Deadly Force (26 page)

“Skipper, I've got a two-man lookout position. No bunker or protection. Both are sitting on a log beside a sort of trail up from a stream. Must use it for getting water. Both men are soldiers and armed with long guns. Want me to take both down with my MP-5?”

“How far to the substation?”

“About a hundred yards, up an easy slope. I don't see anyone around the high-fenced area.”

“I'm coming up to take a look.”

When Murdock squirmed up beside Lam in the thick growth, he saw a problem. They could see the big transformers and electrical grids and power cables, but anyone in the small control building on this side of all the electrical equipment could also see the two guards. If they went down, someone inside would know it.

“This gives us a big problem,” Murdock whispered to Lam. The two soldiers sat on the log thirty feet out front. “How are we going to take out these two and hit the control shack up there at the same time and not damage any delicate instruments and controls?”

 

 

Lam looked at the scene again, then grinned. “Hey, Cap, you joshing me or what? This is a piece of cake. We take out the people inside the control shack first. Put one EAR blast into that substation window, and a second or two later we take out the two guards with silenced MP-5s.”

“You're right,” Murdock said. “Remember the Bishop Museum in Hawaii? The EAR shots didn't hurt any of the artifacts in there, so we should be okay here.” He hit the Motorola. “Get the EAR up here pronto,” he said. “Lam, just after the EAR shot, you take out the sentry on the right, I'll take the man on the left.”

Kenneth Ching came charging up with the EAR, and settled in for a shot after Murdock pointed out the target.

“Right through the window, Ching. Make it a good one.” On the Motorola he told the platoon to move up where he was and stay out of sight. “We're going to use the EAR through the window, then take out the two sentries. When they are down, we charge up the last hundred to the control room and see what we have to work with.”

Murdock looked at Ching in the darkness. “Whenever you're ready, Ken.”

A second later Ching triggered off the highly charged burst of enhanced air that slammed through the distance and shattered the pane-glass window as it burst inside the small shack. For a moment Murdock wondered if the sides of the structure would explode outward. They didn't. He heard Lam fire, and he refined his sight on the second guard and pulled the trigger on single-shot. Murdock's chest hit was a little off center. He fired again where the guard had
fallen, and the soldier didn't move anymore.

“Let's go,” Murdock said into his mike, and the seventeen men lifted up and charged silently up the slope. There was a high fence around the substation itself, but the ten-foot-by-ten-foot shack stood outside the fence.

Murdock tested the door. Unlocked. He jerked it open and stared inside around the doorjamb. In the lighted room he saw two men lying on the floor. Murdock motioned the Loyalist soldier forward, and he looked around the shack.

“Nothing here to hurt the substation,” the Loyalist soldier said. “We have to get inside the fence.”

“No wire cutters for a fence this heavy,” Jaybird said.

“Blow it,” Murdock ordered.

Canzoneri, their resident explosives expert, ran forward and looked at the fence gate.

“Easiest way to get in is to blow the hinges off,” he said. As he talked, he pasted two one-inch squares of TNAZ plastic explosive on the hinges and inserted twin timer/detonators. “Get back thirty,” he said. Then he set the timers for twenty seconds, pushed them both to activate the timers, and sprinted to the side and behind the control shack.

The sharp crack of the explosives sounded like twin rolls of thunder in the carpet of green jungle that covered the hills.

“Everyone down and dirty,” Murdock barked in the radio. “There has to be a small force up here and they will be on the run. Keep your eyes on.”

“I've got noise coming up the back of the hill,” Tracy Donegan said. “Sounds like company.”

“Spread out, find cover,” Gardner said on the Motorola.

Donegan saw them first. “I've got a dozen coming up a trail, bunched. We have weapons free?”

“Wait until we can see them all,” Murdock said. “Fire on my MP-5 rounds.”

Donegan was closest to them. He counted eleven as they came up the trail and then spread out as they entered the cleared space around the far side of the electrical substation.

“Now,” Murdock said, and chattered off six rounds from his MP-5. At once the rest of the men fired. The rattle of the MP-5s was covered with the heavier rounds coming
from the sniper rifles and the machine gun. Then the 5.56 rounds shrilled into the fight, and the eleven federal soldiers caught in the open with no cover went down.

Two surged up and darted for some trees at the edge of the clearing. One took a round in the leg, but both made it into the brush and tangle of the jungle growth. JG Gardner was closest to them.

“Donegan on me, let's go get those last two.” The SEALs' fire cut off as all the enemy were down. Donegan and Gardner sprinted twenty yards to the edge of the forest, where Gardner held up his hand and they both stopped. He pointed to his ear and then into the growth and both listened.

They heard sounds of movement even through the lush tropical growth. Gardner took the lead, running where possible, ducking under and around trees, skirting patches of thick growth, and every fifty feet stopping to listen.

“Getting closer,” Gardner whispered on the last stop. They had worked down the back side of the mountain, and now a small ridge showed to the left that bordered a tiny ravine no more than fifty feet across. The two SEALs paused to look. Gardner lifted his Bull Pup and fired a 20mm round into the valley. The round went off with a snarling roar, and Gardner waved them forward.

“Saw one of them beside a tree down there,” he said. “Hope I nailed the little bastard. Let's go take a look.”

They worked through the jungle growth faster now. Up here on the slopes the ground was relatively dry. The almost daily rain could run off toward the drainage downstream.

The SEALs moved up on the target tree carefully, supporting each other as they leapfrogged the last fifty yards. At the tree they found one man slumped against some brush. He lifted a pistol and was about to shoot at point-blank range when Donegan swung up his H & K G-11 caseless-bullet rifle and sprayed ten rounds into the surprised federal soldier. There was no sign of the other one.

“We wasted one of them, but there's no sign of the other
one, Skipper,” Gardner said on the radio. “The second man must be long gone.”

“Bring the dead man's weapon and ammo and return,” Murdock said. He had just finished a tour of the substation with the Loyalist soldier/electrician.

“If we just blow up the place, we run the risk of blacking out the whole grid back up through four countries,” the soldier/electrician said. “It would be easy if there was a transformer we could knock out, but the juice comes in high voltage and goes out as high voltage.”

“So what do we tear up?” Murdock asked. “No switches we could throw and black it out?”

The electrician laughed. “Not that easy. No switch that strong. We need to hit it at the output. We could blow down that first steel tower, or cut the lines that it carries.”

“The lines would be easiest to repair. Let's work on them. How many do we need to cut?”

It took the electrician a half hour to decide where to set the charges. Canzoneri helped him set up the TNAZ and place it on supports that got the lines started south. The blasts would knock down the supports, overstress the thick cables, and tear them apart. When they dropped into the jungle they would be dead and harmless.

The electrician figured the repair time would be about a week, with the facilities and equipment that the federal troops and the substation's manpower could raise. Then he shook his head. “No, there is a way to do it quicker. They can put in bypass cables to send the juice south, then build permanent supports and finish the job. The bypass could be done in two days.”

Murdock nodded. “Good, let's go ahead and set the timers for two minute. Then we get everyone back down the hill a ways.”

Canzoneri and the electrician coordinated their work, then pushed in the timers to activate them. Then the two men rushed down the trail fifty yards from the substation.

The explosions were not large, and they came in a succession of snarling blasts that were followed by huge showers of sparks as the power lines parted and the dead ones fell into the Sierra Bijimi jungle waiting to be repaired.

Murdock, the JG, Mojombo, and the electrician ran up to the substation and looked over the results of the blasts.

Mojombo was pleased. “Yes, that will make a statement to the general population. The federal Army will rush workers up here to fix the damage. We have struck a blow for liberty.”

Murdock watched the black man. There was no doubt about his sincerity. He was dedicated to his nation and his plans to rip it out of the hands of the despots who ruled it now. Murdock's big problem was trying to figure out how he and the SEALs could help him do that without getting in a batch of serious international trouble. He shrugged. First they had to find the chopper and get the hell out of there before more troops came in.

Murdock used the Motorola. “Load them up and move them out,” he said. “Column of ducks. JG, you take the lead with Lam out front on point. I'll ride drag. If you Easterners don't know what that means, it has nothing to do with how I dress. In the Old West on a cattle drive, the worst possible spot was to ride drag or the last man on the drive. The drag rider had to chase strays back into the herd, prod along the loafers, and in the process eat all the dirt that four thousand hooves could dig up and swirl around in a huge dust cloud that always drifted back over the drag rider. Enough? Let's move.”

Fifteen minutes later they were almost down the mountain when the Motorola warning stopped them.

“Skipper, looks like we have a situation here. From what I can tell in the dark there is a whole piss-pot full of troops heading our way. My estimate is about forty to fifty. Suggestions?”

“How far off, Lam?”

“Skipper, I'd say maybe a half mile. Some of them are even singing. Not a care in the world.”

“We'll go to ground. I want everyone to take a hard-right-flank march and move fifty yards into the jungle cover. Keep the man next to you in sight at all times so we don't get split up. Move it right now.”

It was more than twenty minutes later that they heard the federal troops go by. They didn't march exactly, and there
were some more songs. It sounded more like a summer camp outing than an Army movement. Murdock waited ten minutes after the men passed before he called for his troops to move back to the trail and get on down the mountain.

After they left the trail, Lam angled them toward where the chopper should be. They were within a mile of the bird when Lam went on the net again.

“Skipper, I'm not sure what the hell is going on up here. You better come take a look. Near as I can tell from this distance, the federal bohunks have set up what looks like a permanent facility up here. Nothing like this when we came in earlier tonight.”

“I'm coming, Lam. Could it be that we're on a slightly different course than the one we went in on and we just missed this installation?”

“From the looks of it, you're right. It's been here for some time. We were lucky to miss it when we came in. Now we need to take a small detour. Must be a hundred men and tents and even some four-wheel-drive rigs.”

“Any activity like they heard the blasts up on top?”

“Doesn't look like it. I'll wait for you here.”

Murdock and Gardner took a look.

“Too many of them, unless we want to hit them with all of our twenties,” Gardner said.

“Then the survivors would chase us all the way to the chopper and might shoot it down,” Murdock said. “Let's slip around them and find the chopper and get out of here. We don't need a body count on this run.”

They backtracked half a mile, then charged into the jungle. Murdock used the Motorola. “Halstrom, you still wide awake?”

There was a moment's dead air. Then: “Oh, yeah. Had a wake-up call about an hour ago. Heard a patrol of some kind, but it never got within sight of the chopper or me. But they left to the south and west if I'm oriented.”

“Yeah, we found their camp. Almost went in for a dog-steak dinner, but declined. We went around them. Any landmarks around there we can zero in on?”

Not much. Just the little tributary stream. It's not huge, as you know.”

“We'll put our bloodhound noses on and see if we can find you. Darker out here than an old maid's bedroom at midnight.”

Murdock found Lam. “So which and where?”

“He's got to be north of us. I worked too far down the trail before I turned west and north. Let's give it another try. Wish these Motorolas had a built-in homing device.”

“We can suggest it.”

After a twenty-minute hike, Lam came on the net. “Oh, yeah, troops, we're on the right track. We're at the little creek we passed before, the one the chopper should be on. We turn upstream and should nail him in about ten.”

They did.

Once everyone was on board, Gardner asked for a casualty report. They had one turned ankle that wasn't all that bad, and nothing else. They flew a more direct course this time back to their camp north of Sierra City, and landed well before dawn.

As they walked to their tents, Lam saw three shadowy forms in front of Mojombo's tent. He warned the others. They advanced slowly. One of the forms sat up.

“Mojombo?”

“Yes.”

“Good, you're back. I'm Captain Kintay from Colonel Amosa's regiment. There have been some changes and we need to talk with you right now.”