“Ching isn’t so bad. Looks like a graze on his scalp that might have knocked him out, and one round through his right arm, up in the biceps. Neither one is going to swim one hell of a lot.”
Murdock checked with the two wounded men. Ching was mad.
“Hell, why they pick on me? Just a scratch, Skip. Shit, I can swim as good as any of you fuckers. Give me the chance.”
Murdock grinned at him in the darkness. That attitude was part of what made him a SEAL. “Sure you can swim, Ching, and you’d leave a blood trail a yard wide that would bring about twenty hungry sharks homing in on us from five miles away. Just take it easy and stay down.”
The SEALs had automatically cleared their weapons of water, made sure they were locked and loaded, and they spread out in a perimeter defense around the two wounded men.
The JG was hurting.
“Damnit, Skip, I caught one. Not my turn. Your turn. Don’t think I can swim much. I’m a good floater. We should have saved one of those flotation bags.”
“No sweat, DeWitt. We’ll tell the Pegasus to come in here and get us. Not that many patrol boats running around.”
“There will be, Skip, once they realize those subs didn’t blow up by themselves. We get both of them?”
“Not sure, the photos tomorrow will show us. Now all we have to do is get home.”
“Lampedusa materialized without a sound beside Murdock.
“Commander, we’ve got some trouble. About ten or twelve bad guys coming toward us from down the bay shore. Could be navy security.”
“Get on your ears,” Murdock whispered to the closest SEAL. He passed the word. Soon all the Platoon men had their Motorolas on.
“Company from the north. Lam says about a dozen. We take them out silently if we can. Only silenced weapons until we need you big guys.”
In the stillness he could hear weapons clicking off safety to single shot or three-shot mode.
They waited.
DeWitt gritted his teeth but a low moan came from his lips.
The SEALs waited.
Two dark shadows appeared twenty yards from Quinley, silhouetted against the light from the navy base. Quinley slammed out five silent rounds from his H & K G-11 with its caseless bullets. One of the men went down, the other lifted his rifle. Two more shots jolted him to the ground before he could shoot or cry out.
They heard some low voices ahead. The next figure that came toward them was low on the ground, crawling. Lampedusa heard him before he saw him. When the scout had a target, he drilled the man with six rounds from his Colt carbine M-4A1. The man bellowed in pain, then died.
All was quiet for a moment. Then, on a slight rise a hundred yards away, what Murdock figured was a tripod-mounted heavy machine gun blasted at them with five- and seven-round bursts.
The SEALs hugged the ground. They had no cover to hide behind. The machine gun cut off, and a dozen black shapes showed against the lights of the base, charging forward with their guns blasting.
“All weapons,” Murdock said into his Motorola. The sniper rifles cracked and the others chattered on full auto or three-round bursts. Quinley finished off one fifty-round magazine and pushed another into place.
Half of the attackers went down; the rest dropped to the ground and kept firing. Slowly, the SEALs’ superior firepower drove back the Arabs, punishing them.
“Casualties?” Murdock snapped into the Motorola.
Two more men checked in with minor wounds.
“We’ve got to get wet,” Murdock said. They have the advantage here. That MG is going to open up again when they’re sure all their live ones are out of its line of fire. Go now, pull back to the water. Mahanani and Ostercamp, take care of the JG. Ching, you okay to get wet?”
“Damn right, Commander.”
“Let’s move.”
Before the machine gunner had time to check with his men in the immediate area, the SEALs stowed their radios in waterproof pouches and slid into the black waters of the Strait of Hormuz. Murdock squatted in the water and counted the SEALs as they went into the wet.
“Fourteen,” he whispered to Holt. “Who in hell is missing? We need fifteen bodies.”
“One man must not have not been able to report in on the casualty call,” Holt whispered. “I’ll go check the beach.”
Before Murdock could tell him not to, Holt lifted out of the water and charged the beach. He was on it and checking around when the machine gun on the high ground cut loose again. It worked the other side of the thirty-yard-wide area. Holt quartered the beach, saw nothing. When the gunfire worked over toward him, he dove into a low spot where a small stream came into the bay. The rounds went over his head.
He heard a low moan.
Holt lifted up and looked. No NVGs. Damn. He looked again. “Hey SEAL. It’s Holt. Where are you?”
The moan came again from his right. The machine gun worked to the left. Holt lifted up and charged along the sand. He saw the man then, down and not moving. Holt dove over beside him. Checked his face. Bradford.
“Bradford, can you hear me? We’ve got to get the hell off the beach. Can you move? Bradford.” There was no response.
The machine gun worked back toward them. Holt grabbed the big man and dragged him. He had to stand up to do it. He was giving away forty-five pounds. He couldn’t find Bradford’s weapon. He tugged and pulled, slipped and fell down, dragged the 215-pound man another three feet.
The machine gun swept the area again. Six more feet. He lunged and tugged and rolled Bradford and at last nudged him into the small depression and slid in beside him.
The machine gun bullets tore up the sand where they had just been. Holt panted from the burst of energy he had used up pulling Bradford into the depression.
As soon as the MG stopped, he’d try to carry the big man to the water. How in hell could he do that? The bullets stopped whining into the sand and he was just about to grab Bradford and move him, when a white flashlight beam nailed him where he sat and someone shouted in Arabic at him. A rifle slammed three rounds into the sand and dirt beside him. Slowly, he lifted his hands.
Shit, he’d be the first SEAL in the platoon captured by the enemy. The Navy didn’t even furnish them with cyanide pills.
In the gentle surf forty yards away, Murdock stood and watched the shore. There was no sign of Holt. He had checked Alpha Squad and quickly discovered the missing man was Bradford. If he was badly hurt, there was little chance that Holt, at 170 pounds, could drag him off the beach and into the water. Then that damn MG had started.
Senior Chief Dobler squatted in the water near Murdock.
“They got pinned down by that MG, or blown away,” Dobler said. “Look, a light. The damn infantry must have found them. What the fuck we do now, Skipper?”
“We’re not losing two good men. Get everyone to move up the channel toward the base. First we nail that bastard on the machine gun, then we get our troops back. Let’s go.”
The SEALs hit the water and swam silently up the channel to where they figured the machine gun was. Murdock and Jaybird took the assignment and worked out of the water silently and up the slight incline.
“There he is,” Murdock whispered. The gun was set up with sandbags holding down the legs for better accuracy. Two men hovered over it but weren’t firing. One man used a handheld radio.
Murdock nodded at Jaybird. “I’ve got the one on the right,” he said. The two SEALs lifted their silenced MP-5s and sighted in. The range was only thirty yards.
23
Murdock and Jaybird fired their silent weapons on three-round bursts at almost the same time. They watched both Iranian soldiers in the faint moonlight take the rounds. One slumped over the machine gun; the second one slammed away from the weapon and sprawled in the dirt. The SEALs worked up to the gun position carefully. When they were sure the two were dead, they took the weapon apart and threw the pieces in different directions.