Coonts, Stephen - Jake Grafton 7 - Cuba

by Cuba (lit)

  bulldozers helped with the digging.

  The machine-gun nests were gone now, victims of

  Hellfire missiles, but the troops in trenches

  were harder to kill. . Fortunately for the Cubans, the

  trenches were not straight, but zigged and zagged around

  trees and stones and natural obstacles.

  The young commander was dead now, killed by a single

  cannon shell that tore his head off when he tried

  to look over the lip of a trench to find the

  SuperCobras. Most of his officers were also dead.

  One of the SuperCobras had been shot down

  by machine-gun fire. A Cuban trooper with an

  AK-47 killed the pilot of another with a lucky

  shot in the neck. The first chopper managed

  to autorotate down-, and the crew jumped from their

  machine into an empty

  trench. The copilot of the second machine flew it

  out of the battle and headed for the refueling and rearming

  site the marines had established in a sugarcane

  field between silos three and four.

  The SuperCobras on site were almost out of ammo,

  and they too went to the refueling site, where they were

  fueled from bladders and rearmed with ammo

  brought in by Ospreys from

  Kearsarge.

  Then they rejoined the fray.

  The noise of eight assault choppers hovering around

  the battlefield that centered on the barn did the

  trick. One by one, the Cubans threw down their

  weapons and climbed out of their trenches with their hands

  over their heads.

  Several of the SuperCobras turned on their landing

  lights and hovered over the barn, turning this way and that

  so that their lights shone over the men, living and dead, that

  littered the ground.

  Minutes later an Osprey landed just a hundred

  feet from the entrance to the barn. Toad Tarkington was

  the last man out. He was ten feet from the V-22 and

  running like hell when it lifted off and another

  settled onto the same spot. Marines with rifles

  at the ready came pouring out.

  With his engines running and the canopy closed, Major

  Carlos Corrado taxied his MiGo-29 toward the

  runway at Cienfuegos. Two rnen walked

  ahead of the fighter with brooms, sweeping shrapnel and

  rocks off the concrete so the fighter's tires would not

  be cut. They weren't worried about this stuff going in

  the intakes: on the ground the MiGo-29's

  engines breathed through blow-down panels on top of the

  fuselage while the main intakes remained closed.

  Inside the fighter Corrado was watching his

  electronic warning equipment. As he suspected,

  the Americans had a bunch of radars aloft tonight,

  everything from large search radars to fighter radars.

  He immediately recognized the radar signature of the

  F-14 Tomcat, which he had seen just a week or

  so ago out over the Caribbean.

  Yep, they were up there, and as soon as his wheels

  came up, they would be trying to kill him.

  Carlos Corrado taxied his MiGo-29 onto the

  runway and shoved the twin throttles forward to the

  stop, then into afterburner. The MiGo-29 rocketed

  forward. Safely airborne, Corrado raised the

  landing gear and came out of afterburner. Passing 400

  knots, he lowered the nose and retarded the

  throttles, then swung into a turn that would point the

  sleek Russian fighter at Havana.

  Inside the barn at silo one, Toad Tarkington

  took in the carnage at a glance. He was the first

  American through the door.

  Cannon shells and shrapnel from Hellfire

  warheads had played hob with the wooden barn

  structure. Holes and splintered boards

  and timbers were everywherestanding inside, Toad could see

  the landing lights of the helicopters and hear

  Americans shouting.

  Apparently several dozen men had taken refuge in

  the barn; their bloody bodies lay where the bullets

  or shrapnel or splinters from the timbers cut them

  down. The floor and walls were splattered with

  blood.

  Toad found the wooden door, got it open, used his

  flashlight to examine the steel inner door. He

  set three C-4 charges around the combination lock and

  took cover.

  The charges tore the lock out of the door and warped the

  thing so badly it wouldn't open. Toad struggled with

  it, only got it open because two marines came in

  to check out the interior and gave him a hand.

  The stairway on the other side of the door was in

  total darkness. Not a glimmer of light.

  With his flashlight in his left hand and his pistol in his

  right, Toad slowly worked his way down.

  He saw lightbulbs in sockets over his head, but

  they were not on. Once he came to a switch. He

  flipped it on and off several times. No

  electrical power.

  At the bottom of the stairs he came to a

  larger room.

  The beam of the flashlight caught an instrument

  panel, a control console. A bit of a face ...

  Toad brought the light back to the face.

  A white face, eyes scrunched against the

  flashlight glare. An old man, skinny, with

  short white hair, frozen in the flashlight beam,

  holding his hands above his head.

  The radar operator in the E-3 Sentry AW

  ACS plane over Key West was the first to see the

  MiGo-29 get airborne from Cienfuegos. He

  keyed the intercom and reported the sighting to the

  supervisor, who used the computer to verify the

  track, then reported it to Battlestar Control.

  The AW ACS crew reported the MiGo as a

  bogey and assigned it a track number. They would

  be able to classify it as to type as soon as the

  pilot turned on his radar.

  Unfortunately, Carlos Corrado failed

  to cooperate. He disleft his radar switch in the off

  position. He also stayed low, just a few hundred

  meters above the treetops.

  There are few places more lonely than the cockpit

  of a single-piloted airplane-at night when

  surrounded by the enemy. Corrado felt that

  loneliness now, felt as if he were the only person

  still alive on Spaceship Earth.

  The red glow of the cockpit lights comforted him

  somewhat: this was really the only home he had ever had.

  The lights of Havana were prominent tnhe saw the

  glow at fifty miles even though he was barely a

  thousand feet above sea level. He climbed a little

  higher, looking, and saw a huge fire, quite

  brilliant.

  Carlos Corrado turned toward the fire. Perhaps

  he would find some airborne targets. He turned

  on his gun switch and armed the infrared missiles.

  The E-2 controller datalinked the bogey information

  to the F-14 crew patrolling over central

  Cuba at 30,000 feet. There should have been two

  F-14's, a section, but one plane had

  mechanical problems prior to launch, so there was

  only one fighter on this station.

  The bogey appeared on
the scope of the radar

  intercept officer, the RIO, in the rear seat of the

  Tomcat. He narrowed the scan of his radar and

  tried to acquire a lock on the target, which was

  merely a blip that faded in and out against the ground

  clutter.

  "What the hell is it"..."...the pilot demanded,

  referring to the bogey.

  "I don't knowea"...was the reply, and therein was the

  problem. Without a positive identification,

  visual or electronic, of the bogey, the rules

  of engagement prohibited the American pilot from

  firing his weapons. There were simply too many

  American planes and helicopters flying around in

  the darkness over Cuba to allow people to blaze away at

  unknown targets.

  The darkness below was alive with lights, the lights of

  cities and small towns, villages, vehicles,

  and here and there, antiaircraft artilleryflakwhich was

  probing the darkness with random bursts. Fortunately the

  gunners could not use radar to acquire a, targetthe

  instant they turned a radar on, they drew a

  HARM missile from the EA-6BS and

  FirstA-18's that circled on their assigned

  stations, listening.

  The F-14 pilot, whose name was Wallace P.

  "Stiff" Hardwick, got on the radio

  to Battlestar Control. "Battlestar, Showtime One

  Oh Nine, request permission to investigate this

  bogey."

  "Wait."

  Stiff expected that. Being a fighter

  pilot in this day and age wasn't like the good old

  days, when you went cruising for a fight. Not that he was

  there for the good old days, but Stiff had sure heard

  about them.

  "That goddamn Cuban is gonna zap somebody

  while the people on the boat are scratching their

  assea"...Stiff told his RIO, Boots

  VonRauenzahn.

  "Yeahea"...sd Boots, who never paid much attention

  to Stiff's grousing.

  STEPHEN COONTS

  Carlos Corrado saw that a building was on

  fire, burning with extraordinary intensity. Never

  had he seen such a hot flre. He assumed that the

  building had been bombed by a cruise missile or

  American plane disand began visually searching the

  sky nearby for some hint of another aircraft.

  He flew right over the V-22 Osprey carrying

  Tommy Carmellini and Doll Hanna back to the

  ship and never saw it.

  A lot of flak was rising from the outskirts of

  Havana, so Carlos turned east, away from it.

  In the black velvet ahead he saw lights, and

  steered toward them. At 500 knots he

  closed quickly, and saw helicopters' landing lights!

  They were flying back and forth over a large barn!

  They must be Americansthey sure as hell weren't

  Cuban. As far as he knew, he was the only

  Cuban in the air tonight.

  Corrado flew past the areanow down to 400 knots

  and did a 90-degree left turn, then a

  270-degree right turn. Level, inbound, he

  retarded the throttles of the two big engines.

  Three hundred knots... he picked the landing

  lights on some land of strange-looking twin rotor

  helicopter and pushed the nose over just a tad,

  bringing the strange chopper into the gunsight. Then he

  pulled the trigger on the stick.

  The 30-mm cannon shells smashed into Rita

  Moravia's Osprey with devastating effect. She

  was in the midst of a transition from wing-borne

  to rotor-borne flight and had the engines pointed up

  at a seventy-degree angle. The rotors were

  carrying most of the weight of the twenty-ton ship, so

  when the cannon shells ripped into the right engine and it

  ceased developing power, the V-22 began sinking

  rapidly.

  The good engine automatically went to emergency

  torque and transferred some of its power to the

  rotor of the

  bad engine through a driveshaft that connected the two

  rotor transmissions.

  With shells thumping into the plane and warning lights

  flashing, Rita felt the right wing sag. Some of the

  shells must have damaged the right transmission!

  The ground rushed at her, even as cannon shells

  continued to strike the plane.

  She pulled the stick back and left, trying to make

  the right rotor take a bigger bite.

  Then the machine struck the earth and the instrument panel

  smashed into her night vision goggles.

  In the missile control room, Toad Tarkington

  held his flashlight on the old man as he

  produced a candle from his pocket and a kitchen match.

  He lit the match and applied it to the candle's

  wick.

  One candle wasn't much, but it did light the room.

  Toad turned off the flashlight and stood there

  looking at the old man.

  Muffled crashing sounds reached him, echoed down the

  stairwell, but no one came. Toad's headset was

  quiet too, probably since he was underground.

  "Do you speak English"..."...Toad asked the

  white-haired man in front of him.

  The old man shook his head.

  "Espanol?"

  "Si, senor."

  "Well, I don't."

  Toad walked over and checked the man, who had no

  visible weapons on him.

  He had a handful of plastic ties in his pocket.

  These ties were issued to every marine for the sole purpose

  of securing prisoners' hands, and feet if necessary.

  Toad put a tie around the old man's hands. The

  man didn't resist; merely sat at the control

  console with his face a mask, showing no emotion.

  "Cuban"..."...Toad asked.

  "Nyet."

  "Russki?"

  The white head bobbed once, then was still.

  Toad used the flashlight to inspect the console,

  to examine the instruments. This stuff was old, he could

  see that. Everything was mechanical, no digital

  gauges or readouts, no computer displays ... the

  console reminded Toad of the dashboard of a 1950's

  automobile, with round gauges and bezels and ...

  Well, without power, all this was academic.

  His job was to get that damned warhead out of the

  missile, then set demolition charges

  to destroy all this stuff, missile, control room,

  and all. He left the Russian at the console and

  opened the blast-proof door across the room from the

  stair where he had entered.

  Another stairway led downward.

  Toad went as quickly as he dared, still holding the

  flashlight hi one hand and his pistol in the other.

  He went through one more steel door... and there the

  missile stood, white and massive and surreal in

  the weak beam of the flashlight.

  The aviation radio frequencies exploded when

  Rita's plane was shot down as everyone tried

  to talk at once.

  Battlestar Control finally managed to get a word in

  over the babble, a call to Stiff Hardwick. "Go

  down for a look. Possible hostile may have shot

  down an Osprey."

  Stiff didn't need any urging. He rolled the


  Tomcat onto its back, popped the speed

  brakes, and started down.

  "Silo oneea"...Boots said. "This bogey is

  flitting around down there like a goddamn bat or

  something, mixing it up with the SuperCobras and

  Ospreys. Let's not shoot down any of the good

  guys."

  "No shitea"...sd Stiff, who was sure he could handle

  any Cuban fighter pilot alive. This guy was

  meat on the table: he just didn't know it yet.

  Carlos Corrado pulled out of his strafing ran and

  soared up to three thousand feet. He extended out for

  eight or nine miles before he laid the fighter over

  in a hard turn.

  He had seen helicopters d6wn there, at least

  two. It was time to use the radar.

  As he stabilized inbound he flipped the radar

  switch to "transmit." He pushed the button for

  moving targets and sure enough, within seconds the

  pulse-doppler radar in the nose of the MiGo-29

  had found three. The rest of the drill was simplicity

  xfhe selected an Aphid missile, locked it

  on a target, and fired. Working quickly, he

  selected a second missile, locked on a

  second target, and fired.

  He had to keep the targets illuminated while the

  Aphids were in flight, so he continued inbound toward

  the silo.

  One of the SuperCobras exploded when an Aphid

  drilled it dead center. The second missile

  tore the tail rotor off its target, which spun

  violently into the ground and caught fire.

  Carlos Corrado flew across the barn, holding his

  heading, extending out before he turned to make another

  shooting pass.

  Toad Tarkington found the circular steel ladder

  leading upward in the missile silo and began

  climbing.

  When he reached the catwalk he walked around the

  missile, examining the skin. There was the little access

  port, six inches by six inches, with the dozen

  screws! That had to be it.

  Toad Tarkington put the flashlight under his left

  armpit and got out a screwdriver.

  He had three screws out when the flashlight

  slipped out of his armpit and fell. It bounced off the

  catwalk and went on down beside the missile, breaking

  when it hit the grate at the bottom.

  The darkness in the silo was total.

  Toad Tarkington cursed softly, and went back

  to taking out screws. He worked by feel. Someone would

  come along in a minute, he thought, bringing another

  flashlight: If

  someone didn't, he would take the time to go find

  another.

  The trick, he knew, would be to hold on to the