Operation Southern Cross - 02

by Jack Shane

  “In other words?” Autry asked Eliot.

  The Navy officer smiled broadly. “I think what they’re trying to say is, ‘We surrender…’”

  ONCE ALL THE WOUNDED WERE SECURED BELOW FOR treatment, any XBat trooper who could still walk filed down to the mess hall for his first real meal in days.

  Autry, McCune, Eliot and Mungo were there, sitting with the men, Mungo quietly telling them about his travels after he buzzed the CaracCo oil plant. The “unimportant” target he’d blindly fired on turned out to be an electrical substation for the facility. And while Mungo’s attack had little effect on CaracCo’s refining process, it did knock out about 90 percent of the plant’s exterior lighting. Once the glare of all those halogen lights was gone, Mungo found it easy to slip away from the too-high, too-fast Venezuelan jet fighters.

  Or at least that was his story.

  About halfway through the feast of warmed-up MREs and the ship’s abysmal coffee, one of Eliot’s guys walked in and handed another message to the ship’s captain. It was a news story picked up by the ship’s communication room. It contained a single paragraph, issued by the Venezuelan interior ministry. It stated that a volcano in the midsection of the country had displayed some seismic activity shortly before dawn that day. This activity had since settled down; however, the Venezuelan government would not be allowing any foreign seismologists to visit the scene anytime soon, due to “security concerns.”

  “I guess the SBI finally got wise to what happened at Area 14,” Autry said, after Eliot had passed around the document. “Had to explain that big hole in the ground some way.”

  McCune was chugging a cup of the ship’s awful coffee like it was whiskey.

  “Makes you wonder, though,” he said, still not quite believing they’d all made it out alive. “We took care of Area 13 and Area 14. But what the hell is happening at Area 12 or Area 15? Or Area 1, 7 or 20? Who knows how many places like that those guys are building?”

  Autry poured the rest of his muddy coffee into McCune’s cup. “I refuse to think about that right now,” he told the young officer.

  With that, Autry got up and bid them all a good night. Even though it was barely 10 A.M., he was going below to get some sleep.

  That was the plan anyway. Instead, when he got to his cabin he took out a pen and paper pad he’d stashed earlier and started writing. Not his report on what had just happened in Venezuela, or a line-by-line list of all the things wrong with XBat’s new choppers. Instead, he was writing a letter to his wife.

  It was something he would ask her to read before they said one word at their reunion, and he thought it was a good idea at first, a great way to break the ice. But no sooner had he put pen to paper when he realized writing the letter would probably be the hardest thing he’d done in the past 5 days.

  He didn’t know where to begin, never mind how to end it. His first attempt started with a list of all the bad things he’d done during their fourteen-year marriage, some of which she knew about, some she didn’t. He was about halfway through this when he wised up, tore the letter to shreds and threw it out a porthole, one piece at a time, insuring that no one would ever be able to reconstruct it again. That was definitely not the way to go.

  His second attempt came from the opposite angle. He began with a list of all the good times they’d shared in those dozen-plus years, the tent poles of their marriage. But when he really thought about it, he didn’t have enough stuff to hold up a pup tent. Their wedding day was like something from a storybook—except he was late getting to the church because he’d gotten drunk with his copter buddies the night before. Their honeymoon was tropical bliss on Maui—until he cut it short to volunteer for a hush-hush mission to Chechnya. The list got even worse after that.

  It was his third attempt at the letter that held the most promise. It went further back in the time machine to their first date. It was a hamburger joint in Atlanta. He was just starting ROTC; she was still a senior in high school. They’d known each other for years, but this had been their first official romantic meeting. Autry could remember exactly what she wore that night, what they talked about, even where they sat. It was a special night in his life, before all the top-secret hero bullshit started, and was special to her too, as this was the place where she wanted them to meet.

  This memory was what he wound up writing about—and even after ten pages, he was still going strong. Around page thirteen, though, he finally put his head down on the desk, just for a rest, and quickly fell asleep. In the dream that resulted, his wife liked his letter so much, she turned it into a best-selling book and then a movie.

  Autry would never really know just how long he slept like this, pen still in hand, head on the love letter, his last smidgen of gum hanging halfway out of his mouth. But he knew what woke him up: the sway of the big carrier suddenly turning. It was so dramatic, it startled him back to reality.

  He rubbed his eyes and stuck his head out the porthole. The sun was not as high above him as it should have been by now—that is, if they were heading back to the United States. Actually, it was behind them.

  This meant only one thing: The Lexington was no longer steaming north.

  Instead, it was most definitely going south.

  AUTRY RAN AT TOP SPEED BACK UP TO THE FLIGHT deck, clunking his knees against bulkheads, whacking his shoulders on doorways. When he got to the top, sitting right next to the control island was the last thing he wanted to see.

  Weir’s all-black Textron helicopter.

  Son of a bitch.

  Not again.

  Weir met him coming out of the hatch. He’d been waiting for Autry to arrive.

  “I’m not going,” Autry told him firmly. “I’m not going. My men aren’t going. You might as well turn the ship around again, because if you don’t we’re just flying off—like we were promised we could do. And if you want to shoot us down or lock us up, that’s fine with me. But wherever it is you want us to go this time, we just ain’t going.”

  Weir wasn’t hearing it, though. “You have to go, Bobby,” he told Autry.

  But Autry was adamant. “No more ‘have to go,’” he said. “No more ‘want to go.’ I’ll resign my commission. I’ll close down the unit. My guys are in no shape to do anything else but sleep for about a week. And look at those copters. Swiss cheese doesn’t even begin to describe them.”

  But Weir was just shaking his head. “There’s just no choice in this one,” he said. “They’ll hang us all if you don’t go.”

  “How so?” Autry pleaded with him.

  “Because, very much on the record, we are about to be in shooting situations in no less than five spots around the world,” the agent said. “Just about all of them made infinitely worse by the Galaxy Net being down.”

  “But there’s nothing we can do about that,” Autry spit back. “My men are depleted. Our equipment is in a shambles. None of us has slept in a week—and we just fought an entire war on our own. So why do we have to go?”

  “Because they’ve finally ID’d some people who’ve been fucking with the Galaxy Net,” Weir answered him bluntly, quickly updating him on the killer laser-beam situation. “And not only that, they’ve discovered where they’ve been doing it. And at this moment, you and your men are the closest Special Ops unit to this location. You’re the only ones who can do something about it right away. And right away is when it has to happen.”

  This stopped Autry in mid-breath, but only for a moment. “This killer laser can’t possibly be in Venezuela,” he declared.

  Weir was shaking his head. “You’re right. Like I said, we now know where it is—and it isn’t in South America. Damn close though…”

  “Well, where the hell is it then?” Autry demanded.

  Weir held up a computer-generated map of the South Atlantic and pointed to a pair of tiny specks at the bottom of the chart.

  Autry had to squint to read the small print.

  “‘The Falkland Islands?’” Autry roared. “You’ve go
t to be kidding me. You want us to fly all the way down there?”

  “How many times do I have to tell you that we are stretched very thin everywhere,” Weir replied. “Special Ops. Regular military. Reserves. Everyone is someplace else. There is no one else anywhere near here that can do this job. And to gear up someone—like the 82nd or whoever—and fly them down, will just take too freaking long. Not to mention the security disaster if word of what they were up to leaked out.

  “Plus, when it comes to all these other trouble spots around the world, at least three could break out inside the next twelve hours—and I mean missile-launching situations. They need the Galaxy Net up and running. They need their eyes and ears back—or it will be catastrophic. So, it’s you guys, again.”

  “But wait a minute,” Autry said. “Aren’t those islands still British? Don’t they have any soldiers down there?”

  “Sometimes they do,” Weir replied. “But they only go down there on six-month deployments. Six on, six off. They’re due to go back in five weeks. Whoever is doing this thing with the laser knew the Falklands would be the perfect place to deploy. Not only is it the right spot to pounce on these satellites as they are going overhead in their polar orbits, they also must have known that there would be no British soldiers down there to interfere. And those islands are so thinly populated, none of the locals down there has any idea what’s going on either.”

  Autry looked at the map again. They were a very long way away from the two tiny islands where England and Argentina fought one of the strangest wars in history back in 1982. The islands were several hundred miles off the southern tip of Argentina and not that far from the South Pole itself. Meanwhile, as far as Autry could tell, the Lexington was now just in sight of the coast of French Guiana.

  “But how can we possibly do it?” he said to Weir. “We’re still a thousand miles away—or even more. We don’t have any gas left. And there’s none onboard this ship. No ammo either.”

  “It will be a situation of daisy chaining you along with aerial refuelings and an onboard ship landing,” Weir told him. “I think we can get you down there in about eight to ten events—and that means just 12 hours.”

  But Autry continued protesting.

  “You’re asking us to cross an entire ocean,” he said. “And I mean lengthwise. In bad weather, doing in-flight refuelings and landing on ships not fixed up to handle us? How can you expect us to do all that?”

  “Because you’ve done it before,” Weir answered simply.

  Autry was about to tear into the CIA agent again when he stopped himself. Weir was right. That’s exactly how the unit crossed the Pacific to get to North Korea during that nightmare mission. Autry alone had done more than a dozen in-flight refuelings to get from the United States to the trouble zone, and he’d set down on a very unprepared U.S. Navy supply ship as well.

  They had done it before—and that meant he had no argument against it.

  He looked at his watch. It was less than 48 hours before he was supposed to meet his wife. He cursed himself now for writing the letter to her. Cursed himself for thinking that he’d ever get back in time to see her.

  McCune had been right all along.

  They were never going home.

  THE LEXINGTON WOULD HAVE KEPT GOING UNTIL ALL its engines burned out. As it was, its first power plant started to go four hours and almost a hundred miles after turning south under orders directly from the National Security Council. There was no doubt the old ship was slowly dying. Lights, air purifiers, water heaters, even some safety systems were being shut down, all in an effort to conserve power and stretch what little fuel they had left. By the time they reached the midway point off the coast of French Guiana, the second of the four engines had burned out, dying an oily, smoky death. But Eliot continued pushing the ship full speed ahead.

  The fuel helicopters from Guiana arrived around 1500 hours, six hours after the Lex had turned around—and two hours late. The helicopters were massive Super Frélon 160s, relics of the French navy. On board each were two rubber fuel bladders filled with 250 gallons of aviation gas. The French crewmen simply unloaded their cargo, along with two field pump stations and departed with hardly a word.

  A thousand gallons of fuel sounded like a lot of gas, but a fully loaded Black Hawk could only fly 450 miles before it needed fuel again. And that was under the best of conditions. As the hastily prepared plan called for it now, XBat had to fly almost 1,500 miles, most of it over water, and at least the last third of the way in some of the roughest weather on Earth: over the South Atlantic Ocean. The fuel from the French copters would only be enough to get them airborne off the Lex. From there, they would have to fly out to a point a hundred miles off the Brazilian coast, where they would meet up with their so-called aerial replenishment assets, tanker planes that would be carrying fuel for the next leg of their journey.

  And if the weather was bad, or the tankers were late, or if they didn’t show up at all…

  Then Autry and his men would all be wishing they were back in the jungles of Venezuela.

  ONLY FIVE COPTERS WERE GOING.

  This was Autry’s one and only act of official defiance. It was too dangerous an operation for the entire unit to go, all the risks, the danger, multiplied by nine. No, not when his men were half dead already.

  So five were going and they would all be Black Hawks—three DAP gunships and two troop-carrying Special Ks. This meant twenty-four XBat troopers would be doing the mission in all, less than half their present number including wounded.

  Once he received word of the mission, which someone had dubbed Operation Southern Cross, Autry gathered all his able men together and explained the situation as Weir had told it to him. Then Autry asked for volunteers. Everyone raised his hand. Autry underscored the danger they would be facing, and asked for volunteers again. Still, every hand went up.

  That’s when he had to start making executive decisions. He immediately dismissed every trooper who was married. That got the number down to thirty-three. Then he took out the four enlisted guys in XBat who were over forty. At twenty-nine guys, he told the five youngest troops to fall out.

  Many of those who remained were still in their green, slimy jungle camos and still had the green camo paint all over them; they would not even have time to clean up. Each one collected a cup of the ship’s putrid coffee and was told to report to the deck to reboard their copters.

  Meanwhile, Autry had one last meeting with Weir, just inside the hatch leading out to the flight deck. The CIA agent gave him what was called the mission report. It held the details of what the Agency and the National Security Council expected XBat to do once it reached the Falklands, and included the location of further fuel stores and the most likely places where the bad guys had their killer laser set up. It also detailed the procedure they’d use just to get down there.

  Weir suggested Autry bone up on the report during the flight down, then handed it to him. Usually these types of documents went on forever. Yet this one was exactly two pages long.

  Autry groaned when he saw this. This thing was even more of a shoestring than he thought.

  As he was leaving, Weir had one more piece of news for him. Intelligence the CIA had picked up somehow indicated that once XBat reached their goal, the reception from the killer laser’s perpetrators would probably not be a friendly one.

  “You might be looking at an opposed landing,” Weir told him. “That’s not confirmed, but I suggest you be prepared for anything.”

  IT WAS NOW LATE AFTERNOON. THE MISSION WAS ALREADY four hours behind schedule.

  The five copters were lined up on the deck, all of them bearing the familiar gray splotches of paint and metal chips that the Lex’s crew had perfected as patching material. Overhead, it was getting cloudy and starting to rain. The seas were getting a bit rough too.

  Autry visited every copter and made sure its gunners and troopers knew what they were about to do. Then, as he was stepping into his own DAP, Mungo and McCune
walked by.

  In all earnestness, McCune said to him: “You’re still married, aren’t you, Colonel? Why don’t you let us do this one ourselves?”

  Autry was taken back by the comment. Bone-tired, dirty, unprepared—he would have given anything to pass this one up. But there was no way he would let his guys go without him.

  Still, it was McCune’s question that really threw him. Was he still married?

  “Are you trying to get rid of me, Captain McCune?” he finally replied in his best no-nonsense manner.

  McCune got the hint. He saluted Autry and then ran down to his own DAP gunship. That left Autry and Mungo alone, in an awkward moment.

  “Did you pack your rod and reel, Captain?” he asked Mungo, probably the first thing he’d ever said to the troubled officer that was unrelated to a mission. “I hear they have salmon as big as tuna down in the Falklands.”

  Mungo just shrugged and put on his crash helmet.

  “I wouldn’t know about that, Colonel,” he said, a buzz killer to the end. “I’ve never been fishing in my life.”

  THEY TOOK OFF AT 0450 HOURS. NONE OF THE FIVE copters left with a full fuel tank. While the Lex’s crew was getting very good at putting gas in XBat’s aircraft, with the carrier’s engines burning out and the growing bad weather, what were calm conditions at full speed ahead got a little rough on the carrier at 50 percent power. Some fuel was spilled during the transfer operation; some refused to come out of the French-made bladders at all. As it turned out, the five copters took off with about two-thirds of the maximum operation fuel load in each. This meant if the tankers were just ten minutes late, XBat’s copters would start going down.

  Once above the low-level clouds, they found themselves flying into the moonless night. Autry was astonished by the number of stars overhead. The inky ceiling above them was flooded with celestial formations. Autry had flown all over the world, but he’d never seen the sky look quite like this.