“Ronson, come up to the front.”
A minute later Ronson came striding up. He took one look at Gonzalez, picked him up like a baby, and carried him forward. He had given his machine gun to Murdock.
“Half a mile, and we take a break,” Murdock said. Gonzalez had closed his eyes. Murdock knew how proud he was to be a SEAL. He didn’t want anyone helping him. Only now it was absolutely necessary.
Murdock went back to the middle of the line, and told Dewitt about the assist. The big problem now would be daylight. Before then they had to have somewhere to hide or be across the border into Saudi Arabia.
The caves might be the answer. That is, if they didn’t run into the blocking force before it got anywhere near light. Murdock wanted to be well into Saudi Arabia by the time the desert sun came up.
The caves would give them good protection for a rest. If the Kuwaiti was right, and if he could find them in the dark.
5
The Third Platoon hiked along the wadi for half an hour. Murdock heard something and hit the dirt, and the rest of the platoon went down as well. He turned. The sound had come from close by.
Fayd Salwa chuckled. “Commander, I’m afraid it’s the alarm on my watch. It’s new, and I’ve never figured out how to turn it off, so I set it at two-fifteen A. M., and two-fifteen P.m. Sorry.”
“False alarm,” Murdock said into his lip mike. “Let’s move.”
He grinned at Salwa. “Hey, don’t worry about it. Just glad we weren’t sneaking up on somebody. At least now I know what time it is.
We have, what, maybe four hours to daylight?”
“Sunup about six-thirty, or oh-six-thirty.” Salwa looked ahead again through the NVG. “Yes, yes. This is the way. The caves are no more than a hundred yards ahead. We’ll go down a steep place in the wadi here.”
Five minutes later, they had dropped in the gully to twenty feet below the level of the desert. The first cave was nothing but a black hole in a rock wall.
“First one isn’t much,” Salwa said. “Let’s go to the middle one.
It’s huge.”
Fifty feet down the wadi, they came to the second cave. The wadi was open on the top, and the cave showed black and dank on the right-hand side. Murdock took a pencil flash from his vest, and aimed it into the cave. The thin light went only a few feet.
“It’s more than a hundred feet deep, and thirty feet wide,” Salwa said. “The ceiling is up about twenty feet. Lots of room.”
Murdock stared at it. “How far are we from the border, and can we make it there before daylight?”
“From here, four miles. I know. We hiked in when I was in school.
Four miles, four hours, usually no problem.”
Murdock rubbed his jaw. Gonzalez would be a problem. “Take a break,” he said into the Motorola. “Fifteen minutes.” He turned back to the Kuwaiti. “Do any of these caves have water in them, drinkable water?”
“This one does. Far back.”
Three of them carried all the canteens, and found a small spring that came out of seemingly solid rock, gurgled down twenty feet, and vanished underground again. They filled the canteens, and using both Murdock and Dewitt’s flashlights, worked their way back to the front of the cave.
Murdock told Holt to make another SATCOM contact giving their MUGR coordinates. The reply came back quickly.
“You now have a better location. Kuwait border still too hot to cross. Might have a chance since you’re near the Saudi border. Give us an hour to do some consulting with our allies.”
“Not much of an answer, Commander,” Holt said.
“No answer at all.”
Just before the end of the break, Joe Lampedusa, the platoon scout, hit his mike.
“L-T, we’ve got company. Commander, that is. A small vehicle of some kind with bright lights just slid down the steep grade, and is about fifty feet up the wadi. Maybe a dozen men with it.”
Murdock ran for the entrance. The two machine gunners Joe Douglas and Horse Ronson, beat him to it. They went prone, and set up their machine guns, then charged in the first round as silently as possible.
The Iraqi men in the rig left it, and investigated the first cave.
Six of them were visible in front of the headlights.
“They can’t miss us,” Murdock said. “Get two grenade throwers up here,” he told his lip mike.
Kenneth Ching and Guns Franklin slid to the ground and dug out hand grenades.
Murdock waited a minute; then more men came in front of the small rig, and the motor started. Murdock jolted off six rounds from his MP-5SD, and the machine guns chimed in with a series of five-round bursts.
Four men in the headlights went down. The truck’s windshield shattered. A hand grenade burst at the side of the rig showering instant death. The second grenade that exploded was WP, white phosphorus, and it sent unquenchable blobs of the fast-burning phosphorus spraying into the cave, and across four more men, who went down screaming. The sticky substance burned through uniforms, then into flesh, and through it and bones as the soldiers bellowed in agony.
There was no return fire. The men were so caught by surprise, and the fire coming at them was so intense, that all died in their tracks, or ran out of the wadi hoping to escape the sudden death.
Murdock took the men with him from the cave mouth, and charged the jeep with assault fire. There was no opposition. They checked the bodies in the pale moonlight. Only one was alive. He was dispatched with a round to the head. SEALs take no prisoners, leave no wounded.
Five minutes later, the platoon had saddled up, and moved out of the wadi heading due southwest for the Saudi border.
“Only four miles,” Murdock said. “A little over four miles to the border. We can do that standing on our pricks and waving our arms. Any questions?”
“Yeah,” somebody said on the radio. “Who the fuck were those guys?”
“Don’t know, don’t care,” Murdock said. “Either Saddam’s troops or El Raza’s kin. They’re dead, and we’re going home.”
Gonzalez was doing better. The fifteen-minute break had rejuvenated him. He wanted to walk. Doc told Murdock Gonzalez couldn’t walk far. Murdock had Bill Bradford, the next-largest man in the platoon, walk beside Gonzalez for when he was needed.
They hiked across the barren desert-like landscape for a half hour, and were about to head down a gentle slope when Murdock saw Lam go down ten yards ahead. Murdock and the rest of them hit the desert sand and rocks.
Just ahead in the moonlight, they could see a small campfire. They heard the sound of music, some stringed instrument with lots of weird sounds and the plucking of the strings.
Murdock, Ed Dewitt, and Jaybird crawled up to the scout, and watched the scene below.
“How many men?” Murdock asked.
“Twenty to twenty-five,” Jaybird said.
“More like thirty to thirty-five,” Dewitt countered.
“Yeah, Commander, at least thirty,” Lam said.
“Too damn many of the fuckers to go through them. We take a small detour and quietly move around the sleeping dogs and let them make their music.” Murdock looked at the shadowed faces of the others. “Any other suggestions?”
“Go around,” Jaybird said, and the other two SEALs nodded. They backtracked a half mile, then did a wide roundabout of the camp. They never came within a half mile of it, and when they were safely around, they moved back on the compass course that Salwa gave them.
Before they finished their backtracking, Gonzales fell to his knees. Bill Bradford put him on his back piggyback-style, and told him to hold on. Bradford carried him as if he was a feather pillow.