Specter (2 page)

To make matters worse, U.S. foreign policy had been unusually inept lately. The current Administration vacillated almost comically between chest-puffing bluster and appeasement, threatening air strikes one week, calling for sanctions and no-fly zones the next, then promising political concessions and millions in foreign aid after that. The indecisiveness bitterly angered Murdock, as it did most of the men in the Teams. Hell, the tragedy now playing itself out, especially up the coast to the west, was enough to leave anyone with a love of America and of history furious. Modern Dubrovnik had once been an independent city-state republic called Ragusa, the first foreign government in the world to recognize the infant United States of America in 1776. If ever a place deserved meaningful help from the U.S., it was Dubrovnik.

Murdock had first learned that historical tidbit while watching a news special on ACN about the fighting in Bosnia and Croatia, and he'd researched it some on his own since. The son of a U.S. congressman from Virginia, he had been unable to grow up without acquiring a love of American history that delighted in squirreling away such nuggets. If nothing else, his knowledge of history often gave him a reassuring sense of who he was and what he was doing. Unfortunately, it could also lead to intense frustration when he saw people who should have known better proving Santayana's maxim: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Still, Murdock was realist enough to know that it was irresponsible to launch a war over what amounted to ancient history. The real crime was that Washington could not decide on a single course of action and then stick to it. As always, the real victims of that indecisiveness were the civilians, the innocents caught at ground zero ... and the American combat forces committed piecemeal to the meat grinder, usually with no clear goals and no definite or coherent policy.

Forces like Third Platoon, SEAL Seven.

Headlights flared down the road to the east, and Murdock and Roselli hunkered down lower, invisible in the wall's shadow. A moment later, a truck rumbled past on the highway meters beyond the wall; a heavy vehicle from the sound of it, almost certainly military. With a clash of badly worn gears, the noise dwindled away toward the west. Probably a truck carrying supplies to the Serbian forces besieging Dubrovnik.

A triple metallic click caught his attention. Turning his head toward Roselli, he saw the SEAL point down the beach. Murdock looked in the indicated direction....

Yes! There! Even with the NVDs they were almost invisible against the water, but Murdock could see the rest of the platoon now, a low, black, almost shapeless mass rising and falling with the rolling surf as it made its way steadily shoreward. As it neared the beach, the mass resolved itself into what the Navy called an inflatable boat, small—or IBS for short—and what SEALs usually called a CRRC, for Combat Rubber Raiding Craft. Five men—the rest of Third Platoon's Blue Squad—occupied the raft. An outboard engine was attached to the motor mount, but since even the most silent-running of outboards made some noise, the SEALs had opted to make the approach the old-fashioned way, leaning out over the rubber sides to wield their paddles. At the edge of the surf line, the SEALs rolled out of the craft, snatched it up by its carry handles as though half a ton of IBS and gear was virtually weightless, and dashed through the spray and up onto the beach. Reaching the seawall halfway between Murdock and Roselli, they dropped the raft and began unloading weapons and equipment. Keeping low to avoid showing his head above the wall, Murdock duckwalked across to join the newcomers.

“Lieutenant.” The one-word greeting was a whisper, more felt than heard, easily lost beneath the hiss of the surf and the rumble of artillery fire to the west.

“Hey, Mac,” Murdock replied as quietly. Master Chief Engineman George “Big Mac” MacKenzie was the oldest of Blue Squad's old hands, an NCO who'd been in the Navy for sixteen years now and in the Teams for eleven. A big-boned, powerfully muscled Texan, he normally hefted Blue Squad's SAW. This op, however, required stealth and speed rather than raw firepower; he'd left his usual M-60 machine gun behind in favor of a sound-suppressed M-16.

“Quiet beach?”

“Nothing so far.”

Mac's teeth flashed white in the darkness against the black and green of his paint-smeared face. “Shit, L-T. Half expected to find ACN waiting for us.”

The reference was an old in-joke within the Navy's Special Warfare command. When SEALs and Marine Recon personnel had slipped ashore at Mogadishu in 1992, just before America's intervention in Somalia, they'd found a small army of reporters, news cameramen, and lights waiting for them on the beach. SEALs liked to keep a low profile, and the screwup continued to be a source of wry, sometimes bitter humor within the Teams.

“Looks like we're not going to be on the evening news this time,” Murdock replied, grinning. “C'mon. Get the gear broken out and let's diddy.”

“Aye, aye, L-T.”

It took less than ten minutes for the IBS, twelve feet long, six wide, and weighing 289 pounds minus its load of men and equipment, to disappear completely beneath the loose sand. The five newly arrived SEALs worked furiously while Murdock and Roselli continued to mount watch. The Chem-lite sticks were retrieved, stowed, and buried, and two men made their way back down the beach with a pair of brushes, with which they carefully wiped out every footprint, every trace of the team's arrival.

Gathered once more in the shadow of the seawall, the platoon divvied up the gear and weapons they needed to carry with them. Tactical radios were donned and checked, and the squad's HST-4 C2 element sat-comm gear was carefully unpacked. Murdock took advantage of the time to go to each of the men, whispering a few well-chosen words as he checked their rigs and assault vest loadouts.

The TO&E roster for SEAL Seven's Third Platoon currently called for two squads—Blue and Gold—of seven men each. For this op, Blue Squad had been assigned to the landing party, while Gold waited in reserve aboard the amphibious assault ship
Nassau
, now on patrol in the Adriatic a few miles off the coast. Besides Roselli and MacKenzie, Blue Squad included Hull Technician First Class Juan Garcia, the dark-haired demolitions expert known as “Boomer” to the rest; Quartermaster First Class Martin “Magic” Brown, the team's sniper; Electrician's Mate Second Class William Higgins, the squad's radioman, whose quiet and somewhat erudite manner had landed him the nickname “Professor”; and Hospital Corpsman Second Class James Ellsworth, whose calling had inevitably given him the handle “Doc.”

Good men, all of them. A little wild on liberty, sometimes, especially Doc and Razor, but they were the very best. In their black nomex and heavily laden combat vests, with their camo-painted faces and mismatched assortment of booney hats and watch caps and scarves, they were a frightening-looking lot. The camo paint liberally smeared on their faces—in Magic's case the stuff was pasted on so thick it was impossible to tell that the man was black—gave them all an eerily nightmarish quality. Murdock was proud to be in their number.

He just wished this mission counted for something. The thunder in the west was growing louder, more insistent.

As the final checks were made, Higgins radioed the team's initial entry report over the sat-comm gear, a single code word condensed to a burst transmission fired into the sky by the press of a button. Too tight and too quick for any eavesdroppers to get a fix, the code word would alert both Gold Squad, back aboard the
Nassau,
and the senior officers of NAVSPECWARGRU-Two and USSOCOM, who were listening in back at the Pentagon, that Blue Squad was on the beach and proceeding with the mission.

Ready now, their swim gear buried in the sand with the IBS, their weapons and combat loads checked out and ready, the SEALs one by one rolled over the top of the wall, then hurried across the highway. On the far side was open forest. The squad moved in patrol order, five meters between each man. Boomer took point, followed by Mac, the compass man with the GPS. Next came Murdock, then Higgins with the radio. Doc, Razor, and Magic brought up the rear. Only the point man and the tail gunner wore NVDs; the goggles could be hard on the eyes if they were worn for an extended period of time, and for a long trek through the night Murdock wanted the majority of the squad to have full use of their peripheral vision.

Their destination lay some six kilometers inland, just across the border.

Nearly all of this part of the Dalmatian coast had originally belonged to Croatia. The bulk of that state lay well to the north, enfolding Bosnia-Hercegovina between the slender horns of a crescent. Here, the southern horn dwindled away to almost nothing, a thin sliver of beach and coastal highway that isolated Bosnia from the sea save for one narrow passage at Neum, between Dubrovnik and Split.

West and south of Bosnia lay the new Federated Republic of Yugoslavia—which was to say Serbia and a scattering of smaller states from Vojvodina in the north to Montenegro and Macedonia in the south. Of all the Yugoslav republics, Serbia had kept the closest semblance to the old Communist regime and had proven itself more than willing to keep fighting to maintain Serbian hegemony over the Balkans.

And squarely between the Federated Republic and Croatia lay tragic Bosnia-Hercegovina, a triangular block of mountainous land both shared and claimed by Croats, Serbians, and Muslim Bosnians. It was there that the Yugoslav civil war had been most savagely fought since early 1991, there that the world had first heard the sickening phrase “ethnic cleansing.” Now Bosnia was being divvied up between the Serbs and the Croats, with eager help from Bosnian Serbs openly armed and supported by the remnant of the Yugoslav federation. Lately, Serbians and Croatians, after a period of halfhearted cooperation against the Muslims, had begun fighting each other again, squabbling over the dismembered corpse of Bosnia as the UN, NATO, and the United States all helplessly watched, proposed partition plans, and attempted to impose laughably short-lived truces. The resulting tangle of territories defined by ethnic groups, religions, and nationalistic loyalties made even the most convoluted gerrymanderings of political districts back in the States look tame by comparison.

Like many Americans, Murdock had for a long time been uncertain about just what role the United States should play in the Balkans, when he thought about it at all. On the one hand were the stories of the atrocities, especially those reportedly committed by the Serbs against the Muslims—stories of whole village populations rounded up, packed aboard cattle cars, and shipped to concentration camps where starvation, beatings, torture, and mass executions were being used to exterminate an entire people. Stories of children being thrown beneath tank tracks, stories of the wholesale slaughter of men and the systematic rape of women, in a campaign designed to empty entire districts for Serb occupation.

Stories, in other words, that sounded chillingly like another type of “ethnic cleansing” carried on by another supposedly civilized nation half a century earlier.

On the other hand, there was the feeling that the United States had no business getting involved in this quagmire. The animosities in this tortured hodgepodge of states and peoples went back a long, long way. Those mountains looming into the eastern sky had been bathed in blood time after time over the centuries. The anarchist who'd started World War I by assassinating Archduke Ferdinand had done so on the anniversary of a Serbian defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1389. The Serbs still called the Bosniaks “Turks,” bringing to mind the centuries of misrule by the Ottoman Empire. These people had
long
memories.

Could anything the United States did make any difference here at all?

Murdock didn't know . . . and, in fact, the politics of this war, the decisions in Washington that had brought him onto this beach, were not his concern. He and his men had a mission to carry out.

According to the briefing Third Platoon had received yesterday aboard the
Nassau,
this particular stretch of Croatia, together with most of the former Bosnian territory inland, was now under the control of the Serbian Volunteer Guard—local militia unit composed of pro-Serb Bosnians-and a Serbian motorized infantry brigade. The Serbs were trying yet again to seize Dubrovnik. When Yugoslavia had started breaking up in 1991, Croatia had grabbed all of the former Yugoslav naval bases save one, the Montenegran port at Kotor, sixty kilometers east of Dubrovnik. Now, the Serb-dominated Yugoslav Republic was trying to get some of those ports back, as well as to seize the initiative in the squabble with Croatia over the Bosnian corpse.

A rusted wire fence marked the official boundary between Croatia and Bosnia, but since the entire area was under Serbian control at the moment, the border was not patrolled. After a careful reconnaissance, searching for mines, patrols, or automated sensors, the SEALs crossed the wire into Bosnia halfway between the village of Mjini and Cilipi International, the shut-down airport twenty kilometers east of Dubrovnik.

There'd been a number of SEAL ops into the Balkans in recent months, all of them highly classified, with missions ranging from scouting out antiaircraft batteries to pulling full recons on stretches of the Adriatic coast that might become landing beaches if the decision was made to send in the Marines. Blue Squad's orders this night were to slip ashore unseen, rendezvous at the St. Anastasias Dominican monastery with a local contact in the pay of the CIA, and collect from him a list of Serbian units in the area and their deployments. The information might—
might
—be useful soon, in the event that the President decided to punish Serbian aggression by ordering air strikes.

A spook job, then. The SEALs and the Company had a long working partnership, one begun during World War II between the SEALs' forerunners in the old Underwater Demolition Teams and the CIA's predecessors with the OSS. Though he'd been on plenty of intelligence ops before—maybe
because
he'd been on plenty of them before—Murdock didn't like this sort of mission. For one thing, the civilian agency rarely had its priorities straight. Agency suits were as likely to request some routine bit of intel-gathering that could as easily have been handled by satellite as they were to load the team down with a dozen conflicting mission requirements, an often deadly misuse of assets. For another, Langley too often showed a nasty tendency to regard combat teams as expendable.