“A blocking force?” Lam asked.
Murdock looked down in the small valley. Six hundred yards ahead he saw six wall tents, cooking fires, a dozen men moving around the tents, and a squad of eight lined up in front of the area for an inspection or getting ready to go out on patrol.
“Infantry, for damn sure,” Murdock said.
“Bet they have patrols out blocking every possible route through this area,” Lam said. “There could be fifty to seventy-five troops in that camp.”
“So we don’t tangle with them,” Murdock said. “Even with the twenties, because we don’t know where all of their men are. Let’s not make the ones not in camp mad. We work around and through them, and hope we get a break.”
Murdock looked around. “Best bet is we go down this ridge to the valley, up the other side and over that ridge. Gives us about a mile away from the camp. Then we work west and watch for any ambush patrols just sitting there waiting for somebody to walk into their traps. We also look for roving patrols and individual sentries. With that many men they can flood this area.”
Before either of them could move they heard a jet passing over them and thundering away to the west, then it turned north.
“Never hear those suckers until they go by you when they’re that close,” Lam said. “Think he saw us?”
“No. He was looking at the camp down there. Checking on it. Probably in radio contact with them for any help they might need. We better get moving.”
It took the SEALs almost an hour to get away from the Chinese camp and into the next ravine-like small valley and back on their way to the west.
Murdock wondered how long the Chicoms had been in that blocking position. If they had just arrived by chopper, they might not have a lot of patrols out yet. His platoon might get lucky and slip through.
Lam edged up to the lip of another ridge and looked over. They had to go down the other side and across a larger valley with the hint of a stream in the bottom. In the center of the valley beside the now-dry streambed, stood a tree. In the shade of the tree sat six Chinese soldiers, evidently taking a break and eating from their rice rolls that usually were slung over their shoulders.
“Skipper, our luck ran out. We’ve got a six-man patrol up here on our route.”
Murdock hurried up to the spot and looked over.
“Looks like they will be there for a while. Can you see any radios?”
“Nope. Check it with your Pup scope.”
Murdock put the scope on the six and shook his head. “No radio, but a few twenty rounds could be heard in here for five miles.”
“Skipper, don’t look like we can go round this one without backtracking four or five miles. I’ve been watching this ridge to our right. That’s the way we’d have to go. It’s a sheer cliff two hundred feet high. Not a rat’s ass chance we can get up it. We go through these guys or we backtrack a mile out of sight and try to go past them on the left. Which I don’t recommend.”
“Done,” Murdock said. “DeWitt, take a look at this,” Murdock said in his Motorola.
The tall, slender (j.g.) came up to the spot and swore when he saw the patrol. “They settled down there to keep house for a month or so?”
“Looks like it. No chance to go around them on the right. We could go back a mile and try to get past them on the left.”
“More Chicoms over there, it’s a bet,” DeWitt said. “Hell, we have to go through them and then run like hell west before the rest of those Chicoms come boiling in here to see who’s shooting.”
“Agreed. We move up the ridge to the closest spot to the patrol, then do it.”
It took them fifteen minutes to move along the side of the ridge to the spot Lam had picked for the attack. They spread out five yards apart and set up. The Chinese patrol had finished eating and the men were sitting around waiting. The targets were less than two hundred yards away.
“Fire on my command. Ten seconds should do it. All weapons. Ready… fire.”
The fourteen weapons cracked, chattered and blasted. The machine gun belted out six-round bursts. The twenties exploded on contact riddling the standing and sitting Chinese infantry. Two crawled behind rocks and returned fire, but they didn’t seem sure where the rounds came from. Murdock saw one of the men hiding behind a rock and lasered a round and fired. It exploded ten feet over the rock shredding the back side of the hiding spot with deadly shrapnel.
Twelve seconds into the firing, Murdock called a cease-fire.
Only one Chinese soldier still stood. He raised his rifle, then fell flat on his face.
“Let’s move, people,” Murdock said. “Down the slope through that little valley and up the other side before our Chicom friends get some support. Go, go, go.”
Murdock trotted down the easy slope with the others, double-timed across the small valley edging around the dead Chinese. One of them lifted a pistol and took six SEAL rounds in his chest.
Murdock used the mike as he jogged along. “Okay, logic time. This last hit means the Chicoms will figure out in about twenty seconds where we’re headed. Not sure how much farther we have to go, but even if it’s two miles, it gives them plenty of time and space to set up a surprise for us. How?”
“Send in a pair of choppers with troops to cover four or five of the valleys we may use,” Lam said.
“Could, what else?
“Same choppers could bring in a small tank?” Jaybird asked. “They have birds big enough to lift that much?”
“Unknown. Other ideas.”
“A pair of chopper gunships, like our Cobra. The kind built for strafing and rocketing ground targets. They would know to stay out of range of our twenties.”
“Yeah,” Murdock said. “Three ideas that could happen. So now we work on ways to counter all three of them. So work on them, and in the meantime we blast our way over this fucking ridge and get out of eyesight of the bodies back there. That’s in case they have any sub-five-minute mile runners on their Chicom teams.”
They soon topped the ridge and worked at a slower pace down the far side. Again it was slab rock, some decomposed granite and a little more sparse growth of grass and a bush here and there.
“Lam, how far have we come since we turned west,” DeWitt asked on the mike.
“Six, maybe eight miles,” Lam said.
“So, if we only had ten to twelve to go, we could be within two to four miles of the border.”
“Hell of a long choggie when a hundred bastards are shooting at you,” Howie Anderson said.
They worked down a two-mile-long razor-thin valley that had a dry streambed in the bottom. More growth showed now, with a scattering of brush along the streambed.
Thirty minutes after topping the ridge line, they were though the valley and moving up another ridge. Lam edged to the top and stared over it. Then he stood and waved them forward. They were halfway down the slope before they saw the two camouflaged Chinese armored personnel carriers. Both moved out and machine guns on the hatches pivoted toward the SEALs.
“Scatter,” Murdock bellowed and the SEALs darted different directions until they were twenty yards apart. They hit the ground, and at once the heavy machine gun fire came their way.
“What the hell, Skipper,” Jaybird barked. “Our twenties won’t touch those babies.”
“About the size of our V-three hundred Commando APCs,” Anderson said. “Which means they could have ten troops inside each one.”
“Bull Pups, dig out your armor-piercing rounds and load five in the mag. Then let’s see what we can do. Sound off when you’re loaded and ready.”
Forty seconds later the five men with Bull Pups were ready.
The enemy machine guns chattered again. They were heavy, fifties, Murdock decided. Big enough to tear a man’s arm off at the shoulder.
“Fire two rounds of twenty each,” Murdock said. He sighted in without the laser and fired. Worked the sight and fired again. Murdock watched the target through his six-power scope. He saw two of the rounds hit and explode with no penetration. One jolted through a viewport and must have exploded inside. The vehicle veered off course and came to a stop.