by Dick Couch
“Okay, listen up. This is gonna be a hot extraction—damn hot,” Bautista said into his boom mic. “I want all weps-trained to starboard. We’re still,” he paused, glancing down at his Garmin 720 Marine Navigator, “about eight miles away from the primary extraction site. I want the Two Boat in loose trail until we get to where we’re going. Then, at the extraction point, I want us no more than ten yards offshore and ten yards bow to stern. Remember, get a clear field of fire for every weapon. Got it?”
“Yep, Chief . . . Got it, Skipper . . . No worries . . .” and other short replies told Bautista his crews were up on step, just like their boats. “Remember our creed, boys,” he said, referring to the six-paragraph SWCC Creed each of them knew by heart: “‘I will close and engage the enemy with the full combat power of my craft. I will never quit and I will leave no one behind.’”
The answering mic clicks told Bautista all he needed to know. The boat guys, his guys, were ready. What they had trained for, for most of their professional careers, was about to go down.
* * *
At Engel’s position on the shallow rise, the first hint of dawn was creeping into the eastern sky. All he could do for the moment was stare at the scope and watch the quick-reaction force close on the compound. Daylight would make their movement out of the camp easier, but they would also lose their night-vision advantage.
“Get out of there, Chief.”
“Working on it, Boss.”
Occasionally, there was the soft bark of the Mk12 as Weimy found a target. The Tango sentries on the far side of the camp who responded to the initial bursts of gunfire were quickly taken out. Several others appeared but soon went into hiding when they realized there was an accomplished sniper out there. They were content to remain hidden and alive, at least for now.
Sonny searched the room while A.J. did what he could to get Morales ready to travel. Suddenly Nolan was at his side. “How’s she doing?”
“She’s passed out, and there’s no way she can walk. How’s Mikey?”
“Not good. Sonny, we done here?”
“Yeah. I got a laptop, a cell phone, and two flash drives. That’s about it.”
“Bag it and go help Ray with Mikey. We got a QRF breathing down on us. I’ll take her, and we’ll go out the back door. A.J., take us out of here and make for the first rally point.”
“Hurry, Chief.” There was an urgency in Engel’s voice. “They’re closing fast.”
“Copy, Boss. We’re out the door now.”
Engel and Weimy watched as A.J. led them from the building toward the first rally point, a predetermined meeting place on the road that led north out of the camp toward the river. They left the building at a slow run, with Sonny carrying Mikey like a sleeping child and Nolan with Morales draped over his shoulder. A guard along their route saw an opportunity and moved from behind a tree. Before Engel could shout a warning, Weimy’s rifle spat a round and took him in the chest. He went down to all fours, and a second round knocked him flat.
“Good shooting. Now, we gotta get out of here.” Engel no longer needed the Raven display to track the QRF; he could hear them coming. He snapped the Toughbook computer shut and stowed it. Seconds later he and Weimy sprinted down the hill toward the rally point. Just outside the camp, this initial rally point was also only about a quarter mile from the river. If they could meet there and get into the bush before the QRF trucks were on them, they had a chance. If not, the trucks would run them down and that would be that.
Nolan and his team were moving at a jog trot at best, and he knew they were moving way too slow. But once clear of the building, he saw the truck with the dead guard slumped at the wheel.
“A.J.!” he shouted. “The truck!” but A.J. was already heading for it. He grabbed the dead Tango by the collar and jerked him from behind the wheel, dumping him unceremoniously into the mud. The keys were in the ignition. The engine turned over once, then twice, and finally caught. Nolan laid Morales into the truck bed as gently as he could and jumped in after her, followed by Ray. Sonny put Mikey in the rear seat of the extended cab and jumped in with him.
“Any time now!” Nolan yelled to A.J., who had just wiped away the last of the blood and brains from the windshield. He jammed the truck into gear and mashed the gas. In a flurry of mud flying from all four tires, the truck slewed around and headed for the back road that would take them from the camp. As they cleared the compound, Nolan saw the two trucks from the QRF enter the compound on the main road and charge after them.
“Damn,” he said, to no one in particular, “we were almost home free.” He keyed his mic. “Hey, Boss, we’re clear of the camp en route to the rally point, but we got two Tango vehicles on our tail, and they look pissed. The good news is that we have wheels and should be at the rally point in less than a minute.”
Engel and Weimy got to the road and the rally point just ahead of the SEALs in the truck. Engel carried the squad’s one and only LAAW—a light anti-tank/assault weapon that was more than capable of dealing with a truck. He pulled the launcher over his head and discarded the carrying strap, slinging his M4 rifle in the LAAW’s place. He quickly extended the launching tube, removed the safety pin, and kneeled down with the rocket on his shoulder, just as A.J. and the SEAL truck rounded a bend in the road. They flashed past him and slowed to a halt.
Weimy was at Engel’s side with a hand on his other shoulder. They were both breathing hard from the dash to the rally point. “Steady, Boss. Sight picture and trigger squeeze.”
“Sight picture and trigger squeeze,” Engel repeated.
The pickup truck rounded the bend well ahead of the Explorer. It was a big Ford extended-cab 250, and its bed was crowded with armed men. Engel pressed the trigger detent and the rocket leapt from the tube. It took but a nanosecond for the missile to cover the thirty meters between the LAAW launcher and the grill of the Ford. The force of the blast pushed the engine back through the firewall and essentially buckled the frame from the dashboard forward, causing the truck to hinge, nose down. With the nose of the truck burrowing into the mud, the inertia of the vehicle generated a forward flip, with the truck bed careening over its front bumper, tossing close to a dozen stunned Tangos into the dirt in front of the two SEALs. Engel, momentarily frozen from the blast of the rocket, recovered in time to dodge a bouncing tire that almost took him out. Weimy calmly shot two of the shaken Tangos who tried to get to their feet. What was left of the pickup slid into the far ditch on its top.
“Today, gentlemen, if you don’t mind!” Nolan yelled at them. “There’s another fuckin’ truck coming!”
Weimy and Engel turned as if poked by a hot iron and ran for the truck. They dove into the bed, careful to avoid hitting Morales, who was curled into a fetal position. A.J. stomped the accelerator. With the other vehicle in pursuit, there was no time to unload everyone and carry their wounded through the bush to the primary extraction site; they had to keep moving. Engel keyed his support-net radio.
“Whiplash, Blackbeard, over.”
“This is Whiplash, go ahead, over.”
“Make for the secondary extraction site—I say again, secondary extraction site, how copy, over?”
“Blackbeard, Whiplash. Understand secondary extraction, over.”
“Roger that, Whiplash. Blackbeard, out.”
Nolan put a hand on Engel’s shoulder. “Good show, Boss. Now what are you going to do with that?”
Engel glanced at the empty, now-worthless rocket-launcher tube. “Oh, yeah,” and tossed it from the truck. He then took his M4 from his shoulder and checked the action. “How’s Mikey?”
“He’s holding his own, but we got to get him some attention.”
On a straight stretch of road, the Explorer came into view. It was gaining on them. Several rounds pinged on the tailgate as Tangos leaned out the window to shoot at them. Nolan dropped onto the curled form of Morales to shield her from fire. Ray and Weimy began to return fire, with steady well-aimed rounds. A puff of smoke was e
mitted from the Explorer, and there were several spiderwebs in the windshield, but still they continued to come.
“A.J.,” Engel called over the tac net, “how far to the secondary?”
“Maybe five minutes, maybe less.”
A lifetime, Engel thought, wondering how A.J. could drive so well and still key his radio. “Drive on, brother. Smooth is fast.” Then switching radios, “Whiplash, Blackbeard, over.”
“Whiplash here, over.”
“We’ll be at secondary in four mikes, over.”
“Copy four minutes. See you there. Whiplash, out.”
The secondary extraction site was four miles downstream from the primary. While this meant four miles in the truck getting shot at, it also meant four fewer miles for the SOC-Rs to travel. At the secondary site, the road passed close to the bank of the river before veering away. Again, Engel reckoned it was going to be close.
The Explorer was still coming after them, but no one was leaning out the window shooting at them anymore. Ray and Weimy continued to fire—steady and measured, with each round finding the windshield or the grill of the vehicle. Then the Explorer slowed and began to drift back. Either the truck or the men inside, or both, had lost the will to continue. Nolan looked up from where he was shielding Morales and grinned.
“Guess we showed those assholes what they get for tailgating a bunch of SEALs.”
Weimy and Ray matched Nolan’s smile, each slumping into a corner of the truck bed at the tailgate. For Engel, it was a wave of relief, now that they had a clear shot to the secondary extraction site. Then, suddenly, a Dodge Ram crew cab swung in behind them from a side road, and they were again under small-arms fire. If possible, there were even more Tangos in the Ram than in the first pickup.
“E-fuckin’-nuff already,” Weimy shouted as he and Ray began to return fire. There was no burst of fully automatic fire or even rapid fire. They both went back to steady, rhythmic shooting, making every round count. The truck dropped back momentarily in the face of this precise fire, but it was still coming. Behind the Ram, a stake truck appeared with a dozen or more Tangos. Suddenly, the back window of the SEAL pickup exploded, which for some unknown reason revived Mikey, who popped upright.
“Will someone get some goddamn suppressing fire on those fuckers, for Christ’s sake?”
As Sonny grabbed him and pulled him down in the seat, several more rounds came through the nonexistent rear window and stitched the windshield. A.J., in the act of a contortionist, kept his left foot on the gas and kicked out the spiderwebbed and brain-streaked windshield with his right. Nolan continued to shield Morales while Engel joined Ray and Weimy returning fire. They came to another straight stretch in the road, and someone in the bed of the Ram fired an RPG that whizzed just over their heads and exploded in a stand of trees well in front of them. First one rear tire, then the other, began to come apart from multiple bullet strikes. They slowed, and the pursuing trucks drew nearer. Engel dumped the rest of his magazine on full auto and keyed his mic.
“Whiplash, you with us, over?”
“Whiplash here. We’re thirty seconds from the secondary extraction, over.”
“So are we,” Engel replied, having no idea how close they were and not even sure they could last another thirty seconds in this wild chase, “and we are extremely hot, over.” He did a quick mag change and rejoined the fight.
A.J. felt the truck dying underneath him. At every bend in the road he expected to see the river, but each time he was disappointed. Then, suddenly, he saw it at the end of a long straight stretch. He stomped on the gas pedal even though it was already on the floor. He rammed the shift lever into low trying to gain more purchase on the muddy road. The engine screamed as the truck slewed side to side. The rear wheels were still shedding rubber and spitting mud—the front wheels were dragging the truck along. Suddenly he lost the right front and it was all he could do to keep the truck on the road.
“Come on, bitch!” he screamed. “Just a little farther.”
They were losing speed rapidly, but they were almost at the bank. He could see the shallow berm ahead on the right that separated the road from the river. “Hang on!” he yelled over his shoulder, both hands on the wheel, “we’re going in!” The road veered sharply to the left and there was a barrier straight ahead. Just before they got to the barrier, A.J. swerved to the right, never taking his foot off the gas. The truck climbed the berm, just missing the barrier, and nosed over into the slow-moving river.
In the rear seat, Sonny grabbed Mikey and held his head to his chest for the impact. In the back, Chief Nolan wrapped his arms around Morales from behind, clamping her hips between his thighs. Engel, Ray, and Weimy knew what was coming, but they kept shooting until they were airborne. Just before Engel hit the water, he caught a glimpse of two shapes on the water about twenty meters from the shore and thirty meters downstream, gliding toward the extraction point. When his head broke the water after the dunking, he was wearing a grim smile. They’d been outmanned, outgunned, and running for their lives. Now all that was about to change.
Chief Bautista saw the SEAL pickup charging toward the river and the two Tango trucks in hot pursuit. He quickly grasped the situation. He turned the One Boat to port so that the Two Boat following closely in his wake would also have a good field of fire. Moments earlier they had cut their engines, come off step, and were now coasting toward the extraction site, pushing a large bow wave into the gentle current.
The men in the two pursuing trucks held on as their vehicles skidded to a stop right where the SEAL pickup had jumped the berm. They were suddenly and acutely aware of the two strange craft closing on their position. Some of the Tangos were training their guns on the heads that were popping up to the surface as the pickup began to drift and sink lower in the water. Others were turning their attention and their guns toward the two strange craft. For most of them, it would be their last conscious thought. As the two trucks slammed to a halt, Chief Bautista came up on his tactical net.
“Okay, boys, bring the pain.”
Simultaneously, four Dillon M134D electrically driven Gatling guns, often called mini-guns, opened up on the two trucks at a range of thirty yards. In the first five seconds of this one-sided encounter, the two trucks absorbed close to two thousand rounds of 7.65mm NATO standard coming at them at 2,800 feet per second. In those five terrible seconds, the two trucks received more than forty pounds of brass-encased steel in 150-grain increments. That was in the first five seconds, then there was another five seconds, and another five seconds after that. Incidental to the mini-guns were the four .50-calibers that contributed another two hundred rounds in focused bursts of fire during each of those five seconds. The .50s deal out far fewer rounds, but the armor-piercing, incendiary, and tracer slugs go through everything, save for the few rounds that found the engine blocks. The sound was deafening, and the carnage unimaginable. Trucks and Tangos shredded into an amalgam of blood, bone, mud, and metal.
In less than twenty seconds, it was over. The silence was deafening as the echoes from the gunfire reverberated from the foothills. While several gunners panned over the two steaming hulks, the boats and crews began to maneuver to pick up those in the water. The One Boat recovered Engel, Nolan, Morales, and Weimy. The Two Boat got the others. The corpsman/gunners on each boat quickly checked them all and then began to treat Morales and Mikey. The gunfire was quickly replaced by the roar of diesels and the boats sprung up on step, now running west with the current. Before Engel could ask, Chief Bautista was up on the support net to give him an update.
“Sir, we have all eight of you and are heading for an extraction site about nine miles downriver. I’ve alerted a MEDEVAC chopper and they’re already inbound. We’ll have you airborne in about fifteen minutes. They’ll take you all back out to the Bonnie Dick. And my corpsman in the Two Boat says your wounded SEAL is now conscious. Good chance he’ll pull through.”
Engel paused to say something, but then realized normal speech was imposs
ible with the roar of the engines. He keyed his support net. “Chief, what kind of premium whiskey do you drink?”
“Uh, I don’t drink, sir, but maybe a couple of bottles of Wild Turkey for the boys might be in order.”
“Done, and Bravo Zulu all around. You guys saved our asses.”
“Just another day in the Special Boat Teams, sir, but thanks.”
As he slumped back, Engel caught Nolan’s eye. Both men felt the overwhelming exhaustion that came after a sudden ultra-adrenaline high. Nolan would have given him a mock salute, but his arm was too heavy to raise. Anyway, he didn’t need to. The look that passed between them said it all. We went to the very edge, and we came through it alive—again. After this brief moment of silent communication, they both summoned the energy to move aft to where the corpsman was tending to Morales. With some effort, she focused on the two strained and grizzled faces, and a look of pure gratitude washed over her face. She mouthed, Thank you. Then Engel made his way back to where Weimy, the consummate professional, had his Mk12 trained over the gunwale, still looking for targets along the wooded riverbank. Engel put his hand on Weimy’s shoulder and leaned close to make himself heard.
“Thanks, brother. You were there every time, all the time. We wouldn’t have made it without you.”
“Hey, Boss, the only easy day was yesterday.”
Moments later, the two boats came off step and gently nosed into a bank that abutted a flat grassy area. The grass was close to two feet tall but was now blown flat by the prop wash of two MH-60S Navy Knighthawk helicopters. One was a slick—a MEDEVAC bird with several corpsmen and two litters. The other was the chase bird, amply armed with two M240 machine guns mounted in the doors behind each pilot and four Hellfire rockets on the Knighthawk’s batwings.
The deafening noise of the Knighthawk’s howling GE T-700 turbo-shaft engines and the slapping four-bladed rotors drowned out any attempt to talk. The swick crewmen carefully handed Morales and Mikey over the blunt bows of the SOC-Rs to the waiting arms of a team of corpsmen. They were quickly tied into litters and rushed to the MEDEVAC chopper, which lifted off immediately, heading west back toward the Bonhomme Richard.