Cuba (55 page)

He pointed the rifle at the ground and held it

close to his leg, then eased the door open and

stepped inside. No Cuban saw him.

They were looking intently at something in a sealed unit

with remote-control arms. A radio was playing

somewhere, playing loudly.

Chance stepped into the air lock, stood there looking

at the people while he waited for the interior door

to unlock automatically.

He recognized the voice on the radio: Alejo

Vargas. The gravelly flat delivery was

unmistakable.

“My fellow Cubans, now is the hour to rally to the

defense of our holy mother country. Tonight even as I

speak the nation is under attack from American

military forces, who have leveled the awesome might of

their armed forces against the eleven million

peaceful’people of Cuba.”

Ten seconds passed, fifteen, twenty. After a

half minute, the interior door clicked. Chance

pushed it open and stepped into the lab.

Racks holding eight or ten culture trays

each stood beside the benches. He lifted the rifle,

thumbed off the safety, walked forward toward the working

figures, who still had their backs to him. The tables

on both sides of the aisles contained tools, parts,

glassware, specialized instruments.

“Join with me in fighting the forces of the devil, the

forces of capitalism and exploitation that seek

to enslave the Cuban people so that the Yanquis can

manufacture more dollars for themselves….”

One of the workers spotted Chance when he was ten feet

away, and turned in his direction.

Chance gestured with the rifle, motioned for them to raise

their hands. They did so.

still

should just shoot them,

he thought, acutely aware of the culture trays just

beside his elbow, and theirs.

Maybe I won’t have to.

Backing up between two tables, he jerked his head

back the way he had come, toward the air lock,

gestured with the barrel of the rifle.

“Our hour of glory is nowea”…Alejo Vargas

thundered, “an hour that will live in all of Cuban

history as the supreme triumphant moment of our

people, that moment in the history of the world when we humble people

struck back against the enslaver and oppressor and

became forever free….”

Slowly, watching Chance, the closest man began

moving, passed him, kept walking with his hands up.

The second man passed.

The third …

He was turning to look at the fourth man when the man

grabbed the barrel of the rifle with one hand and stabbed

Chance in the solar plexus with the other.

William Henry Chance looked down at the handle

sticking out of his abdomen. A screwdriver! The

man had stabbed him with a screwdriver.

The man was fighting him for the rifle!

A shot. He heard a shot over the noise of the

aircirculation fans. The man who stabbed him

collapsed.

More shots.

Chance fell. His legs didn’t work anymore and

he was having trouble breathing.

“Kill the American enslavers wherever you find them,

wherever they choose to shovel their odious filth onto

a committed socialist peopleea”…Vargas shouted over the

radio. “Beloved Cuba, the mother of us all, needs

our strong right arms,”

On the floor, his vision narrowing to tiny points of

light, fighting for air he couldn’t get, William

Henry Chance felt someone roll him over. Through the

face plate on the mask of the man who held him,

he could just make out Carmellini’s features.

“You should have shot ‘emea”…Carmellini shouted.

“You stupid bastard, you should have shot ‘em.”

Chance was trying to suck in enough air to reply when his

heart stopped.

Carmellini and the two marines in CBW suits

carried the aluminum cylinders they had brought from the

Osprey into the lab and set them down. There was not a

moment to be lost. Bullets had gone through several

of the men lying dead on the floor and punctured the

transparent plastic walls of the facility.

The two marines went back after more cylinders while

Carmellini brought plastic cans of gasoline through

the air

lock. He didn’t have time to wait for the lock to work,

so he jammed the door so it would not close.

Please God, don’t let the viruses out.

With six cylinders on the floor near the cultures

and ten gallons of gasoline sitting nearby,

Carmellini was ready. The five Cubans who were

working in the lab lay where they had fallen. Chance’s

body lay where he died. Carmellini ignored the

bodies as he worked.

He gestured to the marines to leave, then turned to the

nearest cylinder, which was a five-inch-diameter

magnesium flare designed to be dropped from an

airplane. A small steel ring was taped

to the side of the thinghe tore that off and pulled it out as

far as it would go, which was ab”…a foot. Then he gave

it a mighty tug, which tore it loose in his hand.

He laid the cylinder on the wooden floor and

walked for the air lock. As he went through he

released the door, allowing it to close.

He still had a few seconds, so he stood in the

lock as the suction tore at his CBW suit,

trying to cleanse it of dust and stray viruses.

But he was running out of time.

He pushed the emergency button and let himself out of the

lock through the exterior door. Walking swiftly,

he exited the barn and strode for the waiting Osprey.

Doll Hanna was standing there with a rifle in his arms.

“Let’s get the men”…Carmellini began, but the

ignition of the flare stopped him. The glare of a

hundred-millioncandlepower magnesium fire

leaked out of the barn through the door and cracks in the

siding.

“Let’s get the hell out of here before it goes up like

a rocketea”…Carmellini shouted, and trotted for the

Osprey.

Three minutes later, with all the people aboard and the

plane airborne, he went to the cockpit and

looked back. The fire was as bright as a

welder’s torch, so brilliant it hurt his eyes

to look. The heat of the first flare had set off the

second, and so on. The heat from the first few flares

probably caused the gasoline cans to explode,

raising the temperature dramatically and helping

ignite the other flares.

“Think the fire will kill all the viruses”…”…the

pilot asked.

“I don’t knowea”…Carmellini said grimly, and went

back to his seat. He didn’t have any juice

to waste on the merely worried.

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 MiGo-29 toward the

runway at Cienfuegos. Two rnen 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 MiGo-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 MiGo-29 onto the

runway and shoved the twin throttles forward to the

stop, then into afterburner. The MiGo-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 everywherestanding 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 AW

ACS plane over Key West was the first to see the

MiGo-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 AW ACS crew reported the MiGo 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 disleft his radar switch in the off