by Jack Shane
Autry went even lower in his seat. In the black ops business this was known as an in and out. Essentially dropping an operative to the ground in some hostile environment, and if all is kosher, leaving him there for a later pickup. If not kosher, then making noise until he can get away. This was bread-and-butter stuff for the regular TF-160 air battalions. Autry had done dozens of them.
But he sure didn’t want to do this one.
His reason went beyond getting his men back on solid ground. It was more personal than that. It had to do with his marriage. Or what was left of it.
The divorce rate among Special Ops members was always very high. Long periods away from home. The emergency calls in the middle of the night. The need for a huge adrenaline rush every few weeks. It was tough for any spouse to take.
And so it was for Autry’s wife. She’d left him several years ago, ending a romance that had started back when they were both kids. Though they’d never divorced, they’d communicated very sparsely over the intervening months—until just a few weeks ago. It was at the end of the North Korean hair-raiser, after Autry and his guys were safely out of hostile territory, the Navy somehow got a well-traveled letter to him.
It was from his wife. She was going to be in the Atlanta area soon and asked if they could get together, maybe talk to a counselor, maybe patch things up. The letter blew Autry away. At that point he would have met with Carl Jung if it meant getting back with her. He’d certainly been no angel, but their split had affected him more than he’d ever imagined. He was still deeply in love with her and wanted her back in his life. Simple as that.
Their date was set a week from now. That was why Autry wanted to get back home as soon as possible. But with Weir obviously about to give XBat another mission, meeting her at the appointed time and place might be in jeopardy. And it wasn’t like he could just call her up or have anyone else contact her. Not when he was hanging between two highly secret missions.
Besides, he didn’t even know her phone number.
“Are you saying everyone else is occupied?” Autry asked Weir finally.
The CIA agent nodded. The Nightstalkers had four regular air battalions, each one containing two dozen aircraft. It also had a training battalion which featured some of its best pilots as instructors—only the best could teach some of the things TF-160 members were called on to do. Usually at least one unit was stateside, in the process of refitting or doing advanced training.
“Two of 160’s battalions are in the Gulf,” he said. “One is in Kabul. The fourth unit is in Asia somewhere, and half the training unit is with them. This thing I have came up rather quick, and well, just by fate you guys happened to be in the neighborhood.”
But Autry was having trouble believing his ears. He’d been involved in so many black ops he couldn’t count them all. But this? They’d nearly been shot down just hours before. Now the Agency was sending them out again. So soon?
Autry just shook his head. “Does the Navy, the Pentagon know about this?”
Weir shrugged. “You serve directly at the pleasure of the president,” he replied.
“But for the record, my guys are dog tired and looking up from the gutter,” Autry told him. “Plus, I have issues I have to deal with back home.”
The agent nodded. “So noted.”
That’s when Autry just surrendered. Further protest would be futile. Once the wheels were set in motion in these things, they were almost impossible to stop. The reunion with his wife was still seven days away. In theory, he could still do whatever Weir wanted and get back to Georgia with time to spare. Or so he hoped.
Weir looked across the table at him, a hopeful glimmer in his eye. “So, can you do me this favor, Bobby?”
Autry finally nodded. “If you really need this guy to get somewhere, we’ll give it a shot.”
The CIA agent immediately took out his S2S cell phone—as in “scramble to satellite”—and pushed in a series of numbers. In seconds, he was talking to someone up at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
“The match is on,” he said simply. He listened for a moment, then said: “First round immediately.”
The agent listened another few moments. Then he started to say: “Nine helicopters operational…” but suddenly stopped.
The line had gone dead.
“Son of a bitch,” Weir muttered, looking at his S2S phone like it was a Wal-Mart reject. “That’s the second time that’s happened today.”
Autry was too tired to laugh. Though the expensive high-tech phone was supposed to be failure-proof, his own S2S phone had failed at a very inconvenient time after the Pablo strike—and just before they got jumped.
“Better tell someone to pay the phone bill,” he said to Weir, “or this could become a problem.”
The CIA agent looked at Autry strangely. A man of secrets, Weir looked like he was suddenly carrying one more.
“Can you tell us where we are going on this limo ride?” Autry asked him.
Weir began banging his phone on the table. “To the ass end of Cuba,” he said.
Autry rolled his eyes again. Cuba…He’d been there many times during his days running the TF-160 ops out of Panama. It was not an easy place to get in and out of, not unless you knew what you were doing.
“But, on the bright side,” he said wearily, “maybe I can pick up some cigars.”
All the while, Eliot had waited patiently, wondering why he was being made privy to all this. He’d been in the Naval Reserves his entire career. The most exciting thing he’d ever done, besides spending a dozen years, off and on, aboard aircraft carriers, was sail an old Navy minesweeper from Puget Sound to Guam, where he watched it get sunk by a Harpoon missile during live-fire training.
“May I ask something, please?” he finally said. “How’s the Lexington involved in all this?”
Weir was still banging his cell phone against the table, trying to get it to work again.
“I’m sorry, Captain,” he said finally. “You have a small role to play: These guys have to get close to Cuba, and you and this ship are going to take them there.”
CHAPTER 4
BY 2200 HOURS THAT NIGHT, THE USS LEXINGTON WAS fifty miles off the western end of Cuba.
After many more hours of backbreaking work by the Lex’s crew, XBat’s nine surviving helicopters were back up on the deck. Engines humming, rotors spinning, the helicopters were being checked by the crew. This was a preflight ritual that insured all moving surfaces and weaponry would be able to endure the upcoming flight.
Luckily, appearance didn’t count when it came to the flight-worthiness of the unit’s aircraft. Using a mixture of Navy gray epoxy and metal filings, the Lex’s crew had patched up XBat’s perforated copters to the point that some looked to be wearing leopard-spotted camouflage. In fact, one of the Chinooks was more gray than black, an interesting color scheme for the warm, blue Caribbean.
The plan for the night was simple. The nine copters were to proceed to a point just off Cuba, flying just a few feet off the water to avoid radar detection. Reaching their IP near the western end of the island, two of the Black Hawks would break off from the pack while the remaining aircraft went into shallow orbits over the sea. These two primary copters would be designated Taxi 1 and Taxi 2.
Taxi 1 would be carrying the super spy. McCune would be flying this copter, a K version of the UH-60, essentially XBat’s aerial troop carriers. Taxi 2 would be one of the unit’s heavily armed UH-60/DAP gunships. Autry would be piloting this craft.
If everything went as planned, the taxi copters would drop off the super spy at his intended ingress spot about twelves miles inland, and then exit the area quickly.
If everything didn’t go as planned…well, that would be a different story.
Autry was still below, in his musty, borrowed officers’ billet, going through what amounted to be his own preflight ritual.
No stretching or calisthenics. No last-minute prayers or taping an envelope containing his will to the cabin’s mirror. No,
Autry put on his game face by swallowing four extra-strength Tylenol tablets and then strapping on his wristwatch. The timepiece wasn’t a Rolex, or a cool aviator’s watch. It was battered and scratched and the band was frayed to the point of breaking. But it was the most sentimental thing he owned.
The watch face showed two digital readouts. One displayed the current time, while the other could be adjusted to any other time zone in the world. It had been a gift from his wife, for their first anniversary, back when they could barely afford a six-pack. The idea was when Autry went on a mission, he would always know what time it was, both in his location and hers, a way of reminding him that he shouldn’t forget her.
He wore the watch for the first five years of their marriage, and indeed, whenever he looked at it, he could tell if she was asleep, or awake, at work, or just at home. But after a while, when things began to go south with them, he wore the watch less frequently, and finally not at all.
Yet here it was with him again. He’d found it in his stuff after returning from the North Korean mission, purposely cleaned it up a bit and replaced the batteries. Now, as before, one of the readouts was set to his time zone. But for the second readout, he’d enabled the stopwatch function. That readout was now counting down the days, the hours and the minutes until he was supposed to meet his wife again. It was the corniest thing he’d ever done, and not like him at all. But something was changing him. After a quarter century of flying low and fast, dodging bullets and flattening bad guys, he was trying to teach himself to pay attention to the things that really were important.
And getting back with his wife was number one in that category.
AUTRY ARRIVED ON DECK AT 2210. THEY WERE TEN minutes away from takeoff.
He walked the line of copters, making sure his men were in the right places, doing the right things. Most of their weapons had escaped the jet-fighter attack unscathed and they still had plenty of ammo left over from the Pablo mission. Still, Autry told his gunners to make sure to take a test shot once they were airborne. Though unlikely, there was always a chance they might come to need every weapon they had. It was important all were working properly.
Many of the Lex’s crew were standing around the island looking on. It seemed like Creation itself was moving around them; though XBat’s copters had noise-dampeners on their engines, subsonic shock waves from their whirring rotor blades were causing this disruption in the continuum. It lent even more drama to the mid-sea, late-night takeoff.
The first eight copters checked out OK. Two Chinooks, two Killer Eggs, and four Black Hawks. Weapons, ammo, radios and fuel, all up to snuff. Autry then climbed aboard his Black Hawk, the first in line. He began punching buttons on his flight computer, this as his copilot, WSO Zucker, was inspecting the outside of the aircraft. Their copter looked especially crazy with epoxy polka dots.
Autry checked his watch. It was 2215 hours. They were on schedule. He looked up through his canopy at the weather. Scattered clouds, mostly high stuff. He saw more stars above him than vapor. The sea was calm. The moon was half full. A good night for subterfuge.
Just a plain old in and out, he kept telling himself. Drop the package, fly back, get some sleep, and before they knew it, they’d be tying up in Corpus Christi, and he’d be just hours away from flying home to Georgia. This would leave Autry with plenty of time to get his act together for the big rendezvous with his wife.
Zucker climbed aboard and strapped in. He and Autry banged fists, their signal they were both good to go. They went through their cockpit checklist. Fuel, electricity, hydraulics, communications—everything came back green. Weapons, power, aux power, environmentals—again, all looking good.
That’s when Autry heard someone banging on his canopy’s window. He turned to see McCune standing on the deck outside, frantically motioning to him. He wanted Autry to get out of the aircraft. But they were about to take off. What could he possibly want?
Leaving the copter in the hands of Zucker, Autry unstrapped and climbed out. McCune was waiting very anxiously.
“I’m sorry, Colonel,” he said. “But we’ve got a situation.”
In XBat, this could mean just about anything. “Speak,” Autry told him.
“That guy? The spy we’re dropping in Cuba?”
Autry nodded. Agent Superstar.
“What about him?”
McCune’s eyes got wider. “Mungo just beat the crap out of him.”
Autry stared back at him. “Who did what?”
“Mungo—just knocked that guy all over the place…”
Autry’s head began to spin. This didn’t make sense. Why would Mungo attack Superstar?
“Are you sure?” he asked McCune.
McCune shrugged.
“One of my guys broke it up,” he said.
McCune motioned one of his gunners over. Autry asked the man what happened.
McCune’s guy told him that he was doing his checklist outside his copter—which was the Special K ship that would be carrying the super spy—when he saw a commotion inside. Peering into the cargo bay, he found Mungo holding the spy down on the floor, pummeling his head and face as the spy was trying to kick him away. By this time, more people had heard the disturbance and rushed to the scene. They helped McCune’s guy separate the two combatants.
Autry just couldn’t believe it.
Trouble with Mungo…again?
The battalion had many things to do in the next few hours. They were already stretched to their limit. They were beat. They were dirty. They needed a warm meal and a warm bed—and Autry had to repair his home life. Dealing with a Mungo problem was the last thing he wanted to do at the moment.
Autry hurried over to McCune’s copter, fifth down in line. Mungo was sitting on the floor in the back, his uniform rumpled, his right hand swollen. The super spy, meanwhile, was in the next copter over, getting a head wound bandaged.
Autry quickly took stock. Mungo was extremely sensitive to anyone calling him a coward. And he wasn’t a coward; Autry had been with him in combat in North Korea and he might have been one of the bravest, if perhaps craziest, soldiers he’d ever served with. Trouble was, anything the unit did was so top secret, few people would ever be privy to the kind of courage Mungo had displayed.
But even if this bizarre incident had something to do with an attack on Mungo’s manhood, why with the super spy?
Mungo finally acknowledged Autry’s presence. He gave him the barest of salutes.
“What happened here, Captain?” Autry asked him.
Mungo didn’t hesitate. “That asshole was taking pictures of the cockpit of this copter,” he said. “He’s got a little camera with him and he was filming away when I caught him.”
Battered though they were, XBat’s copters were filled with classified technology: advanced GPS navigation gear, advanced Nightvision, substantial electronic warfare suites, plus their myriad communications devices with which they could speak to just about anyone anywhere in the world. Most of this stuff was so secret, some of the top people in Army Aviation weren’t aware of it.
But why would any of it be of interest to the super spy? He was about to be dropped into a hostile country to do some dirty work. What would he care what was under the hood of XBat’s hot rods?
Or maybe Mungo was just making it all up—like the story he told that day in Mogadishu. If it had been any one of Autry’s other troopers, there would have been no question that the truth was being reported. But with Mungo, with all his baggage, necessary and not, everything had to be taken under question. That’s just the way it was.
At that point, Weir arrived, sprinting over from where the super spy was getting bandaged up.
“What the hell is going on here?” the CIA agent asked Autry sternly.
Autry replied: “My guy says your guy was taking pictures of the stuff in our cockpits. What does your guy say?”
Weir just shook his head. “That your guy attacked him—unprovoked.”
“Does he have a camera with
him?” Autry asked Weir.
“Of course he does,” Weir replied. “He’s a spy, for God’s sake. He says he was just trying it out, taking some test shots when your guy started beating on him.”
Autry said simply: “But that’s all classified stuff inside our cockpits. We can’t even take pictures of it.”
Weir looked about ready to jump overboard. “Look—this guy is very high on the ladder. His security clearance is higher than both of ours combined.”
Autry turned to McCune, who was hanging back a little. “Go check if anyone else saw these two bozos fighting.”
McCune saluted and hurried off into the night. Autry came back to Weir.
“What do we really know about this guy?” he asked him. “This super spy.”
Weir shrugged. “I’ve never heard the Agency blow the horn louder for anyone like they have for him,” he replied. “He’s supposed to be able to get in and out of any situation you can imagine. Just on disguises alone, he was able to get into some of Saddam’s most secret briefings. They have pictures of him, for God’s sake, looking at Iraqi battle plans, standing right next to Saddam himself.
“He supposedly did the same thing with Milosevic in Serbia, with the mullahs in Iran. The guy is like a movie star. And now they’re sending him to Sugarland on a matter of grave importance. What’s his mission? I have no idea. Maybe he’s going to put two in Fidel’s hat. But I do know, if we lose him, well, we just might as well keep on sailing—because if we go home, they’ll have us making little rocks out of big ones at Leavenworth.”
At that point McCune returned.
“A few other guys saw him snapping pictures,” he reported. “They thought it was strange, but assumed it was OK, this guy being such a big shot and so on.”
Autry thought about this for a moment. A few other guys saw the spy snapping away, yet only Mungo chose to beat him for it.
He checked his watch again. It was 2225 hours. They had to leave now.
He pulled Weir out of earshot of Mungo and McCune. The rest of the unit were in their copters looking out on the scene, wondering the hell was going on.