“Yeah, you sound like it. Take a rest in a good bed, and we’ll see you in the morning. Get some good food and some sleep.”
Ten minutes later, Captain Orejuela’s jeep had taken Murdock and Lam back to their barracks.
Murdock had talked to the captain about some food. That was the next stop. A mess hall had been provided for the men less than three hundred yards away.
The SEALs ate together on steak, mashed potatoes and gravy, two vegetables, and ice cream for desert. The coffee was strong and black. When they returned to their barracks, Murdock found a messenger waiting for him. The envelope held a brief message: “See me as soon as possible. The messenger will bring you here.” It was signed by Colonel Paredes.
Murdock took Ed DeWitt and Senior Chief Dobler with him. He explained it to the Colombian.
“Colonel, if this involves a mission for my men, I need these two with me to help evaluate and plan. It’s the way we do things in the SEALs.”
The colonel frowned for a moment, then rubbed his chin.
“Very well.” He introduced them to two of his aides. Murdock couldn’t remember their names. Both were majors.
“This is the situation. With our Loyalist Forces, we control most of the Cali area, from the coast to the mountain range to the east. The north flank is our weak spot, and that’s where the so-called Democratic Forces are poised, ready to strike south.
“We are strong up the Cauca River Valley all the way to Tulua, which is about a hundred miles north. Beyond that, we have some control up another forty or fifty miles. Above that is the force we estimate at about four thousand men. They have armor and artillery and can call in fighter aircraft with air-to-ground missiles.
“That point is about two hundred miles south of Medellin, the headquarters of the drug syndicate and the second capital. The new president spends most of his time there.”
“Do they have plans to move south with their troops?” Murdock asked.
“It’s a threat. I’m not sure of their plans. We try for intelligence, but have lost six good men trying to infiltrate their planning section.”
“There are good roads along the river, I would guess,” Ed DeWitt said.
“Yes, good hard-surfaced roads, and the enemy has enough trucks to move his troops quickly down those roads.”
“What about the river?” Dobler asked. “Sir, can it be used by large ships to move his men?”
“Not a factor. We have few ships we could use, and he has none that we know of.”
“If we took out his transport, it would be a huge setback for any attack plans,” Murdock said.
The colonel brightened. “Yes, good. I understand that he has more than two hundred trucks in the area, many what you Americans call six-by-six trucks.”
“How would we get to the general area?” DeWitt asked.
“We could move you at night with one truck to within twenty miles of their outposts. From there on, it would be up to you how to proceed.”
“Could we use the truck without your driver beyond that twenty-mile point to ram through their outposts and drive in as far as possible before we went on foot?” Dobler asked.
“Yes, we could sacrifice one of our trucks. But would it be wise to let them know someone was infiltrating?”
“Colonel, if you had that strength, would you worry about one truck trying to break through an outpost or two?”
The colonel chuckled. “No. You’re right. They could write it off as a probe, a reconnaissance mission. I see. Yes, it should work. That way, you could get yourselves and a quantity of ammunition, supplies, and explosives in with ease.”
“Maybe closer,” Murdock said. “Once we break through the first outpost or roadblock, they’ll come looking for us. We expect that.”
The colonel stood and walked to a large wall map of Colombia.
He touched the area they were talking about. “You can always vanish into the mountains. There is a high range of mountains on both sides of the river valley. Yes, they are high, rugged, and tough. But they could be your salvation.”
“How long have that many troops been in this threatening position?” Ed asked.
“As near as we know, they have built up to their present strength in the last six months.”
“Do they have buildings or is it in a bivouac situation?”
“They have taken over many buildings so they are inside, have good food, and even entertainment.”
“Good. They must be getting a little soft and used to their easy living,” Murdock said. “That could be to our advantage once we start working against them.”
The colonel went back to his desk. “There may be some urgency. We have heard rumors that the troops up there may be planning on moving within two weeks. They have been doing some training they didn’t do before.”
“So the quicker we get there, the better,” Dobler said.
“Exactly.”
“Can we draw some equipment and rations and goods we may not have?” Murdock asked. “We lost some of our matériel when the truck was hit on the way in here.”
“Anything we have you need, is yours,” the colonel said. He nodded at one of his majors.
“Let us work over some plans tonight and in the morning,” Murdock said. “We will want to leave here so we hit their checkpoint just after dark. I’ll leave the timing up to you.”
“Is there anything else?” the colonel asked.
“We’ll need a good, detailed map of the area,” Dobler said. “A half dozen would be good, especially if they are waterproofed and the size that we can fold for our pockets.”
The colonel said something in Spanish to the major, who made a note.
He looked at them again.
“That should do it for now,” Murdock said. “We’ll need an H&K machine gun in the NATO round size, and another long automatic rifle. We’ll work through Captain Orejuela for those.”
“Thank you, Commander. Anything we can do we will be glad to do. Let me or the captain know.”
They drove back to the barracks, talking about the mission.
“Captain, we want you in on our planning session. We may be at it late tonight.”
“Yes. I want to be there.”
At the barracks they pulled the men around and told them about the mission. There were some questions, then Murdock outlined the general plan to get to the adjacent area.
“Once we get within striking distance of the main camp, we’ll have to decide what we can do and how to do it.”
“Man, we don’t want to get into a land war with four thousand troops,” Franklin said.
“Amen to that,” Bradford said. “So we get in, hit them hard, and vanish into the mountains?”
“Sounds possible. There isn’t any lack of mountains around here. How high do they go?” They looked at Captain Orejuela.
“The peaks go from thirty-five hundred feet up to fifty-five hundred. That’s coming out of a valley by the river that could be no more than six or eight hundred feet above sea level.”
“Lots of trees and brush up there?” Lam asked.
The captain nodded. “Lots of timber type trees and brush. A rain forest. Easy to hide in.”
They talked for two hours about how they could get in, blow the motor pool into rubble, and then get out.
“We send in sappers to get as many trucks as possible,” Jaybird said. “Then we go with our twenty-mike rounds and riddle the place with the proximity fuses and hope to hit some more gas tanks.”
At midnight, Murdock called a halt. “Captain, can you be here at 0800 hours tomorrow? We’ll have a list of items we need, including the two new weapons and some more explosives if you have any C-3 or C-4.”
“I’ll be here.”
As they broke up, Murdock called on Holt. They went outside the barracks and set up the SATCOM antenna. It took three calls to raise anyone at Home Base, the carrier.
“Yes, Roamer, this is Home Base. ¿Qué pasa?”
They used voice, bu
t it was all automatically encrypted both ways.
“Don Stroh. You finally made it. We’re on site in Cali, going on a move soon to short-circuit an invasion force. We could use some more of those twenty-mike-mike rounds.”
“Sorry, can’t do it,” Stroh said. “We’ve had a cease and desist order from the maker. They say not to fire the Bull Pup weapon even in testing. They have found cracks developing in the receiver after two hundred rounds. One of the on-bench test weapons fired automatically actually exploded at 280 rounds.”
“So we’re not supposed to use them?”
“That’s what the maker says.”
“Yeah, I hear you. We’ll let you know how our first go-round goes here. This is just the beginning. Glad you’re on board way out there.”
“The weapons, you won’t use them?”
“We got the message, Stroh. We got the message. Out.”
11
Camp Bravo
Cali, Colombia
Ron Holt looked at Murdock with surprise flooding his face.
“What the hell Stroh mean, we can’t use the Bull Pup? Our whole attack plan is formed around those twenty-mike-mikes.”
“Pretend you never heard him,” Murdock said. “I didn’t hear him say anything about our not using the Bull Pup. We’ve got them, and we’re going to use them. We’ll check for cracks in the receiver, but we haven’t fired any of ours more than ten times, let alone two hundred and eighty.”
“Yeah, take our fucking chances.”
“Don’t tell anyone what you just didn’t hear,” Murdock said.
The next day, they left the camp promptly at noon after a heavy meal at the mess hall. They had the two new long weapons and another ten pounds of C-3 they would use on the trucks.
The six-by they rode in was not new, but the engine sounded good, and Tony Ostercamp pronounced it fit for the 240-mile jaunt. Tony would be driving when they let the Colombian army man out and went on their own. Murdock rode in the front seat along with Captain Orejuela. He’d keep them on the right road.
The highway was two lanes, blacktopped, but not built for speed. The best they did was 45 mph, and that was down a slight grade. They arrived at Tulua about 1650 and stopped for the box lunches that the mess at Bravo had sent with them. It would be MREs from there on.
They passed the second friendly outpost and roadblock about twenty miles north of Tulua, and the Colombian driver moved to the side of the road and got out. He chattered with the captain for a moment, then ran back to the outpost.
Tony Ostercamp took over the wheel. At fifteen miles beyond the last outpost, Tony turned off the lights. There was almost no traffic on the road. He managed it in the soft moonlight. The road hugged the river and went gently downhill with the flow of the stream.
Five miles farther along, they saw lights ahead.
“Headlamps, of two rigs,” Ostercamp said. “They must hear us coming.”
“Turn your lights back on and slow down, then slow again like you’re getting ready to stop.” Murdock lifted the H&K MP-5 he had put on the floorboards and told the men in back to be ready to shoot at the roadblock as they rammed through.
The two rigs were positioned so there was room between them for a truck to get through. As they came closer, Murdock saw that both roadblock rigs were sedans.
“Clip one of them as you ram through,” he told Ostercamp. The race car driver and ex — destruction derby driver grinned.
Fifty yards from the roadblock, they could see six troops standing beside the cars. Half of them showed rifles. Tony slowed again, then shifted into second gear and let the engine grind down.
The guards relaxed. Twenty feet from the roadblock, Tony rammed down on the gas pedal, and the six-by jolted forward in second gear, gaining speed as it covered the ground. He hit the left front fender of one of the sedans, spinning it around as they boiled through the poorly planned roadblock.”
Just before they hit, Murdock slammed a dozen rounds from his submachine gun into the gawking troops. Three of them went down.
As they rammed past the cars, the SEALs in back used their Bull Pups on the small barrel and riddled the rest of the men and the cars with the 5.56mm rounds. Tony shifted into high and raced down the road with the headlights on full.
There had been no return fire.
“Anybody hurt?” Murdock asked on the radio.
“Hail no, Cap,” Fernandez said. “They didn’t know what hit them. We didn’t take a single round of return fire.”
Ostercamp pointed at the odometer. “Fucking kilometers,” he said. “That’s point six two percent of a mile. Ten kilometers say six miles. Thirty kilometers, about nineteen miles. We’ll watch for thirty kilos on the old dial for the next roadblock.”
“Didn’t look like they had radios back there,” Captain Orejuela said, “so there should be no warning for the next roadblock. I’ve heard that it’s larger, heavier, better manned than this first one.”
“So we get past it if we can,” Murdock said. “How far from the next roadblock on to the enemy camp?”
“We figure it’s about thirty kilometers,” the captain said. “There may be more installations leading into the camp.”
“So if we get through number two and then drive twenty kilometers more, we should have run through our luck. We stop and set the truck on fire and haul ass into the mountains.”
Murdock frowned at the Colombian. “Hey, thought you were heading back with the driver.”
“I decided to stay, learn what I can from you. I have my own weapon, a NATO round rifle.”
Murdock shrugged. “What the hell, you stick with me and Lam when we go on our look-see. Have to scout out the camp before we wade into it. Want to know what to expect and where to hit them.”
Later, Ostercamp gave them a readout. “That’s fifteen kilometers, and I don’t see any lights ahead. Why no traffic along here?”
“They stop traffic at night for better security,” the Colombian captain said.
“So they know we’re not supposed to be here,” Murdock said.
“Maybe they see an army truck, they wonder if it’s one of theirs,” Ostercamp put in. “Yeah, that might help us.”
Ten minutes later, they saw lights ahead. Ostercamp blinked his lights as if to identify his truck as friendly.
“I want the MG and long guns through slits in the top pointing front,” Murdock said on his mike. “As soon as we see any sign they don’t like us, we blast them. Everything. This way we don’t have to stop and ambush them. The long guns. Maybe two or three minutes. Look alive, stay alive.”
They were still two hundred yards away when Murdock saw the winking lights of rifle fire.
“Do it now,” Murdock bellowed. He had the Bull Pup out the window and fired the small barrel on two-round bursts. Half a dozen weapons overhead chimed in, and he could see hits on the men ahead. They had a six-by-six truck blocking the center of the highway. A sedan nosed up to the truck on each side, covering the two-lane highway.
“I’m taking the right-hand sedan,” Ostercamp said as he gunned the engine. He was doing almost fifty miles an hour when the heavy bumper of the six-by smashed into the grill of the sedan and rammed it fifteen feet off the road into the ditch. The weapons in back of the six-by kept yammering as the truck plowed past the rest of the roadblock and slammed down the highway, picking up speed. This time there had been return fire.
When shooting stopped in the rear, Murdock used his radio again. “Check for casualties. Anybody hit?”
“Yeah, Cap, Jaybird took a round through his left arm below the elbow. Don’t look too good. Anybody else hit?”
“Mahanani, check each man, we don’t want a KIA not saying anything back there.”
A minute later, the radio came on. “Okay, Skipper. No KIAs back here.”
That’s when Murdock saw the bullet hole in the windshield. The round had missed him. He felt Captain Orejuela slump against his shoulder. In the pale moonlight coming in the wind
shield, Murdock saw the round, purple hole in the captain’s forehead. Carefully, Murdock touched the back of the Colombian’s head. It was wet and sticky with fresh blood.
“Men, we do have a KIA up here. The captain took one in the forehead. I didn’t notice until just now. He died without making a sound.”
The men were quiet. Only the roar of the big engine and the whine of the tires on the road came through.
“How much farther can we go?” Murdock asked Ostercamp.
“Another five miles, and we better look for a lane we can pull off the highway and hide the truck. Come daylight, they’ll be scouring this road for it.”
“What about the captain?” DeWitt asked.
“We’ll have to take time and bury him,” Murdock said. “Least we can do. Get his dog tags if he has them. We’ll make a map for his family so they can find the grave later.”
Ostercamp looked over at his leader. “Commander, looks like we lucked out. Could have been you or me in front of that slug. Damn lucky. Hey, there’s a lane to the right. Let’s take it and get rid of this truck.”
“Go.”
A half hour later, they had the truck a quarter mile off the highway. They found a spade strapped to the truck and used it to dig a three-foot-deep grave. They piled rocks over the fresh earth when they had the grave filled. Murdock made a map on the back of the area map.
“Back to business,” Murdock said. “We have about two hundred pounds of extra goods we can’t carry. We’ll move them a mile forward and hide them.”
“We going to burn up the truck?” DeWitt asked. He hurried on. “Figured a fire here would be a beacon to anybody out looking for us. There had to be a radio in one of those roadblocks.”
“Good,” Murdock said. “We won’t burn it. Disable it. Flatten all the tires, mess it up proper. Ostercamp, your job.”
It was just past midnight when Murdock checked his watch. They had the extra C-4 and TNAZ they couldn’t carry planted near a tree and covered with brush. It would be easy to find if they needed it to do the job.
“How far we from that camp?” Jaybird asked.
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