“Where we going to hole up for the daytime?” Lam asked.
“How about up the slope here a ways,” Murdock said. “Gives us a good lookout and we can see what the Chinese are doing.”
“How will we find you?” Lam asked.
Just follow the delightful aroma of the MREs.” Murdock chuckled. “We’ll be working the half-track search from this side. If we don’t find anything we’ll shoot our sixty rounds at midnight. Otherwise, blow the half-track, then shoot the sixty rounds. If one squad finds a rig before midnight, the other will jump in with the twenties at the same time. Let’s do it.”
The squads split, giving the blocking force plenty of room, and went around it. Jaybird worked the point for Alpha Squad, and they soon found a faint track that Jaybird said probably was one half-track instead of four or six on the same trail.
The track through the brush and trees made hiking much easier than it would have been crashing brush. They’d be doing plenty of that before this mission was over.
Ten minutes ahead they came to another campsite. This was the main one. Over fifty fires were still burning. The SEALs were close enough to see figures around the fires. They saw only a few tents, the size that the U.S. Army used to use for officers.
Jaybird shook his head. “No sign of the half-track. It turned in here, but nothing shows.”
The camp was pasted against the side of the sudden rise of the Koolau mountain range.
“Maybe some altitude will give us a better idea where to look,” Murdock said. “That first little ridge up there maybe three hundred feet.”
It took them a half hour to climb up the slope, which was steeper and tougher than it looked. Once up, Murdock told the men to flake out for a while. He found a lookout spot, dug out his binoculars, and studied the moonlit camp below him. It stretched to the right for a quarter of a mile, maybe more.
Some background sound kept nudging at his consciousness. He listened closer and then had it. A small gas-powered generator motor. That would be for the major and his staff. But Murdock had no idea where it was. There were no electric lights burning anywhere that he could see.
Murdock made a note to get the generator when they could find it, then looked at the rest of the situation.
He tried the radio. DeWitt came in on the second try.
“Barely hear you, Cap. We’ve got a line on two of the half-tracks. One is almost on the edge of the camp, the other one fifty yards inside past about a hundred sleeping men.”
“Do the first one with C-5 if you can, and target the second one with your twenties,” Murdock said. “What’s your timing?”
“We’re set up now. I’d say Lam and Train Kahi will go in about fifteen minutes. Your twenties into the camp will help us on our getaway.”
“Good, circle to the south. We’re about a third of the way along the camp and on a cliff three hundred feet over the valley floor. When you get closer we’ll give you some directions.”
“That’s a Roger. We’re in motion here.”
“Good luck.”
Murdock spent the next ten minutes placing his weapons. Ronson still had his H & K 21-E machine gun. Bill Bradford had the sniper rifle. The rest of the squad had the twenties, and they all would fire into the camp as soon as they heard the first blast from Bravo Squad.
“As soon as we fire, we’ll bug out and move at least two hundred yards up the ridge, so if they have any large counter-battery, it won’t touch us,” Murdock said.
A few minutes later the silence of the Hawaiian night burst open with a brilliant flash followed by a slow-moving crack of a dozen thunderclouds as the C-5 went off in the Chinese camp below.
“Let’s do it,” Murdock said into his radio mike. The machine gun chattered first. His shots fell short, and he raised his sights and kept firing five-round bursts. The range finder laser beams had done their work, and the first few rounds hit squarely in the middle of the rash of campfires below.
The airbursts tore into anything they could find, from sleeping bodies to supplies, weapons, and food. A large fire started that Jaybird said looked like a tent to him. Each of the five weapons fired twelve rounds. Then the sniper rifle and the MG closed down as well, and the men moved to the right more toward the center of the long thin camp. They found a new ledge off the ridge that would serve them well, and settled down.
They had heard firing from across the way, and it continued a short time after their own rounds had been used.
Murdock tried the Motorola again.
“Ed, you still there?”
“Fit and hearty and moving. Lam got the half-track, blew it to hell, and got out all right. We’ve taken a little return fire, but not much. So far no casualties.”
“Bug out around the north end of the camp and get up against the hills. We’ll get you into home port here somehow. Let us know if you hear or feel any kind of pursuit.”
“Roger that. We’re jogging. Out.”
They waited. Half the fires in the camp below went out. Murdock figured that within ten minutes the rest of the fires would be snuffed and the camp would revert to just another shadow in the green Hawaiian hills.
He pulled Ron Holt up with the SATCOM, and they tried to remember what frequency the carrier Jefferson used. Holt tried three, and on the third one received a response.
The conversations were all encrypted and spat out, then turned back into the spoken word on the other end through the right encrypter machine.
“Jefferson, this is Murdock. Who am I speaking with?”
“Commander Hollingsworth. We’ve been told to watch for your signal. A party named Stroh has urgent need to contact you. He said if you call to ask you to get on TAC fourteen at Pearl. He said any time day or night. Any problems we can help you with?”
“Not at the moment. Thought I might have a target for you, but it’s dark down there now. We’ll call Stroh. Keep our gear safe. We’ll be back to the ship eventually. Murdock out.”
“TAC Fourteen? We don’t have a Fourteen,” Holt said.
“Is it on a dial?”
“Yeah.”
“Dial in fourteen and see what happens.”
“Okay, yeah, I did. The number is holding. I’ll give it a try.”
Murdock contacted Stroh on the third call.
“Murdock, glad I caught up with you. You’re operational there now, I know, but a few dozen other items have come up. How is it going?”
The CIA man received a quick summary of activities from the SEAL. “Tomorrow morning we’ll see what kind of damage we did and decide what else to do,” Murdock said. “On the other hand, the Chinese may put out two hundred troops on a destroy mission and we’ll be running for our lives. You at Pearl?”
“Yes, and with some news.”
“Hold the news. Tell our liaison there that we may want that red-signature chopper back here for a pickup at any time. I want that bird on ten-minute call for us and nobody else.”
“We can do that. Admiral Bennington is pleased with your work on the commo shack. I’ll talk to Commander Johnson and keep the bird ready for you.
“Next, they found out an hour ago that there has been an invasion of Kauai. The admiral is putting together a task force to head out there. Recon planes estimate the forces there at something like fifteen hundred. Our other recon shows the Chinese stalled against the mountains inland from Kaneohe. Why the hell did they come onshore there and drive into the mountains?”