by Cuba (lit)
bulldozers helped with the digging.
The machine-gun nests were gone now, victims of
Hellfire missiles, but the troops in trenches
were harder to kill. . Fortunately for the Cubans, the
trenches were not straight, but zigged and zagged around
trees and stones and natural obstacles.
The young commander was dead now, killed by a single
cannon shell that tore his head off when he tried
to look over the lip of a trench to find the
SuperCobras. Most of his officers were also dead.
One of the SuperCobras had been shot down
by machine-gun fire. A Cuban trooper with an
AK-47 killed the pilot of another with a lucky
shot in the neck. The first chopper managed
to autorotate down-, and the crew jumped from their
machine into an empty
trench. The copilot of the second machine flew it
out of the battle and headed for the refueling and rearming
site the marines had established in a sugarcane
field between silos three and four.
The SuperCobras on site were almost out of ammo,
and they too went to the refueling site, where they were
fueled from bladders and rearmed with ammo
brought in by Ospreys from
Kearsarge.
Then they rejoined the fray.
The noise of eight assault choppers hovering around
the battlefield that centered on the barn did the
trick. One by one, the Cubans threw down their
weapons and climbed out of their trenches with their hands
over their heads.
Several of the SuperCobras turned on their landing
lights and hovered over the barn, turning this way and that
so that their lights shone over the men, living and dead, that
littered the ground.
Minutes later an Osprey landed just a hundred
feet from the entrance to the barn. Toad Tarkington was
the last man out. He was ten feet from the V-22 and
running like hell when it lifted off and another
settled onto the same spot. Marines with rifles
at the ready came pouring out.
With his engines running and the canopy closed, Major
Carlos Corrado taxied his MiGo-29 toward the
runway at Cienfuegos. Two rnen walked
ahead of the fighter with brooms, sweeping shrapnel and
rocks off the concrete so the fighter's tires would not
be cut. They weren't worried about this stuff going in
the intakes: on the ground the MiGo-29's
engines breathed through blow-down panels on top of the
fuselage while the main intakes remained closed.
Inside the fighter Corrado was watching his
electronic warning equipment. As he suspected,
the Americans had a bunch of radars aloft tonight,
everything from large search radars to fighter radars.
He immediately recognized the radar signature of the
F-14 Tomcat, which he had seen just a week or
so ago out over the Caribbean.
Yep, they were up there, and as soon as his wheels
came up, they would be trying to kill him.
Carlos Corrado taxied his MiGo-29 onto the
runway and shoved the twin throttles forward to the
stop, then into afterburner. The MiGo-29 rocketed
forward. Safely airborne, Corrado raised the
landing gear and came out of afterburner. Passing 400
knots, he lowered the nose and retarded the
throttles, then swung into a turn that would point the
sleek Russian fighter at Havana.
Inside the barn at silo one, Toad Tarkington
took in the carnage at a glance. He was the first
American through the door.
Cannon shells and shrapnel from Hellfire
warheads had played hob with the wooden barn
structure. Holes and splintered boards
and timbers were everywherestanding inside, Toad could see
the landing lights of the helicopters and hear
Americans shouting.
Apparently several dozen men had taken refuge in
the barn; their bloody bodies lay where the bullets
or shrapnel or splinters from the timbers cut them
down. The floor and walls were splattered with
blood.
Toad found the wooden door, got it open, used his
flashlight to examine the steel inner door. He
set three C-4 charges around the combination lock and
took cover.
The charges tore the lock out of the door and warped the
thing so badly it wouldn't open. Toad struggled with
it, only got it open because two marines came in
to check out the interior and gave him a hand.
The stairway on the other side of the door was in
total darkness. Not a glimmer of light.
With his flashlight in his left hand and his pistol in his
right, Toad slowly worked his way down.
He saw lightbulbs in sockets over his head, but
they were not on. Once he came to a switch. He
flipped it on and off several times. No
electrical power.
At the bottom of the stairs he came to a
larger room.
The beam of the flashlight caught an instrument
panel, a control console. A bit of a face ...
Toad brought the light back to the face.
A white face, eyes scrunched against the
flashlight glare. An old man, skinny, with
short white hair, frozen in the flashlight beam,
holding his hands above his head.
The radar operator in the E-3 Sentry AW
ACS plane over Key West was the first to see the
MiGo-29 get airborne from Cienfuegos. He
keyed the intercom and reported the sighting to the
supervisor, who used the computer to verify the
track, then reported it to Battlestar Control.
The AW ACS crew reported the MiGo as a
bogey and assigned it a track number. They would
be able to classify it as to type as soon as the
pilot turned on his radar.
Unfortunately, Carlos Corrado failed
to cooperate. He disleft his radar switch in the off
position. He also stayed low, just a few hundred
meters above the treetops.
There are few places more lonely than the cockpit
of a single-piloted airplane-at night when
surrounded by the enemy. Corrado felt that
loneliness now, felt as if he were the only person
still alive on Spaceship Earth.
The red glow of the cockpit lights comforted him
somewhat: this was really the only home he had ever had.
The lights of Havana were prominent tnhe saw the
glow at fifty miles even though he was barely a
thousand feet above sea level. He climbed a little
higher, looking, and saw a huge fire, quite
brilliant.
Carlos Corrado turned toward the fire. Perhaps
he would find some airborne targets. He turned
on his gun switch and armed the infrared missiles.
The E-2 controller datalinked the bogey information
to the F-14 crew patrolling over central
Cuba at 30,000 feet. There should have been two
F-14's, a section, but one plane had
mechanical problems prior to launch, so there was
only one fighter on this station.
The bogey appeared on
the scope of the radar
intercept officer, the RIO, in the rear seat of the
Tomcat. He narrowed the scan of his radar and
tried to acquire a lock on the target, which was
merely a blip that faded in and out against the ground
clutter.
"What the hell is it"..."...the pilot demanded,
referring to the bogey.
"I don't knowea"...was the reply, and therein was the
problem. Without a positive identification,
visual or electronic, of the bogey, the rules
of engagement prohibited the American pilot from
firing his weapons. There were simply too many
American planes and helicopters flying around in
the darkness over Cuba to allow people to blaze away at
unknown targets.
The darkness below was alive with lights, the lights of
cities and small towns, villages, vehicles,
and here and there, antiaircraft artilleryflakwhich was
probing the darkness with random bursts. Fortunately the
gunners could not use radar to acquire a, targetthe
instant they turned a radar on, they drew a
HARM missile from the EA-6BS and
FirstA-18's that circled on their assigned
stations, listening.
The F-14 pilot, whose name was Wallace P.
"Stiff" Hardwick, got on the radio
to Battlestar Control. "Battlestar, Showtime One
Oh Nine, request permission to investigate this
bogey."
"Wait."
Stiff expected that. Being a fighter
pilot in this day and age wasn't like the good old
days, when you went cruising for a fight. Not that he was
there for the good old days, but Stiff had sure heard
about them.
"That goddamn Cuban is gonna zap somebody
while the people on the boat are scratching their
assea"...Stiff told his RIO, Boots
VonRauenzahn.
"Yeahea"...sd Boots, who never paid much attention
to Stiff's grousing.
STEPHEN COONTS
Carlos Corrado saw that a building was on
fire, burning with extraordinary intensity. Never
had he seen such a hot flre. He assumed that the
building had been bombed by a cruise missile or
American plane disand began visually searching the
sky nearby for some hint of another aircraft.
He flew right over the V-22 Osprey carrying
Tommy Carmellini and Doll Hanna back to the
ship and never saw it.
A lot of flak was rising from the outskirts of
Havana, so Carlos turned east, away from it.
In the black velvet ahead he saw lights, and
steered toward them. At 500 knots he
closed quickly, and saw helicopters' landing lights!
They were flying back and forth over a large barn!
They must be Americansthey sure as hell weren't
Cuban. As far as he knew, he was the only
Cuban in the air tonight.
Corrado flew past the areanow down to 400 knots
and did a 90-degree left turn, then a
270-degree right turn. Level, inbound, he
retarded the throttles of the two big engines.
Three hundred knots... he picked the landing
lights on some land of strange-looking twin rotor
helicopter and pushed the nose over just a tad,
bringing the strange chopper into the gunsight. Then he
pulled the trigger on the stick.
The 30-mm cannon shells smashed into Rita
Moravia's Osprey with devastating effect. She
was in the midst of a transition from wing-borne
to rotor-borne flight and had the engines pointed up
at a seventy-degree angle. The rotors were
carrying most of the weight of the twenty-ton ship, so
when the cannon shells ripped into the right engine and it
ceased developing power, the V-22 began sinking
rapidly.
The good engine automatically went to emergency
torque and transferred some of its power to the
rotor of the
bad engine through a driveshaft that connected the two
rotor transmissions.
With shells thumping into the plane and warning lights
flashing, Rita felt the right wing sag. Some of the
shells must have damaged the right transmission!
The ground rushed at her, even as cannon shells
continued to strike the plane.
She pulled the stick back and left, trying to make
the right rotor take a bigger bite.
Then the machine struck the earth and the instrument panel
smashed into her night vision goggles.
In the missile control room, Toad Tarkington
held his flashlight on the old man as he
produced a candle from his pocket and a kitchen match.
He lit the match and applied it to the candle's
wick.
One candle wasn't much, but it did light the room.
Toad turned off the flashlight and stood there
looking at the old man.
Muffled crashing sounds reached him, echoed down the
stairwell, but no one came. Toad's headset was
quiet too, probably since he was underground.
"Do you speak English"..."...Toad asked the
white-haired man in front of him.
The old man shook his head.
"Espanol?"
"Si, senor."
"Well, I don't."
Toad walked over and checked the man, who had no
visible weapons on him.
He had a handful of plastic ties in his pocket.
These ties were issued to every marine for the sole purpose
of securing prisoners' hands, and feet if necessary.
Toad put a tie around the old man's hands. The
man didn't resist; merely sat at the control
console with his face a mask, showing no emotion.
"Cuban"..."...Toad asked.
"Nyet."
"Russki?"
The white head bobbed once, then was still.
Toad used the flashlight to inspect the console,
to examine the instruments. This stuff was old, he could
see that. Everything was mechanical, no digital
gauges or readouts, no computer displays ... the
console reminded Toad of the dashboard of a 1950's
automobile, with round gauges and bezels and ...
Well, without power, all this was academic.
His job was to get that damned warhead out of the
missile, then set demolition charges
to destroy all this stuff, missile, control room,
and all. He left the Russian at the console and
opened the blast-proof door across the room from the
stair where he had entered.
Another stairway led downward.
Toad went as quickly as he dared, still holding the
flashlight hi one hand and his pistol in the other.
He went through one more steel door... and there the
missile stood, white and massive and surreal in
the weak beam of the flashlight.
The aviation radio frequencies exploded when
Rita's plane was shot down as everyone tried
to talk at once.
Battlestar Control finally managed to get a word in
over the babble, a call to Stiff Hardwick. "Go
down for a look. Possible hostile may have shot
down an Osprey."
Stiff didn't need any urging. He rolled the
Tomcat onto its back, popped the speed
brakes, and started down.
"Silo oneea"...Boots said. "This bogey is
flitting around down there like a goddamn bat or
something, mixing it up with the SuperCobras and
Ospreys. Let's not shoot down any of the good
guys."
"No shitea"...sd Stiff, who was sure he could handle
any Cuban fighter pilot alive. This guy was
meat on the table: he just didn't know it yet.
Carlos Corrado pulled out of his strafing ran and
soared up to three thousand feet. He extended out for
eight or nine miles before he laid the fighter over
in a hard turn.
He had seen helicopters d6wn there, at least
two. It was time to use the radar.
As he stabilized inbound he flipped the radar
switch to "transmit." He pushed the button for
moving targets and sure enough, within seconds the
pulse-doppler radar in the nose of the MiGo-29
had found three. The rest of the drill was simplicity
xfhe selected an Aphid missile, locked it
on a target, and fired. Working quickly, he
selected a second missile, locked on a
second target, and fired.
He had to keep the targets illuminated while the
Aphids were in flight, so he continued inbound toward
the silo.
One of the SuperCobras exploded when an Aphid
drilled it dead center. The second missile
tore the tail rotor off its target, which spun
violently into the ground and caught fire.
Carlos Corrado flew across the barn, holding his
heading, extending out before he turned to make another
shooting pass.
Toad Tarkington found the circular steel ladder
leading upward in the missile silo and began
climbing.
When he reached the catwalk he walked around the
missile, examining the skin. There was the little access
port, six inches by six inches, with the dozen
screws! That had to be it.
Toad Tarkington put the flashlight under his left
armpit and got out a screwdriver.
He had three screws out when the flashlight
slipped out of his armpit and fell. It bounced off the
catwalk and went on down beside the missile, breaking
when it hit the grate at the bottom.
The darkness in the silo was total.
Toad Tarkington cursed softly, and went back
to taking out screws. He worked by feel. Someone would
come along in a minute, he thought, bringing another
flashlight: If
someone didn't, he would take the time to go find
another.
The trick, he knew, would be to hold on to the
