At Mach 1.5, only two seconds elapsed from launch of the Starburst to impact. The hapless Black Hawk in the Starburst’s sights exploded with a deep whoomph, raining flaming wreckage down onto the still-smoking coca field.
“Justice!” de Santiago whooped. “Let los diablos imperialistas burn in their own hellfire!”
The two-second flight of the missile was more than enough for the Apaches. They were already facing that way and vectored in on the launch site. One of the choppers came roaring straight toward them. The chin turret, with its death-spitting twin chain guns, snapped back and forth like a cobra searching for its prey.
Guzman didn’t hesitate. He grabbed de Santiago by the collar of his starched khaki shirt and leaped off the trail, over the bluff and down the steep mountainside.
"Got to move!" he bellowed as they dropped into open space.
Projectiles zipped past them and over their heads as the two men fell a good twenty feet straight down, then began rolling and tumbling. The thickness of the vegetation was the only thing that kept them from falling much farther and much harder. They finally stopped rolling. They were in a thick tangle of vines. Chewed-up leaves and tree limbs peppered down on them.
De Santiago listened to the final screams of his slower reacting troops, the continuous buzz saw of the chain gun, and the guttural rumble of the helicopter, now directly overhead.
It was finished. The patch of mountain where the rebel leader had been standing a moment before was now gnawed down to bare rock. What remained of four of his best men lay in bloody pieces amid the litter of the attack. Two others were cowering in the brush, checking their wounds. Down in the valley, the remains of the Black Hawk continued to burn fiercely while one of its brothers hovered above, checking for signs of life. Seeing none, it swooped up and followed the rest of the helicopters that were already disappearing over the ridge.
“Damn them to hell,” de Santiago grunted under his breath as he shoved Guzman off the top of him. He fought through the ferns and vines and climbed out of the small ravine where they had landed. He took stock of himself. Nothing broken. Cuts and contusions but nothing that would not stop bleeding on its own. A knot on his forehead from a tree trunk he had bounced off on the way down.
"You okay, El Jefe?" Guzman asked as he emerged from the wall of green. The bodyguard limped slightly but seemed all right otherwise. He looked at his leader, tilted his head, and ventured an unsolicited opinion. "That was a very foolish thing to do, you know."
De Santiago’s rage flared once again as he turned on his bodyguard.
"What would you have me to do? Would you have me run like a coward? Is that what you want? Look what those damned Americans have done. They will pay far more than one helicopter! I will make them pay!"
De Santiago stalked off, angrily slapping aside the vegetation. He followed the trail that led up from the field and over the mountain. Guzman shook his head. It was difficult for him and the other rebel troops to keep pace with their leader. Years of fighting in these cloud jungles had toughened the man, given him the ability to endure pain and weariness without even appearing to be aware of it. He never noticed that his best fighters and his rock-hard bodyguard often struggled to stay up with him.
Guzman tried to ignore his twisted ankle and hurried after de Santiago before he was too far gone.
“Catch up after you have buried the dead and bandaged the wounds of the others,” the rebel leader called back to him.
The progress was slow. The two injured fighters lagged far behind. They climbed back up the mountain, beyond the tree line. Scrambling over rocks and scree, they came again to the pass over the mountain ridge.
De Santiago paused there for only a moment. He glanced over his shoulder, to the west, and a strange calm seemed to come over him. He knew that from up here, from this high trail first blazed by his Inca ancestors, if it weren't for the clouds, they could see the ocean over two hundred miles away. A realization struck him. He was disgusted with himself for not having seen it before. As much as he loved his mountains, the leader knew at that instant that the key to all that he must accomplish rested out there, with the sea.
He walked on, deep in thought.
They stopped for a short rest in the saddle of the pass. A stack of rocks left centuries before by the Indians marked this high point on the trail. The two troops caught up, falling in their tracks, exhausted from the brisk climb and gasping for breath in the thin air. They checked their crude bandages. Guzman loosened the laces on his boot so the swollen ankle would have more room.
“Does he never rest?” one of the soldiers asked, nodding toward Juan de Santiago.
“No,” was Guzman’s answer.
De Santiago paced back and forth, an odd look on his mud-smeared face, muttering crazily all the while. The other men tried not to look at him. They had never seen their leader in such a state.
Mountains on either side of this narrow pass soared to over eighteen thousand feet. The wind whistled through the cut. It was bitter cold at this altitude, driving snow and bits of sleet at them. The rough trail clung to the side of a near vertical rock face. It would take very sure steps and nerves of steel to descend without falling a thousand feet to sure death.
De Santiago turned and set off down the trail even faster than before. It was as if he had heard a call the others had missed. Guzman groaned and followed after him, favoring the ankle. The other two men looked at each other, then stood and obediently straggled along behind as best they could.
Headquarters was another twenty miles away. Worse, sunset would come in less than an hour. Trying to traverse this trail in the dark would be suicide. De Santiago charged on, unaware of the danger or of the misery of his men.
Guzman yelled at his leader’s disappearing back.
"Wait! Slow down. We can't keep up. It's not safe." His words echoed off the cliff faces.
The rebel leader seemed not to hear him. Guzman struggled to keep pace. The others had given up. They lagged several hundred yards farther back up the trail, shuffling down the narrow path. Guzman could no longer hear their ragged breathing or the scuffling of their feet on the scrabble rock path.
De Santiago stopped and turned, frustration in his voice.
"Keep up the best you can. Tell the other children behind you to camp at the pass tonight and hike in tomorrow. Join them if you must."
He turned and continued his determined downhill dash. Guzman trudged on. It was his duty to stay with his commander, to protect him. That was difficult to do if he was out of sight on a narrow sliver of mountain trail.
They were crossing the face of the mountain, clinging to a path that was barely a foot wide. Below them, the mountain dropped away, nearly vertical for a thousand or more feet. Above them, it was straight up to a summit that was completely lost in the cloudy mist.
It was totally dark when the pair crossed a shoulder of the mountain and the path became a little wider. The drop below them was not nearly so plumb. Still, the loose rock and talus made the footing treacherous.
Guzman slipped and grabbed for a handhold, stopping his slide just as his feet were at the edge. When he regained his breath, he yelled ahead again.
"El Jefe, what is so important that we stay out here like this? Even if we don't fall to our deaths, we can't make the camp until morning anyway."
Guzman could hardly make out the dark figure of the most dangerous man in Colombia. De Santiago abruptly stopped on the trail and turned back to answer him. Guzman later swore that he could see the sparks flashing in the leader’s eyes as he spoke. His words were soft but determined. The wind carried them as it did the fine icy vapor.
"Guzman, my friend, we must get back as soon as we can in order to continue what has already begun. There is much to do and many pieces to put in place. This will be a night you will tell your grandchildren about. This is the night the final victory begins."
FINAL BEARING: Chapter 2
Commander Jonathan Ward slapped up the pe
riscope handles in exasperation. Reaching over his head, he grunted in disgust and snapped around the large red periscope lift ring, lowering the scope.
"Dammit, XO! That merch just won't move!” he complained to his executive officer. “He's still sitting up there and we can't shoot ‘til he leaves. How much longer until the launch window closes?"
Ward wiped the sweat away from his forehead with the back of his hand, half dreading the answer he would get to his question. His blue poopie suit had long since wilted. Wide, dark streaks of sweat ran down its back. He paced across the side of the periscope stand, trying to walk off the nervous energy while he waited for his XO to finish checking figures.
Except for the skipper’s footsteps on the deck, the crowded control room of the nuclear attack sub Spadefish was surprisingly quiet. The only other sound in the stifling air was the hum of the vent fans, straining to remove the body heat of twenty closely packed human beings.
Lieutenant Commander Joe Glass looked up from the chart table jammed into the forward starboard corner of the control room.
"Another five minutes, Skipper. Not enough time to shoot," he reluctantly reported.
A chart of the Southern California coastline was spread out on the table before him. It was crisscrossed with colored lines representing all the ship traffic in the area. Joe Glass was trying his best to find an open spot somewhere in the mess of tangled spaghetti surrounding a dot that represented Spadefish. There simply wasn't one.
Glass was the perfect counterpoint to Jonathan Ward in several ways, some obvious from appearance, others not. Where Ward was tall and razor slim, Glass was short, stocky, and prone to a paunch. Ward's thick shock of blonde hair was a contrast to Glass’s rapidly receding brush of dark hairline. Ward tended to assay a situation instantly, then moved quickly and decisively. Glass was more likely to ponder a problem studiously before moving toward the solution. The crew had long since dubbed them Mutt and Jeff, but only when they were for certain beyond earshot.
Lieutenant Steve Friedman turned from the computer console where he sat. He too had a complex picture before him, a mess of dots on the screen that he had been staring at for the last several minutes. Now that Glass had broken the silence, Friedman chimed in with his own report, speaking slowly, precisely, exactly as he had been trained to do, but in a thick Southern accent.
"Captain, I have tracking solutions on sierra four-five, sierra four-nine and sierra five-four."
Ward acknowledged with little more than a nod.
"Skipper," came another voice from across the control room. It was Stan Guhl, the Spadefish’s weapons officer. He turned away from his launch panel to speak once the captain had looked his way. His accent was flat and nasal, “New Yawk” all the way, Queens or Brooklyn. "The torpedo room reports the Tomahawk in tube two has another ten minutes before we need to down-power it."
Ward absorbed all the information he had just garnered.
"Very well, Weps," he said. He stepped down from the raised periscope stand and looked over Friedman's shoulder. "Whadda you have, Steve?" he asked quietly.
Despite his youthful face, Steve Friedman was a master at operating the CCS Mark II fire control system. He had an uncanny ability to extract the most information out of the least input, sometimes seeing things in the scrawl of figures and cryptic symbols on the CRT that Ward swore couldn’t be represented there.
"Well, Skipper," he began in his slow Alabama drawl, "Sierra four-five is the closest. He must be that merch y’all are looking at. Range four thousand. Speed ten. Course about zero-two-five. CPA in fifteen minutes at three thousand yards, bearing three-four-seven. I'm guessing he’s headed into Long Beach."
CPA stood for "closest point of approach," the closest the contact would get to Spadefish if all the analysis was correct. Sub skippers start to get nervous when vessels come within a couple of thousand yards. There were too many collisions on record, caused when ships get too close then unknowingly turn toward the submarine while the skipper is looking the other way.
And how many sugars is the merchant ship’s captain having in his cup of coffee? Ward thought. It wouldn’t have surprised him if the kid could tell him. He looked at the stick diagram that showed the computer’s opinion on the more important matter at hand.
“Yeah, that looks about right. He might be a little broader in aspect. I could see across his main deck. The forward king posts were almost in line. That would bring his range in some and put him just about at CPA now."
Friedman twiddled a bit more with the push stick controls, moving the sight diagram slightly.
"Yeah, Skipper. I can make that work. The other two are farther out. CPAs at about eight thousand."
Ward let out a long breath and turned to the senior captain who was standing quietly, observing from the back of the control room.
"Captain Hunsucker, we won't be able to launch in the time window. Too much interfering traffic in the area. I'm drafting a message to Pearl now to tell them. I’m also requesting a new launch basket. Just too damn much going on up there."
Mike Hunsucker appeared to be ignoring the captain as he studiously scribbled something in his steno pad, writing with such force his jowls bounded slightly. Now the scratching of his pen point on paper was the only sound in the room. The older man glanced up, looking at Ward over the top of his half glasses.
"Very well, Captain. Let's meet in your stateroom in five minutes."
"Yes, sir."
Mike Hunsucker eased himself into the little fold-down settee in the captain’s stateroom. It had always been a running joke among submariners. The “stateroom” was hardly “stately,” and not what the name might imply aboard a luxury cruise ship. About the only nod to grandeur was the dark walnut-colored Formica that covered the bulkheads. The stateroom was small and Spartan. Jon Ward preferred to call it compact and utilitarian.
The size of a small walk-in closet, the room contained everything that the captain needed in the way of a place to live and from which to command a nuclear attack submarine. The communications equipment next to the settee allowed him to talk with anyone throughout the sub. And, when he was patched to the sub's radios, his voice could reach to anywhere on the planet. The small course, speed, and depth repeater on the forward bulkhead enabled him to keep track of the sub's movements, too. Right now they told him that Spadefish was at periscope depth, and that they were heading slowly out to sea, farther away from the crowded California coast.
Hunsucker didn’t even take a sip of the coffee from the cup in front of him before he began.
"Jon, I’ll be direct. Your boat isn't doing very well. This is supposed to be a Tactical Readiness Examination. So far we haven't seen any tactics at all. My team is not impressed."
Ward slumped back in his chair but he met the senior captain’s direct gaze.
"Mike, be fair for a moment. You just left command of Topeka a couple of months ago. You can't have already forgotten what it's like."
The JA phone buzzed before Hunsucker could respond. Ward instinctively reached to yank it out of its stainless steel holder, then saw the senior captain’s nod that the interruption was okay.
Ward held the handset to his ear and pinched the push-to-talk button in its grip
"Captain."
"Captain, Officer of the Deck. Message sent to SUBPAC reporting the interference and asking for a new launch basket and launch window. Receipt acknowledged."
The ship's Navigator, Lieutenant Earl Beasley, was standing watch as the OOD, controlling all of the operations of the sub.
"Very well. Tell me as soon as they answer. Meanwhile, stay at periscope depth. Continue on to the western boundary of our operations area. We'll bet on them giving us a new area farther out."
Beasley acknowledged and Ward replaced the phone. He turned back toward Hunsucker. The older man had raised the coffee cup to his lips. Ward spoke before the other man could swallow the thick, black liquid, hoping to make his point while he had the chance.
&nbs
p; "Well, we asked. Don't know what they'll say. Anyway, back to what I was saying. You want us to do a Tomahawk launch simulating a wartime fight, but also following all the peacetime safety rules. All right, so far we're on the same wavelength. But then you put the launch basket close in-shore off LA…so close we can keep score in the beach volleyball games…and you give us a tiny operating area in one of the most heavily trafficked shipping lanes in the world. How do you expect us to show you anything except how damned proficient we are at not running into shiploads of Toyotas?"
Hunsucker set his cup back down deliberately. He leaned forward, a stern expression on his face. The sparkle in his beady eyes seemed gleeful.
"Jon, remember that you have the proud distinction of having the oldest boat in the fleet. This is the last Sturgeon-class left. Your reactor core is almost exhausted. We set this all up close to shore to save your core as much as possible." He grinned and smacked his lips. "And you still serve some damn fine coffee."
Ward finally breathed and let a small smile play across his face. He doubted he was out of the woods with Hunsucker yet. The tension that had gripped him for the last couple of hours was partially relieved.
"It’s from Kauai. Good Hawaiian stuff. The supply officer gets it from a friend on a boat based in Pearl. I never ask what we’re giving them in return.” Ward could see Hunsucker was not impressed. “I know we have an old boat. We fight that every day. Talk to the Engineer. That is if you can ever catch him with his head out of something else that’s gone on the fritz." Ward sipped his own coffee. Hunsucker was right. Compared to most boats, the Spadefish’s brew was spectacular. "This boat is older than he is. She's still a class act, though. You know that, Mike. She does a lot of things that even those new Virginia-class boats won't be able to. Just give us a chance and we’ll show you a few things."
Operation Golden Dawn Page 31
