by Cuba (lit)
The muzzle flash strobed the darkness, and revealed
Santana swinging the butt of his rifle, swinging it
at Carmellini's head.
He tried to duck but the rifle struck his shoulder and
sent him sprawling. He held on to the pistol,
triggered two more shots, which came like giant
thunderclaps, deafening him with their roar.
The flashlight was gone, lost when he fell. His
left shoulder was on fire where the rifle butt
struck him, his arm numb. He could hear Santana
running, shuffling along, the sound fading.
He felt for the flashlight with his right hand, couldn't
find it, paused and listened and searched some more. There!
He picked it up without releasing the pistol. Now
he put the pistol between his legs, tried to work the
flashlight with his right hand. It was broken. He set
it on the floor out of the way.
He listened, heard the faintest of sounds, then
nothing.
Tommy Carmellini slowly got to his feet and
began moving back the way he had come, after
Santana.
"Showtime One Oh Two, Battlestar Strike.
You are cleared to engage the bogey with a gun.
Weapons free gun only, acknowledge."
"Weapons free gun only, ayeea"...sung out
Stiff Hardwick, and jammed his throttles forward
to the mechanical stop. The engines wound up quickly;
Stiff eased the throttles to the left, stroked the
afterburners. The big fighter leaped forward and began
closing the five-mile gap between the two planes.
Carlos Corrado glanced over his left shoulder,
for the hundredth time, expecting to see nothing, but this time
he saw the plume of flame that was Hardwick's
burners.
The Yanqui must be right behind me.
Enough!
He slammed the throttles to the hilt, dropped the
left wing and pulled right up to six Gs. The
MiGo-29 then showed why it was one of the most
maneuverable fighters in the worldit turned on a
dime.
As it did, Carlos Corrado fought the G and
flipped his radar switch to the transmit position.
Leveling up after a 180-degree turn, the radar
scope came alive ... and there was the
Americanclose. Too close! Jesus Christ!
Without time to even consider the problem, Carlos
Corrado punched off an Aphid missile, which
roared off the rail in a blaze of fire straight
for the F-14.
Sailor Karnow saw the bogey wind into a left
turn, and called it to Stiff, who instinctively
lowered his right wing to stay in the MiGo's rear
quadrant.
What Stiff wasn't prepared for was the
unbelievable quickness with which the MiGo-29 whipped
around and pumped off a missile.
The sight of the fiery exhaust of the Aphid missile
coming at him from eleven o'clock and the wailing of the ECM in
his ears, telling him that he was being painted by a
MiGo-
29 pulse-doppler radar, reached Stiff
Hardwick's brain at the very same instant. Before
Stiff could react in any way, the missile shot
over his canopy inches above his head. Fortunately
for Stiff and Sailor and their progeny yet
unborn,, the Aphid had not flown far enough to arm, so
the missile passed harmlessly.
"Holy shit!"
Sailor shouted into her oxygen mask.
Stiff Hardwick hadn't spent the last four years
flying fighters for nothinghis instincts were finely
honed too. As the Aphid went over his head, he
jerked the nose of his fighter toward the closing
MiGo, visible only as a bogey symbol on the
HUD, and pulled the trigger on the stick. The
20-mm M-61 six-barreled cannon in the
nose lit up like a searchlight as a river of fire
streaked into the darkness.
Carlos Corrado saw the finger of God reaching for
him and slammed his stick back, then sideways. The
MiGo's nose came up steeply and the right wing
dropped in a violent whifferdill that carried it up
and out of the way of the fiery stream of cannon shells.
Completing the roll, Carlos Corrado pushed the
nose of his MiGo downward, toward the city, and let
the plane accelerate without afterburners, the light of
which would beacon to the American. Or Americans,
if there were more than one, which was probable.
Carlos pulled out just above the rooftops and thundered
across the city. He had lost track of the
enemy's location
because he could not see him visually or with his radar.
He desperately needed his GCI site just now
to call the enemy's position, but of course the GCI
people had been knocked off the air and were either dead or
drunk.
Still, the contest appealed to his sporting instincts.
He decided to try for one in-parameters missile
shot before he called it a night and went looking for a
bar.
His radar was still on, still looking at nothing.
Without further ado, Carlos pulled the stick back
and let the MiGo's nose climb. Up past the
vertical, G on hard, the MiGo used its
fabulous turning rate to fly half of a very tight
loop. Upside down with its nose on the
horizon, Carlos slammed the stick sideways and
rolled upright The F-14 was out to his left,
turning toward him. Corrado flipped his switches
to select an infrared missile, turned toward the
American until he got a tone in his headset,
and squeezed it off.
Then he killed his radar and turned hard ninety
degrees right to exit the fight.
"Oh, noea"...Stiff Hardwick swore as
he saw the missile coming at him from ten o'clock.
He lit his afterburners and dropped the right wing
slightly and willed the Tomcat to accelerate,
trying to force the missile into an overshoot, while
he punched off chaff and flares with a button on his
right throttle.
The missile tried to make the turn but couldn't.
Perhaps the IR seeker in the nose locked onto a
flare. In any event, as it flew past the tail
of the Tomcat its proximity fuse caused the
warhead to detonate, spraying shrapnel into empty
air.
The MiGo-29 was gone. It had disappeared.
"You know, dickwickea"...Sailor Karnow told her
pilot, "I think God is really trying to tell us
something."
Carlos Corrado knew that he had had more than his
share of luck this night. Although he was flying a
tremendously maneuverable airplane, the
electronic detection and coun-
termeasures systems were generations behind the F-14 that
had followed him around. Why the F-14 had not shot
him down he couldn't guess, but he was wise enough to know
that luck sorely tried is bound to turn.
He decided to put his MiGo on the ground
while it was still in one piece. Fortunately there-was
an airport nearby, Havana's Jos6 Marti
Internati
onal, right over there in the middle of that vast
dark area. Since there was a war on, someone had
turned off the runway lights.
Corrado pulled off the power, let the fighter slow
to gear speed, then snapped the landing gear down.
Flaps out, retrim, and swing out for an approach
to where the runway ought to be. On final he turned
on his-landing light and searched the darkness below.
There! Concrete.
He squeaked the MiGo on and got on the brakes.
He left the landing light on to taxi.
"Showtime One Oh Two, the MiGo is landing at
Jos6 Marti."...That was the air force controller hi
the Sentry AWACS plane.
Stiff Hardwick was climbing through five thousand
feet at full power when he heard that
transmission. Fortunately he had committed a
map of the Havana area to memory, so he knew
precisely where Jose Marti International lay.
He cut the power and lowered the nose.
"What in hell do you think you're doing,
Stiff"..."...Sailor demanded.
"Shut up."
"We barely got enough fuel to make the tanker as it
is, pea brain. You go swarming around down here for a
few more minutes begging that Cuban to give you-the
shaft and we'll be swimming home."
"I'm gonna get that Cuban son of a bitch.
Gonna strafe him on the ground. Gonna kill that
bastard deader than last week's beer."
Sailor Karnow knew the pilot was serious. Here
was a
frustrated man if ever she had met one. As the
plane dove for the black hole that was Jose'
Marti International, she tried to reason with Stiff:
"You can't shoot the guy on the ground at a
civilian airport. There's no lights down there,
you might kill a bunch of civilians!"
"There he is! I can see the fucking guy
taxiinghe's still got his landing light on!
There he is!"
Sailor Karnow was losing her patience.
"You pull that trigger, Jake Grafton will cut
your balls off, you silly son of a bitch!"
His
Stiff Hardwick knew the jig was up. Sailor
was right he hated women who were always right. He reached
up and safetied the master arm switch. And
kept the Tomcat coming down.
Edged the throttles forward as he dropped lower and
lower, boresighting that barely moving plane down there
with the single landing light shining forward. The needle on the
airspeed indicator crept past Mach 1.
The radio altimeter deedled, he kept going
lower....
"Don't fly into the ground, you idiotff"...Sailor
pleaded from the rear cockpit.
Thfe fear in her voice probably saved both their
lives. Stiff eased back on the stick just a
smidgen, an almost microscopic amount, so the
F-14 rose another ten feet above the ground as
it roared over Carlos Corrado's taxiing
MiGo-29 like a giant supersonic missile.
The American fighter passed a mere four feet
over the MiGo's tail; the shock wave shattered the
MiGo's canopy.
Then Stiff pulled the stick back in his lap and
lit the burners and went rocketing upward like a bat
out of hell.
"Better get on the horn and get us a tanker,
baby, or you're gonna be my date in a life
raft tonight."
Sailor had the last word. "Honest
to God, dickwick, you oughta think about taking up
another line of work."
Tommy Carmellini wondered if he had managed
to put a bullet into Santana. That was a lot
to hope for, but still... three shots, and the man no more
than five, six feet away?
With luck.
A man needs luck as he goes through life.
Life is timing, and timing is- experience plus
luck.
Carmellini wondered just how much experience sneaking
along dark corridors Santana had had through the
years. He hadn't impressed Carmellini as the
sneaking type. One never knew, though.
He found himself moving slower and slower, listening with his
eyes closed caret concentrating. He could
hear...
Breathing. Corning from somewhere ahead. Definitely
breathing.
Jake Grafton had Rita circle out over the
harbor while he talked to other airplanes he had
inbound. After a few minutes, he told her to fly
toward the university.
Looking through the infrared viewer, he could see that the
streets around the university were deserted.
Not a car or truck moving, none parked, no people.
Alejo Vargas was down there, all right.
Jake got out of the copilot's seat and went aft
to talk to Hector Sedano, who was sitting beside
Lieutenant Colonel Eckhardt. Jake
pulled one of the Spanish-speaking marines along
to translate.
"Do you know of the biological-warfare laboratory
in the science building of the university?"
No, Hector didn't. Jake took a minute
to explain.
"My government has sent me to destroy the polio
viruses that are in that lab, and the equipment that was used
to grow them. Do you have any objection to me doing that?"
Hector did not, as long as innocent lives were not
lost unnecessarily.
Talking loudly over the aircraft's high internal
noise, Jake continued while the young marine, a
buck sergeant, translated: "I promise you,
we will proceed with all due
care. The stakes are very high, those viruses must be
destroyed. If you will join me in this humanitarian
effort representing the new Cuban government, I
believe the job can be done with a minimum loss of
life."
'Tell me of this laboratoryea"...Hector Sedano
demanded. "What you know of it, and how it came to be."
The feeling was coming back in Tommy Carmellini's
left arm. It hurt like hell now, like someone had
tried to carve on his shoulder with a dull knife.
Ignore the arm. Listen!
He froze. He hadn't realized it, but there were
cells on both- sides of the corridor, cells with
open doors.
Santana must be in one of them. Which one?
A sound like a sigh.
He heard it! From the left, maybe ten feet.
Frozen like a chunk of solid ice, Carmellini
didn't move. He continued to breathe, but very
shallowly, taking all the time in the world.
Minutes passed. How many he couldn't say.
He could hear the murmur of the mob somewhere below. No
doubt they had turned all the prisoners loose.
The other man was being extremely quiet.
Extraordinarily so.
Carmellini finally began moving, reluctantly,
ever so slowly, like the shadow of the sun as it marches
across a stone floor. And he made about the same
amount of noise.
.he was in the cell, feeling his way ...
when his left foot touched something that shouldn't be there.
Like a cat he reacted, the pistol booming fas
ter
than thought.
In the muzzle flash he saw that Santana lay
stretched on his back on the floor, his eyes open
to the ceiling.
The bastard was dead.
From the cockpit Jake Grafton could see the
crowds below on the streets. Rita had the Osprey
flying at 2,000 feet, and
*
Jake could see the swarms of people with his naked eye,
without using the infrared viewer, though he used it
occasionally to check on the progress of the crowd.
Rita swung the Osprey over the university
district, and he picked out the science building.
He watched the mass of humanity flow into the
district, surge along toward the science building.
He used the viewer, steadied it carefully and
cranked up the magnification. Yes, the knot of
humanity at the front of the crowd, that had to be around
Ocho. El Ocho, as the Cubans called him.
The boy was fearless. This afternoon when Jake explained
to Ocho that there was a strong probability that the
soldiers would refuse to fire on the
civilians, might even disobey their officers if
ordered to fire, Ocho merely nodded.
Perhaps the ordeal in the ocean had toughened Ocho, or
perhaps he had always been impervious to fear. That
emotion affected people in an extraordinary variety of
ways, Jake knew.
Looking through the viewer it was difficult to be sure,
but apparently soldiers were joining the crowd with Ocho
as he walked along.
He wanted to let Hector accompany Ocho, but
his better judgment told him no. A single
sniper, one frightened soldier, and the last best hope
of Cuba might be dead in the street. With the
viruses still in that lab, that was a risk Jake
Grafton was not yet prepared to take.
As he watched, he wished he were with Ocho. That
walk must be sublime, he thought.
Ocho Sedano knew a great many people because he had
spent years accompanying his brother to speeches,
sitting in planning sessions, helped him dig
holes to hide weapons. Many more people, however, knew
Ocho. Every Cuban between eight and eighty knew of the
star pitcher who threw the sizzling fastbalis and hit
home runs when his turn
came to bat. Many people recognized him,
shouted to him as he walked along, then decided
to shake his hand and join the throng behind him.
As the human river turned the corner onto the
avenue that led to the university, a knot of soldiers
left the shelter of a doorway and came toward
Ocho. He didn't stop, kept striding along the