Vincent “Vinnie” Van Dyke set up his H & K NATO-round machine gun and covered the street itself. Anything that moved caught his attention. Lampedusa trained the laser sight on the Bull Pup rifle and sent two aerial bursts from the 20mm rounds over the troops moving up. Five or six of them turned and charged to the rear.
Paul Jefferson, Engineman Second Class, used the 5.56 barrel of his Bull Pup and began picking off the Libyans as they tried to move forward.
Ed DeWitt’s sub gun was outranged, so he had taken Fernandez’s sniper rifle, and now made every round count. Within three minutes of their first rounds, the SEALs had stalled the attack from the front.
“Keep up the pressure,” DeWitt said on the Motorola. “Don’t let them get the idea they can move an inch forward.”
Inside the building, Kat hesitated before strapping on the explosives. “Maybe we should take this one with us,” she said. “We’ve never had one of these and our nuke guys would go nuts over taking this one apart.”
Murdock decided at once. “We can’t take the risk. Too damn heavy to carry if we have to ditch the vehicle. Blow it up here. Let’s see if there’s a rear door to this place.”
There was: two doors that opened outward, large enough to let the APC squeeze through.
“Get everything on board,” Murdock said. “Kat, set up a blast for inside here with a five-minute timer. Give them something to think about.”
Two minutes later the rig was loaded except for the five SEALs out front.
“Ed, bring them home,” Murdock said on the personal radio. “Time to haul ass out of Dodge.”
Murdock cracked the back doors and looked through an inch-wide space. He scowled and eased the doors closed.
“I want all of the Bull Pups up here right now, and get out your twenty-millimeter. We’ve got a fucking tank staring down our drawers back here.”
Lampedusa, Ron Holt, Jack Mahanani, and George Canzoneri trotted up to the back door.
“The tank out there is at a forty-five-degree angle to us so we can see his treads. I want four rounds on the front of those treads to try to blast them off. The twenties are contact detonation, so belly down and as soon as I open the doors, blast that damn tank.”
The men loaded a round in the chambers of the 20mm barrels and flattened out in front of the door.
“Now,” Murdock barked, and pushed open the doors. Almost at once the four twenties fired, and then in ragged order they fired again and a third time. By then the tank had begun to turn, but before it had moved a foot, the front of the left track curled off and the big tank spun round in a circle facing away from the SEALs.
Murdock closed the door before the tank’s machine gun could be brought to bear on them.
“Everyone in the rig,” Murdock bellowed. “We’ll head out the front door and take our chances with the riflemen.”
Kat set the timer on the bomb for five minutes, and they pushed the scientist toward the front door. Then they all squeezed into the APC, barreled through the front door, and raced away, then took a hard right down the street. In seconds they were away from the riflemen, who had begun to move forward again.
They took some rifle fire on the armored rig, but the rounds bounced off.
“Where the fuck to?” Ostercamp called from the driver’s seat.
“No damn river here that we can jump into and swim right past them at the port,” Murdock said. He tried to remember the maps he had looked at. Then he had it. The coast wandered a little south to the east of Tripoli. If they headed due east they should be able to find the water, jump in, and call in the Pegasus well before daylight.
“East, Ostercamp,” Murdock said. “We want to head east and maybe a little north to find the wet.”
“Great, Skipper. Which way is east?”
“Lam, ride shotgun with Oster up there,” Murdock said.
“Black as the inside of a whore’s heart up here, Skipper,” Lam said a moment later. “Hey, got a clue. We take a hard right at the next road. Looks like it goes to the east. Some traffic, so that’s a good sign. None of them are tanks hunting us, which is a better sign.”
“Anybody wounded?” DeWitt asked. Nobody responded, so DeWitt relaxed a little.
“Bunch of lights up front a mile or so,” Ostercamp said. “My guess is it’s a roadblock.”
“Move up until we’re sure,” Murdock said. “Then we take it out with the twenties. Ed, work the top hatch with your Bull Pup. That scope should help you ID the roadblock if that’s what it is.”
The Bull Pup was the SEALs’ latest weapon, still under development for the Armed Forces by Alliant and not set to be issued to the military until 2005. The SEALs and Don Stroh had talked the company out of six of the weapons and the needed ammunition.
The top barrel of the weapon fires a 20mm round that can come in armor-piercing, ball, or with a proximity fuse for airbursts. The weapon has a laser beam that, when fixed on a target, sends back the range data, then fuses the round for the number of rotations needed to reach that target and explode in the air. The rounds also will detonate on contact. The weapon comes with a six-shot magazine. The 20mm rounds cost $30 each. The bottom barrel on the weapon is a standard 5.56mm kinetic round with a thirty-shot magazine.
DeWitt pushed back the top hatch and leveled in the weapon, which was lighter than the old M-16 Army rifle. He checked through the six-power scope and video camera, but couldn’t be sure what the lights were. A quarter of a mile later he had it. Two trucks parked across the road.
“We have a roadblock,” he shouted to the men below, then aimed with the laser and when he had a spot on one of the trucks, fired, then adjusted his sight and lasered the second truck and fired. They were three quarters of a mile away.
He saw the first hit over the truck. The round exploded twenty feet in the air, blasting shrapnel in all directions. He saw two men go down, and two more dead on the ground. The second round hit in the same general area and exploded in the air.
Then he concentrated on hitting the trucks. His first round slammed into the engine and it exploded, setting the truck on fire. The second truck was driving away from the first one. DeWitt’s third round jolted through the rear of the truck and exploded in the driver’s compartment, shredding the soldier and dumping the truck into a ditch well off the road.
Ed dropped down into the APC. “Looks like we have a clear path ahead through the roadblock.”
When they drove through the roadblock, Ostercamp had to make a small detour around bodies in the road and the still-burning truck. If any of the men manning the spot were still alive, they had fled in terror.
“Still heading east?” Murdock asked Ostercamp.
“Yes, sir, if my small pocket compass is working and not picking up too much metal. At least we’re getting out of the clumps of towns. These Libyan suburbs?”
“Must be. Keep us moving.”
Ten minutes later Ed dropped down from the open hatch. “I’ve been scouting ahead with the scope. Looks like we have some real trouble. Two tanks are rumbling along toward us. No way we can hurt them head-on with the twenty. Might be time to give up our horse and get back on our feet.”
“Anywhere we can pull off the road and let them go by without their seeing us?” Murdock asked.
DeWitt shook his head. “Not around here, Skipper. No trees, no brush, no ravines. We’re into flat almost desert country.”
“How far away?” Murdock asked.
“I’d say a mile and we’re closing at about sixty miles an hour. Thirty theirs and thirty of ours. That gives us about a minute until we slam into each other. What the hell are we going to do, Skipper?”
8
Murdock heard DeWitt’s warning and shouted at the driver. “Stop this thing and put it crossways in the road. Everybody out, take your gear.