Death Orbit (10 page)

The air raid continued for about five more minutes as a handful of the first- and second-wave attackers came in again, dropping whatever ordnance they had left and then quickly exiting the area.

By 0055, the last enemy aircraft had dropped its last bombs on the base’s water supply. A trail of AA fire followed this airplane into the night, and then, finally, the guns fell silent. The all-clear sounded at 0105. The survivors began filing out of the shelters a few minutes later.

What they found was a scene of utter and complete destruction.

For all intents and purposes, the Key West air base was gone. Five of its six major structures were in smoky ruins; its main runway was cratered beyond repair. Fires were raging out of control just about everywhere on the base. And while the majority of personnel had escaped injury by staying in the well-fortified bomb shelter, 23 defenders had been killed and 55 wounded in the attack. The base was so roundly devastated that the scramble jets were forced to fly to another UA field further up the coast in order to land.

The settlement of Old Town had also disappeared. Flames had literally consumed the settlement and now nothing over five feet tall was left standing. Here the death toll would be astronomical: 735 civilians killed, 210 more missing. The wounded would number only 26, proving the napalm had done its job all too well.

However, in this catastrophe, there was still a silver lining. For even though NAS Key West had just been bombed out of existence and Old Town burned to the ground, sitting astride the air base’s cratered runways were two F-14 Tomcats and an F/A-18 Hornet.

And now in the custody of the base’s security personnel were the five pilots who had landed them there.

I
T WAS EXTREMELY CLOUDY
when Crunch arrived over the northern edge of Cuba.

He wasn’t really surprised that the F/A-18 he’d wounded had led him here. The large concentration of unfriendly fighters that had been converging on Key West had to have come from somewhere. And if there wasn’t an aircraft carrier or two about, then Cuba was the most likely spot.

Lawless, corrupt, and filled with terrorists, criminals, drug runners and spies, present-day Cuba wasn’t that much different from the pre-Big War version. With its hundreds of miles of rugged coastline, thick jungles, and vast mountainous regions, Cuba was a natural safe haven for some of the world’s more nefarious types. More than once in the top-secret meetings of the United American Armed Forces Security Council the subject of invading Cuba had come up. Such an action would have eliminated not only the misery of several million civilians still stuck on the island nation, it also would have secured the UA’s southeastern flank.

But such an idea was always voted down simply because an invasion of Cuba would cost too many lives, both in UA troops and civvies on the ground. It would soon be evident to Crunch, though, what the price of that decision might be.

His Super Voodoo had a certain amount of stealth capability, and its high-speed and high-altitude operating characteristics made it a hard target to detect. He crossed over the edge of Cuba right at Matanzas, about 50 miles east of Havana. The lights from the notorious place were quite evident off to Crunch’s left. Green, yellow, and neon blue, they gave the impression that one big festival was in progress just over the horizon.

The F/A-18 pilot, his left wing smoking badly, still wasn’t aware that Crunch was trailing him. It was obvious that the Nazi flier was concentrating all his efforts into getting back to where he’d come from and setting down safely. Looking in his rearview mirror for anyone on his tail certainly wasn’t foremost in his mind.

The Hornet finally began descending about ten minutes after Crunch made landfall. The pilot was turning slightly to the left and heading for what looked to be a fog-enshrouded valley surrounded by mountains and high ridges on all sides.

Once Crunch saw the Hornet pilot commit to a landing approach in this valley, he yanked back on his stick and was soon traveling straight up again. At last he knew where the Nazi F/A-18 was going—now he wanted to find out why.

Within forty-five seconds, the Super Voodoo was doing a long, looping orbit nearly thirteen miles above this mysterious valley. Crunch had spent the first couple of minutes of this high-flight checking his instruments and making sure that his airplane would be able to stand the nose-bleeding altitude. But everything seemed to be green, so he clicked open his lookdown IF radar set and took a peek.

What he saw chilled him.

The valley housed a huge military base, one that had somehow gone undetected by the routine recon flights the UA flew over Cuba. This base had no less than a dozen runways, several control towers, two dozen large aircraft hangars, and rings upon rings of SAM sites and AA guns protecting it all.

The place was enormous and obviously well equipped. But once he got over the initial shock, the surprise wore off pretty quickly. To find a secret air base in the middle of the Cuban wilderness was only mildly astonishing. As the United Americans had grown in strength and projected power, their various enemies had excelled in building secret bases. It was almost like a game: the UA’s enemies concentrating on getting as close as possible to the land of milk and honey, and usually the UA discovering these hidden places and taking them out.

So this place in the Cuban mountains was just another example, though its size was certainly larger than those bases found in the past. Crunch opened up the small but powerful recon camera he kept in the nose of his airplane and snapped off a roll of IR photos. He saw the wounded F/A-18 land on the base’s northernmost runway and the small army of crash trucks that had come out to meet it. He also saw at least another dozen or so Hornets out on the flight line along with a dozen or so medium-sized bombers. They looked like Ilyushin IL-28 Beagles, formidable if ancient airplanes, capable of bombing any number of targets in the southeastern part of America.

Crunch did another sweep over the base, he wanted to make sure he was getting an accurate account of the surrounding AA emplacements. After what had happened earlier in the Florida Straits, he was anticipating that the UA would have to hit this place someday soon, and finding out what the ground opposition was going to be was very important.

After about two more minutes of selective picture-taking, Crunch checked his fuel load and decided it was time to start thinking about returning to base. He would do one more go-around, and then scoot. If everything went okay, he could be back in UA airspace inside 15 minutes.

Then something strange happened. Whether it was because of a brisk wind or that the ground temperatures were suddenly changing, the fog was lifting slightly around the hidden base, giving Crunch a much better view than before. For the first time, he realized that there were actually two valleys down there, hidden by the high mountains, one sitting right next to the big air base. Inside this new place, Crunch spotted more military installations.

But they weren’t SAM emplacements or aircraft revetments or AA sites. Nor were there runways or hangars or fuel depots. Inside this valley next door were roadways that, from Crunch’s tremendous height, looked like dozens of figure-eights carved into the rugged, if flat, terrain. Inside these looping thoroughfares he saw hundreds of cylindrical objects, some long, some short, many apparently still inside packing crates and poorly camouflaged with netting and jungle flora. All of this was contained inside a miles-long extremely high fence.

Even for a veteran like Crunch, it took a few moments for him to realize exactly what he was looking at. The curly-Q roads, the large number of thin tubes, the crude attempts at camouflage—this was a weapons storage area he was looking down on. But it was not a typical one; it was one that seemed sinister by virtue of its rather elementary layout.

“Jeezus,” he breathed, “Can it be?”

Crunch desperately put his airplane into yet another orbit, now concentrating on the second hidden valley. Looking down through the dissipating mists and the moonless night, he switched on a device that had come already installed inside the Super Voodoo. It was an ACQ-167YV radiation threat detector, literally an aerial Geiger counter.

No sooner had he powered up this doodad when he heard a high-pitched series of staccato electrical bursts. The volume grew and grew until Crunch had to reach over and turn the amplification down and then finally off completely. Still his ears rang from the frightening sound for several seconds; it was echoing back and forth, up and down, as if it were bouncing around inside his skull and couldn’t get out.

Then he felt as if a giant hand had taken him by the chest and was beginning to squeeze him tightly. The ACQ-167YV had confirmed his worst fears. The weapons storage yard below was generating tremendously high amounts of low-yield radiation.

In other words, it was filled with nuclear weapons.

Crunch’s fuel bingo light popped on a second later, but he hardly noticed it. His heart was beating faster than he could ever remember. He was taking gulps of oxygen so deep, his eyes began to ache.

He suddenly felt as if he’d been transported back in time to the cockpit of a spy plane overflying Cuba more than forty years before—and finding just about the same thing below. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis had transformed the world, had brought it to the brink, and had run up the collective anxieties of just about everyone on the planet. Many wars had been fought since then, and more than once the earth had felt the nuclear glow.

But because they were so expensive and so hard to maintain, nukes were very rare these days—or at least, everyone thought they were. The UAAF had a stockpile of less than three dozen. The UA’s various enemies combined had fewer than that, or so the current intelligence said.

But right now, right below him, within about a square mile area, were at least forty nuclear warheads of all shapes and sizes, many more than he or anyone else in the UAAF thought still existed on earth.

The most frightening part was, all these nukes were just 90 miles from the American mainland.

Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, UA Florida

I
T WAS CALLED THE
VAB.

The letters stood for “Vehicle Assembly Building,” but this did not come anywhere near to describing what the building actually looked like. Many people called it the VBFB—“Very Big Fucking Building”—and that was much closer to what it was: the largest freestanding one-room structure on the planet. Its front door was so monstrous, an entire space shuttle and its movable launch pad could fit through it with room to spare. It was by far the biggest structure among the vast expanse of buildings, roadways, and wetlands that made up the Kennedy Space Center.

The VAB also had an extensive underground section, and it was here that the United American Armed Forces command had set up temporary headquarters.

The only reason the UAAF was located at the Kennedy Space Center was that the Zon shuttle had blasted off from here and it was here that it was expected to return, with the supercriminal Viktor II in custody. The entire command staff of the UAAF had taken over the sub-basement of the VAB, a bunkerlike affair which gave them plenty of room to move around and install their communications gear.

General Dave Jones, commander-in-chief of the UAAF and the de facto president of United America, had brought his office here, too. For the past few weeks, in tandem with the UA’s infant space program, he’d been running the country from a small suite located in the deepest part of the VAB. Because of the quick move to the Kennedy Space Center, there were only about 800 UAAF personnel at the base at present, most of them technical support people. Only about 200 were combat soldiers. This number was low for two reasons: the UA command didn’t expect to stay at the KSC for very long, and moving a large number of UA troops to the KSC didn’t seem necessary because no one was expecting any trouble from any outside forces.

As it turned out, that had been an incorrect assumption.

The disturbing news about the brutal firebombing attack on Key West and the sighting of the battleship flotilla in the Florida Straits reached the VAB command bunker at about 0430 hours.

General Jones immediately called an emergency meeting of his command staff; they were all gathered in the VAB situation room by 0500. Every one of the officers was astounded at the reports of enemy activity off the south Florida coast, Jones included. There had not been a substantial attack on American soil in nearly a year, not even a threat of one. The UAAF reconnaissance and intelligence services were the best in the world. Neither of them had foreseen any kind of unfriendly activity on any potential front around the UA’s borders.

It was obvious now that strong naval elements of the Asian Mercenary Cult had made a long, covert transglobal trip to show up off the American East Coast. Even worse, at least three squadrons of swastika-adorned warplanes were operating somewhere in the Caribbean, too. These, Jones and his officers feared, might actually be remnants of the Fourth Reich, the Nazi-led mercenary army that had invaded America several years before only to be thrown out after a series of titanic battles.

Jones and his men spent the next few hours hunkered down in the command bunker, poring over a huge lighted situation board currently projecting a map of the south Florida region. UAAF reinforcements were already rushing to the area. A company of the famous Football City Special Forces, UAAF’s version of a rapid deployment force, was presently en route to the Kennedy Space Center. Six UA C-5 gunships, monstrously armed aerial weapons platforms, were also on the wing, heading down from their base at the former Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. Advance elements of the UAAF’s 1st Airborne Division Reserve, presently headquartered near Fort Hood, Free Texas, would also be at the Cape by dawn.

There was some cold comfort in the fact that though the sneak attacks had destroyed the Key West base, the quick action of the scramble planes and especially the crew of the Seamaster had forestalled what probably was intended to be a follow-up bombardment on another target and possibly even an armed landing by Cult troops aboard the battleships. And the UA did have three high-tech jets and five prisoners to show for their defense of the doomed air station. Still, the unexpected action cast a gloom over Jones and the two dozen or so men crammed into the VAB situation room. What they’d heard about Key West was apparently part of a trend that was actually developing worldwide.