He reached under his shirt and pulled his pistol out of his belt, an old but serviceable 9mm Makarov. It was quite possible that the two prisoners would have to be shot while they were trying to escape. But not just yet….
With the pistol in one hand, he unlocked the door with the other and stepped swiftly inside.
Halstead rose silently through blackness, one hand extended until he felt the smooth, solid bulk of the hull above him. Carefully, he felt his way off the keel and up the rounded slope of the yacht's hull until he reached the waterline just beneath the port bow.
Like the rest of the assault squad, he was garbed for what the Teams referred to as a VBSS subsurface assault — the initials stood for "Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure." He wore a Nomex flight suit and hood, mask and fins, both a Secumar UBA jacket connected to his Draeger oxygen rebreather and a standard inflatable UDT life jacket, and an assault vest with web gear. The assault gear and clothing made him massively bulky, and in the water it felt as if it was dragging him down, but he adjusted the pace of his kicks to hover motionless in the water.
He had to work entirely by touch in the ink-black darkness, but he could feel the tug at his combat harness as he moved that told him DiMercurio was a few feet away, attached to him by a short safety tether. With his free hand, he raised the leech and pressed it home.
"The leech" was a temporary mooring ring, an attachment point for the cable DiMercurio was trailing behind him. Halstead sealed it to the hull by pushing down two levers, one to either side of the ring, creating a powerful suction that anchored the device to the hull. As soon as it was set, Halstead tugged at the safety tether three times. DiMercurio moved closer, then, snapping a hasp over the mooring ring. The
ASDS was now secured to the yacht; the suction device wouldn't be up to towing a fifty-five-ton SEAL minisub very far, but if the yacht suddenly hared off toward the far horizon, the drag on the mooring line would certainly slow the Al Qahir before it gave way. The line also provided a path, by following it down hand-over-hand, back to the relative safety of the sub, should the assault squad need to make a hasty exit.
"Trident Three, in position" sounded over the headset imbedded in his Nomex hood, the voice somewhat garbled, but intelligible. The SEALs wore seaproof Motorolas, tiny radios with microphones imbedded in their flight suits at their throats. Range was sharply limited underwater, since radio waves didn't penetrate that medium well, but was good enough for the squad to maintain contact in the area immediately around the target.
"Trident Seven, ready."
"Trident Four, ready to roll!"
One by one, the other SEALs checked in, each reaching a pre-assigned position and sounding off.
"Trident One ready," Halstead said when the other seven all had spoken. "Trident Two, give us a sneak-and-peek."
"Roger that," EM1 Nemecek's voice responded. "I see four… five… make it six tangos on the aft deck. AK-47s. Looks like they have an attitude."
Meaning Nemecek thought they looked like they were on the alert. Well, they couldn't have everything.
"Assault team, stand ready. Trident Two, give 'em a show!"
Nemecek had come to the surface some fifteen to twenty yards off the Al Qahir's starboard side, surfacing just enough that he could get his face above water and eyeball the target. At Halstead's order, he yanked the lanyard on a small flare attached to its own flotation collar and hurled it into the darkness; the flare burst into intense white light, bobbing on the surface of the ocean only a few yards off the Al Qahir's starboard side.
"They see it," Nemecek announced. "Port side clear!"
"Trident, go!" Halstead snapped, and the SEAL squad surged upward.
There were nine SEALs in the water including Hal-stead. One — Nemecek — was providing the starboard-side diversion. The rest worked in four buddy teams of two. In each pair, one man carried as a part of his gear an extensible painter's pole with a hook on the business end attached to a rolled-up caving ladder. On Halstead's command, the four men with the painters' poles surfaced, extended the poles, and snagged Al Qahir's gunwale at four different spots along the port side. The other four SEALs, weapons strapped at the ready to their sides, grabbed hold of the caving ladders and scrambled up out of the water.
The brightly burning flare had grabbed the attention of every man on Al Qahir's deck, dragging them over to the starboard side. Four SEALs came up the port side as one, opening fire as soon as their heads and shoulders cleared the yacht's gunwale.
Most of the tangos — milspeak for terrorists — had their backs to the SEALs as they leaned over the side, staring at the flare. One tango was just turning to face the port side as Halstead surged up the railing. Hal-stead grabbed the grip of his H&K, flicking on the laser sight. When the dancing red dot jittered across the tango's center of mass, he triggered the weapon one-handed, putting the man down with a sound-suppressed three-round burst.
CQB — Close Quarters Battle — is not the arena for fair play or chivalry. The man Halstead gunned down probably hadn't even seen the SEALs, not if he'd stared into the flare's light and wrecked his night vision. The other terrorists started twisting and collapsing as silenced rounds slammed into their backs close behind the dancing red dots of the laser sights, cutting them down before they even had a chance to realize they were in danger. Within three seconds, the first four SEALs were on the deck, each down on one knee, their weapons covering all directions as the next four men climbed aboard.
A tango standing on the weather bridge walked over to the ladder leading down to the superstructure; Diller hit him with a three-round burst and he tumbled down the ladder, hitting the deck with a heavy thud.
Slipping off his fins in favor of the gripping soles of his wetsuit booties, Halstead rose and jogged for the door leading down into the yacht's interior. DiMercurio took the ladder next to the door, heading up topside for the superstructure and bridge.
They'd studied the blueprints for yachts identical in design to Al Qahir, and had a good idea of what was where and how to get from one place to another. The assault now had three goals. First and foremost, they needed to find out if there were hostages on board and secure them. Halstead's group had that responsibility. At the same time, DiMercurio's fireteam would secure the yacht's bridge and communications center. Only after those goals were accomplished would they take down the rest of the terrorists on board.
Halstead kicked in the flimsy door to the yacht's lounge and rolled back as Forrester tossed a crash-bang through. The lounge lit up with a firecracker string of piercingly loud detonations, and then Diller and Pulaski stormed through the door and down the steps.
One tango, a scrawny, terrified-looking kid wearing a bright orange life jacket, was on his knees, hands over ears streaming blood. Diller shot the kid through the head and the SEALs kept moving. Ahead, a passageway led forward, with four closed stateroom doors.
Each SEAL took a different door, moving up beside it, slapping a breaching charge next to the lock, and yanking the fuse igniter. Almost as one, the four charges went off in a stuttering barrage of four ringing blasts that splintered wood and filled the passageway with roiling clouds of smoke.