“This thing says we are a mile and a half southwest.”
“I’ll buy that”
“Missed the landing zone by a half mile.”
“Not bad at all.” Merriweather unslung his weapon and checked it over. Then he got to his feet.
“The other two guys should be around,” Handy muttered.
“They’d better be. We don’t have much time.”
After a careful check of the GPS unit, the two men started walking northeast toward missile silo number six. They had gone only about a hundred meters when they came to the bank of a stream, a fairly wide stream.
“What the hell is this?” Merriweather demanded, and got out his map. He and Handy huddled behind a tree studying the thing.
“Holy shit,” Handy said. “We’re in the wrong place. We’re at least four miles from the damned silo. Look here.” He pointed to the stream. “That has gotta be this thing in front of us.”
“So where’s the other half of our team?”
“Gotta be over there, near the silo.”
“Let’s get on the phone, give ’em the bad news.”
“Oh, man,” Handy moaned softly. “This ain’t good.”
The four-man recon team for silo number two approached the barn via a large seasonal drainage ditch that ran more or less in the right direction. Fortunately the sides were relatively dry, though the ditch contained a few inches of water and the bottom felt soft.
They stopped moving when they were about fifty meters from the barn where they believed the silo to be. They were completely surrounded by Cuban Army troops. Two tanks stood outside the barn, trucks were parked in a nearby grove of trees, and troops were setting up a cooking tent near the farmhouse’s well. Other soldiers were down in the woods to the left, presumably digging latrines.
“Must be a couple hundred of em,” Asel Tyvek whispered to Jamail Ali, who was lying in the ditch beside him.
“Sure as hell we can’t stay here,” Ali whispered. “It’s just a matter of time before somebody inspects this damn ditch with a flashlight.”
“The silo must be in that barn. Gotta be. If we crawl down this ditch, we should get within thirty yards of the thing. When the shit hits the fan, maybe we can get in there.”
“Let’s spread out, man, fifty yards apart,” Jamail Ali suggested. “If they find one of us, the others will have a chance.” Tyvek nodded and Ali whispered to the other two men, and pointed. They disappeared into the darkness.
Tyvek keyed the mike on his helmet-mounted radio. In seconds he was talking to a controller aboard USS United States, telling her what he saw around the missile silo.
“Twelve minutes,” the female voice from United States said in his ear. “Twelve minutes.”
“Roger that, Battlestar. Twelve minutes.”
Norman Tillman and the three men of his recon team were up to their knees in cow shit. They waded through the barnyard and shoved the mooing dairy cattle out of the way so that they could get to the door of the barn, a possible biological weapons manufacturing site.
“I thought there weren’t any damn cows around here,” Tillman’s number two muttered unpleasantly.
Tillman took off his night-vision goggles, got his flashlight in hand, and took a firm grip on his rifle. He nodded at his number two, who carefully opened the barn door, which creaked on its rusty hinges anyway. Tillman launched himself through the door opening. He slipped on something, fell, and slid for several feet on his chest. Much to his disgust, he could identify the substance he was lying in by its smell.
Tillman stood, used the flashlight. He was standing in a conventional wooden barn that had not been mucked out in several weeks. Two cows turned and stared at the light. They looked nervous, as if they wanted to run, then began bawling. Cursing under his breath, Norman Tillman went on through the building, checking it out.
Five minutes later he stepped outside and keyed his helmet radio. “Battlestar, this is Team One. Negative results. Nothing here but cows.”
“Roger, Team One. Stand by for a pickup.”
“Team One standing by. Out.”
“I thought there weren’t any cows at these sites,” one of the men said.
“Yeah, but the cows didn’t know they were supposed to be on vacation.”
“Maybe we landed at the wrong dairy farm.”
Tillman thought that over. Naw. That would be quite a screwup. More likely, the cows were being held in a nearby field when the recon photos were taken.
“Sarge, somebody coming.”
The men dove facedown into the dirt-and-manure mix at their feet. The person coming turned out to be a farmhand in civilian clothes. The marines made him sit with his back against the barn wall where they could watch him, but they didn’t tie his hands.
At first the man was frightened. He got over it when one of the troops offered him a cigarette and lit it for him.
Tillman crawled over a fence out of the muck and sat down under a tree to wait for the helicopter. One man watched the farmer while the other two posted themselves as sentinels.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“There are several hundred troops and three or four tanks around silos one and two, Admiral, and at least two tanks and a squad of soldiers around three. Four and five appear to be unguarded. The recon team checking out silo six seems to have been dropped in the wrong place — only two of the four have reported in; they estimate they are three miles from the silo. We haven’t been able to contact the other two men.”
The briefer was an Air Intelligence officer who zapped the map with a laser flashlight pointer whenever he mentioned a silo.
Jake Grafton wasn’t paying much attention to the map, which he had memorized. He glanced at his watch, compared it with a clock on the bulkhead.
“Lab site Alpha is a dairy farm. The recon team checking out Bravo reports jackpot, but not many troops — no more than a dozen. The Osprey will be there in less than ten minutes.”
The admiral got up from his chair, stretched, rubbed the back of his neck. So far it was going better than he expected it would. So far. Nobody shot down yet, only one recon team lost …
“Is someone monitoring Cuban radio and television?”
“Yes, sir. The National Security Agency. They will keep us advised.”
“Ummm.”
“What are we going to do about silo six, Admiral?” Gil Pascal asked.
“Nothing we can do. The assault team will have to go into the landing zone blind.”
“The Cuban Army may be waiting.”
“They might,” Jake Grafton agreed.
He put on his headset and switched between radio channels. By simply flipping switches he could monitor the aircraft tactical channels. In addition, with the new tactical com units, he and his staff could hear everything that was said on the helmet radios worn by marine officers and NCOs.
Since the signals were rebroadcast and ultimately picked up by the satellite, they were also being monitored in the war room of the White House. One of Jake’s concerns was that the politicians or senior officers would be tempted to step into the middle of the operation. Although the Washington kibitzers could not communicate on the nets, they could quickly get in touch with someone who could, and an order was an order, even if ill-considered.
He would worry about the politicians when the meddling started, he decided, not before.
Doll Hanna was the recon team leader at dairy Bravo. He was sitting on a biological warhead assembly plant and he knew it. There wasn’t a cow in sight, two clean, modern dairy trucks sat near the entrance to the barn, and Hanna could hear air conditioners running. And the Cuban Army was guarding the place.
From where he lay he could see two soldiers in cloth hats with rifles in their arms standing in front of the main entrance. He knew that there were men on the door in the rear of the building and in the old thatch-roofed farmhouse nearby.