Flashpoint sts-11

by Keith Douglass

  “Village, we find food,” the pilot said.

  “Mount up, troops, short walk to our new mess hall.” Murdock checked his webbing. He had one more WP grenade. He ran to the plane and tossed it into the cockpit. It exploded with streamers of white phosphorus arcing through the craft.

  By the time they were half a mile away, they heard the fuel tanks explode with what was left of the fuel.

  Ten minutes later, Lam was out front of their column of ducks when he went to ground. Murdock hurried up beside him. Ahead in the moonlight, Murdock saw four good-sized one-story houses. All had small barns and sheds in back of them. No light showed. He checked his watch. It was almost 0400. He passed the word to send the pilot up with Ching.

  “Go down there and pick the best-looking house and get them up. They have sixteen guests to feed. Ching, watch what the pilot says. Tell him he’s dead meat if he tries to hurt us. Nobody leaves the house once you’re inside.”

  Ching talked to the pilot a moment, then they both stood and walked quickly toward the houses. They all still had on their Motorolas.

  “Lam, take a tour. See what kind of transport you can find. Two old cars or a farm truck would be handy. We came across a road back there, so there must be roads that lead all the way to he coast.”

  Lam nodded and took off at a trot toward the last house in the group.

  Jaybird settled in beside Murdock. “Wonder why that jet didn’t come back and blow us out of the sky. He must have air-to-air missiles and radar and guidance systems.”

  “Maybe he couldn’t find us.”

  “Sure he could, with his radar.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t sure if we were one of the smugglers’ planes. The pilot said he’d flown through that pass before, coming this way.”

  “At least we’re still alive.”

  Murdock watched through his NVGs as the pilot knocked on one of the houses’ doors. It took several minutes of repeated knocking before anyone came. A light glowed inside, then the door opened.

  Murdock could hear faintly some of the Spanish over his radio as the pilot spoke.

  Then Ching’s voice came on. “Yes, tell him there are sixteen of us, and we will pay him well. We need food and water.”

  A minute later, Ching spoke.

  “All set here, Skipper. Bring in the troops. We’re getting food. We’ll give him a hundred dollar bill, and he’ll be delighted. Of course, if he tries to cash it in, he may be shot as a spy.”

  “Roger that,” Murdock said. They lifted up and walked down the slight incline to the house.

  The small front room in the house was sparsely furnished. Murdock liked the kitchen better. By the time they got there, women in their forties were starting a fire in a wood range and cooking. Two men came into the room and stared at the uniforms. Both talked with the pilot, and Ching monitored it.

  “He’s explaining how his plane crashed,” Ching reported. “They seem satisfied.”

  The food came quickly. First a mush with milk and honey and coffee, lots of good, black Colombian coffee. Then chicken, which had been pan-fried along with sliced potatoes and half a dozen kinds of steamed vegetables. There were thick slices of homemade bread and more honey and lots more coffee.

  Lam had slipped into the long table and reported to Murdock.

  “There’s an old farm truck out there with a stake body, ton and a half, I’d say. We can all ride on it. Has a full tank of gas and looks like it gets used daily.”

  “Lam, you have some of that drug money?”

  “Sure, five hundred thousand dollars. Some guys have six hundred thousand. Jefferson figured it out.”

  “Let’s buy the truck,” Murdock said, grinning.

  They later asked the pilot what the farm truck would be worth to the family. He looked at it in the dark and said maybe six hundred dollars, U.S.

  Ching and the pilot talked to the local Colombian men and soon made the bargain. They paid them a thousand dollars, and the SEALs loaded up. Their canteens were full and their stomachs belching. It had been a weird breakfast.

  The pilot climbed on board the truck. Murdock frowned. Ching saw him and asked him where he was going.

  “Go with you. Guide you to coast for two hundred U.S. dollars.”

  DeWitt belched. “Yeah, bring him. He might get us through something we don’t know is coming up. How far to the damned coast?”

  The pilot asked the farmer, who said it was twenty miles. By then it was nearly daylight.

  “Let’s move,” Murdock said. Ostercamp had checked out the rig. They paid the farmer for his truck and the meals and drove away. The road turned north and then west and held that line for five miles. By that time, it was fully daylight.

  The dirt and gravel roads were not made for speed. Ostercamp was glad when they could average fifteen miles an hour. Just after daylight, they heard a jet fighter. It screamed overhead and followed the valley they had just left.

  When it came to the burned-out transport, it circled several times, then went high and circled again before it turned and flew directly where the truck had been moments before.

  Ostercamp had pulled the rig under three large trees that totally concealed it from the air. The jet made two more passes, then lifted up and raced away.

  “We’ve been made,” Murdock said. “Five will get you fifty that we have some ground troops heading our way right now. Let’s get as far away from that burned-out plane as we can.”

  Ostercamp hit the gas but had to slow almost at once on a washboard section that jarred their teeth.

  Murdock figured they were halfway to the coast when he saw the roadblock ahead.

  “We can take it out,” Ostercamp said. “Done it enough times before.”

  “No,” Murdock said. “We hit a curve and get out of sight, then we abandon the bloody truck. It’s an albatross around our neck. That jet must have reported we were on this truck. So we dump it. We hit the shank’s mares and fade into the countryside. We can’t be more than ten miles to the wet.”

  They ditched the truck and found a stream heading toward the coast. It had a friendly growth of brush and trees they could use for cover as they passed the roadblock half a mile over and kept right on going. When they were two miles beyond the roadblock, Murdock called a halt.

  “Holt, let’s do it.”

  Holt took out the SATCOM and aimed the antenna.

  “Home Base, this is Rover. Home Base, this is Rover.”

  They waited, but there was no answer. The fourth time he made the call, the answer came.

  “Rover. We read you.”

  “Figure we’re about three miles from the wet. On a compass bearing due west of Plato.”

  “What’s your ETA on the wet, Rover?”

  “Not sure. Depends on our luck and the skills of the Colombian National Army. Will give you a definite ETA on our next call. Shall we expect a Knight or a rubber raft?”

  “The Knight is our choice. Keep us informed.”

  “Let’s rumble,” Murdock said.

  They hiked with renewed interest then. Lam was a quarter of a mile in front as they skirted farms, waded the creek twice, and stayed under cover as much as they could.

  “Two choppers ahead, Cap,” Lam said. “They’re doing a pattern search. No way they can miss us if we keep moving.”

  “Come back, Lam. We’ll go to ground in these trees and hope they pass over without spotting us. Odds are in our favor.”

  “Hold, Skipper. Now I see. There are two of them, and they are big jobs, with about twenty men each. They’re leapfrogging over each other. Let the men out to search a half mile, then pick them up and jump them over the next group. They’re working right up this valley. Could be a dozen units like this working all the routes up to that burned-out plane.”

  “Hold, Lam. I’m on my way.”

  Murdock ran the two hundred yards up to where Lam lay in brush on a small rise so he could see downstream. One big chopper had just lifted off and raced toward them a hal
f mile, dropping off its load a quarter of a mile from where Murdock lay.

  He stared at the soldiers spreading out in a search formation and starting up the valley.

  “Oh, yes,” Murdock said. “Now that does present us with a small problem.”

  26

  Golfo de Morrosquillo

  Colombia

  The helicopter rested on the ground for a few minutes while the troops moved slowly toward the SEALs. Murdock and Lam now had their Bull Pups.

  “Twenties on that first chopper,” Murdock said. “You laser it, I’ll try for a contact hit.”

  They both aimed and fired. Murdock watched as the airburst riddled the chopper with shrapnel. The rotor blades slowed, then stopped.

  His round came in almost at the same time, hit the cockpit, penetrated, and exploded inside. A moment later, the chopper boiled into a fireball.

  “Use the laser on the troops,” Murdock said. He worked the Motorola. “Get the Bull Pup shooters up here. We’ve got company.”

  Murdock and Lam fired four rounds each, lasering the troops on the ground. They had stalled in place. When the proximity fuses exploded the 20mm rounds ten feet over their heads, the troops must have wished that they had scattered. They tried to then, but round after round followed them.

  Jaybird nudged next to Murdock and got off a shot.

  “Where’s the other chopper?” Jaybird asked.

  Then they saw it, climbing into the sky a mile off.

  “Let’s try it,” Murdock said. Both he and Jaybird used the laser sight and automatic arming device built into the weapon, and when they had the laser on target, they fired.

  The chopper came slowly toward them, perhaps to see what had happened to the other bird. The laser sighting was off only a little as the chopper moved. The first round exploded twenty feet behind the aircraft. The second one went off directly over it and smoke billowed from the helo as it settled gently to the ground. Two more rounds with the laser sighting brought gushes of smoke from the helicopter, and soon it burned furiously.

  Murdock looked at the troops ahead of them a quarter mile. They were in a total rout.

  “Cease fire,” Murdock said on the net. “We may need the ammo later.”

  Lam motioned ahead. “Which way, Cap? We go down through the bodies? There may be more choppers on the other side of these small hills.”

  “True, and these guys must have radioed their problems before they got creamed. Straight ahead, straight west is our best bet. More farms and maybe a village we can slip through. Let’s move.”

  A half mile along the small valley, they came to the bodies. They skirted them and the still-smoldering choppers.

  Mahanani worked his way up to Murdock a short time later.

  “Canzoneri is having some trouble with his leg, the one that got sliced up. Can we take ten while I rebandage it?”

  “Let’s hold it in place for five,” Murdock said on the lip mike. “Lam, get a quick recon and see what’s ahead of us. We should be within three or four miles of the beach.”

  Mahanani worked on Canzoneri. Some of the stitches had come out. Mahanani put on some bandages to cinch together the parted flesh, then tied the wound tightly. An ampoule of morphine helped.

  Lam came back quickly. “Directly ahead not more than a mile there’s some kind of an army camp. Don’t know how big it is, but it sprawls out a ways. We better go south for about three miles. Then maybe we can make a run for the wet.”

  “Any activity that looked like they were coming after us?” Murdock asked.

  “Not that I saw, Cap. Fair-sized camp.”

  “We better choggie. Let’s go up and moving. Let’s hope we can find some cover.”

  They had hiked for ten minutes when the net came on.

  “I’ve got a chopper high and left,” DeWitt said. “We better go to ground and not move. He should miss us.”

  “Do it,” Murdock ordered, and the SEALs lay absolutely still.

  Lam came on the radio. “Cap, do I need to find a hide hole for us for the rest of the day? A damn lot of army around here.”

  “Not yet. Let’s see if we can break through into the water. My gut feeling right now is that the Colombian army is confused and doesn’t really know where to find us.”

  Jaybird spoke up on the Motorola. “Hey, what happened to our friendly pilot guide? Where the hell did he go?”

  “Did he get paid in advance?” Ching asked. “If he did, he took the money and ran. At least he won’t cause us any problems.”

  They moved out again. After what Lam figured was three miles, he probed west again and saw that they were a mile beyond the last of the military buildings and the wire fence with concertina barbed wire on the top.

  Lam settled in on top of a small hill and used his binoculars to check out the western route. He groaned.

  “Cap, you need to see this. I don’t know if the damn army is on maneuvers or just on a camp out. I’d say there are at least two thousand men in pup tents and company fronts and mess halls and kitchens out here in front of us.”

  Murdock worked up to his scout and scanned the area with his binoculars.

  “Be damned. Look over there. Jeeps flying white flags. Men with white helmets on. Those are judges. The whole operation is maneuvers, and they’re getting ready for a contest of blue against red or some such.”

  “Nice thing about maneuvers, Cap. None of them will have any live ammunition.”

  “But they could call in live ammo help in a rush if we tried to take them on. We go around them.”

  “Again?”

  “Again, unless you have a better idea.”

  Lam looked at them again. “If we’re going around them, we better move. Looks like one of the teams is getting ready to march out. Must be a whole fucking battalion of them.”

  The SEALs marched themselves. They picked up the pace to four miles a minute and angled straight south again, which they hoped would put them well out of the maneuver’s area.

  Two hours later, Murdock figured they were eight miles from the maneuver bivouac. They hadn’t seen any troops or jeeps or white-helmeted judges for the past two miles.

  “End run to the Caribbean?” Lam asked on the net.

  “Let’s give it a try,” Murdock said. “Just past 1200. If we don’t run into the damn new Colombian president and his staff, we should make it this time.”

  Murdock went to the head of the column with Lam out fifty yards in front as they turned due west. They had gone about a mile, Murdock figured, when they heard a clanking, grinding, and roaring in front of them.

  “Tanks?” Lam asked.

  Coming around a small valley and churning up the grass and weeds were six tanks. The first machine stopped, the tank gunner at the hatch rattled off six bursts of ten rounds each. The hot lead cut a swath through the brush just past where Murdock and Lam had been standing. They drove for the ground.

  “They sending tanks after us?” Lam asked.

  “Tanks don’t mind 20mm rounds,” Murdock said. “No way they could know where we are. They haven’t had a spotting since those choppers, to hell and gone back there this morning.”

  “So why are they shooting at us?” Lam asked.

  “They don’t even know we’re here. This must be a live firing range for the tanks. Let’s pull back out of this firing range. We can deal with the war games better.”

  They moved back through the cover to where the rest or the platoon waited, then backtracked another mile toward the war games.

  Murdock called a halt in a grove of trees near a small stream.

  “Let’s find that hide hole and take a break. We’ll have more luck getting out of here after it gets dark.”

  “There’s some high ground about five or six hundred yards up this stream,” Lam said. “I looked at it when we came by. Want me to check it out?”

  “Go,” Murdock said. “We’ll wander up that way behind you.”

  Just then, a series of rifle shots came from in fro
nt of them and not more than two hundred yards away.

  “Down,” Ed DeWitt whispered in the radio. The SEALs went flat in the grass and weeds in the brushy area. Jaybird crawled through the brush until he could see the shooters. He chuckled into his mike.

  “Blanks. Don’t you crackers know the difference in the sound of a blank and a live round? The troops out there are having a great time shooting blanks at each other. They’re moving away from us now with three captives. No sign of a white-hatted umpire.”

  Twenty minutes later, Murdock figured the top of the hill they were near was three hundred feet above most of the rest of the swatch of green in front of them. They had burrowed into the brush and behind small trees to be completely out of sight. Sleep was the purpose.

  Murdock and DeWitt took the first watch. They saw some patrols of the cammy-clad Colombian troops, but none came near them. Twice they saw firefights between the two sides, but no prisoners were taken. Once they saw white-helmeted judges and referees moving along a hint of a road in a jeep.

  Murdock brought Holt up with the SATCOM. Holt zeroed in the antenna and gave Murdock the handset. The transmissions went out in bursts so quick that triangulation was impossible. The words were also encoded so no one without the decoder could read them.

  “Homeplate, this is Rover.”

  “Rover, we’ve been waiting. Are you held up?”

  “That’s a roger. Stalled and can’t move until full dark. Will let you know what’s happening after that. Possible we can get to the wet during the darkness. Will this give your birdman any problems?”

  “Negative, Rover. Let us know, and we’ll be there.”

  “We’ll be in contact in about six hours.”

  Mahanani slid into the brush beside Murdock.

  “Let me take a look at that left wrist. You probably thought I’d forgotten all about it.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Good, then it won’t hurt to put some ointment on it and a new bandage.”

  Murdock held out his left arm. The corpsman pulled up the woodland green cammy sleeve and looked at the bandage. It was almost black with a large red stain on it. He cut off the bandage and checked the wound on both sides where the rifle round had dug through.