Operation Southern Cross - 02

by Jack Shane

  McCune couldn’t believe it.

  It was Autry.

  McCune put the Chinook into an almost impossible tight bank, knocking many of those in back to the right hand wall. No sooner had he jinked the big copter to the right when he had to push it back the other way, throwing those in back against the opposite wall.

  Just as quickly, he righted the copter again. All the rocking and rolling resulted in his perfectly placing the Chinook above the pitching bow of the ship. There was no time to lower a ladder to Autry. The burning frigate was just seconds away from slamming into the cargo ship. McCune brought the Chinook down to eye level and no less than six of the troopers in back hauled Autry aboard.

  His uniform was covered with soot, his face blackened, his boots still smoldering—but he was alive.

  Once he was sure Autry was aboard, McCune yelled again, “Hang on!” Then he yanked back on the Chinook’s controls and started the copter screaming straight up.

  The burning frigate rammed the cargo ship an instant later. The noise of the collision was loud enough to be heard in the ascending Chinook, even above the racket of the ongoing battle. Even though McCune was climbing as fast as he could, the conflagration enveloped the copter for several heart-stopping moments before retreating back toward the sea.

  Everyone onboard had his nose pressed against the side windows, watching the two ships lock in a violent death throe. Had they stayed on the cargo ship ten seconds longer, they all would have been killed. Two of their brand-new “Ferrari” helicopters were gone, but everyone was safe. And the two ships were going up, providing a light show for all the drunken college kids on Aruba, just eighteen miles away.

  McCune nearly slumped over his controls with relief.

  Could have been worse, he thought.

  That’s when the Venezuelan Air Force showed up.

  IT WAS NO ACCIDENT THAT COLONEL HUBERTO BONZO was flying one of the two Mirages that arrived on the scene.

  He was commander of the newly formed Special Air Squadron which was, essentially, the SBI’s own air arm. He too had played a part in many coups, counter-coups and counter-counter-coups. Being given command of Aero One was his reward for loyalty to the people currently in power.

  But it was more personal than that. Bonzo had been flying one of the jets that had attacked a gringo helicopter force a few nights ago. Engaging the copters had been a mistake, sort of. There had been another convoy of “special weapons” ships moving through the area that night. When Bonzo and his wingman detected the U.S. copter unit emerging from Colombian air space, they erroneously thought they were going to attack the freighters and started firing.

  It was Bonzo himself who made the mistake of following one of the copters down to sea level, where he was promptly chased away by a storm of gunfire coming from the copters. To be shot down by a helicopter would have been a disgrace. Turning tail and running when they first saw the U.S. carrier had also been embarrassing. He still couldn’t figure out why no F-14s chased them that night.

  But now he was out here again.

  The problem was, he and his wingman had been looking for the three-ship convoy for the past ninety minutes. They didn’t have the luxury of anything like the Galaxy Net, when it was working properly. In fact, they had no idea it even existed. They used old-fashioned ATC vectors to find their way to the ships, a time-consuming process if the timing wasn’t just right. Add in the sudden fog banks and the need to fly most of their mission in radio silence, and Bonzo wound up doing search patterns more than a hundred miles away from where the ships were. By the time their controllers back at the base got it right, Bonzo and his wingman were already on their auxiliary fuel tanks.

  This was not good for their side. The mission’s prime objective was for Bonzo and his colleague to ride convoy duty until the ships were in Venezuelan territorial waters.

  He and his wingman eventually came upon the battle simply by following the glow. Seeing the flames spiraling into the air and covering the water, they had no idea at first what had happened.

  Then they saw the helicopters.

  Bonzo couldn’t believe it! The gringos were out here again?

  By the time the two Mirages were on the scene, the battle had been in progress for several minutes and was in the process of breaking up. Just as they roared overhead, they saw the U.S. copters break into a scattered formation and literally streak away in different directions, not ten feet off the surface of the water. Bonzo knew this was not a rout brought on by the first sight of the jets, but a coordinated withdrawal. The U.S. troops had completed their mission and were now leaving the area in a swift and orderly fashion.

  Still, Bonzo yelled over to his wingman: “The gringos run again. We are just too much for them!”

  Then they too turned for home.

  THE GUYS IN THE BACK OF MCCUNE’S COPTER USED the basic AWACs system onboard to watch the pair of Venezuelan fighters disappear over the southern horizon.

  No fuel, no guts, no mas… was how one trooper saw it, watching the fighters depart.

  The unit’s tactical withdrawal plan was simple but effective. By scattering in ten different directions, it gave any pursuing aircraft pause deciding who to follow and where. The copters made sure most of their flight paths appeared to be heading out further to sea, a discouragement for any aircraft that burned fuel as quickly as a jet fighter.

  Add in the night, the general confusion…and maybe a little lack of guts to face the scrappy copters again. The stars aligned for XBat on this occasion, just as being so close to the Lex had helped them out even before that. But they knew it would be foolish to think they would be so lucky if it happened a third time.

  It was only after McCune was sure that the rest of the unit had escaped unscathed that he was able to turn the controls over to his copilot once again and crawl back into the Chinook’s overcrowded cargo bay to find Autry.

  The CO was on his hands and knees trying to look through the handful of files he’d taken from the mysterious cargo ship just minutes before his very harrowing escape.

  He explained to McCune about the double-locked room he’d spotted.

  “I figured that’s the only place they’d keep the family jewels,” he said.

  He described a room plain in nature except for a huge safe in one corner. A safe that was not locked, he added. Its door was wide open, revealing many documents within. Why was it open? Maybe the crew or the SBI soldiers, under orders to destroy the safe’s contents, had panicked at the first sign of XBat and had only completed the first part of the job. Maybe the safe’s door was never locked. In any case, when Autry saw the inscription SHIPMENT 41 on a duffel bag full of documents, he grabbed it…and then ran like hell.

  “It’s one thing to want to go down with the ship,” he told McCune now, referring to his last-minute rescue. “Not to have a choice in the matter is something else completely.”

  As it turned out, the Shipment 41 bag was full of plans, photographs and instructions of some kind, for many different things. Some of them were written in Spanish, some in Chinese, Russian or Urdu. It was a potpourri of stuff that apparently the people it was destined for thought would never have made it through a security system at an airport or in a diplomatic bag.

  It was hard to read any of it, especially under the circumstances, but the photographs included told much of the tale.

  In seconds, Autry had found a photomap of where the cargo ship was going—and it wasn’t Los Tripos. Its destination was another secretly dredged-out jungle port in the western part of the country, near the Rujillo region. This place was just as remote, just as secret and just as camouflaged as Area 13. In fact, its name was Area 14.

  There was one big difference between the two sites. Area 14 was completed. What’s more, there was a picture of it, taken from high above, somehow. And it had many things in common with the site at Area 13—lots of cement footings and evidence of slave labor.

  But what had looked like random work at Area 13 sudden
ly made sense when looking at the completed Area 14.

  McCune and the rest of the troopers onboard were looking over Autry’s shoulder, taking it all in.

  “What does it all mean?” McCune asked Autry. “Are they really building air bases to handle the Bear bomber?”

  Autry held up the aerial photograph of Area 14 and shook his head slowly. The cement pourings were connected by roads. But these roads weren’t straight, in fact, just the opposite, they were all curves. Put together, the layout formed a perfect figure 8.

  Autry asked him: “Does that look like a runway to you?”

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 10

  Hulbert Field, Florida

  One hour later

  GARY WEIR WAS HAVING TROUBLE STAYING AWAKE.

  The weary CIA agent was sitting at a huge, futuristic console located deep inside the top-secret Special Operations Command bunker at Hurlbert Field. The console was contained within an all-glass room, which in turn was surrounded by a half dozen similar glass enclosures, each devoted to monitoring a potentially dangerous flashpoint somewhere in the world.

  Weir’s cubicle was known as Bubble 3, or the South America Room. He was here because South America was now his beat. Judging by the frantic activity going on in the adjacent bubbles, his beat was relatively calm. On the list of current crises plaguing the U.S. Government, South America—or more specifically Venezuela—was penciled in at Number 6. And everyone wanted to keep it that way.

  It took long hours of diligence. Weir had been sitting in this same spot for most of the past twenty-four hours, leaving only to hit the head and get more cans of Coke. Two NSA technicians sitting with him had been here just as long and were just as weary. On the couch behind them, an overweight man with coffee stains on his tie was asleep and snoring loudly. He’d been cooped up in there for the past twenty-four hours too.

  In front of Weir was a 72-inch super-high-definition TV screen. Its official name was the XDF, for extraterrestrial direct feed. Part of the Galaxy Net, the XDF had the ability to broadcast, in real time, satellite video imagery from just about anywhere on the planet.

  At the moment, this screen was showing them passive video images of the Venezuelan mainland. A squadron of Galaxy Net spy satellites had been tasked two days earlier to keep an eye on all key Venezuelan military installations, especially the new, top-secret ones—or at least the ones the CIA knew about.

  Weir and the NSA techs had watched thousands of images of these military installations in the past twenty-four hours. With the system automatically switching back and forth between several dozen targets, like a network of security cameras inside a building, each facility got about twenty seconds of air time before being bumped by the next. Anything interesting could be zoomed in on with the push of a button. Under the right conditions, sounds and even voices could be picked up too.

  It was high-tech spying at its finest. But no matter what base they were looking in on, Weir and the NSA guys always saw the same thing: typical comings and goings of military life. A lot of new construction. A lot of new weapons being delivered and stored away. So far, it had been very boring, and with each passing minute, Weir’s eyelids got heavier.

  That is, until the image scanner switched from a Venezuelan army barracks near Barinas to an air base up along the northwest coast of the country. Then it became very un-boring, real quick.

  The moment the imager switched, Weir and the techs found themselves looking at a scene out of a war movie. Flames, smoke, explosions going off. Guided munitions falling everywhere. Even though they were being shot from a location high over the Earth, the XDF’s satellite images were unbelievably vivid in color and clarity. Looking down on it from above, with the XDF’s God’s-eye view, there was no mistaking what was going on. This air base was under attack.

  “What the fuck is going on there?” Weir cried. Even though he’d been sitting in front of the screen for more than a day, he still didn’t know one Venezuelan installation from another. “Where is that place?”

  “It’s the air base at Legos,” the senior NSA tech replied quickly; he was just as surprised as Weir. “Highly classified area. It’s the home base of the 1st SBI fighter squadron. The place where the jets involved in the action near the Lexington last week are stationed.”

  Weir was wide awake now. He tore open his situation manual and began ticking off commands to the techs: Start saving all images on the hard drive now. Cue every satellite in the squadron with a view of Legos to add to the feed. Start the radar-imaging scan so they could view the situation in three dimensions once enough data was absorbed.

  Then he took another good look at the XDF screen. The air base was being pummeled. The explosions and the flames were incredible. But by whom?

  Weir asked for a closer view. At the same moment, another satellite in the squadron began sending down images. From this angle and height, Weir could see aircraft crisscrossing the base, dropping ordnance, firing missiles. But they were moving so fast at first—plus the smoke and flames—it was hard to see exactly what kind of aircraft they were.

  Until some of the smoke cleared…

  Oh God, Weir thought. Are those helicopters?

  “Do you have enough data to go to VR?” he worriedly asked one of the techs. Again, the XDF’s radar imager could sweep the area and feed the information into a CGI computer, which then produced a 3-dimensional virtual reality display of what was going below. On his order, the techs pushed some buttons and a second screen next to the HDTV came alive. Now it really did look like a war movie. And yes, those were helicopters bombarding the base…

  Black Hawks, Chinooks, Killer Eggs. They were all painted gray-black and were sleeker than the usual design of those venerable copters.

  Weir recognized them right away.

  XBat.

  “What are those assholes doing?” he swore loudly, almost waking the man on the couch. “They’re supposed to be laying low, for Christ’s sake…”

  The techs quickly recalled images from two minutes before the base was attacked, images stored away in the XDF’s memory and not showing on the big screen at the time the attack began. In this replay, they could see two Mirage jets landing, this after one of them did a kind of victory roll over the base. A zoom-in revealed a number of ground personnel gathering around one of the Mirages once it had landed. The pilot seemed to be addressing them about a combat encounter he might have just experienced. Everything seemed peaceful.

  But then, sure enough, in the upper right corner of the frame, ten ominous black shapes appeared, flying low, toward the base, coming out of the rising sun. These were the attacking helicopters. They saw two of them launch a total of eight Hellfire missiles. Four impacted on the base’s control tower, four hit its weapons magazines. With two huge explosions at opposite ends of the base, the helicopters themselves arrived overhead, and the vicious air strike began in earnest.

  Back on the live screen, the helicopters, seemingly tired of bombing and strafing the airfield, were now seen congregating around a section of the base located on the furthest edge of the facility, a place with several open-ended Quonset huts. Two of the huge Chinooks had already landed there, with a pair of the Black Hawks touching down as well. As soon as each copter set down, its heavily armed passengers jumped out and began forming a defensive perimeter. Meanwhile, other crewmen could be seen pulling long black hoses out of the rear of the Quonset huts to their landed copters. They were rushing around like fire fighters.

  “What are they doing now?” Weir asked the techs, baffled. “Are they putting out fires on their aircraft?”

  One of the techs clarified the VR screen, then looked back at the XDF broadcast. “No sir,” he said. “That’s the air base’s fuel depot. It looks like they’re swiping their aviation fuel.”

  “So, this isn’t an attack,” the other tech said. “It’s a robbery.”

  But no sooner were those words out of his mouth when both screens in front of them blinked out.

>   There was just stunned silence at first. But then came torrents of obscenities, not just in Bubble 3, but throughout the glassy facility. The Galaxy Net had cut out again, all over the world. For Gary Weir, it couldn’t have happened at a worse time.

  All the cursing finally woke the man on the couch. He stretched, yawned, burped and got to his feet. He wasn’t CIA or NSA. Nor did he work for Army Special Ops Command. He was an employee of the company that built the Galaxy Net.

  “Down again, is she?” he said, opening up his little tool bag, something that contained nothing more exotic than a flashlight and a Phillips-head screwdriver. “That’s a shame…”

  THE NEXT HALF HOUR WAS FRANTIC.

  The two NSA technicians did everything they could to bring the Galaxy Net back on line, this while the repairman seemed more intent on slurping his coffee and shining his flashlight into the back of the console. All three men were baffled. True, the Galaxy Net had been having problems. But the equipment here on-site at Hurlbert seemed perfect. Nothing shorted out, nothing showing up on the trouble check screen.

  The problem, the repairman said, and not for the first time, might be with the tons of space junk circling Earth interfering with the eyes, ears and brains of the multibillion-dollar Galaxy Net.

  “Time to buy a new system,” he told them, only half joking. “After all, this one’s already six months old.”

  All this time Weir was in the back of the glass room, out of earshot, madly dialing his S2S phone, trying to reach XBat. But all he got was a continuous busy signal, the insanely annoying reminder that the Galaxy Net was still fucked up.

  He was about to hurl the phone against the glass wall when suddenly, the big TV screen burst to life again. The techs couldn’t believe it—neither could the repairman. The Galaxy Net had snapped back to life entirely on its own.