The Pegasus’s machine gunner jolted the craft with the 12.7mm rounds as they stormed past it fifty yards away and at thirty knots. There was no return fire. The searchlight angled upward and still blazed with a shaft of brilliance through the dark night.
Once they made it past the river patrol boat, Ensign Turley looked at Murdock with new interest.
“Never seen you SEALs in action before,” he said. “You do good work. So far, we’ve only run the admiral around. Glad to get in some real action. This boat was made specifically to take you SEALs in and out of places on your missions.”
“We’ve heard,” Murdock said. “This is our first ride in one.” Murdock went into the small cabin and looked out front. The captain had been right; it was hard to see out there at night.
“That inland patrol boat must have had a radio. If they did, they probably got the word out that we were here. That land machine gun might have had contact, too. My bet that we have some more company downstream. How far do we have to go yet?”
“Thirty miles.”
“Plenty of time and distance for them to radio ahead and put out some heavy-duty welcome for us. Can we juice it up to thirty-five knots?”
“Might be safer than running though some concentrated fire from the riverbank.” He nodded to the helmsman who revved the throttle. Then he switched off the interior lights. “If they can’t see us, we’ll be harder to hit.”
“How’s your supply of forty-mike grenades?”
“Plenty, two cases of HE and a case of WP.”
“Good. Our guys might need to borrow some if they run out.”
They raced along hard and fast for a while. The river here was fairly straight and getting wider.
Ten minutes later, they saw a light downstream. Turley put his twenty-power scope on it. “Can’t tell. Could be a searchlight or maybe a bonfire onshore.”
He cut the power and the sound of the two big V-12 diesels that kicked out 4,500 horsepower.
“Whoever it is can hear us but can’t see us,” Murdock said. “How about hugging the opposite shoreline.”
“Dangerous over there, but we’ll try it and cut power again. Let’s hope we can creep by them.”
“SEALs up and at ’em,” Murdock bellowed. “Weapons on ready, especially you long guns. Some more company up front. If there’s a spotlight, I want it to go first. Snipers decide who gets it.”
The SEALs moved from the small, covered cabin to anywhere on the Pegasus that they would have a good firing position. The boat angled for the far shore. The light was on the right-hand shore. They chugged along at about five knots, and the engines sounded like they were idling.
Without warning, they saw a flash from the shore and a trail of sparks and fire coming toward them. It fell halfway to them.
“RPG,” Ed DeWitt said. “Damn poor calculation on range. They can get this far.”
As he said it, three more flashes showed onshore, and the rockets flew farther this time, but all fell short and slightly upstream from where they were.
The river here was three hundred yards wide. They were still fish in a barrel.
With dazzling suddenness, the light they had seen before turned in their direction, slashing a brilliant shaft of white searchlight across the water. It highlighted the far shore, swung back and forth in a good search pattern, but never got upstream far enough to find them.
“Do it,” Murdock said.
Two shots without suppressors blasted from the sniper rifles. Within half a second, the searchlight died.
Ensign Turley gave an order. The SEALs heard the motor revving up and slid back into safety or hung on with both hands. The slender boat leaped ahead, thrust by the four thousand horses. It went from five knots to forty knots faster than Murdock had ever gone before.
A machine gun chattered from shore. The rounds hit well behind them now. Turley aimed the dartlike boat at the middle of the river and pushed the throttle forward again until they were racing along at forty-five knots. Everyone hung on to anything solid he could find.
The machine gun fire faded.
Turley pulled the throttles back to fifteen knots and sailed down the center of the river.
“We didn’t hurt them much back there,” Murdock shouted over the engine noise to Turley. “They might have some more friends downstream waiting for us.”
“Might,” the Pegasus captain said. “I’m not counting on it. We didn’t see any activity at all on the way in here. I figured we might have to fight our way in and then get clobbered on the downstream run. But now I doubt if it is going to happen. They would have most of their defenses nearer to the navy base. We’re a long way from there now. Fifteen, maybe twenty miles to the gulf.”
“Hope to hell you’re right,” Murdock said. “That last bunch really messed up my nap. Gonna try it again.”
Murdock found a vacant spot in the cabin and sat down, crossed his ankles, and went to sleep.
14
The SEALs made it down the river to the Persian Gulf with no more problems, and then on to Kuwait City. The next morning, they had a big breakfast at the air base near Kuwait City before they flew on a COD back to the carrier. There Murdock pigged out on a big steak dinner for lunch, with all the trimmings he could find. At 1300, he and the SEALs were working over their gear in the assembly room, when Stroh boiled in the door, waved at the two officers, and put them down in chairs at the far end of the big room. He told them the problem quickly.
Murdock and Ed DeWitt looked at Stroh with surprise.
“What do you mean, the Navy minesweeper guys don’t know what kind of mines those are across the Strait of Hormuz? They must know, that’s their rice bowl.”
“They’ve been probing the area for the past day and a half while you were playing float down the river. They report that none of their usual testing and search-and-find operations are working.
“They have located a rough line of chunks of serious metal on the strait floor in a rough line spanning the three-mile channel. The metal chunks haven’t been there before, and the specialists say that they must be some kind of mines. They don’t know for sure. There are nine of them. Presumably, there were ten before the tanker went down.
“Incidentally, about half of the oil slick is washing into the Gulf of Oman, and the Southern Iranian coastline will also take a hard hit from the oil pollution. Not much of it burned off.”
“So how did the Navy find the chunks of metal that may be mines?” DeWitt asked.
“The usual metal detection equipment and a batch of other mine identification and neutralization systems on board the mine sweepers.”
“So why don’t they neutralize them?”
“They didn’t say, exactly. I understand that many marine mines are suspended on cables from anchors on the bottom. They hang in the way of ships passing by, and when one is hit, boom, there goes another rubber tree plant. The mine experts on the Ardent and the Dextrous say that these mines are not the hanging variety. Instead, they are down there on the bottom of the strait. That’s from three hundred to three hundred and fifty feet below the surface.
“So they can’t send divers down unless they get a submersible, and that much metal might set off the thing,” Murdock said.
“Now you’re starting to see the problem. Too deep for free diving, no way to shoot a torpedo at the things to detonate them, kind of hog-tied until they figure out exactly how to set the things off without sending another tanker to its grave.”
“These mine countermeasure craft are the ones made out of a lot of wood, right? And they had no trouble moving over and around the nine mines. But one tanker rocked one of them, and it hit and sank the ship. So, how does the bomb get from the bottom, three hundred feet below, and into a tanker?”