The Boxer had been steaming north all day at twenty-two knots. It would need fourteen hours to get into position. She would lay five miles off Bahrain until an hour before the landing was set. Then she would steam within a mile of the beach and discharge the Marines in a pair of borrowed LCU 160 °Class Utility Landing Craft. They would each hold 350 Marines, and one would attack each coast.
The SEALs and Recon men ate late chow at 1900 and then went to their disembarking point in the stern of the big ship on the third level down. The huge ramp at the stern of the ship opened to let the LCUs move through the water into the open sea.
When they were ten miles off Bahrain, the SEALs would launch in the Pegasus that had sailed to the Boxer as soon as the mission was set. By that time it was nearly 0200 and pitch black. They would have the south shore of the island and the Marines the north.
The SEALs boarded the Pegasus and checked their gear again.
“The captain tells me we’re about ten miles off the coast. We’ll be going in fast for the first eight, then simmer down and move in as close as he can go, maybe a hundred yards, just outside the surf line. From there we take a swim. You know the score on clearing a beach. Anything that will mess up a landing craft, we take care of. We have a little less than an hour’s ride. The time now is 0220, meaning we’ll have five or six hours to find any obstacles, mines, concertina on the beach, anything at or near the beach that would cause problems. Questions?”
“Yeah. What was all that?” Joe Lampedusa asked. They all laughed.
“Take a nap, you guys. You may need the sleep before this one is over.”
Half of them slept. The other half were the least experienced at the real thing: shooting at people and having them shoot back at you. Murdock watched them and looked at the sky. A partial moon, no clouds. At least no rain. He’d been on a dozen of these beach-cleaning missions. The only thing he worried about were pressure-activated mines just under the surface of the wet or dry sand. Maybe they would be lucky.
The constant roar of the two big diesel engines drove them across the open gulf toward the island nation. When the sound toned down and then nearly stopped, Murdock came awake at once and talked to the ensign.
“Two miles out, we’re moving in at five knots so nobody will hear us,” the officer said. “At least we hope nobody expects us, so they won’t be watching for us.”
“My hopes exactly,” Murdock said.
Another mile closer to the beach, and Murdock could see lights on the island. What did Stroh say, it was a forty-six-mile square? Plenty of room to hide. He wondered how many of the 10,000 troops had followed their murderous leader. They would soon find out.
“Okay, you guys, up and at ’em. Wake up time. Final check on weapons and waterproof pouches. We’ll want the Motorolas later. We have another quarter of a mile to go. Bravo Squad off first and work to the shallows where you can stand. We’ll join up there and check the situation, then make assignments.”
Five minutes later, the ensign running the boat nodded.
“Bravo, over the side. Good luck.”
They tipped into the swells and could hear the breakers less than fifty yards ahead of them. They surfaced and stroked easily shoreward with their weapons strapped on their backs.
Murdock’s Alpha Squad followed them. They met in three feet of water with breakers pushing them forward with each wave.
Murdock and the SEALs scanned the area. It was a mile-long, sandy beach, evidently a gradual slope that could give the bigger LCUs beaching trouble. So the Marines get wet coming in. He didn’t see any mechanical metal tank traps or angled steel to rupture the landing craft. The SEALs spread out in the center of the area. They would clear a section and put up a waterproof rolled-up sign they had brought to indicate the center of the cleared landing area. Hopefully, the coxswain on the landing craft could see it.
For two hours they walked the waves and shallows but found nothing to deal with. It was 0300 when they hit the first problem. Horse Ronson had moved out of the surf to the edge of the wet sand and walked along, gently probing the sand ahead of him with his K-bar. Suddenly, he stopped and didn’t move. He had his Motorola out and working and whispered into the lip mike.
“Murdock, we have a problem.”
Murdock came out of the foot-high gulf and saw Ronson squatting in the wet sand.
“Hit metal, Skipper. Not the hell sure what it is. Should I take a look?”
“Wait. Get Jaybird up here. Your ears on, Jaybird?”
“Yeah, coming,” Sterling responded.
He came up on the wet side of Murdock and Ronson.
“Back the way you came,” Jaybird said. “Both use your footprints in the sand as stepping stones. Let me take a look.”
Jaybird had become the platoon’s mine man when he deactivated six mines left over from World War II that the SEALs discovered deep in the sand at their desert training grounds.
He probed gently with the KA-BAR already in the sand. He withdrew it gently and probed in the wet sand around the point where he knew there was metal. The rest of the platoon moved down the beach in the foot-deep water and out to three feet deep, examining the black water and the sand when they could see it. Their job was to clear a 300-yard stretch of beach for the Marines to land on.
Jaybird looked at Murdock, who knelt in the wet sand right behind him.
“Wish to hell I could use a light,” Jaybird said.
They both knew that he couldn’t. He twisted one way to let what little moonlight there was shine on the spot. By this time, he had an outline. It was no more than three inches across.
“How in hell did he ever find this needle?” Jaybird said. Slowly, he began to scrape the wet sand off the top of the area. He went down an inch, then two inches. He scraped metal. After that, he moved more cautiously as he removed the sand from the circle around the object.
“Could be an old tin can,” Jaybird said. Sweat formed on his forehead and ran into his eyes. He slashed it away.
“Yeah, but more likely a bouncing Betty. Remember them from that training film?”
“Yeah, about three inches across. You step on one, even the side, and a small charge goes off, bouncing the real whammer four or five feet in the air, where it goes off like a grim reaper, wiping out a squad at a time.”
“Could do it right here.”
“Don’t they wish.” Jaybird had a hole excavated around the three-inch cylinder. Now he could see the metal sides of the bomb. It was no tin can.
“Yes, a bouncing Betty type at least. Sometimes they put this one together with a pressure-release type mine. Say the Betty is on top of it, like holding down an arming spoon. As soon as a jerk like me lifts the Betty off, thinking he’s solved the problem, the arming device clicks in, and whammmo, there goes another rubber tree plant.”
As he talked, Jaybird probed down each side of the mine, then deeply under it until he was satisfied.
“Okay, sports fans, no double trouble here. We’ve got one Betty, but are there any more? If I was gonna spread them out down here, I’d put them in a rough line across the beach, parallel to the fucking shore.”
“I’ll start looking,” Murdock said. He took out his KA-BAR with its eight-inch blade and began probing the wet sand two feet over from where Jaybird worked, doing the final removal of the mine. He took out an orange plastic sack from his combat vest and delicately wrapped the bomb in the sack. Every man in the platoon knew what the orange sack meant. Jaybird began probing the sand, moving the other way from Murdock.