Specter (6 page)

But Lieutenant Blake Murdock was not just another SEAL platoon leader, whatever he might tell the guys. He was the son of Congressman Charles Fitzhugh Murdock of Virginia, and Roselli knew damned well that there was a lot riding on that relationship. According to the scuttlebutt, the elder Murdock hadn't wanted his son to go into Navy Special Warfare in the first place, and had done damn near all he could to get him out. The L-T was a stubborn son of a bitch, though, and the story was that he'd joined the teams in defiance of his dad's wishes.

But man, if the story got out that Murdock personally had blown away a bad guy after he'd tried to surrender, the political fallout would be inconceivable. At the very least it would end the younger Murdock's career ... and maybe the elder Murdock's career as well. There were plenty in Congress who felt that SEALs and elite units like them were anachronisms, necessary, possibly, during the Cold War, but embarrassing and even dangerous in this enlightened day of world peace and military cutbacks.

Besides, the L-T just wasn't that cold. Oh, Murdock could be hard when he had to be; he ran a tight platoon and didn't let the guys slack off for a minute. But he was also less intense than a lot of SEALs, and he didn't come across as a stone killer. He'd been to Annapolis—an honest-to-God ring-knocker—and he looked more like a fighter jock or an XO aboard some supply ship or, hell, like a
lawyer
than he did a SEAL. Athletic—lean and wiry rather than muscular—and clean-cut, clear-eyed, nonsmoker, nondrinker, kind of on the quiet side. And sometimes, like now, he got
real
quiet ... and then you never knew what was going to go down.

He'd talked to that spook local for quite a while, then tried to use him as a translator with the women, none of whom spoke any English. That hadn't worked out very well, because the women were still in shock and Gypsy had been real anxious to be on his way. Before he'd let the guy go, though, he'd made him promise to take the girls along, get them out of the area. Gypsy hadn't wanted to do that, but Murdock had told him that the CIA would find out if he didn't take them someplace safe ... and then the SEALs would come for
him
.

Then he'd made the guy wait even longer while he had some of the guys take shirts and coats from some of the Serb bodies, ones that weren't too badly bloodied, and give them to the women who'd had their clothing cut up.

That was scarcely the manner of a cold-blooded killer, or even of a SEAL officer who thought of nothing but the mission.

For the next half hour, Murdock had had the SEALs picking up all the spent brass from the firefight and bagging it. The 9mm rounds fired by H&Ks were common throughout Europe, but the .223 rounds fired by the M-16s carried by Mac and Magic were unmistakably NATO. Perhaps he should have insisted that everyone carry local weapons, like AKs, but damn it, there wasn't supposed to have been a firefight in the first place. The weapons were insurance against the unthinkable ... to be used only as a last resort.

Now their concern was exfiltration, getting out with the minimum fuss possible. He'd ordered Doc and Higgins to gather up the bodies and dump them in the two trucks, after which Mac had siphoned off a couple of liters of gasoline and doused both vehicles and their contents. There was no way to hide what had happened here tonight, but Murdock clearly hoped to leave as few traces behind as possible.

“Everything's set,” MacKenzie said, as Roselli shrugged into his assault vest. “The squad's ready to move out.”

“Okay. Touch off the trucks and let's go.”

MacKenzie stayed behind long enough to toss a couple of thermite grenades into the backs of the trucks. The SEALs were already well into the woods when the incendiaries went off, and the night-black forest behind them lit up brighter than day.

They were moving single file down the slope moments later when Murdock stopped, letting the rest of the men file past him. Roselli had the next-to-the-last position, just ahead of Mac. “L-T?” he asked as he came up to where Murdock was standing. “You okay?”

“I keep thinking I hear something,” Murdock said. He looked worried.

Roselli stopped and listened too. He could hear the roar of the fire, but far off now. There was nothing else. . . .

No, there was something. Roselli heard it too, a kind of dull, clattering noise.

“Chopper,” Murdock said. “
Damn
that was fast!”

“Maybe they're just passing by.”

“Maybe. And maybe they're stopping to have a look at our handiwork.” Murdock reached up and touched his tactical radio's transmit switch. “Blue Squad! The dogs are out. Let's take it double-time!”

Roselli could hear the helicopter clearly now, a pulsing
whop-whop-whop
sounding through the forest from higher up on the hill.

Murdock hadn't been kidding. The hunt was on, and the SEAL squad was the prey.

“My General,” the aide said. “This does not look like the work of Turk rabble.”

Mihajlovic nodded, watching the flames in front of the monastery dwindle. “I am beginning to agree. Sergeant.”

“You say you were just there, by the southeast corner, when the attack occurred?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the commandos must have been there ... hidden in the brush at the tree line.”

“Yes, sir.”

There was little left of two military trucks save for the charred and twisted frames. There were no bodies lying around as Jankovic had claimed, but there was plenty of evidence of a massacre—splatters of blood on the ground and on the front wall of the monastery, bullet scars on the stone.

“You are right, Major,” Mihajlovic said thoughtfully to his aide. “Someone has gone to considerable trouble to clean up after himself.” He'd already had the men with him using flashlights to scour the area for empty brass casings that would have identified the weapons the intruders had used, but so far they'd found nothing, no shells, no discarded equipment or wrappers or food tins,
nothing
that would have told Mihajlovic who had been here. “Muslim militia would not have been so thorough. Even Croats would simply have ambushed our people, then melted away into the forest. Besides, I suspect they would have left some bodies about as a kind of calling card,
ne?
”

The bodies of the militia troopers and their weapons, he thought, had probably been dumped in the trucks before the fires had been set. The attackers could be anywhere now, hidden by the night and the forest.

But they would not have gotten far. The fire was still burning; it couldn't have been set more than thirty minutes or so ago, ... and maybe less. That meant that the invaders were still close, within two or three kilometers at the most.

“Major, if the intruders were, indeed, Americans or other members of NATO,” Mihajlovic continued after a thoughtful moment, “then they are on their way to an extraction point. It is up to us to guess where that extraction point might be.”

“Extraction, my General . . . by helicopter?”

“Possible ... possible. We shall alert the Air Force, have them watch for incursions in the area by low-flying, unidentified aircraft.”

Helicopter extraction did seem the most likely way out for the intruders ... but Mihajlovic had been giving the situation some hard thought during the past few minutes, and he was not convinced of that scenario. Despite their bluster, NATO had not been enforcing their no-fly zones lately, yet their AWACs aircraft must be tracking the Yugoslav aircraft that were being employed against Dubrovnik. It didn't make sense to risk a helicopter extraction in heavily wooded, mountainous terrain, in a region where Yugoslav interceptors were active.

So ... would extraction be more likely by air ... or by sea? American Special Warfare groups commonly used both means of exfiltration. The Americans were good at undersea incursions, made from submarines ... their Special Forces, their SEALs ...

SEALs. Their Navy commandos. With the fighting at Dubrovnik, even with fighter cover the Americans would have been foolish to risk their special forces aircraft to SAM and antiaircraft fire. And St. Anastasias was only six kilometers from the sea.

“Both of you, come with me.” Paced by Jankovic and the aide, Mihajlovic returned to the helicopter, which had landed on the main road just outside the monastery turnoff. In the back of the main cabin, he selected a map case from a storage rack and pulled out a military topo map covering the region between Kotor and Dubrovnik. Using a pocket flashlight, he studied the terrain carefully for a moment. “Sergeant Jankovic?”

“How would you like another chance against these mysterious commandos?”

Jankovic hesitated, and Mihajlovic could almost hear the wheels turning as the man considered his reply. He couldn't be eager to face those black attackers again.

“I would welcome the opportunity, my General. Of course.”

Mihajlovic pointed to a spot on the map. “They almost certainly came ashore somewhere about here ... east of Dubrovnik. I suspect that they have hidden diving gear somewhere along the coast. All we need to do is put down a force along M2.” He dragged his fingertip along the coastal highway on the map. “Patrol from here to here and we will have our frogmen trapped, high and dry like a beached fish.”

“Do we have troops enough available for such an operation?” the aide wondered. “That's a good five or six kilometers of highway.”

“We can bring JNA regulars from the front lines at Dubrovnik, Major. I will give the necessary commands at once. Sergeant, you may draw a weapon and join my escort. I will be heading this operation personally.”

“Yes, sir!”

The timing, Mihajlovic thought, would be tight ... but he was pretty sure they could pull it off. More than revenge was riding here. If these frogman commandos were Americans, he wanted to take one or more of them prisoner. With solid evidence of covert American military action on Yugoslav soil, Belgrade might well be able to break the coalition of European and UN forces arrayed against Serbia in this damned, festering civil war. It would mean disgrace for the Americans, a propaganda victory for Greater Serbia, a promotion and an opening of political goals for himself.

In fact, it would tie in perfectly with Operation Dvorak, which had many of the same goals. A victory here would nicely complement his operation in Macedonia—a complex plot that had been in preparation for months now and was due to reach a climax in only a few more days.

Would this affect the timing of Dvorak at all? He didn't think so. It probably couldn't have been better if he'd planned it this way from the beginning.

And all he needed to do was to capture a handful of lightly armed men before they could reach the safety of the sea.

They'd alternated running and walking down the flank of the Gora Orjen, using a ground-eating pace across the open, pine-needle-covered forest floor to put as much distance as possible between them and their pursuers. The hunt was definitely on. Possibly the missing militia trooper had managed to call for help; more likely, a passing JNA helicopter had sighted the burning trucks and come to investigate. Either way, the Serbian military command in the Dubrovnik area would be alerted. At the very least, there would be patrols out, both on foot in the forest and in vehicles along the road. If the JNA commander decided to risk the threat of NATO air involvement, he would have helicopters up as well, both transports carrying squads of soldiers, and gunships.

At least that's what Murdock knew he would do if he were in the enemy commander's place.

They reached the edge of the forest just above the border fence, and Murdock called a halt. The coastal highway lay another four kilometers down the hill, across an open, gently descending field. Beyond that was the seawall and the beach.

They'd emerged from the woods within a few hundred meters of where they'd gone in. As the other SEALs took up position crouched in a defensive perimeter about the area, Murdock and MacKenzie both checked the GPS, pinpointing their position and giving them a fix on where they'd left their equipment.

“So,” MacKenzie said. “What do you think? Looks clear.”

“Yeah, it does. I think to be on the safe side, though, we should call in. Higgins!”

The squad's radioman crawled over to them. “Yeah, L-T?”

“Break out the sat-comm gear, Prof. We're going to phone home.”

“Will do.”

It took only a few minutes to set up the sat-comm system's antenna, which was stowed in a pocket of one of the rucksacks like a folded-up umbrella. With legs and arms extended, it sat on the ground, facing south, its dish just seventeen inches across. A coaxial cable extending from the back of the antenna was plugged into Higgins's HST-4 unit.

Using a small manual, the
Equatorial Satellite Pointing Guide
, Higgins began lining up the antenna while the commo gear ran through its automated self-checks and calibrations. When he heard a tiny peep, the antenna was properly aligned with one of the military communications satellites in geosynchronous orbit above the equator.

“Ready to transmit, Skipper,” he said.

“Okay. Give him a sit-rep. Tell 'em we have the package and we're four klicks from the beach, but that we got into a firefight and could have bad guys on our tail.”

“Yes, sir.”

As Higgins began speaking in low, measured tones into his microphone, Murdock unpacked a pair of 7x40 binoculars and began to carefully study the highway below. Low-light gear didn't help much at ranges over 150 meters; there were still situations where relatively old-fashioned equipment was more useful than modern, high-tech toys.