Lieutenant Homer Dodds stuck his head out the side jump door of the chopper and peered down. The two vessels looked peaceful enough, he thought as a crewman stepped from the pilothouse and waved a greeting. Nothing unusual or suspicious. The armament he had been warned about was not visible.

He spoke into a microphone. "Have you established radio contact?"

"We've hailed on every marine frequency in the book and they don't answer," replied the pilot from the cockpit.

"Okay, drop us over the barge.

Roger.

Dodds picked up a bullhorn and spoke into the mouthpiece.

"Ahoy, the towboat. This is the U.S. Navy. Reduce speed and slow to a stop. We are coming aboard."

Below, the crewman cupped hands to his ears and shook his head, signaling he couldn't hear above the exhaust whine of the helicopter's turbines. Dodds repeated the message and the crewman made an inviting wave of his arm. By now Dodds was close enough to see he was an Oriental.

The speed of the towboat and barge dropped off, and they began to roll in the swells. The pilot of the helicopter played the wind and hovered over the flat deck of the barge in preparation for Dodds's assault team to jump the final three or four feet.

Dodds turned and took a final look at his men. They were lean and hard, and probably the toughest, raunchiest, meanest bunch of multipurpose killers in the Navy. They were the only group of men Dobbs ever commanded who genuinely liked combat. They were eager, their weapons at the ready and prepared for anything.

Except, perhaps, for total surprise.

The copter was only ten feet above the barge when trapdoors were sprung on the towboat, hatch covers thrown back and twenty crewmen opened up with Steyr-Mannlichef AUG assault carbines ' The .223-caliber shells flew into the SEALS from all directions; smoke and the grunts of men being hit erupted simultaneously.

Dodds and his men reacted savagely, cutting down any towboat crewman who exposed himself, but bullets sprayed into their cramped compartment as if concentrated out of a firehose and turned it into a slaughter den. There was no escape. They were as helpless as if their backs were against the wall of a dead-end alley.

The noise of the concentrated firepower drowned out the sound of the helicopter's exhaust. The pilot was hit in the first burst, which exploded the canopy, hurling bits of metal and Plexiglas throughout the cockpit. The chopper shuddered and veered sharply around on its axis.

The co-pilot wrestled with the controls but they had lost all response.