“We have a fringe of developed land along the coast, maybe three miles deep,” Murdock said into his mike. “We get through that into the increasingly dry desert, until within five miles we’re in the heart of the Sahara with sand built on sand. We find a highway to the site and follow it. This time we hike. We don’t want to ring an alarm by stealing a vehicle. Maybe on the way back. It’s only seven miles. About an hour out. Let’s chogie.”
Joe “Ricochet” Lampedusa took the point as scout as usual, moving out fifty yards as the others waited in the brush. Lam crossed a blacktopped road and scurried to a ditch on the other side as two cars whipped past. Ahead lay the outskirts of the coastal village. Two houses and a pair of sheds. Lam worked around them, saw no lights on, and waved the platoon forward.
Murdock took his Alpha Squad out first. Here they were in a single-file combat mode, five yards apart. They jogged across the road when it was clear, and then moved silently past the houses into an irrigated field. It had been harvested, and Murdock figured the crop was a grain of some kind. The coastal plain here was irrigated from wells and some small oasis spots where water bubbled up from the underground water table. His intelligence reports said that at this spot along the coast the arable land extended only three miles inland.
Once across the irrigated field, Lam angled to the west, where he heard traffic. The reports said there would be little vehicular use of the roadway into the maximum-security facility.
For once Murdock had been given exacting information about their target. It was a former European-owned estate house, with a fenced compound, guards outside and in the main house. There were two other buildings on the site, one a barracks for the military guards, and another that was formerly a garage, now used for supply and storage. No dogs were reported inside the wire. The SEALs had worked out an attack plan, but situations often changed when the platoon came to the actual target.
The irrigated fields lasted for three miles inland, with an occasional house and a few buildings where the owner of the land lived. Background on the area advised Murdock that most of the parcels were small, some only five or six acres, and they were highly prized because of the shortage of arable land.
Sand and clumps of saltwort and spurge flax began to invade the area as the SEALs moved south toward the desert. The clump grasses would soon take over the land in the area that couldn’t be irrigated.
Up front, Lam had located the roadway south and had paralleled it three hundred yards off. There had been some truck traffic, and now there was a sedan or two, all painted military dull-green. Once past the cultivated fields, Lam found what he figured were off-road vehicle trails. Some had metal tracks; others had low-pressure tires to bigfoot on the softer sandy areas. He stopped and listened, but heard only one sedan on the highway. He moved ahead.
“Some strange tracks, Skipper,” Lam reported on the radio. “Not sure what they are, but they ain’t here now.”
“Roger that. Keep your ears open.”
They moved ahead. Five minutes later the third platoon went to ground as a roaring, clattering armored personnel carrier stormed out of a wadi to the left and charged into the center of their line of march.
The desert-cammy-clad men dove into the sand and watched the machine storm toward them. It had no forward lights, but the Libyan moon was full, giving reasonable night vision. Tran Khai, Torpedoman Second Class, and Jack Mahanani, Hospital Corpsman First Class, had to surge up from the sand and sprint ten yards to get out of the direct path of the growling giant.
There was no reaction from the men in the armored carrier. Either they didn’t see any of the SEALs, or they discounted them as a friendly patrol. The rig continued in a straight line to the highway, then turned and headed south along the road.
“Radio check, Bravo,” the JG whispered into his mike. All seven men responded. “Okay here, Skipper,” DeWitt reported.
“The driver wasn’t using night vision goggles or he would have spotted those two runners. We lucked out on that one. But it could mean tighter security around this special facility than we figured.”
A half-mile march farther into the desert, they came to shifting sand and dunes twenty feet high. Lam moved the men closer to the road, but kept a hundred yards away.
Murdock figured they were still two miles from the facility when Lam called.
“Skip, we’ve got some trouble. Better come up and take a gander. I’d guess it’s a blocking force up front.”
Five minutes later, Murdock and Lam bellied up the side of a sand dune and peered over the top. They had heard voices, metal on metal, and even Murdock could smell the spicy aroma of food.
“Lunchtime for a twelve-hour shift,” Lam said.
In a small wadi near the road, a field kitchen had been set up, complete with mess tent and a cook tent. Still in line at the serving table were a dozen troops in field gear and with weapons slung over their shoulders. They all wore steel helmets.
“How many?” Murdock asked.
Both men stared through their NVGs, which turned the night into a green dusk.
“Thirty, maybe thirty-five, depending how many are in the mess tent,” Lam said.
“Agreed. If they’re eating, they won’t be on patrol. Might be a good time for us to move.”
As he said it, an armored personnel carrier roared up thirty yards downwind from the kitchen, and a dozen men poured out of the rig. They yelled and shouted and raced each other to the chow line. None carried mess kits. They would eat off metal trays.
On the way back to the rest of the troops, Lam and Murdock worked out their plan. They would move a half mile to the side of the eatery, and pound past as quickly as they could, then swing back toward the highway.
It took twenty minutes for the maneuver; then they worked south again five hundred yards off the highway. They were in their usual field formation, a diamond for each squad, with Lam out in front of Alpha Squad.
There was no warning. They were marching along, knowing they were coming closer, when three white flares burst over their heads turning the black night into midday bright. At once rifle fire stuttered from the darkness in front of them.
At the first crack of the flares high overhead, the SEALs dove for the ground hunting any cover they could find. There was none. No orders were needed. The SEALs automatically returned fire. Four men with Bull Pups aimed the 20mm lasered airburst rounds at the muzzle flashes in the darkness. Four seconds after the first rifle fire aimed at them, the SEALs had returned the first shots. Two seconds later four more 20mm airbursts thundered into the dark of the Libyan desert. Only one enemy rifle fired after that. The flare continued to burn for thirty seconds, which seemed to be a lifetime.
The SEALs had stopped firing when the enemy guns went silent.
“Hold for the flare, then we move up to where those guns fired from,” Murdock ordered in his mike.
The flares fizzled out and glorious darkness reigned again.
“Let’s go check our work,” Murdock said. The SEALs lifted off the sand, formed into a line of skirmishers, and with weapons trained to the front, walked forward. The squad of Libyan soldiers lay sprawled in a wadi only two feet deep, but usually enough to offer total cover for the men. They didn’t count on the airbursts.
One Libyan was still alive. Colt Franklin, Yeoman Second Class, grabbed the man and spoke gently to him in Arabic. Murdock hurried up. “Ask him why all the security.”
Franklin did, and the man shook his head. “Said he has no idea. He just does what the officers tell him.”
“Ask if he knows what is in the large house a few miles south.”
Again the Libyan shook his head. “He says some important people but he doesn’t know who.”