Slowly, watching Chance, the closest man began moving, passed him, kept walking with his hands up.
The second man passed.
The third …
He was turning to look at the fourth man when the man grabbed the barrel of the rifle with one hand and stabbed Chance in the solar plexus with the other.
William Henry Chance looked down at the handle sticking out of his abdomen. A screwdriver! The man had stabbed him with a screwdriver.
The man was fighting him for the rifle!
A shot. He heard a shot over the noise of the air-circulation fans. The man who stabbed him collapsed.
More shots.
Chance fell. His legs didn’t work anymore and he was having trouble breathing.
“Kill the American enslavers wherever you find them, wherever they choose to shovel their odious filth onto a committed socialist people,” Vargas shouted over the radio. “Beloved Cuba, the mother of us all, needs our strong right arms.”
On the floor, his vision narrowing to tiny points of light, fighting for air he couldn’t get, William Henry Chance felt someone roll him over. Through the face plate on the mask of the man who held him, he could just make out Carmellini’s features.
“You should have shot ‘em,” Carmellini shouted. “You. stupid bastard, you should have shot ’em.”
Chance was trying to suck in enough air to reply when his heart stopped.
Carmellini and the two marines in CBW suits carried the aluminum cylinders they had brought from the Osprey into the lab and set them down. There was not a moment to be lost. Bullets had gone through several of the men lying dead on the floor and punctured the transparent plastic walls of the facility.
The two marines went back after more cylinders while Carmellini brought plastic cans of gasoline through the air lock. He didn’t have time to wait for the lock to work, so he jammed the door so it would not close.
Please God, don’t let the viruses out.
With six cylinders on the floor near the cultures and ten gallons of gasoline sitting nearby, Carmellini was ready. The five Cubans who were working in the lab lay where they had fallen. Chance’s body lay where he died. Carmellini ignored the bodies as he worked.
He gestured to the marines to leave, then turned to the nearest cylinder, which was a five-inch-diameter magnesium flare designed to be dropped from an airplane. A small steel ring was taped to the side of the thing — he tore that off and pulled it out as far as it would go, which was about a foot. Then he gave it a mighty tug, which tore it loose in his hand.
He laid the cylinder on the wooden floor and walked for the air lock. As he went through he released the door, allowing it to close.
He still had a few seconds, so he stood in the lock as the suction tore at his CBW suit, trying to cleanse it of dust and stray viruses.
But he was running out of time.
He pushed the emergency button and let himself out of the lock through the exterior door. Walking swiftly, he exited the barn and strode for the waiting Osprey.
Doll Hanna was standing there with a rifle in his arms.
“Let’s get the men—” Carmellini began, but the ignition of the flare stopped him. The glare of a hundred-million-candlepower magnesium fire leaked out of the barn through the door and cracks in the siding.
“Let’s get the hell out of here before it goes up like a rocket,” Carmellini shouted, and trotted for the Osprey.
Three minutes later, with all the people aboard and the plane airborne, he went to the cockpit and looked back. The fire was as bright as a welder’s torch, so brilliant it hurt his eyes to look. The heat of the first flare had set off the second, and so on. The heat from the first few flares probably caused the gasoline cans to explode, raising the temperature dramatically and helping ignite the other flares.
“Think the fire will kill all the viruses?” the pilot asked.
“I don’t know,” Carmellini said grimly, and went back to his seat. He didn’t have any juice to waste on the merely worried.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
There were just too many Cuban troops at silo one. The two SuperCobras assigned there expended their Hellfire missiles on the tanks and trucks, then scourged the area with 20-mm cannon shells. Between them the assault choppers fired fifteen hundred rounds of 20-mm. As the first two assault choppers left the arena to refuel and rearm, Battlestar Control aboard United States routed other SuperCobras to the site. They began flaying the area with a vengeance.
The problem was that the troops were fairly well dug in. Almost a thousand men had arrived in the area early that morning under an energetic young commander who had ordered trenches dug and machine guns emplaced in earth and log fortifications. Two small bulldozers helped with the digging.
The machine-gun nests were gone now, victims of Hellfire missiles, but the troops in trenches were harder to kill. Fortunately for the Cubans, the trenches were not straight, but zigged and zagged around trees and stones and natural obstacles.
The young commander was dead now, killed by a single cannon shell that tore his head off when he tried to look over the lip of a trench to find the SuperCobras. Most of his officers were also dead. One of the SuperCobras had been shot down by machine-gun fire. A Cuban trooper with an AK-47 killed the pilot of another with a lucky shot in the neck. The first chopper managed to autorotate down, and the crew jumped from their machine into an empty trench. The copilot of the second machine flew it out of the battle and headed for the refueling and rearming site the marines had established in a sugarcane field between silos three and four.
The SuperCobras on site were almost out of ammo, and they too went to the refueling site, where they were fueled from bladders and rearmed with ammo brought in by Ospreys from Kearsarge. Then they rejoined the fray.
The noise of eight assault choppers hovering around the battlefield that centered on the barn did the trick. One by one, the Cubans threw down their weapons and climbed out of their trenches with their hands over their heads.
Several of the SuperCobras turned on their landing lights and hovered over the barn, turning this way and that so that their lights shone over the men, living and dead, that littered the ground.
Minutes later an Osprey landed just a hundred feet from the entrance to the barn. Toad Tarkington was the last man out. He was ten feet from the V-22 and running like hell when it lifted off and another settled onto the same spot. Marines with rifles at the ready came pouring out.
With his engines running and the canopy closed, Major Carlos Corrado taxied his MiG-29 toward the runway at Cienfuegos. Two men walked ahead of the fighter with brooms, sweeping shrapnel and rocks off the concrete so the fighter’s tires would not be cut. They weren’t worried about this stuff going in the intakes: on the ground the MiG-29’s engines breathed through blow-down panels on top of the fuselage while the main intakes remained closed.
Inside the fighter Corrado was watching his electronic warning equipment. As he suspected, the Americans had a bunch of radars aloft tonight, everything from large search radars to fighter radars. He immediately recognized the radar signature of the F-14 Tomcat, which he had seen just a week or so ago out over the Caribbean.
Yep, they were up there, and as soon as his wheels came up, they would be trying to kill him.
Carlos Corrado taxied his MiG-29 onto the runway and shoved the twin throttles forward to the stop, then into afterburner. The MiG-29 rocketed forward. Safely airborne, Corrado raised the landing gear and came out of afterburner. Passing 400 knots, he lowered the nose and retarded the throttles, then swung into a turn that would point the sleek Russian fighter at Havana.