Firestorm

20

Jaybird's eyes widened just a moment. Then he reached out, caught the 4.2-second-fused fragmentation grenade, spun, and threw it as far as he could toward the boxes he had just set up as targets. At once, Jaybird dropped to the desert sand and turned his head away from the coming blast.

The grenade exploded just as it hit the ground between the thirty- and forty-yard targets. The men heard some shrapnel whistling through the air over their heads.

"Anybody hit?" Murdock asked. The SEALS shook their heads, and there were a couple of audible negatives. Jaybird got up, dusted off his cammies, and walked on up to the group.

"Jaybird didn't know I was going to do that," Murdock said. "He reacted properly under an extreme stress situation. As SEALS we always have to be ready for the unexpected. That's how we stay alive and make sure the other guys die. For the next half hour or so we're going to throw live grenades. No horsing around. These little bombs kill people."

The SEALS sat up and then stood.

"Fernandez, go into the bus and bring out another case of fraggers. The rest of you line up and get ready to throw some. Those cardboard boxes out there are open on the top. Whoever puts a grenade inside any of them gets a three-day pass.

"You'll each throw three times, one M-67 at each of the three boxes. Better hit the deck after that first twenty-yarder."

Jaybird led off the line. He was long on the twenty-yard box, came within six feet of the thirty-yard one, and was short on the forty.

The shrapnel kept flying. Jaybird moved all the men but the thrower back another twenty yards as a precaution.

One of the new men, Harry "Horse" Ronson, was the only one to drop a grenade into a box. He hit the thirty-yarder and blew it into pieces. They were nearly finished throwing. Jaybird sent a man out to replace the shrapnel-torn box.

Murdock was the last man to throw. He picked out one of the WP grenades and threw it as far as he could. It sailed five yards beyond the last box and burst into a star pattern of fiercely burning white phosphorus trails. When the smoke blew away, Jaybird led the SEALS out to make sure there were no smoldering fires in the sparse grass and shrubs of this far end of the Mojave Desert. White phosphorus burns so hot it will burn right through anything flammable. That includes an arm or a leg if the sticky WP hits a person. When the SEALS came back, Murdock was ready for them.

It was 1537. The sun burned down with an attitude and the men had finished their canteens, filled them, and drained them again. Someone said a working man in the desert needed seven quarts of water a day to survive. At this point Murdock believed the figure.

"Now the fun stuff begins," Murdock told his troops. "Grab your TO weapon and a spare canteen of water. We'll take the usual load of issue ammo, and our blessed HK forty-five hideouts. Get the gear from the trailer and report back here on the double."

Murdock got his own load. He carried the MP-5 and six loaded magazines. He filled a canteen to join its brother on the other side of his utility vest and hit the desert again.

This was the outback of the armpits of the far end of the desert. Nobody complained about some booms or autoweapon firing out here. There was nobody to complain. The village of Niland at one time had had 1,200 people. He didn't know how many were there now. It was six miles away to the south and west. There was a numbing, vacant area of sage and hills and sand across the Chocolate Mountains to the northwest for forty miles before a hiker would find another road, Interstate 10, running between Blythe and Indio. There were a lot of miles of wilderness to get lost in.

One dirt track of a road crossed about in the middle of the parcel, but it was seldom used. Murdock turned and looked at Lion Head Mountain, the highest point in the Chocolates. It rose only 2,090 feet. The low mountain range was close to the Salton Sea, which is 235 feet below sea level. Might be interesting climbing the peak in the dark.

When the men assembled, Murdock put Jaybird in control of Second Squad and laid out the general plan.

"We usually march around at four miles an hour. Fifteen minutes to the mile. This afternoon, after that big meal, we'll be moving out at six miles an hour or exactly a mile in ten minutes. To do this we'll start with a half mile hiking and a half mile jogging at a smart pace. At the end of the first two miles, we'll check our watches and see how we're doing."

Murdock looked his men over. There were no questions. Nobody griped about the training run or the hot weather which had resulted in their cammies showing dark sweat splotches. These men were the professionals. They knew that to stay alive they had to be in top shape every day. A mission might grab them tomorrow. Besides, as every SEAL knew, "The only easy day was yesterday."

"Let's go. Combat spacing, five yards between men. Let's do it."

He didn't tell them anything about the mountain. He'd have a surprise for them on that score. The hill itself was about ten miles from where the bus sat. A nice little twenty-mile jaunt, plus some other goodies.

Before they started the march, Murdock asked them a question. "How many of you have a compass?"

Four or five men called out, "Yo-o-o-o-o." A batch of hands went into the air.

Murdock nodded. He had taken a sighting on the mountain before, and now headed across country for the spire. They hiked the first twenty minutes, then jogged for the next twenty. There was a lot of grumbling and adjusting equipment and lashing down gear that tended to bounce around as they ran.

The two HW men groaned under the twenty-five-pound HK M-88, but they all kept going.

There was no bantering now, no good-natured insults or jabs or barbs. Now they were professionals doing their job, staying in shape and enduring another hike that could be a long one. The mile in ten minutes didn't faze the SEALS. That speed was drastically slow for a track-and-field man. Many marathoners ran twenty-six miles at slightly over five minutes to the mile, but they weren't packing along forty pounds of gear on their backs.

Murdock kept up the pace. His butt hurt again and his legs started to burn in back where the shrapnel shards still had to work their way to the surface. He gulped three Motrins without the aid of water and kept going.

After the first half hour, the sun was still beating down on them like the messenger of doom. The desert wouldn't start to cool off until an hour or two after sundown. Murdock looked at the bright orb up in the cloudless sky. The sun would be with them for at least two hours yet.

They alternated the running and walking. Then, just as they came up a small rise, Murdock pulled out a fragger and pitched it thirty feet to the side well out of range and with no chance of hurting anyone.

The moment the grenade went off the SEALS as a man flopped into the dirt and chambered a live round in their weapons. Murdock flipped the fire selector on his MP-5 to three round bursts, swung the barrel down, and jolted off two three-round bursts into the area where he had thrown the grenade.

Taking their cue from their leader, the SEALS on that side of the line immediately fired into the same area. The men on the far side faced outward acting as security.

Murdock stopped shooting. "Clear!" he shouted. The word was repeated down the line and the men ceased fire.

The squads changed now from a garrison-type march to a combat order. They did it silently as Murdock gave hand signals. First in each squad came the point man, then the Squad Leader. For the Second Squad Jaybird filled in for Ed Dewitt. Next in line was the radioman dogging the L-T's heels. The AW man with the heavy M-88 was next. The fifth man was the grenadier, who often carried a CAR-15 with a grenade launcher attached. In this case the medic for the platoon walked with the First Squad as the grenadier.

The sixth man in a squad combat march was the second AW man, with an M-88 on this training run. The seventh man was normally the Platoon Chief, and the last man was the rear guard who watched to the rear and did a lot of walking backwards to cover the rear on a 180-degree arc.

Murdock kept up the pace. They passed through some sharp arroyos where desert cloudbursts sent sudden floods of water down every gully digging them deeper and sweeping everything in front of them. The water, much needed, often came so fast, little of it could soak into the parched ground and it ran off into temporary streams.

An hour out, Murdock called a halt. The HW men leaned their M-88's butt-down in the sand and wiped sweat.

"How the hell hot is it?" Jaybird asked.

"My thermo shows a hundred and eleven," somebody called out.

"Got to be hotter than that," Jaybird answered.

Murdock called Jaybird over. "See that nubbin up there on the skyline?"

"Lion Head Mountain, about twenty-one hundred feet high?"

"That's the one. Here's where we split up. We're about four miles from the top. You take a compass bearing to a point a mile due north of it. I'll go due south. Should take you about an hour to get in position. We don't have our radios, so we'll have to do it by timing.

"We start to close the pincer at exactly 1800. It's now a little after 1630. Gives us an hour to move to our initial point and then a half hour to get to the top."

"No live firing," Jaybird said.

"Absolutely. We don't want to blow away half our platoon on an exercise. We'll take ten minutes here, then move out."

An hour later, Murdock brought his First Squad into position. The sun was down at last, but the heat still shimmered over the sand and desert rocks. They had kicked out two rattlesnakes and a desert jackrabbit on their way.

Now, Murdock checked the top of the low peak. He'd been there before. Half the SEALS in the platoon had done this one. They had another ten minutes to wait for the timing. At 1800 they packed up and started for the top. It was a series of small rises, then a last slant up a slope with loose rocks. It was more of a walk than a mountain climb.

When they got within fifty yards of the top, somebody bellowed at them.

"Halt! Who goes there?"

"Your mutha!" Magic Brown bellowed back.

"You're a friend, come on up."

Jaybird met them from behind a pair of boulders near the top.

"Make a fine defensive area," he said.

"Exactly what it's going to be," Murdock said. "Spread your men out in a perimeter on that side. I'll take this side. When everyone's in place, throw a WP grenade as far down your side of the mountain as you can. Then put up defensive fire on the WP."

They did.

Murdock threw a WP on his side, then moved from one of his men to the next. The M-88's barked with their heavy voices. The MP-5's chattered off three-round bursts. Doc got off his five rounds of double-aught buck from his beloved shotgun.

After four minutes Murdock called a cease-fire and the weapons trailed off firing into silence.

Jaybird dropped down beside Murdock where he lay in the sand looking down the mountain at the last wisps of smoke from the WP grenade.

"Make a fire check on both those WPS," Murdock said. "Then we'll assemble below and head for the bus. Hope that we have plenty of the MRES left." Before they left the top of the hill, Murdock called over Doc for another shot of his joy juice. Murdock had felt the damn shrapnel every step up the mountain, but he wasn't about to let anyone know it.

It was cool and nearly dark two hours later when they arrived back at the bus. Jaybird passed out a different kind of MRES to the men, and then talked to Murdock. "This a no-sleep operation?"

"Started out to be. How are your men holding up?"

"Tired. No urgency to push them, like running for their lives. But they'll keep going."

"Good. Half hour to eat, then we get moving again. Oh, get some boy scout to build a fire so we can make some coffee. Go damn good about now."

It was forty-five minutes later before the troops left the bus, just after 2100. It was fully dark by this time. The HW men now carried their more standard HK M-89 sniper rifles with the 7.62mm NATO round. It cut the weight by ten pounds. The other men had either MP-5's or M-4A1's, the CAR in.223-caliber with the M-203 grenade launcher under the barrel.

Six of the men packed the CARS. Two men carried sacks of 40mm grenades. Each man in the platoon would be firing the grenades.

"Let's say we're holed up in Libya," Murdock said, "a desert country we're not on friendly terms with. We've accomplished our mission and now all we have to do is get out. We can't risk world opinion with a chopper retrieve, which could prompt some air battles. So we have to walk out. We hide by day and move at night. The coast and our contact with a sub is eighty miles away across the desert. How long does it take us to walk to the coast?"

"Dark for about eleven hours," Red Nicholson said. "At four miles an hour through that damn desert sand, we can do forty miles a night. I bid two days in spades."

"Sounds good," Murdock said. "I'd allow another night's travel just in case we ran into some minor skirmishes with Libyan forces hunting us."

"You mean we have forty more miles to go tonight?" a voice piped up.

"Anybody got blisters?" Doc shouted.

Nobody had. Most of them had calluses an inch thick on their feet.

"No, we won't go forty miles tonight," Murdock said. "But we will take another hike and blow up some 40mm grenades. Let's move out."

They hiked to the canal and along it for two miles, then came back and stopped outside the old Kill House made of old rubber tires filled with sand.

They set up two hundred yards away and began firing. The first rounds hit short. The men with the CARS lined up and fired one after the other to keep track of hits. Murdock fired a flare high over the old Kill House tire rooms, and the hits began to come as long as the flare lasted.

When each man had fired his three rounds of the 40mm grenades, Murdock headed the men back to the bus. Once there, he grouped them around him.

"I had big plans for the rest of the night, but I think we've done enough for one day and a half. Flake out where you want to. No blankets, no sleeping bags. The bus seats might work out best. Somebody raid Jaybird's cold chest and see if we ate up all those chocolate bars."

They hadn't. The SEALS took care of the rest of them, and Murdock looked around for a place to sleep. Doc moved over and watched him. "Moving a little slow there, L-T."

"True."

"One more shot of juice?"

"No. Had enough. Hell, I'm a SEAL. See you in the morning."

They were all awake when the sun came up a little after six. They had another MRE and made coffee and chocolate, and even ate the entree. Then Murdock surprised them.

"Load up and let's get out of here. We've done what I wanted to do. Now we're heading back to Coronado."

"Yeah, and a shower!" somebody called.

"Why now? You ain't had one in two months," someone answered him.

It went that way for the first half hour. Then most of the SEALS went to sleep for the last two hours of the ride back to Coronado.