At midnight, Murdock checked the target again through the NVGs. He had trouble finding any lights. At last he made out two, both small. Next he searched for the guards. Yes. There was one. He timed the man’s circuit. It was fifteen minutes before a guard appeared at the same spot. Probably the same man.
Lam slid into the sand beside Murdock.
“I make their rounds every fifteen minutes,” Lam said.
“Agreed. Senior Chief, are you awake?”
“Ready,” came the sound over Murdock’s earpiece.
“Work with Canzoneri and spread out the men so we can take the guards. Also have him give the men the twenty detonators in the sequence he wants. Have them put the detonator-receivers into the bombs. Do it now.”
“That’s a roger.”
Ten minutes later, the radio earpiece spoke.
“All men in position,” Commander. “All detonators given out in the proper sequence. We’re ready.”
“Good, Senior Chief. Let’s move up slowly. Everyone will stop twenty yards from the tents and displays. When the guards come, dispatch them silently. Let’s move.”
Murdock checked the line with his NVGs. The fourteen other SEALs were in line and moving forward.
They were twenty yards from the target when the men began dropping to the ground. Murdock went with them. Directly ahead, he saw a guard come around the corner of a bright blue tent. He didn’t even look toward them. Instead, he stopped and lit a cigarette, cupping the glow of the smoke. Murdock was closest to the man. He waited until the guard turned away, then Murdock unsheathed his KA-BAR fighting knife and moved silently forward. The last four steps, he ran. The Iranian must have heard his footsteps. He started to turn just as the blade drove deeply under his left arm into his heart. He went down, dead, like a head-shot steer.
Murdock took the AK-47 and checked it. Loaded. He looked down the line and saw two other SEALs moving up to the tents and display tables. He heard no sounds. Good. He waited four or five minutes, then used the radio.
“Alpha Squad, how many guards down?”
He knew the voices. Four responded. His made five. That left fifteen. “Bravo Squad, how many terrs down?” Six different voices answered. That made eleven. Maybe they could pull it off. Another ten minutes, and he saw more guards through the NVGs moving around the backs of the displays.
He saw one man go down, then a second.
Before anything else happened, a piercing scream shattered the Iranian night, then the flat blasts of a dozen AK-47 rounds ripped through the air. Another voice shrilled. He heard the chugs of a silenced weapon near him. Somewhere a siren went off.
Murdock hit the mike. “Shoot those forty-mikes. Four rounds each. Fire now. Everybody plant those charges.”
Murdock ran to the front of the tent and ducked inside. The tent was filled with 105 rounds and stacks of bags of gunpowder. He pushed two charges under the gunpowder. Sympathetic explosions should wipe out all of the rounds as well. He ran outside and began working to his left.
By now, he wasn’t sure that the double teams were intact. They would plant what bombs they could and haul ass when the fresh Iranian troops arrived.
He had heard the forty-mikes being fired and exploding well inland. He hoped that drew most of the others on hand. More sirens wailed. He saw a pair of headlights racing up the old concrete runway toward them.
Before the rig came into the range of Murdock’s MP-5, a longer SEAL gun knocked out the lights and the rig itself with six rounds.
Murdock kept placing the bombs and checking the detonators. He’d never seen such a variety of weapons and ammunition. He had a glimpse of a jet aircraft of some kind and several armored personnel carriers down the way.
Machinist’s Mate First Class Tony Ostercamp and Paul Jefferson had killed the guard they surprised and now came to the white tent. To the left side, they found tables piled high with assault rifles, machine guns, and boxes of ammo.
Jefferson worked there. Ostercamp waved and headed the other way to the tent. Jefferson wrapped charges around two AK-47s at the bottom of the pile. He moved to his right to an orderly layout of RPGs, rocket-propelled grenades. It took him only a few seconds to bury a quarter-pound charge of TNAZ under the stack and push in more securely the electronic detonator. He looked to his right.
Something moved.
He waited. The shadow he had seen stepped forward cautiously. Jefferson was glad his black face and hands wouldn’t show in the darkness of the moonless night. The figure took two more strides forward, then turned to look behind. The guard held an Ingram submachine gun.
Jefferson froze in place, waiting. Another four steps. The man checked behind him again, then came forward.
Jefferson leaped upward at the last moment before the guard would have stepped on him. His KA-BAR knife drove out at the end of his stiff arm like a spear. It slashed through soft cloth, glanced off a rib, and penetrated deeply into the Iranian’s heart. The man slumped forward, dead without a sound.
Jefferson caught him before he fell. The Ingram came between them and wedged in as Jefferson dragged the man behind the table of weapons. He found a canvas and hid the body under it, cleaned off his KA-BAR on the dead man’s shirt, and sheathed it.
He could hear small arms fire inland. He hoped that the forty-mikes drew off some troops. He knelt and looked around. He saw no more guards. They were either dead or hiding. A grenade blew up fifty yards down the long line of arms.
Jefferson went back to his work on the weapons. Next he came to an armored personnel carrier, a small, fast almost-tank that could haul eight to ten men into battle sporting a fair amount of armored protection. He pried off the fuel tank filler tube, pushed an eighth pound of TNAZ into the tube, and reset the electronic detonator.
Jefferson put a quarter pound of TNAZ on the underside of the engine block where it wouldn’t be easily found.
The next display was inside a tent. He unzipped the doorway and went in. A sleeping man jolted upright, lifting a pistol. Jefferson’s boot slammed into his jaw, pivoting his head upward and backward, breaking his neck in a millisecond. The pistol fell out of his hand before his death spasms could jerk his dying finger on the trigger.
Jefferson found nobody else in the tent. Inside were six tables loaded with radios and simple radar equipment, enough to outfit at least a battalion. Jefferson strung primer cord around a dozen of the most complicated units, then put three one-eighth-pound chunks of TNAZ on radios, under tables, and in various spots where they might not be easily seen. He hoped the first man into the tent in the morning figured the primer cord was large electrical lead wiring.
When he finished, Jefferson dragged the dead man outside and put him behind the tent. Jefferson broke off some desert brush and covered him, then continued his work to the right. He heard more weapons fire. Far down at the end of the display, he saw some winking lights as weapons were fired his way. He could hear no rounds hitting.
His sector here was fifty. By then he should meet another SEAL working toward him from the other direction. He left the white tent and had started to look at the next display of shoulder-fired missiles when he felt something jab into his back.
“Do not even twitch, American SEAL. I have seen you people work before. Don’t even think about moving or breathing, or I’ll blow you in half with my machine gun.”
2
Paul Jefferson knew what a gun muzzle in the back felt like. This was the real thing. He didn’t have a clue who held it.
“What the hell’s the matter with you, muthafucka? I’m here on security just the shit like you is. Take a good look at me. Hell, I’m black as a burned-out hutch. Get that stick outa my back.”