Hostile Fire (32 page)

“Not from up here,” Murdock said. “If they know where it is, they would beat us to it. But see that rocky area ahead? By the time they get there, they’ll be so tired, they’ll walk across it.”

“Yeah, if they are heading upstream,” Lam said. “What if they are waiting to see which direction we go? They could have seen the chopper circle something upstream and then come back and land.”

Murdock studied the jungle below with his binoculars. He could see no movement, no armed men, nothing unusual.

“There,” Lam said. “Almost straight down the slope and two fingers to the right. A whole flock of birds just flew out of those trees. Something down there disturbed them. Like a squad of men.”

“So we wait them out,” Murdock said. “They might kick up a few more birds as they move up the ravine.”

Murdock checked his Motorola. It was on. “Flyboy One, this is Murdock. Come in.”

“Yes, Murdock. Figured you were cutting your way through the damn vines out there. How far did you get?”

“We’re at the top of the ridge. We can see you. Just got shot at, so we have unfriendlies somewhere below us in the crash gully. Some of them might come looking for you. You’ll have no notice if they do. If your petrol is good, you better lift off for a new LZ. If you get out of radio range, fly over this area every two hours. We’ll contact you with what we’re going to do.”

“Roger that. We’re out of here. Talk later.”

“Another bunch of wild birds flew out down there,” Lam said.

“Cap, want us to put a couple of twenties into that last bird fly?” Prescott asked.

Murdock shook his head. “No. Then they would know we
were armed and they wouldn’t go anywhere near that bald spot. Let’s wait awhile longer.”

A half hour later, Lam reported. “Cap, I’ve seen three more bird flyouts. Looks like their lead man must be about thirty yards from the bald spot. So will they cross it or go around in the cover?”

“Cover,” Canzoneri said.

“Cross it,” Bradford said. “They’re civilians not in condition. By now they are dead tired. They’ll take any gift they can find.”

Prescott snorted. “Yeah, cross the bald spot. I’ve got a fiver if anyone wants to cover me.”

“We have three twenties,” Murdock said, “and the sniper rifle. If they cross it in a group, we all fire when they are bunched. Time to play our cards. Let’s lock and load.”

It took the men below ten minutes to get to the rock face. Then one figure burst out of the trees, ran across the first twenty-yard section, and paused. He looked ahead, then up at the ridge. He carried a rifle. At last he waved the men forward with the classic infantry arm motion.

Six men came out of the trees and started running across the rock.

“Now,” Murdock said. The four weapons fired almost at the same time. They had been sighted in and the gunners awaited the command. Murdock watched through the scope on his twenty. The first round hit just below the first two men in the group. The blast riddled them with shrapnel and blew them ten feet to the side. Neither moved again.

The other two 20mm rounds exploded on the near side of the men; two more died and one crawled toward the jungle. With the sniper rifle Canzoneri stopped him ten yards short of his goal. Two men were missing.

“The scout ahead got away,” Lam said.

“I saw the last man in the group turn and run back the way they came a second before we shot,” Bradford said. “He must have figured it out.”

“At least we lowered the odds,” Murdock said. “Let’s move on up this ridgeline to that bend and see if we can spot the wreckage.”

Five minutes later they hadn’t come to the bend, but the
ridge had flattened out into a mesa, which Murdock figured must be two hundred yards wide. Near the ridge edge the trees multiplied and grew much taller and denser. Lam had been out thirty yards in front of them, and he came back now to Murdock, sporting a strange expression.

“Not sure I believe what I’m seeing,” he told Murdock softly.

“Why? What did you see?”

“From where I stopped it looked like five or six moss-covered buildings made of rough-hewn stone. One of the buildings is three stories tall and partly in ruins. The other smaller ones are mostly caved in and the jungle is claiming them as its own.”

“Might be some old ruins of an Aztec city,” Murdock said. “Or were they farther north? I don’t remember. Let’s take a look at it.”

The six SEALs stared in amazement at the stone blocks that some ancient people had hoisted into place, some thirty feet high.

“Blocks must weigh a ton each,” Lam said. “How did they get them all the way to the top?”

They saw some doors and openings that might have been primitive windows. “Don’t go inside any of them,” Murdock said. “They might come crashing down at any time.”

Before he finished the sentence, Prescott let out a muffled scream and staggered against Mahanani, who almost fell down.

“I’m hit in the leg,” Prescott shouted.

Mahanani lowered him to the forest mulch on the clearing around the buildings.

“It’s an arrow,” Mahanani said softly.

“Everybody go down on one knee and don’t use your weapons,” Bradford said. “Got to be some primitive tribe in here that hasn’t been contacted by the Mexican authorities. That’s my guess. By kneeling, we show respect and subservience.”

“What else would they respond to?” Murdock asked.

“Prescott got hit with a bird arrow, small, light, just a sharpened point on the stick arrow,” Mahanani said. “Not sophisticated at all. Maybe if we sit down and put our weapons
on the ground they’ll come out, and we can make signs with them.”

The SEALs looked at Murdock. “Yes, sit down. No loud talk and no threatening motions. If they shot just one arrow, they must be good with their bows.”

The SEALs sat down in a defensive circle from habit, so they could observe in all directions. Murdock checked his watch. He’d give the shooter five minutes, then his team had to move. He wondered where the survivors of the shoot-out down below were. They were an hour ahead of the SEALs to get to the wreck if they’d kept going. Murdock used the Motorola.

“Flyboy One, can you read me?”

“Just barely, I moved two miles downstream. If you go much farther, I’ll lose your signal.”

“We’re held up here in an old ruins. Come up past the wreck every two hours on the hour. It’s now ten minutes to the first hour.”

“Roger. That’s…I say…that’s…”

“Losing him,” Lam said.

They waited. SEALs are good at waiting without talking, without moving. Mahanani had pulled the arrow out of Prescott’s leg. It had been imbedded only two inches. There was almost no blood. He cut a slice in the cammie pants and put a bandage on the wound, then taped the pants leg tight to his leg.

Just before the five minutes were up, a solitary figure, holding a bow and nocked arrow and wearing only a short breechclout, stepped out from behind the wall of the tall stone building. The brown man stood less than five feet tall, had long, dark-black hair, and was slender and muscular.

Murdock stood slowly, left his weapon on the ground, and held out his hands, palms up in what he hoped was a sign the small man would understand.

“We come in peace,” Murdock said.

The small man scowled and Murdock could see tattoos on his chest and face. He chattered something and lifted his bow.

Murdock shook his head. “We will not hurt you,” he said.

With that, the native let out a cry and twenty warriors his
size ran up beside him. All had their arrows nocked in the string, ready to be drawn and shot.

“Okay, somebody, get creative,” Murdock whispered. “No way we’re going to shoot down these aborigine men. We’ve got to think of something quick. These guys have lots of firepower and those dartlike arrows can cause great pain and death. Come on, men, some ideas.”

Prescott stood slowly, took a deck of playing cards from his combat vest, and proceeded to do Las Vegas dealer tricks. He fanned the cards and collapsed them. He spread them out on top of a fallen log and reversed them in a flash. He threw a card in the air and watched it vanish. He moved to Murdock and showed his open hand, then withdrew a coin from Murdock’s nose.

The small men’s eyes lit up and they smiled.

“Magic,” Prescott whispered as he walked slowly toward the aborigines. They watched him, curious. He came near them and reached out toward one. The man shrank back. He reached toward the first man who had shown himself and pulled a coin from the man’s ear. He flipped it into the group. The small men cheered. He went from one to another of the men, who now stood their ground. Five times he pulled coins from the men’s noses, ears, or mouths and gave each man the coin. Murdock couldn’t see the coins plainly but they looked like Mexican pesos.

Prescott took a white handkerchief from his pocket and carefully stuffed it into his hand, then went to throw it into the air and it had vanished. The small men gasped in surprise. Prescott turned around slowly, his arms outstretched, his head bent back so he looked at the tops of the tall trees. Then he stopped and said a dozen nonsense words. He stepped back to the head man and slowly pulled the handkerchief from the man’s ear. When it was all the way out, the small men dropped to their knees and put their heads on the ground. Only the head man of the tribe remained standing. He smiled and grinned and bowed.

Prescott sat down in front of the head man and motioned for him to sit as well. When he did, Prescott took out an
MRE package and tore it open. He displayed the many items of food and convenience on the mulch of the forest ground between them. He took out one of the energy bars and opened it; he broke it in half and took a bite of it. Then offered the other half to the head man.

For a moment the aborigine hesitated; then he watched Prescott chewing and taking another bite. The native nibbled on the bar a moment, his face frozen in worry and curiosity. Then he chewed and smiled. He ate the rest of the bar quickly and searched through the contents of the MRE for another. Prescott found one, tore off the wrapping, and gave it to him. He held it up, turned to his men, and shouted something. They all stood and hurried away.

The head man finished the second bar quickly and both he and Prescott stood. The head man waved his arms and motioned forward. Prescott smiled and nodded, and the SEALs stood and walked with caution past the small man and along what now became a trail near the side of the bluff that looked down into the valley where the crash had occurred.

The head man ran to the front of the group and made motions to Lam, who was leading. They were follow motions, and Lam moved in behind him.

“I think he wants to lead us down this trail,” Lam said.

“Just so we stay near the valley on the left,” Murdock said from the end of the group.

The small, dark man led them forward along what they now saw was a well-worn trail. Vines and brush had been systematically cut back, and they moved quickly.

A quarter of a mile farther up the incline of the mesa, the trail turned left, and below through the trees they could see the tendrils of smoke and the gleaming side of the airliner.

Lam stopped and pointed down, then pointed to himself and down the slope again.

The small man shook his head. He pointed ahead and held his hands a foot apart. Prescott had moved up and stood beside Lam. The aborigine looked at Prescott and smiled, and then he made the same motion with his hands.

“My guess is that if we go up a short way, the small native
has an easier way for us to get down through the jungle,” Prescott said.

“Let’s give it a try,” Murdock said.

Lam nodded and waved forward. The small man grinned and went ahead at a slow trot. The SEALs followed. A half mile on the trail along the lip of the mesa ridge, they stopped. To the left they saw another path that had been cut through the brush and vines. The small man pointed down and motioned them. Lam reached into his combat pack and handed the native one of his MREs. The aborigine smiled and nodded and bowed, then dropped to his knees and put his head on the ground. He remained that way until the last SEAL had passed, and then he stood and ran on down a continuing trail, laughing and holding up the MRE.

Murdock moved up beside Prescott. “Where in hell did you come up with that magic idea?”

“These looked like simple people, without a lot of imagination or smarts. A little magic could work wonders with them, I figured, and it did. Just glad that I had those Mexican pesos in my pocket and that old handkerchief. If I’d had my props, I could have put on a real magic show for them.”

“You did enough. Those MREs are valuable currency out here.”

The trail dropped rapidly, and within fifteen minutes they had moved down over a mile toward the crash site. Twice Lam stopped and searched the area around the airliner with binoculars.

“Don’t see a thing, Cap,” he said on the radio. “Nothing moving down there. Can’t be any survivors in a crash that bad. Don’t see any birds flying up either, or any sign of those two escapees from our quick little firefight.”

“Move on,” Murdock said.

The trail ended at the creek, now larger due to the rain. They found where the aborigines evidently came to the stream for water or bathing or ceremonies. A small cleared place beside a large pool may have been used for tribal rituals.

Lam turned them downstream. “Not more than a hundred yards to the end of the burn swath,” Lam said. “Probably are parts of the plane up here. Maybe the wings or the cockpit.”

Twenty minutes of tough jungle battling later they came to the first part of the plane. It was still on the end fifteen feet of one wing.

“No fuel in this end,” Murdock said. “So it didn’t burn.”

They walked through the burn strip now, since it was easier. Lam came past another chunk of the plane and kept going. He stopped fifty yards from what looked like the nose of the plane that had buried itself into the streambed. The rest of the group came up beside him.

“Cockpit must be ten feet into the ground,” Bradford said. “Anybody in there when it crashed is sleeping with the fishes.”

“The bomb couldn’t have been up that far in the plane,” Murdock said. “Let’s go around this and get to that big section of the fuselage.”