Then he heard the jeep again. It came closer, then moved away. On the next pass it was no more than a hundred yards away. He had pulled a floppy hat from another pants pocket and put it over his head when he first left the ship. Now he ducked his head under it and turned his face away from the jeep. If the man used the glasses this time, he’d almost certainly be found.
Damn, found, caught, captured, maybe shot. A .45 against an AK-47 was no contest. The Iraqis would never be in range of his pistol.
He had to know. Lieutenant Van Dyke turned his head slowly, a half inch at a time, until he could see in the direction where he had heard the engine. The jeep had stopped and now he could see two men. One a driver, the other one standing in his seat and searching with the binoculars.
They wanted his scalp bad. Yeah, but they weren’t going to get it. He’d heard about prisoners the Iraqi captured. No fun. Not nice at all.
Again, the man in the jeep sat down and the rig rolled away. If their search pattern was working this way, he had to do something. Move, get away. He stood and ran away from the jeep, on farther away from the burning plane as well. They had used that as the center of the search. There might be three or four jeeps out there looking for him. What a prize he would be for their propaganda machine.
He ran harder until he began to wheeze. He wasn’t in the best shape for this kind of workout. The jeep sounded again, but now it was farther away. He dropped into the sand and rocks, glad for the breather.
He lay there five minutes, couldn’t hear the engine, so he stood and began walking away from the crash site.
He topped a small rise, and fifty feet away he saw the jeep with two Iraqi soldiers standing in it and aiming rifles at him.
“Well, Lieutenant. We have been looking for you. Time you had a ride out of the desert. Just keep walking this way. My English? I learned it at San Diego State on a student visa. Yes, my English is as good as yours, perhaps better. I was a straight-A student at State.”
Van Dyke had no place to run. He lowered the .45 to his side but didn’t move.
“Come, come, Lieutenant. You have no chance. Either you surrender, or we kill you. Now, is that an offer you can refuse?”
A second later, he heard a roar and clack of a chopper as a search and rescue helo with USAF markings lifted up behind the jeep. A gunner in the open door of the rescue bird chopped up the two Iraqis with twenty rounds from a door-mounted machine gun. The soldiers slammed out of the jeep and sprawled on the ground.
The S&R chopper settled slowly to the ground.
First Lieutenant Pete Van Dyke ran up to the jeep and checked the two Arabs. Both were dead. He grabbed one of the AK-47s and ran for the chopper.
He jumped in the door, and the bird took wing at once.
“Just one of you?” a sergeant asked. He handed Van Dyke an ice-cold can of Coke.
“Yeah, just one. My gunner…”
“That’s all right sir, we understand. Need to report in to base. We’ll have you in a nice cold shower in thirty-five minutes.”
First Lieutenant Van Dyke leaned back against the side of the chopper and closed his eyes. He said it to himself this time.
“Damnit to hell, Jimmy. I didn’t want you to die.”
26
Don Stroh came back and found Murdock just as he finished his meal, and they went to his compartment. Murdock sat on his bunk and Stroh tried to pace, but there wasn’t room.
“Like I said, we know where Saddam has his poison gas, we know what it is, and we know how to destroy it with as few deaths in the entire area as possible.”
“Sure, meaning a dozen or so SEALs.”
“You will not be in serious danger if you do the work the way the NBC boys say it should be done.”
“How long do we have to train for this job?”
“Roughly twelve hours.”
“I’ll have all the men write suicide letters before we leave. Make it easier on you when you have to write our next of kin.”
“Stop that, Murdock.” Stroh said, his impatience tingeing his words. That caused Murdock to look up.
“You’re serious about this mission?”
“Damn serious, and so is the President. He says it must be done, and done quickly and done right. He suggested you and your platoon.”
“He didn’t know how shot up we are.”
“This isn’t going to be a hundred-mile marathon. You’ll have all the support we can give you, and that’s a hell of a lot.”
“Chopper in?”
“Absolutely, with four to six Cobra gunships for protection.”
“Chopper out?”
“Yes, it’s too far to walk.”
Murdock eased up from the bunk. He felt the twinges again, the little hurts that bothered him sometimes from the shrapnel still in his ass from several missions back. “Just what the hell can we do with nerve gas? There’s no easy way to destroy the stuff without spreading it around the whole damn globe. We going to do that?”
“Absolutely not. We have a proved way to do the job.”
“Nerve gas doesn’t deteriorate quickly. It won’t burn. It can’t be broken down chemically without a whole fucking cracking plant. So how the hell can twelve of us do the job?”
“This gas is called ectoprocy. Don’t ask me what it means or how to spell it. It’s a known nerve gas but hasn’t been used much. It is generally considered too unstable to qualify for production or installation on weapons. Saddam didn’t agree. He’s done it. He has it. A whiff of a minute quantity of ectoprocy will shut down the nervous system of any animal on earth. It happens in a shorter time than I can tell you about it.”
“How would Saddam deliver it?” Murdock asked.
“Missiles. He’s still flush with the Scuds and can fire them from mobile units. Which means he can drive them right up to his borders and have a much greater range for them than we figured.”
“So the Scuds are the key. Destroy them and you checkmate his gas.”
“For a while. We know he has artillery he can use the gas with. That limits his range, but with the right wind, this stuff can be deadly.”
“It’s a nerve gas, so it bursts out of the shell or missile and clouds across a populated area, killing everything that breathes it?”
“Now you’re getting the idea.”
“How can we destroy the stuff?”
“You ever seen one of the cloud bombs we have?”
“No.”
“It’s a combustible liquid chemical, and when released, it vaporizes and forms a huge cloud, maybe a quarter of a mile wide. That is ignited, and the whole quarter of a mile explodes with a fury that hell would like to get the franchise for. This could be burned or exploded something like that.”
“You’re telling me that this nerve gas will burn? Be damned. You want us to be the trigger?”
“No. We need an accounting.”
“We going to be counting warheads and missiles and canisters that hold the deadly shit?”
“That’s what we’re thinking right now. Unless you have a better plan. The situation is, we must make sure that we get all of the gas. It’s manufactured at this plant; the shells and missile heads are assembled there. They have had accidents. Once two years ago, twenty men died when a tiny leak developed in one artillery shell. The shell was containerized and buried at once.”
“Gas masks for the tender twelve?”
“Yes, two, actually. We have a new one that will filter out particles down to microns smaller than ever before. This mask has worked in every test it’s been given. Using animals, of course. Then you’ll have a regular-issue gas mask that is pretty damn good.”