by Cuba (lit)
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 blowby-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.""...ationo 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 bolstered 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
missilesthe guy was hi 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 stuffea"...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
hi place looked like Dzus fasteners. They
weren't, though: they were plain old screws. Careful
not to drop mem, he unscrewed them one by one and put
the screws hi 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 sleeve to swab his face, then went back
to twisting the screwdriver. He worked as quickly as he
could. comFinally 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 s
o 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
areaea"...he said. "They don't know we're here yet.
The aircirculation 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 rifleea"...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.
"Okayea"...sd 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.
still
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 nowea"...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
aircirculation 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 peopleea"...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 'emea"...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
airpla
ne. A small steel ring was taped
to the side of the thinghe tore that off and pulled it out as
far as it would go, which was ab"...a foot. Then he gave
it a mighty tug, which 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-millioncandlepower 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 rocketea"...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 knowea"...Carmellini said grimly, and went
back to his seat. He didn't have any juice
to waste on the merely worried.
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
