The pair above faced each other. Murdock decided they were resting or observing. They had to be Chinese frogmen patrolling out there. Who else could it be? This house onshore must be more important than the Navy stars and CIA back in Washington thought. Security out here on the water? A waste of manpower. He wondered if there were more of the frogmen along this beachfront.
Murdock was six feet under the surface treading water easily with his fins. He made up his mind to attack. He used hand signs to tell Holt which Chinese he would take. Then on signal, both surged upward, caught the frogmen by the waist, and tugged them downward.
Murdock grabbed the threshing swimmer by the chest and jerked off his face mask and breathing mouthpiece. The man flailed in panic. The Chinese frogman desperately struggled to get at his knife. Murdock pulled the weapon out of the scabbard and dropped it. He forced the Chinese downward again, and then Murdock wrapped his left arm around the enemy's throat. The SEAL leader saw crazed eyes through the dark water. Murdock's blade drove deeply into the enemy's side. The blade sliced through intestines and into one lung. Blood poured from the wounded man's mouth.
The man's body contorted in one frantic effort. Then his held-in air bubbled from his mouth and his body went limp. The Chinese frogman struggled again for a moment with one last dying effort, but it was too late. He had been caught by surprise. Another long burst of air bubbles streamed from the dead man's mouth.
Murdock held his man until he was sure he was dead. His body remained limp and his eyes stared sightless through the dark water. The platoon leader pushed him downward and looked for Ron Holt. Holt and his adversary faced each other, both with knives out. They were only ten feet away through the moonlit water near the surface. Murdock put on a burst of swimming speed, holding his K-Bar straight in front of him with his arm stiff. He came from the side and slightly behind the enemy frogman.
The victim must have sensed someone nearby, and turned toward Murdock spoiling a quick kill. The Chinese swimmer surged to the side away from Murdock, and slashed at him with a long knife as he passed. The blade grazed Murdock's shoulder. He wondered if it had sliced through his wet suit and into his flesh.
Holt powered forward with a hard kick, forcing the Chinese swimmer to turn toward him again. Murdock swam fast at the target. The Chinese frogman faced Holt, his knife high. Fighting underwater to Murdock was like wallowing in molasses. Every move an effort, each attack slow and easy to counter.
Now the Chinese thrust at Holt, then backed away. Murdock held his blade at arm's length and drove forward again, coming at the man at the side. The Chinese man turned his head toward Murdock just in time to see the long blade jolt through fabric and stab deeply into his side. The heavy knife point slanted upward past ribs and through a part of his lung, and sliced through the Chinese sailor's heart.
He looked at Murdock in surprise, his silent cry of terror shown in his tortured expression through his face mask.
He dropped his fighting knife, his arms floating uselessly, his body collapsing. Murdock jerked his K-Bar free of the man and let him drift down and away from them with the slight current.
Murdock pointed to Holt, who caught the trailing buddy line and retied it to his skipper.
The lieutenant took out his MUGR (Miniature Underwater GPS Receiver). It was no larger than two packs of cigarettes and totally waterproof. Murdock pulled free a small floating antenna that drifted to the surface only a few feet above, with a wire attached to the MUGR. There it went into action picking up signals from the nearest three Global Positioning Satellites. The triangulation from the satellites pinpointed his location. A readout on the MUGR reported his position within plus or minus ten feet.
He hit the button marked POS, and looked hard at the line of alphanumerics displayed on the instrument's small, lighted screen. The coordinates showed that the team was less than seventy meters off target course. Great.
Murdock bobbed his head. He and Holt were off line due to their small unpleasantness with the two Chinese swimmers. He pointed, and he and Holt shifted their direction and swam again.
Twenty minutes later they could hear the roar of surf ahead of them. Murdock pulled on the buddy line and when Holt looked at him, the Platoon Leader motioned upward with his thumb. They broke the surface just enough for a sneak and peek. They were still fifty meters off the beach, and in thirty meters the swells turned into breakers rolling up on a dark-looking shore. It didn't show white or even gray in the moonlight. He remembered the briefing. The beach here was about twenty meters wide at high tide when they arrived, and was covered with medium-sized stones and pebbles. No sand.
Rendezvous time. Murdock treaded water and watched the sea around him. Two men popped up twenty meters away, then two more on the other side. He needed ten more men. Three teams came up almost at the same time, then the fourth. All were within thirty meters of him. He was still one team short. Concern shadowed his face. There was always the possibility of a team getting lost or taken out by some enemy on a mission like this. He scanned the water around him again.
On any operation, when a SEAL or a team became lost or wasn't able to reach the rendezvous or continue the mission, standing orders were to return to the drop-off point and call for or wait for pickup. It had only happened to Murdock once, and he didn't want to do it again. As he thought about the chances, the last team surfaced. The men moved into their proper order, in the First and Second Squads, and removed the buddy lines. Murdock checked his watch. It was 0218. Good. He hated to start any attack on the hour.
Their briefing and planning had been detailed and specific. The house onshore in front of them had once been owned by a local strongman who had worked closely with the Communists, but had also maintained his own local power base. Two years ago he had lost favor with the central government in Beijing and had been arrested. A year ago he suddenly became ill and died in prison. His house was immediately taken over by the local party officials. Later it had been given to a wealthy manufacturer of the new Hoy-25 machine gun.
Tonight this house was the contact point for the SEALS and a Chinese "Christians in Action" CIA agent who had information so valuable that this SEAL operation was set up. Murdock hesitated. Why had there been Chinese frogmen patrolling this insignificant stretch of beach? Had their Chinese agent been broken and had the SEALS been lured into a well-armed killing field? Was there a welcoming committee of Chinese regulars with plenty of firepower to overwhelm sixteen SEALS? Murdock worried for a moment. There was only one way now to find out.
He went over his selection of weaponry. Half of the assault force carried the old standby, the Heckler and Koch German-made MP-5, a submachine gun spewing out 9mm messengers. The SEALS used the MP-5SD4 with its integral sound suppresser. That's a fancy word for a silencer, which doesn't really silence but cuts the sound down to a minimum.
The model had been especially crafted for the SEALS with a unique handgrip, safety, and stock. The tritium dots on the sights were for night shooting. There had been some problems with the sound-suppressed models because when you dampen the sound, you also cut down on the range and power of the weapon. The effective range of the muffled MP-5 was only fifty meters.
That was fine for house-to-house work and clearing rooms. Murdock liked them for that because the rounds wouldn't jolt all the way through a body and kill a civilian or a hostage. One of his four-man fire teams held the HK MP-5SD4's.
The other four-man team used the M-4A 1, once called the CAR-15. It had a short, sliding stock. These also had attached sound suppressers that were only eight inches long and screwed onto the flash hider. These shooters spouted.223 stingers at high velocity. Each of the M-4A1's had a M-203 40mm grenade launcher mounted beneath the barrel the way the M-16 did. To top off the weapon it had a laser aiming light, an AN/PAQ-4 that shot out a small beam of laser light that you could see with night-vision goggles. Even though muffled, these weapons had a much longer range than the MP-5.