“Kat, set your timer on a bomb for three minutes and let’s all haul ass. Move, move, move. We’ve got about forty-five seconds left. Go to the left of the road. Move.”
Ostercamp stopped, then pulled the APC crossways in the narrow road. The back hatch on the APC burst open and bodies flew out of it in all directions. Kat put a timer/detonator in three charges of TNAZ and set the timer for three minutes. Then she jumped out of the rig, charged across the road to the left, and kept running. Most of the SEALs were fifty yards ahead of her.
Jaybird had slowed, and waved as she came up. They sprinted together the hundred yards to where the SEALs had all gone to ground behind whatever concealment they could find.
Behind them on the road, the two tanks lumbered forward in the darkness. The lead tank came within thirty yards of the APC and slowed, then stopped. The top hatch opened and a man leaned out, staring ahead.
Slowly the tank crept forward until it nudged the Russian-built APC.
Three minutes on the timer elapsed. The TNAZ blew with a resounding crack like an artillery shell going off. The APC shattered into scrap metal flying in all directions. The lead tank jolted backward from the blast, then tipped to one side until it rolled over.
“Let’s move, people,” Murdock said into his Motorola. The SEALs stood and jogged away from the blast at a right angle, putting all the distance they could between them and the pools of fuel burning in the roadway where the APC used to be.
A mile from the blast, Murdock called a halt and looked at his compass. “East is to the right,” he said. “Lam, out in front fifty, keep us to the east, and we should find the wet.”
“How far?” somebody asked.
“From five to fifty miles,” Murdock said. “Your guess is as good as mine. We’ll never get there just talking about it.”
They moved out in their usual diamond formation, with Lam in front by fifty yards, then Murdock and his Alpha Squad, with DeWitt and Bravo right behind them. Ron Holt, with the SATCOM radio, walked behind Murdock. The SEALs maintained a five-yard distance between each other in the best combat tradition. A lucky grenade, mortar round, or burst of enemy fire would get only one or maybe two men. If they were bunched up, shoulder to armpit, a lucky round could wipe out a whole squad.
They were in the country now, with few buildings. It was the coastal plain, and semiarid, but here and there they came to cultivated fields. Murdock could not figure out what they were growing. It looked like some kind of grain, but he wasn’t sure. They swung wide past a village that was dark and quiet. Only two dogs greeted them as they hurried by.
They had lost the blacktopped road, and now they found few others. They were mostly dirt and gravel tracks that had no traffic this time of night. For more than two hours of hiking they saw only one motor vehicle, an old farm truck of questionable vintage parked beside a weather-worn farmhouse.
Murdock stopped the men. “Lam, you hear anything?” he asked on the radio.
“Yeah, for the past five minutes. We’re moving right toward the sounds. I’d say about four heavy trucks on a road ahead somewhere.”
“Military?”
“My guess. Who else would be out this time of night with four heavy trucks in the country?”
“We’re still heading east and a little north. Any sign of the coast?”
“Nada.”
“Figures. Let’s move up until we can see what those trucks are hauling.”
“Hey, Skipper, the trucks stopped. Dead ahead, maybe two miles.”
“Exploding that bomb was a signpost pointing directly at us, but it had to be done,” Murdock said. “We live with it.”
“Want me to move out and see what those trucks are?” Lam asked.
“Yeah, Lam. Go. Double-time it and let’s see what this is all about. We’ll come along at the usual pace.”
“Roger that, Skipper.”
Kat moved up beside Murdock. “At least this is easier than last time.”
“So far. We’re not out of this one yet. Then what about finding those other missiles? Say China grabbed them or bought them. They sold this one to Libya. Maybe they sold another one to Iraq and one to Iran and one to Afghanistan. Are we going to have to chase down all of them?”
“Never thought of it that way,” Kat said. “I figured that if China was the buyer from some lowlife in Ukraine, they would keep most of the warheads for themselves. They could chop out the nukes and dump the missiles in the Mediterranean and make it a lot easier to get the bombs back home. Fly them even.”
“Now you’re getting me worried,” Murdock said. “Thanks a lot. So we either have to take down that Chinese freighter or find out who the Chinese sold the other missiles to.”
“We’ll have some help on that one.” She took a deep breath, and Murdock looked over at her. “At least I haven’t had to kill anybody on this mission.”
“Not yet,” Murdock said. “You’re not quite recovered from that walk in Iran, are you?”
She looked at him and shook her head. “No, I don’t think I will ever forget it, forget how I felt right afterwards.”
“You did what you had to do, what we had trained you to do, and it worked. Saving my life was a bonus — for me.”
She flashed him a smile. “That was what helped me get through the first month or so.”
Murdock’s radio earpiece came on with a whisper.
“Skip, I’m here and I don’t believe it. They are Army trucks and six or eight soldiers. They seem to be in charge of more than a hundred civilians. All have some kind of a firearm, an old rifle, a pistol, a carbine. Looks like a home guard of some kind. They have spread out in a line of skirmishers maybe a half mile wide.”
“So, we go around them,” Murdock said.
“Not that easy, Skip. There’s a bluff on one side here and on the other side a good-sized village. The valley we’re in now funnels in here. Nowhere to go around.”
“Are they moving forward or in place?”
“They seem to be just sitting here, waiting. A blocking force. Do we have to shoot up a bunch of civilians? I mean, Skip, these are old men and boys, and I’m sure I’ve seen a dozen or so women in the group, all with guns.”
“Hold there and we’ll be up to you soon and figure it out. Any trees around there?”
“Yeah, some on the bluff and around the town. Not much in between.”
“Roger. We’re moving.”
Kat shivered. “Civilians up there? Murdock, I don’t like the sound of this. Are we going to have to shoot our way through them? Old men and boys and women?”
“Not if there’s another way. Come on, Kat. Stay hard for me here. We’re going to need you.”
Five minutes later Murdock and DeWitt crawled the last fifty feet on hands and knees to a small rise. Ahead of them, less than half a mile, they could see three Army trucks and a line of people. Both officers used binoculars.
“Civilians, all right,” DeWitt said. “In a good blocking position.”
Lam lay in the sand beside them. “Since we talked, another truck came, a civilian one, and dumped out twenty more old men and boys with weapons, then headed back to the village.”
“The soldiers, are they spread out to command the troops?” DeWitt asked.
“That’s what it looked like.”
“Diversion,” Murdock said. He turned his binoculars, and then used night-vision goggles and checked the bluff to the left.
“Yeah. We’ll have three of our Bull Pups put airbursts over those trees on the end of the bluff. Four rounds per gun and keep the muzzle flashes hidden so the people out front won’t know where the rounds came from. That could pull a bunch of the civilians and soldiers out of the line and moving that way to reinforce.”