Murdock forgot and tried a stroke with his left arm and screeched in pain.
Holt was there. "Don't worry, L-T, we all gonna make it. The Two-IC has us in control. We're all in a bunch and moving offshore. Feels like the fucking tide is going out. We finally got some good luck on our side."
Murdock tried to sidestroke with one arm. It didn't work. At last he rolled on his back and did a flutter kick. He was surprised how well he floated. Then he remembered all of his combat gear was still in China or on the bottom of the Taiwan Strait.
Rounds started slapping into the sea around them. The Taiwan jets must have seen the ground fire. They came back with cannon roaring and two more rockets and the rifle fire ended abruptly.
Dewitt swam back and helped push them along. Soon all thirteen SEALS were within touching distance of each other.
"Hold it this way," Dewitt boomed into the sudden silence of the still-dark Chinese night. "We stay together. Holt told me he put out two sonar beacons. The sub might pick up the signal and help those Taiwan choppers find us. At any rate, we're out of fucking China."
A cheer went up.
Doc swam over and checked on Murdock's wound. The bandage had come off and he was bleeding again. Too much blood. Doc put on another bandage and kept it in place with two rubber bands.
"L-T, you've got to keep that arm quiet. I'll unbutton one of your shirt buttons and you stuff that hand inside your shirt. A kind of sling. Best we can do right now. You can't loose any more blood. You read me, sir?"
Murdock nodded. Doc looked at Holt, who bobbed his head.
They moved away from the coast slowly. The swimming was at the rate of the slowest man. Murdock was feeling a little better. Either the morphine was wearing off or dulling his pain. He didn't know which. He had five or six wounded. He had no communications, he was a quarter of a mile from China, which was still fighting mad. How the hell was anybody going to find them in the fucking Taiwan Strait? He asked Holt the question.
"They'll do it, sir. That's their job. We did ours. Now the pickup guys have to do theirs."
They drifted with the tide, swam a little, drifted again. Dewitt kept the men together. Doc went from one wounded man to the next. Dewitt came over to talk to Murdock.
"We're more than a half klick out in the strait now," he said. "Should be far enough away that Uncle wouldn't mind getting involved. Did that last message say the Navy was going to have some aircraft over this way just before sunrise?"
Murdock said that's what he remembered.
"Take a look to the east," Dewitt said.
Murdock looked and saw the first faint hint of a tinge of light.
Ten minutes later they heard choppers. Half the men cheered. Then they were silent to pinpoint where the birds were coming from. They could be Chinese. They came from off the coast. That was a good sign. Five minutes more and they saw a parachute flare blossom to the east and north.
"A flare," Holt screeched. "They must be looking for us."
"Yeah, but we're not sure just who they are," Dewitt said.
A single bird came closer. Another flare, then another one closer yet. The next flare drifted down slowly about fifty yards from them. Then they saw four more choppers swing into line and all five dropped flares as they came forward directly over the swimmers. They waved and shouted and waved again.
"Looks like they're the good guys or they'd be shooting by now," Jaybird said.
The jets snarled down toward the beach again hitting the Chinese with machine guns and rockets one last time.
The choppers were too high for the swimmers to make out any identifying marks. They slowed and came around and dropped another series of flares. For a quarter of a mile the ocean was like daylight.
"So they know we're here. How are they going to pick us up?" Murdock asked. Holt shook his head.
Then they heard another sound, the heavier, deeper, and more familiar whup, whup, whup of a big chopper.
"Sounds like a CH-46," Magic Brown said.
It came in slow, ten feet off the gentle swells of the strait. It made one pass over them, then made a wide circle and came back moving no more than five miles an hour.
The tail hatch opened and a rope ladder dropped down. The SEALS cheered again. They had made this pickup at sea dozens of times in practice and training. It was a rough pickup method, but sometimes the only one available. Like now.
The big chopper settled down to ten feet off the water and hovered. Jaybird went up the ladder first. It was tricky work, hard physically to control the swaying ladder. Two men grabbed it in the water to hold it fast, then one more SEAL went up, then another.
A head poked out the hatch door with a bullhorn. "We've got a sling coming down. Understand you have two wounded who can't climb."
Dewitt bellowed that the sailor was right. He moved toward the far side of the ship where another hatch opened and a sling dropped down. They towed Murdock over there and got the sling around his shoulders without hurting his left arm. On signal he was lifted up and away.
Frazier went up on the next drop of the sling, and then Ronson. His leg was bleeding badly again. Holt and Dewitt stroked over to the ladder and climbed it into the glorious interior of the big chopper.
Before Dewitt sat down he made sure that Doc was tending to his patients. Then he sat beside Murdock.
"We made it, Skipper. By God, we got out of fucking China."
Murdock couldn't say a word. All he could do was nod.
39
When the CH-46 landed on board the carrier a half hour later, Murdock refused a stretcher and walked with his men following the white shirt across the landing deck.
Two Navy corpsmen met them and ushered the four wounded to sick bay. Murdock made sure that Ronson, Frazier, and Fernandez were all being treated before he let the medics look at his arm. By that time it was dripping blood again.
The doctor shook his head as he cleaned out the wound.
"Slug went all the way through, missed most of the muscle tissue, but you won't be doing any push-ups for a while." The doctor was quiet for a moment. Then he looked at Murdock's buttocks and the backs of his legs. "Lieutenant, are those shrapnel wound scars?"
"Yes, sir."
"What I thought. I'm new here, haven't seen any from shrapnel before. It all come out yet?"
"Yes, Sir."
"You're one of the SEALS?"
"Yes, sir."
"Figures." They both laughed. When Murdock's arm was patched up, he checked on the other three. Fernandez was out of bed working on a tray full of food.
"They said I could have whatever I wanted," he said between mouthfuls.
Frazier's side wound looked worse, his doctor said. He'd be in sick bay for at least a week before he could be moved.
Horse Ronson sat up in bed and worked on a tray of food. His doctor told Murdock his concern.
"The bullet hit a bone, but didn't break it. Not even a hairline crack. It's going to be painful for at least a month after the bullet wound itself heals. Be sure you keep watch on him."
Murdock said he would.
Don Stroh tracked down Murdock and shook his hand.
"Next time, Don, don't cut it quite so fine. I figured that we had maybe twenty minutes left down there on China soil before those hordes would be all over us."
"I pulled every string I knew of, even some I didn't know about. I think the person-to-person with the two Presidents is what did it. Made old Lee Teng-hui so chagrined that we'd helped out his little island so much he just about had to come around. It was him or nobody."
Stroh brought out an envelope with satellite photos.
"You boys did one hell of a job. Take a look at your recent handiwork."