The shells would come in breaking the sound barrier, followed by the explosions, then tiny pieces of fragmentation and rock splinters singing by.
Then the Gazelle pilot did a very foolish thing. Perhaps he was overconfident, perhaps he was used to targets that didn’t shoot back. Instead of standing off and pouring cannon fire into the rocks, he continued his gun run and made a high-speed pass overhead. Murdock had seen Marine Corps Cobra pilots do the same thing. Maybe the pilot planned on making a quick turn and then shooting straight down on them.
As the Gazelle passed overhead the SEALs all rose up shooting. They used the old Viet Cong technique of picking a spot in the sky ahead and letting the helicopter run into the fire.
The Gazelle shuddered and then sped off to the east, trailing smoke.
“I guess we’ve done our part in writing down the Syrian Air Force inventory,” said Razor Roselli as he peeked up to watch the helicopter go. He patted Magic on the back. Then, from the rocks off to the side an urgent cry rang out. “Doc, over here!”
Murdock felt sick to his stomach.
36
Doc Ellsworth leaped over the rocks, his medical pack in hand and Blake Murdock on his heels.
Razor Roselli shouted, “Everybody stay put and keep your eyes open. The Doc don’t need no help. Now sound off!”
“Jaybird.”
“Magic.”
“DeWitt.” And then the same voice. “I’m here with the Professor.”
Murdock found DeWitt applying direct pressure, with his only good hand, to a wound in Higgins’s side.
“I didn’t see any other wounds,” DeWitt said to Doc. And then: “I … I tried to get a battle dressing open, but I couldn’t.”
“You did just fine, sir,” the Doc said soothingly. “Don’t worry, Higgo, we’re under control here.”
Murdock stripped off Higgins’s radio pack, then elevated his legs to force blood back into the upper extremities and prevent shock.
Doc cut away part of Higgins’s jacket so he had room to work. “Okay, sir,” he said to DeWitt. “Take your hand off.”
Doc took a close look at the wound, then inserted a woman’s tampon into the hole. It was a little battlefield medical trick. The tampon absorbed blood and swelled outward, sealing off the wound and effectively stopping the bleeding. The size and shape were perfect for fitting inside wounds.
Higgins was staring into the sky, blinking hard, groaning through gritted teeth, but not saying a word.
Then Doc placed a four-by-seven-inch battle dressing compress over the wound, winding the two long green gauze strips around Higgins’s torso and then tying the ends together over the compress. He checked Higgins for other wounds. Finding none, the Doc listened to Higgins’s chest with his stethoscope and slid on a blood pressure cuff. He gave Higgins a shot of morphine, clipping the empty syrette to his collar to keep track of the dosage. Finally, Doc started an intravenous line and hooked up a clear plastic bag of Lactated Ringer’s solution. DeWitt held the IV bag up.
“No sweat, Higgo,” the Doc said confidently. “You’re going to be fine.”
Higgins nodded. The morphine was starting to kick in.
Doc slid his nylon stretcher underneath Higgins in case they had to move fast. He covered the Professor with a green foil space blanket to keep him warm, and then wrapped the stretcher straps around the whole setup. Then he slipped away to give Murdock the score.
“It doesn’t sound like the fragment’s in the thoracic cavity,” Doc repeated. “Lungs are clear, and thanks to Mister DeWitt he didn’t lose too much blood. He’s stabilized. Other than that, I’m not psychic.”
“I know you’d like to get him out now,” Murdock said. “Can he wait until dark?”
“He’s got to,” Doc replied, putting it as simply and bluntly as a SEAL corpsman could. “If he stays stable, he should be all right. But not too long after dark, okay, sir?”
“Do my best,” said Murdock.
37
“They know where we are now,” Murdock said to Razor Roselli. “And I don’t like that one bit, no matter how defensible the position is. Not with only five of us in fighting shape.”
Razor nodded in agreement. “If we move two or three klicks south down this mountain range, we’ll still be in a good position to dominate the road up.”
“You’re reading my mind again,” Murdock replied.
SEAL officers did not delegate the grunt work. Murdock sent Jaybird out ahead to scout a good route. He, Razor, Magic, and Doc would carry Higgins on the stretcher. It would take all four of them to negotiate the rocks. Ed DeWitt would have to cover the rear single-handed. In more ways than one, as Razor humorously told him.
Moving two kilometers, or little over a mile, was no easy matter when you were doing it across the top of a rocky mountain range in thin high-altitude air while carrying a wounded man on a stretcher. And despite their superb physical condition, the SEALs were already exhausted. Since the early hours of the morning they had been walking and running a marathon over the Lebanese hills under almost constant enemy pressure.
The enemy pressure was the key. When SEALs did a for-real combat swim during the invasion of Panama, they found that the increased stress caused them to use up the air supply in their Draeger rebreathers at twice the rate of regular training swims.
They had been out of drinking water for some time, and were all dehydrated. There was snow on the peaks, but it had to be melted. And that took time and heat, both of which were in short supply. You could operate a long time without food, but not without water.
The air was cold and dry, which made their thirst worse. There were only the rocks for shelter from the whipping wind on the peaks. The solution was movement, fast enough to keep their body temperatures elevated and prevent hypothermia. As long as they kept moving, their relatively light dress would be no problem. As a matter of fact, light dress was a necessity since sweat-soaked clothing caused dangerous overheating and then rapid cooling. The result was a potentially fatal drop in body temperature — hypothermia.
Having been pushed to the limits of physical endurance in their selection and training, the SEALs were used to constantly monitoring their bodies and staying alert for danger signals. But what made them so formidable was the extreme outer threshold of their physical limits.
The snow was patchy, mostly accumulating among the rocks that were out of direct sunlight. Jaybird moved along gingerly.
The snow might be concealing holes or crevasses; he knew that a broken leg and one more man down would mean disaster for the whole unit. The four carrying the stretcher were careful to follow in Jaybird’s footprints.
There was nothing approaching a path available to them as they trudged down the mountain range. Jaybird chose the easiest going, but all that meant was having to climb over the smallest rocks.
After the first few halting attempts, a system was developed. Murdock and Razor would take the stretcher themselves while Magic and Doc climbed up the larger rocks. Then they passed the stretcher up and climbed on their own. Occasionally they had to stop and give DeWitt a hand up.
After lifting Higgins up and over a particularly narrow boulder, Razor said smugly, “Now you know why they made you carry those rubber boats and logs around on your head during BUD/S.”
Magic winked at Doc. “And all this time I thought they did that just to fuck with us.”
“You hang around with Razor Roselli,” Doc pronounced, “and you learn something new every day.”