Flashpoint

17

Murdock laid out the route of the small ditch and all of them with tools started digging. It went from an upstream point across twenty feet and down about fifty feet to the white mound of cocaine.

“We melt the damn stuff,” Quinley said. “Damn, I wonder how much that would be worth on the street in New York?”

Jefferson lifted his brows. “I’d say between forty and fifty million bucks. Lots of money.”

“Damn, really?” Quinley said. “Too bad we can’t cash in on that some way.”

“You do every time you cash your paycheck,” Murdock said. “Dig.”

He put three men at the cocaine, pushing it to the near side with boards until it was in a small depression. The mound of white powder looked much larger out of the garbage cans than it had inside them.

They dug the ditch a foot deep and rapidly moved it down the hill, angled for the white powder. Before it was done, Murdock had three men lugging rocks from the area to build a small dam across the four-foot-wide stream. Once the rocks were in place, he had them pile dirt in front of them to seal off the damn.

“Ready with the ditch,” DeWitt called. Lam dug out the foot-wide section to open it up to the stream, and the water flowed rapidly downhill toward the cocaine. Two men filled in the last of the dam, and more water surged into the canal.

Two SEALs poked the mound of cocaine a little at a time into the water. It swirled and at last overflowed the small depression. When the white powder hit the water, it dissolved at once. The coke-loaded water ran under the burned-out floor and down the side of the hill.

It took them two hours to melt down the mountain of cocaine they had. When the last of it fell into the water, the SEALs let out a cheer, and Murdock shoveled dirt into the canal to shut off the water supply.

Murdock watched the water drain out and cheered with the rest of them.

“Treats are on me, men. I’m a big spender. MREs for everyone.”

They hooted him down, but most of them flaked out and had a meal ready to eat.

Captain Herrera came up to Murdock.

“The workers. What about them?”

“Put all of them you can on those two trucks and the one car I saw and drive them into Cali or let them off along the way if they want that. Otherwise, it’s a long walk.”

“The three prisoners?”

“Turn them loose and let them walk back.”

“They looked at the dead men this morning and said the lab boss and his assistant were not there. They must have run away at the first sound of gunfire.”

“Figures,” Murdock said.

“We need to take a walk,” Captain Herrera said.

They went to the first lab building and viewed the destruction.

“One problem here,” the captain said. “Somebody else could come in and use the vats. They are made of metal and some kind of coating to withstand all the chemicals, and were not hurt a bit by the fire.”

“Looks like we’ll have to use our explosives and blow them up,” Murdock said. They went back to the combat vests, and Murdock took a quarter pound of TNAZ and a detonator/timer and they moved back to the first lab. Murdock placed the bomb under the lip of the vat halfway down so it would ruin the structure even if it didn’t shatter it completely.

He set the timer for five minutes, and the two men walked away.

The blast came right on time and jolted most of the SEALs who didn’t know what had happened.

“Relax, SEALs,” Murdock boomed in his parade ground voice. “Just a little experiment.”

Half the SEALs looked at the results. The ten-foot-square vat had a two-foot hole blown in it, and the near side crumpled until it touched the far side.

“Should be sufficient,” Murdock said. The Colombian captain nodded his agreement.

“Senior Chief,” Murdock called. Dobler hurried over, showing only a hint of a limp.

“Senior Chief, we need to blow all of the vats like this one. As I remember, there are something like twenty of them. Check out our supply of explosives and get the job done. After that, we’ll be heading back for hot chow and showers.

“Aye, aye, sir,” Dobler said and moved away with more of a limp now that he wasn’t thinking about it. He called the men around him, and they went to their gear and gave him a total on the quarter-pound charges they had. They were short.

“A whole case of C-4 in the truck,” Jaybird said. Dobler told him to go get it.

For nearly thirty minutes the hills rang with the sound of explosions. The SEALs set them off one at a time until the last vat was punctured and twisted beyond all repair.

The trucks had pulled out an hour before with all of the workers. They were packed in tightly but didn’t mind. They were being freed of a kind of slavery that only the homeless and truly destitute know.

It was just 1000 when the destruct job was done, the dead men buried, and the SEALs and Captain Herrera pulled away from the former major cocaine processing plant.

“Somebody in Cali is going to be angry,” the captain said.

“I’d like to meet him face-to-face,” Murdock said. “He wouldn’t be angry long. He’d be dead.”

Herrera put on a crooked smile, and Murdock wasn’t sure what he believed about the cocaine traffic. He was following orders, but that might be the extent of his anti-cocaine feelings.

The truck was two miles from the burned-out cocaine lab when Murdock asked Ostercamp to stop so Holt could key in the SATCOM.

“It’s set up to receive, Cap,” Holt said. “How long you want to wait for a message?”

“We’ll cool it here for ten minutes and see if anything urgent is popping,” Murdock said.

It was just past five minutes when Murdock thought he saw something move in the brush a hundred yards down the little valley. He was about to say something about it when a shot snarled in the deep green and a round slammed into the overhead canvas covering on the back of the truck.

“Down!” Murdock bellowed. “Sniper moved to the left front about a hundred yards out. Long guns, do it.”

The sniper rifle responded first, but not before another round came smashing into one of the roof struts. Bill Bradford sent six rounds into the general area, then saw movement and changed targets and fired six more times.

Ronson got his H&K NATO round machine gun up and working and sprayed the same area with hot lead. The 5.56 weapons scattered shots into the same spot, but Murdock figured the sniper had moved on by that time. It would be impossible to find the man, let alone track him in the heavy brush.

“Cease fire,” Murdock boomed to get over the sound of the weapons. “Get us out of here fast, Ostercamp.”

The truck jolted forward on the narrow lane and soon passed the spot where the sniper had been. Another half mile down the trail, and the men relaxed a little.

“Anybody get hurt on that last go-round?” Murdock asked. He was thankful that no one had. He looked at his own arm. He had forgotten about his wound. Proved it wasn’t much. He grinned. This would be his thirty-seventh purple heart if he was receiving them.

He had four men with semiserious wounds already, and the mission was just getting moving. He hoped this wasn’t going to be one of those times when every man in the platoon came home and reported at once to Balboa Naval Hospital.

The rest of the ride was uneventful, and they came into Camp Bravo a little after 1400. Murdock and Dobler went to the hospital. They had their wounds checked, treated, and were released. They went up a floor to find Canzoneri.

When they came to his bed, he was sitting up talking to a pretty little nurse. He chattered some Spanish words at her and she giggled and shook her head and said them the correct way.

“Hey, slugger, looks like you’re feeling better.”

“Told them I was fine. Conchita here is teaching me some Spanish. So far I know perro, which is dog, and qué lastima. That means what a pity.”

“So, what she’s telling you is that it’s a real pity that you’re a dog,” Dobler said.

“Hey, that’s not it. So you guys were shot up, huh? You guys here professionally? You get nicked?”

“Just a scratch,” Murdock said. “I need to find that nurse that speaks English.” He found her and she looked at Canzoneri’s chart. She smiled.

“He can go back to his unit now, but he should come in after two days for us to change the bandage and look at the wound.”

“Good,” Canzoneri said. “Where are my pants?”

Back at the barracks, Holt had the SATCOM on receive. He handed Murdock a note.

“Stroh called a half hour ago. He says get you on the horn as soon as you get here. He says this is flap city, and he’s the fucking mayor, whatever that means. Should I get ready to transmit?”

“Probably. Maybe we should have some chow first.”

“He seemed insistent that you get back to him ASAP.”

Murdock snorted. “He’s always in a rush. Yeah, beam me out, Scotty.”

Stroh answered as soon as Murdock’s message went out.

“You’re back. Good. We’ve got a problem.”

“I have no problem except having a big supper, a hot shower, and about twelve hours of sleep. We just came in, Stroh.”

“Good, glad you made it. What I want to talk about is a serious situation. The American embassy in Bogotá has been invaded and captured by Colombian military forces. They used three tanks and a flamethrower. Your job is to go in and get the hostages out before anything else happens.”

“How? We’re a hundred and seventy miles from Bogotá. If you come in from the Pacific, it’s about two hundred and seventy miles. That’s an RT of five hundred and forty miles. We don’t even have a bird that can do that.”

“So, it’ll take some planning. From Cali up and back would be only three hundred and forty miles. You’re directed to talk to the captain and air boss here on the carrier. They have some ideas. We don’t have a hell of a lot of time. They took over the embassy this morning just before noon. The ambassador figured some trouble was coming, so they flew most of the personnel out. The ambassador is still there, and he says they have only twelve Americans left there. You get in touch with Captain Ingman here on the carrier. He’s the man you’ll have to coordinate things with. I’ve talked to him, but you’ll need to do the overhead planning.”

“Yes sir. We better go through Lieutenant Commander Emerling. He’s my contact. Can you phone him and get him up there and have him set up a time for me to call the captain?”

“Can do. Soonest. Talk later. Stroh, out.”