Seal Team Seven #20: Attack Mode (33 page)

When the crashing sound of the six rounds died out, Murdock heard a voice shouting in Arabic from ahead. He caught most of it, but turned to Izzy, who was right beside him.

“The man says he’s a scientist, not a soldier, but if we don’t stop shooting and get out of his lab within two minutes, he’ll set off a charge of plastic explosives under the plutonium and kill everyone within a half mile.”

Izzy looked at Murdock and shook his head. Then he began to tremble. First his hands, then his arms and his torso. He wailed softly and crawled back from the stub wall.

“Rafii, get up here fast,” Murdock said. The slender Saudi stepped forward and slid down beside Murdock.

“I heard what he said,” Rafii growled. “Let me talk to the sonofabitch.”

Murdock nodded.

Rafii’s voice came out confident, sure, pleasant, not at all demanding. He spoke in Arabic.

“Look, we don’t want to hurt you. Your two friends are here with us and not harmed. You’re not soldiers. You’re scientists. We respect that. There’s no reason anyone must die here. Do you have a family?”

There was a period of silence, then the voice from down the room came softer, less angry. “Yes, yes, I have a wife and three boys. Two are smart, want to be scientists. I say okay, but you must study hard.”

“What would happen to them if you die here in this forsaken place?”

“They would not be able to continue school. It is expensive. A private school for gifted children.”

“What we’re here to do is save lives. Yours and mine, and those of the hundreds of thousands who might be killed if this plutonium is sold to some unstable country which goes ahead and drops a nuclear bomb on its enemies. We don’t want that to happen. It could start a domino
effect that would produce a worldwide nuclear war. I don’t want that. Do you want that?”

“No. But I have to do what I’m ordered to do.”

“My name is Omar Rafii. I’m from Saudi Arabia. What’s your name?”

A silence. Murdock looked at Rafii and frowned.

“I’m Amud Bardi. I’m a radiologist for a hospital in Tehran.”

“The government sent you out here to deal with the radiation of the plutonium?”

“Yes. Then they said I had to break it down into the small lead boxes. I know what they will do with them.”

“Sell them to the highest bidder, whether a country or a terrorist organization,” Rafii said.

“Yes, but what can I do?”

“Are there any more men in there with you?”

“No, not now. One is dead; two left when you called.”

“You could come out now and let us handle the plutonium. We promise that you will not be harmed. You and your colleagues will be free to go back to Tehran.”

“I don’t know. The government will be furious with me.”

“You can stand that a lot better than leaving a widow and your boys, who won’t get to go on to school.”

Another silent spell. Then the voice came again, closer this time.

“All right. I’m coming out. Don’t shoot. I can’t stand guns. I’m coming out now.”

Rafii told Murdock the man was coming out.

“No shooting,” Murdock said on the net. “A man is coming out. Don’t hurt him, don’t tie him up.”

A moment later a man came around the stub wall. He was in his fifties, with gray hair and a long face with a heavy black beard, and his eyes moved from side to side as if trying to assess his chances of staying alive.

“Good, you came,” Rafii said. “We won’t hurt you. Show us where the other bottle of plutonium is and how you have dealt with it.”

Rafii told Murdock what he had said to the Iranian.
Murdock nodded, and the three of them stood while Rafii waved the Iranian back the way he had come.

Murdock, Rafii, and Jaybird followed the man around the stub wall and into a grouping of lead blankets hung from the ceiling and extending from the floor up seven feet. It turned out to be a kind of maze, with the final opening of the black heavy lead blankets leading into an area ten feet square. In the center stood the lead bottle held upright by foot-square chunks of lead. Six empty lead boxes like those they had seen before were on the concrete floor nearby.

“We tried to take the plutonium out of the big lead container,” the Iranian scientist said. “In this state the plutonium is a solid that has been formed into balls of various sizes. The balls are what go into the nuclear device. They create the massive explosion. We couldn’t roll them out. At last we decided that we need a safe room, heavily shielded with lead blankets and pierced with mechanical arms and hands to move the plutonium balls from the large container into the smaller ones. We’ve been trying to find such equipment, but it had to come from the West. We found a firm in Germany that would sell it to us, but it would take two weeks to get here. We are still waiting.”

As the man talked, Rafii filled in Murdock and the rest of the SEALs with his comments.

“Is the plug still in the large lead container?” Rafii asked.

“Oh yes, we returned it and sealed it when we knew it would be some time. Too much radiation. We wore the radiation suits and had the lead shields, but one of our men got sick almost at once. Radiation poisoning. He died two days ago.”

“Who has the Geiger counter?” Murdock asked on the net.

Fernandez said he did and that he’d bring it to the back of the building. “I’ve seen only trace elements of radiation out here,” Fernandez said. “Almost none around the crated plut, so it’s safe enough.”

Murdock waved and the men moved back from the lead
blanket shields. When Fernandez brought up the Geiger counter, he gave it to Rafii, who hurried back to the lead blankets and began taking readings. He finished quickly and went out near the front of the building, where Murdock talked on the radio.

“Gardner, report in,” Murdock said.

“Just about wrapped this up out here. We took down the barracks. Only two live ones inside, who didn’t stay that way long. The officers and the girls were tougher. Three of the shitheads used the women as shields. We picked them off one by one. We have the front gate, three trucks, two jeeps, and two sedans. This place belongs to us. We have four prisoners who demanded that we capture them. What we gonna do with them?”

“Give them a water bottle and start them hiking back toward the highway,” Murdock said. “We’ve got what we want. Now how the hell do we move it?”

“Got you on that one, Cap,” Gardner said. “We found a forklift that works. Probably the same one they used to unload the trucks and move the goods inside. We’re firing it up and moving it and three trucks over near that area. You can take your pick.”

The SEALs looked at each other.

“Yeah, we’ve got it, now what the hell do we do with it?” Jaybird said.

“The man has a mind like a steel sponge,” Lam said. “So what can we do with it?”

Murdock waved the men in around him. Men from Bravo straggled in and those driving rigs parked them and came over. “Let’s get down to business here. What the hell can we do with this four hundred pounds of weapons-grade Plutonium 239?”

“We can’t ruin it for weapons,” Canzoneri said. “We don’t have any radioactive waste products.”

“We can’t just scatter it around out here in the desert. It could kill a thousand people before anyone knew what the heavy black balls were,” Murdock said.

“You know they’re black?” Bradford asked.

“The scientist said they are,” Jaybird said.

“What can we do?” Murdock asked.

“Dump it into a deep gully and blast down the sides to hide it good,” Prescott said.

“Yeah, but the first good cloudburst would wash all the dirt away and expose the shit,” Rafii said.

“No abandoned oil wells out here we could dump the plut down,” Gardner said. “We can’t truck the stuff very far, only deeper into the desert.”

“We can’t call in a couple of heavy lifter choppers to take the crates out of the country and stick them into an aircraft carrier’s nuke rooms,” Mahanani said. “Those big, slow guys would get shot down before they got halfway to the water.”

Murdock tried to sum it up: “So we can’t take it offshore, we can’t find a well, we can’t leave it here or spread it around the landscape out there.”

“Only thing left to do is bury it,” Lam said. “No bulldozer or front bucket here to work with, but we can dig a damn big hole with C-5. We find the side of a hill where there isn’t a lot of runoff and we blast down about twenty feet and slide the crates in. Then we use the forklift with an eight-foot-wide wooden push frame on the front, so it works like a bulldozer. That way we can fill in the hole and normalize the area.”

“I’ll vote for that,” Claymore said. “We know the Iranians will look for the shit, but chances of them finding it twenty feet down are damn near astronomical.”

“Does anybody else have a plan?” Murdock asked. He looked around. “Okay, that’s it. Claymore, pick three guys and get working on a push board for the forklift. Gardner, bring the forklift right up to the door. Let’s tear down those lead blankets so we can get up to that uncrated plut. We won’t bother crating it. Haul those lead blankets outside. We’ll drape them over the goods once we put them in our hole. Move it. We don’t know how much time we have.”

An hour later they had the lead blankets all outside and draped over the bed of one of the two-ton trucks. Lam
said he’d used a forklift before, and he maneuvered it into the building and picked up the still crated nuke. It took them ten minutes to work the big crate onto the forks and ease it out the door to the nearest truck. Lam lifted the package a foot at a time, then eased it into the truck and let it lean against the side. Then he went into the building again with the forklift.

Two SEALs had on radiation suits and stood beside the big lead bottle. The container was not long enough to reach across both of the forks. They hustled up four two-inch-thick planks and put them on the forks; then with ropes holding the top of the container, they tilted it over and let it down softly on the planks.

Lam took off his hat and wiped sweat off his forehead and out of his eyes. “Anybody else want to run this thing?” he asked. There were no takers.

He lifted the load a foot off the concrete pad and backed toward the door. Twice he had to move ahead a few feet and take a better angle around the stub wall and furniture. Once outside with the container, Lam relaxed a little. He moved the forklift to the next truck that they had backed right up to the door.

It took him three tries before he had the bottle safely inside the heavy truck. Then he realized he couldn’t get the forks out from under the heavy lead container.

“I’m fucked,” Lam said. “I can’t move the forks.”

Claymore laughed. “Man, I thought you said you’d used one of them things. No sweat. We start the truck engine, you put your rig into neutral, and the truck tows you right out to the dumping grounds.”

“Might work,” Lam said.

“For sure it’ll work,” Claymore said. “Done it a hundred times out in Iowa on the farm.”

Murdock looked over the heavy plank form the men had built to front the forklift once they had the hole blasted. Prescott showed him how they would chain the form in place before using it.

Murdock checked his watch. It was after 0400.

“Two hours to daylight. We’ve got to move. Gardner,
you stay here with your squad and all the Bull Pups. We could have early morning company. Take out anyone who comes anywhere close to this place. We drive straight west. Oh, we’ll need all the C-5 and TNAZ that you Bravo guys have.”

They traded weapons, ammo, and explosives, then Alpha got in the trucks and they headed east over a track of a road that might have led somewhere once upon a time.

Three miles from the camp, Murdock stopped the trucks. They had come across two small hills and were out of sight of the men and the camp they had left. Murdock decided against the hill idea. He picked a flat spot without any drainage scars. He stopped the trucks and walked out into the area he wanted. “Right here,” he said. “Let’s do some blasting.”

Murdock knew that digging a hole with explosives wasn’t the easiest job. The blasts acted like a bomb going off, and the dirt and rocks flew in every direction. After four charges had been set in the new hole, they found they were only four feet below the surface. Both trucks had shovels on the sides. Murdock brought them over, and they dug holes in the bottom of the pit two feet deep, planted the C-5 in them, and filled up the hole before setting off the explosive. It blasted a lot more dirt out of the hole. The new method hurried the work. After an hour and two thirds of their explosives were used up, they had a bomb crater eight feet deep and twice that wide.

Murdock called a halt. It was starting to show streaks of light in the east. “Bring up the truck. The naked bottle first. Put the lead blankets down the side and on the bottom. Might cushion her a little.”

They did, then stood back as Lam lifted the lead bottle off the truck and rolled up to the edge of the hole. The sides were sloping at about a forty-five-degree angle. He lowered the forks to the ground. The lead bottle remained lying on the planks across the blades. He backed up so the tips of the fork blades were on solid ground at the edge of the hole.

“Pry bars,” Lam said.

They pulled two two-by-sixes off the pusher for the forklift and edged one end of each behind the bottle and pried it forward. Three tries later the big bottle tipped over, came to the end of the blades, and teetered for a moment, then rolled slowly down the incline and stopped on the bottom. The SEALs cheered.

The plut in the crate was easier. They edged it to the brink and pushed it with the blades until it slid down the side of the hole. It lay half on top of the other bottle but didn’t look like it had ruptured it.

Lam went down with the Geiger counter and pronounced it safe. The makeshift bulldozer began to scrape the dirt and rocks back into the hole. Half of it was up to fifty yards away. Lam worked all around the edge of the hole, then attacked a small mound nearby with the points of the forks. He dug into the ground, then used the pusher to get the dirt and rocks and sand over to the hole.

They had the plut well covered, and the lead blankets that had been thrown on top of them, and now it was a