Twisted Cross

by Maloney, Mack;

  After two days of constant injections, Sandlake’s daughter finally broke. Her interrogators knew very well that her branch of archaeology—called “dark zone” archaeology—was the study of the deepest inner areas of ancient sites. Two years before the war broke out, startling discoveries had been made at certain Mayan and Inca sites previously thought to have been researched to the full. “Dark Zone” archaeologists had found a number of man-made caves, walkways and tunnels underneath several Central and South American sites, often accessible only through narrow wet clay passages. These secret chambers had laid undiscovered for years by general school archaeologists as well as looters. The researchers theorized the Mayans and the Incas had used these Dark Zones for religious rituals or as hiding places.

  But for what ever reason, in every case, the Dark Zoners found these strange places filled with gold…

  The Party members were quick to realize they had come upon an incredible coincidence: Not only did they have the man who invented the small, nuclear-tipped underwater mines they sought for the Panama Canal, they also had someone who was an expert in locating long lost treasures of Mayan and Inca gold.

  Once again the invaders started beating and torturing the doctor, demanding that he reveal the location of the nuclear mines. Finally, on the climactic 13th day of the nightmare, the Party members stripped his daughter naked in front of him and threatened to rape and then kill her if he didn’t give them the information. Sandlake felt he had no choice but to tell, a decision aided by the fact that he too was injected several times with truth serum.

  Two helicopters left the ranch and returned four days later to report that they had found the nuclear mines right where Sandlake said they’d be—in the lead-lined underground storage center at the Key West Naval Air Station. Once they had what they wanted, the Party members bundled up his daughter and took her away. Then they took him out to the back of his house, shot him twice in the head and left him for dead.

  Now it was Sandlake’s time to get lucky. Shortly after the Party members departed, a bartering group happened by the ranch. They found Sandlake barely alive but still breathing and they took him with them. By some kind of miracle, he survived his severe head wounds, though he admitted that his mental capacities were only about 70 to 80-percent of what they once were.

  “I was never absent-minded before all this,” he told the pilots sadly. “But I came back from the dead. Saw my own body, lying there on the ground, blood everywhere. My blood! Believe me, that can’t help but affect you. Now, sometimes I lose track of time, dates, my own past…”

  Once he recovered, Sandlake returned to the ranch and the underground bunker and immediately began work on a disarming device for the nukes. The “Deactivator” he called it. His short-circuited reasoning had him figuring he could hire some mercenaries to travel to the Canal and put the mines out of action. But his diminished capacity, along with a general lack of equipment, made the project slow going. Even when he recruited the four young women—no dummies, they were all graduate students in engineering from Texas A&M before the war—the work on the deactivator device dragged on. He made a mistake of trying to barter for some much needed equipment via an arms dealer working on the outskirts of El Paso. He thought that through this individual, word got back to The Twisted Cross that he was still alive.

  The smaller group of Canal Nazis had landed just two days before. Surprised at the defensive firepower mounted by the doctor and his lovely assistants, they decided to play it safe and lay siege to the ranch, hoping to starve them out and retrieve whatever parts of the deactivator they had completed. Sandlake spent those past 48 hours intentionally entering misleading data into computers, so as to confuse the Nazis should they succeed in getting into his bunker.

  “An incredible story,” Hunter fold the man.

  “You should get all this down in writing,” Fitz told him. “Should they ever start printing books again, this one will be a bestseller…”

  “But the final chapters aren’t written as yet,” Sandlake said glumly. “At least I hope they haven’t…”

  “They haven’t,” Hunter told him. “First of all, we’ll have a chopper here in the morning. You and your assistants are coming back to DC with us. You can work on the deactivator there. You’ll have a lot more resources and more people to help.”

  “But what about my daughter?” the man asked, close to tears. “She’s been missing for so long…”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Hunter said decisively. “I’ll get your daughter back for you…”

  Chapter 26

  MORE THAN 1200 MILES to the south as the crow flies, Colonel Krupp was sitting in the back of his command truck, drinking heavily.

  His convoy was now halfway to the Uxmaluna site, the bombed-out, burned-away road provided for them proving to be very slow going. Two hours before, he had called a halt to work for the day, his troops mistakenly praising him for stopping a full four hours early. But he hadn’t done it for their sakes. He would have worked them 24 hours straight if he thought he could get away with it.

  His reasons for knocking off early were totally selfish and devious. That was why he had spent the last hour fortifying himself with a jug of bad banana brandy. He was an awful drinker. Having no experience with it, he tended to overindulge at all the wrong times. This occasion would be no exception.

  Before him, tied to his fold-down bed, was the woman. She was stripped naked, bound hand and foot to the bed-frame with leather straps and gagged with a cloth. It was the way he had dreamed of seeing her ever since the beginning. Now was the opportunity…

  He took another long gulp of the scorchingly bad brandy, and reached for a small leather whip. Her eyes went wide with alarm as she watched him play with the tassels. She tried to scream something, but the cloth in her mouth prevented that. However her aggressive action surprised him.

  “You are not supposed to resist…” he said, drunkenly slurring the words. “You are here to be taught a lesson…”

  She started to thrash about, hurting her arms and wrists where they were so securely tied to the bed. For his part he felt a guilty pang of true pleasure shoot through him as he watched her breasts and hips move back and forth.

  “Oh, my dear,” he said, slobbering a smile. “Don’t you realize that all this… this moving and gyrating… is futile?”

  She tried to scream a second time, but her cry was once again muffled by the gag.

  He leaned over toward her, his lips just inches from her lovely well-formed breasts. “You defied me today, my sweet,” he said in a weird, inebriated sing-songy whine. “It is almost as if you don’t understand who you are dealing with here.”

  He dared reach out at that point, putting his leather glove on her right breast. He suddenly felt as if he had made history, and in a sense, he had: It was the first time in his 42 years that he had touched a woman’s naked body.

  She squirmed hard again, trying to force his hand from her, but she couldn’t. He pinched her nipple tightly, causing her to arch up and back.

  “You… you actually enjoyed that, didn’t you?” he asked her, completely misreading her action.

  He then put his hand between her soft white legs, feeling the smoothness of her thighs even through the leather glove. Again she tried to stop him from touching her by moving about, but again it was no use.

  “And that?” he said, taking a swig of brandy, half of which wound up on his chin and neck. “You liked that too, didn’t you?”

  She violently shook her head from side to side.

  “You didn’t?” he said, his voice now approaching the timber of an elderly woman. “Well, that’s good…”

  Another gulp from the brandy and his uniform pants were down. He ripped open his jacket to reveal a hairless, almost feminine chest.

  “Prepare yourself, my dear,” he said, fighting off a violent series of hiccups. “Prepare to feel the sting of some long overdue discipline…”

  Just then he reached down for h
is whip and for the brandy bottle at the same time. The complicated maneuver caused him to lose his balance. He came crashing down on top of her, cracking his head on the metal bed frame as he did so. Suddenly he rolled off her and fell to the floor, completely blacked-out, a nasty gash bleeding on his nose.

  She prayed he was dead…

  Part II

  Chapter 27

  “I SUPPOSE THERE’S NO way I can talk you out of this?” Jones asked Hunter as they walked down to the edge of the Potomac River.

  Hunter didn’t answer. He simply shrugged and readjusted the large, overfilled knapsack he was carrying.

  “How about if I gave you a direct order not to go?” Jones continued.

  The Wingman stopped and looked the general straight in the eyes. “Then I wouldn’t go…” he said. He took a deep breath then asked: “Are you going to give me such an order?”

  Jones stared at him for a moment then shook his head.

  “No, I’m not, Major,” he said. “But I want you to convince me that you know just what you’re getting yourself into.”

  “I don’t know what more I can say, General,” Hunter told him as they resumed walking toward a small, riverside pier. “I promised Sandlake that I’d find his daughter. I feel I have to make good on it.”

  “But look at the monumental task you’ve taken on,” Jones said. “Trying to find one person? In Central America? These days?”

  “I know it’s crazy,” Hunter replied. “But I can’t go back on my word. Besides, I’ve been holed up with Sandlake for the past five days, going over every possible Mayan or Inca site where they may have taken his daughter. It’s really just a question of tracking them down to the right place.”

  “And then what?”

  “And, then I’ll try to snatch her back,” Hunter said. “Just how will depend on the circumstances.”

  Jones let out a long, gruff sigh. “We don’t have much time, you know,” he told the pilot.

  “I know that, sir,” Hunter replied. “But we do have some time. We have to prepare the strike force, draw up the battle plans, do the logistics…”

  “All true,” Jones said. “But we are moving ahead very quickly to accomplish all that.”

  As if to underscore his point, he nodded to the long column of United American M-l tanks that was rumbling down nearby Independence Avenue on their way to Fort Meade in old Maryland. Several of the tank commanders recognized Jones and Hunter and offered friendly waves and salutes.

  “The Texans and the Free Canadians are on board,” Jones continued. “And we’re gathering the airlift capacity and putting everyone through a quickie course in jungle combat training.”

  “That’s all great,” Hunter said. “But we also have to take into consideration that Sandlake is still a way from completing his deactivating device.”

  “He seems to be progressing well,” Jones said, watching two United American A-7 Strikefighters pass overhead and turn south, “Christ, we’ve got more than twenty engineers working with him and his rather lovely assistants.”

  “Again, that’s super,” Hunter replied. “But I’ve gotten to know the guy pretty well. He’s really not a well man. He goes in and out. Flashes of brilliance, sure. But there are a lot of dark spots in there, too.”

  Jones nodded sympathetically. “Getting shot in the head does that to you,” he said.

  “So does missing part of your family,” Hunter replied. “And frankly, that’s not something that I myself have thought a lot about—until this past week, that is. Now I know what they mean when they say that having someone close to you turn up missing is worse than having them die on you…”

  They walked without talking for the next few minutes. Jones had the feeling Hunter was stepping into uncharted psychic territory; a very personal place in his mind.

  Two more A-7s streaked over, breaking the silence between them. Finally they had reached their destination, a small dock just this side of the Arlington Memorial Bridge.

  Jones took one look at the contraption tied up to the pier and said: “Good God, what the hell is that?”

  Hunter’s mood lightened instantly. “I’m surprised at you General,” he said. “I would have thought you’d recognize one of the best, most under-rated airplanes ever built.”

  “But it looks like it’s an antique…” Jones said.

  “It is an antique,” Hunter replied. “And I can’t think of a better airplane to take on this mission…”

  It was a Vought OS2U Kingfisher, a World War II-vintage seaplane that Hunter and Fitz found packed away deep in the bowels of the Smithsonian’s Washington, DC storage facility. Working with a crew of UA Air Force volunteers, they had it flying in just a few hours. Hunter then spent another half day souping up the single prop engine from 450 horsepower to 650, and adding extra fuel tanks. Another few hours went into installing three special mini-computers of his own design, plus a long range radio set, an infra red spotting device and a few more high-tech weapons systems, all modular construction.

  “Why this airplane?” Jones asked, running his hand along the Kingfisher’s smooth, all-metal frame. “We certainly have bigger and better aircraft you could use.”

  “I know that,” Hunter replied. “But this baby has a few advantages over anything else we’ve got.

  “First of all, it’s a low maintenance bird. The engine is as simple as one in a ‘65 Chevy. It’s durable and it will run well in hot, humid weather. The Navy used these airplanes in the South Pacific for the entire war as observation craft, air-sea rescue, things like that. They catapulted them off battleships and cruisers, or they took off right from bays and harbors. They took a real beating and kept flying.

  “It’s got a range of eight hundred miles and with the extra tanks I’ve added, I’ll bet I get twelve hundred miles or more between fill-ups.”

  “But why a seaplane?” Jones asked. “You’re going to the middle of the jungle…”

  “Well, that’s what I thought at first, too,” Hunter replied. “Then I did some studying and some talking with Sandlake.

  “It turns out that many of the Mayan sites are actually built fairly close to rivers or lakes. It makes sense because the people who built these places two thousand years ago needed water close by for construction and for drinking. And later, when the site was finished, they wanted to be near water for agriculture and so on.”

  “So you figure you can land this thing on any river or lake?” Jones asked.

  “That’s the topper,” Hunter said, admiring the Kingfisher. “This airplane could land on a fair-size stream if it had to. And it’s very maneuverable for something of its size and bulk. I think that’s an option I’ll need…”

  Hunter could see Jones was slowly falling under the spell of the ungainly elegance of the Kingfisher. It was nearly 34 feet in length with a wing span of 35 feet, 11 inches. And with the float attached—it alone was more than 35 feet long—the OS2U stood 15 feet high on dry land. The pilot rode in a cockpit very close to the forward-mounted single engine. This pilot’s compartment continued on two thirds of the way down the fuselage where it ended in a rear-facing gunner/observer seat. Overall, the airplane was somewhat similar in size and appearance to the more recognizable Grumman TBF-1 Avenger divebomber, one of the stalwarts of the US Naval Air effort against the Japanese. Except this airplane could float…

  This Kingfisher now carried a very modern, very deadly Vulcan cannon contained in a weapons pod on its left wing; a small air-to-ground missile firing platform balancing the load on its right. Jones noted that Hunter had also somehow managed to hook up two air-to-air missiles to the Kingfisher’s wingtips—“mini-Sidewinders” was what the pilot called them.

  Jones peeked inside and saw that Hunter had arranged his minicomputers along one side of the pilot’s compartment, his advanced weapons firing systems along the other. The tunnel between the pilot’s seat and that of the observer/gunner was now adorned with a simple hammock and some boxes of food. A .50 caliber machine
gun was attached to the gunner’s post.

  “Original equipment,” Hunter told him pointing to the big fifty. “Believe it or not they used to shoot down Zeroes with those things…”

  Jones took a step back and took in the whole package. It was a beautiful-looking airplane, much in the same manner as a Tucker had been a beautiful-looking automobile.

  “What can I say?” Jones asked, “It looks like you’ve covered as many bases as possible.”

  “Well, I’ve tried…” Hunter replied, giving the airplane an affectionate pat on the rear. “But, then again, you never know…”

  Jones checked his watch. “The staff is meeting in two hours,” he said. “I understand you wrote out a list of recommendations for pre-strike activities?”

  Hunter nodded, throwing his gear inside the airplane. “They’re just suggestions, but I think they can only help us in the long run,” he said. “We should establish a strong link between us and those chopper guys in Panama—the CATS. They’re good at what they do, they know the terrain and they’ve been a thorn in the side of The Twisted Cross before we even knew what the hell was going on down there.”

  “Sounds like a good idea,” Jones said, making a notation in his ever-present notebook. “What else?”

  “Local involvement,” Hunter said. “There are a lot of native Panamanians and Indians in that area who have been virtually enslaved by The Twisted Cross. If we could somehow get them informed, they’d be a tremendous help when the time comes to move.”

  “Again, another good idea,” the general agreed. “Perhaps the CATS can help in that regard also…”

  “The only other thing is the deactivator itself,” Hunter said, giving the Kingfisher one last look over. “J.T. and Ben are working closely with Sandlake, as is Fitz. If I understand the good doctor correctly, his device works on a high frequency radio burst system. Blasting the mines with short, quick bursts of radio waves screws up the timing devices.”