“Should be sufficient,” Murdock said. The Colombian captain nodded his agreement.
“Senior Chief,” Murdock called. Dobler hurried over, showing only a hint of a limp.
“Senior Chief, we need to blow all of the vats like this one. As I remember, there are something like twenty of them. Check out our supply of explosives and get the job done. After that, we’ll be heading back for hot chow and showers.
“Aye, aye, sir,” Dobler said and moved away with more of a limp now that he wasn’t thinking about it. He called the men around him, and they went to their gear and gave him a total on the quarter-pound charges they had. They were short.
“A whole case of C-4 in the truck,” Jaybird said. Dobler told him to go get it.
For nearly thirty minutes the hills rang with the sound of explosions. The SEALs set them off one at a time until the last vat was punctured and twisted beyond all repair.
The trucks had pulled out an hour before with all of the workers. They were packed in tightly but didn’t mind. They were being freed of a kind of slavery that only the homeless and truly destitute know.
It was just 1000 when the destruct job was done, the dead men buried, and the SEALs and Captain Herrera pulled away from the former major cocaine processing plant.
“Somebody in Cali is going to be angry,” the captain said.
“I’d like to meet him face-to-face,” Murdock said. “He wouldn’t be angry long. He’d be dead.”
Herrera put on a crooked smile, and Murdock wasn’t sure what he believed about the cocaine traffic. He was following orders, but that might be the extent of his anti-cocaine feelings.
The truck was two miles from the burned-out cocaine lab when Murdock asked Ostercamp to stop so Holt could key in the SATCOM.
“It’s set up to receive, Cap,” Holt said. “How long you want to wait for a message?”
“We’ll cool it here for ten minutes and see if anything urgent is popping,” Murdock said.
It was just past five minutes when Murdock thought he saw something move in the brush a hundred yards down the little valley. He was about to say something about it when a shot snarled in the deep green and a round slammed into the overhead canvas covering on the back of the truck.
“Down!” Murdock bellowed. “Sniper moved to the left front about a hundred yards out. Long guns, do it.”
The sniper rifle responded first, but not before another round came smashing into one of the roof struts. Bill Bradford sent six rounds into the general area, then saw movement and changed targets and fired six more times.
Ronson got his H&K NATO round machine gun up and working and sprayed the same area with hot lead. The 5.56 weapons scattered shots into the same spot, but Murdock figured the sniper had moved on by that time. It would be impossible to find the man, let alone track him in the heavy brush.
“Cease fire,” Murdock boomed to get over the sound of the weapons. “Get us out of here fast, Ostercamp.”
The truck jolted forward on the narrow lane and soon passed the spot where the sniper had been. Another half mile down the trail, and the men relaxed a little.
“Anybody get hurt on that last go-round?” Murdock asked. He was thankful that no one had. He looked at his own arm. He had forgotten about his wound. Proved it wasn’t much. He grinned. This would be his thirty-seventh purple heart if he was receiving them.
He had four men with semiserious wounds already, and the mission was just getting moving. He hoped this wasn’t going to be one of those times when every man in the platoon came home and reported at once to Balboa Naval Hospital.
The rest of the ride was uneventful, and they came into Camp Bravo a little after 1400. Murdock and Dobler went to the hospital. They had their wounds checked, treated, and were released. They went up a floor to find Canzoneri.
When they came to his bed, he was sitting up talking to a pretty little nurse. He chattered some Spanish words at her and she giggled and shook her head and said them the correct way.
“Hey, slugger, looks like you’re feeling better.”
“Told them I was fine. Conchita here is teaching me some Spanish. So far I know perro, which is dog, and qué lastima. That means what a pity.”
“So, what she’s telling you is that it’s a real pity that you’re a dog,” Dobler said.
“Hey, that’s not it. So you guys were shot up, huh? You guys here professionally? You get nicked?”
“Just a scratch,” Murdock said. “I need to find that nurse that speaks English.” He found her and she looked at Canzoneri’s chart. She smiled.
“He can go back to his unit now, but he should come in after two days for us to change the bandage and look at the wound.”
“Good,” Canzoneri said. “Where are my pants?”
Back at the barracks, Holt had the SATCOM on receive. He handed Murdock a note.
“Stroh called a half hour ago. He says get you on the horn as soon as you get here. He says this is flap city, and he’s the fucking mayor, whatever that means. Should I get ready to transmit?”
“Probably. Maybe we should have some chow first.”
“He seemed insistent that you get back to him ASAP.”
Murdock snorted. “He’s always in a rush. Yeah, beam me out, Scotty.”
Stroh answered as soon as Murdock’s message went out.
“You’re back. Good. We’ve got a problem.”
“I have no problem except having a big supper, a hot shower, and about twelve hours of sleep. We just came in, Stroh.”
“Good, glad you made it. What I want to talk about is a serious situation. The American embassy in Bogotá has been invaded and captured by Colombian military forces. They used three tanks and a flamethrower. Your job is to go in and get the hostages out before anything else happens.”
“How? We’re a hundred and seventy miles from Bogotá. If you come in from the Pacific, it’s about two hundred and seventy miles. That’s an RT of five hundred and forty miles. We don’t even have a bird that can do that.”
“So, it’ll take some planning. From Cali up and back would be only three hundred and forty miles. You’re directed to talk to the captain and air boss here on the carrier. They have some ideas. We don’t have a hell of a lot of time. They took over the embassy this morning just before noon. The ambassador figured some trouble was coming, so they flew most of the personnel out. The ambassador is still there, and he says they have only twelve Americans left there. You get in touch with Captain Ingman here on the carrier. He’s the man you’ll have to coordinate things with. I’ve talked to him, but you’ll need to do the overhead planning.”
“Yes sir. We better go through Lieutenant Commander Emerling. He’s my contact. Can you phone him and get him up there and have him set up a time for me to call the captain?”
“Can do. Soonest. Talk later. Stroh, out.”
18
Murdock, Jaybird, DeWitt, Lam, and Dobler sat on bunks at the far end of the barracks, thinking through the problem.
“Makes more sense to go and come from here,” Jaybird said. “We’re only a hundred and seventy miles away, maybe a hundred and twenty of that over hostile territory. We can resupply from here. The chopper could come in here from the carrier with no sweat.”
They had agreed that a chopper rescue was the only reasonable way to get the remaining twelve Americans out of the embassy.
“Yeah, if they’re still there,” Dobler said. “Remember the embassy in Iran? They had our people out of the embassy almost at once and scattered all over the city.”
“From what we know so far, the Americans are still at the embassy,” DeWitt said.