Death Blow

13

Where were those guys? Murdock stared into the glare of the early morning sunshine. Another island to the right fifty yards. He squinted. Yes, somebody was over there.

Jaybird came up. “I’ve got five more men on that next little island to the right,” Jaybird said. “Looks like it’s about flooded over. We going over there or have them come over here?”

“Here,” Murdock said.

Jaybird adjusted his Motorola. “Hey guys on that other island. If you’ve got your ears on, Skipper says come over here. See me, I’m waving.”

Jaybird had no response to his call.

“My radio is dead,” Murdock said. “How did you have time to get yours waterproofed?”

“Did that the minute I saw that MiG making his first run. I’ll go up as far as I can on this land and yell at the guys. It ain’t that far away.”

Mahanani came up. “Hey, found two more slippery SEALs. One is talking about a hurt leg, Franklin. Don’t know how bad yet. How many men we missing?”

“Still short three. They must be here somewhere. The current isn’t that strong, no downpulls.”

“Where’n hell are you guys?” Mahanani’s ear piece asked.

“Hey, I’ve got a live one here. Who is this and where are you?”

“Ostercamp you jerk. Three of us found this little reef, sandbar, whatever. We’re sitting in six inches of water but it’s easier than swimming. Where are you?”

Jaybird came running up from where he’d been up the island.

“Good count on that other island, Cap. I’ve got five over there. That makes fourteen chicks in the basket. Everyone accounted for.”

“Good, where’s DeWitt?”

“Must be on the island. They’re going to swim over here. Haven’t spotted the sand bar guys yet, but they can’t be far away. I’ll make another run down the island.”

Mahanani, Lampedusa and Howie Anderson looked at their platoon leader. “So, what the hell we do now, Skipper?”

“First we get the men together. Where are the three sandbar sitters?”

“Where are you guys on the sandbar? Can you see a big island maybe three four feet high anywhere? Probably behind you. How far downstream did you go before you got to the reef?”

“Not sure,” Ostercamp said. “Big island. Small one in front, oh yeah, now I see it. Behind us, maybe, what three hundred yards.”

“Jaybird should be showing up at your end of the island. If you can see him, give him a holler. We’ve found everybody now.”

Murdock moved down the island until he could see where his five men were swimming across the fifty yards from the other one. They came in pairs fighting the five-knot current. The last pair came slower, drifted farther downstream and Murdock saw that one man was helping the other one.

They were going to be swept by the end of the island, but Howie Anderson swam out and pulled them in. The last two were DeWitt and Will Dobler. Dobler was the one getting help. Murdock ran up to them where they both lay on the beach.

DeWitt motioned Murdock to one side. “Will must have taken some shrapnel from one of the twenties. Got him in the upper leg and doesn’t look good. We better get a couple of first aid kits off the men. Mahanani is looking at it. Not fatal, but he won’t be walking much for a while.”

“Glad to see you guys. We’ve got three fish sitting on a sand bar downstream about three hundred yards. Ostercamp and two others. They have a working radio. I took mine for a swim.”

“So what now?” DeWitt asked.

“We’re not moving downstream a hell of a lot farther,” Murdock said.” He looked around, saw Lam, and called the tracker over. “Do a quick survey of the island. Let me know what we have. Any vegetation, where it’s the driest, any concealment. Go.”

Lam took off on a trot heading for the far side of the island.

“I figure we’re still about thirty-five miles from the mouth of the Ganges,” DeWitt said. “Hope that chopper pilot doesn’t get nervous about charging into enemy territory up the river.”

“That’s what we pay him for,” Murdock said.

He rounded up the men he had and moved then down the island. Two SEALs helped as Dobler hobbled along on one foot. The land was a quarter of a mile long, maybe half that wide. There was no vegetation of any kind on this side, just mud and sand. The dry part was three to four feet above the river level. Toward the center of the island it rose to twenty-five or thirty feet. Murdock moved the men up there.

“Mahanani, contact Jaybird and see if he can spot those three sandbar guys.”

Mahanani made the radio call. He waited a minute and looked up. “Jaybird says Ostercamp has Jefferson and Khai with him. All are okay. He says they don’t want to do the swim back upstream just yet. Give them another half hour and they will join us.”

“Good. Tell Jaybird to stay there and keep in contact with them and ride herd.”

Murdock looked at the island. He moved the men to the highest point. It was dry there. They flaked out, tried to get the Ganges silt out of their ears, and dried out a little. Everyone had a weapon except Will Dobler.

Lam caught up with Murdock. “Looks like a little bit of brush and grass over on the far side about halfway down. Might be enough to conceal us if a chopper comes around. That’s about it for this bit of Bangladesh soil.”

Murdock went with Lam to take a look. By the time they made it back to the top of the island, the three reef sitters were back on dry land and telling how hard it was swimming in the grime of the Ganges against that five-knot current.

“What a bunch of wimps,” Howie bellowed. “My grandmother could swim up there and she’s ninety-two.”

Murdock called the men around and in typical SEAL fashion laid out the problem.

“You know our situation here, let’s have some input. What should we do?”

“What the hell can we do to get closer to the bay?” Jaybird asked.

“We can’t swim down forty miles with a wounded man,” DeWitt said. “No way. Dobler has the leg wound.”

“Hell I can still swim,” Dobler said.

“Yeah, and we’d have a pack of sharks following down your blood trail,” Mahanani said.

“Our Motorolas are good for maybe five miles,” Howie said. “Oh, shit. I left the SATCOM on the boat. It’s long gone by now.”

Murdock scowled. “Next mission I’m gonna staple the fucking SATCOM to your ears. So, the SATCOM is out. Next I want everybody to make a hide hole here in this brush. It isn’t much, but better than raw sand. Get a spot fixed so you can go invisible at fifty feet. You know the drill. Let’s do it now, and hope that we don’t need it. Be thinking on this small situation we’re in.”

The SEALs moved ten feet apart and scraped out foliage, leaves, and dirt until they could lie down, and cover themselves with the material, leaving only their faces showing. To those they applied new steaks of wet mud to break up the visual image.

They were done in ten minutes.

“Now, any new ideas,” Murdock called. Murdock was next to Dobler and had helped him with his hole.

“The obvious,” Jaybird said. “We wait for that forty-six to come and spot us.”

“Play stranded and lure a boat over and capture it,” Jefferson said.

“Yeah, the place is just teeming with traffic this morning,” Howie snapped.

“Send our two best swimmers downstream, maybe with a float log, and watch for the chopper, and guide it back up here.” Mahanani said it. He was the best swimmer in the platoon.

“Find some native girls and settle down on our island and grow pineapple and sugarcane?” Canzoneri asked with a grin.

“I’m for that one,” Bradford yelped.

“Back to business,” Murdock said. “At least my watch works. We send one waterproofed Motorola with the swimmers. It’s almost eleven hundred. We should have seen that chopper by now.”

“Must be a dozen good-size channels branching off the Ganges,” DeWitt said. “The pilot could have picked any one of them and been wrong.”

Lam stood and looked to the north. “Chopper coming, moving quickly.”

“Let’s hit our holes, men. No firing. Weapons undercover as well as usual. Go down, now.”

The SEALs vanished into the brushy area where the tallest of the growth was only three feet. They waited. Murdock had his face almost covered, but he could see out a hole to the south. It was a chopper like the last one, two rotors, and could have troops inside. It moved slowly forward, pausing at each small island. He hoped the bird was high enough so the downdraft from the rotors wouldn’t blow away their camouflage.

It moved closer. The SEALs remained motionless. Then in a burst it was over their island working one side, then back up the side where the SEALs lay. Murdock saw a door gunner waving his machine gun around. He didn’t fire. The chopper hovered over the patch of brush but at more than a hundred feet so the rotor blast wasn’t enough to move the sand and leaves.

It hesitated again, then moved on to the end of the island and back down the other side.

“Footprints in the sand,” somebody said. “We must have left a batch of them along the shore.”

“They didn’t see them, or didn’t believe them,” DeWitt said. “Let’s get up, should be safe now.”

Before he finished saying it, a jet fighter blasted overhead. It was more than five hundred feet and Murdock knew the pilot couldn’t see them, still he ducked down again and waited.

“Just what we need, some damn MiG to find our forty-six and blow it out of the sky with a rocket,” Mahanani said.

The SEALs came out of their holes slowly.

Murdock looked downstream, then to the north. “We don’t have much choice,” he said. “We move two swimmers downstream. Take a radio, check with us at five miles and we’ll see if we can receive. We’ll keep a Motorola on here while you’re gone. Find that damn CH-forty-six for us.”

Mahanani peeled out of his webbing and shirt. The sun came down like a warm blanket. The others were sweating. Mahanani looked around, waved at Howie. “Get your gear off, sailor. Let’s see if you can swim.”

Howie yelped and pulled off his webbing and shirt. “Boots, too?” he asked.

Murdock shook his head. “Better keep them on for protection. They aren’t that heavy. Stay near the shore and you might find a log you can use for a float. Five knots drifting with the current is good, don’t push it.

“No weapons,” Murdock said. “Unless you have hideout revolvers. Take no chances. If you find the forty-six, use one of the flares in your pants knee pockets. Then come get us. If he misses you, and finds us, we come get you. The flare again. Questions?”

“Civilians?” Howie asked.

“Keep clear. Don’t think you’ll see any people out here unless they have a boat. Still stay clear.”

The two pushed into the water and stroked evenly into the current and let it take them downstream. Within five minutes they were out of sight.

“Stay near the brush,” Murdock said. “We don’t want any surprises. Nothing we can do. Will, how is that leg?”

“Hurts like hell, Skipper. Damned if I know how I got it. Must have been kicking on the surface at just the wrong time and in the fucking wrong place.”

“You get some morphine?”

“Not yet. We don’t have much. One ampoule in each aid kit. I’ll wait until I really need it.”

DeWitt came over and sat down in the leaves. “What a mess. How did we get into this one?”

“We must have volunteered. Just glad we didn’t have any of the embassy people on that second bird when the Chicoms got the range.”

They looked at each other. Both thinking about the same thing. Was this the fucked up mission that was going to wipe out the whole platoon? Murdock drove that idea out of his head. He checked over the men. They were doing fine so far. No food for eighteen hours or more. Water would be the big need, and soon. So far they had toughed it out. Who needed canteens on a four-hour mission?

He deliberately thought about something else. Something pleasant, fun, beautiful. Which brought Ardith Jane Manchester to mind. Oh, yeah. She had been one of the really fine bits of life to happen to him so far. Tall and blond and svelte and sexy as all hell. Oh, yeah. A smart woman, a lawyer on her senator father’s staff in D.C. Yeah, and maybe moving up to a better spot as some department or cabinet officer’s assistant. Or maybe just yank her out of D.C. with a wedding ring and bring her out to Coronado and let her play with some free legal clinic for the Chicanos, blacks, and Asians. She would go for that. Had they talked about it? Dozens of times. He wondered what she was thinking of right now.

“High and dry, this is Wet Two with a friendly log moving downstream,” Jaybird’s Motorola came to life. “Figure we’re four miles plus. Do you copy?” The sound of the Motorola filled the brushy area.

“Read fives, buddies,” Jaybird said. “Keep floating. Bring us back a big fucking, hairy assed chopper.”

“Amen to that bro. We’re moving again. No more transmissions. Don’t see any people, no boats, no planes, but then no hungry sharks either. We’re out of here.”

“Good swimming, guys.”

Five miles down and no chopper. Where the hell was that bird? Murdock tried to get his mind back on Ardith, but somehow it wouldn’t turn on. He thought about their situation. Damn bad. He thought about their chances. All depended on that one lone forty-six they hoped was coming. It had been arranged. Yeah, they had set it up, so where was he? Range was right, should be no enemy action on the water or around the multiple mouths of this hundred mile wide delta of the Ganges.

Wrong mouth? Yeah. He wondered how many of the channels the bird had been working up and then back down. How long for a forty-six to fly forty miles? Sixteen minutes as Murdock remembered.

Damn it to hell, where was that chopper?

Lam heard it first, a faint hum that grew from the north and became louder.

“Boat, Skipper,” Lam said. “Coming this way fast.”

“All of us back in our holes, and keep your weapons locked and loaded so you can lift up and fire when I bellow. This one could get sticky if the boat has troops and they are searching the islands. They might be looking for that chopper crew or the patrol boat crew. Then again, they could be searching for us.

“We stay covered up from right now until all problems are past. If we have to lift and shoot, Alpha Squad take the beached boat and riddle it. Bravo work on the search party. Should be a barrel of laughs. Or it might be a boat traveling downstream and not even wondering about this island.”

The boat came closer. Murdock lifted slightly so he could see it. A patrol boat, forty footer, maybe. Would need a small boat to get men ashore. Yeah, that big a craft was damn bad news. Where the hell was that chopper?