Firestorm

35

"Wish to hell we still had our fifties," Magic Brown said. "We could blow them damn choppers into kindling."

"Roger that, Magic, but we don't," Murdock said. "So what comes next?

We've got too fucking many Chinese out there. We can't go forward. No sense going backward and running into those fresh troops off the trucks."

He looked at the terrain. "Tactics depend on the situation and the terrain." He'd had that axiom drilled into him for ten years. He knew the situation. What about the terrain? He stared into the half light of the moon. They were near a small valley that drifted up to the left, and into a partly forested hill. It couldn't be over three hundred feet high.

Potential. "Move up that little valley," he told Red, and the rest of them followed. Halfway up, Murdock angled his squad to the left and sent Dewitt with Second Squad to the right. "Find firing positions and cover behind a tree or rock. We'll wait and see if these guys send a detail up here to check it out. If they do we teach them better manners."

"After we let them know where we are, what comes next?" Jaybird asked from where he had settled down behind a foot-thick pine tree.

"Straight over the hill and see what's on the other side. Red is up there now taking a gander."

"Want to talk to the carrier again while we have a chance?" Holt asked.

"Set up the antenna and put it on receive," Murdock said. "If they have any word for us they'll put it on a three-hour repeat. We might catch something. I don't hold much hope that the Taiwanese Air Force will help us. Too political. They haven't raised a hand against China in fifty years. Why should they start now?"

"I'd say they have thirteen good reasons," Holt said. Then he unslung the SATCOM and began hitting switches, unfolded the small dish antenna, and angled it at the right spot in the sky to find the satellite.

When it was aimed, he snapped another switch, but the radio remained quiet.

"Figures," Murdock said.

The SEALS went rock silent then. They had heard something at the mouth of the small valley.

"Incoming," Jaybird whispered.

The Chinese troops were not trying to be quiet. They talked to each other. Equipment jangled, metal scraped against metal. Now and then someone laughed. Murdock tried to see through the nighttime gloom, but couldn't. The nightscope was up the hill. They waited.

The first troops were thirty yards away when Murdock saw them. There were twelve to fifteen men spread out at three-yard intervals across the floor of the valley moving slowly forward. Holt silently folded the SATCOM antenna and stowed it, and buttoned up the radio and slung it over his shoulder. No messages.

Murdock aimed his AK-47 at the man in the center who could be the detail leader. The Chinese soldier looked upward toward him and Murdock fired. The chest shot slammed the trooper backwards into the grass and weeds.

The rest of the platoon fired, and Murdock got off four more rounds before the Chinese troops were either dead or had run into the haze of the darkness.

Red Nicholson slid onto the ground beside Murdock. "Nothing on the other side I can see, Skipper. No lights, no people. Another small ridgeline. Looks like we're in a batch of woods that goes on a while."

"Move it," Murdock said into his lip mike, and the SEALS lifted up and trotted behind Red as he led them up the hill, over the top, and down the other side.

"Southeast," Murdock said to Red. They both looked at the stars and Murdock found the one he had been using. "Right about twenty degrees," he said.

"Yeah, about what I'd say too," Red said, and they swung that direction across another small ridge, through more trees, and away from any sign of the Chinese troops that almost had boxed them in.

For a moment Murdock thought he smelled salt air. Then he shook his head. Fantasizing. They pushed hard for half an hour, then came out of the woods and ahead saw a good-sized road with an occasional car or truck rolling along with headlights glaring.

"No curfew here," Magic said.

"Could be trouble to get across," Murdock said. They worked up through a field until they were within a quarter of a mile of the road. It was built up above the level of the fields on each side. A truck labored past, then all was quiet.

Murdock frowned.

"Yeah," Jaybird said. "I heard it again. That's a fucking shovel hitting a rock. Somebody on the other side of the road is digging in. Looks like they're waiting for us."

"Red, go take a look."

Red Nicholson could slip up on an Indian. He knew how to move without making a sound. He was the best point man Murdock had ever seen. The SEALS went to ground and rested.

Murdock worried about the choppers. The men in the trucks he could get away from, for a while. The choppers could rush men in ahead and behind them before they knew which way was up. That worried him. He looked at his watch. The dull glow showed that it was a little after 2230. Maybe eight hours to daylight. There was no chance they would be lucky and find another cave like the one they stayed in during the day. No chance in hell. He tried to spot Red on his movement forward. He couldn't.

Red was gone fifteen minutes. When he came back he knelt beside Murdock and touched him on the shoulder. The platoon leader jumped like he'd been given a jolt with a cattle prod.

"Sorry, Skipper. The Chinese are digging in all right. I figure they have a two-hundred-yard front, and beyond that I can't tell. There could be troops all along that road. It's a natural fort for them."

"Hard to get across?"

"Fucking near impossible."

They both heard the choppers about the same time. They came from behind them and to the north.

"The hunting dogs are out," Murdock said. "Red, do you sometimes have the feeling that we're being driven like cattle into the right place that will turn into a killing field?"

"That's what they hope. Never happen."

They listened as the choppers came closer.

"Sounds like the same troop transporters we almost collided with before," Murdock said.

"They must know we dodged them back there," Jaybird said. "Now they're moving up the troops. Maybe we could get a shot or two at them just before they set down."

"Or just before they lift off after dropping off their cargo," Murdock said. "I've a hunch they don't want their precious choppers around where there could be a firefight."

"So where are they going to land?" Red asked.

The sound came closer, then seemed to be right on top of them. The SEALS sprawled in the field hoping the big birds didn't turn on their downward-directed landing lights.

The copters thundered over them, swept to the left, and a half mile away began to form up for a precision landing.

"Let's go get them," Murdock said. The SEALS took off at a fast trot. They saw the Chinese birds turn on their lights and drop down to the ground and the troops pour out of them. Murdock didn't want to count, but he figured at least twenty men per chopper.

The SEALS covered a quarter mile in record time, and went down behind rice paddy dikes three hundred yards away from the copters.

Murdock went to his Motorola. "Your long guns, anything we've got. Let's see how many of those choppers we can blast into little pieces. If anybody has any M-40 rounds, this is the spot to use them. Let's do it."

He leveled in with his heavy AK-47. He had twelve rounds and was determined to expend all of them. His first shot was slightly high. The rest of the troops opened up. He brought down his sights and nailed the closest chopper with a round through the canopy in front. He got four more shots into the bird before it tried to lift off.

It made it to thirty feet, then the rotors died and it fell like a rock and burst into flames.

Al Adams estimated the range and lofted an M-40 WP at the closest chopper. It landed ten feet short, but the forward surge of the WP streamers caught the grass and the chopper itself on fire and the troops scattered. A minute later the whole helicopter was a mass of flames, and machine gun rounds in the ship began exploding.

Dewitt yelled in delight as his AK-47 rounds punctured another chopper. It spun around as it tried to take off, then made it and lifted into the darkness.

The other birds at last had their landing lights turned off, making them harder targets. Two more were so wounded by the rifle and machine gun fire that they never got off the ground.

The troops on board had spread out, but didn't move forward. Murdock had counted on their attacking, but the platoon's two machine guns must have dissuaded their leader.

When the last choppers were airborne, Murdock hit his mike three times and the SEAL fire stopped.

"We move," Murdock said into the mike. "On me. We parallel the road and get away from all those Chinese troopers. Go, go, go."

They ran a hundred yards to the south parallel with the road. Again they took some rifle fire, but it was random. They were still hidden in the dark.

Murdock started down the road to his right and saw more than a dozen pairs of headlights coming toward them. Trucks, probably, with more ground troops.

He slowed the men to a walk and looked around. The mass of a hill reared to the left. It had some trees and brush that he could see in the soft moonlight.

"Up the hill," he said to Red, who swung that way, found a trail of sorts, and led out at a brisk pace.

More firing came from behind them. Murdock stopped to listen. He could hear and then see elements from the choppers moving toward them. He had no idea how many men. He trotted back to the front of the platoon and picked up the pace.

"No way they can follow us," Red said.

Murdock shook his head. "All they have to do is saturate the possible routes with men and they'll find us. What can we do to slow them down?"

"I've got a claymore," Jaybird said. "I think Doc still has one. We could use them if somebody gets on our trail in some kind of a narrow place."

"Good. Red, hit that gully up there to the left. We'll move up that and see if we have anybody on our ass end."

They hiked for another ten minutes. Now and then they heard troops behind them, but no one close. They were almost at the top of the ravine when they heard someone below them.

Murdock stopped his men and they listened.

"How many?" he asked Dewitt.

"I'd say twenty at least."

"Maybe thirty," Jaybird said.

"Use the claymores," Murdock said. "Go down about halfway in that narrow spot and set them in sequence with trip wires."

Jaybird and Doc ran back down the hill. They set the antipersonnel mines in the faint trail twenty yards apart, one farther up the hill than the other. They were aimed downhill. The trip wire would set off the mine and spew out over two hundred small ball-bearing-like projectiles in a cloud of death. They angled the mines for the best killing effect, set the trip wire on the first one, then on the second.

Jaybird and Doc hurried back up the trail. They could hear the Chinese coming up the slope behind them. They stopped fifty yards from the rest of the platoon to watch the trap.

"I can see some of them coming," Jaybird whispered. "No fucking scout out in front of them. Assholes. Must be twenty of them and all in range. How stupid can they get?"

A moment later a Chinese boot broke the trip wire and the first claymore went off with a roar. Screams of rage and agony echoed through the valley after the sound of the explosion died. Half of the men coming up the hill didn't stand up again.

Someone shouted in Chinese below and the survivors charged up the hill. One man was past the second trip wire when the second Chinese hit it and another belching roar showered the Chinese troops with instant death. The man beyond the death scene turned around and ran down the hill.

Jaybird and Doc grinned in the darkness and hurried up to the rest of the SEALS.

Murdock took their report and they trotted over the top of the hill. On the far side they found another hill, higher. They took the downslope at the fast march and started up the other side. A machine gun opened up far to their left. The five-to-nine-round bursts came as a surprise.

"Who the hell they firing at?" Fernandez asked.

"The night ghosts," Ross Lincoln said. "Might mean they got a lot of green troops out there tonight."

Murdock had been thinking the same thing. The Chinese hadn't had a war to fight since Korea, forty-five years ago. New troops, new fears.

"We keep going unless that chatter gun comes closer than a mile," Murdock said. They kept moving up the hill.

"We still heading southeast?" Al Adams asked. "Swear I can smell the ocean."

"You get the imagination award of the mission," Frazier said. "You're probably smelling your armpit."

They kept climbing. There was no path or trail now. The brush was sparse and the trees few, mostly pine, Murdock decided. They made it to the top, and Red Nicholson stood there looking down.

Murdock moved up beside him. "Goddamn."

"About the size of it. Must be two hundred feet straight down, like somebody sliced the mountain in half with a cleaver. Left or right, L-T?"

They heard the sound of trucks to the right.

"Company to the right," Red said.

"Yeah, lets take this slope down to the left and get around that drop-off as soon as we can. These fucking Chinese know the territory. They know we're stalled up here, so watch them try to plug both sides and the rear."

They hiked down the slope to the left. Murdock called up Doc, who reported that the two walking wounded were not holding them up.

"Frazier is a tough little cookie, sir. His side wound is hurting him, but it ain't serious. Fernandez has that arm wound, but he's still fit for duty. No other casualties so far."

"Keep it that way, Doc."

They hiked along the rim of the drop-off for ten minutes working down the left flank.

Red heard them first.

Murdock was close behind him. "More choppers," he said. "Moving up to block us on this left flank. Damn, told you these fuckers knew the terrain. That gives them a huge killing advantage."