“Company up front about three hundred. Looks like a small camp. They have a fire and guards on the road. Must be a vehicle there somewhere but I can’t see it.”
Murdock looked at Lam. He had been limping badly the past few minutes.
“I’m fine, just fine and dandy, Commander, sir,” Lam said. “Just figure how in the hell we get out of here.”
Murdock grinned. If Lam was bitchy he must be making it. Hurting, but weathering the fucking storm. “Back into the woods,” Murdock said. “We work toward them and do some recon, see exactly what we have to work with. How are we on ammo?”
“Twelve more of the twenties, lots of 5.56,” Van Dyke said.
“Plenty of both kinds, Skipper,” Lam said.
The three SEALs worked through the woods near the side of the road on what turned out to be a long spit of solid ground in the middle of the twenty-mile-wide swamp. They saw the wet places more and more at the sides of the road. The mangrove trees flourished in the murky environment. Then Murdock held up his hand and they stopped. Through the brush he’d spotted the camp.
“Looks like a blocking position,” Murdock said. “But all of their weapons are aimed the other way, down the road to keep anyone from coming up this way. I see four men on duty. One on a heavy machine gun, and the others behind sandbags. Could be a backup platoon sacked out in the brush on that side of the road.”
“Or on this side,” Lam said. “Wish I could go take a look, but I don’t have the potatoes right now.”
“I’ll check it,” Murdock said. “Hold here, be back in five.”
He had only to go another fifty feet to see that the area on his side of the roadblock had no rebel residents. He used the Motorola and called the others forward. They worked past the guards without a sound. The last dozen feet they had to move into the edge of the swamp to find cover at a brushless area next to the road.
They came out wet to the knees, but without drawing any attention from the rebels.
“How far we have to go?” Van Dyke asked, nodding at Lam.
“Can’t say. We take it easy. We’ve got all night. Before the sun comes up we should run into some government troops. If they planned on picking up these munitions and arms, they should have had a bunch of people around.”
“Why out here in the middle of a twenty-mile-wide swamp?” Van Dyke asked.
“Hard to get into, easy to defend,” Murdock said. “Just depends who was here first.”
They kept hiking. Twenty minutes later, Lam went down and Van Dyke called to Murdock.
“Give me ten and I’ll be moving again,” Lam said. “Don’t know why I’m so fucking weak.”
Murdock checked the bandages and found out. Both were bleeding, had been for some time. They treated the wounds again, then wrapped them with the last of their bandages and had Lam lie down and relax. Murdock had two ampoules of morphine in his kit. He opened one and gave the shot to Lam, who nodded.
“Yeah, Cap, I needed that. Sorry to be such a wipeout. Shit, this isn’t me.”
“Take it easy. We’ll have you out of here before daylight and on the way to that big floating island off the coast and their hospital. We move out in ten.”
It was almost twenty minutes before they could get Lam up and walking. Then he leaned on Murdock’s shoulder and Van Dyke carried his weapon and most of his ammo. They saw no more rebels.
“Hope to hell all the bad guys are behind us by now,” Murdock said.
An hour before sunrise, Murdock heard laughter ahead. He left the other two and worked up cautiously. Looking past a large mangrove tree, he saw a fire with half a dozen men around it. They were relaxed, and had out no security that he could see. He watched them for ten minutes. No one came to or left the fire. They all had on uniforms, and some had weapons slung over their shoulders muzzle-down.
Murdock moved up slowly until he was just outside the light from the fire. Looking at the fire so much, they would be night-blind looking into the dark.
When he was thirty feet away, he lifted up and sent a burst of three rounds over their heads from the 5.56.
“Don’t move or you’re dead,” Murdock bellowed. “Who’s in charge?”
One man lifted his hand.
“Rebels or government troops?” Murdock roared.
“Government troops, sir. Sergeant Tejan.”
“Were you supposed to pick up weapons and ammunition tonight from some helicopters?”
“Yes, sir. Supposed to. Rebels cut us off and we missed it.”
“Where are the rest of your troops?”
“We’re an outpost, sir. We have a thousand men a half mile down the road. No way we could get to the landing field.”
“Lay down your arms and hands on your heads. SEALs come on up,” Murdock said to his shoulder mike.
They both came in with weapons leveled.
Murdock had moved up to within six feet of the sergeant.
“Prove to me you’re who you say you are. An ID card?”
The sergeant slowly lowered one hand, took a folder from his shirt pocket, and extracted two cards. One was a Sierra Leone Army Identification Card. The other a credit card. The name was the same on both.
Murdock nodded and lowered his weapon.
“Good. We have a wounded man. Do you have a medic here?”
A man stepped forward with an over-the-shoulder medical kit. He went to Lam and nodded. He put him down on some grass and using a flashlight, began treating both wounds and bandaging them.
“You have any transport?” asked Murdock.
“No, sir.”
“Any communications with your main body?”
“Yes, sir. Radio.” He took a handie-talkie-size radio off a holder at his side.
“Get a jeep up here as soon as you can. Tell them that we’re part of the force that brought in the munitions.”
Twenty minutes later, the SEALs sat in a large tent on a solid piece of ground beside a blacktopped road.
Colonel Limba smiled as he gave his guests a breakfast and cans of Coca-Cola. “We are glad to know that you destroyed most of the weapons and ammunition. We will have trouble enough salvaging what is left. The rebels have an amazing network of spies and methods of travel in the swampy area. They knew you were coming, where the goods would be unloaded, and how to block us from getting to it. Sometimes their intelligence is better than ours.”
“Can you help us get back to our ship, or at least communicate with the carrier off your coast?”
“It has been done already, Commander. As soon as it’s light and we have total security, we will send you to Freetown, where a Navy helicopter is waiting for you. Within two hours you should be back on board the carrier.”
3
Lieutenant Commander Blake Murdock settled behind his desk at Third Platoon, SEAL Team Seven, and tried to relax. It had been a week since they had returned from the ammo delivery mission into Sierra Leone, and he still wasn’t sure what the final outcome was. From what Don Stroh told him, the government forces had charged up the road the next morning, blasted through the weak force at the roadblock, retaken the landing field, and recovered about half of what had been sent to them.
At first the government forces had been furious that so much of the equipment and ammo had been destroyed. Then their field commanders explained to them that the rebel truck would have hauled away all of the weapons and ammo and shipped it out on small boats through the maze of waterways in the swamp by morning.
When the SEALs burned down the rebels’ truck, they’d stopped the looting of the goods. The SEALs had had no way of knowing what other transport the rebels might have had. As near as anyone knew now, the government army got half of the shipment, the rebels about an eighth, and the rest was blown up. Also, Uncle Sam lost one Osprey aircraft, two pilots, and a crew chief. A copilot on another of the Ospreys was wounded in the shoulder. Third Platoon had only one wounded. Lam was clamoring to get out of Balboa Naval Hospital over in San Diego. He wanted to get back with the platoon. The doctors had not been kind. They told him he’d be there for two weeks and then on limited duty. Turned out the bullet in his leg had been a ricochet and had done little damage, but they wanted to watch it. One of the doctors told Murdock when he was visiting that they routinely kept SEALs in the hospital longer than usual so they wouldn’t try to get back on duty too quickly and hurt themselves further.