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sleep with it.”
    There was more laughter. Murdock good-naturedly declined the CIA man’s joking offer to take the money off his hands.
    The fishing boat headed south, and the
Kamehameha
, unneeded, drifted away. After a leisurely journey of several days and a confinement below deck that drove the platoon of active SEALs crazy, the boat emerged into the Gulf of Aden and then the Indian Ocean. One night two U.S. Navy SH-60F Seahawk helicopters plucked 3rd Platoon and all their gear from the fishing boat and carried them to the aircraft carrier
U.S.S. Nimitz
. A C-2A Carrier Onboard Delivery aircraft flew them to the British/American naval base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. At Diego the platoon boarded a C-141 jet transport for a very, very long flight back to the U.S.

4
Monday, September 4
    0645 hours
    Naval Amphibious Base
    Coronado, California
    Blake Murdock hated garrison life with a burning passion. Even the sound of the BUD/S tadpoles singing as they ran by his window was no compensation. The field was where you dove, fired weapons, and blew things up. Garrison was where there were always mounds of paperwork waiting whenever you returned from the field. And there was way, way too much command supervision here at Coronado.
    Team Seven had originally been stationed at Little Creek Amphibious Base near Norfolk, Virginia, the home of the East Coast SEALs. But then someone up in the chain of command became offended by the aesthetics of having an odd-numbered team in the midst of all the East Coast “evens”: Teams 2, 4, 6, 8, and SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team 2. Murdock also suspected that all the action Team Seven had been seeing was beginning to grate on the “Jedi Knights,” the high-speed-low-drag hostage-rescue specialists of Team Six up at Dam Neck, Virginia. A turf war was inevitable.
    And with Team Six firmly established as Delta Force’scounterpart in the elite Joint Special Operations Command, it was more than clear who was going to win. So after the typical bureaucratic power games at command level, Team Seven was shipped off to Coronado and Naval Special Warfare Group One, the West Coast home of the “odd” SEAL Teams: 1, 3, 5 and SDV-1, not to mention the Special Warfare Center and the Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL course.
    Since Team Seven still didn’t publicly exist in the SEAL order of battle, and carried only four platoons instead of the official (but almost never fully manned) ten, it had been redesignated a “black” team. The mission was now primary support for the intelligence community, with special classified intelligence missions known only by their code words, dirty little jobs that didn’t officially happen, the kind of ops that the platoon referred to as “weren’t there, didn’t do that.” Like Port Sudan.
    The headquarters was located in the fenced-off Special Warfare area of the base, but the building wasn’t marked—even though all SEALs knew what it was. The important thing was that no one other than SEALs knew.
    For Murdock Coronado had two main disadvantages. The first was operational: they were now five hours further away by air from Europe, and therefore less likely to be employed. Exactly what Team Six must have had in mind. But then again, they’d gotten the Sudan op, so maybe there were some advantages to playing with the CIA. That is, as long as you remembered to sit with your back to the wall when you were around those boys.
    The second disadvantage was more personal. There were far, far more opportunities for his wild young SEALs to get into trouble. San Diego was just across the bay. L.A. was a short drive north. And the Mexican border and the sinful pleasures of Tijuana were just a stone’s throw to the south.
    Murdock dearly loved his job, but it was getting to the point where he was afraid to step over the quarterdeck each morningand hear what new atrocities 3rd Platoon had committed the night before. Granted, the boys were expected to blow off some