by Jack Shane
At the first signs of trouble, the copters went down very low and scattered over the water. The jets’ first two passes had done the most damage. Their cannon streams tore into two of the unit’s four hulking Chinooks. How either one was able to stay aloft long enough to reach the Lex really was again a testament to XBat’s highly trained pilots.
After those first two passes, though, came twenty nightmarish minutes when the two jets kept coming back, looking for the copters in the murk of the moonless night. It was only because the XBat pilots knew how to fly virtually inches off the surface—whether it was water or terra firma—that the unit wasn’t shot to pieces then and there. The people flying the jet fighters were a bit squeamish about dropping down that low.
At one point, though, one of the attacking planes came down to about fifty feet off the water—and found a storm of tracer fire coming up to meet it. In fact, gunners on nearly half the twelve copters took a shot at the daring jet fighter. Helicopters fighting jet fighters in the middle of the night, over water? That was the XBat all over.
The brief but violent encounter kept the fighters at bay for the last few desperate minutes as the unit searched frantically for the Lex in the dark. It was only because Shaw had asked that the carrier light itself up like a Christmas tree that the unit was able to land and scare off the fighters.
Though a few of his men had been burned, and several more wounded by flying shrapnel, incredibly, no one was killed in the incident.
So much for XBat’s second mission.
BY COMPARISON, ITS FIRST MISSION HAD BEEN A grand slam—if no less ugly. After being formed more by a misguided conception from the Pentagon than anything else, XBat proved its mettle under some very harsh basic training, and then was sent to the North Korean mountains to look for a wayward nuclear device that had the ability to snuff out all life on planet Earth. Of all the U.S. Special Forces units searching for this Doomsday Bomb, it was XBat who not only found it, but had to go into battle against an entire division of North Korean special forces in order snatch the bomb away and, literally, save the world.
This was how the unit had made its bones. They’d been unorthodox in their methods, but their success had raised their profile in the eyes of the people who mattered in Washington. The unit was given new helicopters to replace the ones lost during the action in North Korea. Their stark secret base located in the middle of the Georgia swamp was spruced up and made habitable, a big improvement. They were even given new combat gear, including new uniforms, black camos with a unit patch showing the constellation Orion—the original Sky Hunter—with a large red X going through it. They looked cool and they acted cool, and when the chance to put the hurt on “Supercrack Pablo” came up, Autry grabbed at the opportunity to have his men show their stuff a second time, to prove they would not fall to the sophomore jinx.
They’d almost all been killed as a result.
He sipped the awful coffee again. His body was just now beginning to calm down. He was in his mid-forties, with a rugged face and fit for his age, with nearly a quarter century in TF-160 and thousands of miles driving Special Ops copters under his belt. The guys in his unit were, at first anyway, considered borderline and unfit to serve in the regular TF-160 battalions. But now, after their baptism of fire in North Korea, they too were fit and rugged.
As tough as they were, though, they were in dire need of a rest period and good food—they’d been living in the jungle for the past six days, and before that, had been through intense training for weeks to get ready for the mission. Moreover, for both professional and personal reasons, Autry had to get back to Georgia. As he felt all the energy slowly drain out of him now, he wanted no less than to get the unit home by the end of the next day. Actually crossing his fingers, he prayed this petition would come true.
The door to the mess swung open and his two senior officers walked in. These were Mungo and McCune, both captains, both great pilots, but as opposite as night and day.
McCune was the youngest officer in the unit. He was the type of chopper driver who flew his machine as if it was a high-performance hot rod. Originally assigned to operations in Iraq, McCune was actually recalled to the United States because of “overly aggressive actions during sensitive operations.” (He harbored a secret desire to fly jet fighters, and more than once had applied for fighter training with the Air Force.) He proved to be a godsend for XBat, though, arriving just in time during the North Korean operation to save the unit from being annihilated. A native of the tough Boston streets, boisterous and verbose, he was a favorite among the members of the secret team.
Mungo, on the other hand, was not. He’d never been accused of being anyone’s favorite in or out of XBat. In fact, years ago, as part of the regular TF-160, he was supposed to fly the infamous Black Hawk Down raid. But by claiming a very vague illness, he had missed the mission, and as a result, was forever tagged as a coward. Mungo had always been tight-lipped about what really happened to him that day, why he had chickened out just when TF-160 needed him most. He’d actually sued the Army later on to keep him in Special Ops, but upon winning the case was relegated to shit duty—that is, until he was plucked from obscurity and put in XBat.
The irony was, he’d done some incredible things during the recent North Korean operation: finding the last piece of the puzzle needed to locate the Doomsday device, and then saving dozens of the unit’s men during the resulting battle with his aerial heroics, sometimes putting himself in between the enemy and wounded members of the team. Captured and beaten to within an inch of his life, he was rescued by the same people he’d saved earlier and eventually recovered enough to join the unit on the Pablo mission.
The two officers now took seats at the table, this after drawing two cups of the tepid coffee for themselves. Strangely, both men drank the black goop like it was cappuccino.
McCune was carrying a handful of photos with him. At the height of the jet-fighter attack on the copters, a few of the guys in XBat had had the wherewithal to snap pictures with their digital cameras. Since landing on the Lex, they’d been able to enhance the lighting in the pictures and print them out up on the carrier’s rudimentary weather station scanner. McCune now handed the pictures to Autry.
“Was it the worst-case scenario?” Autry asked him before looking at the images. “Blue on Blue?”
Thank God, McCune shook his head no.
The real nightmare would have been if the attacking planes had belonged to the United States, meaning that this had been a friendly-fire incident—a Blue on Blue. A huge mistake that had nearly cost the lives of everyone involved.
“They weren’t our guys,” McCune confirmed. “They were Mirage 2000s. The latest variant. See that tail fin? See those wings? Those canopies?”
Autry finally studied the photos and came to the same conclusion. But Mirage 2000s were very high tech French-built weapons. Who flew this kind of jet fighter in the Caribbean basin? Autry asked.
“Venezuela,” Mungo replied, each syllable seeming to be painful to utter.
Autry turned to him. “Venezuela? Are you sure?”
Mungo shrugged. Eyes downcast as always, he explained that the people running the always-volatile South American country these days were fringe leftists who maintained power by pretending the United States was always trying to overthrow them.
“They’re raising a two-million-man army,” Mungo told them. “And when you consider there’s only about three million people in the entire U.S. military, you can see these guys are really going overboard. They’re also buying weapons to equip this massive army—AK-47s mostly. But they’re also trying to get larger weapons, like short-range missiles, submarines, maybe even nukes. And as you can see, they’ve managed to get at least a couple of the top-shelf Mirages. They probably have more.”
Not all of this was foreign to Autry. Before being dropped into XBat, he’d been in charge of several squadrons of TF-160’s regular battalion in Panama, running drug interdiction missions in Central Americ
a and flying agents in and out of nearby Cuba. But this latest upsurge of military nonsense in Venezuela had happened in just the last few months, a time when Autry was forming the new unit and trying to keep it together. He hadn’t kept up so much with foreign affairs. But somehow, Mungo had.
Mungo went on: “They’re the fifth-largest oil producer in the world. They own Citgo, which means billions come in every day. People are starving and living in filth in their own country, but this is how these guys have decided to spend their money—creating the first superpower in South America, or trying to anyway.”
Autry studied the photos again. XBat’s copters were unmarked, so he supposed the Venezuelans could make the excuse that they didn’t know who the copters belonged to. But the attack took place nearly 250 miles off the Venezuelan coast—well beyond any territorial limit. And there was no way the unit had crossed over into Venezuelan airspace after finishing the Pablo operation.
“Why did they shoot at us then?” Autry wondered aloud.
Mungo just shrugged. “Why did North Korea attack the USS Pueblo years ago? Why did North Vietnam fire on two American destroyers back in 1964? Why does anything like this happen? They probably want to start a war.”
Autry pushed the photos away from him in disgust.
“Well, if just one of our guys had gotten killed,” he said almost under his breath, “then I’d give them their war at about seven o’clock tomorrow morning. As it is, though, we’re lucky we made it through. We’ll just leave this one for the Einsteins in Washington.”
With that, Autry and Mungo got up and headed towards the ship’s sick bay to visit their injured men, momentarily leaving McCune alone with his murky coffee.
“Where the hell is Venezuela?” the young pilot thought aloud.
NO SOONER HAD XBAT’S COPTERS SLAMMED ABOARD her deck when the Lexington received new orders from the Pentagon.
The plans to proceed through the Panama Canal and onto San Diego had been scuttled. The Lex was to turn around and head back for Corpus Christi instead.
The orders didn’t go into detail on the reasons for the change—but then again, they didn’t have to. The Lex had floated into the middle of a serious international incident, one that could erupt into a full-blown military confrontation at any minute. The brass didn’t want the old carrier anywhere near the trouble zone. As Corpus Christi already had facilities for her, that’s where the Pentagon wanted the Lex to go.
But surprisingly, a different branch of the U.S. government had other plans for the Blue Ghost.
THE SUN WAS JUST COMING UP WHEN THE BLACK Bell Textron helicopter appeared on the northern horizon, about twenty miles out from the Lexington.
The carrier’s skeleton crew was exhausted by this time. Again, most were Naval Reserve guys, middle-aged vets of aircraft-carrier operations who’d been handed one last adventure to round off their careers. Many of them had looked on the Lexington ferry cruise as a sort of lark, similar to what a few private veterans’ groups had been doing recently, sailing World War II era ships across the Atlantic for museum berths in the States. Never had they expected anything like this.
In the hours before dawn, the crew had worked nonstop clearing the old carrier’s deck of helicopters, crashed and otherwise. This too had been ordered by the Pentagon. With a major international crisis about to break, they wanted all evidence of XBat and its battered copters out of sight as quickly as possible.
Getting the working copters below had been a bitch. Most of them had intentionally blown out their tires on landing so they wouldn’t roll off the carrier. This meant the copters had to be dragged to the Lex’s only working flight elevator, which then had to be raised and lowered manually, a task that took shifts of twenty crewmen up to two hours each to perform for one cycle, slowly turning the gears that moved the platform.
Once the nine workable choppers were below, the crew began getting rid of the wreckage left on top. Both the pair of Chinooks and a UH-60 gunship that had crashed on landing had burned completely through. All that remained were their shells, unstable, sharp and dangerous. Because the carrier’s lone deck truck could only handle so much, most of the work had to be done by hand, piece by piece, with three teams of 50 men each sifting through the carcasses and tossing anything they could lift over the side of the ship.
Through it all, the members of XBat were right down there with the Lex’s crew, Autry included, pushing and pulling and sweating and throwing junk over the side. It was a miserable way to spend the night, but by 0530 hours, they had the deck cleared.
The strange helicopter appeared shortly after that.
AUTRY WAS JUST AS EXHAUSTED, DIRTY AND SWEATY as the rest of them when the unmarked Bell landed on the Lex. The grand old ship was now steaming north, all engines full, hoping to make Corpus Christi by late evening the following day. This was something that couldn’t happen soon enough for Autry or his men.
The civilian copter set down just off the carrier’s island; its pilots had radioed the Lex ahead of time saying they had a passenger onboard who was carrying important information for XBat. When the copter relayed a series of code sequences that Autry recognized, he told the Lex’s Captain Eliot it was OK to let the copter set down.
The Bell’s side door opened and a fortyish man with a wild shock of Kennedy-esque hair climbed out. Autry recognized him right away. It was Gary Weir, a colleague who’d worked with XBat on the recent North Korean operation.
Weir was a nice guy; he and Autry went way back. But he didn’t work for the Navy or Army Special Operations, or any branch of the military. He was CIA—and after the Korean adventure, he’d been put in charge of the agency’s highly classified Covert Action Division, the group that handled the country’s deepest secret operations.
Autry took one look at him and groaned. What the hell is he doing here?
They met at the copter’s door, shaking hands warmly if a little uncertainly. Remaining inside the copter with the pilot was a man dressed all in black, including a very distinctive black fedora, with a black scarf pulled up over his mouth. Strange garb for the Caribbean, Autry thought. The guy looked like something from a spy movie.
Autry and Weir scrambled out from under the copter’s rotors, heading to the main hatch on the side of the island, where Captain Eliot was waiting. Autry did the introductions. Weir was the first CIA agent Eliot had ever met.
“Is there somewhere we can talk?” Weir asked him once their handshake was done.
Eliot nodded. “I’ve arranged a cabin where you and Colonel Autry can speak in private.”
“I appreciate that, Captain,” Weir replied. “But I meant the three of us. I need you to be included in this too.”
THEY SETTLED AT A TABLE IN THE SHIP’S DILAPIDATED officers’ galley, Weir spreading some paperwork in front of him. Eliot poured them some of the mess hall’s cruddy coffee. The CIA agent took a sip of his and almost turned green. Autry knew better, simply nudging his away.
“How many helicopters do you still have operational?” was Weir’s first real question to Autry. “Officially, I mean.”
“Officially?” Autry replied. “Nine. Why? Are they replacing the three we lost already?”
Weir’s shrug was noncommittal.
“Eventually they will, I guess,” he said. “And how about your men? I understand about a dozen are down out of, what? Fifty-two?”
“Burns and fragment wounds, mostly,” Autry confirmed. “Nothing life threatening. Is this a debriefing on what happened the other night?”
Weir pretended to look at his paperwork.
“Someone else will be taking a full statement on that later,” he said. “We’ve got something else we have to take care of first.”
“Something more important than two assholes from Venezuela trying to shoot us down last night?” Autry asked.
The CIA agent chose to ignore that question too. Instead he turned to Eliot. “Captain, I know the circumstances of your being here, and believe me, there are heaps
of gratitude for you up in D.C. for helping out. But now I have to ask you something: Is this ship still seaworthy?”
Eliot was surprised by the question. So was Autry.
The Lex’s captain replied truthfully, “For now, yes.”
Weir made a note on his paperwork. “And had you not been interrupted, you would have made it all the way to San Diego?”
“We’d hoped to,” Eliot told him. “She’s really holding together well. So far.”
“But that trip to San Diego, it was going to be twelve hundred miles or so?”
“Yes…”
“And if you had to, could you sail at least half that distance, just in another direction?”
It was another funny question. Eliot thought about it for a moment, but then again answered yes.
Weir turned back to Autry. His face had softened a bit.
“I’m sorry, Bobby,” he said. “I know you want to get your guys home. And I know you’ve been through a lot. But like I said, something has come up.”
Autry sank deeper into his chair, even as Eliot sat up straighter in his. He’d heard that line from Weir once before—and a few hours later, he was trudging through the blinding snow of North Korea looking for a Doomsday Bomb.
“That character up in my chopper?” Weir said, nodding up toward the flight deck. “He has to get somewhere in a hurry. It’s best that he in go quietly, but if someone has to blast him in, so be it. Even if the LZ is hot, he’s got to be dropped off.”
“Who is he?” Autry groaned.
Weir shrugged. “Beats me. Some very important intelligence asset, at least to some people up in D.C. So much so, his code name is Superstar. Personally I find that kind of embarrassing, but what he has to do and where he has to go is a very high priority to them, which means it is now a very high priority to me.”