Seal Team Seven #20: Attack Mode (31 page)

Izzy pulled an Ingram submachine gun from under the front seat and went with them. They found a breach in the wire and were all inside when a sentry with a guard dog leveled an automatic rifle at them.

“Stop, you thieves, or I’ll blast every one of you into hell,” the sentry shouted.

“Idiot, imbecile, asshole,” Izzy screeched into the black Iranian night. “What the hell’s the matter with you? Didn’t you read the notice about a test exercise tonight? It was all over the motor pool. It’s a test, you stupid dunderhead. A group of raiders were set to try to sneak in and take down the motor pool and burn down all of our vehicles. You and your guards were supposed to stop them. There are referees around you haven’t seen yet. Officially our side has shot you down before you saw us, and now you’re dead, so you sit down where you are, unload your weapon, and stay there until a referee comes and tells you that you can leave.”

The soldier’s rifle wavered. “A test? I didn’t hear about a test.”

“Did you read the bulletin board this morning or tonight before you came on duty? Hell no. Stupid goat herder,” Izzy raged. “Now, sit down and shut up and don’t even move a finger until a referee comes. They’re wearing white helmets in case you don’t know.”

“But … but you have weapons.”

“Don’t you think anyone trying to break in here would have weapons? We have to make it realistic.” Izzy had walked slowly forward and was now within arm’s reach of the guard. The man had lowered his rifle until it pointed at the ground. “Now, sit down before I knock you down.”

The man dropped to the ground. Lam came up behind him and pounded the side of his MP-5 down on the guard’s head, knocking him out. Two other men jumped
forward and bound his hands and feet with riot cuffs and carried him into some high weeds.

Murdock moved up with Izzy. “Good work. Good idea about setting the trucks on fire. That way they won’t miss just one. Let’s move up to that shed, then on to the parking lot. Didn’t I see about a dozen vehicles lined up there?”

“Maybe twenty trucks and jeeps.” They ran ahead to the shack, which proved to be a storage area for empty oil drums. Ahead they saw two guards walking near the trucks.

Jaybird squirmed up near Murdock. “I can take out one of them when he passes that last truck.” Jaybird had out his razor-sharpened KA-BAR knife.

“Go. We’ll get the other one with silenced rounds.” They waited while Jaybird ghosted from one dark shadow to another as he worked his way thirty yards to the rear of the last truck in the yard. He crouched there until the walking guard made his turn to start back over to his post. Jaybird sprinted forward, caught the guard just as he turned, and drove the blade deep into his chest, slanting off a rib and daggering into his heart. The man slumped to the ground. Jaybird dragged him between two trucks and waved at Murdock.

The second guard came in sight again from around the front of the trucks. Two silenced shots whuffed from the SEALs’ weapons, and the Iranian soldier went down without a sound. Izzy said he would pick the truck and drive it, while the SEALs set up timed C-5 bombs on the gas tanks of four of the trucks.

Now Izzy ran forward with the SEALs. He chose the second six-by-six covered truck in the line and found the keys in the ignition where they should be. He started it and drove it forward. The SEALs had been working on their small bombs—half a stick of C-5 and a timer detonator set for ten minutes.

“Charges ready?” Murdock asked over the net. All four chimed in as ready. “Set for ten minutes, activate.” The four timers were pushed into the on position and the four
SEALs charged away from the trucks, toward the one that sat at the front of the group. They climbed on board and Izzy drove toward the front gate. A thin barrier barred the way. Two men stood at the gate. Izzy rolled down the window and scowled at the two soldiers.

“Didn’t you get the word about a night exercise?” he asked in Arabic.

“Nothing on my schedule,” a corporal said.

“Should be,” Izzy said. He lifted the Ingram submachine gun from his lap and fired three rounds into the first guard’s chest, then moved his aim and hit the second guard standing near the guard shack. Two of the three silenced rounds jolted into the soldier’s neck, putting him down and bleeding severely.

Izzy put the truck into gear, hit the gas, smashed through the thin lift arm, and they were on the road heading back toward the small town of Sirik.

“We still have twelve SEALs?” Murdock asked.

“Ten back here,” Mahanani said. “I’d say about three more minutes to the big bang-bang.”

Izzy pulled to the side of the road and they looked back at the motor pool. One charge went off early, blasting a splash of light into the darkness and sending a rolling thunder of sound toward them. Then the other three exploded and the sound intensified. A rush of air went past them toward the explosion, then came racing back at them. They heard five or six secondary explosions.

“Fuel tanks going up,” Prescott said.

Izzy put the truck into gear and drove on toward town.

“There’s a turnoff from the main highway to the new road. It had a guard there when we came by. I’ll pull into his spot and tell him we just saw a big explosion behind us. He might go for it.”

Less than a mile later Izzy slowed and came to a stop on a turnoff that held a small shack and a soldier standing in front with a submachine gun.

“You came from the north,” the guard said. “Did you see a big explosion up that way?”

“Damn big one. Looked like the motor pool went up.
Probably some asshole smoking around the fuel dump. You got a phone, you should report it.”

“No phone, no radio. You need a pass to get on this road.”

“Nobody told me that. Hell, where do I get one?”

“I give it to you.” The guard held out a piece of blue plastic about six inches square and thick. “Put that in your windshield and you’re covered.”

Izzy put the plastic in the windshield near his side and drove on through.

“Glad you came along,” Murdock said once they were past the checkpoint.

“Me, too,” Izzy said. “I haven’t been on a real operation for three years. I was getting rusty and damn impatient.” He frowned. “We made one mistake. We shouldn’t have left that first guard alive back there in the tall weeds. He can tell whoever will listen that a dozen civilians attacked him, blew up the trucks, and—”

“We didn’t make a mistake,” Murdock said.

“You mean he won’t talk?”

“Dead men never do,” Rafii said. “SEALs don’t take prisoners, unless they are at least brigadier generals.”

Izzy nodded, kicked up the truck to a higher gear, and they raced down the road, which was surprisingly good, well engineered and constructed, but without the blacktop surface on it yet.

“I figure another fifteen minutes and we’ll be to the next north-south highway,” Izzy said. “Then we’ll have to play it by ear and see what kind of security they have and what the hell we do then.”

Murdock used the net. “Listen up. We’ll be coming to the intersection up here. They may have heavy security from there on east. We’ll have to play it as it goes. Everybody get sharp. We don’t know what we’ll find or what we’ll do.”

They saw the lights from a mile away.

“We’ve got the blue plastic pass,” Murdock said. “You can tell the guards we’re bringing in more civilian workers for the plant.”

“But, Skipper,” Jaybird said, “if they challenge us, we’re sitting ducks. It’s for sure they have RPGs there, and plenty of automatic weapons.”

“A quick recon couldn’t hurt,” Lam said. “We pull over, put up the hood, and if anybody stops to help, you’re letting her cool off. Running too hot. I take a run up to the lights and see what I can find out, and call in on the net.”

“I agree with Lam,” Gardner said. “We’re flying blind right now.”

“Any more wild ideas?” Murdock asked. The radios were silent. “Okay, Izzy, pull it over and kick up the hood. Lam, take a hike.”

“Yeah,” Jaybird said. “And be careful out there.”

Lam took off down the shoulder of the road. Not much vegetation along here. If a car or truck came along, he’d have to hit the dirt and play dead. Shouldn’t be any cars, just army trucks. His civilian clothes wouldn’t help him out here; in fact they could get him shot if this was a military-only area.

He jogged the first half mile. The lights were still well ahead. Another half mile and he was closer, maybe a thousand yards. He could spot army trucks around a flood of lights. No slipping through there. He could see the other highway, another two-lane blacktopped type. It was a grade crossing, so no overpass. He looked behind and saw headlights coming, still half a mile away. He walked into the desert at the side of the road and found a bush that he squatted behind. It didn’t completely conceal him, but there would be no direct light on him from the headlamps. The truck pounded past, and he watched it as it came to the floodlighted area. It stopped. The driver and a front-seat person got out with hands up and stood for an inspection and a pat down. Then the two drivers marched away. The back of the truck was opened and three men with large lights stepped inside the truck. Soon they came out and a different guard got in the truck and drove it through the checkpoint and into the darkness beyond. The
drivers were marched in that direction, but Lam never saw them get back in the truck.

Lam told the net what he had seen. “Not a chance we can sneak through, and my guess is they have plenty of arms on hand if we try to blast through.”

“So we take a hike and pick up some transport on the far side,” Murdock said. “Wait for us there, Lam. Get back off the road a quarter and we’ll meet. Let’s move it, SEALs. This is why you get paid the big bucks.”

It took the SEALs fifteen minutes to find Lam, then another half hour to hike to the north-south highway and follow it south for a mile before they tried to cross it. There was almost no traffic, and they ran across on the first try, regrouping and heading north again a quarter mile out from the highway. When they came to the new and unfinished road heading into the eastern desert, they stopped and watched for traffic.

Nothing moved in either direction on the dirt roadway except six trucks in convoy heading to the east.

“If there was a single truck, I could play dead in the road,” Jaybird said. “Did it once before and it worked.”

“And you almost got yourself run over,” Mahanani said. “I hate to try to patch a guy up who has been run over by a semi truck and eight wheels.”

Murdock checked his glowing-dial wristwatch. “It’s not quite twenty-four hundred. We’ll do a five-mile hike and see what it produces. We need to get close to this plant where they break down the plut, but we’ll also need a spot where we can hide out during the coming daylight. Let’s choggie.”

Murdock set the pace. It was a swift jog, moving them along at seven minutes to a mile. They took a break after the first three miles, then after ten minutes moved out again. They had seen two more trucks driving east during the run, and none going west.

“No suicide by truck, Jaybird,” Murdock said. “Too dangerous with your dirt-brown clothes and the dirt-brown
road. We hike again, see what we can find, and well before daylight find a nest we can crawl into until tomorrow night.”

“Should be some way,” Lam said. “Yeah,” he said and grinned. “See that small hill just ahead. Can’t see the road on the other side. We wait there for the first single truck to come along and we put out a red flare. Red means stop almost everywhere. The dumb-ass driver stops and we reduce him to a corpse, hope he doesn’t have a load of soldiers, and utilize his transport for our own transportation eastward.”

“Help if we had brought one of those army uniforms,” Izzy said. “But I like the plan. It should work. Most of these trucks this time of night would be taking in supplies.”

“Let’s do it. Lam, double-time up to the spot and pick out where you want to throw the red flare. Pop it when you see a single truck’s headlights coming about a quarter of a mile off.”

“I’m gone.” Lam moved down to the shoulder of the new road for better footing and ran his marathon pace toward the rise about half a mile away. The rest of them hiked in the desert near the road at their five-yard interval and regular pace. Murdock figured they might have an hour or two to wait.

Ahead, Lam picked his spot. There was a slight ditch here beside the road, as if they had thought of leveling out the hill then figured it was too much work. He pulled a red flare from his combat vest and watched down the road.

Ten minutes later he heard the rest of the platoon come up and flake out in the sparse vegetation near the road. He saw lights far down on the road and tensed, but there were three sets of headlamps. He relaxed and made sure he was out of sight of anyone on the road. Minutes later the trucks rumbled past, kicking up a storm of dust that covered Lam. He coughed and sputtered it out of his mouth, then pried his eyes open to check down the road. He hadn’t yet dusted himself off when another set of
headlights showed. Yes, just one pair. This was his meat. He picked up the red flare and decided where he would throw it, then waited.

If it was a normal-sized truck, the lights should be about a quarter of a mile away. He yanked the fuse and threw it into the roadway. It popped and burned a bright red in the dark sky. He heard the truck slowing down, then saw it in the red glow as it crawled up slowly toward the light. Lam had been somewhat behind the flare, and now he lifted up and ran to the side of the truck away from the driver and stepped up on the running board. The window was down. He fired three rounds from his MP-5 into the driver, who jolted against the far door, and the truck stalled.

SEALs raced up to the truck and pulled back the tarp over the high bows on the top. Murdock heard strange sounds from inside the truck. He brought up his flashlight and shone it inside the rig. He almost dropped the light. Smiling back at him were ten women, all in Western attire and half of them blondes. A voice came out of the truck in English.

“Well, what the hell you staring at? Just what the fuck do you guys want, as if I didn’t already know.”