“A couple of thousand would be a good start.”
“Sure, when elephants do the backstroke.”
“Really. We like the weapon, but we can’t take it on a mission blind, hoping it works and have all five of them jam with the first twenty shots.”
“All five?”
“Oh, yeah, we need three more for the squad. Thinking of replacing the Colt fourteen.”
“You know that weapon isn’t fully tested yet. There could be a lot of changes.”
“We like what we’ve got. Get us three more of them if you have to sell the Pentagon to do it.”
“Yeah, I’ll try. How is fishing?”
“Wrong time of year to be good. Last time I checked, they were getting a few bonito, some barracuda, and lots of sand bass.”
“Next time I’m out there and we have time, we’re going to hit Seaforth.”
“What about this Spanish trip?”
“Not sure just what your involvement will be. This one is so covert that I won’t even know about it until the day I call you.”
“Gives you time to get those weapons and ammo to us.”
“One-track mind. How is Ardith?”
“Not sure. Haven’t seen her since we got back from across the pond.”
“You probably will. So, brush up on your Spanish.”
That night after chow, the men reported back to the day room for Spanish classes.
“That’s right. A crash course in Spanish,” Murdock said. “Miguel and Ching are your instructors. You two take your squads in separate corners of the room and get moving. This is conversation Spanish. Do it.”
For two hours they worked at it.
“Buenos días,” Miguel said to Bravo Squad. They chanted the phrase right back at him.
“That means good morning,” Miguel said. “Polite conversation. To thank someone, it’s gracias. If you need to fake it with some locals you can mutter, ¿Qùe pasa? That means what passes or how’s it going.”
After he told them a word or a phrase, he had them say the words six times, then had each man repeat the word alone. Some picked up the words quickly. Others struggled.
“Where is a key word we might need. Dónde. You could say, “Dónde es su casa.”
Murdock sat in with Alpha Squad, and DeWitt chanted the phrases with the Bravo Squad men.
They worked the Spanish classes for two hours every night along with their normal training schedule.
The third day, a special delivery came from North Island, where it had just landed on board an F-18 from Minnesota. DeWitt opened the wooden box and cheered.
“Five hundred rounds of HE twenty-mike-mike rounds. Let’s go do some shooting.”
That afternoon they drove thirty miles into east San Diego County into the bare hills to their unofficial long gun range. They had an agreement with the rancher who owned the property. He put up a signal to them when he was using this part of it for grazing. There was no signal this time. They went through the stretched barbed wire gate and drove into their range.
“Unload those ten three-foot-square cardboard boxes and open them, then lock the tops and bottoms in place,” Senior Chief Dobler said. “We’ll spot five of them here forty yards apart, then bring the other five back to the five-hundred-yard range.”
When the boxes were placed, the SEALs rode their rig back to the firing position. Ed DeWitt had both the Bull Pup weapons ready. DeWitt took the first shot. He’d studied up on the procedure again. He loaded a six-round magazine and chambered a round.
He snapped on the laser sighting device and zeroed in through the six-power sight on one of the cardboard boxes at the thousand-yard range.
“Oh yes, I have a red dot on that box,” DeWitt said. He pulled the trigger that worked both barrels. The 20mm round went off with a sharp report that none of them had ever heard before.
“Sounds like half a dozen thirty-ought-six hunting rifles going off at the same time,” Jaybird said. A moment later, they heard the round explode in the air downrange. They could see the puff of smoke as the 20mm fragger detonated. DeWitt kept his prone position and checked through the scope.
“Be damned,” DeWitt bellowed. “That box is shattered, ripped into half a dozen pieces. Jeeeeeze, but that’s a beauty.”
Murdock sighted in on one of the boxes at 500 yards and fired. Both men checked the box through their scopes.
Murdock came away from the scope smiling. “Hard to find any of that box left. The fuzing and trajectory is working just fine.”
Ed nodded. “If these things are rugged enough to keep up with us, they’re going to make one hell of a difference in how we operate.”
The rest of the men used the weapons then. Soon they were firing at chunks of cardboard. The last men in the squads had to pick out friendly rocks at the thousand-yard range to shoot at.
“Let’s call it on the twenties,” Murdock said. “No use wasting what could be our operational ammo. Remember, those twenties cost thirty dollars a shot.”
They switched to the five-five-six NATO rounds.
“Won’t quite reach out five hundred,” Bradford said. “But I like the way it handles at three hundred yards.”
They each fired a thirty-round magazine of rounds through the smaller barrel, then picked up their brass and policed the area. The owner of the land was never supposed to be able to find any evidence they had been there. That meant finding and grabbing all the pieces of the ten cardboard boxes.
They arrived back at their HQ just after 2000, and Master Chief MacKenzie waited for them.
“Commander, you’re to call Don Stroh whenever you get in. He said he’s at work, wherever that is.”
“We getting employment?” Jaybird asked.
“Maybe. Hard to tell with Don. Usually he’d beep me if he was in a rush.”
The platoon waited for Murdock to make the call. Jaybird and DeWitt broke down, cleaned, and oiled the Bull Pups.
“Two barrels to clean instead of one,” Jaybird snorted.
Senior Chief Dobler paced the outer room. He wasn’t sure what to do. He tried to plan ahead. If it was a mission, how could he leave with Nancy just coming out of the hospital? Could she manage the kids while he was gone? Would his fourteen-year-old Helen have to carry the load?
He heard Murdock contact Stroh and went up to the door to listen.
“Oh, yeah, Don, we’re here. If I had a loudspeaker phone, the whole platoon would listen. What’s up?”
“Remember I told you to brush up on your Spanish? You’re going to need it. Down in Columbia they had an election today. The bad guys dumped out ballot boxes, stuffed others, kept hundreds of thousands of voters away from the polls with threats, shot down one whole election staff at one polling place. They in effect stole the election by wide-open fraud and violence.
“Tonight the winning presidential candidate has declared his victory. There was no international committee monitoring the election. One delegation from Germany and England went to Begotá but were kept prisoners in their rooms by armed men.”
“So they can claim they have a legitimate government and nobody can rush in to save the country,” Murdock said.
“Part of it. The rest is worse. The fraudulently winning president is Hector Luis Sanchez, known in this country as the second biggest drug cartel operator in Colombia.
“This went down the way State said it probably would. Now it comes to us. You are authorized to go in within a week. You will have three objectives. One is to disrupt the cocaine production, processing, and shipment from all Colombian ports. The second mission is to disturb and reduce the corrupt officials starting with the top man and working down. You realize this is not an instruction to assassinate anyone. We don’t do that anymore. But if some of those illegally elected officials were caught in a crossfire by some drug traffickers, the U.S. could not be blamed.”