The Lucifer Crusade (10 page)

An instant after the shell exploded, Hunter was up and firing his M-16 towards a point two-thirds of the way up the cliff. He had detected a telltale puff of smoke from the grenade launcher and was now spraying the point with tracer-laced M-16 bullets.

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The two Brits and many of the soldiers caught along the road did the same thing. But, at the same moment, a powerful machine gun opened up from another part of the rocky bluff. Then another and another.

Within seconds, a full-fledged firefight had broken out.

Hunter still concentrated his fire on the point where he knew the RPG launcher was. After his fifth barrage, he heard something hit home. There was a loud explosion on the side of the cliff and a rain of rocks and metal showered down onto the roadway. Hunter's fire had not only found the RPG operators, it had hit their ammunition. Two bodies came down the bluff in the small avalanche, both landing with a bloody splat in the middle of the road.

The machine-gun fire intensified. Still, Hunter had to find out who the attackers were. To the shock and amazement of the two British pilots, he was up and running toward one of the attackers who had fallen from the cliff.

With" bullets splashing all around him, the Wingman dragged the fallen ambusher back to the trench.

Even Hunter was amazed that the man was still breathing, though he had only seconds to go. His body was cracked and bleeding from a number of points. The pilot studied the man. He was wearing a nondescript black uniform, with a turban and a cloth covering most of his face. Each breath the man took resulted in a exhalation of blood, which spurted out of the cloth covering his mouth. Still, his eyes were open.

"Who are you?" Hunter demanded. "Who is your boss?"

The man actually managed a laugh. "Hunter . . ."

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he gasped. "You fool . . ."

His eyes then went up into his head. A gush of blood came out of his mouth and he was dead.

Hunter, surprised that the man knew him by name, slowly unwrapped the bloody cloth that covered most of the dead man's face. He recognized the man's features right away. It was el-Fauzi, the man he had met at the Casablanca control tower.

"Do you know him?" Heath asked, crawling over to Hunter and the dead man.

"Believe it or not, I do," the pilot replied, searching the body. "He led me to a character named Lord Lard in Casablanca. Lard's the guy who told me to come here, to Algiers. They must have been setting me up."

"That's what it looks like, old boy," Heath said, ducking away from a barrage of machine-gun fire. "But the question is: were they just after that billion-dollar bounty or are they allies of Lucifer?"

Hunter looked at el-Fauzi's broken body.

"Maybe I'll never know," he said to himself.

The fire from the cliff intensified. Hunter pushed aside the body and concentrated on the rest of the attackers. There were spits of fire coming from at least a dozen locations on the side of the cliff as well as at its peak. Meanwhile, many of the mercenaries who happened to be on the fringes of the ambush had withdrawn, leaving only Hunter, Heath, Raleigh, and three bystanders square in the line of fire.

The good news was that one of those bystanders had a radio ...

Fifteen minutes later, Hunter heard the chopper approaching from the west. It was a Westland Lynx, the British-built helicopter originally built for anti-92

shipping operations. As the copter came into view, Hunter could clearly see its bright yellow-and-green markings as well as the half-dozen TOW missiles jimmy-rigged on its belly.

"Humdingo came through for us," Heath said to Hunter.

They had crawled over to the mercenary who happened to be carrying the radio and called back to the Algiers airport control tower. For the promise of a bag of silver, a runner carried a detailed message to Humdingo, who was on duty guarding the F-16 and the Tornados. Humdingo then arranged to have one of the airport's many freelance helicopter gunships fly out to the site of the ambush.

The fire from the cliff had intensified in the ensuing time, but now it was redirected when the helicopter arrived. The Lynx ignored the barrage of bullets being thrown up at it by the ambushers and, in workmanlike fashion, swooped in and deposited a TOW missile directly on the top of the cliff. The resulting explosion caused a small landslide-two more bodies landing on the road amidst the debris.

The Lynx circled around and fired two more missiles into the side of the bluff. Again, the two explosions caused minor avalanches as well as three tumbling bodies. The chopper made two more passes, both times firing its dual machine guns. Even above the racket of the chopper blades, Hunter could hear the shells puncturing flesh. One more TOW missile strike and all fire from the cliff ceased. The attack was over.

The trapped soldiers emerged from the trench just as the Lynx was setting down on the road. Heath made a point of giving a bag of silver to each of the unlucky mercenaries trapped in the ambush, including a half-dozen gold coins in the bag of the man

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who had been carrying the lifesaving radio.

The mercenaries went on their way as Hunter, Heath, and Raleigh approached the Lynx. Humdingo himself stepped out of the aircraft, his grin even wider than before.

"Heath, old man," he said in perfect Queen's English. You are lucky you have such a good friend as Humdingo in Algiers."

"Amen, chief," Heath said, with much relief.

The Lynx pilot-he looked like a Greek to Hunter-stepped out of the chopper and approached Heath.

"Who pays?" he asked, nonchalantly.

"I do," Heath said, reaching into his satchel to what Hunter was beginning to believe was an endless supply of money. "How much?"

The pilot stroked his thin beard. "Let's see," he said, doing some quick calculations. "Four TOWs, six belts of ammo, fuel, and landing fees. That's four and a half bags of silver."

Heath took a look at the battered jeep and dug out five full bags of silver coins.

"I'll throw in another half bag for a lift back to the airport."

The Greek pilot gave him the thumbs-up sign. "Done," he said with a smile.

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"Iron Fist" was the name of the group that controlled the territory once known as the French Riviera.

The Fist was an offshoot of a radical anarchist group that had once carried out terrorist bombings in prewar France. Back then, its members, although publicly described as "left-wingers," were actually pseudo-political troublemakers, the sons and daughters of rich Gallic industrialists who grew bored with being wealthy and decided to kill and maim innocent people in the name of some hair-brained "People's Revolution." Their dream came true with the start of World War III; the Red Armies deposited their "revolutionary"

SCUD poison missiles in the middle of Europe on Christmas Eve, killing millions. Members of Iron Fist were crushed right alongside their bourgeois countrymen in the Soviet onslaught that followed. Many of its surviving members simply cowered in hiding places while the real armies fought the war.

Only when the guns fell silent and the beaten yet victorious Russians withdrew did the members of Iron Fist emerge from their holes and claim the 95

once-posh Riviera as their "Liberated Zone of the People." The comical thing about it all was that the only "people" living in the territory were the members of Iron Fist itself.

Such grade-school revolutionary foolishness was more than an inconvenience to the Sir Neil and his British adventurers. The USS Saratoga was beached 2000

feet off the territory controlled by Iron Fist. The problem was that the British Intelligence people believed Iron Fist had made some "new friends"

lately. Namely, a notorious motorized division known as The Red Army Faction.

They too were a band of terrorists before the war. But unlike members of the Fist, The Red Army Faction had gotten into the freelance military business in a big way. And more than a few observers believed the Faction was supported in some part by the warlords in Moscow.

Recruiting many surviving Warsaw Pact soldiers and recovering much of their battlefield equipment, the Faction became a modern-day equivalent of the Goths-20,000 well-armed barbarians on wheels. Their specialty was sacking cities. Their military formula was simple: attack, rape, pillage, carry off slaves, and move on. They had been terrorizing central Europe since the end of the first Great Battles. No one on the continent had had the ambition to take them on. Thus, the Faction added to the instability that Moscow craved.

The Brits had suspected for some time that the Faction wanted to grab some territory in the warmer climes, at least during the European winter months. As with any army, its troops needed a place to take R&R. The Riviera was a natural choice-it gave them an outlet to the sea, plenty of living accommo-96

dations, plus an ally in Iron Fist that at least shared some of their revolutionary fervor, if in name only. And the Fist was weak enough that they could be crushed at first whine.

As it turned out, The Red Army Faction also had plans for the USS Saratoga.

If The Faction intended to make the Riviera its R&R billet, it would need some security, especially in air defense. When the two RAF commandos had first reconnoitered the carrier, they had found that someone had stripped away about a third of its ship defensive weapons, including its important antiaircraft systems. The Brits knew such an operation was '• beyond the limited know-how of the pampered revolutionaries of Iron Fist, yet well within the technical expertise of the Faction. When many of the missing carrier guns and SAM

launchers started showing up in recon photos sitting atop the formerly luxurious casinos and mansions from Nice to Monte Carlo, the Brits knew the Faction was serious about vacationing in the south of France.

"Now, they take potshots at passing aircraft every once and a while," Sir Neil was telling the group of officers, including Hunter, as they studied a lighted map of the Riviera. They were in the control room of a Norwegian frigate, one of four anchored in a small port on the deserted Mediterranean island of Majorca, several hundred miles to the southwest of France. "They got two airliners last week. Either their troops get bored very quickly and like playing with the ack-ack guns or it's the Faction's way of telling everyone that they've claimed some exclusive beachfront property."

Hunter shook his head. He wondered if the battle—

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hardened soldiers of the Faction sat up all night playing roulette with the pussies of Iron Fist.

"The trouble is that we have very little hard information about the area," Sir Neil continued. "We have to assume that, besides whatever Iron Fist can do, there might be at least a couple battalions of Red Army Faction soldiers lounging around the city."

Three days had passed since Hunter, Heath, and Raleigh had left Algiers. As per their contract, four of the fifteen Norwegian frigates had arrived in Gibraltar during the night, where they had picked up a British Special Air Services battalion and a hundred of Yaz's men and proceeded to Majorca. RAF

airborne combat engineers had already secured a landing area and docking facilities on the island. The frigates arrived the following night, shortly before Hunter landed his F-16 at the island's secret airbase, along with six heavily armed Tornados.

Now, for what seemed like the one hundredth time, Sir Neil meticulously went over the plan to retrieve the Saratoga. Those in attendance in the control room with Sir Neil and Hunter included Heath, Raleigh, two SAS officers, Yaz, and the Norwegian commander-Gjaff Olson, who was also the skipper of the command frigate.

"We have to do three things before we can even think of moving the carrier,"

Sir Neil explained. "One, we have to suppress the antiaircraft guns in Villefranche. Two, we have to secure the beach-we'll call it Gold Beach-near where the Saratoga is stuck. And three, we have to secure the Saratoga itself.

"Three Tornados will be responsible for the first objective. They will attack the town's SAM sites. Don't worry about whether we have justifiable prov-98

ocation - remember those bastards have shot down airliners full of innocent people. As for securing Gold Beach, we'll use the landing crafts on frigates one, two and three, and put about 600 men of the SAS battalion ashore. The choppers from those ships will stand by for any rescue duties.

"Once there, the SAS will set up an aggressive beachhead and occupy the three blocks of buildings right on the shoreline. This should give us a reasonable buffer zone and prevent anyone from Villefranche from getting close enough to accurately fire on the carrier.

"The 300 remaining SAS troopers will be in' charge of boarding the Saratoga itself. We've got one helicopter to work with, so two squads of SAS will chopper right onto the deck of the carrier. If there is anyone aboard - either Fist or Faction-these troops will have to deal with them. The rest of the 300

will be on board this vessel, frigate four. They will move up alongside the carrier and go up on ropes provided by the chopper squads. By that time the ship should be secure.

"Once we are certain that the carrier is in our hands, we'll chopper about a hundred of the Yank sailors aboard. We'll be running the whole operation from right here in frigate four."

The room was quiet while Sir Neil let the information sink in.

"As you know, we'll have to hold the beach for at least six hours until the Yanks can get the carrier's primary systems running," he continued. "Captain Olson's men will help the Yanks install the main towlines so when O'Brien's tugs arrive at midnight, we'll be set to pull her off."

The moon was with them-the tides would be ideal to float the big ship, providing everything was

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ready. And one of the first tasks Yaz's men would perform would be to get the carrier's aircraft-retrieval systems in order. Once that was done, Hunter, his F-16 already equipped with the necessary belly-attached arresting hook, would be able to land on the USS Saratoga's flight deck. Important task number two would be to get the carrier's aircraft-launching catapult systems working.