by Jack Shane
There was a long hesitation in the reply message. Finally, it popped onto the screen. “To be determined,” was all it said.
But then came another strange request: The person at Army SOC asked if Eliot could get on a secure phone. All Eliot had was his cell phone, so he typed in his number and then retreated to his very spare captain’s quarters. His phone was ringing even before he shut his door.
The caller identified himself as Bob Shaw, major, U.S. Army. He worked for both the DIA and Army Special Ops Command. He apologized for the interruption, but then surprised Eliot by saying the topics they were about to discuss were highly classified. And while Eliot’s standard security clearance was “Secret,” Shaw was temporarily raising it to “Top Secret.”
Shaw told him the incoming copters belonged to one of the country’s most classified Special Ops units. They were so secret, few people outside of Army SOC even knew the unit existed. Shaw explained they were an offshoot of the famous TF-160 Nightstalkers, the copter drivers whose job it was to fly people like Rangers and Delta Force in and out of their missions. Eliot didn’t have to be told who TF-160 was. Everyone in the military knew about the Nightstalkers. Heroic to a fault, they flew the copters that dark day in Somalia back in 1993, in the disastrous mission forever known as Black Hawk Down.
Eliot had just assumed the TF-160 copters were taking part in a training mission—unexpectedly landing at sea, that sort of thing. He was just about to tell Shaw the Lex would help in any way it could, when suddenly the call was interrupted by a loud squeal of static. When Shaw came back on the line, his heretofore calm voice sounded very troubled, very anxious.
“How many people do you have onboard?” he asked Eliot, a bit out of breath.
Eliot replied the ship was carrying a very skeletal crew of 350.
Then, an even stranger question: “Do you have any weapons aboard?” Shaw asked.
In the background, behind Shaw’s voice, Eliot could hear a roomful of people, talking loudly and trying to be heard over each other. He could almost feel the tension through the phone connection.
Eliot told Shaw: “This is just a ferry cruise. We are barely more than a hull and some engines. We don’t have a squirt gun onboard.”
Another interruption of static; more tense voices, some were now shouting. Then Shaw told him: “Put every man you can spare up on your flight deck. Give them flashlights, flares, anything with illumination. Then turn on every light you have onboard. And if you have ship’s horns, sound them.”
Eliot couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He was just recovering a bunch of black ops copters on a training mission, right?
Shaw’s reply was stark.
“Negative, Captain,” he said. “This situation has just turned hostile…”
THERE WERE NO BELLS TO RING ABOARD THE LEX. NO horns, not even a Klaxon system. So Eliot ran to the officers’ galley, clicked on the ship’s intercom button, put an air horn up to the mike and let it blow. The noise was deafening, almost painful. But it got the attention of everyone onboard.
Then Eliot made an astonishing announcement: every available light aboard the ship was to be turned on. Plus, every available crewman was to report to the flight deck and they were to bring flashlights, ship’s beacons, flares with them. Their mission: to move around, look active and await twelve helicopters coming on board. Eliot signed off by saying he would explain it all later.
The Lexington was about to take part in a very strange charade. Inside of five minutes, the skeleton crew had to make the old bird farm look like it was an active, working, powerful super-carrier.
The lives of the people on the Special Ops helicopters depended on it.
IT WAS NOW 0115 HOURS. BY THE TIME ELIOT REACHED the bridge, all of the Lex’s exterior lights had been turned on. This in addition to the three hundred or so crew members who had appeared on deck with flashlights, trouble lanterns, flares and even green luminescent break sticks. It was an amazing sight. The collection of lights created a glow that reflected off the warm waters of the western Caribbean and bounced back up at the ship again. Never did Eliot think the old Lex would look this good again.
But there was little time to admire the light show. Off to the south, he saw another light. At turns yellow and orange, it was coming straight for them. Eliot stood transfixed for a moment, eyes glued to this thing. It was getting bigger, brighter by the second.
It took a few moments before he realized that this was a helicopter heading their way. A large two-rotor Chinook.
And it was on fire.
Jeesuz Christ…
Though the Lex was sailing bare bones, it did have a fire team. Eliot blew his air horn into the intercom a second time, then ordered the ship’s fire fighters to start laying foam from the mid-deck to the bow. But even as the words were coming out of his mouth, he knew there would not be enough time for this. The burning copter was just seconds away from crashing into them.
The sailors on the deck had spotted it by now too. At least the lights on the Lex were glowing bright enough for the copters’ pilots to see where they were going. The question was, could they make it to the deck before the flames caused their copter to explode?
Damn, Eliot whispered. This is going to be close.
The Chinook seemed to be moving at an incredible speed, for a large double-bladed heavy lifter, that is. But just as it reached a point about a hundred feet off the carrier’s bow, its pilots performed a maneuver equivalent to slamming on the brakes. The helicopter’s chin suddenly went nearly straight up in the air, yet the aircraft continued moving forward. Once its rear wheels were over the bow, the pilots pushed the actuator down and the big Chinook slammed onto the deck. It bounced once, then came down hard again, blowing all of its tires, exactly what the pilots wanted to do. Flat tires made it more unlikely the copter would roll off the side of the ship.
The crew of the Lex didn’t need an air-horn message this time. They ran en masse toward the fiery crash. Regular sailors, officers, the guys in fire gear—they all reached the copter’s wreckage at the same time and began pulling people out. Wisely, someone aboard the Chinook had doused the passengers with the aircraft’s fire extinguishers before it slammed in. People were coming out of the wreckage stunned, wet with foam and sizzling but still alive.
Eliot was down on the deck by this time, out of breath but aiding in the rescue. Just because people were actually getting out of the wreck didn’t mean the fire had gone out. Flames had fully engulfed the rear of the big copter by now and were quickly moving toward its midsection. When a team of sailors in fire gear arrived with water hoses, Eliot directed them to the rear of the copter, ordering them to lay water on it until they got everyone out of the burning craft.
Then Eliot returned to the front hatch of the Chinook and resumed helping pull people out. One of his NCOs used his head and drove the ship’s only deck tractor up to the front of the copter, smashing the Chinook’s cockpit windows, and allowing the flight crew to crawl out to safety through the broken glass.
“Sixteen!” both pilots were yelling as they came out headfirst, their boots on fire. “Sixteen onboard besides us!”
Eliot heard the pilots’ cry down on the deck. The process of people escaping the copter had taken on an almost surreal turn: For every person to crawl out of the wreck, another appeared, like circus performers endlessly climbing out of a compact car.
And what strange characters they were! They didn’t look like soldiers, and certainly not Special Ops forces. Almost all of them had longer-than-regulation hair and all of them were sporting unshaven faces. Not beards—simply unshaven. Their uniforms were torn and ragged.
They look more like rock stars, Eliot thought.
Finally the strange parade ended. The sixteen passengers were all accounted for, plus the two pilots. Some of the survivors had severe burns, but none looked life threatening.
At that point in the confusion, a member of the fire team ran up to Eliot and literally pulled him to th
e back of the wrecked helicopter. The Chinook’s hindquarters were fully engulfed by flames, and the heat was growing tremendous. The crewman pointed to what was left of the rear end of the copter.
There was a line of massive holes torn right through the copter’s skin. Each one was large enough to put a fist through.
“Cannon shells?” Eliot thought aloud.
“That’s my guess,” the crewman replied.
But both knew what this meant: the Chinook didn’t crash on the Lex due to mechanical problems.
It had been shot down.
As this was sinking in, Eliot saw another fire fighter pointing up into the sky, off the rear of the boat. Another Chinook was up there, coming right for the deck. It was on fire too.
Only those who saw it would believe what happened next. The second Chinook came in right over the first, cleared the last of the burning wreckage and slammed onto the deck just as the first one had, blowing out all four tires and intentionally sticking itself into the carrier’s landing surface.
Both its escape hatches blew even before it crashed onto the deck—but this aircraft was burning worse than the first. It was almost totally engulfed at this point, and for a moment, it looked like everyone would be caught inside—the flames were moving that fast.
Suddenly, a third copter appeared out of the darkness. It was a small, buglike craft and it was hardly making any noise. It came down right on top of the second burning Chinook, and by turning 25 degrees on its axis, directed its massive downwash back toward the rear of the stricken craft. It was a risky move—it could have fanned the flames and hastened disaster. But not this time.
The downwash served to hold back the fire long enough for everyone on board the second Chinook to get out. They were as wet and steamy as their colleagues, but as a whole, in better shape.
Suddenly the sky above the carrier was filled with helicopters. They seemed to be coming in all directions, slamming down onto the carrier as if some giant were swatting them out of the sky.
The last copter in the flurry, a UH-60 Black Hawk bristling with weapons, ran out of gas just as it reached the Lexington. It came down the hardest of them all, up near the carrier’s control island. It bounced so violently, it nearly went right off the ship. Only by luck were the pilots able to balance it long enough for some of the Lex’s crewmen to rush to the scene and literally pull it away from the edge.
Dodging his way around the men in black jumping off the newly arrived copters, Eliot huffed his way back toward the control island to help the survivors of this third crash. He noticed that nearly all of the black helicopters had gaping holes in them, more evidence that the Special Ops unit had been attacked in midair.
Eliot’s head was spinning by this time. One moment they had been happily floating through the Caribbean like a celebrity cruise ship—and now his deck was awash in smoke and flames and chaos.
What had happened here? Where had these copters been? And what would have happened if the Lex hadn’t been in a position to help them? They were still more than a hundred miles from land, and from the looks of the twelve aircraft, there was no way any of them would have made it safely had the old carrier not been on hand.
But just when it seemed like it couldn’t get any more confusing, two more lights suddenly appeared in the sky. They too were coming out of the south, but they weren’t helicopters. They were moving too fast. And theirs was hardly a silent approach.
They were fighter jets. The darkness prevented Eliot from seeing any national insignia or even what kind of jets they were. Who the hell are these guys? he wondered.
It was strange; it was almost as if the two jets had come up on the brightly lit carrier too fast. Seeing what appeared to be nothing less than the USS Nimitz or the Truman or the Reagan below them, they quickly turned on their wings and retreated with all swiftness back to the south—certain, no doubt, that a pack of F-14 Tomcats was hot on their tails. Still, some of the people who had jumped off the copters ran to the edge of the carrier deck and started shooting at the jets with the rifles and even pistols. Some kept shooting until the flare of the jets’ exhausts disappeared over the horizon.
Only then did things aboard the Lex quiet down. By this time, Eliot had reached the island to find that the people who’d crash-landed in the Black Hawk nearby were finally exiting their aircraft.
The last man off this copter walked up to him, recognizing Eliot as the ship’s CO. This guy was an Army colonel dressed in an all-black camo outfit.
He saluted Eliot, saying wearily, “Colonel Bobby Autry, TF-160, X-Battalion. Thanks for the assist…”
Eliot returned the salute and then shook the Army officer’s hand.
“What happened here, Colonel?” he asked, looking around at the floating junkyard the carrier’s deck had suddenly become.
Autry just took off his oversize Fritz helmet and shook his head.
“We were jumped,” was all he said.
CHAPTER 3
THIRTY MINUTES LATER, COLONEL BOBBY AUTRY WAS sitting alone in the Lex’s mess hall, cradling a cup of disturbingly thick coffee. It smelled awful and tasted even worse—almost as bad as the stuff his ex-wife used to make. And it wasn’t even warm.
This was a hell of a long way to come to get a lousy cup of coffee, he thought.
He drank it nevertheless. Things could have been worse. He could have been sleeping with the sharks after what happened not an hour earlier this wild night. Had it not been for the courage of his men and the toughness their equipment, they’d all be chum by now. Still, it had been a very scary thing.
Autry was commander of the X-Battalion, the highly classified offshoot of the famous TF-160 Special Operations unit. Where the 160’s regular air battalions served as high-tech taxis, moving Rangers, SEALs or Delta Force in and out of harm’s way, the X-Battalion was a small special forces army unto itself. Each member specialized not only in his duty pertaining to one of their twelve helicopters—as a pilot, crew chief or gunner—but also in skilled special forces operations on the ground. They were as highly trained as the more famous secret warriors that the rest of TF-160 spent their time shutting around.
The X-Battalion’s actions tonight had been up to snuff, at least when it came to their mission to grind the bones of Pablo Escoban into powder. That part of the mission had gone off like clockwork. Using satellite photos provided to Army Special Operations by the National Security Agency, XBat had flown deep into the South American jungle five days before the attack. They set up a hidden base not a mile from Pablo’s mansion, hiding all of their copters beneath the heavy tropical canopy, and in effect, disappearing into the green hell of the upper Amazon.
This might have seemed impossible, to hide a dozen helicopters—some of them the size of a tractor trailer. But that’s exactly what XBat was good at: doing the impossible.
They scouted out targets for the next two nights, and again, using a link up to NSA satellites, planned their twin assault right down to the last millimeter. They knew when the guards at the supercrack processing plant would be at their lowest energy ebb—right around shift change at midnight. They knew when Pablo would be sound asleep—after another night of over-sampling his own coca-based wares.
When they finally came, it was swift and with all guns blazing. The X-Battalion was as much about scaring the hell out of the enemy as they were about filling him with holes. They left no one standing at the processing plant or at the mansion. They knew going in that they would be burning up nearly a billion dollars’ worth of supercrack. This would be, in less than ten minutes, as big a victory in the war against drugs as decades of work by other U.S. government agencies. That’s why the National Security Council itself, with the president’s blessing, gave XBat the assignment in the first place. They were considered that special, that good.
Toying with Pablo in the last moments of his life was also part of the plan. An example had to be made of him. In the thought processes of the local natives, especially the Xtaki, to see
a man die such a dishonorable death meant that any successor would have to be killed immediately. Translation: the chances of anyone like Pablo flourishing in their coca-rich growing area anytime soon was highly unlikely.
So the mission itself was a home run…
But then, as the unit was heading out of the area, two unexpected things happened, both of them bad. First, they lost their NSA satellite link. One moment it was there, the next it was gone. Their only guess was that there had been a malfunction in the NSA satellite their communications were slaved to.
Trouble was, they needed this link, both for photos and communications, to lead them to a point off the coast of Nicaragua, where they were scheduled to be refueled in flight and then be escorted by the aerial tanker up to a naval station in Texas, where they would finally land.
Once they lost the NSA link, though, they had to make an emergency call to Specials Ops Command at Hurlbert Field in Florida. It was there that their contact, Major Shaw, scrambled to find a friendly place where the top-secret unit could land safely without being seen.
It was only by a small miracle then that Shaw found the USS Lexington moving through the area, some two hundred miles south of where the aerial tanker was supposed to be. Shaw was able to vector the twelve helicopters towards the Lex—and the day seemed to have been saved. That is, until the mysterious jet fighters attacked them.
Who were they? Autry didn’t know. It was dark and the jets began shooting at them at such a long distance, they couldn’t get a read on the type. But at the moment the cannon fire started, it didn’t matter who the attackers were, or why they were shooting at them. What was important at that point was that XBat escape.