Seal Team Seven Read Online Free PDF Page A

screen was a SEAL op. A twenty-five-year veteran, he’d started out with SEAL Two in Vietnam. Now he was the commanding officer of SEAL Seven, an elite and highly classified unit organized into four platoons of fourteen men each.
    The room’s lights were out, and watchers’ faces were illuminated by the eerie phosphor glow of the screen. In the background, a whispering murmur of many voices could be heard, the relayed comments of aircraft pilots and of the SEALs themselves as they spoke to one another over their tactical radios. Operation Blue Sky was a large and complex mission, one involving far more assets than just the SEAL platoon now on the ground.
    The scene on the television monitor was a bird’s-eye view of an airport; a large, four-engine aircraft, seen from almost directly overhead where it sat on the runway, was clearly visible. The points of light moving toward it were antlike in comparison.
    But Coburn felt a thrill as he watched the screen. Those were his men moving like shadows across the television monitor. God, how he wanted to be with them!
    â€œFeeling your age, Phil?” a soft voice murmured at his side.
    â€œStuff it, Paul,” he whispered back, and the other man grinned in the darkness.
    Captain Paul Mason was Coburn’s single friend and confidant in the room, and another veteran of the Teams in Nam. A training injury had knocked Mason out of the jump and PT quals twelve years back, though he still thought of himself as a SEAL. The Teams were like that. Once you were one of them, you never left, no matter what your current duty assignment might be. Now Mason was a staff officer, serving as a voice for the Teams with USSOCOM, the U.S. Special Operations Command that managed all SPECWAR groups, including the Army Special Forces and Delta Force, as well as the Navy SEALs.
    Shared experience had made the two men friends. Mason was no longer qualified as a SEAL, while Coburn, though he’d maintained his quals over the years with a fiercely dedicated daily regimen of running, exercise, and workouts, was stuck behind a desk. His last field assignment had been Grenada, and at fifty years of age he could feel the inner clock ticking away. Damn it , he thought, staring at the monitor. I should be there, not nursemaiding a bunch of suits and flags in a Fort Fumble basement!
    â€œI’m still not sure what the hell I’m seeing,” a Navy admiral complained. His name was Thomas Bainbridge, and he was the commanding officer of NAVSPECWARGRU-Two, the Little Creek-based headquarters of the East Coast SEALs.
    â€œReal-time thermal imaging, Admiral,” Mason said smoothly. “Computer-enhanced and corrected to give a steady image from a single angle. Right now our Aurora is circling above Shuaba at ninety thousand feet . . . so high up you couldn’t even see it from the ground in broad daylight, much less in the middle of the night. Its scanning infrared sensors are incredibly sensitive. What you’re seeing is the body heat from our SEALs as they deploy for the assault. This lone guy here on the control tower is probably an Iraqi soldier. These white glows up here look like warm engines, probably a couple of jeeps parked there in the past couple of hours. And . . . looks like four more guards by the jeeps.”
    â€œThere they go,” an Air Force general said, pointing to the left side of the screen. “Can you get a close-up of that?”
    A computer technician typed several characters, and the image on the screen changed, zeroing in on four ghostly shapes moving with short, leapfrogging rushes across the dark blue ground toward a cluster of green buildings. Three other shapes remained in place in the rear. Close inspection revealed one of them to be a man bracing a dark, elongated object atop a low hill.
    That would be the team’s sniper.
    â€œThe detail is absolutely amazing,” an Army colonel remarked.
    â€œWelcome to the twenty-first