He came in and wiped a bead of sweat off his forehead. “Hey, Commander Murdock. We’ve got our commo back again. The admiral says you need a chopper, a Sea Knight. I’ve put in the order with the air commander at Pearl. His aide said with the red-signature order he’ll have one ready for combat in thirty minutes.”
“Good, Johnson. Stick close to me. We’re about to have a planning session like you probably haven’t seen before.”
Ten minutes later Murdock had DeWitt, Jaybird, Master Chief Dobler, and Lam sat around a table. All had pads and ballpoint pens.
“Now, you know our mission, so how do we best work it?” Murdock asked.
“No EAR rifles,” Jaybird said. “We leave them here and use our twenties.”
“Agreed,” DeWitt said. “But we need the sniper rifles and the MGs.”
“Amen to both of those,” Murdock said. “I’m taking an MP-5 sub gun on my back. Anyone who wants to can have a second shooter.”
“Hit and run, sounds like fun, but where do we stash our extra ammo?” Lam asked. “We’ll be all over the place. We establish a cache of ammo and explosives that we can’t carry?”
“Double ammo if we can pack it,” Senior Chief Dobler said. “Yes, I’d agree, we need a stash somewhere. Maybe more than one.”
They went at it for an hour and came out with their operations plan. Johnson was amazed.
“I’ve never seen an outfit work this way before,” Johnson said. “Usually the officers work out the plan and the details. I like this way better. Everyone knows what’s happening and you get input from your smartest EMs as well.”
“You got the idea. You want to work the field with us?”
Johnson laughed. “Hey, I’m a desk guy. Last infantry-type shit I did was in boot camp. I don’t even have my shots.”
Murdock looked at his watch. It was l630. “When does it get dark here?” Murdock asked.
Johnson frowned. “This time of year, about 1930, more or less.”
“Be damn handy if we had a map of that area with the spot marked where the admiral thinks the Chinese are,” Dobler said. “Then we can figure out where we drop in and set up our stash.”
By 1800 they had a map.
The chopper was waiting on the pad at the runway.
Master Chief Dobler had the troops ready with fifty percent more ammo than normal. Six drag bags were loaded with ammo, grenades, explosives, and more ammo. They had an expanded first-aid kit as well as Mahanani’s regular corpsman’s gear.
Murdock checked everything. “Looks like we’re about ready,” he said. “Ed, you happy with your mix of weapons?”
“Right. We have the sniper and MG, five Bull Pups, and three MP-5 submachine guns as doubles.”
“What’s our mix on WP versus HE on the grenades?”
“Two HEs to one WP.”
Murdock turned to Johnson. “How far is it to that chopper?”
“About a mile and a half.”
“Have it set down in the parking lot behind this building within thirty minutes.”
Johnson shook his head. “Can’t do it, Commander. None of our choppers are cleared to land anywhere but at the regular designated areas.”
Murdock grinned. “Commander, let’s see just how good that admiral’s red signature is. Tell whoever you contact the level of the order and see what happens.”
Johnson laughed. “Yeah, let’s see. It should work like a charm. I don’t get to play with that red sig often. In fact, never before.”
Murdock got the right TAC frequency, and used the SATCOM to talk directly with a recon plane over the Kaneohe invasion zone.
“The town itself was bypassed,” the observer said. “They have some half-tracks, maybe six of them. Hard to hide their trails. They swung north of the town and moved about three miles from the coast in toward the mountains. Damn strange. They don’t seem to be going anywhere. Just sitting there. Maybe waiting for orders. Maybe the Chinese command didn’t think they would even get onshore.”
Murdock told the observer his mission.
“Where do you suggest we sit down and set up our stash?”
“Not more than two miles from the beach. There’s a little stream comes out in that area. Just to the south of their half-track trail.”
Right on schedule, the Sea Knight, a CH-46 with the two big contra-rotating, three-blade main rotors, dropped in as requested. It kicked up a storm of dust even from the blacktopped parking lot.
The Third Platoon of SEAL Team Seven moved on board, loaded on the drag bags at l935, and lifted off two minutes later. Murdock showed the pilot on his map where he wanted to drop in.
“A recon plane reported that there should be no ground fire from that area,” Murdock said. The kid flying the chopper looked barely old enough to be out of high school. Actually he was a JG with probably five years of duty.
“Bring you in at that point in about eighteen minutes, sir,” the JG said. He wiped sweat off his forehead. “Sir, does this mean I’m getting combat pay?”
“Good guess, JG. Just be sure you live long enough to spend it. If we ask for a resupply, you’ll probably be coming in to the same spot we land today. Memorize where it is.”
They swept up and over the Naval base, then the town of Aiea. Beyond that it was green. This part of Oahu seemed to be made up of three elements, housetops, blacktopped streets and parking lots, and lush green foliage. Below, the landscape began to rise as they headed for the north end of the Koolau mountain range. The trees, shrubs, and grasses below were intoxicatingly green. Murdock knew that if he were down there they would even smell green.
They had planned to come in from the north, following Highway 83 from the village of Kahaluu south. When about two miles from Kaneohe they would swing inland and watch for the half-track trail through the brush and trees. By this time it was almost dark. Dusk came and went in a moment, and the pilots used night-vision goggles to check the landscape below.
It was a harder target than in daylight, but after five minutes of slow moving along the highway, the chopper pilot spotted the smashed-down grass and small trees. He picked out a cleared area nearby with a stark stone chimney standing by itself, all that was left of a previous dwelling.
“We go in about a minute,” Murdock told the troops. They were up in marching order, ready to run out of the bird as soon as the rear ramp dropped to the ground.
A light turned from red to green over the ramp and it lowered. The SEALs charged out, established a point twenty yards from the Sea Knight, then went back for the drag bags filled with ammo, explosives, and grenades.
Four minutes after landing, the Sea Knight took off and went back the way it had come to the north so it might escape detection by the Chinese troops on the ground.
The SEALs divided the bags and put two in each location. One by the chimney, the others by a struggling koa tree, about sixty feet tall.
Murdock had the men spread out, and used the Motorola to talk to them. “Recon said the main force of the Chinese is to the left, tucked up against the first rise of the mountains.
“We sit here for half an hour and see if they send out a patrol to investigate. If not, we move toward them or any elements they may have strung out around their main force. Remember, there are two thousand guns out there. We will not get in an all-out firefight with that kind of odds. We punch and run, shoot and haul ass. No heroics, nobody taking on a company or any of that shit. Everyone read me?”
He got a chorus of chirps on his earpiece.
“Good. Someplace along here the mountains come down closer to the ocean. Sometimes they hang back. This is one of those spots. In twenty-five minutes more we take a hike a mile due west and then start working south to find the bad guys.”