Thunder in the East (6 page)

The basket hit his shoulder first and the impact swept him up inside. He quickly pulled his legs in, then reached up and closed the wire mesh door. He then yanked the red cord dangling over his head. This would let the chopper crew know that he was inside, intact and ready to be lifted. As soon as he hit the red cord, he could feel the basket being drawn in.

Up he went, into the midnight sky over the city. The wind blew harder the higher he got, and now he was thankful for his heavy wool flight suit. Below him the lights of the city started to compress as he was raised high over them.

It's a long way down, he thought. This was not a place for anyone squeamish of heights.

The chopper was across the Mississippi by the time they hauled him in.

The first guy he saw was his old friend, Ben Wa. The Oriental fighter pilot, who had also been in the Thunderbirds demonstration team with him before the Big War, gave him a warm handshake after the basket had been secured and Hunter had climbed out.

"Made it again, eh?" Ben said.

"Well, you guys are getting better at it," Hunter said, rubbing his sore shoulder. "At least we did it on the first try."

They moved up to the flight deck of the big chopper, where another friend and fellow Thunderbird

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pilot, J.T. "Socket" Toomey, was at the controls.

"Mr. Wingman," J.T. said, giving him a quick handshake. "Nice night for a ride, isn't it?"

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Yaz adjusted his South Afrikaner Army uniform and pulled the cap down tighter on his head.

"Does this look OK to you?" he asked Elvis. All three of them were wearing the phony uniforms, left in a manhole by a member of Football City's small but highly-trained underground.

"Sure, you look like a Nazi," Elvis told him.

"I feel like a Nazi," Yaz said. The gray-brown two piece field suit did bear some resemblance to a German Army desert dress uniform, circa 1942.

"Well, don't worry," the man named Ace told him. "The Circle and the Afrikaners are tight. No one will bug us while we're wearing these."

They put the radio-controlled bombs, each the size of a paperback book, into a gunny sack, then stuffed their original clothes in around them. Then they set out for the center of the city.

Five minutes later, they were walking down a crowded boulevard, rubbing shoulders with hundreds of Circle troops on liberty. Yaz was fascinated at how lively the place was, despite the fact that just about 30 miles away, an invading army lay in wait. The street was jammed with honking limousines, jeeps and an occasional tank or APC. Hookers of every description, age, color and proclivity lined every street corner, fighting for space with the drug pushers, the gun salesmen, fast-food vendors, insurance hawkers and other types of low-life. All seemed to be doing burgeoning business.

Yaz saw that just about every building was strewn with marquee-type flashing lights, advertising big jackpots, cheap drinks and girls-girls-girls. He hadn't been close to any of the three in quite a while, so he was interested .

. .

They walked for several blocks drinking in the atmosphere until they reached a rather subdued-looking casino called The Executive. Unlike most of the other gambling houses, The Executive was a private club, open only to members of the Circle Officer Corps and visiting dignitaries.

It was their first target of the night. . . .

"We'll do the HE-TWO first," Elvis said casually as they walked past the front door of the place, nodding to the two soldiers and an armed doorman on duty.

"Let's plant it in that car over there, then stick HE-1 around back."

Ace reached into the gunny sack, retrieved the number two bomb and nonchalantly flipped it into the back seat of an unattended Chrysler New Yorker limo parked next to the place. Then he took HE-ONE and quickly tossed it in the alley at the rear corner of the building.

The bombs in place, they continued walking up to a cafe style restaurant a block and a half away. They took a table outside and boldly ordered three 67

drinks. All the while, Ace was fingering a remote control device in his pocket.

It won't be long now, Yaz thought.

Just then, they heard a racket coming from the end of the street. They turned to see a line of open troop trucks moving toward them, the Circle Army emblem emblazoned on each door.

"Hey, maybe we just got lucky," Ace said. "We could blow both bombs just as that convoy passes by. Take out a lot of those bozos if we do."

"Let's wait and see," Elvis cautioned as the trucks drew nearer.

The lead vehicle stopped right next to them, and for the first time they could see that the men sitting in the back of the truck were not Circle troops, nor soldiers of their allies.

They were POWs . . .

"What the hell is going on here?" Elvis asked under his breath as the lead truck started up again. One by one the trucks passed them, each one carrying 25 bound prisoners in the back. Some of them appeared wounded and sick.

"The Circle moving POWs at night?" Ace said. "I would think that would require too much brain power. . ."

"Well, they're doing it," Elvis said as the last of the 16-truck convoy rumbled by. "And I don't like the looks of it. They usually don't tie prisoners by the hands."

They watched as the trucks took a right turn opposite The Executive and headed east.

'They look like they're going down to the river," Yaz said.

"Yeah, and judging by their direction, I'd say they're headed for the Gateway Park," Elvis said, referring to the location of the battered but still 68

standing St. Louis "Gateway to the West" arch.

"There's nothing down that way," Ace said. "Certainly no construction, not even during the daytime, never mind at night."

"This really smells fishy," Elvis said, estimating that some 400 prisoners were being moved.

He looked around and then said: "OK, let's get this over with. We'll be moving toward that area afterward anyway. Maybe we'll see what's up then."

A Circle Army staff car pulled up in front of The Executive, and two high ranking officers stepped out. They saluted the armed guards out front, tipped the AK-47-toting doorman and went inside.

"Big fish," Elvis said. "That's a good omen . . ."

He did one last check of the streets and sidewalks near the building.

Convinced that no innocents were about, he nodded to Ace.

The first thing Yaz saw was the flash-bright, yellow, so intense he instinctively turned away. Before he did he saw the whole rear quarter of the building simply lift off the ground. The sound of the explosion didn't arrive until two seconds later. When it did, it shook the ground so hard, their table collapsed in their laps.

The explosion rocked the landscape for blocks around. When Yaz dared to look back at the building, he saw that it was completely engulfed in flames and already crumbling brick by brick.

He turned to see that Elvis had thrown himself to the pavement, flinging his hat away and intentionally ripping his uniform's collar.

"Act natural," he hissed up to Yaz and Ace. "Look shocked . . ."

The owner and patrons of their cafe came running outside to see the building down the block

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surrounded by a mass of flames and two Afrikaner officers treating a third who had been knocked over by the explosion.

Soon the streets were filled with soldiers-both Circle and allied. Patrol cars and even a couple cannon-armed APCs screeched up to the site. Circle officers were barking orders to the lower troops, telling them to spread out and look for suspects. Off in the distance, Yaz could hear the sirens of the approaching fire equipment.

Elvis was playing the part of a wounded officer very well. He had rolled his eyes up into his head and held his tongue out, as if he was in a seizure. He had crushed a fake blood capsule between his teeth and was now letting the red liquid drool profusely from his mouth. The act was so convincing, two Circle soldiers ran up to them, took one look at Elvis, and kept right on going.

The saboteurs stayed that way for another minute or so as the pandemonium in the street built up around them. The fire equipment arrived, all of it manned by Circle troops.

They had just started to play the first water hose onto the roaring inferno when Ace detonated the second bomb.

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The specially-equipped, high-flying CH-53 Super Stallion leveled off at 21,000

feet and started to circle.

Inside, Hunter, Ben Wa and Toomey were all huddled in heavy arctic gear as the temperature inside the helicopter's cabin plunged to below zero.

"Goddamn, it's cold," Wa said, pulling his collar up around his neck. "You think they would have insulated these birds when they made them a high flyer."

"Hey, at least we know the equipment will work and they can't see us up here,"

Hunter shrugged, tapping on of the dials in front of him.

He was sitting before a somewhat jury-rigged terrain guidance radar imaging device. By bouncing radar waves off the surface of the earth four miles down they were able to map not only structures on the ground but also those below ground. This was how Hunter and the Western Forces came to first learn the layout of the catacombs beneath the streets

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of Football City.

Now, in their third and hopefully final radar mapping mission, Hunter was intent on solving the final clues of the jigsaw patterns of the catacombs.

"We have a fairly direct route from where the main prisoner holding center is to the flood tunnel," he told Wa as he focused in the radar-imaging screen.

"But we have two POW concentrations downtown, plus many exit routes for the civvies that have to be evacuated."

Hunter tried to breathe some warmth onto his bare hands. He had to turn so many knobs and push so many buttons on the radar imager that even his thin and warm flight gloves were a hindrance.

"You are right over the target area right now, Hawk," Toomey yelled over his shoulder to him.

Hunter centered the surface initial signal on the imager and pulled a bank of switches to On. Deep in the back of the Sea Stallion, he heard the business end of the radar imager start to hum. Slowly, a more detailed outline of the surface came onto the video screen. Hunter punched in a code into the imager's computer, committing the video read-out to memory. Then he flipped a half dozen more switches and watched as the original image slowly dissolved, to be replaced by a series of thick and slender colored lines, which quickly grew contours. These were the catacombs as depicted by the radar imager. Hunter set the computer's memory to record, then, working through the smoky vapor of their breath in the sub-zero chopper cabin, he and Wa set about the long task of mapping the tunnels beneath the streets.

An hour passed and finally the task was done.

"OK, J.T.," he finally called out. "Let's get off this dime."

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Toomey took the chopper off hover and started moving eastward again.

Hunter was going over some post-mapping data when Wa called his attention to another image which had appeared on the screen.

"What the hell is that?" Wa asked, pointing to a row of perfect rectangular shapes that appeared just below the surface in a relatively abandoned part of the city.

"Very strange," Hunter said, just as another row of the shapes came into view.

"Can you hold it up a little, J.T.?" Hunter called out, feeling the copter slow down almost immediately.

"What the hell you got?" Toomey yelled back to them.

Hunter wasn't sure. The two long rows of rectangles were so exact and thin, he couldn't believe they were part of the catacombs.

"They're boxes of some kind," Wa said. "Big boxes ..."

"Maybe railroad boxcars?" Hunter wondered aloud. "The size would match . . ."

"Yeah, same approximate shape," Wa said, trying to focus the image. "But boxcars buried under the ground?"

"Maybe it's an underground garage, or an old railroad service shop . . ."

Toomey yelled back.

"That's probably it," Hunter said. "But they're not empty-I'm getting an infrared reading from them. Not strong, but warm enough to indicate they're loaded, with something. There's probably more of them than we're picking up here."

"War material, maybe?" Wa asked.

"Ammo? Weapons?" Toomey pitched in.

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Hunter did some quick calculations then punched a swarm of numbers into the imager's computer. The result was an overall view of the city with a thin green line indicating the nearest catacomb tributary.

"We have a tunnel that swings within fifteen feet of that area," Hunter said, once again committing the image to the computer's memory banks and then his own. "If we can, we'll get in there tomorrow night, see what the hell's going on. If that's a weapons supply dump, then it means the Circle has about twice as much firepower as we thought."

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Within five minutes, Yaz, Elvis and Ace were five blocks from the area where they had detonated the two radio-controlled bombs.

All three knew they had accomplished their mission-and then some. They had created two separate firestorms of carnage, and they knew the Circle body count would be high.

"There's a thin line between an urban guerrilla and an out and out terrorist,"

Ace said.

Like a terrorist bombing, the two explosions had also served the psychological purpose: air raid sirens were going off all over the city, adding to the confusion and causing many sections to be blacked out.

"When they find out those bombs were planted," Elvis said, through the sputtering fake blood, "the guys in charge of this burg will really get nervous . . ."

They made their way through the streets away from the downtown area and toward the river, Elvis holding a wet towel given to him by the cafe's owner. The water and fake blood mixed to give his head and throat a particularly realistic, major-sucking-wound look. On two occasions, Circle soldiers stopped to question them, but each time, Ace and Yaz simply shouted down their inquiries by demanding directions to the nearest hospital.