“Again?”
“Again, unless you have a better idea.”
Lam looked at them again. “If we’re going around them, we better move. Looks like one of the teams is getting ready to march out. Must be a whole fucking battalion of them.”
The SEALs marched themselves. They picked up the pace to four miles a minute and angled straight south again, which they hoped would put them well out of the maneuver’s area.
Two hours later, Murdock figured they were eight miles from the maneuver bivouac. They hadn’t seen any troops or jeeps or white-helmeted judges for the past two miles.
“End run to the Caribbean?” Lam asked on the net.
“Let’s give it a try,” Murdock said. “Just past 1200. If we don’t run into the damn new Colombian president and his staff, we should make it this time.”
Murdock went to the head of the column with Lam out fifty yards in front as they turned due west. They had gone about a mile, Murdock figured, when they heard a clanking, grinding, and roaring in front of them.
“Tanks?” Lam asked.
Coming around a small valley and churning up the grass and weeds were six tanks. The first machine stopped, the tank gunner at the hatch rattled off six bursts of ten rounds each. The hot lead cut a swath through the brush just past where Murdock and Lam had been standing. They drove for the ground.
“They sending tanks after us?” Lam asked.
“Tanks don’t mind 20mm rounds,” Murdock said. “No way they could know where we are. They haven’t had a spotting since those choppers, to hell and gone back there this morning.”
“So why are they shooting at us?” Lam asked.
“They don’t even know we’re here. This must be a live firing range for the tanks. Let’s pull back out of this firing range. We can deal with the war games better.”
They moved back through the cover to where the rest or the platoon waited, then backtracked another mile toward the war games.
Murdock called a halt in a grove of trees near a small stream.
“Let’s find that hide hole and take a break. We’ll have more luck getting out of here after it gets dark.”
“There’s some high ground about five or six hundred yards up this stream,” Lam said. “I looked at it when we came by. Want me to check it out?”
“Go,” Murdock said. “We’ll wander up that way behind you.”
Just then, a series of rifle shots came from in front of them and not more than two hundred yards away.
“Down,” Ed DeWitt whispered in the radio. The SEALs went flat in the grass and weeds in the brushy area. Jaybird crawled through the brush until he could see the shooters. He chuckled into his mike.
“Blanks. Don’t you crackers know the difference in the sound of a blank and a live round? The troops out there are having a great time shooting blanks at each other. They’re moving away from us now with three captives. No sign of a white-hatted umpire.”
Twenty minutes later, Murdock figured the top of the hill they were near was three hundred feet above most of the rest of the swatch of green in front of them. They had burrowed into the brush and behind small trees to be completely out of sight. Sleep was the purpose.
Murdock and DeWitt took the first watch. They saw some patrols of the cammy-clad Colombian troops, but none came near them. Twice they saw firefights between the two sides, but no prisoners were taken. Once they saw white-helmeted judges and referees moving along a hint of a road in a jeep.
Murdock brought Holt up with the SATCOM. Holt zeroed in the antenna and gave Murdock the handset. The transmissions went out in bursts so quick that triangulation was impossible. The words were also encoded so no one without the decoder could read them.
“Homeplate, this is Rover.”
“Rover, we’ve been waiting. Are you held up?”
“That’s a roger. Stalled and can’t move until full dark. Will let you know what’s happening after that. Possible we can get to the wet during the darkness. Will this give your birdman any problems?”
“Negative, Rover. Let us know, and we’ll be there.”
“We’ll be in contact in about six hours.”
Mahanani slid into the brush beside Murdock.
“Let me take a look at that left wrist. You probably thought I’d forgotten all about it.”
“It’s fine.”
“Good, then it won’t hurt to put some ointment on it and a new bandage.”
Murdock held out his left arm. The corpsman pulled up the woodland green cammy sleeve and looked at the bandage. It was almost black with a large red stain on it. He cut off the bandage and checked the wound on both sides where the rifle round had dug through.
“Looks worse than the day you were hit,” Mahanani said. He treated both sides of the wrist, put compresses over the wounds, then bandaged it tightly and wrapped the bandage with inch-wide 3M Transpore sticky tape.
“Should keep you until we get back in the wet. If that starts hurting, you give me a holler. Checked Dober’s thigh, and it looks worse than your wound. Who fed you guys those indestructible pills, anyway?”
“Got them from you, corpsman. Now get some sleep.”
DeWitt watched Murdock a minute. “That arm giving you trouble?”
“No, it’s fine. Now you get some sleep.”
Ed held his finger to his lips and pointed down the hill. They saw four men in cammies like theirs moving slowly upward as if following a trail. Murdock ducked behind a larger bush and waited. The four men kept coming, some chattering, some looking up the hill.
“We sure they have only blanks?” DeWitt whispered.
“We shoot beside them, they’ll hear the lead. We don’t let them use their weapons.”
By then the four men were twenty yards away. They frowned, argued among themselves, then came on. When they were ten yards away, Murdock and DeWitt sprang out, firing two two-round bursts from the 5.56mm barrel of the Bull Pup. They shot beside the men so they could see the bullets.
Murdock and DeWitt charged the men. Two had dropped their rifles and held up their hands. The other two half lifted weapons, then lowered them. One chattered something in Spanish.
Ching ran down the trail to the group. “He said you’re not supposed to have real bullets. You’ll get in a lot of trouble.”
“Tell them we’re not in his game,” Murdock said. “The game is over for them. Tie them up. We’ll leave them here when we leave. Somebody will find them before they starve to death.”
Half the SEALs woke up with the firing. They helped put the plastic riot cuffs on the four Colombians and stashed them at the side of the trail. They stacked their rifles neatly and went back to their improvised bunks.
“If anyone comes looking for them, we get the troops up and bug out over the hills to the south,” Murdock said. He had Ching pull guard duty, and he and DeWitt vanished into the brush for some sleep.
One of the SEALs highest on the slope was Senior Chief Dobler. He hadn’t slept. He kept thinking about home and his wife and family. How was Nancy holding up? He wondered if the two women were meeting with her and helping her.
He hoped so. His family was tremendously important to him. He had been on the point of quitting the SEALs several times in the past year. Nancy was so insecure, so worried about him, about the kids, about everything.
Dobler remembered when they were first going together. He could remember the exact time when he first saw her at that little dance in the community center. He had been nearly twenty-two years old and sure that he would be a bachelor forever. It just seemed the best way to go. No responsibilities. No one to answer to every night. No one to explain what happened if he lost his pay in a poker game. No one…
That soon became unimportant. He saw Nancy, and she twirled when dancing with someone else. Her eyes lit up and her face was ecstatic. She was simply the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He cut in on the couple and whirled her away and longed to see that same expression on her face. He had taken her home from the dance.