“Where the hell are the Marine choppers?” Murdock asked.
Holt gave him the handset. “We’re back on TAC Two, skipper.”
Murdock called the Chinooks.
“Have a small problem, SEALs. We’re overloaded. Our pilots refuse to take on any more men, not even three or four per bird. I can’t overrule them. We’re heading for the temporary base just across the line. We’ll unload and send one Chinook back for you. Hang tight for another two hours, and we’ll have you.”
“Let me talk to that chickenshit pilot of yours. Those Chinooks can carry over seven tons. Fifty Marines at two hundred pounds each is only five tons. That overloading is a bunch of bullshit. Tell him!”
“I’ve told him a dozen times. He outranks me. He’s the boss of his plane. Captain of his ship. I can’t change his mind.”
“I’ll make an appointment with him at that advanced base just as soon as we get in. Tell him to get his life insurance paid up. Out.”
Murdock gave Holt the handset, his face a mask of fury. He tried to calm down. The way he felt right then, he’d change all four of those pilots’ status into KIA if he had the chance.
“So, skipper?” Dobler prodded.
“We keep walking west. Get as far from that damn nerve gas as we can.”
Dobler and Jaybird got the men back in line spread out ten yards apart, and Dobler led the line west.
They had walked for fifteen minutes when Lam frowned and motioned to the rear.
“Commander, we’ve got a vehicle coming up behind us.”
“Scatter, spread out. Franklin, get the Iraqis spread out. We don’t know who this fucker might be. Damn sure he isn’t one of ours.”
The SEALs went to the sand, covered part of themselves with it, and ducked their heads to complete the camouflage with their desert cammies.
Murdock watched to the rear. He saw it three minutes later. The rig was a half-track of some brand. It had a machine gun in front and a man scanning the landscape.
“Stay down,” Murdock said on the Motorola. “This one has an MG up front with a man on it. Not sure what else he has. Hope he gets close enough before he spots us. Long guns, get ready.”
“Yeah, see him,” Fernandez said. “Holding.”
The half-track kept coming. Murdock figured it was still back five hundred yards. The guy on the gun wouldn’t be able to see the SEALs, but he might spot some of the civilians. Would he shoot at them?
“Got him dead to rights,” Tony Ostercamp said.
“Hold. If he fires, we fire,” Murdock said. “Weapons free at that time.”
They watched the half-track grinding across the sand and rocks of the western Iraqi desert. It came to a slight rise and paused. The man on the machine gun lifted binoculars and scanned the landscape ahead of him. He passed quickly over the area where the SEALs and the Iraqis lay. Then he came back and studied it again. He went behind his weapon and fired a six round burst into the area.
One of the Iraqi civilians stood up, screaming in fear, and held his hands high. The machine gunner splattered him with five rounds and he went down, dying in the sand. The half-track turned and charged forward at the place where the civilian died. The rig was only a hundred yards away when Murdock changed the order. No one had fired when the MG did because of the range.
Now he was in killer range. “Let’s get him,” Murdock said and cut loose a six-round burst from his submachine gun without the suppressor. Six more weapons fired, and the machine gunner slumped to the side, then was blown off the rig as round after round jolted into his body.
The half-track stopped. “Get the cab,” Murdock said.
Ostercamp concentrated on the front tire he could see. He put ten rounds in it and watched the rig settle on that side.
More rounds shattered the windshield, then ripped into the side of the rig. Two forty mikes hit close, then two more and a WP sprayed the half-track with burning phosphorus.
The rig backed up slowly, turned, and with one wheel running on the rim, drove back the way it had come. The chasing fire tapered off, then stopped, and they let the half-track continue on out of sight.
“Let’s take another hike,” Murdock said into his lip mike. The SEALs waved at the Iraqis, Franklin yelled at them in Arabic, and slowly the line formed again and Dobler used his compass and led them to the west. They left the dead civilian sprawled in the sand. There was nothing else they could do for him.
“We need another two miles,” Murdock told Jaybird. “Then we should be out of harm’s way.”
Jaybird frowned and rubbed his jaw. “That’ll put us ten miles from the damn nerve gas. Thought you said it would burn up? Damn, they must be planning some bombing raid.” He grinned. “Hey, bet they’re gonna use one of those mile-long gas bombs.”
Murdock just waved and kept hiking. If they saw the mushroom cloud, they would see it. Nothing he could do about that.
A half hour later, they were at the point Murdock figured was ten miles. He had Holt crank up the SATCOM on the satellite channel and this time caught Don Stroh near the radio on the carrier.
“We’re at the ten-mile point. You have word that the four choppers of the Marines and their Cobras are out of the area?”
“We do. We plan to wait until you are into Saudi to take out the complex. Hear one of the Chinooks will be back to take all of you clear of the area.”
“I’ve got a duel to fight as soon as I find that bastard Chinook pilot.”
“Easy, easy. He had orders. We want all of those Iraqi civilians out, too, and the birds couldn’t take them. No duel. Hang tough, we have talked with the Chinooks. They are now at the forward base. Should be refueled and on their way to pick you up in ten minutes. Say an hour in the air. Watch for them. You have any coordinates?”
“No, didn’t bring the machine. We’ll use flares when we spot them.”
“Do it. Things are moving nicely. We’re almost there.”
“Maybe you are. We’re still stuck in the middle of the fucking Iraqi desert.”
Fifty-five minutes later, the big chopper roared overhead. They didn’t have to use a flare. Franklin explained to the Iraqis that they were being taken to a base and later would be flown to a small village on the Iraqi border. That’s what Murdock told him to say.
They loaded up and landed back at the Air Force’s Forward Logistical Temporary Base. Just as they got off the chopper, Murdock heard a strange noise, then he felt the ground shake under his feet.
“They did it,” he said. Dobler frowned at him.
“They did what?”
“They just blew up that nerve gas factory and all those Scuds.”
Dobler laughed. “You getting psychic on me, Skipper? That place is a hundred miles away from here.”
Murdock managed to work up a tired smile as they moved toward the mess tent. “A hundred miles, Senior Chief Dobler, and I hope to hell that all that nerve gas stays right there.”
29
General F. Jablah stared in total concentration at the expanded map of the eastern border of Syria and Iraq. The rough line of markers showed the front lines. Fighting still raged on most of the five-mile front that Saddam Hussein had attacked.
In two places, the enemy had driven ten miles into Syria. At one place directly aimed at the capital of Damascus, the Iraqi army had penetrated almost twenty miles. That thrust had been blunted, over a hundred Iraqi tanks destroyed through the aid of the United States airpower and his own MiGs and their Dassault Mirage fighters. Now that incursion had been pressed back to the ten-mile line.
His other army units were attacking the Iraqis all along the MLR. Their interdiction of the supply lines with their own fighters and the U.S. planes had made serious shortages in the already-strained umbilical of food and ammunition for the Iraqis.