Magic Brown in the First Squad carried his sniper rifle, a bolt-action Mcmillan M-89 shooting the 7.62 NATO round. The weapon had a shortened barrel and a fixed sound suppresser. It had attached a Litton M921 3-power Starlight Scope.
Harry "Horse" Ronson, one of the new men in the First Squad, gave them firepower with his Heckler and Koch 21A1 machine gun spouting 7.62 NATO rounds.
Every one of the sixteen men had a backup weapon, a standard-issue Sig-Sauer P-226 9mm pistol in a tied-down thigh holster.
The troops had spread out ten yards apart in their preplanned attack positions. Each man knew exactly what his job was on this mission and what he had to do.
Murdock could see the target house. There were other houses around it, but this one stood on a small point of land that lifted it half a story above the others. They could see two lights still burning in the house.
Murdock signaled the men to move forward. They swam another twenty yards, then moved in with the breakers until they were prone on the black rocks with an occasional wave washing over them.
Now they saw the house clearly. It had a two-foot-high wooden fence between it and the sea. Three slender and wind-whipped trees grew near the fence. The house looked as if it were plastered on the outside, and had some metal sheets on the roof and some wooden panels. A brick chimney extended from the far side of the roof.
One three-foot-wide window showed toward the sea. It was dark. A line at the side of the house held flapping laundry. The structure was one story high and had a door on the front and one on the side, just as they had been briefed. They would ignore the front door and use the side one. It wasn't a palace, Murdock decided, but maybe by Chinese standards it was upper-class. Due to the tight security in China, the SEALS did not have a floor plan of the house. Once inside, they would play it by ear using their much-rehearsed Kill House techniques.
The Kill House was their name for a mock-up house in the California Desert where they practiced attacking a room with dummy bad guys and hostages placed inside. They had to identify the bad guys from the hostages and use live rounds to shoot them. The SEALS trained in the facility dozens of times a year.
Now the platoon lay on a dark beach of smooth black rocks. The color blended in well with their all-black wet suits and gear. Their faces were blackened and they wore dark Nomex flight gloves to protect and hide their hands.
Murdock took the M-89 from Magic Brown and checked the layout with the Starlight Scope. He saw three men who were trying to hide themselves near the side and front of the house. None was looking at the sea. They seemed concerned with a street on the far side of the house.
He gave the weapon back to Magic and hand-signaled that there were three guards. Magic found them quickly. The M-89 coughed. Murdock watched through his one-lens night-vision goggles and saw the man in front of the house slam backwards and lay still.
Down the line the other M-89, in the Second Squad, coughed and the guard on the far right of the house tried to rise, then collapsed into a heap.
Magic drilled the third guard with a silenced shot. The man had seen the second lookout wounded and tried to go to him. Then all was quiet.
Murdock gave a hand signal that was passed down the line. The men took off their swim fins and tied them to their equipment vests. They kept on their Draeger breathing units. If anything went wrong they might have to leave in a rush and there wouldn't be time to put on the breathing apparatus. They could live without fins, but it would be a dangerous swim without the underwater rebreathers.
After that, Murdock didn't have to give any orders. The assault team with the MP-5s rushed up the beach to the house. They cleared the yard and knelt near the side door. Six more men raced silently to the front of the house. Four men spread out at the sides of the lot for security.
Murdock came up to the side door. He brought down his NVG (night-vision goggles), checked the troops, then lifted his MP-5 and kicked in the door. Holt pitched a flash-bang grenade inside and then flattened against the outside wall.
The flash-bang grenade is designed to render both blind and deaf anyone in the same room with the non-lethal device. The explosion is a series of ear-shattering blasts accompanied by a string of strobing light pulses so brilliant that anyone not covering his eyes is temporarily blinded.
When the last strobe of light from the grenade stabbed into the night through the opening, Murdock charged past the kicked-in door cutting to the right, watching for any movement or sound inside the room. From many hours of practice in the Kill House, he and his men knew exactly what to do. Murdock's sector was the right half of the room and he swept his MP-5 that direction looking for tangos. No, they weren't terrorists this time, just Chinese soldiers.
Murdock saw movement through his green-field NVG on his side and spewed a three-round burst of 9mm greeters at a man who raised a pistol. Holt fired two three-round bursts on his side of the room, the suppressed sub-machine gun coughing quietly. In a small window of silence, Murdock heard a long death rattle.
Enough light came through a door to the next room that Murdock could now see the three men down and dead, two with chest shots and one a pair of head hits. He flipped up his NVG. "Clear," Murdock said into his mike.
"Clear," Holt echoed.
Two more of the assault squad charged through that room to the next and more firing erupted. Murdock rushed to the door behind them. A lightbulb burned in the middle of the room on a cord from the ceiling. A blood-smeared Chinese man sat in a chair bound by his chest, legs, and ankles. His mouth and face had been beaten bloody and raw. His chest and arms showed dozens of knife slices that bled continuously. One eye was closed, and the lid had been smashed or cut off the other eye.
Two Chinese men in civilian clothes, warned by the flash-bang, had put up a fight. Both had handguns out, but they were no match for the MP-5s. A third man tried for the back door, but died before he got to it with six slugs in his side and back. The same two assaulters rushed into the next room and Murdock jolted forward to the doorway. He heard more firing from the suppressed sub-machine guns, then silence.
Machinist's Mate Second Class David "Jaybird" Sterling crashed into his Platoon Leader at the doorway.
"Some dip-shit tore out the backdoor," Sterling said. "Red is on his tail. He'll have him down and dirty within a block."
Torpedoman's Mate Second Class Eric "Red" Nicholson was lean and fast. If any of the squad could catch a running man, Red could. Murdock heard the "clear" calls from the other men, then went back to the prisoner bound to the chair.
There was no way this could be a setup, a plant. The Chinese might have known that this man was a CIA operative, but they must not have known what was happening tonight. Murdock seriously doubted they knew there would be foreign visitors who would hold a beach party.
Murdock looked at the tied-up man. His hands were behind his back. He was naked to the waist. His head hung down. Now he struggled to bring it up to look at these new men. When he opened his mouth, Murdock saw the jagged, smashed-out remains of his front teeth.
"Please, water?" the Chinese man whispered in English, his words slurred. His chest and arms had been sliced many times. It was the old Chinese torture of a thousand cuts. No one slice will kill you, but after a few hundred you will bleed to death.
"Untie him," Murdock said to Holt. The radioman cut the heavy cords that bound the man to the chair, and the tortured Chinese agent almost fell off. Murdock caught him, then knelt beside him and steadied him. Murdock lifted a canteen to the CIA man's mouth and he drank.