Deathrace

28

"Magic? How bad is he? What do you mean do something to keep him with us?"

"Not fatal, no, he's in good spirits. His damn leg is hurting like crazy. I've overdosed him on morphine as it is. What I think we better do is trash his pistol and K-bar, all of his equipment. Dig a hole for it. He can't carry anything but himself. Somebody else has the fifty and the ammo."

All around them men came out of their holes, dusted off the cammo cloth, and folded it up. Murdock knelt down beside Magic, who sat on the ground.

"Hey, Magic. Shuck out of that combat vest. You don't need to carry that anymore. We'll leave it here for the stupid Iranians. Put it in your hole and have the guys kick it full of dirt from the sides. Nobody will find it for a hundred years. How are you feeling?"

"Hurts like hell, L-T. Got myself fucked up good this time. Holding up the march. Fuck it!"

"No sweat. We're going to get out of here. Dark now, and they can't see us, so we move on down the trail. Another good night of hiking, and we'll be close to the water."

"Try my damnedest, L-T."

Murdock slapped him on the shoulder gently, and went back to his hole. He had his gear on, and his weapon in hand in a minute, and checked around. Nobody could tell that they had been there. Kat stood waiting for him. "Magic?"

"Not good. We'll be moving at his pace."

Murdock sent Lam out front, then brought up Magic and Ronson in line right behind Kat. Magic had his arm across Ronson's shoulder. Just moving fifty feet was work for Magic. They hiked back down to the small valley, and used it for half a mile before they had to climb another of the never-ending hills.

Murdock figured they were making less than two miles an hour now. Magic was dragging one foot as he moved forward.

Just past 2040, Lam came back and called to Murdock.

"Got some company up front. Don't know where they came from, but they're on a damned picnic. Three big fires, and what must be about twenty small cooking fires. You better take a look."

The moon had come out from behind some clouds, and the outline of a valley fully a quarter of a mile wide showed in the dim light. In the center of it were the fires. Voices floated up from half a mile away. Murdock figured the valley was a mile long. A huge open space in this maze of ridges, canyons, gullies, and mountains.

"Must be a hundred men down there," Murdock said. "Twenty cooking fires and five men to a fire. Too many for us. Can we slip by at the left-hand edge of the valley? It looks like they're slightly toward the right side."

"I'll go take a look. Be a lot easier on Magic if we can. How's he doing?"

"Not the best. As long as he can walk, we move."

The men, and Kat, moved up to the edge of the valley and waited for Lam. He moved out like a shadow, and was soon lost in the nighttime haze.

Ten minutes later, he came back.

"Yeah, lots of room, as long as we don't talk or rattle. They don't have any security out, no patrols, from what I could tell. I hope they don't surprise us."

Al Adams took Ronson's place, helping Magic and the file move out. They were five yards apart now, in combat mode, just in case a lucky round or fragger came in. That way it could nail only one man.

They moved silently along the open valley. It was smooth and flat, and looked like it might have been a huge lake at one time. They came near the Iranian troops, heard them shouting and laughing, and moved on past without a word.

When they were at the end of the valley, they lifted up and over a slight rise, then Lam had a new bearing for them. Again they angled to the right, and went along a new small valley, then over another low ridge and down a narrow ravine into what might have been a streambed, which lasted for almost a mile. Then it simply vanished.

"Underground," DeWitt said. "The ancient river probably went underground at this point."

They took a break. Magic sat down and Doc looked at his leg. It was swollen more. It had started bleeding again. Doc replaced the bandage and wrapped it. Magic gritted his teeth through it all. Ken Ching came up and talked to Magic. "Hey, man, you ever been hypnotized?"

"No, I don't want to run around flapping my arms and crowing like a chicken."

Ken laughed. "Not that show business stuff, the real medical kind of hypnotism."

"Nope, not me. Nobody's gonna dangle a watch in front of me and put me out. I want to know what I'm doing."

Ken shrugged. "Just wondered. Hypnotism is sometimes used to control intense pain."

"Hell, not me."

Ken waved and moved back to his gear. Doc followed him. "Ching, you can hypnotize people?"

"Sure, been doing it for years. I do myself when I go to the dentist, no Novocain that way."

"Let me work on Magic. If you hypnotized him, the pain would still be there, but he wouldn't feel it?"

"Right. He'd still limp and walk with a lot of trouble, but the pain would be gone."

"I'll get back to you."

They moved out again.

Murdock listened to what Doc had to say about Ken Ching.

"Yes, it works," Murdock said. "But Magic would have to want to be hypnotized before he'd go under. Talk about it to the big guy."

Murdock checked his watch. 2300. They had been on the move for over two hours. Murdock figured they had covered five miles at the most. He wasn't sure how Magic did it. If he went down, their run would be over.

A half hour later, they had managed another small ridge, worked through one more half-mile valley, and climbed up another slope. Doc Ellsworth came back to Murdock.

"Magic says what the fuck, give it a try. Ken says we won't even have to stop walking. He'll do it all with his voice. If you hear some mumbling and grumbling back here, that's what it is."

Murdock sagged back a few steps to listen.

"Magic, you know me. You know I wouldn't do anything to hurt you in any way, right?"

"Yeah, man, right."

"Okay, I'm going to hypnotize you. That just means that you and I will work together to put you in a kind of trance. In this trance you won't do anything that you wouldn't do ordinarily. I can't turn you into a rapist or a robber or anything like that. Do you understand?"

"Yeah, get on with it."

Murdock moved away then, checked with Lam, and they angled to the right this time to keep on their southern route.

When he got back, Doc waited for him.

"Damn that was cool. Magic went under in about a minute. Ken said he was a good subject. For the past five hundred yards, he hasn't groaned once or said anything about pain. He's even walking better. No foot drag, which might have been psychological. He's good for a fast three miles an hour, so we can step it up if you want to."

They did.

Twice before midnight they heard planes flying over. Some were obviously prop-powered and small. Two or three times they heard jets streaking overhead.

"Tomorrow is not going to be an easy twelve hours of daylight," Murdock said.

They took a break at 0 1 00. Magic was talking and joking with the guys around him. Doc checked the leg wound and found no new bleeding.

"Magic, how you doing?" Murdock asked, squatting down beside where the big black man sat.

"Fucking good, L-T. How the hell you doing?"

"I'm gonna make it, Magic. Got to get us wet so we can talk turkey with that fucking submarine."

"Oh, yeah, in the wet this damn leg won't bother me none. It don't want to work right. Doc says I got shot."

"Just a scratch. Don't worry about it."

To one side, Murdock asked Ken Ching how long the trance would last.

"I can reinforce it every three hours. He'll be good until daylight. Then we'll let him pass into a normal sleep."

They ate MRE's there and left twenty minutes later. The next two hours went according to plan. Magic kept up, Miguel Fernandez was now helping him, with his arm over Miguel's shoulder. They made their six miles and Murdock pulled them up at the side of a high mountain.

Ahead of them a gentle valley opened up that went too far to the east, but they decided they would take it. Just before their short break was over, Lam came back with news.

"I was out front a ways, and I heard some choppers." He pointed down the valley. "Seem to be coming from that direction."

They all looked that way then, and a half mile in front of them they heard large helicopters coming in. Then the choppers snapped on landing lights, making six round islands of light in the wilderness of night.

"Goddammit to hell," Murdock said. "Lam, get as close as you can and see how many men get off each bird."

Lam left at a sprint, settled down to a trot, and made a quarter of a mile in fast time. He walked forward carefully. At a hundred yards he went flat on the ground. The last chopper had landed and disgorged its troops.

Lam counted twenty-five combat-ready troopers getting off each chopper. Then the birds lifted off, turned off their landing lights, and flew back to the south.

Murdock was surprised by the number of troops on each bird. "That's a hundred and fifty men out there looking for us." He shook his head. "We were making good time. DeWitt and Jaybird, let's talk."

They worked it over for five minutes and all agreed. What was open was the direction. Murdock decided that.

"Okay, platoon, listen up. We're blocked down front. Lam said they were sending out security and what looked like patrols. We can only go around them. We head due east for Pakistan. We're still about ten to twelve miles from it. We'll go east for two miles, then swing south again and maintain that heading. Any questions?"

"Only a hundred and a half?" Gonzalez called out. "Hell, L-T, let's take them. Them ain't bad odds for SEALS."

There were some quiet voices of agreement.

"Now I know that Gonzalez has his insurance paid up," Murdock said. "Okay Lam, lead us out due east."

Kat came up beside Murdock. She had been step for step with the SEALs all the way.

"Maybe we could go all the way into Pakistan. We've had better relations with them than with Iran."

"Their border guards wouldn't ask any questions, Kat. They would shoot us down to get our weapons. No chance we're going across the border. We'll skirt it if we have to, but we'll still be eight to ten miles away. We just jog around this bunch and hope for a better tomorrow."

The landscape changed as they headed east. Here and there they found shrubs and a few trees. In the gullies now were some brush and stunted trees. Murdock hoped they would find some kind of cover like this when daylight came. They could do the hide hole again, but they had been lucky last time. He didn't believe in straining the fates any more than he had to.

Magic Brown was walking better now, and Doc couldn't explain it. He asked Chin.

"The physical pain is still there. The injury is there. But the more he forgets about it, and subjugates it, the better he feels, therefore the better he can walk. Once the trance is gone, the pain will come back like gang-busters. Happened to me the time I had a root canal with hypnosis. The dentist was scared as hell. I told him if I came out of it and started screaming, he could shoot me with a bucket of painkiller."

Dock hesitated. "Chin, with him hypnotized that way, could I go in and hunt for that damned slug?"

"Sure, he won't feel a thing. Do you have the right kind of instruments?"

"Hell no. I've got one probe, a pair of forceps, and a K-bar. About all I have I can use."

"Might do more damage than leaving it alone."

"If it's in there another twenty-four hours, he could lose the leg."

"Hell, give it a try. I'd check with the L-T, though, first. You'll need light or daylight. Either one will be risky for the whole platoon."

Doc talked with Murdock as they hiked along the hills. They were doing more up and down now since the former rivers and any runoff had been going south the way they wanted to go.

Doc explained it to Murdock.

"We'll wait and see about the light. If we find some cover, it might work. If not, we could start a fire or something in a protected spot and line up everyone around it. Let's see closer to morning."

They had made good time the first two miles east, then Lam turned them south again, and they caught a fine valley that made the night march easier.

There were fewer of the shrubs and small trees here, but as they came closer to the coast, Murdock figured there should be more rain, and perhaps more vegetation. They had come another four miles south when Murdock realized it was stopping time. Lam came back with a report that he might have a canyon with some cover. They hiked another ten minutes and just before dawn found it. The brush and trees were no more than three feet tall, but they covered a small canyon ten yards wide and fifty long, as it angled up toward a really large mountain. There must have been some natural runoff here, and any rains would bring down a torrent of fresh water from the catch basin higher up.

Murdock grinned — some good luck at last. The men dug into the tangle of brush and trees and within ten minutes they all had vanished. Murdock pushed in past Kat and found a place he could stretch out. He hit the Motorola.

"I hope all of you are happy with your five-star accommodations. Remember, we're short on water. Ken, see that Magic gets moved into his sleep mode. I have the first watch. The rest of you can eat an MRE, or sack out, whichever you want.

"Doc, let's think about that job you might do. It looks possible. You could fix up your area for it later this morning when we check out our actual cover in the daylight."

Lam came on the net. "L-T, I've been seeing some lightning to the north. I don't know how far. That could mean a storm is coming, which would mean rain."

"So, it will cool us off and we can catch some for our canteens," Fernandez said.

"Also it could trigger a flash flood. Know what a wall of water ten feet high and racing along at sixty miles an hour can do to a bunch of campers like us?"

Murdock swore again. "And we're right in the middle of a flood channel for such a torrent if it rains hard in this area. Whoever is on watch, keep an eye on the lightning. That means a spot outside the brush where you're concealed but can see to the north. This might not be the best spot to hide out after all. But we'll stay here until the storm hits to the north or bypasses us. Keep a sharp watch to the north."