Deathrace (28 page)

“L-T. Like I told Magic, his leg doesn’t look any better. A little more swelling. There’s infection inside the wound that I can’t get to. That slug has got to come out in thirty-six hours.”

“Right, Doc. We’ll try to figure something.” He checked his watch. It was 1042. Too damn much daylight left. He figured this first day would be the hardest, while they were the closest to the nuke plant.

“Let’s get some more sleep,” Murdock said. “Who’s on watch?”

“I am,” Kat said.

Murdock started to protest, then shook his head. “Good, Kat. Stay awake, stay alert to any sound or sight that might get us in trouble. Yell into your mike if that chopper comes back or you see any paratroopers hitting the silk.”

“Aye, aye, L-T. I can do that.”

Murdock lifted the edge of his camo cloth and looked over at Kat. She had pushed up a little so her face was out of the camo. It gave her a good view of the canyon and the hills beyond and the sky. She was set.

Murdock couldn’t go to sleep. The adrenaline still pulsated through his system. It had been close with that chopper. One loose chunk of camo cover and they would have been made. Running in the daylight would have been fatal for them.

At least eight more hours of daylight. What else could go wrong?

“Murdock. Murdock. Wake up, L-T.”

Murdock came out of his sleep rubbing his eyes, almost pushing the camo cloth away, then he remembered. “Yes, Kat?”

“Yes. We’ve got a plane. Bigger one, at least two propellers up high. Seems to be cruising around waiting for some instructions. I’ve seen it three times now. Must be up four or five thousand feet. Could be more. Not going fast, so it isn’t a jet. Sounds like a prop plane.”

“I saw it,” Les Quinley said. “Must have been the last pass. Kat’s right, it’s up high, just cruising. My guess is paratroopers. Not more than, maybe, fifteen in a crate like that.”

“Figures,” Murdock said. “They could fly a plane up here from Chah Bahar. If they have paratroopers there, they could dump them out of anything that flew and had a door to open.”

“Sure, but they still need a pinpoint location to drop them,” DeWitt chimed in. “That they don’t have because the chopper and the spotter plan haven’t given them one yet. We’re still in the ball game.”

“Yeah, but when do we get to bat?” It was Ken Ching.

“We had our first inning ups,” Murdock said. “Back there on that hill last night, and we hit a home run. Now we wait
for our next shot at batting. Until then it’s a waiting game. Not a damn thing we can do until it gets dark.”

“Seven more fucking hours!” somebody said.

Murdock checked his watch. 1208. “Who’s next on watch?”

“I’ll do it,” Al Adams said. “Can’t sleep on this damn gravel mattress anyway.”

“So, the rest of you, get some sleep. It’s going to be one hell of a long night once we get in motion.”

“Murdock.” It was Kat across the way.

He turned away from his lip mike. “Yes, Kat.”

“I keep thinking about that damn movie.”

“That was another time, another war. Hell, we had over four hundred thousand dead in World War Two. That’s the war that movie was about, the Expendables. Couple of dozen more was nothing back then.”

“Except for that couple of dozen.”

“True.” There was a long silent time.

“So we’re seventeen,” Murdock said. “We have more accidental deaths than that every year in the services. One year the Navy lost almost three hundred men and women dead in auto crashes while off duty.”

“Yeah, but you’re on duty,” Kat said. “I’ve been thinking about Magic. There is no way he can last three or four days. Not a chance he can walk another, what, forty miles, or more. Hell, Murdock, maybe we are expendable.”

“No chance. Shut up that kind of talk. We’re all getting out of here, every one of us. Magic included. Now, Lieutenant Kat, I fully expect you to get to sleep. You’ll need the rest once we start moving with the darkness.”

“Yes, Daddy,” she said. He could imagine that sneaky grin of hers.

He snorted and closed his eyes. He figured he’d just rest them a minute.

When he woke up, it was 1640. He let the camo part
briefly and looked around. He couldn’t see anybody. Good. He positioned the lip mike.

“Who is on watch?”

“Washington,” the answer came back.

“Anything moving?”

“No, sir. No planes or choppers, nothing except one hyper mouse of some kind and a giant tarantula. Each thinks he’s going to eat the other one.”

Murdock eased back his camo cloth and sat up, resting his back against the sculptured dirt. He took a much folded topographical map of the area from inside his shirt and checked it. He had plotted in the exact location of the plant previously, using the mugger. Now he estimated the distance they had moved south. Was it six or eight miles?

He wanted to know. He took out the mugger. It was the size of a cellular phone and had been in his webbing. He pulled out a small antenna they had adapted for land use, turned on the set, and let it search for the closest four Global Positioning Satellites in high orbit overhead.

Within a few seconds they were locked on and reported his exact location within a plus or minus ten feet. He read the alphanumerical figures on the small screen. They were longitude and latitude. He checked the map again, made a few wavy lines from the borders, and nailed down the position. They were a little over ten miles from the plant. That left forty miles.

Magic, Magic, Magic. He put the mugger away and tried to come up with something that would work. That one small plane, with ten to twenty paratroopers, could blow up into ten or twelve large transports with a hundred paratroops in each one. They could bring in truckloads of infantry when the SEALs got closer to the coast. Damnit, Iran could seal off the coast from them with five thousand troops if they really wanted to.

From everything he had seen so far, somebody wanted to
catch them so bad that he would use every available man and machine that Iran had at its military command.

The watch changed. Murdock was still thinking about what to do when the sun slid behind the mountain to the west and dusk fell.

“Up and at ’em,” Murdock said in the mike. “Time to haul ourselves out of here and make some time down the road.”

Doc was the first one to Murdock, even before he had his cammo sheet folded and packed.

“Better come and talk to Magic, L-T. He’s not good. We’re gonna have to do something to keep him with us.”

28

“Magic? How bad is he? What do you mean do something to keep him with us?”

“Not fatal, no, he’s in good spirits. His damn leg is hurting like crazy. I’ve overdosed him on morphine as it is. What I think we better do is trash his pistol and K-bar, all of his equipment. Dig a hole for it. He can’t carry anything but himself. Somebody else has the fifty and the ammo.”

All around them men came out of their holes, dusted off the cammo cloth, and folded it up. Murdock knelt down beside Magic, who sat on the ground.

“Hey, Magic. Shuck out of that combat vest. You don’t need to carry that anymore. We’ll leave it here for the stupid Iranians. Put it in your hole and have the guys kick it full of dirt from the sides. Nobody will find it for a hundred years. How are you feeling?”

“Hurts like hell, L-T. Got myself fucked up good this time. Holding up the march. Fuck it!”

“No sweat. We’re going to get out of here. Dark now, and they can’t see us, so we move on down the trail. Another good night of hiking, and we’ll be close to the water.”

“Try my damnedest, L-T.”

Murdock slapped him on the shoulder gently, and went back to his hole. He had his gear on, and his weapon in hand in a minute, and checked around. Nobody could tell that they had been there. Kat stood waiting for him.

“Magic?”

“Not good. We’ll be moving at his pace.”

Murdock sent Lam out front, then brought up Magic and Ronson in line right behind Kat. Magic had his arm across Ronson’s shoulder. Just moving fifty feet was work for Magic. They hiked back down to the small valley, and used it for half a mile before they had to climb another of the never-ending hills.

Murdock figured they were making less than two miles an hour now. Magic was dragging one foot as he moved forward.

Just past 2040, Lam came back and called to Murdock.

“Got some company up front. Don’t know where they came from, but they’re on a damned picnic. Three big fires, and what must be about twenty small cooking fires. You better take a look.”

The moon had come out from behind some clouds, and the outline of a valley fully a quarter of a mile wide showed in the dim light. In the center of it were the fires. Voices floated up from half a mile away. Murdock figured the valley was a mile long. A huge open space in this maze of ridges, canyons, gullies, and mountains.

“Must be a hundred men down there,” Murdock said. “Twenty cooking fires and five men to a fire. Too many for us. Can we slip by at the left-hand edge of the valley? It looks like they’re slightly toward the right side.”

“I’ll go take a look. Be a lot easier on Magic if we can. How’s he doing?”

“Not the best. As long as he can walk, we move.”

The men, and Kat, moved up to the edge of the valley and
waited for Lam. He moved out like a shadow, and was soon lost in the nighttime haze.

Ten minutes later, he came back.

“Yeah, lots of room, as long as we don’t talk or rattle. They don’t have any security out, no patrols, from what I could tell. I hope they don’t surprise us.”

Al Adams took Ronson’s place, helping Magic and the file move out. They were five yards apart now, in combat mode, just in case a lucky round or fragger came in. That way it could nail only one man.

They moved silently along the open valley. It was smooth and flat, and looked like it might have been a huge lake at one time. They came near the Iranian troops, heard them shouting and laughing, and moved on past without a word.

When they were at the end of the valley, they lifted up and over a slight rise, then Lam had a new bearing for them. Again they angled to the right, and went along a new small valley, then over another low ridge and down a narrow ravine into what might have been a streambed, which lasted for almost a mile. Then it simply vanished.

“Underground,” DeWitt said. “The ancient river probably went underground at this point.”

They took a break. Magic sat down and Doc looked at his leg. It was swollen more. It had started bleeding again. Doc replaced the bandage and wrapped it. Magic gritted his teeth through it all.

Ken Ching came up and talked to Magic.

“Hey, man, you ever been hypnotized?”

“No, I don’t want to run around flapping my arms and crowing like a chicken.”

Ken laughed. “Not that show business stuff, the real medical kind of hypnotism.”

“Nope, not me. Nobody’s gonna dangle a watch in front of me and put me out. I want to know what I’m doing.”

Ken shrugged. “Just wondered. Hypnotism is sometimes used to control intense pain.”

“Hell, not me.”

Ken waved and moved back to his gear. Doc followed him.

“Ching, you can hypnotize people?”

“Sure, been doing it for years. I do myself when I go to the dentist, no Novocain that way.”

“Let me work on Magic. If you hypnotized him, the pain would still be there, but he wouldn’t feel it?”

“Right. He’d still limp and walk with a lot of trouble, but the pain would be gone.”

“I’ll get back to you.”

They moved out again.

Murdock listened to what Doc had to say about Ken Ching.

“Yes, it works,” Murdock said. “But Magic would have to want to be hypnotized before he’d go under. Talk about it to the big guy.”

Murdock checked his watch. 2300. They had been on the move for over two hours. Murdock figured they had covered five miles at the most. He wasn’t sure how Magic did it. If he went down, their run would be over.

A half hour later, they had managed another small ridge, worked through one more half-mile valley, and climbed up another slope. Doc Ellsworth came back to Murdock.

“Magic says what the fuck, give it a try. Ken says we won’t even have to stop walking. He’ll do it all with his voice. If you hear some mumbling and grumbling back here, that’s what it is.”

Murdock sagged back a few steps to listen.

“Magic, you know me. You know I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you in any way, right?”

“Yeah, man, right.”

“Okay, I’m going to hypnotize you. That just means that you and I will work together to put you in a kind of trance. In this trance you won’t do anything that you wouldn’t do
ordinarily. I can’t turn you into a rapist or a robber or anything like that. Do you understand?”

“Yeah, get on with it.”

Murdock moved away then, checked with Lam, and they angled to the right this time to keep on their southern route.

When he got back, Doc waited for him.

“Damn that was cool. Magic went under in about a minute. Ken said he was a good subject. For the past five hundred yards, he hasn’t groaned once or said anything about pain. He’s even walking better. No foot drag, which might have been psychological. He’s good for a fast three miles an hour, so we can step it up if you want to.”

They did.

Twice before midnight they heard planes flying over. Some were obviously prop-powered and small. Two or three times they heard jets streaking overhead.

“Tomorrow is not going to be an easy twelve hours of daylight,” Murdock said.

They took a break at 0100. Magic was talking and joking with the guys around him. Doc checked the leg wound and found no new bleeding.

“Magic, how you doing?” Murdock asked, squatting down beside where the big black man sat.

“Fucking good, L-T. How the hell you doing?”

“I’m gonna make it, Magic. Got to get us wet so we can talk turkey with that fucking submarine.”

“Oh, yeah, in the wet this damn leg won’t bother me none. It don’t want to work right. Doc says I got shot.”

“Just a scratch. Don’t worry about it.”