by Jon Land
The gunships were gaining ground, letting their final target bob and weave to its heart’s content. There was no reason to rush things. The old plane was moving away from the base, not toward it, and there were no more cropdusters in the air to protect. The gunners kept firing erratic bursts from their machine guns as they closed the gap on the Warhawk, down to two hundred yards now.
The glass surrounding Locke shattered and he felt something hot stab his shoulder with burning agony. His ears were exposed to the rushing wind, the effect like twin sledgehammers pounding away on either side. With his free hand, he squeezed his wounded shoulder and felt blood soaking his fingers.
Pop knew the choppers were closing and started with more evasive maneuvers, swinging up and down, left and right, to avoid their fire. The motions hit Locke’s stomach like a roller-coaster ride, but that was a hell of a lot better than being hit by the bullets pouring from behind them. He clung to the hope that the Blue Wing had successfully disabled the remainder of the cropdusters, blew them to bits, burying Tantalus forever.
There wasn’t much chance of that, Chris knew, not with the gunships to consider. And then he noticed the blinking red light next to the Warhawk’s fuel gauge.
“Wouldn’t happen to have any gasoline handy, would you, friend?” Pop shouted back at him.
Ahmad Hamshi knew he had responded to the crisis brilliantly. The enemy planes had all been destroyed. He had managed to save twenty-seven of the cropdusters and all canisters from six more. The overall operation would be slowed but hardly wiped out. So when word had come from the helicopters that they were in pursuit of the final ghost fighter, Hamshi ordered the dusters to return to the runway and begin takeoff procedures again immediately. Keysar Flats was isolated but still too close to civilization for comfort. A prolonged aerial battle would certainly have drawn attention to the area, and with the dusters—and their contents—still on the ground, it was attention he could ill afford.
Men perched behind the remaining machine-gun and antiaircraft cannons watched the sky warily, anticipating yet another attack from the ghost squadron. The engines of the cropdusters, meanwhile, were revving, and the first two had taxied into takeoff position.
Ahmad Hamshi allowed himself a smile.
The smile vanished quickly at the sight of the battered blue Piper Cub roaring over the hangars, barely clearing them, coming out of nowhere.
“Heeeeeee-yahhhhhhhhhhh!”
Mickey Ostrovsky was screaming as his Piper soared over the hangar. Parts of his guts had escaped from a gaping wound in his stomach and were hanging over his belt but he didn’t care. The cancer had taught him how to live with pain, and he had only two months left anyway. He had another minute before it got to be too much, and a minute would suit him, just fine.
His Piper had almost crash-landed minutes before but he had managed to keep it whole, losing consciousness only briefly. When he came to, he pushed the fighter back into the air, feeling its wheels scrape against the hangar roof, and headed it straight over the big guns for the runway.
The men manning them struggled to change the big guns’ angle but the best they could manage was to bring them directly overhead. Only the machine gun was able to get off any rounds at all as the blue plane screamed above them.
Mickey O. took a chest full of lead and felt the blood filling his mouth, but he wasn’t about to let such inconveniences stop him. He was going out the way he had always wanted to and the rest of the world be damned.
He fired his three remaining rockets and followed them to the ground, crashing his Piper into the line of cropdusters at the front just as his rockets tore up the middle rows. The dusters were shoved back against each other, tumbling like dominoes, as Mickey O. grazed the ground and waited for the merciful explosion that would end his life. Enough of the dusters’ fuel tanks had ruptured upon impact, and the flames from his final rocket blasts sniffed out the gushing gas and stuck to it. The explosions came fast and furious, belching black smoke and orange flames, consuming the last of the air before Mickey realized he couldn’t breathe it.
Ahmad Hamshi rushed desperately about, hands flapping and signaling, ordering his men to salvage the canisters. His words were absorbed by the fire and the blasts, but he knew it didn’t matter; there could be nothing left to salvage. His men were fleeing toward safety. He fled with them.
Mickey O.’s remaining eye found the sky he had loved one last time. Two bright flashes broke before him, coming straight from the heavens, angels no doubt sent to carry him up.
“I’m gonna make a fight of this,” Pop said, breaking the red warning bulb with his bare fist. “Hang on, Chris.”
With the gunships only seventy yards back, Keller swung up and over them, hoping to move in from behind and take them with his guns. But the battered Warhawk moved too sluggishly to gain him the advantage he sought, and he fired his guns at targets already swerving to the side, angling themselves in for a direct hit. His only advantage was gone now, Pop knew. He kept firing his guns until the hammers snapped on empty chambers, which was about the same time the engine began to sputter.
Chris watched the helicopters closing for the kill, dual guns blasting at the dying Warhawk as it started to drop from the sky. The giant insects hovered with it briefly, taunting their prey, then roared forward angling for a rocket shot.
There was a blinding explosion that shook Locke’s eyes closed, and he opened them fully expecting to see a long tunnel extended toward the next world.
What he saw was totally different.
The remains of one of the gunships were slipping from the sky, shedding more parts of its carcass as it fell. Locke turned toward the second chopper just as a similar explosion shattered the air and turned it hot. He shook himself from what must have been a hallucination. In the cockpit, though, Pop Keller seemed to be jumping for joy as he struggled to hold the Warhawk steady.
A pair of F-16s roared over them and then circled back to render assistance. Chris felt the tears burning his eyes. The jets were the prettiest sights he’d ever seen, and he forgot about his injured shoulder long enough to wave at them.
“We ain’t out of the woods yet, friend,” Pop said grimly.
The engine sputtered one last time, then died out altogether. Pop had used its last spurt of fuel to level out the Warhawk’s descent into the wind.
The ground came up fast. The last thing Christopher Locke remembered was checking to make sure his seat belt was fastened. Impact shook him forward, then quickly back so that his head smashed against the wooden railing. He felt himself being shaken violently up, straining against the seat belt, and imagined he had been catapulted outward into the warm air.
But he hadn’t imagined anything. The brave Warhawk had broken up around him, and Locke had been thrown well into the air at a frightening clip. The landing knocked the wind out of him, and he felt himself rolling over again and again, crunching bones with each turn. The pain was everywhere at once yet still spreading.
Then darkness.
Part Ten:
San Sebastian, Monday Morning
Chapter 35
ROSS DOGAN TIGHTENED HIS parachute belt in the cargo hold of the C-160. Around him 150 members of the army’s elite Rangers were crowded together passing cigarettes and candy. The hold had been silent for ten minutes now. The jump was almost upon them and there wasn’t an eye that strayed long from the red signal light, waiting for it to start flashing.
Dogan stared at the light intently, trying to fight against the exhaustion that threatened to overwhelm him. He needed to be in top form for the next few hours.
Yesterday Calvin Roy had heard his story, accepting his words with little argument and posing only essential questions. Roy had scrambled the F-16s to Keysar Flats but word came back that a mothballed air force base the cropdusters were using had been devastated before their arrival. The jet fighters merely finished the job, a mop-up operation. Incredibly, it seemed the participants of an air show had done the bulk of
the damage but information was still sketchy, as was the fate of Christopher Locke. Dogan knew Chris had been behind the bizarre raid and prayed he had managed to survive it. He was astounded by the amateur’s resourcefulness. Amazing how fast men learned when they had to.
Roy’s first inclination was to launch an air strike over San Sebastian after reconnaissance photographs confirmed men and equipment were massing in the dead town. Dogan, though, had argued vehemently against that strategy. Yes, an air strike would successfully obliterate the canisters that were there, but who knew whether Mandala had more stored somewhere else. The only acceptable solution was a ground-based strike. Mandala would have to be neutralized. He could not be allowed to revive his mad plan another day.
Ultimately Roy had relented and set about getting the bureaucracy in motion to call up the elite Rangers for a foreign operation. The two C-160 cargo-personnel transports had left at nine the previous evening, allowing only a brief stop in Panama for refueling en route to their target in Colombia. By launching an attack from the hillsides surrounding San Sebastian, the Rangers could effectively surround Mandala’s troops. Up till now things had gone miraculously without a hitch.
The red light flashed on. Wordlessly the Rangers shuffled to their feet. Dogan fell in step among them, taking a place in line. He was here under CIA authority but answerable to the Rangers’ commander. His job was to get Mandala while the Rangers took care of the rest of the town.
Dogan swallowed as much air as he could. He had never enjoyed jumping even under the best of circumstances, so when it came to his turn he leaped from the ledge with feet trembling and eyes squeezed closed. The fall was swift and uncomfortable, the added weight in Dogan’s pack making it harder for him to stay with the group’s dive pattern. He angled his body to keep close, shifting his pack to ease the strain. It included a pair of Laws rockets, the army’s miniature bazooka; a Mac-10 machine pistol with four spare clips; and Dogan’s favorite handgun, the Heckler and Koch P-9.
He hit the ground and rolled to a halt. The heavy equipment was being released above, and the Rangers were already clearing the area for its landing.
It was an hour later—amazing time really—before everything was organized and the Rangers were ready to set out. They had come down a good thirty miles from San Sebastian to insure against being spotted in the air. Dogan wasn’t expecting Mandala to be watching for them anyway; he had no reason to. There was no way anyone should have known the specifics of his private endgame.
The problem at this point was travel. The Iranian rescue had failed due to a combination of bad weather and equipment breakdown. Weather was not a factor here but walking the thirty miles was unthinkable given the time frame, which meant the transports had to hold up. And if the operation was to be a complete success, the trucks toting artillery and antiaircraft guns had to make it as well. The Rangers couldn’t afford to let even one of Mandala’s planes or its contents slip from their grasp.
Nor could they afford to alert Mandala to their presence at any time prior to the direct assault. Mandala would certainly have guards posted on the hillsides surrounding the town, and the Rangers’ heavy equipment could be spotted easily from a distance of a half mile or so. It was Dogan who suggested what eventually became the unit’s working plan, and now as they headed for San Sebastian under a hot and heavy sun he could only hope things would go as expected.
It took ninety minutes to reach the town’s outskirts. At that time they abandoned their transports and covered the rest of the ground on foot. They made their approach to San Sebastian from three different angles, much of the last eighth mile with their bellies to the ground. All three divisions stopped perhaps fifty yards from where Mandala’s first guards had been spotted. Dogan nodded to the bearded Ranger commander and started off alone, crawling on his stomach toward one of the hillsides overlooking the town.
Since his job was to infiltrate the enemy and destroy the planes along with Mandala, no assault could begin before he made a careful inspection of the area. Once satisfied, he would signal the Ranger commander and the next phase of the operation would begin. Dogan crept through the dirt and burned-out debris, almost to the first line of Mandala’s defenses. Fortunately, the guards were spread out with far too much distance between them. And they each wore a different uniform, which provided Dogan with the final shadow of his plan.
He crawled closer and closer until he could almost smell the boots of an approaching guard. The man’s eyes were locked on the town instead of the surrounding area. A lucky break. When the guard passed him, Dogan yanked his feet out hard and without any hesitation snapped the man’s neck. Then he took the dead man’s place.
Dogan pulled a pair of binoculars from the pack he wore over his shoulder and held them to his eyes. With a slight shudder he realized this was how it had all begun when Lubeck had occupied a similar position overlooking the town more than two weeks ago. He pushed that thought back and turned the focusing wheel, pretending to first look out over the wide expanse of land where the Rangers were pressed to the ground. Even with the binoculars he couldn’t see them. Amazing. He turned the binoculars on the town beneath him.
Mandala’s troops were everywhere, especially concentrated in an area north of the burned-out town where a makeshift airstrip had been constructed and a dozen small planes had lined up one after the other. No, Dogan realized, they weren’t planes but small jets capable of carrying the fungus infinitely farther and faster than their counterparts in Keysar Flats. A dozen would be all it would take to do the job nicely, assuming refueling stops had been arranged, and Dogan was sure they had.
He shifted his binoculars toward the dead fields. More of the troops were at work there, handling shovels instead of guns. Silver canisters perhaps two feet long were being lifted from the ground and handed to men passing by in jeeps. No wonder Mandala had left guards behind in San Sebastian. His hidden canisters had to be protected from anyone who ventured too close. He must have buried them before the genetically advanced seeds had been planted, the precise agenda of his plan clear even then. The fields were an ideal resting place for his canisters, for who would ever expect him to burn the ground resting over them?
Dogan focused his binoculars next on the formidable arsenal, which included small tanks, small artillery lodged behind sandbags, and several machine-gun nests. The ground had been set up as if Mandala expected an attack, and Dogan had to give him credit for taking such elaborate precautions.
Satisfied that he knew the layout, Dogan pressed a button on his belt-held communicator, giving the Ranger commander the GO signal.
Two minutes later, two jets dropped out of the sky, belching white exhaust no more than a thousand feet over the town. Men began scampering frantically about, eyes locked on what looked like small missiles sliding toward the ground. The missiles burst upon impact and huge swells of thick, gray smoke stretched outward.
Dogan started down the hill, tripping and stumbling, panic on his features. He passed into the gray smoke and felt his eyes burning. The charging Rangers would have donned gas masks to protect themselves. But since Dogan had to pass through Mandala’s lines to reach the airstrip, he had to appear to belong among his troops. That meant no mask for him. In addition to providing camouflage for the Rangers’ charge, the smoke had the same effect as tear gas on the nose, eyes, and mouth. Dogan was coughing and wheezing horribly as he struggled forward in the direction of the jets.
Behind him the sound of gunfire was beginning. The Rangers would spare nothing in taking the town now. The advantage was clearly theirs, and they weren’t about to squander it. Mandala’s heavy guns and tanks pounded away, though, taking few casualties but slowing the Rangers’ rush. Their own artillery weapons were motoring into position now, ready to shoot down fleeing planes.
Dogan rushed through the lines, staying low and shielding his mouth as floods of Mandala’s troops charged by him. His nose felt as if he had sniffed ammonia and his eyes poured hot tears that obscured his
vision. He kept moving as the gunfire behind him intensified, indicating the first wave of Rangers had reached the town and were engaging Mandala’s troops directly. Dogan quickened his pace.
The Mac-10 was held tight in his hand now and he had fitted the Heckler and Koch P-9 snugly on his hip. His weighted-down pack still slowed him slightly. The Rangers were using a funnel strategy, assaulting Mandala’s men from two sides and the front simultaneously, moving constantly inward to pin them into the smallest possible area. Dogan made for the runway as fast as he could, knowing that the line would be pushed back upon him before long.
The airstrip was located at the very edge of San Sebastian and the gas thinned as he got closer to it, allowing his eyes to clear slightly. The rapid gunfire, shouts, and screams were still behind him. He had turned all his attention forward just as a series of bullets hit the ground at his feet. He dove to the side, rolling with the Mac-10 blazing in the direction the shots had come from. Dogan rolled further, behind a parked jeep, and looked up to see a pair of machine-gun nests resting just off the side of the airstrip, guarding the small jets while men worked feverishly to finish the loading process. Already pilots were struggling with the controls, readying the jets for takeoff. The Rangers would be breaking through the enemy lines within minutes but that was too long and Dogan did not trust the accuracy of antiaircraft fire. The planes had to be stopped now.
Dogan ripped his pack from his shoulders and unzipped it. He pulled the three grenades free along with one of his two Laws rockets and sifted through twenty powerful bombs composed of plastic explosives for another machine-gun clip. He lifted the Laws rocket up to his shoulder and snapped up the sight. His target was the first of the dozen jets in line for takeoff. His object at this point was disruption.