Now they were about eighty yards from the water, and still some two hundred yards or more from the Yuduki Maru's pier. Doc could see the forward half of the Japanese freighter, revealed in the gap between two small buildings. The fires on her deck appeared to have died down.
Damn! The ship was still too far for the short reach of their tactical radios. Each time Doc tried, he heard only garbled bursts of noise and static.
Coburn pointed to a line of military vehicles parked beside a storehouse, apparently untended. "There's transport."
"Yeah." Doc's voice sounded less than certain.
"We've got to get to the Maru's pier," Coburn said. "In a jeep we can just drive up to the dock like we own the place."
"And maybe get nailed by our own guys when they think we're the Iranian cavalry." But Doc had to agree that riding would get them where they needed to go faster than by shank's mare. And though he'd said nothing to the patient about it, Coburn was not in good shape. The immediate effects of the CO2 poisoning had been banished by getting rid of the rebreather, but the SEAL Seven commander could well have internal injuries. Doc wouldn't be able to know that for sure, though, until he had Coburn back aboard the Nassau. Where other ships had a sick bay, the LHA had no less than three well-equipped hospitals with a total of six hundred beds and all the high-tech medical wonder gadgets you could ask for.
But for any of that to do any good, Doc had to get his patient off the beach and aboard the Nassau. "Okay," he said at last. "We'll give it a try."
Ellsworth and Coburn moved together, sticking to the shadows at the perimeter of the field, circling the well-lighted part until they reached what appeared to be a small motor pool. Doc selected a vehicle, a military jeep of obvious American manufacture, handed Coburn his H&K, and slid in behind the wheel.
"No keys," Coburn said.
"No problem," Doc replied. Drawing his knife, he used the hilt to smash the face plate off the ignition block assembly. Selecting two wires, he cut and stripped them with his knife, then brought the bare ends together. The engine ground, then caught as Doc pumped the gas.
Coburn watched the process, which took less than five seconds, dubiously. "Your record says you're a country boy, Doc."
"Yup, that's me. Just a sweet, simple country boy..."
"...trying to get along in the big city, yeah," Coburn said, finishing the old line for him. "I've heard that one before. Remind me never to trust you with my car."
Doc gunned the engine once, put the jeep in gear, and pulled out of the motor pool area. "Hey, I'm just a laid-back kind of guy," Doc replied easily. "You can trust me with your car, your money, your girl..."
"Yeah, you're laid back like a rattlesnake. I don't know if... watch it!"
Doc had seen the danger at the same instant, a line of Iranian soldiers moving along the catwalk atop a massive, concrete structure that looked like a dry dock crib. He increased the jeep's speed slightly. "Don't sweat it, Captain. We're Iranians too, remember? This here is an official Iranian government vehicle."
But the men on the catwalk evidently were not convinced. Muzzle flashes popped and stuttered as the Pasdaran infantry opened fire. Bullets sparked off the pavement and slammed into the jeep's side.
"Right," Coburn said. Twisting in his seat, he aimed his H&K and loosed a long, full-auto burst. "Unauthorized use subject to heavy penalty!"
Doc spun the jeep's wheel, sending the vehicle hurtling down a narrow alley between two warehouses. They emerged on the waterfront, driving along a broad, concrete wharf. Startled Iranian soldiers and dock workers dove left and right, scattering from the jeep's path.
"I hope you're a better corpsman than you are a driver," Coburn yelled. Then a burst of machine-gun fire slammed into the jeep from the front, shattering the windshield and shredding the right front tire. Doc felt the jeep going out of control, the rear skidding wildly to the left, and he fought to keep the vehicle from flipping over. Smoke exploded front beneath the hood, and the engine died. Still spinning now, they skidded another ten feet and slammed hard into a bollard rising from the water's edge.
"Damn, the pedestrians are getting worse every..." He stopped. Coburn was slumped over in the passenger's seat, fresh blood bright against his scalp. "Shit!"
Half standing in the wrecked jeep, Doc grabbed his H&K from the back seat, thumbed the selector to full auto, and cut loose at a squad of advancing Pasdaran. Two collapsed on the pavement and the others scattered. Doc glanced back over his shoulder; the Yuduki Maru was still a good fifty yards away.
"The sea is your friend," Doc said. He'd meant the words, drilled into SEAL recruits throughout their BUD/S training, to be ironic, but right now he was well aware of the truth behind them. He checked Coburn, finding a strong pulse. It looked like a round might have grazed his scalp, knocking him unconscious, though Doc wanted to give him a thorough look-over.
There was no time for that now, though. Another bullet slammed into the side of the jeep. "C'mon, Captain," he said, dragging Coburn's limp body from the passenger's seat and draping him over his back in an awkward fireman's carry. "Let's us go for a swim!"
With Coburn still over his shoulders, Doc leaped off the wharf and into the cold, dark embrace of the harbor once more.
0132 hours (Zulu +3)
Helo Devil Dog One inbound to Bandar Abbas
The helicopters had launched nearly an hour earlier, but they'd been orbiting over the Gulf since that time, well out in international waters. Devil Dog flight consisted of six UH-1 Hueys, "Slicks" off the Nassau and the Iwo Jima. Each carried a Blue/Green Team, a joint SEAL/Marine Recon boarding party of fourteen men, and they came in low and fast, close behind a flight of two Marine SuperCobras. The Cobras clattered across the Yuduki Maru's deck, less than twenty feet above her steel deck, then wheeled across the dockyards and waterfront buildings beyond.
Automatic gunfire chattered from a dry dock; there was a rippling flash, and then a bundle of living flames slashed from the lead Cobra, lighting the sky with their contrails. The rocket barrage struck a catwalk running along the side of the dry dock, flinging shards of metal and fragments of bodies far across the compound.
By now, the entire shipyard was in chaos. A siren wailed its mournful ululation against the crump and rumble of exploding ordnance. Somewhere in the distance, antiaircraft batteries were going off with a stolid-sounding crump-crump-crump, apparently at random and apparently without actually bothering to aim at anything. Green tracers drifted across the sky above the horizon.
Over the shipyard, however, the American forces appeared to have won a momentary control. Flames continued to boil into the sky from the fuel dock, which was now blazing from one end to the other. The fire had spread to the patrol boat as well, and fresh explosions continued to rack the sadly listing vessel's frame as fuel and ammo stores detonated. Ashore, men were running everywhere, some armed and moving with purpose, but most scattering in desperate bids to find shelter or simply to leave, as quickly as possible. Very few stood their ground and attempted to duel with the circling Cobras. Those who did were cut down almost at once, by rocket salvos, or by ratcheting fusillades of 7.62mm minigun rounds, sprayed from the helos' chin turrets so quickly the tri-barreled cannons sounded like chain saws.
The lead Huey, meanwhile, circled the Yuduki Maru once, trying to draw fire from her deck or from the pier alongside. When no one accepted the offer, the Slick came in at a hover, twenty feet above the forward deck, tail low; from its open cargo doors, ropes and black-faced men descended with stomach-wrenching drops.