The rest of them must have gone with him. Murdock looked over at Lampedusa, who gave him a thumbs-up. He stared forward to see the pair of SEALs they had been following, but the pair was out of sight.
Murdock checked his wrist compass, turned slightly, and gave a tug on the buddy line. He and Lampedusa swam forward twice as fast as they had been, and in thirty strokes saw the kicking feet of a pair of SEALs ahead of them.
They all surfaced at the three-mile point, and the first thing Murdock heard was about the dolphins.
“Must have been a hundred of them,” Dewitt said. “They played around, jumped and dove, one hit our buddy line and almost tore it off me. Amazing.”
Everyone had something to say about the dolphins. Two of the men had touched the creatures.
“Man, they are fast,” Jaybird said. “I bet they can swim thirty knots.”
When the talk quieted down, Murdock got things moving again.
“Everyone all right? Any complaints?” None surfaced. “Okay, Jaybird and I’ll take the lead, First Squad behind us. Ed, play catch-up at the tail end. Let’s move, we’ve got a lot of swimming to do.”
Murdock gave Jaybird the attack board. “You’ve got the con, Jaybird. Let’s motor over the last three miles to the point.”
Jaybird put his mouthpiece back in, and dove. Murdock caught up with him, and tied him to the buddy line. They leveled out at fifteen feet under the choppy Pacific, and Jaybird angled them along the right bearing for the point.
SEALs swim at a given pace. Every man can tell by the number of strokes he takes underwater how far he’s traveled. The distance is usually off by no more than ten yards over half a mile. That’s part of the reason for these continuous retraining and conditioning swims.
Underwater positioning, even in murky harbor water, had been of vital importance in missions past, and would be in future assignments.
Jaybird motioned upward to Murdock, and they came to the surface.
They were about thirty yards off the tip of Zuniga Point. “Low tide, so more of it’s exposed,” Jaybird said.
They waited for the rest of the SEALs to surface, then treaded water for another few minutes.
“Let’s go home,” Murdock said. “Mahanani, you’re our Second Squad tracker, I want you on the attack board and lead out. Team up with Jaybird and I’ll take your buddy-line partner.”
They were over halfway back to the starting point when Murdock saw in the clear water twenty feet to one side a solitary cruising shark.
He checked it out, pulled the buddy cord, and pointed to it. Fred Washington nodded that he saw the shark.
Murdock watched it. He knew sharks were curious, and this was a blue, not known for having a vicious streak. The shark moved closer and closer to this strange thing in the water. In its tiny brain, the shark must have had only one purpose, to find out if this flailing, unstreamlined creature was good to eat.
It moved closer. Murdock had been up close before with sharks. On one exercise they had baited two sharks up to a boat, and gone overboard to see how the blue sharks reacted.
Now the blue came closer. Murdock figured it was no more than four feet long. Everything looks much larger underwater. The dark eyes seemed to be checking out this strange swimmer. It nosed closer until it was less than three feet from Murdock. He stopped swimming. The shark came closer.
Murdock struck out through the water as hard as he could with his fist, and slammed it into the nose of the shark Just over its closed mouth. The shark jolted backward, turned, and swam away.
Washington gave a jerk on the buddy line and a thumbs-up; then they went back to swimming for home.
Twenty minutes later on the beach across from the BUD/S o-course, Washington told the others about the shark. By that time it had grown to eight feet long and its mouth was wide open ready to take off Murdock’s leg.
“You actually punched a shark in the nose, Commander?” Joe Douglas asked.
“It’s a common way to treat blue sharks around here. Most of them aren’t vicious, but they are curious as hell. A good slap on the nose and they’ll cut and swim away fast. Now that the nature hike is over, how did you like the swim?”
“Just a warm-up, Skipper,” Ching said. “When are we going on a long swim, like out to the Coronado Islands and back?”
“Ching, you’re going soft,” Jaybird called. “That’s only fourteen miles round trip. How about we swim from here up to Oceanside and back?
That would be about an eighty-miler.”
The men hooted him down.
“You go, Jaybird,” Doc Ellsworth said. “I’ll pace you in a kayak.”
Murdock got control again. “You’ll get wet enough in the next four days to satisfy most of you frog-hoppers. Now, have some chow, and report back at the o-course at thirteen-thirty. Move out.”
As Murdock ate his noon meal, he kept trying to figure out a way to show Ardith just how important to him the Navy and the SEALs were. He figured she knew that the SEALs were formed out of the Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams that were put together during World War II. They were assembled first as the Naval Combat Demolition Units to clear mines and underwater obstacles from harbors and beaches where military landings were planned.
They quickly became the UDTs, and worked in the Pacific clearing and charting beaches on Kwajalein, Saipan, Leyte, and Okinawa before the Marine amphibious invasions.
There was little need for UDTs in Korea, but they did work on the Inchon harbor, and did some behind-the-lines demolition work. This soon developed into a companion group called the Special Operation Teams for land or water use. From that, the SEALs were formed, the name indicating that they could function from and on the Sea, strike from the Air, or come in by Land.
President John E Kennedy pushed for a stronger unconventional war capability in 1961. Then, on January 1, 1962, SEAL Team One and SEAL Team Two were formed. The SEALs had an expanded role after that.
They were tasked to do reconnaissance, take on covert missions against any and all enemies, to destroy bridges, harbors, ports, and other strategic targets. Their first mission was to work out tactics for these missions, develop training for completing them, and select and train with weapons to help them do the job.
From there the SEALs were ready for Vietnam; then they went in at Grenada and Panama and during Desert Storm. Weapons, tactics, and personnel changed over the years, but the mission remained the same. To do an attack on a given enemy quickly, often silently, with sudden overwhelming firepower, and to pull out with as few casualties as possible.
Now the SEALs were a part of the Naval Special Warfare Command.
Group One was located in Coronado, where SEAL Teams One, Three, Five, and Seven were headquartered. Group Two was in Little Creek, Virginia, where SEAL Teams Two, Four, and Eight were situated.
Murdock pushed the rest of his food away, and headed for the quarterdeck. Maybe he should have Master Chief Mackenzie talk to Ardith. He snorted. Oh, hell, yes, that would sink him in a rush.
There had to be a way. He had five more days to find it, and to make Ardith understand.
The SEAL mystique was a hundred times more than the “brotherhood” of a college fraternity. It was much more than blood brothers who took a blood pledge. In combat most of them had bled for the others on the team, for the mission, for the cause, for the SEALS.
The officers were unlike those in any other service or component of any military unit in the world. The officers took the grunge training the same way the other SEAL recruits did. The officer might be a lieutenant (j. g.) or a full lieutenant, but he took his bars off during training, had sand kicked in his face, and was tormented physically and mentally the same as the other tadpoles.