One man crawled away from the fire directly toward Jaybird, who switched to 5.56 and drilled six rounds into the crawling form. The terrorist flopped over once, then never moved again.
“Welcome to hell, bastard,” Jaybird whispered.
“Light or no, we’ve got to move.” The radio brought Epstein’s words. “We’ll circle and find you, then get away at a fast run. Moving.”
Jaybird saw them come out of the fringes of the light. He jogged out to meet them; then they angled for the fence, and the two miles they had to cover to get to their parking spot.
Jefferson and Victor pulled alongside Jaybird.
“Good shooting, little buddy,” Jefferson said.
“Yeah, but I’m down to one more twenty.”
“I’ve got four more in case we hit trouble. Glad to share.”
They kept running.
Just over twenty minutes later they hit the dirt and checked out the hole in the fence they had cut an hour ago. It would be a perfect trap for anybody watching for them.
One of the SAS men slithered toward it, used night-vision goggles, and tapped his mike three times.
“All clear,” Epstein said. “But we still go through one at a time, twenty yards apart. Move.”
Five minutes later they slid into the two cars and headed for Ramallah.
“Nice night’s work,” Jaybird said where he sat next to the driver in the front seat.
“Beautiful,” Sergeant Jacob Epstein said. “We’ve got to get some of those twenty-millimeter slammers if we have to steal them.”
“Amen to that,” Jaybird said. “I voted to have each of our men carry one, but seven is all we could wrangle.”
“Don’t make me jealous. Now let’s settle down and get some sleep before we hit home. I’ll let you know if we run into any trouble.”
It took Jaybird five minutes to get to sleep. He wondered what the rest of the SEALs were doing. Was it target practice like they’d had, or did some of the guys come up against some real opposition? He looked north, where more SEALs were in operation around the headquarters of this training complex.
17
They had a seven-man squad with four SEALs and three Israelis. Fernandez checked the scene. They had just hiked in two miles from their transport, and were on a small rise behind what they were told was the general headquarters building of the training complex run by the PLO with some assistance from Osama bin Laden.
Fernandez frowned. Ahead was a concrete-block building, two stories, with only one window on the rear and no rear doors. From his vantage point it looked like a fort. SEALs Donegan, Franklin, and Canzoneri dropped beside Fernandez.
“We going to take that place down?” Canzoneri asked. “Looks like the outside of a tank.”
Sergeant Menuhin slid into the dirt beside Fernandez. “Looks pretty tough, doesn’t it? But we take it from the front. We have ten minutes before 0100. By that time we’ll be in front of it with half the squad on each side. We have one of the twenties. You’ll fire it to start our operation. Then after five or six rounds inside, we throw grenades through the windows and charge in and clear it out room by room.”
“How many rooms?”
“Twenty-eight if our spy is correct. Shouldn’t take long. Your long-range artillery should soften them up considerably.”
“Who will be there this time of night?”
“It’s a combination office and living space for the top officials in the training division here. If we’re lucky, we can wipe out their top cadre and training officers. There are supposed to be twenty-two men quartered and working here. We better move.”
The Israeli Mistaravim had split his seven men into two details, one on each side of the block house. They expected no guards walking outside. It was a secure area. Fernandez and Canzoneri went with the sergeant and another Israeli around the right-hand side of the building.
The three with the sergeant walked toward the building as if they belonged there, especially in their Arab civilian clothes. They paused at the side of the building, and Sergeant Menuhin checked his watch.
“Two minutes to wait,” he said.
They took a quick look around the corner of the building, and saw four men leave the complex. All had on civilian clothes since that was what they wore when they went on raids. Menuhin let them go. He looked at his watch again, then saw two quick flashes of light from the far side of the building.
“Let’s move. We get out front far enough for Fernandez to use that twenty. Now.” They sprinted out thirty yards and went to the dirt in what looked like a parade ground. Fernandez put the first round through a second-story window, the second one through the front door, which he blew off the hinges. He tried a WP round on the first floor to the left, and by the time he got off one more WP round to the second floor left, men began pouring out of the building.
He lasered one round over the heads of a dozen, then shifted to his 5.56 barrel and with the rest of the shooters began picking off individuals who darted out of the building. They couldn’t get out the back.
Some return fire came. Fernandez saw muzzle flashes from the end of the second floor. He triggered a twenty into the room, where it exploded, and the firing stopped. He searched other windows for shooters, but found none. No more men came out the door.
“Move up,” Sergeant Menuhin said into the personal radio. “We go in two at a time. SEALs pair and you Army types take it. First team goes in and works down the left-side hallway clearing the rooms as you go. Grenades or gunpowder. Next team in takes the right-hand side and we do the same routine. When the first floor is clear and there isn’t a battalion out front firing at us, we work the second floor. SEALs, inside.”
Fernandez and Franklin hit the hole where the door had been, and darted to the left through a small lobby. They saw no one alive. Two bodies had been blown across a desk and another one was sprawled beside it. They ran to the first door in the hallway. Fernandez kicked it open and jolted to the wall beside the opening. No reaction. He looked inside. The lights were still on in the building. No one was in the room.
Franklin went to the next door on the other side, and turned the knob and pushed it open hard. Two rounds blasted through the opening. Franklin reached around with his MP-5 and hosed down the room with nine rounds. He looked in from floor level, and found two men in civilian clothes, both dead against the far wall.
They checked seven rooms on the ground floor left, found four empty, and killed four more terrorists before they reported the floor clear to Sergeant Menuhin. They had heard firing to their left, and soon Donegan and Canzoneri came on the radio reporting their section clear.
“Stairs center,” Menuhin said. “We’ll meet there and take on the upstairs.”
They met and moved up the stairs slowly. The sergeant poked his head over the top step and then jerked it down. Three rounds blasted through the space where his skull had been.
Donegan jerked the pin out of a grenade, let the handle fly off, and cooked it two seconds before he threw it down the hall. It exploded when it hit and they heard some yells. By that time the sergeant had a grenade ready, and he threw it farther down the hall.
When the shrapnel stopped zinging down the hallway, Canzoneri lifted his MP-5, pushed it over the top step, and sent three bursts of three rounds down the hall. He took a look.