Seal Team Seven #20: Attack Mode (15 page)

“I can have a Sixty stripped and ready for your squad in ten minutes,” the CAG said. “We have acquired four IBS for your use. One will be loaded on the Sixty ready to go.”

Lieutenant (j.g.) Gardner stood up. “With the captain’s permission, I better get my squad ready and on the flight deck.”

“Permission granted, Lieutenant.”

Gardner and Canzoneri left the room. Captain Olenowski looked at the men around the table. “Now we wait and see what the real warriors do, and how the terrorists react.”

Gardner and Canzoneri rushed back to the SEALs compartment and spread the news. Bravo Squad got its gear ready, put on wet suits, and hoisted the usual combat vests and short weapons.

“Two screws,” Gardner said. “We’ll wire on three one-quarter pounders on each screw just to make sure. Bring timer/detonators. I want Canzoneri to carry the three quarter chunks of C-5. Prescott you carry three timer/detonators. Fernandez, you tote the other three quarter-pounders,
and your timer/detonator man is Rafii. Everyone know his assignment? Four on the screws, the other four of us on watch and security. Let’s choggie.”

Murdock watched Bravo Squad come on deck. He had already checked the bird and the inflatable Rubber Duck. The engine had a full tank of gas; all was ready. Gardner put his men in the bird, then turned and popped a salute to Murdock, who was so surprised he almost forgot to return the salute. Then the door closed and Gardner saw his men sitting down on the bare floor of the SH-60.

“I understand we’re only twenty miles from the atoll. We’ll fly in to the ten-mile mark to insure total surprise. That’s going to take us about four minutes in the air. This pilot will take us down to ten feet over the swells, where we push out the Duck. We’ve done it a dozen times. Mahanani, you’ll be custodian of the Duck while we’re gone. When we’re done, we’ll swim back on the same course we went in on. When we’re a half mile out, we’ll use our Motorolas so you can find us. Any questions?”

“There’ll be a drift,” Mahanani said. “I’ll use a floating flare and try to judge the direction. If I can’t find you I’ll call in the chopper to figure out where you are. Should be a piece of cake.”

“One minute to drop,” the crewman said.

“We’ll go out the back as usual,” Gardner said. “No fuckups.”

The rear hatch swung up, showing the sky and the blue water below them. When the bird settled down to ten feet, the chopper crewman yelled, “Go, go,” and they pushed out the Rubber Duck and jumped off behind it.

There was a current. It took them five minutes to get all eight men into the IBS. Then Mahanani started the engine, turned to the right azimuth, and powered the little boat toward the atoll. The chop was gone from the water. Mahanani figured they could make eighteen knots. That meant about thirty minutes to move the ten miles toward the atoll—if he figured this current right. He edged the angle of the boat more to starboard to compensate for the drift. Now he hoped that he could find that speck of sand in the damn big South Pacific.

“We’ve been motoring for twenty minutes,” Prescott said.

“Where’s the fucking atoll?”

“We’re still too far out,” Mahanani said.

“In San Diego we can see land from five miles,” Claymore said.

“Only here there aren’t two thousand foot mountains behind this little atoll, and no forty-story buildings near the beach the way there are in San Diego,” Mahanani said. “Give me another ten minutes.”

Nine minutes later on Mahanani’s stopwatch, he saw a small pile of clouds twenty degrees to port. He angled that way and two minutes later he saw it. “There it is, you disbelievers. That damn little coral atoll must not be more than twenty feet off the waves. We’ll motor in another quarter, then you’re on your own. We’re still about a mile out. Swim will be good for you.”

When Mahanani stopped the boat, JG Gardner had his course plotted and they dropped over the side and went down fifteen feet. He used the compass board and checked his men. Four sets with buddy lines. They swam toward shore. Gardner counted strokes, and when he figured they had done a half mile, he told the men on his underwater Motorola that he and Claymore were going topside to check. He barely broke the surface of a swell with his face. He was in a trough and saw nothing but sky and water. He waited for the trough to develop into a swell and at the top he looked again. Yes, there it was, a quarter of a mile and three degrees to the right. He went back down and told the men where they were, and they moved
forward. The big freighter sat on this side of the atoll, making the approach easier.

They came up amidships on the freighter, and the four sappers went to the stern. The other three men hovered out twenty yards, watching upward and to the sides for any enemy swimmers or boats.

Fernandez took the port screw and was surprised again how big the propellers were. He made doubly sure the big screw wasn’t turning, then swam up to it and unwrapped the wire and the three packages of plastique explosive in quarter-pound chunks. They reminded him of quarter pounds of butter at the supermarket.

He wrapped the wire around the end of the drive shaft just behind the propeller and forced the plastic explosive against the hub of the propeller. When he was finished, he held out his hand, and Rafii handed him two timer/detonators, which he pushed into the soft plastic explosive. Fernandez used the Motorola.

“I’m ready here on the port blade. Setting the two timers for ten minutes, agreed?”

Canzoneri came on the net. “Hold up, I’m not quite done. Damned wire hung up on me. There. Now I have it, all snugged in tight. We don’t want to have to come back for seconds. I’m inserting two timers into the C-5. They are set for ten minutes each. Ready to activate?”

“I’m ready,” Canzoneri said. “We’ll activate on your count of three.”

“One, two, three.”

Both men pushed in the activating levers, and all four stroked away from the ship. The men guarding them also headed away. They would swim out the same way they came in, and after a quarter of a mile, they would surface and get together for the rest of the swim out to the mile marker.

Mahanani had followed the conversation. He punched up his stopwatch and scanned the water ahead of him for any sign of the swimmers. There wouldn’t be any, but he looked just the same. He had drifted about ten degrees to port and now started to adjust, but as he thought about it,
he realized that the swimmers would also have a port drift. He waited.

At nine minutes he figured he’d see some heads pop out of the water to escape the concussion that would push through the ocean in all directions when the blasts went off underwater. There would be a lot of dead fish floating into shore tomorrow.

He thought he saw a small splash a hundred yards out, but then it dropped into a trough and he lost it.

“Four, three, two, one,” he counted down to ten minutes. Ten seconds later he felt the concussion as the sea trembled. At the stern of the freighter a geyser of water shot fifty feet into the air and the heavy cracking roar of the sound came out with the water. Was there one blast or two? Or did they come right on top of each other? He wasn’t sure. The men closer to the blasts would be able to tell.

The heads he thought he had seen were gone, nothing but the placid Pacific settling down into its beautiful routine of swell and trough and swell.

In the water, the JG came to the surface with Claymore. He did a three-sixty but couldn’t see the Rubber Duck. “Mahanani, where the hell are you?” the JG asked on the radio.

“I’m here. Where are you? Nice shooting. Did I hear one blast or two?”

“Two almost at the same time. We’re on the same course we went in on. Where are you?”

“You drifted about five degrees to port. I drifted, too. Do a stand tall and I’ll check you out.”

Both Claymore and the JG surged upward and scissors kicked to get as far out of the water as possible.

“Missed you,” Mahanani said. “Why don’t all seven of you do the same thing? I’ll check another quadrant.”

This time the seven SEALs lifted as high out of the water as they could and slapped the water with their hands as they came down.

“Gotcha!” Mahanani shouted. “You’re about fifty yards short and to the west. Stay there. I’ll come pick you up.”

Five minutes later all eight of the SEALs lay in the rubber boat. They didn’t move, watching for any developments they could see on shore. A small boat gunned out a channel in the coral and motored to the freighter. They saw two copper-skinned men dive into the water.

“Checking out our work,” Canzoneri said.

“Let’s get out of here, as quietly as possible,” the JG said. “Five knots will be just fine.”

When they were three miles off the freighter, the JG took the carrier radio, about a foot long and three inches square. He turned it on and hit the send button.

“Home Base, this is Waterwings.”

“Waterwings, go.”

“Ready to come home. We saw two blasts, so if we know what we’re doing, the freighter should be screwless. Send us a chopper with a rope ladder. We’re a little west of where he dropped us. A current is working. We’re about three miles off the freighter, but we don’t care now if they hear the bird or not, right?”

“Right, Waterwings. A bird is lifting off now. Should be at your position in about twelve minutes.”

“Should we shred the Rubber Duck when we leave it?”

“Right. Dismount the motor and drop it overboard, then shred all the air pockets you can reach. See you in about thirty.”

“Gun the motor up to give us fifteen knots so we can meet that Sixty partway there,” the JG said.

“Think we got both of the screws?” Canzoneri asked Fernandez.

“Hell, I nailed mine. If you got yours, it’s a clean sweep.”

“Yeah, we got them,” Canzoneri said. He leaned back and closed his eyes, but held on as the little Zodiac craft bounded along over the swells north and east toward the carrier.

It was almost dark by the time the Sixty picked up Bravo Squad and hauled it back to the carrier. The men changed
and had chow. In the CIC Murdock listened to Gardner tell the CAG about the mission.

“So, looks like we got both screws. Which means that tub is stranded for some time. Where in this neighborhood are those hijackers going to get new screws?”

“This is boat country,” Murdock said. “Half the economy is in boats. My money is on Majuro. Marine repair. CAG, do you have someone monitoring radio frequencies from that ship to Majuro?”

The CAG nodded at Murdock and Gardner. “Yeah, we been scanning all the bands they might use. Twenty minutes after your boys blew his screws off, the hijacker was on the air to Majuro talking to a marine salvage and repair outfit. They have two used screws that will work. Might be a little small and cut down his speed, but the
Willowwind
can get operational again.”

“Only if that repair boat gets here,” Murdock said.

“The repair guy got talked into a night run. It’s two hundred and eighty-five miles on our charts from Utrik to Majuro. The repairman said his ship can only do twelve knots. Take him almost twenty-four hours to get here.”

“So we have some time to stop him,” Murdock said. “What I’m wondering is why did the ship anchor here at Utrik? Is this another contact point?”

“We’ve talked with the mayor of Utrik by radio. He says he’s seen some newcomers around lately. The three transport planes landing there were a surprise. He asked us why we shot them up. I told him. I scared the hell out of him when he heard about the plutonium. He has two men in his entire police force. He’ll cooperate in any way he can.”

“At least they didn’t take over this atoll,” Murdock said. “I still wonder why they stopped here.”

Gardner shook his head and looked up. “It’s got to be small boats. This is coming down to a crapshoot. They know they can’t keep the freighter all the way to Iran, so they use whatever they can to spread as many of the packages as they can, hoping that several of them will get through and they can use them or sell them.”

“This is boat country,” Murdock said. “There must be a thousand seagoing boats in and around the atolls. How many forty-footers or larger are in the lagoon right now?”

Captain Olenowski talked to one of his men. “Our latest report from the Hawkeye shows that what could be four boats that size or larger were in the lagoon. They haven’t checked that lately.”

“Any way that we can watch the freighter tonight to see if it’s off-loading any of the crates?” Gardner asked.

“We could put three men on the atoll, across the lagoon from the ship,” Murdock said. “Send them in with a twenty-power scope. They’d have to have lots of lights on to do a night loading.”

The CAG scowled. “They could be off-loading right now. We don’t have anybody flying CAP on them. Let me check with the Hawkeye.”

“Can they track a boat as small as a forty-foot?” Murdock asked.

“They like larger targets but I think they can do it.” He waved at one of the men, who handed him a microphone.

“This is Home Base calling Skyhigh One.”

“Skyhigh here.”

“Can you track a forty-foot oceangoing boat?”

“Sometimes, depending on conditions. That’s a small item for us to follow.”

“Has there been any activity of that sort around Utrik in the past few hours?”

“Affirmative. We have three tracks moving away from the atoll. Two just before dusk, and one since.”

“Any idea of their size?”

“One looks like a hundred-footer, the other two probably eighty feet.”

“Stay on them. We need to know exactly where they go and if they hit any other atolls.”

“Wilco. We’re on it. You want updates?”

“If they land at any other atolls, we want to know immediately.”

“That’s a roger, Home Base.”

“Those boats could be innocent civilians on legitimate commercial runs,” Gardner said.

“True,” Murdock said. “Captain, can you contact the mayor again and ask him if the freighter has off-loaded anything today?”

Olenowski said he could and talked to the mayor on the radio.

“Oh, yes, this ship, the
Challenge
unloaded large crates into at least three boats I know about. The boats came in a few days ago waiting for the ship.”