Gonzalez heard the message in his radio. He snorted. “What the hell he mean, not push me too hard. I’m a hairy-assed, nookie-fucking SEAL, goddamnit. I can keep up with this shitty outfit any day.”
Doc Ellsworth agreed with him. Doc took Gonzalez’s weapon over his shoulder and helped him stand.
“Okay, now nice and easy, RG. We ain’t in no damned race here. We just move, right?”
Doc was surprised how slow Gonzalez walked. The bullet had done more than drill one small hole. It hadn’t come out his back, so it was inside somewhere causing all sorts of hell. Doc hoped that Gonzalez could last for a mile.
Murdock and the rest of the platoon moved out a few minutes later, and caught the slow-moving Gonzalez quickly. Murdock slowed the pace, put Lam out in front, and told him to check the sides of the ravine every few minutes. He had Jaybird riding Tail End Charlie as rear guard.
Murdock figured the pace was about three miles an hour. If Gonzalez could maintain it for two hours, they should be right next door to the Saudi border. A damn big if, he knew.
He called Ed up and laid it out. “War games, Ed. We’re in this situation, and you’re El Raza. You know about where we are. What are you going to do after the choppers didn’t nail us?”
Ed took a deep breath. Murdock had caught him doing that several times when he wanted a minute to think. He shifted his weapon to the other shoulder, and motioned with his right hand.
“First, I’d get some troops out in front of where it looks like we’re headed. I’d cover both of the borders. Say about three miles away from the line. Put a blocking force of all the men I could spare.
We know El Raza had two hundred men at one time. We lowered his force by at least a dozen, maybe fifteen or twenty.
“He has some choppers. Just how many we don’t know. So I’d use choppers or half-tracks and move eighty men into blocking positions along the Saudi border and along the Kuwait boundary. Then I’d sit and wait for us to fall into the trap, or for daylight when my jets could do the job.”
“El Raza doesn’t have any jets.”
“Then whose were those we saw?”
“Probably Uncle Saddam. He may be in the equation now. If so, he’s got all the firepower, and men, he wants. But would he pull El Raza’s chestnuts out of the pot? Why would he?”
“To give Uncle Sam a bloody nose. He’s already shot down one U.S. chopper and should be able to prove it. If he could capture or kill sixteen U.S. military men on Iraq soil, he could shout invasion and all sorts of wild things in the world court of public opinion. And he’d win the round.”
“Good. About what I had decided on, the blocking move. If he has eighty men for each spot, how long a line could he use to be sure to block us?”
“Eighty men at twenty yards apart at night would be the best he could do. That’s sixteen hundred yards. Damn near a mile. Seventeen hundred and sixty yards in a mile. Two eight-eighties that I used to run for the Academy track team.”
“If we hit the screen, we’d have to take out three of the sentries to give ourselves a safe passage between them of eighty yards. Almost a football field. Which I didn’t play on for the Academy.” They both chuckled.
“So, if Lam can spot them in time, and if we manage to hit the wrong spot where they are, we need to take out three sentries in a row,” Dewitt said. “Wish we had bows and arrows. Even our silenced sniper rifles are going to make too much noise.
“Knife work,” Murdock said. “You, me, and Jaybird.”
Lampedusa came back every ten minutes. He was surprised how slowly they were moving, then remembered Gonzalez.
“I can’t see shit up there,” Lam told Murdock. “Don’t look like there’s anybody ahead or behind us. Think we shot the fuck out of that chopper bunch.”
Murdock told him about what he and Dewitt had been talking about.
“Makes sense. Only how do you know they’ll put them twenty yards apart?”
“We don’t. It’s what I’d do in his situation,” Murdock said.
“What if he figures by our hits on his people that we’re heading for Saudi, not the other one, and he puts all one-eighty along that border?”
“Then we’ll have a better chance of hitting his nearly two-mile picket fence, but still just as good a chance of getting through,” Dewitt said.
“Yeah. Okay. I want to be one of the guys with the knife.”
“A volunteer,” Dewitt said.
“We’ll worry about that when you spot those pickets. Remember, this is Iraq. They’ll probably be talking and most surely smoking.
Should be fish in a fucking teacup.”
The pace had slowed. Murdock wondered about carrying Gonzalez. He was 180 pounds. Ronson could pack him for half a mile. Then what? No, they were stuck with the best pace that their wounded man could do.
Murdock went up to see them. Gonzales looked worse. Doc gave him another shot of morphine from the small one-time-use ampoules, and he perked up a little.
“You tell me where you hurt, Gonzalez. None of this hero shit, you understand?”
“Yeah, Doc. Too damn tired to argue.”
“How tired? Like you aren’t getting enough blood to carry oxygen to your muscles?”
“No, just tired. My arms feel like they’re about to fall off, but they ain’t.”
Gonzalez wasn’t wearing his combat vest with his ammo and other items. It usually weighed about twenty pounds. Doc had given the Colt carbine to someone else as well.
“So, buddy, just keep moving them big feet one ahead of the other, and we’ll get out of this chicken-shit country.”
“Amen to that. How far?”
“Not a clue, nobody will tell me. We’ll take it one step at a time.”
Later, Murdock thought he heard an aircraft, but he couldn’t be sure. Nobody else heard it. He was fantasizing. He checked his watch.
It was 0130. They had five hours to daylight. Salwa had put on Gonzalez’s combat vest, and had his Colt. He gave Murdock the .45 H&K pistol.
“I’m more used to a long gun,” Salwa said.
The ravine kept getting smaller and shallower. They were moving upstream. A half mile more and they were back on the desert floor.
They shifted their heading back to the southwest.
Salwa came up to Murdock. “Hey, now I know where I am. We’re near some caves — I don’t remember what they called them. Back in my student days we came here on a field trip. Relations between the countries were better then.”
Murdock gave the Kuwaiti a drink from his canteen.
“I’m remembering a little more about this area,” Salwa said.
“There were several of the large caves. Ancient ones with hints of a previous civilization.”
Murdock put his canteen back on his belt. “How big were the caves?”
“Huge. But it was a long time ago.”
“Might be a good defensive position if we get tracked down,” Murdock said. He took off the NVGs and handed them to the Kuwaiti.
“Take a look around, you might see something familiar.”
Salwa took the goggles, and stared around the landscape for a minute. Then he caught up, and walked again beside Murdock.
“Yes, I did see something. The start of a wadi. It’s nearly on our course. I think if it’s the right wadi, that I can find the caves.”
Murdock talked with Ed Dewitt and Jaybird. They agreed.
Ten minutes later they moved in a slightly more southern direction, and soon found a wadi, or gully, that was small, but grew deeper as they walked along it.
“Yes,” Salwa said. “This is the one. The caves should be less than a half mile ahead.”
Murdock went to the front of the line and checked in with Gonzalez.
He looked decidedly worse than he had a half hour before. As he walked beside Murdock, Gonzalez stumbled, and Doc had to catch him. Murdock talked to his mike.