It was fifteen inches high, three inches square, and had power from ten watts all the way down to one tenth of a watt for short-distance clandestine operations. It had the capability of voice, data, or video transmission and receiving, and encrypted each message automatically.
It could send out a lengthy message in a burst of energy less than a tenth of a second long to make it almost impossible for an enemy to find the transmitter.
Murdock took the pad, and typed in his message: “Have package, waiting pickup. Murdock.” He used the MUGR, the Miniature Underwater Geographic locator. It usually worked underwater with an antenna that drifted to the surface, where it contacted the three closest positioning satellites for triangulation to pin down the location anywhere on the globe to within ten feet. He took the reading off the dry-land model, and entered the coordinates in his message.
Murdock reviewed the words, then punched the button to encrypt it, and it was sent a moment later in a quick burst of power.
“Now we sit down and wait for our bird to come, Murdock said. Fayd Salwa had been following the procedure with interest.
“This is fascinating to me,” he said. “When I was in the army we had nothing like this. We had a weapon, and sometimes bullets, and if extremely lucky a truck so we didn’t have to march so far. It wasn’t a good army.”
“These gadgets are fine as long as they work,” Murdock said. “Once we had a SATCOM that took a pair of slugs right in the middle, and it was just fifteen pounds of worthless junk.”
A moment later, a message came back on the SATCOM.
“Help on the way. ETA ten minutes.”
Murdock nodded, and told the troops. How long did it take a chopper to fly ten miles? Only he didn’t know where it was coming from.
The border with Kuwait might be more than ten miles away to the southeast, he knew.
Murdock checked each man. Nobody else had been wounded, no other physical problems. They had been lucky to get in and out with so little damage. It was always a deadly chance going into these blind situations. Sometimes they simply didn’t have enough intel.
Five minutes later, they heard a noise to the southeast. They let the sound grow until they knew it was a chopper. Murdock let it fly directly over them at a hundred feet until he was sure it was a U.S. machine. Then he popped a red flare, and the bird circled around and landed a hundred yards from them.
“Let’s get the hell out of Dodge,” Murdock said. The men had been standing waiting; now they started to run across the sand to their air bus out of Iraq.
They were still fifty yards away, when Murdock heard the whooshing sound he had nightmares about, an incoming Rocket Propelled Grenade.
These lethal rockets were deadly, easy to use, and to conceal.
Before he could yell at his men to take cover, one rocket hit the chopper, and then another, and a third. The bird, with its big rotor chugging around, burst into flames; then the fuel exploded, and there was nothing left but fiercely burning bits and pieces of machine and the dead crewmen.
“Hold!” Murdock shouted. “We can’t help the poor bastards! Let’s find the shooters!”
They all hit the sand, and listened. Over the roaring fire of the chopper they managed to hear some high-pitched chatter and a fired round or two. Murdock pointed to the left, where there was a small gully.
Murdock whispered into his mike. “Ed. Take your squad fifty yards south. We’ll move north, then we move up on that gully. A surprise party.”
It took them only a few minutes to get in position, and then move forward. At the edge of the small arroyo, they stopped and peered over the side. It was an armored personnel carrier with a dozen men around it. They were celebrating the destroyed chopper.
Murdock gave his men time to set up; then he aimed his subgun at the closest troops below and kicked off a twelve-round burst. At his signal, the rest of the weapons opened up.
There was no immediate response, as the men below dove for any cover they could find, mostly behind the armored rig. Then gunfire answered the SEALS.
Murdock ducked back a minute, and rolled to the left to establish a new firing position. Half of the men along the lip of the gully did the same thing.
Bill Bradford settled in behind the big M-87R .50-caliber rifle, and zeroed in on the vehicle. The big Mcmillan bolt-action rifle had a ten-round magazine hanging out the bottom of it. Bradford put his eye to the Leopold Ultra MK4 16-power scope, and triggered off the first round.
The AP, armor-piercing, round splattered through the hood and exploded deep inside the diesel engine, killing any more movement by the rig. He then concentrated on the cab and blasted three rounds in there.
He had loaded the magazine with alternate AP and HE, and the effect riddled the personnel carrier, turning it into an elongated bit of flotsam on a sea of sand.
Murdock rattled off three-round bursts at the dimly lit targets.
The SEALs continued to take return fire, but the men below must have figured they were outgunned. No RPG rounds came their way. The Iraqi troops, or the men from El Raza, must not have been able to tie down a good target.
After four minutes, the firing from below tapered off, then stopped. The survivors evidently knew when to quit, and had faded into the desert night, moving away from Murdock and his team.
“That’s a wrap,” Murdock said on the Motorola.
It was too late to check for survivors in the chopper. The three RPG rounds had brought a nearly immediate fuel explosion, and there was no chance anyone could have lived through the blasts.
“Move out, double-time back to our transport,” Murdock said into his mike. “We need to get away from this fucking grave site. Somebody in that personnel carrier might have radioed in the shoot on the enemy bird, and that will bring all sorts of visitors to this place.”
Holt jogged up beside his commander. “Should we give a report on the chopper, Sir? Somebody back there will be wondering.”
“Right, but in a half hour. By then we should be well away from this death scene. The time won’t matter to that chopper crew.”
Fayd Salwa came up on the other side of Murdock. “Could I offer a suggestion? Distance from that scene is the key, but they will expect us to run directly for the Kuwait border. If they search for us it will be there. My suggestion is that we turn and go southwest, which will put us into Saudi Arabia in about fifteen miles. I know this area.”
Murdock considered it. He nodded. He touched the lip mike. “Men, we’re changing direction a little, southwest instead of southeast.
We’re heading away from where the bad guys will be looking for us. This direction will put us in Saudi Arabia, a friendly nation.”
Back at the motorized rigs, they loaded up and moved out southwest.
If they were only fifteen miles from the border, there was a chance they could get there quickly.
Murdock could imagine the worry about the chopper back at its base.
He pulled up the rigs a mile from the crash site and sent a cryptic note on the SATCOM about the chopper, asking for another pickup. A message came back quickly. “Positive there are no survivors? No chance for another pickup. Our radar shows numerous Iraqi aircraft moving into your area. Try to make a run for the border.”
Murdock sent back a message that there was no chance for survivors.
Then they moved with lights off.
They had gone no more than a mile when Murdock halted the rigs and turned off the engines. The sound he had thought he heard came again; then a jet fighter roared over their heads at two hundred feet.