Operation Southern Cross - 02 (23 page)

But Weir was just shaking his head. “There’s just no choice in this one,” he said. “They’ll hang us all if you don’t go.”

“How so?” Autry pleaded with him.

“Because, very much on the record, we are about to be in shooting situations in no less than five spots around the world,” the agent said. “Just about all of them made infinitely worse by the Galaxy Net being down.”

“But there’s nothing
we
can do about that,” Autry spit back. “My men are depleted. Our equipment is in a shambles. None of us has slept in a week—
and
we just fought an entire war on our own. So why do
we
have to go?”

“Because they’ve finally ID’d some people who’ve been fucking with the Galaxy Net,” Weir answered him bluntly, quickly updating him on the killer laser-beam situation. “And not only that, they’ve discovered
where
they’ve been doing it. And at this moment, you and your men are the closest Special Ops unit to this location. You’re the only ones who can do something about it right away. And right away is when it has to happen.”

This stopped Autry in mid-breath, but only for a moment. “This killer laser can’t possibly be in Venezuela,” he declared.

Weir was shaking his head. “You’re right. Like I said, we now know where it is—and it isn’t in South America. Damn close though…”

“Well, where the hell is it then?” Autry demanded.

Weir held up a computer-generated map of the South Atlantic and pointed to a pair of tiny specks at the bottom of the chart.

Autry had to squint to read the small print.

“‘The Falkland Islands?’” Autry roared. “You’ve got to be kidding me. You want us to fly all the way down there?”

“How many times do I have to tell you that we are stretched very thin everywhere,” Weir replied. “Special Ops. Regular military. Reserves. Everyone is someplace else. There is no one else anywhere near here that can do this job. And to gear up someone—like the 82nd or whoever—and fly them down, will just take too freaking long. Not to mention the security disaster if word of what they were up to leaked out.

“Plus, when it comes to all these other trouble spots around the world, at least three could break out inside the next twelve hours—and I mean missile-launching situations. They need the Galaxy Net up and running. They need their eyes and ears back—or it will be catastrophic. So, it’s you guys, again.”

“But wait a minute,” Autry said. “Aren’t those islands still British? Don’t they have any soldiers down there?”

“Sometimes they do,” Weir replied. “But they only go down there on six-month deployments. Six on, six off. They’re due to go back in five weeks. Whoever is doing this thing with the laser knew the Falklands would be the perfect place to deploy. Not only is it the right spot to pounce on these satellites as they are going overhead in their polar orbits, they also must have known that there would be no British soldiers down there to interfere. And those islands are so thinly populated, none of the locals down there has any idea what’s going on either.”

Autry looked at the map again. They were a very long way away from the two tiny islands where England and Argentina fought one of the strangest wars in history back in 1982. The islands were several hundred miles off the southern tip of Argentina and not that far from the South Pole itself. Meanwhile, as far as Autry could tell, the
Lexington
was now just in sight of the coast of French Guiana.

“But how can we possibly do it?” he said to Weir. “We’re still a thousand miles away—or even more. We don’t have any gas left. And there’s none onboard this ship. No ammo either.”

“It will be a situation of daisy chaining you along with aerial refuelings and an onboard ship landing,” Weir told him. “I think we can get you down there in about eight to ten events—and that means just 12 hours.”

But Autry continued protesting.

“You’re asking us to cross an entire ocean,” he said. “And I mean
lengthwise.
In bad weather, doing in-flight refuelings and landing on ships not fixed up to handle us? How can you expect us to do all that?”

“Because you’ve done it before,” Weir answered simply.

Autry was about to tear into the CIA agent again when he stopped himself. Weir was right. That’s exactly how the unit crossed the Pacific to get to North Korea during that nightmare mission. Autry alone had done more than a dozen in-flight refuelings to get from the United States to the trouble zone, and he’d set down on a very unprepared U.S. Navy supply ship as well.

They
had
done it before—and that meant he had no argument against it.

He looked at his watch. It was less than 48 hours before he was supposed to meet his wife. He cursed himself now for writing the letter to her. Cursed himself for thinking that he’d ever get back in time to see her.

McCune had been right all along.

They were
never
going home.

THE
LEXINGTON
WOULD HAVE KEPT GOING UNTIL ALL
its engines burned out. As it was, its first power plant started to go four hours and almost a hundred miles after turning south under orders directly from the National Security Council. There was no doubt the old ship was slowly dying. Lights, air purifiers, water heaters, even some safety systems were being shut down, all in an effort to conserve power and stretch what little fuel they had left. By the time they reached the midway point off the coast of French Guiana, the second of the four engines had burned out, dying an oily, smoky death. But Eliot continued pushing the ship full speed ahead.

The fuel helicopters from Guiana arrived around 1500 hours, six hours after the
Lex
had turned around—and two hours late. The helicopters were massive Super Frélon 160s, relics of the French navy. On board each were two rubber fuel bladders filled with 250 gallons of aviation gas. The French crewmen simply unloaded their cargo, along with two field pump stations and departed with hardly a word.

A thousand gallons of fuel sounded like a lot of gas, but a fully loaded Black Hawk could only fly 450 miles before it needed fuel again. And that was under the best of conditions. As the hastily prepared plan called for it now, XBat had to fly almost 1,500 miles, most of it over water, and at least the last third of the way in some of the roughest weather on Earth: over the South Atlantic Ocean. The fuel from the French copters would only be enough to get them airborne off the
Lex
. From there, they would have to fly out to a point a hundred miles off the Brazilian coast, where they would meet up with their so-called aerial replenishment assets, tanker planes that would be carrying fuel for the next leg of their journey.

And if the weather was bad, or the tankers were late, or if they didn’t show up at all…

Then Autry and his men would all be wishing they were back in the jungles of Venezuela.

ONLY FIVE COPTERS WERE GOING.

This was Autry’s one and only act of official defiance. It was too dangerous an operation for the entire unit to go, all the risks, the danger, multiplied by nine. No, not when his men were half dead already.

So five were going and they would all be Black Hawks—three DAP gunships and two troop-carrying Special Ks. This meant twenty-four XBat troopers would be doing the mission in all, less than half their present number including wounded.

Once he received word of the mission, which someone had dubbed Operation Southern Cross, Autry gathered all his able men together and explained the situation as Weir had told it to him. Then Autry asked for volunteers. Everyone raised his hand. Autry underscored the danger they would be facing, and asked for volunteers again. Still, every hand went up.

That’s when he had to start making executive decisions. He immediately dismissed every trooper who was married. That got the number down to thirty-three. Then he took out the four enlisted guys in XBat who were over forty. At twenty-nine guys, he told the five youngest troops to fall out.

Many of those who remained were still in their green, slimy jungle camos and still had the green camo paint all over them; they would not even have time to clean up. Each one collected a cup of the ship’s putrid coffee and was told to report to the deck to reboard their copters.

Meanwhile, Autry had one last meeting with Weir, just inside the hatch leading out to the flight deck. The CIA agent gave him what was called the mission report. It held the details of what the Agency and the National Security Council expected XBat to do once it reached the Falklands, and included the location of further fuel stores and the most likely places where the bad guys had their killer laser set up. It also detailed the procedure they’d use just to get down there.

Weir suggested Autry bone up on the report during the flight down, then handed it to him. Usually these types of documents went on forever. Yet this one was exactly two pages long.

Autry groaned when he saw this. This thing was even more of a shoestring than he thought.

As he was leaving, Weir had one more piece of news for him. Intelligence the CIA had picked up somehow indicated that once XBat reached their goal, the reception from the killer laser’s perpetrators would probably not be a friendly one.

“You might be looking at an opposed landing,” Weir told him. “That’s not confirmed, but I suggest you be prepared for anything.”

IT WAS NOW LATE AFTERNOON. THE MISSION WAS ALREADY
four hours behind schedule.

The five copters were lined up on the deck, all of them bearing the familiar gray splotches of paint and metal chips that the
Lex
’s crew had perfected as patching material. Overhead, it was getting cloudy and starting to rain. The seas were getting a bit rough too.

Autry visited every copter and made sure its gunners and troopers knew what they were about to do. Then, as he was stepping into his own DAP, Mungo and McCune walked by.

In all earnestness, McCune said to him: “You’re still married, aren’t you, Colonel? Why don’t you let us do this one ourselves?”

Autry was taken back by the comment. Bone-tired, dirty, unprepared—he would have given anything to pass this one up. But there was no way he would let his guys go without him.

Still, it was McCune’s question that really threw him.
Was
he still married?

“Are you trying to get rid of me, Captain McCune?” he finally replied in his best no-nonsense manner.

McCune got the hint. He saluted Autry and then ran down to his own DAP gunship. That left Autry and Mungo alone, in an awkward moment.

“Did you pack your rod and reel, Captain?” he asked Mungo, probably the first thing he’d ever said to the troubled officer that was unrelated to a mission. “I hear they have salmon as big as tuna down in the Falklands.”

Mungo just shrugged and put on his crash helmet.

“I wouldn’t know about that, Colonel,” he said, a buzz killer to the end. “I’ve never been fishing in my life.”

THEY TOOK OFF AT 0450 HOURS. NONE OF THE FIVE
copters left with a full fuel tank. While the
Lex
’s crew was getting very good at putting gas in XBat’s aircraft, with the carrier’s engines burning out and the growing bad weather, what were calm conditions at full speed ahead got a little rough on the carrier at 50 percent power. Some fuel was spilled during the transfer operation; some refused to come out of the French-made bladders at all. As it turned out, the five copters took off with about two-thirds of the maximum operation fuel load in each. This meant if the tankers were just ten minutes late, XBat’s copters would start going down.

Once above the low-level clouds, they found themselves flying into the moonless night. Autry was astonished by the number of stars overhead. The inky ceiling above them was flooded with celestial formations. Autry had flown all over the world, but he’d never seen the sky look quite like this.

The seventy-five-minute ride out into the Atlantic was thankfully incident-free. They were flying at 5,500 feet and the copters stuck together as best they could. At least they were able to fly with their navigation lights on, a rarity in black ops missions. This, combined with their night-vision goggles, made it easy to keep an eye on one another. It was a luxury they knew would probably not continue throughout the mission.

As he was out in the lead slightly, Autry was the first to reach the assigned place and altitude for the meeting with their aerial replenishment assets. Much to his relief, their fuel was waiting for them when they arrived.

The desperation, if not the outright insanity, of what they were doing was underscored when they reached the rendezvous spot. Again, there wasn’t just one tanker waiting for them here. There were three. Two KC-10s jumbo jets refuelers and a KC-130 Hercules gas truck.

There was a reason for the crowd: XBat’s copters were midair refueling capable, but there was a catch. They couldn’t take on fuel from a rigid boom like jet fighters could. They had to be filled via flexible hose booms. The KC-10s jumbo tankers had rigid booms. But the KC-130 prop plane had wingtip-mounted flexible hoses that could lock on to the copter’s receptacle, plus it could be refueled by either flexible hose or rigid boom.

What this meant was that some fancy flying had to be done tonight if XBat’s aircraft were going to get at least partway to where they had to go—and it would be complex. The KC-130 was filled with fuel. In the first round of refueling, the XBat copters would take gas from the four-engine prop plane. Then the 130 would hook up with one of the KC-10s and take on more fuel, for their own tanks as well as for XBat’s. They would do this five times, until the first KC-10 ran out of extra fuel. Then it would turn back, and the second jet tanker would take its place in the daisy chain.