The Twisted Cross (11 page)

"We had three choppers, so we started hiring out as a land convoy protection service. Down here the birds come in handy when the guys driving the convoy trucks have no idea what's around the next bend. We made some money, bought new equipment, bought more choppers and expanded the business.

"Then about two years ago, the Cross started showing up around the Canal Zone.

They hired some Colombian gangs, outfitted them as military units and kicked ass on the various local armies that were 'based along the Canal . . ."

"So The Twisted Cross didn't do much of the fighting themselves?" Hunter asked.

"That's right," Burke answered him. "They had the Colombians do their dirty work for them. But, get this: as soon as the Canal was in their hands, they turned around and massacred their hired hands. Killed about twenty five hundred Colombian meres, just like that . . ."

"These guys play rough," Hunter said in classic understatement.

"So did the Colombians, up to that point anyway," Dantini said. "But after they greased those meres, no one, anywhere in the area, wanted to fuck around with The Cross."

Hunter nodded. He had heard it all before. "They were sending a message," he said.

Both Dantini and Burke agreed. "And it was received down here, loud and clear," Dantini said.

Hunter took a few moments to let it all sink in. The stories of brutality of The Cross by Pegg and now by the chopper team matched up.

"But you guys have gone up against The Cross, right?" Hunter asked.

"Yeah, that's what the locals hired us to do," Dantini confirmed. "But we're just in the beginning stages of something that will take a few years at least.

Frankly, we're just harassing them now. Hit and run stuff. We hit them, then we move. They look for us and we hide from them. When the smoke clears, we establish a new base and hit them again."

"It's a vicious cycle," Burke laughed.

"And only sporadically effective," Dantini added.

Hunter was just about to say something when he felt a tingling sensation run down his spine.

"Damn," he whispered. "And you guys don't have any SAMs, do you?"

Both Dantini and Burke were mystified. "What the hell are you talking about?"

Dantini asked him.

But Hunter didn't hear him. His equipment, captured when he blundered down into the chopper team's territory, was stacked near the entrance to Dantini's tent. He quickly scooped up one of his knapsacks and was already out of the tent and in the center of the chopper team's campground. Dantini and Burke quickly ran up behind him.

"Aircraft coming!" Hunter said, facing the south. "Four of them . . . Get your people into shelters, now! We've got about five minutes ..."

Dantini scanned the sky in every direction. "I don't see or hear anything," he said cautiously.

"Trust me," Hunter yelled over his, shoulder as he sprinted over to one of the team's choppers.

Major Jann Hoxter, flight leader for the four F-4 Phantoms, put his airplane into a screaming dive.

Directly ahead of him was the clearing near the beach where a TV-camera equipped recon drone had spotted suspected enemy activity earlier in the day.

Careful analysis of the drone's information confirmed that the area was being used by the band of helicopter mercenaries that had been harassing The Twisted Cross for some time.

Finding the enemy chopper unit had been nearly impossible - until now. The exorbitant price paid to a South African arms dealer for the ultra-high tech video drone was now looking like a very good deal indeed. Apparently it had been able to accomplish in two days what the Cross's own intelligence operatives had been trying to do for nearly 18 months . . .

No sooner had the information from the drone been processed when Hoxter's superiors ordered an immediate air strike on the enemy camp. Military sensibilities would have called for dropping antipersonnel bombs on the chopper base, followed up by barrages of air-to-surface missiles. But in this case, the sensibilities were overridden from above. A message had to be sent.

Therefore, the canisters slung under the wings of Hoxter's flight were filled with hundreds of gallons of napalm, the jellied gasoline cocktail that was a favorite signature of the High Command of The Twisted Cross.

While his three charges circled above, Hoxter rolled in on the suspected target, intending to make one, fast sweep of the area. His prestrike orders were to absolutely confirm enemy troops and equipment in the target zone before bombing-napalm didn't come easy or cheap these days and there was no sense wasting it if the enemy troops were no longer around.

Hoxter's hopes rose when he spotted a line of tents at the edge of the clearing, and next to them, two large Chinook helicopters. Oddly, the place looked deserted - almost as if the enemy troops knew the air strike was coming. This bothered Hoxter as he yanked back on his control stick and gained some altitude. His preflight briefing officers had assured him that the enemy didn't have any kind of early warning radar system. Nor did they have any SAMs.

Rejoining the three other F-4s, they immediately circled the target once more, then split into pairs. Hoxter and his wingman, Frugal, would go in first . . .

"Hang on, Lieutenant," Hoxter called back to his rear-seat weapons officer, a man named Minz, as he again put the green-camouflaged F-4 into a dive. He lined up the crosshairs of his jet's Head's Up-Display with the row of tents in the clearing, intent on dropping the first of his two napalm canisters onto the bivouac.

"Steady," he whispered to himself, his finger twitching on the weapons release button. Already he could envision the line of tents being washed over by a tidal wave of sticky blue flame so intense, it would instantly incinerate anyone hiding inside. The immolation would be the first giant step in eliminating the pesky helicopter troops . . .

Lower and lower he went, the F-4 bucking like a bronco in the murky air just above the dense jungle. "Steady," he whispered once again. In his mind's eye he could already see the flames leaping up from the target, the choking black smoke, the victims engulfed in the napalm running in panic seconds before they died.

"All for the cause," he thought. "All for our glorious leader . . ."

He reached his release altitude, took a deep breath and started to squeeze the trigger.

But suddenly he heard a loud crash! directly behind him. At the same instant, his rear seat officer cried out in pain.

Hoxter immediately pulled up and out of the dive, twisting in his seat to look back at Minz. He was stunned to see that the rear part of the two-piece canopy had been blown away and that Minz was practically headless.

"What is this!" he cried out as his section of the cockpit rapidly decompressed. Incredibly, it appeared as if someone had hit them with a small, but extremely accurate, SAM.

It was too late for Hoxter to call off his wingman Frugal from his attack run.

The pilot watched as the second-in-line F-4 came in low and slow over the target area. Suddenly Hoxter detected a flash coming from behind a line of trees. An instant later, Frugal's F-4 went up in a ball of fire. It hit the ground sideways, the flaming wreckage cartwheeling through the clearing and out onto the beach. It had happened so incredibly fast! Another small antiaircraft missile had made a direct hit on Frugal's doomed Phantom.

Hoxter was confused and on the verge of panic. The last thing he had expected from the bombing mission was accurate and effective groundfire. Someone had screwed up badly; someone in the High Command would be punished. But the flight leader faced more immediate problems. The damage to his own jet was already affecting his flight controls. He knew he had to get back to his base

-and fast. Still, he twisted his jet up and over the line of trees where the flash had come from and was astonished to see a Chinook helicopter hovering not more than 20 feet off the ground. He knew in an instant the small SAMs had been fired from the Chinook.

Meanwhile the lead ship pilot of the second pair of F-4s had witnessed what had happened and had also spotted the Chinook.

"How can someone shoot so well?" this pilot radioed over to Hoxter.

But the flight leader had no answer. He briefly considered rolling in on the Chinook, but quickly decided against it. The suddenly death of WSO Minz and the downing of Frugal's F-4 had spooked him.

"Shall we go after the helicopter?" the other F-4 pilot asked him over the radio.

"No . . ." Hoxter answered quickly, trying not to let the panic come through in his voice. "Abort the mission. Return to base immediately . . ."

"Good God, how did you learn to shoot like that?"

Dantini and Burke were simply amazed. They had joined Hunter in the Chinook seconds after he had correctly predicted that an air strike was on the way.

The fighter pilot had started the engines himself, gunning their throttles in such a way that the chopper was ready to take off in two minutes, about one-tenth the amount of time it normally needed for lift-off.

Once airborne, Burke had taken over the controls while Hunter and Dantini cranked one of the copter's .50 machine guns out of its port window.

While Burke kept the Chinook steady and hiding behind the line of trees, Hunter retrieved the small SAM pistol from his knapsack. The gun was only about the size of a flare pistol. Its projectiles just five inches long. But packed into their tiny warheads was a mini-ultrasonic detecting device complete with an electronic ear he designed to home in on the high-range frequency sounds put out by the whine of a jet engine's turbine blades. When the pistol was fired, the projectile, which was made of depleted uranium, would seek out the nearest source of the particular high frequency and impact near it. Because of the incendiary properties of the depleted uranium shell, the immediate result of a hit was an instantaneous flash fire, meaning direct hits weren't always necessary. Should the small missile hit the airplane's engine, it would more than likely mortally disable it, but the aircraft could stay airborne at least for a while if a good pilot was behind the controls.

However, should the projectile hit something flammable such as a fuel tank-or a canister of napalm - it would cause it to instantly explode on impact.

As Hunter had only two projectiles with him, he knew he must count the shots.

So the computer in his head started reeling off figures for such things as velocity of the small SAM, the rate of its flight path decay divided by the height of the hovering Chinook, the rate of speed of the F-4s and, most important, the distance between him and the target. When the first jet came in, Hunter had Dantini call off its approach profile, then at precisely the right moment, the Wingman squeezed off one shot. It wobbled a little, but nevertheless smashed through the F-4's canopy.

Just a few scant seconds later, Hunter had reloaded and fired off his other missile at the second attacking airplane. It ran truer, finding the volatile napalm canister attached to the airplane's portside wing weapons station. A microsecond after striking it, the canister exploded and obliterated the Phantom.

"How did you do that?" Burke asked again, once they had set the Chinook back down. "Those were two, one-in-a-million bullseyes!"

Hunter shrugged. "I majored in Advanced Velocity Physics at college," he said.

Dantini looked at him, then at the burning wreckage of the downed Phantom, then back at Hunter.

"Well, I'm convinced," he said, his hand outstretched. "It's an honor to finally meet the famous Hawk Hunter . . ."

There was no light at all in this part of the cave.

In the complete darkness, the eyes become useless, subservient to the other senses. The far-off scurrying of some cave rodent is picked up by the ears right away. Same for the flapping wings of a distant bat, returning from a nocturnal search for food.

The tongue tastes the damp moisture of the cavern as if it were strong liquor.

The nose detects the odor of smoke, even though the nearest fire is a half mile away and out of the cave.

The tips of the fingers yearn to reach out and touch warm flesh . . .

She had lost track as to just how many days she'd been held prisoner in the cave. With no visual confirmation of the changing of day from sunup to sundown and back again, her existence simply became one long night. There was no need for blindfolds down here. And the single thick strand of rope was enough to keep her in one place. Food was eaten unseen and she couldn't remember what color clothes she was wearing. Deprived of what was once taken for granted, her life had been pared down to the very basics.

She was sure now that Hell was little more than a dark cave . . .

Colonel Krupp topped off his morning meal of eggs and leftover steak with a large cup of thick, black coffee.

The day had dawned in overcast -at least there'd be no sun beating down on them mercilessly as they broke camp and moved out, the officer thought. He stepped down off the back of his command truck, stretched and took a quick look around the camp.

As usual, the tops of the nearby surrounding hills were being patrolled by the camp guards. Even the pyramid itself had a squad of lookouts perched on top, their half-dozen long-range binoculars continually scanning the nearby countryside. And Krupp knew that in the dense jungle behind the pyramid and beyond the hills, no less than four squads - more than forty of his soldiers -

walked patrol. Though not a shot had been fired at them during their five-week encampment at the pyramid, Krupp still found it impossible to convince himself that the jungle and the mountains beyond weren't teeming with mysterious dangers of all kinds.

After all, somewhere out there was the missing officer, Heinke . . .

He walked over to their single helicopter, a refurbished Soviet-built Mil Mi-26 "Hook." The copter was a giant. More than 135 feet long, in its service with the Red Army, it could carry up to 70 men. But this aircraft wasn't designated as a troop carrier. In its hold sat something the High Command considered more precious than the relatively puny lives of its footsoldiers.