Bloodstorm

8

Murdock heard DeWitt’s warning and shouted at the driver. “Stop this thing and put it crossways in the road. Everybody out, take your gear.

“Kat, set your timer on a bomb for three minutes and let’s all haul ass. Move, move, move. We’ve got about forty-five seconds left. Go to the left of the road. Move.”

Ostercamp stopped, then pulled the APC crossways in the narrow road. The back hatch on the APC burst open and bodies flew out of it in all directions. Kat put a timer/detonator in three charges of TNAZ and set the timer for three minutes. Then she jumped out of the rig, charged across the road to the left, and kept running. Most of the SEALs were fifty yards ahead of her.

Jaybird had slowed, and waved as she came up. They sprinted together the hundred yards to where the SEALs had all gone to ground behind whatever concealment they could find.

Behind them on the road, the two tanks lumbered forward in the darkness. The lead tank came within thirty yards of the APC and slowed, then stopped. The top hatch opened and a man leaned out, staring ahead.

Slowly the tank crept forward until it nudged the Russian-built APC.

Three minutes on the timer elapsed. The TNAZ blew with a resounding crack like an artillery shell going off. The APC shattered into scrap metal flying in all directions. The lead tank jolted backward from the blast, then tipped to one side until it rolled over.

“Let’s move, people,” Murdock said into his Motorola. The SEALs stood and jogged away from the blast at a right angle, putting all the distance they could between them and the pools of fuel burning in the roadway where the APC used to be.

A mile from the blast, Murdock called a halt and looked at his compass. “East is to the right,” he said. “Lam, out in front fifty, keep us to the east, and we should find the wet.”

“How far?” somebody asked.

“From five to fifty miles,” Murdock said. “Your guess is as good as mine. We’ll never get there just talking about it.”

They moved out in their usual diamond formation, with Lam in front by fifty yards, then Murdock and his Alpha Squad, with DeWitt and Bravo right behind them. Ron Holt, with the SATCOM radio, walked behind Murdock. The SEALs maintained a five-yard distance between each other in the best combat tradition. A lucky grenade, mortar round, or burst of enemy fire would get only one or maybe two men. If they were bunched up, shoulder to armpit, a lucky round could wipe out a whole squad.

They were in the country now, with few buildings. It was the coastal plain, and semiarid, but here and there they came to cultivated fields. Murdock could not figure out what they were growing. It looked like some kind of grain, but he wasn’t sure. They swung wide past a village that was dark and quiet. Only two dogs greeted them as they hurried by.

They had lost the blacktopped road, and now they found few others. They were mostly dirt and gravel tracks that had no traffic this time of night. For more than two hours of hiking they saw only one motor vehicle, an old farm truck of questionable vintage parked beside a weather-worn farmhouse.

Murdock stopped the men. “Lam, you hear anything?” he asked on the radio.

“Yeah, for the past five minutes. We’re moving right toward the sounds. I’d say about four heavy trucks on a road ahead somewhere.”

“Military?”

“My guess. Who else would be out this time of night with four heavy trucks in the country?”

“We’re still heading east and a little north. Any sign of the coast?”

“Nada.”

“Figures. Let’s move up until we can see what those trucks are hauling.”

“Hey, Skipper, the trucks stopped. Dead ahead, maybe two miles.”

“Exploding that bomb was a signpost pointing directly at us, but it had to be done,” Murdock said. “We live with it.”

“Want me to move out and see what those trucks are?” Lam asked.

“Yeah, Lam. Go. Double-time it and let’s see what this is all about. We’ll come along at the usual pace.”

“Roger that, Skipper.”

Kat moved up beside Murdock. “At least this is easier than last time.”

“So far. We’re not out of this one yet. Then what about finding those other missiles? Say China grabbed them or bought them. They sold this one to Libya. Maybe they sold another one to Iraq and one to Iran and one to Afghanistan. Are we going to have to chase down all of them?”

“Never thought of it that way,” Kat said. “I figured that if China was the buyer from some lowlife in Ukraine, they would keep most of the warheads for themselves. They could chop out the nukes and dump the missiles in the Mediterranean and make it a lot easier to get the bombs back home. Fly them even.”

“Now you’re getting me worried,” Murdock said. “Thanks a lot. So we either have to take down that Chinese freighter or find out who the Chinese sold the other missiles to.”

“We’ll have some help on that one.” She took a deep breath, and Murdock looked over at her. “At least I haven’t had to kill anybody on this mission.”

“Not yet,” Murdock said. “You’re not quite recovered from that walk in Iran, are you?”

She looked at him and shook her head. “No, I don’t think I will ever forget it, forget how I felt right afterwards.”

“You did what you had to do, what we had trained you to do, and it worked. Saving my life was a bonus — for me.”

She flashed him a smile. “That was what helped me get through the first month or so.”

Murdock’s radio earpiece came on with a whisper.

“Skip, I’m here and I don’t believe it. They are Army trucks and six or eight soldiers. They seem to be in charge of more than a hundred civilians. All have some kind of a firearm, an old rifle, a pistol, a carbine. Looks like a home guard of some kind. They have spread out in a line of skirmishers maybe a half mile wide.”

“So, we go around them,” Murdock said.

“Not that easy, Skip. There’s a bluff on one side here and on the other side a good-sized village. The valley we’re in now funnels in here. Nowhere to go around.”

“Are they moving forward or in place?”

“They seem to be just sitting here, waiting. A blocking force. Do we have to shoot up a bunch of civilians? I mean, Skip, these are old men and boys, and I’m sure I’ve seen a dozen or so women in the group, all with guns.”

“Hold there and we’ll be up to you soon and figure it out. Any trees around there?”

“Yeah, some on the bluff and around the town. Not much in between.”

“Roger. We’re moving.”

Kat shivered. “Civilians up there? Murdock, I don’t like the sound of this. Are we going to have to shoot our way through them? Old men and boys and women?”

“Not if there’s another way. Come on, Kat. Stay hard for me here. We’re going to need you.”

Five minutes later Murdock and DeWitt crawled the last fifty feet on hands and knees to a small rise. Ahead of them, less than half a mile, they could see three Army trucks and a line of people. Both officers used binoculars.

“Civilians, all right,” DeWitt said. “In a good blocking position.”

Lam lay in the sand beside them. “Since we talked, another truck came, a civilian one, and dumped out twenty more old men and boys with weapons, then headed back to the village.”

“The soldiers, are they spread out to command the troops?” DeWitt asked.

“That’s what it looked like.”

“Diversion,” Murdock said. He turned his binoculars, and then used night-vision goggles and checked the bluff to the left.

“Yeah. We’ll have three of our Bull Pups put airbursts over those trees on the end of the bluff. Four rounds per gun and keep the muzzle flashes hidden so the people out front won’t know where the rounds came from. That could pull a bunch of the civilians and soldiers out of the line and moving that way to reinforce.”

“Might work,” Lam said.

“Ed, get back to the men and put those rounds into that bluff. Then bring the rest of the people up here.”

Four minutes later, Murdock heard the first explosion over the bluff and saw the rounds going off. He could hear chatter below as the civilians and their Army trainers talked it over. One section of the line directly in front of the SEALs swung to the left, moving toward the bluff. Another section of the line jogged in the same direction.

Murdock grinned as the rest of the SEALs ran up beside them.

“We have everyone?” Murdock asked. The men checked in on the radio network.

“All present,” Ed said.

“Let’s move down there through that gap,” Murdock said. “Everyone with suppressors put them on. We don’t want to let them know we’re here if we don’t have to. Move out.”

They jogged forward in a line twenty yards wide, ignoring the five-yard rule this time. Murdock was slightly ahead, and as they came to the spot where the Libyans had been, he checked the area carefully. He spotted the trucks and a driver leaning against the fender. Murdock lifted his submachine gun and put three rounds into the man, who cried out and fell to the ground.

Just to Murdock’s right another figure lifted up and fired a shot. It missed Murdock. Before he could swing his weapon around, he heard the pffhitts of three rounds from a sub gun, and the Libyan shooter spun around and sprawled on the ground in the faint moonlight.

Murdock looked to his right and saw Kat lower her weapon. In the moonlight her face showed as a mask of tension and terror. He grabbed her by one arm and they ran forward.

“God, did you see that?” Kat asked, her voice raspy, and she sounded almost in tears. “Did you see that? The shooter back there was a woman. That woman tried to shoot you, Murdock. So I killed her. I shot her three times and she looked up at me. I’ll never forget that expression of anger, and pain, and terror. I just reacted. I saw her shoot at you and I didn’t know it was a woman and I fired. Oh, God, I never wanted to kill anybody else. Damn you, Murdock!”

“Good, yeah, my fault. Now let’s move our asses or one of us is going to get hurt out here in the dark.”

The SEALs charged on through the spot, and were a quarter of a mile away before the civilian army realized it had been tricked and began working forward after the SEALs.

It was no contest. Murdock told Lam to head the SEALs due north. The Mediterranean had to be up there somewhere.

Murdock kept watching Kat. She stayed up with them. She looked angry, yet resigned. It was another traumatic shock for her, but she’d come through it. He checked with Lam on the Motorola, but there was no sign or indication they were any closer to the water than they had been two hours ago.

He checked his watch. It was 0220. They had another four hours, maybe five to dawn. Was there time enough to get to the water and be picked up?

The SEALs jogged again. They had systematically lightened their drag bags when the need for the equipment was gone. After they found out the missile was in the warehouse, not the ship, they’d dumped the heavyweight limpet mines they had for the ship. Later they’d dropped the extra explosives and gear they had brought in case they had to open a missile. Now they were down to their combat vests, usual personal weapons, and regular issue of TNAZ.

Twenty minutes later they came over a small rise and saw a road ahead with moving traffic.

Murdock sniffed and grinned. “I can smell salt air. Can’t be far now.”

They moved down to the road and ran across it when there was no traffic, and just beyond some dunes they could hear the light surf of the Mediterranean slapping the Libyan shore. They could see no troops or transport for troops up or down the beach.

“Holt, crank up that SATCOM, let’s do some Navy business.”

It took three tries to contact the Pegasus offshore. The boat had just arrived on station. The time was 0315.

“What’s your position, SEALs?”

“We have no idea. No road signs. Wait a minute. Ed may have a Mugger.”

He did, and they used the locator device to talk to four satellites and give them their location by coordinates. Ron sent the coordinates to the Pegasus.

“How did you get twenty miles down the coast from Tripoli, SEALs? We’ll be off your location in ten minutes. How far out will you come?”

“Ten minutes’ worth, or enough for a half mile,” Murdock said.

The SEALs stowed their Motorolas in their waterproof pockets, slung their weapons over their backs, and walked into the Mediterranean.

Murdock tied his buddy cord to Kat. She looked up and took a deep breath. “Murdock, we’ve got to stop meeting this way. Every time that I’m around you I wind up killing somebody. I don’t like this one bit.”

“Let’s go for a swim and forget about it. I promise you won’t even have to fire your weapon again.” Murdock frowned when he looked away. He sincerely hoped that he was right.