He stayed high on the first pass, five thousand feet, staring down to assess the scene before making his decision.
Batman had been right this was a guns-only mission.
Good thing he probably wouldn’t need them for the rest of it.
He swung the Tomcat around and dove for the deck, picking up speed as he descended. He stayed to the west of all participants, hoping to avoid silhouetting himself against the rising sun. He stopped his descent barely one hundred feet above the churning ocean, made a small course correction, and arrowed in toward the submarine.
Four hundred feet away from the Foxtrot, he fired his first short burst, made another small course correction, then walked the guns in toward the submarine. There were men running around the fo’c’sle frantically, trying to clear the conning tower and decks in response to his gunfire. However, a Tomcat traveling at three hundred knots covers a lot of ground quickly. The first of them had barely started down the ladder into the interior of the submarine when the rounds stitched their way down the submarine’s hull. He saw two men crumple and fall to the deck and another one topple off the narrow flat surface into the sea.
With the decks cleared, the SEAL boat immediately kicked it in the ass and took off for the carrier. Tombstone watched them go, made sure that the submarine crew stayed out of sight long enough for them to escape, then turned his attention back to the approaching small boats.
The SEALs could probably outrun them, but there was no point in taking chances. Two low-altitude passes, four sharp sparks of gunfire, and the small boats were out of action.
“Mission complete,” Tombstone radioed back to the carrier. “Now, may I please get back to my original mission?”
“Permission granted,” Batman said crisply. “And when you get back to the boat, I think you’re going to find there are a couple of SEALs on board who want to buy you a beer.”
Her face slammed into the side of the boat as an unexpectedly rough portion of chop caught the small rubber craft sideways. She yelped, then quickly stifled herself.
Huerta had taught her the value of silence. She wondered if she’d ever be able to scream again without experiencing an anticipatory dread of that steel-banded hand closing over her mouth.
No, her time with the SEALs on this mission had been singularly unrewarding. They’d done nothing but abuse her, gag her, try to run her into the ground and drown her, and now, batter her against the side of a small boat that had no business skimming across waters as quickly as it was. She felt anger well up and something else.
For a moment, Pamela paused, her hand gingerly resting on her aching cheekbone, her body a mass of lactic acid laden muscles and bruises, and thought. What was it that she actually felt about this? Hate for SEALs? Yes, that certainly but something more. Underlying it all was a grudging respect, the beginnings of an understanding as to why these men were the way they were, and what their purpose in the world was.
She didn’t like their tactics to be honest, she didn’t like their tactics when they were applied to her but after watching them in action, she was beginning to understand the necessity for them.
She glanced across the boat at Thor. He was large enough to brace himself midships, his ribs resting on one side of the craft, his feet planted snugly against the opposite side for security. The pilot he would have been dead by now, had it not been for the SEALs.
And would she herself have survived? She tried to believe that her Cuban captors/friends would have freed her from her cell, would have warned her of the incoming attack.
Tried, and failed. In the three days she had been in their country, they had shown no more concern for her safety or well-being than a spider does for a struggling fly caught in its web. They’d used her, steered her toward sights and sounds they wanted broadcast to the world, tried to subvert her from her true purpose of getting the facts out.
And she’d let herself be used, she admitted. She had thought she’d be able to play the delicate cat-and-mouse game with them, pretending to do what they wanted while managing to sneak such shots to her audience as her cunning and wile would allow. In the end, they’d come out almost even, she suspected.
She suddenly realized with a chill that if she’d stayed at the compound she would have been dead by now. The SEALs had saved her life, and more than that, earned her grudging respect.
Not that that meant they’d be getting favorable coverage for this little episode. Oh, no, far from it. But she’d find a way to bring some balance to the picture, to show the necessity for such men in a world like today’s, and to explore the political considerations and checks and balances that held their deadly power in leash.
She turned to Sikes suddenly. “The dog did you kill it?”
He gazed back at her, eyes a dark steel blue, face carved out of granite. There was no way that she could make him answer, none at all.
But something must have shown in her face. Finally, he nodded his head frantically. “Didn’t like to do it, but there was no other way.”
She settled back against the rigid gunwale and thought about it. Why should she judge them harshly for killing a dog, when Cuba had made few bones about murdering thousands and thousands of its countrymen?
Should Americans be held to a higher standard of honor than foreign nations? And if so, how does one fight rogue nations like Cuba, those barely civilized hordes of hotheaded fascists now in possession of some of the world’s latest technology?
Fire with fire, she decided. That’s what it would have to be. But some part of her mourned the death of that dog.
The Cubans hunkered down in the command bunker twenty feet below ground had escaped the bombardment with minimal damage. Plaster had crumbled off the walls as a result of the vibrations bombarding the center, and a few chunks of ceiling had detached themselves from the steel beams overhead and shattered on the concrete floor below, but everything was still operable.
Santana wished he could say as much for the launchers above. How had the Americans managed to locate the underground launch tubes? A satellite, he supposed, or perhaps one of those damnable reconnaissance flights. No matter he glanced at the weapons status indicator panel again, and was relieved to see it was unchanged.
The rows and columns of idiot lights looked like Christmas. At least half of them were glowing steady red, indicating that their components were beyond reinitialization or repair. Another half was blinking red, clamoring for operator attention to either reset critical parameters or simply clear something obstructing a launch hatch. Finally, on the far right-hand side of the board, three columns of lights glowed bright, steady, reassuring green. At least three missiles were still operational, if the damage indicators could be trusted. Three chances to strike, either at the mainland, or at the battle group poised to strike from the south.
The mainland, he decided finally. That had been their intent all along, and the first hint of attack against their landmass would no doubt send the Americans sputtering and sniveling to the United States.
That alone would tie up their forces for days, while Cuba negotiated a massive aid package in exchange for an apology from the United States for their uninvited incursion into a foreign nation. The fact that Cuba had retaliated all out of proportion to the alleged violation would be ignored, as it always was. In terms of politics, the Americans were the perennial patsies.