The book said sending more men into the building was not the solution, but Johnson had to do something. He couldn’t stand by and let his friends be killed off at the NKVD’s leisure.
He got a hundred Canadian volunteers, added to fifty of his guys. They were about to enter the building when they heard a loud, screeching noise over their heads.
It was Hunter’s clown plane returning from the waters off Long Island. Before anyone could move, it slammed down onto the plaza right next to Johnson’s CP.
Hunter jumped out, still wearing his duct-taped crash helmet and carrying his M-16. He and Cat did a soul shake.
Johnson couldn’t help but ask, “What’s with all the rubber, brother?”
“Came like that from the factory,” Hunter told him with a shrug.
Johnson updated him on the situation. More than thirteen hundred of the good guys were trapped about halfway up the skyscraper, lured there after his artillery had reached its elevation limit.
“Like when the B-17s used to lose their fighter protection halfway to Germany,” Johnson said. “Those guys are on their own now. They’ve got Reds above them and below them. We were getting ready to go in.”
He let his voice trail off.
Hunter bit his lip hard. This was certainly not in the plan.
But then a bolt from the blue. The funny thing was, it hit Hunter and Johnson at the same moment.
“Tower One,” was all that Hunter had to say to him.
“Read my mind,” Johnson replied.
In minutes, Hunter, Johnson, fifty of his men, and fifty Free Canadians were carrying component parts and ammo for ten M-6s across the plaza to Tower One. The remaining Canadians took over Johnson’s CP and covered the hastily assembled team.
Compared to Tower Two, which was lit up with fire, smoke, and gun flashes, its twin looked dark and sinister. MOP hadn’t gotten around much to Number One. There were no lights on anywhere, no signs of life. It looked like a huge black monolith stretching to the stars.
Airstrikes against Tower Two were out of the question. They’d agreed on that back in Nantucket. Even if they could somehow get more Su-34s down from the Isakov, if one of the powerful fighter-bombers unloaded all its ordnance on the tower’s midsection, combined with the entire building being wired with explosives, it might send it crashing to the ground. The same for the Kamov gunships, if they attacked it repeatedly.
The M-6 was a much more precise weapon. Its HE shells went where you wanted them to go and caused a fire, but not an overload of structural damage. Or so they hoped. Nothing was ever certain in war. But the situation was getting desperate and they would have to chance it.
So they were going to bring the artillery pieces up to the same floors in Tower One that corresponded with those where their friends were trapped inside Tower Two, put the guns back together, and fire across at the enemy. Artillery support from the fiftieth floor.
But then they hit a roadblock of the strangest kind.
All the entryways for Tower One were not only locked tight, they were covered with plastic explosives. Warning signs, hanging everywhere, declared that any tampering with the locks would result in the detonation of all the explosives ringing the huge building. The notices were simply signed “MOP.”
Half the artillery team dispersed, trying to find another way of entry or maybe a break in the line of interconnected plastic explosives. But when they all returned to the starting point, the universal report was the same: They could find no Achilles’ heel.
“Fucking Russians,” Hunter spat. It would take days for the JAWS guys to deactivate all the plastique around the bottom of Tower One. There was literally tons of it.
“What they do is never pretty,” Johnson said, “but it always seems to work.”
Then one of Johnson’s men found a computer circuit box next to the building’s main entrance. It seemed designed to take a four-digit code, which would turn off the miles-long string of explosives and open the doors.
“That sounds easy,” Johnson said. “Got any ideas for the code?”
“N-K-V-D?” Hunter suggested—he was no good at these things.
Johnson shrugged and began to enter it. But before he could punch ENTER, a figure came out of the darkness and grabbed him.
Johnson’s guys were on top of the assailant in a flash. Hunter and Johnson added their M-16s to the dozens of weapons pointed at the man on the ground.
He was wearing a hooded overcoat and was tensed up as if ready to take them all on in a fight.
They got him to his feet and patted him down for weapons. Only then did Hunter flip back the hood.
They found themselves looking at a man about fifty, thin face, almost regal-looking. Under the cloak, he was wearing a battered and burned Russian Army uniform with colonel’s leaves.
He was also wearing a patch over his right eye.
“The code is U … S … S … R,” he told them in heavily accented English. “Had you punched in anything else, it would have detonated everything.”
Before any of the Americans could say a word, the man punched in the code and then ran back into the night. He called over his shoulder to them, “And the elevators still work.”
They did not pursue him. The doors opened, and they rushed the M-6 components into the lobby of Tower One. They pressed every elevator button they could find.
“How the hell did you arrange that?” Johnson asked Hunter, still incredulous over the encounter outside.
Hunter shook his head. “I have no idea,” he said. “I’m just glad you saw him, too.”
The fifty Free Canadians stayed on the bottom floor, covering their six.
Hunter and the Righteous Brothers took a total of twenty-five elevators up to the forty-eighth floor, bodies jammed in with jigsaw pieces of M-6s. It all seemed so surreal to Hunter, just like everything else that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. He still had the taste of oranges in his mouth and he hadn’t been to sleep in almost five days. A lot of weird things were happening—more than usual.
But the man with the eye patch was the weirdest.
Hunter was astonished by how quickly Johnson’s men could put the M-6s together. They were loaded and ready to go in under two minutes, and that included equipping each with a pair of mini-tires to help mobility.
Johnson’s men pushed each of the ten guns up to windows looking right across at Tower Two, where the assault team was trapped. They looked like cannons on an old-time sea galleon, getting ready to deliver a broadside.
Now Hunter and Johnson talked strategy. If something like this was going to work, then they first wanted to clear out the NKVD troops on the floors below their trapped friends and hopefully open up an escape route down.
But then two problems instantly popped up. The first was they didn’t know exactly where their friends were at that moment.
“The last time I talked to Bull, he was trying to make his way back down from forty-eight,” Johnson said. “And then his radio went dead.”
“So did they go down a floor?” Hunter wondered out loud. “Or are they still trapped on forty-eight?”
It made a big difference in where they would aim their guns.
Problem two: The way the exterior facade of the Twin Towers had been designed, it was difficult to tell one floor from the other when looking directly across the divide between the two mammoth buildings.
“In theory, we should be parallel to each other,” Johnson said. “But these buildings are so damn big, we’d have to consider the curvature of the Earth if we decided to guesstimate where to put the ordnance. That would be very dangerous for Bull and the guys.”
Even through night-vision goggles they couldn’t see clearly into the next building; they just weren’t close enough. Making it worse, the NKVD had shut off just about all the lights in Tower Two by now, including those in t
he stairways and in the office spaces adjacent to them. All this was totally unexpected, but the unexpected had to be expected in combat.
Johnson took off his battle hat and wiped his face with his hands. “How the hell do we do this, Hawk?”
Suddenly, Hunter jumped to his feet and started running for the elevators.
“Stand by,” he told Catfish. “I’ll try to fix this.”
Johnson heard the buzzing about five minutes later.
He and his men knew what it was right away. Pressed up against the windows, they watched as the clown plane streaked by them in a flash of light.
It did a hard bank and was suddenly circling the midsection of Tower Two, going in the opposite direction. It went around the building three times. On the fourth orbit, the clown plane’s engine gave out a mighty screech and suddenly it was standing up on its tail, hovering in flight.
Johnson’s men were astonished by the maneuver. Their CO just laughed.
“He’s done this before,” he told them.
They watched as Hunter stuck his hand out the plane’s open glass panel and fired a flare into a window right on the corner of the building.
At the same moment, Johnson’s radiophone came alive.
It was Hunter.
“Bad guys on forty-seven, ten ball in the corner pocket,” was all he said. Then the nose of the little plane came down, and it was gone in a flash.
Johnson clicked the radio twice then yelled to his men, “Go to the light, brothers!”
Hunter had veered away from the building just seconds before the M-6s fired. He had the best view of anyone of what happened next.
It really did look like a broadside coming from one old warship to another. This was no two-shot mini-barrage. It was a ten-cannon fusillade. The multiple streaks of fire crashed into the windows of the forty-seventh floor’s southeast corner—but then blew out the other side, carrying a wave of flame and debris that was so powerful it disrupted the air flow around the circus plane. Some of the booby traps in the inner offices must have detonated, Hunter guessed, because Tower Two suddenly began to shake. He could see it plainly with his night-vision goggles.
“Stay together, baby,” he whispered, desperately battling his controls to stay level. “You’re made of good old US concrete and steel. You can take more than that.”
For several long moments, though, he was sure the building was going to topple right over.
But then it stopped shaking. There was still a lot of fire and smoke, but everything seemed to settle down a little.
Hunter let out a long whistle of relief. Tower Two remained standing.
It had been a case of bend not break.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Bull Dozer had lost his cigar.
Somewhere between getting trapped on the forty-eighth floor and the M-6–assisted breakout, he’d misplaced his box containing his one and only unlit stogie. Strangely, he still had the empty box, but the last cigar was gone.
“What am I going to smoke when I get to the top?” he grumbled.
The 7CAV was flying up the stairways now. All NKVD opposition was being crushed, thanks to Hunter’s clown plane and Johnson’s expert gunners. The unlikely tactic was winning the day, even though, at times, it felt like the building was coming down on top of them. Every floor from the fiftieth up to sixty-eight had been blown out in the advance. In some cases, if the floor was heavily booby-trapped, it caused the building to sway violently. But it did not fall.
The unusual bombardment killed dozens, then hundreds, of NKVD gunmen with each barrage. There was nowhere to run, and they had no weapons comparable to the M-6. By the seventy-second floor, the assault team was moving so fast, they were taking over floors before Johnson’s guys could even fire into them.
Then they reached the 105th floor. As always, Dozer went to open the fire door, expecting to see, as in the floors below, an empty shell with lots of broken and burned office furniture lying around.
But 105 was different.
Dozer peeked in to see as many as five hundred NKVD cops looking back at him. They all appeared haggard, many were wounded, many were without combat weapons. The last-ditch guys, Dozer thought quickly. Get by them, and we’ve got this thing dicked.
But the Russians came right at them, and suddenly Dozer was fighting for his life. Sheer numbers allowed the assault team to push their way into the lobby, but it was quickly packed with so many struggling bodies, Dozer couldn’t even raise his M-16 to fire. He was using his fists and the rifle’s butt instead. One Russian came at him with an AK-47 with no ammo clip but an extra-long bayonet. He lunged at Dozer’s chest, but when the tip of the blade hit his empty cigar box, the man pulled back and tried again. This gave Dozer enough time to push his M-16 into his attacker’s stomach and squeeze the trigger.
The result was a bloody mess, but Dozer didn’t care. He took the man’s bayonet and started slicing his way through the Russians. It felt like he was in a dream. The battle turned into a rugby scrum stretched out for the entire length of the 105th floor. Brutal hand-to-hand combat, falling over old desks and office chairs, flattening cubicle walls, using massive copying machines for temporary cover. It was madness. The floor was soon slippery with blood.
Still anyone’s game, the Americans kept pouring onto the floor from the stairwell, but they were coming in a very thin stream. And while many of the Russians had run out of ammunition, they were swinging their bayonet-tipped AK-47s like medieval swords—one swipe in the right place and you were KIA. Plus, as these guys were the cream of Zmeya’s crop, they all seemed to be tall, hulking Slavic giants. On brute strength alone, they were beginning to win the battle.
Then a miracle for the Allies. At that moment, Jim Cook and the JAWS team broke through the booby-trapped stairwell on the northeast side, and a second wave of Allied fighters streamed onto the 105th floor from the opposite direction. Mercs mostly, they threw themselves onto the gang of Militsiya gunmen from their rear.
With two groups of Americans pushing the Russians from front and back, the NKVD line finally began to break. The Militsiya policemen began stumbling back over themselves as they were stabbed or shot by the stampeding Americans. Hacking with the bayonet with one hand and firing his M-16 with the other, Dozer was leading the charge. Blood, guts, and computer paper were everywhere. As everyone tripped over old telephone wires, huge sections of the suspended ceiling fell on top of the combatants. It was the most unlikely battle any of them had ever fought.
It went on like this for five more brutal minutes, but the Russian resistance finally ended. The wide-open office where the battle had been fought was devastated. Dead and dying NKVD policemen were everywhere.
Finally, Dozer blew his whistle and it was over.
As his men greeted the JAWS team and the mercs, Dozer just threw down his weapons, exhausted beyond words, covered in water and sweat and blood.
Then he spit on the nearest NKVD policeman’s body and said, “Smile about that, you assholes.”
But there was one more grisly sight awaiting him.
Once the 105th floor was secure and their dead and wounded brought back down, Dozer sent his deep recon guys to check out the next four floors.
If another assault was going to be needed for the top floor penthouse, he wanted to launch it as close as possible to their goal.
The recon team that went up to the 106th floor quickly declared it empty and free of booby traps. The same for 107 and 108. But the guys who went up to 109 called back to Dozer within two minutes.
“You might want to come see this,” one told him.
Dozer quickly went up to the 109th floor. The recon team was spread out in the lobby in defensive positions. The squad leader led Dozer to an executive-style suite. The door had been blown off.
Dozer looked in to find another scene from a nightmare. Even in this building
of horrors, it gave him a start.
Inside were a dozen young women. They were all blonde, all lovely, all spitting images of Dominique. These were the girlfriends procured for the NKVD’s despised CRPP, the Committee of the Revolution for the Protection of the People.
But all the girls were covered, nearly head to toe, in blood. One practically fell into Dozer’s arms, begging him to rescue her. Behind them was a sex-and-torture chamber filled with toys and restraining devices. But scattered about were the bodies of the four remaining committee members.
They’d all been mutilated by knives, broken glass, and even teeth. As battle-hardened as he was, the gruesome sight was almost too much for Dozer to take.
He immediately sent the girls down along with a medic. Then he looked back into the blood-soaked room.
“Jesus, who could be responsible for that?” the recon man asked him.
Dozer just shrugged and said, “Well, I don’t think any of those guys killed themselves.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
Zmeya’s suitcase communicator was dying.
Fifteen minutes ago, it had been flashing and beeping furiously with so many people on the lower floors of Tower Two trying to talk to him, get his orders, and find out what was happening with the battle.
But the higher the Allies had climbed, and the more floors they managed to blow out with their artillery, the fewer the calls coming in. Finally, the communicator fell silent, none of its lights were flashing. That had never happened before.
But Zmeya knew what it meant.
Hitler in the bunker. The end of the adventure. Time for the next one.
But where was his helicopter?
Suddenly, one light on his suitcase popped on. Zmeya answered it, wondering who could be left.
It was Sublieutenant Borski.
“Still standing by, sir,” the hideous officer reported.
Zmeya had to think a moment about what he was talking about.
“The prisoners at Yankee Stadium,” Borski reminded him. “We’re awaiting your execution order.”
Battle for America Page 27