Ambush sts-15

by Keith Douglass

  He looked across the room at a girl who lounged on a round bed. “I’m thirsty,” he said. The girl stood at once, smiled, and hurried out the door. Muhammad nodded. She was a pleasant girl who gave him no trouble. She was topless as usual, and that pleased Muhammad. He glanced at his desk and the list of projects to get done today.

  One item on his list was not to his liking, but had to be done to insure discipline. A recruit, not much more than seventeen, had decided he didn’t like the rebel life after all and had deserted. He had been tracked down, captured, and brought to the stronghold by a roundabout means by a trusted lieutenant. The boy must be dealt with.

  Teta brought in the insulated cup filled with his favorite chilled wine. He thanked her, reached out, and stroked her breasts, so young they still had a slight upthrust. Then he waved her away. He took the cup with him as he left the office and went outside. Three of his best soldiers stood at attention next to a rock wall. Directly in front of them knelt the deserter.

  Muhammad didn’t waste time. He marched to the deserter, lifted his chin, and stared into his eyes.

  “You deserted the holy Muslim troops. You have shamed yourself and your family. For this you must pay.”

  The youth looked at Muhammad and nodded. Muhammad went behind him, drew the .45 pistol from his holster, and fired one shot into the back of the deserter’s head. The youth slammed forward, his arms flying out to the sides as his face scraped in the grass of the yard.

  “Send him back to his family for a traditional burial,” the rebel leader said. Then he went back into his office. The wine in his cup was almost gone. He needed some more.

  Near Camp Bunga

  Lam had nearly finished the radio call to Murdock when the first shot slammed past him and hit a tree. He signed off, grabbed the antenna and radio, and bolted out of there.

  “Incoming,” he bellowed at Juan, who had slid behind a tree when he heard the first shot. He turned his MP-5 and sprayed the whole clip at the direction the fire flashes came from. He jerked out the empty and pushed in a new clip.

  “Move to the rear, I’ll cover you,” Juan yelled. “Go now.” He fired again at the single flashes from below and to the right. He had no idea how the patrol had found them. They had only single-shot rifles. That was good. Maybe a squad in training. He fired spaced shots now, three here, then another three. It kept the attackers’ heads down.

  “I’ll cover you now,” Lam shouted from forty feet to the side of the hill. As soon as the shots came from Lam, Juan grabbed his combat vest and small pack and surged toward Lam. It was across the face of the hill and not that hard moving. He felt something sting his leg, but kept going. A graze maybe. A few seconds later he dove behind a fallen log and out of the line of fire.

  “Where did they come from?” Lam asked.

  “You’re the ears,” Juan said. “First I heard them was that first shot somebody fired too soon. They knew where we were; they should have closed in and cut us to pieces before we knew they were there.”

  “Thanks for green troops,” Lam said. “We better keep moving along the hill. If we don’t fire, they won’t know where we are. The growth is too thick here for them to spot us.”

  They ran along the hill, then climbed higher and went along the side of the slope again. Lam figured they were a mile from the first attack and he called a halt.

  He held up his hand and listened. Shook his head. “Nobody back there. Hasn’t been for the last half mile. They gave up on us. Green as grass in-training troops.”

  “So what should we do now?” Juan asked.

  “Get back in touch with Murdock. Lay out a sked for tomorrow on the town. I’d bet he’s left his set on to receive. I didn’t tell him where to come.”

  Lam checked their back trail, listened intently again, then set up the dish antenna so it would pick up the satellite. He closed his eyes and listened again.

  “Nobody out there for a mile at least.” He turned on the set and made the call.

  “Yes, Scout, sounded like you were attacked.”

  “We were, Home Plate. Some green troops in training, we figured. They should have riddled us like a pair of sat-down ducks. We were lucky. I didn’t tell you where this camp is. Figured you’d want to know. It’s about twenty-five miles below the one we hit where we had the good firefight.”

  “Twenty-five miles downstream. Shouldn’t be hard to find. Our LZ will be which side of it?”

  “Upstream three to four miles on the west bank. Can’t really go downstream because the valley flattens out into farmland.”

  “Roger that. Same time. We have the place. You guys dig a hole somewhere and wait for us. Don’t get fancy and try to do anything by yourselves.”

  “We’ll go find an LZ and stay put. I can see a long nap before bedtime.”

  “Do it and we’ll talk to you just before we take off at 1900. Home Plate, out.”

  “Right, Home Plate. See you there.”

  Lam folded up the dish antenna and packed it with the SATCOM. “Nothing like modern communications,” Lam said. “Let’s get out of here and find a good LZ three or four miles upstream from the town.”

  They found it about 0100. It was maybe five miles from the town, Juan figured, but a great spot. Here a small piece of farmland had been carved out along a tributary that came into the main stream. There was an open space of two or three acres on this side of the river that had been recovered from the encroaching jungles. Now it was dry, but there was a two-foot dike all around the field like in a terrace. Only here there was but one level. It could be flooded from a short canal from upstream. Part of the field was still green. The area nearest the river was harvested, and Lam guessed rice had been the crop.

  They moved back away from the LZ to the first lift of a ridgeline, and found a level spot just in back of the top. They could stretch out there and sleep and still get to the ridgeline in seconds to check out the trail along the river and the farmed field.

  They relaxed.

  “Should we stand guard?” Juan asked.

  “Oh, yeah. Take your pick, 0100 to 0300 or 0300 to 0600.”

  “Hey, I’ll take the first shift. You get some sleep. Don’t worry, I won’t go to sleep. I value my Filipino hide too much for that. They could have a night patrol out roaming around. If I hear them or see them, we’ll be fine.”

  Lam hesitated. Now to 0300 was the most dangerous time for night patrols. He lifted his brows. The guy was an officer in the Army. He should know what he was doing. No complaints so far. Lam changed his mind in a flash.

  “Hell, no, Juan. I want the first shift, worst time for nighttime raiders. I can hear them better than you can. You get some sleep. I’ll wake you up at 0300.”

  “Either way. Yeah, I am a bit tired.” He lay down and propped his head on his pack, and was sleeping by the time Lam found his OP on the ridgeline.

  Nothing happened for an hour and a half. Just after 0230 Lam heard movement in the growth below. He hated how the jungle ate up the sounds, but enough noise was there. He tried to count the men, but he couldn’t. The moon was out halfway and gave some light in the heavy growth.

  Then a man ran across an open space two hundred yards away. The motion caught Lam’s eye. He put his binoculars on the spot. At night the glasses magnified the image, and also magnified the light. Not as good as NVGs, but they helped. He saw the next man go across. All had new-looking uniforms. They had field packs and rifles, canteens, but no blanket rolls or shelter halves. A patrol.

  Lam watched them for another fifteen minutes as they worked their way slowly closer to the ridge where he crouched. If they came too close, he’d have to wake Juan and haul ass. He watched them through the glasses. The lead man looked tired. He kept moving across the face of the slope instead of going up it. Somebody would yell at him and he’d go up a step, and then to the left again.

  Lam’s finger gently caressed the MP-5’s trigger. He could nail all six of them right there in the opening and nobody would hear a
shot. They were too far from the camp and the jungle muffled the sound like a blanket. He moved the sights to the first man. Three-shot bursts from one to the other, right down the line. The fools were no more than two or three feet apart. Bad soldiering.

  He eased his finger off the trigger.

  No. Not his mission. They would pay, but it would be later tomorrow night when the whole SEAL platoon was there and they were taking down selected targets like bowling pins.

  Yes, wait.

  Then moments later a new leader took over, and he moved straight up the slope. When he crossed it he would be only a dozen feet from where Lam lay. Lam pulled the MP-5 down so the muzzle aimed at the men. Seventy-five yards away. How long could he wait? He blotted sweat off his forehead. He should wake up Juan.

  12

  A sharp command came from behind the rebels, and they turned in stride and worked their way back down the slope and in the direction of their camp.

  Lam wiped sweat from his forehead. He decided not to wake up Juan right then. He’d tell him about it at 0300.

  Nothing else happened the rest of the night. The word about the patrol coming so close was enough to keep Juan alert for the next three hours. Then the pair picked up and hiked over the next hill, and two miles deeper into the untarnished wilderness. At 0700 they stopped and used the SATCOM.

  Lam told about their close call the night before, and emphasized the idea that the town might be expecting some kind of an attack since they had found two strangers with automatic weapons on their doorstep.

  “They might be ready, but we’ll be ready too,” Murdock said. “I had an early meeting with General Domingo this morning. Alvarez has been placed under arrest and will probably be charged with treason, misappropriation of funds and equipment, bribery, conduct unbecoming, and all sorts of nasty stuff. General Domingo says we get anything we want. He brought in three forty-sixes. Turned out there were only two here despite what Alvarez said. Now we’re ready when we track down the hostages.”

  “Don’t think we’ll find them on this shot,” Lam said. “We’ll have to keep our eyes and ears open about where they might be. Juan says some of the rebels wear red tabs on their shoulders. That may be our only sign who the leaders are.”

  “Roger that. It’s in our briefing. You find a better hole?”

  “Right, we’re three miles from the river, and snuggled down for a long daytime nap. Next we’re going to try out those new MREs they gave us this time. Supposed to be better than what we had before. About it. We’re out.”

  “We’ll check again 1900 to keep our ducks in a row. We’ll leave the receive button on here in the meantime in case you need to call. Home Plate, out.”

  “New MREs,” Juan said. “Let’s try them, right now.”

  They dug out the large brown plastic envelopes and tore them open. “Mine says menu number one: grilled beefsteak,” Lam said. He looked at what was inside. It contained the main meal in a plastic pouch. There was another long plastic pouch that could be used to heat up the entree. “It’s called a nonflammable ration heater,” Juan said. “You just put some water into it, insert your main meal pouch, seal it, and it heats the food piping hot in a few minutes.”

  They tried it and it worked. Juan had menu number ten, chili and macaroni. Also in the large MRE pouch were packets of salt and sugar, Taster’s Choice coffee, a non-dairy creamer package, a Tootsie Roll, a Jolly Rancher bar, a tiny bottle of Tabasco sauce, a plastic tray and plastic spoon, iced-tea-drink mix, a book of matches, crackers, an envelope of peanut butter, an envelope of jam, and a Hooah! Nutritious Booster Bar.

  “How do we heat the water for coffee?” Juan said. They tried putting water in the heating envelope, and it worked. They ate, drank, and decided the Hooah! Bars were the hit of the meal.

  “Better than most airline food,” Lam said. “You should see some of the junk they try to feed you on those airlines. Our Senior Chief, who picked these up, said that there were twenty-four different menus. He mentioned beef strips in teriyaki sauce, chicken breast strips with salsa, black bean and rice burrito, and boneless pork chop with noodles. How many more do we have?”

  They each had two more, and checked what the main courses were. Two each of chicken breast strips and boneless pork chops.

  “So much for our gourmet food,” said Lam. “What are we going to do today?”

  “Hide out here, sleep, and sharpen our KA-BARs,” Juan said.

  “Mine won’t get any sharper,” Lam said. He jolted up from where he lay on the grassy mat under the trees. He pointed to his left. Lam had heard noises; something moved through the heavy growth. Somebody in Davao had said that there were more then ten thousand kinds of flowering plants and shrubs in the Philippines. Looking at the overgrown lush tropical rain forest now, Lam believed it.

  The sound came again, foliage crashing and a grunting sound.

  Before Lam could lift his MP-5 a wild pig as big as a German shepherd darted out of some heavy green growth and charged straight at where he lay. An instant later a man jolted through the cover and threw a wooden spear that hit the pig in the side and lanced all the way through. The animal sprawled, then rolled, trying to get rid of the lance. The man was short, no more than four feet tall, and dark with stringy black hair. He took a knife from a belt and slashed the animal’s throat. Lam stood and the small man turned, holding the knife pointing at Lam.

  “I’m a friend,” Lam said. The small man scowled, then wiped the bloody blade on the side of the dead wild pig and pulled out his spear.

  “Friends from America,” Lam said.

  The small black man rolled his eyes and looked at the pig, then back at Lam. Behind Lam, Juan stood and rattled off a dozen words in some strange tongue that Lam figured was Filipino.

  The small man relaxed and put down the spear. He grinned.

  “You GI. Me go teach GI jungle survival at old Navy base at Subic Bay.”

  Juan moved up and shook hands with the small man. They squatted near the pig and talked in the other Philippine official language, English.

  The small man stood and walked over to Lam. “GI call me Blackie. You come my house, we have feast.”

  Lam looked at Juan, who nodded. “How better can we spend the day? The food will be good. These guys are the best hunter/gatherers in the world. They roam around the hills, drop down to the lowlands for coconuts, make out like crazy. The government has even set aside a huge reserve for several of the minorities where no logging or trespassing can be done. I’ve seen these guys work before. They are good. Spears and knives, that’s their weapons. They don’t trust guns.”

  “How far?” Lam asked.

  Juan translated. “Blackie says two ridges, which could be two miles or ten. My guess about three or four miles. It won’t come close to the town. They stay well away from the roads, camps, and guns.”

  “Hell, why not?” Lam said, and they picked up their gear and walked. The spear had been rammed through the pig from the open mouth and out the tail. Lam carried one end of the lance and Blackie the other. Lam figured the wild pig must weigh about 120 pounds. His shoulder got sore, and he traded off with Juan. Blackie didn’t notice; he just kept hiking up the side of the slope and through the growth of evergreen trees, bamboo, and a few banana trees. Blackie stopped at one banana cluster of trees and looked at a three-foot-long stalk with twenty or thirty hands of bananas. He shook his head.

  “Too fucking far walk carry,” he said. Lam laughed and they moved ahead.

  They soon passed through growth of teakwood trees and a sprinkling of towering Philippine mahogany trees. Lam figured they were well over 150 feet tall. The jungle was so green, and up here on the slope it didn’t feel all that tropical wet. Lam started to sweat. The average temperature hovered around eighty degrees, Juan had told him. Up here on the slope it was cooler, but not much.

  After a half hour of hiking they moved down a slope, and Lam could smell, then soon see small spirals of smoke rising through the trees. They ca
me into a village that was so temporary it had only small lean-tos, with the tops made of nipa palm fronds. Two women and six children ran to meet Blackie as the little caravan arrived. The women grabbed the lance with the pig and hurried it to a large rock, where they began butchering it. At once slabs of the meat were cut out, taken to a small cooking fire, and dropped into two heavy cast-iron skillets.

  “Out here these people, who are called Negritos, eat when and where they can,” Juan said. “No three squares a day here. It’s feast or famine, but with these people, it’s usually feast. They can harvest a dozen kinds of fruit from the jungle, including bananas and cassava, which makes tapioca, or the roots can be used to make flour like meal. Down near the coast they can find coconuts, and there are a few deer around and if they get really hungry, monkeys and crocodiles down on the rivers near the coast.”

  Blackie wore only cut-off jeans. Lam had no idea where he’d gotten them. The two women wore-loose fitting dark cloth skirts and no tops. The children, all under ten, wore nothing at all. The kids and women clustered around the pig, and soon it had been cleaned and skinned and the head put in a special iron pot.

  Soup later on, Lam thought and grinned. Wild pig-head soup. Not high on his eating list.

  Blackie took pride in introducing his two wives to his guests. They spoke no English at all, but Juan talked with them in Filipino.

  Blackie said that usually they lived much higher on the mountain and farther from the coast. His wives wanted coconuts, so he’d brought the family here. He would make nighttime trips lower where the coconuts grew, and harvest some to take back to his village.

  “How many people at the village?” Lam asked.

  Blackie grinned. “How many I know. I speak how many. Yes, maybe thirty. I learn count in Subic Bay but not good. No?”

  They all laughed. “You count good, Blackie, good,” Lam said. He looked around, and could see almost nothing that would be moved. The lean-tos would stay; the fire pit held only the three cast-iron skillets and pot. There were no bedrolls, no bundles of clothes, no eating utensils that he could see. It was a camp ready to move at any time.