Seal Team Seven #19: Field of Fire by Keith Douglass Read Free Book Online Page B

Lieutenant sir. I was just kidding. Congratulations on a fine shoot.”
    Lam did the poorest he’d ever done on the targets. He had a 53 percent kill score. “Hell, anybody can have an off day,” he said.
    “Not when it’s for real,” Murdock said. “That is not when it’s for real and you still want to live.”
    Lam kept to himself. It wasn’t unusual. He didn’t know what else to do. He hadn’t given the police the men’s names. He figured he could do that in a later call. Now he was going to be out of the country for a while. What the hell should he do, phone the WETIP tonight? He wasn’t sure.
    A Navy van met the SEALs in the parking lot at 0730 the next morning.
    “Feel naked,” Jaybird said.
    “Hell, you are naked,” Lam jabbed. They all stepped into the van and ten minutes later were at the North Island Naval Air Station looking at one of the small business jets that the military often used for VIPs and select senior officers or groups that needed to move in a rush, like the SEALs. They had flown in this aircraft before.
    It was the Gulfstream II, the VC-11. Made by Grumman, it carried a crew of three and could seat nineteen passengers. It was powered by two Rolls-Royce RBI63-25 Spey Mk 511-8 turbofan engines. It cruised at 25,000 feet at 581 mph, and had a top ceiling of 43,000 feet. On one tank of jet fuel it could cover 3,712 miles. Originally built as a civilian executive jet, it held first-class-size aircraft seats, a galley, and electronic provisions for laptop computers and other communications equipment.
    The crew chief today was a Coast Guard first class petty officer who met them at the door. She had on her class A uniform and smiled.
    “Good morning, gentlemen. I know you had breakfast, but if anyone is still hungry, we’ll have a snack in two hours and then a hot lunch at eleven-hundred. Our flying time today will be about five hours and twenty-seven minutes if the pilots can hook onto the right jet stream. As you know, the jet stream always flows from west to east, sometimes up to a hundred miles an hour. At least that’s what I’ve heard. Are there any questions?”
    “Yeah, are you married?” Jaybird asked.
    “That wasn’t a question, SEAL, that was an over-powering desire by a poor lost soul who desperately needsto be mothered and protected. Any questions about our flight?”
    “Two points scored for a takedown by the lady, and zero points for Jaybird,” Lam said. Everyone laughed, including the crew chief. She vanished back into the front of the plane.
    The trip went so quickly Murdock didn’t have time to think much about where they were going. Transcontinental flight always amazed him. In early days it would take a horseback rider a hundred and fifty days to go from coast to coast if he could find horses that could walk steadily for twenty miles a day. A mach two interceptor, like the F-14, could do the run in less than two hours traveling at 1,544 mph. Amazing.
    They landed at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, where they rolled up to the transient aircraft terminal and were met by a closed van. A civilian drove and another sat in the front seat beside him with an Ingram submachine gun held casually in one hand. The gunman stepped out as the steps came down on the plane and Murdock went down them.
    “Commander Murdock and five SEALs?” the gunman asked.
    “Right,” Murdock said and the man stepped to the side and opened the van sliding door and motioned them inside. There were seats for twelve and no windows. The man closed the door, stepped into the front seat, and the rig moved away from the plane at once.
    “Feels like I’m in a cave,” Jaybird said.
    “You can look for girls later,” Lam said.
    They drove for almost an hour, and Murdock figured they were not taking the shortest route to their objective. He could see a little out the windshield. He recognized one building that they had passed twice. Then they were in a rural area and the only thing