Seal Team Seven (39 page)

The likeliest action by the Iranian port authorities once Boghammer 15 failed to report in, Murdock was guessing, would be to send out patrols looking for the missing craft. With luck, no one would notice that there were now
two
Boghammer 11s, especially at night and within the bustle and confusion of a major naval shipyard facility.

“Okay, Razor,” Murdock called. “Let's get away from the scene of the crime. I don't want you guys to have to paint another fake number on our sides.”

“You got that right, Skipper,” Roselli called back as he eased the throttle forward, eliciting a deeper growl from the engine. “Scraping and painting's for the
real
Navy. I joined the SEALs so I wouldn't have to do that shit!”

Smoke fumed from the Boghammer's engine vents as her screw churned the water aft to white froth. Veering sharply away from the beach, they began moving into deeper water.

Murdock and Higgins turned to the task of testing out the connections on their HST-4 sat comm and the KY-57 encryption set, the “C-2” communications element that would let them stay in touch with both II MEF and Washington. Before abandoning the
Beluga
, Higgins had transmitted a final set of intelligence data over the yacht's small sat-comm unit, including Murdock's impressions of the port facilities as seen through binoculars from Qeshm. The island provided an excellent OP, just eleven miles south of the port, but to get the detailed intelligence Deadly Weapon would need, the SEALs would have to get a lot closer than that. The transmission had been insurance against the possibility that the four SEALs would be killed or captured while trying to penetrate the Iranian port.

As darkness fell across the Gulf, the lights of Bandar-é Abbas gleamed like brilliant pearls on a necklace stretched across the northern horizon. Once clear of the beach, Roselli opened up the Boghammer's throttle, the knife-pointed prow came up out of the water above a boiling white streak of foam, and they jolted into the passage between Qeshm and the mainland at twenty-eight knots.

The
Austin
, LPD 4, was a bulky, hybrid-looking vessel, half transport, half carrier, known officially as an Amphibious Transport, Dock. With a crew of four hundred and berthing facilities for nearly a thousand Marines, she was part of II MEF's assault transport contingent—the backbone of the Marine Expeditionary Force—which included the
Nassau
and the helicopter carrier
Iwo Jima
.

All together, II MEF comprised a Marine air-ground task force, or MAGTF, comprised of fifty ships and over 52,000 Navy and Marine personnel, the largest and most powerful of all Marine task forces. Under the overall command of FMFLANT—Fleet Marine Force Atlantic—II MEF drew its forces from the 2nd Marine Division, the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, and the 4th and 6th Marine Expeditionary Brigades. The force, which had been on maneuvers in the Med during the opening scenes of the
Yuduki Maru
drama, had transited the Suez Canal and passed south through the Red Sea, emerging in the Gulf of Aden south of the Arabian Peninsula. After the abortive attempt to reach the
Yuduki Maru
at sea, the task force had been routed into the Gulf of Oman, closely following the Iranian squadron, dogging their formation with helicopters, AV-8 Harriers, and F/A-18 Hornets. They were massed now in international waters just outside the Strait of Hormuz, ready to strike with the entire, staggering might of a reinforced Marine division.

And the very tip of that titanic Army-Navy spearpoint was now on
Austin
's well deck, preparing to get under way.

“Captain Coburn?”

Phillip Coburn straightened up from the bundle of equipment he'd been checking. “Here!”

A commander in Navy khakis approached him across the crowded, metal grating of the deck. “Commander DiAmato, sir,” the officer said, saluting. “They said to pass this on to you.”

DiAmato handed him a sheaf of papers. Awkward in his black gear, wet suit, and full rebreather rig, Coburn accepted it and started reading. It was an intelligence update, the latest condensation of data from satellites, reconnaissance aircraft . . . and from the SEALs already in the approaches to Bandar-é Abbas.

Metal clanged and gonged in the cavernous space around him and echoed with shouts and the whine of overhead hoists.
Austin
's well deck was completely enclosed, a vast, echoing cave of gray-painted metal, overhead pipes, and a central well that could be flooded in order to facilitate the launch of various vehicles and small craft. Normally, this was where Marine LCMs or the odd-looking, tracked LVTs were loaded before letting them swim out through the huge doors set into the transport's stern. This time, however, the well deck was occupied by several craft that made even the boxy LVTs look ordinary.

Three were Mark VIII SDVs. “SDV” stood for Swimmer Delivery Vehicle, but SEALs referred to the contraption as a “bus.” Each was twenty-one feet long, with a beam and draft of just over four feet, and looked like a blunt, overfed torpedo. Hatches in the side gave access to the interior; two SDV crewmen, a pilot and a navigator, manned a cramped compartment forward, while four more SEALs could snuggle in aft, squeezed in side by side.

The three SDVs were being loaded now; their twelve passengers were the ten men of SEAL Seven's Third Platoon who'd returned early that morning from the
Beluga
mission plus EM2 Wilson and Captain Coburn.

Coburn finished reading the message printout, then handed it back to DiAmato. “Looks like nothing much new,” he said. “At least we know where they've stashed the damned target.”

“I'd just like to know how a captain rates getting to go out on a joyride,” another voice boomed from behind.

Turning, Coburn saw the craggy features of Rear Admiral Robert Mitchell, the commander of the Navy component of the MEF.

“Excuse me, Admiral,” Coburn said, saluting. “I didn't know you were aboard the
Austin
.”

“I just heloed over from the
Nassau
.” Mitchell returned the salute, then extended a hand. Coburn took it. He'd known Bob Mitchell all the way back in Annapolis; the fact that Mitchell was a rear admiral now while Coburn was still a captain was proof of the adage that special forces assignments slowed a man's Navy career track.

“Heard you were about to go and wanted to see you off,” Mitchell continued. Planting fists on hips, he stared at the nearest SDV, suspended above the flooded well deck from an overhead hoist. “You know, I still think it's nuts for a captain to go joyriding like this. How'd you pull that off?”

“Ah, I told Admiral Winston I'd hold my breath until I turned blue,” Coburn replied easily. “Besides, I'm still dive-rated. Just because I've got four stripes doesn't mean I'm senile. You need flag rank for that.”

Mitchell laughed. “Sounds like even CO-MIDEASTFOR has trouble managing SEALs. Housebreaking you guys must be a bitch.”

“Hey, if you want housebroken, send in the Marines. They can break
anything
if they put their minds to it.”

“As a matter of fact, we're planning on doing just that little thing.” Mitchell extended his hand again. “Good luck, Phil.”

“Thanks, Admiral. See you in Bandar!”

Minutes later, Coburn was tucked into the passenger compartment of SDV #1. He was rigged out in the SEALs' new UBA Mark XV gear, an advanced underwater life-support system that used a computer to regulate the rebreather's gas mix. With the Mark XV, a SEAL could dive deeper and stay deep longer than he could with the old Drager LAR V system; he wore a full-face mask that allowed him to communicate by voice, either through an intercom jack or by radio, though the range of radio communications was sharply limited within the radio-wave-absorbing medium of the sea.

Seated next to Master Chief MacKenzie, and just ahead of HM2 Ellsworth and HT1 Garcia, Coburn plugged his breathing system into the boat's air supply, a measure that would extend the range of his own rebreather gear, then waited as water flooded the cramped compartment. It was dark, and the confines were downright claustrophobic. Coburn chuckled to himself as he thought of the ongoing budgetary war that continued to keep the Navy divided into separate, rival camps. Many years earlier, the submariners, seeking to expand their control over a portion of the Navy's appropriations, had managed to push through a rule with Congress that established that
only
they could build and operate “dry” submarines, underwater craft that provided a shirtsleeve environment for their operators. As a result, arms of the service that could use small, covert entry or reconnaissance craft—arms like the SEALs and the Marines—had to rely on “wet” submarines like the Mark VIII.

For that reason, SDV operations were sharply limited in range. The Mark VIII could manage about six knots on its electric batteries and had an endurance of six hours, so the SDVs had to be piggybacked to within eighteen nautical miles of the target—three hours in, three hours back—with the further disadvantage that the SEALs aboard were going to be tired long before they even got there. That narrow-minded bean-counting was a typical example of the bureaucratic idiocy that plagued those military circles high enough in the Washington hierarchy to be contaminated by the politics of that town.

Usually in SEAL SDV missions, ferry duty fell to one of the few dry submarines equipped to carry SDVs in special hangars on their decks. Unfortunately, none of the subs so equipped had been available on such short notice, which meant that
Austin
had been tasked with carrying the SEALs in to a drop-off point eighteen miles south of Bandar-é Abbas.
Austin
's captain, Coburn thought, as well as the skippers of her escorting warships, must be sweating bullets about now, wondering if the Iranians were about to launch a preemptive strike against the task force. The Iranians
had
to figure that the American MEF was here for more than a show of force, that they weren't going to just stand by and watch while the Iranians rifled the
Yuduki Maru
of her cargo.

What was their response going to be? There was no way of telling. All the SEALs could do was plan it the best they could, then Charlie Mike.

 

A few yards away, MacKenzie stood on the steel deck grating and watched Coburn talking with the admiral. He'd learned that Coburn was joining the platoon only a few hours earlier, when the captain had met the team in a briefing room and explained the nature of the mission.

MacKenzie didn't like this twist, not one bit. Captain Coburn was a capable officer, but damn it, the guy was getting a bit old for this sort of thing. Coburn was fifty years old and had served in Nam. Three hours in a wet suit, breathing reprocessed air, was incredibly draining, especially for an old guy.

The chief protested, of course, and he'd been slapped down. Coburn had grinned to rob the rebuke of its sting and pointed out that if he, Coburn, was over the hill, Master Chief MacKenzie couldn't be far behind.

MacKenzie grimaced at the thought. He was forty-five . . . but at least he'd been active in the Teams' diving proficiency drills and PT over the years. When was the last time the Old Man had swum two miles, with fins, in seventy minutes? Or run fourteen miles in 110?

He decided he would stick close to Coburn throughout this mission . . . just in case.

With her powerful engine barely ticking over, the Boghammer growled past the huge, gray bulks of a dozen Iranian military craft, most yard tenders and oilers, but a few heavily armed patrol boats as well. The sailors on the decks of those craft watched the sleek craft incuriously if at all; Boghammers were common enough in all parts of the harbor that it should not excite curiosity.

So far, the Iranian shipyard and naval facilities appeared quiet. No alarm had sounded, no heavily armed patrol boats were dashing about. Their most serious test had come as they'd approached a massive boom guarding the hundred-yard-wide opening to the shipyard's inner harbor. Half expecting to be turned aside without the necessary password or code, they'd motored slowly toward the boom, only to see the central section slide open for them, allowing them to pass inside. Guard towers rose on either side of the opening; the boom floated on the water's surface but was clearly the support for a heavy antisubmarine net. Guards patrolled everywhere, but none paid more attention to the Boghammer than a casual wave or salute.

Inside the harbor, most activity seemed lethargic. Except for a few armed guards in evidence ashore, the only men visible were lounging and talking on the decks of their ships. Most of the base was dark, save for patches of illumination cast by street lights along the waterfront.

The single area of intense activity appeared to be centered on the forward deck of the freighter
Yuduki Maru
, which had been drawn up, port side to, at a long pier close by the shipyard's dry-dock area and launching way. Tarpaulins had been stretched across the forward deck in an obvious attempt to block out surveillance by American spy satellites, and a construction crew could be seen by the flaring, actinic light of cutting torches hissing on the forward deck.

“Could be they're running into some computer trouble,” Murdock said. All four of the SEALs were inside the Boghammer's pilothouse, peering out through the salt-encrusted windscreen at the activity on the huge freighter. “Without the right password, they're not going to get through the cargo hatches.”

“So their only option is cutting their way through solid steel,” Roselli said, standing at the boat's wheel. “That should take 'em a while, even with dockyard facilities.”