Well, maybe not too calm.
The fierce cross fire sent Duncan and Beau diving to the wooden pier.
They leaned into the flour bags in front of them.
“Damn, Beau,” Duncan said as the shooting tapered off. “We can’t stay here. We’ll be killed if we do! We’ve got to move. Follow me.”
“The hell you say?” Beau mumbled, grabbing his carbine by the stock as he took off after Duncan. He wiped the sweat from around his eyes, smearing dirt across his sunburned face.
The two men scrambled around and behind more pallets, putting several thousand pounds of flour between them and the Algerian rebels who had them pinned. They looked at each other, amazed neither was wounded.
Grinning, Duncan said, “See! God still loves us. Let’s go.”
Dodging from pallet to pallet, they were fifty feet from where they started when an explosion sent them rolling down the pier. Duncan grabbed his right knee as a thin trickle of blood stained his cammies.
Star bursts danced across his vision.
“Splinter,” he blurted through clinched teeth to Beau’s unasked question. Duncan grabbed the three-inch piece of wood and jerked it out.
At least it was his bad knee, he thought as he rubbed the swollen, arthritic, now bleeding, joint. Small flesh wound, he told himself.
Smoke and flames engulfed the front of the pier.
“Armored car?” asked Beau.
“No! Rocket-propelled grenade. The armored car is out there. If it’s the one from the village, it doesn’t have a cannon,” Duncan replied.
“At least, Colonel Yosef said it didn’t.”
“Well, that gives me a warm fuzzy. We’ll just ignore its machine gun.”
From the other side of the pier Monkey fired a long burst from his MG-60. Several rebels running down a side alley achieved martyrdom.
The others turned back to the warehouse from whence they came.
“Allah Alakbar that, assholes!” Monkey yelled.
Rapid tooting of a whistle from the end of the pier drew the attention of the SEALs on the pier. The SEALs on the boat waved for them to hurry. The whistle signaled the diesel engine on the old coastal water carrier had finally been started.
“Maybe we should have stayed with Bashir,” Beau remarked.
“If I’d known those assholes were this tenacious we would have. How the hell they found us is beyond me.”
“Think he’ll be all right?”
“Who?”
“Bashir.”
“Of course. Bashir is a product of the desert. Who else could have found a doctor in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, like he did?”
“Good thing, too. H. J.“s shoulder wound would have been septic by now.
I was amazed. Amazed doctors existed in Algeria and amazed he had penicillin.”
A series of shots dug smalj holes in the pier near them.
Screams in Arabic interrupted from the other side of the barrier.
Machine-gun fire rippled over their heads.
Duncan peeked over the top of the bags. He raised his carbine and fired at several attackers who had decided to make a dash across the top of the warehouse. One of them grabbed his stomach as he tumbled off. The abandoned cargo blocked their view of the rebel hitting the road.
Movement across a warehouse window caught Beau’s attention. He fired a burst, shattering the window.
“How the hell did they followed us, is what I want to know,” Duncan said, more to himself than to Beau.
Another explosion rocked the flour bags to the left, knocking Monkey back into a nearby pallet.
“Doesn’t matter. They have and …” Beau stopped as the sound of a revving engine reached their ears. “Shit! They’re working up nerve to try the armored car.”
“Monkey!” Duncan shouted. “You okay?”
Monkey sat up, shook his head to clear it, and then gave Duncan a thumbs-up.
“Let’s hope they have that boat ready. If they don’t, then we’re going to have one hell of a problem. Let’s go!”
The SEAL machine-gunner only needed to be told once. Monkey looked like a hunchbacked Neanderthal dragging a club as ran down the pier, his backpack and MG-60 gripped tightly in each hand. Bullets peppered his footsteps as he zigzagged toward them.
“Damn, that hurts!” he shouted as wood splinters hit his ankles and calves.
Beau rolled from cover, fired several bursts from a horizontal position in the direction of the rebels. He was rewarded with a cry as one of his random shots hit.
“That makes twenty-two.”
“Twenty-two what?” Duncan asked as Monkey tumbled into the small space behind the sacks of flour. Beau rolled to the right, following Monkey behind the barrier.
“Twenty-two kills.”
“You keep count?” Duncan asked incredulously.
“Well, not exactly, but I like to round things off to a good statistic.”
Monkey tossed his pack aside and threw himself prone with his MG-60 ready to fire.
Duncan looked at Monkey’s legs. “Monkey, you’re bleeding.”
Monkey looked down at his legs. Small pinpoints of blood flowed from where several inch-long splinters stuck out from his calves. He reached down and began to pick them out like bothersome thorns from a walk in the woods. “It’s nothing, Captain. More blood from where that came from.”
From the direction of the water carrier, Colonel Yosef and Chief Judiah ran up the pier, dodging from cover to cover as snipers on the warehouse roof tried to shoot them.
Monkey raised the angle of his MG-60 and sent a deadly blast along the roof. A rebel screamed as a bullet in the chest sent him tumbling off the edge to his death below.
“That’s two roadkill now,” Beau added.
“Twenty-three,” Monkey said, grinning at Beau. “You’re behind, Commander.”
Yosef and Chief Judiah shoved themselves into the crowded space.
“Captain, you look as if you could use some help,” Colonel Yosef said.
“You remember that armored car that chased us out of the village yesterday?”
Yosef nodded.
“We didn’t lose it. It’s up ahead somewhere. It’ll come through these sacks of flour any minute, like grease through a goose. The wood pallets and metal containers crisscrossing the head of the pier are the only things stopping it. That, and they’re probably still trying to figure out what they’re up against. When they figure out we don’t have anything to stop it, then they’ll come.”
Colonel Yosef reached into his pack and pulled out several square packages. He tossed one to Duncan.
“Semtex?”
“Semtex. I brought it with me when we fled the palace. Semtex can be a great tonic when applied properly.”
“And how do you propose to apply it?”
Yosef rapped his knuckles on the pier. “The pier, it is only wood. We will blow it. Then the armored car will be trapped on one side while we are on the other.”
“And then we’re stranded with only the sea behind us,” Beau added.
“That’s true, but we’re already trapped with only the sea behind us.
Besides, the boat engine works and it is a water carrier. And there’s tinned food on board.”
Turning to Duncan, the Algerian Palace Guard commander continued.
“Captain, I am trained in explosives. Chief Judiah tells me he is your explosive expert?”
“That’s true. Though it’s a skill we didn’t expect to use.”
“In fact,” Beau added, “we didn’t expect to spend three exciting, fun-filled days in an Algerian shooting gallery as targets.”
The firing from the rebels increased in tempo.
“I don’t think we have much longer.”
“I think you are right, Captain. I suggest that you, Commander Pettigrew, and your machine-gunner Monkey retreat to the boat. Chief Judiah and I will lay the explosives.” “I’ll stay here,” Duncan said.
“Captain, you need to hightail it with the commander,” said Judiah.