Specter (30 page)

Quietly, turning a red-filtered flashlight on one of the NSA maps of the area faxed to them earlier from Washington, Roselli showed Murdock where he and Sterling had been. “Four sentries here,” he said, pointing. “This part of the road is clear. . . and over here too. We made it as far up the hill above the main road as this part of the cliff. No other hostiles. No alarms. And no sign that we're expected.”

“Okay,” Murdock said, nodding. “Olympus says that Chariot is set to ride, but Achilles is late.”

“Damn. How late, L-T?”

“We won't know until they get to San Vito, will we?” A grim smile showed in the darkness. “But we're to Charlie-Mike.”

Continue mission. “I'd damn well say we'd better. Shit, L-T, we're close enough to smell the tangos. If they told us to abort and extract, I'd be damned tempted to develop fucking radio trouble.”

“You and me both, Razor.” A rustle in the vegetation upslope, and the softly whispered sign and countersign, warned of DeWitt's return.

“Hello, L-T,” DeWitt said softly. “You guys here having a picnic on the beach?”

“Pull up a rock, Two-Eyes. Whatcha find?”

DeWitt took the NSA map, pulled a pencil from his vest, and began pointing out the route his patrol had taken.

“Two decent approaches, L-T, unless you're partial to going up the access road?”

“I don't think this time.”

“Thought not. Okay, we got as far around the front of the castle as here. The structure really is built into the side of the mountain. The south slope isn't too bad. . . about thirty percent up through here, and we could climb that without too much difficulty. If we work our way up this cliff here, on the southeast corner, we could climb this rock face, fix lines to the edge about here, and rappel onto the outer ward wall.”

“That's fine,” Murdock said, studying the map. “Except that we'll be coming over the east wall, which seems to be where they expect us.”

Gorazamak's weakness was the cliff rising behind its east wall, a tactical disadvantage that hadn't worried the Ottoman ruler who'd built it since the tower was little more than a police outpost on the road to Korce, not a bastion expected to withstand a siege. The bad guys inside could be counted on to have the wall beneath the eastern cliffs thoroughly covered with fire.

“Right. Well, the other approach could be tricky with all the ice and snow, but it's up this way.” He pointed to a narrow ravine northwest of the outer castle wall and south of the access road. A stone bridge crossed the ravine just outside Gorazamak's gate tower. “Red says he could scale that, no sweat, and drop lines to the rest of us. The ravine is pretty narrow in through here, more like a chimney than anything else. We climb up and come out by the bridge.”

“Right outside the main gate?”

“Two possibilities. We take out the guards at the front gate quietly and walk right in. Or we climb the wall here... or here. The gate tower sticks out from the wall about a meter or so. We could pull a ninja-of-the-night stunt and go right over the top without being seen. Advantage too is that the power lines for the place go in right here, next to the gate.”

“They'll have a generator.”

“Which probably hasn't been used for a while. It'll take time to find the damned thing and crank it up.”

Murdock nodded. Roselli could almost hear the wheels turning. When the L-T had first taken command of Third Platoon, Roselli had had his doubts about the man. Shit, the guy was a ring-knocker, an Academy grad, and though that kind of crap might sit well with the bean-counters at the Navy Department, it didn't mean a hell of a lot in the field. Men had died in combat because their officers were too tight-assed to blend well with their men.

The Teams were just that. . .
teams
, and a man's background or wealth or family or political connections didn't cut him a damned thing when it came to that special warrior's brotherhood shared by all who'd gone through BUD/S and won their Budweisers.

Murdock was different. He cared for his men,
loved his
men ... and they loved him back. It wasn't a thing that most SEALs could put into words; hell, they wouldn't even try. But Roselli had seen the look in Murdock's eyes when they'd reached the beach earlier and confirmed that Ellsworth was missing.

At that moment, Roselli had known that he would follow Murdock
anywhere,
up the face of a sheer cliff, into a storm of automatic-weapons fire, straight into Hell if he had to. Because he cared for his people.

“You know,” Murdock said softly, “it's just possible that we could manage both approaches. How about if we try this?”

It had taken Doc about ten minutes to get down out of that damned tree, but he'd finally made it. While he didn't have any climbing line on him, he had perhaps the next best thing. Carefully, he'd reached up to his shoulder and grabbed the rip cord for his reserve chute, yanking it out and down. With a rustle of nylon, his reserve had spilled from the pack and dropped toward the ground. Next, Doc had unlocked his harness quick release, and then, grasping hold of his reserve chute's risers, he'd unsnapped his harness. His chute had slipped a foot or two and the branches supporting him had creaked and swayed alarmingly, but he'd managed to slide all the way down the reserve, landing in the snow at the base of the tree with an agonizing thump a moment later.

God
, his ankle hurt. First things first, though. Swiftly, he broke out his primary weapon, fished a magazine from his load vest, and snapped it home. The H&K CAW had originally been developed as a contender in the U.S. military's search for a combat shotgun. It looked more like a gadget out of science fiction than a serious weapon, all clean lines and sharp angles and with a bullpup receiver in the butt, set behind the hand grip. The ten-round box magazine could be emptied one shot at a time, or with a twice-per-second cyclic that was death incarnate at close quarters.

Too bad most of his ammo was gone now. He had just five loaded magazines for the thing tucked into various pouches in his vest—four after he'd untaped the weapon and snapped a mag into the receiver. Fifty rounds was enough to do some serious hurt, but when they were gone Doc would be left with his Beretta secondary, and four clips. Alone, he wouldn't last long.

Weapon ready, he checked his ankle. He was pretty sure from the feel of the thing that it was sprained rather than broken. Gingerly manipulating it, he felt no crepitus—the grinding sensation of two jagged ends of bone grating across each other—and he could still flex it up and down, though he couldn't move it back and forth. With care, he could put weight on it; it hurt like hell when he tried, but he could manage it. He could feel the ankle swelling inside his boot.

Well, there was nothing for it then but to strap himself up and make do. He didn't remove the boot; if the ankle ballooned too much while he had it off he'd never get the thing back on afterward. Instead, he unlaced the boot, then relaced it as tightly as he could manage. After that, he found a branch—there were plenty lying nearby that had fallen when he'd hit the tree—and fashioned a splint out of two inch-thick sticks and a roll of gauze from his first-aid kit. Could he walk? He tried a mincing step, using his CAW as a crutch. Shit ... he could walk, but not very well, and anything requiring climbing or jumping was definitely out. Facing south, he could make out a bit of a glow beyond the trees where the castle lay about a half a mile distant. The dogs were still barking.

His options were limited. He had his tactical radio, of course, but he was out of line-of-sight from the rest of the team and they might not hear him. Even if they did, he couldn't risk calling them until after the raid had started... and then they would be too busy to bother with him. So ... he could sit tight and call in a rescue chopper once the second-wave elements arrived, but that could evolve into a pretty complicated rescue mission in its own right, especially if hostiles were running through these woods. He could hobble back down to the beach and signal for a pickup there.

Or he could make for the castle.

James Ellsworth, Doc to his friends, did not consider himself to be a hero. When he'd joined the Navy five years ago, he'd been a simple, relaxed, laid-back kid from Tennessee, best described by the kids in his boot company as “Old Mellow.” He'd volunteered for BUD/S because Joe Saraglio, a good friend at his first duty station, had done so. It had sounded like a lark, learning to scuba dive and to blow things up. Certainly it would be more fun than bedpan duty and morning reports on a naval hospital ward.

One of the first things he'd learned at Coronado was that laid back and relaxed simply didn't cut it. A dozen times during Hell Week he'd come
that
close to quitting... and rejoining the sane world of showers and clean uniforms and six or eight hours of blissful, uninterrupted sleep.

Why hadn't he quit? Even now, two years later, he wasn't sure. Part of it, at least at first, had been the knowledge that he'd already signed for an extension to his original four-year hitch so that he could take SEAL training. If he left, he was still obligated, and he would be facing ten years of bedpan duty instead of four.

But gradually, he'd realized that there was more to it than that. He loved the Teams, loved the feeling of belonging. Loved the people most, he guessed, though some of them were thoroughgoing bastards. He'd toughed it out because he'd wanted to belong, and because BUD/S had already taught him that he could do things that he'd never thought himself capable of doing before.

He couldn't think of any other reason to carry on, especially after Joe had managed to get himself killed in a training accident, the silly bastard.
That
episode had nearly killed Ellsworth, left him feeling like he was caught between two worlds, the SEALs and the rest of the Navy. He couldn't go back ... so all that was left was to go ahead.

He'd changed a lot in the years since. Laid-back and relaxed cut it no better as an active-duty SEAL than it had at Coronado. He had a wild rep now, one that he worked hard to live up to. The guys in his platoon joked that Doc's idea of the SEAL acronym wasn't even Sleep, EAt, and Live it up, but that he'd improved on that by changing to SEx and ALcohol.

Okay, so some small, tucked-away part of himself kept telling him that he was trying to die. Like Joe. But Doc's reason for living was the Team, the other guys in the Team, and he wasn't going to let them down. He might get there late, but by hell he would get there!

With the CAW as a crutch, he began hobbling painfully along the hillside, making for the castle lights.

“Okay, Red,” Murdock said softly, punching the man's shoulder. “You're on.”

The SEAL Teams tended to assemble odd accumulations of talent. Both Murdock and Jaybird had experience sailing, for instance, and Kosciuszko had a pilot's license and flew his own Beachcraft. Red Nicholson's means of unwinding before he'd joined the Navy had been mountain climbing, both free climbing and with all the trimmings. He stood at the bottom of the crevice now, a light nylon line snapped to his belt and trailing out behind. He removed his gloves, stooped to tighten the laces of his boots, then pulled his gloves back on and cinched them snug.

“Heads up,” he said. “Climbing.”

Murdock and MacKenzie watched as Nicholson ascended the cliff, one arm up, then one foot. . . then the other arm ... the other foot. From there at the bottom, the cliff looked unscalable, at least without pitons and climbing gear, but they were too close to the sentries on those castle ramparts to risk striking steel to rock. At this point, the ravine was perhaps thirty meters deep, a little taller than two telephone poles stacked atop one another.

Nicholson vanished into shadow almost at once. Even in the soft green glow of NVD goggles, it was almost impossible to separate his form from that of the cliff, though Murdock's electronic optics picked up enough IR to pick him out from the cold, black rock.

Leaving Mac to pay out the line as Nicholson climbed, Murdock picked his way back down the steeply slanted floor of the ravine, to where the remaining members of Blue Squad were waiting. Roselli, Magic Brown, Professor Higgins. Nick the Greek Papagos. So few, with both Garcia and Doc missing. Damn! What had happened to Doc? Jaybird Sterling, along with Nicholson because of his climbing skills, had been shifted over to Blue Squad to fill out the numbers. DeWitt and the other five had already left to carry out their part of the mission approach.

From here, if you craned your head all the way back, you could just see the edge of the castle wall rising from the top of the cliff. The sky was lighter now with moonrise, and the overcast had given way to the scud of broken, patchwork clouds, now revealing, now concealing the stars.

“All I vant is your blood,” Magic Brown intoned in low and sepulchral tones, looking up at the castle silhouetted against the ominous sky.

“Wrong country,” Papagos said quietly, and a little nervously. “You want Romania.” He pointed north. “That way.”

“Yeah, I always knew you were a blood-sucker, Magic,” Sterling said.

“No, man,” Higgins said. “That's Doc. Where the hell is our platoon vampire anyway?”

“If I know Doc,” Roselli said, “he's making it right now with some Albanian shepherdess.”

“Yeah,” Magic added. “Or her sheep.”

Their voices were barely audible, their humor tight and hard beneath pre-combat nerves. Murdock considered ordering them to be quiet—they were breaking mission routine—but decided to let it go. They couldn't possibly be heard more than a few feet away.