Twenty miles southwest and three thousand feet above his men, Colonel Bill Cadler sat in the soundproof battle management center just behind and below the flight deck of the AC-130U. The middle finger of his right hand slid over the index finger as he counted off the seconds. The required wait dissipated quickly. “Take us in,” he instructed the pilot over the intercom, switching back to the radio net immediately. “Toolbox, this is Raptor. Move on my mark.”
“The fueling is complete,” the beaming officer announced.
General Juan Asunción let out the breath he had been holding for days and leaned on the command center’s console, staring down at the few switches and buttons he would manipulate in but a few hours. Then the vengeance would be wrought. A fitting target the presidente had selected, Asunción believed.
“Remove the trucks from…” His head swiveled toward the overhead vent shaft, through which the sound was entering the small structure. “What is Guevarra doing up?” he asked the air. Then the kind of sound caught his attention. Guevarra’s craft did not sound like…
“General?” the young officer said, seeing the elder man’s face go pale.
“Damn them!”
The Pave Hawk crossed the perimeter of the plant at ninety knots, Duc maintaining his altitude with only minor adjustments in course to avoid buildings. Ahead, through the NVGs, he saw the cooling towers to the right, and straight to the front the target. “Gambler to Raptor, on target.”
Cadler keyed the mic. “Raptor to Toolbox. Execute.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
DONNYBROOK
The eight guards patrolling the perimeter fence on the west turned toward the sound coming from the east. They never heard what came next.
The Kalashnikovs in the tree line burped briefly, felling the eight loyalists with no resistance. Ojeda’s group, divided into three 60-man sections, needed no further signal. They raced toward the fence in staggered columns, their numbers spread out along a quarter-mile front. At the head of each section were soldiers carrying what appeared to be small backpacks. Fifty feet from the fence all but these men went to ground. A second later they, too, dived for cover as the breaching charges arched through the air in unison.
The roar of the Pave Hawk’s turbines reverberated off the endless concrete slab as Duc flared the helicopter perfectly, setting Captain Buxton and sergeants Makowski, Jones, and Vincent precisely two hundred yards south of cooling tower number one. They released themselves from the SPIE rig just before their feet met pavement and made a quick turn to the right, running as fast as possible toward their objective.
Duc freed the empty rig and nosed forward, dropping a few feet in the process, the main objective coming at him quickly.
Fifteen feet below, Major Sean Graber slid his thumb upward on the MP5SD4’s grip, activating the LAM. Next his finger moved onto the trigger, and his left hand eased its grip on Lewis’s web gear, ready to reach for the release handle on his harness.
The feeling was one of surprise, then wonder, then realization, then anger. Major Orelio Guevarra looked toward the sound and saw the shadow of the helicopter pass between him and the star-flecked southern sky.
“Chiuaigel!” Guevarra screamed as he bolted for the Havoc.
Sergeant Montes ran after his commander, joining him at the MI-28’s front. “Where did it come from?”
“Dammit, who cares.” The major pulled his helmet on with haste and clambered into the aft seat of the helicopter, plugging his communications umbilical into the intercom/radio jack as Montes dropped into the front seat.
“We have no missiles,” the sergeant said. He opened the power circuits to all his weapons as Guevarra fired up the twin Isotov turbines above and behind them.
The major looked left and right. A damned ground attack, eh? “No, but we can still fight.” He recalled the wide, flat profile of the craft streaking across the sky. A transport, he knew, though it could not be the type he had initially thought. But still a transport. More correctly it was prey. And he was the predator.
“Systems on line. Checklist?”
“To hell with the checklist,” Guevarra said, pulling the collective up in a steady motion, the Isotovs responding with a surge of power. “Switch to cannon,” he ordered as the Havoc leaped into the darkness.
“Bolt those doors,” Asunción directed the officer with him. He went to the firing controls as his orders were carried out. He had performed the motions repeatedly in his mind, and an equal number of times in preparation of the day when he would do so for real. That day, that moment, was now at hand.
He flipped the two rows of safety covers up, exposing the switches that had to be thrown to give control of the power and pumping functions to the missile. With his right thumb he threw each switch from manual to auto. Asunción cleared another safety cover to the right and pressed the single black button beneath it, locking the preprogrammed target codes into the missile’s guidance system.
Then he lifted the final plastic cover. The others were black. This one was red. Beneath it was a circular button of the same color.
“Raptor, this is Sandman.”
“Sandman, go ahead,” Colonel Cadler said, acknowledging the call from the E3C Sentry thirty miles to his rear.
“We’re showing a second air target northeast of Gambler. Distance is about a half-mile. Just coming up from zero AGL. Heading is southwest. No IFF, Raptor. This one’s a Bandit.”
Goddammit! Cadler swore silently, switching to intercom. “Captain, step on it. Gambler has company.”
“On target.”
The Delta troopers swung forward in the motion of a pendulum as Duc flared the Pave Hawk and dropped toward the ground. They pulled their release handles almost in unison and sprinted toward the squat gray structure fifty feet away. Lewis, Graber, and Goldfarb broke left to the south-facing door; Antonelli and Quimpo right to the north. In fluid motions Goldfarb and Quimpo pulled the pre-cut strips of det cord from pouches on their webbing and reached up, attaching the adhesive end to the top of each door on the latch side. They stepped quickly to the side, the thumb-switch detonators in their hands.
No nod was needed. Sean already had his hand on the chest mic.
Buxton’s group reached the base of cooling tower number one unopposed. They split into two pairs and took up overwatch positions a hundred feet apart, ready to deal with any threat, except for the one that was taking shape inside the walls of the tower at their backs.
“Go!”
The det cord exploded with a bright flash that the troopers did not see. The energy created by the blast was focused inward along a vertical line and severed both doors inward of their latches. The steel slabs twisted inward as the sound of the explosion cracked inside the concrete walls. Without hesitation the entry team moved through the portals.
Practice, in this case, had made for a perfect entry. Lewis, the first through, was met by the sight of a single figure near the west wall. The LAM painted the man’s form with IR light, giving the Delta trooper a clear picture of his target. Armed or not, the man was a target. And the pulsating dot of red on his chest was the bull’s eye.
Sean came through the opening, stepping on the steel door, just as Lewis fired a single burst. He caught the scene in his peripheral vision. The target suddenly moved backward as if a massive fist had punched it in the chest, then collapsed like a felled tree. The movement of Antonelli and Quimpo to his right registered in Sean’s vision, and Goldfarb’s hand touched his back as he entered and passed to the center. The sensory input at that moment was tremendous. The sights of the first shots; the staccato popping as though a child were making a machine-gun sound; the feel of his team members; every tiny motion.