Brown, Dale - Independent 02

by Hammerheads (v1. 1)

  Quickly he selected the Sea Stinger missile pod, then pivoted further to align on the retreating F-5 fighter as he waited for the aiming donut to appear. But the instant it popped onto his field of view he made a small correction to center it on the radar-tracking signal, got a lock-on beep from one of the Sea Stinger missiles—and fired.

  He knew the game was over moments after the missile left the pod. It tracked dead on the hot tailpipe of the F-5E fighter—until Salazar made a hard climbing right turn to line up again on the AV-22. The small Sea Stinger missile made a sharp but erratic bob to try to keep up, immediately lost the heat signal, and exploded moments later. Like the Chain Gun pod, the Sea Stinger, Hardcastle knew, was just not designed to kill fast-moving jets, especially one as small and maneuverable as an F-5.

  Now he dialed the engine nacelles down to begin moving forward—the closer he could get toward the oncoming F-5, the less time Salazar would have to aim and fire. But with the F-5 now travelling seven miles a minute, the AV-22 appeared as if it was in a constant hover. Hardcastle switched back to the Chain Gun pod, raised the nose and held the trigger down as the F-5 bore in for the kill. Firing ten high-explosive rounds per second and already partially depleted from the earlier attacks, the Chain Gun ran out of ammunition in a few seconds, well before the F-5 fighter opened fire. In a last-ditch effort to save them, Hardcastle chopped the power and dumped the nose, throwing the AV-22 toward the earth.

  The sudden maneuver may have kept Salazar in the F-5 from concentrating a sustained burst on the Sea Lion but it wasn’t enough to keep Hardcastle’s plane from getting hit. Twenty-millimeter shells plowed into the center-wing area, rupturing fuel-transfer lines and causing a fire in the hydraulic and fuel systems. The F-5 used a little right rudder and walked the murderous gunfire straight down the left wing, chewing great holes in the wing and splitting open the left-engine nacelle. The Sea Lion heeled sharply over into the free- rotating left rotor, and the aircraft plummeted to the ground.

  Because Hardcastle had almost landed the plane before the attack the drop was only thirty feet. The left engine nacelle and wing hit first, collapsed into a ball of flames and burst apart. The destroyed wing tore free of the weakened center-wing pivot, and the fuselage was thrown another two hundred feet along the desert and scrub brush before nosing over an embankment and skidding down into the Rio Grande.

  Although smoke filled the cockpit, Hardcastle found his harness- release switch, unstrapped and climbed out of his seat. The left side cockpit windows were smashed in, clouds of smoke and debris flowing inside and waves of searing heat enveloping Sanchez. Fueled by a rush of adrenaline, Hardcastle unstrapped her from the seat and carried her from the plane, cradling her bleeding head on his shoulder.

  Nearly ankle-deep in fuel-soaked sand, Hardcastle ran into the Rio Grande, waded in thigh-deep water until his legs gave out, then half-floated, half-crawled to shore, a hundred yards downstream from the crash site. The Sea Lion lay crumpled on its right side, the right-engine nacelle bent awkwardly and nearly snapped off the wing and the right rotor blades stuck deep into the side of the embankment. It looked like a mangled bird, with its huge cockpit windows a blank death’s stare, imploring for help. A fire had started in the area of the sheared left wing, and quickly spread to the right wing.

  “Rice!” Hardcastle shouted. “Hidalgo!” He tried to crawl up to his feet but his legs were too weak. Gursing his body, Hardcastle made sure Rachel Sanchez was safely out of the water and breathing, then began crawling through the sand up the embankment.

  Suddenly, the sound of burning fuel and popping metal was replaced by the smooth, rattlesnakelike hissing of a jet fighter passing overhead—the F-5 fighter screaming less than fifty feet overhead. He was coming around for one last pass . . .

  In the glow of the stricken Sea Lion aircraft Salazar saw him—none other than Admiral Hardcastle, crawling up the side of the river- bank. Someone was with him, still lying near the water’s edge. Salazar checked his fuel—less than forty minutes’ worth—but he had made up his mind as soon as he saw Hardcastle crawling like a dried-up old turtle on the water’s edge. It didn’t matter if he was only running on fumes. He was going to kill Admiral Hardcastle. He started a thirty-degree-bank turn to the right, circling over the crash site and using the burning Sea Lion as a landmark. He used the tight turn to bleed off airspeed, slowing to one hundred eight knots—the slowest he dared go at such a low altitude—and racetracked around to line up for one last strafing run on the beach. The F-5E had no true ground-attack mode for the twin cannons, but the reticle was accurate enough to smear bullets in the area.

  Rolling out of his final turn, he saw Hardcastle trying to drag his comrade out of the water and into the shadow of a few bushes near the top of the embankment. It was thoughtful of them to move closer together. As he moved within cannon range, he saw that Hardcastle had taken out his sidearm and appeared to be firing ... at him. The ultimate futile gesture, like a mouse pissing on an eagle just before the end—

  “Yo. Colonel Salazar. This is your old friend Viktor Charbakov. I’m a’comin’ for you, old buddy.”

  “Who? What?” The strange voice on the emergency GUARD channel was immediately followed by the scream of the F-5’s Threat Warning Receiver and a blinking red air-to-air radar threat-warning indicator. At first Salazar was distracted by the man’s voice on the radio, then by the warning light. He quickly looked around for any sign of pursuit—pointless, really, since except for the burning AV-22 below it was total black outside. By the time he faced around to check his alignment on Hardcastle, the aiming reticle had just passed over him. He did get a half-second burst off before flying overhead. But who . . . ?

  “You remember me, Colonel. Flight Kepten Viktor Peytorvich Charbakov?” It was, Salazar now7 realized, the young pilot that had flown the Sukhoi-29 into Verrettes!

  Powell had been alerted by Elliott once the details of Salazar’s plan were known, and since the Border Security Force and the Mexican government had finally made a cooperative border security agreement, he had been standing by with a two-seat F-15E fighter from nearby Luke Air Force Base, with the representative of the Mexican Air Force flying in the backseat, to chase down Agusto Salazar.

  “You threw one of your pig-stickers into my arm, Colonel. I wanted to get you so bad I joined the U.S. Air Force to get a shot at you. Now it’s just you and me.”

  Salazar put in full power. No afterburners ... that would have been an easy giveaway . . . climbed to only two hundred feet and turned northwest. With an enemy somewhere nearby, pitch black outside, a threat-warning receiver that didn’t give bearings to the source of the enemy radar, he had no choice against a pursuer except to run— and the best place to run was the city of Juarez, with El Paso right across the river. The ground clutter might disrupt their radar, giving him a better chance to escape.

  “Colonel Agusto Salazar,” another voice, an older, Latino voice, came on the channel, “this is General Tomas Rodriguez Fuentes of the Monterrey District Headquarters of the Mexican Air Forces. You are ordered to reverse course and lower your landing gear immediately.”

  Salazar was only ten miles outside Juarez—already overflying outlying villages and communities. He had to delay his pursuers for just a few moments longer—then, so close to the city, they would not dare open fire on him . . . “General, I would not do that,” Salazar said on the GUARD emergency channel. “My men have your family ...”

  There was a long pause. The lights of the city were getting closer— Juarez was just six miles away, the outlying lights almost touching the air-data probe on the needle-nose of the F-5. Just a few more . . .

  Salazar reached between his legs and pulled the yellow ejection ring moments before the Mexican general hit the launch button and sent two Sidewinder missiles from Powell’s F-15E fighter into the F-5. Both missiles hit dead on target, and the fighter blew apart like a ripe melon hit full force by a sledgehammer, pieces scattering for miles across the Rio Grande
and sending debris over both sides of the border . . .

  Salazar was jarred by a huge slap of jet-hot wind followed by a driving, pounding noise. His helmet was ripped from his head, breaking his nose and temporarily blinding him. His parachute opened in time to give him one swing in a fully opened chute before he slammed into the hard-packed earth, head and shoulders first.

  Dazed, bleeding, his left shoulder in a vise-tight jaw of pain, Salazar untangled his feet from the parachute risers and painfully undipped himself from the parachute harness. There was a shack about a half-mile away on fire, and beyond that it seemed the entire desert was ablaze. He dragged himself to a tree nearby and drew his side- arm, a Soviet-made Tokarev 10-millimeter automatic pistol with a nine-round clip.

  It now appeared to Salazar that he had landed just a few hundred meters outside a small farm. He could see buildings and a pyramidshaped grain silo, highlighted by the glow of the fires. Just ten meters to his left he saw a pickup truck and decided to make his way to it. But as he did he heard a sound overhead—another Sea Lion aircraft was hovering only a few hundred meters away, searching near the area where he had landed. He couldn’t stay around here—the Hammerheads were closing in . . .

  Ignoring the pain in his shoulder, Salazar crawled to his feet and ran to the pickup, crashing, exhausted, into the passenger door. He pulled open the door and crawled inside just as the NightSun searchlight flared through the darkness and the heavy, rhythmic beat of the Sea Lion’s rotors got louder and louder—

  The driver’s door now swung open, Salazar raised his pistol and aimed at the head of... an old woman who had come out to see what all the late-night commotion was about. What she confronted, and froze her, was a mangled, bloody face.

  As the searchlight beam came closer Salazar managed to get out in Spanish, “Wave at the plane, old woman, Wave pretty . . .’’

  The NightSun beam swept across the side of the farmhouse and rested just in front of the pickup truck. Salazar slumped to the floor of the truck, as far into the shadows as he could. “Wave. ” The old woman looked into the bright light and waved at the Sea Lion crew. The beam swept around the yard, searching the tree that Salazar had just hidden near, then moved away . . .

  He had made it... the Hammerheads had missed the dark, camouflaged parachute in the piowed-up field, missed the tracks he had made in the dirt.

  He hauled himself up ofif the floor and into the passenger side of the truck. “Get in, old woman,” he ordered. “You will drive m^into Juarez.”

  Too frightened to protest, the woman finally slid into the driver's seat and started the engine.

  “Take a back road,” Salazar told her as she pulled out onto the main road. “If we are caught by the police, you will be shot.”

  “No, senor, por favor ...”

  “Just do as I say and you will be safe ...” They began moving down the chip-and-seal road toward the distant glow of the city of Juarez. The woman was hunched over the steering wheel, her lips moving but not making a sound. “Turn your damned headlights on,” Salazar shouted at her. “Drive normally.”

  The woman gasped, reached down and turned the headlight switch on . . .

  And there, illuminated in the dull glow of the headlights, was a person standing in the middle of the road leading a donkey by the reins.

  “iJesus Cristo, el burro mio!” the woman wailed. Salazar got a glimpse of a woman in a pair of bright-colored overalls just before the old woman slammed on the brakes. Unable to hold himself steady with his left arm, Salazar pitched forward and crashed against the dashboard.

  “iVaya! VayalAl abrigo!” someone was shouting. With remarkable speed the old woman threw open her door and scrambled out. Salazar fired once out the driver’s door but the woman had disappeared. He climbed behind the steering wheel, put the Tokarev automatic pistol on the seat beside him, and was about to put the pickup truck into gear when a blinding white light hit him in the face.

  And rising out of the darkness, like some mythic, fire-breathing dragon, the AV-22 Sea Lion hovered in ground effect just a few dozen yards directly in front of the truck. The aircraft had been hiding behind a lush tree line on one side of the highway and had, seemingly, popped up out of nowhere. Salazar could see the Chain Gun pod deployed and aimed at him—in fact, he was close enough to see the pilot in the right seat with the targeting visor lowered. Soldiers in dark helmets carrying M-16 rifles were running down both sides of the road, moving to surround him . . .

  He reached for the pistol . . .

  “Pare!” a woman's voice sounded over the roar of the Sea Lion’s rotors. “Don’t move, Salazar,” she said in English. Salazar looked to his right and saw Geffar, who had left the AV-22 when Masters landed it to unload the I-Team, aiming a huge automatic pistol directly into his bloody face. She wore a Hammerheads orange flight suit and an I-Team communications helmet. Her eyes were directly on his, as unwavering as the automatic.

  The fingers of his good right hand were inches from the gun. He tried to inch it down . . .

  “Go ahead,” Sandra Geffar said. “I need to kill you. Give me a reason.”

  Salazar straightened his fingers, carefully lifted them clear of the pistol.

  “Hands behind your head—slow.” Salazar raised his right hand to the back of his head, his left arm as high as he, could—his dislocated shoulder was obvious. “Don’t move.” Geffar stepped away from the truck door and reached up to her helmet to draw the communications microphone closer, to her lips. The Hammerheads I-Team and federales were closing in. “Got him . . . Salazar,” GefiFar radioed to them. “Looks like he’s hurt. Better get ground transportation out here—”

  In a flash—desperation helped—Salazar’s right hand moved down to the special sling behind his neck, his fingers found the leather- wrapped butt-end of a throwing knife, the knife was slipped out of the sling and Salazar aimed—

  Fast as he was, his old lightning speed had been leeched by the injury, which, along with Van Nuys’ tip, gave Geffar her chance ... and as he aimed to let fly she dropped into a shooter’s crouch and fired, all in a single motion. The first .45-caliber slug, the one that counted, that made the difference, went through his right eye, into the back of his skull, scattering brain tissue over the cab of the truck. The remaining rounds were redundant, but necessary. They were for too many good people, dead and still to die, thanks to the late Colonel Agusto Salazar.

  EPILOGUE

  The White House Press Room, Washington, D.C.

  Two Days Later

  The SENIOR officers of the Border Security Force were standing in a line on the stage, hands behind their backs, fidgeting uncomfortably under the hot lights: Curtis Long, Rushell Masters, Sandra Geffar and Ian Hardcastle on one side of the President; the Mexican ambassador Lidia Pereira, Vice President Martindale and Drug Control Policy Advisor Samuel T. Massey on the other.

  “I did not want to make a public statement about the events of the past few days,” the President began, “without recognizing the people on this platform today. It was because of their remarkable efforts that a major multi-billion-dollar drug shipment was stopped and the principal smugglers arrested or killed. It has been a crippling, if not fatal, blow to the cartel. My special thanks go to the people and the government of Mexico, who have had the courage and conviction to enter into an unprecedented cooperative border security and antismuggling task force with us, one in which we will fly, sail and fight together to secure our common borders. I would especially like to thank the ambassador from Mexico, Dr. Lidia Pereira, for her ... role in securing this historic agreement.” Pereira nodded her thanks to the President, maintaining her famous smile in spite of the qualifying pause in the President’s accolade. She caught it, as he intended.

  “The real warriors are represented by these men and women here. They are the ones who directed the Border Security Force aircraft, vessels and surveillance forces against a well-organized and remarkably strong paramilitary organization. My thanks to Curtis Long,
director of the Hammerheads’ Investigating Team; Rushell Masters, chief pilot; and especially Inspector Sandra GefiFar and Admiral Ian Hardcastle, the heart, the soul of the organization. They may not consider it a reward, but I’m grounding both of them effective imme diately—Ian Hardcastle will take command of the new western division of the Border Security Force, where he will be in charge of establishing detection and interception facilities and procedures for the Mexican border and against the growing California smuggling trade. Sandra GefiFar will command the eastern division, including the expanded Hammerhead facilities along the Atlantic seaboard.

  “I anticipate that Congress will very soon pass the law elevating the Border Security Force, the Hammerheads, to Cabinet-level under civilian command. At that time my current drug control advisor, Samuel Massey, will be nominated to be the first Secretary of Border Security Forces. Further, under pending legislation, the Border Security Forces will soon officially include the Coast Guard and Customs Service under one roof so to speak, thereby uniting all federal agencies concerned with traffic across America’s borders

  Hardcastle, listening to the President’s intention to name Massey, had to wince inwardly, remembering as he did Massey’s early opposition to the notion of the Hammerheads to protect his turf. Still, maybe it was a good sign that a bureaucrat with a fierce protective instinct about his territory would be the nominal head of Hammerheads. And he suspected, thinking on it, that the President had the same idea in mind . . .

  “Finally,” the President went on, “I’d like to recognize the efforts of the Vice President in behalf of the Border Security Force. As director of national drug control and enforcement, Kevin Martindale has taken the lead in insuring that our country remains effective in controlling our borders and stopping the spread of illegal drugs in our society. At the risk of sounding too much like a campaign speech, let me suggest America should be proud to have a man of such strength and firmness of conviction as its Vice President ...”