Brown, Dale - Independent 04

by Storming Heaven (v1. 1)

  “I get the message.”

  “Aircraft on taxiway bravo near the tower, this is Chico ground, hold your position and acknowledge. Orders from the sheriffs department. Say your call sign,” the ground controller radioed.

  “Checklists, Stork, checklists,” Cazaux shouted crosscockpit. He reached across the cockpit and flipped on the engine ignition switches—if the engines faltered during takeoff, leaving the igniters on would help to restart them quickly. “Mr. Krull, your job is to watch this indicator. When it hits sixty, punch this button to start the stopwatch. . You will count down precisely twelve seconds and give me a warning beginning five seconds before the sweep hand reaches twelve seconds, using the words ‘ready, ready,’ then ‘now’ in a loud voice when the clock reads twelve seconds. Do you understand?”

  “What the hell for, man?”

  “I told you, keep your mouth shut and pay attention, Mr. Krull, and you’ll do fine in my organization,” Cazaux said. “Do you understand what I just told you?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I got it.”

  “Very good. This is an acceleration test, Mr. Krull. You see, we’re not going to take the long runway—we’re taking the short runway, one-three right. The twelve seconds is our safety margin—we have twelve seconds to go from sixty knots to one-twenty. If we don’t do it, we won’t take off. Simple enough.”

  “Then we better make it, man,” Krull said, “because whoever’s chasin’ us ain’t gonna be too happy about us set- tin’ off a stick of dynamite in their faces.”

  “True enough. Oh—hit that button for me right there, if you would.” Krull reached over to a small aluminum box mounted atop the glareshield above the instrument panel, took a look at Cazaux, who was busy with the checklists, and at the Stork, who was grinning with complete mirth at him. Krull hit the button ...

  ... and a ring of volcanoes appeared to erupt all around them, with huge thick geysers of fire shooting into the sky, obscuring the buildings on the east ramp near the control tower. One by one, private airplanes and crop dusters were sent spinning into the air by the explosions. The explosions were set in precise patterns, causing a rippling effect across the airport—as soon as the L-600 taxied past a spot, the explosions would cut off the taxiway and obscure them with fire and smoke. “Jesus Christ, what in hell... ?”

  “It is so pitifully easy to set explosives on airports in America,” Cazaux said. “Offer to wash a windshield or paint a few stripes on the ground, and pilots in this country will let you do anything you want around their planes. But I am disappointed—only about half of my detonators are going off. I think I’ll have a talk with those Mexican dealers. They owe me a refund.” Krull felt as if he was in some kind of hellish nightmare—the airport was systematically being destroyed all around them, and Henri Cazaux was chatting on about business matters as if the explosions were just the twinkling of fireflies. Krull saw one explosion erupt under the control tower, but the darkness and smoke obscured his view and he couldn’t see if the concrete and steel structure hit the earth.

  “Rather like setting up dominoes in a row and watching to see if the pattern completes itself, no?” Cazaux asked Krull. “You cannot help but watch. The disaster is magnetic.”

  Sixty seconds ago, Special Agent Russell Fortuna was in command of three trucks filled with seventeen heavily armed ATF agents—now, two trucks had disappeared in balloons of fire, and his own truck was abandoned and they were taking cover behind it. Like a freight train out of control, the six agents were helpless as the columns of fire erupted all around them. A small single-engine Cessna with a Playboy bunny painted on the tail disappeared in a flash of light and an ear-splitting sound only twenty yards away, shattering the windshield in the truck and blowing out two tires. Two agents were dazed, one finding blood oozing from a ruptured eardrum in one ear. All the rest appeared unhurt—four out of a strike team of eighteen. Aftermath of a typical Henri Cazaux ambush.

  “Team two, check in . . . team two, check in,” Fortuna tried on the portable radio. Nothing. ‘Team three ...” He didn’t try team three anymore, because he saw those poor bastards get blown away when the booby traps Cazaux’s thugs were carrying went up. “Damn it, somebody answer me!”

  “Russ, this is Tim,” Chief Deputy Marshal Lassen radioed. “I’ve been monitoring your frequency. What’s your situation?”

  “The target booby-trapped this entire airport,” Fortuna replied. “No reply from my two support units.” He was not about to say on an open frequency, scrambled or not, that both his assault trucks had been blown sky-high. “Suspect is taxiing to the northwest for takeoff on runway one-three left. What’s your position?”

  “We’re five minutes out, Russ,” Lassen replied. “We’ll try to block the runways.”

  Lassen’s three-helicopter SOG team was less than five minutes out—they were close enough to see the burning aircraft, like large bonfires, dotting the darkness around the airport. The runway lights, taxiway lights, and tower rotating beacon were all out. The flight crew of the Black Hawk had to lower night-vision goggles in place to find the airport. The moving shape of the large cargo plane was now visible, moving rapidly down the inner taxiway. Only a few dozen yards and Cazaux would be at the end of runway one-three left, lined up for takeoff. “I want one Black Hawk in the middle of one-three left,” Lassen radioed to his other helicopters, “and the Apache hovering at the southeast end to cover. We’ll fly overhead and take one-three right in case he tries to use the shorter runway. I want—”

  Suddenly a bright flash of light erupted on the ground ahead of them, and a streak of light arced out across the sky, heading right for them. Lassen’s Black Hawk banked hard left, away from the second Black Hawk, which was flying along in formation on their right. The streak disappeared immediately, and Lassen was about to ask what it was when a brilliant burst of light flashed off to their right. The second helicopter was illuminated by an orange-blue sheet of fire on its left side. “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” the pilot of the second Black Hawk radioed. “Hunter Two has taken some ground fire. One engine on fire, losing oil pressure. We’re going down!”

  “Hunter One, this is Wasp,” the pilot of the Apache attack helicopter radioed. “I have a vehicle at the spot where that missile came from. Three men. They appear to have another man-portable missile and are preparing to fire. Request permission to engage.”

  Lassen didn’t hesitate—he had run this very scenario in his head a dozen times since putting the request for the AH- 64 Apache helicopter into the California Air National Guard. His warrant, signed by Judge Wyman, specifically said that he could not use the Apache’s weapons unless they were under attack—well, they were definitely under attack. “Request granted, Wasp,” Lassen radioed immediately. “Clear to fire.”

  He was about to ask his pilot where the Apache was, but he found out himself a moment later as several bursts of rocket fire flashed just a few yards away, the strobe light-like flashes freezing the rotors of the deadly Apache gunship. The Apache launched at least two missiles, and both hit the same spot on the ground ahead, creating a mushroom of fire. Lassen saw a swirl of light on the ground, jumping and looping and cartwheeling in the air like a comet gone crazy—an unfired Stinger or Redeye missile round cooking off, he guessed.

  “Target suppressed, two secondary explosions, target destroyed,” the Apache pilot reported.

  “Good shooting, Wasp,” Lassen radioed. ‘Take the end of runway one-three left, keep the suspect aircraft in sight, and attempt to block its taxi path.”

  “Wasp copies.” But a moment later, the pilot came back: “Hunter, this is Wasp, suspect aircraft is lined up on runway one-three right, repeat, one-three right, and he appears to be on his takeoff roll. Am I clear to fire?”

  Lassen put his night-vision goggles back in place and searched the airport, now less than a mile away. Sure enough, Cazaux had decided not to taxi all the way to the long runway—he was on the short runway and already starting his takeoff run. It would b
e impossible to block his path now. But he could still stop him—the Apache gunship had a 20-millimeter cannon that could shred Cazaux’s plane in two seconds, plus at least two more wire-guided TOW (Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wire-guided) missiles that would rid the earth of Henri Cazaux once and for all. One word from him, and Cazaux would be a flaming hole in the earth.

  “Hunter, this is Wasp, am I clear to engage? Over.”

  Henri Cazaux had killed a handful of ATF agents that night alone, plus killed or injured his deputy marshals on the second helicopter, plus any unlucky civilians who were on that airport when Cazaux decided to destroy it to cover his escape. Add all those souls to the list of his victims in the past several years. And those were only the ones Cazaux himself had killed that were known to the Justice Department—he was undoubtedly responsible for hundreds, perhaps thousands of other deaths because of his gun-smuggling and terrorist activities.

  Henri Cazaux deserved to die.

  Unfortunately, Chief Deputy Marshal Timothy Lassen didn’t have the legal or moral authority to kill him. Would Judge Wyman or any other federal judge throw the book at him for putting a TOW missile into Cazaux’s filthy hide? Probably not, Lassen decided ...

  “Hunter, the target is reaching my max tracking speed. I need authority to shoot. Am I clear to engage?”

  . . . but his own conscience would prosecute him, find him guilty of selling himself out, and sentence him to a life of remorse and guilt for betraying his badge, his sworn oath, and himself.

  “Negative,” Lassen said on the radio. “Do not engage, repeat, do not engage. Stay clear of the suspect aircraft, tail him as long as you can, report his position. Hunter out.”

  Cazaux taxied the LET to the end of runway 13 Right, rapidly performing last-second checklist items as he aligned himself with the runway centerline. Then he stomped hard on the brakes and held them. The Stork was intently watching the engine instruments as Cazaux pushed the throttles up. The LET rumbled and rattled like a freight train out of control as the two sets of engine needles began to move. They heard a few loud coughs and bangs from the engines, and out the comer of an eye Krull could see long tongues of flame occasionally bursting from the exhausts and lighting up the tarmac.

  “Attention aircraft on runway one-three right, warning, shut down your engines immediately.”

  The Stork yelled something and pointed to one of the instruments, but Cazaux shook his head. Krull saw several gauges with their needles in the red arcs, but Cazaux was ignoring them all. It seemed to take forever, but finally the power needle made it up past 90 percent, and Cazaux released the brakes. The Stork kept his hand on the throttles to make sure they were full forward, jabbering away unintelligibly about something. The engines still didn’t sound right, were obviously not putting out full power yet.

  “Hey, Captain,” Krull said, “this looks bad.”

  “Sixty knots . . . now!” Cazaux shouted. Krull hit the stopwatch. “Just be quiet and give me a countdown.”

  “Five seconds!” Krull shouted. It looked as if the airspeed needle had barely moved. “Eight seconds . . .” The needle was just over ninety knots, bouncing back and forth wildly in its case. “Ready, ready ... now! ”

  Cazaux did nothing but continue to watch the instruments, both hands on the yoke, feet dancing on the rudder pedals, trying to keep the plane on the centerline.

  “I said twelve seconds, Cazaux, twelve seconds! We’re only at one-ten. Aren’t you going to abort the takeoff?” “Not likely,” Cazaux said. He waited until the runway end-identifier lights had flashed under the nose, then hauled back on the control yoke with all his might. The nose of the LET L-600 hung in the air precariously. The Stork’s eyes were wide with fear as the white chevrons of the runway overrun area became visible—and then the cargo plane lifted off. But it was as if the Belgian mercenary wanted to commit suicide, because he immediately pushed the control yoke away from his body, forcing the nose of the LET down.

  “What the hell are you doin’?”

  “Shut up, goddammit!” Cazaux shouted. “We lifted off the runway in ground effect—we aren’t at flying speed yet.” His eyes were glued to the airspeed and vertical-speed indicators. Airspeed was pegged at one-ten, still ten knots below flying speed. Krull could do nothing but watch the trees at the departure end of the runway get closer and closer by the second. A lighted windsock whizzed by, the orange, cone-shaped flag not far below eye level. They were still too low.

  “Pull up!” Krull shouted. “We’re gonna hit!”

  Cazaux watched, and in a few seconds the airspeed indicator crept up to one-twenty and the vertical speed indicator nudged upwards. As soon as it did, Cazaux raised the landing-gear handle. The cockpit occupants heard a loud swiissssh! outside the windows as the tops of a stand of trees were chewed apart by the propellers. Krull could see the lights of homes atop the nearby hills getting larger and larger by the second. But as soon as the red landing gear warning lights were out, Krull felt pressure on the bottom of his feet, the LET behaved more like an airplane and less like a ballistic sausage, and the homes disappeared safely under the nose—close enough to rattle the windows, but there was no impact.

  “Jesus . . . man, I thought we were goners,” Krull exhaled. “You either crazy or you got big brass balls. What was all that bullshit about acceleration timing? I thought you said you were gonna abort the damn takeoff.”

  “Mr. Krull, there is only one thing worse than dying in a massive fireball in Chico, California, and not making the delivery as promised,” Cazaux said as he slowly, incrementally raised the flaps, carefully watching the airspeed to make sure it didn’t decay, “and that is surrendering to the police or to the military. I will never surrender. They will have to take my bullet-riddled body away before I will give up, and I will take as many with me as possible before I go. If I’m awake I will try to escape, because capture is worse than death to me. I was in a prison once. It will never happen again.”

  “Well, you crazy motherfucker, you did it,” Krull said with undisguised glee and relief. “Those pricks ain’t gonna catch us now.” The Stork looked at Krull with wide, white, disbelieving eyes, then began to laugh loud enough to be heard over the thunder of the LET’S turboprops. “What’s this brother laughin’ at?”

  “He’s laughing because we’re not out of danger yet, Mr. Krull,” Cazaux said. “If the authorities want me as badly as I think they do, they have one more card they can play.”

  Southwest Air Defense Sector Operations Command Center (SOCC)

  March AFB, Riverside, California

  The night crew had just finished a grueling three-hour-long exercise in which a flight of ten Sukhoi-25 attack bombers from Mexico had tried to penetrate the air defense screen around the United States and bomb the Coast Guard base at San Diego and the U.S. Customs base at March Air Force Base so all drug smugglers could enter the United States easier. They had gotten that idea from a series of actual attacks a group of Cuban terrorists had made a few years back, when sophisticated drug cartels used military weapons to protect their drug shipments from American interdiction forces. That was good for about a dozen different air defense scenarios built into the computer system at the Southwest Air Defense Sector.

  Lieutenant Colonel John Berrell, the Senior Director on the floor that evening, made the last few remarks in his shift exercise critique sheet. Overall, it was a very good exercise. His shift was young and inexperienced, but they performed well. There were usually no instructors around at night, so every console operator had to be on his toes and be prepared to carry his or her load alone. A few coordination items had been missed by overzealous operators in one of the Weapons Control Teams who thought they knew their procedures down cold and didn’t use their checklists. The plastic-covered pages in the red folders before each operator had been built over decades of experience and covered every known contingency in the air defense game. It was almost guaranteed to keep the operators out of trouble when the fur started flyi
ng.

  His crew had accomplished the most important aspect of the job: detect, track, and identify.

  Berrell clicked on his master intercom button: “Ops to all stations, well done.” No use pointing out the ones that screwed up—they still had a long night ahead of them, and he wanted everyone’s mind clear and sharp. “Run your postexercise checklists and check your switches are back in real-world mode. Repeat, check switches back in real- world mode.” Several years ago in Europe, an American air defense unit had been running a computer simulation in which a large stream of Soviet bombers invaded West Germany. The exercise was a success and the computer-generated bad guys driven off—unfortunately, after the exercise, one operator forgot to turn off the simulation. An hour later, the “second wave” of Soviet bombers “appeared” on radar, and the panicked operator scrambled dozens of very real, very expensive American, West German, Belgian, Norwegian, and Danish fighters against the phantom bombers before someone realized it was not happening.

  Those were the good of days, Berrell thought. Before the sweeping world political changes in 1991 and 1992, air defense units were the spearhead of national defense and deterrence. Radar constantly sweeping the horizon, young faces staring at green cathode ray tube radarscopes, picking out the enemy from within the friendly targets; determined, daring men sitting by their planes ready to launch at a moment’s notice to track down and destroy any intruder. Before 1992, before the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the threat was deadly real. A Soviet Backfire bomber that appeared on radar five hundred miles off the coast was already in position to launch a large AS-12 nuclear cruise missile—one such missile could destroy Washington, D.C., or any major city on the eastern seaboard.

  Now, in 1994, the Soviet Union was gone; the Russian long-range bomber threat was nonexistent. The Russians were still flying their heavy bombers, but now they were selling rides to wealthy Westerners in mock bomb runs out in Nevada, for God’s sake! The air defense forces of the United States had been cut down to only eighteen locations across the contiguous United States, Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. With only two alert aircraft per location, that meant a total of thirty-six aircraft were defending approximately forty million cubic miles of airspace. True, many countries, including Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, still had bombers and cruise missiles aimed at the United States, but the real day-to-day threat had all but disappeared. Air defense had all but gone away as a mission.