Free Seal Team Seven #20: Attack Mode by Keith Douglass Page B

have him shot.”
    “Then we’d never get away from this island.”
    “That little sonofabitch. I remember him. Too smart for his own good. Nothing else I can do. Yeah, tell him we have a deal. You come up to the bridge and I’ll give you five thousand. He gets the other five when we’re moving.”
    “He figured you’d go for it. I’ll be right up. Oh, he’s been working on the new program for an hour. Figures another hour and he’ll have it. Maybe we can get under way in two hours.”
    On board the
Carl Vinson CVN 70
    “Skycap calling Home Base.”
    “Go, Skycap.”
    “We’ve got a positive on a freighter at the Sibylla Island. It’s up here at five hundred. You better put a nursemaid in the air. We’re not going to make it back to the ship without a drink of juice. We’ve stayed at fifteen and made a positive ID on the type of freighter. Same onboard crane amidships and that crazy looking house just in back of the crane. She’s at anchor and I don’t think anyone on board knows that we’re up here. Want us to fly CAP on her or head home for drink about halfway?”
    “No CAP, we don’t want him to get lucky. Come back for some fuel and then set down. We’re changing course for that island. The helm tells me we’re only three hundred miles due east of there. Good work. Come home.”
    “What’s next?” Murdock asked.
    “We’ll switch one of our Hawkeyes to circle the area up at least twenty thousand, and keep us informed about her position. If she moves, we’ll know it. What’s next for you and the SEALs?”
    Murdock looked at his watch. “Hey, it’s oh-six-thirty-two. I almost missed breakfast. Then we get the SEAL heads together and figure out the best way to take down this ship.”

7
    After morning chow, the SEALs gathered in their quarters and began kicking around ideas.
    “We know these hijackers went on board as seamen, so they probably don’t have any long guns or machine guns,” Senior Chief Sadler said. “Might be a pistol for each of them, so maybe the best way would be to rope down from a chopper to the deck.”
    “No way,” Jaybird said. “They went to all the trouble and planning to get on board, my bet is that they sneaked on board at least five or six Ingrams or maybe taken-apart Uzis. Roping down is just too risky. We’d be perfect targets. Besides, by now they must have found the ship’s gun locker. Don’t most freighters carry a few rifles on board?” Nobody knew.
    Murdock doodled on a pad of paper. He wrote “rope down” then crossed it out.
    “Then we go in with Rubber Ducks and climb up the side,” Lam said. “That freighter can’t have a rail more than forty feet off the water.”
    “Done that before,” Canzoneri said. “Maybe they’ll have a pair of men on watch with rifles. We’ll be damn easy targets.”
    “How about having the Tomcats blast the whole damn thing with twenty millimeters and then we rope down,” Bradford said. “I like going down better than up.”
    “It’s anchored now; what if it starts to move?” Murdock asked.
    “No difference,” Mahanani said. “We can do any of our plans with it making twelve knots or anchored.”
    “Let’s use the Turtle,” Jefferson said. “Hey, that’s what we got her for. She’s quiet. We do a silent approach and up the side, take out any deck watch with silenced shots, and we’re halfway home.”
    “We can only move eight men in the Turtle,” Lam said. “For this one we need all of us.”
    “How big is the deck?” Omar Rafii asked. “We could drop in six men in chutes, have them secure the deck and then bring in the rest of the men by Rubber Duck.”
    Murdock kept making his list and circling or crossing off items as they went.
    “JG, what do you think?” he asked.
    Chris Gardner frowned and rubbed his face. “We don’t have a lot of options. We need to take her down as quickly as possible, before she knows we’re on to her. Has to be a night mission, at first dark I’d guess,