“Two down,” Murdock said.
“I think the grenade did the other two,” DeWitt said on the radio. “Franklin is checking.”
“Two down here, Cap,” Franklin said.
“Get back to the hosing down,” Murdock said. “We’re running behind schedule. How is Fernandez?”
“Not good. He took two rounds, one in the high chest, one in the shoulder. Mahanani got the bleeding stopped, but Fernandez is moving slow. Nothing vital. Mahanani is worried about the top of his lung getting hit.”
As they spoke, Murdock saw his men turning on the hoses again. All of the tops were off the boxes. The millions of dollars of cocaine rapidly turned into worthless soup on the hold’s floor.
Murdock put Lam on deck as a lookout. He checked his watch. It was nearing 2200. He had hoped they could be out of there and moving toward the dock warehouse and the ether by this time.
He found DeWitt. “How much longer here?”
“Half hour at the most. We’re on the last boxes now.”
“Rush it any way you can. How about Fernandez? Use two men to help him up to the rail across from the one you came in. Send any line you have with him. We don’t want him jumping in the water. I’m going to check on top. Any chance those four clowns we offed had a radio?”
“Don’t know. I’ll have somebody check the bodies. Fernandez is on his way. He’s bitching, so he might not be as badly hurt as it looks like.”
Murdock was halfway to the open deck when his earpiece spoke.
“Cap, looks like we have visitors. Two army trucks. Troops getting out of them.”
“Roger that. Dobler and Jaybird. Get out of that ship and into the bay. Come over to the south side of this freighter and wait. Bring all of our drag bags with you.”
“Aye, Cap. Will do.” It was Dobler.
Murdock ran up the last ladder and slid to the deck so he could see over the rail. Looked like two squads of infantry, fourteen men, maybe sixteen. One squad approached each of the two freighters. They went to ground near the gangplank. What were they waiting for?
“Ed, get your guys out of there, now. Come up the far side if you can. Go over the side and pick up the drag bags. Any line? Can you get Fernandez down gently? Time for us to split. Visitors look like security guards, not anxious to get into a fight. Let’s move, now. Everyone over the far side and into the wet.”
“Yes, we have line. We’ll rappel Fernandez down. We’re moving.”
They all still had on their full wet suits, with rebreathers and fins tied around their necks. The SEALS hung on the rail and dropped into the water twenty feet below.
Dobler and Jaybird waited for them at the side of the ship. The rest of the SEALs dropped in and moved underwater at the side of the ship, touching each other to stay together. Murdock and Dobler waited for Fernandez to be let down. He grinned at them, but there was pain in his dark eyes.
“Can you swim, Fernandez?”
“Think so, Cap. Might not keep up. Hurts like hell. One-arm swim time.”
Murdock put Harry Ronson on Fernandez to buddy him and help him keep up. They would try to match their swim speed to the best that Fernandez could do.
Ed indicated by signs he was on his way with a man to get their drag bags on the other side of the freighter. He was back seven minutes later. Murdock had everyone surface along the side of the freighter, and he swam along, counting wet suit hoods. All sixteen accounted for.
Murdock signaled down, and the seals tied as buddies went to fifteen feet and swam around the freighters. Their intel said the ethyl was in one of a pair of old warehouses on the docks near an unused pier no more than five hundred yards from the freighters. Murdock hoped that they were right. Fernandez worried him. The chest shot could be bad. He could go sour and die as he tried to swim.
After enough strokes to cover 500 yards, Murdock surfaced with his tied-on buddy, Holt, for a sneak and peak. He barely let his face break the surface and looked around. They were thirty yards off the dock, a wooden affair that stilted ten feet into the water.
Around Murdock more SEALs broke the surface. He counted. Seven pairs of heads showing.
Where were Fernandez and Ronson? It had to be them. He waited two minutes by his watch, then another minute. To his relief, he saw two more heads surface slowly. Ronson’s rebreather tube came out of his mouth. “Cap?” he whispered. Murdock was halfway there.
“Need to get Fernandez to shore pronto. He’s hurting.”
Murdock helped pull Fernandez along as they swam to shore under the overhead of the dock. They eased down on the rocky shoreline, and Fernandez took off his mouthpiece and goggles and shook his head.
“Gonna be a long night, Cap. Don’t think I can hold up my end of the fight.”
“You rest right here. This one should be a cakewalk. Just a little bonfire to start. Then we take an easy run down the channel and out to sea. Have you back on the Jefferson before you know it.” Murdock found Quinley along the line of SEALs.
“Watch Fernandez. Stay with him. Get him some morphine and pain pills from Mahanani. Time for us to be moving up.”
They left their rebreathers and fins on the rocky slope just over the water and took out of the drag bags what they needed. More TNAZ and C-4 and extra ammo. The alert around the ship might have triggered more troops to come to the area.
Murdock went to the side of the pier and up to the top. He watched the first warehouse for five minutes. There appeared to be no roving guards. He couldn’t be sure about fixed guard posts. Lam had come up with him and said he’d take a quick look around the place and see what he could find.
Lam moved a dozen feet toward the building. He was still thirty feet away from it when a siren went off, floodlights billowed on his side of the building, painting the whole scene as light as day. Lam surged back over the rocks beside the pier and out of sight.
The SEALs had taken out their Motorolas from waterproof pouches as soon as they landed. Now Murdock hit his lip mike.
“Snipers, get the hell up here. We have some fucking floodlights to shoot out. Looks like the party is starting.”
22
On the Docks
Cartagena, Colombia
Murdock watched the warehouse area with the floodlights blazing. They had snapped on when Lam broke some beam or tromped on a movement or vibration sensor. These drug cartels could afford the best in protection. But what about personnel?
Bill Bradford slid in beside Murdock with his H&K PSGI sniper rifle with a suppressor. He began taking out the lights with the deadly cough of the NATO round.
Murdock worked on two close lights and snuffed them with his silenced MP-5 on single shot.
On the other side of Murdock, Jaybird began taking out lights with his MP-5. Two Colt Commander carbines came on line, and within two minutes, all the lights on their side of the building were shot out. When the firing stopped, Murdock and Lam listened to the silence. A dog barked far off. Some kind of a night bird shrieked as it dove on a mouse. They heard no trucks, no alarms. No men running. The siren had cut off when the first floodlight smashed.
Murdock used the radio. “DeWitt. Get your squad up here and take the front of the building facing the water. Alpha, let’s get the side in the dark and test the back. Go inside if you can, DeWitt, and see what our situation is. Let me hear. Go.”
Murdock’s squad boiled over the small berm and darted across the blacktop to the side of the now-dark building. They paused but could hear no opposition. The back of the building had not been lit up. Or had it and all the lights went out due to a short when the others were shot out? Probably. Murdock and his men charged around it to the dark far side and then to the front.
“Cap, we’re inside,” DeWitt said on the Motorola. “This is the place. Maybe two hundred barrels of ether in here. No interior guards.”
Alpha Squad ran through the truck-sized door in the front of the building and stared in amazement at all the barrels. They were stacked four high on steel r
acks along the walls, three high on the floor. Dozens were in rows with alleys between them. Enough ether to run a drug cartel for a year.
“TNAZ on three locations would do the job,” Canzoneri said.
“Go,” Murdock said. “Set the timers for ten minutes, but don’t activate them. Lam, Ching, out front and watch for any arriving cavalry. There must be some military here somewhere.”
Canzoneri picked up TNAZ from two other SEALs and plotted out his charges. He put three quarter-pounders of TNAZ in one spot about a third of the way into the building. The explosives went under one barrel so the blast would be reflected upward from the concrete floor.
The second one he put a third of the way into the warehouse down a row of three high stacks of barrels. This one he put between the containers six feet off the floor for a spread pattern blast. Again he used three quarter-pounders. One quarter-pound chunk of TNAZ was enough to blow apart the average-sized three-bedroom house.
He put the last bomb closer to the door so the upward blast would carry into the steel frames that held up barrels around the sides of the building.
Canzoneri came up to Murdock. “Charges set, Cap. Rigged them for ten minutes. I’m clear here. Haven’t activated the timers yet.”
The radios buzzed. “Commander, some native sons approach in trucks. Four trucks. Not sure how many troops. We have the fifty?”
“In a drag bag,” Bradford said. “Back by the bay.”
“No time,” Murdock said. “Activate the charges. Everyone pull back to the water. This is one fight we don’t want unless they cut us off. Go, go, go.”
Canzoneri ran to the charges and activated the timers, then was the last man out of the big warehouse. The oncoming troops couldn’t see the front door as the SEALs jolted through it and raced for the pier. Canzoneri had set a countdown watch on his wrist. He limped as he came over the edge of the rocks and underneath the rotted wooden pier.
“How did it go?” Quinley asked. He was with Fernandez, who lay on the edge of the bank. He had Fernandez’s rebreather in place and his gear all on. Murdock knelt down beside him.
“Hey, man, how do you feel?”
Fernandez looked up at him and tried to grin. “Hurting like a bitch in heat, Cap. I’m not gonna be much on swimming.”
“No sweat, Fernandez. Our job is to get you back into the wet and out the harbor.” He turned to the others. “Suit up,” Murdock said. “Rebreathers and fins and we hit the water.”
“Six minutes,” Canzoneri said. “Best if we can get off another three hundred yards or so. Gonna be one fucking big blast in another six.”
“Jefferson, Bradford, over here,” Murdock called.
They came up and looked at Fernandez. “Palm off your drag bags. You two are going to work with Fernandez until we get a pickup.”
They tucked Motorolas in waterproof pouches, grabbed their drag bags, and slid into the murky water of the bay. They knew the compass course out of the bay, dug down fifteen feet to the usual SEAL water highway, and swam.
Bradford and Jefferson took turns towing Fernandez through the dark water. Two other SEALs took their drag bags, and they all swam.
As time for the explosion came, the SEALs popped out of the water two at a time to watch. They were about two hundred yards off the pier when the first charge went off. It was partly muffled, but the blast was stronger than they had heard for a while.
Murdock watched as one section of the roof blew off and a boiling cloud of smoke and fire streaked into the sky. The second blast came before the first had finished its havoc, and this one flattened the rest of the building, launching burning barrels of ethyl into the sky like rockets, some soaring out a quarter of a mile, Murdock figured. One landed behind the SEALs with a huge splash and created a massive cloud of steam as the burning ether barrel sank, putting out the fire.
The third blast eclipsed the other two. Building on the heat and open fuel, it sounded like a doomsday bomb. The SEALs instinctively dove underwater before the compression wave of hot air stormed past them. They came up a few moments later and stared in awe at the huge fire.
Murdock gave them some time to check their handiwork, then moved them back toward the bay mouth. He had to find some dry land and take out the SATCOM. He surfaced every five minutes and found his spot on the third lift. He grabbed Jaybird going by and had him swim forward and head the SEALs to shore. Most of them landed thirty yards down the bay.
Holt came out of the water and had the SATCOM out of its waterproof housing and ready to work in two minutes.
“Home Base, this is Rover.”
The response came at once.
“Rover, location and requirements.”
“Home Base, moving down the channel to the bay mouth. Suggest pickup in forty minutes about half a mile offshore with the Sea Knight. That should be the one with resupply of ammo and TNAZ. I show the time as 0110. That would put the pickup about 0150. You copy?”
“Copy, Rover. That bird is ready for takeoff. Resupply on board. Stay due west of the bay. Copy pickup in forty at about 0150.”
“Home Base. We have one badly injured. Request change in mission after pickup to return wounded man to Home Base and continue the mission with first dark tomorrow.”
“Rover. Will consult and have word for you at the pickup. Good swimming. Out.”
Holt had the SATCOM turned off the minute the “out” was said, and had the fifteen-pound radio back in its waterproof house two minutes later. They walked down to the other SEALs, and Murdock checked on Fernandez.
Mahanani had given him another shot of morphine, and he was a little woozy.
“Fernandez, we’ve got a chopper coming. Hang in there for us. In a half hour, we should be out of the wet.”
Murdock motioned the men back into the water. Jefferson and Bradford helped Fernandez into the wet. His buoyancy in the water made it much easier to move him than it would have been on land.
They swam. Murdock and Holt led the group at the usual fifteen feet. They surfaced twice to check their position, then felt the pull of the tide stronger as they went over a shallow bar and surged into the Caribbean Sea.
Murdock checked his watch: They had another twenty minutes to get offshore a half mile. No sweat. They all surfaced by arrangement at 0120 to help them keep together. Murdock counted thirteen heads. He pulled out his mouthpiece.
“Is Fernandez here?” he asked.
“Don’t think so, Cap,” Jaybird said. “They were falling behind.”
“Lam, swim back surface and see if they have come up. Give me two short whistle blasts if you find them.”
The rest of them waited. It was nearly five minutes on his watch before Murdock heard what he thought were some whistles. Jaybird nodded.
“Yeah, Cap. That was Lam. He’s got them.”
Nearly ten minutes later, the four SEALs came up to the rest. Murdock had Mahanani check out Fernandez.
“He’s in rough shape, Cap,” the corpsman said. “Must have lost a lot of blood. Not a damn thing we can do here. He’s in and out of consciousness. Better keep him on top.”
Murdock nodded. “Ching, Dobler, front and center and take over Fernandez. Keep him topside. We’ll all stay on the surface for the rest of the swim. Anybody else hurting?” He received no response. “Let’s move, due west. Don’t worry about the time.”
Murdock put Fernandez at the head of the line. They would swim at the speed that Dobler and Ching could move him. So they would be five minutes late at the meet; it wouldn’t matter.
Murdock felt himself relax. He was at home again, in the water. SEALs always felt safer in the water where they were better than any enemy. Here he and his men were in their element. The swim went a little faster than Murdock thought it would, but they had fresh legs on the towing work.
Lam heard the chopper coming in before anyone. “Chopper to the east,” Lam shouted. They all stopped swimming. Murdock took out a red signal floating flare, lit it, and thew it twenty feet to the sid
e. The red glow blossomed on the sea.
The big Sea Knight came in gently, found the flare, and lit up a circle of light that pinpointed the SEALs. The first thing down was a basket from the side hatch. Dobler helped Fernandez into the aluminum basket. He strapped the wounded man in and gave a thumbs-up to the operator.
Once Fernandez was inside the bird, the rear hatch opened, and the rope ladder dropped down. Jaybird made it to the ropes first and began climbing up. Two more SEALs grabbed the bottom rung to hold it steady, and the SEALs scurried up the ladder as if it were a set of steps on dry land. Murdock was the last one up, and the ladder swung free, making it twice as hard to climb. He came over the lip of the rear hatch and bellied into the ship with the help of two handy SEALs. Once he was inside, the hatch swung upward, closing.
“Commander?” A youngish looking lieutenant (j.g.) asked.
Murdock rolled over where he lay on the floor and nodded.
“Right. Any word on our direction?”
“You’ve been ordered back to the Jefferson, sir. Glad we found you. Anything I can get you and your men?”
“What about some nice hot coffee and sandwiches?”
“Surprise, Commander. Somebody named Don Stroh got all over my lieutenant until he took on board this special box. Yeah, hot coffee and monster sandwiches. Enjoy. We have about a forty-minute ride back to the ship.”
Murdock laughed. There really was hot coffee and sandwiches. Not your usual Navy sandwich, but humongous built things that looked like they came from the neighborhood deli. Murdock had two of them and three cups of the black, scalding-hot coffee.
Mahanani came over, shaking his head. “Don’t know about Fernandez. He doesn’t respond. I had a radio message sent to the carrier. They’ll have an emergency team with a gurney on deck when we get there. His vitals are all way down, but he’s fighting.”
Murdock went over and sat beside the wounded man. He was unconscious but breathing. Mahanani sat on the other side, monitoring him every second.
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