Southern Bosnia
âL-T?â
âYeah, Razor.â
âWe got the brass policed, L-T,â Roselli said. Heâd found the lieutenant standing next to the highway, staring up the mountain, a distracted look on his face. âWeâre clean.â
âOkay. Get your gear together and letâs move. Itâs time to get the hell out of Dodge!â
Roselli, frankly, wasnât sure what to make of the L-T. Heâd thought heâd known the man pretty well; eight months of close, hard training and two combat deploymentsâone in the Indian Ocean, the other just a few days later at the Iranian naval port at Bandar Abbasâwere enough to make brothers out of any two men, whatever the differences in their backgrounds or families. Now, though, he wasnât so sure.
It was, he knew, the way Murdock had gunned down that Serb militiaman, right at the end of the firefight. Oh, the fact of the killing alone wasnât the problem. SEALs, like covert forces tasked with counterinsurgency/counterterrorism worldwide, frequently had to get into tight places and out again without being seen and without jeopardizing the opâs success by dragging along prisoners. The written orders for this mission had directed Blue Squad to handle prisoners âaccording to SOP,â a bit of verbal misdirection that meant they would not be taking prisoners.
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 hadnât 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 heâd joined the teams in defiance of his dadâs wishes.
But man, if the story got out that Murdock personally had blown away a bad guy after heâd tried to surrender, the political fallout would be inconceivable. At the very least it would end the younger Murdockâs career ... and maybe the elder Murdockâs 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 wasnât that cold. Oh, Murdock could be hard when he had to be; he ran a tight platoon and didnât let the guys slack off for a minute. But he was also less intense than a lot of SEALs, and he didnât come across as a stone killer. Heâd been to Annapolisâan honest-to-God ring-knockerâand he looked more like a fighter jock or an XO aboard some supply ship or, hell, like a lawyer than he did a SEAL. Athleticâlean and wiry rather than muscularâand 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.
Heâd 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 hadnât worked out very well, because the women were still in shock and Gypsy had been real anxious to be on his way. Before heâd let the guy go, though, heâd made him promise to take the girls along, get them out of the area. Gypsy hadnât wanted to do that, but Murdock had told him that the CIA would find out if he didnât take them someplace safe ... and then the SEALs would come for him .
Then heâd 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 werenât too badly bloodied, and give them to the women whoâd had their clothing cut up.
That was scarcely the manner of a