"Hunker down, buddy, find some cover," Murdock said. "We'll swing around to the left and see if we can track the visitors."
Murdock and the three men ran bent over to the left, entered the grove of trees, and kept going to the other side of the thirty-yard-wide thicket.
Murdock hit the dirt and the other three followed. Directly ahead not more than fifty yards, they saw the winking of muzzle flashes. The rounds were not coming at Murdock. He reviewed his weapons. Ching had a colt with grenade launcher, Quinley had the caseless-rounds H&K G-ll, and Bradford had his sniper rifle. His own subgun was outranged.
"Ching, drop in four HE forties on them. As soon as they hit we'll open up. Faster the better."
Ching loaded and fired, and had two rounds in the air before the first one hit. He was slightly short, moved it up, and fired twice more. With the first explosion of the 40mm grenade, firing from the North Koreans slackened off, then built back up. The second two rounds came down right in the middle of them, and the firing nearly stopped.
"Good shooting, buddy, we didn't have the opening here." It was DeWitt. Murdock fired his H&K MKP-5 submachine gun. He'd taken the suppressor off and now had the range. Two minutes of rapid fire from the four men silenced the attacking soldiers.
"Where to?" DeWitt asked.
"South," Murdock said in his Motorola. "Let's link up. We're to the south, you come to us. Just past the trees on your side."
Before Murdock stopped talking he heard it. Then he knew for sure what it was. "Belay that, JG. We've got a fucking tank breathing right down our naked necks over here."
The tank loomed out of the night directly ahead of them and rumbled forward. It was a big sucker.
"What the hell we do about him?" Bradford asked. "Take him out," Ching said.
"Sure, wiseass, how?"
Murdock wondered the same thing. Then he remembered the TNAZ. "How much of that explosive you guys got left?" Murdock asked.
They had about three pounds.
"Quarter of a pound should boost the tracks off the rollers," Murdock said. "All we have to do is get close enough to him. Each of you take a quarter pound and give me one too. Put in detonator/timers and set the timers for thirty seconds. Whoever gets a chance at a tread, jam in the soup and push the timer, then get the hell out of there."
"This could turn out to be a fun trip," Ching said.
They split, two on each side of the big tank that kept coming straight at them from about forty yards. Murdock wondered if the driver had nightscopes. He bet the man didn't.
Murdock crawled twenty feet to the left of where the tank should come, and waited. He used the mike to tell DeWitt what they were doing. The 2IC was to go south when he got the chance. They would link up later.
The tank rumbled ahead. Without warning, the .50 caliber machine gun on the front of the tank blasted, sending a stream of big slugs out front but nowhere near the SEALs. It kicked off seven rounds, then another seven-round burst.
Murdock grinned. He was shooting at shadows, and drawing attention to himself. Dumbass.
The tank clattered ahead at a walking pace. Murdock crawled forward so he'd have a chance at the tracks, but still room to get away if the brute pulled a locked-track ninety degree turn on him.
The tank was ten feet away when Murdock lifted up, held the quarter pound of explosive in his right hand, and ran for the churning tracks. His foot hit some brush and he stumbled, but kept his feet. The tracks kept grinding around. Where to put the bomb? He decided on the up side of the track, just before it started its downward trip to grip the ground.
He waited, walking along beside the beast. Now. He pushed in the timer, dropped the TNAZ on the inside of the rollers, and sprinted away. Behind him, he saw Ching running in the same direction.
"Sixteen tanks, seventeen tanks, eighteen tanks," Murdock counted trying to work off the seconds. At twenty-eight tanks, the sky lit up with a small sun and a roaring sound cascaded toward him, jolting him forward a step before a storm of hot air slapped him forward another step.
Ten seconds later the second bomb went off — on the other side of the tank, Murdock figured. The blast effect on Murdock was not so great, but he dove to the dirt anyway. Behind him twenty yards away, he saw the tank through the soft moonlight. It had stopped. The track on Murdock's side was completely off the rollers, and the rig had slewed around in half a turn as the other tread had kept grinding before it blew up.
"We just nailed ourselves a tank," Murdock said on the mike. "Where the hell is everyone?"
"Commander, we're about two hundred yards south of the grove of trees," Jaybird said. "That tank blast was north of us."
"You have eleven bodies?"
"Roger that."
"We're moving that way soon, so hold your fire."
The four SEALs lay where they had dropped when the tank blew. All waited for the turret to pop and a head to show.
"How the fuck long we gonna wait?" Quinley asked in a whisper into his lip mike.
"Long as it takes," Murdock whispered back. "He's still got that fifty up there that can chew us up."
Murdock squirmed in the dirt and weeds. He had his subgun up on three-round-burst setting, and a fragger in the other hand. Another minute. He'd give the tank commander another sixty damn seconds.
Before the time was up, Murdock heard the grating as the tank turret rattled, then lifted up. A moment later an Asian head lifted out. Three weapons slammed rounds into it and the man slid back into the tank, dead in a thrice.
Quinley was closest to the top. He jumped up the tank's tracks and dropped a cooked grenade down the hatch. The almost instantaneous explosion rattled the tank, but set off no rounds inside.
"Move out," Murdock said to the mike, and the four SEALs joined up south of the tank and headed for where they figured DeWitt would be with the rest of the platoon.
They found them five minutes later flaked out in a small patch of brush.
"Time to call in the chopper?" DeWitt asked.
"We have any more company around here? A chopper is gonna kick all kinds of bad guys out of the brush."
Lampedusa, their chief scout and the best set of ears in the platoon, lifted his fist and they all quieted.
"Company, trucks, five, maybe eight on that road over there about two hundred yards. I saw it before on a little recon."
"Maybe they'll just drive by," Murdock said. "Heading north or south?"
"Coming our way, Cap."
"We were close there. Now we have to wait and see what these newcomers are going to want."
"Us probably," Jaybird said.
They moved into a line of skirmishers fifty yards from the road. Each SEAL had an open field of fire to the road. It was more a track through the countryside than a highway. One truck wide, dirt surface, but showing a lot of use, Lam had told the officers.
Two minutes later the first beams of the headlights showed to the north, and swept down the roadway at a hazardous thirty miles an hour.
Murdock called up Holt, who had the SATCOM tuned to TAC One. Murdock took the handset.
"Cobra, this is SEALs North. Do you copy?"
"Roger that, SEALs. This is Cobra Alpha."
"We have some company up here we might need some help on. Convoy of six or eight trucks that look to have troops in them. Figure they came up to give us a good old-fashioned welcome."
"We're five minutes away. Your position?"
"About three hundred yards south of our target. Grove of trees, just behind us. We'll put a red flare on the trucks if they are still there. You coming?"
"On the way. Count the minutes."
Murdock watched the trucks roll into sight. The first two stopped directly across from them, the others to the north. At once twenty to twenty-five men jumped out of each truck and formed up next to the vehicles.