Murdock took the end of the line next to the gully, and looked at it carefully. Patches of soft sand showed the tire tracks. Where the hell could that vehicle be? They walked slowly forward, weapons with rounds in the chambers and safeties off.
Forty yards from the end of the gully, Murdock halted the men. Something wasn’t quite right about the bottom of the rock wall. If this gully had been gouged out after hard rains when the water had no place to soak in and came down this way, the water would have had to come from high in the mountains and spill over the sheer wall. A waterfall that high would carve out a serious hole in the sand in front of the wall. It could be ten or twelve feet below the level of the arroyo. There was no such hole here.
“Hit the dirt, men, and get behind any cover you can find. I’m going to shoot the wall at the end of the gully with a twenty and see what reaction we get.”
Alpha Squad dove to the ground, some men rolling into small depressions, or moving behind a handy rock. Murdock went prone, aimed at the center of the wall where the water should be coming from, and fired. The contact fuse detonated on impact, and when the smoke cleared, showed a two-foot-wide hole punched through a non-rock wall.
“Twenties, two rounds each at that wall. It has to be a cave in there. Fire when ready.”
The first three rounds shattered what turned out to be a wood wall built into the side of the granite slab. The next rounds slammed deep into the tunnel and exploded. When the fourteen rounds finished their killing ways in the cave, Murdock and the men sprinted for the side of the wall next to the opening. Smoke and dust filtered out of the cave.
“DeWitt. We’ve found a cave and it looks like one of the cars ran right into it. Do you have anything on the other rig?”
“Not yet, but we’re getting closer. We can see a dust trail ahead from the tires. Keep us informed.”
From what Murdock could see, the blasted opening was about eight feet high and ten feet wide. “Lam, take a look. Don’t go inside.”
Lam edged around the side of the cave and past a blown-apart stud wall, and peered inside from ground level.
“Can’t see much, Cap. Looks like one dead body about three feet back. He has a weapon. Still smoky in there.”
“No sign of the car?”
“Not a trace. It could have been driven back in there. The place is plenty big enough.”
“You sense any air currents coming out of the opening?”
“Yeah, now I do. Yes. Something is blowing the smoke out of the place. So it must have an air inlet somewhere.”
“Maybe a chimney or another entrance,” Murdock said. “Let’s give it five minutes to clear out and then we’ll work our way inside. Who brought flashlights?” The two-cell lights were standard on missions, but many times the men didn’t carry them. Murdock received ayes from five of his seven men. “Good, we’ll need them. Patrol order when we go in. Remember to hold the lights at arm’s length from your body. Lam, edge into the place ten feet and hold, let me know what you can see.”
“Copy that, Skipper.”
Lam squirmed around the jagged piece of the wall and into the cave. At once he felt a temperature change from hot to less than hot, but not yet cool. He used the ambient light to stare into the cave, but could see little. The dead man’s head was turned away from him, so he couldn’t tell if he was Korean. He gave up and turned on the Maglite, holding it in his left outstretched hand. He scanned the floor just ahead of him checking for trip wires or pressure plates for mines. Nothing. He sectioned the rock floor and eased forward. When he was ten feet inside the opening, he had found nothing but rock walls, rock ceiling, and rock floor. It didn’t even look like it could be the channel of an underground river.
“Nada, Skipper. Just the one body and a whole potful of rock. No car, no tracks, no trip wires. Clear and benign.”
“Roger, Lam, we’re moving in. Take it easy and go out another twenty feet, but slowly and clearing the terrain as you go. Keep up a running commentary to us as you move.”
“Copy that, Skipper. Yeah, now I see where one of our twenties must have hit. Shattered some rock and dropped it on an otherwise clean rock floor. Might have been water that washed this rock clean of dust and dirt, I don’t know. Can’t figure it. Where the hell can it go? Can’t tell if it’s a man-made tunnel carved out of the rock, or if it was some kind of a volcanic tube. Don’t see how it could have been cut by this small volume of water coming through. This is solid damn granite.”
Lam kept moving. When he was twenty feet inside the cave he spotted a booby trap. “I’ve got a trip wire, Skipper. Not sure what the hell to do with it. Oh, yeah, followed the wire up the wall to a claymore. Looks like one of our own. Can Canzoneri get up here and disarm this thing?”
“No sweat, Chicken Lam,” Canzoneri said. “Hell, that’s the easiest kind to deactivate. Be there in about three if you guarantee there are no trip wires between you and me.”
“Guarantee. Bet your life on it. Move.”
Canzoneri arrived a minute later and moved his flashlight beam along the wire and up to the claymore. The blue mine was about four inches high, eight inches wide, and two inches thick. It had been taped to the rock wall and aimed toward the cave mouth. Inside, it was little more than a slab of C4 explosive behind up to two hundred steel pellets that formed a killing field sixty yards in front of it. Canzoneri was the platoon explosives maven. He checked the mine itself, then adjusted a lever on the back and eased the claymore off the wall. He pointed it away from the entrance and then snipped off the trigger wire. It didn’t explode.
“Not sure if any of these have a delay mechanism on them, but would be a great idea for the future. Then you get it disarmed, which is really a second way to arm it, and in ten or twenty seconds it goes off.” He paused. “Okay, the twenty seconds are up. I’d say we’re home free.” He put the claymore down on the side of the cave with the face of it on the rock.
“I’m moving forward,” Lam said. He continued to scope every foot of the cave floor as he walked. For fifteen feet he found nothing unusual. Then another body. This one was definitely Korean. He’d taken a dozen pieces of shrapnel in his chest. He still cradled a submachine gun. Lam reported it and continued. Ahead twenty more feet, the cave became smaller, but still large enough to drive a car through. It took a turn to the left. Lam went to the left side of the cave wall and edged up to where he could see around it. He shone his light down the cave, and took a burst of three rounds from a submachine gun. They missed his light and his arm. He jerked both back.
“Heard it,” Murdock said on the radio. “Sub gun. Hold there.”
Two minutes later Murdock was beside Lam. “We could use some more twenties, but the brass wants one alive. Who has the EAR? Get your ass up front now.”
Frank Victor came up behind them. “Ho, Cap. The EAR is here.”
Murdock moved back. “Ease the barrel around the wall and send one shot down there. Then after ten seconds give them one more. When you’re ready.”
The first whooshing sound came from the weapon, and Murdock realized there was something of a rear blast of air as well, but not as concentrated as the front one. He counted down the ten seconds with elephant-one, elephant-two. Then Victor fired the second round.
“We three,” Murdock said. “We move down quickly, watching for trip wires. They’re like rattlesnakes, always travel in pairs.”
They worked ahead faster than before. Twenty yards down they found a shooter. He had a sub gun and was prone facing toward them. He was breathing and unconscious. They bound his hands and feet and moved on. Another twenty yards ahead and the size of the cave shrank again, but it was still seven feet high and eight feet wide.