Flashpoint sts-11

by Keith Douglass

  Murdock heard loud voices near one shed, then he saw the muzzle flashes of at least three guns and heard the hot lead streak past him well over his head.

  Six SEALs fired at the flashes, and they heard one loud cry, then the dark shadows ran behind the building.

  Murdock pulled the three-cell flashlight from his webbing. Each SEAL had one for this mission. They were tied to the webbing on a stretch cord.

  “Ed, move your squad into that first building and clear it. We’re on backup.”

  The Bravo Squad surged forward. Quinley opened the door and jolted to one side. No shots came through. He poked his flash around the doorjamb and looked where the beam went. It looked like a storage area. Sacks and bales and boxes.

  “Clear first building,” he said.

  Ed DeWitt came up beside him and confirmed. “Yes, first building clear.”

  The line of SEALs swung to the left and advanced on the next structure. It was an open-sided shed with a floor built up two feet off the ground. Inside they found twenty large plastic garbage cans with covers in place.

  Captain Herrera opened one and confirmed. “Coca paste. The raw stuff waiting to be processed. No people here.”

  Bill Bradford heard the captain and repeated his words over the Motorola.

  Just as they swung around the second building, gunfire erupted from the shadows around the third structure.

  “Cover,” Murdock snapped into the Motorola. The SEALs dove to the ground and returned fire. Within seconds, two hundred rounds slammed into the area where the guards had fired. They heard one scream over the gunfire, then the muzzle flashes slowed and stopped ahead.

  “Hold fire,” Murdock said into the radio.

  A moment later, all was quiet.

  “Holt, Ching, check them out. See if any of them are still alive up there.”

  Two forms lifted off the ground and zigzagged on a run the thirty yards to the next building. They went to the ground at the spot and found two bodies.

  “Two dead here, and two extra rifles. Look like AK-47s. Holding.”

  “Move up,” Murdock said, and the SEALs surged forward to the near side of the building. “Ronson, Sterling, check inside.”

  Ronson rushed to the door, turned the knob, and pushed it inward as he twisted away from the opening. No shots came though. He dropped to the ground and shone his flash through the door from the floor level.

  “Cap, looks like a barracks. Lots of people in there. Better get a Spanish speaker up here.”

  Murdock sent one of the Colombian sergeants to the door, and he began shouting in Spanish.

  “Move around it to the next building,” Murdock said. “Easy. They must have some more guns here somewhere.”

  The line of SEALs moved around each end of the barracks and forward. In front of them they saw in the dim light an open space where two trucks were parked. Beyond that was what looked like an office building. It was better made than the rest with glass windows and a chimney. It also was built two feet off the ground.

  Without warning, a weapon on full automatic cut loose in front of the building, spraying bullets in their direction, but most of them went over the SEALs’ heads. They hit the ground and returned fire. The automatic fire ceased, and a door slammed.

  “Move up slowly,” Murdock ordered. “Who has a Willy Peter?”

  “Got me one,” Holt said on the Motorola.

  “Get up there and put it through that window. Bravo Squad, move around to the back to cover any rear entrance. Go, Holt.”

  Holt ran forward, pulled the pin on the white phosphorous grenade, and threw it through a two-foot-square window. Four seconds later, they heard the pop as the grenade went off, then saw the streamers of furiously burning white phosphorus through the broken window.

  Inside, somebody screamed. When exposed to air, white phosphorus burns instantly and so hot that it burns through cloth, flesh, and even bones. It is impossible to put out and usually creates an instant fire when used in a building.

  Less than a minute after the WP grenade exploded, the SEALs saw fire taking hold of the all-wooden building.

  Ed DeWitt reported from the rear of the place. “We have three men coming out the back. None seem armed.”

  “Capture them,” Murdock snapped.

  DeWitt fired over the men’s heads. Miguel Fernandez had heard the orders from the platoon leader, and he bellowed at the startled men in Spanish.

  “Hold it right there, or you’re dead meat. Hands up and stand still.” Fernandez fired over their heads, then ran up with two other SEALs and put plastic cuffs on their wrists and ankles. Fernandez told them not to move if they wanted to stay alive.

  “Any of you Jaime Leal?” Fernandez asked in Spanish.

  All three denied that they were the lab boss.

  “Secure here, Commander,” DeWitt reported.

  The rest of the SEALs came around the burning building. It was about twenty by thirty feet, and soon fire shot out the windows. They moved quickly to get out of the firelight. Ahead were two more buildings, larger than the rest.

  They heard a generator purring contentedly and saw low-level lights in the first building.

  “Night shift?” Murdock wondered on the net. He saw two doors, one at the side and the other at the front. This building was better made than the others and had sides and what looked like a good roof.

  Murdock worked his way to the side of the place, then forward to the door. It had no windows. He touched the door and felt it give. Not locked. “Dobler, Ching, Lam. On me at the door, now.”

  He sensed the men lined up behind him. “We go in soft. Anyone here probably is one of the dog washers. Innocents. Don’t shoot unless fired at.”

  He rammed the door open, and the four SEALs stormed inside. They were in a processing shed. More than a dozen large vats took up the entire area of the one hundred-foot-long building. Murdock could see no workers.

  They filtered through the spaces around the vats, discovered no one hiding, and went out the door on the far side. Murdock had sent the rest of the SEALs around the building toward the next one.

  When the SEALs were in the open, rifle fire erupted from windows of the next building thirty yards away. Return fire came at once from the SEALs. Murdock heard a groan and figured one of his men was hit.

  “Scatter,” Murdock ordered on the radio. “Ed, see if you can get half your squad behind them. We’ll keep firing here.” He thought of the 20-mike-mike rounds but knew the range was too short. The explosive rounds wouldn’t have time to arm. He fired with the 5.56 half of the Bull Pup and was pleased with the way it functioned.

  He hit the dirt and rolled, fired, and rolled again. The return fire had slackened off.

  “Hold fire in front,” Murdock said on the Motorola.

  A moment later, a strange silence hovered over the scene. “Who got wounded?” Murdock asked.

  “Yeah, just a scratch, Cap. Nothing serious.”

  “Senior Chief?”

  “Yeah. Picked up one in my right leg. Thigh. I’m still mobile. Carry on.”

  “Mahanani, you copy that?”

  “In front, I’m coming back. Hold it right there, Dobe.”

  Murdock held up any movement until he saw that the medic was talking with Dobler.

  “Let’s move up to that building. Find out where the shooters went.”

  There was no fire from the structure as they charged it. Murdock and Jaybird went through the door, one diving left, the other right. It was dark inside. The two men waited without moving or breathing, listening.

  Suddenly a shadow stormed out of the blackness, a weapon in hand, firing on semiautomatic. Jaybird threw up his MP-5 in a reflexive action, his finger on the trigger at full auto. He saw fifteen rounds jolt into the black figure. Then the Colombian’s finger went slack on the trigger as the form fell forward just past Jaybird and in front of Murdock.

  The SEAL commander kicked the weapon away and then kicked the man in the side. He didn’t mov
e or make a sound. Murdock bent down and checked his carotid pulse. Dead. Murdock sat down quickly. His head pounded and he began to sweat. What the hell?

  “Hey, Cap, you okay?” Jaybird asked.

  “Not sure. Yeah. Okay, took a round in my left arm. Now it’s hurting like hell. Where’d that guy come from?”

  “Cap, you stay put, I’m going to clear this place. Looks like an office or storeroom, maybe a little of both. You hold steady there, and I’m back in about a minute.”

  Jaybird ran down an aisle, back up another one. He stopped near the front windows a minute, then came running back.

  “Can you walk, Cap?”

  “Yeah and talk and chew gum. I’m not hit that bad.”

  “Let’s get outside. We’ve got two more dead bodies over there by the windows. I only saw three shooting out of here, so I think we have them all.”

  Jaybird watched his commander stand, weave a little, then walk steadily out the door they had come in.

  “Jack, we need you over here near the front door,” Jaybird said.

  The medic was there before Jaybird got Murdock sat down. He motioned at the commander. “His left arm, take a look.”

  Mahanani held a pencil flash in his mouth as he examined the officer’s left arm. “About halfway up, and the slug went on through. Gonna hurt like hell for a few days, Commander. I think it missed the bone. I’ll wrap it up and take a better look at it as soon as it’s daylight.”

  Jaybird hit the lip mike. “JG, we need you back here. Can you bring your squad around?”

  “That’s a roger. What’s the problem?”

  “The Cap took one in his left forearm.”

  “We’re on our way.”

  The SEALs called a halt to the clearing job. They heard no more gunfire but weren’t sure the place was safe yet. DeWitt had the SEALs and Colombians in a perimeter ring around the two casualties. Senior Chief Dobler was growling and feeling better.

  “Damn it, I can still walk and run and fight and piss and fuck, so let’s get on with it.”

  They told him about Murdock’s wound and he settled down a little. Captain Herrera talked with DeWitt.

  “Can the commander finish the job here?”

  “Hell, yes. We’re a team, Captain. We function as a unit, and one or two men down doesn’t mean we fall apart. If I get the word from Murdock, I’ll take over command for the rest of the mission. If he can carry on himself, he will. My guess is he’s in a little shock, but he’ll be raring to go in a half hour.”

  Murdock called DeWitt over. “Send Lam out and find out how many more buildings we have to clear. Don’t bury me yet, Ed. I’m not about to cut and run.”

  “What I was telling the captain. Let me find Lam.”

  The corpsman treated Murdock’s wound, bandaged it up tightly, and gave him three pain pills.

  Lam came back fifteen minutes later with his report.

  “Cap, there are five more buildings we need to clear. One is a barracks, one a kitchen/mess hall, two more processing sheds, and a big storage building that looks like it’s loaded with raw product, finished cocaine, and a lot of fifty-five gallon barrels.”

  “See any more hostiles?”

  “Not a one.”

  “Let’s get on our feet and clear the rest of the buildings,” Murdock said. “Moving out.”

  DeWitt looked at Murdock and watched him take his first few steps. He touched Mahanani on the shoulder. “Stay with the skipper,” he said. The corpsman nodded.

  They spent an hour clearing the rest of the structures, found one more dormitory filled with workers and the storehouse with the barrels and large plastic garbage cans filled with a white powder that the corpsman said he was sure was cocaine.

  They had come back to the storage building, and Murdock surveyed it. “What’s in the barrels?” he asked.

  Two SEALs checked them out with their flashlights.

  “Ethyl ether,” Franklin said. “What’s ether doing way out here?”

  “Ether is a vital element in the final phase of cocaine production,” Ed DeWitt said. “It’s also a colorless, volatile, and highly flammable liquid.”

  Murdock swayed a moment, then caught his balance. “Looks like we have some of our fireworks right here. Captain Herrera, can you get your men to wake up all of the workers and get them a quarter of a mile away from the buildings, back along the road?”

  “That we can do, Commander. Yes. At once.”

  Murdock waved him on. “Ostercamp, I want you to get those trucks and cars we passed and drive them all down away from the buildings. We’ll use them tomorrow.”

  Ostercamp took off at a trot.

  “Now for the fun part. Ronson and Jefferson. Grab one of those barrels of ether and roll it down to this next building and push it up against the wall.”

  Jaybird grinned. “Regular Fourth of July fireworks, Cap?”

  “Could work out that way. We don’t want to waste all of our goodies in one bonfire.”

  The building the barrel of ether rested against was one of the labs, about a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide. Murdock pulled the troops all away from the building and lifted his Bull Pup. He fired six 5.56 rounds into the middle of the barrel. The whizzers ripped through the metal and a waterlike liquid poured out. He fired two more rounds into the barrel, hoping for a ricochet and a spark.

  “Ronson, hit the bottom of the barrel with two of your NATO rounds.”

  It only took one. There was an instantaneous explosion as the vaporized ether gushed into a ten-foot-wide fireball and splattered the flaming liquid across the length of the lab building. The SEALs moved back from the sudden heat.

  After that, it was a matter of logistics. The SEALs rolled barrels of ethyl ether down the slight grade to seven of the other buildings. When they were sure all of the workers had been moved away, the barrels were punctured and set on fire by rifle rounds. Within ten minutes, the landscape for half a mile around was lit up like noontime by the fires.

  They had used WP grenades to set on fire the six buildings above the storage area. Now the last building to be fired was the one with the twelve large garbage cans filled with pure cocaine.

  “Will that stuff burn?” Jefferson asked.

  “It’ll melt,” Bradford said. “Is that freebasing?”

  Nobody knew. There were four barrels of ether left. They rolled them around the cocaine, took off the plastic covers of the garbage cans, and moved back. They punctured all four barrels and then one caught fire and another one exploded. They moved back another fifty feet.

  The fire was intense.

  “So we wait for dawn and see how we did,” Murdock said. He had the Colombian soldiers guard the workers and went to question the three prisoners they had captured. Captain Herrera handled the interrogation.

  They knew little. Two said they had been hired as guards just a week ago and this was the first problem. The boss was here, but they didn’t know if he had stayed or run away. They would look at the dead men in the morning and see if the big boss was one of them.

  Murdock put two men on guard and let the rest of the SEALs get some sleep.

  Mahanani had been shadowing him ever since he took the hit. He waved the big Tahitian/Hawaiian off. “You don’t need to baby-sit me anymore, Mahanani. I’ll live. Get some shut-eye.”

  Murdock took two more pain pills the corpsman gave him, then stretched out on a grassy place, and slept before he knew it.

  He came awake suddenly and heard rifle shots. It was dawn and nearly full light. He grabbed his Motorola he had taken off and hit the mike. “Who the hell is shooting?”

  “Yeah, Cap. Lampedusa. Two big, ugly birds were starting to have breakfast on one of the dead Colombians. Figured a couple of shots would scare them off.”

  “Yeah. Good. Want to take a look at the coke?”

  They walked up the rise to the former storage area. Every building they passed had burned to the ground, including the wooden floor. At the storage area they
found the same. The plastic garbage cans had melted and let the white powder spread out on the ground.

  “Looks like 90 percent of the cocaine is still here,” Lam said. “Damn stuff is hard to burn in this quantity.”

  “Would it melt in water?” Murdock asked. “Seems to me I remember guys trying to melt down stash in the toilet when they were raided.”

  “Worth a try.”

  Murdock took his canteen out of the pouch and grabbed a handful of the cocaine powder and poured water on it. It slowly melted.

  “Yes,” Lam said. “Now we need the local fire truck and a high-pressure hose.”

  Murdock looked at the small stream that ran through the complex. He grinned. “Lam, see how many shovels you can find. There must be some around here somewhere, unless we burned them all up.”

  Lam looked at him strangely. “Shovels?

  “Yes, shovels, go.”

  Murdock walked upstream and decided it would work. He hit the mike. “Men, I need the platoon up here above the cocaine stash. If anybody finds a shovel or pick, bring it along.”

  Lam found five shovels and two picks. He had it figured out before he made it back to where Murdock stood by the small stream.

  “It’s not ecologically correct to alter the course of a natural streambed,” Lam said.

  “No problem,” Murdock said. “We’ll use it and then lose it.”

  17

  Cocaine Lab Near Cali, Colombia

  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.