Cuba

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

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 MiG-29 toward the runway at Cienfuegos. Two men 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 MiG-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 MiG-29 onto the runway and shoved the twin throttles forward to the stop, then into afterburner. The MiG-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 everywhere — standing 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 AWACS plane over Key West was the first to see the MiG-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 AWACS crew reported the MiG 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 left his radar switch in the off position. He also stayed low, just a few hundred meters above the treetops.

There are few places more lonely than the cockpit of a single-piloted airplane at night when surrounded by the enemy. Corrado felt that loneliness now, felt as if he were the only person still alive on Spaceship Earth.

The red glow of the cockpit lights comforted him somewhat: this was really the only home he had ever had.

The lights of Havana were prominent tonight — he saw the glow at fifty miles even though he was barely a thousand feet above sea level. He climbed a little higher, looking, and saw a huge fire, quite brilliant.

Carlos Corrado turned toward the fire. Perhaps he would find some airborne targets. He turned on his gun switch and armed the infrared missiles.

The E-2 controller datalinked the bogey information to the F-14 crew patrolling over central Cuba at 30,000 feet. There should have been two F-14s, a section, but one plane had mechanical problems prior to launch, so there was only one fighter on this station.

The bogey appeared on the scope of the radar intercept officer, the RIO, in the rear seat of the Tomcat. He narrowed the scan of his radar and tried to acquire a lock on the target, which was merely a blip that faded in and out against the ground clutter.

“What the hell is it?” the pilot demanded, referring to the bogey.

“I don’t know,” was the reply, and therein was the problem. Without a positive identification, visual or electronic, of the bogey, the rules of engagement prohibited the American pilot from firing his weapons. There were simply too many American planes and helicopters flying around in the darkness over Cuba to allow people to blaze away at unknown targets.

The darkness below was alive with lights, the lights of cities and small towns, villages, vehicles, and here and there, antiaircraft artillery — flak — which was probing the darkness with random bursts. Fortunately the gunners could not use radar to acquire a target — the instant they turned a radar on, they drew a HARM missile from the EA-6Bs and F/A-18s that circled on their assigned stations, listening.

The F-14 pilot, whose name was Wallace P. “Stiff” Hardwick, got on the radio to Battlestar Control. “Battlestar, Showtime One Oh Nine, request permission to investigate this bogey.”

“Wait.”

Stiff expected that. Being a fighter pilot in this day and age wasn’t like the good old days, when you went cruising for a fight. Not that he was there for the good old days, but Stiff had sure heard about them.

“That goddamn Cuban is gonna zap somebody while the people on the boat are scratching their ass,” Stiff told his RIO, Boots VonRauenzahn.

“Yeah,” said Boots, who never paid much attention to Stiff’s grousing.

Carlos Corrado saw that a building was on fire, burning with extraordinary intensity. Never had he seen such a hot fire. He assumed that the building had been bombed by a cruise missile or American plane and began visually searching the sky nearby for some hint of another aircraft.

He flew right over the V-22 Osprey carrying Tommy Carmellini and Doll Hanna back to the ship and never saw it.

A lot of flak was rising from the outskirts of Havana, so Carlos turned east, away from it.

In the black velvet ahead he saw lights, and steered toward them. At 500 knots he closed quickly, and saw helicopters’ landing lights! They were flying back and forth over a large barn!

They must be Americans — they sure as hell weren’t Cuban. As far as he knew, he was the only Cuban in the air tonight.

Corrado flew past the area — now down to 400 knots — and did a 90-degree left turn, then a 270-degree right turn. Level, inbound, he retarded the throttles of the two big engines. Three hundred knots … he picked the landing lights on some kind of strange-looking twin rotor helicopter and pushed the nose over just a tad, bringing the strange chopper into the gunsight. Then he pulled the trigger on the stick.

The 30-mm cannon shells smashed into Rita Moravia’s Osprey with devastating effect. She was in the midst of a transition from wing-borne to rotor-borne flight and had the engines pointed up at a seventy-degree angle. The rotors were carrying most of the weight of the twenty-ton ship, so when the cannon shells ripped into the right engine and it ceased developing power, the V-22 began sinking rapidly.

The good engine automatically went to emergency torque and transferred some of its power to the rotor of the bad engine through a driveshaft that connected the two rotor transmissions.

With shells thumping into the plane and warning lights flashing, Rita felt the right wing sag. Some of the shells must have damaged the right transmission!

The ground rushed at her, even as cannon shells continued to strike the plane.

She pulled the stick back and left, trying to make the right rotor take a bigger bite.

Then the machine struck the earth and the instrument panel smashed into her night vision goggles.

In the missile control room, Toad Tarkington held his flashlight on the old man as he produced a candle from his pocket and a kitchen match. He lit the match and applied it to the candle’s wick.

One candle wasn’t much, but it did light the room. Toad turned off the flashlight and stood there looking at the old man.

Muffled crashing sounds reached him, echoed down the stairwell, but no one came. Toad’s headset was quiet too, probably since he was underground.

“Do you speak English?” Toad asked the white-haired man in front of him.

The old man shook his head.

“Espanol?”

“Si, señor.”

“Well, I don’t.”

Toad walked over and checked the man, who had no visible weapons on him.

He had a handful of plastic ties in his pocket. These ties were issued to every marine for the sole purpose of securing prisoners’ hands, and feet if necessary. Toad put a tie around the old man’s hands. The man didn’t resist; merely sat at the control console with his face a mask, showing no emotion.

“Cuban?” Toad asked.

“Nyet.”

“Russki?”

The white head bobbed once, then was still.

Toad used the flashlight to inspect the console, to examine the instruments. This stuff was old, he could see that. Everything was mechanical, no digital gauges or readouts, no computer displays … the console reminded Toad of the dashboard of a 1950s automobile, with round gauges and bezels and …

Well, without power, all this was academic.

His job was to get that damned warhead out of the missile, then set demolition charges to destroy all this stuff, missile, control room, and all. He left the Russian at the console and opened the blast-proof door across the room from the stair where he had entered.

Another stairway led downward.

Toad went as quickly as he dared, still holding the flashlight in one hand and his pistol in the other.

He went through one more steel door … and there the missile stood, white and massive and surreal in the weak beam of the flashlight.

The aviation radio frequencies exploded when Rita’s plane was shot down as everyone tried to talk at once.

Battlestar Control finally managed to get a word in over the babble, a call to Stiff Hardwick. “Go down for a look. Possible hostile may have shot down an Osprey.”

Stiff didn’t need any urging. He rolled the Tomcat onto its back, popped the speed brakes, and started down.

“Silo one,” Boots said. “This bogey is flitting around down there like a goddamn bat or something, mixing it up with the SuperCobras and Ospreys. Let’s not shoot down any of the good guys.”

“No shit,” said Stiff, who was sure he could handle any Cuban fighter pilot alive. This guy. was meat on the table: he just didn’t know it yet.

Carlos Corrado pulled out of his strafing run and soared up to three thousand feet. He extended out for eight or nine miles before he laid the fighter over in a hard turn.

He had seen helicopters down there, at least two. It was time to use the radar.

As he stabilized inbound he flipped the radar switch to “transmit.” He pushed the button for moving targets and sure enough, within seconds the pulse-doppler radar in the nose of the MiG-29 had found three. The rest of the drill was simplicity itself — he selected an Aphid missile, locked it on a target, and fired. Working quickly, he selected a second missile, locked on a second target, and fired.

He had to keep the targets illuminated while the Aphids were in flight, so he continued inbound toward the silo.

One of the SuperCobras exploded when an Aphid drilled it dead center. The second missile tore the tail rotor off its target, which spun violently into the ground and caught fire.

Carlos Corrado flew across the barn, holding his heading, extending out before he turned to make another shooting pass.

Toad Tarkington found the circular steel ladder leading upward in the missile silo and began climbing.

When he reached the catwalk he walked around the missile, examining the skin. There was the little access port, six inches by six inches, with the dozen screws! That had to be it.

Toad Tarkington put the flashlight under his left armpit and got out a screwdriver.

He had three screws out when the flashlight slipped out of his armpit and fell. It bounced off the catwalk and went on down beside the missile, breaking when it hit the grate at the bottom.

The darkness in the silo was total.

Toad Tarkington cursed softly, and went back to taking out screws. He worked by feel. Someone would come along in a minute, he thought, bringing another flashlight. If someone didn’t, he would take the time to go find another.

The trick, he knew, would be to hold on to the screwdriver. He only had one, and if he dropped it, it would go down the grate.

He heard muffled noises from above, but he couldn’t tell what they were. It didn’t really matter, he decided. Getting this warhead out of this missile was priority one.

Carefully, working by feel, he removed the screws from the access panel one by one. When he had the last one out, he pried at the panel. It came off easily enough and he laid it on the catwalk near his feet.

So far so good. He carefully stowed the screwdriver in his tool bag and wiped the sweat from his face and hands.

Okay.

Toad reached up to find the latch that the ancient Russian engineer on television had said should be here. God knows where the CIA found that guy!

Yep. He found the latch.

He rotated it. Now the latch on the left. He was having his troubles getting that latch to turn when the lights came on in the silo.

From instant darkness to glaring light from twenty or more bulbs.

Toad Tarkington pulled his arm from the missile, clapped his hands over his eyes and squinted, waiting for his eyes to adjust.

He could hear a hum. Must be a fan or blower moving air.

No. The hum was in the missile, just a foot or two from his head.

Something winding up. The pitch was rising rapidly.

A gyro?

What was going on?

Toad started down the ladder, moving as fast as he could go, intending to go to the control room to see what in hell was happening.

He heard a grinding noise, loud, low-pitched, and looked up. The cap on the silo was opening.

Holy …

He still had his tools. If he could get that access panel off and cut the guidance wires, the wires to control the warhead …

Toad Tarkington scrambled back up the ladder.

The little six-by-six access hole gaped at him. He ran his arm in, trying to reach the other latches that would allow the large panel to come off.

He got one open. The gyro had ceased to accelerate — it was running steadily now, a high-pitched steady whine.

Holy shit!

He was out of time: the fire from the missile’s engines would fry him to a cinder.

He heard the igniters firing, popping like jet engine igniters.

The rocket motors lit with a mighty whoosh.

Toad grabbed for the access hole with both hands, held on desperately as the missile began to rise on a column of fire.

The noise was beyond deafening — it was the loudest thing Toad Tarkington had ever heard, a soul-numbing roar that made his flesh quiver and vibrated his teeth.

Rising … the missile was rising, dragging him off the catwalk.

He clung to the access hole with all his strength,

The missile came out of the silo, past the floor of the barn, accelerating, going up, up, up ….

The tip of the missile burst through the rotten, shattered roof and threw wood in every direction.

As it did Toad curled his feet up against the fuselage of the missile, released his hold on the access hole, and kicked off.

He flew through the darkness, bounced on the collapsing roof, felt the blast of furnace heat as the rocket motors singed him, then he was falling, falling ….

Stiff Hardwick couldn’t believe his eyes. He had his F-14 Tomcat down at 4,000 feet, fifteen miles from silo one, and was impatiently waiting for Boots to sort out the villain from the other airborne targets in the area when he saw the ballistic missile rising into the night sky on a cone of white-hot fire.

“Jesus Christ!” he swore over the radio, “the bastards have launched one.”

“Lock it up, Boots,” Stiff screamed, still on the radio, although he thought he was on the intercom. “Lock it up and we’ll shoot an AMRAAM.” The acronym stood for advanced medium-range air-to-air missile.

Boots was trying. The problem was that the ballistic missile was essentially stationary in relation to the earth. It was accelerating upward, of course, but its velocity over the ground was close to zero just now. The designers of the F-14 weapons system did not envision that the crew would want to shoot missiles at stationary targets, so Boots was having his troubles.

Frustrated, he snarled at Stiff, “Go to heat, goddamnit. Shoot a ’winder at that exhaust.”

“A ’winder ain’t gonna dent that fucking thing,” Stiff replied, his logic impeccable. He was on the ICS now. “We’ll come up under it and shoot as it accelerates upward.”

“Okay! Okay!”

And that is what he did. As the missile accelerated upward, Stiff Hardwick kept his nose down, punched the burners full on and accelerated in toward the launch site, then pulled up to put the climbing, accelerating ballistic missile in front of him.

Now Boots got a radar lock.

The symbology on the HUD was alive, showing the target, the boresight angle, the drift angle ….

Stiff Hardwick lifted his thumb to fire the first AMRAAM. As he did an infrared missile from Carlos Corrado’s MiG-29 went up his right tailpipe and blew a stabilator off the F-14.

Jake Grafton heard all of it. “A missile is in the air! Just came out of silo one!” was the shout over the radio.

He picked up the red telephone, the direct satellite connection with the White House.

“Mr. President, I don’t know what happened, but apparently the Cubans have launched one.”

The president must have heard the shouts over the net the same as Jake did. His question was, “What is the target?”

Jake had the targets memorized. “It came out of silo one, sir. The target is Atlanta.”

“Thank you, Admiral,” the president said mechanically, and hung up.

When Toad Tarkington came to, the night was quiet. He was lying on cool earth, the sky above was dark … and there was a marine standing over him with his mouth moving.

He was deaf. He had lost his hearing.

Toad sat up, fell over, forced himself into a sitting position again. He ached all over, every muscle and tendon screamed in protest. But he was alive.

He got to his feet, swaying. The marine helped steady him.

The barn was right there beside him.

He pulled his pistol, staggered for the entrance.

The interior was a shambles, the stench nearly unbearable from bodies fried and seared by the exhaust of the missile.

Toad pulled boards out of the way to get to the open door that led down to the control room.

The lights were still on. Using a palm on one wall to steady himself, he descended the stair.

The old man was still sitting at the console, still wearing the tie around his wrists.

He looked at Toad dispassionately.

“You bastard,” Toad said. He said the words but he could barely hear them. “You foul, evil old man.”

A young marine who had followed Toad down the stairs grabbed the white-haired old man, shoved him toward the stairs. “Get going, you old fart! Upstairs, upstairs.”

Tarkington sagged to his knees on the floor, then stretched out. He was so tired ….

Boots VonRauenzahn pulled the ejection handle, and both he and Stiff Hardwick were launched from Showtime One Oh Nine a fraction of a second apart.

Stiff got his wits about him as he hung in his parachute harness in the night sky. He could see the ballistic missile accelerating into the sky — it was now a bright spot of light amid the stars — and he could see the burning wreckage of his Tomcat as it fluttered toward the ground.

He couldn’t see the MiG-29 that had shot him down. He could hear him though, a rumble that muffled the fading roar of the ballistic missile heading for space.

What he didn’t know was that Carlos Corrado had decided that his fuel state didn’t allow him to jab the Americans anymore this night. He was on his way back to Cienfuegos. With his radar off.

The SPY-1B radar aboard Hue City acquired the rising ballistic missile as it rose over the rim of the earth and transmitted the information by datalink to Guilford Courthouse, which picked up the missile on its own radar seconds later.

Hue City’s tactical action officer (TAO) in the Combat Control Center reached out and pushed the squawk-box button for the bridge, notifying her captain. “Sir, we have a possible ATBM threat, bearing one hundred seventy-five degrees true.” An ATBM was an antitactical ballistic missile threat.

The information from the SPY-1B radar was fed into the Aegis weapons system, which used the radar to control SM-2 missiles. The TAO waited for the computer to present the specifics of the target’s trajectory.

Her orders were to shoot down any missiles launched from Cuba over the Florida Straits. To do that, she would use the latest version of the SM-2 missile, of which her ship carried eight. Guilford Courthouse also carried eight of these weapons, which had an extraordinary envelope. They could fly as far as 300 nautical miles and as high as 400,000 feet, about 66 nautical miles.

The ballistic missile that was flying now was still climbing and accelerating. The trick was to shoot it over the Florida Straits before it got out of the SM-2 envelope.

The captain was on the squawk box. “You may fire anytime,” the old man said.

The TAO was Lieutenant (junior grade) Melinda Robinson. Her mother had wanted her to be a dancer and her father wanted her to take up law, his profession, but she chose the navy, confounding them both.

Just now she concentrated on the computer presentations on the large, 42-inch by 42-inch console in front of her.

“Two missiles,” Robinson ordered. She was tempted to fire four, but the Cubans might launch more ballistic missiles, so she couldn’t afford to run out of ammo.

“Fire one,” she said.

The SM-2 Tactical Aegis LEAP (lightweight exoatmospheric projectile) missile roared from the vertical launcher in front of the ship’s bridge in a blaze of fire.

Two seconds later a second missile roared after the first.

Guilford Courthouse also fired two missiles.

The solid fuel third-stage boosters of the SM-2 missiles lifted them through the bulk of the atmosphere, and finally separated at an altitude of 187,000 feet. The second stages ignited now, lifting the interceptor missiles higher and higher.

At 300,000 feet the second stage of the missile pitched over and ejected the nose cone of the missile, exposing the infrared sensor of the kinetic-energy kill vehicle. The motor continued to burn for another sixteen seconds, carrying the kill vehicle higher and still faster. At 370,000 feet the kill vehicle was aligned by its GPS-aided inertial unit and was ejected from the missile.

Tracking the target now at 375,000 feet of altitude, the kill vehicle homed in on the ballistic missile’s final stage at 6,000 miles per hour.

And hit it.

The second missile missed by a hundred feet, the third struck a piece of the target missile, and the fourth missed by seven feet.

“Admiral Grafton, Hue City reports the ballistic missile was destroyed over the Straits.”

Jake picked up the telephone to the White House and waited for someone to answer.

“Hue City, an Aegis cruiser, reports the Cuban missile was destroyed over the Straits.”

The president didn’t say anything, but Jake could feel his relief. When he did speak, he sounded tired. “How many warheads are still in those missiles?”

“Only one left, sir. Number four. There are no Cubans there but the marines are having trouble getting the warhead out of the missile.”

“Are you destroying the missiles when they are sanitized?”

“Yes, sir. A magnesium flare ignited near the nose cone. The heat melts it, then finally ignites the solid fuel and causes an explosion in the silo.”

“You destroyed the warhead manufacturing facility?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All that’s left is the lab at the university?”

“That’s correct”

“I want it destroyed, Admiral.”

“There will be casualties, sir, American and Cuban. That thing is smack in the middle of downtown Havana.”

“I understand that. Destroy it.”

“We’ll do it tomorrow night,” Jake Grafton said.

Toad Tarkington found Rita putting a bandage on her copilot, Crash Wade, who had smashed his face into the instrument panel when their Osprey crashed. Half the marines aboard had been injured, but by some miracle only two were killed. The Osprey was a total loss.

Toad put his hands on Rita’s shoulders. She turned and he saw a large goose-egg bump on her forehead, one already turning purple. One of her eyes was also black and slightly swollen.

He knelt beside her. “How’s your head?”

“I’m okay. Didn’t even knock me out.”

“And Crash?”

“The wound that’s bleeding is pulpy — I think his skull is smashed. He doesn’t seem to recognize me or anybody.”

When she had Wade’s wounds bandaged, she and Toad walked over to a tree and sat down. “Somebody said a MiG shot us down, Toad. Cannon holes all over the right engine nacelle. I couldn’t save it.”

She was so tired. When he leaned back against the tree she put her head down in his lap.