Flashpoint

12

Murdock heard something behind him and saw Lampedusa sliding in beside him with his field glasses up.

“Thought I heard something down there,” Lam said.

“How many troops?” Murdock asked.

They both studied the area.

“I’ve got six,” Murdock said.

“Three more just came from behind that brush,” Lam said. “Hey, these three have axes and a crosscut kind of saw.”

“That’s a stand of cedar they’re in,” Murdock said. “They aren’t after wood. Seems like they’re sizing up the cedars. Must need some long, straight trees, telephone poles or such.”

A moment later, the sound of an ax cutting into wood rang out in the forest. Ed DeWitt dropped down beside them. Murdock handed him his glasses.

“Company,” he said.

“Engineers,” DeWitt said. “Maybe they want to put up a quick bridge over a creek or small stream.”

“I’m not going to stop them,” Lam said. “I’ll bird-dog them. If they come this way, I’ll use the Motorola.

“Yeah,” Murdock said. “I could use a few more hours of sleep while I can get it.”

“That was an easy one,” DeWitt said as they walked the fifty yards back to their temporary camp.

“Yeah, if that’s all there is to it. What if they need more cedars and come up to this bunch we’re sleeping under?”

DeWitt grunted. “No way. They should have all they need right there, at least for those nine men to drag down the hill.”

The JG was right. The lumbermen cut down three cedars, trimmed them, and used a small tractor to drag them down the hill. Two hours later, the men were gone, and the forest took on the natural quietness of a few birds singing and the wind sighing through the treetops.

Murdock had the men up, MREs eaten, and ready to move a half hour before dark. Lam had drawn maps of the motor pool and set up the routes into the place.

Canzoneri took the drawings of the trucks parked close together and worked out a plan to bomb every fourth truck with a quarter pound of C-4 or TNAZ.

“We hit the trucks on the outside all the way around, and they should ignite the ones in the middle. At least no one will be able to drive them out.”

“How many men you need with the bombs?” Murdock asked.

“Say we plant forty charges, each man does five, that would be eight men. We’ll use the regular timer detonator. Set the first charges at thirty-five minutes, then work down a minute for each new charge to thirty minutes. Then get the hell out of there the same way we went in.”

“I want the men with Bull Pups to stay back with me,” Murdock said. “We’ll be in support if you need it, and as soon as the first blast hits, we’ll be using the twenty-mike-mike to raise all sorts of hell.”

“What about inside the big garage?” Lam asked.

“Sounds too dangerous to go inside,” Canzoneri said. “We’ll play it by ear, depending on the time and the number of guards we have to waste. If we can get some charges inside, we will. Otherwise, the proximity fuses on the twenties could do the trick.”

“Agreed,” Murdock said. “Timing. We’ll move down closer and wait until 2300 before we move in. That will leave us six hours of darkness to make our exfiltration.”

“Which direction in case we get split up?” DeWitt asked.

“Like we talked, up the river road we came in on. Our objective is that first Loyalist roadblock up the river about forty miles away.”

“Walk in the park,” Ronson said.

“I want all of the Bull Pup shooters over here,” Murdock said. Jefferson, Mahanani, Franklin, Ching, Lampedusa, and Canzoneri came over. Murdock took Canzoneri’s Bull Pup and gave him his submachine gun.

“Pick your sappers from the rest of the men. Take the MP-5 guys. We don’t want anybody packing a heavy MG in there.”

The men were chosen, and Canzoneri gave them each their five bombs with the detonator/timer inserted. All they had to do was dial in the time and leave the bomb.

“We’ll put the charges in the fuel tank filler tube or on the gas tank when we can,” Canzoneri said.

When it was fully dark, Murdock marched the SEALs away from their hideout. It was less than two miles when they arrived at the brushy section just across from the motor pool. The whole truck park blazed with lights, and two dozen men worked in and around some of the trucks.

“Not normal maintenance,” Ostercamp said. “That they would do during the day. They seem to be checking the oil, tires, like they might be getting ready to move out.”

“We wait.”

Lam came up with a suggestion. “We could send the men into the motor pool from both sides. It would take a fence cut on each side, but I doubt if any of it is fixed with alarms.”

Murdock and Lam talked to Canzoneri, who agreed. They dug out two wire cutters, and Canzoneri gave one to each squad. He led one four-man detail and Will Dobler led the other one. He volunteered to go in.

They waited.

By 2200, half the lights had been turned off, and only two men still worked on trucks. By midnight, the last floodlights snapped off and only what must be the normal night-lights remained. Murdock watched the scene and nodded.

“Remember, go back out the hole in the fence you went in. Any shooting must be with the silencers. Get outside the wire and get back here where we’ll be throwing in the twenty-mike-mikes.”

Murdock watched them move away through his NVGs. The fence didn’t need cutting. They simply lifted up the bottom barbed wire strand and crawled under it. Then he lost them in the gloom of the trucks.

A jeep rolled around the area, snapped on its lights, and Murdock could see one man jump off the jeep and run toward the trucks with a weapon up. The man stumbled and fell. He didn’t move. The driver in the jeep stepped out of the rig and promptly fell backward onto the seat and didn’t move.

Murdock nodded. Those sound suppressors were great little gadgets.

He checked his watch. The men had been inside for fifteen minutes. It was taking longer than they had figured. Then he spotted two shadows running for the fence. They were joined by two more. He checked the other entry point and saw three of his men there, crawling under the fence. Where was the last man?

He waited as the three men vanished into the brush. Just as he was about to call Ed DeWitt, the fourth man stumbled away from the trucks and limped toward the fence. He fell down as he reached it and crawled under it. On the other side, two men appeared and helped him up, and they all ran into the brush.

“Canzoneri, I have eight men out of the wire. One is hurt. Are you on your way back here?”

“That’s a roger, Commander. I’m the one hurting. Had a small argument with a guard over a knife he wanted to give me. The guys tied up the leg slice. I should be mobile. See you in about ten. The charges have another twelve or thirteen to boom boom.”

“Take it easy, Canzoneri. Good job. No rush getting here.”

Murdock brought his Bull Pup shooters up. He spotted them ten yards apart. “As soon as the charges go off, we start shooting into the open door of the big garage. Two on the right concentrate on the trucks in the center of the park. We need to get those burning as well. If any group of ten or more men charge into the area, use the twenties on them. For now, let’s do ten rounds each, then see what happens.”

The eight sappers had not returned to the firing line when the first charge went off. It must have been in a fuel tank. The crack of the near air explosion slammed through the air, followed at once by a gush of flames and then a roaring of fire as gasoline from the tank caught on fire, splattering twenty yards away and burning furiously.

Seconds later, five more explosions rocked the motor pool. Sirens wailed below. Men ran from one building to another. As more and more charges detonated, the trucks parked on the outside row erupted in flames and created secondary explosions as more gas tanks went off. Less than a minute after the first charge, Murdock saw that almost all of the trucks on the outside ring around the park were on fire, and the flames were spreading to trucks parked next to them and all the way to the center.

“Now,” Murdock said and fired the Bull Pup’s 20-mike- mike round through the black entrance of the large garage. As he hoped, the laser dot had affixed somewhere inside the structure, and his round went through the open door before it exploded. He fired two more through the door, then looked at the trucks inside the circle of fire. Too many of them had not caught fire.

“Get the trucks,” Murdock shouted. The gunners shifted their target, and the trucks began taking the exploding 20-mike-mike rounds. Some merely pulverized the windows, windshields, and tops with the deadly shrapnel. Others took direct hits on the engine or gas tanks, sparking a fire and then an explosion.

By the time Murdock had fired eight rounds, he couldn’t find a truck that wasn’t on fire. He looked farther down the camp. A formation of twenty to thirty men marched toward the fires. He put one round just ahead of them, and they walked right into the rain of flesh-shredding hot steel. A dozen went down, the rest scattered. For his last round, he picked a building well beyond the motor pool and fired. It was a wake-up call, something for the brass at the camp to think and wonder about.

When Murdock finished his last round, he saw that most of the others were through as well. Two more shots fired, then the men looked at him.

He used the mike. “Canzoneri, what’s your position?”

“Making it, Cap. We’re about fifty yards from you and moving. How did the bonfire go?”

“Beautiful, Canzoneri. Just like you laid it out. I don’t think a truck parked outside escaped. Not sure how much hurt we did them inside, but they won’t be transporting four thousand men anywhere for a long time.”

“Commander, we’ve got some visitors,” Mahanani said. “Beyond the motor pool.”

Murdock checked in the string of lights below. What looked like a company of armed men double-timed toward the motor pool.

“Two rounds each into the formation,” Murdock said. They used the proximity fuzes, and the rounds would detonate ten or fifteen feet over the marching men. Three rounds hit almost at the same time, and Murdock was amazed at the result. It was like dropping in a half dozen 40mm grenades. Twenty or thirty men slammed to the ground. Most never got up. Others screamed and ran away from the formation, dripping blood. More rounds hit and slaughtered another twenty. By the time the last round exploded in the area, there were few soldiers standing and none coming forward.

“My God!” Colt Franklin said. “This Bull Pup should be classified as top secret and our new top weapon. My God! Did you see what we did down there with twenty rounds?”

The other SEALs were quiet.

“You said it all, buddy,” Jefferson said. “I just found my true love: this damned little Bull Pup.”

They heard noise to the left.

“Hey, Canzoneri coming in,” the Motorolas whispered. The sapper came in, limping badly. Mahanani was the first one to him. He took off the temporary bandage made from a shirtsleeve. He had Canzoneri behind some brush to screen him from the camp and hovered over him with a pencil flash in his mouth.

He washed the four-inch slice in Canzoneri’s thigh with disinfectant, then used some cinch bandages and pulled the sliced-open flesh together until it matched. Then he treated it with ointment and put a bandage around it to keep it clean and help hold the cut together.

Ed DeWitt came up, and he and Murdock talked about the route out. Lam knelt down with them.

“Back this side of the river, same way we came in,” Murdock said. “Mahanani, over here.” The medic came, putting his kit back in place.

“How’s Canzoneri?”

“I’d say he can make the forty miles. But not all in one chunk. Some transport would be nice.”

“Roger that. Let’s get put together and move out. Lam out front. We’ll do a column of ducks unless it gets too hairy. My guess is that they will send out at least six patrols trying to track us down. We need to get ahead of them.”

DeWitt put Canzoneri right beside him on the move and kept a tight watch on him. “Canzoneri, I know your leg is hurting like hell. You’ll get another morphine in an hour. If we’re going too fast, give me a yell. We go the rest of the way at your pace.”

“Hell, no sweat, JG. Just a fucking scratch. I can keep up with these bastards any day.”

DeWitt stared into Canzoneri’s eyes a moment and saw the determination there. He moved out again with the rest of the men.

They were what Murdock figured was five miles from the smoking ruins of the motor pool when Lam held up his hand for a stop. Murdock moved up to see the situation.

“Figure there’s about ten of them,” Lam said. “Must have taken a radio call and come up from somewhere down this way. How would they know we were on this side of the river?”

“Where we fired from,” Murdock said.

“There,” Lam said. They saw two men run across an open space about thirty yards ahead.

“I need six men up here on a company front,” Murdock whispered into his mike. “They’re too close for the twenties. Use the rifles or the 5.56 on the Pup. Quietly.”

The two men ahead who ran across the open space went back the other way.

“What the hell they doing?” Lam asked.

“Scouts,” Murdock said. He felt rather than heard men coming into a line on both sides of him and Lam.

They heard a loud click, then a greatly amplified voice boomed across the open space and through the woods.

“U.S. SEALs. We know you have invaded our sacred Colombian homeland. There is no way you can escape. We have you completely surrounded. You will die here, SEALs. Your blood and your bodies will fertilize our fine Colombian soil. You will die, SEALs. Every one of you will be cut down and dead within an hour.”