Coonts, Stephen - Jake Grafton 7 - Cuba

by Cuba (lit)

climbed straight up out of the dust cloud and only then

  began the transition to winged flight.

  The lieutenant was named Charlie Herron, and he

  had his orders. His primary responsibility was

  to ensure that the missile in that silo never left the

  ground. As his feet hit the ground, he flopped on

  his belly and waited while the roaring Osprey

  climbed away. When the dust began to clear, he

  spotted the barn and went for it on a run.

  Bodies and body parts lay scattered everywhere. The

  living men he passed sat in the dirt with empty

  hands reaching for the sky. Herron shouted over the

  radio, "Cease-fire, cease-fire. They are

  surrendering."

  Inside the barn he found Asel Tyvek standing over

  a dead Cuban.

  "Over here, Lieutenant. I think this wooden thing

  is a door."

  Tyvek and Herron opened the wooden

  door, which revealed a steel door with built-in

  combination lock. "Think there's anybody in

  there"..."...Herron asked. After all, Tyvek had been

  here longer than he had.

  "I don't know, sir."

  "Well, we gotta get in there. Let's blow the

  door."

  A charge of C-4 took less than a minute

  to rig. The two men took cover behind a wooden

  stall.

  The explosion was sharp, a metallic wham that rang

  their ears.

  The demolition charge cut the lock clean out of the

  door and warped it. The two men pried the door

  open. A stairway lit by naked light bulbs led

  away downward. Herron

  and Tyvek took off their night-vision goggles and

  let them dangle around their necks. With Herron in

  the lead with his pistol in his hand, the two of them

  descended the stairway.

  Aboard

  United States

  Jake Grafton was getting the blowby-blow

  update. Air Intelligence officers annotated

  the maps and briefers told him of every

  report from the silos. "Heavy firefight around

  silos one and two.""...ationo opposition at sites

  four, five and six.""...Ospreys on the ground at

  sites two, three, and four.""...SeaCobra hit and

  in trouble at site one.""Team leader into silo

  two."..."...Recon leader into silo six."

  Each report was entered on a checklist: there were

  eight of them, one for each silo and dairy site.

  First Lieutenant Charlie Herron and Asel

  Tyvek found the control room of silo two

  empty. A series of stairs and more steel doors

  led downward to the bottom of the concrete structure.

  The doors weren't locked. When he opened the last

  door, there was the missile towering upward. The shiny,

  painted fuselage reflected pinpoints of light from

  the naked bulbs arranged around the top and sides of the

  concrete silo.

  Under the missile was a steel grate over a black

  hole. That was the flame pit, to exhaust the flame

  and gases when the missile was launched.

  A circular steel stairway led up to a

  catwalk. From the catwalk it appeared a person

  could reach over and gain access to the missile's

  warhead and control panel.

  Herron bolstered his pistol and turned

  to Sergeant Tyvek. "See if you can figure out a

  way to safety this bottle rocket so they can't

  fire it from Havana while I'm working on it."

  "Lieutenant, I've got bad news for you. I

  don't know shit about guided missiles."

  "Well, you sure as hell don't want to be standing

  here

  with your thumb up your butt if they light this thing off.

  Now go look for a switch or something."

  "Yes,

  sir"

  Tyvek said, and disappeared back up the stairway.

  Herron took the steps two at a time. He hoped

  he would find what he expected when he got to the

  catwalk, although he thought a lot of the old

  Russian engineer's explanation had been pure

  bullshit. Somebody had found an engineer in

  Russia who said he helped design these

  missilesthe guy was hi his eighties. They had him

  on television for an hour explaining how the business

  end of the missile was put together. The engineer spoke

  not a word of English so a translator did the

  talking. The man had a hell of a memory or was

  lying through his teeth. Herron was about to find out which was the

  case.

  "If it's typical Russian stuffea"...the

  American briefer said, "you'll be able to work on it

  with pliers and screwdrivers. American designers

  could learn a lot from Russian engineers, who

  design for ease of maintenance." They gave each

  officer and NCO who might get near a missile

  a small tool pouch.

  Herron examined the access panel, which was only about

  six inches long by six inches high, and curved, a

  part of the missile's skin. The screws holding it

  hi place looked like Dzus fasteners. They

  weren't, though: they were plain old screws. Careful

  not to drop mem, he unscrewed them one by one and put

  the screws hi a shirt pocket. There were a dozen

  screws, just like the Russian engineer said. Okay!

  So far so good.

  Sweat dripped down his nose, ran into his eyes.

  He wiped the palms of his hands on his camo pants

  and used his sleeve to swab his face, then went back

  to twisting the screwdriver. He worked as quickly as he

  could. comFinally he took out the last screw.

  Carefully, ever so carefully, Herron pulled off

  the access panel and laid it on the catwalk by his

  feet. He dug a small flashlight from his

  pocket. Looking through the access

  panel, he could see lots of wires. And a

  stainless-steel sphere about the size of a

  basketball. That, he concluded, must be the

  biological warhead. The missile had been

  designed for a nuclear warhead, which would have been round,

  so the biological warhead had to go into the same

  space. Yet the warhead was too large to come out this

  little six-inch access hole.

  Charlie Herron reached through the hole to his elbow,

  felt upward with his ear against the skin of the missile.

  Yes, he could feel the latch. He opened it. Now

  down ... one there too. Right, then left.

  With the last latch open, he pulled at the panel he

  had his arm in. It came out in his hand, making a

  hole at least twenty inches across. So the engineer

  had been telling the truth.

  Herron turned to put the panel on the

  catwalk... and dropped it.

  It fell, striking the side of the missile, finally

  landing on the grate at the bottom with a tinny sound,

  much like the lid of a garbage can.

  Charlie Herron grabbed the rails of the catwalk and

  held on to keep from falling.

  He wiped his face on his sleeves, the palms of

  his hands on his trousers.

  Using a pair of wire snips, the lieutenant

  began clipping wires, then pulling the ends out of the

  way s
o he could see how the warhead was held in

  place.

  William Henry Chance and Tommy Carmellini

  stepped from their Osprey transport wearing their

  CBW suits. Two marines similarly clad

  followed them. Each marine carried a cylinder about

  six feet long and five inches in diameter

  balanced on his shoulder.

  Doll Hanna was waiting for them as they approached

  the main entrance. "I count five people in the clean

  areaea"...he said. "They don't know we're here yet.

  The aircirculation system is pretty loud."

  Chance went to the partially open door and eased his head

  around for a peek. He counted the people inside. Five.

  He had been thinking about this moment ever since Jake

  Grafton asked him to take out this facility. If

  the integrity of the sealed area was broken before the fire

  got hot enough to destroy the virus, some of the virus

  might escape. If there were any free viruses in

  the air inside there, or if one of the culture

  trays was broken, intentionally or unintentionally ...

  How much was some? Who could say?

  He pulled his head back, looked at

  Doll Hanna, looked at the marines carrying the

  cylinders on their shoulders.

  Well, it was a hell of a risk. A

  hell

  of a risk.

  Just then William Henry Chance wished he were back

  in New York City, eating dinner at a nice

  restaurant or preparing a case for trial or

  sitting at home with the woman who had shared his life

  for the past ten years. Anywhere but here.

  "Give me your rifleea"...he said to Hanna, who

  handed him. his M-16.

  "Is it loaded?"

  "Full. Selector is on single shot. This is

  the safety."...Hanna touched it.

  "Okayea"...sd William Henry Chance.

  He turned to Carmellini. "If worse comes

  to worst, you know what to do."

  Carmellini didn't say anything.

  The dumb shit is probably wishing he was safe and

  snug in a federal pen,

  Chance thought.

  He pointed the rifle at the ground and held it

  close to his leg, then eased the door open and

  stepped inside. No Cuban saw him.

  They were looking intently at something in a sealed unit

  with remote-control arms. A radio was playing

  somewhere, playing loudly.

  Chance stepped into the air lock, stood there looking

  at the people while he waited for the interior door

  to unlock automatically.

  He recognized the voice on the radio: Alejo

  Vargas. The gravelly flat delivery was

  unmistakable.

  "My fellow Cubans, now is the hour to rally to the

  defense of our holy mother country. Tonight even as I

  speak the nation is under attack from American

  military forces, who have leveled the awesome might of

  their armed forces against the eleven million

  peaceful'people of Cuba."

  Ten seconds passed, fifteen, twenty. After a

  half minute, the interior door clicked. Chance

  pushed it open and stepped into the lab.

  Racks holding eight or ten culture trays

  each stood beside the benches. He lifted the rifle,

  thumbed off the safety, walked forward toward the working

  figures, who still had their backs to him. The tables

  on both sides of the aisles contained tools, parts,

  glassware, specialized instruments.

  "Join with me in fighting the forces of the devil, the

  forces of capitalism and exploitation that seek

  to enslave the Cuban people so that the Yanquis can

  manufacture more dollars for themselves...."

  One of the workers spotted Chance when he was ten feet

  away, and turned in his direction.

  Chance gestured with the rifle, motioned for them to raise

  their hands. They did so.

  still

  should just shoot them,

  he thought, acutely aware of the culture trays just

  beside his elbow, and theirs.

  Maybe I won't have to.

  Backing up between two tables, he jerked his head

  back the way he had come, toward the air lock,

  gestured with the barrel of the rifle.

  "Our hour of glory is nowea"...Alejo Vargas

  thundered, "an hour that will live in all of Cuban

  history as the supreme triumphant moment of our

  people, that moment in the history of the world when we humble people

  struck back against the enslaver and oppressor and

  became forever free...."

  Slowly, watching Chance, the closest man began

  moving, passed him, kept walking with his hands up.

  The second man passed.

  The third ...

  He was turning to look at the fourth man when the man

  grabbed the barrel of the rifle with one hand and stabbed

  Chance in the solar plexus with the other.

  William Henry Chance looked down at the handle

  sticking out of his abdomen. A screwdriver! The

  man had stabbed him with a screwdriver.

  The man was fighting him for the rifle!

  A shot. He heard a shot over the noise of the

  aircirculation fans. The man who stabbed him

  collapsed.

  More shots.

  Chance fell. His legs didn't work anymore and

  he was having trouble breathing.

  "Kill the American enslavers wherever you find them,

  wherever they choose to shovel their odious filth onto

  a committed socialist peopleea"...Vargas shouted over the

  radio. "Beloved Cuba, the mother of us all, needs

  our strong right arms,"

  On the floor, his vision narrowing to tiny points of

  light, fighting for air he couldn't get, William

  Henry Chance felt someone roll him over. Through the

  face plate on the mask of the man who held him,

  he could just make out Carmellini's features.

  "You should have shot 'emea"...Carmellini shouted.

  "You stupid bastard, you should have shot 'em."

  Chance was trying to suck in enough air to reply when his

  heart stopped.

  Carmellini and the two marines in CBW suits

  carried the aluminum cylinders they had brought from the

  Osprey into the lab and set them down. There was not a

  moment to be lost. Bullets had gone through several

  of the men lying dead on the floor and punctured the

  transparent plastic walls of the facility.

  The two marines went back after more cylinders while

  Carmellini brought plastic cans of gasoline through

  the air

  lock. He didn't have time to wait for the lock to work,

  so he jammed the door so it would not close.

  Please God, don't let the viruses out.

  With six cylinders on the floor near the cultures

  and ten gallons of gasoline sitting nearby,

  Carmellini was ready. The five Cubans who were

  working in the lab lay where they had fallen. Chance's

  body lay where he died. Carmellini ignored the

  bodies as he worked.

  He gestured to the marines to leave, then turned to the

  nearest cylinder, which was a five-inch-diameter

  magnesium flare designed to be dropped from an

  airpla
ne. A small steel ring was taped

  to the side of the thinghe tore that off and pulled it out as

  far as it would go, which was ab"...a foot. Then he gave

  it a mighty tug, which tore it loose in his hand.

  He laid the cylinder on the wooden floor and

  walked for the air lock. As he went through he

  released the door, allowing it to close.

  He still had a few seconds, so he stood in the

  lock as the suction tore at his CBW suit,

  trying to cleanse it of dust and stray viruses.

  But he was running out of time.

  He pushed the emergency button and let himself out of the

  lock through the exterior door. Walking swiftly,

  he exited the barn and strode for the waiting Osprey.

  Doll Hanna was standing there with a rifle in his arms.

  "Let's get the men"...Carmellini began, but the

  ignition of the flare stopped him. The glare of a

  hundred-millioncandlepower magnesium fire

  leaked out of the barn through the door and cracks in the

  siding.

  "Let's get the hell out of here before it goes up like

  a rocketea"...Carmellini shouted, and trotted for the

  Osprey.

  Three minutes later, with all the people aboard and the

  plane airborne, he went to the cockpit and

  looked back. The fire was as bright as a

  welder's torch, so brilliant it hurt his eyes

  to look. The heat of the first flare had set off the

  second, and so on. The heat from the first few flares

  probably caused the gasoline cans to explode,

  raising the temperature dramatically and helping

  ignite the other flares.

  "Think the fire will kill all the viruses"..."...the

  pilot asked.

  "I don't knowea"...Carmellini said grimly, and went

  back to his seat. He didn't have any juice

  to waste on the merely worried.

  There were just too many Cuban troops at silo one.

  The two SuperCobras assigned there expended their

  Hellfire missiles on the tanks and trucks,

  then scourged the area with 20-mm cannon shells.

  Between them the assault choppers fired fifteen

  hundred rounds of 20-mm. As the first two

  assault choppers left the arena to refuel and

  rearm, Battlestar Control aboard

  United States

  routed other SuperCobras to the site. They began

  flaying the area with a vengeance.

  The problem was that the troops were fairly well dug

  in. Almost a thousand men had arrived in the area early

  that morning under an energetic young commander who

  had ordered trenches dug and machine guns emplaced

  in earth and log fortifications. Two small