Brown, Dale - Independent 04

by Storming Heaven (v1. 1)

  “I don’t know exactly in what capacity you serve Kevin Martindale, Miss Harley, but one thing’s for sure—I’ve got a toe in the White House right now. I think you would serve the Vice President and the Project 2000 Task Force better if you were with me instead of spying on Martindale’s political enemies—isn’t that what you do, Miss Harley?”

  Harley blushed—something Hardcastle never thought he’d see her do. “I don’t think it’s relevant to discuss—” “What’s wrong, Miss Harley? Don’t you think you can pass the White House security check?”

  “Admiral, I don’t think that’ll be a problem,” Harley said. “I know precisely what my White House security file says—I designed it. In fact, I’ve seen the White House’s security report on you. I’ll even show it to you later on.” Hardcastle nodded—he could tell by her confident halfsmile and steady gaze that she was telling the truth. This woman was much more than a simple executive assistant— she was obviously Martindale’s chief troubleshooter, an invisible insider able to pass through the inner sanctums of the current Administration with apparent ease—definitely not someone to piss off. “Find anything interesting to you, Miss Harley?”

  She laughed, pointed a finger accusingly at Hardcastle, and replied, “All I can say is, Admiral, that if you plan on doing only half the things to Henri Cazaux that you did to the Haitian, Bahamian, and Colombian governments while you were with the Hammerheads, Cazaux is in big, big trouble.”

  Fallon Naval Air Station, Nevada Three Days Later

  Before any aircraft carrier air wing begins a cruise, its crews must certify to the carrier air group commander that they are fully qualified and ready to perform their assigned duties. For Navy and Marine Corps strike units in the western half of the United States, that means a trip to Navy Fallon in northern Nevada for a very intensive two-month training and evaluation course on aerial gunnery, bombardment, and missile tactics. With thousands of square miles of ranges spread out over three counties, mostly desolate hills and dry lake beds, hundreds of men (and now women) per year streak over the high desert and mountains, line up on plywood tanks or airfields scratched into the hard-baked earth by bulldozers, and drop thousands of tons of live bombs, rockets, missiles, and cannon rounds. The ranges are also used for operational evaluations of new weapons about to be deployed for the first time. Because of its very isolated location, Navy Fallon is also one of the country’s largest ordnance depots, from which thousands of tons of weapons and explosives are stored, distributed, repaired, refurbished, dismantled, and disposed.

  For aircrew members, the eight-week TDY to Navy Fallon is a mixed blessing. Although the base facilities are first-rate, the surrounding town is so isolated and small that, apart from the temptation to visit one of the many legal brothels nearby, there was little to do in Fallon for relaxation or enjoyment. But it was a good opportunity to prepare oneself for a long deployment at sea, where the facilities and chances for rest and relaxation were even less available, and it was definitely some of the best flying around. Crew members actually looked forward to Fallon’s open skies, big ranges, plenty of live ordnance, and the chance to show the brass what you can do with the Navy’s most modem warplanes. .

  It was also a weapons smorgasbord for arms dealers and smugglers, if you had the money and the right connections.

  After a flight into Fallon Municipal Airport, five miles northwest of the Naval Air Station, Gregory Townsend, Henri Cazaux’s third-in-command and chief of plans and operations, signed a lease for a large hangar, the flight crew fueled and prepared their aged de Havilland C-8 Buffalo cargo plane for departure, and Ysidro and his crew made preparations for their meeting.

  Just after midnight, they heard the sounds of heavy truck engines approaching outside the hangar. After an hour-long wait, undoubtedly so their counterparts could move toward them and surround the hangar, Ysidro and Townsend were met by several men in a Navy Humvee. Six men emerged from the big vehicle, all armed to the teeth with M-16 rifles and military-issue Beretta automatic pistols. Two men wore Navy utility uniforms; three others were in civilian clothes but had military haircuts; and one, who stepped out of the front passenger side of the Humvee and looked like the leader, looked like a civilian all the way. While two men stood before Ysidro and Townsend, armed with M-16 rifles, two of the gunsels herded the smuggler’s crewmen inside the de Havilland to watch them, and two others stationed themselves at the front and rear hangar doors.

  Both Townsend and Ysidro were frisked, and their weapons taken from them. Ysidro was heavily armed with an automatic submachine gun, two pistols, and two knives—those were taken from him—but he was allowed to keep the aluminum briefcase he carried, after a careful inspection. Inside the suitcase was U.S. cash in twenties, fifties, and one hundreds, along with Swiss and German bearer bonds. “They brought the cash,” the soldier reported to the civilian after checking the case for hidden weapons.

  “We’ve been doing business a long time,” Townsend said to the leader. “We want it to stay that way. We’ll play fair with you in return for good service. Cash for quality goods.”

  But even then, reassuring words did not tone down the rough search he had to undergo. Townsend carried only one gun, a Colt .45 auto pistol, along with a Tekna three-cell flashlight—which was carefully inspected, even to the point of unscrewing the butt cap and sliding out the batteries—and, to the gunsel’s surprise, a sixteen-inch Bowie knife in a sheath strapped to his back, handle down so he could draw it easily. After showing the huge knife to the others, the gunsel rasped, “Like fuckin’ Crocodile Dundee. What’s this for, bobbie?”

  “Skinning snakes,” Townsend spat back. “Be careful with it. It has special sentimental value.”

  “From your mother, I suppose.”

  “My father beat up and killed my mother when I was a child,” Townsend said in a conversational, matter-of-fact tone. “I took that knife from Mohammar Kaddafi’s bedroom during a botched SAS assassination mission. Three of my best soldiers were killed on that raid, and the bastard wasn’t even home.” He leaned forward, and in a low, ghostly tone of voice, said, “I was so upset I resigned from the SAS, returned home, got drunk, and sliced off my father’s head with that knife.”

  The soldier didn’t know if Townsend was telling the truth, but one look at his crocodile’s smile and he decided not to make any more smart comments. He placed all the weapons and gear inside the front seat of the Humvee and backed away without further comment.

  Relieved of his weapons and gear, Townsend took a moment to carefully study the men around him. They all looked like professional soldiers, although he noticed how quickly and easily they relaxed when Ysidro’s and his own weapons were confiscated. If the gunsels knew anything about unarmed combat, they would know that a professional soldier never relaxed, even with ten-versus-two odds. Two of the Navy men in uniform were known to Ysidro and Townsend, but the rest were strangers, which Townsend didn’t like. “Who the hell are these blokes? We agreed only us four at the setup.”

  “That was before you asked for the heavy stuff, Townsend.” Crenshaw laughed. “Our first deal was easy—six thousand pounds of waste ammonium nitrate and perchlorate. Hell, the Navy dumps at least six thousand pounds a day of waste chemicals and explosives into open pits out here—drink the well water around here for a couple years and if you fart you blow your ass off.”

  “All right, let’s get on with it,” Townsend said impatiently. “Perchlorate and hydrazine we can get anywhere—the state of Nevada practically gives the shit away. You got the rest of it?”

  “What I’m telling you, bobbie, is that the prize is gonna be worth the price.” Crenshaw turned to the guard at the front hangar door, who made a signal with a flashlight. Soon two five-ton utility trucks, painted Navy gray with desert-camouflaged canvas tops over the cargo beds, rumbled toward them. When the trucks pulled up to the group and the hangar doors were closed, Crenshaw stepped behind the first truck and flipped open the canvas cover on the bac
k, and Townsend jumped up on the back of the truck to examine the contents. There were eight 55-gallon drums marked high explosive, and four drums marked flammable. He found an opener tool in the bed of the truck and opened each screw opening of the first eight drums, and the unmistakable acidic-aluminum-blood smell of aluminum perchlorate filtered out. He inspected the last four drums, this time mixing two ounces of the liquid in the second barrel with a pinch of the powder in the first set of barrels in a small plastic tube. After swirling the mixture in the tube, he carefully held a lighter to the opening of the tube, and a long cylinder of blue fire shot out with a loud pop.

  He repeated the test with all four barrels, satisfied that he had the good stuff. Hydrazine and aluminum perchlorate were two highly explosive compounds all by themselves, but mixed together they formed a thick, unstable vapor that, mixed with oxygen and ignited with a spark, created a huge, violent explosion hundreds of times more powerful than gasoline or TNT. “Drove all this way across the desert at night with simple nylon ropes securing these barrels, did you?” Townsend asked as he stepped out of the truck. He knew that there was enough aluminum perchlorate and hydrazine in that truck to once and for all bring down one of the World Trade Center towers. “You’re either braver or stupider than I suspected.”

  “Not as stupid as you two are, Townsend,” Crenshaw said, motioning with glee at the twin-engined de Havilland cargo plane. “We got here in one piece. Let’s see how brave you two are when you gotta fly outta here in that piece-of-shit cargo plane. You opened the drums. One wisp of hydrazine lingering in the air or near those engines when you start them up—poof. You blow the hydrazine, scatter the perchlorate, make an even bigger boom.” Townsend had to nod at that last remark—yes, it was going to be tricky going.

  “These are the real prizes, gents.” Crenshaw stepped over to the second truck and opened a canvas flap, revealing several different oddly shaped weapons. There were eight devices in all, all about four to five feet long. “Took some time collecting these bad boys,” he said proudly. “All Gulf War veterans, all fully operational. Three Mark-77 napalm canisters, three CBU-55 fuel-air explosives units, and six CBU-59 cluster bombs units. Best stuff in the arsenal.”

  “Very good,” Townsend said. It was indeed an impressive haul—perhaps too impressive. The Navy didn’t let ordnance like this just lie around. Crenshaw was a top munitions maintenance man, but even he had to carefully account for stuff like this. “My flashlight, if you please?”

  “Suit yourself,” Crenshaw said, motioning to one of his men, who handed Townsend his flashlight. Townsend jumped up onto the truck, placed the flashlight in his teeth, and carefully examined each weapon.

  The Mark-77 was little more than a large blunt-ended gas tank filled with chemical beads, which Townsend checked. Once filled with gasoline, the beads dissolved to form napalm, which could blanket nearly an entire city block with a sheet of fire. The CBU-59, with the words contents: live loaded blu-77/b stenciled on the sides, were metal containers that, when released and opened by a barometric nose fuze, scattered seven hundred APAM (anti-personnel, antimaterial) bomblets across a four-hundred-foot oval swath. The one-pound baseball-sized bomblets were filled with steel dartlike projectiles that could mutilate anything—or anyone—in their path. Some of the bomblets exploded on contact, while others had timer fuzes which would detonate them minutes or even hours later.

  The real prize was the fuel-air explosives bombs. The CBU-55 canisters were simply very large fuel tanks that would be filled with the hydrazine and aluminum perchlorate, the stuff in the other truck. Behind the endplate of each canister was a dispenser holding three BLU-73 bomblets. When released, the two compounds would mix, the canister would automatically spray the target area with a large cloud of explosive gas, and then the parachute-retarded bomblets would ignite the gas—the resulting explosion would be equivalent to ten 2,000-pound bombs going off at once. Pound for pound, the CBU-55 was the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in the American military arsenal. In limited service in the Vietnam War because the dense foliage dissipated its explosive effects, it was the weapon of choice in the wide-open deserts of Iraq. Officially it was used only to “clear minefields,” but it was used with terrible effect on large masses of Iraqi troops, squashing and incinerating anything within five hundred yards of ground zero. Its devastating killing power was considered -unethical, almost on a par with chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.

  “Very impressive, Crenshaw,” Townsend said, swinging the flashlight beam into Crenshaw’s face, then snapping it off. Acquiring the fuel-air explosive weapons would make Cazaux very happy indeed. “I hope bearer bonds are acceptable. They have been in the past.”

  “As long as you got my share in U.S. greenbacks in there, I don’t care about that shit,” Crenshaw said. “The officers want the fuckin’ Kraut bonds, not me. Now get the fuck down and—”

  Distracted by the flashlight beam, Crenshaw didn’t see what Townsend was doing until he had nearly finished doing it—he had unscrewed the butt cap off the three-cell flashlight, removed the two rear D-cell batteries, screwed them together, and aimed it at him. Before Crenshaw could raise his submachine gun, Townsend pressed a button, and with a barely audible pufff, a two-inch razor-edged arrow pierced his chest, sliced through his heart, deflected off a rib, and ricocheted around inside his body like a pinball, slicing up blood vessels and lungs in the blink of an eye. He turned and shot darts into the first truck driver and two more gunsels standing nearby, then leaped off the truck. Everything had happened so fast that the driver of the first truck was still idly sitting behind his wheel when Townsend ran over to his door, put the weapon to his left temple, and fired a bolt into his brain.

  Ysidro disdained the use of any sort of fancy James Bond-type weapons. As soon as he saw Crenshaw go down, Ysidro was on the move. He bashed the heavy metal briefcase into the soldier nearest him, grabbed his gun as he went down, and started pumping bullets at anything that moved, remembering not to shoot toward the explosives- laden trucks and counting on Townsend to kill anyone near him. The massacre of the three soldiers near him was complete in a matter of seconds. The guard at the rear of the hangar took off running as soon as he saw Ysidro sprinting after him, but luckily the back door to the hangar was locked. Ysidro dropped him with a bullet in his chest from fifty feet, then stepped up to him and put a second bullet in his brain.

  “Jesus Christ, Ysidro, one bullet ricocheting in the wrong direction could’ve cooked us all,” Townsend said.

  “Hey, we’re already fuckin’ stupid for accepting this assignment in the first place—this is a job for the grunts,” Ysidro said. “I’m a guerrilla, not a trash-hauler, and if we blow, we blow. Let’s just get the hell out of here. Linnares, get your ass out here and load these explosives now!” Johann Linnares, the leader of the flight crew, stepped out of the de Havilland along with his crew—they had killed the two guards who tried to lock them up in the plane as soon as they were alone.

  “I still don’t fucking understand why we had to kill these guys this time around,” Ysidro said as the crews began to load the explosives and weapons aboard the cargo plane. “These guys were swaggering assholes, but they were generally straight with us, and we been trading with them for a long time. What gives?”

  “Things are going to get too hot around the clubhouse once we begin the next series of attacks,” Townsend said. “We paid these blokes pretty well, but when the feds see what we’re about to do, the heat gets turned up and the reward money for our heads will undoubtedly be more than assholes like Crenshaw could resist. I think Henri was correct—once these attacks are completed, it’ll be time to open up some new sources of hardware. By then, we’ll be the top dogs in the terror-for-hire game. We’ll have the world’s pick of the litter.”

  ‘7/ we survive,” Ysidro said. “Henri really is fuckin’ possessed, and I think we’re gonna need the Devil’s help to get out of this alive.”

  Dallas-Fort Worth Internation
al Airport, Sunrise

  Two Days Later

  If you had to go to war, had to deploy at a moment’s notice, had to hump all night to get your unit set up and operational as fast as humanly possible, there were worse places to do it than Dallas, Texas.

  Lieutenant Colonel Valerie Witt, U.S. Army, emerged onto the catwalk with a cup of coffee just as the first rays of sunlight peeked over the horizon, putting the skyline of the city of Dallas in stark profile. The dawn was hazy and cool, but she had ditched her field jacket back in her new office downstairs hours ago. She allowed herself the luxury of drinking in the sunrise, letting the brilliant yellow sun charge her batteries. For a moment, she was back in her hometown of Ogunquit, Maine, watching the sunrise from her parents’ home on the coast, or on the beach at Treasure Cay in the Bahamas on her honeymoon. Beautiful. Just beautiful...

  But as she scanned the horizon an unusual sight brought her back to reality very quickly—and Avenger FAADS (Forward Area Air Defense System) unit parked a few hundred yards beyond the approach end of runway 35 Right. It was hardly more than a speck out there, but its two box launchers aimed skyward, each containing four Stinger heat-seeking antiaircraft missiles, could be seen. This was not her honeymoon. This was not home. Yes, it was Fort Worth, Texas, but it was also war.

  Valerie Witt was the commander of Third Battalion, 43rd Regiment, and was the senior air defense artillery battalion commander deployed to the defense of Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. Her communications headquarters were on the second level of Dallas-Fort Worth’s multistory control tower, where she had a clear view of all her air defense units at DFW; but her weapon command center, the AN/MSQ-16 MICC (Master Information and Coordination Central), a large steel green-painted box crammed full of radar sets, radios, and air conditioners (for the electronics, not the humans who work inside), had been hoisted up onto the roof of terminal 2W of Dallas-Fort Worth. Beside the MICC was the AMG, or Antenna Mast Group, a truck carrying two UHF antennas that linked Witt’s MICC with all the air defense units surrounding Dallas-Fort Worth. Because DFW was one of the busiest and most important airports in the United States, there were a lot of air defense units deployed here to try to stop Henri Cazaux if he tried to attack here.