“Where, Peter?” Hunter asked him, staring deep into those blue pools of madness. “Where are the Sidewinders?”
Peter drew himself up straight in the chair, brushed back his gooey hair, and said: “Cagliari … ”
Chapter 17
The S-3A passed over the coast of Sardinia and turned southeast. The Australian pilot named E.J. Russell was at the controls; Hunter was strapped into the side-by-side copilot’s seat, working the sophisticated surveillance gear. The airplane had recently received a coat of Navy gray to cover its former punk-pink color. It was flying at 56,500 feet, higher than any SAM that might be lurking on the western coast of the island, and hopefully beyond the reach of the radar they assumed was operating on the eastern edge.
Cagliari was the largest city on Sardinia, the island that sat below Corsica, and less than 200 air miles west of Rome. After the Big War started, the Italian Navy evacuated the civilians from the sparsely populated island as they were easier to protect back on the mainland. As the war intensified, all that remained on the island were the tens of thousands of goats that lived there — and the American troops stationed at the massive air base at Cagliari.
Cagliari’s air base was built by the Americans in the 1980s for two good reasons. First, as a possible launching point for air strikes against the looney-tunes that once ruled Libya, and second, as a modern weapons-storage facility for NATO. Sardinia’s central Mediterranean location and small population made it ideal for storing armaments that could be needed anywhere in the region. When fighting broke out in Europe, the aircraft stationed at the big base were instantly dispatched to the front. They never came back. Soviet SCUD missiles, carrying poison gas, hit the airbase soon afterward, killing every living thing on the island, including all of the base’s ground personnel.
After the major battles of the war were over and done with, and the whole of Europe became a strange kind of netherworld, unseemly elements drifted down from northern Italy, sailed back to Sardinia, and claimed it as their own.
What they found was a huge military complex, an air base still virtually intact — containing, everything except the airplanes. There were many deep, underground, concrete bunkers containing thousands of weapons that were never used. It was an arms bonanza. So, the new Sardinians — deserters and war criminals, most of them — set up a large arms-wholesale operation.
At the same time, they wrapped the island — and their enterprise — in a veil of secrecy. They were wise to the point of knowing that the less said about what they had, the better. So they sold their wares through an army of middlemen, with entangled webs of backdoor deals and money passed in the night. They quietly reaped incredible profits. Though few of the buyers knew it, many of the weapons bought in the bazaars of Algiers — especially air weapons — originated from the underground warehouses just across the Med at Cagliari.
As a result of this strictly enforced code of silence—omerta was a tradition in the region — very few normally informed sources in the Med knew what was going on with the people running the Cagliari base these days. But the reports that filtered through — via rumors, travelers’ stories, and gun-running braggadocio — added up to one strange situation.
The arms marketeers had quickly conquered Corsica to the north and set up a territory majestically called The Holy Sardinian Empire. And they took their ancient Roman history seriously. They reportedly paraded around in togas, accompanied by modern Roman-Legion-style guards. They acquired slaves and with the free labor built a slew of pseudo-Roman-style buildings — palaces, temples, coliseums, meeting houses, bathhouses, and aquariums. By raiding nearby Italy — now in the throes of anarchy — the Sardinians were able to capture their most prized possessions — their “virgins.” These young girls — hundreds if not thousands of them — were used by the twenty central figures in the Sardinian government in a never-ending frenzy of lust and perversion. Not a day started on Sardinia without the obligatory virgin sacrifice, and the sado-masochistic rituals carried on all day and well into the night. The Sardinian rulers were apparently gluttons (they had appropriately built vomitoriums), living a satyr’s life of endless food, wine, and sex with young girls. All of it was fueled by the profits they made selling the nearly bottomless supply of weapons held in storage in the underground warehouses at Cagliari.
How Peter knew there was a major celebration in the works for Sardinia was anyone’s guess. But by using the S-3A’s long-range, video-imaging, look-down radar, Hunter was able to confirm the strange man’s prediction. Crossing over the center of the island, he could clearly see that preparations for some kind of holiday were going on inside the city of Cagliari itself even though it was the dead of night. The adjacent air base was all but unlit and apparently deserted. By monitoring local radio bands and using the small amount of Italian at his disposal, Hunter was able to ascertain that the celebration — The Day of the Kings, they were calling it — would take place in forty-eight hours.
The pilot Russell pulled the S-3A to the south and started a long sweep around the bottom of the island. Here Hunter got his first good look at the defenses surrounding the base at Cagliari itself. In a word, they were heavy.
“Christ, these guys have air defense in triple depth,” Hunter said to Russell as he watched his video-imaging screen from the side jump seat of the S-3A. “It’s all American stuff too. Hawks. Rapiers. I’m sure they must have hundreds of Stingers lying around too.”
“They’re like kids in a candy store, mate,” Russell said, taking a peek at the video screen. “But how can they possibly have enough guys willing to man all that stuff? No one’s ever attacked them — and with all that young stuff tied down and waiting for them, who’d want to sit in front of a Rapier screen all day?”
“That’s a good question,” Hunter said, sharpening the image on the video screen. “They must have a central firing station somewhere.”
“You mean someplace where one or two guys can watch over the whole thing?” Russell asked.
“Possibly,” Hunter said, unfastening his oxygen mask and stroking his two-day beard. “They would see a blip coming and push the right buttons. Or maybe push all the buttons and hope they hit something.”
The S-3A streaked on into the night, Hunter watching the video screen carefully for anything likely to be the base’s central firing-control station.
Then he saw it. “Take a look at this, E.J.,” Hunter told the pilot. “The place looks like a small temple of some sort. It’s got a lot of what look like phone lines running into it.”
“Yes, and it’s up on a hill,” Russell commented. “Good command of the sky in all directions.”
Hunter pushed a bank of buttons and turned some fine-tuning knobs. “Bingo!” he said. “I got a lock on a radar dish. A big one too. Right next to the temple. But it’s only operating at half power.”
“They probably have to make their electricity locally, maybe with gas-driven generators,” Russell said. “It would take a big one to run all those SAMs, though.”
Hunter scribbled down a barrage of notes, then told Russell, “Okay, let’s head for home.”
“You got an idea, major?” the Aussie pilot asked.
“Not yet,” Hunter said, smiling. “But I’m working on it.”
Hunter lay awake on his bunk, thinking. He and Russell had landed the S-3A just an hour before; Sir Neil’s BBC crew was all set up when they arrived to capture their landing on videotape. Now he was trying to catch some shut-eye before he briefed Sir Neil and the others on what they’d seen on Sardinia.