Twisted Cross

by Maloney, Mack;

  “It’s a vicious cycle,” Burke laughed.

  “And only sporadically effective,” Dantini added.

  Hunter was just about to say something when he felt a tingling sensation run down his spine.

  “Damn,” he whispered. “And you guys don’t have any SAMs, do you?”

  Both Dantini and Burke were mystified. “What the hell are you talking about?” Dantini asked him.

  But Hunter didn’t hear him. His equipment, captured when he blundered down into the chopper team’s territory, was stacked near the entrance to Dantini’s tent. He quickly scooped up one of his knapsacks and was already out of the tent and in the center of the chopper team’s campground. Dantini and Burke quickly ran up behind him.

  “Aircraft coming!” Hunter said, facing the south. “Four of them… Get your people into shelters, now! We’ve got about five minutes…”

  Dantini scanned the sky in every direction. “I don’t see or hear anything,” he said cautiously.

  “Trust me,” Hunter yelled over his shoulder as he sprinted over to one of the team’s choppers.

  Chapter 14

  MAJOR JANN HOXTER, FLIGHT leader for the four F-4 Phantoms, put his airplane into a screaming dive.

  Directly ahead of him was the clearing near the beach where a TV-camera equipped recon drone had spotted suspected enemy activity earlier in the day. Careful analysis of the drone’s information confirmed that the area was being used by the band of helicopter mercenaries that had been harassing The Twisted Cross for some time.

  Finding the enemy chopper unit had been nearly impossible—until now. The exorbitant price paid to a South African arms dealer for the ultra-high tech video drone was now looking like a very good deal indeed. Apparently it had been able to accomplish in two days what the Cross’s own intelligence operatives had been trying to do for nearly 18 months…

  No sooner had the information from the drone been processed when Hoxter’s superiors ordered an immediate air strike on the enemy camp. Military sensibilities would have called for dropping anti-personnel bombs on the chopper base, followed up by barrages of air-to-surface missiles. But in this case, the sensibilities were overridden from above. A message had to be sent. Therefore, the cannisters slung under the wings of Hoxter’s flight were filled with hundreds of gallons of napalm, the jellied gasoline cocktail that was a favorite signature of the High Command of The Twisted Cross.

  While his three charges circled above, Hoxter rolled in on the suspected target, intending to make one, fast sweep of the area. His prestrike orders were to absolutely confirm enemy troops and equipment in the target zone before bombing—napalm didn’t come easy or cheap these days and there was no sense wasting it if the enemy troops were no longer around.

  Hoxter’s hopes rose when he spotted a line of tents at the edge of the clearing, and next to them, two large Chinook helicopters. Oddly, the place looked deserted—almost as if the enemy troops knew the air strike was coming. This bothered Hoxter as he yanked back on his control stick and gained some altitude. His preflight briefing officers had assured him that the enemy didn’t have any kind of early warning radar system. Nor did they have any SAMs.

  Rejoining the three other F-4s, they immediately circled the target once more, then split into pairs. Hoxter and his wingman, Frugal, would go in first…

  “Hang on, Lieutenant,” Hoxter called back to his rear-seat weapons officer, a man named Minz, as he again put the green-camouflaged F-4 into a dive. He lined up the crosshairs of his jet’s Head’s Up Display with the row of tents in the clearing, intent on dropping the first of his two napalm cannisters onto the bivouac.

  “Steady,” he whispered to himself, his finger twitching on the weapons release button. Already he could envision the line of tents being washed over by a tidal wave of sticky blue flame so intense, it would instantly incinerate anyone hiding inside. The immolation would be the first giant step in eliminating the pesty helicopter troops…

  Lower and lower he went, the F-4 bucking like a bronco in the murky air just above the dense jungle. “Steady,” he whispered once again. In his mind’s eye he could already see the flames leaping up from the target, the choking black smoke, the victims engulfed in the napalm running in panic seconds before they died.

  “All for the cause,” he thought. “All for our glorious leader.

  He reached his release altitude, took a deep breath and started to squeeze the trigger.

  But suddenly he heard a loud crash! directly behind him. At the same instant, his rear seat officer cried out in pain.

  Hoxter immediately pulled up and out of the dive, twisting in his seat to look back at Minz. He was stunned to see that the rear part of the two-piece canopy had been blown away and that Minz was practically headless.

  “What is this!” he cried out as his section of the cockpit rapidly decompressed. Incredibly, it appeared as if someone had hit them with a small, but extremely accurate, SAM.

  It was too late for Hoxter to call off his wingman Frugal from his attack run. The pilot watched as the second-in-line F-4 came in low and slow over the target area. Suddenly Hoxter detected a flash coming from behind a line of trees. An instant later, Frugal’s. F-4 went up in a ball of fire. It hit the ground sideways, the flaming wreckage cartwheeling through the clearing and out onto the beach. It had happened so incredibly fast! Another small antiaircraft missile had made a direct hit on Frugal’s doomed Phantom.

  Hoxter was confused and on the verge of panic. The last thing he had expected from the bombing mission was accurate and effective groundfire. Someone had screwed up badly; someone in the High Command would be punished. But the flight leader faced more immediate problems. The damage to his own jet was already affecting his flight controls. He knew he had to get back to his base—and fast. Still, he twisted his jet up and over the line of trees where the flash had come from and was astonished to see a Chinook helicopter hovering not more than 20 feet off the ground. He knew in an instant the small SAMs had been fired from the Chinook.

  Meanwhile the lead ship pilot of the second pair of F-4s had witnessed what had happened and had also spotted the Chinook.

  “How can someone shoot so well?” this pilot radioed over to Hoxter.

  But the flight leader had no answer. He briefly considered rolling in on the Chinook, but quickly decided against it. The sudden death of WSO Minz and the downing of Frugal’s F-4 had spooked him.

  “Shall we go after the helicopter?” the other F-4 pilot asked him over the radio.

  “No…” Hoxter answered quickly, trying not to let the panic come through in his voice. “Abort the mission. Return to base immediately…”

  “Good God, how did you learn to shoot like that?”

  Dantini and. Burke were simply amazed. They had joined Hunter in the Chinook seconds after he had correctly predicted that an air strike was on the way. The fighter pilot had started the engines himself, gunning their throttles in such a way that the chopper was ready to take off in two minutes, about one-tenth the amount of time it normally needed for lift-off.

  Once airborne, Burke had taken over the controls while Hunter and Dantini cranked one of the copter’s .50 machine guns out of its port window.

  While Burke kept the Chinook steady and hiding behind the line of trees, Hunter retrieved the small SAM pistol from his knapsack. The gun was only about the size of a flare pistol. Its projectiles just five inches long. But packed into their tiny warheads was a mini-ultrasonic detecting device complete with an electronic ear he designed to home in on the high-range frequency sounds put out by the whine of a jet engine’s turbine blades. When the pistol was fired, the projectile, which was made of depleted uranium, would seek out the nearest source of the particular high frequency and impact near it. Because of the incendiary properties of the depleted uranium shell, the immediate result of a hit was an instantaneous flash fire, meaning direct hits weren’t always necessary. Should the small missile hit the airplane’s engine, it would more than
likely mortally disable it, but the aircraft could stay airborne at least for a while if a good pilot was behind the controls. However, should the projectile hit something flammable such as a fuel tank—or a cannister of napalm—it would cause it to instantly explode on impact.

  As Hunter had only two projectiles with him, he knew both shots had to count. So the computer in his head started reeling off figures for such things as velocity of the small SAM, the rate of its flight path decay divided by the height of the hovering Chinook, the rate of speed of the F-4s and, most important, the distance between him and the target. When the first jet came in, Hunter had Dantini call off its approach profile, then at precisely the right moment, the Wingman squeezed off one shot. It wobbled a little, but nevertheless smashed through the F-4’s canopy.

  Just a few scant seconds later, Hunter had reloaded and fired off his other missile at the second attacking airplane. It ran truer, finding the volatile napalm cannister attached to the airplane’s portside wing weapons station. A microsecond after striking it, the cannister exploded and obliterated the Phantom.

  “How did you do that?” Burke asked again, once they had set the Chinook back down. “Those were two, one-in-a-million bullseyes!”

  Hunter shrugged. “I majored in Advanced Velocity Physics at college,” he said.

  Dantini looked at him, then at the burning wreckage of the downed Phantom, then back at Hunter.

  “Well, I’m convinced,” he said, his hand outstretched. “It’s an honor to finally meet the famous Hawk Hunter…”

  Chapter 15

  THERE WAS NO LIGHT at all in this part of the cave.

  In the complete darkness, the eyes become useless, subservient to the other senses. The far-off scurrying of some cave rodent is picked up by the ears right away. Same for the flapping wings of a distant bat, returning from a nocturnal search for food.

  The tongue tastes the damp moisture of the cavern as if it were strong liquor. The nose detects the odor of smoke, even though the nearest fire is a half mile away and out of the cave.

  The tips of the fingers yearn to reach out and touch warm flesh…

  She had lost track as to just how many days she’d been held prisoner in the cave. With no visual confirmation of the changing of day from sunup to sundown and back again, her existence simply became one long night. There was no need for blindfolds down here. And the single thick strand of rope was enough to keep her in one place. Food was eaten unseen and she couldn’t remember what color clothes she was wearing. Deprived of what was once taken for granted, her life had been pared down to the very basics.

  She was sure now that Hell was little more than a dark cave…

  Chapter 16

  COLONEL KRUPP TOPPED OFF his morning meal of eggs and left-over steak with a large cup of thick, black coffee.

  The day had dawned in overcast—at least there’d be no sun beating down on them mercilessly as they broke camp and moved out, the officer thought. He stepped down off the back of his command truck, stretched and took a quick look around the camp.

  As usual, the tops of the nearby surrounding hills were being patrolled by the camp guards. Even the pyramid itself had a squad of lookouts perched on top, their half-dozen long-range binoculars continually scanning the nearby countryside. And Krupp knew that in the dense jungle behind the pyramid and beyond the hills, no less than four squads—more than forty of his soldiers—walked patrol. Though not a shot had been fired at them during their five-week encampment at the pyramid, Krupp still found it impossible to convince himself that the jungle and the mountains beyond weren’t teeming with mysterious dangers of all kinds.

  After all, somewhere out there was the missing officer, Heinke…

  He walked over to their single helicopter, a refurbished Soviet-built Mil Mi-26 “Hook.” The copter was a giant. More than 135 feet long, in its service with the Red Army, it could carry up to 70 men. But this aircraft wasn’t designated as a troop carrier. In its hold sat something the High Command considered more precious than the relatively puny lives of its footsoldiers.

  Inside its hold sat a fortune in gold…

  The engines for the gigantic helicopter were always just one click away from starting. At least one pilot was always strapped into one of its seats, ready to fire its turbos and lift-off. Whenever a gold object was retrieved from a deep cave, it was immediately carried to the aircraft. These instructions had come directly from the High Command. Should Krupp’s encampment be attacked, they wanted to make sure that the so-called “blitz” helicopter—and its precious cargo of bullion—be off and away in the shortest amount of time.

  Krupp threw away the rest of his coffee and climbed inside the Hook’s expansive cargo hold. It contained ten crates now—four were filled with gold coins, the others were packed with artifacts such as gold plates, goblets and necklaces. This was the final booty from this particular site—the eighteenth shipment of plunder from the secret cave the woman had indicated beneath the Chichen Itza pyramid. Within the hour, the Hook would lift off and meet the two escorting jet fighters that would shepherd it back to Panama.

  “Shall we feed the prisoner, my colonel?” Krupp heard a voice behind him say.

  He turned to see one of his sergeants holding a small pot containing a disgusting, undercooked egg and beef fat remnants.

  “This is all there is to feed her?” he asked the sergeant.

  The man shrugged. “She’s always given the leftovers,” he said. “And our remaining food is packed away.”

  He dismissed the man with the wave of his hand. He wasn’t about to worry what the woman was being fed. More important things were pressing on him, like preparing to get to the next site, some 60 miles away.

  To this end, he walked back to the command truck and sent his personal guard to round up his staff officers.

  “Who’s there?” the woman cried out.

  Her ears had detected the soft footsteps coming from the forward part of the cave. She also heard her voice echo between the walls of the pitch-black chamber.

  “Is someone out there?” she called, her voice shaking.

  “It’s your food,” came the gruff reply.

  She could sense a faint light working its way down toward her. The shadows it cast frightened her. They always seemed to take on the shapes of large, terrible monsters. Quickly, she wrapped a soiled rag around her eyes, knowing that even a pinprick of direct light from a flashlight beam could damage her already frail, light-deprived retinas.

  “I don’t want any food,” she called out wearily.

  “But you must eat,” came a snickered reply. “You are our guide. Without you, our work here would be meaningless.”

  The soldier carrying the small tin of food laughed, his sadistic tone echoing perversely around the cavern. She batted away the hand he put on her breast, but felt her own wrist squeezed hard as he forced her hand between his legs.

  “I know you want to eat,” he said, holding her hand tight against the fly of his uniform pants. “Now give Hans a rub and he’ll leave your food.”

  “I don’t want any food!” she screamed, struggling and momentarily succeeding in pulling her hand back from him.

  He laughed again, roughly grabbed her breasts and then put his mouth to her neck.

  “Eat now,” he said in a heavy voice. “We move soon and you will not get fed until we get to the next camp, many miles away.”

  She felt tears coming on, and try as she might, she couldn’t hold them in.

  “Give it to me,” she said, reaching out for the tin.

  The soldier obliged her, then ran his hands all over her shapely young body while she forced down the runny yolk and small bits of fat.

  “You get smarter every day,” he said to her, finishing his liberties and taking the tin from her. “Just be sure you do not tell them of our little arrangement. If you do, I will be forced to slit your pretty throat…”

  Tears were running down her face now, moistening the dirty rag she used to pro
tect her eyes and causing it to smell awful.

  “Please…” she sobbed, feeling dizzy and insane again. “Please tell me what color my hair is…”

  Chapter 17

  THE CLOUDS HAD ALSO covered the sunrise down in Panama, something Hunter took to be a lucky sign.

  He was lying flat out in a clump of bushes no more than 25 feet from a control house for the “eastern” side locks of the Panama Canal. His face was covered with green paint and several different kinds of twigs and bushes were tied to his back, arms and legs. Even his M-16 was draped in green vines and twigs.

  In his hands was the mini-video camera—a device that worked best when there was no direct sunshine. The cloud cover above the waterway allowed him to take long slow sweeps of the canal and the lockworks without worrying about the sun’s glare screwing up the camera’s cathode ray tube and possibly washing out an important shot.

  He’d been at it for nearly an hour, recording the routine comings and goings of the military men running the locks, as well as their many small attack craft cruising the waterway. The camera’s short, but nevertheless effective, zoom lens allowed him to key in on a number of defensive positions on both sides of the Canal. He was especially interested in the numerous SAM batteries—mounted Blowpipes and Rolands—in evidence on both shorelines and atop many of the lock’s administration buildings. In addition to the SAMs, there were also many large gun emplacements. Some featured South African Armscor G5 155-mm howitzers; others had rare Soviet-built S-23 180-mm guns. Dozens of smaller gun sites also dotted the landscape.

  All of it defense in depth against an airborne attack.

  Everywhere he looked there were soldiers—all dressed in either the drab khaki uniforms or the smart, intense all-black outfit. To a man they were well-armed with either M-16s or AK-47s, plus more than a few guns Hunter recognized as Mausers and Enfields. Several soldiers drifted by carrying RPG launchers and even TOW anti-tank weapons.