Merriweather gave the pilot a thumbs-up and arranged himself on the skid. Handy was clinging to the skid on the other side.
The chopper came slowly into a hover, then dipped its nose and began moving forward. Merriweather held on for dear life as the rotor downwash and slipstream tore at his clothing, helmet, and gear, and threatened to rip the night vision goggles from his head.
What a stupid idea this was! How in hell had they ended up four miles south of the goddamned landing zone? If he ever again laid eyes on that son of a bitch who flew the Herc, he was going to stomp his ass.
Bryne and McCormick—those two were missing. If they were okay surely they would have checked in on the radio. Maybe their parachutes didn’t open. Maybe they fell into that river. Maybe the Cubans captured them as soon as they hit the ground. Maybe, maybe, maybe …
He could see the barn now. The chopper was just a few feet above the trees, making an approach to the area right in front of the damn thing. The other chopper was flying over the trees, three or four hundred yards away——close, but not too close.
Nobody in sight around the barn. Not a soul.
Merriweather jumped when the chopper was three feet off the ground, and fell on his face. He got up, staggered out from under the rotor blast.
Handy appeared at his elbow.
The glow of a cigarette tip showed in the door. Someone sitting there!
Merriweather froze, his M-16 at the ready.
A marine sat in the open door smoking a cigarette. His face and neck were coated with green and brown camo grease. His helmet and night-vision goggles lay in the dirt beside him.
Merriweather walked over to the man, who said, “No one around.”
“Where’s Bryne?”
McCormick nodded toward the east. “Over there about a hundred yards. Parachute streamed, backup didn’t open.”
“Your radio?”
“Broke. Bryne’s got smashed.” McCormick stood, took a last drag on the cigarette, and tossed it away. “Been sitting here waiting for you. The place is deserted, quiet as a graveyard.”
“Too bad about Bryne.”
“Left two little kids. Too fucking bad.”
The interior of the barn was large, empty, and dark. Merriweather used a flashlight, looked in every corner, inspected the ceiling, the floor, the nooks and crannys.
Then he spoke into his boom microphone. “Let’s get the Osprey into the LZ, set up a perimeter.”
Through her night-vision goggles, Rita Moravia could see the silo two landing zone and the hovering SuperCobras plain as day as she made her approach in the Osprey. She saw bodies lying everywhere, still-warm bodies radiating heat, and she saw living men. She transitioned to hovering flight and lowered the Osprey toward the ground between the choppers. A cloud of dirt and dust rose up, obscuring everything. She went on instruments.
On the intercom she told the lieutenant to get ready.
As soon as the wheels hit, the marines in back charged out the door of the Osprey and kept right on going for fifty yards, when they went down on their stomachs with their rifles at the ready.
Rita didn’t wait to see what was going to happen next. As soon as her crew chief said the last marine was out, she lifted the Osprey into the air, climbed straight up out of the dust cloud and only then began the transition to winged flight.
The lieutenant was named Charlie Herron, and he had his orders. His primary responsibility was to ensure that the missile in that silo never left the ground. As his feet hit the ground, he flopped on his belly and waited while the roaring Osprey climbed away. When the dust began to clear, he spotted the barn and went for it on a run.
Bodies and body parts lay scattered everywhere. The living men he passed sat in the dirt with empty hands reaching for the sky. Herron shouted over the radio, “Cease-fire, cease-fire. They are surrendering.”
Inside the barn he found Asel Tyvek standing over a dead Cuban.
“Over here, Lieutenant. I think this wooden thing is a door.”
Tyvek and Herron opened the wooden door, which revealed a steel door with built-in combination lock. “Think there’s anybody in there?” Herron asked. After all, Tyvek had been here longer than he had.
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Well, we gotta get in there. Let’s blow the door.”
A charge of C-4 took less than a minute to rig. The two men took cover behind a wooden stall.
The explosion was sharp, a metallic wham that rang their ears.
The demolition charge cut the lock clean out of the door and warped it. The two men pried the door open. A stairway lit by naked light bulbs led away downward. Herron and Tyvek took off their night-vision goggles and let them dangle around their necks. With Herron in the lead with his pistol in his hand, the two of them descended the stairway.
Aboard United States Jake Grafton was getting the blow-by-blow update. Air Intelligence officers annotated the maps and briefers told him of every report from the silos.
“Heavy firefight around silos one and two.”
“No opposition at sites four, five and six.”
“Ospreys on the ground at sites two, three, and four.”
“SeaCobra hit and in trouble at site one.”
“Team leader into silo two.”
“Recon leader into silo six.”
Each report was entered on a checklist: there were eight of them, one for each silo and dairy site.
First Lieutenant Charlie Herron and Asel Tyvek found the control room of silo two empty. A series of stairs and more steel doors led downward to the bottom of the concrete structure. The doors weren’t locked. When he opened the last door, there was the missile towering upward. The shiny, painted fuselage reflected pinpoints of light from the naked bulbs arranged around the top and sides of the concrete silo.
Under the missile was a steel grate over a black hole. That was the flame pit, to exhaust the flame and gases when the missile was launched.
A circular steel stairway led up to a catwalk. From the catwalk it appeared a person could reach over and gain access to the missile’s warhead and control panel.
Herron holstered his pistol and turned to Sergeant Tyvek. “See if you can figure out a way to safety this bottle rocket so they can’t fire it from Havana while I’m working on it.”
“Lieutenant, I’ve got bad news for you. I don’t know shit about guided missiles.”
“Well, you sure as hell don’t want to be standing here with your thumb up your butt if they light this thing off. Now go look for a switch or something.”
“Yes, sir,” Tyvek said, and disappeared back up the stairway.
Herron took the steps two at a time. He hoped he would find what he expected when he got to the catwalk, although he thought a lot of the old Russian engineer’s explanation had been pure bullshit. Somebody had found an engineer in Russia who said he helped design these missiles—the guy was in his eighties. They had him on television for an hour explaining how the business end of the missile was put together. The engineer spoke not a word of English so a translator did the talking. The man had a hell of a memory or was lying through his teeth. Herron was about to find out which was the case.
“If it’s typical Russian stuff,” the American briefer said, “you’ll be able to work on it with pliers and screwdrivers. American designers could learn a lot from Russian engineers, who design for ease of maintenance.” They gave each officer and NCO who might get near a missile a small tool pouch.
Herron examined the access panel, which was only about six inches long by six inches high, and curved, a part of the missile’s skin. The screws holding it in place looked like Dzus fasteners. They weren’t, though: they were plain old screws. Careful not to drop them, he unscrewed them one by one and put the screws in a shirt pocket. There were a dozen screws, just like the Russian engineer said. Okay! So far so good.
Sweat dripped down his nose, ran into his eyes. He wiped the palms of his hands on his camo pants and used his sle
eve to swab his face, then went back to twisting the screwdriver. He worked as quickly as he could. Finally he took out the last screw.
Carefully, ever so carefully, Herron pulled off the access panel and laid it on the catwalk by his feet. He dug a small flashlight from his pocket. Looking through the access panel, he could see lots of wires. And a stainless-steel sphere about the size of a basketball. That, he concluded, must be the biological warhead. The missile had been designed for a nuclear warhead, which would have been round, so the biological warhead had to go into the same space. Yet the warhead was too large to come out this little six-inch access hole.
Charlie Herron reached through the hole to his elbow, felt upward with his ear against the skin of the missile. Yes, he could feel the latch. He opened it. Now down … one there too. Right, then left.
With the last latch open, he pulled at the panel he had his arm in. It came out in his hand, making a hole at least twenty inches across. So the engineer had been telling the truth.
Herron turned to put the panel on the catwalk … and dropped it.
It fell, striking the side of the missile, finally landing on the grate at the bottom with a tinny sound, much like the lid of a garbage can.
Charlie Herron grabbed the rails of the catwalk and held on to keep from falling.
He wiped his face on his sleeves, the palms of his hands on his trousers.
Using a pair of wire snips, the lieutenant began clipping wires, then pulling the ends out of the way so he could see how the warhead was held in place.
William Henry Chance and Tommy Carmellini stepped from their Osprey transport wearing their CBW suits. Two marines similarly clad followed them. Each marine carried a cylinder about six feet long and five inches in diameter balanced on his shoulder.
Doll Hanna was waiting for them as they approached the main entrance. “I count five people in the clean area,” he said. “They don’t know we’re here yet. The air-circulation system is pretty loud.”
Chance went to the partially open door and eased his head around for a peek. He counted the people inside. Five.
He had been thinking about this moment ever since Jake Grafton asked him to take out this facility. If the integrity of the sealed area was broken before the fire got hot enough to destroy the virus, some of the virus might escape. If there were any free viruses in the air inside there, or if one of the culture trays was broken, intentionally or unintentionally …
How much was some? Who could say?
He pulled his head back, looked at Doll Hanna, looked at the marines carrying the cylinders on their shoulders.
Well, it was a hell of a risk. A hell of a risk.
Just then William Henry Chance wished he were back in New York City, eating dinner at a nice restaurant or preparing a case for trial or sitting at home with the woman who had shared his life for the past ten years. Anywhere but here.
“Give me your rifle,” he said to Hanna, who handed him his M-16.
“Is it loaded?”
“Full. Selector is on single shot. This is the safety.” Hanna touched it.
“Okay,” said William Henry Chance.
He turned to Carmellini. “If worse comes to worst, you know what to do.”
Carmellini didn’t say anything. The dumb shit is probably wishing he was safe and snug in a federal pen, Chance thought.
He pointed the rifle at the ground and held it close to his leg, then eased the door open and stepped inside. No Cuban saw him. They were looking intently at something in a sealed unit with remote-control arms. A radio was playing somewhere, playing loudly.
Chance stepped into the air lock, stood there looking at the people while he waited for the interior door to unlock automatically.
He recognized the voice on the radio: Alejo Vargas. The gravelly flat delivery was unmistakable.
“My fellow Cubans, now is the hour to rally to the defense of our holy mother country. Tonight even as I speak the nation is under attack from American military forces, who have leveled the awesome might of their armed forces against the eleven million peaceful people of Cuba.”
Ten seconds passed, fifteen, twenty. After a half minute, the interior door clicked. Chance pushed it open and stepped into the lab.
Racks holding eight or ten culture trays each stood beside the benches. He lifted the rifle, thumbed off the safety, walked forward toward the working figures, who still had their backs to him. The tables on both sides of the aisles contained tools, parts, glassware, specialized instruments.
“Join with me in fighting the forces of the devil, the forces of capitalism and exploitation that seek to enslave the Cuban people so that the Yanquis can manufacture more dollars for themselves … .”
One of the workers spotted Chance when he was ten feet away, and turned in his direction.
Chance gestured with the rifle, motioned for them to raise their hands. They did so.
I should just shoot them, he thought, acutely aware of the culture trays just beside his elbow, and theirs.
Maybe I won’t have to.
Backing up between two tables, he jerked his head back the way he had come, toward the air lock, gestured with the barrel of the rifle.
“Our hour of glory is now,” Alejo Vargas thundered, “an hour that will live in all of Cuban history as the supreme triumphant moment of our people, that moment in the history of the world when we humble people struck back against the enslaver and oppressor and became forever free … .”
Slowly, watching Chance, the closest man began moving, passed him, kept walking with his hands up.
The second man passed.
The third …
He was turning to look at the fourth man when the man grabbed the barrel of the rifle with one hand and stabbed Chance in the solar plexus with the other.
William Henry Chance looked down at the handle sticking out of his abdomen. A screwdriver! The man had stabbed him with a screwdriver.
The man was fighting him for the rifle!
A shot. He heard a shot over the noise of the air-circulation fans. The man who stabbed him collapsed.
More shots.
Chance fell. His legs didn’t work anymore and he was having trouble breathing.
“Kill the American enslavers wherever you find them, wherever they choose to shovel their odious filth onto a committed socialist people,” Vargas shouted over the radio. “Beloved Cuba, the mother of us all, needs our strong right arms.”
On the floor, his vision narrowing to tiny points of light, fighting for air he couldn’t get, William Henry Chance felt someone roll him over. Through the face plate on the mask of the man who held him, he could just make out Carmellini’s features.
“You should have shot ‘em,” Carmellini shouted. “You. stupid bastard, you should have shot ’em.”
Chance was trying to suck in enough air to reply when his heart stopped.
Carmellini and the two marines in CBW suits carried the aluminum cylinders they had brought from the Osprey into the lab and set them down. There was not a moment to be lost. Bullets had gone through several of the men lying dead on the floor and punctured the transparent plastic walls of the facility.
The two marines went back after more cylinders while Carmellini brought plastic cans of gasoline through the air lock. He didn’t have time to wait for the lock to work, so he jammed the door so it would not close.
Please God, don’t let the viruses out.
With six cylinders on the floor near the cultures and ten gallons of gasoline sitting nearby, Carmellini was ready. The five Cubans who were working in the lab lay where they had fallen. Chance’s body lay where he died. Carmellini ignored the bodies as he worked.
He gestured to the marines to leave, then turned to the nearest cylinder, which was a five-inch-diameter magnesium flare designed to be dropped from an airplane. A small steel ring was taped to the side of the thing—he tore that off and pulled it out as far as it would go, which was about a foot. Then he gave it a mighty tug, wh
ich tore it loose in his hand.
He laid the cylinder on the wooden floor and walked for the air lock. As he went through he released the door, allowing it to close.
He still had a few seconds, so he stood in the lock as the suction tore at his CBW suit, trying to cleanse it of dust and stray viruses.
But he was running out of time.
He pushed the emergency button and let himself out of the lock through the exterior door. Walking swiftly, he exited the barn and strode for the waiting Osprey.
Doll Hanna was standing there with a rifle in his arms.
“Let’s get the men—” Carmellini began, but the ignition of the flare stopped him. The glare of a hundred-million-candlepower magnesium fire leaked out of the barn through the door and cracks in the siding.
“Let’s get the hell out of here before it goes up like a rocket,” Carmellini shouted, and trotted for the Osprey.
Three minutes later, with all the people aboard and the plane airborne, he went to the cockpit and looked back. The fire was as bright as a welder’s torch, so brilliant it hurt his eyes to look. The heat of the first flare had set off the second, and so on. The heat from the first few flares probably caused the gasoline cans to explode, raising the temperature dramatically and helping ignite the other flares.
“Think the fire will kill all the viruses?” the pilot asked.
“I don’t know,” Carmellini said grimly, and went back to his seat. He didn’t have any juice to waste on the merely worried.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
There were just too many Cuban troops at silo one. The two SuperCobras assigned there expended their Hellfire missiles on the tanks and trucks, then scourged the area with 20-mm cannon shells. Between them the assault choppers fired fifteen hundred rounds of 20-mm. As the first two assault choppers left the arena to refuel and rearm, Battlestar Control aboard United States routed other SuperCobras to the site. They began flaying the area with a vengeance.
The problem was that the troops were fairly well dug in. Almost a thousand men had arrived in the area early that morning under an energetic young commander who had ordered trenches dug and machine guns emplaced in earth and log fortifications. Two small bulldozers helped with the digging.
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