Death Blow

25

With the first muzzle blast from the machine gun, four SEALs fired with their twenties. The machine gun rounds splattered into the rocks around the SEALs. Three of the four twenties hit the bird and exploded on impact. The gunner slumped over his 30 caliber before he could fire again. One 20mm round detonated inside the cockpit, shattering the instruments, killing the pilot and sending the craft into a whirling and gyrating dance as it dove power on into the ground and exploded fifty feet from the SEALs.

“Any casualties?” DeWitt asked on the Motorola.

“Only the Chicoms in the fucking chopper,” Jaybird chirped. “That was a big bird, a lot like our forty-sixes. Must be used for transporting troops. So I wonder where they are?”

“Yeah, Lieutenant, I’m not exactly a casualty, but I’ve got me a little scratch,” Guns Franklin said, his voice missing its usual twang.

“On it,” Mahanani said. He lifted from the ground and looked around for Franklin. He was at the edge of the group. The medic ran to him and knelt in front of Franklin. He couldn’t see any blood.

“Where, buddy?”

“Arm, a ricochet I’d guess. Fucker hurts like my arm was blown off.”

Mahanani saw some blood then, halfway up Franklin’s left forearm. He peeled back the cammy shirt gently.

“Yeah, just a scratch, Guns. About three inches long and to the bone. Gonna need some stitches in there. I’ll use some butterfly bandages to pull it together.”

Mahanani dumped antiseptic on the wound, then pulled it together and bound the whole thing with a roller bandage.

“There you go, Guns. You want a morphine?”

“Hell, no, just a damn scratch.”

“Fit for duty, Commander, and ready to roll,” Franklin said to his lip mike.

“Yeah, we better move,” Murdock said. “If there’s any more Chicom air in the area, this burning chopper is another damn signal flare to them where we are. Let’s choggie.”

They hiked.

Lam kept them on a generally western course, heading into the closest friendly territory, the Sikkim area of India. Murdock wondered if there would be any border guards. India and China had never been on good terms. Now with the overflights and the shoot downs, tensions could be running high. Even so, he figured that border guards up in this remote most northern part of India were unlikely.

They moved out for an hour down the small valley, then had to go up and over another ridge when the valley turned south. They were on the side slope with no vegetation at all when they heard a jet plane.

“Down and don’t move,” Murdock barked into the Motorola. “We don’t know where he is or if he’s coming this way. We play it safe.”

They waited for five minutes.

The jet sound faded and was gone.

The SEALs moved again to the west.

Murdock couldn’t help but think about the pilot on the first 46 that bugged out on them. It was mortar fire, not pinpoint target shooting. Chances were that the bird would not have been hit at all, even with a fire-for-effect, six-round salvo from the Chicom mortar men. A mortar is an area weapon, not a direct targeting one.

When they got out of here, Murdock was going to make every effort to contact that pilot in person and take him apart verbally and physically if possible. The bastard had run out on them. Yellow-bellied out, and Murdock would have some satisfaction.

“You never leave your men behind in combat.”

It was a principle that every officer had to commit to. This fucking pilot chickened out and flew away when the first mortar round hit. Murdock let his anger rage as he walked along. He was going to write up a scathing letter of objection, critical and asking for a reprimand, a letter in the officer’s permanent personnel file, and a court-martial if possible.

Murdock came out of his reverie with sound in his earpiece.

“Looks like some trouble up ahead,” Lam said.

“What?” Murdock asked.

“Not sure, come on up, skipper and take a look.”

Murdock called a halt and put the men down, then moved up to where Lam lay at the top of the ridge looking down the reverse slope.

“A blocking force?” Lam asked.

Murdock looked down in the small valley. Six hundred yards ahead he saw six wall tents, cooking fires, a dozen men moving around the tents, and a squad of eight lined up in front of the area for an inspection or getting ready to go out on patrol.

“Infantry, for damn sure,” Murdock said.

“Bet they have patrols out blocking every possible route through this area,” Lam said. “There could be fifty to seventy-five troops in that camp.”

“So we don’t tangle with them,” Murdock said. “Even with the twenties, because we don’t know where all of their men are. Let’s not make the ones not in camp mad. We work around and through them, and hope we get a break.”

Murdock looked around. “Best bet is we go down this ridge to the valley, up the other side and over that ridge. Gives us about a mile away from the camp. Then we work west and watch for any ambush patrols just sitting there waiting for somebody to walk into their traps. We also look for roving patrols and individual sentries. With that many men they can flood this area.”

Before either of them could move they heard a jet passing over them and thundering away to the west, then it turned north.

“Never hear those suckers until they go by you when they’re that close,” Lam said. “Think he saw us?”

“No. He was looking at the camp down there. Checking on it. Probably in radio contact with them for any help they might need. We better get moving.”

It took the SEALs almost an hour to get away from the Chinese camp and into the next ravine-like small valley and back on their way to the west.

Murdock wondered how long the Chicoms had been in that blocking position. If they had just arrived by chopper, they might not have a lot of patrols out yet. His platoon might get lucky and slip through.

Lam edged up to the lip of another ridge and looked over. They had to go down the other side and across a larger valley with the hint of a stream in the bottom. In the center of the valley beside the now-dry streambed, stood a tree. In the shade of the tree sat six Chinese soldiers, evidently taking a break and eating from their rice rolls that usually were slung over their shoulders.

“Skipper, our luck ran out. We’ve got a six-man patrol up here on our route.”

Murdock hurried up to the spot and looked over.

“Looks like they will be there for a while. Can you see any radios?”

“Nope. Check it with your Pup scope.”

Murdock put the scope on the six and shook his head. “No radio, but a few twenty rounds could be heard in here for five miles.”

“Skipper, don’t look like we can go round this one without backtracking four or five miles. I’ve been watching this ridge to our right. That’s the way we’d have to go. It’s a sheer cliff two hundred feet high. Not a rat’s ass chance we can get up it. We go through these guys or we backtrack a mile out of sight and try to go past them on the left. Which I don’t recommend.”

“Done,” Murdock said. “DeWitt, take a look at this,” Murdock said in his Motorola.

The tall, slender (j.g.) came up to the spot and swore when he saw the patrol. “They settled down there to keep house for a month or so?”

“Looks like it. No chance to go around them on the right. We could go back a mile and try to get past them on the left.”

“More Chicoms over there, it’s a bet,” DeWitt said. “Hell, we have to go through them and then run like hell west before the rest of those Chicoms come boiling in here to see who’s shooting.”

“Agreed. We move up the ridge to the closest spot to the patrol, then do it.”

It took them fifteen minutes to move along the side of the ridge to the spot Lam had picked for the attack. They spread out five yards apart and set up. The Chinese patrol had finished eating and the men were sitting around waiting. The targets were less than two hundred yards away.

“Fire on my command. Ten seconds should do it. All weapons. Ready… fire.”

The fourteen weapons cracked, chattered and blasted. The machine gun belted out six-round bursts. The twenties exploded on contact riddling the standing and sitting Chinese infantry. Two crawled behind rocks and returned fire, but they didn’t seem sure where the rounds came from. Murdock saw one of the men hiding behind a rock and lasered a round and fired. It exploded ten feet over the rock shredding the back side of the hiding spot with deadly shrapnel.

Twelve seconds into the firing, Murdock called a cease-fire.

Only one Chinese soldier still stood. He raised his rifle, then fell flat on his face.

“Let’s move, people,” Murdock said. “Down the slope through that little valley and up the other side before our Chicom friends get some support. Go, go, go.”

Murdock trotted down the easy slope with the others, double-timed across the small valley edging around the dead Chinese. One of them lifted a pistol and took six SEAL rounds in his chest.

Murdock used the mike as he jogged along. “Okay, logic time. This last hit means the Chicoms will figure out in about twenty seconds where we’re headed. Not sure how much farther we have to go, but even if it’s two miles, it gives them plenty of time and space to set up a surprise for us. How?”

“Send in a pair of choppers with troops to cover four or five of the valleys we may use,” Lam said.

“Could, what else?

“Same choppers could bring in a small tank?” Jaybird asked. “They have birds big enough to lift that much?”

“Unknown. Other ideas.”

“A pair of chopper gunships, like our Cobra. The kind built for strafing and rocketing ground targets. They would know to stay out of range of our twenties.”

“Yeah,” Murdock said. “Three ideas that could happen. So now we work on ways to counter all three of them. So work on them, and in the meantime we blast our way over this fucking ridge and get out of eyesight of the bodies back there. That’s in case they have any sub-five-minute mile runners on their Chicom teams.”

They soon topped the ridge and worked at a slower pace down the far side. Again it was slab rock, some decomposed granite and a little more sparse growth of grass and a bush here and there.

“Lam, how far have we come since we turned west,” DeWitt asked on the mike.

“Six, maybe eight miles,” Lam said.

“So, if we only had ten to twelve to go, we could be within two to four miles of the border.”

“Hell of a long choggie when a hundred bastards are shooting at you,” Howie Anderson said.

They worked down a two-mile-long razor-thin valley that had a dry streambed in the bottom. More growth showed now, with a scattering of brush along the streambed.

Thirty minutes after topping the ridge line, they were though the valley and moving up another ridge. Lam edged to the top and stared over it. Then he stood and waved them forward. They were halfway down the slope before they saw the two camouflaged Chinese armored personnel carriers. Both moved out and machine guns on the hatches pivoted toward the SEALs.

“Scatter,” Murdock bellowed and the SEALs darted different directions until they were twenty yards apart. They hit the ground, and at once the heavy machine gun fire came their way.

“What the hell, Skipper,” Jaybird barked. “Our twenties won’t touch those babies.”

“About the size of our V-three hundred Commando APCs,” Anderson said. “Which means they could have ten troops inside each one.”

“Bull Pups, dig out your armor-piercing rounds and load five in the mag. Then let’s see what we can do. Sound off when you’re loaded and ready.”

Forty seconds later the five men with Bull Pups were ready.

The enemy machine guns chattered again. They were heavy, fifties, Murdock decided. Big enough to tear a man’s arm off at the shoulder.

“Fire two rounds of twenty each,” Murdock said. He sighted in without the laser and fired. Worked the sight and fired again. Murdock watched the target through his six-power scope. He saw two of the rounds hit and explode with no penetration. One jolted through a viewport and must have exploded inside. The vehicle veered off course and came to a stop.

“One lucky hit,” Murdock said on the mike. “What do we do with the other one?”

“I’m hit,” a SEAL shrilled in his lip mike.

“Who?” Murdock asked.

“Canzoneri. Caught a splatter of one of their rounds off a rock. Not too bad. I won’t be running any marathons for a while.”

“Mahanani, can you get to Canzoneri?”

“Roger that, Skipper.”

The armored personnel came closer. “She’s at six hundred yards,” Ed DeWitt said. “Bull Pups, work the treads. If she turns left or right, get on the side of the treads. If not, hit them head on.”

The twenties spoke again and again, but the APC plowed ahead over the hard ground and flat rock.

“Who has the EAR?” Murdock asked.

“On my back,” Ostercamp said.

“Charge it and get ready to try for any kind of a port that thing has. Fire when you’re ready. Aim at the nose of it where there could be concealed ports. We might get a lucky bounce.”

“Cap, we’ve got ten grunts out of that first APC. They’re moving up,” Jaybird said.

“Seven hundred yards. Bradford and I will go at them with our Pups, rest of your stay on the baby tank.”

Murdock sighted in, lasered and fired. Bradford fired about the same time. Murdock sighted in again as the rounds hit. Four of the Chinese went down. He fired again and so did Bradford. This time three more men slammed into the ground and didn’t move. The last three men ran behind the dead personnel carrier.

Murdock heard the familiar whoosh of the EAR. They had used it effectively at four hundred yards. He wasn’t sure if it would reach out five hundred. The EAR blast sent up a gout of dirt and dust well in front of the tank. Short.

“Wait on the EAR until the APC gets to four hundred yards, then fire five times.”

“Roger that, Skipper.”

Murdock had been sighting in on the APC. It suddenly hit some glazed rock and one tread slipped slewing it almost sideways. Four Pups barked and rounds slammed into the tread rollers and exploded. One had been an AP round, which bored through some linkage and then exploded. The APC came back on line for the SEALs but the left track wasn’t working right. It kept turning the carrier off course to the left.

At four hundred yards range, Ostercamp fired the next EAR round, waited ten seconds for the charge to build and when the red light flicked on, he fired again. Both rounds hit the APC. At first there was no obvious effect. Then gradually the rig began to slow. Ostercamp punched another EAR round at it, and then a fourth. This time the armored personnel carrier came to a stop. Only two men came out the back. They began to run to the rear, but stumbled and waved their arms to get their balance, then fell into the rocks and dirt of the high country of China, and started a six-hour nap.

Murdock waited. No more men came out of the stalled rig. He looked at his Bull Pup. He had only six rounds left. “Ammo count on the Pups,” he said.

When the men checked in, they averaged five rounds per man.

“Hold fire on the twenties unless we absolutely need them,” Murdock said. “Use the five fifty-six instead.”

“Lam, what do you see up there?”

Lam had taken out his eight-by-thirty fieldglasses and stared down the valley. “Not good, Skipper. I wondered why those two men ran to the rear. There are at least three camouflaged tents back there a mile and half. Big enough to hold twenty men each. They could still have forty men ready to fight. Must be some kind of a check point. Not sure but there could be a chopper on the ground almost behind one of the tents. They know we’re here. Men running all over the place. I see no vehicles.”

There was some dead air on the Motorolas.

“Medic, how is Canzoneri?”

“Gouge out of his right leg. Took out a chunk of flesh and bled like a stuck hog. I’ve got it bundled up, but he’s gonna need a crutch to walk and we’ll distribute his equipment and weapon. Not ready for duty.”

“Noted, Mahanani.”

“I’ll be a shit-faced mama whore,” Lam exploded. “They just formed up in squads and now are marching this way in diamond formations. A whole fucking bunch more than just forty. I’d say over a hundred. Commander Murdock, what the hell are we supposed to do now?”