The Cuban major saw the first American trot down the incline from the airplane’s interior. He was black, as were many of the security troops around the area, but much darker. Direct African descent, thought Major Sifuentes. Not much like his own troops, who were a motley mix of Caribbean blood.
McAffee stopped short of his Cuban counterpart and saluted. “Major,” he began in flawless Spanish, “on behalf of my troops and my government, thank you for your much needed assistance in this terrible, terrible incident”
Sifuentes recognized the content as gracious. Behind the words and thankful tone, though, the American must have been gloating at his being here. What is happening? Why would the general secretary allow this?
“Yes, yes. It is a terrible thing that some would deny others liberty.” The hand came down from its return salute and rested atop his pistol holster. “Major Orlando Sifuentes, and you?”
“Major Mike McAffee, United States Army.” The major did not offer his hand, as it was silently understood that a military salute would be the boundary of their shows of mutual respect.
“Yes. Army.” Sifuentes turned his head, breathed, then looked back to his onetime nemesis. “You may ride in my car. I understand you have your own vehicles, no?”
“Two. I’ll have them follow.”
The Cuban nodded. His own men were all over the tarmac, a good portion of them forming a widely spaced human gauntlet to the service hangar where he would lead the Americans.
McAffee returned down the ramp, the lights of the Humvees coming on and backlighting him from inside. “We’re ready, Major Sifuentes.”
“Good. Let us hurry, then. I understand your quarry is not far behind.”
As the open-back truck pulled away with Sifuentes and McAffee, the two Delta vehicles rolled down the stern ramp. Graber radioed the pilot of Thunder One that they were clear. The Starlifter would have under five minutes to get airborne and clear of the area.
In the lead vehicle, Joe held his black duffel on one knee while watching the right-side guardrail of gun-toting soldiers. Their white eyes showed no love of the guests, leaving Joe with a realization that there truly was an adversary of some determination very close to home, a thought even more sobering considering that this adversary was now a very unwilling bedfellow.
Springer Seven-Eight loitered twenty-five thousand feet above the billowing tempest that usually was the peaceful watery paradise of the Florida Keys. The cloud system was playing havoc with shipping far from land, and closer in to shore the oil rigs off the Gulf Coast were battening down for the storm. It wasn’t a hurricane yet, just a strengthening tropical storm, named Aldo. It was moving almost directly west after lashing Nassau with sixty-mile-an-hour winds, and there was no telling which direction would be next.
“This thing’s a bitch,” one of the radar operators commented with a shake of his head. He was on weather watch, his set using special Doppler techniques to track and analyze the storm system.
“A bastard, Airman.”
“Sir?” The young white kid from Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, was taken by surprise. The louie had heard him.
“Bastard, Wickham. Aldo is a male name. It’s all gender-respective now.”
“Gender what, sir?” The talk was above him. He could handle twenty million dollars’ worth of radar equipment, but fancy talk soared right over him.
“You’re on the weather scope, son — you should know this. Severe tropical weather systems, like tropical storms and hurricanes, they used to all be named after women. Nowadays they alternate between male and female. The last one was Zelda, so Aldo got the call on this one.”
“Yeah. I see.” He didn’t really. Hell, they were clouds after all, right? Clouds were clouds. Sure, they did different things, but why name them. Blizzards and tornadoes didn’t get names.
“What’s south Florida saying on the winds?” the lieutenant asked.
The airman looked to his last report from the land stations on the tip of the panhandle. “The cape’s showing sixty-five knots, and Fort Meyers got a straight sixty, sir.”
That meant Aldo was probably going to go north. Before getting AWACS duty the lieutenant had spent two tours in Central America, mostly in Panama and Guatemala. His MOS was meteorology, a pseudo art form he had perfected forecasting Pacific weather. The East Coast stuff wasn’t so different he had discovered in his two years on the Atlantic side.
“What were the readings at Fort Meyers thirty minutes and ninety minutes ago?”
“Uh…just a minute, sir.” He folded back two pages of the printout. “Forty knots ninety minutes ago, and fifty-eight thirty minutes ago.”
It was the pattern, and the history. Aldo was going to follow the warm coastal waters of the Florida Gulf Coast almost directly north. His was a little conjecture mixed with the scientific, the lieutenant knew, but tropical disturbances moving due west had proven easier to forecast over the years. The nature of the beast, he figured. Aldo would never make it to hurricane strength. It’d try too hard to suck up that nice, warm Gulf water and then run aground still thirsty. There’d be some nasty thunderstorms for a day or so, not much more than Aldo’s peripheral systems had given to the Atlantic coast all the way up to Norfolk.
“Keep an eye on the direction, Wickham. He’ll probably go north.”
“Yes, sir.”
Farther forward, two operators were sweeping the sea’s surface and the nearby air corridors for traffic. Aside from two unlucky Aeroflot jets heading north to New Orleans there was no traffic between Havana and Miami. Only flight 422 and its tail, Springer Seven-Three, were visible, moving west by southwest, twenty miles south and far below Springer Seven-Eight
“Commander, this is Radar One.”
“Go ahead.”
“Air traffic is clear, and surface traffic is moving out.”
“Good. Okay, clear Seven-Three: We’ve got the bird now. How many surface contacts?”
“Two, sir. Looks like the weather did most of the work.”
It had. An exaggerated National Weather Service forecast had sent those in the area scurrying for the shelter of the coast. The commander wondered what story the higher-ups would have concocted if Aldo hadn’t conveniently shown.
“Com, send to Snowman: The weather is clear.”
Almost directly below the AWACS the USS Chandler, a Kidd-class destroyer, was ending her own search of the area. Even with the weather churning the sea surface and playing noise games with her sonar there was no mistaking the sound of nuclear-powered steam turbines pushing two submarines out of the area at flank speed. The rush of superheated coolant through their pumps sent waves of sound through the ocean, the easily distinguishable high-frequency whirring in stark contrast to the staticky low harmonics of the surface disturbance.
Both of the subs would soon be out of the exclusion zone. One was American. The other was as yet unidentified.
Fifty miles to the east the USS John Young, a Spruance-class destroyer, was moving north at full speed through heavy seas, her own area now sanitized.
The stage was now clear for the players to be engaged.
Hours after wearing the vest, the soreness turned to a sharper pain as Hadad donned the explosive-laden garment before landing. Two wide lanes of fire ran front to back over each shoulder, exactly where the metal support straps were. Comfort hadn’t been a priority when designing the weapon, and, he reminded himself, it shouldn’t cloud his determination now. Others have suffered much more than this minuscule discomfort. He could see the faces of them in his mind, and every time he slept. They were the force behind the purpose.