Keith Douglass
Specter
1
The figure slid ashore with the roll of the surf, garbed all in black, glistening in the wan light of a new-risen last-quarter moon partly masked by scattered clouds, and with the oily sheen of phosphorescence off the sea. It might have been an oil-coated chunk of flotsam washed in by the tide — or a corpse — but the eyes, the whites like ice behind the nonreflective plate of the face mask, were very much alive, shifting back and forth to scan the length of beach.
The next wave brought a second armed and black-clad figure ashore, five meters to the left. The first signaled the second with silent, slashing movements of one hand Check that way.
Both figures clutched knapsacks before them as though black nylon could provide cover from hostile fire; both held the sleek, black deadliness of HK MP5SD3 submachine guns in gloved hands. The men lay belly-down in the sand as surf boiled and frothed around their bodies, using the knapsacks as firing rests for their weapons' muzzle-heavy barrels.
The beach, barely visible in the uncertain moonlight, looked deserted save for those two figures. A line of poplars, dimly visible against moon-brightened clouds, marked the side of a highway paralleling the coast to the north, thirty meters ahead.
Thunder boomed and rumbled in the distance. To the left, westward, the sky was aglow with light reflected from low-lying clouds, light that wavered and flickered like the pulse of distant lightning.
Lieutenant Blake Murdock slithered a few more meters up the beach, then, still alert for movement or any sign of life, stripped off his face mask. From a waterproof pouch in the knapsack, he extracted an AN/PVS-7 night-vision device and slipped it down over his head.
They weighed a pound and a half and they sharply reduced his field of vision, but when the NVD goggles were switched on they pierced near-total darkness, transforming it into green-tinted day. Details hidden at first by darkness sprang into sharp relief a low stone wall at the top of the beach; a small fishing boat pulled up on the sand a hundred meters to the east; the seashore clutter of civilization — lumps of sea-hardened oil, plastic six-pack rings, crumpled aluminum cans, tangles of fish line or plastic net, plastic jugs — marking the tide line between wet and dry sand. The beach, as expected, was empty. Satellite surveillance suggested that this strip of the Dalmatian coast east of Dubrovnik was at best only intermittently patrolled.
Murdock checked his swim buddy, who stared back at him with the hard-edged, mechanical-insect face of a man wearing NVD goggles. Chief Machinist's Mate Tom "Razor" Roselli gave Murdock a gloved thumbs-up Looks clear.
Murdock signaled back: Affirmative — move out.
Flat on their bellies, the two men crawled the rest of the way up the beach until they reached the shelter of the seawall, where they stashed fins, face masks, and rebreathers. Both wore black nomex flight suits over wet suits. It was late winter, and both air and sea were bitingly cold despite the warm, southerly surface current off the Dalmatian coast. Murdock could feel the first signs of exposure after his long swim, the tingling numbness in his fingers, the faint trembling of his lower lip. He'd endured far worse than this during BUD/S training, though, a calculated set of tortures and privations that had shown just how far he could push himself in the wet and cold. He could keep on pushing for a long time yet.
He had to. They still had a long way to go.
Roselli produced a Global Positioning System receiver and carefully studied its luminous digital readout. After a moment, he snapped Murdock a thumbs-up. Their trip north in a CRRC from the U.S.S. Nassau, followed by a two-kilometer swim in ink-black water, had put them ashore precisely on target.
Communicating solely by gesture, the two black figures separated, crawling in opposite directions until they were twenty meters apart. Chemical light sticks, pulled from their packs and ignited with a shake, were planted in the sand, their pale green luminescence marking a landing zone visible only from the sea.
Then the two men settled down to silently watch… and wait.
They were U.S. Navy SEALS, members of the elite, high-tech warrior teams that took their name from the acronym for SEa, Air, and Land. Blake Murdock, the commanding officer of the Third Platoon, SEAL Team Seven, had been the platoon leader for nearly eight months now.
He crouched in the sand, alive to the night, to the stink of garbage and rotting fish on the beach, to the chill of the offshore breeze cooling his soggy flight suit, to the rough, gritty hardness of the stone wall pressed against his back. Though unusual and officially discouraged, the practice of having a CO come ashore first on an op was not unheard of in the Teams. During the Vietnam War, many SEAL platoon leaders regularly took point, officially because they could react more swiftly to the unexpected from that position. Few SEALs cared for official reasons, though, and the truth of the matter was that taking point was just one more way of demonstrating the special bond most SEAL officers shared with their men. Murdock had trained constantly with his people since assuming command of Third Platoon. More, he'd been in combat with them. Being first man ashore on a hostile beach was nothing compared to that.
Besides, he'd wanted to assess the situation himself, through his own eyes, before committing the rest of the squad.
The pulsing glow to the west brightened and quickened, and seconds later, the far-thunder rumble grew louder, more insistent. Some of the light took on a silver-white tinge — artillery flares, Murdock thought — mingled with the flash of antiaircraft tracers and the sullen, ember-red illumination of burning buildings. The Serbs were shelling the port city of Dubrovnik. Again. The rumble of the bombardment sounded like that of a summer storm, save that it went on and on, without letup.
Damn them, Murdock thought, but he wasn't even sure who he was damning most at the moment the dozens of militia and warlord factions that were so bloodily intent on carving up the mountainous territory of what had once been Yugoslavia, or the Washington bureaucrats and politicians who seemed so pathetically unable to do anything at all about the ongoing slaughter.
This latest round in the age-old bloodshed involving the Balkan's religious, ethnic, and political factions had been going on virtually without letup for several years now. The power vacuum left by the collapse of Communism in Europe had led to increasingly violent clashes among the patchwork states and populations that over eighty years earlier had given the world a new word balkanization. Serbs and Croats, Bosnians and Albanians, Slovenians and Montenegrans, Muslims and Christians, Monarchists and Communists, and more seemed hell-bent on drowning these ancient mountains in blood. So far, the United States, NATO, and the United Nations all had failed repeatedly to find a peaceful solution; and with each failure, the possibility that the fighting in the Balkans would touch off a larger, bloodier European war — as it had in 1914 — loomed larger, more certain, more deadly.
To make matters worse, U.S. foreign policy had been unusually inept lately. The current Administration vacillated almost comically between chest-puffing bluster and appeasement, threatening air strikes one week, calling for sanctions and no-fly zones the next, then promising political concessions and millions in foreign aid after that. The indecisiveness bitterly angered Murdock, as it did most of the men in the Teams. Hell, the tragedy now playing itself out, especially up the coast to the west, was enough to leave anyone with a love of America and of history furious. Modern Dubrovnik had once been an independent city-state republic called Ragusa, the first foreign government in the world to recognize the infant United States of America in 1776. If ever a place deserved meaningful help from the U.S., it was Dubrovnik.