by Jack Shane
“Who do you believe?” Autry asked Weir once they were alone.
The CIA agent shook his head. “Bobby—it’s ‘he said, she said.’ But either way, it’s too late to kill this thing now. Even if Superstar murdered someone, he has to go in tonight.”
“So, you’re saying go ahead with the mission?”
The agent nodded emphatically. “We’ll sort it out later—if we have to…”
Autry almost laughed. “That’s a strange choice of words,” he said.
Weir wiped his tired eyes. “Well, confidentially, we might not have much to worry about.”
Autry was puzzled. “What do you mean?”
Weir lowered his voice and said, “From what I hear, whatever Superstar’s being dropped in to do, it might be so hot, he’ll be dead within twenty-four hours of hitting the ground…”
CHAPTER 5
THE DROP-OFF POINT WAS A PLACE CALLED EL TAPOS.
It really was located at the ass end of Cuba, on a finger of land jutting off the southwestern edge of the island.
According to the pre-mission intelligence, El Tapos was a bowl-like clearing in the middle of a jungle surrounded by mountains. It would be easily recognizable from the air by the perfectly round lake close by.
Or at least that’s what it said in Weir’s mission file. Autry was reading that file again, not on a piece of paper or his laptop but on his head-up display, this as he was roaring over the open waters of the Caribbean at 160 knots, just ten feet above the waves. It was still very dark, and at this speed and shallow altitude, this was a very dangerous way to travel. But again, that’s what XBat did best. They flew fast, at night, in any weather, just above the clotheslines.
El Tapos was indeed an empty, isolated place—or it had been when the mission file’s latest picture was snapped. This was a minor problem: XBat was working off photos that had been taken nearly a week before. The reason? According to Weir, unidentified bugs were plaguing the NSA’s heretofore invulnerable Galaxy Net, the matrix of cell communications, airborne recon and surveillance satellites that was available only to the United State’s most-secret Special Ops teams. The system had crashed several times in the past week. This was why everyone’s S2S phones had been acting up lately.
The glitch meant they had about two-thirds of the pre-mission intelligence that would normally be required for a good in and out. But that was another thing about XBat and TF-160 as a whole: if the situation was dire enough, they still went in, with whatever they had, improvising if need be and hoping for the best.
At exactly 2315 hours, the coastline of Cuba came into view. Since Autry had flown agents in and out of here many times, he knew the key was to stay below Cuban ground radar, of course. Even more important, though, was to avoid Cuban MiGs, some of which had look-down radar. XBat was prepared for that too. One of their Chinooks was carrying the equivalent of a miniature AWACs suite. When hooked into the Galaxy Net, it could spot hostile aircraft within a hundred miles of its position. And as far as they knew, that part of the Net was working.
As the coastline came up on them, Autry ordered XBat into FTR mode, as in forward timed response. Just the two taxi copters would be needed to fly into El Tapos: One to drop, one riding shotgun. The rest of the unit would wait offshore, flying at predetermined 360s, to be called on only if there was trouble.
At one mile out, Autry and McCune’s copters peeled off from the rest of the unit, leaving the three Black Hawks, two Chinooks and two Killer Eggs to begin their circular patterns. The pair of Killer Eggs went into a picket course close to the ingress beach. Being controlled by the AWACs team in the command Chinook, they would be able to sweep up and down the beach unencumbered, their colleagues ready to warn them of any danger. The rest of the copters quickly fell into their shallow orbits as well.
Mungo was the CO of this FTR holding force. The incident with the super spy was still fresh in his mind. He had a ton of excuses should anyone want to hear them. He’d been just as exhausted, just as hungry, just as agitated as the rest of the unit after the attack on Pablo and the ambush by the Venezuelan jet fighters. Just because he was a flake didn’t mean he was immune to these things.
But the fight with the spy happened—there was no taking it back. Another chapter in his universally unlucky life. What Command would say about it once they got home, he didn’t know. Any one of a million different things, he supposed. Disciplinary action? Loss of flight status? Another court martial? As he began circling, these gloomy thoughts, having snuck into Mungo’s head on the way out, were really beginning to percolate.
For about thirty seconds.
That’s when he got the first trouble call from El Tapos.
It was Autry’s voice, distant and excited, but still under control. “Code Five,” was all he kept saying, over and over. The meaning was simple: the two taxi copters were in danger.
But Mungo knew what to do. Code Five meant the whole unit was to come roaring to the rescue, with all the fire and dash and scariness they could muster. And they were just a minute or so away. But when Mungo told the guys in the command Chinook to start feeding him real-time satellite video of the area, just so they’d know what they were getting into, the Chinook radioed back that this would be impossible.
The NSA Galaxy Net had crashed again.
THE SKY ABOVE EL TAPOS WAS LIT UP LIKE DAYTIME.
Sparks and smoke were rising up all over the area. Structures were aflame. Tracers ruled the night. On the edge of the nearby lake was one of the Black Hawks, shot down and on fire.
Autry was in the other aircraft. At the moment, he was circling directly over the downed copter—trying to keep what seemed to him to be a small army of ghosts from getting near it and killing all those inside.
Autry still wasn’t sure what had gone wrong. They arrived over El Tapos just minutes before to find not the rural isolated place it had promised to be, but what amounted to a small Wild West town with newly constructed pine buildings, muddy streets and pens for horses and cattle located nearby. At first, no one seemed to be around, though, no humans anyway. Both his and McCune’s night-vision gear said the area was clear.
The drop-off had started out OK. McCune’s copter descended quickly, the central lake being the most prominent topographical feature as advertised. It was only when McCune passed through 100 feet in altitude that the firestorm erupted. Suddenly there were guns blazing everywhere. Dozens of soldiers materialized below them, firing at the helicopters from nearly point-blank range. How were these people able to hide their heat signatures from the prying night-vision eyes of the two XBat helicopters? By emerging from holes dug in the ground and covered over by turf, and in some cases, walking directly out of the lake itself. Autry wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own illuminated eyes.
Only one word popped into his mind when he saw the fusillade of tracers fire climbing up at him.
Ambush…
Someone had been expecting them.
The wave of gunfire caught McCune’s Black Hawk head-on. How the young pilot was able to keep his aircraft under control was a miracle in itself. That he was still alive was simply unexplainable. His copter was hit all over, but not mortally, at least not yet. Instead of crashing into the intended drop zone, McCune regained his aircraft’s forward momentum and wobbled it toward the center of the lake. Its ability to stay so low is what saved it for the first thirty seconds or so. There were gunmen around two-thirds of the lake, but shooting at something in the middle was their hardest shot.
Meanwhile, Autry had banked hard and immediately let loose a volley of rockets over the center of the Wild West town, the location of a lot of the ground fire. He didn’t have the time to actually aim the damn things—at the moment, he just wanted to make some noise and let the ghostly shooters below know there was someone else up there.
The barrage had the intended effect: His missiles began picking off buildings on both sides of the street, blowing half of them sky high. He saw people
running, diving, fleeing below. Some were aflame. Suddenly the fire and brimstone was coming from the opposite direction.
Autry then put the copter on its tail and folded over. Now all his forward guns were lined up with the nearest edge of the lake’s shoreline. His four gunners in the rear opened up, firing their enormous fifty-caliber machine guns in every direction. Meanwhile, WSO Zucker, Autry’s copilot, engaged the copter’s four nose-mounted cannons. These weapons too had the ability to make things like buildings, jungle and people simply disappear. That’s why within just thirty seconds of their arrival, the sky above El Tapos looked like it was on fire.
While all this was going on, McCune had managed to get his copter under some semblance of control, pulling up to a slowly moving hover over the middle of the lake. It was obvious, even in the darkness and confusion, that the water was just a few feet deep, even at the center.
It was then that McCune told the super spy this was where he was getting out. The super spy had different ideas, but McCune, never one to mince words, insisted. The mission was to put him down, hot situation or not, and McCune, for a change, was just following orders.
But the super spy did not want to go. So McCune requested two of the huge XBat troopers riding in back to assist in the deplaning. They picked the spy up and threw him out the door. He hit the water with a splash and immediately began swimming toward the far shore.
By this time, Autry and his crew had finished strafing the nearby beach. He turned the gunship over and headed to cover McCune. But bullets that had ripped through McCune’s fuselage moments before were now taking their toll. Many of his hydraulic lines had been severed. His power systems were short-circuiting, and he was losing air pressure in his turbos. Not a good situation.
McCune didn’t want to crash into the lake—no matter how shallow it was, rotor blades whipping around in water tended to break into hundreds of razor sharp shards that moved fast enough to tear through the skin of the copter and all those inside.
Common sense told McCune that heading toward the far shore would be his best chance at survival. But that was the way the super spy was heading, and he didn’t want to draw fire down on the man they’d just delivered.
That’s why McCune turned his copter around and headed for the side of the lake in the exact opposite direction as the man was swimming. Autry caught on right away and strafed that end of the beach as well. Autry observed the super spy safely reaching dry land and turned over to see that McCune had crashed on the near side of the lake.
Autry rushed for the crash site. He arrived overhead to see McCune and his guys jumping out of the copter, the gunners picking up their machine guns from their collapsible mounts and dragging miles of ammunition belts with them. Autry did another hard bank, his men firing the whole time, keeping off the three waves of gunmen now rushing toward the downed copter.
But suddenly a barrage of bullet rounds tore through the underbelly of Autry’s copter. He and Zucker would have been killed instantly if they hadn’t been sitting in a reinforced cabin. In a heartbeat, though, things began sparkling and sizzling all around them. Smoke began filling the cabin. They started losing altitude.
That’s when the rest of XBat showed up.
EVERYONE IN XBAT HAD BEEN IN THIS SITUATION before.
There were people on the ground shooting at their colleagues. This meant the first order of business was to shoot back. It was also important, in the shadowy world of black ops, to make a statement, to leave a calling card, so to speak: This is what XBat did to people who shot at them. Fuck around with us, and this will happen to you too. In other words, they would now lay waste to this place—whatever this place was.
Autry knew this. So did McCune.
It was up to Autry to get the taxi copter’s crew out safely before the roof really fell in on El Tapos.
The pair of Killer Eggs swooped in first. Both had powerful searchlights attached to the chins. The pilots flipped their switches, and in a flash, the battleground around the edge of the lake where McCune’s copter had been forced down was illuminated brightly. For the first time XBat could see exactly who they were fighting.
These people weren’t in uniforms—not typical ones anyway. Instead the gunmen were dressed in what could only be described as gang colors. Floppy tropical shirts or no shirts at all. Huge floppy shorts, sneakers, and many, many red bandanas. Though many militias around the world, especially in Africa and parts of Asia, were known to dress like this, at the moment, it appeared as if XBat was descending into a nest of Cripps. Or would that be Bloods?
With the glare of the searchlights, several things became much clearer. This was obviously some kind of training site for irregular forces, guerrillas, tough-guy mercenaries and such—maybe under Cuban command, maybe not. In any case, there were a lot of these characters down there—and a lot of them were now converging on McCune’s downed copter.
The Killer Eggs swooped in together, side by side, searchlights blazing, their mini guns firing into the swarm of advancing gunmen. Meanwhile, the rest of XBat fell into a tight orbit above the burning camp. They were gradually opening up with their weapons. But not full bore—not yet.
Autry took his cue. He pushed his copter’s controls forward and the bottom fell out of his Black Hawk. The guys in the back, along with their weapons, became weightless for a few moments, this was how sharp Autry’s plunge became. They came over McCune’s position, not twenty feet above the hard deck. McCune’s five-man crew had set up a ragged circle around the burning copter and were firing madly at the gangs of gunmen approaching from three sides. It was the standard defensive tact to take, but it reminded Autry a little too much of Custer’s Last Stand—or worse, downtown Mogadishu.
And there was no way he was going to let that happen again.
The pair of Killer Eggs came down nearly on top of him, their weapons still spraying cannon shells in every direction. Two of the Black Hawk Special K flying trucks screeched in a moment later and added to the barrage—this as the rest of the unit started firing on other elements of the gang soldiers still inside the Wild West town.
As soon as the Special Ks arrived on the deck, Autry slammed his Black Hawk into the ground fifty feet from McCune’s burning copter. He could hear McCune’s distinctive voice rising above the fray, yelling to his guys to get their asses on Autry’s copter. They didn’t need to be told twice. With dozens of these bandana soldiers moving in on them, it was clearly time to go.
They sprinted for Autry’s copter even as a long spray of tracer fire lit up the Black Hawk from one end to the other. Autry’s crew were helping to haul them in while still firing their weapons. McCune was the last to leave the wreck. Given enough ammunition, he would have stayed down there forever, fighting off those assholes.
Finally he too jumped onboard. Autry yanked up on the controls and the Black Hawk began to rise, even as McCune was still in the act of climbing into it. Another line of tracers came up at them, but Autry hit the controls and the gas at the same time, and the line of gunfire began popping along the landing strut, just inches away from the open cargo bay and cockpit. He put on the rest of the gas and they went straight up into the smoke, long lines of tracers following them, licking at their heels.
While all this had been going on, Zucker activated the copter’s digital camera set up on the control column in front of him. Other copter pilots were recording the battle too. It was important that they get the rescue on tape, to help future members of 160 and XBat learn how to do it right. Plus, all kinds of surprising things could be picked up during a battle—if their cameras were pointing in the right direction, that is.
Now that Autry’s copter had cleared the area, the rest of XBat really went to work. They broke from their tight circle and began annihilating what was left of the camp. First the other DAP gunships went in, nearly a dozen weapons firing from each one, tearing up what would be considered the main street of the encampment. They were followed by the Black Hawk troop ships, each man on
board firing their personal weapons out the sides and perforating buildings on either side of the burning street.
Then the Chinooks came in, one behind the other, all mini guns and cannons, laying down a spectacular wash of fire that destroyed everything in its path. Behind them, the two Killer Eggs added their mini guns to the mayhem. Then it was the Black Hawks’ turn again.
It went on like this for nearly five minutes, an eternity for someone on the ground being fired at. There was return fire for a minute or so—tracers coming up to meet the copters in scary multicolored back-and-forth spray patterns. But gradually all resistance ceased. All that remained were the flames and XBat’s exercise in moving the rubble.
Autry flew over the moving barrage, surveying the target. It was clear their work was done here. He radioed the message that the unit was to egress, toot sweet. The remaining copters fell into a loose formation behind him and they all turned to the west—all except Mungo, that is. He headed in the opposite direction. In seconds he was over the south beach of the lake, the place where the spy had emerged from his midnight swim.
Mungo pulled up sharply and directed his own spotlight on the jungle below. Here he found the super spy cowering, or simply hiding, in the underbrush. Mungo was flying so low, their eyes met.
And then the spy got to his feet and started running deeper into the forest, looking over his shoulder more than once to see if Mungo was in pursuit.
CHAPTER 6
The next morning
AUTRY HAD NEVER HAD WHISKEY ON CORNFLAKES before…but there was a first time for everything.
He was sitting in the USS Lexington’s dingy officers’ mess, staring into a bowl of cornflakes and Jack Daniels. The flakes were courtesy of the carrier’s slowly depleting food supply; the Jack was courtesy of the ship’s captain, Jumbo Eliot.
