DeWitt had just bolted from the tree line when a glow came through the trees and headlights began to emerge from around the bend. DeWitt dropped flat. Murdock cursed. If anything happened now he was separated from the bulk of his men by the open road.
The lights flashed past and headed down the road. DeWitt got up and scrambled across. Murdock gave silent thanks for Lebanese drivers. They went so fast they’d miss an elephant grazing by the side of the road. DeWitt slid into the trees and found Murdock.
“How’s your arm?” Murdock whispered, worried that DeWitt had damaged it even more when he’d hit the deck.
“Hurts,” DeWitt replied bluntly.
Ask a stupid question, thought Murdock. When Doc came across, he sent him over to DeWitt.
Doc checked him out and came back over to report. “He landed right on the arm, but the fracture still didn’t go compound. I gave him another shot. Don’t know how he kept from yelling when he hit the ground. Tough little bastard.” Having dispensed his highest praise, Doc slipped back into formation.
No more cars showed up, and the rest of the SEALs crossed without any difficulty. They pushed on. It was getting alarmingly bright. Murdock called a halt for another conference.
“If we stop here,” he said, “we’re right in the middle of a box of roads, with another road cutting across the box. I don’t like it, but to get out of the box we’ve got to patrol in daylight and cross another dirt road.”
“The roads all form boxes,” Razor replied. “One after the other.” He pointed to the map. “But the box after the next, a little over ten klicks away, is a hell of a lot bigger. The ground is higher, and at least there aren’t any villages nearby if we keep going.”
“So what you’re trying to say is that you want to go?” Murdock asked.
Razor nodded.
“Staying here doesn’t feel right,” said DeWitt.
“Okay,” said Murdock. “Then we go nice and easy. I want to take two hours to move the ten klicks. If we take three, I won’t be pissed. Right?” he asked Jaybird, who had been brought into the circle.
“You got it, sir.”
Murdock pointed his pencil at a spot on the map. “I want to establish a patrol base near this high ground, and an observation post on the high ground. Any problems with that?”
There were none. In a perfect world Murdock would have preferred to establish the patrol base while it was still dark. It was a shame the world wasn’t perfect.
Jaybird set a careful pace. Take a step, carefully scan your assigned sector of observation, then take another step. The SEALs were spread so far apart that it would take an ambush the size of two full platoons, around sixty men, to catch them all in a single killing zone. They refilled their canteens in a stream and crossed another dirt road. As Razor had said, at least it was a bigger box, about six miles east-west by three miles north-south. Five ridges ran east to west across it. It took a little time to find the right spot for a patrol base, a secure area where they could hide out. The rules were that a patrol base had to have good cover and concealment and be away from human habitation. It ought not to be ground that a military unit could easily move through, or would even choose to move through. All roads, trails, or natural lines of movement had to be avoided. They found it in a large thicket of brush and brambles in low ground that probably held water during the spring rains. The SEALs didn’t head right in, instead patrolling past the thicket. Then they circled back onto their own trail and set up an ambush to snare anyone who might be following them.
They sat motionless for an hour and a half. No one showed up.
Doc Ellsworth went into the thicket first, on his hands and knees. He didn’t trample and break down the bushes, instead parting the branches and working his way through carefully. The rest of the SEALs followed, in his exact path. Razor Roselli went in last, smoothing out the marks in the earth and bending the branches back into place. When he finished there was no trail, and no open spots in the thicket. Anyone following would have to pass along the original trail that led past the thicket, thereby alerting them.
Murdock and Jaybird had remained outside. By necessity, the patrol base had to be located in an area where visibility was restricted. Murdock intended to find an observation point where he could get a good look at what was happening in the surrounding countryside.
There was a dominating hill nearby, within MX-300 walkie-talkie range. And if by some chance they couldn’t return to the others, Jaybird was carrying the second, backup PRC-117.
When the two of them reached the hill, Murdock carefully circled around the entire base, looking for trails or any sign of human presence. They found none, so they worked their way up.
They avoided the top. While observation might be best there, it would be equally easy for someone else to observe them. It had to be a place they could move out from under cover if they detected the enemy observing them.
They found an out-thrust corner of the hill that afforded a good view in three directions. Murdock removed his MSG-90 sniper rifle from the drag bag and set the rifle up on its bipod legs. The Hensoldt 10-power telescopic sight would be his observation device. Jaybird cut some brush to camouflage their position.
The sun had risen far enough to use the telescopic sight without fear of a reflection off the glass. SEALs used the sniper’s trick of fitting lens hoods to the ends of their scopes; just a piece of plastic tubing that extended out from the objective end of the sight. With the hood in place, there would be no lens reflection unless the sun was directly in the scope’s field of view. It took a lot of effort to be that careless.
Perfectly concealed, Murdock scanned the area through the scope. It took some time, because the telescope had a very narrow field of view.
They were around six thousand feet up, and the surrounding hills and ridges were in the four-to-five-thousand-foot range. Murdock could even see Baalbek. He couldn’t make out the warehouse, but a pall of smoke still hung over the town from the fire, or fires.
Vehicles were racing around the town, and up and down the Bekaa highway.
Then Murdock was alarmed to see a long line of military trucks, armored personnel carriers, and even a few tanks speeding up the same route they’d taken in the Mercedes. They were heading straight for the village of Bteday.
27
Saturday, November 11
0945 hours North central Lebanon
The Syrians were responding a hell of a lot faster than Murdock had expected them to. He’d been counting on it taking at least a day to get their shit together. Perhaps the firefight with the smugglers had attracted even more attention than he’d thought.
Murdock couldn’t see what the trucks did when they reached Bteday; a ridgeline was in his way. Several light observation helicopters that looked like the French Gazelles flown by the Syrians were buzzing up and down the valley. Confident of the SEALs’ camouflage, Murdock wasn’t worried about the helicopters.
Finally, the strain on his eyes from the scope was too much. Sitting still made him aware of the twenty-four hours worth of stress and fatigue he’d been fighting. He turned the rifle over to Jaybird and dug in his pockets for the mocha energy bar he knew was there somewhere.
The sun was warming up the ground wonderfully. Murdock was even enjoying the smell of the brush Jaybird had cut to cover them. It was like rosemary.
Then he was in the midst of a dream about being chased; he ran and ran and couldn’t make any progress no matter how hard he tried. Then he shot awake. Jaybird was shaking him.
“Sorry to wake you up, sir.”
“Why did you let me sleep?” Murdock grumbled, furious with himself for giving in to it. Doubly furious for sleeping while one of his men had to stay awake.
“Thought you ought to see this,” said Jaybird, scooting out from behind the rifle.
Murdock locked the stock against his shoulder and followed where Jaybird’s finger was pointing. It was the secondary road Ed DeWitt had had so much trouble crossing. A lo
ng line of troops was crossing the road, along what seemed like its entire length.
“Looked to me like at least a battalion, maybe two,” said Jaybird. “And check this out.”
All the villages within view and most of the road intersections were occupied by at least a couple of military vehicles and milling troops. They were on every road that came off the Bekaa highway, every road that led into the mountains, from Bteday all the way up to a secondary road that passed far north of their hill. The box of roads, Murdock thought. How fitting he’d called it that. Because they were in the damn box.
Jaybird gestured around. “There’s the cordon, to hold us in,” he said. Then he pointed back to the troops, who had by now crossed the road and disappeared into the trees. “And there’s the sweep.”
“Sweeping toward us,” said Murdock. “To flush us into the cordon.”
“Yup,” Jaybird agreed. “From Baalbek to the checkpoint we busted, the Mercedes, and then on to the smugglers, Pretty soon to Kos’s body. The sons of bitches are just connecting the dots.”
28
Saturday, November 11
1215 hours North central Lebanon
From his vantage point, Murdock considered the situation. He thought the Syrian sweep was a serious development but not a catastrophic one. The advance on line was the most difficult military formation to control. Anyone who had tried it with only a few troops over a short distance knew how hard it was. To do it with more than a thousand troops over miles of woods and broken ground was well-nigh impossible without breaks in the line, units getting ahead of or behind each other, and frequent stops to sort things out. Seven men ought to be able to either evade or slip through that force. It was something SEALs specialized in.
The main problem, as Murdock saw it, was bringing helicopters into the midst of such a concentration of enemy, even at night. It was going to be tricky. And, like all ground commanders in the age of the helicopter, he wasn’t quite sure how much information to give out. If you told the truth about how bad it was, they might not come and get you. If you didn’t, they might come in using the wrong routes or tactics and get shot down, also putting you in the lurch. He wasn’t worried about the 160th. It was the CIA’s timidity that had gotten them into the present situation, and Murdock didn’t intend to test their resolve any more than he had to.
He would have loved to consult with Razor Roselli just then, but he had to assume that the Syrian electronic warfare units had also come out to the field that Saturday. With modern equipment, even a short transmission from an MX-300 was way too easy to get a fix on.
The essence of war was the right place and the right time, and Murdock intended to choose well. He estimated that the Syrian sweep line would reach the patrol base in an hour and a half, two hours at the outside.
“As nice as it is up here,” he said to Jaybird, “I think we’d better get back to the platoon.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hey, Jaybird?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Stop calling me sir, will you? After all this time it just makes me think you’re fucking with me.”
Jaybird’s grin was enormous. “Yes, sir.”
Murdock sighed.
They eased their way down the hill and back to the patrol base. And after an exchange of birdcalls, the backup signal to a radio message, they got into the patrol base without being shot by their fellow SEALS. It had happened.
“I love it how the breaks just keep getting better and better,” said Razor Roselli after Murdock gave him the news.
All the SEALs were in a tight circle. Shoulder-to-shoulder, face-to-face. “Comments?” Murdock requested.
“Make some hides, let them walk right past us?” Higgins suggested.
“We don’t have time to dig good ones,” said Doc. “These woods are so open, if a Syrian took a wrong step and fell into just one hide, we’d all be screwed.”
“What the Syrians are counting on,” Magic Brown weighed in, “is that we’ve got the wide-open valley and fields to our east, and another thousand feet of mountains that are just bare rocks to our west. These woods aren’t more than three miles across at the widest point. Look how long we had to patrol to find enough cover to cross the damn roads. We’re going to have a hell of a time maneuvering around to find a gap in their lines.”
“I was watching how they’re doing the sweep,” said Jaybird. “Every time they came to a road everyone would automatically stop. That way whoever fell behind got a chance to catch up. Then, when they were all on the road, all covered and aligned, they’d start up again. It worked pretty good, ‘cause there’s dirt roads cutting across these woods every couple of miles. So if we’re going to make a move, it has to be just before they reach a road and get themselves unfucked. That’s when they’re the most disorganized and vulnerable.” He looked around the circle to see what everyone was thinking.
“Keep going,” Murdock urged. “You’re on a roll.”
“Okay,” Jaybird said, feeding off the enthusiasm. “What we’ve got to do is think a couple of moves ahead of them, like Magic does in chess.”
Imagining he was hearing his game slandered, Razor’s eyes narrowed. “Now,” said Jaybird, “What I was thinking is this.
Listening, Murdock felt once again that any officer who thought he had all the answers was an asshole.
When Jaybird finished, Razor Roselli was the first to speak. “You know something, Turdbird? I think you’re starting to work your way off my shit list.”
29
Saturday, November 11
1305 hours North central Lebanon
The SEALs were spread out among the trees, and not coincidentally had located themselves on the far western portion of the woods. Except for the quarter-mile-long portion they were in, a ridgeline stretched across that entire length of woods and continued down into the valley.
Out ahead of them they could hear the shouting of frustrated Syrian sergeants and platoon commanders trying to keep their troops together. Murdock took some comfort from the fact that the Syrians were having a long day too, and had probably reached the point where their heads were concentrated on maintaining the formation, not preparing to engage the enemy. And the SEALs were all dressed in Syrian uniforms, which was about the only bit of gratitude he could work up for the CIA just then.
But the sounds kept coming on, and Murdock began to get worried. Something should have happened by now.
A few minutes passed and Murdock could now hear the Syrians crashing through the brush. If they got any closer he was going to have to make a tough call. If he pulled back, Jaybird’s plan was blown. But if he stayed there and nothing happened they were committed to a firefight.
Like one of those “find all the animals in the barnyard” puzzles, Murdock could make out the green camouflaged faces of his SEALs among the trees. They were all looking over to him for a signal. He could have all the discussions he wanted, but in the end he would always be the one in charge. And the SEALs would do exactly what he decided, whether it got them killed or not. In training that ultimate responsibility was a lot of fun. Now it felt like being slowly crushed by a large rock.
He decided to throw the dice and stay put. But when he was able to pick out the uniforms of the Syrian troops moving toward him through the trees, he knew he’d chosen wrong, and his stomach flipped over. Then he heard the explosions in the distance, and was reprieved.
1314 hours North central Lebanon
A mile to the east of the SEALS, the line of Syrian commandos looked up at the ridge they would soon have to climb and shook their heads. Although called commandos, these were not special forces like the SEALs or Green Berets. In the October 1973 War with Israel, the performance of Syria’s conscript infantry had been disappointing. So the Syrian Army decided to form independent commando battalions to which they assigned their best and most reliable soldiers. The commando name was for morale and esprit; the units performed conventional infantry missions. The decision paid off. In the
1982 War in Lebanon, the Syrian commandos performed extremely well. Although present on the battlefield only in small numbers, they fought effective delaying actions, retreating only when ordered — a minor miracle for Arab armies up until that time. The commandos also sprang effective ambushes on the Israeli armor as it tried to negotiate the narrow Lebanese roads and rocky hills. Now their sergeant shouted at them, and the commandos started up the ridge. They didn’t notice the monofilament fishing line snaking across their path. One of the Syrians snagged the line and tripped two hand grenades rigged with instantaneous fuses — the sort of toys SEALs carried in their pockets. The grenades blew and threw up a cloud of black smoke. Three commandos went down screaming.
Almost instantaneously, right in front of them there was a series of fast popping explosions, like the concentrated fire of a number of automatic weapons.
The Syrian soldiers hit the dirt and opened fire on the ridge. Nearby units, thinking that the enemy had been found atop the ridge, opened up also. Whenever a Syrian stopped to change magazines he still heard firing going on, so he continued shooting. It was a very common phenomenon and linked to the necessity of gaining fire superiority. No one wanted to slacken their fire and let the enemy gain an advantage. It happened more often than not in the confusion of battle. In the past even SEALs hadn’t been immune to it.
What the Syrians had actually heard after the initial grenade explosions were 7.62mm M43 Kalashnikov bullets looped around a long piece of explosive detonating cord that had been taped to the grenades.
Certain that they had finally discovered the enemy, all the Syrian units along the line followed their orders. They began to maneuver to surround the enemy force and pin it down. It was the first step toward its destruction. Two more grenade booby traps were hit, convincing the Syrians that they were on the right track.
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