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Authors: Keith Douglass

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“Yeah,
right
,” said Razor Roselli.

“Don’t be too hasty, Chief,” said Murdock. “Take a look at how our boy here is dressed, and judge for yourself how the story is shaping up.”

“Well, when you put it that way,” said Razor.

“I swear it’s the truth, Chief,” said Jaybird. “I was there with my buddy Hanson, from Team One. He was right there, and he couldn’t believe it either.”

“So what did you do?” asked Razor.

“I went home with her,” Jaybird replied, as if he couldn’t believe the question. “We went to the bar in Hanson’s car, but she said she’d drive me back to base.”

“Jaybird,” Razor said wearily, “you must’ve come in on the noon balloon.”

“SEAL groupie,” said Murdock. “Nutcase.”

“Anyway,” said Jaybird, anxious to get back to his story, “we head for her apartment. And all the way there she’s telling me everything she wants to do. She practically rips my clothes off in the elevator. Now, I’m figuring, this is that night, right? The one you’ll remember when you’re eighty and still get hard thinking about it. And if we ended up actually doing everything she was talking about, my picture was going up in some Hall
of Fame somewhere, and I’d get a plaque to commemorate the event. And if I died, they’d retire my number.”

“Get
on
with it,” said Razor.

“Okay,” said Jaybird, “we’re in the apartment, then we’re in the bedroom. You should have seen this painting she had over her bed; I don’t even know where you could buy something like that.… Anyway, my clothes are off, and I’ll tell you, Chief, I had a hard-on that could cut glass.”

“And at that point,” said Razor, “she tells you she needs a hundred dollars to pay her mother’s medical bills.”

“I ain’t never paid for it, Chief,” Jaybird protested.

Roselli shot him a disbelieving look.

“Well, not with money,” said Jaybird, grinning, “just little pieces of my heart.”

“That’s why the chicks dig him,” Roselli said to Murdock. “He’s deep.”

“Am I ever going to hear this fucking story?” Murdock demanded.

“Like I said,” said Jaybird. “We’re in the bedroom, naked. Then someone starts pounding on the door.”

“Uh, oh,” Razor said facetiously.

“I stay in the bedroom, she goes to answer it,” said Jaybird. “It’s her husband.”

“Who she neglected to mention all this time,” said Murdock.

“Must have forgot,” said Razor. “It’s the oldest one in the book. You’re standing there at attention, he’s got a gun, and it’s going to take the contents of your wallet to make him go away.”

“I wasn’t hanging around for any of that,” said Jaybird. “There was a phone right there, so I made a real quick call to the duty.”

“Good presence of mind,” Murdock conceded.

“Then I went out the window,” said Jaybird. “And over the balcony. And you know, the whole way down I couldn’t stop
thinking about everything she said. Took a couple of floors to lose my hard-on.”

“Thanks for sharing that with us,” said Murdock. Then, just for the sake of clarity; “And you did all this without your clothes.”

“They were in the living room.”

“You’re sitting here in the lieutenant’s truck with your wallet and your pager,” Razor said dubiously. “But your clothes are back in her living room?”

“I’m not that green, Chief. I might get separated from my threads, but not my wallet and keys. I stuck ’em in my mouth when I went over the balcony.”

“I don’t ever want to know how you got them into the bedroom,” said Murdock.

Jaybird opened his mouth.

“I told you I didn’t want to know,” Murdock said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Jaybird,” Murdock said kindly, “do you remember how you got your nickname?”

“Ah, yes, sir.”

“Tell me,” Murdock ordered.

“Well, sir, this girl and I—”

“Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?” said Razor.

“We were getting it on in the ocean, and these people came down to the beach and parked right where we left our clothes. So we had to swim down the beach and escape and evade back to my car—”

“Naked, right?” Murdock interrupted.

“Yes, sir.”

“And you got caught?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you were Jaybird forevermore. Jaybird?”

“Yes, sir?”

“One time you can put down to carelessness. Twice is starting to look like a personal problem.”

“I see your point, sir. Sir?”

“Yes, Jaybird?”

“I’m never gonna live this one down, am I, sir?”

“No, I wouldn’t think so,” said Murdock.

Especially when they arrived back on base, and Razor Roselli marched Jaybird Sterling right through SEAL Team Seven headquarters on the way to get some clothes. Jaybird handled it well. His general demeanor was the same as that of the Queen of England when greeting her subjects. The SEALs, however, demanded an explanation.

13
Monday, September 19—Tuesday, November 7

Chocolate Mountain Gunnery Range

Niland, California

The CIA had wanted all the mission preparations to take place at their training facility at Camp Peary, Virginia, known as The Farm. Murdock, suspecting that their real desire was to supervise him more closely than he wanted, used the excuse that the residents of nearby Williamsburg wouldn’t take kindly to thousand-pound demolition shots going off at all hours. So Niland it was. The country was suitably arid and covered with scrub, and the mountain range was perfect to train for the helicopter part of the mission.

But one of the advantages to working for the CIA rather than Special Operations Command was that things got done in days rather than weeks. Murdock found plenty for the platoon to do. First, everyone had to be briefed on the mission, even though only half the platoon, eight men, would be going. Someone might get sick, or have a training accident, and one of the others had to be ready to step in. Of course, Murdock also had a more devious motivation behind the arrangement. The second eight, furious at being left behind, would bust their balls in training to prove to the lieutenant that he’d made a mistake
in not picking them. They would push the first eight so hard that Murdock wouldn’t have to as much as raise his voice.

And the first eight would be Murdock, DeWitt, Roselli, Kosciuszko, Jaybird Sterling, Doc Ellsworth, Magic Brown, and Professor Higgins.

Once the plan was briefed, they fell into a daily routine. In the mornings they did a hard PT while the desert was still fairly cool, and then fell to on the book work. Each man would have to memorize the entire route they’d be driving. From the insertion landing zone, to Baalbek, then out of town to the extraction landing zone. Satellite photos were put through a stereoscopic projector to give a 3-D view. Murdock insisted that everyone commit the entire street plan of Baalbek to memory. It would be night, there might be no street signs or time to consult them, and they might also have to deviate from the planned route. Getting lost was not an option. Neither was stopping at the nearest gas station to ask for directions.

In the afternoons they drove out to a secluded spot on the eastern side of the Chocolate Mountain range. A team from the CIA’s office of Technical Service had flown in with some civilian contractors and heavy equipment. Near an old dirt auxiliary landing strip they constructed a wooden replica of the Baalbek warehouse. Any Russian noticing something new on a satellite photograph would have figured it for an airplane hangar target, since SEALs practiced air base attacks all the time. Inquisitive SEALs from other platoons were encouraged to think the same thing. The Technical Service people surrounded the warehouse with a chain-link fence, and graded in a rough dirt road in exactly the right spot.

Technical Service were the people in the CIA who did everything from supplying disguises to agents to planting listening devices in objects without leaving a mark or a seam. They also supplied the Russian AKM assault rifles and PKM machine guns, the same weapons used by the Syrians, that the SEALs would be taking on the mission. The pink-dappled
Syrian camouflage uniforms, Presidential Guard berets and insignia, boots, and web gear were fitted to each man and then packed away for the actual mission.

With Hummvees initially standing in for the armored cars and limousines, and man-shaped metal targets scattered about, the SEALs practiced the actual mechanics of shooting their way into and out of the area. It was all done with live ammunition—SEALs never used blanks.

The trick, as always, was not so much hitting the targets. It was not accidentally shooting one of your own in the smoke, noise, and confusion. If you wanted it to come off fast, you had to first walk your way through step-by-step in daylight. Then half speed, then full speed in daylight. Then with live ammo, and then at night. It took time, and was as complex as any grand ballet. If you didn’t rehearse, the wrong people died.

A few days later they were joined by what the Army called a Special Operations Aviation Task Force.

The Army’s premier helicopter unit was the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne). It had formed in the aftermath of the botched Iranian hostage rescue mission, when everyone had realized that the skills to fly helicopters behind enemy lines had been lost after Vietnam. The 160th had three battalions. The 1st and 2nd were the “black” battalions, stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The 3rd Battalion was stationed at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, Georgia. It supported the Army Rangers, in particular the 1st Ranger Battalion, also located at Hunter.

The task force that showed up at Niland to support Murdock consisted of five MH-60K Blackhawks of 1st Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion of the 160th, all eight MH-47E Chinooks of Alpha Company of the 2nd Battalion, and a maintenance element from the maintenance companies of both battalions.

These were not plain-vanilla helicopters. Both the Blackhawks and Chinooks had the same avionics suites, optimized
for low-altitude penetration of hostile airspace: a forward-looking infrared system for night flying, in addition to the pilots’ night-vision goggles; a terrain-following/terrain-avoidance/digital ground-mapping radar; automatic target handoff and digital automatic flight controls; radar and laser warning systems, infrared jammers, and chaff and flare dispensers to handle any missiles that might be launched at them; six-barrel 7.62mm miniguns for the door gunners to shoot at anything else that might bother them; and several redundant precision navigation and communications systems. Both aircraft types had in-flight refueling probes, and the Blackhawks had pylons for extra fuel tanks or weapons.

The task force was led by a dapper little major who sported a full mustache that wouldn’t do him much good with his next Army promotion board. He listened carefully while Murdock briefed the plan and then broke into a huge smile, visions of Distinguished Flying Crosses obviously dancing in his head.

Besides a captain and two first lieutenants, the rest of the major’s pilots were warrant officers. While Army commissioned officer pilots had to follow career paths and only did three-year tours with their respective units, all the warrants did was fly. In a unit like the 160th, which was all volunteer and handpicked the best pilots in the Army, that told.

The warrants were the kind of people who enjoyed screaming over the treetops at more than a hundred knots in the dead of night, their only view through the green tunnels of their night-vision goggles. So of course they couldn’t wait to fly into Lebanon and get their asses shot off.

In fact, like Murdock’s SEALs, the pilots nearly got into a fistfight after the major decided who was going to fly the mission and who would be backup.

Unlike Air Force helicopter pilots, who sometimes acted as if the safety of their expensive aircraft was more important to them than accomplishing the mission, the pilots of the 160th were beloved by the SEALs, Delta, and Special Forces. All you
had to do was point to a spot on a map and the 160th would take you there, and when you were done working, fly back through any kind of weather, ground fire, or the gates of Hell itself to get you out. They were shit hot, and bigger prima donnas than even the SEALs. They called themselves the Nightstalkers.

And while the SEALs trained to take down the target, the Nightstalkers got busy. The National Security Agency had electronically mapped the location of every radar and antiaircraft system in Lebanon and Syria, and the pilots carefully plotted their route through the gaps and dead spaces. Satellite radar mapping gave them the exact radar images they would see in their scopes as they flew the route. Their computer planning system digitized satellite photographs and gave the crews a virtual-technology view of the route as seen through any of the aircraft windows. It could stimulate daylight, night, and night-vision-goggle light.

The pilots slept during the day and flew at night, skimming over the desert and through the canyons of the Chocolate Mountain range. They didn’t need Murdock and the SEALs. The helicopters were loaded with the equivalent weight of the vehicles and personnel they’d be carrying, and if one went into the ground only the crew would be lost. The 160th had lost more men in training than they had in Panama, the Gulf, Somalia, and other unmentioned places around the world combined.

Then the Office of Technical Service showed up with the mission vehicles. The Shorlands armored cars were painted in Syrian camouflage with all details correct, even the extra smoke dischargers Murdock had requested.

The Shorlands had the same general shape as the classic Land Rover, except the body was steel armor. The engine, suspension, and tires had been beefed up to take the extra weight. The Shorlands normally came with a machine-gun turret on the top, but it made the vehicle too high to fit in the
back of a Chinook and had been removed. Even if they had kept the turret, there wouldn’t be room for anyone to work the gun; the entire compartment would be filled with explosives. The front lights were covered by heavy wire grills, and the bumpers were reinforced to take a heavy impact. Top speed from the four-stroke V-8 engine was sixty-five miles per hour. Being a British vehicle, it was right-hand-drive. Being good Americans, the SEALS were driven absolutely crazy learning to shift with their left hands.

BOOK: Direct Action
12.07Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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