An hour out, Murdock called a halt. The HW men leaned their M-88's butt-down in the sand and wiped sweat.
"How the hell hot is it?" Jaybird asked.
"My thermo shows a hundred and eleven," somebody called out.
"Got to be hotter than that," Jaybird answered.
Murdock called Jaybird over. "See that nubbin up there on the skyline?"
"Lion Head Mountain, about twenty-one hundred feet high?"
"That's the one. Here's where we split up. We're about four miles from the top. You take a compass bearing to a point a mile due north of it. I'll go due south. Should take you about an hour to get in position. We don't have our radios, so we'll have to do it by timing.
"We start to close the pincer at exactly 1800. It's now a little after 1630. Gives us an hour to move to our initial point and then a half hour to get to the top."
"No live firing," Jaybird said.
"Absolutely. We don't want to blow away half our platoon on an exercise. We'll take ten minutes here, then move out."
An hour later, Murdock brought his First Squad into position. The sun was down at last, but the heat still shimmered over the sand and desert rocks. They had kicked out two rattlesnakes and a desert jackrabbit on their way.
Now, Murdock checked the top of the low peak. He'd been there before. Half the SEALS in the platoon had done this one. They had another ten minutes to wait for the timing. At 1800 they packed up and started for the top. It was a series of small rises, then a last slant up a slope with loose rocks. It was more of a walk than a mountain climb.
When they got within fifty yards of the top, somebody bellowed at them.
"Halt! Who goes there?"
"Your mutha!" Magic Brown bellowed back.
"You're a friend, come on up."
Jaybird met them from behind a pair of boulders near the top.
"Make a fine defensive area," he said.
"Exactly what it's going to be," Murdock said. "Spread your men out in a perimeter on that side. I'll take this side. When everyone's in place, throw a WP grenade as far down your side of the mountain as you can. Then put up defensive fire on the WP."
They did.
Murdock threw a WP on his side, then moved from one of his men to the next. The M-88's barked with their heavy voices. The MP-5's chattered off three-round bursts. Doc got off his five rounds of double-aught buck from his beloved shotgun.
After four minutes Murdock called a cease-fire and the weapons trailed off firing into silence.
Jaybird dropped down beside Murdock where he lay in the sand looking down the mountain at the last wisps of smoke from the WP grenade.
"Make a fire check on both those WPS," Murdock said. "Then we'll assemble below and head for the bus. Hope that we have plenty of the MRES left." Before they left the top of the hill, Murdock called over Doc for another shot of his joy juice. Murdock had felt the damn shrapnel every step up the mountain, but he wasn't about to let anyone know it.
It was cool and nearly dark two hours later when they arrived back at the bus. Jaybird passed out a different kind of MRES to the men, and then talked to Murdock. "This a no-sleep operation?"
"Started out to be. How are your men holding up?"
"Tired. No urgency to push them, like running for their lives. But they'll keep going."
"Good. Half hour to eat, then we get moving again. Oh, get some boy scout to build a fire so we can make some coffee. Go damn good about now."
It was forty-five minutes later before the troops left the bus, just after 2100. It was fully dark by this time. The HW men now carried their more standard HK M-89 sniper rifles with the 7.62mm NATO round. It cut the weight by ten pounds. The other men had either MP-5's or M-4A1's, the CAR in.223-caliber with the M-203 grenade launcher under the barrel.
Six of the men packed the CARS. Two men carried sacks of 40mm grenades. Each man in the platoon would be firing the grenades.
"Let's say we're holed up in Libya," Murdock said, "a desert country we're not on friendly terms with. We've accomplished our mission and now all we have to do is get out. We can't risk world opinion with a chopper retrieve, which could prompt some air battles. So we have to walk out. We hide by day and move at night. The coast and our contact with a sub is eighty miles away across the desert. How long does it take us to walk to the coast?"
"Dark for about eleven hours," Red Nicholson said. "At four miles an hour through that damn desert sand, we can do forty miles a night. I bid two days in spades."
"Sounds good," Murdock said. "I'd allow another night's travel just in case we ran into some minor skirmishes with Libyan forces hunting us."
"You mean we have forty more miles to go tonight?" a voice piped up.
"Anybody got blisters?" Doc shouted.
Nobody had. Most of them had calluses an inch thick on their feet.
"No, we won't go forty miles tonight," Murdock said. "But we will take another hike and blow up some 40mm grenades. Let's move out."
They hiked to the canal and along it for two miles, then came back and stopped outside the old Kill House made of old rubber tires filled with sand.
They set up two hundred yards away and began firing. The first rounds hit short. The men with the CARS lined up and fired one after the other to keep track of hits. Murdock fired a flare high over the old Kill House tire rooms, and the hits began to come as long as the flare lasted.
When each man had fired his three rounds of the 40mm grenades, Murdock headed the men back to the bus. Once there, he grouped them around him.
"I had big plans for the rest of the night, but I think we've done enough for one day and a half. Flake out where you want to. No blankets, no sleeping bags. The bus seats might work out best. Somebody raid Jaybird's cold chest and see if we ate up all those chocolate bars."
They hadn't. The SEALS took care of the rest of them, and Murdock looked around for a place to sleep. Doc moved over and watched him. "Moving a little slow there, L-T."
"True."
"One more shot of juice?"
"No. Had enough. Hell, I'm a SEAL. See you in the morning."
They were all awake when the sun came up a little after six. They had another MRE and made coffee and chocolate, and even ate the entree. Then Murdock surprised them.
"Load up and let's get out of here. We've done what I wanted to do. Now we're heading back to Coronado."
"Yeah, and a shower!" somebody called.
"Why now? You ain't had one in two months," someone answered him.
It went that way for the first half hour. Then most of the SEALS went to sleep for the last two hours of the ride back to Coronado.
21
Murdock luxuriated in his clean, dry cammies and tilted the cold can of Coke. The sub had picked them up slightly after 0400 hours, and an hour later they were on board the supercarrier Intrepid steaming south from the Foochow area toward the Chinese port city of Amoy.
He'd been first on board with Greg Johnson's body, and had seen that it was properly taken care of. His next of kin would be notified with the visitation by two officers. Murdock would write a letter to his people with a believable lie about how Johnson had died in a tragic training accident at sea. His coffin would be closed.
Murdock had seen that his men were given dry uniforms and fed, then had Jaybird make sure their new-issue weapons were cleaned and oiled and ready to go. By 0700 hours most of the SEALS had sacked out for much-needed rest.
Murdock had taken a sleep period as well. He'd set his mental alarm clock to wake him up after six hours, and had come to promptly at 1300 refreshed. He'd had a can of orange juice, then gone to find Jaybird and Magic Brown.
Both had been up. He'd taken them back to his quarters, and now they sat down and worked over the rough plans they had made for the second phase of their attack on the Chinese mainland the day before.