Deathrace (29 page)

To one side, Murdock asked Ken Ching how long the trance would last.

“I can reinforce it every three hours. He’ll be good until daylight. Then we’ll let him pass into a normal sleep.”

They ate MRE’s there and left twenty minutes later. The next two hours went according to plan. Magic kept up, Miguel Fernandez was now helping him, with his arm over
Miguel’s shoulder. They made their six miles and Murdock pulled them up at the side of a high mountain.

Ahead of them a gentle valley opened up that went too far to the east, but they decided they would take it. Just before their short break was over, Lam came back with news.

“I was out front a ways, and I heard some choppers.” He pointed down the valley. “Seem to be coming from that direction.”

They all looked that way then, and a half mile in front of them they heard large helicopters coming in. Then the choppers snapped on landing lights, making six round islands of light in the wilderness of night.

“Goddamnit to hell,” Murdock said. “Lam, get as close as you can and see how many men get off each bird.”

Lam left at a sprint, settled down to a trot, and made a quarter of a mile in fast time. He walked forward carefully. At a hundred yards he went flat on the ground. The last chopper had landed and disgorged its troops.

Lam counted twenty-five combat-ready troopers getting off each chopper. Then the birds lifted off, turned off their landing lights, and flew back to the south.

Murdock was surprised by the number of troops on each bird. “That’s a hundred and fifty men out there looking for us.” He shook his head. “We were making good time. DeWitt and Jaybird, let’s talk.”

They worked it over for five minutes and all agreed. What was open was the direction. Murdock decided that.

“Okay, platoon, listen up. We’re blocked down front. Lam said they were sending out security and what looked like patrols. We can only go around them. We head due east for Pakistan. We’re still about ten to twelve miles from it. We’ll go east for two miles, then swing south again and maintain that heading. Any questions?”

“Only a hundred and a half?” Gonzalez called out. “Hell, L-T, let’s take them. Them ain’t bad odds for SEALs.”

There were some quiet voices of agreement.

“Now I know that Gonzalez has his insurance paid up,” Murdock said. “Okay Lam, lead us out due east.”

Kat came up beside Murdock. She had been step for step with the SEALs all the way.

“Maybe we could go all the way into Pakistan. We’ve had better relations with them than with Iran.”

“Their border guards wouldn’t ask any questions, Kat. They would shoot us down to get our weapons. No chance we’re going across the border. We’ll skirt it if we have to, but we’ll still be eight to ten miles away. We just jog around this bunch and hope for a better tomorrow.”

The landscape changed as they headed east. Here and there they found shrubs and a few trees. In the gullies now were some brush and stunted trees. Murdock hoped they would find some kind of cover like this when daylight came. They could do the hide hole again, but they had been lucky last time. He didn’t believe in straining the fates any more than he had to.

Magic Brown was walking better now, and Doc couldn’t explain it. He asked Chin.

“The physical pain is still there. The injury is there. But the more he forgets about it, and subjugates it, the better he feels, therefore the better he can walk. Once the trance is gone, the pain will come back like gangbusters. Happened to me the time I had a root canal with hypnosis. The dentist was scared as hell. I told him if I came out of it and started screaming, he could shoot me with a bucket of painkiller.”

Dock hesitated. “Chin, with him hypnotized that way, could I go in and hunt for that damned slug?”

“Sure, he won’t feel a thing. Do you have the right kind of instruments?”

“Hell no. I’ve got one probe, a pair of forceps, and a K-bar. About all I have I can use.”

“Might do more damage than leaving it alone.”

“If it’s in there another twenty-four hours, he could lose the leg.”

“Hell, give it a try. I’d check with the L-T, though, first. You’ll need light or daylight. Either one will be risky for the whole platoon.”

Doc talked with Murdock as they hiked along the hills. They were doing more up and down now since the former rivers and any runoff had been going south the way they wanted to go.

Doc explained it to Murdock.

“We’ll wait and see about the light. If we find some cover, it might work. If not, we could start a fire or something in a protected spot and line up everyone around it. Let’s see closer to morning.”

They had made good time the first two miles east, then Lam turned them south again, and they caught a fine valley that made the night march easier.

There were fewer of the shrubs and small trees here, but as they came closer to the coast, Murdock figured there should be more rain, and perhaps more vegetation. They had come another four miles south when Murdock realized it was stopping time. Lam came back with a report that he might have a canyon with some cover. They hiked another ten minutes and just before dawn found it. The brush and trees were no more than three feet tall, but they covered a small canyon ten yards wide and fifty long, as it angled up toward a really large mountain. There must have been some natural runoff here, and any rains would bring down a torrent of fresh water from the catch basin higher up.

Murdock grinned—some good luck at last. The men dug into the tangle of brush and trees and within ten minutes they all had vanished. Murdock pushed in past Kat and found a place he could stretch out. He hit the Motorola.

“I hope all of you are happy with your five-star accommodations. Remember, we’re short on water. Ken, see that Magic gets moved into his sleep mode. I have the first watch. The rest of you can eat an MRE or sack out, whichever you want.

“Doc, let’s think about that job you might do. It looks possible. You could fix up your area for it later this morning when we check out our actual cover in the daylight.”

Lam came on the net. “L-T, I’ve been seeing some lightning to the north. I don’t know how far. That could mean a storm is coming, which would mean rain.”

“So, it will cool us off and we can catch some for our canteens,” Fernandez said.

“Also it could trigger a flash flood. Know what a wall of water ten feet high and racing along at sixty miles an hour can do to a bunch of campers like us?”

Murdock swore again. “And we’re right in the middle of a flood channel for such a torrent if it rains hard in this area. Whoever is on watch, keep an eye on the lightning. That means a spot outside the brush where you’re concealed but can see to the north. This might not be the best spot to hide out after all. But we’ll stay here until the storm hits to the north or bypasses us. Keep a sharp watch to the north.”

29

Murdock decided he’d have to get out of the brush so he could see the north and still have some kind of concealment. He passed Kat as he crawled to the side.

“Is it really going to rain?” she asked.

He noted a touch of weariness in her voice.

“Could. Could be trouble. How you holding up?”

“We haven’t even done a marathon distance yet. I’m fine. Glad Magic is doing better.”

“Yeah, he’s the controlling factor on this one. I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Get some sleep.”

She picked up an MRE. “I think I need some food more than the sleep.”

He continued out of the brush to the side, and found a spot where he could see north past a small hill. He settled in below a shrub with lots of gray leaves, and checked north again. A sudden darting lightning bolt daggered down and out of sight behind the hill.

He didn’t know enough about the weather patterns in southern Iran to know if the lightning was dry or if it
heralded rain. He did know that rain in the desert areas like this one usually came in torrents, suddenly, and in great volume. He remembered eleven hikers in the U.S. desert southwest who were drowned in a sudden flash flood that originated from a rain ten miles away.

It was almost daylight.

Murdock winced when he heard the sound of an aircraft. A jet, probably a fighter, a MiG. It slammed over to the south behind some hills so he never saw it. That meant it was low to the ground. How could you use a Mach one fighter to do a search? It meant that the military was throwing everything they owned into the hunt, whether it would produce results or not.

Something moved to his left. His peripheral vision barely caught it. He turned slowly in that direction, and watched. It was against the hill. The movement came again, and he relaxed. The creature was small and slow, cold-blooded, some kind of a lizard, not more than a foot long. It lifted its head gradually and stared toward him. Did lizards have good eyesight? He figured they didn’t. The creature was ten feet away. Its tongue darted out, evidently testing the air for scents. It turned, and waddled away into some brush, evidently satisfied that the strange creature was not a food source or held any danger.

Murdock almost dozed. The temperature rose as the light increased. They would be in the shade until about noon. A big help. He watched the small area behind them that he could see. There were slices of two slopes, and a gully no wider than the one they were in. He was nearly blind from a good observation point of view, but the concealment was worth ten times that drawback.

He looked over the brushy ravine. Nothing showed that seventeen fighters were hidden there.

Murdock hit the mike. “Doc, come and see me. I’m at the edge of the brush.”

Doc Ellsworth squirmed out of some overhanging shrubs twenty feet below Murdock, walked up, and sat beside him.

“Magic?”

“Ken will help me. He decided to let Magic sleep for two hours to gain some strength. Then he’ll hypnotize him again, and I’ll go in and try to dig out the lead.”

“I want to be there.”

“Right, keep you up to date.”

Doc went back to his spot, and Murdock worked on the MRE he dug out of his pack. The main course was macaroni and cheese. Who worked out these menus anyway? He ate what he could of it, buried the rest, and dug out the mugger.

He set up the antenna and took a shot at the four positioning satellites. When the figures showed up on the readout screen, he copied them down on the edge of the map, then plotted them.

They were now well east of where they had been and, from the distance on the map, still twenty-six miles from the coast. Too damn far. How would Magic react after the cutting today? One lucky Iranian bullet could stop his whole platoon dead in the water.

Nothing else happened until his two hours were up. Murdock called Ron Holt to take the next watch. He gave an acknowledgement on the Motorola, and Murdock headed back for his spot inside the brush.

Kat seemed to be sleeping.

He eased down, making as little noise as possible.

“You do this for a living,” Kat said.

Murdock grinned. “Hell no, I do it for the amazing high it boots me to. I’m a thrill junkie, didn’t you know? There’s no war on, so what’s a fighting man to do? I’m too chicken to start my own war.”

Kat laughed. “Yeah, you say.” She watched him in the full daylight now that filtered into the shaded areas under the thin canopy. “What are you going to do when you grow up?” she asked.

“I don’t know, Kat. I might learn how to tear apart weapons of mass destruction just for the thrill of it. Why do you risk life and limb just to rip apart nukes?”

“I get this amazing high, like a thousand sexual climaxes all at once. I’m a thrill junkie.”

They both chuckled.

“A thousand climaxes?” Murdock said.

“It was a figure of speech.”

“Oh, good, otherwise I figure you must have exploded.”

“You do have a good imagination, I like that.”

“Careful, Dr. Garnet, we still could be expendable.”

“Yeah, Murdock, but what a way to go. I figured I was doing mankind a favor by deactivating some nukes. But over here we just saved what I figure is at least a million lives. Iran would have dropped a bomb on some mid-sized Arab city, I’m sure. A million Arabs we saved. Now they’re trying to kill us.”

“Fortunes of war, Kat. And don’t doubt it, this is a war. You ready for a nap? I sure am.”

Kat grinned. “Does this mean I’m sleeping with you?”

Murdock laughed. “More like sleeping near me. Remember I still outrank you by date of commission.”

“Good night, David.”

“Good night, Chet, and you’re too young to remember them,” Murdock said.

“My dad’s first name is Chet. He told me about them.”

Murdock thought he’d just got to sleep when his Motorola clicked three times. That would be Doc. He eased away from the sleeping Kat and worked out of the brush, and down where Doc had emerged earlier. He saw Joe Douglas on watch, and crawled in where he saw Doc and Ken Ching.

“Hey, L-T. Ken’s got Magic under again. I figure I’ll use a tourniquet around his thigh above the wound to try to slow bleeding. I’ve got two pocket knives and my K-bar. First I’ll
use the wire probe from my kit, and see if I can find the damn bullet.”

Chin held a three-inch hand mirror. He caught a beam of sunlight and bounced it directly on the wound. Doc took a six-inch-long piece of stiff spring steel wire, and gently probed it into the wound. It began bleeding.

He pushed the wire in farther and farther.

“Damn, four inches, and I don’t feel a thing.” He stopped. “There. I can feel it. Christ, I found the bullet. It’s four inches in there.” Doc wiped sweat off his forehead. He took the long-handled surgical pliers, which were slender and had an inch-long grasping head on them. He pressed the head of the tool into the wound. It bled more.

Ching soaked up the blood with a white T-shirt.

Doc sweated.

He pushed the forceps in deeper.

Blood spurted. Ching covered it.

“Another damn inch. Am I killing him? Damn, I’ve never dug into a body this way before.”

“Do it, Doc, or he loses the leg,” Murdock said.