“Saw one of them beside a tree down there,” he said. “Hope I nailed the little bastard. Let’s go take a look.”
They worked through the jungle growth faster now. Up here on the slopes the ground was relatively dry. The almost daily rain could run off toward the drainage downstream.
The SEALs moved up on the target tree carefully, supporting each other as they leapfrogged the last fifty yards. At the tree they found one man slumped against some brush. He lifted a pistol and was about to shoot at point-blank range when Donegan swung up his H & K G-11 caseless-bullet rifle and sprayed ten rounds into the surprised federal soldier. There was no sign of the other one.
“We wasted one of them, but there’s no sign of the other one, Skipper,” Gardner said on the radio. “The second man must be long gone.”
“Bring the dead man’s weapon and ammo and return,” Murdock said. He had just finished a tour of the substation with the Loyalist soldier/electrician.
“If we just blow up the place, we run the risk of blacking out the whole grid back up through four countries,” the soldier/electrician said. “It would be easy if there was a transformer we could knock out, but the juice comes in high voltage and goes out as high voltage.”
“So what do we tear up?” Murdock asked. “No switches we could throw and black it out?”
The electrician laughed. “Not that easy. No switch that strong. We need to hit it at the output. We could blow down that first steel tower, or cut the lines that it carries.”
“The lines would be easiest to repair. Let’s work on them. How many do we need to cut?”
It took the electrician a half hour to decide where to set the charges. Canzoneri helped him set up the TNAZ and place it on supports that got the lines started south. The blasts would knock down the supports, overstress the thick cables, and tear them apart. When they dropped into the jungle they would be dead and harmless.
The electrician figured the repair time would be about a week, with the facilities and equipment that the federal troops and the substation’s manpower could raise. Then he shook his head. “No, there is a way to do it quicker. They can put in bypass cables to send the juice south, then build permanent supports and finish the job. The bypass could be done in two days.”
Murdock nodded. “Good, let’s go ahead and set the timers for two minute. Then we get everyone back down the hill a ways.”
Canzoneri and the electrician coordinated their work, then pushed in the timers to activate them. Then the two men rushed down the trail fifty yards from the substation.
The explosions were not large, and they came in a succession of snarling blasts that were followed by huge showers of sparks as the power lines parted and the dead ones fell into the Sierra Bijimi jungle waiting to be repaired.
Murdock, the JG, Mojombo, and the electrician ran up to the substation and looked over the results of the blasts.
Mojombo was pleased. “Yes, that will make a statement to the general population. The federal Army will rush workers up here to fix the damage. We have struck a blow for liberty.”
Murdock watched the black man. There was no doubt about his sincerity. He was dedicated to his nation and his plans to rip it out of the hands of the despots who ruled it now. Murdock’s big problem was trying to figure out how he and the SEALs could help him do that without getting in a batch of serious international trouble. He shrugged. First they had to find the chopper and get the hell out of there before more troops came in.
Murdock used the Motorola. “Load them up and move them out,” he said. “Column of ducks. JG, you take the lead with Lam out front on point. I’ll ride drag. If you Easterners don’t know what that means, it has nothing to do with how I dress. In the Old West on a cattle drive, the worst possible spot was to ride drag or the last man on the drive. The drag rider had to chase strays back into the herd, prod along the loafers, and in the process eat all the dirt that four thousand hooves could dig up and swirl around in a huge dust cloud that always drifted back over the drag rider. Enough? Let’s move.”
Fifteen minutes later they were almost down the mountain when the Motorola warning stopped them.
“Skipper, looks like we have a situation here. From what I can tell in the dark there is a whole piss-pot full of troops heading our way. My estimate is about forty to fifty. Suggestions?”
“How far off, Lam?”
“Skipper, I’d say maybe a half mile. Some of them are even singing. Not a care in the world.”
“We’ll go to ground. I want everyone to take a hard-right-flank march and move fifty yards into the jungle cover. Keep the man next to you in sight at all times so we don’t get split up. Move it right now.”
It was more than twenty minutes later that they heard the federal troops go by. They didn’t march exactly, and there were some more songs. It sounded more like a summer camp outing than an Army movement. Murdock waited ten minutes after the men passed before he called for his troops to move back to the trail and get on down the mountain.
After they left the trail, Lam angled them toward where the chopper should be. They were within a mile of the bird when Lam went on the net again.
“Skipper, I’m not sure what the hell is going on up here. You better come take a look. Near as I can tell from this distance, the federal bohunks have set up what looks like a permanent facility up here. Nothing like this when we came in earlier tonight.”
“I’m coming, Lam. Could it be that we’re on a slightly different course than the one we went in on and we just missed this installation?”
“From the looks of it, you’re right. It’s been here for some time. We were lucky to miss it when we came in. Now we need to take a small detour. Must be a hundred men and tents and even some four-wheel-drive rigs.”
“Any activity like they heard the blasts up on top?”
“Doesn’t look like it. I’ll wait for you here.”
Murdock and Gardner took a look.
“Too many of them, unless we want to hit them with all of our twenties,” Gardner said.
“Then the survivors would chase us all the way to the chopper and might shoot it down,” Murdock said. “Let’s slip around them and find the chopper and get out of here. We don’t need a body count on this run.”
They backtracked half a mile, then charged into the jungle. Murdock used the Motorola. “Halstrom, you still wide awake?”
There was a moment’s dead air. Then: “Oh, yeah. Had a wake-up call about an hour ago. Heard a patrol of some kind, but it never got within sight of the chopper or me. But they left to the south and west if I’m oriented.”
“Yeah, we found their camp. Almost went in for a dog-steak dinner, but declined. We went around them. Any landmarks around there we can zero in on?”
Not much. Just the little tributary stream. It’s not huge, as you know.”
“We’ll put our bloodhound noses on and see if we can find you. Darker out here than an old maid’s bedroom at midnight.”
Murdock found Lam. “So which and where?”
“He’s got to be north of us. I worked too far down the trail before I turned west and north. Let’s give it another try. Wish these Motorolas had a built-in homing device.”
“We can suggest it.”
After a twenty-minute hike, Lam came on the net. “Oh, yeah, troops, we’re on the right track. We’re at the little creek we passed before, the one the chopper should be on. We turn upstream and should nail him in about ten.”