by Jack Shane
At that point, Autry’s flight engineer would engage their copter’s psych-ops loudspeakers and call down to the ship that it should prepare to be boarded. Autry’s hope was that the freighter’s crew was made up of hired hands, non-Venezuelans who might be unwilling to get flattened for the likes of the SBI. That would be the ideal situation.
They were soon just a minute away from getting a visual on the ship. Autry radioed the rest of the team to get ready to change formation, reminding each aircraft of its part to play, and telling them, most important, to be ready to get in and out quick. Then he told his own aircraft’s crew to get to their battle stations and check their weapons and ammo.
Thirty seconds away from what the Galaxy Net promised would be a true visual, the fog got thicker, if that was possible. Each copter did a radio check and confirmed their position via their GPS gear. Each pilot also called in an aircraft status report. Though low on fuel, all of the new copters were running fine.
Fifteen seconds out, Autry told WSO Winters to turn on the external digital cameras. No matter what happened, it would be important to get the encounter down on film. Then Autry called back to his engineer to turn on the loudspeaker system. A squeal through his headphones told him this was working too.
Autry turned back to the VR screen on his control panel. They were all still flying at just fifteen feet, but the fog was so thick, it was like they were passing through high cumulus clouds. He studied the virtual reality image of the target ship. Nearly pristine in its clarity, the image was actually a radar profile of the ship being scanned by a Galaxy Net satellite overhead, beamed down to the set on McCune’s Chinook and then bounced over to Autry’s control panel, all in a matter of nano-seconds.
Amazing, he thought.
At ten seconds out, on his command, the rest of the unit broke formation and began slotting into their positions for the carousel around the ship. Autry could hear their mighty engines accelerate as half the squadron roared by him to get into place.
At five seconds out, Autry still didn’t have a visual on the ship. Just their luck—the fog was the thickest yet. Eyes glued to the VR screen, he continued following his instruments, slowing up dramatically while rising slightly, to about thirty feet.
Four seconds…
Three…
Two…
One…
Autry looked up and there it was, right in front of them. A tramp steamer plowing its way south through the soupy fog, doing 12 knots.
The Galaxy Net was right on the money.
He jerked his copter into a moving hover as the rest of XBat’s Black Hawks reappeared out of the mist and began their noisy orbit around the cargo ship. Chinook Number 3 then descended from the thick cloud, and right on cue, fired two illumination shells across the ship’s bow. At this, Autry brought his copter down next to the fog-enshrouded ship. His engineer began broadcasting their message via the external psych-ops loudspeakers. Speaking in English, he told the crew that the helicopters represented the United Nations, and that the request to board her was strictly routine.
Autry drew in a little closer, trying to catch a glimpse of the ship’s crew. Then he looked back down at the Galaxy Net screen—and nearly felt his heart stop. Suddenly the screen wasn’t showing just a single cargo ship but three other ships around it. And these were not cargo ships. They were naval frigates, flying the Venezuelan flag. At that same moment, a message began blinking on the VR screen: GN update. Full screen approved. Autry couldn’t believe it: This was Galaxy Net language for, “We fucked up. What you thought was real wasn’t. Here’s the real image.”
In other words, instead of locating one pokey cargo hump, they were now facing three heavily armed warships.
And the anti-aircraft weapons on those warships were going hot.
“I can’t believe this,” Winters cried once he realized what had happened. “I can’t believe the G-Net screwed us!”
Autry couldn’t either. The question now was, what to do? Autry’s mind was going at warp speed, his Juicy Fruit chewed down to nothing. They had to land on the cargo ship. That’s the only way they could find out what Shipment 41 was. To let the ship get away now would scotch the whole mission.
But helicopters against frigates?
As it turned out, the people on the frigates solved his problem for him. Not two seconds after appearing out of the fog, anti-aircraft guns on all three warships opened up on the circling helicopters. Suddenly the thick mist was alive with the streaks of tracer rounds and shells exploding.
“Star Break and defend!” Autry yelled into his chin mike, another quick decision made. They’d taken hostile fire in the course of a mission. Just like over El Tapos in Cuba—when someone shot at XBat, they shot back. Translation: They would do an armed landing and fight the frigates.
Even before Autry’s words were out, the other copters in XBat began falling away from their orbiting formation, gaining height and arming their weapons. The next ten minutes of combat might have been the most confusing ever experienced by a US helicopter unit.
Not to mention the Venezuelan Navy.
Autry and one of the Special K troop trucks slammed onto the deck of the cargo ship seconds later. The ship’s crew knew they were coming. In fact they had scattered as soon as Winters started talking over the loudspeaker.
The two copters hit simultaneously, the troop truck banging in on the stern and Autry’s copter coming down on the forward cargo deck. Their troops began spilling out onto the deck almost immediately.
The ship itself was a mess, a typical tramp steamer, all rust and dried salt, with webs of ropes and chains crisscrossing its main deck. A nasty place to land a helicopter. It had a recessed control house, meaning the first two thirds of the ship was taken up by its cargo hold.
The XBat troopers started firing their weapons in every direction, trying to spook the crew. The noise alone was tremendous, fire and sparks and tracers ricocheting everywhere. The pyrotechnics worked. Crewmen started popping up from everywhere. Hands raised, many were screaming, No mas!
The Special K troops quickly corralled the crew, identified the captain and ran him over to the boss gunship. Autry was just climbing out of his copter, and like the rest of the landing party was in full battle gear. He told the captain that he and his crew had two choices: tell them what was so important aboard on the ship or go over the side now.
At that moment a surface-to-air missile was launched from one of the frigates. It went spiraling through the night, passing right over the mast of the cargo ship and disappearing back into the fog. A fusillade of tracers coming from the opposite direction seemed to reply. Suddenly explosions were going off all around them. The battle between the copters and the frigates had begun in earnest.
The noise distracted Autry and the ship’s captain from their “negotiation.” Autry started to repeat his conditions when another AA missile whooshed by, this one even lower. This was followed by the growl of one of XBat’s Chinooks streaking overhead, all its guns trained on a target somewhere deeper in the murk.
Shortly after the Chinook roared by, there was a tremendous blast off the starboard bow, followed by a huge ball of bright yellow fire. In the silhouette of this blast was the outline of one of the Venezuelan war ships. The Chinook had hit something volatile on the frigate and now there were secondary explosions going off all over her. The warship immediately went into a heavy list. All this happened in a matter of seconds.
When Autry looked back at the cargo ship’s captain, the man was nearly wetting himself. Without another word, he pushed past Autry and went over the side of the ship in a swan dive. Half his crew followed. Why?
Because the other half was being machine-gunned to death.
Now came another eternity of confusion. The ship’s remaining crewmen were falling at Autry’s feet. He yelled for his men to hit the deck and suddenly tracer bullets were zipping all around them too. Autry’s worst fear was that these were XBat’s bullets, being shot at them by one of
their own copters. It took him a few moments to realize the bullets were coming from weapons much closer. Up on the control-house deck, at least a dozen men with machine guns, all in black uniforms and ski masks, were firing down at them.
SBI, Autry thought. The Venezuelan special forces had a squad of shooters onboard—and they had Autry and his men dead in their sights.
Autry didn’t even have time to think about it. When his wife’s face flashed before his eyes, he was certain his life was over. But just as the SBI soldiers were pulling their triggers, one of the Killer Eggs came out of the night and unleashed a missile barrage on the deck in front of the control house. There was a blinding explosion, which the little copter flew right through before rocketing away into the night and fog. When the smoke cleared, not only were there no SBI soldiers up on the control house, there was no more control house. It had been blown away along with the SBI gunmen.
Autry couldn’t believe it. They’d been saved.
But the steamer’s crew was now all gone, and the Americans still had no idea what was so important on the ship. Certainly nothing was strapped to the deck.
“Get below!” Autry yelled to his men. “We’ve got to search this fucker ourselves!”
They headed down the nearest ladder and in seconds were running through the ship’s passageways, trying to steer themselves to the cargo bay as the sounds of the fierce copter-versus-frigate engagement raging overhead were getting louder by the second.
Autry was in the lead, night-vision goggles down, flashlight on the end of his M-16. The passageway smelled of bilge and cigarette smoke. They moved quickly through the tubes for what seemed like hours. It’s a cargo ship, Autry said to himself, over and over. How hard can it be to find its hold?
Finally they reached a huge hatchway that had been closed and locked tight. This had to lead to the cargo bay. Autry actually stopped for a moment, thinking he could somehow figure out the lock—but his troopers weren’t so patient. One stepped forward with his Mossberg shotgun and blew the wheel-and-gear assembly to pieces. The big door blew open, and the troopers rushed in.
They found themselves on a catwalk that ran along one side of the cargo hold. Below them were stacks of boxes on wooden pallets, each one covered with a black tarpaulin.
Autry tried to take it in all at once and do some lightning calculations. If a Bear bomber, roughly the size of a B-52, was taken apart and put into wooden boxes, how many wooden boxes would it take to ship the thing across the Pacific to South America?
A hundred? Five hundred? A thousand?
He didn’t know. But it was time to find out.
Autry’s guys did not have to be told. Six of them leaped over the railing, flew through the air like superheroes and landed with six successive thuds on the covered wooden pallets below. With knives attached to their rifles, they started tearing away at the black tarps.
Autry’s new theory was that this was not one bomber broken in pieces, but rather packed-away flight controls, cockpit gear—the guts needed for many bombers to be put back together and made flyable again.
But he was wrong. The boxes didn’t contain pieces of an aircraft or tons of flight controls. They were filled with one thing only: smoke detectors, hundreds of them, the battery-powered kind.
“What is this crap!” one of the troopers yelled from below.
No sooner were those words out of his mouth when the ship was rocked by another explosion. Violent and ear-splitting, it killed half the lights on the freighter. The blast hadn’t happened on the inside of the ship, though. Had that been the case, they all would have been dead in an instant.
“What do we do with all this stuff?” another trooper yelled up to Autry. “It will take us an hour just to shoot all of it up or frag it to death.”
Autry had to think quick again. This cargo couldn’t possibly be what all the fuss was about. Why would three frigates be protecting a few hundred smoke detectors?
“Screw it!” he finally yelled. “Let’s get out of here!”
Again, his men didn’t have to be told twice. The troopers below began climbing up the stairway of pallets until they reached the catwalk railing again, where they were helped over by their colleagues. Inside of ten seconds, they were all running back down the passageway.
Autry could see the barest of light down by the hatch they’d opened on deck. At the moment it seemed like a mile in the distance. But it was their only way out.
They were about halfway to their goal when the ship was rocked by another explosion. Inside or out—they couldn’t tell this time. But the blast killed all power left aboard the ship. The passageway suddenly went dark, only to come alive again with waves of crackling wires and sparks, the result of so many sudden power spikes and short-circuits!
The troopers fought their way through this mini lightning storm, somehow reaching the ladder to the deck intact. Autry waited at the bottom, counting each of his men as they went up. He was relieved when the last guy reached him—they had left no one behind. Autry boosted this man up the ladder and began to climb up himself, but then stopped.
By the glow of a sparking electrical cable just a few feet down the passageway from the ladder, he saw a door that was double padlocked, with a crudely painted sign that read in both English and Spanish: ENTER ONLY UNDER RISK OF DEATH.
It took him a split-second to process this information. What could possibly be behind this door that the crew would be threatened with death not to mess with it?
That’s when the third explosion rocked the ship. Flames and smoke were suddenly everywhere. Everyone up top hit the deck and covered up as a small storm of shrapnel and debris blew by.
When the last trooper reached back down the hole to help Autry up the ladder, the XBat CO was gone.
BECAUSE HE WAS HAULING THE AWACS GEAR IN THE back of his copter, McCune had been late to the fight. As soon as he’d become aware of the false reading on the Galaxy Net, he had to have the copter’s onboard computer turned off and rebooted again. Only that way could he get a clear view of whatever the Galaxy Net was sending out in its new corrected format.
By the time he arrived, Autry’s men had already gone belowdecks on the cargo ship and the other copters were already engaging the frigates, diving on them with a scary ferocity. This was XBat’s first naval engagement, and it was not a textbook attack so far. But what the copters were lacking in coordination, they more than made up for in sheer firepower. Total chaos was spelled out in the thousands of tracer lines lighting up the foggy night.
From this vantage point McCune also saw one of his fellow Chinooks unload on one particularly hapless frigate. A handful of lucky shots from the big copter’s nose cannons must have hit a magazine of some kind, because the ship lit up like a magnesium flare, hitting them with a shock wave nearly a thousand feet away.
By this time, the AWACs gear had completely rebooted and was back on line. Having eliminated the Galaxy Net flow, McCune was now looking down on things through plain old NightVision. The crippled frigate was completely on fire, its tail section covered in smoke. But its engines had not disengaged. It was still churning through the fire and water, heading right for the cargo ship. It was moving so fast, only seconds remained before a collision.
He looked down to see that Autry’s men had returned to the deck of the cargo ship. Only now were they aware that the stricken frigate was heading right for them at top speed.
McCune didn’t even think about it. There wasn’t time. For Autry’s men to reach their helicopters, McCune would have to save them. He cut the bottom from beneath his copter and was instantly free-falling toward the cargo ship. The guys in back had already thrown open all of the Chinook’s hatches. In five seconds they were just above the stranded troopers. With no prompting, they began clamoring aboard the Chinook while McCune fought to keep the big copter steady in the storm of AA fire and tracers.
It was then that he realized something was wrong. All of the rescued troopers were screaming that Autry was missi
ng.
McCune looked off to his left and saw the flaming frigate no more than a hundred yards away from a collision with the cargo ship. He froze at the controls. What should he do? If he didn’t lift off now, they’d all be killed. But there was no way he was going to leave Autry behind.
Suddenly, out of the smoke and fog, one of the other Chinooks appeared. It was Number 3, the one equipped with the small howitzer. Braving the AA fire coming from the other two frigates, the big copter pulled up level, positioned itself between the burning warship and the stricken cargo ship—and began blasting away. It was quickly clear what the Chinook was trying to do: blow enough holes in the burning frigate to sink it or stop it or somehow deflect it from its deadly course.
It was a valiant effort—but to no good end. There was just too much momentum behind the burning ship. The Chinook pumped two dozen shells into its hull, and while it might have slowed it down a fraction, there was just no way to stop it from colliding with the cargo ship.
What came next was probably the hardest decision McCune ever had to make. But he started yelling to the men in back to hold on, they were getting out of there. Then he pulled up on the actuator and the big Chinook began to rise.
No sooner had they cleared the forward mast when another explosion rocked the cargo ship from stern to midships. Whether this was caused by a stray AA missile or stray fire coming from one of the other helicopters, it was impossible to say. But it was clear that the cargo ship was mortally wounded—and that it would have been impossible for anyone belowdecks to survive.
McCune started to accelerate, when, just on a whim, he looked back over his left shoulder.
Something caught his eye.
There was a figure standing in the bow of the ship, trying to balance himself on the very nose. He was waving one hand madly, and underneath the other was a duffel bag full of something.