Seal Team Seven

Author:Keith Douglass
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2011-09-12T16:00:00+00:00

15

2315 hours (1515 hours Zulu—5) Join Special Operations Command Center The Pentagon

In Washington it was mid-afternoon, but the overhead lights in JSOCCOMCENT had been turned off, giving the windowless room the feel of night. The only illumination came from the green-glowing phosphorescence of a large television monitor.

Congressman Charles Fitzhugh Murdock leaned forward, studying the monitor with keen interest. The image on the screen, an oblique view of the Japanese freighter Yuduki Maru glowing in pale, green-white light, was real-time, an infrared image transmitted from a satellite passing south over the Indian Ocean. The camera angle slowly changed as he watched.

“What is it?” he asked. Ten other men were in the room, civilians and high-ranking officers of several military services, clustered with him about the monitor. “What did I just see?”

A slender civilian first introduced to Murdock only as “Mr. Carter” pointed at ghost figures now slipping over the Yuduki Maru’s taffrail. “Those tiny flashes of light were gunshots, Mr. Congressman,” he said. He was holding a telephone receiver in his hand and had been whispering into the mouthpiece at intervals ever since the drama had begun unfolding.

“Two terrs are down,” a Navy captain, Paul Mason, said. “The rest of our people are climbing on board now.”

Murdock suppressed the churn of acid fear in his belly those words raised. It was a lot worse than he’d feared, standing in this room ten thousand miles away, watching the action unfold on a television screen like the make-believe gunplay of some computer game.

General Bradley, the big, bluff Air Force officer who appeared to be in charge of this room, pointed at the screen. “Damn,” he said, chewing on the end of an unlit cigar. “Can’t we get a better view on this thing?”

Carter spoke quietly into a telephone, and Congressman Murdock realized he must be in direct communication with whoever was controlling the spy satellite. A moment later, the image of the ship expanded, the view zeroing in on the aft third of the ship. The glowing ghost figures of nine men, two of them prone on the deck, were barely distinguishable against the heat-glow of the ship itself. The imagery remained clear, but the satellite’s motion was more apparent. The view kept slipping to the right, forcing the unseen controller to shift the camera angle left in compensation.

It had, Murdock reflected, taken all but an act of Congress to get him here, into this shielded, buried room within the Pentagon labyrinth, impregnable behind four separate security checkpoints. Captain Granger had been his passport into this underground shadow-world, and he’d had to do a fair amount of arm-twisting to pull it off. Look, he’d told Granger the day before. The SEALs need a friend on the HMAC, someone who’s willing to slug it out with Farnum and his kill-the-military cronies, and I’m it! But damn it, you’ve got to give me some cooperation on this. Let me see what it is I’m supposed to be defending. . . .

Even yet, Murdock wasn’t certain what strings Granger had had to pull to get him into this room.

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