At least eight more hours of daylight. What else could go wrong?
"Murdock. Murdock. Wake up, L-T."
Murdock came out of his sleep rubbing his eyes, almost pushing the camo cloth away, then he remembered. "Yes, Kat?"
"Yes. We've got a plane. Bigger one, at least two propellers up high. Seems to be cruising around waiting for some instructions. I've seen it three times now. Must be up four or five thousand feet. Could be more. Not going fast, so it isn't a jet. Sounds like a prop plane."
"I saw it," Les Quinley said. "Must have been the last pass. Kat's right, it's up high, just cruising. My guess is paratroopers. Not more than, maybe, fifteen in a crate like that."
"Figures," Murdock said. "They could fly a plane up here from Chah Bahar. If they have paratroopers there, they could dump them out of anything that flew and had a door to open."
"Sure, but they still need a pinpoint location to drop them," DeWitt chimed in. "That they don't have because the chopper and the spotter plane haven't given them one yet. We're still in the ball game."
"Yeah, but when do we get to bat?" It was Ken Ching.
"We had our first inning ups," Murdock said. "Back there on that hill last night, and we hit a home run. Now we wait for our next shot at batting. Until then it's a waiting game. Not a damn thing we can do until it gets dark."
"Seven more fucking hours!" somebody said.
Murdock checked his watch. 1208. "Who's next on watch?"
"I'll do it," Al Adams said. "Can't sleep on this damn gravel mattress anyway."
"So, the rest of you, get some sleep. It's going to be one hell of a long night once we get in motion."
"Murdock." It was Kat across the way. He turned away from his lip mike. "Yes, Kat."
"I keep thinking about that damn movie."
"That was another time, another war. Hell, we had over four hundred thousand dead in World War Two. That's the war that movie was about, the Expendables. Couple of dozen more was nothing back then."
"Except for that couple of dozen."
"True." There was a long silent time.
"So we're seventeen," Murdock said. "We have more accidental deaths than that every year in the services. One year the Navy lost almost three hundred men and women dead in auto crashes while off duty."
"Yeah, but you're on duty," Kat said. "I've been thinking about Magic. There is no way he can last three or four days. Not a chance he can walk another, what, forty miles, or more. Hell, Murdock, maybe we are expendable."
"No chance. Shut up that kind of talk. We're all getting out of here, every one of us. Magic included. Now, Lieutenant Kat, I fully expect you to get to sleep. You'll need the rest once we start moving with the darkness."
"Yes, Daddy," she said. He could imagine that sneaky grin of hers.
He snorted and closed his eyes. He figured he'd just rest them a minute.
When he woke up, it was 1640. He let the camo part briefly and looked around. He couldn't see anybody. Good. He positioned the lip mike. "Who is on watch?"
"Washington," the answer came back.
"Anything moving?"
"No, sir. No planes or choppers, nothing except one hyper mouse of some kind and a giant tarantula. Each thinks he's going to eat the other one."
Murdock eased back his camo cloth and sat up, resting his back against the sculptured dirt. He took a much folded topographical map of the area from inside his shirt and checked it. He had plotted in the exact location of the plant previously, using the mugger. Now he estimated the distance they had moved south. Was it six or eight miles?
He wanted to know. He took out the mugger. It was the size of a cellular phone and had been in his webbing. He pulled out a small antenna they had adapted for land use, turned on the set, and let it search for the closest four Global Positioning Satellites in high orbit overhead.
Within a few seconds they were locked on and reported his exact location within a plus or minus ten feet. He read the alphanumerical figures on the small screen. They were longitude and latitude. He checked the map again, made a few wavy lines from the borders, and nailed down the position. They were a little over ten miles from the plant. That left forty miles.
Magic, Magic, Magic. He put the mugger away and tried to come up with something that would work. That one small plane, with ten to twenty paratroopers, could blow up into ten or twelve large transports with a hundred paratroops in each one. They could bring in truckloads of infantry when the SEALs got closer to the coast. Damnit, Iran could seal off the coast from them with five thousand troops if they really wanted to.
From everything he had seen so far, somebody wanted to catch them so bad that he would use every available man and machine that Iran had at its military command.
The watch changed. Murdock was still thinking about what to do when the sun slid behind the mountain to the west and dusk fell.
"Up and at 'em," Murdock said in the mike. "Time to haul ourselves out of here and make some time down the road."
Doc was the first one to Murdock, even before he had his cammo sheet folded and packed.
"Better come and talk to Magic, L-T. He's not good. We're gonna have to do something to keep him with us."
28
"Magic? How bad is he? What do you mean do something to keep him with us?"
"Not fatal, no, he's in good spirits. His damn leg is hurting like crazy. I've overdosed him on morphine as it is. What I think we better do is trash his pistol and K-bar, all of his equipment. Dig a hole for it. He can't carry anything but himself. Somebody else has the fifty and the ammo."
All around them men came out of their holes, dusted off the cammo cloth, and folded it up. Murdock knelt down beside Magic, who sat on the ground.
"Hey, Magic. Shuck out of that combat vest. You don't need to carry that anymore. We'll leave it here for the stupid Iranians. Put it in your hole and have the guys kick it full of dirt from the sides. Nobody will find it for a hundred years. How are you feeling?"
"Hurts like hell, L-T. Got myself fucked up good this time. Holding up the march. Fuck it!"
"No sweat. We're going to get out of here. Dark now, and they can't see us, so we move on down the trail. Another good night of hiking, and we'll be close to the water."
"Try my damnedest, L-T."
Murdock slapped him on the shoulder gently, and went back to his hole. He had his gear on, and his weapon in hand in a minute, and checked around. Nobody could tell that they had been there. Kat stood waiting for him. "Magic?"
"Not good. We'll be moving at his pace."
Murdock sent Lam out front, then brought up Magic and Ronson in line right behind Kat. Magic had his arm across Ronson's shoulder. Just moving fifty feet was work for Magic. They hiked back down to the small valley, and used it for half a mile before they had to climb another of the never-ending hills.
Murdock figured they were making less than two miles an hour now. Magic was dragging one foot as he moved forward.
Just past 2040, Lam came back and called to Murdock.
"Got some company up front. Don't know where they came from, but they're on a damned picnic. Three big fires, and what must be about twenty small cooking fires. You better take a look."
The moon had come out from behind some clouds, and the outline of a valley fully a quarter of a mile wide showed in the dim light. In the center of it were the fires. Voices floated up from half a mile away. Murdock figured the valley was a mile long. A huge open space in this maze of ridges, canyons, gullies, and mountains.