Antonelli and Makowski had the no-snag duffels containing the SPIE rigs setting between their legs. A steel oval ring, which would attach to the twin connection points under the Pave Hawk, stuck through the cinched opening of each bag. The two troopers tested the spring-loaded safety bar on each oval, letting it snap back after depression several times. A thumbs-up told the major everything was a go.
Joe Anderson, sitting in the middle of the forward-facing bench seat, watched the preparations with mild interest. The nine troopers were readying themselves, checking weapons, cinching straps, testing equipment. They had those things to do. He had just his thoughts to occupy him. Thoughts of another job. Thoughts of his home, his wife. Thoughts of his life. What he had done, what he would miss. He could have let sadness and bitterness envelop him, had it not been for the reality that his sacrifice had saved a lot of lives. He wasn’t a hero for doing it, just as these men didn’t think themselves deserving of accolades, but he, and they, could all take satisfaction in doing a job and doing it well. It might seem simplistic, even insincere, to those who could not understand the motivation to do something, even if dangerous, because it needed to be done, but it was what counted. Success meant the good guys won. To Joe, and to those he proudly joined on this mission, winning was a very private victory.
“You ready, Mr. Anderson?” Sean yelled across the two feet that separated them.
Joe lifted his equipment case and nodded. “Always, Major.”
The noise picked up as the door gunners, one on each side of the Pave Hawk just behind the cockpit, slid their respective windows open and swiveled the pintle-mounted miniguns into the open. The weapons locked into position, and the gunners tested the built-in stops that prevented the guns from rotating too high, lest they inadvertently put a stream of 7.62mm shells into the 230-gallon fuel tanks that hung from the high mounted wings on each side. A low whine emanated from each mount. They were now powered up, ready to fire if need be, just the pressure of their gunner’s finger required.
“Test your LAMs,” Sean ordered. He lowered his NVGs and activated the LAM mounted underneath his MP5SD4’s integral suppressor with a touch to the grip-mounted pressure switch. A beam of infrared light sprayed from the unit, a focused red laser dot in its center. Sean moved it around in the darkened cabin, placing death spots on three of his comrades before he was satisfied that all was working properly. He flipped the NVGs up again and checked his watch. “Five minutes to first stop! Lock and load!”
The nine troopers pulled the loading levers back on their weapons and slid them easily forward, chambering the first round.
“Safety on until we’re swinging, then set on controlled burst!” Sean checked the left side of his weapon, making sure the selector switch was to its top position: safe. He looked left to Buxton. “Move fast, Bux.”
“Like lightning.”
“And keep your head down,” he added, not knowing quite why.
“Then I won’t be able to see all the fun.”
Sean nodded and motioned for the team to switch on their radios. “Test check.” He got eight nods in response. In sequence the other troopers transmitted over the short-range system. “Cho, you got us?”
“Five by five, Major. Two minutes to tippee-toes.”
Sean held up two fingers for Anderson, who did not wear a radio.
Joe saw the victory sign and gave a thumbs-up to the confident gesture. It was nice being among the best of the good guys.
* * *
The Communications Vessel Vertikal, a former whaler that had taken its share of leviathans from the deep during its previous life, plowed through the mild Atlantic swells at seventeen knots, churning a bright white wake that luminesced in the low moonlight. There was barely any spray over the high bow, even running at her top speed, and the captain of the ship stood confidently just outside the wheelhouse, the thought of wearing a slicker blasphemous on such a warm night.
“Debris in the water, dead ahead,” the lookout reported.
“Where?” the captain asked skeptically. They weren’t supposed to be near the reported site for another hour. Flotsam could not have drifted this direction, nor this distance since the American Coast Guard contacted them.
“There, Captain.”
He scanned the swells, and there it was. The unmistakable blob of orange floating and bobbing on the water. And more. The captain counted ten separate pieces of debris. But of what? And how did it get here? An aircraft going down would not have spread its remnants over twenty nautical miles. Nor would a ship going down. There would be a greater concentration of debris in either case. It was as if it had been spread across the ocean from high above. Or far below.
But it could not be that. Or could it?
“Launch the boats. Bring back everything you find. Fast!”
* * *
First Lieutenant Duc made his altitude fifty feet as the Pave Hawk skimmed the choppy waters toward the deserted beach near Playa Rancho Luna on the eastern shore of the Bay of Cienfuegos.
“Nothing ahead,” Second Lieutenant Sanders reported. His eyes were focused on the LLTV and the FLIR sensors, both of which stole the darkness from the expanse of white sand that was to be their first stop. The copilot flipped his NVGs, which were specially designed for use by flyers, down and scanned their flight path. Duc had them on a straight run in. Reconnaissance had showed no troops in this immediate area, and any civilian stupid or lucky enough to catch a glimpse of them would have little time to sound a warning. The objective was just minutes from here.
“Here we go, Maj.”
Sean did a quick look around the cabin, his eyes falling upon Anderson last. “See you in a few!”
Joe barely heard the shout. “Don’t mess up my missile!”
The major smiled and gave the signal to open the doors. The chill of an eighty-knot breeze instantly filled the cabin of the Pave Hawk.
“Feet dry,” Duc announced.
Antonelli and Makowski gripped their duffels tighter as the sound of the rotors changed. It became a deep, throaty pulse before the Pave Hawk’s nose flared, slowing the helicopter and reducing altitude.
“Go!” Sean yelled into the radio as they settled at five feet above the sand.
The troopers piled out through both doors, Antonelli and Makowski turning as they hit and going beneath the floating helicopter. They attached the hooks to the fore and aft SPIE connectors respectively and pulled the duffels out from below, Antonelli going to the left with the short rig, and Makowski to the right with the aft rig, which was longer by ten feet.
“Good hooks, troops. Double check.” Sean lined up in a prearranged row with the rest of the entry team: Antonelli, Goldfarb, Lewis, and Quimpo. They attached the paired connectors, one to each shoulder, and made themselves a semi-rigid unit with carefully placed handholds on each others’ web gear. One hand was dedicated to that. The other held their weapons. “Bux?”
“Ready.”
“Safeties off.” Nine selector switches moved down one notch to the controlled burst setting. “Let’s make ‘em pay. Ready, Cho. GO!”
Lieutenant Duc needed no time to ease into the maneuver, which he had practiced countless times and used for real in several tight spots before. He brought his collective up with the helicopter in a hover, lifting Sean’s group first, then, a second later, Buxton’s group clear of the ground. When the latter was thirty feet above the sand, he added more power and nosed the Pave Hawk down, gaining speed and maintaining his altitude. The two groups of Delta troopers, nearly invisible in their coal-black working suits, swayed backward, away from the direction of travel, their HKs held forward in preparation and anticipation.
“Raptor, this is Gambler,” Duc said over the net. “Two minutes out.”
* * *
Twenty miles southwest and three thousand feet above his men, Colonel Bill Cadler sat in the soundproof battle management center just behind and below the flight deck of the AC-130U. The middle finger of his right hand slid ov
er the index finger as he counted off the seconds. The required wait dissipated quickly. “Take us in,” he instructed the pilot over the intercom, switching back to the radio net immediately. “Toolbox, this is Raptor. Move on my mark.”
* * *
“The fueling is complete,” the beaming officer announced.
General Juan Asunción let out the breath he had been holding for days and leaned on the command center’s console, staring down at the few switches and buttons he would manipulate in but a few hours. Then the vengeance would be wrought. A fitting target the presidente had selected, Asunción believed.
“Remove the trucks from...” His head swiveled toward the overhead vent shaft, through which the sound was entering the small structure. “What is Guevarra doing up?” he asked the air. Then the kind of sound caught his attention. Guevarra’s craft did not sound like...
“General?” the young officer said, seeing the elder man’s face go pale.
“Damn them!”
* * *
The Pave Hawk crossed the perimeter of the plant at ninety knots, Duc maintaining his altitude with only minor adjustments in course to avoid buildings. Ahead, through the NVGs, he saw the cooling towers to the right, and straight to the front the target. “Gambler to Raptor, on target.”
* * *
Cadler keyed the mic. “Raptor to Toolbox. Execute.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
DONNYBROOK
The eight guards patrolling the perimeter fence on the west turned toward the sound coming from the east. They never heard what came next.
The Kalashnikovs in the tree line burped briefly, felling the eight loyalists with no resistance. Ojeda’s group, divided into three 60-man sections, needed no further signal. They raced toward the fence in staggered columns, their numbers spread out along a quarter-mile front. At the head of each section were soldiers carrying what appeared to be small backpacks. Fifty feet from the fence all but these men went to ground. A second later they, too, dived for cover as the breaching charges arched through the air in unison.
* * *
The roar of the Pave Hawk’s turbines reverberated off the endless concrete slab as Duc flared the helicopter perfectly, setting Captain Buxton and sergeants Makowski, Jones, and Vincent precisely two hundred yards south of cooling tower number one. They released themselves from the SPIE rig just before their feet met pavement and made a quick turn to the right, running as fast as possible toward their objective.
Duc freed the empty rig and nosed forward, dropping a few feet in the process, the main objective coming at him quickly.
Fifteen feet below, Major Sean Graber slid his thumb upward on the MP5SD4’s grip, activating the LAM. Next his finger moved onto the trigger, and his left hand eased its grip on Lewis’s web gear, ready to reach for the release handle on his harness.
* * *
The feeling was one of surprise, then wonder, then realization, then anger. Major Orelio Guevarra looked toward the sound and saw the shadow of the helicopter pass between him and the star-flecked southern sky.
“Chiuaigel!” Guevarra screamed as he bolted for the Havoc.
Sergeant Montes ran after his commander, joining him at the MI-28’s front. “Where did it come from?”
“Dammit, who cares.” The major pulled his helmet on with haste and clambered into the aft seat of the helicopter, plugging his communications umbilical into the intercom/radio jack as Montes dropped into the front seat.
“We have no missiles,” the sergeant said. He opened the power circuits to all his weapons as Guevarra fired up the twin Isotov turbines above and behind them.
The major looked left and right. A damned ground attack, eh? “No, but we can still fight.” He recalled the wide, flat profile of the craft streaking across the sky. A transport, he knew, though it could not be the type he had initially thought. But still a transport. More correctly it was prey. And he was the predator.
“Systems on line. Checklist?”
“To hell with the checklist,” Guevarra said, pulling the collective up in a steady motion, the Isotovs responding with a surge of power. “Switch to cannon,” he ordered as the Havoc leaped into the darkness.
* * *
“Bolt those doors,” Asunción directed the officer with him. He went to the firing controls as his orders were carried out. He had performed the motions repeatedly in his mind, and an equal number of times in preparation of the day when he would do so for real. That day, that moment, was now at hand.
He flipped the two rows of safety covers up, exposing the switches that had to be thrown to give control of the power and pumping functions to the missile. With his right thumb he threw each switch from manual to auto. Asunción cleared another safety cover to the right and pressed the single black button beneath it, locking the preprogrammed target codes into the missile’s guidance system.
Then he lifted the final plastic cover. The others were black. This one was red. Beneath it was a circular button of the same color.
* * *
“Raptor, this is Sandman.”
“Sandman, go ahead,” Colonel Cadler said, acknowledging the call from the E3C Sentry thirty miles to his rear.
“We’re showing a second air target northeast of Gambler. Distance is about a half-mile. Just coming up from zero AGL. Heading is southwest. No IFF, Raptor. This one’s a Bandit.”
Goddammit! Cadler swore silently, switching to intercom. “Captain, step on it. Gambler has company.”
* * *
“On target.”
The Delta troopers swung forward in the motion of a pendulum as Duc flared the Pave Hawk and dropped toward the ground. They pulled their release handles almost in unison and sprinted toward the squat gray structure fifty feet away. Lewis, Graber, and Goldfarb broke left to the south-facing door; Antonelli and Quimpo right to the north. In fluid motions Goldfarb and Quimpo pulled the pre-cut strips of det cord from pouches on their webbing and reached up, attaching the adhesive end to the top of each door on the latch side. They stepped quickly to the side, the thumb-switch detonators in their hands.
No nod was needed. Sean already had his hand on the chest mic.
* * *
Buxton’s group reached the base of cooling tower number one unopposed. They split into two pairs and took up overwatch positions a hundred feet apart, ready to deal with any threat, except for the one that was taking shape inside the walls of the tower at their backs.
* * *
“Go!”
The det cord exploded with a bright flash that the troopers did not see. The energy created by the blast was focused inward along a vertical line and severed both doors inward of their latches. The steel slabs twisted inward as the sound of the explosion cracked inside the concrete walls. Without hesitation the entry team moved through the portals.
Practice, in this case, had made for a perfect entry. Lewis, the first through, was met by the sight of a single figure near the west wall. The LAM painted the man’s form with IR light, giving the Delta trooper a clear picture of his target. Armed or not, the man was a target. And the pulsating dot of red on his chest was the bull’s eye.
Sean came through the opening, stepping on the steel door, just as Lewis fired a single burst. He caught the scene in his peripheral vision. The target suddenly moved backward as if a massive fist had punched it in the chest, then collapsed like a felled tree. The movement of Antonelli and Quimpo to his right registered in Sean’s vision, and Goldfarb’s hand touched his back as he entered and passed to the center. The sensory input at that moment was tremendous. The sights of the first shots; the staccato popping as though a child were making a machine-gun sound; the feel of his team members; every tiny motion.
Motion.
Sean caught it first as the LAM swept the far end of the room, beyond where Lewis had fired. That target had blocked the sergeant’s view of the scene beyond, and Goldfarb was not yet in position to see what his commander was seeing.
* * *
Asunción had ducked as a reflex when the crack of an explosion invaded the command bunker. But duty quickly overcame his natural reactions, and he began to rise, the launch button right there, just inches from the finger that he was stabbing toward it.
* * *
Man. His back was to Sean. Hands moving. The laser dot danced across the target’s back to a point between the blades before Sean squeezed the trigger. A three-round burst of 9mm rounds spit from the front of the MP5SD4 with hardly a flash. There was a sound to accompany the meeting of lead with flesh, but it was not from the weapon. Not from Sean’s, that is.
* * *
General Juan Asunción’s final act was hardly a difficult one, but it set in motion a complex series of actions that were to culminate in a disastrous event, though not that which he had envisioned when his finger came down upon the launch button.
The first manifestation was probably the least involved. A minute electrical current traveled five hundred yards through a wire, buried with many others in a conduit running from the command bunker to Tower One. A backup radio signal would have been transmitted if there had been a problem with the power, but there was not. The pulse of energy reached a sequencer box just behind the missile’s guidance package. Here it “tripped,” in sequence, a series of electrical switches. The first initiated a wholly separate signal that ordered the explosive bolts securing the missile to its launch pedestal to fire. All twenty did, breaking the bonds that held the weapon in place. The second switch started four separate pumps near the base of the booster’s first stage. Two of these were primary and two secondary, and all four began drawing the two liquids from their separate tanks in the first stage but were stopped from delivering the propellant combination to the combustion chamber. The final switch in the sequencer removed the intended blockage, activating a series of piston-driven drop valves that allowed the hypergolic mixture of undimensional dimethylhydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide to flow under tremendous pressure into the bulbous first-stage combustion chamber.
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