Cloudburst
Page 33
“Here, let me show you.” The doctor, a neurosurgeon, pulled a pen from his lab coat pocket. “The bullet entered here, just about a centimeter from the trachea. It progressed back through muscle and nerve fiber—no significant damage there—then impacted with this: the third cervical vertebra. Now in a lot of cases that would mean the end, but your man was very lucky. He must participate in some kind of sport to develop his neck muscles to the extent they are.”
“Wrestling,” Maria said. “He coaches at our son’s high school, but I think he gets into the demonstration part of it a little too much sometimes.” She wiped a single tear with the back of her hand, catching it high on the cheek.
“Well, it probably saved his life. That muscle fiber took most of the shock, which slowed the bullet down appreciably. When it struck the vertebra it bounced off, and came back about an inch. Right here.” His pen circled a spot on the chart. “We’re going to go after it in a little while. Our only concern, though, is a big one. There is a bone fragment that chipped off the vertebra and entered the spinal canal. It’s right in with bundles of nerves. The spinal cord at this level is extremely delicate, and fairly inaccessible to us, so we’ll have to just leave the fragment there and hope that it stays put.”
“Is he going to be paralyzed?”
“No, Mrs. Toronassi. There has been no damage to the spinal cord that we can see, but with that bone fragment in there a chance will exist for some time that damage could be done.”
“Which means?”
“Your husband will have to curtail his activities somewhat. The more sedate he is, the better his chances are for a normal life. No wrestling, no more gunplay in dark alleys...”
Art swallowed hard, though not noticeably. “Just the kind of stuff a street agent does, right, Doc?”
The doctor thought it easier to pronounce death to people at times, rather than limitations. “That will have to be looked at. But let’s remember something: He is alive. He is breathing, his brain is fine, and in a week or so he’ll probably walk out of this hospital on his own, God willing.”
Maria nodded, thanked the doctor, then buried her head against Art’s chest, her hands pulled up between her face and his shirtfront.
“Hey, hey. Come on, little lady. He’s going to be okay.” Art waited for the sobs to stop, then for the sniffling. “Here.” He pulled two folded pieces of tissue from a pocket.
“It’s like, I don’t know.” Her tear-streaked face pulled back slightly and looked up to the ceiling. “You always hear about this stuff when your husband’s a cop, but it’s just TV. It’s never really real. He goes away in the morning, and he comes home later, just like a regular job.” Her eyes began to fill again. “But people don’t shoot at other people in a regular job.”
Art guided her head down again, this time sideways to rest against his chest. He was a full twelve inches taller than her and could see clearly into the rest of the lobby. It was filled with agents and cops from everywhere. He caught Frankie’s glance and motioned for her to come over.
“Maria, this is Frankie. She works with Ed and me.”
The women looked alike, though Frankie was an even ten years younger than Maria. “Mrs. Toronassi, why don’t you come with me. We’ll get something to drink, and just talk. Okay?”
They walked off down the hall and disappeared to the right, a roomful of caring eyes looking at their backs.
Art turned away, looking the opposite direction. The flood of emotions was too much. He had ruined a marriage, his own life, and now...
His hand tensed up involuntarily. He looked down at it as it came up closer to his chest. Tears were in his eyes as he tried to open the hand, but couldn’t. Ed, I’m sorry. This didn’t have to happen.
A voice came from behind, but it sounded strange. Very loud, yet far away. He knew it. It was Jerry, but it was strange. The words were stretched out into almost unintelligible lengths, none making complete sense. One side of his body became very warm. Not hot, and not painful, but warm. A kind of moist warmth.
Art tried to turn to greet the voice, but his body became a corkscrew of sorts, spiraling down to the floor, where everything became very dark, and very quiet. Next, it was as black as a dream with no dreamer.
Thunder One
“Half an hour!” Blackjack announced.
Sean noted the time. They would do final checks first, then land. In Cuba. If someone had told him that, he’d have taken any odds against it. Strange was always able to outdo itself, though. Sean had learned that from experience.
The Delta captain leaned forward and scanned the hold from side to side, checking his squad. They were all quiet, spending the last few moments with themselves. Buxton was checking his backup SIG meticulously one final time. The sergeants were all eyes closed, except for Makowski—he had his pocket-size Bible open and was focused on one page. The only Delta member not in some kind of quiet reflective state was Antonelli, which was par for the course. One ear was covered by the headphones of his personal cassette player, his head moving from side to side as he paged through a newer edition Superman from his collection of comics.
Blackjack was semi-hidden in the shadows of the lead Humvee. His eyes were open, Sean could see, and staring ahead at nothing. It was his way.
Sean turned to Anderson, sitting one seat to his left. His upper body was contorting, bringing his neck down into his shoulders. Then his head would rotate halfway to the left, then back to center, then to the right. Graber watched the process repeated twice.
“Limbering exercises?”
Joe was in his own kind of trance, but snapped out instantly at the question, shaking his shoulders and arms loose. “You got it.” He still didn’t face the captain. “I can get into some tight spots sometimes, literally.”
“So you’ve got to wriggle in wherever, right?” Sean asked.
Joe nodded. “Wherever it is, whatever it takes.” He paused and got up, then sat one seat closer to the captain. “Listen, I don’t want you to take this wrong, but have you ever done this before? I don’t mean exactly what you’re going to do in a while, but anything similar?”
“Sure. A couple of times. One time I went in with the forces of another country on a ‘lend-lease’ kind of arrangement. The major did, too.”
“Can you say where?”
“Sure. It was in the papers and even in a few books since it happened. Thailand. There were a bunch of ‘separatist who-knows’. Communist guerrillas they later figured out. Three guys and one girl took over a 707 at the airport in Bangkok. The Thais asked us for assistance with the entry since we’d trained their commandos. Basically we just tossed the flash-bangs and brought up the rear. We nailed them all cold.” Sean’s words ended for a moment. “But we didn’t get there fast enough, at least not for the three folks the bad guys killed before we got in.”
Joe noted sincere regret in the captain’s voice, not the voice box utterings of an automaton he might have expected. “But you did your job?”
“Sure, that’s what the powers that be can claim. But to us any life lost is a loss. We can’t work on the assumption that there will be an acceptable number of casualties, simply because no one can give you a good, moral answer as to what that is. Is one percent okay? What about ten percent, or twenty percent? At what point does ‘success’ become failure? No, Mr. Anderson, we don’t go in thinking that we can lose one or two people. That just doesn’t work.”
“I see.” Joe understood a little better the troops’ motivation for doing what they did, and it wasn’t even close to his preconceived notion. Gung ho might be a description of their determination, but not of their motivation.
“This may be the first real shot we’ve ever had at doing our job,” Sean said. “It would be nice to earn our pay for once.”
Joe, you can be such a thick skull. The civilian felt somehow humbled. His mission was to defeat a machine. Theirs was to defeat men to save men. “What about Iran? Were you there?”
“Yes,” Se
an answered, the memory coming back. It was manageable now. “I was a sergeant back then, a gun-toting rescuer of innocents.” The captain released a wistful sigh. “We all thought it was going to happen, that we were going to go in and snatch those folks out all safe and secure. When everything got fucked up, we cried. Every goddamn one of us whimpered like a baby. Except the major. He dealt with it his way. The rest of us, though, we were hurting. It’s not an easy thing to watch men die because of screwy-ass operational details, none of which we even knew about until after the fact. Hell, we set down at the desert rendezvous and the next thing we knew was we were going to be short choppers. The rest...”
“You know, back there in the States, it was Vietnam all over again. The military fucks up.” Joe leaned forward on his knees.
“Yeah. But you learn from it. We did.” The old memories were part of the past, but at times they still could sting. “What about your end of it, Anderson?”
“You mean have I done this before?”
“Or something similar.”
He was about to go into a tricky situation with some homemade nuclear reactors ready to melt down, but it wasn’t like anything he’d done before. It might turn out to be easier, and though most people would consider it unlikely, it bore less of a devastating potential than Joe’s shining moment. “Something like it, though not up here.”
“Need to know?” Sean asked, sensing the reluctance to discuss whatever it was.
“You know the game,” Joe responded. There were always those who ‘wanted’ to know some bit of restricted information, but very few who had a ‘need’ to know. It was the foundation of the government’s compartmentalized security policy toward information, and it worked. Still... “Let’s just say I’ve dealt with some of our own big guns when things went awry.”
Sean smiled. “I get the picture. Those things can go haywire?”
“They’re mechanical. Things go wrong,” Joe explained, not giving the whole picture. He knew the limit.
Sean went wide-eyed at the thought. A nuclear-tipped ICBM gone wrong! “They must have hushed that up real good.”
“They did.” Joe didn’t say that a local newspaper in the Great Plains had nearly picked up on the real story, and would have, had it not been for some fancy footwork by the DOD. It was just as well. The country, or the world for that matter, didn’t need to know the real story. Neither did the Delta captain.
Sean felt more comfortable with Anderson, even with the knowledge that he, at times, could be a real ass. What counted was ability, and he had that, Sean reasoned, or he wouldn’t be among them. “Guess you’ll earn your pay on this one, too.”
“Just doing my job,” Joe responded. “Like you.”
Nineteen
THINE ENEMY
Thunder One
Blackjack held his SIG up for the troops to see. “I want no mistakes here. No screwups. So watch me close.” He slid the receiver back until it emitted an audible click. “No rounds in the chamber and no magazines inserted.”
“Isn’t that being a little less than careful?” Quimpo asked. “I mean, the Cubans, no matter what anyone says, they’re not our friends.”
“Precisely why we’re doing this.” McAffee released the slide back to forward, giving the pistol its normal shape, and tucked it into the holster high on his thigh. “If there’s any antagonism I want our weapons safed. There will be no reactionaries in this group...on this team. Mr. Anderson, would you please verify that everyone’s weapon is empty and safe?”
Joe made the rounds of the eight team members, two drivers, and the major, taking each weapon in hand personally.
McAffee continued, “The word we have is that the Cubans will cooperate, but keep this in mind. First, we’re only going to be on their soil a short time, God willing, and second, if we do anything to prevent our chance to take that bird down, then we’ve screwed ourselves and a whole lot of innocents.”
Everyone was quiet now. Their weapons were checked and holstered. Soon they would remove them and load the magazines with 9mm frangible ammunition, rounds preferred by counter-terrorist troops who might find themselves firing among tens or hundreds of hostages and needed to avoid ricochets or over-penetration of their intended targets. Special equipment, the latest available, was at their disposal, but the lowest common denominator was each man and his weapon, the SIG in this case. Each man, isolated from his conscience for the duration of the mission, was a killer. It was a sobering and sometimes horrid thought to those not connected with such antiterrorist efforts that men could have such a cold and calculated purpose. To kill. It was their only function. Kill the bad guys. Kill them at the first opportunity so that they would never again be able to wreak terror upon innocents. Kill them. One and all. Dead. Leave no chance of retaliation or retribution, and take no prisoners. If a terrorist tried to surrender, he or she was dead. No second thought A shot, preferably just above the bridge of the nose, would be fired, giving a long last look at life through the blast of a muzzle flash. Every man knew his job, trained for it hoped for a chance to do it and prayed that he never would. Their existence was a dichotomy of desires, but one that they were uniquely able to live with, for they knew that at the moment of truth, they were as close to death as their adversaries.
* * *
The Starlifter’s co-pilot loosened his harness a bit and leaned forward, looking out the side window to the right and behind the aircraft.
They were there, though he could see only one. There would be another on the left side, symmetrical with its wingman, about a hundred feet off and fifty feet behind the wingtip, slightly above the big jet.
“I got one on this side,” he said. “Friendlies, right?”
The pilot a thirty-year Air Force veteran, liked the sarcasm in the lieutenant’s voice. “You got it. Compliments of Fidel himself.”
Another look satisfied the lieutenant’s curiosity. All he could make out in the darkness were the anti-collision strobes underneath the much smaller aircraft “The light pattern looks like a twenty-nine,” the rights eater commented, referring to the MiG-29 Fulcrum, a compact Soviet-built fighter.
“Well, the Cubans have a bunch of those, for sure. You can bet whatever’s under the wings doesn’t hold extra avgas.”
“Right sir.”
It was a good guess. If the light had been better they would have been able to clearly make out the AA-10 Alamo air-to-air missiles on each wing.
The navigator swung his mask over his mouth. “We’ve got glide slope in two minutes. Suggest descend to eight thousand and come left to two-five-zero.”
The pilot acknowledged the recommendation and began nosing the Starlifter down toward the waters south of the Florida Keys and turning it toward Havana. He made the adjustments slowly, giving his somewhat unwelcome wingmen ample time to come clear and modify their flight profile.
“We’re cleared straight in, right?” the airman operating the com console asked, for verification only.
“That’s a roge,” the lieutenant answered. “No tower contact required.”
“Let’s take her in,” the captain said. “Everything by the numbers. Com, let the major know we’ll be on the ground in fifteen.”
* * *
The time evaporated rapidly. McAffee felt his web seat shift slightly to the left as the pilot flared the aircraft for touchdown, then, five seconds later, the main gear, just forward of the team, grabbed the runway. The nose wheel came down a few seconds later, and with no fanfare, the Americans had come to Havana.
Thunder One rolled to the end of the runway and turned left on the last taxiway, following a decidedly military-looking aircraft-service vehicle. Atop it was a rack of rotating amber strobe lights and in its bed were two soldiers in Cuban Army smocks and carrying the unmistakable Kalashnikovs familiar to all American military men.
As the aircraft’s roll slowed, the team went through their final checks. Graber checked each Humvee, paying particular attention to the stowed equipment.
“Fire them up!” the major ordered. The Humvees rumbled, belching a short spurt of smoke which was vented out through the Starlifter’s filtering system. “Okay, listen up. When the ramp goes down we’re going to move to cover. Where that is I don’t know. The word is that we’ll be directed somewhere. I want everyone in the buggies when they roll out. I’ll be on foot. Do not pass me. Understood?” The drivers gave a thumbs-up in reply. “Mr. Anderson, you’re with Captain Graber’s section. Keep track of your gear.”
“Got it,” Joe answered, trying not to sound nervous.
“All right. We’ll do a final talk-through once we have a spot to lay up. Remember, the bird’s going to be here in about twenty minutes, and we don’t know how long the turnaround is going to be, so everyone is ready to go now—right?”
“Right!”
Joe looked around, embarrassed almost that he was feeling a twinge of nerves. This was really going to happen.
“Mount up!”
The vehicles filled quickly. McAffee walked the few yards to the hinge of the stem ramp and waited for the aircraft to stop completely. A minute later it did with a last forward lurch. Immediately the outer part of the rear opening swung upward, allowing streams of light from numerous vehicles to bathe the inside of the aircraft. The ramp dropped next. It touched the tarmac with a metallic clang.
* * *
The Cuban major saw the first American trot down the incline from the airplane’s interior. He was black, as were many of the security troops around the area, but much darker. Direct African descent, thought Major Sifuentes. Not much like his own troops, who were a motley mix of Caribbean blood.