First Strike

FOURTEEN

Under any other circumstances, Lieutenant Bruno Parto would have considered this a tropical paradise. Towering palms swayed gently in the light breeze, and the foliage was dense with a wide range of exotic flowers. Everywhere he looked it was green, the colors running the gamut from the pale yellow shades to dark, almost black greens. Hibiscus blossomed seemingly at random, deep red and yellow splashes against the green canopy.

This far up the mountain, there were few sounds of civilization. No trucks, no internal combustion engines. No aircraft. Instead, the air teemed with shrieks and raucous cries of birds as they went about their daily tasks.

Yes, paradise. Except for the area immediately in front of him.

Someone had been brutal about clearing the area, as well as quite thorough. A cleared path slashed through the forest, leading down to the main road he’d observed from the air. Up here, the road widened into a clearing forty feet in diameter. Within the cleared area, everything was trampled to the ground. Ugly stumps seeping sap poked up, raw and wounded. The debris was tossed around the edges of the circle, already turning brown and melting down to join the compost on the tropical floor. Parked in the center was the rocket launcher, its rails extending up from the bed, a missile already in place.

Parto ran his hand over the ground, letting the rich loam sift through his fingers. Even the most brutal treatment by men could not permanently stop nature. Already, only a week after the area had been cleared, the jungle was trying to reclaim its own. Small sprouts of green poked up through the debris, and twigs were visible in the center of the tree trunks. Within another week, the ground would not be visible as foliage started to sprout, and in perhaps as little as three months he would never have been able to tell it had been cleared.

But, for now, it was an ugly scar on the land, easily visible from the air, although a bit more difficult to find on the ground. The dense foliage screened it until you were almost on top of it.

It was the smells that first gave away the location even before he had visual contact on it. The scent of people, cooked meat and tobacco, sweat, and the oily, noxious odor of machinery. He motioned to the members of the squad, and they dispersed silently around him. They advanced slowly, each with his own assignment, knowing that time was running short.

The previous three sites had been easily taken down. The SEALs had approached like Ninjas, undetected, and during the night had silently and finally eliminated the soldiers asleep in their trucks. After everyone was dead, Parto himself had run through the simple sequence of input commands on the attached fire control panel, canceling all preprogrammed launch instructions. As a final precautionary measure, they carefully detached the warhead sitting on the bed of the truck and rolled it off onto the ground. It would be impossible to remount on the launcher, and other teams would be along later to dispose of it.

But they had run out of darkness before they had run out of trucks, and the result was that they were making their approach on this one in the afternoon, already worn out after a night of operations.

Parto could smell something cooking, as well as coffee, and he swore silently. He would have preferred to catch them just as they stumbled out of their beds, when they were still caught in the no man’s land between sleep and alertness.

But you played the cards you were dealt, and Parto was not one to demand a recount.

Just as he was about to give the command over his whisper-mike, the technicians scrambled over the missile. They began raising the launch arms, putting it at the angle necessary to launch through a narrow hole in the canopy overhead.

As the launch arms rotated upward, the mounting platform under them complained. A good coat of grease would have prevented the metal-on-metal grinding, but Parto knew how hard it was to maintain equipment in the warm salty air. As the missile launch rails reached the angle of approximately twenty degrees above vertical, something snapped. The entire assembly jolted hard to the left.

“Not yet,” Parto whispered. He waited. There was a sharp crack, and then a seam near the tip of the missile opened. From it gouted a burst of white vapor, a fog that wafted in the gentle breeze toward the depths of the jungle.

The men around the truck panicked. Some grabbed gas masks, others fled wildly into the jungle. With cold dread in his stomach, Parto knew what the warhead was.

“Fall back,” he ordered, moving himself away from the site. “Get as far away from here as fast you can — it’s a chemical warhead, and it’s leaking. Head down slope, into the wind — we’ll form up at Charlie point.”

His men needed no urging. He heard them moving out, sacrificing stealth for speed. If they didn’t escape the deadly cloud heading for them, there would be no second chance of this mission.

Which nerve agent? It didn’t matter. Not if he didn’t get out of range fast enough. He had the standard antidotes in self-injecting vials in his pocket, atropine and a few others, but they weren’t effective against everything. Some nerve agents didn’t even need to be inhaled. The slightest touch of their vapor on skin would be immediately deadly.

Was he clear of it? Did he feel muscle tremors starting now? No — he was imagining things. It was the normal, comfortable feel of adrenaline pumping through his body as he put out maximum physical effort.

He was the second man to arrive at the muster point, but the others weren’t far behind him. There was something peculiarly terrifying about chemical and biological weapons. For all the SEALs’ strength, for all their physical prowess and weapons, they had no sure counter to this enemy. What they could not see, what they could not touch, they could not fight. And that was a very odd sensation for each one of them.

“What now?” one asked. Despite the hard run, Parto was breathing normally.

“The last thing I heard before all hell broke loose was a launch order. They’re planning on letting them rip sometime in the next hour. Every site still around is raising launchers, setting in coordinates, and preparing to fire. If we are going to stop them, we have to do it now.”

“Metal fatigue, probably,” one commented. “You don’t maintain something, you use it too hard, that’s what happens. They should have known that.”

“I wonder if all of them are in the same shape,” another said.

“Probably — or close to it. Makes our job easier, huh?”

“No. That was a one-in-a-thousand mishap,” Parto said firmly. “We’ve got an hour — if we move fast enough, we can take out two more.”

Not one of them would have expressed doubt openly, but he could see it in each face. Hell, he felt it himself, the gut feeling of revulsion and fear that made him want to beat feet as far and as fast as he could from this place.

But that’s what they were here for, wasn’t it? To take the risks that they didn’t want to subject their families and friends to back in the States? They were the hard spear tip of the American military, protecting the soft underbelly of the civilian population, and sometimes it came down to this — put up or shut up.

He didn’t have to tell any of them that. They would make the connection in their own way, come to the same conclusion. There was no help — they had to take out the ones that they could.

Suddenly, he heard a crashing in the bushes. Chief Petty Officer Jesus Lacar held up a hand, nodded, and silently slipped out of the group. He would find whoever was approaching and dispose of the problem.

The noise stopped. A few moments later, he reappeared. His face was pale and tight.

“Whatever it was, it got him,” he said, his voice steady, maybe too steady. “Definitely a nerve agent. He had blood coming out of his mouth and was in convulsions when I got there. Big red boils all over his skin, some of them breaking open. And his eyes…”—the man could not repress a shudder—“his eyes were solid bloodred. They must’ve been hurting bad because he was trying to claw them out.”

“Better here than at home,” Parto said finally. “Come on, let’s move out.”

The next crew they approached was much sloppier. The guard had his back to him as Parto approached, and he died quickly and quietly. They were in the clearing in a heartbeat, moving silently, but not as carefully as they had before. The clock was ticking.

On signal, six handguns rang out with a double tap, dropping six men, and then again until everyone was dead.

If we hit the missile… He shuddered to think how close to disaster they may have come before.

“One more,” Parto said, as they hastily regrouped. “We have twenty minutes — we’ll use them.”

Maskiro’s people disliked giving him bad news. Over the previous three days, he’d gone from an aggressive, canny tactician into an easily irritated manic. So, when the Russian air traffic controller saw the spate of aircraft symbols appear around the American aircraft carrier, he groaned.

Maskiro was behind him in an instant, stinking of sweat. “What is that?”

“It appears to be aircraft launching from the carrier, comrade,” the controller said, trying to keep his voice level.

“Impossible. They will not take the chance of incurring civilian casualties. I have that on the best authority and we are not.” Maskiro’s voice trailed off as he saw the aircraft symbols merge into a single mass, and then break apart into two separate flights. One group headed for the island. The second turned north, staying out of range of the antiair weapons, but clearly intending to intercept the reinforcement MiG squadron now approaching the island.

“No.” Maskiro picked up the portable radio that connected him with the medium-range land attack launchers. He paused for a moment, and the controller thought he saw a flash of sanity and sorrow. Before he could speak, the radio came to life.

“Command, sector one commander. Comrade, three stations have failed to conduct their hourly status reports. I have been unable to raise them by radio. I think we must consider the possibility that American special forces are now on the island.” The sector commander had no hesitation in voicing his opinion, since he was out of Maskiro’s immediate reach. “I have ordered additional security measures, but I cannot guarantee our security here. Comrade, your orders?”

Maskiro howled in rage. He slammed the radio down on the desk and turned insane eyes around the room as though seeking someone to take the brunt of his anger. The radio blared again. “Comrade, your orders?”

Maskiro grabbed the radio. “Launch. I repeat, all land attack site launch! Now!” He then turned to the air controller. “Notify the inbound flight and Comrade Korsov that we are under attack.” Maskiro drew his personal side arm and chambered around. “And that we will fight here to the death.”