Operation Southern Cross - 02

by Jack Shane

  But at that moment, when Autry might had tended to agree, he heard a beautiful sound—above the sporadic gunfire, above the cry of the brisk wind, above the sound of his own copter’s engine, coughing slightly as the last of its fuel began to drain down.

  Above all this, he heard the sound of another helicopter.

  It was Mungo.

  He flew in from the west, apparently unaware that a fierce battle was going on around the mountain.

  The gunmen saw him and started firing at him right away, but undaunted or uncaring, Mungo circled the summit of Mount Usborne once and then came in for a snowblown, windy landing.

  Autry was ready to rip into him. Landing in a hot LZ was not the thing to do in this combat situation—that’s why McCune wound up on the next mountain over. But as soon as Mungo bounded out the copter’s door, he beat Autry to the punch.

  “I’ve found it,” he told the XBat CO excitedly.

  “Found what?” Autry asked him in exasperation.

  “The killer laser,” Mungo replied. “I know where it is. We were looking on the wrong island.”

  Autry looked back at him like he was from another planet. In the midst of the murderous cold and the fierce firefight, he’d forgotten about the fucking laser.

  “Are you sure?” he asked Mungo.

  Mungo looked his straight in the eye. He said, “Colonel, I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.”

  They put together a quick and imperfect plan. Mungo had his men get off his copter and add their weapons to the firefight. Their addition was a welcome shot in the arm for the mountain’s defenders. Mungo’s guys had boxes of ammunition with them, as well as a SR-60 “Streetsweeper,” essentially a machine gun that fired small hand grenades. This upped XBat’s firepower significantly.

  Autry told all his men to conserve their ammo and hold the position.

  Then he climbed aboard Mungo’s copter and the two of them went off to find the killer laser.

  THERE WAS ANOTHER RELATIVELY TALL HILL IN THE Falklands.

  At 2295 feet high, it was just five feet shorter than Mount Usborne. It had a protected south face, which was good because that’s the direction most of the storms in the Falklands seemed to blow. It was also in a place that was even more isolated than Usborne, if that was possible.

  It was called Mount Adam; it was located on West Falkland, the lonelier of the two main islands. And it was here that Mungo claimed to have found the killer laser.

  Autry had questions though. If Mungo found the laser, why didn’t he just take it out as soon as he spotted it? Why did he come to Mount Usborne and report it first?

  Mungo had several answers when Autry put the question to him: He claimed that they’d spotted the laser from such a distance away that he was actually closer to Mount Usborne than he was to the spot where he believed the laser to be. He also didn’t know if the site was heavily defended, so he didn’t want to risk his entire crew by attacking it. Plus, with the radios out, he didn’t want to attack it without the rest of the unit knowing. If the attack failed and they were shot down and killed, no one would ever know what had happened to them.

  By the time Autry heard all three explanations, he didn’t know which one to believe. Which was why Autry had insisted on going back with Mungo. If this was going to be another one of the pilot’s famous disappearing acts, Autry was going along for the ride.

  They were soon across Falkland Sound and flying above West Falkland Island. One thing Mungo said proved true: The place was even more barren than East Falkland.

  They flew about fifteen miles inland, soon getting Mount Adam in their sights. But then Mungo did something strange. They were about ten miles away from the tall bump on the landscape when he started to push the copter toward the ground. Before Autry could say anything, Mungo had put them in a landing profile.

  “What’s the reason for this, Captain?” Autry asked him harshly.

  Mungo just kept his eyes on the mountain in the distance. “Bear with me, Colonel,” he replied. “It will all make sense soon.”

  It was at that moment that Autry really questioned what the hell he was doing out here. Mungo was a weirdo. They were in such an isolated place, Mungo could easily shoot him here, and then take off for places unknown, finally making the getaway that everyone was always suspecting him of cooking up.

  As these paranoid thoughts were going through Autry’s weary head, Mungo scrambled out of the copter, stepping down into the foot-high snow. He still had his helmet on, and after taking two steps away from the copter’s door, activated his night-vision goggles via a long extension cord stretching out of the cockpit. Autry was totally confused at this point. NightVision technology was moot in the daytime. So what was Mungo up to?

  It took a few seconds, but then Mungo started shouting to Autry, who was still sitting inside the copter.

  “There it is!” he yelled. “I can see it!”

  Autry just shook his head, and seriously considered whether he was in dereliction of duty for leaving his men behind to go on this ghost chase. One thing Weir’s mission report clearly stated was that they would not be able to see the killer laser while it was in operation. It was just not that kind of laser.

  But Mungo was insistent. So Autry climbed out of the copter and walked over to where the pilot was standing. He looked in the direction of Mount Adam, but saw only a clear blue sky that was slowly going to dusk.

  “I don’t see anything,” he told Mungo sternly.

  “That’s because you’re not wearing NVGs,” Mungo replied.

  Without asking, Mungo took off the NVG helmet and jammed it onto Autry’s head. Autry was about to throttle the man, when suddenly he saw it too.

  It defied logic, but even though it was daylight, with the NVG turned on, he could see a long, thin green beam of illumination going up into the sky.

  He couldn’t believe it. Mungo was right: He’d found the killer laser.

  TWO MINUTES LATER, THEY WERE IN THE AIR AGAIN.

  This was no time to be subtle. They flew over the area where they could see the laser beam emanating from. There was more than a tent up here. There was a small wooden hut ringed by a high rock wall and some shrubbery applied on top to cover it all. This hut, though looking like nothing more than a glorified ice-fishing shack, had several satellite dishes on its roof.

  There were gunmen here too. Clothed in the same arctic wear as their colleagues on East Falkland, they started shooting at the Black Hawk right away. Autry and Mungo didn’t hesitate: they started shooting back.

  The DAP had no missiles, just a few cannon shells. It had plenty of 50-caliber ammunition, but only the nose-mounted guns were loaded. With Mungo at the controls, they did several strafing runs, walking gunfire up the side of the mountain, and bouncing a few shells off the stone-enclosed hut itself.

  Working the copter’s weapons together, Autry and Mungo managed to suppress all the gunfire after just three passes. But then a warning light began blinking and an emergency buzzer started crying at the same time. Autry looked down at the copter’s fuel gauge and swore. Now they were out of gas.

  Mungo showed some real brilliance in the next few seconds. He brought the copter down on a ledge about two hundred feet below the hut. It was a controlled crash, but Autry suffered nothing more than a bump on his helmet on landing.

  They both fell out of the copter and looked up at the hut above them. There was a long, gradual slope leading up to it, with the bodies of many gunmen strung out along it. Autry and Mungo checked their ammo magazine loads. They had no idea if they had killed all the gunmen, but they had to go up the mountain as quickly as they could. Autry was carrying a large M-60 machine gun. Mungo had an M-16 and a pistol. A lot of firepower, but would it be enough? They would soon find out.

  They started to climb. Mungo was amazingly nimble of foot, but Autry kept slipping and sliding backward. Every time he stumbled, he left some of his uniform’s green jungle slime on the cold Falklands ground.

&n
bsp; They passed one gunman who had been seriously wounded in their strafing run. Mungo casually put a bullet in his head. Another wounded gunman tried to fire his weapon in their direction. Mungo also shot him to death. Both of these men were wearing red bandanas under their hoods.

  Once they were within a hundred feet of the hut, two more gunmen suddenly appeared from behind some high rocks. Autry raised his gun to fire but before he could think about it, the gunmen fired at him. Three shots cracked in the cold air. All three hit, not on his body, but on his gun. The big M-60 shattered in his hands; the impact knocked Autry back ten feet, throwing him to the ground.

  He hit a snowbank, half conscious, leaving a great green splotch on the icy ground. He fell awkwardly, twisted on top of his left arm. His double-dial watch wound up right in front of his eyes. Groggy and momentarily out of it, he couldn’t help but look at the two time displays. The local time told him that, incredibly, not even a week had gone by since the first bombs landed on Pablo the supercrack king’s house.

  The other dial delivered the bad news: he had less than twenty hours to get back to Atlanta to meet his wife, impossible now. Autry just laid his head back down in the snow and closed his eyes. He’d had it.

  Mungo continued on alone. He was within twenty feet of the summit when he saw the killer laser apparatus for the first time. Just as the CIA had predicted, it was no bigger than a backyard telescope. Its sodium-crystal power supply was housed in nothing more elaborate than a plastic milk crate. A spaghetti strand of wire connected the two, but overall, it appeared the laser was something somebody had put together in his garage.

  Mungo moved to within ten feet of the equipment. Suddenly, off to his right, a gunman stood up, as if looking for Mungo somewhere farther down the hill. The gunman was bundled up, as they all were, in the heavy-weather arctic gear, but he too was wearing a red bandana. Mungo fired at him, striking him twice in his parka’s hood, both bullets passing through to hit the man in the head. He fell over and rolled down the hill, spewing his blood on the pristine snow all the way down.

  It was only then that the man actually operating the laser realized Mungo was but a stone’s throw away from him. Why he was taken completely by surprise was a mystery; Mungo and Autry had just strafed the area minutes before, and there had been some gunplay during their climb up the hill. Possibly a key satellite in the Galaxy Net system was passing overhead? One that just had to be hit?

  Mungo didn’t know, and at the moment he didn’t care. Dressed in the heavy arctic gear, with a face mask and sunglasses, the man behind the killer laser turned and fired twice at Mungo with a high-powered pistol. Mungo never bothered to duck; he immediately returned fire with his M-16. Three bullets—all misses. The man fired at him again, the bullet whizzed by Mungo’s ear. Mungo pulled his trigger again…but nothing happened. His M-16 was empty.

  Now the man fired six shots at Mungo. Mungo saw the puffs of smoke, heard the crack of the bullets leaving the pistol’s barrel. He was certain he’d taken his last breath. But every bullet missed him. The man’s heavy arctic gear had prevented him from aiming properly.

  Now Mungo was furious. He pulled out his pistol and rushed up the last ten feet to the mountain top.

  That’s when the man got his first good look at Mungo’s face and cried, “You?”

  In that moment of astonishment, Mungo raised his pistol and fired five shots into the man. The backfire knocked Mungo on his ass, the ground beneath his feet was so slippery. But the man was dead before he hit the ice.

  Mungo crawled the last few feet to the top of the mountain. He kicked the laser gun over, shattering it on the hard ice. Then Mungo reached the man’s body and ripped open his heavy arctic jacket, expecting to expose another weapon. A slew of ID cards came tumbling out instead.

  There were many of them, but only one seemed to be authentic—and it was a big surprise. The man was not a member of the Chinese secret service, the Russian FSB or North Korean intelligence. In fact, though he had diplomatic passes from many countries on him, it didn’t appear he belonged to any governmental agency at all.

  Instead, according to the ID card, he was an employee.

  Of the company that manufactured the Galaxy Net.

  AUTRY WAS KNOCKED OUT OF HIS STUPOR BY MUNGO slapping him hard across his face.

  “Wake up, Colonel!” Mungo was screaming at him. “You’ve got to see this!”

  Somehow Autry gained his senses and realized Mungo was sitting beside him, and next to him was a very bloody corpse, wrapped in arctic gear.

  “What is this?” Autry cried, kicking himself away from the corpse. “Who is he?”

  Mungo dramatically pulled the body’s hood back.

  It was the spy the CIA called Superstar.

  Autry couldn’t believe it.

  “What the fuck is he doing here?” he roared.

  “I knew he was dirty from the beginning,” Mungo said. “This guy wasn’t a super spy, as much as he was a spy for hire. They said he was good at disguises, remember? Well, he fooled those assholes at the CIA, thinking he was something special, when all he was probably doing was taking money from the Galaxy Net’s manufacturer to dump their system, so they could sell the United States another one.”

  Autry just stared back at Mungo. Everything around him seemed so unreal except, strangely, Mungo’s explanation of why they found the super spy up here on the lonely mountain on very lonely West Falkland Island.

  Finally Autry was able to speak. “With everything else going on, we have to worry about this stuff too?” he said wearily. “What would you call it? Not just industrial espionage, but industrial combat?”

  Mungo just shook his head, and for the first time ever, Autry actually saw the man smile. It was a grin of satisfaction and vindication.

  “Welcome to the twenty-first century, Colonel,” was all he said.

  CHAPTER 18

  BOBBY AUTRY’S LONG RIDE HOME COMMENCED THREE hours later.

  He was awakened from a deep sleep in the police barracks at Port Stanley, the only sizable settlement on the Falkland Islands.

  He and Mungo had been picked up by two locals in a Sno-Cat just minutes after the gun battle on Mount Adam. The rest of the unit had been rescued by local constables, men who rode in trucks specially made for the harsh terrain. They’d been alerted by the CIA to be on the lookout for some U.S. soldiers practicing war games in the barren reaches of East Falkland. In the shootout that followed, all of the red bandana gunmen were either killed or, chillingly, they took their own lives.

  Fuel was provided to all the working copters and the XBat troopers were brought to the islands’ capital city. They’d been told that they would be in Stanley for two days, the time it would take to get some USAF C-130 cargo planes to fly down to the Falklands to pick them up along with their copters, and the bodies of Superstar’s mercenary army. Just who these people were—and the Cuban government’s involvement in all this—would have to be cleared up later.

  From XBat’s point of view, though, it was clear that by dropping Superstar off in Cuba, and risking their lives to do it, they’d simply provided a taxi service for the mysterious operative, a way for him to reunite with his posse and begin their trip down to the Falklands.

  Documents found in the stone hut on Mount Adam further indicated that at least some of Superstar’s red-bandana army had been in the Falklands for some time, firing the laser at times with directions left for them. Why Superstar joined them only recently was not known. But with the fleet of spy satellites stabilized again, the Galaxy Net, or what was left of it, was back up and working again.

  After learning this via a radio-phone call from Weir, Autry and the others were offered spare bunks at the police barracks, where they could finally get some rest. Half the troop took advantage of the sudden R & R, the other half headed off to one of Port Stanley’s several pubs to celebrate the end of their mission in a more typical way.

  Autry had opted for sleep, intending to stay in bed unt
il the C-130 recovery planes arrived.

  But now he was being shaken awake.

  Two of the constables and a man in a pilot’s suit were standing in front of him.

  “Are you the guy who has to get back to Atlanta?” the pilot asked him.

  THE NEXT THING AUTRY KNEW, HE WAS WALKING OUT to the small air base located on the edge of Port Stanley.

  There were still crater holes all around the place, leftovers from when the Argentine army had taken over the place and the British Royal Navy sent in its Harrier jump jets to bomb them out of it.

  Out on the runway sat a very unusual aircraft. It was a Lockheed SBJ-100, essentially a business jet that could fly at supersonic speeds. It looked not unlike a Lear business aircraft, except it featured an inverted V attachment to its wings and tail, a device that muted the jet’s sonic booms. The plane was painted in the colors of the U.S. executive branch—red, white and pale blue—like the White House’s own fleet of aircraft.

  Autry climbed aboard to find a second pilot at the controls. While the man who had fetched him strapped into the copilot seat, the pilot told Autry: “We’re doing this as a favor for your friend Gary Weir. He told us you had to get back to the States in a hurry. We can’t work miracles, but we can try.”

  Two minutes later, they were in the air, heading north.

  THE ODYSSEY TOOK AUTRY FROM THE FALKLANDS TO the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, this with four aerial refuelings along the way.

  The top-secret SBJ could not fly over the continental United States, so Autry was put on a Navy plane that carried him to Jacksonville, Florida. From there, he caught an Army Short cargo plane for a flight up to Hunter Airfield, near Savannah. He had no idea how Weir had known about his personal plans, but at this point, heart beating out of his chest, Autry thought he actually had a chance to make the meeting with his wife, now just two hours away. He had two problems though: He was still lugging around a couple pounds of Venezuelan jungle slime, and he needed a new set of clothes.