The co-pilot adjusted his own NightScope glasses then he too saw it. Off to their left, a small, flat-top mountain that broke off into a cliff. At its summit was a tall white skyscraper.
This building was their objective.
Once an ultra-luxurious resort hotel, the 25-story structure was surrounded by high walls and fronted on the seaside by a large concrete bunker. A long curving road ran from the entrance to this bunker down the sloping oceanfront hillside to the beach below, a distance of about a mile.
Halfway down, the road flattened out slightly right next to a dense grove of palm trees. This was the predesignated landing zone. In seconds, Hunter had turned the Osprey toward it.
“Hang on, gang,” he called to the troops in back as he approached the LZ. Then, pulling back on the Osprey’s controls and rotating the big nacelles fully skyward, he quickly put the aircraft into its hover mode. The effect was like slamming on the car’s brakes at 70 mph. There was an audible screech as the airplane suddenly went true vertical and started to drop, its huge rotors scattering sand and loose brush in the downwash as it drew closer to the palm grove.
They landed with a thump! Hunter instantly idled the twin engines and once again called back to the Rangers.
“Welcome to Bermuda, boys.”
Swiftly and silently, the Rangers lowered the Osprey’s rear ramp and scattered into the palm grove. In less than a half minute, they had secured the deserted landing zone. Thirty seconds later, the airplane was camouflaged with special netting.
At that point, Hunter keyed his microphone and set the Osprey’s transmitter to “Long Range—Send.”
“OK, partner,” Hunter said to JT. “Let’s see if we can get a clear radio shot.”
Using his best hey-mon accent, Hunter called into the microphone: “Hello, Cousin. Hello Cousin. Fishing is fine … I say, fishing is fine …”
Five agonizing seconds went by.
He repeated the message.
“Hello, hello, Cousin. I say, fishing is fine … very fine …”
Both he and JT stared at the aircraft’s radio speaker, as if looking at it would produce the needed reply.
“They might be out of range,” JT offered, his tone slightly worried.
“Not if they’re on time, they’re not,” Hunter said before repeating the message a third time.
Suddenly the speaker burst to life. “’Alio, ’alio! Cousin!” a strange, obviously mimicked voice on the speaker called back to them. “If fishing is fine, then we come to fish …”
Both Hunter and Toomey breathed a sigh of relief. The low, focused radio message had come back loud and clear, so much so it caused both Hunter and JT to shake their heads at someone else’s bad imitation of a Bermudan accent.
“See you soon, Cousin,” Hunter replied. “Over and out.”
The all-important diversion was in motion. Now it was time for the strike team to get to work.
Hunter and JT climbed out of the Osprey and quickly took a look at the lay of the land. They were just 20 feet from the dirt road that led up to the cliff that jutted out above them about a mile away. It had stopped raining and was getting lighter. The sun was just above the horizon now, its intense gold light already burning off some of the clouds.
Once again, Hunter checked his watch. It was 0607. They had less than twenty minutes to get in position before the diversion started. But one important element was still missing. He gathered the assault team in the thicket of palms to review the plan and wait.
Barely a minute later, the low rumble of a large diesel engine caught his ear. Someone—or something—was advancing up the coast road.
In a split-second the strike force dove for cover among the palms, pointing their M-16s down the open road at the advancing sound. Soon a vehicle, completely enveloped in a cloud of smoke, came into view. It was a battered, double-deck tour bus, its trail of dirty engine exhaust punctuated by staccato bursts of backfiring.
The clustered Rangers hunkered down even farther as the ancient vehicle came grinding up to the clearing. The driver, intent on jamming his balky gearshift into what seemed like every other gear, didn’t see the commandos until he was literally on top of them.
Suddenly he was facing 25 M-16s …
The bus driver, a tall, rugged black man, slammed on the brakes, and seeing he was surrounded, nervously stepped out of the creaking bus. Two Rangers stepped up to frisk him and found nothing. By this time, Hunter and JT had moved up.
Immediately, Hunter and the driver engaged in a hearty handshake and a quick orgy of back-slapping.
“Hunter, my old friend!” the sunny black man said in an excited whisper dripping with the Queen’s English. “It is good to see you well.”
“Humdingo, it seems like I am always asking you for a favor,” Hunter told the man. “But it is good to see you also, sir.”
Though he looked and talked the part, the man, Humdingo, was not a native Bermudan at all. In fact, he was an African, and a chief of a tribe of Congolese warriors to boot. Educated in England before the Big War, Humdingo had close ties to the British Free Forces who now held some semblance of order in near-anarchic Western Europe. Hunter had met the chief a year before when the pilot helped some Brits tow a disabled nuclear aircraft carrier across the Mediterranean in an effort to stop the ruthless terrorist known as Viktor from relighting World War III. Humdingo and his men had guarded Hunter’s precious F-16 at a crucial time during that mission.
Now, the mighty chief was working with the United Americans. He was the leader of one of the UA spy teams that had been inserted on the island. He had learned much. But most important, via a pocketful of bribes, he had bought a job driving non-essential New Order personnel and visitors from the center of town to the skyscraper and back.
“We have so little time to talk, my friend,” Hunter told him. “Is everything going according to plan?”
“Yes,” Humdingo answered quickly. “Everything is set. I suggest you have your lads hop into the motorcoach. Their clothes are bundled up in the back.”
A signal from Hunter and 20 of the Rangers scrambled aboard the ancient vehicle. They immediately hid between the seats, retrieving packages of clothing they found there. As planned, JT and the rest of the commandos would stay with the Osprey.
“Good luck, Hawk,” JT called out to Hunter.
“You, too,” Hunter replied as he hopped into the rickety open cab of the bus. “And when you hear us holler, come a-runnin’.”
Then, with a series of loud backfires and grinding of the gears, the double-decker behemoth started up the steep incline, heading to the entrance of the bunker.
Hunter looked at the time again, and peered over the cracked dashboard to see the dusty road ahead.
Only twelve minutes to showtime, he thought.
Chapter 2
FIFTY MILES OFF THE western coast of Bermuda, the two brightly painted F-4 Phantoms were hugging the surface of the softly swelling Atlantic. On the flight leader’s count, they turned at a predescribed point and streaked toward the island at more than 800 miles per hour.
The bold lettering on their nose sections labeled them “The Ace Wrecking Crew,” the well-known free-lance air combat team that flew for Hunter and the United American Army. Their slogan, emblazoned in similar circus-style lettering on the shining fuselages, read: “No Job’s Too Small, We Bomb Them All.”
The owner/operator, Captain “Crunch” O’Malley, had always believed that it paid to advertise. Because these days if you had two supersonic fighters and crews who knew their business, you had a very marketable commodity in the New Order world.
But Crunch and his team weren’t flying for pay now—this mission they were doing gratis.
The “fishing is fine” signal they had received from Hunter told them that they still had the critical advantage of surprise—no alert had been sounded at the time Hunter had called in the strike. That was fine with Crunch—his Phantoms were kick-ass jets, but any day he could avoid tangli
ng with MiGs and the like was fine with him.
With a wing signal to his partner in the Number 2 Phantom, a captain known to all as Elvis Q, Crunch relayed the order to arm their ordnance. Each plane was carrying about ten thousand pounds of napalm bombs on hard points under the wings and fuselages of the souped-up fighter-bombers.
In the rear seat of his F-4, Crunch’s navigator/bombardier snapped off the red covers over the bomb arming switches and clicked all of them up to prepare the deadly munitions. Five tons of jellied gasoline hanging from the wings made both men momentarily religious—one stray tracer round from an enemy gun and their speeding fighter would turn into a supersonic ball of fire.
Crunch turned to make the final approach, hugging the rolling wavetops as he kept his two-ship flight under radar until the last possible second. The wave-licking wouldn’t last long though—they would need some altitude when they let the napalm go, or they’d be caught by the flames of the explosions.
On O’Malley’s order, the Phantoms broke up off the deck together. They were now a scant five miles away from their main target: Bermuda’s tiny military airport. Using his APG-65 advanced imaging radar set, Crunch was able to “see” a scattering of aircraft on the airport’s runways and taxiways. The largest was a Soviet-built airborne tanker that he guessed was of Libyan origin.
All the better, Crunch thought.
His rear-seater targeted the big tanker, parked near the airport’s main fuel depot. Although O’Malley knew the Soviets and their satellites were drilled in proper defensive deployment and dispersal of aircraft, that knowledge was not evident at the New Order base.
In other words, the big tanker was a sitting duck.
The two F-4s flashed over the beach, at the same instant “popping up” to 750 feet. Both pilots then immediately kicked in their afterburners, increasing their speed to an awesome 1,000 mph.
Six seconds later, they were over the target.
To the shocked gun and missile crews, many just sitting down to morning chow, it appeared as if the circus-colored F-4s had materialized out of nowhere. Before they could race to their battle stations, the first sticks of napalm bombs had been loosed from the wings of the streaking Phantoms, smashing into the clustered machines on the crowded runways.
Crunch’s bombs found their mark with a direct hit on the tanker, which, as he correctly guessed, was covered with Libyan markings. The gelatinous mixture exploded in an ugly, oily mushroom of orange-white flame as it engulfed the big plane, touching off an even bigger explosion as the contents of the tanker—several thousand gallons of jet fuel—erupted into the murky gray sky.
In Phantom 2, Elvis’s bombardier had laid his deadly napalm eggs among the scattered fighter planes and helicopters along the opposite end of the runway. These, too, erupted in searing geysers of fire that grew larger with every airplane and fuel tank that was added to the angry tempest.
The two sets of fires grew in size and ferocity until they met near the center of the main runway, devouring several Cuban-marked Hind helicopters and igniting an underground ammunition bunker.
“Bingo!” Elvis cried out as he saw the tell-tale greenish-white flame of tons of rifle ammo going off.
Within seconds, the secondary explosions started successive chain reactions among the nearby fuel storage tanks, bursting one after another until the entire fuel depot was one sprawling sheet of flame.
Less than a minute after the jets had departed the area, the entire airport was engulfed in a wind-whipped firestorm, one which generated temperatures so hot, the asphalt on its runways literally melted.
Arcing his swift Phantom around to survey the scene, Crunch realized the extent of the destruction at the airport. So intense was the inferno that the fires were beginning to spread beyond the airport’s perimeter and on to other parts of the island. Their mission was complete; the target was destroyed. There would be no need for a second pass.
Crunch felt a brief pang of remorse. He had visited Bermuda many years ago—on his honeymoon yet—and had always remembered it as a peaceful island paradise, noted especially for its calm and cooling ocean breezes.
Now it looked like a little piece of Hell itself.
Picking up his partner on the back side of his turn, Crunch took one last look at the towering column of flame and black smoke over the airport. Then he kicked in his afterburner and roared away to the west, leading the Phantoms of the Ace Wrecking Crew back to Cherry Point.
As it had many mornings before, the beat-up shuttle bus labored up the winding road to the skyscraper’s hilltop entrance and approached a small guard station.
“Everyone stay cool,” Hunter calmly called back to the Rangers. “Here comes our first potential problem.”
No longer crouching in the aisle, the Rangers, now wearing long white sheets and hoods, were sitting two by two in the seats on the lower deck of the bus. The strange disguise was a key to the mission. Humdingo had found out several weeks before that a number of criminal gangs from the American mainland—neo-Nazis, Mafioso, air pirates—regularly visited Bermuda at the invitation of the New Order ministers. Provided guns, drugs and prostitutes, these gangs would eventually return to America and whip up trouble.
Now, the United Americans’ plan called for the strike team to play the part of one of the more notorious racist gangs Humdingo knew were actually elsewhere on the island.
Humdingo slowed the bus as it reached the guardhouse. Inside the small building was a Vietnamese lieutenant. The chief gave the man a routine wave and handed him an envelope. The guard, who recognized the old bus, quickly read the note which authorized the Knights of the Burning Cross to proceed to the skyscraper. Hardly looking up from the dog-eared nudie magazine he was reading, the Vietnamese officer waved the bus through.
“Thank you, Ho Chi Minh,” Hunter whispered as Humdingo gunned the bus past the guardhouse and into the small parking lot next to the skyscraper. They came to a stop in front of a combination blockhouse and bus stop shelter, which was right next to the entrance to the building’s little-used underground parking garage.
Nearby a large closed-circuit video camera rotated monotonously back and forth across the approachway, its cold unblinking eye passing over the bus several times.
To the rear of the bus was a spectacular view of the Atlantic Ocean. On cue, the Rangers turned and let out a chorus of “ooos” and “aahs.” Then several who were carrying cameras began clicking away. Meanwhile, Hunter stood and addressed the group in mostly incomprehensible pidgin English.
To the half-dozen New Order guards—mercenaries all—sprawled around the bus stop structure, nothing about the odd scene looked unusual.
Just another busload of free-loading American terrorists, wearing their crazy costumes and taking tourist-type pictures. Absorbed in eating a pick-up breakfast in the warm, early-morning, Bermuda sunshine, none of the guards gave the busload of sheeted people a second look.
But then, suddenly, the guards felt the ground starting to shake …
“Now! Go! Go!” Hunter screamed at the Rangers.
The robed Rangers burst out of the creaking bus, the first six men firing away with their silencer-equipped M-16s. In a matter of seconds, the startled guards were quickly—and quietly—mowed down and the strike force’s sharpshooter had put a hushed burst into the Vietnamese officer in the guardhouse. At the same time, Hunter blinded the rotating security camera with a blast from his tracer-filled M-16 assault rifle, which was also carrying a silencer for the occasion.
All the while the ground continued to rumble with the force of a mini-earthquake. Off to the southwest, Hunter could see the billowing black smoke and towers of flame shooting up from the tiny airbase a dozen miles away. Once again, Crunch & Crew had been right on the money.
Now, it was up to Hunter and his gang to work quickly….
The trio of South African mercenaries manning the skyscraper’s bottom floor video security system was baffled at why their rear entrance camera had sudden
ly blinked out. Short-circuit? Sudden drop in power? Or perhaps the slight shaking they had felt moments earlier had something to do with it.
In any case, with the early morning hour and their coffee just being poured, none of the three was too anxious to get up and check out the camera’s problem. Still, it had to be done.
“I’ll go,” one of them, a sergeant, said finally. He was hungover from a late-night drinking bout and was hoping the fresh air would clear his head and settle his stomach.
Retrieving his little-used AK-47, the soldier drained his coffee cup and started out of the small TV security control room. But when he reached the door he was surprised to find that someone was trying to come in as he was trying to go out.
It was a man dressed in an outlandish white robe and hood. Behind him were a dozen other men, all dressed the same way. As they stood facing each other for a very long second, the South African saw that the “visitor” was holding a camera in one hand; a hand grenade in the other.
Suddenly the hooded man pushed the South African Hard, causing him to reel back into the control room, tossing the grenade in at the same time.
There was a bright bolt of light and a very muffled explosion as the HE flash grenade quietly obliterated the small TV studio and everyone in it.
Hunter nodded grimly as the Ranger sapper gave him the thumbs-up signal. The first objective had been destroyed. Surveillance cameras all over the building were at that moment quietly blinking out.
No one noticed that the building’s top floor camera had suddenly stopped moving. To the contrary, it was business as usual on the top floor of the skyscraper.
The ten-man nightguard was preparing to change shifts at 0630, as usual. The long-range satellite communications system—the electronic umbilical cord to the military clique in the Kremlin—was about to be switched on, as usual. The evening’s retinue of high-priced call girls—having plied their trade all night long in the skyscraper’s top floor penthouse—were about to be paid and dismissed, as usual.
But when the officer of the nightwatch—a Bulgarian mercenary—drew back the suite’s massive drapes to let in the morning light, he saw something very unusual. Instead of the routine picture postcard view, he and the others in his squad were astounded to see a funnel cloud of black smoke and flame rising up from the airfield, 12 miles to their south.
Final Storm Page 2