Operation Southern Cross - 02

by Jack Shane

  Were they were afraid to come down, or were they content with letting the Pucaras do the work? He had no desire to find out. He jumped into the tailwind of McCune’s Chinook and kept heading out of the city.

  He checked his watch. Despite all the action, they’d been over the city less than two minutes. Autry could see the green canopy of the Avila National Park dead ahead, just on the other side of a line of skyscrapers, these finished.

  And beyond that, the blue sea.

  And beyond that? Atlanta…

  It was strange how it happened, because in the next moment, Autry couldn’t see McCune’s Chinook, nor the skyscrapers or the forest or the sea. All he could see was smoke, and fire and the streaks of tracer fire crossing his nose.

  He heard one of the guys in back yell something, then all hell broke loose—again.

  It was a Pucara. Where it came from Autry had no idea—either it had been flying high, watching everything unfold below, or had been flying low, looking up. It didn’t matter. The swift prop fighter was now coming at Autry at his ten o’clock position, machine guns blazing—and Autry had no way to turn the Black Hawk to fire back, or even get out of the way.

  They were cooked.

  But then, another bright flash. Autry thought sure the Pucara’s bullets had found his main fuel tank, and that his Black Hawk was blowing up in agonizingly slow motion. He couldn’t stop himself from closing his eyes, waiting for the end…but several moments went by and he felt nothing unusual. His eyes opened and he realized that it was the Pucara that had blown up, not him.

  How?

  From the left he saw another flash. Another copter had come up beside him, its forward guns having just been fired. It was a Killer Egg—but not the unit’s remaining OH-6. The tiny copter was already over the Avila forest.

  This was the XBat’s second Egg. Behind the controls: Captain Dan Mungo.

  Autry thought he was seeing things. Mungo was wearing a USS Lexington jacket, obviously from the veteran carrier, but he’d certainly not been wearing it before. How could this be? Had Mungo pulled off the oil-refinery diversion and come back for them? Or had he gone directly to the ship, and the VAF had just started guarding the oil plants on their own? Autry hated himself for even thinking it, but with Mungo, there was always that little bubble of doubt.

  Yet he’d just saved Autry’s butt and everyone else on Autry’s aircraft—and not for the first time. Autry now realized that the blurred shape he’d seen between the two skyscrapers just a minute before had been a Killer Egg—this Killer Egg—and that Mungo had downed another Pucara then, saving McCune’s Chinook as well.

  So was he a coward or a hero? Or both? Or neither? Autry’s brain was close to overload, his gum all but gone, he’d punished it so much.

  Some things would have to be sorted out later.

  With a wag of his machine, Mungo went up and over and headed north, falling in line behind the rest of the unit. And Autry fell in behind Mungo. He was now the last in line of the fleeing copters.

  Or so he thought. He took a quick count of the XBat aircraft he could see in front of him and realized something was wrong: One of the DAP gunships was missing.

  He called ahead to the AWACs ship, asking if they had any indication of the DAP. The radar copter had just made it over the huge Avila forest, free to burn rubber, with most of the Pucaras having been dealt with. They did a sweep of the city behind them and reported they could only see Autry’s copter, two Chinooks and a Killer Egg. There was no sign of the missing Black Hawk.

  Autry whacked himself upside the head. Once more he yelled for his crew to hang on.

  He was going back.

  IT WAS THE PILOT, WSO JENNINGS, WHO FIRST REALIZED that his DAP gunship was in trouble. He was flying at the tail end of the column when it left the jungle, trying to keep an eye on the slower howitzer gunship—at least that was the plan. But as soon as they entered the forest of under-construction skyscrapers, and the Pucaras showed up, well…it became a very confusing five minutes.

  Jennings had tried to sneak down an avenue that was somewhat removed from the building boom of downtown Caracas. He found himself flying over thousands of the protesters, some so angry they threw bricks and stones at the aircraft.

  They went right over a huge marketplace, having to fly sideways for a moment to get through a narrow space between two very old buildings. Even through the haze of battle, and miles of clotheslines with clothes hanging on them, Jennings could see most of the unit ahead, speeding toward the sea. For the moment, it actually looked like they were going to pull this off.

  But then, as he rose out of this neighborhood, gunning his engines in an effort to catch up with the unit, he found a Pucara flying right above him.

  The first barrage of machine-gun fire arrived a moment later. Jennings heard the impacts all over his rotor blades and engine mounts. Five explosions, right in a row, went off inside his copter. They sounded like small nukes detonating inside the gunship. An electrical shock wave went through the helicopter. When Jennings looked down at his flight computer’s readout screen, it blinked twice and went out.

  They started losing altitude a second later. The only thing below them was a very crowded street.

  AUTRY FOUND JENNINGS’S BLACK HAWK ABOUT A minute later. It had crashed near the corner of Avenida Urdaneta and a place called Norte 5, a side street.

  Its rotors were aflame and they had stopped spinning. Its cargo bay was smoking heavily. Autry counted a half dozen men on the ground outside the copter, three on each side. As it was a DAP gunship, with six people aboard, everyone had gotten out. But it was obvious that all of them were injured—some seriously.

  The noise of the crash and the explosion that followed attracted hundreds of people right away. Many were protesters from the night before, and some of these people were armed. It was clear, even from above, that their anger had turned 180 degrees and now saw the North Americans, and not the Caracas cops, as the enemy. By the time Autry overflew the copter the first time, it was surrounded by a mob of angry, armed civilians.

  Autry felt his breath catch in his throat. One word flashed through his mind: Mogadishu.

  The nightmare of anyone connected to the Nightstalkers family.

  Autry couldn’t let it happened again.

  He brought his copter down to treetop level and buzzed the length of the street where the crash had happened. This sent a few people scattering, but not many. The protesters were veterans of street battles for the past week, at least—a copter buzzing them like some big bug was no big deal.

  Still, Autry turned the copter around and tried again, but even as he passed over the stricken copter a second time, he could see the mob getting closer to the wreck and the injured men on the ground.

  What could he do? Fire on a crowd of Venezuelan citizens? There was no way he was going to allow his men to be torn apart by the mob.

  As these thoughts were rocketing through his mind, he saw that one of the other unit copters had turned around and was coming back. It was a Special K troop truck. He could see the weapons of the troopers onboard sticking out of every opening—but they were holding their fire too. Like Autry, they were at a loss as to what to do.

  The Special K joined Autry in buzzing the crowd. The sight of two helicopters was a bit more intimidating, but not much more. All the noise, all the posturing only seemed to be delaying but not stopping the crowd from closing in on the wounded gunship crew.

  Autry opened his radio link. He was soon talking to the pilots of the Special K. The pilot asked him: “Should we shoot our way in?”

  Autry hesitated. He just couldn’t give the order; but again, he could not leave his men to die. He keyed the mike to tell the Special K to prepare to open fire, at the same time yelling back to his own guys to get ready on their weapons.

  The crowd was right up on the crew of the stricken helicopter. Some were armed with pieces of wood, some had pipes. Some had guns.

  Autry buzzed the crowd a
gain, but it seemed to have little effect. He tried letting off a barrage from his front gun’s dwindling ammunition supply, impacting high on a wall near the crash site. It stopped the crowd from advancing, but only for a few seconds. Then they started surging forward again.

  Then the strangest thing happened. A gang of people barged their way through the crowd. These people, maybe a hundred in number, were not dressed like the others. There were wearing odd hats and colored shawls.

  They quickly ringed the stricken helicopter as if it was going to be their pleasure to kill the wounded crew. But then, the big surprise: the people in the weird hats and the colorful shawls turned on the crowd itself, linked arms and stopped them in their tracks. Some of the strangers began signaling to Autry and the Special K pilots to come down and pick up the wounded crewmen.

  Who were these people? Autry couldn’t tell, and at the moment, he didn’t care. He dropped his copter down through the smoky air, landing on the street with a thump. His guys were quickly out of the aircraft; some with weapons ready, others picking up the three wounded crewmen on one side. Meanwhile, the Special K came down on the other side of the copter and its crew picked up the three wounded guys there.

  Autry had his M-16 short stock sticking out the window all this time, covering the flank. He got a fair look at the group of strangers that had so unexpectedly helped them out. Their backs were to him, and only the occasional glimpse as one looked over his shoulder gave him a clue as to their identity.

  They had darker skin than the others as well as different clothes. From the look of the people in the mob who were still surging forward in places, it was clear that they didn’t want to tangle with these unexpected Good Samaritans.

  It was total confusion for about thirty seconds. Finally Autry’s guys got the three wounded crewmen on his copter; the other three had been loaded onto the Special K as well.

  Before he even thought about it, Autry pulled up on the controls and the copter went straight up at full power, shuddering down to its last rivet.

  Only then, when they were finally airborne, did the people who’d helped them turn around and he could see their faces clearly.

  Indians.

  There was no doubt about it. It was a group of indigenous people, in Caracas, maybe for market day, that had not only saved the downed gunship’s crew, but had prevented a massacre by North Americans of South Americans.

  But which Indians were these? The people XBat had freed back at Area 13? Or their friends, the Acupa? Or the Indians who’d witnessed the death of the supercrack king Pablo? All of them? None of them? Did those people even come into the cities?

  Autry didn’t know.

  And again, at the moment he didn’t care. He didn’t even bother to look at his watch this time.

  He just kept flying straight up, as fast as he could, rotor blades pointed toward heaven.

  CHAPTER 17

  CAPTAIN JUMBO ELIOT HAD BEEN GOING IN CIRCLES for forty-eight hours.

  Cruising twenty miles off the coast of Venezuela, he’d been waiting for XBat to return. Even though he hadn’t heard from the Special Ops unit since they had left the Lexington two days earlier, Eliot’s last order from the CIA had been blunt and simple: As no other assets were available, he was to stay on station and be prepared to recover rotary aircraft. And that’s exactly what Eliot had been doing: circling endlessly and waiting…

  Two hours earlier that morning, everything had changed. That’s when a lone Killer Egg had banged aboard the ship, flying in low and taking everyone by surprise. Behind the controls was the officer named Mungo, a guy Eliot knew only from the brawl he’d been involved in with the Superstar spy before the unit dropped him off in Cuba.

  Mungo had somehow found the Lex coming out of its latest 360-degree turn, just over the horizon from Caracas. He had just fumes in his gas tanks and no ammunition in his guns when he landed. No sooner was he down though, when he scrounged the last few gallons of aviation gas onboard, as well as some ammunition taken from XBat’s old copters before they were dumped over the side. Then he took off again.

  In the few minutes he was onboard, Mungo told Eliot as much of the Area 14 saga as he could, including the diplomat Owens’ report that the Venezuelans had declared war on the United States. Then the copter pilot made a bold request: He asked Eliot to bring the old Navy ship even closer to the Venezuelan coastline. Why? Because the rest of XBat would be trying to get out of the country soon, and they would all be low on gas too.

  Eliot agreed, using one of the fog banks drifting down from the notorious Enola Shallows to cover his big ship’s approach. He stopped three miles off the coast, just outside the international limit, and began circling again. Eliot waited on the bridge, eyes looking south, expecting to see a gaggle of black shapes coming over the horizon at any minute. But as the daylight grew, so did his fears that all this was an exercise in frustration.

  Maybe XBat wasn’t coming back.

  Things got hairier about thirty minutes after the Lex reached its new station. No sooner had the ship started circling again when four Venezuelan Air Force MiGs showed up. They started off by flying high overhead, but on five occasions, two came down very low, in obvious attack profiles, and loudly buzzed the ship. It was ear-splitting and nerve-rattling every time, but Eliot held his position, keeping his men up on the deck and trying to maintain the illusion that the Lexington was something more than just an old floating museum.

  The cavalry finally arrived around 0800 hours. It came in the form of four F-15s of the Texas National Guard. Called to action by SOC, they’d tanked up aerially five times, just to get there. As soon as the four U.S. aircraft began circling the Lex, the VAF MiGs went away.

  A few minutes after that, XBat finally showed up.

  ONE OF ELIOT’S BRIDGE OFFICERS PUT IT BEST. ON spotting the bedraggled copter unit’s approach, the officer said, “Haven’t we seen this movie twice already?”

  He was right. Once again, just about all of the copters were trailing smoke or flames. Some were shot up, some were having mechanical failures, others were sputtering due to bottomed-out fuel reserves—just like the last two times the secret unit had landed aboard the Lex. If possible, these returning XBat copters, new when they had left the ship just a few days before, looked worse than the unit’s old copters that had been thrown over the side.

  One thing was clear though: Had Eliot not pulled the venerable carrier closer to the coastline, all of the copters would have wound up in the drink.

  Still directing things from the bridge, Eliot was ready for the copters this time. He’d had his fire teams suited up and waiting, with the deck itself covered in the last of the ship’s fire-suppression foam. The rest of the crew was standing by as well, ready to help with the wounded if needed.

  The entire copter unit slammed onto the deck almost simultaneously, sending up sprays of the sudsy fireproof foam. Troopers began falling out of the copters right away. Some celebrated like kids on the last day of school, slipping on the wet deck, overjoyed to have made it back alive. Others looked like they were still in a state of shock, not believing that the hell of Venezuela was actually behind them.

  One copter was carrying three civilians; Eliot knew they were Owens the diplomat and his family. They were quickly taken below. This copter was also carrying the pilot named Zucker. When Eliot’s men first lifted his stretcher off the Black Hawk, the Navy captain was sure the man was dead. His uniform was covered with blood; so was his face and hair. Yet the wounded pilot was awake and moving as the sailors rushed him to the sick bay below.

  No sooner had the last copter banged aboard when Eliot ordered the Lex to turn about and exit the area at full speed. Then he left the bridge, intent on getting down to the flight deck to greet the returning heroes. Just as he was going down the bridge ladder, though, one of his communications guys handed him a message. Transmitted from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the number of codes and time stamps on its prefix indicated the message had made m
any stops before reaching the e-mail box of the Lexington. Still, it was only about thirty minutes old.

  It had come from an extremely modest diplomatic channel within the Venezuelan government, the same place, Eliot would learn later, that the low-key declaration of war had originated. Eliot read over the message—and then laughed for what seemed like the first time in years. Yet, weird as it seemed, he knew the scrap of paper was actually a historical document. Message in hand, he resumed his climb down to the deck.

  He arrived just as Autry was climbing out of his own beat-up copter. The XBat CO quickly walked up and down the deck, taking a head count of his men. While no one in the unit had been killed in the operation, several besides Zucker were seriously wounded, including the crew of the Black Hawk that had crashed into the street in Caracas. But the Lex’s men were already carrying the injured troopers below.

  Autry and Eliot greeted each other warmly.

  “How fast can this ship go north?” Autry asked the carrier’s captain. “And if I gave you a million dollars could you make it go faster?”

  “We’re at full speed now,” Eliot replied. “I don’t think we’ve gone this fast since World War Two.”

  They looked up and saw the F-15s still above them. “And those guys?” Autry added. “I’ll have to buy them a few kegs of beer, I guess.”

  “Getting rescued can be an expensive thing these days,” Eliot chided him. He handed Autry the message he’d just received. “This might brighten your day, though.”

  Autry read the message—and he laughed too. Its topic was Venezuela’s low-level declaration of war on the United States just two days before. But this message referred to the previous one as a “misunderstanding in communications and translation,” and apologized to the U.S. government for any confusion. It also called for U.S. and Venezuelan diplomats to get together as soon as possible to discuss “subjects of mutual interest.”