Seal Team Seven by Keith Douglass Page B

in this new era of government fiscal responsibility,” he’d continued, “that those of you who finish this course— if any of you finish this course—are truly the elite, the very best men in body and spirit we can produce. In short, ladies, SEALs.
    â€œOf course, I very much doubt that any of you have what it takes to be SEALs. . . .”
    It was a canned speech, one that Murdock had delivered numberless times before to numberless SEAL recruits. He’d been stationed with the Training Division at Coronado for almost two years now.
    When, he wondered, was he going to get his transfer? He wanted a combat platoon, had been applying for one for the past six months. He strongly suspected that the dread hand of his father was somehow involved.
    Blake Murdock had been a SEAL for five years now, but he was one of the unlikeliest SEALs in the Teams. Eldest son of a wealthy Virginia family that had gone into politics three generations ago, he’d long since grown tired of the questions leveled at him almost every time he came aboard a new duty station. “Murdock? Are you any relation to Charles Murdock?”
    â€œYes,” he would always answer, a little wearily when he admitted to it at all. “He’s my father.”
    Blake had grown up on the rambling Murdock estate outside Front Royal, half a mile from the banks of the slow-flowing Shenandoah. He’d attended local private schools, then Exeter, with the clear expectation that he would go on to Harvard, followed by a career in law or politics. Indeed, from the very beginning he’d had the feeling that his entire future, from school to marriage to career to internment in the St. John’s Episcopal family vaults, all had been carefully planned out with all the care and attention to detail of a well-crafted military campaign.
    Murdock knew exactly when he’d begun wanting more, needing more than the stuffy wood paneling and elitist snobbery of Exeter’s hallowed halls. It had been during the summer before his senior year, when he’d somehow ended up in the mountains of Colorado with an Outward Bound group. At school he’d been a star track and field man, as well as making first string on the football team, and he’d thought he was in pretty good shape, but a summer of long hikes, rugged climbing, and orienteering through the Rockies had convinced him otherwise.
    And, of course, that was where he’d met Susan.
    His parents had never quite accepted her. She’d been Jewish, for one thing, and for another she came from a military family. Her girlhood had been spent growing up in such diverse places as Yokosuka, Subic Bay, and Pearl Harbor; her father had been a Marine gunnery sergeant who’d lost a leg at Da Nang, her oldest brother a Navy chief stationed aboard an attack sub.
    Not exactly the sort of people the Murdocks could easily seat at a dinner party with the landed gentry of Warren County at their Front Royal estate, or worse, at the Chevy Chase Country Club inside the Washington Beltway.
    By the time he’d graduated from Exeter, he’d decided that he didn’t want any part of Harvard, and Susan had had a lot to do with that decision. Certainly, Outward Bound had generated in Blake a fierce and burning need to keep proving himself physically, and in more challenging ways than joining Harvard’s football or track teams.
    His parents had not been happy with his decision to join the Marines. There’d been considerable discussion on the matter, ending at last, in the best tradition of Washington politics, in compromise. Blake would attend Annapolis and become an officer in the U.S. Navy.
    That would never have been possible, of course, without the direct intervention of his father, Congressman Charles Fitzhugh Murdock, former Virginia state legislator and a three-term member of the House of Representatives. A member of the House Military Affairs Committee, the elder Murdock had