Death Orbit (26 page)

With barely 1000 people defending the space center, how could that landing be anything but successful?

As it turned out, the fact that all of the JAWS officers were riding on the same helicopter was fortuitous. This way they were able to assess the situation in a more or less secure environment. But what should they do, exactly? It would have been acceptable for them to fly to an area unaffected by the battle and set down to wait until things were all clear. This course of action would have been perfectly understandable—after all, the JAWS team was returning from an combat-intensive infiltration mission. Many of the men had been up for at least 24 hours and after the long flight were probably depleted.

But sitting on the sidelines just because you were a little tired was not the style of the UAAF and definitely not the style of the guys from JAWS.

They knew they had to do something—something big and dramatic; nothing less would do. But there were a few problems. First, both choppers were running dangerously low on fuel. Second, two helicopters flying around low and slow in the middle of the attack would make inviting targets for the gunners aboard the battleships and the Ilyushins. Not to mention the danger of getting hit by friendly fire.

After a quick discussion, the JAWS officers decided they should head in the opposite direction.

With little fanfare, they directed the pilots of the two Sea Stallions to head further out to sea.

The Sparvee fast-attack boat was a strange little weapon.

It was no bigger than a speedboat, so small it could barely hold its crew of ten. Many of its surface materials were made of plastic and aluminum, none of them strong enough to stop a bullet. Because the boat required an inordinate amount of gasoline to get from one place to another, it carried several large reserve fuel tanks at its rear. Unprotected and vulnerable to the slightest spark, Sparvees were known to become completely engulfed in flames within 30 seconds of a fuel-tank rupture and sink in less than a minute, usually with all hands still aboard.

But there was an upside to these dangerous little boats. They packed more firepower than some ships ten times their size. In reality, a Sparvee was less a boat and more like a floating missile launcher, especially ones readapted after the Big War. Gone were the front-mounted 5-inch naval guns. Now most Sparvees carried four Styx missile launchers, each capable of firing a semiguided SSM weapon carrying a warhead packed with several hundred pounds of highly explosive fragmentation bombs. One of these missiles hitting the right place on a heavy cruiser, a battleship, or even an aircraft carrier could probably sink that ship. Four missiles in the right place would destroy it utterly. It was the ultimate naval version of David and Goliath. And the Styx missiles worked just as well on land targets.

The Sparvees were also hydrofoils, and as such, they could reach speeds as high as 50 knots. This was great for maneuvering as well as getting away once their missile loads were expended. But there was a downside to this above-the-water capability: it was very noisy at full throttle, so noisy that every man aboard a Sparvee had to wear a radio headset just to communicate with the man standing next to him. So noisy that sometimes the crew was unable to hear the loudest noises of a battle raging around them.

So noisy it could drown out the racket of an approaching helicopter…

Ernesto Sparviero had served aboard the noisy fast-attack boats for so long he’d taken the vessel’s name as his own.

Ernesto’s squadron of four boats, known as
Elixo,
made up part of a naval mercenary team originally out of Genoa, Italy. They’d seen almost continuous action in the five years since the Big War, mostly around the Mediterranean or in the Arabian Gulf, but with forays as far away as the Indian Ocean and the Malay Peninsula.

This job to the American continent was the longest and most enduring ever for the
Elixo
squadron. The trip over from Europe had been stormy and plagued with mechanical problems. Once in place near an isolated chain of islands in the northern Bahamas, the
Elixo
fleet had to wait for two months until the people who had hired them—their identities were unknown to Ernesto and his mates at the time—got their battle plans in order.

More bad weather and a number of false starts delayed their seeing action even further. At one point, the four attack boats had to retreat to the islands south of Cuba after the mighty hurricane now battering the northeastern part of America had come too close to their Upper Caribbean hiding places.

But finally, all of the attack elements came into place. While massing off northern Cuba a week ago, Ernesto and his men saw for the first time the Beagle bombers and the Toti submarines and knew that they were about to become engaged in a major action.

But it wasn’t until they saw the flotilla of battleships—they looked like ghosts on the misty horizon that foggy morning seven days ago—and the squadrons of swastika-adorned F-18s and F-14s flying overhead that they realized exactly who their employers were. And that’s when it all began to make some rather frightening sense. They were working for two of the most ruthless, feared entities on earth: the Asian Mercenary Cult and the Fourth Reich. Their opponent would be the United Americans, undoubtedly the most respected.

This revelation put fear into the hearts of Ernesto and his comrades. True, they were mercenaries, and by definition, they fought for the highest bidder. But even in their cold hearts they knew that getting in league with the Fourth Reich and the Cult would probably lead only to misery and despair, especially if they believed, as most people in the Old World did, that these two forces were actually just military fronts for a far more nefarious entity: Viktor II, the devil himself.

All this made Ernesto and his mates very uneasy, and the night before they sailed from Cuba, they all took a vote to renege on their contract and return to Europe. Word of this reached one of the Cult’s low commanders, who sent two representatives to discuss the action with Ernesto’s immediate superior, a captain named Bilbaldi.

The next morning, Bilbaldi’s head was found attached to a spike on the quarterdeck of Sparvee number 1. After that, the rest of the
Elixo
fleet reconsidered its decision to bolt.

When the rest of the attacking force sailed north toward UA Florida, the Spavees of
Elixo
squadron sailed with them.

Now Ernesto and his men were in the thick of it—and so far, things weren’t going that badly.

The Beagle bombers were plastering the objective—which Ernesto and his crew thought was just a large American air base—and their Styx missiles had destroyed three of the four targets they’d been assigned, communications huts apparently vital to the UA’s operations. Further out to sea, the gang of Cult battleships was waiting, their holds filled with bloodthirsty marines just itching to get ashore and kill. From Ernesto’s point of view, standing on the bridge of
Elixo
2, the action could be wrapped up by noontime. The Cult would have destroyed the UA air base and then invaded and killed whatever survivors were left. Then Ernesto and his colleagues could collect their money and start the long voyage home.

So maybe their initial fears had been unnecessary, he kept telling himself. Maybe they could make a lot of money here and get out with their lives.

But then again, maybe not.

Ernesto’s men were loading and arming Styx launcher number 4 when he heard the strange sound.

The years of working on the Sparvee boats had damaged his own hearing considerably—this was an occupational hazard they all endured—and at first he ignored the high-pitched whine that was somehow leaking through his headphones and into his dirty ears. He was maneuvering the boat in further toward the shoreline—the last missile shot was their furthest, a huge igloo-like communications building located about three kilometers in, and therefore isolated from the rest of the squadron. The Styx missile was originally built for ship-to-ship combat; firing one at a land target took a little more finesse. Ernesto knew the closer he could get to the shoreline, the better the chances of hitting the target. As their eventual pay would be based on the number of assigned objectives they actually destroyed, he was determined to put the last missile right on the money.

He’d moved the boat to a position just slightly more than a mile offshore. From here, the columns of smoke and flame rising from the American position were so evident, Ernesto imagined he could feel the heat from the battle zone. He was quick to dismiss this as a figment of his imagination—just like the strange whining noise in his ears.

His headset crackled once; it was a report from his first missile officer. Launcher number 4 was ready to fire. Ernesto did one last check of his position and radioed the helmsman, who was standing right next to him, to reduce speed and prepare to fire.

Oddly, the helmsman did not respond. Ernesto repeated the order, then looked over at the man, who was looking straight back at him, a silent scream etched on his face. A gush of blood suddenly cascaded out of his mouth and nose. He fell forward, landing on the throttles, unluckily for Ernesto and the rest of the crew, stalling the engines at the worst possible time. The man then slumped to the deck. For the first time, Ernesto realized he had a hole in his back the size of a bocci ball.

Startled and more than a little confused—Ernesto was certain that a stray shell from one of the other boats had killed his helmsman—he quickly spun around expecting to see another of the Sparvee boats right on his tail. What he found instead was a monstrous black helicopter hovering off the bow not 20 feet away from him, its open left door filled with heavily armed men firing their weapons down at him. The strange noise he’d heard but ignored had been the helicopter’s huge engines, unmuffled and straining, as they’d come closer to his speeding boat.

Now Ernesto realized that three more of the crew were lying on the deck behind him, bleeding heavily, their bodies riddled with bullets, that the number 2 launcher was engulfed in flames, and that soldiers were jumping out of the unstable helicopter and onto his deck, firing their weapons in every direction but his own.

What is this?
These words echoed in Ernesto’s ears. His first thought, irrational and panicked, was that the Cult had sent these soldiers to kill him and his crew because of some transgression they’d committed. It wouldn’t be the first time a mercenary’s employer had decided to kill the hired help rather than pay them.

But in the next moment, Ernesto realized these heavily armed men jumping onto his swift little boat were not Cult soldiers or anyone in their employ. They didn’t move like Cult warriors and they seemed more determined than mercenaries. That’s when Ernesto finally reached the only other logical conclusion.

These soldiers were Americans, and they were here to capture his boat.

Trying to fight them was futile. In the few seconds since Ernesto realized what was going on, more than 20 American soldiers had jumped to his deck, an action made infinitely easier since the boat’s powerful engines had stalled. Ernesto screamed an order into his microphone, telling his crew not to resist, to let the invaders have their way and maybe they would get out of this with their lives.

But when Ernesto looked around and began counting the bodies on the boat’s tiny deck, there were nine, each one wearing the distinctive blue striped jersey of the
Elixo
squadron. Ernesto realized he had no more crew. They were all dead. He was the only one left—and now the Americans were climbing up to the bridge to get him.

A few prayers ran through his mind in the seconds it took for the fierce troopers to reach him. They seemed awfully big to him; he was a slight Mediterranean type. They seemed to be in possession of more weapons, utilities, ammo belts, and combat gear than any one person could possibly carry. The first man to reach him slammed his fist into Ernesto’s jaw, then knocked him across the control column. Another kicked him hard twice in the seat of his pants. Another drew out a frighteningly sharp serrated knife and put it across Ernesto’s unprotected neck. The steel of the blade was so cold it seemed blazing hot to Ernesto. He was certain he would die in the next second.

But the man with the knife bent down close to his ear, so close Ernesto thought he was about to bite it off. The man had a question for him. His voice gruff, his tone leaving no doubt that he would just as soon slit Ernesto’s throat as to save it, he asked him in very broken Italian:
How many missiles do you have left, on board?

Ever the diplomat, Ernesto gave the exact answer the American wanted to hear:
As many as you want.

Mark Snyder was holding on for dear life.

The acting JAWS CO was hanging halfway out of the open door of the Sea Stallion helicopter, an enormous .50-caliber machine gun between his legs, a series of safety harnesses lashed tightly around the rest of his body, trying to shout orders down to his men on the deck of the captured Sparvee missile boat just 20 feet below.

It was a hard thing to do, though. The commotion around them was deafening. The racket of the helicopter, its noise dampeners long ago blown out, the sound of the missile boat’s engines, now restarted and screaming, and the roar of the battle still going on all around them combined to make any conversation, real or amplified, virtually impossible.

So Snyder just gave up. The two squads of men on the missile boat knew what they had to do. He gave a thumbs-up to the pilot of his chopper, and slowly the huge flying beast finally moved away. A Beagle bomber suddenly flashed overhead and was met with a barrage of machine gun fire from the second Sea Stallion hovering right next to Snyder’s. The wall of tracer fire rising up toward the Ilyushin was more than enough to chase the bomber away. It was clear its crew wanted no part of whatever was happening on the water’s surface below.

From Snyder’s vantage point now, he saw the tiny attack boat stop almost dead in the water, turn 180 degrees to its left, and then start moving again, this time straight out to sea. Another Beagle went over, its pilots too intent on getting out of the battle zone to pay attention to the attack boat or the pair of choppers hovering nearby. The sky was still filled with exploding AAA fire as well as Stinger missile bursts. It really was no place for an airplane to be.