Final Storm (3 page)

In the rear seat of his F-4, Crunch’s navigator/bombardier snapped off the red covers over the bomb arming switches and clicked all of them up to prepare the deadly munitions. Five tons of jellied gasoline hanging from the wings made both men momentarily religious—one stray tracer round from an enemy gun and their speeding fighter would turn into a supersonic ball of fire.

Crunch turned to make the final approach, hugging the rolling wavetops as he kept his two-ship flight under radar until the last possible second. The wave-licking wouldn’t last long though—they would need some altitude when they let the napalm go, or they’d be caught by the flames of the explosions.

On O’Malley’s order, the Phantoms broke up off the deck together. They were now a scant five miles away from their main target: Bermuda’s tiny military airport. Using his APG-65 advanced imaging radar set, Crunch was able to “see” a scattering of aircraft on the airport’s runways and taxiways. The largest was a Soviet-built airborne tanker that he guessed was of Libyan origin.

All the better, Crunch thought.

His rear-seater targeted the big tanker, parked near the airport’s main fuel depot. Although O’Malley knew the Soviets and their satellites were drilled in proper defensive deployment and dispersal of aircraft, that knowledge was not evident at the New Order base.

In other words, the big tanker was a sitting duck.

The two F-4s flashed over the beach, at the same instant “popping up” to 750 feet. Both pilots then immediately kicked in their afterburners, increasing their speed to an awesome 1,000 mph.

Six seconds later, they were over the target.

To the shocked gun and missile crews, many just sitting down to morning chow, it appeared as if the circus-colored F-4s had materialized out of nowhere. Before they could race to their battle stations, the first sticks of napalm bombs had been loosed from the wings of the streaking Phantoms, smashing into the clustered machines on the crowded runways.

Crunch’s bombs found their mark with a direct hit on the tanker, which, as he correctly guessed, was covered with Libyan markings. The gelatinous mixture exploded in an ugly, oily mushroom of orange-white flame as it engulfed the big plane, touching off an even bigger explosion as the contents of the tanker—several thousand gallons of jet fuel—erupted into the murky gray sky.

In Phantom 2, Elvis’s bombardier had laid his deadly napalm eggs among the scattered fighter planes and helicopters along the opposite end of the runway. These, too, erupted in searing geysers of fire that grew larger with every airplane and fuel tank that was added to the angry tempest.

The two sets of fires grew in size and ferocity until they met near the center of the main runway, devouring several Cuban-marked Hind helicopters and igniting an underground ammunition bunker.

“Bingo!” Elvis cried out as he saw the tell-tale greenish-white flame of tons of rifle ammo going off.

Within seconds, the secondary explosions started successive chain reactions among the nearby fuel storage tanks, bursting one after another until the entire fuel depot was one sprawling sheet of flame.

Less than a minute after the jets had departed the area, the entire airport was engulfed in a wind-whipped firestorm, one which generated temperatures so hot, the asphalt on its runways literally melted.

Arcing his swift Phantom around to survey the scene, Crunch realized the extent of the destruction at the airport. So intense was the inferno that the fires were beginning to spread beyond the airport’s perimeter and on to other parts of the island. Their mission was complete; the target was destroyed. There would be no need for a second pass.

Crunch felt a brief pang of remorse. He had visited Bermuda many years ago—on his honeymoon yet—and had always remembered it as a peaceful island paradise, noted especially for its calm and cooling ocean breezes.

Now it looked like a little piece of Hell itself.

Picking up his partner on the back side of his turn, Crunch took one last look at the towering column of flame and black smoke over the airport. Then he kicked in his afterburner and roared away to the west, leading the Phantoms of the Ace Wrecking Crew back to Cherry Point.

As it had many mornings before, the beat-up shuttle bus labored up the winding road to the skyscraper’s hilltop entrance and approached a small guard station.

“Everyone stay cool,” Hunter calmly called back to the Rangers. “Here comes our first potential problem.”

No longer crouching in the aisle, the Rangers, now wearing long white sheets and hoods, were sitting two by two in the seats on the lower deck of the bus. The strange disguise was a key to the mission. Humdingo had found out several weeks before that a number of criminal gangs from the American mainland—neo-Nazis, Mafioso, air pirates—regularly visited Bermuda at the invitation of the New Order ministers. Provided guns, drugs and prostitutes, these gangs would eventually return to America and whip up trouble.

Now, the United Americans’ plan called for the strike team to play the part of one of the more notorious racist gangs Humdingo knew were actually elsewhere on the island.

Humdingo slowed the bus as it reached the guardhouse. Inside the small building was a Vietnamese lieutenant. The chief gave the man a routine wave and handed him an envelope. The guard, who recognized the old bus, quickly read the note which authorized the Knights of the Burning Cross to proceed to the skyscraper. Hardly looking up from the dog-eared nudie magazine he was reading, the Vietnamese officer waved the bus through.

“Thank you, Ho Chi Minh,” Hunter whispered as Humdingo gunned the bus past the guardhouse and into the small parking lot next to the skyscraper. They came to a stop in front of a combination blockhouse and bus stop shelter, which was right next to the entrance to the building’s little-used underground parking garage.

Nearby a large closed-circuit video camera rotated monotonously back and forth across the approachway, its cold unblinking eye passing over the bus several times.

To the rear of the bus was a spectacular view of the Atlantic Ocean. On cue, the Rangers turned and let out a chorus of “ooos” and “aahs.” Then several who were carrying cameras began clicking away. Meanwhile, Hunter stood and addressed the group in mostly incomprehensible pidgin English.

To the half-dozen New Order guards—mercenaries all—sprawled around the bus stop structure, nothing about the odd scene looked unusual.

Just another busload of free-loading American terrorists, wearing their crazy costumes and taking tourist-type pictures. Absorbed in eating a pick-up breakfast in the warm, early-morning, Bermuda sunshine, none of the guards gave the busload of sheeted people a second look.

But then, suddenly, the guards felt the ground starting to shake …

“Now! Go!
Go!
” Hunter screamed at the Rangers.

The robed Rangers burst out of the creaking bus, the first six men firing away with their silencer-equipped M-16s. In a matter of seconds, the startled guards were quickly—and quietly—mowed down and the strike force’s sharpshooter had put a hushed burst into the Vietnamese officer in the guardhouse. At the same time, Hunter blinded the rotating security camera with a blast from his tracer-filled M-16 assault rifle, which was also carrying a silencer for the occasion.

All the while the ground continued to rumble with the force of a mini-earthquake. Off to the southwest, Hunter could see the billowing black smoke and towers of flame shooting up from the tiny airbase a dozen miles away. Once again, Crunch & Crew had been right on the money.

Now, it was up to Hunter and his gang to work quickly….

The trio of South African mercenaries manning the skyscraper’s bottom floor video security system was baffled at why their rear entrance camera had suddenly blinked out. Short-circuit? Sudden drop in power? Or perhaps the slight shaking they had felt moments earlier had something to do with it.

In any case, with the early morning hour and their coffee just being poured, none of the three was too anxious to get up and check out the camera’s problem. Still, it had to be done.

“I’ll go,” one of them, a sergeant, said finally. He was hungover from a late-night drinking bout and was hoping the fresh air would clear his head and settle his stomach.

Retrieving his little-used AK-47, the soldier drained his coffee cup and started out of the small TV security control room. But when he reached the door he was surprised to find that someone was trying to come in as he was trying to go out.

It was a man dressed in an outlandish white robe and hood. Behind him were a dozen other men, all dressed the same way. As they stood facing each other for a very long second, the South African saw that the “visitor” was holding a camera in one hand; a hand grenade in the other.

Suddenly the hooded man pushed the South African Hard, causing him to reel back into the control room, tossing the grenade in at the same time.

There was a bright bolt of light and a very muffled explosion as the HE flash grenade quietly obliterated the small TV studio and everyone in it.

Hunter nodded grimly as the Ranger sapper gave him the thumbs-up signal. The first objective had been destroyed. Surveillance cameras all over the building were at that moment quietly blinking out.

No one noticed that the building’s top floor camera had suddenly stopped moving. To the contrary, it was business as usual on the top floor of the skyscraper.

The ten-man nightguard was preparing to change shifts at 0630, as usual. The long-range satellite communications system—the electronic umbilical cord to the military clique in the Kremlin—was about to be switched on, as usual. The evening’s retinue of high-priced call girls—having plied their trade all night long in the skyscraper’s top floor penthouse—were about to be paid and dismissed, as usual.

But when the officer of the nightwatch—a Bulgarian mercenary—drew back the suite’s massive drapes to let in the morning light, he saw something very unusual. Instead of the routine picture postcard view, he and the others in his squad were astounded to see a funnel cloud of black smoke and flame rising up from the airfield, 12 miles to their south.

“Jesus Christ …” the startled officer said in a voice barely above a whisper. “What the hell is happening over there?”

He turned to tell his second-in-command to quickly inform the ministers that something was amiss at the airport. Instead his attention was momentarily distracted by five of the skyscraper’s six elevators all arriving at the top floor simultaneously.

The next thing he knew, the penthouse reception area was awash in deadly, yet strangely muffled gunfire. Armed men in long white robes and hoods were pouring out of the elevators and shooting everything in sight. The New Order officer was immediately shot square in his left shoulder and, a moment later, in his right knee. He crumpled to the ground, instantly in shock, and watched as the intruders methodically blasted away the men in his squad.

In his last conscious moment, he saw two men, apparently gunmen’s leaders, sprint across the foyer. They pressed themselves up against the far wall, quickly consulted a small map, then dashed off down the hall toward the First Minister’s private office.

“Christ,” the officer said as darkness clouded in on him. “They’ll fire me for this …”

Hunter was the first one to reach the predesignated door, leaping into it with his full weight, nearly bursting the heavy slab of wood from its hinges.

Rolling up in a tuck, he sprang up with his M-16 at the ready, sighting it down an absurdly long conference table at the three nattily dressed men seated on the other end. The startled trio was silent as Hunter, Humdingo and twelve of the Rangers filled the plush conference room to surround them, whipping off their hooded masks to reveal their faces for the first time.

At last Hunter was face-to-face with the traitor himself.

As he stared into the man’s piercing eyes, The Wingman felt his finger tighten on the M-16’s trigger. The gun was on full automatic, and a three-second burst would surely be enough to dispatch the man to Hell.

But frontier execution was not his mission.

Before him was the ultimate saboteur, the man who a handful of years before had knowingly crippled America’s defenses and allowed the devastating Soviet missile strike to smash America’s ICBMs in their silos. Twenty million casualties and a nuclear nightmare known as the Badlands had been the result.

Before him was the man who had murdered the President, his family and his cabinet. The cold-blooded but hands-off assassin whose henchmen had done the dirty work, while he jetted to Moscow and into the arms of the war-mongering Soviet military clique.

Before him was the architect of the most vile form of tyranny imaginable—the oppressive New Order that had been imposed on a dazed nation against her will. Designed to keep America disjointed and fragmented, its creators had tried to choke the very thought of freedom from ever stirring in the nation’s conscience again.

But in Hunter’s opinion, the worst of all the traitor’s crimes was that he betrayed the nation that had given him life, wealth, and power, even while serving as the country’s second-highest official. Yes, before him, like a modern-day Benedict Arnold, was the man whose kiss of death had sealed the fate of the nation.

Before him was none other than the ex-Vice-President of the United States.

A long moment of silence passed before the traitor spoke.

“Who … who are you?” he asked, his face absolutely white with fear. “Those robes. We weren’t expecting you today.”

Hunter didn’t recognize the other two men sitting at the table. But from the papers scattered across the top of the table and the clatter of a nearby telex, it was apparent that the three were in the midst of some kind of review meeting when the attack came.

“What do you want?” the traitor asked nervously. “
Money?
”

Hunter almost had to suppress a laugh. As if something as petty as gold or silver served to fuel his passions.

Hunter cleared his throat and began a speech he’d been waiting to deliver for years.