Twisted Cross

by Maloney, Mack;

  He counted a half dozen different helicopters buzzing about—Soviet Mi-24 Hinds mostly, but he had also spotted a few ancient Soviet-built Mi-4 Hounds. And higher up, he had tracked the vapor trails of twelve F-4 Phantoms, the venerable fighter-bomber that seemed to be the jet aircraft of choice for The Twisted Cross.

  Phantoms had carried out the aborted attack on the chopper team’s encampment and now the skies above the Canal were positively lousy with them. But what bothered Hunter most was the fact that he had tangled with Phantoms on his trip to New Orleans. Could the fighters that attacked the airliner over Louisiana have been flown by pilots of The Twisted Cross?

  It was just one of many questions running through his mind.

  The official name of the chopper team was the Central American Tactical Service—CATS for short. Hunter and Dantini, the overall commander of CATS as well as its corporation’s president, had stayed up all night, discussing the movement which would bring them here to the very edge of the Canal.

  It had been a simple plan that nevertheless required a lot of coordination. Although they staved off the air strike, the CATS were forced to abandon their convenient, seaside encampment and look for a new, more secure forward base. Being experts at relocation, the entire chopper force was packed and gone within 45 minutes of the F-4s’ attempted napalm attack.

  Eight of the big helicopters, as well as the rest of the smaller ones, immediately moved to a new base on one of the northernmost islands in the Mosquito Gulf, a spit of land called Bocas del Toro. Meanwhile, Hunter, Dantini, Burke and ten of Dantini’s best troops took one of the Chinooks on a long, arcing journey out over the Caribbean and back into the more eastern part of Panama. Landing on yet another island, one of a chain called San Blas, they were ferried to the Panamanian mainland on rubber rafts. Then they walked, reaching the Canal just at dawn. Hunter had been shooting footage with his small video camera ever since.

  “The guys in the black uniforms are members of what they call The Party,” Dantini, who was one bush over from Hunter, explained to him in a voice barely above a whisper. “It’s almost like an organization within an organization. Their guys call all the shots within The Twisted Cross. What they say, goes.”

  “Almost like an elite officer corps,” Hunter said, training the camera on two black-uniformed officers who were standing just outside one of the canal locks station. “Or should I say, more like Hitler’s SS.”

  “Now you’re getting the picture,” Dantini replied.

  Hunter knew what the man meant. It had been unspoken even before he arrived in Panama. And the word never left the lips of Dantini or Burke or any of the soldiers in CATS. It was as if the word was too horrible, too repugnant even to speak. But there was no denying just what The Twisted Cross stood for, both in symbolism and in action. The uniforms the Cross soldiers wore, the way they marched, even the helmets on their heads were all flashbacks to another sinister time earlier in the century when men of their ilk tried to take over the world and destroy it at the same time.

  It only took a few seconds, but Hunter closed his eyes and relived one of the most mystifying events of his life.

  He was back in the Arabian desert. His arch-foe Viktor stood before him, Hunter having shot down the fiend’s helicopter just before his own airplane crashed. Now they stood in contrast: Hunter, holding his M-16 on Viktor, trying with all his might to fight off the temptation of pulling the trigger and ridding the world of one of its worst scourges; Victor mocking him, telling him that democracy and freedom were out-moded in the New Order world.

  Suddenly, a shot rang out. Viktor’s throat exploded in a burst of blood and bones. Then another shot hit him, right in the center of the back, exiting through his breastbone. He fell face down in the sand at Hunter’s feet—dead before he hit the ground…

  Hunter spotted two uniformed men about a half mile away, holding a rifle with a telescopic sight. They quickly retreated in a desert vehicle. Retrieving his binoculars, he was able to catch a glimpse of the armbands both men wore…

  Those armbands and the symbol pressed upon them—a red circle with a black twisted design inside—were identical to ones worn by the soldiers now guarding the canal locks.

  It made Hunter’s stomach turn just thinking about it, but he knew that certain facts had to be faced. Whether they called themselves The Twisted Cross or The Party or nothing at all, the hideous swastika design that each man wore told it all: the people in control of the Panama Canal were Nazis…

  Hunter and the members of the CATS spent the next three hours moving up and down the bank of the waterway, avoiding Cross patrols and videotaping anything and everything.

  The farther they went down the waterway, the more apparent it became that the Cross had lined both sides of the Canal with a startling array of weapons. It seemed as if there was either an anti-aircraft emplacement—whether it be a SAM site or a radar-guided gun—every 50 yards. And the space in the middle was taken up by a grabbag of weapons ranging from the ever-plentiful . 50-caliber machine gun nests to the large, long-range howitzers.

  “And I thought The Circle was heavy in equipment,” Hunter said to Dantini at one point. “These guys seem to have more guns than they do people to operate them.”

  Dantini agreed. “We’ve heard that the members of The Party originally started out as arms dealers,” he told Hunter.

  “They apparently have a ton of money as well as access to a lot of weapons, both new and reconditioned.”

  “It’s that ‘ton of money’ that worries me,” Hunter said.

  “There are plenty of crackpots around who would love to rule the world but the only thing holding them back is lack of funds. But these guys seem to have a bottomless barrel of cash.”

  As illustration, he pointed out several gun emplacements that were just now nearing construction. Also, the Cross had heavy earth-moving equipment operating on both sides of the waterway, building roads, docking facilities, fuel stations and even more gun and missile emplacements.

  “This is a work in progress,” Hunter said to Dantini, capturing it all on video. “These guys are planning to stay awhile…”

  “Well, we know the Cross has a thing about gold,” Dantini whispered to him. “We’ve both heard stories about their demanding gold for passage through the Canal, even taking gold fillings from people.”

  Hunter nodded and zoomed in on work being done on a new SAM site about 100 yards from their position.

  “Yes, that’s true,” he said. “But it sure takes more than a bag full of gold fillings to pay for all this stuff. And I can’t believe it’s all coming from just the gold they extract from ships passing through. They have to be getting it from some other source.”

  They were about to move further down the waterway when a small boat caught Hunter’s attention. There was no lack of Twisted Cross attack craft zipping up and down the Canal, but this particular vessel—a tugboat painted all white—looked unusual. First of all, it wasn’t armed to the teeth as was every other attack craft on the water. Secondly, just about everyone on board appeared to be wearing bulky white suits, almost of the style a beekeeper would wear. And those not dressed up in the bulky clothes were wearing even bulkier deep sea diving gear.

  They watched as the white tugboat cast off from a dock near the lockworks and cruised to a point almost directly in front of them. The crew dropped anchor and soon there was a lot of activity at the rear of the boat. Five minutes passed and then two men in the old-style deep sea diving gear—complete with large globe helmets—were lowered over the side, several of the crewmen carefully playing out the air lines for the divers.

  Another five minutes passed. Then the tug crew was seen lowering two long silver tubes into the water. All the work being done on the tug was slow and deliberate, especially the handling of the silver tubes. Meanwhile, every other craft on the waterway gave the tugboat the widest possible berth.

  “They’re certainly going through a lot of trouble for whatever the hell the
y are doing,” Dantini observed. “Those suits they’re wearing almost look like they’re protective in nature, don’t you think?”

  Hunter was way ahead of him. He knew the deck crew’s suits might be anti-radiation suits, the same kind worn by workers in nuclear power plants. And if this were true, it was a good bet the diver’s suits were at least partially protective as well. But what was going on? Pegg had told him that he had observed a similar operation—silver tubes being lowered into the water—though he put the location as closer to the lockworks.

  Hunter didn’t want to jump to conclusions. But something inside him was saying that the biggest threat the Canal Nazis posed was not their overabundance of weaponry along the banks of the waterway, or their apparent overflowing gold coffers, or their well-stocked F-4 Phantom air force. Something told him that the real threat lay inside those long silver tubes.

  And it was up to him to find out just what they were .

  Chapter 18

  “HERE IT COMES!” ONE of the CATS lookouts yelled excitedly.

  Within moments, Hunter, Dantini and Burke joined the other soldiers out on the beach of the small island. It was the middle of the night, two days after their daring reconnaissance mission to the canal. Soon after they had returned to the island, Hunter put in a coded call to a receiving station in Texas, using his miniature radio set. The Texans relayed the message up to General Jones in Washington. It had said, in effect, that Hunter needed some “special equipment.”

  Hunter would learn later on that it was his old friend Mike Fitzgerald who had come up with the equipment he needed. Fitzie was a businessman first, a fighter pilot second. He was one of those guys who seemed to be able to put his hands on anything at anytime, no matter how rare or obscure it might be.

  In this case, Hunter had radioed Jones that he needed a lead-lined diver’s suit. Somehow Fitz was able to produce one inside of three hours.

  Now as Hunter and the others watched from the beach, one of the New York Hercs C-130s appeared out of the darkness from the north. The big cargo plane was flying very low and without the usual navigation lights. With its heavy green camouflage scheme, it was barely discernible against the dark ocean.

  It made one pass, and picking up on the coded flashlight signal from Hunter on the beach, turned around and came in low again, not more than 25 feet off the surface of the water. Suddenly they could see a small package drop out of the side cargo door and hit the water with a splash. Within seconds, a team of CATS soldiers were madly paddling toward the floating package.

  The big C-130 turned out to sea, did a wide arc and came back across the shoreline once more. By this time, the CATS soldiers had retrieved the package and had indicated it was still intact. Hunter flashed another coded light signal to the C-130 as it roared past, this one telling them the drop had been successful. The message received, the cargo plane wagged its wings twice then disappeared into the night.

  “This is the craziest idea I’ve ever heard of,” Dantini was saying as he and Hunter unpacked the bundle the CATS soldiers had hauled in. “How can you expect to just dive down there right under their noses?”

  “Sometimes you’ve got to take chances,” Hunter told him as he concentrated on cutting the many holding lines around the package. “Also, I was hoping you guys could provide a little diversion for me should I get in trouble. Just a bunch of noise would do…”

  “Damn, you know you can count on us, Hawk,” Dantini told him. “We’ll blow their fucking eardrums out if we have to. It’s just that you don’t know exactly what’s down there and neither do I. No one does, probably except the high mucky-mucks of the Cross. For all you know, they could have boobytrapped those damn things…”

  “I hear what you’re saying,” Hunter told him, finally breaking through the last seal holding the package together. “But I’m down here on a recon mission. My job is to gather as much intelligence as possible. Somehow we’ve got to find out what the hell they are putting down there and I can’t think of any other way to do it.”

  At that moment he had stripped away the top layer of the bundle’s waterproof packing. He reached inside and with some effort, hauled out the large, rather outlandish diving suit.

  “Jesus…” Hunter murmured, somewhat astonished at the size and bulk of the one-piece outfit.

  “It looks like a costume from a bad science fiction movie,” Burke said, helping Hunter lay out the beast on the sand. “A very bad science fiction movie.”

  Hunter had to agree with him. The suit looked like a cross between the outfits worn by the Apollo Moon astronauts and a beekeeper’s nightmare. It was heavy, due to its lead lining and the two enormous air tanks attached to its back. Its front plate was covered with dials and switches, none of which he had any idea how to operate. The attached boots alone looked like they could fit a size 20 foot.

  Hunter could only shake his head. “Where the hell did Fitz get this?” he wondered out loud.

  Chapter 19

  COLONEL KRUPP TOOK ANOTHER look at his map, then motioned for his driver to stop.

  The 27-vehicle, heavily-armed convoy screeched to a halt behind his lead truck. It was the fourth time they had stopped in the past hour and each time the blazing sun and the oppressive humidity took its toll on the soldiers as well as their vehicles’ radiators.

  The convoy had left Chichen Itza more than five hours before, Krupp sending out one last token search party to look for the long-missing Heinke. Since then it had been winding its way south, rumbling over cratered jungle roads and speeding up whenever it reached a rare open stretch of highway.

  Still, the pace was too slow for the colonel. He had drawn up a precise schedule for the move, estimating the convoy could make at least thirty miles an hour. But by checking the terrain against his map, it appeared they had yet to travel even sixty miles.

  Either that, or they were lost…

  “Call back and tell them to bring the woman up here immediately,” he said to his driver.

  The man quickly got on his radio and did as ordered. Soon two more soldiers appeared, leading the hooded woman between them.

  “Pass the word down that this is not a rest stop,” Krupp ordered the two soldiers. “We’ll be moving in less than five minutes…”

  The two soldiers saluted and quickly ran back to relay Krupp’s orders. Meanwhile the colonel lifted the woman up and into the back of his command truck. Only when the rear curtains were drawn and tight did he remove the black hood from her head. A tiny battery-operated lamp was the compartment’s only illumination.

  She instinctively shielded her eyes with her manacled hands, wincing against the dim light.

  “Look at this map,” he said to her authoritatively, while still letting his eyes wander over her breasts. She was wearing a multi-pocket field blouse, a short khaki skirt and once-white tennis sneakers, the same clothes she was wearing when they first came into possession of her. But even though her blouse was tattered, her skirt soiled and her hair a bush of dark brunette tresses, she was still beautiful.

  “Look at this map,” Krupp said again, nudging her into the small chair that was pulled up against his planning board. She was groggy, the result of both the many injections of sodium pentathol they had given her over the past few weeks and her nearly constant confinement. Still, she was the only one in the convoy who really knew the territory.

  “I need water,” she said wearily, moving her wrists in her handcuffs. “I need to go home…”

  “You’re not going home,” Krupp told her matter-of-factly, surprising himself by stating the apparent death sentence. “Now just look at the map and tell me if we are on the right track.”

  “Not unless I get some water,” she said quietly but defiantly.

  Krupp hastily ripped the canteen from his utility belt and shoved it in front of her. She grasped it between her bound hands and drank a few sips.

  “How can you people be so inhuman?” she asked him, still shielding her eyes away from the weak light.
“Have you no conscience? No dignity?”

  He grabbed her shoulder roughly.

  “Read the map!” he hissed at her between clenched teeth. “Tell me if we are going in the right direction.”

  “How… how can I?” she asked in a voice barely above a whisper. “I don’t even know where I am. Or even who I am…”

  “You will be on your way to a firing squad if you don’t cooperate,” Krupp snapped back at her. Every minute this went on was another minute off his schedule. In his mind it was imperative that they reach the next site before darkness fell and the countryside came alive with God-knows-what.

  He nudged her again, holding her face just inches from the map. “I think we are following this road,” he said, indicating a point on the map just south of Chichen Itza. “But according to the map, we should be seeing mountains off to our west and a river to our east. I have seen neither.”

  She studied the map as best she could, taking greedy sips of the water as she did so.

  “The river is deep in the forest,” she said finally. “You cannot see it from the road…”

  “And these mountains?” Krupp asked. “They, too, have disappeared?”

  She wiped her eyes and said: “They aren’t mountains. They are merely hills, no more than two hundred feet high. You probably won’t be able to distinguish them anyway.”

  “So you are saying that we continue on this road?” Krupp asked.

  “Yes…” she said with a heavy, congested sigh, adding defiantly: “Follow it all the way to Hell for all I care…”

  Chapter 20

  HUNTER COULDN’T REMEMBER A time when he had felt more uncomfortable.

  His face, neck and upper back were covered with scrapes and bruises. Both his shoulders ached, his hip muscles were strained and the blisters on his feet ran from heel to toe. His nose was runny from the dirty oxygen and it was all he could do to suppress sneezing inside the restrictive helmet.