Escape from Nicaragua

by Stephen Mertz

  M.I.A. Hunter: Escape From Nicaragua

  By Stephen Mertz

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2012 / Stephen Mertz

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  Stephen Mertz has traveled the world as a soldier, adventurer, and writer. His novels have been widely translated and have sold millions of copies worldwide. He currently lives in the American Southwest, and is always at work on a new novel.

  Book List

  Novels:

  Blood Red Sun

  Devil Creek

  Night Wind

  The Castro Directive

  M.I.A. Hunter Series:

  M.I.A. Hunter

  M.I.A. Hunter: Cambodian Hellhole

  M.I.A. Hunter: Exodus from Hell

  M.I.A. Hunter: Blood Storm

  M.I.A. Hunter: Escape from Nicaragua

  M.I.A. Hunter: Invasion U.S.S.R.

  M.I.A. Hunter: Crossfire Kill

  M.I.A. Hunter: Desert Death Raid

  M.I.A. Hunter: L.A. Gang War

  M.I.A. Hunter: Back to 'Nam

  M.I.A. Hunter: Heavy Fire

  M.I.A. Hunter: China Strike

  DISCOVER CROSSROAD PRESS

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  Prologue

  The Huey Cobra skimmed dark clouds, crackling with jagged streaks of lightning. There were five men on board; two were C.I.A. agents being sent into Nicaragua to contact a mountain band of Contras.

  One of them, Don Shepard, said, "It's getting late. Will we make it before dark?"

  "Trust me," the pilot answered. "I've been over this route a dozen times. I'll get you to the church on time."

  The other agent, Jack Harris, said, "Aren't we pretty goddamn high?"

  The pilot glanced at him. "Listen, you want to take over the controls? I'll curl up in the back there. I could use some sleep."

  "Come on . . . I didn't mean nothing."

  The pilot grunted. He was tired and wanted to set the bus down and have a drink. Instead, he was up in the fucking blue, heading into enemy territory to deliver some C.I.A. spooks to a postage-stamp drop in the hills. He didn't care for it. Especially when SAMs had been reported no longer than a week ago in the area.

  He scanned the horizon and moved the controls gently to starboard, lining up two mountain peaks. His destination was just to the right of them. He glanced at his watch. They were probably twenty minutes to a landing.

  In the control center on the rim of an active volcano, the Nicaraguan air-traffic controller fixed his gaze on the small blip as it moved down along the coast, flying just high enough to avoid the white-capped waves.

  At the operator's left elbow stood General Romero Perez. He wiped his sweaty brow with his sleeve. The small room was hot, humid, claustrophobic.

  "It is headed toward Managua," he said in his native Spanish. "She will fly along the coast, just outside our coastal limits, then cut in abruptly across the mountains to the capital. Let's scramble the MiGs and shoot her down the moment she enters our air space."

  On the other side of the radar operator Colonel Zharka, a Soviet "adviser" assigned to Perez's unit, shook his head.

  "Nyet." He corrected himself and switched to Spanish. He tried to speak the native language wherever he served. "No. I want them alive. We shall put plan 'capture' into effect."

  Perez showed puzzlement, then anger.

  "I know of no such plan."

  "The squadron knows. So does the commander of your helicopter gunships. Just call them."

  "No. This is my country. I give the orders."

  "It is your country only as long as we permit it to be so." Zharka reached for a telephone. He would give the order himself. But he tried to placate the general, too.

  "The MiGs will form a circle around the helicopter. Nothing can escape their encirclement. But their firepower is only for destruction. A helicopter gunship has many weapons. They can force down one of their own kind with less chance of killing the passengers."

  He spoke Russian into the telephone.

  "There," he said as he hung up. "It is done. In an hour we should have two live C.I.A. agents. Plus a pilot and co-pilot, hopefully alive. You will be honored in Managua."

  "And you," Perez said bleakly, his eyes still on the radar blip, "will be honored in Moscow. . . ."

  Aboard the helicopter the pilot checked his instruments. "Goddamn! They're locked on to us already."

  His co-pilot leaned left and checked the radar detector. Its light blinked brightly. No question. A radar somewhere inland had picked them up as a telltale blip on its screen.

  The younger man tried to hide the fear snaking up his back. It was his first flight into enemy territory, and he had been clammy wet in his own sweat since he had first seen the flight plan.

  If the commander had given him more time, he might have feigned illness. He was sick all right, nauseated at the prospect of deep penetration into enemy territory.

  Unbuckling his belt and unplugging his earphones, the crewman, a lean kid, left his seat and worked his way back to where the two men sat, both locked in their private thoughts.

  Seeing them lifted the co-pilot's spirits. At least he wasn't them. He and the ship would be on the ground only long enough for the two men to toss out their ordinary-looking suitcases and jump to the ground.

  They would be staying behind.

  When they raised their eyes and escaped from their private thoughts, he plugged in his intercom cord and waited as the two men pressed hard on the side of their helmets. There was no other way to be heard above the roar of the engines.

  "We've been picked up by enemy radar."

  The two men exchanged glances.

  "Have we aroused any suspicion or defensive action yet?" the older of the two men asked. He called himself Shepard this time, but he had been known by many names through the years. He was forty-five, practically over the hill in his business, and his face made him look older. There was a scar on one cheek and a general dry hardness to his skin. Beneath his shirt and trousers were the scars of previous missions that went sour.

  Impatiently he repeated his question. "Is there any sign that we have aroused suspicion or defensive action so far?"

  Before the crewman could reply in the negative, the stronger, more confident voice of the pilot came over the intercom.

  "I just got a report via satellite," he said. "Near as I can tell, three bogies just scrambled from the air base at Managua. They're no more than five minutes out. And I got something slower headed our way."

  The crewman looked hopefully at the passengers. Shepard said nothing.

  His partner appeared disinterested.

  "Well?" The lieutenant looked from one to the other.

  "Well what?" Shepard asked.

  "Do we turn back? In five minutes we can be back over international waters. They won't hit us there. Bad press. And there's two destroyers backing us up." He was talking fast, his frayed nerves showing in every muscle of his face. His eyes darted, his nostrils flared. "Don't you understand?" His voice became high-pi
tched and boyish. "They're going to shoot us out of the fucking sky!"

  A high-pitched roar overpowered the sound of the chopper's engine. The craft dropped, throwing the lieutenant against the unpadded ceiling. He bounced back, slamming into the floor, then flew against the bulkhead and dropped unconscious. Shepard caught him and drew him into a plank seat where he could buckle him into a seat belt.

  The crewman was out of it. He was barely breathing as a streak of flame cut across the starboard side, shaking the helicopter.

  They'd been given the pep talk, the kamikaze lecture, the boys in the field called it. Die for the good U.S. of A. But don't get captured.

  Shepard and Harris had nodded when given the order. They would have raised their right hands, placed their left on a Bible, and given their Scout's honor. But they weren't dying for anybody if they could help it.

  And right now the question seemed moot as the night sky came apart with the thundering roar of jet engines, streaks of lightning-like flames of rockets and tracer ammunition. The American helicopter did a dance, slid off to the left, slid to a fast stop, and hovered briefly in the path of the oncoming jets.

  "Yeah, they're bogies all right," the pilot said from the cockpit.

  He remained calm. The whole sky was a mass of streaks and noise and confusion. If he expected to live for the next two minutes, he would have been a fool.

  But then he had been at the embassy in Saigon when the helicopters snatched the last Americans and the highest-ranking South Vietnamese collaborators from the oncoming Communists. He hadn't expected to live through that either.

  "Are they saying anything to you?" Harris asked.

  He had taken off his seat belt and moved to the cannon position amidships. His partner took up a similar position on the starboard side. They would try to take one of the MiGs with them if the whole mission fell apart.

  "Yeah, they're talking to me," the pilot replied. "Spanish and Russian. I can't understand a fucking word."

  "Give them the cassette," Shepard ordered.

  In the front cabin the pilot ignored all the complex instrumentation and punched the play button of a twenty-five-dollar tape cassette.

  The message, garbled Russian, played into the radio transmitter.

  "Mayday, Mayday," it cried in essence. "We cannot read you. Mayday. Ermine two heading for Managua airport. Clear the runways. Mayday."

  For several moments the MiGs continued crisscrossing the sky, but as they turned to take up perimeter positions like Indians riding bareback around the circled wagon trains, Don Shepard sensed disaster.

  The pilot raised the chopper nose, braked his forward motion like a cat skidding on her claws at the sight of three Dobermans rushing at her across a barren field.

  It happened too quickly to really see. The two MiGs collided head-to-head. One minute there was a blur in front of the chopper. The next the sky exploded. Yellow flames. Popping fireworks. Then chunks of metal cutting, slamming, against the American chopper.

  Big holes appeared in the windscreen.

  The rest of the clear plastic spiderwebbed with cracks. Wind cut at the pilot's face, flooding his eyes with tears.

  The last thing Shepard saw clearly was the moon-splashed waters of Lake Nicaragua, an expanse of water more than a hundred miles long and several dozen miles wide.

  It was directly below him.

  Disaster, he thought.

  The flight plan had been simple. After signaling Mayday, he was supposed to send out the message that he'd be making an emergency landing, but he expected to make it to the international airport at Managua on the far side of the lake.

  The lie would buy them time for their real orders.

  They were supposed to go down on the sandy beach of the lake, then drop the two passengers and a barrel of oil to simulate a crash site. From there the chopper would skim the jungle growth and follow the lake south into Costa Rica.

  The two passengers would have time to disappear into the jungle before the Communists reached the phony crash site. But the whole plan exploded on him.

  They were already halfway across the lake.

  And then, as he watched the burning jets plunge into the shallows of the giant lake, the pilot finally saw a slower craft off his right wing. A fearsome Russian Hind gunship had taken up an escort position off their right side.

  Russian crackled in their earphones.

  The other pilot wanted them down. Now. Not ten minutes from now. But now, exactly now.

  A burst of cannon fire across the bow made the message perfectly clear.

  From the rear agent Shepard said, as calmly as he could, "I got the Russki in the sights, I think." He wasn't trained in the use of the weapon, but he was willing to try.

  The pilot considered briefly. There was still another jet fighter in the sky that would finish them in an instant if they showed any offensive intent. On the other hand, if they were going to crash anyway, they might as well take the Russian helicopter with them.

  His optimistic side prevailed.

  He made one more check ahead. Through the largest hole he thought he saw a darker area, a blotch on the still waters.

  An island, he decided. He remembered from the charts he had studied before the mission.

  "Hold your fire. I think there's an island ahead. I'll drop you guys there and see if I can get out during the confusion."

  "An island?" Harris didn't approve. "How the hell are we going to get to the mainland?"

  "Swim," the pilot said.

  His choice evaporated anyway. The Russian chopper had taken up a position directly in front of him. And the last MiG was throttled back, making banking circles around the intruder.

  "Bullshit," Shepard snarled from the intercom. "No islands."

  "No choice."

  The camouflaged helicopter shuddered as the cannon on the port side let loose a burst, aimed at the circling jet.

  "No!" the pilot screamed. "For chrissakes—"

  But it was too late. The other cannon was in action, too, and for a moment the jet climbed frantically, escaping disaster only because of the untrained men at the guns.

  The remaining Russian—the helicopter—wrote the finale. In one burst it chipped away the ends of a rotor.

  Shivering and quaking, the American chopper began losing altitude. It obviously wasn't going to make the island.

  They were going down.

  Chapter One

  The new headquarters building for the guerrilla warfare school at Fort Bragg was a miniature Pentagon, a six-sided doughnut with a corridor running along the outside. The offices and conference rooms looked out on an atrium in the center. Shrubs and grass flourished there in the wet and moderate climate of North Carolina.

  In the building's small theater the only light came from the exit signs and the reading lamp on the podium, where Mark Stone stood.

  Seated before Stone, in the last row, was Terrance Loughlin, and two rows closer sat Hog Wiley. Carol Jenner sat in the first row on the right, next to the emergency exit.

  Stone was a big man with the muscular coordination of a hungry tiger. He had been a master sergeant in a Green Beret Special Forces unit stationed out of Da Nang during the Vietnam War. His specialty had been covert actions of all kinds, usually involving hit-and-run, cross-border operations into Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam. He had undergone extensive stateside training in all of the classic infiltration techniques, including weapons, demolition, hand-to-hand combat, survival, paratroop training, and camouflage. He had played a vital part in some of the most sensitive operations of that war, and had the distinction of having served more tours of duty in Indochina than any other Special Forces soldier.

  In the years since that dirty war, Stone had begun returning periodically to Southeast Asia in search of living American missing in action prisoners of war on behalf of the families of such men. It was a matter of honor and nothing else.

  Stone and his team had on numerous occasions isolated and penetrated P.O.W. slav
e camps, neutralizing resistance to rescue American prisoners. The catch had been that, until very recently, the more Stone had proved that there were living M.I.A.s over there, the more intense had become the pressures to cease his unsanctioned activities.

  The official U.S. government line was that there were no living M.I.A.s in Southeast Asia, and Stone had first been branded a nuisance, then a maverick, and finally a criminal as he had moved increasingly outside the law. The C.I.A. had actually sent a team out after his head, and he and his men had become fugitives from federal indictments involving their M.I.A. work.

  Until, yes, very recently.

  Until a friendly senator had begun pushing for the powers that be to see the light. After much finagling, this had eventually resulted in no less than a presidential pardon for Stone, and an offer to broaden his scope of activities, operating decidedly off the record but with government sanction, utilizing the unique hard-punch capabilities honed to a fine edge by Stone and his men during their M.I.A. missions.

  Based out of Fort Bragg, Stone's team would be brought into action whenever and wherever American military, government, or civilian personnel were declared "Missing in Action," around the world, when standard diplomatic or military response was inappropriate.

  The way the world was going these days, it was thought such a team could and would be kept more than a little busy in global hotspots.

  This was the first mission for Stone and company since the presidential pardons. Stone sensed the edginess of his teammates.

  Loughlin and Wiley sat sideways in their seats, their hands subtly on the butts of their concealed weapons. They could gun down anyone entering the unlit auditorium.

  Wiley's selection of a seat two rows closer to the front was not a random choice. Seated in the same back row, he and his teammate might kill each other if they opened fire on someone entering through the double doors in the rear wall.