Seal Team Seven #20: Attack Mode (19 page)

“Yes, sir, Mr. Mayor. That’s what I’m saying. The plutonium is sealed in three-inch-thick lead jars, so it can’t get out. What is curious to me is why these hijackers go to the trouble to build an underground complex.”

“That’s easy. I did see them moving the crates. Huge things and dastardly heavy. Leaf springs in that truck were
flat and the tires were squished down soft. Big lots like that would be hard to sell to terrorists. They need a place where they can safely open the lead containers and break the plutonium down into smaller lead bottles so they can easily transport and sell it.”

“That is what we have decided. We can’t let them do that. I have fourteen men here all heavily armed, all experienced in this type of warfare. Our job is to stop them and recover the plutonium. The Navy has had permission from Majuro to land on any of the Marshalls and take what action is needed.”

“So why do you need me?”

“Courtesy call, Mr. Mayor. And to get an idea what we have down there at the end of the airstrip. Were you ever in that underground bunker?”

“Nope. I asked; they said no. I didn’t have clearance.”

“Figures. We’re going to be moving that way. Are there any residences or businesses down there?”

“Just Miwah at the airport. Yell at him and he’ll grab his bike and get up out of your way in a rush.”

“Thanks. You can explain to the people what’s going on. Oh, if you have a cop or two, could they block off the far end of the air strip so nobody from town can get down there?”

“Yeah, be glad to.” The mayor hesitated. “You be damn sure that none of that plutonium gets spilled on my atoll.”

“We’ll try our best, Mr. Mayor.”

Murdock and Jaybird left the house and jogged back to where the SEALs waited on the dock. “Let’s go for a hike,” Murdock said. “We’re going to play spelunkers and investigate an underground cave complete with your own radiation bath.”

The thirteen SEALs met on the road just south of the small village, and Murdock told them what he had found out about the lab.

“So we can’t go in blasting with our twenties,” Murdock said. “We don’t know what stage of breaking down the plut they are in. The only reason to build a secure complex like this is to divide the jugs of plut into smaller lead jugs so they can sell them easier. The two hundred pounds of plut could go for a hundred million. If they can break it down into protected twenty-pound jugs, they could still charge fifteen million each and make more money.”

“So, how can we dig them out?” JG Gardner asked.

“Very carefully,” Jaybird said.

Lam came in on the net. “This has to be the front door where I’m watching. It’s concealed. So there must be a back door, too. They know that we’re here. They had to hear the choppers come in, and one of them shot at us.”

“We can’t do an awful lot until daylight,” Murdock said. “Lam, you have NVGs with you?”

“Negative.”

“I’ll send Jaybird down with mine. You keep that area under watch and try to figure out where the door is. We’ll go to the sides and back of the hill and try to determine where some other entrances must be. How did they get those heavy crates in? Not through the place you are, right? Too many trees?”

“Yeah, Cap. You’re right. So look for a side door with
a cleared ramp where the truck could ease up to it and a crane could lift out the package.”

“I like the way you think, Lampedusa,” Murdock said. “JG, take your squad down the road to what you figure should be the far end of the bunker. We don’t know how big it is, but let’s say it’s not more than a hundred feet long. Check with Lam on the way by and then find some cover down there and we’ll wait for daylight.

“Alpha will cover the front and try to find that truck entrance. Let’s move. We have about two hours to daylight, or maybe three. No handy newscaster is going to tell us when sunrise is down here in the South Pacific.”

Both Howard and Jefferson were in the carrier’s hospital, so that left each squad with seven men. Murdock accepted that and sent the JG on his way.

Gardner put his men five yards apart and led out to find Lam. They told him they were coming and he met them on the road. They talked with Lam then moved on along the trail. They quickly passed what looked like a drive that ended abruptly against the jungle growth of the hill. Farther along they passed two new-looking Ford pickup trucks. The JG kept going to what he figured should be the end of the bunker. He was maybe two hundred feet from Lam. He reported in to Murdock and told him about the suddenly stopping road and the pickups.

Murdock had waited for Gardner to get Bravo well down the road before he took his squad. It was more of a trail than a road here past the airport, but he could tell even in the darkness that it had been used a lot. It had crushed coral spread on it, but grass and weeds had grown up between the twin tire tracks. Murdock passed where he figured Lam was. He clicked his mike twice and Lam came on.

“Yeah, Cap, you’re about twenty feet up trail from where I figure the entrance is. With all the concrete and lead shielding they must have in there, the place must be as soundproof as a Beatles recording studio.”

“Agree. We’ll check out the trail here for a truck entrance. Should be easy to find.”

Murdock and Jaybird led the way. The moon fought off a series of scudding clouds left over from the storm days before. They were rushing toward a low-pressure area far to the west across the Pacific.

The twin tracks led down farther than Murdock figured and at last turned right and stopped at a wall of jungle growth. Murdock put his men down in the brush near the trail, and he and Jaybird moved forward a slow step at a time, testing the area, trying to find anything that would indicate a building.

All they found was the sudden end of the truck tracks at a wall of growth. They touched the growing brush and small trees and Jaybird chuckled softly.

“Bastards,” he whispered into his mike. “Try to move some of that growth. It doesn’t budge. It’s fastened to a real wall. It’s living camouflage, so there must be boxes of dirt below the wall where the damn plants and trees take root and grow. Then somehow they lift or swing the wall and the greenery to the side. That’s what I call hiding something damn well.”

“Back,” Murdock said. He and Jaybird retraced their steps to the trail, which they now found also continued straight ahead for another fifty feet. There sat two Ford 350 pickups, both with oversize tires and extra leaf springs that lifted the bodies a foot higher than usual.

“Rigged to take a damn heavy load,” Murdock whispered to Jaybird.

They went back where the rest of the squad had settled down near the front of the bunker.

“Sadler. There’s a wall up there with living camouflage of trees and vines. That’s your target. Jaybird and I will back up Lam at the front door. We’ll move slowly and see what happens when the sun comes up. Do they live in, eat out, or just stay in there and work now that they have something to work on? We’ll find out as soon as we can. JG. What have you found back there?”

“Not a hell of a lot, Cap. We went fifty yards beyond those two Ford pickups, but we ran out of hill. We’re moving back to within about twenty yards of the trucks
and finding cover and concealment. Something will pop come daylight.”

“Yeah, we hope,” Murdock said. “If they don’t come out, we’ll have to use twenties on the doors we can find and blast them down. Hope they didn’t use reinforced concrete slabs for their doors.”

Five minutes later he and Jaybird contacted Lam and settled down in concealed positions. It was still dark.

“One man on each spot on guard duty. The rest of you can sack out. Keep your ears on. Ten four.”

“Ten four?” Jaybird whispered. “Cap, you got to stop watching those old cop shows on TV.”

After that it was quiet.

Murdock took the guard duty on the front door, but he didn’t think that Lam would do any snoozing. He brought up the NVGs he had borrowed back from Lam and concentrated on the area Lam had pointed out where he saw the man vanish. Had to be a door there somewhere.

If they were discovered, what good would it do them to try to break down the tanks of plut? Maybe they weren’t sure who it was they had shot at. Maybe. Sure, and maybe they were complete idiots. They had to know the Navy was on the island. Did they think they could outgun the whole fucking U.S. Navy? Or did they have some other pipeline?

Murdock thought about it until his head began to hurt. Now he realized just how much he appreciated and relied on the input from those men around him. Third Platoon was a team in more than one sense.

More than two hours later, Murdock was getting tired. He moved again, this time going prone and propping the goggles up with his hands and his elbows into the soft mulch under the trees and vines. He heard something. A squeak? A hinge moving? Then into the ghostly green of the NVGs a man stepped out of the trees and stood there. He had a cigarette cupped in his hand and now took a long pull and inhaled the smoke, then blew it out.

No smoking inside? Murdock wanted to take him out, but he didn’t have a silenced weapon. “Lam, Lam, wake
up,” he whispered on the Motorola. “Lam, do you have a silenced gun? We’ve got a man outside the door.”

“Uh, what the hell? Skipper?”

“Do you have a silenced weapon? We’ve got a man outside the entrance.”

“Yeah, silent, but you’ve got the goggles. I can’t see him up there.”

“Jaybird?”

“Can’t help you, Cap. Take him out with one of the 5.56s. They’ll never hear it inside that tomb.”

Murdock sighted in with his Bull Pup, making sure he was on 5.56. Just as the man turned to leave, Murdock pulled the trigger on a three-round burst. The three shots from the rifle sounded to Murdock like 105 field artillery rounds going off in the pristine pure South Pacific air and the total silence of the night. Murdock watched as the man slammed backward. At least two rounds hit him, Murdock figured.

“Lam, you’re closest,” Murdock said.

The SEAL leader saw Lam lift out of his hiding spot and rush to the fallen man. He bent over him a moment, then hoisted him on his shoulders and walked quickly to the road and down it toward the village.

“Jaybird, stay,” Murdock said, lifting up and running to catch up with Lam. They put the man down in the brush twenty feet from the road.

“Dead as a turkey on Thanksgiving morning,” Lam said. They went through the pockets of the civilian clothes he wore: a billfold with five hundred dollars in it, two bank credit cards from London, some old clippings, and a U.S. Maritime Seaman’s card.

He had a full beard and black hair.

“Could be an Arab,” Lam said.

“Probably. He’ll be missed.” Murdock used the Motorola. “Anybody awake. We took out one of them who came outside to smoke. That means they may be working inside and not allowing smoking there. We have one less to deal with when we get inside.”

“People inside probably didn’t hear the shots,” Gardner
said. “If that place is made of concrete and lead, it’s totally insulated from outside sound.”

“Even if it is built like a tomb, it has to have air vents,” Murdock said. “Unless they purify and reoxygenate the air through some kind of rebreathers. Not likely.”

“So let’s find them,” Gardner said. “Canzoneri and Prescott, go up the side of the hill from the back and start hunting for the vents. They’ll be cleverly camouflaged. Should be on the very top of the little ridge.”

“Right. Lam and Jaybird, get up to the top on this end and do a search. Go.”

“When we find one?” Jaybird asked.

“Give a call on the net and I’ll come and look it over with you. Be great if we could pour five gallons of gasoline down each one and then drop in a WP. But that would leave this atoll with a continuing problem of several hundred pounds of deadly plutonium 239 splattered over half the land and the lagoon, and we really don’t want to do that. The easy way won’t work this time.”

“So what’s the hard way?” Lam asked.

“That we’re going to have to find out minute by minute as we try to dig those bastards out of there without dumping that plut all over the landscape. If that happens, we’ll be the first victims, dead in about a half hour.”

“That shit don’t mess around, does it?” Jaybird said. The two scouts were halfway up the side of the forty-foot hill when Jaybird called.

“Might want to look at this, Cap,” he said on the net. “I think I’ve got one.”

Murdock left his post and hurried up the direction he had seen Jaybird go through the goggles. He found him a short time later. Jaybird sat beside what looked like a tree stump. Only it wasn’t. It was slabs of wood fastened around a three-inch black iron standpipe. Every house in the States with a bathroom has one poking through the roof. Lam put both hands over the pipe covering it. He grinned in the darkness.

“Suction, pulled my hand hard against the top. It’s an
intake pipe. This is how they get fresh air into the place.” The Motorola picked up what they said and everyone on the net knew.

Less than a minute later, Canzoneri sounded off. “I’ve got a second one, Cap. Looks like an intake vent.”

Within a half hour they had the area covered and had located three intake vents and three exhaust tubes. The exhaust type was made of foot-diameter sheet metal tubes that came three feet out of the dirt of the hillside and had been camouflaged with green paint and covered with growing vines and small brush.

“Who has those folded plastic emergency water carrying sacks?” Murdock asked. They were designed to haul water in desert situations, but folded into a three-inch square less than a half inch thick. He had seven responses on the net.

Murdock took one of the plastic sacks from his combat vest and unfolded it. The plastic was tough—yes it would work. “All right, I want one of these sacks on each of the vents. Use as many thicknesses as you can to cover the top of the large and small vents, down at least six inches. Then use good old green tape and tape the plastic on tight, so nothing can get in or out. Let’s do it now.”

Murdock folded the heavy plastic again and put it over the intake pipe, then quickly brought it down around the sides. Both he and Lam held the plastic in place, and Jaybird put on three wraps of the tape. The plastic on top sucked down a half inch as the pumps below tried to bring in more air. The plastic fluttered, then held solid. No fresh air would get down this intake pipe.