Operation Orion - Kevin Dockery [25]
As they came up to the dome, Chief Harris and Harry Teal each pulled a breaching charge from his belly clip. Leaving their G15 carbines hanging by the straps, they slapped the two charges to either side of the round hatch of the air lock. Splitting into their fire teams, the eight SEALS pressed tightly to the surface of the dome, four on each side of the entry. The charges, set by prearrangement to five seconds, detonated with perfect synchronization, sending a soundless blast of flame and debris shooting outward from the entryway to the dome.
The time for radio silence was past. “Go!” Jackson barked to Chief Harris, who led the second fire team around the side of the shattered hatch.
“Got an inner door, LT—closed and sealed!” the chief said.
“LaRue. Take it out,” the lieutenant ordered.
Mindful of Baby’s backblast, which spumed into a wide fan some twenty-five meters long, the other Teammates ducked to the side as the G-Man raised his rail gun and in rapid succession sent three blisteringly hot rounds against the inner air lock door. Air billowed out of the holes, a mist of smoke and water vapor and miscellaneous debris erupting as the dome depressurized. But the hatch, punctured and mangled, did not break away.
“Harris! Teal! Two more charges,” Jackson commanded, and his two breachers snatched up their C-6 charges and pushed against the blast of air, forcing themselves into the air lock, where they clapped the charges against the hinges of the second hatch.
“Grenade launchers!” the LT ordered the rest of his men, snapping one of the explosive missiles under the barrel of his G15.
The second round of breaching charges did the trick, blasting the hatch off its hinges. The Teammates stayed back, out of the blast effect, and watched as the heavy steel door tumbled past, expelled from its frame by the continuing blast of depressurization. Fighting the flow, which was like a powerful gust of wind, Jackson leaned around the outer air lock and fired his grenade into the installation. Several other SEALS did the same thing, ducking back out of the way as a satisfying series of flashes indicated the detonations somewhere within the pirate base.
By then the flow of escaping vapors had settled to a brisk breeze, and Chief Harris, with Teal, Robinson, and Keast following closely, charged into the installation. Each man fired another grenade as he came through the door, the first two shooting forward and the next two lobbing their missiles to the left and right, respectively.
Jackson and his fire team came after them to find that the SEALS’ attack had wreaked utter havoc in a functional but fairly large utility chamber. A large hatch, currently open, led deeper into the pirate installation; smaller hatches to the right and left were closed and, to judge from the lack of leaking atmosphere, sealed. The multiple grenades had killed five or six men in the room and had blasted racks containing space suits—now thoroughly punctured—as well as a weapons cabinet, a tool bench, and bare, functional tables, chairs, and benches.
At a word from Jackson, Harris and Teal took breaching charges to the two side hatches, while Jackson led his men straight through the entry chamber into the passageway through the open doorway. Keenly aware of their advantage—his men were wearing pressure suits whereas the occupants of the base presumably were not—the LT was eager to wreak as much havoc as possible in the first minutes of the attack. They passed several sliding doors, now shut, and he gestured to Robinson and Keast to blast them with breaching charges as he and Dobson continued deeper into the installation.
Soon the pair of them came up against another secure door and set charges of their own even as the two men behind them blew open the doors. The LT and his shooting partner withdrew to discover that the other two men had blasted their way into a computer room to the left and a storage locker to the right. A pair of computer operators, as scruffy and unshaven as the pirates they had fought aboard the Lotus, were in the process of dying from