Flashpoint

26

The helicopter rested on the ground for a few minutes while the troops moved slowly toward the SEALs. Murdock and Lam now had their Bull Pups.

“Twenties on that first chopper,” Murdock said. “You laser it, I’ll try for a contact hit.”

They both aimed and fired. Murdock watched as the airburst riddled the chopper with shrapnel. The rotor blades slowed, then stopped.

His round came in almost at the same time, hit the cockpit, penetrated, and exploded inside. A moment later, the chopper boiled into a fireball.

“Use the laser on the troops,” Murdock said. He worked the Motorola. “Get the Bull Pup shooters up here. We’ve got company.”

Murdock and Lam fired four rounds each, lasering the troops on the ground. They had stalled in place. When the proximity fuses exploded the 20mm rounds ten feet over their heads, the troops must have wished that they had scattered. They tried to then, but round after round followed them.

Jaybird nudged next to Murdock and got off a shot.

“Where’s the other chopper?” Jaybird asked.

Then they saw it, climbing into the sky a mile off.

“Let’s try it,” Murdock said. Both he and Jaybird used the laser sight and automatic arming device built into the weapon, and when they had the laser on target, they fired.

The chopper came slowly toward them, perhaps to see what had happened to the other bird. The laser sighting was off only a little as the chopper moved. The first round exploded twenty feet behind the aircraft. The second one went off directly over it and smoke billowed from the helo as it settled gently to the ground. Two more rounds with the laser sighting brought gushes of smoke from the helicopter, and soon it burned furiously.

Murdock looked at the troops ahead of them a quarter mile. They were in a total rout.

“Cease fire,” Murdock said on the net. “We may need the ammo later.”

Lam motioned ahead. “Which way, Cap? We go down through the bodies? There may be more choppers on the other side of these small hills.”

“True, and these guys must have radioed their problems before they got creamed. Straight ahead, straight west is our best bet. More farms and maybe a village we can slip through. Let’s move.”

A half mile along the small valley, they came to the bodies. They skirted them and the still-smoldering choppers.

Mahanani worked his way up to Murdock a short time later.

“Canzoneri is having some trouble with his leg, the one that got sliced up. Can we take ten while I rebandage it?”

“Let’s hold it in place for five,” Murdock said on the lip mike. “Lam, get a quick recon and see what’s ahead of us. We should be within three or four miles of the beach.”

Mahanani worked on Canzoneri. Some of the stitches had come out. Mahanani put on some bandages to cinch together the parted flesh, then tied the wound tightly. An ampoule of morphine helped.

Lam came back quickly. “Directly ahead not more than a mile there’s some kind of an army camp. Don’t know how big it is, but it sprawls out a ways. We better go south for about three miles. Then maybe we can make a run for the wet.”

“Any activity that looked like they were coming after us?” Murdock asked.

“Not that I saw, Cap. Fair-sized camp.”

“We better choggie. Let’s go up and moving. Let’s hope we can find some cover.”

They had hiked for ten minutes when the net came on.

“I’ve got a chopper high and left,” DeWitt said. “We better go to ground and not move. He should miss us.”

“Do it,” Murdock ordered, and the SEALs lay absolutely still.

Lam came on the radio. “Cap, do I need to find a hide hole for us for the rest of the day? A damn lot of army around here.”

“Not yet. Let’s see if we can break through into the water. My gut feeling right now is that the Colombian army is confused and doesn’t really know where to find us.”

Jaybird spoke up on the Motorola. “Hey, what happened to our friendly pilot guide? Where the hell did he go?”

“Did he get paid in advance?” Ching asked. “If he did, he took the money and ran. At least he won’t cause us any problems.”

They moved out again. After what Lam figured was three miles, he probed west again and saw that they were a mile beyond the last of the military buildings and the wire fence with concertina barbed wire on the top.

Lam settled in on top of a small hill and used his binoculars to check out the western route. He groaned.

“Cap, you need to see this. I don’t know if the damn army is on maneuvers or just on a camp out. I’d say there are at least two thousand men in pup tents and company fronts and mess halls and kitchens out here in front of us.”

Murdock worked up to his scout and scanned the area with his binoculars.

“Be damned. Look over there. Jeeps flying white flags. Men with white helmets on. Those are judges. The whole operation is maneuvers, and they’re getting ready for a contest of blue against red or some such.”

“Nice thing about maneuvers, Cap. None of them will have any live ammunition.”

“But they could call in live ammo help in a rush if we tried to take them on. We go around them.”

“Again?”

“Again, unless you have a better idea.”

Lam looked at them again. “If we’re going around them, we better move. Looks like one of the teams is getting ready to march out. Must be a whole fucking battalion of them.”

The SEALs marched themselves. They picked up the pace to four miles a minute and angled straight south again, which they hoped would put them well out of the maneuver’s area.

Two hours later, Murdock figured they were eight miles from the maneuver bivouac. They hadn’t seen any troops or jeeps or white-helmeted judges for the past two miles.

“End run to the Caribbean?” Lam asked on the net.

“Let’s give it a try,” Murdock said. “Just past 1200. If we don’t run into the damn new Colombian president and his staff, we should make it this time.”

Murdock went to the head of the column with Lam out fifty yards in front as they turned due west. They had gone about a mile, Murdock figured, when they heard a clanking, grinding, and roaring in front of them.

“Tanks?” Lam asked.

Coming around a small valley and churning up the grass and weeds were six tanks. The first machine stopped, the tank gunner at the hatch rattled off six bursts of ten rounds each. The hot lead cut a swath through the brush just past where Murdock and Lam had been standing. They drove for the ground.

“They sending tanks after us?” Lam asked.

“Tanks don’t mind 20mm rounds,” Murdock said. “No way they could know where we are. They haven’t had a spotting since those choppers, to hell and gone back there this morning.”

“So why are they shooting at us?” Lam asked.

“They don’t even know we’re here. This must be a live firing range for the tanks. Let’s pull back out of this firing range. We can deal with the war games better.”

They moved back through the cover to where the rest or the platoon waited, then backtracked another mile toward the war games.

Murdock called a halt in a grove of trees near a small stream.

“Let’s find that hide hole and take a break. We’ll have more luck getting out of here after it gets dark.”

“There’s some high ground about five or six hundred yards up this stream,” Lam said. “I looked at it when we came by. Want me to check it out?”

“Go,” Murdock said. “We’ll wander up that way behind you.”

Just then, a series of rifle shots came from in front of them and not more than two hundred yards away.

“Down,” Ed DeWitt whispered in the radio. The SEALs went flat in the grass and weeds in the brushy area. Jaybird crawled through the brush until he could see the shooters. He chuckled into his mike.

“Blanks. Don’t you crackers know the difference in the sound of a blank and a live round? The troops out there are having a great time shooting blanks at each other. They’re moving away from us now with three captives. No sign of a white-hatted umpire.”

Twenty minutes later, Murdock figured the top of the hill they were near was three hundred feet above most of the rest of the swatch of green in front of them. They had burrowed into the brush and behind small trees to be completely out of sight. Sleep was the purpose.

Murdock and DeWitt took the first watch. They saw some patrols of the cammy-clad Colombian troops, but none came near them. Twice they saw firefights between the two sides, but no prisoners were taken. Once they saw white-helmeted judges and referees moving along a hint of a road in a jeep.

Murdock brought Holt up with the SATCOM. Holt zeroed in the antenna and gave Murdock the handset. The transmissions went out in bursts so quick that triangulation was impossible. The words were also encoded so no one without the decoder could read them.

“Homeplate, this is Rover.”

“Rover, we’ve been waiting. Are you held up?”

“That’s a roger. Stalled and can’t move until full dark. Will let you know what’s happening after that. Possible we can get to the wet during the darkness. Will this give your birdman any problems?”

“Negative, Rover. Let us know, and we’ll be there.”

“We’ll be in contact in about six hours.”

Mahanani slid into the brush beside Murdock.

“Let me take a look at that left wrist. You probably thought I’d forgotten all about it.”

“It’s fine.”

“Good, then it won’t hurt to put some ointment on it and a new bandage.”

Murdock held out his left arm. The corpsman pulled up the woodland green cammy sleeve and looked at the bandage. It was almost black with a large red stain on it. He cut off the bandage and checked the wound on both sides where the rifle round had dug through.

“Looks worse than the day you were hit,” Mahanani said. He treated both sides of the wrist, put compresses over the wounds, then bandaged it tightly and wrapped the bandage with inch-wide 3M Transpore sticky tape.

“Should keep you until we get back in the wet. If that starts hurting, you give me a holler. Checked Dober’s thigh, and it looks worse than your wound. Who fed you guys those indestructible pills, anyway?”

“Got them from you, corpsman. Now get some sleep.”

DeWitt watched Murdock a minute. “That arm giving you trouble?”

“No, it’s fine. Now you get some sleep.”

Ed held his finger to his lips and pointed down the hill. They saw four men in cammies like theirs moving slowly upward as if following a trail. Murdock ducked behind a larger bush and waited. The four men kept coming, some chattering, some looking up the hill.

“We sure they have only blanks?” DeWitt whispered.

“We shoot beside them, they’ll hear the lead. We don’t let them use their weapons.”

By then the four men were twenty yards away. They frowned, argued among themselves, then came on. When they were ten yards away, Murdock and DeWitt sprang out, firing two two-round bursts from the 5.56mm barrel of the Bull Pup. They shot beside the men so they could see the bullets.

Murdock and DeWitt charged the men. Two had dropped their rifles and held up their hands. The other two half lifted weapons, then lowered them. One chattered something in Spanish.

Ching ran down the trail to the group. “He said you’re not supposed to have real bullets. You’ll get in a lot of trouble.”

“Tell them we’re not in his game,” Murdock said. “The game is over for them. Tie them up. We’ll leave them here when we leave. Somebody will find them before they starve to death.”

Half the SEALs woke up with the firing. They helped put the plastic riot cuffs on the four Colombians and stashed them at the side of the trail. They stacked their rifles neatly and went back to their improvised bunks.

“If anyone comes looking for them, we get the troops up and bug out over the hills to the south,” Murdock said. He had Ching pull guard duty, and he and DeWitt vanished into the brush for some sleep.

One of the SEALs highest on the slope was Senior Chief Dobler. He hadn’t slept. He kept thinking about home and his wife and family. How was Nancy holding up? He wondered if the two women were meeting with her and helping her.

He hoped so. His family was tremendously important to him. He had been on the point of quitting the SEALs several times in the past year. Nancy was so insecure, so worried about him, about the kids, about everything.

Dobler remembered when they were first going together. He could remember the exact time when he first saw her at that little dance in the community center. He had been nearly twenty-two years old and sure that he would be a bachelor forever. It just seemed the best way to go. No responsibilities. No one to answer to every night. No one to explain what happened if he lost his pay in a poker game. No one…

That soon became unimportant. He saw Nancy, and she twirled when dancing with someone else. Her eyes lit up and her face was ecstatic. She was simply the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He cut in on the couple and whirled her away and longed to see that same expression on her face. He had taken her home from the dance.

“Hey, pretty Nancy. I’m going to marry you. Did I tell you that?”

She looked up at him and laughed. “Hey, no offense, but I’m shooting for a higher goal. Some rich guy who can take care of me and buy me all sorts of diamonds and cars and furs and boats and we go to Las Vegas and drop a few thousand and we don’t even notice it. Oh, my, yes. I want to marry a rich man. Now isn’t it just as easy for a girl to fall for a rich guy as it is to fall in love with some handsome sailor boy?”

He said he figured it was. At her place there was a porch without a light, and he eased up close and looked at her, then lowered his face toward hers. She didn’t back away or protest. He kissed her gently, then again. The third time, she had her arms around him and pushed close against him.

They went out every night for two weeks, then he had to go on sea duty for six months. When he came back, she was there, waiting for him, and two months later, they were married.

She hated his six-month sea duty, but it came and went. The first time after they were married, she was pregnant with Helen. She cried and asked him to quit the Navy. He explained it wasn’t a job you could walk in and quit. He had signed for four years. Two were up, but he had two more to do. She begged him to quit after the hitch was up. He promised they would talk about it.

Somehow, they never did. Then one day he came home and found Nancy on the floor, nearly dead by her own hand. That was when he talked with her mother and discovered Nancy’s sensitive nature and her suicide attempts when she was in high school.

This last one had been the worst. He thought he had lost her. Even now he wasn’t sure. Yes, she had moderated, she had come down from her manic stage, but how long could she hold? Most important, would the two other SEAL women be a positive influence on her?

He stared himself right in the face and knew the way he was going. He had eighteen years in the Navy. He could do the last year and a half standing on his head. It didn’t have to be in SEALs. He slammed his hand against the ground.

Damnit, if he had to, he would quit the platoon and go back to administration or some other nonfield assignment in the SEAL Team operation. With his clout, he could find a berth for a year and a half. Then he’d consider getting out of the Navy for good. It all depended on how Nancy reacted to this mission and his absence. He knew she’d go half crazy when she saw his shot-up thigh. No way he could keep that a secret.

But first, they had to get out of this trap. How could their own government write them off this way? How could they ignore fifteen U.S. citizens on foreign soil where the embassy had just been invaded, the diplomats held captive, and by now the embassy totally destroyed. How in hell could his own government do that to him?

Twenty feet below where Dobler worried, Murdock came awake and alert. He felt his lip mike in place. “Who’s on guard duty?” he asked softly in the set. No one responded. It was almost dusk in the woodland. He rose silently and moved down the hill to the lookout point. Bill Bradford sat there with his weapon across his knees, looking through a bush down the hill.

“Bradford?”

The man turned. “Hi, Cap.”

“Didn’t you hear my last transmission?”

“Not a whisper. Try it again.”

Murdock spoke into the lip mike.

“Damn, I’m down. Could be the battery. We have spares? Oh, yeah, that little package in the waterproof. Watch this spot for me for a minute, and I’ll go get a new battery.”

“Go.”

Murdock studied the last of the landscape he could see. He could hear no guns chattering. Maybe the war was over until daylight for the game players. He hoped the tanks had gone back to their base. It was so frustrating. He knew they couldn’t be more than three to five miles from the sea, yet somehow they couldn’t get there.

Hell, they were going to head due west with dark and go around or through anybody or anything that tried to stop them. They had the firepower and the incentive. Besides, he was getting hungry.

He tapped his mike. “Wake up call, crew. Time to rise and shine. We’re heading for the water. With any luck, we should be back in some warm, dry bunks before the night is over. Anybody want to take a hike?”

He got various comments over the net. Five minutes later, they were assembled and ready to move.

DeWitt came up to Murdock in the darkness. “We better cut these four soldiers loose, Cap. Don’t see how they can hurt us. Somebody must know we’re in this general area. We’ll take their rifles and throw them away.”

Murdock thought about it a minute. “Go,” he said. The men couldn’t believe they were set free. Ching told them they were lucky to be alive. That they should rush back to their units and say only that they got lost and misplaced their rifles.

Lam led them out due west, down the hill, over part of the heavy tracks of the tanks, and along a small stream heading for the sea.

Lights showed to one side a half mile away. Murdock guessed they were the war games camp. They didn’t have out any patrols or security. Around a small hill they saw more lights, and the clanking of heavy metal on metal.

Lam stopped for Murdock to come up. “Has to be the tank company,” Lam said. “They are working on tracks or rollers, something with a heavy sound.”

“Around them,” Murdock said.

“You don’t want us to steal a tank and ride in style to the beach?” Lam asked.

“Not unless you can get fourteen guys hanging on the outside of the rig.”

They detoured and kept going. Murdock thought he could smell salt air. Lam said no way.

Dobler realized with a start that he was limping. He hadn’t noticed it before. Just a little limp, a quick move with his right leg so it wouldn’t have to take his weight so long. Damn. In the dark nobody could see it.

Nancy would shit purple if she knew he was wounded. He had made Murdock promise not to let her know until they got home and he could do the talking.

A mile on west, they heard loudspeakers. Ching listened closely but could catch only a few words.

“ ‘Enemies of the people of Colombia,’ that’s all I can understand, Cap,” Ching said.

“What the fuck is going on up there?” Murdock asked. DeWitt and Jaybird shook their heads.

“Could be a beach blockade,” Dobler said. “Somehow they knew we were SEALs in the other places. Why not here, too? They know we go to water. They knew where we were. This must be one of the closest places to get to the Caribbean Sea.”

“Lam, Jaybird, on me. Let’s go see.” They worked their way silently through the dark night along the stream, which had now grown into a good-sized river thirty feet across. Beyond the fringe of trees bordering the creek, they could see farmland and a few houses here and there. Most had lights on.

Six hundred yards from where they stopped, the three SEALs bellied down beside a fallen tree trunk and peered over the decomposing top.

They saw a highway, and beyond it the crashing surf of the Caribbean Sea. The highway was easy to spot. Two huge searchlights shone on it, turning the night into noon. Not even an ant could crawl across that blacktop road without being seen.

“The searchlights are easy,” Lam said. “The twenties with impact hits. Then a charge.”

“Where are their support troops?” Jaybird asked. “They must have a couple of hundred riflemen guarding the area with the searchlights.”

“Just beyond the blacktop roadway, the beach drops off ten, fifteen feet,” Murdock said. “They could have the troops down there waiting. A surprise party.”

“The searchlights are reaching out about a hundred yards,” Jaybird said. “So they cover a spot two hundred yards wide. We could shoot out the lights, with most of our guys down in the dark on the other side of that light. That way we’d go across at a spot they didn’t think they would have to defend.”

“Unless they figure that’s what we would figure,” Lam said with a big grin.

“We can’t stay here all night. Lam, you have your Pup. You stay here with your ears on. We get the platoon in position down the way, I’ll give you a go on the lights. You nail both and run your ass down to where the rest of us will be waiting. As soon as you get there, we go across the fucking road.” Murdock whacked Lam on the shoulder.

“Give us twenty minutes to get into position.” Murdock and Jaybird took off at a run to get back to the platoon.