Red was gone fifteen minutes. When he came back he knelt beside Murdock and touched him on the shoulder. The platoon leader jumped like he'd been given a jolt with a cattle prod.
"Sorry, Skipper. The Chinese are digging in all right. I figure they have a two-hundred-yard front, and beyond that I can't tell. There could be troops all along that road. It's a natural fort for them."
"Hard to get across?"
"Fucking near impossible."
They both heard the choppers about the same time. They came from behind them and to the north.
"The hunting dogs are out," Murdock said. "Red, do you sometimes have the feeling that we're being driven like cattle into the right place that will turn into a killing field?"
"That's what they hope. Never happen."
They listened as the choppers came closer.
"Sounds like the same troop transporters we almost collided with before," Murdock said.
"They must know we dodged them back there," Jaybird said. "Now they're moving up the troops. Maybe we could get a shot or two at them just before they set down."
"Or just before they lift off after dropping off their cargo," Murdock said. "I've a hunch they don't want their precious choppers around where there could be a firefight."
"So where are they going to land?" Red asked.
The sound came closer, then seemed to be right on top of them. The SEALS sprawled in the field hoping the big birds didn't turn on their downward-directed landing lights.
The copters thundered over them, swept to the left, and a half mile away began to form up for a precision landing.
"Let's go get them," Murdock said. The SEALS took off at a fast trot. They saw the Chinese birds turn on their lights and drop down to the ground and the troops pour out of them. Murdock didn't want to count, but he figured at least twenty men per chopper.
The SEALS covered a quarter mile in record time, and went down behind rice paddy dikes three hundred yards away from the copters.
Murdock went to his Motorola. "Your long guns, anything we've got. Let's see how many of those choppers we can blast into little pieces. If anybody has any M-40 rounds, this is the spot to use them. Let's do it."
He leveled in with his heavy AK-47. He had twelve rounds and was determined to expend all of them. His first shot was slightly high. The rest of the troops opened up. He brought down his sights and nailed the closest chopper with a round through the canopy in front. He got four more shots into the bird before it tried to lift off.
It made it to thirty feet, then the rotors died and it fell like a rock and burst into flames.
Al Adams estimated the range and lofted an M-40 WP at the closest chopper. It landed ten feet short, but the forward surge of the WP streamers caught the grass and the chopper itself on fire and the troops scattered. A minute later the whole helicopter was a mass of flames, and machine gun rounds in the ship began exploding.
Dewitt yelled in delight as his AK-47 rounds punctured another chopper. It spun around as it tried to take off, then made it and lifted into the darkness.
The other birds at last had their landing lights turned off, making them harder targets. Two more were so wounded by the rifle and machine gun fire that they never got off the ground.
The troops on board had spread out, but didn't move forward. Murdock had counted on their attacking, but the platoon's two machine guns must have dissuaded their leader.
When the last choppers were airborne, Murdock hit his mike three times and the SEAL fire stopped.
"We move," Murdock said into the mike. "On me. We parallel the road and get away from all those Chinese troopers. Go, go, go."
They ran a hundred yards to the south parallel with the road. Again they took some rifle fire, but it was random. They were still hidden in the dark.
Murdock started down the road to his right and saw more than a dozen pairs of headlights coming toward them. Trucks, probably, with more ground troops.
He slowed the men to a walk and looked around. The mass of a hill reared to the left. It had some trees and brush that he could see in the soft moonlight.
"Up the hill," he said to Red, who swung that way, found a trail of sorts, and led out at a brisk pace.
More firing came from behind them. Murdock stopped to listen. He could hear and then see elements from the choppers moving toward them. He had no idea how many men. He trotted back to the front of the platoon and picked up the pace.
"No way they can follow us," Red said.
Murdock shook his head. "All they have to do is saturate the possible routes with men and they'll find us. What can we do to slow them down?"
"I've got a claymore," Jaybird said. "I think Doc still has one. We could use them if somebody gets on our trail in some kind of a narrow place."
"Good. Red, hit that gully up there to the left. We'll move up that and see if we have anybody on our ass end."
They hiked for another ten minutes. Now and then they heard troops behind them, but no one close. They were almost at the top of the ravine when they heard someone below them.
Murdock stopped his men and they listened.
"How many?" he asked Dewitt.
"I'd say twenty at least."
"Maybe thirty," Jaybird said.
"Use the claymores," Murdock said. "Go down about halfway in that narrow spot and set them in sequence with trip wires."
Jaybird and Doc ran back down the hill. They set the antipersonnel mines in the faint trail twenty yards apart, one farther up the hill than the other. They were aimed downhill. The trip wire would set off the mine and spew out over two hundred small ball-bearing-like projectiles in a cloud of death. They angled the mines for the best killing effect, set the trip wire on the first one, then on the second.
Jaybird and Doc hurried back up the trail. They could hear the Chinese coming up the slope behind them. They stopped fifty yards from the rest of the platoon to watch the trap.
"I can see some of them coming," Jaybird whispered. "No fucking scout out in front of them. Assholes. Must be twenty of them and all in range. How stupid can they get?"
A moment later a Chinese boot broke the trip wire and the first claymore went off with a roar. Screams of rage and agony echoed through the valley after the sound of the explosion died. Half of the men coming up the hill didn't stand up again.
Someone shouted in Chinese below and the survivors charged up the hill. One man was past the second trip wire when the second Chinese hit it and another belching roar showered the Chinese troops with instant death. The man beyond the death scene turned around and ran down the hill.
Jaybird and Doc grinned in the darkness and hurried up to the rest of the SEALS.
Murdock took their report and they trotted over the top of the hill. On the far side they found another hill, higher. They took the downslope at the fast march and started up the other side. A machine gun opened up far to their left. The five-to-nine-round bursts came as a surprise.
"Who the hell they firing at?" Fernandez asked.
"The night ghosts," Ross Lincoln said. "Might mean they got a lot of green troops out there tonight."
Murdock had been thinking the same thing. The Chinese hadn't had a war to fight since Korea, forty-five years ago. New troops, new fears.
"We keep going unless that chatter gun comes closer than a mile," Murdock said. They kept moving up the hill.
"We still heading southeast?" Al Adams asked. "Swear I can smell the ocean."
"You get the imagination award of the mission," Frazier said. "You're probably smelling your armpit."
They kept climbing. There was no path or trail now. The brush was sparse and the trees few, mostly pine, Murdock decided. They made it to the top, and Red Nicholson stood there looking down.