The Devil's Footprint (73 page)

Conventional
wisdom dictated that they should assault Madoa airfield and the heavily
reinforced supergun valley simultaneously.
 
Instead, the entire focus was on the airfield and the supergun was being
left to destroy itself — with a little follow-up help from the air force.

But what about
the troops dug in around the supergun valley's perimeter?
 
Even if the supergun did blow, what was to
stop the perimeter troops from attacking the airborne from the rear as they
battled to secure the airfield?
 
There
were only eight kilometers to cross, and the terrorists had artillery, mortars,
and armor.

Fitzduane had
argued that the supergun explosion would be devastating and that any survivors
of the perimeter forces could be handled by air or mopped up afterward.
 
The clincher was that friendly forces should
be kept out of the area until the supergun was destroyed or they would be duck
soup too.

It had seemed
to make sense, but now Carlson was wondering.
 
Well-dug-in troops have an incredible ability to survive blast.
 
How violent can one conventional explosion
be
?
 
Anyway, even if
the sabotage works, how do we know that the terrorists will fire the weapon?

I know Oshima
, Fitzduane had said with
absolute certainty.
 
She won't fire immediately.
 
She
will keep her options open for as long as she can — but as soon as she knows
the full scale of the assault and realizes that she cannot hold, then she will
fire.
 
Sooner rather
than later.

And then
?
Carlson had queried.

If the
supergun blows, she will do three things, Fitzduane had said.
 
She will fight a furious delaying action for
as long as possible; if she has the expertise she may try to mine or activate
any nerve agents stored off the command bunker in some way that will buy her
time; and she will try to escape.

How can you be
so sure
?
Carlson had argued.

She learned
much of her trade under the terrorist known as the Hangman, Fitzduane had
said.
 
Her subsequent record proved that
she learned well.
 
As sure as it rains in
the West of Ireland — both when you expect it and when you don't — Oshima will
have an escape route planned.

The Devil's
Footprint complex is hundreds of kilometers from anywhere, Carlson had
said.
 
Oshima's command bunker in Madoa
is going to have two brigades of the 82
^nd
Airborne Division descend
around it and blow it to shit.
 
The
airfield itself is surrounded by a belt of mines up to half a kilometer
deep.
 
There will be so much aerial
reconnaissance an AWACS will have to make sure no one bumps into each
other.
 
So how?

That's for her
to know and us to find out, Fitzduane had said.

How do we do
that
?
Carlson had asked.

You lie back
and soak in a nice deep hot bath with your eyes closed and think a lot, said
Fitzduane.

Carlson smiled
to himself at the memory, but the anxiety did not go away.

"TEN MINUTES!"
shouted the jumpmasters, hands opening and closing twice, energy and urgency
radiating from them like some kind of psychic transfusion.

"TEN
MINUTES!" roared back the planeload of paratroopers.

Carlson's mind
snapped clear of doubt and uncertainty.
 
Repining was useless.

It was going
to happen.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

"Shit!"
said Cochrane.
 
"I nearly
forgot."

Fitzduane was
thinking about the ground disturbance the infra red satellite photographs had
shown up.
 
On the face of it an extensive
tunnel network had been constructed under the airfield by the relatively fast
technique of evacuating the earth, constructing a deep trench, roofing it over,
and then covering it in.

But Oshima
must have known that surveillance would show up the disturbed ground, and it
was not like her to limit her work to something so obvious.

So what else
had she done?
 
What had she constructed
that would not show?
 
How many of the
tunnels she had constructed were decoys?
 
Had she constructed other tunnels by purely underground digging that
would not show up on film?
 
The giveaway
would be the extracted earth, but that could be intermingled in the earth
extracted from the trenches.

Detectable
tunnels near the surface.
 
Hidden tunnels much deeper down.
 
But deep digging would be much harder, and
this was a rocky plateau.
 
Where could
you dig?
 
How fast could you dig?
 
They had seen an excess of bulldozers and
surface-digging equipment, but had they seen any tunneling equipment?
 
What were your options?

What he had
really needed were the detailed geological reports.
 
The whole area had originally been surveyed
when exploring for oil.

"I've got
the reports," said Cochrane.
 
"Maury dug them up."

Fitzduane
glared at him.
 
"You’ve spent too
long on the Hill, Lee, briefing congressmen just before they vote.
 
It's supposed to be done differently when
people are shooting at you."

Cochrane tried
to shrug.
 
It wasn't possible.

"What am
I supposed to do with them?" snarled Fitzduane.
 
"Read them on the way down?"

"Airborne!"
said Brock.
 
"Cool suggestion, sir!"

"FIVE
MINUTES!" roared the jumpmasters.
 
Five fingers came up.

"FIVE
MINUTES!" came the response.

"GET
READY!"

"GET
READY!"

"OUTBOARD
PERSONNEL, STAND UP!"

"OUTBOARD
PERSONNEL, STAND UP!"

"INBOARD
PERSONNEL, STAND UP!"

"INBOARD
PERSONNEL, STAND UP!"

"HOOK
UP!"

"HOOK
UP!"

"CHECK
STATIC LINE!"

"CHECK
STATIC LINE!"

"CHECK
EQUIPMENT!"

"CHECK
EQUIPMENT!"

"I can't
get to them anyway," said Cochrane.
 
"They're in the small of my back under all this gear.
 
God, I feel like an Egyptian mummy."

"You
should live so long, sir," said Brock.

The side doors
were slid open.
 
The sound of the engines
suddenly increased and was combined with the rush of air and the noise of the
slipstream.

'THREE
MINUTES!" shouted the jumpmasters.

"THREE
MINUTES!" blasted back the paratroopers.

"STAND
BY!"

"STAND
BY!"

A row of holes
appeared toward the tail of the aircraft.

Seconds later
there was a flash of tracer and the helmet of one of the air force loadmasters
seemed to explode.

Blood showered
from his neck over a nearby safety officer as he collapsed.
 
The aircraft bucked and rolled as
antiaircraft fire exploded nearby.

"Guess
we'd better get down there," said Brock quietly, "and refocus the
fucks."

The jumping
light was red.
 
As they watched, it
turned green.

"GO
!
GO
!
GO
!
GO
!
GO
!
GO
!
GO
!
GO
!
GO!"

Two open
doors.
 
A paratrooper in just under a
second jumped out of each door, the rhythm alternating.

The last two
to jump were the jumpmasters.

In thirty-six
seconds, the sixty-four troopers were gone and the C130 was headed to Arkono to
refuel and wait to extract the dead and wounded.

The surviving
air force loadmaster secured the doors,
then
slumped
on a bench in shock.
 
He had seen quite
enough through the open doors to make him glad he had joined the air force
rather than the infantry.
 
The 82
^nd
were jumping into a maelstrom.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

The command
bunker was made up of a linked series of insulated steel spheres supported by
hydraulic shock absorbers similar to the kind used by high-rise buildings in
Japan
to make
them earthquake resistant.
 
Above the
bunker there were layers of armor plate, reinforced concrete, packed earth, and
yet more concrete to a height of fifty feet.

For all
practical purposes, they were invulnerable to conventional bombing.
 
There were rumors of rocket-assisted penetrator
bombs in development, but as far as anyone seemed to know they were just
rumors.
 
Certainly, they were immune to
virtually all existing bombs in general use.

The bombing
had started without warning.
 
Radar
screens showed nothing.
 
Oshima had been
making a personal inspection of the radar facility when the attack started, and
she could see the screens for herself when she felt the shock of the first
impact.

There was
absolutely
nothing
on the radar — not
even a hint or a shadow.

Artillery?
 
Was the
Mexican Army making a move at last?
 
Chiapas
was relatively
quiet, so maybe they thought now was the time to make a move.

Yet someone
would have warned them.
 
True, Quintana
was dead, but they still had plenty of informants in place.
 
Someone would have told them if the Mexicans
were planning anything.
 
Anyway, could
the Mexicans have penetrated the plateau in strength without being detected?

Impossible.

The bunker
rocked again and then again.
 
The lights
flickered and went off.
 
Seconds later,
emergency power cut in and then the reserve generator started up and full light
was restored.

"Bombing,
Commander.
 
Heavy bombing," said Jin
Endo, one of the few remaining Yaibo members still left alive.
 
The few others were unfortunately not of the
first rank.
 
But, despite his youth, Jin
Endo was special.
 
He was intelligent, he
was quick, and he had proved himself.
 
Above all, he was loyal.
 
Jin Endo
would be useful.

Colonel
Carranza had been General Barragan's second in command.
 
His loyalty was based on nothing more than
the stark reality that he had no place to go.

He would fight
if it came to that.
 
But this was
Mexico
.
 
The Americans might conceivably bomb Tecuno
if requested by the Mexican government, but they would never send in ground
troops.
 
Vietnam
,
Lebanon
,
Somalia
, and the
U.S.
media had seen to that.
 
Casualties were not politically acceptable.

"She's
right," said Carranza grimly.
 
"Those are bombs, and no radar warning means Stealth fighters —
which means the Americans."

"Activate
the monitors," said Oshima.

The command
bunker exercised its command-and-control function through a network of deeply
buried landlines and video monitors.
 
The
most important link was to the supergun valley.
 
Oshima could fire the weapon from the command bunker.
 
It was a simple matter of inserting two keys
and flicking a small switch.
 
Quintana
used to be the primary key holder, but he no longer featured in the firing
solution.
 
Both keys were now around
Oshima's neck.

The bank of a
dozen monitors came on stream.
 
They were
on permanently during daylight hours, but in darkness they were activated only
as needed to preserve the batteries on their night-vision equipment.
 
The terrorist troops did not have
night-vision devices except in key points, but a limited number of the long-lens
monitor cameras were equipped with them.

As Oshima
watched, one of the heavily fortified perimeter positions erupted in a massive
yellow and pink blast.
 
She could see
bodies and weapon parts sail skyward and rain down.
 
Blast followed blast with such frequency that
one shock ran into another and the vibrations of the bunker on its hydraulic
mounts were continuous.
 
With each
explosion, the destruction mounted.

"
Do a perimeter
scan," said Oshima.

The monitors
followed a preset pattern.
 
Portion after
portion of the external perimeter was illuminated, but she could see
nothing.
 
If there was going to be an external
attack, there would be some sign at this stage, even if it was only incoming
artillery fire.