The villa, once the showcase home of a managing director, was crumbling along with the rest of the city. It had once been white, and was now gray and peeling. The villa’s address was the Sharia Kabhashi Eissa, the waterfront road. The harbor was a perfect avenue of approach for Navy SEALS, but Murdock guessed that the terrorists weren’t very concerned. The West had always been reactive, moving only after a terrorist outrage occurred. Having the chance to finally do something proactive was making Murdock’s palms itch.
From the water, the rocky shore of the harbor swept up to a ten-foot-high seawall and the lawn of the villa behind it. A simple stone stairway provided access from the shore to the lawn. It met an ornate stone balustrade, about three feet high, which acted like a fence between the lawn and the seawall. The balustrade tied into a seven-foot-high solid stone wall which boxed in the other three sides of the grounds.
The Israeli Mossad had prepared a target folder on the house in case their SEAL-equivalent Ha’Kommando Ha’Yami, or Naval Commandos, ever needed to make a nighttime visit. Just as well, from Murdock’s point of view, since the Israelis excelled in Special Operations intelligence, and the CIA did not.
According to the folder the stone stairway from the shore to the lawn was both alarmed and booby-trapped. A Kalashnikov-armed guard patrolled the lawn and balustrade, and another guard was stationed on a second-floor balcony that overlooked the lawn. The only way to enter the house from the lawn was through an inch-thick cast-iron door, always locked. The windows were covered with iron security grates and shut tight, except for the old and overworked air conditioners that rattled away in a few of them. The grounds were well lighted. The guards were not equipped with night-vision equipment, and if they had once been good, they were now casual and sloppy after endless days of unchanging routine.
Murdock had taken all that into account in his planning. Also the fact that in the tropics people did their living in the relative cool of the evening and their sleeping during the hot times of the day. The terrorists were no exception.
“They practically never sleep,” the CIA briefer had told him. “There’s always a couple of them up shooting the shit or screwing around.”
Murdock obviously couldn’t attack in the daytime. But he could during those golden hours between 1:00 and 5:00 AM when the human brain was always at its worst.
He was going to go in fast and hard, and had picked his weapons accordingly. Normally in an enclosed-house and close-quarters battle situation such as this, the weapon of choice would be the German Heckler & Koch MP-5 9mm submachine gun — in this case the MP-5SD4 with an integral sound suppressor. The model was customized for the Navy SEALS, with special stock, handgrip, safety, and tritium dots on the sights for night and low-light shooting. But the problem with the MP-5 was that the sound suppressor took a lot of velocity off the round. The effective range was less than fifty meters, and sometimes the rounds would even bounce off a car windshield. Even the non-suppressed MP-5 wasn’t much good past 150 meters.
In a house that wasn’t a problem, and the low-powered 9mm pistol round was ideal since it wouldn’t be punching through any walls and hitting any good guys. But if things went sour, you were at a disadvantage. The SEALs of Team Six discovered this while assaulting the Governor General’s mansion during the invasion of Grenada. They were quickly surrounded by enemy troops who had a great time shooting up the mansion with assault rifles and heavy machine guns. The majority of the SEALS, who were armed with MP-5’s, couldn’t shoot back because the enemy was too far away for their submachine guns to reach. Only continuous fire support from Air Force AC-130 Spectre gunships kept them from being overrun.
Murdock didn’t have a Spectre or any other support available, so he wasn’t going to make that mistake. The now-standard sixteen-man SEAL platoon could be broken down into two eight-man squads, First and Second. Each squad could be further broken down into two four-man fire teams. Murdock had armed his First Squad and one fire team of the Second, the assault element, with the short, sliding-stock carbine version of the M-16A2, the M-4A 1. An older version had been called the CAR-15 in Vietnam. And each weapon had an M203 40mm grenade launcher mounted beneath the barrel. Because he still wanted to keep things quiet, Murdock added the Knight’s Armament Company M-16 sound suppressor, made expressly for the SEALS. It was a stainless-steel tube that screwed onto the flash-hider threads of all M-16-series rifles. It was just eight inches long and one and three-quarter inches in diameter, self-draining after immersion in water, and unlike other suppressors, capable of handling full automatic fire without any damage or impairment in the noise reduction. The final accessory was the AN/PAQ-4 laser aiming light which screwed underneath the M-16 carrying handle and projected a fine beam of laser light visible only through night-vision goggles.
What remained of Second Squad, commanded by Lieutenant j.g. Ed DeWitt, was the security and support element. Since they would have to weigh in with heavy firepower in the event of trouble, DeWitt and Chief Petty Officer “Kos” Kosciuszko were armed with the Heckler & Koch HK-21A1 machine gun in 7.62mm NATO. Murdock had taken advantage of his attachment to the CIA to dump his SEAL-standard M-60E3 machine guns. The latest M-60’s were flimsy, and needed to be almost completely rebuilt every ten thousand rounds to maintain their reliability. The HK-21, on the other hand, in use by SEAL Team Six since Grenada, was just as light as the SEAL chopped-barrel M-60. It was the Mercedes-Benz of machine guns. AT-4 antitank rockets and claymore antipersonnel mines completed their armament. The two snipers, Quartermaster First Class Martin “Magic” Brown, and Torpedoman’s Mate 2nd Class Red Nicholson, were packing some very special toys.
Each SEAL carried his equipment in a nylon mesh American Body Armor special operations vest. There were six two-magazine pouches across the chest for those armed with M-4’s, and large pouches for the drum-fed belts of the machine gunners. A radio pouch in back held an encrypted Motorola MX-300 walkie-talkie in a waterproof bag, and grenade pouches were on the web belt that secured the bottom part of the vest. Everyone’s backup weapon, the SIG-Sauer P-226 9mm pistol, rested in a strap-down nylon thigh holster.
They wore no body armor, no matter how much anyone would have liked it. You can’t swim in body armor.
Murdock and Higgins moved closer to the shore, and soon the water around them was filled with SEAL swim pairs, brought to that exact point by their Mugger GPS sets. They linked up with Murdock and then spread out in a line facing the villa.
Finally the last pair checked in, and Murdock’s gut relaxed slightly. Any pair that couldn’t make it to the target by the designated cutoff time was supposed to head back out to sea for pickup. Murdock was glad it hadn’t been necessary. It was a complication his central nervous system didn’t need.
Murdock gave a signal down the line. While still breathing from the Draeger, he and everyone else unstrapped their units, weight belts, and swim fins. If things didn’t go right from the start, they’d have to move very quickly. He checked his dive watch. Murdock had a firm rule against attacking on the hour. A few more minutes and they’d go.