“Sergeant?”
“Yo. You okay?”
“Yeah,” said Kirb Handy.
“Set up the GPS. Figure out where we are.”
With the parachute disposed of, Merriweather put on his night-vision goggles and took a careful look around. He was well out in the center of this field, near as he could tell.
Merriweather sat down in the dirt beside Handy, who was also wearing night-vision goggles. Handy punched buttons on the GPS.
“This thing says we are a mile and a half southwest.”
“I’ll buy that”
“Missed the landing zone by a half mile.”
“Not bad at all.” Merriweather unslung his weapon and checked it over. Then he got to his feet.
“The other two guys should be around,” Handy muttered.
“They’d better be. We don’t have much time.”
After a careful check of the GPS unit, the two men started walking northeast toward missile silo number six. They had gone only about a hundred meters when they came to the bank of a stream, a fairly wide stream.
“What the hell is this?” Merriweather demanded, and got out his map. He and Handy huddled behind a tree studying the thing.
“Holy shit,” Handy said. “We’re in the wrong place. We’re at least four miles from the damned silo. Look here.” He pointed to the stream. “That has gotta be this thing in front of us.”
“So where’s the other half of our team?”
“Gotta be over there, near the silo.”
“Let’s get on the phone, give ’em the bad news.”
“Oh, man,” Handy moaned softly. “This ain’t good.”
The four-man recon team for silo number two approached the barn via a large seasonal drainage ditch that ran more or less in the right direction. Fortunately the sides were relatively dry, though the ditch contained a few inches of water and the bottom felt soft.
They stopped moving when they were about fifty meters from the barn where they believed the silo to be. They were completely surrounded by Cuban Army troops. Two tanks stood outside the barn, trucks were parked in a nearby grove of trees, and troops were setting up a cooking tent near the farmhouse’s well. Other soldiers were down in the woods to the left, presumably digging latrines.
“Must be a couple hundred of em,” Asel Tyvek whispered to Jamail Ali, who was lying in the ditch beside him.
“Sure as hell we can’t stay here,” Ali whispered. “It’s just a matter of time before somebody inspects this damn ditch with a flashlight.”
“The silo must be in that barn. Gotta be. If we crawl down this ditch, we should get within thirty yards of the thing. When the shit hits the fan, maybe we can get in there.”
“Let’s spread out, man, fifty yards apart,” Jamail Ali suggested. “If they find one of us, the others will have a chance.” Tyvek nodded and Ali whispered to the other two men, and pointed. They disappeared into the darkness.
Tyvek keyed the mike on his helmet-mounted radio. In seconds he was talking to a controller aboard USS United States, telling her what he saw around the missile silo.
“Twelve minutes,” the female voice from United States said in his ear. “Twelve minutes.”
“Roger that, Battlestar. Twelve minutes.”
Norman Tillman and the three men of his recon team were up to their knees in cow shit. They waded through the barnyard and shoved the mooing dairy cattle out of the way so that they could get to the door of the barn, a possible biological weapons manufacturing site.
“I thought there weren’t any damn cows around here,” Tillman’s number two muttered unpleasantly.
Tillman took off his night-vision goggles, got his flashlight in hand, and took a firm grip on his rifle. He nodded at his number two, who carefully opened the barn door, which creaked on its rusty hinges anyway. Tillman launched himself through the door opening. He slipped on something, fell, and slid for several feet on his chest. Much to his disgust, he could identify the substance he was lying in by its smell.
Tillman stood, used the flashlight. He was standing in a conventional wooden barn that had not been mucked out in several weeks. Two cows turned and stared at the light. They looked nervous, as if they wanted to run, then began bawling. Cursing under his breath, Norman Tillman went on through the building, checking it out.
Five minutes later he stepped outside and keyed his helmet radio. “Battlestar, this is Team One. Negative results. Nothing here but cows.”
“Roger, Team One. Stand by for a pickup.”
“Team One standing by. Out.”
“I thought there weren’t any cows at these sites,” one of the men said.
“Yeah, but the cows didn’t know they were supposed to be on vacation.”
“Maybe we landed at the wrong dairy farm.”
Tillman thought that over. Naw. That would be quite a screwup. More likely, the cows were being held in a nearby field when the recon photos were taken.
“Sarge, somebody coming.”
The men dove facedown into the dirt-and-manure mix at their feet. The person coming turned out to be a farmhand in civilian clothes. The marines made him sit with his back against the barn wall where they could watch him, but they didn’t tie his hands.
At first the man was frightened. He got over it when one of the troops offered him a cigarette and lit it for him.
Tillman crawled over a fence out of the muck and sat down under a tree to wait for the helicopter. One man watched the farmer while the other two posted themselves as sentinels.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“There are several hundred troops and three or four tanks around silos one and two, Admiral, and at least two tanks and a squad of soldiers around three. Four and five appear to be unguarded. The recon team checking out silo six seems to have been dropped in the wrong place—only two of the four have reported in; they estimate they are three miles from the silo. We haven’t been able to contact the other two men.”
The briefer was an Air Intelligence officer who zapped the map with a laser flashlight pointer whenever he mentioned a silo.
Jake Grafton wasn’t paying much attention to the map, which he had memorized. He glanced at his watch, compared it with a clock on the bulkhead.
“Lab site Alpha is a dairy farm. The recon team checking out Bravo reports jackpot, but not many troops—no more than a dozen. The Osprey will be there in less than ten minutes.”
The admiral got up from his chair, stretched, rubbed the back of his neck. So far it was going better than he expected it would. So far. Nobody shot down yet, only one recon team lost …
“Is someone monitoring Cuban radio and television?”
“Yes, sir. The National Security Agency. They will keep us advised.”
“Ummm.”
“What are we going to do about silo six, Admiral?” Gil Pascal asked.
“Nothing we can do. The assault team will have to go into the landing zone blind.”
“The Cuban Army may be waiting.”
“They might,” Jake Grafton agreed.
He put on his headset and switched between radio channels. By simply flipping switches he could monitor the aircraft tactical channels. In addition, with the new tactical com units, he and his staff could hear everything that was said on the helmet radios worn by marine officers and NCOs.
Since the signals were rebroadcast and ultimately picked up by the satellite, they were also being monitored in the war room of the White House. One of Jake’s concerns was that the politicians or senior officers would be tempted to step into the middle of the operation. Although the Washington kibitzers could not communicate on the nets, they could quickly get in touch with someone who could, and an order was an order, even if ill-considered.
He would worry about the politicians when the meddling started, he decided, not before.
Doll Hanna was the recon team leader at dairy Bravo. He was sitting on a biological warhead assembly plant and he knew it. There wasn’t a cow in sight, two c
lean, modern dairy trucks sat near the entrance to the barn, and Hanna could hear air conditioners running. And the Cuban Army was guarding the place.
From where he lay he could see two soldiers in cloth hats with rifles in their arms standing in front of the main entrance. He knew that there were men on the door in the rear of the building and in the old thatch-roofed farmhouse nearby.
Doll Hanna touched the transmit button on his radio. “Willie, you take the two guys on the north side. Fred, you got the farmhouse. Goose, these two on the main entrance.”
All three men acknowledged.
Doll was wearing his night-vision goggles so he could see Goose crawling behind the milk trucks, then under them, working his way toward the entrance. It was eerie watching Goose sneak along, knowing the guards couldn’t see him.
Taking out two men was a challenge. Either one could raise the alarm.
Goose moved like he had all night.
He didn’t, Doll Hanna well knew. The Osprey was out there now circling, but it wouldn’t come in until he called the area clear. Still, the plane only had so much fuel and the Cubans wouldn’t stay quiet forever.
In fact, a truckload of soldiers could come rolling in here any minute. The troops in the Osprey, when they arrived, would set up a perimeter to keep the Cuban military away.
“Doll, this is Fred. I’m going to make some noise over here.”
“Okay.”
No doubt Goose and Willie heard that transmission. Noise would cause the guards to do something. If necessary, Goose and Willie could just shoot them down.
Hanna heard the faint sound of a slamming door come from the direction of the farmhouse.
The guards near the main door to the dairy got to their feet, looked at each other, then started toward the house. One stopped, told the other to stay, then went on with his weapon at the ready. As he went around the truck out of sight of the guard at the door, Goose got him with a knife.
Then Goose waited.
The man at the door called out to his friend.
Nothing.
The guard looked worried. He called again, got no answer, then walked forward twenty feet or so. He stopped, cocked his head, stood looking into the darkness and trying to hear over the hum of the big air conditioners.
He was standing like that when Goose stepped out from behind the truck and threw a knife. The guard dropped his rifle and pitched forward on his face.
Hanna got up, trotted for the door of the barn. He passed Goose, who was bending over the second guard checking to make sure he was dead. Carefully Doll eased the door open and looked inside.
There were people inside, all right, behind transparent plastic curtains that formed biological seals. They were wearing full body-and-head CBW suits, so they looked like spacemen walking around in there between trays of cultures and rows of worktables.
They had apparently heard nothing above the noise of the air-ventilation system, which was a loud, steady hum.
Doll eased his head back. The people in there would have to wait until the experts arrived.
Major Carlos Corrado walked onto the runway of the Cienfuegos Air Base. The runway lights were off and the night was fairly dark considering that two hangars and at least five aircraft were ablaze. He could hear people shouting, about fire, about water, about missiles, about staying under cover. Straining hard he could hear several cruise missiles—and airplanes—up there in the darkness—American airplanes, because in order to save money, the Cuban Air Force, the Fuerza Aerea Revolucionaria, did not fly at night.
What was happening? Where was the war?
Carlos Corrado had no illusions about the difficulties involved in engaging the American military. His MiG-29, a stripped Soviet export version, had only the most rudimentary of electronic detection equipment and lacked any active countermeasures. And his GCI site was probably in the same condition as the burning hangars behind him.
If he left his radar off he would not beacon on the Americans’ detection equipment. And he would be electronically blind.
Perhaps if he stayed low …
Another cruise missile roared overhead and dove into the last undamaged hangar. The 750-pound warhead rocked the base, then the hangar collapsed outward, its walls silhouetted black against the yellowish white fireball caused by the warhead.
Well, if the Americans were pounding Cienfuegos, they must be pulverizing Jose Marti International in Havana.
Havana. The war would be in Havana, so that was where he would go.
The V-22 Osprey twin-engine tiltrotor assault transport was the ultimate flying machine, or so Rita Moravia liked to tell her husband, Toad Tarkington. It hovered like a helicopter and flew like an airplane, operated from the deck of an airborne assault ship, and was at its best after the sun went down.
So here she was, in the pilot’s seat of a V-22 on her way to a ballistic-missile silo in the Matanzas Province of central Cuba with 24 combat-ready marines, loaded for bear. She had made a vertical takeoff from Kearsarge and was now thundering along at two thousand feet over the Cuban countryside at 250 knots, navigating by GPS and monitoring the forward-looking infrared display (FLIR), which revealed the countryside ahead as if the sun were shining down from a cloudless sky.
Rita’s copilot was Captain Crash Wade, USMC, who earned his nickname in an unfortunate series of ski adventures, not flying accidents. Wade paid careful attention to the multi-function displays (MFDs), computer presentations of everything the pilots needed to know, on the instrument panel in front of him.
Rita was paying careful attention to the voice on the radio, which was that of Asel Tyvek, NCO in charge of the marine recon team at silo number two. Rita didn’t know his real name, just his call sign, Blue One.
“Old Rover, this is Blue One. I want you to hold four minutes out while we get some ordnance on this LZ. It’s sizzling hot.”
“Old Rover, Roger.” Rita keyed the intercom. “Okay, Crash, do a holding pattern.”
“How come we got the hot LZ?” Crash wanted to know.
“Just lucky, I guess,” Rita replied, and selected an intercom button that would allow her to talk to the lieutenant in the cargo bay with his troops.
Asel Tyvek and Jamail Ali were side by side in the ditch, just thirty yards or so from the barn. The other two members of the team were also in the ditch, but well left and right.
“We ought to get in the barn,” Ali whispered, “in case the Cubans want to get in there too.”
“Man, those little boards ain’t gonna protect anybody from anything. You just be ready in case the Cubans start diving into this damned ditch with us.”
“Listen, I can hear our guys coming.”
Tyvek strained his ears. Yep, he could just detect the distinctive beat of chopper rotors. “Snake One, Blue One,” he whispered into his radio. “Cuban troops all around the barn. At least two tanks, eight or nine trucks, a couple hundred men. We’re in a ditch near the barn.”
“Got your head down?”
“Yeah.”
Tyvek could hear the choppers distinctly now. He eased his weapon up, put his finger on the safety. The Cubans were going to be looking for cover very shortly, and he didn’t want to share the ditch.
The SuperCobras eased up over the tree line, barely moving. Tyvek knew what was going to happen next, and it did. He heard the roar as Hellfire antiarmor missiles screamed toward the tanks, and he heard the explosions as they hit.
He lifted his head above the ditch line for a quick peek. The tanks were smoking hulks. Even as he watched, more missiles tore into the trucks.
Not a standing figure could be seen. Everyone was on the ground, crawling or lying still.
The two SuperCobras came closer. The noise of their engines was quite plain now. The flex three-barreled 20-mm cannons opened up and rockets shot forward from the pylons under the stubby wings.
The men in the yard realized they couldn’t stay where they were—the area was a killing zone. Some jumped up and ran for th
e ditch. Fortunately few of them seemed to have weapons in their hands—the attack had caught them by surprise.
“Here they come,” Tyvek shouted, and opened up on the men closest to the ditch. He couldn’t shoot them fast enough. Men dashed for the cover of the ditch as he and Ali and the other two poured fire into them and the SuperCobras lashed the area with ordnance.
Tyvek spoke into the voice-activated mike on his helmet-mounted radio. “We’re gonna need some help, Old Rover. Whenever you can get here.”
Something heavy fell across Tyvek’s legs. He spun and fired at the same time, but the man was already dead: Ali had shot him.
“They’re going into the barn!” Ali shouted. He fired a whole magazine at three men trying to get through the front door. One of the men disappeared inside.
Jamail Ali scrambled over the edge of the ditch and ran for the barn while Tyvek screamed at the SuperCobra gunners not to shoot him.
“Snake One Four, this is Orange One.” Richard Merriweather let go of the mike and waited for an answer from the SuperCobra inbound to silo six.
“Orange One, Snake One Four.”
“Man, we’re on the wrong side of this river or creek five or six clicks south of the LZ. How about seeing if you can find us.”
“Are you standing up?”
“In plain sight.”
Merriweather and his partner, Kirb Handy, stepped away from the trees. With their night-vision goggles, the SuperCobra crewmen should have no trouble seeing two men standing in an open field, and they didn’t.
Both the helicopters settled to earth and the marines on the ground ran to them.
The pilot of the lead chopper opened his canopy as Merriweather ran over. “Where are the other guys?”
“Haven’t seen them or talked to them. Don’t know.”
“Seen any bad guys?”
“Nope. How about a ride over toward the barn?”
“Sit on the skid and grab hold. We run into trouble, you gotta get off if we drop down low.”
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