Cloudburst

Nineteen THINE ENEMY

Blackjack held his SIG up for the troops to see. “I want no mistakes here. No screwups. So watch me close.” He slid the receiver back until it emitted an audible click. “No rounds in the chamber and no magazines inserted.”

“Isn’t that being a little less than careful?” Quimpo asked. “I mean, the Cubans, no matter what anyone says, they’re not our friends.”

“Precisely why we’re doing this.” McAffee released the slide back to forward, giving the pistol its normal shape, and tucked it into the holster high on his thigh. “If there’s any antagonism I want our weapons safed. There will be no reactionaries in this group…on this team. Mr. Anderson, would you please verify that everyone’s weapon is empty and safe?”

Joe made the rounds of the eight team members, two drivers, and the major, taking each weapon in hand personally.

McAffee continued, “The word we have is that the Cubans will cooperate, but keep this in mind. First, we’re only going to be on their soil a short time, God willing, and second, if we do anything to prevent our chance to take that bird down, then we’ve screwed ourselves and a whole lot of innocents.”

Everyone was quiet now. Their weapons were checked and holstered. Soon they would remove them and load the magazines with 9mm frangible ammunition, rounds preferred by counter-terrorist troops who might find themselves firing among tens or hundreds of hostages and needed to avoid ricochets or over-penetration of their intended targets. Special equipment, the latest available, was at their disposal, but the lowest common denominator was each man and his weapon, the SIG in this case. Each man, isolated from his conscience for the duration of the mission, was a killer. It was a sobering and sometimes horrid thought to those not connected with such antiterrorist efforts that men could have such a cold and calculated purpose. To kill. It was their only function. Kill the bad guys. Kill them at the first opportunity so that they would never again be able to wreak terror upon innocents. Kill them. One and all. Dead. Leave no chance of retaliation or retribution, and take no prisoners. If a terrorist tried to surrender, he or she was dead. No second thought A shot, preferably just above the bridge of the nose, would be fired, giving a long last look at life through the blast of a muzzle flash. Every man knew his job, trained for it hoped for a chance to do it and prayed that he never would. Their existence was a dichotomy of desires, but one that they were uniquely able to live with, for they knew that at the moment of truth, they were as close to death as their adversaries.

The Starlifter’s co-pilot loosened his harness a bit and leaned forward, looking out the side window to the right and behind the aircraft.

They were there, though he could see only one. There would be another on the left side, symmetrical with its wingman, about a hundred feet off and fifty feet behind the wingtip, slightly above the big jet.

“I got one on this side,” he said. “Friendlies, right?”

The pilot a thirty-year Air Force veteran, liked the sarcasm in the lieutenant’s voice. “You got it. Compliments of Fidel himself.”

Another look satisfied the lieutenant’s curiosity. All he could make out in the darkness were the anti-collision strobes underneath the much smaller aircraft “The light pattern looks like a twenty-nine,” the rights eater commented, referring to the MiG-29 Fulcrum, a compact Soviet-built fighter.

“Well, the Cubans have a bunch of those, for sure. You can bet whatever’s under the wings doesn’t hold extra avgas.”

“Right sir.”

It was a good guess. If the light had been better they would have been able to clearly make out the AA-10 Alamo air-to-air missiles on each wing.

The navigator swung his mask over his mouth. “We’ve got glide slope in two minutes. Suggest descend to eight thousand and come left to two-five-zero.”

The pilot acknowledged the recommendation and began nosing the Starlifter down toward the waters south of the Florida Keys and turning it toward Havana. He made the adjustments slowly, giving his somewhat unwelcome wingmen ample time to come clear and modify their flight profile.

“We’re cleared straight in, right?” the airman operating the com console asked, for verification only.

“That’s a roge,” the lieutenant answered. “No tower contact required.”

“Let’s take her in,” the captain said. “Everything by the numbers. Com, let the major know we’ll be on the ground in fifteen.”

The time evaporated rapidly. McAffee felt his web seat shift slightly to the left as the pilot flared the aircraft for touchdown, then, five seconds later, the main gear, just forward of the team, grabbed the runway. The nose wheel came down a few seconds later, and with no fanfare, the Americans had come to Havana.

Thunder One rolled to the end of the runway and turned left on the last taxiway, following a decidedly military-looking aircraft-service vehicle. Atop it was a rack of rotating amber strobe lights and in its bed were two soldiers in Cuban Army smocks and carrying the unmistakable Kalashnikovs familiar to all American military men.

As the aircraft’s roll slowed, the team went through their final checks. Graber checked each Humvee, paying particular attention to the stowed equipment.

“One is loaded,” he announced loudly. “Charges are present.” Sean moved back — actually forward — and looked over the number two vehicle. Everything was ready in this one, too, though there were no charges. That had been decided during the final planning stage. It was better, they figured, to have the two very special frame charges together, ready to be used when needed, considering that one would be useless. “Two is ready.”

“Fire them up!” the major ordered. The Humvees rumbled, belching a short spurt of smoke which was vented out through the Starlifter’s filtering system. “Okay, listen up. When the ramp goes down we’re going to move to cover. Where that is I don’t know. The word is that we’ll be directed somewhere. I want everyone in the buggies when they roll out. I’ll be on foot. Do not pass me. Understood?” The drivers gave a thumbs-up in reply. “Mr. Anderson, you’re with Captain Graber’s section. Keep track of your gear.”

“Got it,” Joe answered, trying not to sound nervous.

“All right. We’ll do a final talk-through once we have a spot to lay up. Remember, the bird’s going to be here in about twenty minutes, and we don’t know how long the turnaround is going to be, so everyone is ready to go now — right?”

“Right!”

Joe looked around, embarrassed almost that he was feeling a twinge of nerves. This was really going to happen.

“Mount up!”

The vehicles filled quickly. McAffee walked the few yards to the hinge of the stem ramp and waited for the aircraft to stop completely. A minute later it did with a last forward lurch. Immediately the outer part of the rear opening swung upward, allowing streams of light from numerous vehicles to bathe the inside of the aircraft. The ramp dropped next. It touched the tarmac with a metallic clang.

The Cuban major saw the first American trot down the incline from the airplane’s interior. He was black, as were many of the security troops around the area, but much darker. Direct African descent, thought Major Sifuentes. Not much like his own troops, who were a motley mix of Caribbean blood.

McAffee stopped short of his Cuban counterpart and saluted. “Major,” he began in flawless Spanish, “on behalf of my troops and my government, thank you for your much needed assistance in this terrible, terrible incident”

Sifuentes recognized the content as gracious. Behind the words and thankful tone, though, the American must have been gloating at his being here. What is happening? Why would the general secretary allow this?

“Yes, yes. It is a terrible thing that some would deny others liberty.” The hand came down from its return salute and rested atop his pistol holster. “Major Orlando Sifuentes, and you?”

“Major Mike McAffee, United States Army.” The major did not offer his hand, as it was silently understood that a military salute would be the boundary of their shows of mutual respect.

“Yes. Army.” Sifuentes turned his head, breathed, then looked back to his onetime nemesis. “You may ride in my car. I understand you have your own vehicles, no?”

“Two. I’ll have them follow.”

The Cuban nodded. His own men were all over the tarmac, a good portion of them forming a widely spaced human gauntlet to the service hangar where he would lead the Americans.

McAffee returned down the ramp, the lights of the Humvees coming on and backlighting him from inside. “We’re ready, Major Sifuentes.”

“Good. Let us hurry, then. I understand your quarry is not far behind.”

As the open-back truck pulled away with Sifuentes and McAffee, the two Delta vehicles rolled down the stern ramp. Graber radioed the pilot of Thunder One that they were clear. The Starlifter would have under five minutes to get airborne and clear of the area.

In the lead vehicle, Joe held his black duffel on one knee while watching the right-side guardrail of gun-toting soldiers. Their white eyes showed no love of the guests, leaving Joe with a realization that there truly was an adversary of some determination very close to home, a thought even more sobering considering that this adversary was now a very unwilling bedfellow.

Springer Seven-Eight loitered twenty-five thousand feet above the billowing tempest that usually was the peaceful watery paradise of the Florida Keys. The cloud system was playing havoc with shipping far from land, and closer in to shore the oil rigs off the Gulf Coast were battening down for the storm. It wasn’t a hurricane yet, just a strengthening tropical storm, named Aldo. It was moving almost directly west after lashing Nassau with sixty-mile-an-hour winds, and there was no telling which direction would be next.

“This thing’s a bitch,” one of the radar operators commented with a shake of his head. He was on weather watch, his set using special Doppler techniques to track and analyze the storm system.

“A bastard, Airman.”

“Sir?” The young white kid from Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, was taken by surprise. The louie had heard him.

“Bastard, Wickham. Aldo is a male name. It’s all gender-respective now.”

“Gender what, sir?” The talk was above him. He could handle twenty million dollars’ worth of radar equipment, but fancy talk soared right over him.

“You’re on the weather scope, son — you should know this. Severe tropical weather systems, like tropical storms and hurricanes, they used to all be named after women. Nowadays they alternate between male and female. The last one was Zelda, so Aldo got the call on this one.”

“Yeah. I see.” He didn’t really. Hell, they were clouds after all, right? Clouds were clouds. Sure, they did different things, but why name them. Blizzards and tornadoes didn’t get names.

“What’s south Florida saying on the winds?” the lieutenant asked.

The airman looked to his last report from the land stations on the tip of the panhandle. “The cape’s showing sixty-five knots, and Fort Meyers got a straight sixty, sir.”

That meant Aldo was probably going to go north. Before getting AWACS duty the lieutenant had spent two tours in Central America, mostly in Panama and Guatemala. His MOS was meteorology, a pseudo art form he had perfected forecasting Pacific weather. The East Coast stuff wasn’t so different he had discovered in his two years on the Atlantic side.

“What were the readings at Fort Meyers thirty minutes and ninety minutes ago?”

“Uh…just a minute, sir.” He folded back two pages of the printout. “Forty knots ninety minutes ago, and fifty-eight thirty minutes ago.”

It was the pattern, and the history. Aldo was going to follow the warm coastal waters of the Florida Gulf Coast almost directly north. His was a little conjecture mixed with the scientific, the lieutenant knew, but tropical disturbances moving due west had proven easier to forecast over the years. The nature of the beast, he figured. Aldo would never make it to hurricane strength. It’d try too hard to suck up that nice, warm Gulf water and then run aground still thirsty. There’d be some nasty thunderstorms for a day or so, not much more than Aldo’s peripheral systems had given to the Atlantic coast all the way up to Norfolk.

“Keep an eye on the direction, Wickham. He’ll probably go north.”

“Yes, sir.”

Farther forward, two operators were sweeping the sea’s surface and the nearby air corridors for traffic. Aside from two unlucky Aeroflot jets heading north to New Orleans there was no traffic between Havana and Miami. Only flight 422 and its tail, Springer Seven-Three, were visible, moving west by southwest, twenty miles south and far below Springer Seven-Eight

“Commander, this is Radar One.”

“Go ahead.”

“Air traffic is clear, and surface traffic is moving out.”

“Good. Okay, clear Seven-Three: We’ve got the bird now. How many surface contacts?”

“Two, sir. Looks like the weather did most of the work.”

It had. An exaggerated National Weather Service forecast had sent those in the area scurrying for the shelter of the coast. The commander wondered what story the higher-ups would have concocted if Aldo hadn’t conveniently shown.

“Com, send to Snowman: The weather is clear.”

Almost directly below the AWACS the USS Chandler, a Kidd-class destroyer, was ending her own search of the area. Even with the weather churning the sea surface and playing noise games with her sonar there was no mistaking the sound of nuclear-powered steam turbines pushing two submarines out of the area at flank speed. The rush of superheated coolant through their pumps sent waves of sound through the ocean, the easily distinguishable high-frequency whirring in stark contrast to the staticky low harmonics of the surface disturbance.

Both of the subs would soon be out of the exclusion zone. One was American. The other was as yet unidentified.

Fifty miles to the east the USS John Young, a Spruance-class destroyer, was moving north at full speed through heavy seas, her own area now sanitized.

The stage was now clear for the players to be engaged.

Hours after wearing the vest, the soreness turned to a sharper pain as Hadad donned the explosive-laden garment before landing. Two wide lanes of fire ran front to back over each shoulder, exactly where the metal support straps were. Comfort hadn’t been a priority when designing the weapon, and, he reminded himself, it shouldn’t cloud his determination now. Others have suffered much more than this minuscule discomfort. He could see the faces of them in his mind, and every time he slept. They were the force behind the purpose.

Hadad entered the cockpit, relieving Wael once more. He, in turn, would go below and allow Abu a rest. The door clicked shut without either of the pilots turning to acknowledge or challenge their new guard. Again Hadad wriggled into the jump seat and let the Uzi lie across his lap.

Through the windshield a light glow was visible coming from below, but no discernible feature emitting it. Hadad raised himself up until he had a higher vantage than either of the pilots. There were a cluster of lights visible to the left through what must have been a cloud cover, and almost straight on, but farther off, there was a short line of parallel lights. A runway.

“How long until we land?”

Hendrickson stretched his neck and half turned. “A few minutes.”

And a few after that you’ll be Swiss cheese, Buzz thought. The radio message hadn’t been specific, but it assured them something would be happening.

Hendrickson asked for a last check of Jose Marti’s runways. Buzz pulled the information up on the flight computer.

“That’s two-three ahead,” the co-pilot said.

“Do you think they want us to use it?” Hendrickson asked rhetorically. The Cubans — or whoever was running the show — had only one runway lit amid the blackness: number 23, identified by its compass heading in tens of degrees. “All right. I figure we’re cleared right in. How about you?”

“Maybe we should check it out with our leader here.” Buzz was trying for a little antagonism, just to keep the pirate off-balance. “How about it, Mr. Big? Have we got your permission to land, or do you want us to do a low pass just for show?”

Hadad barely heard the crack and gave it no mind. The time had passed for an iron hand. The end was almost within sight.

“Guess so.”

“Let’s set her down,” the captain said, mostly to himself, his thumb rubbing the control column tenderly. Almost a caress for the Maiden. “Approach checklist.”

The two officers ran through the landing checks in under a minute. They were eight minutes from touchdown. Ahead, the rows of lights were becoming more defined. Hopefully the Maiden would touch down dead center between them, just past the patchwork of red threshold lights. That would give her ample room to stop.

Without tower contact they had no exact word on wind conditions at ground level. Fortunately their surreptitious shadow had fed them enough information to allow for some plans for the landing.

“I show a marker,” Buzz called out. “Don’t know what kind. They don’t use the North American system, do they?”

“Good question. Did you see any others?”

“Nah. It must’ve been an outer.” Or there might have been none at all, Buzz knew. The Cubans had never faithfully bought into any of the conventions of air travel in the Western hemisphere, their main customers being carriers who didn’t fly into U.S. airports, but seemingly minor things such as airport distance markers were ultra important to 422.

“Okay.” The captain thought quickly. “Let’s ignore it just to be safe. It’s pretty damn close in for an outer. We should have passed a middle.”

“We’re doing it by dead reckoning, then.”

“Right,” Hendrickson confirmed.

Intensity of the lights grew, as did their definition into separate specks. The Cubans did have visual referencing, split-colored lights near the runway’s end to give pilots cues as to their position on the glide slope. The Maiden was right on.

“Ten degrees,” Hendrickson ordered. His hands were secure on the column, leaving the flap adjustment to his first officer.

‘Ten degrees…”

The bright red flashing square caught their attention more than the extra loud warning buzzer. A major system had failed. The flaps!

“Shit!” Buzz yelled. “Locked at zero degrees.” He typed a quick command one-handed for a system readout. “Pressure is at one hundred and ten percent!”

Captain Bart Hendrickson had to now think faster than he ever had in his life. The Clipper Atlantic Maiden was a minute from touchdown, with minimal brakes remaining, and a malfunctioning flap system.

“What is it?” Hadad asked excitedly, leaning forward.

“Shut up!”

Hydraulic pressure at 110 percent could only mean that there was some sort of system blockage at the extenders. The pumps were trying to move the big control surfaces to slow the jumbo jet before landing, but something was preventing it. They’d gone into an unplanned overdrive, pumping harder to free the stuck system, and raising the operating pressure to above max. If 110 didn’t free it, nothing would.

Hendrickson released his death grip on the twin upright column handles. He was going to be calm about this. Calm and determined. “Cut number two, all the way.”

Buzz hit the emergency engine shutoff for the inboard left-side engine, in effect cutting off fuel and oxygen flow to the turbine. That would add some drag to slow the plane.

The runway was coming up at them rapidly. Hendrickson brought the column back farther than would be normal to compensate for the reduced lift. The flaps, at this point during landing, would be providing lift and drag, keeping the aircraft in the air while the drag slowed the airspeed and thus its ability to stay airborne.

“When we hit, reverse one and four, and stand on the brakes.”

“Gotcha.” Buzz had both feet ready to stamp on the pedals as soon as the nose wheel was down; any sooner would lock the main gear and bring the aircraft’s nose down hard — maybe too hard. Nose gears had collapsed before when inexperienced pilots had hit the brakes too soon.

“And push your stick full forward. Let’s see if we can make her real heavy.” The captain wanted to use downward force, created by simulating a dive, to artificially raise the weight of the Maiden, creating more drag. Maybe, just maybe, everything in combination would work. But, his experience told him, probably not.

Behind the pilots Hadad could sense the trouble, though he knew little of specifics. His physical senses also told him that the plane was going very fast — faster than he had ever felt a plane go during landing. It would be a final test of the righteousness of his mission. Allah, in His great wisdom, was granting the purpose one final sanction. Hadad sat back, his eyes wide open to watch his prisoners, but his mind free and drifting.

Sitting four full stories above what would soon be the ground, the captain had to aim farther down the runway than pilots of other craft would. It was an artificial point, some fifteen hundred feet past the threshold under normal circumstances. The Maiden needed all the room she could get, so Hendrickson focused only a thousand feet past the beginning of pavement.

“This is too fast…” Buzz watched the speed gauge drop way too slowly. It was only down to 230 knots, and with only fifteen seconds until — impact? — it wasn’t going down much farther. “Jesus, Bart, we’re gonna hit hard.”

The forward motion was terrific, and as frightening was the stone-like rate of descent now that the Maiden was forcing her way to the earth. She was going to land fast, the only way under the circumstances, and she was going to come down with millions of pounds of force on the runway.

“Let’s hope they laid good concrete,” the captain blurted out just as he pulled the column into his gut to slow the Maiden’s descent. The big jet crossed the point where grass met the runway at 210 knots—40 knots faster than normal. Prayers, silent and personal, filled the flight deck.

With her nose ten degrees up, the Maiden’s multiple-carriage main landing gear screeched when the rearmost wheels caught the runway at 206 knots. Like giant shock absorbers the struts on the main carriages compressed under the massive weight, but not enough to compensate. Two tires on the right mains blew a fraction of a second after hitting, but it was barely noticeable as an occurrence, entirely because of the violent metal-scraping-stone sound that came as the contoured rear of the 747 made contact and dragged along the runway. Sparks shot sideways and backward, then the nose eased forward, setting the dual front wheels on the ground.

The jolt inside the aircraft was tremendous. Below, several passengers went frantic, a reaction unnoticed by the hijackers, who were themselves frightened by the noise and violent vibrations. Wael hadn’t settled into a seat and fell awkwardly into the aisle, forward of a group of male passengers. He recovered quickly, grabbing the arm of an empty seat and pointing the submachine gun at the startled men. One, he noticed, was smiling, an expression he could not comprehend at the moment.

Hadad, too, was surprised, even in his enforced serenity. His free hand found the fold-down armrest and dug into it instinctively. In the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful…

Instantly upon feeling the nose wheel touch, Buzz reversed the remaining two turbofans and stood on the brakes. Hendrickson also brought both his feet down on the pedals, full force. There was barely anything left of the brakes, and less than seven thousand feet of cement in front of them.

“Push the stick!”

Buzz heeded the shouted command, joining the captain in holding the control column all the way to the panel. The front end of the Maiden dropped noticeably as upward force on the rear elevators caused an opposite reaction on the nose.

It was working. Though the big Boeing was still moving down the runway way too fast, she was slowing. Whether it would be enough would become apparent very soon.

“Halfway,” Buzz called out.

Hendrickson broke protocol and took his eyes off the direction of travel, glancing at the speed gauge. “One-ten.”

“It’s too damn fast. We’re not gonna make it.” Buzz looked left. The captain was staring through the thick windshield with an icy gaze.

“Weave!”

“What? At one hundred plus? We’ll…”

“Do it, with me, or we’re going to fire-ball regardless.”

Again the pilots broke the rules. Not those of behavior or standards — though several of those were notably excepted in their unorthodox techniques — but those of mechanics and accepted physics. By all common sense and engineering logic the nose wheel, barely enabled to steer at a hundred knots, should break off when forced to turn at the high rate of speed they were traveling.

It didn’t, not even emitting a groan or squeal. The captain, backed up on the rudder pedals by Buzz’s strong pressure, played the Maiden left and right, close to one side of the runway then back to the other. He was creating all kinds of forces to slow the aircraft, and now added severe friction to the list. It was similar to a near skid, only the rear never jackknifed — thankfully.

Eighty. Seventy. Sixty.

“One quarter! She’s doing it!”

“C’mon, girl,” Hendrickson coaxed and cajoled his big baby.

Fifty. The steering was more responsive now, but the brakes were practically nonexistent. On the floor, the pedals felt like steel slabs on a weak spring.

Forty. Thirty. The runway end was upon them.

“Left! Hard!”

Buzz followed the lead, instinctively leaning toward the center console as the Maiden heeled over to the right, opposite the direction of her turn. The tires screeched, and for the first time the blown right-side tires were apparent as the aircraft slid slightly. They were turning hard onto the last taxiway at the end of two-three. It wasn’t even lighted. The aircraft’s own landing beams provided illumination, sweeping across the grassy edge of the strip and painting the fronts of several buildings with a passing glow. Then she slowed in mid turn onto the sweeping taxiway, her brakes letting out a final, abrupt moan as the massive discs ground metal into the contact surfaces, and finally, stopped cold.

The 747’s right side was displayed perfectly to the center hangar which her lights had passed over only seconds before. Behind a line of metal-framed windows a group of men in black stood watching.

“Hell if she didn’t make it down,” Antonelli said, genuinely surprised after the show of sparks they had seen at the far end of the airport.

“Damn,” someone said. The team was realizing it now. They were going to go.

McAffee nodded to Graber.

“Okay, troops,” the captain began. “This is your only good look at the bird. Look at the rear — where the cargo door is.” He was standing behind the others, trying to prep them based on his own experience. “Remember what it looks like now, because you’re going to be up close and personal real soon.”

Less than ten minutes later their pistols were loaded and their faces blackened with anti-flash cream. Then, with two Cubans at the slightly parted hangar door, they boarded the Humvees, which nosed close to the exit.

Hadad refused to allow the aircraft to be towed to the refueling point nearer the service area, and also nearer the terminal. Four fuel trucks, ancient in comparison to those in the ‘real’ world, approached, along with a dispensing pumper. Their antiquity, in this instance, was an asset, allowing the four big tankers to feed fuel to the dispenser truck, basically a big piston-type pump on wheels. Hendrickson gave the tower — and whoever else was there — credit. With only a short radio refusal to come to the normal fueling station, he hadn’t been able to give them much. But someone had figured this solution out, and it would work. Within twenty minutes her not quite depleted tanks should be back up to just beyond two hundred thousand pounds, a little more than half full. It would be plenty to get them to New York, though all three men in the cockpit knew that there was no intention of going there.

“There’s nothing left of the brakes. Zip.”

Hendrickson knew his first officer was right. The pedals barely sprang up from fully depressed, and the metal-on- metal sound near the end of their roll could only have been the retaining pins of the brake pads digging into the discs. There would be several concentric circles of gouges in the hard metal surfaces, caused by the tens of thousands of foot pounds of pressure applied. When the brakes were released after the roll, they were frozen open. The captain thought there might have been some further damage caused by the heat generated during braking, possibly to the hydraulics on the struts. That was of little consequence now. Other problems and happenings would soon be in the forefront, namely that if they had to land again, an act their captor had no intention of allowing, they wouldn’t be able to stop.

“Wherever we go from here, I hope they have a net big enough to stop us,” Captain Hendrickson joked, knowing that the hot mike was still engaged, and hoping that those listening were appreciating the seriousness of their situation. If someone tried a rescue they might be dead, and if they had to take off — with no flaps and less one engine — they might be dead. And landing — though both pilots had figured that this guy had no intention of setting the Maiden down anywhere in one piece — was potentially the most dangerous of all the possible outcomes.

Things weren’t looking good, an understatement the captain was frightened to surpass.

Major Ralph Cooper felt the connection separate a few yards behind his head. The KC-10’s refueling boom rose above the F-106, the light on its nozzle end shining through the cockpit’s angular canopy onto Snoopy’s white helmet.

Several individual vapor streams, the remnants of the tricky nighttime refueling maneuver, trailed off of the rubbery connector fitting which was retracting farther into the flying boom of the dark green Air Force tanker. Her refueling and anti-collision lights both dazzled Cooper’s vision and lit up the underside of the flying behemoth against the star-flecked blackness.

“Romeo, you took about seven-zero-zero gallons,” the boom operator reported. That brought the Delta Dart up to her max internal load of 1,514 gallons, or 9,841 pounds in more correct aerial terms.

“Roger, Tiger Flight. Thanks for the drink.” Cooper watched the military version of the venerable DC-10 gain altitude and bank left, heading north to the States.

His heading was 120. In ten minutes he’d be in Cuban airspace. The controllers aboard the AWACS informed him that his escorts would pick him up two minutes out. From there they all would circle and wait almost directly north of Havana, just five miles off and fifteen thousand feet above the Cuban coast

It didn’t seem too strange, other than the geography of the matter, until one thought about the nuclear-tipped missile in the Delta Dart’s belly. Cooper tried not to think about it but the fact that he was sitting atop a thirty-year-old nuclear weapon had frequently slipped past his mental defenses since takeoff.