Hostile Fire (33 page)

Before Lam could move out, a rifle blasted from ahead and a single bullet tore into Bradford’s left shoulder. The six SEALs dropped into the brush and rolled behind trees. Two more shots came with the flat, booming sound that could only be an AK-47.

“I caught one in the shoulder,” Bradford said.

Mahanani crawled over to him and went to work.

The shots came from the half of the fuselage ahead of them fifty yards. Murdock motioned for Lam and Prescott to circle to the left. He and Canzoneri went to the right. “Halfway,” Murdock whispered.

Lam led out crawling through the brush and vines for ten yards to the left, then he stood beside a tree and looked at the crash. He shook his head and moved forward, down the gentle slope for thirty yards, slithering through the vines and brush by crawling, not walking. Easier that way, he knew, but slower. Prescott came behind him, following the scout’s lead. This time when Lam stood in back of a tree, he saw they were directly opposite the large piece of the airliner, but forty yards away. He saw no shooters. He waited. Two minutes later a man in cammies dropped out of the broken-off rear section of the fuselage and worked slowly forward. He carried a rifle.

Lam moved his selector to 5.56 barrel and zeroed in on the man. Brush and trees got in the way of Lam’s sightline.
Then the man stepped ahead and the brush thinned, and Lam triggered off three rounds. The gunfire in the softly silent jungle sounded like thunder, then it quieted again.

The man with the rifle turned, as if surprised anyone was near him; then he bent in half, dropped the rifle, and sprawled in the edge of the stream beside the airliner. For ten minutes nothing moved around the broken aircraft. Then a machine gun chattered off two twelve-round bursts. The sound came from the other side of the crash site, twenty feet up the slope. The bullets snarled and thudded and ripped through the trees and brush around where Lam and Prescott lay. None hit them.

“Hear that, Cap? We’ve got a chatter gun on your side of the crash.”

“Heard it. We pulled back. We almost ran into a squad of twenty men. Some in uniforms, some in civvies. A ragtag bunch, but all have good-looking rifles and then that damn machine gun. Pull back to where we were, and we’ll try to figure this thing out.

“Roger that,” Lam said, and he and Prescott started their slow but invisible crawl back to their assembly point.

The six men lay in an arc aimed at the aircraft, watching for any movement toward them. “We pull back to the end of the trail,” Murdock said. He checked his watch. Almost noon. He made a radio call, and the sputtering sound of the chopper came in.

“Read you, groundlings.”

“Sky man, cut out for the city. Bring back the rest of the platoon. Stuff them all in your bird. Remind them to bring MREs and double ammo. Land where you did before. We’ll have a guide to meet them. Do not fly over the crash site. We have some unfriendlies there.”

“Understand. How many men?”

“Ten men. We don’t need any more axes or machetes. Get them here as fast as you can.”

“Roger and wilco.”

Lam frowned. “Haven’t heard that word for years. ‘Wilco,’ that means what, will obey your command?”

“Close enough,” Murdock said. “Now let’s get back and
set up a base camp at the pond. Bradford, how is the shoulder?”

“Not the best, Skipper. But I can still do the duty.”

“Good. Canzoneri, you heard the transmission. You’ve got two hours to get up the hill and to the brush beside that burn LZ. Then bring the rest of the troops down here. We’ll wait until it gets dark, then move in on a black raid and try to take them out. The twenties won’t work as well in all this brush and trees, but we’ll get their attention. Where in hell did Fouad get twenty-six to thirty men for an operation like this? And is the mastermind still alive or did he go down with the plane?”

“Oh, he’s down and dead,” Lam said. “He probably left instructions for the worst scenario. This is it, and somebody recruited a bunch of loyalists or mercenaries to come in and check out the bird and rescue the bomb if possible.”

“A lot like us,” Murdock said. “Only we haven’t seen a chopper from the bad guys.”

“We will,” Lam said, “tomorrow.”

Ten minutes later, Lam moved over to Murdock.

“Cap, I’m going out as an FO. I don’t feel good not watching that site down there. We should know what they’re doing.”

“Right. Go. Be careful. Keep your radio on.”

Twenty minutes later Lam was on the net.

“Hey, Cap, funny stuff going on down here. Not sure what. I hear what might be hammers. Some pounding. Maybe they’re trying to get the bomb out of the crate. Would it be in a wooden crate?”

“Could be. If you see anyone outside, pick them off, then move like crazy. Wonder if we should send a couple of twenty-millimeter rounds into the trees over the crash. Might slow them down.”

“I’d vote for that. Let me move a little so I can see the scene better. You have to move to get a clear shot?”

“Some. I’ll let you know before we fire.”

Murdock motioned to Fernandez, and they moved down the trail they had made to the burn swath. Still out two hundred yards to the body of the wreck, they stopped.

“One round each, airburst in the trees uphill on that blind
side of the aircraft,” Murdock told Fernandez. “Lam, two rounds, you clear?”

“More than clear here.”

They fired, and the resulting airbursts in the trees showered the top of the crashed airliner with hundreds of chunks of shrapnel. It could do great bodily harm to anyone in the open near the back of the length of fuselage.

“Well, the pounding stopped,” Lam said. “Nobody is venturing out on this side of the plane. The body that was there has been taken away.”

“Watch and wait. We have another two hours before we will have our whole platoon in hand. Then we figure out exactly what we’re going to do as soon as it gets dark.”

Lam kept watch on the crash site. The hammering had stopped and didn’t start again. He reported spotting no one at the scene.

“What the fuck are they up to?” Lam asked on the radio.

“No good, count on that,” Bradford said. He was moving his shoulder and arm to keep it functioning.

At sixteen-hundred, Canzoneri came back with the rest of the platoon. They all wanted to look at the crash site, and Murdock sent them up two at a time to the closest viewing spot.

“No noise and don’t make the brush shake or you’ll get a machine gun searching for you with hot lead,” Murdock told them.

Just at dark they settled down for an MRE dinner. They were the new ones that heated up when you broke a seal. After that they huddled and Murdock laid it out.

“Tonight we take them out,” Murdock said. “Here is how we’re going to do it.”

It had gone from daylight to dusk to dark in a matter of five minutes, casting a cloak of invisibility around the SEALs. They clustered around Murdock to find out how they would attack and subdue the mercenaries holding the crash site.

“This will be a silent operation for as long as possible,” Murdock said. “We go with our best knife men first, Rafii and Lam. They will move in ahead of our main body. The mercenaries know someone is out here, but they don’t know just who we are. They’ll have security out, but we hope it isn’t well enough trained to do much good. Lam and Rafii have as their first jobs to eliminate that security and call us forward. Depending on what we find, we’ll move in with our silenced weapons and use them if we have to.”

“How far out you figure their security is?”

Lam asked. “In this cover, I’d say not much over thirty to forty yards at the most. They must have some sort of camp in the jungle behind the plane. We have to find it and eliminate as many of them as we can and scare the rest of them off. Let’s hope they don’t have any RPGs in their weapon group.”

“What about our twenties?” Jaybird asked.

“We use them only if we get surprised or they are too good for us to get inside their ranks. You all have knives. The silent approach here is best all the way around. We can’t work in our usual formation. It could be one man at a time moving up in a file and then slanting off into something of an assault line. Just depends what we find, how thick the jungle is right up there, and where they have their camp.”

“When do we go in?” Rafii asked.

“We wait an hour, then start downslope on the trail into the burn area. Right there somewhere, maybe four hundred
yards from the fuselage, we’ll make our base camp and wait on Lam and Rafii.”

“How about a third knife man?” Prescott asked.

Murdock considered it only a moment. Prescott was good with his hands in the magic tricks. “Yes, go. Lam is lead man, go where he indicates. All silent as hell.”

The men moved out in a perimeter defense without being told to. It was second nature. They lay in a circle with their feet nearly touching, all facing outward with weapons loaded and ready.

“Bradford, can you set up the box?”

“Yes, sir, no problem. Hell, do it with one hand if I had to. Give me about two minutes.” Bradford pulled the SATCOM off his back, turned on the switches, and aimed the fold-out antenna until he captured the sky-roving satellite. Then he handed the hand mike to Murdock. “All set on the channel Stroh told us to use down here.”

“Murdock to Stroh. You have your ears on?”

“On and waiting. Where you been?”

“Busy.” Murdock brought Stroh up to date on what they had found and the opposition. “My guess is that they are mercenaries with good equipment. We’re moving in on them in about an hour. We’ll see how well they function in the dark.”

“How did somebody beat you to the prize?”

“Got me, Stroh. Could be one of our helpers at the hangar is more than just a maintenance man. Get rid of both of them. Don’t let them hear anything you plan.”

“Right. I can do that. We’ve contacted your SH-60. The pilot elected to stay there overnight. He’ll do a flyover at eight
A.M.
and contact you on the Motorola. He knows not to fly directly over the crash site.”

“We’re covered. Our job now is to rout these pretenders and go in and make sure that the bomb is on the plane. It must be, or why else would thirty men go in here to protect and try to get it out? We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“Take care, and don’t get shot in the butt with any of those pigmy arrows.”

Murdock closed down the set, and Bradford put it on his back and strapped it down.

A half hour later, Lam checked Rafii and Prescott. Nothing on their gear jingled or rattled. “We’ll use hand signals. Beyond about ten feet we won’t be able to see each other. Use your penlight aimed away from the target for recognition of placement. Radio beeps will be two for come forward, one for wait where you are. Remember, we might lie in one position for ten minutes watching for any movement in the brush and jungle ahead.”

He stopped talking and signaled for them to move ahead. They vanished into the night and down the improvised trail, on their way to the burn swath where the aviation fuel had charred a fifty-yard path a dozen feet wide burning everything in the way.

Fifty yards from the spot where they saw the faint moonlight gleaming off the white side of the airliner, Lam stopped them. They knelt, then went prone and watched the jungle ahead. Lam did as he had for years. He quartered the scene, then divided it in eighths, took one sector at a time, and studied every aspect of it he could see, memorizing the position of branches and trees. When he was satisfied nothing was dangerous in one sector, he moved to the next. It was in the third square of jungle that he saw something out of place. He put his thermal imager scope on it and checked again. Yes, a man’s leg and boot stuck out from a foot-thick tree. Rafii had the other imager. He looked over his part of the vegetation and brush and vines directly in front of him. Twice he saw blips on the dark screen, white figures that scurried away and out of range. Some small animal, he decided and kept looking.

Lam slithered through the moist leaf mould on the jungle floor. He went over roots, around trees, and under more brush. It took him five minutes to work to within ten feet of the leg near the tree. The foliage thinned here. Another section of rock. He moved to the near side of the tree, worked around it in the darkness, and came up soundlessly behind the sentry. The caution was not needed. The man wore a uniform cammie shirt and blue jean pants. He had a rifle cradled in his arms and his head rested on the tree trunk. He snored softly.

Lam grabbed the man’s head from behind, jerked it backwards,
and sliced his fighting knife across the man’s jugular vein and his right carotid artery. The artery spurted hot blood six feet into the air each time the sentry’s heart beat. Then it lessened more and more until it dribbled out. Lam let the man’s lifeless body down gently to the ground and picked up his AK-47.

He touched his Motorola mike twice. It would transmit a slight beep to all the rest of the sets. It was their signal for the other two men to come forward. As he waited for them to catch up with him, Lam studied through the trees ahead. He figured he was still forty yards from the plane’s cockpit. There had to be more guards. Where were they? The scent came faint at first, and then increased until he was certain. Cigarette smoke and he was downwind. He tried to find the angle it came from, but he couldn’t. He used the imager and checked the areas he could see. No white images of hot blood showed on the tube. There had been no match flare. But the smoker could have lit a new one from the old one.

Prescott slid in beside Lam, who turned, surprised. He wasn’t used to men slipping up on him unnoticed. He grinned. The kid was going to be okay. He handed the thermal imager to Prescott and pointed in the areas he hadn’t covered. He made smoking signs with his fingers from his mouth and Prescott nodded.

Rafii knelt on Lam’s other side.

Lam studied the area just ahead of them. The land was on a gentle slope downward. Here it fell off more sharply. They were in a section beyond the burned swath. Evidently the flaming wing had broken off and gone through the air a hundred feet or more before it hit the ground and kept burning and skidding forward. The growth was sparser here, probably from a rocky plate. A good spot for the enemy to lurk behind, waiting for someone to try to cross the fairly open space.