“Ronson, hit the bottom of the barrel with two of your NATO rounds.”
It only took one. There was an instantaneous explosion as the vaporized ether gushed into a ten-foot-wide fireball and splattered the flaming liquid across the length of the lab building. The SEALs moved back from the sudden heat.
After that, it was a matter of logistics. The SEALs rolled barrels of ethyl ether down the slight grade to seven of the other buildings. When they were sure all of the workers had been moved away, the barrels were punctured and set on fire by rifle rounds. Within ten minutes, the landscape for half a mile around was lit up like noontime by the fires.
They had used WP grenades to set on fire the six buildings above the storage area. Now the last building to be fired was the one with the twelve large garbage cans filled with pure cocaine.
“Will that stuff burn?” Jefferson asked.
“It’ll melt,” Bradford said. “Is that freebasing?”
Nobody knew. There were four barrels of ether left. They rolled them around the cocaine, took off the plastic covers of the garbage cans, and moved back. They punctured all four barrels and then one caught fire and another one exploded. They moved back another fifty feet.
The fire was intense.
“So we wait for dawn and see how we did,” Murdock said. He had the Colombian soldiers guard the workers and went to question the three prisoners they had captured. Captain Herrera handled the interrogation.
They knew little. Two said they had been hired as guards just a week ago and this was the first problem. The boss was here, but they didn’t know if he had stayed or run away. They would look at the dead men in the morning and see if the big boss was one of them.
Murdock put two men on guard and let the rest of the SEALs get some sleep.
Mahanani had been shadowing him ever since he took the hit. He waved the big Tahitian/Hawaiian off. “You don’t need to baby-sit me anymore, Mahanani. I’ll live. Get some shut-eye.”
Murdock took two more pain pills the corpsman gave him, then stretched out on a grassy place, and slept before he knew it.
He came awake suddenly and heard rifle shots. It was dawn and nearly full light. He grabbed his Motorola he had taken off and hit the mike. “Who the hell is shooting?”
“Yeah, Cap. Lampedusa. Two big, ugly birds were starting to have breakfast on one of the dead Colombians. Figured a couple of shots would scare them off.”
“Yeah. Good. Want to take a look at the coke?”
They walked up the rise to the former storage area. Every building they passed had burned to the ground, including the wooden floor. At the storage area they found the same. The plastic garbage cans had melted and let the white powder spread out on the ground.
“Looks like 90 percent of the cocaine is still here,” Lam said. “Damn stuff is hard to burn in this quantity.”
“Would it melt in water?” Murdock asked. “Seems to me I remember guys trying to melt down stash in the toilet when they were raided.”
“Worth a try.”
Murdock took his canteen out of the pouch and grabbed a handful of the cocaine powder and poured water on it. It slowly melted.
“Yes,” Lam said. “Now we need the local fire truck and a high-pressure hose.”
Murdock looked at the small stream that ran through the complex. He grinned. “Lam, see how many shovels you can find. There must be some around here somewhere, unless we burned them all up.”
Lam looked at him strangely. “Shovels?
“Yes, shovels, go.”
Murdock walked upstream and decided it would work. He hit the mike. “Men, I need the platoon up here above the cocaine stash. If anybody finds a shovel or pick, bring it along.”
Lam found five shovels and two picks. He had it figured out before he made it back to where Murdock stood by the small stream.
“It’s not ecologically correct to alter the course of a natural streambed,” Lam said.
“No problem,” Murdock said. “We’ll use it and then lose it.”
17
Murdock laid out the route of the small ditch and all of them with tools started digging. It went from an upstream point across twenty feet and down about fifty feet to the white mound of cocaine.
“We melt the damn stuff,” Quinley said. “Damn, I wonder how much that would be worth on the street in New York?”
Jefferson lifted his brows. “I’d say between forty and fifty million bucks. Lots of money.”
“Damn, really?” Quinley said. “Too bad we can’t cash in on that some way.”
“You do every time you cash your paycheck,” Murdock said. “Dig.”
He put three men at the cocaine, pushing it to the near side with boards until it was in a small depression. The mound of white powder looked much larger out of the garbage cans than it had inside them.
They dug the ditch a foot deep and rapidly moved it down the hill, angled for the white powder. Before it was done, Murdock had three men lugging rocks from the area to build a small dam across the four-foot-wide stream. Once the rocks were in place, he had them pile dirt in front of them to seal off the damn.
“Ready with the ditch,” DeWitt called. Lam dug out the foot-wide section to open it up to the stream, and the water flowed rapidly downhill toward the cocaine. Two men filled in the last of the dam, and more water surged into the canal.
Two SEALs poked the mound of cocaine a little at a time into the water. It swirled and at last overflowed the small depression. When the white powder hit the water, it dissolved at once. The coke-loaded water ran under the burned-out floor and down the side of the hill.
It took them two hours to melt down the mountain of cocaine they had. When the last of it fell into the water, the SEALs let out a cheer, and Murdock shoveled dirt into the canal to shut off the water supply.
Murdock watched the water drain out and cheered with the rest of them.
“Treats are on me, men. I’m a big spender. MREs for everyone.”
They hooted him down, but most of them flaked out and had a meal ready to eat.
Captain Herrera came up to Murdock.
“The workers. What about them?”
“Put all of them you can on those two trucks and the one car I saw and drive them into Cali or let them off along the way if they want that. Otherwise, it’s a long walk.”
“The three prisoners?”
“Turn them loose and let them walk back.”
“They looked at the dead men this morning and said the lab boss and his assistant were not there. They must have run away at the first sound of gunfire.”
“Figures,” Murdock said.
“We need to take a walk,” Captain Herrera said.
They went to the first lab building and viewed the destruction.
“One problem here,” the captain said. “Somebody else could come in and use the vats. They are made of metal and some kind of coating to withstand all the chemicals, and were not hurt a bit by the fire.”
“Looks like we’ll have to use our explosives and blow them up,” Murdock said. They went back to the combat vests, and Murdock took a quarter pound of TNAZ and a detonator/timer and they moved back to the first lab. Murdock placed the bomb under the lip of the vat halfway down so it would ruin the structure even if it didn’t shatter it completely.
He set the timer for five minutes, and the two men walked away.
The blast came right on time and jolted most of the SEALs who didn’t know what had happened.
“Relax, SEALs,” Murdock boomed in his parade ground voice. “Just a little experiment.”
Half the SEALs looked at the results. The ten-foot-square vat had a two-foot hole blown in it, and the near side crumpled until it touched the far side.