Twisted Cross

by Maloney, Mack;

  LaFeet was the first one to make the connection. Suddenly his swagger vanished and was replaced with his old friends, fear and groveling.

  “You wouldn’t…” he whined.

  Hunter just nodded and poured out a heaping, dripping portion of the honey on to the jar lid. He stepped closer and stood directly over the big man.

  “Tell us about your little cruise to Colombia,” Hunter snarled at him.

  “No…” LaFeet said. “No way… I can’t… They’ll kill me if I tell you how I got the… the stuff…”

  “We don’t give a damn about your nose candy,” Hunter shot back. “How did you get through the Canal?”

  LaFeet was momentarily taken back by Hunter’s question. But he quickly began shaking his head.

  “They’ll kill me if I tell you that, too,” he said.

  Hunter didn’t want to beat around the bush any longer. It was hot and sticky and very uncomfortable out in the swamp, and the honey on his hand and in the jar lid had attracted a swarm of the pain-in-the-ass “miggee” flies.

  So he took the honey lid and poured out a long stream of the sticky goo over LaFeet’s head. The big man had rather long hair and the honey quickly matted it down.

  “Jesus Christ! No!” he yelled. But it was too late. Within seconds, his face was a mass of honey and swarming flies.

  “How did you get through the Canal?” Hunter asked again, even more harshly.

  “I can’t tell you…” LaFeet screamed. “They’ll hunt me down. They hunt everyone down…”

  Hunter applied some more honey to the man’s face and shoulders. Another few thousand flies immediately showed up.

  “Who’s running the Canal these days?” Hunter pressed. “How come that cruise liner got through?”

  “God, man, this is inhuman!” LaFeet screamed as he involuntarily sucked the bug-drenched honey into his nose and mouth. The man’s face was now actually hard to see with so many swamp flies and other assorted insects flying around his head.

  “So is murder and selling under-age girls…” Hunter said as he dumped another load of honey down the front of LaFeet’s mu-mu. He and the other three airmen then walked a few yards away and sat down to wait, playing their utility flashlights on the tortured 550-pound man.

  “Look! Ants!” Hobbs called out, being the first to spot the dual stream of red insects how crawling up LaFeet’s legs and torso to catch the lower drippings of honey.

  “Talk, big boy!” Hunter yelled out, swatting a few ants away from himself.

  “No! I can’t!” LaFeet screeched, spitting out globs of honey and insect-laced saliva.

  “You will…” Hunter countered.

  Ten minutes passed and it appeared as if every representative of the insect kingdom was now either crawling on or orbiting around LaFeet’s massive frame. The man continued to yell and squeal like a pig. He repeatedly tried to break free of his restraints, but to no avail. Another ten minutes went by, Hunter and the others calmly drinking more coffee as armies of flying and crawling things flocked to the honey-drenched big man.

  Still, it wasn’t until two large, nasty-looking swamp snakes showed up, the fat man finally broke down…

  “Jesus Christ! All right! I’ll talk!” he screamed. “Just get rid of those fucking snakes! I hate snakes!”

  Hobbs accommodated his request, picking off both snakes with two well-placed shots from his Colt .45 automatic sidearm.

  Hunter got to his feet, brushed himself off and walked over to the bound man. The honey jar was still open and ready.

  “How did that cruise liner pass through the Canal?” he asked LaFeet. “I hear the guys running things down there shoot first and ask questions later…”

  “Not if you pay ’em, stupid!” LaFeet screamed.

  “Pay?” Hunter said. “You mean you can deal with them?”

  “Not just anyone, flyboy,” LaFeet answered, his mouth still sputtering bugs and honey. “Arrangements are made ahead of time. They’re businessmen. If they want to deal with you, you pay them a toll. If they don’t want to deal with you, or if you just bust in there half-assed, you’re grease.”

  “How many of them are there?” Tyler asked, coming up to stand beside Hunter.

  “How the fuck would I know?” LaFeet shot back. “I didn’t take a head count for Christ’s sake!”

  Just because LaFeet decided to talk didn’t mean the insects had given up getting dibs on the honey. If anything, more bugs were swarming around him. He looked so uncomfortable it gave Hunter a slight case of the willies.

  “Who are these guys down in the Canal?” Hunter asked him. “They’re not your blow buddies from The Circle…”

  “No way,” LaFeet answered. “These days The Circle couldn’t run a swimming pool, never mind the fucking Panama Canal.”

  “So, who are they?” Hunter asked him again. “Locals? Mexicans? Mid-Aks?”

  LaFeet even managed a sinister laugh at that one. “Yeah, right, Mid-Aks,” he said. “I don’t know who the hell they are… But they sure ain’t Mid-Aks…”

  “I think he’s bullshitting us,” Crockett said.

  “I do, too,” Hunter said, adding with feigned nonchalance: “Lieutenant Hobbs, could you please go round up a snake?”

  Hobbs, a country boy who knew his way around a swamp, immediately jumped to his feet and started looking in the underbrush.

  “Jesus! No!” LaFeet hollered. “I hate fucking snakes!”

  “Then you better start making some sense,” Hunter told him.

  “What’s the toll?” Tyler asked the man. “Guns? A slice of your drug haul? Girls?”

  LaFeet made a great effort to shake his head. “No, no… These guys really don’t give a damn about that kind of stuff. All they want is one thing: gold.”

  Hunter was not totally surprised to hear that. Another piece of the puzzle had just fallen into place.

  The fighter pilot pressed in on LaFeet, standing over him, his boot on the man’s ample neck. “I’ll ask you for the last time: Who’s in charge down there?”

  “I don’t fucking know!” the fat man yelled, his eyelids now partially clogged with a glob consisting of more bugs than honey. “The officers are foreigners…”

  “Foreigners?” Hunter said. “You mean Russians?”

  “No, not Russians,” LaFeet said, letting out a long, slow, exhausted breath. He was caving in. “I’m not sure, but I think they might be Germans…”

  Chapter 8

  HUNTER WAS BACK IN DC less than two days later.

  Before he left New Orleans, he arranged to have LaFeet turned over to the military governor. Then he paid a visit to the hospital to see Captain Pegg. Hunter was heartened to learn from the man’s doctors that, although the old buck was still in rough shape, he was getting better.

  Now, Hunter was in Jones’ temporary Washington headquarters, which was located in the now mostly-deserted Pentagon building.

  “Damn, this is all we need,” Jones said disgustedly as he listened to Hunter’s report on the situation in the Canal and who was running things down there.

  Tyler, Crockett and Hobbs were also in attendance, as was the usual group of the United Americans’ top echelon: former Thunderbird pilots, J. T. “Socket” Toomey, the hipster of the bunch; Ben Wa, the Oriental fighter ace and Mike Fitzgerald, the fighter pilot/soldier turned millionaire-entrepreneur. Also there was Captain “Crunch” O’Malley and Captain Elvis Q of the Ace Wrecking Company; Major Frost of the Free Canadian Air Force; Major Douglas Shane of the elite Football City Special Forces and Colonel Ken Stagg of the New York Hercules Heavy Air Lift Corporation—“New York Hercs” for short. Each man had played a crucial part in the liberation of the eastern half of the country from the Soviet-backed Circle forces, and especially during the climactic battle for Washington, DC.

  Still as Hunter looked around the room at his friends and allies, he couldn’t help but feel a certain presence was missing: Captain John “Bull” Dozer, the valiant leader of the
famous US Marine “7th Cavalry,” was no longer with them. The man had died bravely during a major battle between the United Americans and The Circle at the Washington Monument. In his stead was Dozer’s longtime second-in-command, Captain Lamont Johnson. Known as “Catfish” to his friends, Johnson was a mean-looking six-foot-seven black man who once played defensive end for the San Diego Chargers of the old NFL.

  “So what are our options?” Jones asked, throwing out the question for discussion. “I mean, the good news is that the Canal is in working order. The bad news is there’s a bunch of hobnails running it.”

  “I don’t think we have more than one or two choices,” Ben Wa said. “We certainly can’t do business with these Canal guys, not with the information we have on them now.”

  “Stomp ’em,” J.T. kicked in, adjusting his ever-present sunglasses. “Lay an air strike on the bastards…”

  “We’ve got to know a lot more about them before we do that,” Jones said, slightly scolding the somewhat impulsive fighter pilot.

  “Sure do,” Frost said. “An air strike might knock out their operations for a while, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to turn tail and run and never come back.”

  “Also an air strike might damage the locks or the Canal itself,” Stagg added. “Then we’d be kicking our own ass.”

  “It seems to me that any airstrike would have to be followed up by some kind of ground operation,” Catfish said. “I mean, not only do we have to grease these guys, we also got to get control of the Canal.”

  “And learn how to work it,” Frost said.

  “Okay,” Jones said, tapping his pen on the meeting table. “We’re already talking about a major operation here. Air strikes, a ground invasion, then occupying and operating the Canal ourselves. Those are all tall orders…”

  “But they have to be done, General,” Tyler said, speaking for the first time. “We can fly all the air convoys we want from the West Coast to the East, but they’ll never be able to move enough supplies for us to even consider a realistic reconstruction program. We need an open water route.”

  “What we need first is intelligence,” Hunter said. “What is their strength? In men? In equipment? Do they have SAMs? Do they have aircraft?”

  Crunch spoke up. “That’s our department,” he said, nodding to his partner, Elvis. “You all know one of our Phantoms is now in a recon mode. It’s high time we flew down there anyhow. We can take more pictures of that place in one day than anyone has taken in a hundred years.”

  “That’s true,” Jones said. “But these guys don’t strike me as our usual ass-backwards type of opponent. They sound slick. Organized…”

  “Committed…” Hunter added. “Committed to a cause of some sort. They’re heavy into gold, but I also get the feeling that it’s just the fuel for some kind of fire. Like a weird political type of thing.”

  “You mean like left-wingers? Or right-wingers?” Tyler asked.

  “I mean like fanatics,” Hunter answered. “It’s just a hunch. But I saw those guys who shot at Pegg crunch those cyanide capsules. Well, let’s face it, that’s fanatical behavior.”

  Everyone around the table nodded almost at once.

  Hunter continued. “So, if we go flying around down there, believe me, these cats will catch on very quickly that something is up. And, I’m sure, just like those guys greased themselves, the people in charge will do something drastic.”

  “Well, dammit, we’re back at square one,” J.T. snarled.

  “Which is where we should be,” Jones said authoritatively. “Our successes in the past haven’t come because of any advantages in manpower or equipment. They’ve come because we use our heads and think things out. No sense in changing that now…”

  Everyone took a swig of whatever they were drinking and stole a deep breath.

  “Phase one is always gathering intelligence,” Jones began again. “And in this case, I agree, that recon overflights would be premature at this point. We’ve got to get a man in on the ground down there and get the big picture.”

  “I’m going,” Hunter said immediately.

  There was no need for discussion, no reason for argument. It was a foregone conclusion; everyone in the room knew that the dangerous job would fall to The Wingman.

  The only question Jones had was: “How?”

  Hunter shrugged. “If the Hercs can drop me in,” he said, making it up as he went along. “I’ll snoop around. When I’ve seen enough, I’ll call and someone gets me out.”

  “Feel like lugging a mini-cam with you?” Crunch asked. “It’s a small one—hold it in one hand. Lightweight. Good on batteries.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Jones said, making a few notes. “I think if you could, getting good video would help us on this one…”

  “Sure, why not?” Hunter said. He planned on traveling light anyway. Carrying a small camera would be no big deal.

  Jones closed his notebook, an indication that the meeting was over. “Work up your plan, Hawk,” he said. “Get together with your support guys. You and I will talk it over one more time and then I suggest you jump off as soon as possible.”

  Chapter 9

  EIGHTEEN HOURS LATER, HUNTER was strapped into one of the jump seats in the back of a New York Herc C-130 cargo plane.

  “About another hour, Major,” one of the crewmen called back to him from the cockpit. “Holler if you need help suiting up.”

  Hunter stood up and began the long process of getting ready to jump out of a moving airplane. First he fastened on his main and auxiliary parachutes. Then he checked his front and rear knapsacks—they contained everything from water purification tablets to a small, hand-held SAM pistol of his own design. Next came his utility belt and holster, his NightScope goggles, his M-16 and finally, his flight helmet.

  “Forty-five minutes…” came a call from the cockpit.

  Hunter routinely rechecked his map, lining up the topography on the paper with the terrain outside the C-130’s small window. He was heartened to see that they were right on course, a credit to the ‘130 pilot. The New York Hercs were a great team—the best in cargo lift he’d ever seen. And they were, to a man, just as committed to the causes of freedom and the reunification of America as Hunter or any of the other United Americans. In other words, they were his kind of people.

  The trip down to Central America had been eventless. The Herc took off from DC at sunrise the morning after the planning session. Fighter escort was provided by two Football City F-20 Tigersharks, hot-shit aircraft that were legitimately the best in the world next to Hunter’s own F-16XL. The small convoy stopped for refueling in Football City itself, then again in Dallas. In addition, they all took on additional gas during a mid-air refueling session over the Caribbean about an hour ago, courtesy of the Texas Air Force.

  So now it was dark and they had just passed over the eastern coastline of what used to be Costa Rica, but was now known simply as Big Banana. Now for the first time he could see Panama. His designated drop zone was just over the edge of the Mosquito Gulf, about 10 miles from the “eastern” Atlantic-side entrance to the Canal. More accurately, it was the northern entrance as the Canal, as Panama itself, actually ran more north to south than east to west. Further complicating things was that due to Panama’s crooked elbow shape, the Pacific entrance was actually more to the east than the Atlantic side.

  But geography aside, Hunter planned to set down as close to the shoreline as possible, then hoof it to the Canal.

  Time passed. Hunter felt the C-130 start to descend slowly.

  “Twenty minutes, Major,” the Herc crewman called back.

  Hunter took a succession of deep breaths and rechecked his two parachute harnesses. He decided to review his plan once again, but found his thoughts drifting back to the night before, when he and most of the United American allies attended a football match at RFK Stadium between a Football City All-Star team and a pro team from San Antonio, Republic of Texas. It was one of the first of many exhibi
tion games that had been scheduled around the continent as another means of solidifying and unifying the United American cause.

  The game was a good one—the Texans won in OT, 48-46. Hunter and his friends had had great seats, near the fifty yard line. But still, the pilot’s mind hadn’t been on the game for all four quarters.

  He had sat beside Major Frost and after a few beers, the conversation came around to Dominique.

  Hunter told the Canadian the latest on his beautiful girlfriend, how she had somehow hooked on with a group of prominent Canadians and was now on an isolated retreat in the Canadian Rockies. Although Frost wasn’t familiar with the particular people Dominique had fallen in with, he was aware of similar “human encounter” groups that were springing up in Free Canada.

  “Some of them are quite innocent,” the Canadian had told him. “They are little more than social clubs. But others are quickly attaining cult status. Not quite along the line of America’s cults of the sixties and seventies, but not that far away either…”

  “I’ve never really known Dominique to be a ‘joiner,’” Hunter had told Frost.

  He remembered the worried look that came over the Canadian at that moment. “These groups apparently are especially attractive to people just like that,” he had explained. “People who are isolated. People who are having problems adjusting to this crazy world…”

  Hunter then posed a question he wished he hadn’t. “Just what do these people do on retreat?” he asked.

  Again, Frost admitted he knew little about it all, but because Hunter was his friend and he believed in telling it like it is, he told the fighter pilot that some of the groups practiced “open living.”

  “Fairly open sex, is a better term for it,” Frost explained. “All very safe, of course. But it’s an encouragement to share everything—apparently including your bed—anytime, with anyone you want…”

  It was those last three words that had stuck in Hunter’s mind. “Anyone you want…”

  Hunter and Frost had finished the conversation with a handshake and a promise from the Canadian to look into the particular group Dominique had joined.