Pacific Siege

3

Murdock settled back in the half-track and watched behind him.

Within three minutes he saw lights coming toward him. They must be some of the other half-tracks of El Raza. He had a choice: try to outshoot them, and give away his position, or continue to roll along without lights, and stay lost in the desert.

“Ed, no lights on your rig. I’ve got lights behind me, but no return fire so they don’t know where we are.”

“That’s a Roger. We’ve met the truck. I’ve got six men inside, and eight hanging on the outside. Where to?”

“We’ve been heading east — that should put us far enough away from the town so now we can cut due south. The border is closest to the south.”

“Will the chopper care?”

“Less Iraq airspace they have to cover, the better they’ll like it.

Can’t tell what good old Saddam might have sitting around here with wings on it, and air-to-ground missiles on the wings.”

“Due south it is. How do we join up?”

“I’ll stop our rig and listen,” Murdock said. “Should be able to hear that grinder of yours out here.”

“That’s a Roger. We’re turning south.”

In the half-track, Salwa had heard the transmission from Murdock.

He looked at the American. “Shut it down now?”

Murdock nodded. The rig stopped and Murdock stepped away as the engine died. He turned slowly trying to pick up some sound. Quinley was beside him.

He touched Murdock’s shoulder and pointed. Murdock turned that way.

“There are four half-tracks chasing us,” Quinley said. “Sounds like more than one engine.”

Murdock thought he heard it, but it faded. It was to the left.

Salwa started the engine, and they moved over the dark desert at ten miles an hour.

“Sometimes there are little wadis out here fifteen feet deep from the runoff,” Salwa said. Murdock nodded. They drove south for ten minutes; then Murdock had the engine turned off and they listened again.

Nothing.

Far off they saw headlights.

“Looks like they’re still going east,” Murdock said. “Let’s hope we lost them.”

Then he saw more lights, two pair that were heading in much the same direction as he was. He hit the mike.

“Ed, you have two rigs chasing you? Headlights to the rear?”

“Yeah. Figured something was back there — they just turned on their lights.”

“Keep on the same bearing. We’ll see if we can come up to the side of those two half-tracks and give them a good SEAL hot-lead welcome.”

They drove faster then. A half-moon gave some help. Salwa had grown up in the desert, and knew even with the lights off how to tell a shadow from a gully, at least now that it was vital. The rigs with lights on were going faster, but Murdock had the angle on them. He figured in another two miles he’d have them at a two-hundred-yard range.

All he had to do was blow their tracks off or kill the engine with the half-track’s mounted Fifty.

Ten minutes later, Murdock could see the lights, and the faint shadows of the rigs themselves. He was at four hundred yards. He closed to two hundred, and used the rig’s mounted machine gun to shoot at the first half-track.

The fifty-caliber spoke loudly in the desert silence. He missed with the first rounds, corrected, and slammed six, then twelve rounds into the side and front of the moving rig. It sputtered and died. The headlights went out.

He saw the second rig stop and turn to bring its gun to bear on Murdock’s muzzle flashes. Murdock got off a ten-round burst, then two more five-round bursts before the other gunner could get in action. He saw the front of the rig dissolve in steam; then the fuel tank blew in a gushing explosion fed by the diesel fuel, and the fight was over.

“Oh, yeah, beautiful,” Ed Dewitt said on the Motorola. “I’d say the two are about a half mile behind us, and they were gaining on us like crazy. Can we use lights now?”

“Hell, no. There are still three or four half-tracks out here hunting us. We join up, get another five miles south, then call for our chopper pickup, and in an hour or two a big dinner. What time is it?”

“Just past twenty-three hundred,” Dewitt said. “Come and find us.

I can loan you about six men.”

“Turn off your engine. Let us know when you can hear us, then guide us in. We can’t be more than a mile or two apart.”

Murdock found the rest of his platoon ten minutes later. They overshot them, and had to come back.

“Got you,” Dewitt said on the radio.

Then Murdock saw the truck with men hanging all over it. Salwa pulled the half-track up beside it, and they redistributed the men for better mobility.

“Let’s have a casualty report,” Murdock said to the men.

Holt came up and showed Murdock his arm. “The slug went on through, no big deal. Doc put some gunk on it and wrapped it up proper-like. I’m fit for duty.”

“But no hundred-foot rope climbs, right?”

“Yeah, that would be tough.”

The second squad wound was only a bullet graze. Doc wrapped it and they moved.

“Let’s keep it quiet now, and listen for engines. Somebody get on top of the truck and look for headlights. Be nice if we had a thousand-foot hill to use for a lookout.”

They watched and listened for ten minutes. Murdock was satisfied they didn’t have any of the hunter half-tracks close to them.

“We’ll motor another twenty minutes due south, then put in our call for the chopper. Everyone watch for headlights out here.”

Twenty minutes later, they had covered several miles to the south, and hadn’t run into any sign of the Iraqi hunters. Murdock called a halt, and they listened again. Then he waved at Ron Holt.

“Fire up the SATCOM. Let’s get out of here.”

Holt took the fifteen-pound radio off his back, and opened the flap with the antenna. He set up the small dish, and aimed it somewhere near where the Milstar satellite should be in a synchronous orbit 23,300 miles over the equator. The radio gave instant communications by the satellite with anyone, anywhere in the world. They could call the President, or their families back in Coronado.

It was fifteen inches high, three inches square, and had power from ten watts all the way down to one tenth of a watt for short-distance clandestine operations. It had the capability of voice, data, or video transmission and receiving, and encrypted each message automatically.

It could send out a lengthy message in a burst of energy less than a tenth of a second long to make it almost impossible for an enemy to find the transmitter.

Murdock took the pad, and typed in his message: “Have package, waiting pickup. Murdock.” He used the MUGR, the Miniature Underwater Geographic locator. It usually worked underwater with an antenna that drifted to the surface, where it contacted the three closest positioning satellites for triangulation to pin down the location anywhere on the globe to within ten feet. He took the reading off the dry-land model, and entered the coordinates in his message.

Murdock reviewed the words, then punched the button to encrypt it, and it was sent a moment later in a quick burst of power.

“Now we sit down and wait for our bird to come, Murdock said. Fayd Salwa had been following the procedure with interest.

“This is fascinating to me,” he said. “When I was in the army we had nothing like this. We had a weapon, and sometimes bullets, and if extremely lucky a truck so we didn’t have to march so far. It wasn’t a good army.”

“These gadgets are fine as long as they work,” Murdock said. “Once we had a SATCOM that took a pair of slugs right in the middle, and it was just fifteen pounds of worthless junk.”

A moment later, a message came back on the SATCOM.

“Help on the way. ETA ten minutes.”

Murdock nodded, and told the troops. How long did it take a chopper to fly ten miles? Only he didn’t know where it was coming from.

The border with Kuwait might be more than ten miles away to the southeast, he knew.

Murdock checked each man. Nobody else had been wounded, no other physical problems. They had been lucky to get in and out with so little damage. It was always a deadly chance going into these blind situations. Sometimes they simply didn’t have enough intel.

Five minutes later, they heard a noise to the southeast. They let the sound grow until they knew it was a chopper. Murdock let it fly directly over them at a hundred feet until he was sure it was a U.S. machine. Then he popped a red flare, and the bird circled around and landed a hundred yards from them.

“Let’s get the hell out of Dodge,” Murdock said. The men had been standing waiting; now they started to run across the sand to their air bus out of Iraq.

They were still fifty yards away, when Murdock heard the whooshing sound he had nightmares about, an incoming Rocket Propelled Grenade.

These lethal rockets were deadly, easy to use, and to conceal.

Before he could yell at his men to take cover, one rocket hit the chopper, and then another, and a third. The bird, with its big rotor chugging around, burst into flames; then the fuel exploded, and there was nothing left but fiercely burning bits and pieces of machine and the dead crewmen.

“Hold!” Murdock shouted. “We can’t help the poor bastards! Let’s find the shooters!”

They all hit the sand, and listened. Over the roaring fire of the chopper they managed to hear some high-pitched chatter and a fired round or two. Murdock pointed to the left, where there was a small gully.

Murdock whispered into his mike. “Ed. Take your squad fifty yards south. We’ll move north, then we move up on that gully. A surprise party.”

It took them only a few minutes to get in position, and then move forward. At the edge of the small arroyo, they stopped and peered over the side. It was an armored personnel carrier with a dozen men around it. They were celebrating the destroyed chopper.

Murdock gave his men time to set up; then he aimed his subgun at the closest troops below and kicked off a twelve-round burst. At his signal, the rest of the weapons opened up.

There was no immediate response, as the men below dove for any cover they could find, mostly behind the armored rig. Then gunfire answered the SEALS.

Murdock ducked back a minute, and rolled to the left to establish a new firing position. Half of the men along the lip of the gully did the same thing.

Bill Bradford settled in behind the big M-87R .50-caliber rifle, and zeroed in on the vehicle. The big Mcmillan bolt-action rifle had a ten-round magazine hanging out the bottom of it. Bradford put his eye to the Leopold Ultra MK4 16-power scope, and triggered off the first round.

The AP, armor-piercing, round splattered through the hood and exploded deep inside the diesel engine, killing any more movement by the rig. He then concentrated on the cab and blasted three rounds in there.

He had loaded the magazine with alternate AP and HE, and the effect riddled the personnel carrier, turning it into an elongated bit of flotsam on a sea of sand.

Murdock rattled off three-round bursts at the dimly lit targets.

The SEALs continued to take return fire, but the men below must have figured they were outgunned. No RPG rounds came their way. The Iraqi troops, or the men from El Raza, must not have been able to tie down a good target.

After four minutes, the firing from below tapered off, then stopped. The survivors evidently knew when to quit, and had faded into the desert night, moving away from Murdock and his team.

“That’s a wrap,” Murdock said on the Motorola.

It was too late to check for survivors in the chopper. The three RPG rounds had brought a nearly immediate fuel explosion, and there was no chance anyone could have lived through the blasts.

“Move out, double-time back to our transport,” Murdock said into his mike. “We need to get away from this fucking grave site. Somebody in that personnel carrier might have radioed in the shoot on the enemy bird, and that will bring all sorts of visitors to this place.”

Holt jogged up beside his commander. “Should we give a report on the chopper, Sir? Somebody back there will be wondering.”

“Right, but in a half hour. By then we should be well away from this death scene. The time won’t matter to that chopper crew.”

Fayd Salwa came up on the other side of Murdock. “Could I offer a suggestion? Distance from that scene is the key, but they will expect us to run directly for the Kuwait border. If they search for us it will be there. My suggestion is that we turn and go southwest, which will put us into Saudi Arabia in about fifteen miles. I know this area.”

Murdock considered it. He nodded. He touched the lip mike. “Men, we’re changing direction a little, southwest instead of southeast.

We’re heading away from where the bad guys will be looking for us. This direction will put us in Saudi Arabia, a friendly nation.”

Back at the motorized rigs, they loaded up and moved out southwest.

If they were only fifteen miles from the border, there was a chance they could get there quickly.

Murdock could imagine the worry about the chopper back at its base.

He pulled up the rigs a mile from the crash site and sent a cryptic note on the SATCOM about the chopper, asking for another pickup. A message came back quickly. “Positive there are no survivors? No chance for another pickup. Our radar shows numerous Iraqi aircraft moving into your area. Try to make a run for the border.”

Murdock sent back a message that there was no chance for survivors.

Then they moved with lights off.

They had gone no more than a mile when Murdock halted the rigs and turned off the engines. The sound he had thought he heard came again; then a jet fighter roared over their heads at two hundred feet.

“He couldn’t see us and he doesn’t have good enough radar to spot us on the ground. We’d be so much screen clutter. He’s fishing, but we’ve got to be careful. We’ll keep the trucks a hundred yards apart, and move slowly toward the border. Maybe eight miles from here now.”

The men heard a swooshing sound, and all of them dove out of the rigs and hit the ground.

Another Rocket Propelled Grenade. It slammed into the ground ten yards from the truck, but shrapnel sprayed forward, smashing the windshield, puncturing the gas tank, and chewing up the fuel line on the engine.

“Where did it come from?” Murdock asked his mike.

“From the north,” Ed Dewitt said. “I’ve got three men moving that way. There’s a little gully over there. They could be on the lip of it. Anybody hit by that hot steel? Casualty report.”

“Yeah, L-T. Adams. I picked up a scratch on my leg. Tore my cammies. Not bleeding much.”

“L-T. Douglas. Caught some of that steel on my right arm. Dug in deep. Doc better take a look.”

“I’ll find you, Douglas,” Doc said.

A moment later, they heard gunfire, then more gunfire.

“Nailed two of them, L-T,” Gonzalez said on the Motorola. “They have some kind of a jeep rig and bugged out before we could get anybody else. Don’t think we hurt their transport much.”

At the truck, Joe Douglas had been checking it out. He ground the starter six times. Nothing. With a small flashlight, he looked the engine over. “No way, L-T,” he told Dewitt. “The engine is a mess, fuel line is in ten pieces, a bunch of wiring is chopped up. Take me a week to make it run. Besides, all the gas leaked out. Lucky it didn’t blow up on us.”

“Let’s get to the half-track,” Murdock said on the radio. “We’ll load as many on it as we can; the rest of us will jog along beside it.

We’ll change off every two miles. We’ve got a border to find.”

Ten minutes later, they heard a chopper coming. The men scattered away from the half-track. Murdock manned the fifty-caliber MG. He knew the chopper gunners could see the half-track in the pale moonlight. It wasn’t supposed to be here. That would be enough for a shoot.

He got off six five-round bursts with the big weapon, but wasn’t sure if he scored any hits. Then the bird was coming in on a missile run, and Murdock jumped off the half-track and sprinted away thirty yards before the missile hit the vehicle. The first explosion was enough to destroy it; then a secondary explosion ripped through it, and the half-track became various refrigerator-sized pieces of junk scattered around the desert.

As the chopper came over the rig on its firing run, the SEAL platoon returned fire. Bill Bradford had his Big Fifty out, and got off six rounds as the chopper came over. The last two jolted into the chopper and it began trailing smoke. It tipped left and nearly hit the ground, then righted itself, before it lost power and dropped straight down three hundred feet and burst into flames.

“Take that, Turkey,” Bradford called, and the rest of the SEALs cheered.

Murdock hit his mike. “Listen up. We’re on foot, and still seven or eight miles from the border. Mr. Salwa knows the territory, so he’ll be our guide. We’ll form up in a column of ducks ten yards apart and move out of here at double time. That chopper radioed in our position for damn sure. Let’s motor.”

They kept moving, with Murdock setting the pace at a brisk six miles an hour. He kept a lead scout out a hundred yards and a rear guard as far back as he could see the main body. As far as they knew, no one followed them through the half-moon Iraqi night.

They hiked hard for an hour, then took a break. Lam roamed the area around them, and came back reporting that he saw nothing except two night birds, and heard only a few small scurrying night animals.

Murdock had Holt fire up the SATCOM again, and he reported shooting down the Iraqi chopper. He told them they were aiming southwest for the nearest point of the border with Saudi Arabia. He asked for any orders.

The reply came back quickly. “Kuwait border area alive and active with Iraqi troops and choppers. Do not try to approach. We can send no airlift support. Keep us informed. Good idea on the Saudi border.

Good luck.”

The SEALs sat in the sand and rocks of the Iraqi border area resting. The kidnap victim had stayed close to Murdock. He thanked Murdock again for his rescue.

“Our army simply doesn’t have any commandos like you folks. We don’t have the skills. Now it is my hope that we can get to one of the borders safely. It would not go well for me if either El Raza or Saddam Hussein’s men caught me.”

When Holt had the SATCOM packed up, they moved again. They had heard more jet aircraft, but they were miles away evidently searching a different area. There was a lot of desert out there to cover, Murdock decided.

They had hiked for fifteen minutes on their southwest course when Murdock heard the unmistakable sound of helicopters heading toward them.

“Two choppers, maybe three coming in from the north,” Dewitt said.

“I can see searchlights.”

“Spread out and get into the dirt,” Murdock said. The SEALs scattered twenty yards apart, lay down in the sand and rocks of the desert, and spread handfuls of the sand over their cammies to make them even harder to see. Weapons were hidden under their bodies.

The choppers made a pass two hundred yards to the north of them, then circled back, and came within a hundred yards of their position.

“Nobody move, don’t even breathe,” Murdock said softly into his lip mike.

Murdock watched with surprise as the two choppers settled down to a landing four hundred yards away. The birds landed about fifty yards apart, and were larger than he had first thought.

Each chopper had on landing lights, and he could see twenty combat troops jump down from each one. The troops formed up, and then spread out in a skirmish search pattern and began walking directly toward where the SEALs lay.