Slowly, Riley gathered in the members of the team as he swam. After meeting up with the third jumper he saw the blue chem light come on ahead. It was then that he came across Lalli treading water in the middle of a half-submerged parachute. With the other three team members, Riley pulled Lalli free of his chute and finished sinking it. As Lalli treaded water next to Riley, he told him of his self-inflicted wound and loss of a fin.
"Can you make it to shore?" Riley asked.
"It really doesn't hurt. I'm not sure how much it's bleeding or how bad it is. I can use the leg. The only problem right now is that my suit is filling with water and with only one fin I can't swim as fast as the rest of you."
"Drop your weight belt and use your ruck for buoyancy if you need to. Don't worry, we aren't gonna leave you. We got plenty of time." Riley hissed at Comsky to come over.
Riley told Comsky what had happened. "You stay with Lalli the whole way in. As soon as we get to the changing area, check him out."
"Right, Top." Comsky hooked himself to Lalli with his buddy line and peered at him in the dark.
"You hurt, Comsky fix," he grunted. Just the hulking presence of Comsky in the water next to him made Lalli feel better.
Riley picked up only two more jumpers; the rest of the team headed toward the captain on their own. When he arrived at Mitchell's position, he found the entire team accounted for. That in itself was a major hurdle crossed, Riley knew: infiltrated in the right place with all people accounted for.
With some difficulty, they organized themselves into their team formation for swimming. Lining up in pairs they started finning, Riley and Hoffman, the second-strongest swimmer after the team sergeant, in the lead. They finned slowly, on their backs, arms tight to their sides, not allowing the tips of their fins to break the surface. The weight belts kept their bodies submerged except for their camouflaged faces, which looked up into the night sky. Waterproof rucksacks bobbed in the water behind each swimmer. From the air the formation appeared to be a long, swimming centipede, edging its way toward shore.
After only five minutes of finning, they felt the lake bottom, quickly discovering that the shore was not solid but swampy. Unhooking their buddy lines and taking off their fins, Team 3 stood up and trudged through the swamp for two hundred meters until they hit a patch of firm ground. The buddy teams formed a circular perimeter, and as one man took off his dry suit, the other readied his weapon and provided security.
Each man's dry suit, weight belt, buddy and rucksack lines, dive knife and fins all came off and were stuffed into a sack. Captain Mitchell had decided that they would not cache this equipment, but carry it with them. The extra twenty pounds were a burden, but the captain didn't want to take the chance of a cache site being discovered. Also, the dry suits could become part of one of the variations of their escape and evasion plan if that became necessary.
Comsky peered at Lalli's leg in the dark. Using his fingers he probed the gash. Lalli's sharp intake of breath alerted him that he had found the edges. From his probing, Comsky thought it wasn't too bad. The biggest danger with the wound would be infection.
"Does it hurt?" Comsky solicited kindly, as he pressed the edges of the slash together.
"Yes."
"It ought to. It's going to hurt even more in about two seconds, as I take this armed suture and stick it here, and push it through to here."
Lalli gritted his teeth with the pain. Comsky could be downright nasty and ghoulish when he worked on a patient. Actually, his apparent lack of bedside manner was calculated; it served the purpose of getting the patient so mad at him that they tended to forget their own troubles for a little while — at least that was Comsky's theory.
Finished, Comsky reported to the captain and Riley. "Ape Man fix. No more bleed." Turning serious he added, "The wound itself isn't too bad. It'll start hurting him but he can walk on it if he ain't a wimp. The suture will pull out on the walk and he'll start bleeding again. I'll have to redo it at the base camp. I'm not going to give him any painkiller, considering the walk we have to make. Actually what worries me right now is that he's wet. As long as we keep moving he'll be all right, but if we stop too long he might start getting hypothermic."
Riley considered this. They hadn't brought any change of clothes with them. It wasn't that cold out. In the mid-fifties. But the combination of being wet and wounded could be dangerous. Riley consulted with Mitchell and they walked over to see Lalli.
Mitchell knelt down next to the wounded soldier. "Hey, wild man. How you doing?"
"All right, sir. Comsky did a good job. I think he enjoyed himself."
Riley and Mitchell smiled. Comsky and Devito divided the medical chores between them. Devito considered himself the internal medicine man because he preferred handing out pills to team members when they were sick. Comsky liked the more dramatic injuries. If a detachment member wasn't bleeding, he wasn't hurt, according to the Ape.
Mitchell decided to cut their rest halts down to only five minutes instead of the normal ten on the hour. That would give Lalli less of a chance to cool down. Carrying a ruck through the woods would keep all of them warm. The captain told Comsky to monitor the wounded man and inform him immediately if there were any problems.
With dry suits tied off on top of their rucks, weapons at the ready, and half the men wearing night-vision goggles, the team struck out on a 195-degree azimuth south-southwest. They had more than four kilometers to go before they reached the pipeline. Then they would cross under it, turn south, slide along the pipeline a few hundred meters, and move to their objective rally point.
As far as Meng could tell, everything was proceeding smoothly. There had been no more messages from the FOB, so apparently the commander there was mollified about the earlier communication problem. Meng allowed himself to relax slightly. The next time they should hear anything would be the FOB forwarding the team's ANGLER report.
In the last five minutes, Meng had reprogrammed the computer to alert him whenever a real message from the FOB went to his office terminal. It would sound a tone on the computer in his office when he was in there. For the master console here, all Meng had to do was type in a code word at the start of his shift and the message would be forwarded here; he would be alerted by a special code word appearing on the terminal screen, and he could then access the message. That would hopefully prevent him from being slow in answering any future messages. He didn't want to have any more trouble with the FOB over communications.
He glanced up as he heard General Olson talking to his operations officer about something that concerned Meng also. "Is the ship for the refuel moving?"
Colonel Moore nodded. "Yes, sir."
The general's next words demonstrated that he still wasn't getting into the play of the problem.
"I mean is it really moving? I know you deployed those Blackhawk helicopters up to Misawa, but are we really going to have the navy move one of their guided missile frigates just for this exercise?"
General Sanders fielded that question. "Yes, we are. This is a test of command and control. The Rathburne is not a unit that normally falls under USSOCOM authority. Actually getting the ship to move to the point where it would do the mission is a test of how well the tasking authority of this headquarters works. You have authorization from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to task any element of the armed services to support this operation. The problem is that you also have to keep this whole operation secure."