Authors: Stephen Coonts
Tags: #Action & Adventure, #Cuba, #Political, #Fiction, #Grafton; Jake (Fictitious character), #Thrillers, #Espionage
He pointed the rifle at the ground and held it
close to his leg, then eased the door open and
stepped inside. No Cuban saw him.
They were looking intently at something in a sealed unit
with remote-control arms. A radio was playing
somewhere, playing loudly.
Chance stepped into the air lock, stood there looking
at the people while he waited for the interior door
to unlock automatically.
He recognized the voice on the radio: Alejo
Vargas. The gravelly flat delivery was
unmistakable.
“My fellow Cubans, now is the hour to rally to the
defense of our holy mother country. Tonight even as I
speak the nation is under attack from American
military forces, who have leveled the awesome might of
their armed forces against the eleven million
peaceful’people of Cuba.”
Ten seconds passed, fifteen, twenty. After a
half minute, the interior door clicked. Chance
pushed it open and stepped into the lab.
Racks holding eight or ten culture trays
each stood beside the benches. He lifted the rifle,
thumbed off the safety, walked forward toward the working
figures, who still had their backs to him. The tables
on both sides of the aisles contained tools, parts,
glassware, specialized instruments.
“Join with me in fighting the forces of the devil, the
forces of capitalism and exploitation that seek
to enslave the Cuban people so that the Yanquis can
manufacture more dollars for themselves….”
One of the workers spotted Chance when he was ten feet
away, and turned in his direction.
Chance gestured with the rifle, motioned for them to raise
their hands. They did so.
still
should just shoot them,
he thought, acutely aware of the culture trays just
beside his elbow, and theirs.
Maybe I won’t have to.
Backing up between two tables, he jerked his head
back the way he had come, toward the air lock,
gestured with the barrel of the rifle.
“Our hour of glory is nowea”…Alejo Vargas
thundered, “an hour that will live in all of Cuban
history as the supreme triumphant moment of our
people, that moment in the history of the world when we humble people
struck back against the enslaver and oppressor and
became forever free….”
Slowly, watching Chance, the closest man began
moving, passed him, kept walking with his hands up.
The second man passed.
The third …
He was turning to look at the fourth man when the man
grabbed the barrel of the rifle with one hand and stabbed
Chance in the solar plexus with the other.
William Henry Chance looked down at the handle
sticking out of his abdomen. A screwdriver! The
man had stabbed him with a screwdriver.
The man was fighting him for the rifle!
A shot. He heard a shot over the noise of the
aircirculation fans. The man who stabbed him
collapsed.
More shots.
Chance fell. His legs didn’t work anymore and
he was having trouble breathing.
“Kill the American enslavers wherever you find them,
wherever they choose to shovel their odious filth onto
a committed socialist peopleea”…Vargas shouted over the
radio. “Beloved Cuba, the mother of us all, needs
our strong right arms,”
On the floor, his vision narrowing to tiny points of
light, fighting for air he couldn’t get, William
Henry Chance felt someone roll him over. Through the
face plate on the mask of the man who held him,
he could just make out Carmellini’s features.
“You should have shot ‘emea”…Carmellini shouted.
“You stupid bastard, you should have shot ‘em.”
Chance was trying to suck in enough air to reply when his
heart stopped.
Carmellini and the two marines in CBW suits
carried the aluminum cylinders they had brought from the
Osprey into the lab and set them down. There was not a
moment to be lost. Bullets had gone through several
of the men lying dead on the floor and punctured the
transparent plastic walls of the facility.
The two marines went back after more cylinders while
Carmellini brought plastic cans of gasoline through
the air
lock. He didn’t have time to wait for the lock to work,
so he jammed the door so it would not close.
Please God, don’t let the viruses out.
With six cylinders on the floor near the cultures
and ten gallons of gasoline sitting nearby,
Carmellini was ready. The five Cubans who were
working in the lab lay where they had fallen. Chance’s
body lay where he died. Carmellini ignored the
bodies as he worked.
He gestured to the marines to leave, then turned to the
nearest cylinder, which was a five-inch-diameter
magnesium flare designed to be dropped from an
airplane. A small steel ring was taped
to the side of the thinghe tore that off and pulled it out as
far as it would go, which was ab”…a foot. Then he gave
it a mighty tug, which tore it loose in his hand.
He laid the cylinder on the wooden floor and
walked for the air lock. As he went through he
released the door, allowing it to close.
He still had a few seconds, so he stood in the
lock as the suction tore at his CBW suit,
trying to cleanse it of dust and stray viruses.
But he was running out of time.
He pushed the emergency button and let himself out of the
lock through the exterior door. Walking swiftly,
he exited the barn and strode for the waiting Osprey.
Doll Hanna was standing there with a rifle in his arms.
“Let’s get the men”…Carmellini began, but the
ignition of the flare stopped him. The glare of a
hundred-millioncandlepower magnesium fire
leaked out of the barn through the door and cracks in the
siding.
“Let’s get the hell out of here before it goes up like
a rocketea”…Carmellini shouted, and trotted for the
Osprey.
Three minutes later, with all the people aboard and the
plane airborne, he went to the cockpit and
looked back. The fire was as bright as a
welder’s torch, so brilliant it hurt his eyes
to look. The heat of the first flare had set off the
second, and so on. The heat from the first few flares
probably caused the gasoline cans to explode,
raising the temperature dramatically and helping
ignite the other flares.
“Think the fire will kill all the viruses”…”…the
pilot asked.
“I don’t knowea”…Carmellini said grimly, and went
back to his seat. He didn’t have any juice
to waste on the merely worried.
There were just too many Cuban troops at silo one.
The two SuperCobras assigned there expended their
Hellfire missiles on the tanks and trucks,
then scourged the area with 20-mm cannon shells.
Between them the assault choppers fired fifteen
hundred rounds of 20-mm. As the first two
assault choppers left the arena to refuel and
rearm, Battlestar Control aboard
United States
routed other SuperCobras to the site. They began
flaying the area with a vengeance.
The problem was that the troops were fairly well dug
in. Almost a thousand men had arrived in the area early
that morning under an energetic young commander who
had ordered trenches dug and machine guns emplaced
in earth and log fortifications. Two small
bulldozers helped with the digging.
The machine-gun nests were gone now, victims of
Hellfire missiles, but the troops in trenches
were harder to kill. . Fortunately for the Cubans, the
trenches were not straight, but zigged and zagged around
trees and stones and natural obstacles.
The young commander was dead now, killed by a single
cannon shell that tore his head off when he tried
to look over the lip of a trench to find the
SuperCobras. Most of his officers were also dead.
One of the SuperCobras had been shot down
by machine-gun fire. A Cuban trooper with an
AK-47 killed the pilot of another with a lucky
shot in the neck. The first chopper managed
to autorotate down-, and the crew jumped from their
machine into an empty
trench. The copilot of the second machine flew it
out of the battle and headed for the refueling and rearming
site the marines had established in a sugarcane
field between silos three and four.
The SuperCobras on site were almost out of ammo,
and they too went to the refueling site, where they were
fueled from bladders and rearmed with ammo
brought in by Ospreys from
Kearsarge.
Then they rejoined the fray.
The noise of eight assault choppers hovering around
the battlefield that centered on the barn did the
trick. One by one, the Cubans threw down their
weapons and climbed out of their trenches with their hands
over their heads.
Several of the SuperCobras turned on their landing
lights and hovered over the barn, turning this way and that
so that their lights shone over the men, living and dead, that
littered the ground.
Minutes later an Osprey landed just a hundred
feet from the entrance to the barn. Toad Tarkington was
the last man out. He was ten feet from the V-22 and
running like hell when it lifted off and another
settled onto the same spot. Marines with rifles
at the ready came pouring out.
With his engines running and the canopy closed, Major
Carlos Corrado taxied his MiGo-29 toward the
runway at Cienfuegos. Two rnen walked
ahead of the fighter with brooms, sweeping shrapnel and
rocks off the concrete so the fighter’s tires would not
be cut. They weren’t worried about this stuff going in
the intakes: on the ground the MiGo-29’s
engines breathed through blow-down panels on top of the
fuselage while the main intakes remained closed.
Inside the fighter Corrado was watching his
electronic warning equipment. As he suspected,
the Americans had a bunch of radars aloft tonight,
everything from large search radars to fighter radars.
He immediately recognized the radar signature of the
F-14 Tomcat, which he had seen just a week or
so ago out over the Caribbean.
Yep, they were up there, and as soon as his wheels
came up, they would be trying to kill him.
Carlos Corrado taxied his MiGo-29 onto the
runway and shoved the twin throttles forward to the
stop, then into afterburner. The MiGo-29 rocketed
forward. Safely airborne, Corrado raised the
landing gear and came out of afterburner. Passing 400
knots, he lowered the nose and retarded the
throttles, then swung into a turn that would point the
sleek Russian fighter at Havana.
Inside the barn at silo one, Toad Tarkington
took in the carnage at a glance. He was the first
American through the door.
Cannon shells and shrapnel from Hellfire
warheads had played hob with the wooden barn
structure. Holes and splintered boards
and timbers were everywherestanding inside, Toad could see
the landing lights of the helicopters and hear
Americans shouting.
Apparently several dozen men had taken refuge in
the barn; their bloody bodies lay where the bullets
or shrapnel or splinters from the timbers cut them
down. The floor and walls were splattered with
blood.
Toad found the wooden door, got it open, used his
flashlight to examine the steel inner door. He
set three C-4 charges around the combination lock and
took cover.
The charges tore the lock out of the door and warped the
thing so badly it wouldn’t open. Toad struggled with
it, only got it open because two marines came in
to check out the interior and gave him a hand.
The stairway on the other side of the door was in
total darkness. Not a glimmer of light.
With his flashlight in his left hand and his pistol in his
right, Toad slowly worked his way down.
He saw lightbulbs in sockets over his head, but
they were not on. Once he came to a switch. He
flipped it on and off several times. No
electrical power.
At the bottom of the stairs he came to a
larger room.
The beam of the flashlight caught an instrument
panel, a control console. A bit of a face …
Toad brought the light back to the face.
A white face, eyes scrunched against the
flashlight glare. An old man, skinny, with
short white hair, frozen in the flashlight beam,
holding his hands above his head.
The radar operator in the E-3 Sentry AW
ACS plane over Key West was the first to see the
MiGo-29 get airborne from Cienfuegos. He
keyed the intercom and reported the sighting to the
supervisor, who used the computer to verify the
track, then reported it to Battlestar Control.
The AW ACS crew reported the MiGo as a
bogey and assigned it a track number. They would
be able to classify it as to type as soon as the
pilot turned on his radar.
Unfortunately, Carlos Corrado failed
to cooperate. He disleft his radar switch in the off