Friday, 20 May

1330 hours (Zulu -5)

NAVSPECWARGRU-Two Training Center

Little Creek, Virginia

Lieutenant Murdock stood with the men of Blue Squad, Third Platoon. "Okay, people," he said, his voice devoid of emotion. "Hit it again. Four-man entry, door center, buttonhook."

They were standing outside the NSWG building variously called the "fun house" and the "killing house," part of the SEALS' Little Creek training facilities. They were tired, all of them, and their faces were coated with greasepaint and gunpowder. Their bodies seemed bent beneath the weight of their gear, combat blacks and full harness, Kevlar vests, safety helmets, and tactical radios. Murdock had been running the platoon since daybreak, literally and figuratively. Gunfire banged and crackled in the distance — First Platoon practicing on the outdoor firing range. It had been a long day already, and it would not be ending at five o'clock.

"First four up," Murdock continued. "Let's have Roselli, Garcia, Higgins, and Brown."

"Aw, man, Lieutenant," Brown said. "I'm a sniper, not a God damned door kicker."

"You heard the lieutenant," MacKenzie said softly. There was no threat or anger in his voice, but the men complied immediately, filing into place beside the fun house South wall, where a couple of construction ratings were hammering the wooden framework of another practice door into place.

The subtleties of MacKenzie's line had not escaped Murdock. He'd noted that the men, when they referred to Cotter, called him "L-T," while Murdock was still "the lieutenant." The distinction spoke volumes of the gulf between him and his men.

Or am I just being paranoid? Murdock wondered. He'd not yet worked up the courage to actually discuss the situation with MacKenzie.

He was in a hell of a tough position. In the SEAL Teams especially, the differences between enlisted and officer were almost nonexistent. The men followed the officer not so much because of his rank, but because they knew he'd been through everything they'd been through, Hell Week included, and that he was as good a man as they were. He had to earn their respect, not demand it as a right.

There was an almost overwhelming tendency for new lieutenants joining a platoon to try winning that respect by familiarity, by being "one of the guys," but that approach was dead wrong from the start. The platoon's survival could hinge on whether or not the unit had one absolute leader; he had to be obeyed instantly, without argument or discussion. "Respect" in this context did not mean "like."

He'd held inspection on Sunday, as promised, and been pleased to see the barracks had been cleaned up, as ordered. He'd also noted the fading bruises on the faces of Holt and Roselli but refrained from commenting on them. Keeping order in the ranks was MacKenzie's job, and Murdock had already decided to let the master chief keep running the platoon his own way. If any serious deficiencies cropped up, well, that would be the time to pounce. Not now...

He knew they didn't like him, and after five days he still felt like he was wrestling with Cotter's ghost. But if he drilled them hard enough, by God, the respect would come. If it didn't, they'd never survive as a team.

The workers had finished with the door and stepped back out of the way. The killing house, constructed of plywood, Kevlar, and concrete blocks, was designed to allow rapid reconfiguration for any desired room layout, with or without windows, with one or multiple doors in any location, with or without interior partitions. Except for Higgins, who was carrying a shotgun, all of the men carried Beretta 92M pistols loaded with Glaser safety slugs, frangible rounds that would not punch through walls and kill someone half a mile away... or ricochet from concrete and kill someone in the room.

Safety rounds or not, SEALs took their training with deadly seriousness. Men had died in this exercise. MacKenzie had told them all about the time he'd actually seen a kid shot and killed in the fun house when the guy behind him tripped going through the door.

"Right," Murdock said. He held up his clipboard and read the notes he'd scrawled there. "The situation is three suspected terrorists and at least one hostage. Nothing known about position or disposition. Go in, take 'em down, and try not to shoot the hostages or each other. Ready?"

There were some murmured assents.

"I said, 'Ready?'"

"Hoo yah!" The old SEAL battle cry seemed to draw the tired men together, to focus them. But God, Murdock thought, they're still operating at the ragged edge. Are they going to be ready in time?

He'd learned about Operation Sun Hammer only that morning, when he'd first seen the wall-sized blueprints and detailed scale models of the Yuduki Maru that the team would be using for their briefings. He was at once excited by the prospect, and scared. Was the platoon ready so soon after Cotter's death? Could it be made ready? He still didn't know.

The four men took their positions, careful to stay outside the possible fire zone through the door. Roselli was to the left of the door, with Higgins and the shotgun next to him and a step out from the wall. Brown and Garcia were to the right, squeezed up against the wall with Brown in the lead.

Room entries provided a special tactical challenge for a small assault team. Only one or, at the most, two men could go through a door at a time, and while they were in the doorway they were trapped in what was known as the "fatal funnel," where gunmen inside had a clear shot at them while they were still processing what their eyes and ears told them as they burst through the door. Their decisions had to be both immediate and correct. A misstep or a momentary hesitation could result in two men getting tangled up in the doorway or tripping over an unexpected piece of furniture. A bad call could get a hostage killed or give the bad guys time to open fire. Room entries were carefully choreographed, with different dances for different situations, and each was rehearsed time after time after time, until the decision-making and the movements were all automatic.

Murdock checked the men's positions, nodded, then said, "See you inside." Opening the plywood door, which was centered in the south wall of the structure, he stepped into the killing house.

The dummies had already been positioned by the range captains. Each was a fairly lifelike mannequin similar to those in a department store, though all showed signs of wear and tear and roughly patched bullet holes. The sitting figures slumped with the peculiar lifelessness of propped-up store dummies; the standing figures, suspended on thin wires from the rafters overhead, swayed a little with the air currents in the room. The lighting had been arranged so that it would be in the assault team's eyes, and it cast larger-than-life shadows against the bare, chipped walls.

A male mannequin in civilian clothes sat on a battered sofa directly opposite the door, his wrists handcuffed behind him. At his back, standing behind the sofa, was a female figure, also in civilian clothes and distinguishable as a terrorist only by the automatic pistol taped to her hand and resting inconspicuously on the sofa's back. To the right, near the northeast corner, were two standing figures, a woman in jeans and sweater, her hands fastened behind her back, and a man holding an AK-47 behind her, positioned in such a way that he was partly blocked by the hostage from the vantage point of someone coming through the door. A third terrorist, wearing army fatigues, hung from the ceiling in the southeast corner; and finally, by the west wall, a single uniformed male terrorist sat slumped behind a card table, an AK propped up next to him.

Murdock took a quick look around to make certain that everything was ready. As a final touch, he quietly picked up the low coffee table from its place in front of the sofa and positioned it carefully about two feet from the door. Then he took his place in the northwest corner — well out of the line of fire, he hoped — took out a stopwatch with one black-gloved hand, and switched on his radio.

"Okay, MacKenzie. Ready."

"Yes, sir. Blue Squad Stand ready... go!" Murdock hit the stopwatch timer button. Almost simultaneous with the word "go," he heard the deep-throated boom of Higgins's Remington shotgun, the snick-snack of a manually pumped round, and a second boom as thunderous as the first. The door's hinges, impacted by one-ounce slugs, disintegrated into bits of metal, loose screws, and splinters, and the door smashed back into the room an instant later. A small, black object the size and shape of a cardboard toilet-paper tube bounced across the floor, then gave off a loud crack, a simulation of the flash-bang grenade that would have stunned and blinded everyone in the room if it had been real.

The SEALs came through before the simulator's echoes in the small room had died. Roselli was first, "button-hooking," or rolling around the door frame to the right, toward the southwest corner; Brown was a split second behind him, button-hooking left as Garcia came through the center, vaulting both the coffee table and the wreckage of the door as lightly as any world-class gymnast. Gunfire crashed in tight groups of three, so quickly triggered they sounded like full-auto shots. The terrorist in the southeast corner jerked and spun on his wire, half of his head blown away by three fast shots from Brown; Garcia, far enough into the room to see past the female hostage, took down the man with the AK, while Brown pivoted into the southeast corner, aimed across the room, and put three rounds into the female terrorist behind the sofa. Roselli shot the terrorist behind the table, spun, and put three more rounds into the female terrorist an instant behind Brown's shots, blasting the mannequin's head to fragments and severed it from its wire. A piece of the mannequin's head, a clump of curly yellow hair still attached, bounced off Murdock's flak vest. Garcia leaped across the sofa, checking behind it for any nasty surprises — a hidden terrorist, say — then spun with his Beretta still extended rigidly in front of his body, shifting from corner to corner of the room. "Clear!" he yelled.

"Clear!"

"Clear!" Brown and Roselli chorused in almost perfect unison.

Higgins, crouched in the doorway behind the coffee table, his shotgun covering everyone in the room, joined in. "Clear!"

Murdock's thumb came down on the stopwatch button.

"Five-point-one-eight seconds," he said, reading the numerals off the watch. "That's still slow, people. Damned slow. We can do it in four and a half easy!"

Collectively, the SEALs sagged as they came down off their combat high. Thumbs dropped half-loaded magazines into gloved hands, and then slides were ratcheted back, expending chambered rounds that clinked on the concrete floor. MacKenzie and Ellsworth stepped into the room, squeezing past Higgins and the ruin of the door.

"Assessment," Murdock snapped. He walked over to where the female hostage was slowly turning on her wire. Her right shoulder had been neatly popped from its socket, and a bullet hole showed in her sweater. "Let's take a look at what went wrong. Garcia, I think you cut it a little close on this one. You killed the tango but you also crippled his hostage."

"I was a little rushed, Lieutenant. I was a bit off balance after jumping that fucking table, and I triggered while I was still bringing my aim up."

"I also noticed you turn away from Tilly the Terrorist over there behind the couch. Didn't you see her?"

"I saw her, Sir," Boomer said. "But I thought the guy with the AK, coming in behind the girl, was the bigger threat. His gun was up, Tilly's was down. Besides, she had a hand gun while he had an assault rifle."

"She was also right next to a hostage and she was the last one to die. How could you have taken her down faster?"

The analysis went on for several more seconds before it was interrupted by a sharp, steady beeping. Murdock reached down to his harness and thumbed off the pager. "Excuse me, people. Duty calls. Master Chief, walk them through again, will you?"

"Aye, aye, sir."

Making his way out of the killing house, Murdock walked across the barren dirt outside to a small command center, where a telephone had been set up. Punching in a number, he held the receiver to his ear. "Murdock."

"This is Doubleday in HQ," a voice said. "Sir, you have a visitor here."

"Who? Oh, never mind. I'll be right up." He sighed as he cradled the receiver. Probably Captain Mason and someone from the Pentagon, with the final word on Sun Hammer. What was he going to tell him, that the men were ready? That they could take down a ship at sea loaded with two tons of the deadliest poison known to man?

Ten minutes later, he walked through the front doors of SEAL Seven's headquarters, his boondockers tracking the recently mopped and waxed linoleum deck. He felt sweaty, grimy, and tired, and if this was some bigwig from Fort Fumble, as the Pentagon was sometimes called, he hoped he wasn't being graded for neatness.

He recognized his visitor's back as soon as he walked into the officers' lounge, and felt a sharp twist in his gut. This was no Pentagon VIP.

The man, an old, white-haired, craggy-faced version of Murdock, turned, his back as ramrod stiff, as unyielding as the younger man remembered. "Hello, son."

"Father! What the hell are you doing here?"

"I heard you'd been transferred. I thought I'd come down and look you up." He looked around the lounge, at its peeling paint and shop-worn, fifth-hand furniture, nodding as though it met all of his expectations. "This is where you work now, eh?"

Murdock's lips compressed into a tight white line. "I was seriously wondering if you had anything to do with this. They yanked me out of the middle of a Phase One class in Coronado, had me about bust a gut to get out here."

"And you thought I arranged it to get you back to the East Coast?" The older man shook his head. "I'm afraid not. I could arrange a transfer, you know.

"We've been over that ground, Father. You know how I feel."

"Yes. You seem to have this idealistic notion about your career path. Damn it, Blake, didn't anybody ever tell you that these special-forces units like the SEALs are a dead end career-wise?"

"It's what I want. I'm very good at what I do. Sir."

"Um. I daresay you are." He looked Murdock up and down. "You're looking fit enough. Nice southern California tan."

"What did you want to see me for, Father? My platoon has a heavy training schedule today."

"Well, actually, I heard you might be going overseas soon. On, ah, business."

Murdock glanced about the empty room. Even here in SEAL headquarters there were things that weren't openly discussed. And he wasn't sure what his father's security clearance was.

Hell, the man was a member of Congress, for God's sake, and on the House Military Affairs Committee to boot. Still, the reserve that had built up between the two men, an impenetrable wall for the past five years, remained. Murdock did not immediately reply.

"Look, Blake," the older Murdock said. He spread his hands, as if to demonstrate that he was unarmed. "I know this must be a bad time. But I wanted... I wanted to see you once, before you left."

"I don't know that I'm leaving, sir." He was dying to know what his father knew... and unwilling to be the one to ask.

"Son, this mission coming up is going to be dangerous. And thankless. Definitely a case of damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't."

"How the hell do you know about this?"

"The Joint Chiefs have been keeping Congress informed, of course. Some of us, at any rate. I'm on the mailing list."

"What about Farnum?"

The older Murdock cracked an uneasy smile. "My esteemed colleague from California has, ah, such a pressing schedule, I believe it was decided that it was unnecessary to add to his work load."

Murdock knew how it worked. Notification of Congress about upcoming military operations had long been a sore point in the tug-of-politics between Capitol Hill and the Pentagon. The actions of some congressmen during the debate over Nicaragua during the eighties had, in Murdock's view, been nothing less than treasonous. More than once, covert operations had been given away to Managua by left-leaning representatives, and American advisors and other personnel had died as a result.

The elder Murdock appeared to read his son's thoughts. "I know how you feel about some of my colleagues. There are quite a few powerful men and women on the Hill who are no friends of the military. But you can't lump me in with men like Farnum."

"Of course not. You've been doing your bit to keep the bastards from disemboweling the armed forces. And I appreciate that. All I want is to be able to live my own life. All I have lined up for my 'career path,' as you call it, is to do what I want to do. I'm not going to be some politician's trained, uniformed poodle, okay? I happen to think the SEALs are important, that they're needed."

"I understand that, Blake. I don't think you realize it, but I do understand. And I'm trying to tell you that the SEALs have some pretty powerful enemies, and not just on the Hill. I'm talking about the Pentagon, here."

"Nothing I haven't heard before." A substantial number of the decision-makers and policy-setters in the military still disagreed with the whole idea of elite special forces. General Norman Schwarzkopf, the strategic mastermind of Desert Storm, had been well known for his mistrust of units like Delta or the SEALS. Most military commanders disliked them for the simple fact that they skimmed off the best troops from conventional forces and often got priority treatment when it came to funding and special equipment.

People actually within the Special Warfare community, of course, had a different perspective on the problem.

"Well, it looks like the hammer's going to come down pretty hard in my committee," the congressman said. "Farnum and some of the others have latched onto the SEALs like bulldogs, and they aren't going to let go. And I'm damned worried about this business in the Indian Ocean.

"Uh, I really don't think it's a good idea to talk about some of this stuff. Not here."

"Maybe you're right. But look at it from my point of view for once, Blake, okay? I'm on a committee that is examining the role of Navy special forces. Now, a crisis comes up where those forces have a chance to do what they've been trained to do, and it just happens that the son of one of those committee members is leading the team. If you succeed, it's going to look like the whole operation was set up to give me support. I won't have a power base I can rely on. What I have to say up there will be discounted. Follow?"

"I think so."

"But if what I hear is true, your chances of succeeding are, well, they're not good. Like damned near impossible. What happens to your precious SEALs if the son of a congressman on the Military Affairs Committee comes back a corpse?"

"I don't think..."

"What happens if half of Africa gets contaminated with radioactivity because the SEAL son of the congressman screwed up? It'll mean the end of everything you say you believe in, Blake, not to mention my own political career."

"Not to mention your son."

"Well, yes. Of course. I didn't mean to imply that..."

"The hell with your politics, Father, and the hell with you. The SEALs have a damned important role to play, more so than ever with the world falling apart the way it is." He looked down at his dirty combat blacks, then wiped at the greasepaint smeared on his face. "They're not interested in appearances or tact or appropriate social behavior. They're concerned with the way the world really works. I'm a SEAL. I'm going to carry out my orders to the best of my ability and I'm going to do what I've been trained to do for as long as the Navy will let me do it. And I am not going to let you or Mother or anyone else not in my immediate chain of command tell me what to do with my life. Not any more. Clear?"

Murdock sighed. "Clear. Speaking of your mother, Blake, she sends her best."

"I'm sure she does."

"You really ought to bury the past, son. She does love you, you know, and you've managed to break her heart. All she ever wanted was what's best for you. As I do."

"Then stay out of my life. Sir. Even if you manage to kill the SEALS, I will set my own course. I will not accept a nice, safe posting to some congressional staff because I am not a lap-dog, and I most certainly will not refuse a mission because it might be politically inconvenient for you. Now, sir, I have that training schedule to complete. If there's nothing more?"

When there was no answer, Blake Murdock turned crisply on his heel and strode from the room.

He had to struggle to maintain his composure. Obviously, things had not changed between him and his father. The congressman was still looking to get him into some nice, safe niche inside the Beltway, some place with a political future for the their to the Murdock dynasty.

Outside the headquarters building, he checked his watch. Yeah, there was still time. He wanted to put himself on a four-man break-and-enter team and run through the killing house a few more times before breaking for chow.

It might help him burn off some of his anger. He knew one thing, though, if he knew nothing else. He was more determined now to carry out Sun Hammer than he'd been before, if only because of his father's opposition. Damn the man...