“Good. Tell Jaybird to stay there and keep in contact with them and ride herd.”
Murdock looked at the island. He moved the men to the highest point. It was dry there. They flaked out, tried to get the Ganges silt out of their ears, and dried out a little. Everyone had a weapon except Will Dobler.
Lam caught up with Murdock. “Looks like a little bit of brush and grass over on the far side about halfway down. Might be enough to conceal us if a chopper comes around. That’s about it for this bit of Bangladesh soil.”
Murdock went with Lam to take a look. By the time they made it back to the top of the island, the three reef sitters were back on dry land and telling how hard it was swimming in the grime of the Ganges against that five-knot current.
“What a bunch of wimps,” Howie bellowed. “My grandmother could swim up there and she’s ninety-two.”
Murdock called the men around and in typical SEAL fashion laid out the problem.
“You know our situation here, let’s have some input. What should we do?”
“What the hell can we do to get closer to the bay?” Jaybird asked.
“We can’t swim down forty miles with a wounded man,” DeWitt said. “No way. Dobler has the leg wound.”
“Hell I can still swim,” Dobler said.
“Yeah, and we’d have a pack of sharks following down your blood trail,” Mahanani said.
“Our Motorolas are good for maybe five miles,” Howie said. “Oh, shit. I left the SATCOM on the boat. It’s long gone by now.”
Murdock scowled. “Next mission I’m gonna staple the fucking SATCOM to your ears. So, the SATCOM is out. Next I want everybody to make a hide hole here in this brush. It isn’t much, but better than raw sand. Get a spot fixed so you can go invisible at fifty feet. You know the drill. Let’s do it now, and hope that we don’t need it. Be thinking on this small situation we’re in.”
The SEALs moved ten feet apart and scraped out foliage, leaves, and dirt until they could lie down, and cover themselves with the material, leaving only their faces showing. To those they applied new steaks of wet mud to break up the visual image.
They were done in ten minutes.
“Now, any new ideas,” Murdock called. Murdock was next to Dobler and had helped him with his hole.
“The obvious,” Jaybird said. “We wait for that forty-six to come and spot us.”
“Play stranded and lure a boat over and capture it,” Jefferson said.
“Yeah, the place is just teeming with traffic this morning,” Howie snapped.
“Send our two best swimmers downstream, maybe with a float log, and watch for the chopper, and guide it back up here.” Mahanani said it. He was the best swimmer in the platoon.
“Find some native girls and settle down on our island and grow pineapple and sugarcane?” Canzoneri asked with a grin.
“I’m for that one,” Bradford yelped.
“Back to business,” Murdock said. “At least my watch works. We send one waterproofed Motorola with the swimmers. It’s almost eleven hundred. We should have seen that chopper by now.”
“Must be a dozen good-size channels branching off the Ganges,” DeWitt said. “The pilot could have picked any one of them and been wrong.”
Lam stood and looked to the north. “Chopper coming, moving quickly.”
“Let’s hit our holes, men. No firing. Weapons undercover as well as usual. Go down, now.”
The SEALs vanished into the brushy area where the tallest of the growth was only three feet. They waited. Murdock had his face almost covered, but he could see out a hole to the south. It was a chopper like the last one, two rotors, and could have troops inside. It moved slowly forward, pausing at each small island. He hoped the bird was high enough so the downdraft from the rotors wouldn’t blow away their camouflage.
It moved closer. The SEALs remained motionless. Then in a burst it was over their island working one side, then back up the side where the SEALs lay. Murdock saw a door gunner waving his machine gun around. He didn’t fire. The chopper hovered over the patch of brush but at more than a hundred feet so the rotor blast wasn’t enough to move the sand and leaves.
It hesitated again, then moved on to the end of the island and back down the other side.
“Footprints in the sand,” somebody said. “We must have left a batch of them along the shore.”
“They didn’t see them, or didn’t believe them,” DeWitt said. “Let’s get up, should be safe now.”
Before he finished saying it, a jet fighter blasted overhead. It was more than five hundred feet and Murdock knew the pilot couldn’t see them, still he ducked down again and waited.
“Just what we need, some damn MiG to find our forty-six and blow it out of the sky with a rocket,” Mahanani said.
The SEALs came out of their holes slowly.
Murdock looked downstream, then to the north. “We don’t have much choice,” he said. “We move two swimmers downstream. Take a radio, check with us at five miles and we’ll see if we can receive. We’ll keep a Motorola on here while you’re gone. Find that damn CH-forty-six for us.”
Mahanani peeled out of his webbing and shirt. The sun came down like a warm blanket. The others were sweating. Mahanani looked around, waved at Howie. “Get your gear off, sailor. Let’s see if you can swim.”
Howie yelped and pulled off his webbing and shirt. “Boots, too?” he asked.
Murdock shook his head. “Better keep them on for protection. They aren’t that heavy. Stay near the shore and you might find a log you can use for a float. Five knots drifting with the current is good, don’t push it.
“No weapons,” Murdock said. “Unless you have hideout revolvers. Take no chances. If you find the forty-six, use one of the flares in your pants knee pockets. Then come get us. If he misses you, and finds us, we come get you. The flare again. Questions?”
“Civilians?” Howie asked.
“Keep clear. Don’t think you’ll see any people out here unless they have a boat. Still stay clear.”
The two pushed into the water and stroked evenly into the current and let it take them downstream. Within five minutes they were out of sight.
“Stay near the brush,” Murdock said. “We don’t want any surprises. Nothing we can do. Will, how is that leg?”
“Hurts like hell, Skipper. Damned if I know how I got it. Must have been kicking on the surface at just the wrong time and in the fucking wrong place.”
“You get some morphine?”
“Not yet. We don’t have much. One ampoule in each aid kit. I’ll wait until I really need it.”
DeWitt came over and sat down in the leaves. “What a mess. How did we get into this one?”
“We must have volunteered. Just glad we didn’t have any of the embassy people on that second bird when the Chicoms got the range.”
They looked at each other. Both thinking about the same thing. Was this the fucked up mission that was going to wipe out the whole platoon? Murdock drove that idea out of his head. He checked over the men. They were doing fine so far. No food for eighteen hours or more. Water would be the big need, and soon. So far they had toughed it out. Who needed canteens on a four-hour mission?
He deliberately thought about something else. Something pleasant, fun, beautiful. Which brought Ardith Jane Manchester to mind. Oh, yeah. She had been one of the really fine bits of life to happen to him so far. Tall and blond and svelte and sexy as all hell. Oh, yeah. A smart woman, a lawyer on her senator father’s staff in D.C. Yeah, and maybe moving up to a better spot as some department or cabinet officer’s assistant. Or maybe just yank her out of D.C. with a wedding ring and bring her out to Coronado and let her play with some free legal clinic for the Chicanos, blacks, and Asians. She would go for that. Had they talked about it? Dozens of times. He wondered what she was thinking of right now.