiny little atolls would have. These are commuter and small commercial
planes. Two hundred yards and some of them crates are in the air.”

“We probably couldn’t see much in a fly-over,” Captain Walton said. “Our last weather report from our Hawkeye says this storm is a large one, could last for two days at least. It isn’t moving quickly the way some of them do.”

“That means the hijackers get another two days free rein?” Murdock asked.

“Absolutely not,” the CAG said. “We’re on the radio with Majuro and they are cooperating. They understand the seriousness of the situation. They don’t want that plutonium dumped inside their waters. They have alerted all of the major islands and atolls to be on the watch for the ship and for any suspicious cargo that tries to land from smaller ships.”

“Captain, I thought the Hawkeye could look through clouds for spotting aircraft. Can’t it do the same thing to track a ship on the water?”

“Depends on how heavy the rain is. The clouds we can get through with no trouble, but it’s the density of the raindrops and their size that give us fits. On any radar going into a cloud, most of it is absorbed and doesn’t get reflected. That which does can give us a generalized pattern, but it may or may not be enough to locate a ship on the water below.”

“Say the storm is in waves or squalls with clear patterns in between. Then the Hawkeye could do its work on the ocean and try to find the ship?”

“Right and that’s what we’re hoping for.”

A petty officer brought in some papers for the CAG. He glanced at them. “All right, we are about a hundred and seventy miles from that next atoll, Bikar. Our last spotting of the freighter had it on a heading that would put it right on the atoll. The storm might nudge them off course and will certainly slow them down. But at even ten knots, it could be at the island in seventeen hours.”

Murdock stood and began pacing the small compartment. He shook his head and almost said something once, then changed his mind and went on walking. His mind
was a jumble of plans and drawbacks and problems. The damn weather.

“Captain, can you get in voice contact with the manager of the airfield on Bikar?”

“We’ve been trying. Evidently it’s a part-time job and we don’t get any response. We obtained his call letters from the capitol in Majuro.”

“Captain, we need somebody on that atoll, to check the airport and the dock if they have one. In this weather it might be impossible to parachute in. Could a Sixty find the atoll in this wall-to-wall rain?”

“Find it and drop you off?”

“What I was thinking. We’d need radios that would reach your CIC.”

“Radios would be no problem. The Seahawk might. We could go up to thirteen thousand feet and get over the storm, but then you’d have to come down through it to find the atoll. The radius range would be okay. Finding the damn atoll in all that ocean is the tricky part.”