"Can you take them out with your twenties, Cover Bird?"
"Doubt it, but I've got two missiles. One is a Maverick 65. It's a nice little bird that's made for antitank work. Boss thought there might be some need for an AGM shot around here. Packs a real wallop. Want me to make a run on that tank?"
"That's a go, Cover Bird."
"West," Murdock said in his Motorola mike, and the fifteen men turned and ran down a street again in their offensive formation of two side-by-side arrowheads. Nobody tried to stop them.
Three blocks ahead, they came on a string of heavy trucks lined up across the street. Small-arms fire rattled from under, and at each end of, the trucks.
"Take cover," Murdock bellowed. The trucks and fighting men stood between him and where the general probably was. How in hell did he get around this kind of a manned roadblock?
25
"Magic, front and center," Murdock said into his lip mike. His men had flattened against the sides of buildings, dropped behind cars on the sides of the street, and sprawled behind trees and shrubs. They returned fire on the line of trucks.
Magic Brown sprinted past a car and came to the small truck where Murdock had landed.
"Fifty?" Brown asked. Murdock nodded.
The big black man unfastened a drag bag he had lugged all the way from the grove of trees. He brought out the McMillan M-88 .50-caliber sniper rifle, and shoved a magazine of ten incendiary rounds into the receiver. He flipped out the front bipod, and lay down at the edge of the truck with the big barrel and its muzzle brake showing around the rear tire.
Magic grinned as he sighted in through the Leupold Ultra MK4 16-power scope.
He fired. The round slammed into the gas tank showing as a side step on one big truck. The explosion was immediate as the gasoline vapor in the top of the tank ignited and detonated, engulfing the truck, and the one next to it, in a furiously burning gasoline blaze.
Magic worked the bolt, shoving a fresh .50-caliber round into the chamber, and sighted in. He moved down two trucks, and fired again. This time there was no exposed fuel tank. He put the round into the motor compartment. Then he fired three rounds as fast as he could. The last one connected with another fuel tank in the last truck in the line, and it exploded into a huge fireball sending troops scattering.
A driver in one truck at the head of the line tried to drive away. Magic sighted in on the truck in time to slam two rounds into the side of the engine, stopping the rig in place as the flaming gasoline crept down a wet line on the blacktop toward it. Four of the five rigs were burning or out of commission.
No more firing came from the broken, burning line of trucks.
"Let's move," Murdock said into his mike, and the SEALs came out of hiding unscathed and ran forward toward the trucks. They went through a twenty-foot-wide gap in the burning wreckage with their MP-5s and M-4A1s on full automatic. Once clear of the trucks, they saw no more opposition.
They formed their two inverted-V formations and moved up the street at a steady jog.
That was when they heard the Hornet high overhead. Murdock knew the Hornet would have to be at almost Mach 1 and at a two-to-three thousand-foot altitude to get off a launch of a Maverick-65 AGM missile. It was the best antitank weapon in the cupboard, and could be used for air-to-ground or air-to-ship.
The Maverick had several types of guidance systems to direct the missile on the target. The explosion ahead and to the right blasted well before the aircraft pulled out of the shallow dive.
Murdock changed directions to the right down another open area, and saw no opposition. Past two buildings, things opened up.
Across an open square block, he saw the two tanks. One burned, and a secondary explosion rocked it. The second one had one track off.
The SATCOM radio bleated, and Holt ran up beside Murdock. He held out the handset.
"SEALtime, how is our tank?"
"Cover Bird, scratch one tank. The other one is disabled. Any sign of their leader?"
"SEALtime. I'll make another pass. Thought I saw a convoy of two limos and two armored trucks heading for the west gate. I'll make another check."
Murdock stopped the platoon, and put the men on the ground. Holt kept close by with the radio. They heard the Hornet F/A-18 streak overhead. Then the radio talked.
"SEALtime, that's affirmative on that convoy. How about some twenties on them?"
"Cover Bird. I like it. We're still legal. Take them out."
They heard the fighter make two more passes, and the rattle of the 20mm Gatling-gun Vulcan cannon rounds exploding. The weapon could fire four thousand rounds a minute.
The radio spoke again. "SEALtime, convoy seriously disrupted. Three vehicles out of commission, the fourth abandoned." He paused. "I do see another pair of weapons carrier-type rigs heading for the west gate."
"Cover Bird, this is Rover."
"Yes, Rover."
"Your mission is finished. We have CNO orders to do no more air attacks on Kenyan soil. I'm sure this order comes directly from the Kenyan President to our President. Break it off and come home."
"That's a Roger, Rover. Sorry, SEALtime. The other two rigs are all yours."
Murdock looked at his troops. There was no way to know if the general was in the convoy that had been blasted, or if he was still on base or running out the west gate. Murdock called in DeWitt and Jaybird. Jaybird always surprised him with his sharp grasp of a situation and the strategy needed.
He told them about their loss of air-power.
"So the general might have been in that first convoy, or it could have been a diversion while the old man slipped out the side gate," Jaybird said.
"Yeah, I'm inclined to go with the general trying to make a move," DeWitt said. "I'd look at those weapons carriers heading out west."
Murdock grinned. "That makes it unanimous. Let's see what we can find for transport."
"Those trucks we trashed," Jaybird said. "One of them looked undamaged."
"Let's take a look," Murdock said.
Five minutes later, they were at the trucks that had blocked the street. Ross Lincoln, their top mechanic and driver, stepped into the driver's seat on the third truck in the line.
"Keys in it," he called. He turned over the engine, and it powered into life. Quickly he cramped the wheels, and got the 6 x 6 out of the line. Murdock and Jaybird joined him in the front seat, and the rest of the SEALs piled into the back. The canvas top covering the roof's wooden stays had been burned away, but the rest of the rig was intact.
"Gas gauge shows almost a full tank, L-T. The west gate?"
Murdock gave him a thumbs-up, and the truck powered down one street after another westward until they saw the gate ahead. There were no gate guards. The lift pole that usually swung down across the exit had been smashed and battered aside. Outside the gate, there was one paved road that headed west, but quickly turned north toward the mountains.
Jaybird found a map in the trash on the floor. He folded it twice, and tried to figure out where they were going.
"You sure the half-tracks came this way?" Murdock asked.
"I been watching the shoulders. Only road in this direction, and nobody has driven off it so far."
"How much head start?" Jaybird asked.
"Maybe twenty minutes. I can get forty miles per hour out of this mill, but I can't push her any faster than that."
Jaybird kept looking at the map. "Near as I can tell, we're heading somewhere toward Fort Hall, which is just south of Mt. Kenya. Tall sucker, over seventeen thousand feet."
"We got taller ones in the States," Lincoln said.