Operation Southern Cross - 02 (3 page)

Both its escape hatches blew even before it crashed onto the deck—but this aircraft was burning worse than the first. It was almost totally engulfed at this point, and for a moment, it looked like everyone would be caught inside—the flames were moving
that
fast.

Suddenly, a third copter appeared out of the darkness. It was a small, buglike craft and it was hardly making any noise. It came down right on top of the second burning Chinook, and by turning 25 degrees on its axis, directed its massive downwash back toward the rear of the stricken craft. It was a risky move—it could have fanned the flames and hastened disaster. But not this time.

The downwash served to hold back the fire long enough for everyone on board the second Chinook to get out. They were as wet and steamy as their colleagues, but as a whole, in better shape.

Suddenly the sky above the carrier was
filled
with helicopters. They seemed to be coming in all directions, slamming down onto the carrier as if some giant were swatting them out of the sky.

The last copter in the flurry, a UH-60 Black Hawk bristling with weapons, ran out of gas just as it reached the
Lexington
. It came down the hardest of them all, up near the carrier’s control island. It bounced so violently, it nearly went right off the ship. Only by luck were the pilots able to balance it long enough for some of the
Lex
’s crewmen to rush to the scene and literally pull it away from the edge.

Dodging his way around the men in black jumping off the newly arrived copters, Eliot huffed his way back toward the control island to help the survivors of this third crash. He noticed that nearly all of the black helicopters had gaping holes in them, more evidence that the Special Ops unit had been attacked in midair.

Eliot’s head was spinning by this time. One moment they had been happily floating through the Caribbean like a celebrity cruise ship—and now his deck was awash in smoke and flames and chaos.

What had happened here? Where had these copters been? And what would have happened if the
Lex
hadn’t been in a position to help them? They were still more than a hundred miles from land, and from the looks of the twelve aircraft, there was no way any of them would have made it safely had the old carrier not been on hand.

But just when it seemed like it couldn’t get any more confusing, two
more
lights suddenly appeared in the sky. They too were coming out of the south, but they weren’t helicopters. They were moving too fast. And theirs was hardly a silent approach.

They were fighter jets. The darkness prevented Eliot from seeing any national insignia or even what kind of jets they were.
Who the hell are these guys?
he wondered.

It was strange; it was almost as if the two jets had come up on the brightly lit carrier too fast. Seeing what appeared to be nothing less than the USS
Nimitz
or the
Truman
or the
Reagan
below them, they quickly turned on their wings and retreated with all swiftness back to the south—certain, no doubt, that a pack of F-14 Tomcats was hot on their tails. Still, some of the people who had jumped off the copters ran to the edge of the carrier deck and started shooting at the jets with the rifles and even pistols. Some kept shooting until the flare of the jets’ exhausts disappeared over the horizon.

Only then did things aboard the
Lex
quiet down. By this time, Eliot had reached the island to find that the people who’d crash-landed in the Black Hawk nearby were finally exiting their aircraft.

The last man off this copter walked up to him, recognizing Eliot as the ship’s CO. This guy was an Army colonel dressed in an all-black camo outfit.

He saluted Eliot, saying wearily, “Colonel Bobby Autry, TF-160, X-Battalion. Thanks for the assist…”

Eliot returned the salute and then shook the Army officer’s hand.

“What happened here, Colonel?” he asked, looking around at the floating junkyard the carrier’s deck had suddenly become.

Autry just took off his oversize Fritz helmet and shook his head.

“We were jumped,” was all he said.

THIRTY MINUTES LATER, COLONEL BOBBY AUTRY WAS
sitting alone in the
Lex
’s mess hall, cradling a cup of disturbingly thick coffee. It smelled awful and tasted even worse—almost as bad as the stuff his ex-wife used to make. And it wasn’t even warm.

This was a hell of a long way to come to get a lousy cup of coffee, he thought.

He drank it nevertheless. Things could have been worse. He could have been sleeping with the sharks after what happened not an hour earlier this wild night. Had it not been for the courage of his men and the toughness their equipment, they’d
all
be chum by now. Still, it had been a very scary thing.

Autry was commander of the X-Battalion, the highly classified offshoot of the famous TF-160 Special Operations unit. Where the 160’s regular air battalions served as high-tech taxis, moving Rangers, SEALs or Delta Force in and out of harm’s way, the X-Battalion was a small special forces army unto itself. Each member specialized not only in his duty pertaining to one of their twelve helicopters—as a pilot, crew chief or gunner—but also in skilled special forces operations on the ground. They were as highly trained as the more famous secret warriors that the rest of TF-160 spent their time shutting around.

The X-Battalion’s actions tonight had been up to snuff, at least when it came to their mission to grind the bones of Pablo Escoban into powder. That part of the mission had gone off like clockwork. Using satellite photos provided to Army Special Operations by the National Security Agency, XBat had flown deep into the South American jungle five days before the attack. They set up a hidden base not a mile from Pablo’s mansion, hiding all of their copters beneath the heavy tropical canopy, and in effect, disappearing into the green hell of the upper Amazon.

This might have seemed impossible, to hide a dozen helicopters—some of them the size of a tractor trailer. But that’s exactly what XBat was good at: doing the impossible.

They scouted out targets for the next two nights, and again, using a link up to NSA satellites, planned their twin assault right down to the last millimeter. They knew when the guards at the supercrack processing plant would be at their lowest energy ebb—right around shift change at midnight. They knew when Pablo would be sound asleep—after another night of over-sampling his own coca-based wares.

When they finally came, it was swift and with all guns blazing. The X-Battalion was as much about scaring the hell out of the enemy as they were about filling him with holes. They left no one standing at the processing plant or at the mansion. They knew going in that they would be burning up nearly a billion dollars’ worth of supercrack. This would be, in less than ten minutes, as big a victory in the war against drugs as decades of work by other U.S. government agencies. That’s why the National Security Council itself, with the president’s blessing, gave XBat the assignment in the first place. They were considered that special, that good.

Toying with Pablo in the last moments of his life was also part of the plan. An example had to be made of him. In the thought processes of the local natives, especially the Xtaki, to see a man die such a dishonorable death meant that any successor would have to be killed immediately. Translation: the chances of anyone like Pablo flourishing in their coca-rich growing area anytime soon was highly unlikely.

So the mission itself was a home run…

But then, as the unit was heading out of the area, two unexpected things happened, both of them bad. First, they lost their NSA satellite link. One moment it was there, the next it was gone. Their only guess was that there had been a malfunction in the NSA satellite their communications were slaved to.

Trouble was, they needed this link, both for photos and communications, to lead them to a point off the coast of Nicaragua, where they were scheduled to be refueled in flight and then be escorted by the aerial tanker up to a naval station in Texas, where they would finally land.

Once they lost the NSA link, though, they had to make an emergency call to Specials Ops Command at Hurlbert Field in Florida. It was there that their contact, Major Shaw, scrambled to find a friendly place where the top-secret unit could land safely without being seen.

It was only by a small miracle then that Shaw found the USS
Lexington
moving through the area, some two hundred miles south of where the aerial tanker was supposed to be. Shaw was able to vector the twelve helicopters towards the
Lex
—and the day seemed to have been saved. That is, until the mysterious jet fighters attacked them.

Who were they? Autry didn’t know. It was dark and the jets began shooting at them at such a long distance, they couldn’t get a read on the type. But at the moment the cannon fire started, it didn’t matter who the attackers were, or why they were shooting at them. What was important at that point was that XBat escape.

At the first signs of trouble, the copters went down very low and scattered over the water. The jets’ first two passes had done the most damage. Their cannon streams tore into two of the unit’s four hulking Chinooks. How either one was able to stay aloft long enough to reach the
Lex
really was again a testament to XBat’s highly trained pilots.

After those first two passes, though, came twenty nightmarish minutes when the two jets kept coming back, looking for the copters in the murk of the moonless night. It was only because the XBat pilots knew how to fly virtually inches off the surface—whether it was water or
terra firma
—that the unit wasn’t shot to pieces then and there. The people flying the jet fighters were a bit squeamish about dropping down that low.

At one point, though, one of the attacking planes came down to about fifty feet off the water—and found a storm of tracer fire coming up to meet it. In fact, gunners on nearly half the twelve copters took a shot at the daring jet fighter. Helicopters fighting jet fighters in the middle of the night, over water? That was the XBat all over.

The brief but violent encounter kept the fighters at bay for the last few desperate minutes as the unit searched frantically for the
Lex
in the dark. It was only because Shaw had asked that the carrier light itself up like a Christmas tree that the unit was able to land and scare off the fighters.

Though a few of his men had been burned, and several more wounded by flying shrapnel, incredibly, no one was killed in the incident.

So much for XBat’s second mission.

BY COMPARISON, ITS FIRST MISSION HAD BEEN A
grand slam—if no less ugly. After being formed more by a misguided conception from the Pentagon than anything else, XBat proved its mettle under some very harsh basic training, and then was sent to the North Korean mountains to look for a wayward nuclear device that had the ability to snuff out all life on planet Earth. Of all the U.S. Special Forces units searching for this Doomsday Bomb, it was XBat who not only found it, but had to go into battle against an entire division of North Korean special forces in order snatch the bomb away and, literally, save the world.

This was how the unit had made its bones. They’d been unorthodox in their methods, but their success had raised their profile in the eyes of the people who mattered in Washington. The unit was given new helicopters to replace the ones lost during the action in North Korea. Their stark secret base located in the middle of the Georgia swamp was spruced up and made habitable, a big improvement. They were even given new combat gear, including new uniforms, black camos with a unit patch showing the constellation Orion—the original Sky Hunter—with a large red
X
going through it. They looked cool and they acted cool, and when the chance to put the hurt on “Supercrack Pablo” came up, Autry grabbed at the opportunity to have his men show their stuff a second time, to prove they would not fall to the sophomore jinx.

They’d almost all been killed as a result.

He sipped the awful coffee again. His body was just now beginning to calm down. He was in his mid-forties, with a rugged face and fit for his age, with nearly a quarter century in TF-160 and thousands of miles driving Special Ops copters under his belt. The guys in his unit were, at first anyway, considered borderline and unfit to serve in the regular TF-160 battalions. But now, after their baptism of fire in North Korea, they too were fit and rugged.

As tough as they were, though, they were in dire need of a rest period and good food—they’d been living in the jungle for the past six days, and before that, had been through intense training for weeks to get ready for the mission. Moreover, for both professional and personal reasons, Autry
had
to get back to Georgia. As he felt all the energy slowly drain out of him now, he wanted no less than to get the unit home by the end of the next day. Actually crossing his fingers, he prayed this petition would come true.

The door to the mess swung open and his two senior officers walked in. These were Mungo and McCune, both captains, both great pilots, but as opposite as night and day.

McCune was the youngest officer in the unit. He was the type of chopper driver who flew his machine as if it was a high-performance hot rod. Originally assigned to operations in Iraq, McCune was actually recalled to the United States because of “overly aggressive actions during sensitive operations.” (He harbored a secret desire to fly jet fighters, and more than once had applied for fighter training with the Air Force.) He proved to be a godsend for XBat, though, arriving just in time during the North Korean operation to save the unit from being annihilated. A native of the tough Boston streets, boisterous and verbose, he was a favorite among the members of the secret team.

Mungo, on the other hand, was not. He’d never been accused of being anyone’s favorite in or out of XBat. In fact, years ago, as part of the regular TF-160, he was supposed to fly the infamous Black Hawk Down raid. But by claiming a very vague illness, he had missed the mission, and as a result, was forever tagged as a coward. Mungo had always been tight-lipped about what really happened to him that day, why he had chickened out just when TF-160 needed him most. He’d actually sued the Army later on to keep him in Special Ops, but upon winning the case was relegated to shit duty—that is, until he was plucked from obscurity and put in XBat.

The irony was, he’d done some incredible things during the recent North Korean operation: finding the last piece of the puzzle needed to locate the Doomsday device, and then saving dozens of the unit’s men during the resulting battle with his aerial heroics, sometimes putting himself in between the enemy and wounded members of the team. Captured and beaten to within an inch of his life, he was rescued by the same people he’d saved earlier and eventually recovered enough to join the unit on the Pablo mission.

The two officers now took seats at the table, this after drawing two cups of the tepid coffee for themselves. Strangely, both men drank the black goop like it was cappuccino.

McCune was carrying a handful of photos with him. At the height of the jet-fighter attack on the copters, a few of the guys in XBat had had the wherewithal to snap pictures with their digital cameras. Since landing on the
Lex
, they’d been able to enhance the lighting in the pictures and print them out up on the carrier’s rudimentary weather station scanner. McCune now handed the pictures to Autry.

“Was it the worst-case scenario?” Autry asked him before looking at the images. “Blue on Blue?”

Thank God, McCune shook his head no.

The real nightmare would have been if the attacking planes had belonged to the United States, meaning that this had been a friendly-fire incident—a Blue on Blue. A huge mistake that had nearly cost the lives of everyone involved.

“They
weren’t
our guys,” McCune confirmed. “They were Mirage 2000s. The latest variant. See that tail fin? See those wings? Those canopies?”

Autry finally studied the photos and came to the same conclusion. But Mirage 2000s were very high tech French-built weapons. Who flew this kind of jet fighter in the Caribbean basin? Autry asked.

“Venezuela,” Mungo replied, each syllable seeming to be painful to utter.

Autry turned to him. “Venezuela? Are you sure?”

Mungo shrugged. Eyes downcast as always, he explained that the people running the always-volatile South American country these days were fringe leftists who maintained power by pretending the United States was always trying to overthrow them.

“They’re raising a two-million-man army,” Mungo told them. “And when you consider there’s only about three million people in the entire U.S. military, you can see these guys are really going overboard. They’re also buying weapons to equip this massive army—AK-47s mostly. But they’re also trying to get larger weapons, like short-range missiles, submarines, maybe even nukes. And as you can see, they’ve managed to get at least a couple of the top-shelf Mirages. They probably have more.”

Not all of this was foreign to Autry. Before being dropped into XBat, he’d been in charge of several squadrons of TF-160’s regular battalion in Panama, running drug interdiction missions in Central America and flying agents in and out of nearby Cuba. But this latest upsurge of military nonsense in Venezuela had happened in just the last few months, a time when Autry was forming the new unit and trying to keep it together. He hadn’t kept up so much with foreign affairs. But somehow, Mungo had.

Mungo went on: “They’re the fifth-largest oil producer in the world. They own Citgo, which means billions come in every day. People are starving and living in filth in their own country, but this is how these guys have decided to spend their money—creating the first superpower in South America, or trying to anyway.”

Autry studied the photos again. XBat’s copters were unmarked, so he supposed the Venezuelans could make the excuse that they didn’t know who the copters belonged to. But the attack took place nearly 250 miles off the Venezuelan coast—well beyond any territorial limit. And there was no way the unit had crossed over into Venezuelan airspace after finishing the Pablo operation.