Rushed may be too strong a word. They made their way to the scene with the haste typical of a lifelong government worker secure in the knowledge that he or she will never be fired unless hell froze over. Think motor vehicle department clerks, at any time except five o’clock.
Doc and Shotgun met Red and Mongoose east of the hamlet, easily evading the responding authorities. But the missing bridge and their use of landing area two complicated their escape route, leaving them no choice but the road they had used to get here. And as decreed by Murphy’s Law, this road went past the house of one of the provincial policemen.
Naturally, the four of them were approaching the house just as the man was getting into his car. He tried shouting at them, asking what was going on, but with their heads down and feet pumping furiously, none of them heard, nor would they have stopped to answer if they did.
The policeman felt this was suspicious. He jumped in his car and gave chase.
The small, sandy roads nearby favored the bicyclists, and within a few minutes the policeman’s headlights were no longer behind them. But there were only a few roads here, so simply by being persistent and driving south, the policeman couldn’t help but head in the right direction.
He also had a radio, which is very difficult to outrun.
One of M.W.’s scanners caught the policeman’s request for help—and an answer from the local militia captain. Within a few minutes, the troops that Doc had carefully avoided when landing were scrambling eastward in his direction.
It didn’t take the map Junior pulled up on his computer to realize that the soldiers would be able to cut Doc and the others off from the water. I told M.W. to swoop along the road near the shore that the soldiers were on so we could delay them. He replied with such can-do enthusiasm that for a moment I thought he was one of the air farce pilots who “helped” my guys back in Grenada.
“Are you out of your mind? They’ll shoot us down.”
“Not if you get close enough to the trucks,” I told him.
“Close enough for what?”
“For our grenades to hit them.”
If M.W. said something else, I didn’t hear it; I was already back in the cabin. Junior and I took up stations on either side of the open hatchway, each of us armed with a pair of grenades.
“Now, Junior! Now!” I yelled as the lead truck appeared below.
The grenades were actually flash-bangs, designed to produce a lot of boom and light but not much damage. They do tend to get your attention, though, especially in the dark when they ignite on your windshield.
Good shot, kid.
The lead truck veered off the road, falling down the embankment and crashing into the swamp.
Despite his earlier comments—and maybe because Trace was giving him the hairy Apache eyeball—M.W. had warmed to the mission. He circled back, giving us a second chance at the troops. Instead of using more grenades—that act gets stale pretty quickly—I picked up my submachine gun and splashed a magazine’s worth of nine-millimeter bullets into the front of a second truck, voiding its bumper-to-bumper warranty and taking out the radiator.
I’m not sure whether my bullets hit the cab or not. We never got a chance to go back and find out. Because just then a loud siren-type alarm rang through the aircraft.
“Missile in the air!” yelled M.W., his voice carrying over the roar of the engine and heavy whistle of the wind. “Fuck-suck-dog-cock-mother-shit-tack-whack missile in the air!”
( IV )
I have no idea why he said tack-whack, much less what it was supposed to mean.
The rest I got pretty much straightaway.
A Soviet-era SA-7 heat-seeking missile had been launched almost point-blank at us as we banked over the Cubans. SA-7 is the NATO designation; the Ruskies know and love it as the 9M32 STELA-2. A first-generation shoulder-launched antiaircraft missile, it has a range of about fifty-five hundred meters and can get up to about forty-five hundred meters. It’ll cover almost six hundred meters a second and carries an explosive round that weighs a little more than a kilogram. That may not sound like much—it’s a little less than your average bag of onions—but it’s more than enough if it hits something made of very thin aluminum a few hundred feet off the ground.
M.W. had dealt with shoulder-launched missiles before, including several fired by angry creditors. His PBM was outfitted with two different antimissile systems—a high-tech laser that spun around and was supposed to blind the missile, and a rack of decoy flares that shot out from the wings and belly like a fiery shower.
Both systems were designed to scramble the missile’s brain, causing it to think it had found its target and explode. This is a great idea, but it does assume you’re far enough away from the warhead when it explodes that, aside from the stains in your pants, there’ll be no damage.
Great in a jet. OK in a reasonably nimble prop plane. Not so wonderful in a lumbering seaplane that has taken a hard turn at low altitude and is moving with all the speed of a limp kite on a cold winter day.
Junior and I both heard the warhead explode.
The plane rocked a bit, but settled smoothly.
“That was close,” said Junior, pulling himself off the deck.
Then the plane dipped hard to the left, and flames shot past the open hatch. Parts of the missile had hit the port-side engine, blowing through the crankcase and sending a piston into the fuel line.
“Stand by to ditch!” said the pilot over the interphone loudspeaker.
______
Our game of peek-a-boo with the Cuban army had bought Doc and company enough time for them to get past the intersection without being spotted. Abandoning the bicycles, they waded through the swamp toward the boat. Doc had point; Red was right behind him. Mongoose and Shotgun were a few strides back.
“Jesu!” yelled Red suddenly.
A pair of round yellow eyes stared at her from the shallow water a few feet ahead.
“Croc-a-fuckin’-dile,” yelled Shotgun. “Hot shit! I’ve never seen one up close before.”
And he didn’t see one now. Before Red could pull her gun from her holster, the eyes disappeared below the surface of the water. She took a few shots where it had been, but the bullets passed into the mud without hitting anything.
“Get to the boat! Go!” yelled Doc, hoping that the croc-a-fuckin’-dile was a loner or maybe a vegetarian.
Red reached the boat first. Doc followed with a hurdle that would have won at least a Bronze at the Olympics. Mongoose came next, sliding over the bow with a half gainer.
“I just saw more eyes,” he yelled. “Shit! Two more! They’re all around us.”
“Wow, where?” said Shotgun, still plodding through the swamp.
“Get your ass aboard while you still have one,” barked Doc. “That is an order! Now, Shotgun!”
Like many of us, Shotgun has some difficulties with authority figures, but I’m sure he would have gladly complied with Doc’s orders. The problem was, something had grabbed his pants leg and pulled hard in the other direction. One second he was running forward, submachine gun in one hand, Twinkies cupcake in the other; the next second he was sucking mud.
Mongoose heard the splash. He twisted upright and looked back where Shotgun had been. When he didn’t see his friend, he threw his gun to the deck, grabbed his knife,7 and dove into the water.
The croc-a-fuckin’-dile held Shotgun down, probably intending to drown him before chewing him up. The water was at most eighteen inches deep, but the murky, muddy swamp bottom made it difficult for Shotgun to push himself up. Swallowing a mouthful of mud, he twisted around, pulling his leg and the croc-a-fuckin’-dile forward. This gave Mongoose a better target as he jumped, and the wild Filipino landed square on the croc’s back.
Crocodiles don’t particularly like to be ridden. This one snapped its tail ferociously but refused to let go of Shotgun’s pants. Mongoose dug his knife into the croc’s thick skin, carving a pattern for a wallet as he fished for a vital organ.
Obviously a lifetime member of PETA, the croc-a-fuckin’-dile objected to this crass attempt at exploitation and thrashed even more wildly. The trio spun violently in the water. Finally the animal let go of Shotgun and rolled sideways in the water, pushing Mongoose into the mud.
There was a split second of black calm. Then the water exploded, and the croc-a-fuckin’-dile shot upward.
Mongoose followed, leaping to his feet. Anyone else would have jumped into the boat, which was only a yard or two away. But Mongoose was mad—the croc had gotten mud on his hair, and like many Filipinos, ’Goose is pretty vain about his hair. Knife in hand, he waded after the croc, which had now had quite enough of the confrontation. He grabbed one of the animal’s legs, twisted it over, and with one hard slash, slit its throat.
“Mongoose, get in the damn boat!” said Doc.
“Yeah. Comin’,” said Mongoose.
A dozen of the croc’s closest friends moved in—not for Mongoose or the others, but to sing their buddy’s praises while chewing his remains.
“Are you all right?” asked Red, helping him into the boat.
“Yeah,” said Mongoose, looking back. “He pissed me off.”
“Man, you think you’re torqued,” said Shotgun, checking his ripped pockets and tattered pants. “I lost my last Twinkie out there.”
Back in the PBM, Junior and I grabbed our gear and waited as the aircraft wobbled above the water. Flames no longer shot past the door, but that was small consolation as the remaining engine revved wildly, its whine something you’d expect to hear from a cat caught in a turbine.
“Brace yourself,” I told Junior. “If we hit and the plane starts to sink, get out as fast as you can. I’ll inflate the raft. Swim for it.”
“Got it.” His expression remained doubtful.
“You all right?”
“Yup.”
Probably he was petrified, but I was about the last person on earth he would ever admit that to.
Up-front in the cockpit, M.W. managed to trim the controls and steady the remaining engine to the point where he could level off a few yards above the water.
The engine and a good part of the right wing had been wracked by shrapnel, but it was the float that had taken the brunt of the blast; only a stub of it remained. The float wasn’t absolutely necessary to land—early model PBMs had no floats at all—but M.W. worried that not having them would make the aircraft less stable in the water when he landed.
“Let’s not get too far from shore,” I told him. “We may still have to pick Doc and the others up.”
“They may be picking us up, Dick.”
The landing party had avoided the soldiers, but the policeman was still on their tail. Doc got the cabin cruiser going and backed away from the embankment as the cop’s headlights arced through the swamp. They were close enough to illuminate dozens of dull yellow globes in the murky water—more crocodiles, come to see what the fuss was.8
Doc cleared the mouth of the stream and headed into the open water. He checked in and I brought him up-to-date, giving him our approximate position, which was roughly four miles from the coast, almost directly due south of him.
“How’s Traba’s brother?” I asked.
“Not with us,” said Doc.
“You lost him?”
“He was dead when we got there.” Doc described what Red had found.
“That sucks.”
“Yeah.”
“Dick, M.W. says we have a couple of MiGs coming down from Camagüey toward us,” Trace told me, breaking into the conversation. “You’re going to have to shut the door and grab on to something. They’re coming pretty fast.”
We pause this fubar for a technical explanation: the MiGs in question were not those fug-ugly sixties flying banana crates, held together with glue and rubber bands that Cuba still somehow manages to fly. These were brand-new MiG-29s, outfitted with the latest avionics and radars, and at least on paper decent matches for American F-15s.9 Generally parked on the western side of the island at San Julian, the MiG-29s are the leading edge of an air force that counts 530 aircraft—a total that overshadows everything south of the Rio Grande by a good measure.
Now back to our regularly scheduled fubar.
The fighters were coming south like the proverbial bats out of hell, and they weren’t the only ones invited to the party. A pair of helicopters had been scrambled, and a Cuban border guard craft (Tropas de Guardia Frontera) had been alerted as well. As much as I love being the center of attention, this was a particularly inconvenient time.
“We’ll be swimming soon if we stay here,” M.W. told me. “Our best bet is to stay low near the water and just run toward Jamaica. We may make it. We may not.”
“What are the odds?” asked Junior, who’d followed me up to the cockpit.
“Seventy-thirty theirs,” M.W. said. “Unless we have to pull any evasive maneuvers.”
“What are they then?”
M.W. shrugged. He didn’t have to explain what that meant: if we were hit by a missile or even cannonfire at this low an altitude, we’d go into the drink real fast. There’d be no question of bailing out.
“What, are you thinking of playing the lottery, Junior?” asked Trace.
“Just want to know where I stand.”
“Look at the bright side,” M.W. said. “We may not even make it to Jamaica. Our fuel stores are dropping pretty fast. Something must have nicked one of the tanks.”
On that note of optimism, Junior and I returned to the cabin.
Doc wasn’t worried about the MiGs at first, not even as they passed almost directly over him. He was too busy calculating his course back to Jamaica and planning his fuel management.
Then one of the MiGs turned back.
“I can’t say for certain that they’re interested in you,” Trace warned, watching on the PBM’s radar. “But the plane is turning back in your direction.”
The pucker factor on the boat went up exponentially. With no time to turn back and hide, Doc decided his best bet was to keep moving at flank speed. He leaned on the throttle, muttering a few affectionate and encouraging words all the while.
The MiG came back over his bow at roughly two hundred feet. This time it was easy to see—a black tornado swooping overhead. The boat shook and shuddered, pressing close to the waves as if to duck away.
“Turning back toward you,” warned Trace. We’d turned our active radar off, but the MiG was close enough to be easily tracked using the passive detection gear.
“Let’s try to deke the MiG slimes,” Doc told Red, giving her the mike. “Send out a transmission like we’re answering a call for help from the Cuban coast guard. Make it sound like they’re sinking and ask for details on their last location.”
Doc turned and yelled to Mongoose, who was standing guard on the bow.
“Come over here and stand by to broadcast an SOS,” Doc told him. “You’re a Cuban patrol boat. Garble your message up. Make it sound like you’re sinking.”
“Why are we sinking?”
“You’re not writing a fuckin’ novel—wing it.”
Just then the MiG came back over the boat from the port side. This time it was under a hundred feet, with its nose tilted down at an inauspicious angle.
The better to shoot you with, my dear.
The rounds from the aircraft’s 30-mm cannon splashed in the water, dead ahead of the boat’s bow. Doc turned the wheel hard port, back toward land.
Shotgun was back in the open well behind the boat’s cabin, munching on a Snicker’s Bar to regain his strength after the ordeal with the croc-a-fuckin’-dile. Until this point, he hadn’t been paying too much attention to the MiG. Doc’s sudden maneuver caught him by surprise, and sent the candy bar flying into the ocean.
Which made him mad.
He grabbed his submachine gun and emptied the magazine in the direction of the Cuban plane as it flared back for another run. Whether his bullets had any effect or not, the Cuban’s attack went wide right, mis
sing the boat by a good margin.
Shotgun dropped the empty mag and reloaded, waiting for the jet to twist around for another turn.
But it didn’t.
“Scared that son of a bitch away,” said Shotgun.
“Everybody into the water!” Doc yelled. “Now!”
Shooing everyone else ahead of him, Doc was just throwing himself over the gunwale when the missile hit.
( V )
The MiG chasing us was doing about 450 knots to our one hundred and a prayer. M.W. changed course twice, pushing the aircraft as hard as he dared through the cuts, backing off when he felt the controls starting to give. The MiG seemed to miss us for a few seconds, turning eastward. But soon he was swinging back in our direction, paralleling our course, going ahead of us, and then turning almost head-on for our nose.
M.W. waited until the MiG was five miles away. Then he made us invisible.
Actually, what he did was hit the button for his electronic countermeasures, which scrambled the crap out of the MiG’s radar. But it was essentially the same thing.
By itself, jamming the MiG’s radar wouldn’t accomplish much, since the Cuban knew we were in front of him somewhere. But M.W. had nursed the plane up to about a thousand feet, and as he hit the jammer, he pushed the nose down as hard as he dared. Then he goosed off a few flares and a small device he called the beer keg.
Fashioned from one of those small beer kegs you can pick up in the supermarket, the large aluminum can was filled with gunpowder. Armed by a simple wire that pulled out when it was ejected, the beer keg was essentially a large flash-bang grenade, exploding with a terrific flash of light in the sky a few seconds after it was released.
“Hold your breath!” yelled M.W., killing his ECMs.
The MiG driver, moving at a quick clip a few hundred feet above us, saw the flares and explosion, and assumed that the aircraft had been destroyed.
At least we hoped so.
“Toss your Mae West out the door,” I told Junior, pulling the door back open. I grabbed the survival raft from my gear and snapped the handle to inflate it.
RW15 - Seize the Day Page 5
