Arsenal c-10

by Keith Douglass

  “That’s it,” Garcia said quietly, careful to turn the s into a th sound. It was a habit born of long training, turning sibilant consonants that carried for long distances into fricative soft sounds.

  “Got to be.”

  The other men nodded. They were crouched down in landscaping shrubbery surrounding what appeared to be an administrative building, complete with flagpole out front and decorative bricks around the steps leading up to it. Due east from their position, a two-story cement block building without windows was surrounded by two storm fencing perimeters. The outer one was topped with razor wire.

  Bright lights on tall poles cast a harsh glare down on the building and the land a hundred feet around it. They could see two armed men patrolling just inside the perimeter, displaying none of the uncertainty or clumsiness that had characterized their compatriot by the outer perimeter fence they’d already passed through. These were men with a purpose, and with the training to accomplish it. Their steps were swift and sure. They glanced continually into the darkness around them. Sikes saw night-vision goggles mounted insect like on top of one of their heads, evidently shoved back to allow him better visibility in the bright light.

  The guards would still be able to see them even if the SEALs were to shoot the lights out.

  Not that they would. No, marching orders for this mission were simply to ascertain the location of the prison building and bring the pilot out if possible. Shooting out the lights would put the whole camp on alert immediately, complicating not only their own egress from the compound but compromising the other team as well. They would be lucky to escape with their own lives, much less that of the pilot.

  Huerta ground his teeth in frustration. The rescue mission would have to wait for the next intrusion into the camp, if then. But for now, getting the American aviator away from the Cubans was going to prove tougher than his superiors had thought.

  He motioned to his team, a quick, sharp hand movement, then faded back into the shrubbery. He strained to hear them moving through the brush, and a grim smile crossed his face when nothing met his ears but silence. They were good, very good.

  Unfortunately, this time, it wasn’t enough.

  0400 Local (+5 GMT)

  Tomcat 201

  “Pull up! Pull up!” Gator’s voice was frantic. And about two seconds too late. He could already feel the Tomcat starting to nose up, see Bird Dog gently easing the yoke back.

  Would it be in time? He hoped to hell the young fool knew what he was doing.

  Gator craned his neck around to stare down at the water below them. It was now visible, since they were under the cloud cover and fog that had plagued their mission on the way in. Two thousand feet, maybe less, he decided, staring in horrified fascination at the churning wave tops whitecapped with foam. Not enough.

  The Tomcat was almost in level flight now, but still descending as its inertia carried it forward. Gator stared in silent horror, knowing that nothing he could say or do could change the aerodynamic equation now being worked out between the airframe and the atmosphere. Either Bird Dog had judged it right, or he hadn’t. Either way. Gator was out of the loop.

  He shut his eyes, not wanting to watch, then opened them immediately.

  As soon as he quit looking, every nerve ending in his body seemed to become preternaturally alive, extending out past the skin of the aircraft to feel the warm, hungry sea below him. Better the demons he could see than those he couldn’t.

  Finally, fifteen feet above the waves, the Tomcat pulled out of its steep dive. Gator felt a slight shudder, and wondered if the reckless pilot in front of him had nicked the surface of the ocean with the tail of the Tomcat. Still, the reassuring roar of both engines reassured him that nothing was wrong with their propulsion. He felt relief flood him, and waited for the moment when Bird Dog would start grabbing altitude again.

  It didn’t happen. The Tomcat streaked on northward, still fifteen to twenty feet above the waves. Gator remained silent, not wanting to cause the slightest distraction to the incredible concentration such low-level flying required. He stared at his radar scope, willing the missile away from them.

  “Flares. Chaff.” Bird Dog’s voice was almost mechanical.

  Gator automatically punched the buttons, watching in wonderment over the fact that his hands still knew what to do while his mind stared at the sea. He felt the gentle thumps on me airframe as the two countermeasure packages shot out from the undercarriage, and wondered what the hell good they would do. They were so close to the sea, both were likely to hit the water before the missile following had any chance to acquire them.

  Just as the first thump shook the aircraft. Bird Dog wrenched the Tomcat into a tight roll. The countermeasures, housed on the underside of the aircraft, shot into the air, detonating one hundred feet above the water.

  The ocean was now only twenty feet above his head, as sky and water reversed themselves in his perspective. He experienced a moment of vertigo and a sudden tensing in his stomach. God, puking now, upside down it would have been funny if it hadn’t been so serious.

  As the last of the countermeasures left the aircraft. Bird Dog rolled the Tomcat upright again and pulled back on the yoke. Gator felt the indescribably delicious sensation of moving away from the water, watching it recede until the hundred feet above it that Bird Dog appeared to settle on felt like a vast safety margin. In other circumstances it would have been far too low for his tastes, but now it seemed like the ultimate in safety.

  As the aircraft regained altitude, the hard blip of the missile reappeared on his radar screen. It was now only five hundred feet behind him, far too close for another try at countermeasures. Or maybe it wasn’t. He tried to remember the exact parameters of the countermeasures, calculated the possible maximum speed of the missile, and was still frantically thinking about it when he heard Bird Dog order another set.

  Again, his fingers seemed to know what to do by themselves. He studied the scope. Just as suddenly as it had appeared, the missile’s trace on the radar disappeared.

  Another, more amorphous bloom popped up, and seconds later he heard an explosion behind him.

  “What the hell was that?” Bird Dog said.

  “You know what it was.” Inexplicably, Gator was now angry beyond all measure. “That fishing boat your low-level stunt decoyed the missile right into it.”

  “It was an air-to-air missile not an air-to-surface missile,” Bird Dog said hurriedly. “It shouldn’t acquire a surface ship. No way.”

  “How the hell do you know? It shouldn’t have run as long as it did either. Comes in low, acquires the next best target after us, and some sailor is fish bait now. How are you going to like explaining that to the admiral?” Gator stormed. “This is the last time. Bird Dog. I’m never flying with you again.”

  The two fishing boats were steaming together silently, all lights extinguished. Their wooden structures were poor radar reflectors, and absent the presence of a high-powered beam, neither one was probably evident on any surface radar.

  Finding Leyta on board had been the first surprise and not the last, she suspected. Aguillar had turned her over to him on the docks in Venezuela and told her he’d retrieve her at the same location.

  “We’re safe?” Pamela Drake asked softly.

  Leyta nodded. “As safe as we can be anywhere. I’ve done this thousands of times you are not to worry. Miss Drake.” His nonchalance gave her more reassurance than his words.

  She nodded and gazed off toward the bow of the boat. If the chart was correct, the coast of Cuba was only five miles ahead. Within twenty minutes, she’d be setting foot on Cuban soil. Americans were still barred from visiting Cuba, but the American government had conspicuously overlooked the occasional presence of an American journalist there. She decided not to think about the possible legal consequences and concentrated on outlining the story she’d soon present to the world.

  The story how much of it could she tell? More important, how much would her producers be
lieve?

  The more members of both Aguillar’s and Leyta’s political groups she met, the more disturbed she was by the degree to which they were interconnected. While most of her viewers would have given little thought to the differences in the two groups’ political agendas, to astute observers on the international scene it had always appeared that Leyta was a violently dangerous reactionary while Aguillar was willing to advance Cuba’s cause within the established political system.

  Pamela was no longer sure either statement was true, and she’d made that clear to Keith Loggins during their last conversation.

  Regardless of the political realities, she was finally on the last leg of her journey, itself an experience in the degree to which the two groups cooperated. Aguillar’s people had handled the seaplane flight from Venezuela to the Caribbean, while Leyta’s people manned the fishing boat now ferrying her into shore. As she understood it, her contacts within Cuba were almost exclusively Leyta’s people, a fact that caused her some degree of concern.

  Well, no matter. A story was a story.

  She heard it before she saw it, a brief whine on the edge of her consciousness, like a bothersome mosquito. In seconds it crescendoed to a shrieking scream, and then the boat in front of them exploded into flames. The captain of her vessel had barely enough time to slew the small craft violently to the right to avoid the wreckage and fireball.

  A cacophony of swearing and exclamations, coupled with screams, exploded on her own craft. She stared in horror at the flaming wreckage, which was flung up into the air, paused at mid-trajectory, then made its comparatively slow descent back to the surface of the warm sea.

  Her journalistic instincts kicked in, and she raised the minicam in her hand and pointed it in the general direction of debris, then passed back down to the burning spot on the ocean. Flames everywhere, hurting her eyes as they seared the night-adapted pupils, throwing oddly flickering shadows of goblins over the bulkheads of her craft. She watched it, caught it all on tape, and felt an absurdly inappropriate thrill that she was present to do so.

  “Get below.” Leyta’s hand clamped down on her bicep.

  He jerked her away from the railing and shoved her toward the cabin.

  “I don’t know what’s happened who did you tell you were coming?”

  “No one!” she said, with one eye still glued to the camera.

  “Shut up and leave me alone.”

  “No. Ten of my friends are dead, and you will not be the one to record it.” He shoved her toward the cockpit hatch.

  She swung the camera around to film him. “What happened? Why did it explode?”

  He stared at her as if staring at an alien being. “A missile,” he said finally. “The noise. I think it was. And where that one came from, there are probably others.”

  The prospect of being trapped below decks, waiting unknowingly for an attack, was unappealing. No, more than that completely unacceptable.

  She twisted away from Leyta’s grasp and ran to the stern of the boat, again aiming her camera at the burning wreckage. The vague outline of one side of the ship was now visible through the flames. The superstructure was completely gone. As her vessel drew away from it, secondary explosions probably gasoline tanks, one part of her mind noted dispassionately shook the air.

  “We have to get away quickly. The authorities will be coming to investigate.” Leyta stared at her. “You will stay there no other parts of the boat, you understand? And no movement.”

  She nodded, still filming the burning wreckage. What a scoop.

  After the last flaming bit of wreckage disappeared from the sea, Pamela hunted down her equipment bag below decks.

  She carefully stowed the camera, then extracted her second most critical piece of survival gear. She punched in Keith Loggins’s telephone number from memory.

  0700 Local (+5 GMT)

  Washington, D.C.

  “And your fiancee saw it?”

  Senator Williams demanded.

  Admiral Loggins moved restlessly in his chair. “So she said. She was calling from her cellular phone. I believe she’s off the coast of Cuba as we speak.” He didn’t believe that at allhe knew exactly where she was: on land in Cuba, a far different matter, and one he wasn’t willing to disclose. “She says she has tape, too, at least of the aftermath.”

  Senator Williams groaned. “That’s all we need, a full picture of this U.S. mishap on ACN in the next hour. I’d better brief the President.

  “You realize this supports the position I’ve held all along,” Williams continued. “Using a carrier in close like that is just too dangerous.

  Accidents happen. Pilots get downed, and collateral damage is excessive. The carrier is a battle-ax, not a delicate political instrument. All we need there is the Arsenal ship. The mere threat of that valiant firepower will be sufficient, and it will be far less likely to cause international mishaps than a group of testosterone laden aviators playing grab-ass in the sky.”

  Admiral Loggins wheeled on him. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I do.”

  Senator Williams regarded him sardonically. “Once a jet jock, always a jet jock. We all know about your exploits during Vietnam, your career as a fighter jock, the times you were shot down. But that was then, this is now. The public is determined there will never be another Vietnam, and that means no screwing around with our nearest neighbor to the south. The Arsenal ship is the answer.”

  “Didn’t you learn anything from Vietnam? I sure did. The first lesson is that D.C. can’t be in charge of targeteering.

  It’s micromanaging and it won’t work. The on-scene commander has got to be free to choose his weapons, and that means having somebody with enough savvy to know how to do it. And that, in case you don’t understand it, means the carrier battle group. Besides, the Arsenal ship provides little capability to make the kind of instantaneous decisions that are needed in the air.”

  “Like shooting down a fishing boat?” Williams let the question hang in the air.

  “Our intelligence is better than it was in Vietnam,” Loggins countered.

  “The on-scene commander can make the kind of decisions he needs to.”

  “Which so far have led to one missing pilot, probably captured by the Cubans, and one dead fishing boat. A pretty impressive catch,” Williams responded sarcastically.

  Williams stormed out of the room, heading for the Senate majority leader’s office. A small worry niggled at the back of his mind. Sure, this was an international incident in the making, but why had Loggins not worried more about the fact that his fiancee was on the other boat?

  SEVEN

  Thursday, 27 June

  1200 Local (+5 GMT)

  Fuentes Naval Base

  Pamela Drake glanced at the clock mounted on the cinderblock wall on the other side of the room. The minute hand quivered just millimeters away from the twelve. Good morning, she decided, not good afternoon. That would make her report sound all the more timely.

  And timely it was. That they were here on a Cuban naval base had pissed her off at first. She’d blasted off at Aguillar, certain that he’d lied to her about getting the real story.

  But his explanation had satisfied her and not even surprised the cynical part of her mind that always doubted the sincerity of any military organization. That the Cuban navy part of it, at least had cordial relationships with both Leyta and Aguillar made sense.

  She ran her fingers one last time through the shining cap of brown hair that topped the face more Americans knew than that of the vice president. She took a deep breath, concentrated on centering herself, the normal routine for appearing on camera. Finally, as the minute hand clicked over to the upright position, she nodded at the cameraman.

  “Good morning. This is Pamela Drake, reporting from Cuba for ACN.

  This is a live report from the westernmost Cuban naval base. In keeping with my agreement with my host, I will not divulge any further details other than to say that the location of thi
s particular installation is well known to the United States government.

  “This morning, at approximately four a.m the American government sparked another round in the increasingly escalating tensions between Cuba and the United States. For the past two weeks, the presence of an American battle group allegedly conducting routine operations off the coast almost within the territorial waters of our neighbor has caused increasing concern on the part of the Cuban government. This day, those concerns were made real.

  “As you know, American citizens are not allowed to visit Cuba.” She gave a small, rueful smile. “Restrictions on our First Amendment rights have never prevented ACN from being the first to bring you every story around the globe.

  That dedication to our basic constitutional guarantees of freedom led to the American aggression this morning that almost killed me.”

  Pamela paused for a moment, and repressed an involuntary shudder that threatened to work its way up from the base of her spine to her shoulders. There was no need to show fear with her command of her voice, every member of her watching audience was already experiencing it. She’d survived; that was enough. She took a deep breath and continued.

  “I have no doubt that the American military establishment will try to deny their involvement in this incident. This murder, I should say.

  However, I will not let that happen. I was there. I saw it. An innocent fishing boat, transporting freedom fighters to a clandestine meeting, was intentionally destroyed by an American missile. Whether or not the United States knew I was on board one of those ships, I refuse to speculate. However, you may draw your own conclusions.

  “During a time when the American government has decided its national interests required a formation of a Trilateral Commission, extensive participation in a new world order, and recognition of the impact economies in other nations have on our own, it is particularly disturbing that we ignore our neighbors to the south. The circumstances are made worse by the fact that there are opposing opinions about the proper relationship between Cuba and America. The American government claims that political uncertainty may lead to the loss of investment capital if trade relations are opened with Cuba, and may be taken by the world community as a movement of support for this dictatorship. The U.S. appears solely concerned with dollars these freedom fighters, these men and women, risk their lives. If we can spend fifteen years in a war to try to support democracy on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, how can we rationalize failing to support these people in their struggle against Castro?”