Kat held her MP-5 and began to work through the brush down the hill. Murdock went behind her. The SEALs lay close together across the twenty-yard mouth of the gully where the last good concealment was.
Murdock found a spot, and broke off three small branches to give him a field of fire. "Silencers off," he said.
Then they waited.
Murdock saw the scout. He moved ahead, knelt, and examined the ground now and then, and moved on forward. He was about seventy-five yards ahead of the main body. Murdock counted sixteen men in the main force, plus one. Seventeen to seventeen.
They waited some more. Murdock looked over to where Kat had bellied down, resting her submachine gun on a low branch. Three magazines were laid out beside her. She looked at him and he saw one eye twitch. He nodded. She tried to smile.
Murdock watched the scout then. The crouched figure was ten yards away from the brush where Murdock sighted in on him, and put three 9mm parabellum rounds from the MP-5 in the Iranian's chest. At once the sixteen other weapons fired. Murdock heard both machine guns, the crack of the 40mm grenade launchers and the spurt fire of the HK G11 caseless automatic rifle. He shifted his aim at the troops below. Some of them hadn't even hit the dirt yet. He brought down one of them, then looked for the gun flashes. The SEALs fired for three minutes, and followed the trail of two men who lifted up and zigzagged back the way they had come.
Murdock hit the mike three times, and the SEALs ceased fire. He looked over at Kat. He hadn't thought about her when the shooting began. There was a line of sweat on her forehead. He caught a tear that had rolled down her cheek. He saw that two of her magazines were empty.
"Jaybird, Fernandez, go and make sure."
Fernandez borrowed an MP-5, and he and Jaybird ran down the slight rise to where the Iranians lay. They heard half a dozen shots, then six more.
"Weapons, ammo, water?" Jaybird asked on the radio.
"Water," Murdock said. The two men scurried around the bodies, and then ran back to the brush. Each one carried six canteens.
Jaybird found Murdock. "Could have been a scouting patrol. Not sure. They looked like seasoned men. No kids among them. My guess they weren't paratroopers."
"Might be a larger force behind them?" Murdock asked.
"It's an assumption," Jaybird said. "Which means I'd just as soon get the hell out of Dodge City."
"Yeah, distribute the canteens. Pour and fill. If they can drink it, we can drink it." He touched his radio mike.
"Platoon, good shooting. We have any casualties?" Nobody said a word. "Good. Two or three got away, so now they'll know for damn sure where we are. It'll be dark in half an hour. We're going to hit the trail again, and head due east. Maybe we can mess up their logistics somehow."
Murdock looked over at Kat. Her head was down on her arms.
"Hey Kat, you all right? You hit?"
He moved her way. She held up her hand. "No, I'm not wounded. I just killed at least one man, and it's going to take me a moment or two to get used to the idea. I've never even killed a mouse before in my whole life. Now, I… I shot that man."
"Kat, he was shooting at you. The only reason he came out here was to kill us, to kill you."
"Yes, I know that." She looked at him then, and wiped away the tears. "Let me live with it for a few minutes." She sat up. "When do we load our empty magazines?"
Murdock grinned. She was thinking ahead. She'd be all right.
They left ten minutes later, just after 1600. They walked on rocky ledges whenever they could. They had the last man in the line brush out their tracks with a blanket from one of the dead Iranians. They moved in single file to make detection harder. It was still broad daylight and that bothered them all.
The total plan was to vanish from the site of the killing field and leave no trail. If they could keep that up for two or three miles due east, they could buy a lot of time before the Iranians found them again.
Magic had fired his sniper rifle, the HK PSG1. Ching was near him but wasn't certain if he had come out of the hypnotic spell or not. Magic had trained to fire the weapon. He would do so on command in or out of hypnotism. A quarter of a mile into the march, Magic bellowed in pain and called to Ching. Five minutes later as they marched, Ching had put Magic into his hypnotic trance again, and he swung along at a three-miles-an-hour pace.
In the ten minutes of calm after the firefight, Doc had checked Magic's leg. It had bled a little but not much. Doc was amazed at the guts and stamina Magic was now showing.
At 1730, Murdock called a halt. It was almost dark. He put their east trek at three miles. He talked with Lam.
"Should throw them off the trail. Anyway they can't start to track us until daylight. We can be to hell and gone before then."
"South again. We may hit the wet yet."
"How far you guess we are from the gulf, L-T?"
"Seventeen, eighteen miles. But I've got a hunch when we come to within ten miles of it, we'll run into hundreds, maybe thousands, of troops. By now it's a matter of national pride that they nail us. We've just set back their plans for total control of this whole subcontinent by two or three years. They've got to find us, or maybe get thrown out of power."
Murdock called Ron Holt up. He had the SATCOM set up and turned on by the time Murdock had his message ready. "Stroh. Lull in action. Magic still critical. Need immediate response. What's with the extraction? Murdock."
They sent the message and waited. Murdock figured he'd give Stroh a half hour to reply. To his surprise, he came back in less than ten minutes.
The decoded message came over the small screen.
"Murdock. Top Dog considering. Iran has told the world. They blame everyone. Needed tools ready in Gulf. Would have to be a night action. Contact me in twelve hours. Stroh."
"So?" Kat asked.
"The President is still considering lifting us out of here with a Navy chopper supported by Tomcat fighters. It would be at night."
"Yeah, heavy. The U.S. invading a sovereign nation. Even at night. If one of the birds went down, there would be international shit hitting the fan, right?"
"True. So we keep moving. Let's saddle up, men. Remember, the only easy day was yesterday."
Kat shot him a quick glance. "You guys actually say that."
Murdock waved, and they moved forward due south through the dark Iranian night. There was no valley here. They trailed over a slant of sandy desert mountain, and down the other side to a ravine. It headed south. They took it.
Twenty minutes later they heard a call from Lam. "Hold," came over the radios. Murdock hurried ahead to where Lam lay on the crest of a ridge.
"Another blocking group. In a damn fine place. This is a kind of pass with high ridges we can't climb on both sides. We go through here or we backtrack about five miles."
"Move up," Murdock said on the Motorola.
Jaybird looked over the ridge at the small encampment of soldiers. "Probably parachute guys," he said. "I'd figure maybe twenty at the most. One big fire, and four cooking fires. They must have arrived late in the day." The ravine they were in was forty yards wide.
"No question, we take them out," Murdock said. "Even if it gives away our position. Nothing else we can do.
"Ed, take your squad down the left-hand side. Stop out about seventy-five yards. I'll bring First Squad in on the right at the same distance. We'll get a little cross fire that way. Sooner the better. Ed, give me two clicks when you're in position."
Jaybird stayed with Magic Brown as they moved down the hundred yards along the gentle downslope toward the camp. Kat walked along beside Murdock. He touched her shoulder.
"You all right?" he whispered.
She held up three full magazines and nodded.