October's Ghost

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE DONNYBROOK

The eight guards patrolling the perimeter fence on the west turned toward the sound coming from the east. They never heard what came next.

The Kalashnikovs in the tree line burped briefly, felling the eight loyalists with no resistance. Ojeda’s group, divided into three 60-man sections, needed no further signal. They raced toward the fence in staggered columns, their numbers spread out along a quarter-mile front. At the head of each section were soldiers carrying what appeared to be small backpacks. Fifty feet from the fence all but these men went to ground. A second later they, too, dived for cover as the breaching charges arched through the air in unison.

The roar of the Pave Hawk’s turbines reverberated off the endless concrete slab as Duc flared the helicopter perfectly, setting Captain Buxton and sergeants Makowski, Jones, and Vincent precisely two hundred yards south of cooling tower number one. They released themselves from the SPIE rig just before their feet met pavement and made a quick turn to the right, running as fast as possible toward their objective.

Duc freed the empty rig and nosed forward, dropping a few feet in the process, the main objective coming at him quickly.

Fifteen feet below, Major Sean Graber slid his thumb upward on the MP5SD4’s grip, activating the LAM. Next his finger moved onto the trigger, and his left hand eased its grip on Lewis’s web gear, ready to reach for the release handle on his harness.

The feeling was one of surprise, then wonder, then realization, then anger. Major Orelio Guevarra looked toward the sound and saw the shadow of the helicopter pass between him and the star-flecked southern sky.

“Chiuaigel!” Guevarra screamed as he bolted for the Havoc.

Sergeant Montes ran after his commander, joining him at the MI-28’s front. “Where did it come from?”

“Dammit, who cares.” The major pulled his helmet on with haste and clambered into the aft seat of the helicopter, plugging his communications umbilical into the intercom/radio jack as Montes dropped into the front seat.

“We have no missiles,” the sergeant said. He opened the power circuits to all his weapons as Guevarra fired up the twin Isotov turbines above and behind them.

The major looked left and right. A damned ground attack, eh? “No, but we can still fight.” He recalled the wide, flat profile of the craft streaking across the sky. A transport, he knew, though it could not be the type he had initially thought. But still a transport. More correctly it was prey. And he was the predator.

“Systems on line. Checklist?”

“To hell with the checklist,” Guevarra said, pulling the collective up in a steady motion, the Isotovs responding with a surge of power. “Switch to cannon,” he ordered as the Havoc leaped into the darkness.

“Bolt those doors,” Asunción directed the officer with him. He went to the firing controls as his orders were carried out. He had performed the motions repeatedly in his mind, and an equal number of times in preparation of the day when he would do so for real. That day, that moment, was now at hand.

He flipped the two rows of safety covers up, exposing the switches that had to be thrown to give control of the power and pumping functions to the missile. With his right thumb he threw each switch from manual to auto. Asunción cleared another safety cover to the right and pressed the single black button beneath it, locking the preprogrammed target codes into the missile’s guidance system.

Then he lifted the final plastic cover. The others were black. This one was red. Beneath it was a circular button of the same color.

“Raptor, this is Sandman.”

“Sandman, go ahead,” Colonel Cadler said, acknowledging the call from the E3C Sentry thirty miles to his rear.

“We’re showing a second air target northeast of Gambler. Distance is about a half-mile. Just coming up from zero AGL. Heading is southwest. No IFF, Raptor. This one’s a Bandit.”

Goddammit! Cadler swore silently, switching to intercom. “Captain, step on it. Gambler has company.”

“On target.”

The Delta troopers swung forward in the motion of a pendulum as Duc flared the Pave Hawk and dropped toward the ground. They pulled their release handles almost in unison and sprinted toward the squat gray structure fifty feet away. Lewis, Graber, and Goldfarb broke left to the south-facing door; Antonelli and Quimpo right to the north. In fluid motions Goldfarb and Quimpo pulled the pre-cut strips of det cord from pouches on their webbing and reached up, attaching the adhesive end to the top of each door on the latch side. They stepped quickly to the side, the thumb-switch detonators in their hands.

No nod was needed. Sean already had his hand on the chest mic.

Buxton’s group reached the base of cooling tower number one unopposed. They split into two pairs and took up overwatch positions a hundred feet apart, ready to deal with any threat, except for the one that was taking shape inside the walls of the tower at their backs.

“Go!”

The det cord exploded with a bright flash that the troopers did not see. The energy created by the blast was focused inward along a vertical line and severed both doors inward of their latches. The steel slabs twisted inward as the sound of the explosion cracked inside the concrete walls. Without hesitation the entry team moved through the portals.

Practice, in this case, had made for a perfect entry. Lewis, the first through, was met by the sight of a single figure near the west wall. The LAM painted the man’s form with IR light, giving the Delta trooper a clear picture of his target. Armed or not, the man was a target. And the pulsating dot of red on his chest was the bull’s eye.

Sean came through the opening, stepping on the steel door, just as Lewis fired a single burst. He caught the scene in his peripheral vision. The target suddenly moved backward as if a massive fist had punched it in the chest, then collapsed like a felled tree. The movement of Antonelli and Quimpo to his right registered in Sean’s vision, and Goldfarb’s hand touched his back as he entered and passed to the center. The sensory input at that moment was tremendous. The sights of the first shots; the staccato popping as though a child were making a machine-gun sound; the feel of his team members; every tiny motion.

Motion.

Sean caught it first as the LAM swept the far end of the room, beyond where Lewis had fired. That target had blocked the sergeant’s view of the scene beyond, and Goldfarb was not yet in position to see what his commander was seeing.

Asunción had ducked as a reflex when the crack of an explosion invaded the command bunker. But duty quickly overcame his natural reactions, and he began to rise, the launch button right there, just inches from the finger that he was stabbing toward it.

Man. His back was to Sean. Hands moving. The laser dot danced across the target’s back to a point between the blades before Sean squeezed the trigger. A three-round burst of 9mm rounds spit from the front of the MP5SD4 with hardly a flash. There was a sound to accompany the meeting of lead with flesh, but it was not from the weapon. Not from Sean’s, that is.

General Juan Asunción’s final act was hardly a difficult one, but it set in motion a complex series of actions that were to culminate in a disastrous event, though not that which he had envisioned when his finger came down upon the launch button.

The first manifestation was probably the least involved. A minute electrical current traveled five hundred yards through a wire, buried with many others in a conduit running from the command bunker to Tower One. A backup radio signal would have been transmitted if there had been a problem with the power, but there was not. The pulse of energy reached a sequencer box just behind the missile’s guidance package. Here it “tripped,” in sequence, a series of electrical switches. The first initiated a wholly separate signal that ordered the explosive bolts securing the missile to its launch pedestal to fire. All twenty did, breaking the bonds that held the weapon in place. The second switch started four separate pumps near the base of the booster’s first stage. Two of these were primary and two secondary, and all four began drawing the two liquids from their separate tanks in the first stage but were stopped from delivering the propellant combination to the combustion chamber. The final switch in the sequencer removed the intended blockage, activating a series of piston-driven drop valves that allowed the hypergolic mixture of undimensional dimethylhydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide to flow under tremendous pressure into the bulbous first-stage combustion chamber.

It was there that the mating of the two products, which should have reacted with a predictable violence, began to do something very unexpected, though quite preventable.

The combination of UDMH and NTO, a standard fuel/oxidant mixture used in Russian and Chinese liquid-fueled rockets for decades, was ideal for the purpose because it required no ignition source. The two liquids reacted on contact with each other, in essence exploding in the confines of the combustion chamber, which contained and directed the energy of the reaction through the gimbled thrust nozzle at the missile’s base. As expected, the reaction occurred, spewing a massive jet of flame downward as the powerful engine began to push the Chinese-built missile upward toward the opening of Tower One. Everything was working perfectly. The guidance system was already reading the thrust level and minute attitude shifts, and began factoring the “actual” with the “planned” to correct any deviations that could alter its six-thousand-mile flight course to Moscow. Pumps were whirring robotically without care for the limited life they would have. All was as Anatoly Vishkov had seen to. All, that is, but one thing that he could not control, but that he had warned of. The sharply pointed nose cone was within a yard of clearing the confines of the tower when the unseen error of the fueling crew manifested itself completely within a fraction of a second.

UDMH and NTO, like all combinations of fuel and oxidant, require a precise mixture quotient to react at a level that is proper for their use in a set space — the combustion chamber, in this case. The concentration and amount are critical, and here they had been altered by the use of the contaminated NTO as a primer during fueling from the tank trucks. The nitrate infiltration that Vishkov had feared did happen when the rainwater filtered through the nitrogen-rich soil into the supercooled NTO. The water, in contact with the frigid gas in liquid form, instantly froze, creating a layer of highly crystalline ice atop the oxidizing agent. What nitrates had been held in solution with the rainwater then settled from the ice sheet and contaminated the NTO solution with salts of nitric acid, which again dissolved and upset the delicate balance needed for a successful and controllable hypergolic reaction. In effect the NTO had been diluted by the addition of stable nitrates to the solution, which meant that a higher than normal ratio of UDMH to pure NTO was reacting in the combustion chamber. What occurred when that ratio drifted past the 3 percent variance in favor of the UDMH was similar, though quite a bit smaller, than the effect the opposite end of the missile was designed to unleash.

In less than the blink of an eye the loss of equilibrium in the reaction caused the energy level to rise dramatically and instantaneously. The additional UDMH overtook the reaction, increasing the controlled explosion to a point where the design limit of the combustion chamber was surpassed. The chamber literally fractured into hundreds of sections as the force of the explosion pushed outward in all directions. Traveling upward, it destroyed the pumps, feed lines, and finally the lower tank of NTO. The upper tank of UDMH ruptured a fraction of a second later. Before the liquids could join, they were acted upon by the fireball rising upward and were themselves added to the mix, feeding the uncontrollable inferno. At that point the effect became that of a very large bomb, whose force searched for avenues of escape from the already failing cooling tower that contained it. One route was through the exhaust vents at the base, but the larger opening at the top saw most of the energy pass through it, rising from bottom to top, generating a force that propelled all things in its path skyward.

One of these was the warhead.

Lieutenant Duc had the Pave Hawk in a tight left turn when the night became day for a few seconds.

Joe strained against his belt to look out the open left side door as the helicopter reached a due-west heading. “No…”

The fireball was rolling into the sky, a mass of orange and black and yellow that curled outward and in upon itself. Joe followed the inferno to its source, looking for the structure from which it had come. But it was not there. Just a spreading sheet of flame and smoke lay where Tower One had been. And where those men were supposed to be.

Seven feet ahead, Lieutenant Duc was realizing the same loss when the net came alive.

“Raptor to Gambler, you have company. Sandman reports a bandit at your—”

The report abruptly ended as a burst of 30mm cannon fire ripped through the Pave Hawk from somewhere to port. It stitched across the cockpit, left to right, and continued back into the cabin, drawing a line of the inch-diameter rounds through the gun stations on both doors. Duc’s copilot received four hits, all traveling through his midsection before continuing out and through the helicopter’s windscreen, leaving gaping holes in front of the pilot. Other rounds impacted the metal structure between the cabin and cockpit, penetrating and ricocheting, one passing just an inch from Duc’s chin as it severed the line from his headset to the radio and intercom. Behind him both door gunners were dead, like his left seater, but Anderson had received only a superficial wound from a metal fragment blasted free by a 30mm round.

The lieutenant had a myriad of things assaulting his decision-making processes at the moment, the most important of which was that somewhere very close — too close — was something trying to kill him. Putting distance between his bird and whoever was out there was the first order of business.

“Hang on!” He screamed and would have been surprised to know that Anderson, himself wondering what the hell was going on, had heard the warning plainly above the cacophony of noise that seemed to be rising appreciably.

“A hit!” Guevarra yelled joyously. “Good shooting, Chiuaigel!”

“He’s running,” Montes said, watching as their target banked hard to the right, staying close to the earth as a fine stream of smoke began to trail from one of his engines.

Guevarra got his best look yet at the craft as it silhouetted itself against the light of the blast reflected off the buildings. It was a Blackhawk, and the way it was being flown could mean only one thing. “He is an American, Chiuaigel! Kill him! KILL HIM!”

Montes swung the cannon fully right as Guevarra followed his wounded prey. Falcon and pigeon, the sergeant thought, as he pressed the fire button a second time.

“High!” Guevarra screamed as the stream of fire passed over the banking helicopter. “I will get closer, then destroy him!”

The light of the nearby explosion reached the command bunker just before the awful roar. Sean and his team secured the one-room structure, making sure their targets were very dead, before stepping through the north door into the glow of the fireball rising from where Tower One had been.

“Bux,” Sean said softly, then reached up and keyed his mic. “Bux!”

There was no response.

“Maj,” Antonelli said, pointing up and to the east.

Sean forced himself to look away from the inferno. “My God.”

“Where did that come from?” Goldfarb practically demanded.

Sean watched helplessly as the Pave Hawk, a ribbon of smoke marking its path, sped away, a second helicopter right behind, its turret-mounted Gatling gun spitting fire and lead.

“Maj, what do we do?”

There was nothing they could do about the Pave Hawk, or for anyone on board. Including Anderson. Cho would have to run for cover, which meant that what remained of Graber’s team was on its own. “We do what we came here to do. Until we know otherwise, we have to assume the warhead is in there somewhere.”

“In that?” Goldfarb said skeptically.

“Until we know otherwise,” Sean repeated with authority.

“But what about…”

Quimpo’s words were cut off by Sean. “Listen! We have a mission to complete! You think I don’t feel like shit right now? Well, I do, but I lived through this before, and we sure as hell ain’t gonna run away like we did then!” The nightmare of Desert One seemed all too real at the moment. The fire. The drone of aircraft. The feeling of failure. There Delta had hightailed it out of harm’s way before it could do its job. Men had died there. Sean looked to the fire, knowing that very good men, very good friends, had fallen here also. But there was no ducking this one. For the moment, at least, they were on their own, and there was still a job to do. “Two and three. Mikey, you guys work around to the east side, by those far buildings. Stay clear of the fire. We don’t know if there’s anything left in there that could blow.” Like a nuke? he wondered. “We’ll take this side. Stay in contact until our reinforcements get here.”

A series of small explosions echoed from the distance. Sean hoped it wasn’t the rebels getting bogged down in a fight. He desperately wanted some more firepower on the ground right now.

BOOM.

The distant explosions became a singular one very close as a rocket-propelled grenade fell short after being fired from the corridors between the reactor buildings three hundred yards to the northwest.

“Damn!” Antonelli cursed. “I’m hit!”

Sean and Lewis dropped low and sprayed multiple bursts in the direction of fire. The shots were met immediately by a volley of full automatic fire from the reactor buildings.

“Inside. Hurry.” Sean tapped two more bursts off, but the effective range of the suppressed MP5s was severely limited. They were close-in weapons, not battle rifles. He would have traded a year’s pay for a few M-16s right then.

Quimpo and Goldfarb dragged the big lieutenant back into the bunker. Quimpo went to cover the south door, while Goldfarb, the team’s medic, went to work on his comrade’s nasty leg wound. Sean and Lewis backed in and took cover as round after round peppered the beautifully thick concrete walls.

“At least the Chinese can build decent prefab,” Lewis joked.

“It won’t mean shit once they get around us,” Sean pointed out. They needed help fast. He switched his radio from the local channel, which allowed the Delta troops to talk freely without distracting communications from the net, to tactical. This linked him with the only assistance he could count on for the moment. “Raptor, this is ground. We need some help here.”

“Okay, ground, whaddya got?” Cadler’s welcome voice inquired.

“Unknown strength to the northwest of our pos in the bunker. Autos and RPGs. We have multiple casualties. Can you assist?”

There was no hesitation in the reply. “A-ffirmative, ground.”

“Launch! Launch!” The NORAD threat officer said loudly. Thousands of heat-sensitive receptors on a DSP satellite, looking down upon the Western Hemisphere from twenty-two thousand miles over Gibraltar, had registered a surge of energy from a single point, and the signal-processing computer had judged the event significant enough to warrant a FLASH warning to NORAD.

General Walker hurried down from the command center’s upper deck. “Where?”

“Central Cuba, thermal-launch signature.” The officer processed the information further, the expression on his face signaling that something was not right. “Very concentrated. Similar to a silo hot launch, but then it spread way out. Going from a thermal of three-thousand-point-eight on a narrow aspect to one thousand even on a wide one.

Walker’s heart was beating faster, enough so that he thought he could hear more than feel it. “Better location.”

A few seconds passed. “Cienfuegos, west of the city.”

“Damn.” CINCNORAD walked three consoles down to the position he would occupy during the real thing. Whether this was or not, he did not yet know, but he also could not wait to do what needed to be done. He picked up the tan-colored phone that sat away from the other communication devices before him. It was picked up immediately in the NMCC. “This is CINCNORAD. I am reporting a NUCFLASH event, central Cuba. Possible launch. This is not a drill.”

Yakovlev pulled the phone away from his ear, a puzzled look on his face. “Voyska PVO, sir. Urgent”

President Konovalenko saw Bogdanov rise slightly in his chair. “Put it on speaker.”

A raspy click sounded from the white box on his desk. “You fool! You send men here to arrest me, and now the Americans have done it!”

Konovalenko recognized the voice as Shergin’s. “Have done what?”

“Launched a missile at us, you idiot! YOU FOOL!”

Bogdanov’s head sank at the revelation. “You… You…”

“From where?” Konovalenko demanded, keeping his composure. “Exactly.”

“How do you expect an exact report? The Caribbean, idiot. Is that precise enough for you?”

“No. Is it from Cuba?”

“You are blind! There is a submarine out there that has just fired a missile at us! A Trident missile!”

“Could it have come from Cuba?” Konovalenko pressed the question.

“I cannot believe this!” Shergin practically screamed through the phone. “How much proof do you require?”

“More than you are offering.” The president released the line. “Igor Yureivich, suggestions?”

“We get out of here!” Bogdanov answered for the foreign minister. “Before the damned thing kills us all!”

Konovalenko ignored the outburst. “Quickly.”

Yakovlev refused to believe they had been wrong. They had come so far, building a trust with their onetime enemy. That trust had to continue. “Call the Americans immediately.”

The Communications Vessel Vertikal was running a circular course around the growing debris field, her foredeck covered with growing piles of material as her pilot boats continued to bring it aboard. Some of the more interesting items were already in the wardroom.

“Can you read it?” the captain asked. He knew enough conversational English to excel at his job, but the written word had never been his to master. His signals officer was doing those honors.

“A logbook. A captain’s log.” The officer carefully separated the waterlogged papers and laid them on the steel tabletop. He examined the cracked plastic holder that contained them. “A seaman’s folio. I have seen this in Spain before. During our port call last winter. It is normally waterproof and is made of a buoyant material. This is why it floated.”

“But from where?” the captain wondered. “Or what?”

“Pennsylvania,” the signals officer said.

“Hardly,” the captain replied, assuming his subordinate had made a joke.

“No, sir. The USS Pennsylvania,” he said, pointing to the stencil on the folio’s mangled cover.

Pennsylvania? The captain snatched the object from his signals officer and examined it himself. It said as he was told, but how could it be? There were no other ships in the area even searching, and surely…. Of course. There was a search under way farther north. Radio intercepts had indicated that. And they would have no way of knowing where to look, if this was true. A raket submarine. He looked again at the name.

“Go through these papers immediately. Find out all you can and say nothing to anyone but me. Is that clear?” The captain headed for the door.

“Of course, but where are you going?”

“To the radio,” the captain answered. “This is worthy of an immediate report.” And of a promotion, he thought.

“No radar track, no exhaust plume.” The threat officer looked up to CINCNORAD and the two Russians standing behind. “Whatever it was, it stayed on the ground.”

Colonel Belyayev leaned close and studied the data carefully. The survival of Motherland’s capital might be at stake. He could trust, as Marshal Kurchatov had shown him, but he must also verify.

“Colonel?”

Belyayev returned to upright. “I see nothing. Residual heat signature.”

CINCNORAD noticed that the exchange was in English. He thought it might have been otherwise at a time like this. The relationship truly was different. Not only between their countries but between the people. It was different, and refreshing. “Marshal?”

Kurchatov nodded. “I am satisfied. Let us contact President Konovalenko.”

“Toolbox, mark your pos and keep your head down.”

Antonio looked up, seeing nothing but hearing the faint sound of engines as the AC-130U approached.

“Colonel! Stop the advance!”

Ojeda snapped his head toward the American. “What are you talking about, Papa? We are almost to the objective. These loyalists are paper-thin in numbers.”

Antonio knew he had little time to explain. “Maybe so, but farther on the American unit is pinned down, and someone is going to be laying some heavy fire on the area in less than a minute.”

Ojeda followed Antonio’s gaze upward. He heard the sound also. “Back! Fall back!” He reached for a termite grenade from an aide and pulled the pin. “Where?”

“Here. We’ll be safe on this side, then.”

Ojeda tossed the incendiary device around the building’s corner and trotted back the way they had come. A pronounced pop came a few seconds later.

“Gunners, we have a friendly marker west northwest. One click from the target. Check fire west of marker.”

The gunners aboard the AC130U noted the fire-control officer’s directions and prepared to make some noise. The forward weapons station consisted of a single 25mm Gatling gun, located just aft of the cockpit. Closer to the rear, just forward of the aircraft’s loading ramp, were a 40mm cannon and a 105mm howitzer. All the weapons fired to port, requiring the pilot to put the aircraft into a controlled orbit around the target.

“Ten seconds,” fire control announced.

Cadler keyed his mic. “Ground, take cover.”

All three stations would be used in this attack. The gunners already had the target located on their low-light targeting systems. With five seconds to go, the pilot gave the AC130U an additional five-degree bank, allowing the weapons to have free play on the target during the tight orbit.

“Commence firing.”

Fifty of the loyalist forces had just begun dashing across the open area toward the bunker when the ground around them turned to dust and sparks. It was the last thing any of them saw. Thousands of 25mm rounds showered the vicinity of the target with a show of dancing colors as the lead and steel shells impacted the concrete.

The stream of fire, accompanied by the terrible sound of a buzz saw, followed a gentle curve to the reactor buildings. As the rounds stitched across the buildings’ roofs, the 40mm cannon opened up, concentrating on the mini-canyons between the structures. The 105mm howitzer boomed next, firing straight into the mass of troops scurrying away from the devastation. The 25mm gun also shifted to them a few seconds later. After one half-orbit there was no movement visible, and no fire coming from the reactor buildings.

Ojeda ordered his men to advance as soon as the airborne battery had checked fire. The loyalists that had impeded their advance just minutes before were now fleeing north through the dozens of buildings. Calling for his radioman, he instructed half of the northern group to move south and contain the retreating loyalists, lest they escape. No one, he swore, would get away.

“Helicopters!” the rebel gunner yelled, his body turning as he tracked both aircraft with the SA-14 Gremlin SAM resting on his shoulder.

“No!” Ojeda shouted, running to the soldier and yanking the weapon away. He put it on his own shoulder and tracked the targets with the optical sight, waiting for the high-pitched screech that would signal that the infrared seeker in the missile’s nose had acquired a target. Muzzle flashes from the second helicopter dazzled his vision, then series of sparks fell from the lead craft. What is this? he asked himself as the craft both banked right, one following the other. Following…or hunting?

The lock-on tone screeched from the small annunciator on the Gremlin’s firing unit. Ojeda listened, following the path of the helicopters as they turned sharply east. He had a lock, but he could not fire.

“Colonel?” the gunner said as Ojeda lowered the weapon and switched off the firing unit.

“One of those has to be the Americans,” the colonel explained. “The other…”

“But you could have fired.”

Ojeda handed the weapon back. “If there is one thing I have taught you, it is that you do not fire blindly just for the sake of doing something.” It was a lesson in war, and one in life. He reached to the ground and picked up his Kalashnikov. “Papa Tony.”

Antonio had watched the entire episode, and it had allayed any fears he might have had about his suggestion to Langley. Ojeda was a warrior, for certain, but he was a thinking warrior. He was also a giant of a man. “Yes.”

“Let us go meet your friends.”

The Pave Hawk took its fourth hit in the starboard outrigger tank, which broke free of its wing mount and burst into flames as it fell away.

“Hey!” Joe screamed for what seemed like the thousandth time as his body was thrown left, then right, as the pilot maneuvered violently to evade whatever was trying to kill them.

But his call went unheard. Lieutenant Duc was in the midst of something that came totally from instinct: survival. Helo jocks, even those in the 160th, were not given much training in aerial combat. That was usually saved for the fighter drivers in the other services. Yet that was precisely what he was having to do.

A fifth volley of fire struck as Duc turned hard left, heeling the Pave Hawk over on its side. These hits set off amber warning lights on the control panel and also robbed him of 20 percent of his power. His bird couldn’t take much more.

He continued the hard left until he was heading west again, almost a mile north of the huge fire still burning furiously. His pursuer would be behind and above him, Duc knew, and he kept the helicopter jinking left and right as he searched for somewhere to go, for some way to escape. He was just about to pull a hard turn to the right when the obstacles he was going to avoid suddenly presented him with a hope. Their only hope.

“Hang on tight!” Duc screamed as loud as he could, then put the Pave Hawk on a straight course, cutting his altitude as he guided the dying bird by dead reckoning, knowing he had to do this just right to keep salvation from becoming suicide.

“The bastard is ours, Chiuaigel!” Guevarra yelled. His eyes were locked on the easy target ahead and below. The American was not even trying to evade anymore. Possibly he thought there might be an offer to surrender. Ha! That would not be. Guevarra increased power and closed on his prey. “Open him like a tin can, Chiuaigel.”

“With pleas—Major!”

Duc knew he had to hit it just right, if doing such a thing purposely could ever be termed “right,” and that he did. The lowest power line, which stretched a hundred yards from mast to mast, hit the Pave Hawk’s windscreen with a loud slap, breaking the already punctured Lexan into a dozen irregular panels that blew into the cockpit. The wire, though, slid upward along the metal window brace and was fed into the wire-strike blade, which sliced the inch-and-a-half-thick cable in two. A jolt shook the helicopter as its forward momentum was abruptly slowed by the hit, then it nosed down and continued on, Duc adding as much power as the helicopter could muster.

The pursuing Havoc had no such good fortune. There was no protection for wire strikes installed on the Russian-built attack helicopter and it would have made no difference if there had been. Major Guevarra flew his helicopter into the second power line above that which his prey had cut. The cable hit the bubble canopy that encased the pilot, then bounced upward, catching on the main rotor shaft, causing the helicopter to pitch its nose upward. The rotor hub failed a split second later, unable to tolerate the abuse. Spinning uncontrollably, the main rotor, now separated from the shaft, sliced into the forward portion of the Havoc as it went almost vertical from the impact. Then it fell back, toward the ground, a shower of sparks falling with it. It rotated and hit the pavement on its port side. The rockets that had been intended to do damage to the rebel forces instead detonated and destroyed their host in a fountain of fire.

Lieutenant Duc brought the Pave Hawk around for a final turn and looked immediately for a place to set down, as the increasing number of amber lights were quite clearly telling him to do. He also saw, as the turn was completed, the remnants of his attacker for the first time. The sucker had been tenacious but had wanted the kill too much. That was a fatal flaw, Duc knew, wondering why the other guy had not been blessed with similar knowledge.

The ground beyond the burning wreckage was clear and flat. Duc gingerly took the Pave Hawk below the lowest power line and set down on two flat tires a hundred yards beyond the inferno. He shut down his engines and undid his harness, climbing through the cabin to check on his crew. But he had no crew left. Only Anderson was alive, sitting ramrod-straight against the aft bench seat, his equipment case clenched tightly between both legs.

“You okay?”

Joe swallowed and nodded. “Who the hell was that?”

Duc removed the headset and cord from one of the door gunners, ignoring the carnage that had once been a friend. There would be time for those feelings later. “Cubans, I guess.”

“Did we get him?”

“He got himself,” Duc answered. “Hang tight here.” He handed the other gunner’s headset to Anderson and instructed him to put it on before climbing back into the cockpit. He plugged the working set in and prayed that the radio was still among the living. “Raptor, this is Gambler. Do you copy?”

“Gambler, hell yes!” Cadler bellowed. “What’s your situation?”

“We’re down, but so is the bandit. We have multiple KIA on board, but our civie is A-okay.”

“Copy, Gambler.” The colonel’s tone was no longer that of a relieved commander. “Toolbox is moving your way, and we show no enemy forces near your pos. We will keep you under watch.”

“Copy, Raptor.”

“Gambler, what’s burnin’ near you?”

Duc looked over his shoulder, through the cabin and out the port-side door. “That’s the bandit, Raptor. A hundred yards behind.” The smoke from the blaze was drifting east, blown by a light wind.

“No, Gambler. To your front.”

Duc and Joe both looked through the open front of the helicopter. The barest glow was visible beyond a lot of machinery. “Don’t know, Raptor. Looks like a little one, whatever it is.”

“Not on the FLIR, Gambler,” Cadler said. “It’s radiating better than your bandit.”

Duc’s head shook. Behind him, Joe Anderson’s eyes went wide. “Can’t be, Raptor. No way.”

“Yes, it can,” Joe Anderson said, just before pulling off his headset and jumping from the helicopter, his gear bag in hand.