Specter (24 page)

Forward, the launch director waved, spun, pointed down the deck, then dropped to one knee with his thumb to the steel; at the signal, the Tomcat rushed forward, hurled down the slot of the catapult at an acceleration that took the aircraft from zero to 250 knots in less than two seconds. Steam spilled from the slot that guided the cat shuttle hooked to the Tomcat's nose wheel, almost as though the hurtling aircraft had set the deck afire behind it as it moved. Afterburners glaring like twin, orange-white eyes, the Tomcat flashed off the waist catapult, then ominously dipped below the level of the flight deck, vanishing from view. As Murdock watched, however, the aircraft reappeared a moment later, well ahead of the ship and climbing steadily, rising toward the gray ceiling on a trailing crescendo of thunder.

“Man,” Murdock said, yelling to be heard both above the jet roar and the cranials everyone wore. “I don't know how they do that!”

“They might say the same thing about your job, Lieutenant!”

Murdock turned and found Captain Coburn standing there, along with Senior Chief Hawkins.

“Good afternoon, sir,” Murdock said. He almost saluted... stopping himself when he remembered that he was still in civilian clothes. “We seem to keep bumping into one another out here.”

“Hello, Blake. Ed. Welcome aboard. I hope your boys are rested after their shore leave in Greece.”

“I'm not sure I like the sound of that,” DeWitt said.

“Don't worry. You're gonna love this one. You two eaten yet?”

“No, sir,” Murdock replied. “Things were kind of hectic in Athens.”

“I can imagine. Come on. Hawk will take care of your boys and see that they're fed. I'll buy you lunch and fill you in on some of what's happening. At 1600 hours, we have a pre-mission briefing. Beaucoup braid. I'm beginning to think you guys like slamming your fists into hornets' nests.”

“A mission?” Murdock asked. Adrenaline kicked his awareness to full on. “We're going back in?”

“Damn right you are. Any objections?”

“Not a one,” Murdock replied. “Not a damned one.”

They strode across the deck. Forward, thunder rolled again as a Tomcat roared off one of the bow cats. Closer at hand, the flight deck crew was bringing up another aircraft for launch off the first waist cat. This one was an E-2C Hawkeye, a twin turboprop plane that bore a distinct family resemblance to its Greyhound relation. . . except for the disk-shaped radome, over seven meters across, rising above its back like a flying saucer hitching a ride. The multi-hued deck personnel closed in; the dance on the deck continued, with yet another round.

Aft, another aircraft dropped out of the clouds toward
Jefferson
's roundoff. Scant seconds, it seemed, after the COD had been nudged and prodded out of the way, an EA-6B Prowler electronic-warfare aircraft slammed into the deck in a barely controlled crash, yanked to a halt by the arrestor cable.

It was quieter inside, in the wardroom known as the Dirty Shirt Mess because officers didn't need to change out of flight suits or less-than-reputable uniforms to eat there. Murdock could still hear the roar-slam-
whoom
of aircraft taking off from
Jefferson's
“roof,” another aircraft launching or landing every minute or two. Coburn purchased meal tickets for the three of them, and they went through the line. Lunch today was hamburgers—“sliders” to carrier personnel—trench fries, and coffee.

“Okay,” Coburn told Murdock and DeWitt after they'd found a table and sat down. “CIA and Naval Intelligence bought your story about Kingston and some of her people being moved to Ohrid. There're some satellite photos that back you up, and it turns out the Company has a file on this Mihajlovic bastard. He just might be looking for an opening at the top in Belgrade. Finding a way to humiliate the U.S. would grease his way to the top of the heap real well.”

“I sense a ‘but' in that, sir.”

“Yup. Big time. But it works to our advantage, Lieutenant. It seems that Army Intelligence, the State Department, and the White House are all convinced that the honorable representative from California is still being held at Skopje.”

“Shit.”

“Not shit. We're going to take down both targets, a doubleheader. Or rather, Delta Force will be going into Skopje.
We'll
be hitting Lake Ohrid. If your people are ready, of course.”

“We're ready, sir.”

Damned straight they were ready. They'd discussed the possibility of another mission among themselves during the flight from Hellenica to the
Jefferson.
Something about the urgency in the air during their discussion that morning with the military liaison at the U.S. embassy had told Murdock that something big was on, probably an op. Normally, though, when one unit pulled recon, another would be brought in to carry off the op ... and SEAL Seven's Third Platoon had already been in combat just a few short days before.

Coburn seemed to be reading Murdock's thoughts, or at least anticipating them.

“We have First Platoon on the way from Little Creek,” he said. “And we've put Second Platoon on alert. But time is absolutely critical on this op. Bainbridge has been going ballistic. I think if we could insert you guys twenty minutes from now, it would still be about a week too late so far as he's concerned.”

Murdock smiled. Bainbridge was Admiral Thomas Bainbridge, the commanding officer of NAVSPECWARGRU-Two, and the CO, therefore, of all East Coast SEALs.

“Problems with deployment?”

“The usual. Not enough airlift capability, and some gear problems Stateside. First Platoon ought to be here late tomorrow afternoon, Second Platoon the day after that. SEAL Six has a team in Sicily right now, but they would need more men and they're not up to speed on the tacsit in Macedonia.
You
guys are here. Now. I've asked Admiral Bainbridge to send you in, and he gave the affirmative. So if your people agree, you're the ones.”

“When?”

“Tonight.”

Murdock whistled, and DeWitt spilled some of the coffee just as he was raising the mug to his lips.

“Good God!” DeWitt said. “You're not serious? Sir.”

“Dead serious. If our intelligence is accurate, Kingston and at least four people, maybe more, are being held in an Ottoman castle on the east shore of Lake Ohrid. But the CIA concurs with your assessment, Lieutenant, that there is a mole, an infiltrator of some kind, at a high level of the Greek security system. The moment Greek DEA picked up your prisoner at that hotel, or very shortly afterwards, the mole knew that
we
knew, and he could make a pretty shrewd guess at how much we knew. We're betting he alerted the Lake Ohrid group.”

“He wouldn't have been able to tell them much,” Murdock pointed out.

“Maybe not, but he could tell them that we knew Kingston was there. That means two things. They'll probably beef up their security, for one. For another, if they had some sort of gimmick going with this hijacking—like staging a fake rescue, or killing the hostages and blaming it on the Greeks. . . that's another idea that's been in the wind, lately—then they'll likely move their timetable up. The Agency thinks they could try their move, whatever it is, by tomorrow.”

“So we have to go in tonight,” Murdock said quietly.

“I wish we could give you more time. But. . .” Coburn shrugged, picked up his hamburger, and took a bite out of it. “Anyway, you'll have two more platoons as backup. This'll be a strictly down-and-dirty, no-frills op. You go in, grab the hostages, and keep them safe against all comers until we figure out a way to get you out.”

“Simple,” DeWitt said. He was grinning.

“Oh, getting in is always simple,” Coburn said. “It's getting out that's hard.”

“Actually,” Murdock added, “the trick is in getting out
alive
.”

In the end, the mission had not gone down that night. A hold order had come through from Washington early that evening, delaying the op for twenty-four hours. At first, Murdock had been afraid that the delay would mean the op would be given to someone else, Delta possibly, or SEAL Seven's First Platoon, but it turned out his fears were groundless. Delta, he'd been told, was still working out its operations plan for the assault at Skopje, and both First and Second Platoons would be going into the backup slot for Third Platoon, as planned.

Murdock was relieved. Until the delay had thrown things into question, he'd not been aware of just how much he wanted this mission. . . not out of a sense of duty or an enjoyment of combat, but simply because, more and more, he was beginning to feel a personal involvement in the continuing nightmare that was the former Republic of Yugolsavia. He was thinking a lot about Garcia; one of the first things he'd done after coming aboard the
Jefferson
was to have Doc talk to some of the people in the carrier's medical department and get an update on Garcia's condition from Bethesda.

The word was that Garcia was out of intensive care, which was good news, but that there'd been extensive pulmonary damage, which was bad. SEALs needed good lungs, both for diving and for the kind of physical exertion routinely expected of them both on ops and in training. You
don't
run fourteen miles in 110 minutes with a crippled lung, and swimming two miles with fins in under seventy minutes is flatly impossible. Garcia would almost certainly be dropped from the SEAL program; there was even some doubt about whether he would be allowed to stay in the Navy.

But it wasn't just Garcia that had Murdock personally involved. There was Stepano, and the look on his face after he'd broken Vlachos that had made Murdock wonder if Stepano himself had been broken in some way. And there was the lingering feeling of being jerked around by the Greeks, and the knowledge that his people had been at risk because of traitors in their security force, and probably in their government as well.

And Murdock had also been thinking a lot about Nikki Iatrides during the past few hours, a nice girl from a small village who thought the Muslims living next door were “nice people” and “just plain folks.” Most of the people in the Balkans, Murdock thought, must be pretty much the same, more than willing to get along with their neighbors so long as their neighbors were willing to get along with them. It was bastards like Vlachos and Mihajlovic and the Serbian rape gangs and the fanatic groups like the EMA and the proponents of “ethnic cleansing” that started wars and kept them going.

Maybe, when SEAL Seven paid a late-night visit to the occupants of Gorazamak, they could tip the balance just a wee bit in favor of the just plain folks.

At least that was the way Murdock was thinking about it, and that was why he was looking forward to this op, with all its dangers and all its uncertainties. Time after time in the past, he'd faced the certainty that the bad missions were the ones where people died or were crippled and no one could tell you why.

“This, gentlemen, is Gorazamak, seen from one hundred fifty miles up.”

The room was dark, lit only by the glow off the slide-projection screen at the front, and crowded, an ad hoc theater for a highly classified slide show. The mission briefing was being held in
Jefferson's
CVIC, naval shorthand for “Carrier Intelligence Center,” and inevitably pronounced “civic.” Present, representing SEAL Seven, were Murdock, DeWitt, and Coburn. This time around, the gold-braid-heavy assembly had been crashed by several petty officers as well, both MacKenzie and Ben Kosciuszko for Third Platoon, and Hawkins as Coburn's chief aide.

Representing Carrier Battle Group 14 were Rear Admiral Douglas Tarrant, the CBG commander, and Captain Jeremy Brandt,
Jefferson
's CO. Another four-striper in the room was Captain Joseph Stramaglia, the carrier's CAG, an outdated acronym that meant he was commander of the carrier's air wing. Other officers included men from
Jefferson
's Operations Department—from Intelligence, from Met, from Battle Ops. Squadron commanders were present as well.

At the moment, the floor had been turned over to Lieutenant Commander Arthur Lee, the air wing's intelligence officer, and he was going through a series of slides pulled from the latest batch of satellite photos transmitted to the carrier from NPIC, the CIA's National Photo Interpretation Center in Washington.

“In this shot,” Lee was saying, a telescoping metal pointer in his right hand casting a pencil-thin shadow across the screen, “you can get a pretty good idea of how steep this cliff is. Our shadow triangulations and radar mapping jibe on this one for a change. You've got about twenty meters from the water to the road, here, then another fifty meters of sheer rock, almost straight up, from the road to the objective.”

He pressed a control button in his left hand, and with a ratcheting click-
clunk,
the picture changed. It was the same castle, obviously, but from a slightly higher angle, looking down at a ribbon of white beach at the foot of the cliff. The image was almost magically clear, a crisp black and white that showed minute details of leaves and branches, all in perfect focus. The perspective, looking down the cliff's face, was dizzying.

“This one shows the beach below the castle. It's not very wide, three meters maybe, and sandy. We think the sand was trucked in and dumped, back when the place was a rich-tourist mecca. Of course we can't show you, but the lake is extremely deep—over nine hundred feet out toward the center. Just imagine that cliff continuing, straight down, for the length of another three football fields. The water is remarkably clear. There are stories that you can see fish seventy feet down. For that reason alone, our combat team will have to approach at night.”