Carlos Corrado knew that he had had more than his share of luck this night. Although he was flying a tremendously maneuverable airplane, the electronic detection and countermeasures systems were generations behind the F-14 that had followed him around. Why the F-14 had not shot him down he couldn’t guess, but he was wise enough to know that luck sorely tried is bound to turn.
He decided to put his MiG on the ground while it was still in one piece. Fortunately there was an airport nearby, Havana’s José Marti International, right over there in the middle of that vast dark area. Since there was a war on, someone had turned off the runway lights.
Corrado pulled off the power, let the fighter slow to gear speed, then snapped the landing gear down. Flaps out, retrim, and swing out for an approach to where the runway ought to be. On final he turned on his landing light and searched the darkness below.
There! Concrete.
He squeaked the MiG on and got on the brakes.
He left the landing light on to taxi.
“Showtime One Oh Two, the MiG is landing at José Martí.” That was the air force controller in the Sentry AWACS plane.
Stiff Hardwick was climbing through five thousand feet at full power when he heard that transmission. Fortunately he had committed a map of the Havana area to memory, so he knew precisely where José Marti International lay. He cut the power and lowered the nose.
“What in hell do you think you’re doing, Stiff?” Sailor demanded.
“Shut up.”
“We barely got enough fuel to make the tanker as it is, pea brain. You go swanning around down here for a few more minutes begging that Cuban to give you the shaft and we’ll be swimming home.”
“I’m gonna get that Cuban son of a bitch. Gonna strafe him on the ground. Gonna kill that bastard deader than last week’s beer.”
Sailor Karnow knew the pilot was serious. Here was a frustrated man if ever she had met one. As the plane dove for the black hole that was José Martf International, she tried to reason with Stiff:
“You can’t shoot the guy on the ground at a civilian airport. There’s no lights down there, you might kill a bunch of civilians!”
“There he is! I can see the fucking guy taxiing — he’s still got his landing light on! There he is!”
Sailor Karnow was losing her patience. “You pull that trigger, Jake Grafton will cut your balls off, you silly son of a bitch!”
Stiff Hardwick knew the jig was up. Sailor was right — he hated women who were always right. He reached up and safetied the master arm switch. And kept the Tomcat coming down.
Edged the throttles forward as he dropped lower and lower, boresighting that barely moving plane down there with the single landing light shining forward. The needle on the airspeed indicator crept past Mach 1.
The radio altimeter deedled, he kept going lower ….
“Don’t fly into the ground, you idiot!” Sailor pleaded from the rear cockpit.
The fear in her voice probably saved both their lives. Stiff eased back on the stick just a smidgen, an almost microscopic amount, so the F-14 rose another ten feet above the ground as it roared over Carlos Corrado’s taxiing MiG-29 like a giant supersonic missile. The American fighter passed a mere four feet over the MiG’s tail; the shock wave shattered the MiG’s canopy.
Then Stiff pulled the stick back in his lap and lit the burners and went rocketing upward like a bat out of hell.
“Better get on the horn and get us a tanker, baby, or you’re gonna be my date in a life raft tonight.”
Sailor had the last word. “Honest to God, dickwick, you oughta think about taking up another line of work.”
Tommy Carmellini wondered if he had managed to put a bullet into Santana. That was a lot to hope for, but still … three shots, and the man no more than five, six feet away?
With luck.
A man needs luck as he goes through life. Life is timing, and timing is experience plus luck.
Carmellini wondered just how much experience sneaking along dark corridors Santana had had through the years. He hadn’t impressed Carmellini as the sneaking type. One never knew, though.
He found himself moving slower and slower, listening with his eyes closed, concentrating. He could hear …
Breathing. Coming from somewhere ahead. Definitely breathing.
Jake Grafton had Rita circle out over the harbor while he talked to other airplanes he had inbound. After a few minutes, he told her to fly toward the university.
Looking through the infrared viewer, he could see that the streets around the university were deserted. Not a car or truck moving, none parked, no people.
Alejo Vargas was down there, all right.
Jake got out of the copilot’s seat and went aft to talk to Hector Sedano, who was sitting beside Lieutenant Colonel Eckhardt. Jake pulled one of the Spanish-speaking marines along to translate.
“Do you know of the biological-warfare laboratory in the science building of the university?”
No, Hector didn’t. Jake took a minute to explain.
“My government has sent me to destroy the polio viruses that are in that lab, and the equipment that was used to grow them. Do you have any objection to me doing that?”
Hector did not, as long as innocent lives were not lost unnecessarily.
Talking loudly over the aircraft’s high internal noise, Jake continued while the young marine, a buck sergeant, translated: “I promise you, we will proceed with all due care. The stakes are very high, those viruses must be destroyed. If you will join me in this humanitarian effort representing the new Cuban government, I believe the job can be done with a minimum loss of life.”
“Tell me of this laboratory,” Hector Sedano demanded. “What you know of it, and how it came to be.”
The feeling was coming back in Tommy Carmellini’s left arm. It hurt like hell now, like someone had tried to carve on his shoulder with a dull knife.
Ignore the arm. Listen!
He froze. He hadn’t realized it, but there were cells on both sides of the corridor, cells with open doors.
Santana must be in one of them. Which one?
A sound like a sigh.
He heard it! From the left, maybe ten feet.
Frozen like a chunk of solid ice, Carmellini didn’t move. He continued to breathe, but very shallowly, taking all the time in the world.
Minutes passed. How many he couldn’t say.
He could hear the murmur of the mob somewhere below. No doubt they had turned all the prisoners loose.
The other man was being extremely quiet. Extraordinarily so.
Carmellini finally began moving, reluctantly, ever so slowly, like the shadow of the sun as it marches across a stone floor. And he made about the same amount of noise.
He was in the cell, feeling his way … when his left foot touched something that shouldn’t be there.
Like a cat he reacted, the pistol booming faster than thought.
In the muzzle flash he saw that Santana lay stretched on his back on the floor, his eyes open to the ceiling.
The bastard was dead.
From the cockpit Jake Grafton could see the crowds below on the streets. Rita had the Osprey flying at 2,000 feet, and Jake could see the swarms of people with his naked eye, without using the infrared viewer, though he used it occasionally to check on the progress of the crowd.
Rita swung the Osprey over the university district, and he picked out the science building.
He watched the mass of humanity flow into the district, surge along toward the science building.
He used the viewer, steadied it carefully and cranked up the magnification. Yes, the knot of humanity at the front of the crowd, that had to be around Ocho. El Ocho, as the Cubans called him.