Operation Southern Cross - 02 (20 page)

Downtown Caracas

THE RIOTERS SPENT THE NIGHT IN THE SUBWAYS, HOT,
smelly, and covered with refuse.

The army and the police locked them down there as a way of getting them off the streets. The disturbances of the previous night had been the worst in the two weeks of unrest. Many of the clashes had occurred near Ciudad University, on the edge of the
Jardin Botanico
. Running battles through the flower gardens caused the police to request that the army send in tanks. The army responded with armored personnel carriers instead. Using these faster-tracked vehicles, the authorities managed to pincer the crowd off and force them back to the center of the city. Tear gas and rubber bullets forced the crowds into the subway tunnels and the authorities locked the doors. As a result, the city calmed down for the last few hours of darkness.

With the first rays of daylight, the police quietly unlocked the subway doors and the several thousand protesters who’d been stuck underground began wandering up to the surface.

That’s how they—and the police who were watching over them—became witnesses to one of the strangest air battles ever fought.

THE CONVENT OF THE SISTERS OF THE BLEEDING
Heart was located in a slum called Picardo. Directly to its north was the large valley in which sat Caracas, a city of more than four million.

XBat had to get to the open water of the Caribbean beyond. But because of everything that had happened since firebombing Area 14; the rescue at Carabozo, which included a lot of hard flying; and the recovery of Zucker, the unit was getting low on aviation gas once again. They didn’t have enough fuel to do anything more than get out of the country.

But there was also a matter of geography. Northwest of Caracas was Simon Bolivar Airport, where at least a few SBI jet fighters were known to be stationed. East of the city was the military base near Caraballeda—another SBI air base. Between them was downtown Caracas and beyond that, the huge El Avila National Park. Beyond that was the sea.

Fuel and distance, and the mathematical axiom that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, determined their egress route. Translation: they had to fly directly over a small part of Caracas if they hoped to make the safety of the sea.

This last bit of the strange mission might have seemed to be the most difficult—flying right over the enemy’s capital—but the pilots of XBat were confident they could do it, especially since they were working off the chaos theory. In just the past day, they’d destroyed a major air base, crippled the transportation and communication systems in the middle of Venezuela, took out the SBI’s very classified nuclear missile capability, rescued three American dependants from the horrors of the Venezuelan secret police and recovered their wounded colleague.

They were sure that all of Venezuela’s military assets were looking for them—at least those not tasked with riot control. They were sure that by now, the Venezuelans had discovered their hideout on top of the volcano, since their missile base had been bombed. They were sure that word of the shootout at Carabozo prison had reaching higher-ups.

The country was on edge, and XBat hoped to exploit that one more time. They hoped the last thing the Venezuelans would suspect was XBat making a headlong dash, flying low across their precious, disrupted city. Total time over the urban area: less than forty-five seconds. Then the unit would be over the huge National Park, and seconds after that, out of the country altogether.

The key would be to fly low and fast—between the skyscrapers.

Where the jet fighters couldn’t get them.

THE FIRST PEOPLE TO SEE THE HELICOPTERS PASSING
over were the demonstrators crawling out of the subway station at Carapita. There was a forest of new skyscrapers down there—hundreds, it seemed—being built from the profits of Venezuela’s vast oil supply. Meant not for the ordinary citizens, but rather the well-connected politicians, military and oil officials in the capital, some buildings were completed, while others were just skeletons, erector sets of steel rising into the tropical morning sky.

The people were still in the process of leaving the tubes when they heard a great roar, not unlike the sound of the thunderstorms that frequently swept across the valley that held Caracas—but these things usually happened in the late afternoon, after a buildup of heat during the day. Beside, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

The demonstrators looked to see not a spark of lightning, but a group of helicopters, flying at different levels, all of them low, and spread out in a ragged line. The helicopters were blackish gray and their bottoms seemed to have some fading twinkling lights on them. Once the initial sound dissipated, the copters actually made very little noise.

This was not the Venezuelan military—the people in the streets knew that. The VAF flew few helicopters—and even on Presidents’ Day, they never flew the ones they had in a formation like this. As the demonstrators watched, the copters were suddenly amongst the skyscrapers. They began twisting and turning themselves in and around the under-construction buildings, like snakes through high grass. In some cases, the copters were so low the people on the ground could see the faces of the people flying them.

They were gringos—there was no doubt about that. But what was happening? Venezuela had been rocked by rumors for two days that the Americans were invading or had already invaded—and that the government had declared war on the United States. Looking above them now, this is what the people thought: The Americans were here. This was just a small part of an invasion force; even the police down on the street reached the same conclusion.

But as soon as the copters were there, they were gone again. The skies above the Carapita subway station were empty once more, and the noise had settled down.

For a few seconds anyway.

Because then the people on the street heard a different sound—more mechanical and much louder.

Suddenly there was another gaggle of aircraft above them. Not helicopters, not jet fighters, but propeller planes.

Pucaras…

On the streets below, both police and protesters cheered. The VAF was going after the North Americans.

It was McCune who spotted them first.

Flying the AWACs Chinook, and still discounting the Galaxy Net, he and his crew were using the aircraft’s onboard radar to do sweeps around the withdrawing helicopter unit. McCune could see everything his men could by monitoring the radar readout mode on his main flight display.

The guys in back called up, saying they’d picked up a bunch of blips. McCune glanced down at the screen and thought at first that a flock of birds was following them. That’s what the small clutch of blips looked like. They were about a mile behind the helicopters, appearing just as XBat crossed out of the jungle and over the outskirts of the city itself.

At first McCune wasn’t concerned. He was too hopped up, too excited about the possibility of actually making it out of Venezuela. But then he saw the blips increase in speed. And then they started to spread out. The clutch of six then became a half dozen distinct shapes.

These were not birds.

He immediately called the rest of the unit, and yelled a simple code phrase:
No-hitter gone
. The crew got the message right away: They were being chased by the Venezuelan Air Force—again.

They had a plan for this. It had to do with the helicopter unit breaking apart even further—and a surprise: slowing down to just a hundred knots. This would cause the first line of Mirages to overshoot them, and by scattering, force the VAF pilots to look for many individual targets instead of a convenient bunch.

Slow down and break up they did—but then McCune had some more bad news to deliver: The blips were slowing down and splitting up, just as the copter unit was. At that same moment, McCune, flying toward the end of the U.S. column, realized that one of these distinct blips had come right up on his tail. How could a jet fighter fly so slowly?

He couldn’t see directly behind the copter, a big disadvantage, so he quickly ordered his crew to lower the rear ramp of the Chinook so they could get a visual.

When the door went down the crewmen in the back found themselves face-to-face with a Pucara.

This was not good. McCune was quickly apprised of the situation, and in the next three seconds, did two things at once. He called the rest of the unit—no code words this time—simply screaming: “
They’re prop fighters and I got one on my ass!
” He put the Chinook into a frightening left bank, pulling Gs usually associated with jet fighter operation.

In a matter of a few heartbeats, he’d screamed down to just fifty feet in altitude. His men in the back, hip to his way of driving by now, all hung on for dear life. The violent maneuver had one unintended effect: It ripped a major portion of the bulky Galaxy Net console out of the wall and sent it toppling to the floor. When McCune righted the copter again with a similar, jarring turn to the left, the inertial forces picked the console right up off the floor and sent it rocketing out the back of the helicopter.

Already a bit anxious at suddenly finding himself chasing a Yankee helicopter in and out of this forest of skyscrapers, the pilot of the Pucara was doing all he could just to hang on the copter’s tail. When he saw the half ton of broken technology come flying out of the back of the Chinook, he had to do some fancy flying of his own, in order to avoid a midair collision with the tumbling aerial debris.

This distraction lasted long enough for McCune to swing hard left again—and go around yet another skyscraper under construction. The Pucara pilot stayed with him, going from one wing to the other, screaming around the skyscraper and finding himself back on the tail of the Chinook. But something had changed. The people in the back of the helicopter had recovered from seeing his speedy prop fighter and were now lined up along the lip of the copter’s moving door, strapped in with cargo belts, weapons in hand.

The Pucara pilot saw a line of sparks and puffs of smoke coming right at him. He heard pings all over his aircraft. The pilot swore—and banked hard right, behind another skyscraper, avoiding the barrage.

The troopers in the back of the Chinook let out a spontaneous cheer—until McCune banked hard left again, only to find not one but
two
Pucaras come around the corner of the next building.

The XBat guys started firing again—but so did the Pucaras. Each plane had four 30-caliber machine guns mounted on its wings. Luckily, McCune became aware of the two planes as quickly as his men in the back did. He yelled again for everyone to hang on, and in the next second, McCune yanked up on the copter’s controls, sending the big aircraft into a climb too steep even for the Pucaras to handle. The strain shorted out about half of their electrical system and anything that was not tied down in the copter’s cargo bay went tearing out the back.

The maneuver worked. They lost the Pucaras—for about five seconds.

AUTRY SAW THE BIG CHINOOK DO ITS HANDSTAND
—and knew right away this was McCune’s aircraft. Only he would have dared put such a large machine into such a gut-wrenching headfirst climb.

Flying in one of the DAP gunships, Autry also saw the two Pucaras spiraling their way up and quickly getting back on the Chinook’s tail. It was the first time Autry had ever seen a Pucara up close: two engines on a single wing, high back tail. The pair of machine guns on either side of the nose made it looked like a flying double shotgun. It looked like it could take the Chinook apart in about five seconds.

But the guys in the back of McCune’s copter were getting good at this now. They were all tied in by cargo straps and had turned their most powerful combat weapons out the back. When the two Pucaras climbed back on their tail, they were met by a storm of machine-gun bullets, cannon shells and even rocket fire.

All of it was fired wildly and unaimed, but it was still enough of a nuisance that the Pucara pilots, more used to shooting things on the ground than something in the air, were forced to fly all over the sky to avoid it.

Autry surveyed the sky in front of him. Because they had descended on Caracas so quickly, and because of their high rate of speed, he could see that three of XBat’s copters had already made it over the city and were closing in on the huge El Avila National Park, where they could fly right down on the treetops and be much harder to spot. One of these copters was carrying the Owens family and Zucker. It was way out in front of the others.

This was good, just as they’d planned. But seven other copters, including his own, were still trying to work their way across the urban landscape. He could hear them talking in his headphones. They were all flying low, zooming in and around the tall buildings, trying to shake the Pucaras while trying to avoid midair collisions with skyscrapers or other copters. It was chaos—just not the type of chaos they were banking on.

Flying one row of skyscrapers over, Autry saw the two Pucaras lock back onto McCune’s tail. They were finally lining up their weapons to perforate the fleeing copter.

Autry had to help. He pushed his Black Hawk over, putting himself perpendicular to one of the prop planes pursuing McCune’s big Chinook. Autry squeezed off a burst of cannon shells, hoping to make enough commotion for the Pucara pilot to see him. The gamble worked. The Venezuelan pilot was distracted—so much so, he turned over on his right wing and headed right for Autry.

This part wasn’t in Autry’s plan. He banked his copter to the left, the yelps from the guys in back being drowned out by the roar of the power plants. In front of them was another quartet of skyscrapers being built; Autry headed for it. Banking hard left, he streaked between two of them, only to find the Pucara had looped and was now on his tail. Banking hard right, Autry was heading north again. But the VAF plane was still behind them. And now it was firing at them.