“Hello, Monique!” the man replied. “Just exercising on this glorious, glorious day!”
“I brought you dinner, if you will get properly dressed to eat it!”
“Thank you, lass. You run inside, and I won’t be much longer!”
The woman shook her head in mock disgust as she hoisted a basket of groceries out of the back seat and took them inside. The man stopped his singing and his exercising and looked around, up at the sky through the trees and then off to his right, away from Wilson. Wilson watched as the man stepped over to a tree stump and retrieved his short-sleeved gray shirt, shook it once, and put it on. He then reached down and put something around his neck.
A collar!
The man adjusted the collar and walked to the door, humming the same ditty he had just been singing. Father… the man was a priest! A Catholic priest in Venezuela? Wilson surmised he was a missionary. The woman couldn’t be the man’s daughter, so Wilson pegged her as the housekeeper.
Wilson stayed down and crawled to a spot where he had a better view of the door. He sat there for hours, wondering what to do. He needed help, but now that an opportunity had presented itself, he was hesitant. Once alerted to his presence, soldiers could be here in minutes. After all he’d been through, was a rifle butt across the jaw from an angry Venezuelan soldier worth it? Could he hold out another day and evade to the sea? It must be nearby. One more day. Wilson assessed his boot and his hand.
Hours later, with the sunlight fading, the woman came out of the house, got in the car and drove off. Wilson watched the cabin, and, from time to time, he saw a shadow move past a window. After a while the man came outside, and Wilson saw him go into the outhouse. The priest moved with a sure gait, but Wilson knew he could kick and that he seemed to be in decent shape. Wilson, on the other hand, was armed, but he was also weak — and maybe closer to death than he figured. With his head pounding from stress and dehydration, all of his body in pain, Wilson had to make a decision, fast.
The man came out of the outhouse and headed for the cabin. Wilson had the pistol in hand, breathing hard with fear and uncertainty. He dropped the pistol and got up, lifting his good arm in the air as he took a deep breath.
“Father?” he croaked in a whisper.
CHAPTER 62
Annie Schofield was exhausted. After three days and nights of operations, the pace was getting to her and everyone aboard Coral Sea. During this time, Carrier Air Wing SIX had degraded the San Ramón and Río Salta complexes: their defenses, the supply depots, the key bridges, as well as the facilities themselves. In the eastern part of Venezuela, the FAV was not flying fixed wing, and the Bolivarian Navy remained pier side. The Americans did not attack the moored ships, or even the parked airplanes, many of which remained visible in revetments or on parking aprons.
The Venezuelan forces around the capitol remained strong, however, and one FAV Flanker had downed a F-15E Strike Eagle during the night and escaped to tell the tale. The Mud Hen crew was able to steer their stricken aircraft out to sea before they conducted a controlled bailout near a Dutch destroyer and were rescued. Despite the fact there were hundreds of combat sorties about the Bolivarian Republic, the shoot down of a second American fighter made world news. Venezuelan anti-ship missile batteries were being attrited by the Americans with stand-off weapons. One Venezuelan missile had attacked that same Dutch destroyer which, in turn, was able to successfully spoof the missile and make it guide on something else: a coastal merchant that was in the wrong place 12 miles away. The missile worked as advertised and broke the 350-foot Panamanian-flagged and Brazilian-owned ship in half. The stern sank in minutes and took most of its 30-man crew with it. Emboldened, the Bolivarian forces conducted night and day raids on the Dutch protectorates of Aruba and Curacao, only 14 and 36 miles away from the Venezuelan coast. The local police forces were no match for armed helicopters and light infantry.
The conflict was threatening to spin out of American control. Despite the success of the destroyer using standard NATO countermeasures and tactics, American naval leadership was cautious and kept their ships well outside the known surface-to-surface threat rings, an action that angered the Dutch who did accept that risk — and had the rescued American aircrew to prove it. Colombia and Panama demanded the Americans cease fire, and the Cubans continued to reinforce their brigades around Guantanamo. The American air-bridge resupplied GITMO as best they could, flying contorted approaches to remain clear of Cuban threat fire.
Trinidad and Tobago, watching the conflict play out all around and above them with several known airspace violations, and probably more unknown, expressed their dismay with a belligerent Washington. At its closest, Trinidad was less than ten miles from the military and human colossus of the Bolivarian Republic, and some of its offshore oil rigs were even closer than that. The Venezuelans, attacking them with little more than Boston Whalers and small arms, could cripple their economy and punish them for any cooperation with the Americans. And Port of Spain, sandwiched between Venezuela and the Americans, went to great lengths to ensure Caracas that they were not.
Theodore Roosevelt was positioned south of the Dominican Republic, from where it could support GITMO when required and conduct CAP and strike sorties in the Venezuelan Op Area, in order to placate the Dutch by defending the “ABC islands” of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao. Each theater was roughly 400 miles away from TR and needed more airborne fuel than could be provided by its own carrier-based tankers. USAF tactical airpower based in Puerto Rico depended on big wing tankers to strike Bolivarian targets 500 miles south, and the suitable concrete to base KC-10s and KC-135s in the region was limited. The tyranny of distance, therefore, applied to American operations even in these restricted waters, and with the eastern portion of Venezuela somewhat neutralized, Coral Sea was an invaluable asset that could move where required.
While the islands of the Lesser Antilles offered concealment for the carrier, which made the Venezuelan targeting problem more difficult, Devil Davies and Rick Sanders weren’t too keen on operating Coral Sea in restricted waters. They had to make a tradeoff, and it was decided that Coral Sea would move into the Caribbean near Dominica, affording it coverage of most of the Venezuelan coast. If the Air Force could then dedicate one tanker to them, the carrier’s in-house tanker assets could serve as hose multipliers to send waves of tailhook jets to the continent — and catch them for a drink on the return — in cyclic operations lasting all day or all night. Logistics.
Annie checked the PLAT video monitor. Coral Sea was steaming hard for the Dominica Passage and, according to the expected track, would transit the passage after midnight. The Firebirds and the rest of CVW-6 had stood down from flying for the night, but the aircrews were hard at work planning tomorrow’s strikes. Annie had a late afternoon time-on-target. She would lead eight jets to deliver six standoff land attack missiles against a Caracas missile site, an hour’s flight from the expected launch posit.