Murdock had first learned that historical tidbit while watching a news special on ACN about the fighting in Bosnia and Croatia, and he'd researched it some on his own since. The son of a U.S. congressman from Virginia, he had been unable to grow up without acquiring a love of American history that delighted in squirreling away such nuggets. If nothing else, his knowledge of history often gave him a reassuring sense of who he was and what he was doing. Unfortunately, it could also lead to intense frustration when he saw people who should have known better proving Santayana's maxim Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Still, Murdock was realist enough to know that it was irresponsible to launch a war over what amounted to ancient history. The real crime was that Washington could not decide on a single course of action and then stick to it. As always, the real victims of that indecisiveness were the civilians, the innocents caught at ground zero… and the American combat forces committed piecemeal to the meat grinder, usually with no clear goals and no definite or coherent policy.
Headlights flared down the road to the east, and Murdock and Roselli hunkered down lower, invisible in the wall's shadow. A moment later, a truck rumbled past on the highway meters beyond the wall; a heavy vehicle from the sound of it, almost certainly military. With a clash of badly worn gears, the noise dwindled away toward the west. Probably a truck carrying supplies to the Serbian forces besieging Dubrovnik.
A triple metallic click caught his attention. Turning his head toward Roselli, he saw the SEAL point down the beach. Murdock looked in the indicated direction.
Yes! There! Even with the NVDs they were almost invisible against the water, but Murdock could see the rest of the platoon now, a low, black, almost shapeless mass rising and falling with the rolling surf as it made its way steadily shoreward. As it neared the beach, the mass resolved itself into what the Navy called an inflatable boat, small — or IBS for short — and what SEALs usually called a CRRC, for Combat Rubber Raiding Craft. Five men — the rest of Third Platoon's Blue Squad — occupied the raft. An outboard engine was attached to the motor mount, but since even the most silent-running of outboards made some noise, the SEALs had opted to make the approach the old-fashioned way, leaning out over the rubber sides to wield their paddles. At the edge of the surf line, the SEALs rolled out of the craft, snatched it up by its carry handles as though half a ton of IBS and gear was virtually weightless, and dashed through the spray and up onto the beach. Reaching the seawall halfway between Murdock and Roselli, they dropped the raft and began unloading weapons and equipment. Keeping low to avoid showing his head above the wall, Murdock duck-walked across to join the newcomers.
"Lieutenant." The one-word greeting was a whisper, more felt than heard, easily lost beneath the hiss of the surf and the rumble of artillery fire to the west.
"Hey, Mac," Murdock replied as quietly. Master Chief Engineman George "Big Mac" MacKenzie was the oldest of Blue Squad's old hands, an NCO who'd been in the Navy for sixteen years now and in the Teams for eleven. A big-boned, powerfully muscled Texan, he normally hefted Blue Squad's SAW. This op, however, required stealth and speed rather than raw firepower; he'd left his usual M-60 machine gun behind in favor of a sound-suppressed M-16.
"Quiet beach?"
"Nothing so far."
Mac's teeth flashed white in the darkness against the black and green of his paint-smeared face. "Shit, L-T. Half expected to find ACN waiting for us."
The reference was an old in-joke within the Navy's Special Warfare command. When SEALs and Marine Recon personnel had slipped ashore at Mogadishu in 1992, just before America's intervention in Somalia, they'd found a small army of reporters, news cameramen, and lights waiting for them on the beach. SEALs liked to keep a low profile, and the screw-up continued to be a source of wry, sometimes bitter humor within the Teams.
"Looks like we're not going to be on the evening news this time," Murdock replied, grinning. "C'mon. Get the gear broken out and let's diddy."
"Aye, aye, L-T."
It took less than ten minutes for the IBS, twelve feet long, six wide, and weighing 289 pounds minus its load of men and equipment, to disappear completely beneath the loose sand. The five newly arrived SEALs worked furiously while Murdock and Roselli continued to mount watch. The Chemlite sticks were retrieved, stowed, and buried, and two men made their way back down the beach with a pair of brushes, with which they carefully wiped out every footprint, every trace of the team's arrival.
Gathered once more in the shadow of the seawall, the platoon divvied up the gear and weapons they needed to carry with them. Tactical radios were donned and checked, and the squad's HST-4 C2 element sat-comm gear was carefully unpacked. Murdock took advantage of the time to go to each of the men, whispering a few well-chosen words as he checked their rigs and assault vest loadouts.
The TOE roster for SEAL Seven's Third Platoon currently called for two squads — Blue and Gold — of seven men each. For this op, Blue Squad had been assigned to the landing party, while Gold waited in reserve aboard the amphibious assault ship Nassau, now on patrol in the Adriatic a few miles off the coast. Besides Roselli and MacKenzie, Blue Squad included Hull Technician First Class Juan Garcia, the dark-haired demolitions expert known as "Boomer" to the rest; Quartermaster First Class Martin "Magic" Brown, the team's sniper; Electrician's Mate Second Class William Higgins, the squad's radioman, whose quiet and somewhat erudite manner had landed him the nickname "Professor"; and Hospital Corpsman Second Class James Ellsworth, whose calling had inevitably given him the handle "Doc."
Good men, all of them. A little wild on liberty, sometimes, especially Doc and Razor, but they were the very best. In their black nomex and heavily laden combat vests, with their camo-painted faces and mismatched assortment of booney hats and watch caps and scarves, they were a frightening-looking lot. The camo paint liberally smeared on their faces — in Magic's case the stuff was pasted on so thick it was impossible to tell that the man was black — gave them all an eerily nightmarish quality. Murdock was proud to be in their number.
He just wished this mission counted for something. The thunder in the west was growing louder, more insistent.
As the final checks were made, Higgins radioed the team's initial entry report over the sat-comm gear, a single code word condensed to a burst transmission fired into the sky by the press of a button. Too tight and too quick for any eavesdroppers to get a fix, the code word would alert both Gold Squad, back aboard the Nassau, and the senior officers of NAVSPECWARGRU-Two and USSOCOM, who were listening in back at the Pentagon, that Blue Squad was on the beach and proceeding with the mission.
Ready now, their swim gear buried in the sand with the IBS, their weapons and combat loads checked out and ready, the SEALs one by one rolled over the top of the wall, then hurried across the highway. On the far side was open forest. The squad moved in patrol order, five meters between each man. Boomer took point, followed by Mac, the compass man with the GPS. Next came Murdock, then Higgins with the radio. Doc, Razor, and Magic brought up the rear. Only the point man and the tail gunner wore NVDs; the goggles could be hard on the eyes if they were worn for an extended period of time, and for a long trek through the night Murdock wanted the majority of the squad to have full use of their peripheral vision.
Their destination lay some six kilometers inland, just across the border.
Nearly all of this part of the Dalmatian coast had originally belonged to Croatia. The bulk of that state lay well to the north, enfolding Bosnia-Hercegovina between the slender horns of a crescent. Here, the southern horn dwindled away to almost nothing, a thin sliver of beach and coastal highway that isolated Bosnia from the sea save for one narrow passage at Neum, between Dubrovnik and Split.