Inside the barn at silo one, Toad Tarkington took in the carnage at a glance. He was the first American through the door.
Cannon shells and shrapnel from Hellfire warheads had played hob with the wooden barn structure. Holes and splintered boards and timbers were everywhere — standing inside, Toad could see the landing lights of the helicopters and hear Americans shouting.
Apparently several dozen men had taken refuge in the barn; their bloody bodies lay where the bullets or shrapnel or splinters from the timbers cut them down. The floor and walls were splattered with blood.
Toad found the wooden door, got it open, used his flashlight to examine the steel inner door. He set three C-4 charges around the combination lock and took cover.
The charges tore the lock out of the door and warped the thing so badly it wouldn’t open. Toad struggled with it, only got it open because two marines came in to check out the interior and gave him a hand.
The stairway on the other side of the door was in total darkness. Not a glimmer of light.
With his flashlight in his left hand and his pistol in his right, Toad slowly worked his way down.
He saw lightbulbs in sockets over his head, but they were not on. Once he came to a switch. He flipped it on and off several times. No electrical power.
At the bottom of the stairs he came to a larger room. The beam of the flashlight caught an instrument panel, a control console. A bit of a face …
Toad brought the light back to the face.
A white face, eyes scrunched against the flashlight glare. An old man, skinny, with short white hair, frozen in the flashlight beam, holding his hands above his head.
The radar operator in the E-3 Sentry AWACS plane over Key West was the first to see the MiG-29 get airborne from Cienfuegos. He keyed the intercom and reported the sighting to the supervisor, who used the computer to verify the track, then reported it to Battlestar Control.
The AWACS crew reported the MiG as a bogey and assigned it a track number. They would be able to classify it as to type as soon as the pilot turned on his radar.
Unfortunately, Carlos Corrado failed to cooperate. He left his radar switch in the off position. He also stayed low, just a few hundred meters above the treetops.
There are few places more lonely than the cockpit of a single-piloted airplane at night when surrounded by the enemy. Corrado felt that loneliness now, felt as if he were the only person still alive on Spaceship Earth.
The red glow of the cockpit lights comforted him somewhat: this was really the only home he had ever had.
The lights of Havana were prominent tonight — he saw the glow at fifty miles even though he was barely a thousand feet above sea level. He climbed a little higher, looking, and saw a huge fire, quite brilliant.
Carlos Corrado turned toward the fire. Perhaps he would find some airborne targets. He turned on his gun switch and armed the infrared missiles.
The E-2 controller datalinked the bogey information to the F-14 crew patrolling over central Cuba at 30,000 feet. There should have been two F-14s, a section, but one plane had mechanical problems prior to launch, so there was only one fighter on this station.
The bogey appeared on the scope of the radar intercept officer, the RIO, in the rear seat of the Tomcat. He narrowed the scan of his radar and tried to acquire a lock on the target, which was merely a blip that faded in and out against the ground clutter.
“What the hell is it?” the pilot demanded, referring to the bogey.
“I don’t know,” was the reply, and therein was the problem. Without a positive identification, visual or electronic, of the bogey, the rules of engagement prohibited the American pilot from firing his weapons. There were simply too many American planes and helicopters flying around in the darkness over Cuba to allow people to blaze away at unknown targets.
The darkness below was alive with lights, the lights of cities and small towns, villages, vehicles, and here and there, antiaircraft artillery — flak — which was probing the darkness with random bursts. Fortunately the gunners could not use radar to acquire a target — the instant they turned a radar on, they drew a HARM missile from the EA-6Bs and F/A-18s that circled on their assigned stations, listening.
The F-14 pilot, whose name was Wallace P. “Stiff” Hardwick, got on the radio to Battlestar Control. “Battlestar, Showtime One Oh Nine, request permission to investigate this bogey.”
“Wait.”
Stiff expected that. Being a fighter pilot in this day and age wasn’t like the good old days, when you went cruising for a fight. Not that he was there for the good old days, but Stiff had sure heard about them.
“That goddamn Cuban is gonna zap somebody while the people on the boat are scratching their ass,” Stiff told his RIO, Boots VonRauenzahn.
“Yeah,” said Boots, who never paid much attention to Stiff’s grousing.
Carlos Corrado saw that a building was on fire, burning with extraordinary intensity. Never had he seen such a hot fire. He assumed that the building had been bombed by a cruise missile or American plane and began visually searching the sky nearby for some hint of another aircraft.
He flew right over the V-22 Osprey carrying Tommy Carmellini and Doll Hanna back to the ship and never saw it.
A lot of flak was rising from the outskirts of Havana, so Carlos turned east, away from it.
In the black velvet ahead he saw lights, and steered toward them. At 500 knots he closed quickly, and saw helicopters’ landing lights! They were flying back and forth over a large barn!
They must be Americans — they sure as hell weren’t Cuban. As far as he knew, he was the only Cuban in the air tonight.
Corrado flew past the area — now down to 400 knots — and did a 90-degree left turn, then a 270-degree right turn. Level, inbound, he retarded the throttles of the two big engines. Three hundred knots … he picked the landing lights on some kind of strange-looking twin rotor helicopter and pushed the nose over just a tad, bringing the strange chopper into the gunsight. Then he pulled the trigger on the stick.
The 30-mm cannon shells smashed into Rita Moravia’s Osprey with devastating effect. She was in the midst of a transition from wing-borne to rotor-borne flight and had the engines pointed up at a seventy-degree angle. The rotors were carrying most of the weight of the twenty-ton ship, so when the cannon shells ripped into the right engine and it ceased developing power, the V-22 began sinking rapidly.
The good engine automatically went to emergency torque and transferred some of its power to the rotor of the bad engine through a driveshaft that connected the two rotor transmissions.
With shells thumping into the plane and warning lights flashing, Rita felt the right wing sag. Some of the shells must have damaged the right transmission!
The ground rushed at her, even as cannon shells continued to strike the plane.
She pulled the stick back and left, trying to make the right rotor take a bigger bite.
Then the machine struck the earth and the instrument panel smashed into her night vision goggles.
In the missile control room, Toad Tarkington held his flashlight on the old man as he produced a candle from his pocket and a kitchen match. He lit the match and applied it to the candle’s wick.
One candle wasn’t much, but it did light the room. Toad turned off the flashlight and stood there looking at the old man.
Muffled crashing sounds reached him, echoed down the stairwell, but no one came. Toad’s headset was quiet too, probably since he was underground.
“Do you speak English?” Toad asked the white-haired man in front of him.