Miguel moved silently and swiftly through a doorway and into a hall leading to the voice. Jose followed close behind with his bloody hand on Miguel’s back taking glances behind him for anyone coming down the hall. Already their comrades were pouring through the door into the front office. Ten feet from Miguel a door to an office opened and a uniformed man came half way out. The man’s look of irritation turned to curious concern then immediately to a panicked, fearful surprise. His automatic response to the fast approaching barrel pointing at his eye was to raise his hands as though to feel a pair of breasts. Miguel put his finger to his lips as a sign for the man to keep quiet as he glided silently past him. Jose put the blade of his knife to the man’s throat and reached for the policeman’s gun. There was a slight movement of the policeman’s hand as he realized the gunman had moved down the hall. Jose pressed the sharp blade firmly against the man’s throat till the policeman knew he meant business. The uniformed man made a slight noise as his face grimaced at the pressure of the blade. Jose relieved the policeman of his sidearm as his team filled the hall.
Miguel continued down the hall with the quiet bustling and hoarse whispering of his friends behind him. The offices on this side were empty. Miguel went through the lunchroom to check the back door leading to the back parking lot. Through the window in the door he saw two policemen walking towards the building from their car. The two policemen were 15 meters from the steps leading to the back door when the one trailing slightly behind the other squinted his eyes at the building. Miguel saw his mouth mutter something as he started to point his finger at the center of the building where most of the commotion was still going on. Miguel did not break stride as his momentum carried him out the back door. Standing on the top landing of the steps he leveled the pistol at the first man not more than three meters away. His voice was so loud as he yelled “STOP…DON’T MOVE” that it surprised everyone who heard him including himself. Both men scrambled to draw their pistols as Miguel shot the first man twice in the chest and dropped him then pointed his gun at the second. The second policeman had spun on his heels to run for cover at the same time firing a shot at Miguel, as a result doing neither very well. Miguel instinctively bobbed his head as a bullet whizzed past and smashed into the wall behind him. Miguel fired four shots into the fleeing man, emptying his magazine.
Guantanamo Naval Base
Free Cuban Armed Forces- Free Cuban Sector Airbase
Cuba September 30th, 2018. 9:00 PM - (Please carefully note dates)
“L” Day-or Liberation Day- minus one (one day before Liberation Day)
The dull grey aircraft seemed to sag under the weight of fuel, bombs and missiles. In the heavily armored hangar Cuco Cervantes fired up the F-15’s engines. They came to life with a screaming whine and a deafening roar. He got the avionics spun up and settled. The navigation system aligned itself as the rest of the system warmed up. In the back seat his Weapons Systems Officer (the WSO or the ‘wizzo’) was Ismael Portuondo, Izzy for short and that, of course made him “Izzy the wizzo.” Izzy took one last look around as he snapped in the bayonet clip on his oxygen mask. “I hope they clean those Commie guns outa here quick,” He said referring to Castro’s artillery now menacing the Free Cuban Sector at Guantanamo. “I told Maria I’d take her golfing on Friday. I bet her I would shoot a hole in one…eighteen times in a row,” Izzy said referring to the craters created by the upcoming artillery battle.
“Yeah?” Cuco muttered as he concentrated on the gauges. “What’d she say?”
“Oh man,” Izzy laughed, “she just went white.”
“Really,” Cuco stopped and thought for a moment. That did not seem like the Maria he knew. ‘Maria full of fight’ was his nickname for this average looking but rare female among the Free Cuban Armed Forces at Guantanamo.
“Yeah, well,” Izzy went on “then I could see her jaw get all tight, like when she’s mad you know, and she said, ‘Good, it’s about time.’ Then she said, ‘Just make sure you’re here for your bet.’”
Cuco continued to check his gauges and said “It’s good to know a State secret is safe with you, Izzy.”
Cuco taxied to takeoff position, dropped the flaps and slid the throttles all the way forward. The twin F100 engines roared. Cuco released the brakes. The afterburners blasted flame like a pair of rockets lighting up the night, each engine producing 24,000 pounds of thrust. The sixty-eight-thousand pound F-15 Eagle thundered down the runway to blast itself off the earth. Freedom One was now in the air. His wingman, Freedom Two, waited in his fortified aircraft shelter for a full two minutes before he too taxied to the end of the short runway, plugged in full afterburner on the older Vietnam era Phantom F-4 jet fighter and shot down the runway.
After flying for some time Cuco peered out over the dark Caribbean Sea and said “Give me the leg brief, Izzy.”
“Next heading two-four-zero, leg time twelve minutes fifteen seconds,” Izzy recited. “Descend to Level-off altitude two thousand feet… set and verified. The SA-2iv early warning radar site is our first threat. I’ve got only air traffic control search radars up now.”
Both pilot and WSO had sixteen-color multifunction displays (MDFs).v
Their course was depicted on their display as a roadway, with the road as the computer-recommended altitude. Symbols showed known and detected threats and obstacles. Two large upside-down green cones represented the search radars on the isle of Cuba, with the “roadway” threading precisely between and underneath the edges of the cones.
Colored symbols all along the Cuban coastline represented the location of known antiaircraft threat sites, but so far none were active.
“Our first threat is an SA-2 site, two o’clock, forty miles. We should be underneath it in five minutes. We’ve got two SA-9 Gaskinvi sites at eleven o’clock—search radars only. We should be outside detection range. No fighters detected yet. LADAR (laser radar) coming on,” Izzy said referring to the F-15’s highest tech asset, the Laser Radar. “Our course is clear so far…. OK, we probably have Commie fighters at three o’clock, seventy miles—they’re moving pretty fast, but they don’t have radars on so we can’t identify yet.” Izzy kept up a constant litany of reports and observations. Although Cuco had all that information right in front of him as well, it was reassuring to hear Izzy reciting it all—two pairs of eyes scanning the instruments was always better than one, especially when things started happening fast.
The computer generated “road” started to rise up to meet the aircraft depiction on their navigation displays, so both crew members monitored the level-off carefully. They performed a fast terrain-following system check, verified that everything was working normally. They were over water, forty miles off the Cuban coast. The Cuban coastal air defense sites were all around them, but right now they were quiet—no radar emissions at all.
“Want to step it down, Cuco?” Izzy asked.
Cuco studied the threat display. They knew the position of the nearest SA-2 site—it just wasn’t transmitting yet. At two thousand feet, they were right at the edge of lethal coverage at this range. They could descend well below the missile’s engagement envelope, but then risk being heard from the ground. Only government and military aircraft would be flying over Cuba, and a big plane like an F-15 flying low to the ground would certainly attract attention. “Let’s leave it here for now,” Cuco replied. “We’ll give it a few minutes and--”
Suddenly a female voice from the threat warning receiver spoke: “Caution, SA-2 SAM at two o’clock, thirty miles… warning, SA-2 SAM height-finder at two o’clock, thirty miles…”
“Trackbreakers active,” Izzy verified. “Let’s take it down to one hundred.”
“SA-2 SAM in acquisition mode,” the computer reported. Now every anti-aircraft battery within one hundred miles was popping on line -- searching.
Free Cuban Sector, Guantanamo Naval Base
Fighter Squadron Briefing
September 4th 2018 “L” Day minus 26 days (26 days before Libe
ration Day) (Please carefully note dates)
Author's Note: Please double click on footnotes to find pictures and references. Double click again to return to document.
Captain Fernando Pruna spoke before a large map of Cuba to the sixteen men sitting at small high school desks “Before the build up over the last year, the Communists had 130 plus combat aircraft on the books. Twenty-five were known to be operational. Eighteen of those were operational fighter aircraft. Those are made up of three Mig-29’s, ten MiG-23’s, and five MiG-21’s. They had an additional forty-five armed helicopters. They have added seven additional fighters over the last year. Now we have confirmation that the Chinese shipment we talked about two weeks ago of eight fighters are now in operation. The shiny new paint on those J7’s we’ve been seeing is because the planes are shiny and new. That brings the total we know about to thirty-three fighter aircraft. The unknown, is still the MiG-29’s that may have been shipped in from Venezuela. The rundown is in your book.” The mood in the room grew quiet and gloomy.
“They have over one hundred non-operational combat aircraft, with that many extra parts and airframes you can put together a number of additional planes,” said Captain Fernando Pruna as he overlooked the sixteen airmen that made up the entire Free Cuban Air Force. “We just don’t know how many they have. The plan is that FCN (Free Cuban Navy) will hit them with ship mounted MLRS rockets at 2115 hrs. Hopefully the majority of the aircraft will be on the ground. We will hit and crater the runways and taxi areas and bottle them up in their hardened shelters until we can come back and knock them out one at a time.”
Cuco raised his hand “What if they aren’t on the ground where they’re supposed to be and we’re stuck up there with a bunch of bombs on our racks? Should we try to bomb them mid-air?” An amused murmur went through the men as Cuco looked behind him. “Didn’t you guys get that lesson at Red Flag?” He referred to the discussion of how a U.S. warplane had dropped a laser-guided bomb onto a flying Iraqi helicopter during Gulf War I.
“Your flight package will have eight missiles between you. You’ll have four AAMRAMSvii and your Wild Weaselviii will have four Sparrowsix as well”.
“Look Sir,” Cuco responded with upraised hand, not waiting to be called on, “with all due respect, those planes are not going to be on the ground. They can see us take off from Gitmo. They’re going to scramble just like they always do when we take off, besides they always seem to know what we’re up to,” Cuco said.
Captain Pruna took off his glasses and used them to punctuate his sentence. “They have been scrambling a limited number of fighters lately. For the last month or so they rarely put up more than two of their fighters to every one of ours in the air. This will be a cake walk if the odds are only two to one. And yes, it’s a crap shoot, I know, but they may have enough fighters to overwhelm us or eventually catch us on the ground. If we can hit them first and cripple them, then the war is as good as won.”
“Hey it’s a good as won already, Cap. We’ve got “Izzy the Wizzo,” the highest score at Red Flag.”
“Yeah,” piped up a voice from the back of the room, “and the worst gambler and even he wouldn’t make that bet, Cap”. Raucous laughter rolled through the room as the airmen remembered their nights carousing in Las Vegas, just a short drive from Nellis Air Force Base and the daunting pressures of the Red Flag war games. All the crews were U.S. airmen who joined the Free Cubans. Since that time they had been intensively training at various U.S bases and were the center of attention at this year’s Red Flag exercise. These sixteen Free Cubans had more quality flight time training than the entire Communist Air Force combined.
Strike Package One- F-15 Aircraft Named Freedom One
Cuba September 30th, 2018. 9:00 PM
“L” Day minus one (Please carefully note dates)
“AWACSx to Freedom one” came the call over Cuco’s headphones. “Be advised twenty eight bandits have scrambled throughout Cuba. Six bandits in your vicinity. Over.”
Cuco could not respond and had to maintain radio silence. “No kidding,” he said sarcastically. Izzy chimed in with his Ricky Ricardo imitation “Luuuseee…..Hi toll hue soh.”
The American intel had been a wonderful thing to have. President Trump personally asked the Air Force to provide all the intel they could to the Free Cubans and they were eager to do so. The older grey headed men in the upper echelons remembered the impotent rage they all felt when courageous Cuban patriots were left to be massacred at the Bay of Pigs by a timid and unsure new American President. One of the USAF generals, as a young pilot, had actually flown over the Communists with their armor and vehicles choking the only two roads into the Zapatas swamps. It would have been so easy to waste them all. Back then victory was just a toggle switch away. The Twelfth Air Force, the Air Combat Command headquarters, owned the long-range reconnaissance aircraft needed and enthusiastically put together a reconnaissance schedule that blanketed the entire Island of Cuba which included the unmanned RQ-4A Global Hawkxi, The U-2xii spy plane, the RC-135 RIVET JOINTxiii electronic reconnaissance plane, and the E-8 Joint STARSxiv(surveillance and Targeting Radar System) ground-reconnaissance aircraft. With a combination of these aircraft flying in international airspace just offshore Cuba, augmented with satellite reconnaissance, gave them a 24/7 real-time picture of Cuba. In fact it would be the most complete real-time picture of a battlefield in the history of warfare.
“That SA-2 site knows we’re out here, but he can’t find us… yet.” Cuco said.
“Freedom One, be advised, multiple inbound MLRSxv, southbound, twenty miles, over,” said their guardian AWACS. The powerful radar plane and its accompanying U-2 spy plane had orders to assist the Free Cuban Air Force with the defense of their aircraft and base only. Originally it was understood that the high tech planes would not assist the Free Cubans in attacking Communist ground forces. But at the outset that understanding came with a wink and a nod by the men in uniform who would carry out the policy.
As Cuco looked at the horizon far ahead he saw anti-aircraft guns firing wildly, creating fiery serpentine figures in the sky and the blazing trails of communist missiles reaching up into the darkness. He could not see the incoming MLRS missiles that they were shooting at.
“Here they come, right on time, God bless the Navy!” yelled Cuco. “Izzy, where are those fighters you saw earlier?”
Izzy activated the laser radar for a few seconds. “They’re on their way now,” he said. “Two bandits headed our way at six hundred thirty knots, twenty-nine thousand feet. Less than six minutes out. No identification yet.”
20 km off the southern coast of Cuba
Free Cuban Navy - The FCN (Free Cuban Navy) Ibrahim Torres
September 30th 2018 9:15 PM. L Day minus one
As Cuco’s F-15E flew towards its target, a rusty old container ship newly renamed the Ibrahim Torres erupted in flame giving a fiery birth to sixty-three missilesxvi that were now arcing across the sky to their assigned targets. These included military air and naval bases with their related air defenses, command and control targets and early warning radar installations. The 63 MLRS rockets were mounted amidships in a static forty-five degree angle pointing off to starboard. Each one was steered by GPS coordinates. The Free Cubans felt relieved to get most of them off this rusty hulk and into the air. It was a great satisfaction to the crew that tonight the “FCN Torres” struck a blow for its namesake. Ibrahim Torresxvii was a Cuban patriot who was a victim of Castro’s Biological experimentation and died in Castro’s Gulag. What WWII sailor could have imagined that this old tub could have a much further range than the biggest battleship gun and pinpoint accuracy? Some of these missiles could fly three hundred kilometers or one hundred and eighty-six miles. If there was one country that was vulnerable to sea power it was Cuba. The island was only about fifty to seventy miles wide and could be attacked from either coast. There was no strategic target that was out of range of the sea mounted MLRS rockets.
The Cuban Liberation Handbook Page 2