Brown, Dale - Independent 02 (72 page)

 
          
“Relax,
Captain Charbakov, if that is who you really are,” Salazar said. “We will take
good care of your plane. Now put your hands on the dashboard. Do not move or we
will be forced to—”

 
          
Powell
did not wait for the rest of it. fie reared back with his left foot and kicked
the gear-shift lever between the two front seats, slamming the transmission
from second gear into reverse. The Jeep screeched to a halt and the soldier in
the back seat flew forward up against the driver. His rifle muzzle scraped
along the left side of Powell’s head and was only a few inches in front of his
face when the rifle went off.

 
          
Propelled
partly by the concussion of the rifle, Powell threw himself out of the stalled
Jeep. He landed on his right shoulder, rolled and tried to get to his feet. But
the blast from the rifle had turned his vision into yellow-and-white stars of
panic. He could not make his legs and feet respond. He heard loud shouts in
Spanish, a shuffle of heavy-booted feet, and the sound of a gun being cocked
behind him . . .

 
          
Shots
and screams, the sound of bullets plowing into metal and concrete, but he was
still alive. McLanahan had opened fire on the Jeep from the Sukhoi-27. “Powell,
goddammit,
run!”

 
          
The
ringing in his head was still disorienting, but McLanahan’s warning came
through. Powell tugged his pistol from his holster and, moving sideways, headed
for the Sukhoi-27—the rifleman in the Jeep beside Salazar raised his rifle and
Powell took quick aim and got ofiF a shot. The soldier, uninjured but surprised
at the return fire, jumped out the other side of the Jeep away from Powell and
McLanahan’s fire and took cover.

 
          
Salazar,
disgusted, muttered his feelings to the soldier, climbed out of the Jeep and
stood facing Powell, who was about twenty meters away, half the distance to the
Sukhoi, popping ofiF random shots in Salazar’s direction. Salazar reached into
his right riding boot, extracted a long, thin throwing knife, and like a
baseball pitcher winding up for a fastball, threw the knife at Powell with all
his skill and force . . .

 
          
Almost
there, Powell thought. The rifleman from the Jeep was gone, Salazar appeared to
be unarmed and McLanahan had pinned down the riflemen in the truck. “Major,”
Powell shouted. “Start the APU. Get her ready to—”

 
          
Powell
heard a thin, whispering hiss, like a bumblebee flying near his head. A thin
piece of steel had imbedded itself into his left arm just above his elbow.
Blood spurted through his flight suit’s sleeve, staining the fabric with inky
black circles. He dropped the pistol, grabbed at the knife with his right
hand—and the pain hit him with full force. He felt the point of the stiletto
scrape against bone and half-stumbled as his face flushed and the fingers of
his left hand grew numb. The pain traveled up his left arm, sending a jolt through
his spine to his brain. His feet felt like concrete weights, and he couldn’t
seem to make them do what he wanted any more.

 
          
“Powell,
quick, this way ...”

 
          
Thank
God McLanahan was still calling out. Powell regained his balance, headed toward
the sound of the Sukhoi’s high-pitched whining auxiliary power unit—and ran
headlong into the Sukhoi-27’s fuselage. He crawled under the nose, found the
built-in handholds and toeholds in the left side of the Russian fighter and
began to crawl into the cockpit. He had almost reached the safety of the
cockpit when he felt a hand tug at his right leg.

 
          
Strength
washed out of his body, his energy spent. His left arm felt dead. “Major,
help,” Powell muttered.

 
          
McLanahan
aimed the muzzle of the Uzi over the edge at Field Captain Hermosa, who now had
his hands high over his head. A slip of paper was in one hand.

 
          
McLanahan
kept a careful watch on the soldiers off the right side of the Sukhoi, but kept
the Uzi pointed at Hermosa. “What the hell do you want?”

 
          
Hermosa
tossed the slip of paper into the cockpit. “I know who you are,” he said. “I
have seen you on television, you are one of the Hammerheads of the Border
Security Force . . .”

 
          
The
whine of the Sukhoi’s number-one engine grew louder, threatening to drown out
Hermosa’s voice. Yelling, he continued, “I have pulled the wheel chocks on your
jet. You must return that list to your headquarters. It is very—”

 
          
A
shot rang out, and Hermosa collapsed onto the runway. McLanahan took aim and
fired at soldiers who had gotten around to the left side of the plane. One
fell, the other scurried away and jumped down the slight embankment on the left
side of the runway.

 
          
“Hit it
, Powell,” McLanahan called as
Powell dragged himself into his seat and wearily began preparing his systems
for takeoff.

 
          
The
right engine had just started and was winding up to full power when Powell put
on his helmet, released brakes and shoved the left throttle forward. McLanahan
emptied the Uzi’s last clip at soldiers near the truck who were moving toward
them, tossed the weapon clear of the rolling fighter, sat in his seat and
motored the canopy closed. The thick glass-plastic laminated canopy had already
been starred by several bullet holes.

 
          
“Look,”
Powell shouted, his head clearing. Out ahead of them, nearly at the end of the
runway, sat trucks blocking the departure end of the runway. Soldiers had
already fanned out along the runway with weapons aimed at the Sukhoi. Powell
slammed on the brakes and brought the throttles of the big Russian fighter to
idle.

 
          
“Can
you get over them?”

 
          
“I
think so . . . they’re parked nearly at the end of the runway, which leaves us
about four thousand feet. But they’ll hose us for sure when we go overhead ...”

 
          
“It’s
our only chance,” McLanahan said. “This thing has some armor around it—maybe
we’ll get high enough to survive it—”

 
          
McLanahan
stopped abruptly as they saw two soldiers raising what appeared to be bazookas
or a shoulder-launched heat-seeking or wire-guide missile launcher down the
runway. “They’re not going to wait for us to surrender,” McLanahan said.
“They’re going to blow us away right now ...”

 
          
Two
large puffs of smoke erupted from the large man-carried weapons in front of
them, and two yellow streaks of fire arced away— but the missiles didn’t hit
the Sukhoi-27. The two missiles, fired from SA-7 infrared anti-aircraft
weapons, roared overhead and down the runway behind them.

 
          
“By
God,” they missed,” Powell said, not believing it. He painfully reached for the
latch mechanism to the canopy, preparing to fling it open. “Let’s get out of
here—”

 
          
“No,
they didn’t fire at us . . .”

 
          
McLanahan,
it seemed, was right. As the smoke from the SA-7s cleared they could see the
soldiers in the barricade beginning to scatter. Suddenly the trucks in the
barricade exploded into flame. Smoky streaks flashed overhead into the inferno.
In moments the entire line of trucks blocking the runway was burning fiercely.
And then they saw a lone jet aircraft flash through the smoke and disappear.

 
          
“The
F-111, they were firing at the 111 . . . now, let’s get the hell outta here.”

 
          
Powell
brought both engines to military power, waited a few seconds for them to
stabilize, clicked them into min afterburner, released brakes and slowly
brought them to full afterburner. Unlike American fighters, the Sukhoi banged
into each afterburner stage with a loud explosion, but the power advanced
quickly. Powell held the control stick back as the speed increased, lifted the
nose gear off the ground at ninety knots, then fed in a little forward stick as
the main gear lifted off. He raised the landing gear with a flick of a switch,
allowed the Sukhoi to accelerate to one hundred-eighty knots with the fighter
only a few feet off the ground, then flipped another switch to turn off the
alpha limiter on the flight-control computer.”

 
          
The
Sukhoi-27 at full power in level flight had accelerated to nearly three hundred
knots—five miles per minute—in only a few seconds. When the wall of smoke was
five hundred feet away, Powell yanked the nose skyward. With the alpha limiter
off, Powell was able to move the fighter’s nose nearly vertical, and the
fighter raced skyward like a rocket. It was over five hundred feet in altitude
by the time it crossed the line of burning trucks, and almost a thousand feet when
it crossed the departure end of the runway.

 
          
“Get
out of afterburner and get the nose down, J.C.,” McLanahan urged his young
pilot. “They might have other anti-aircraft weapons on us. It’s better to stay
at low altitude and keep the hot engines away from them.” Powell did as he
said, and several minutes later they were over water and clear of both Haitian
and Cuban airspace.

 
          
Even
though the damaged canopy threatened to shatter and disintegrate at any moment,
Powell kept the power at full thrust, and McLanahan watched the skies behind
them until they were within radar range of the Hammerhead One aerostat
unit—better for the canopy to come loose than for one of Verrettes’ MiGs to
find them. But the canopy somehow held together, and after ten minutes of flying
near the speed of sound Powell brought power back to two hundred knots, climbed
back up to normal VFR air-traffic altitudes and set a special frequency on the
radio unit installed for this mission.

 
          
“Hammerhead
One, this is Pinko,” Powell radioed on the prearranged scrambled tactical
frequency. “How copy?”

 
          
“Loud
and clear, Pinko,” Elliott aboard the Border Security Force’s platform replied.
“Say status.”

 
          
“The
machine is code one, the pilot is code two and the back-seater is scared as
hell but code one,” McLanahan told them. “You got a place for us to set down?
We shouldn’t risk flying it all the way to the planned recovery base.” That
landing spot was one of the many hard-surface auxiliary runways at Eglin Air
Force Base in the Florida panhandle, the largest and one of the most desolate
military bases in the country—a perfect place to hide the illegally obtained
Sukhoi-27 fighter.

 
          
“Bring
it in to
Aladdin
City
,” Elliott told him. “We’ve got a recovery
team standing by and we’ll get an ambulance rolling for J.C. Can you make it?”

 
          
McLanahan
saw Powell’s head nodding in the affirmative, and he did seem to have pretty
good control of the plane in spite of the wicked-looking blade still protruding
from his upraised left arm.

 
          
“Affirmative,
Hammerhead. We will recover at
Aladdin
City
. Have rescue and medical personnel standing
by.”

 
          
“Roger,
Pinko. We’re ready for you.”

 
          
“How
did the pictures turn out?”

 
          
“Better
than we expected, Pinko. We think we found our boys, all right. Well done.”

 
          
McLanahan
for the first time was able to look at the note that Hermosa had thrown into
the cockpit. As he read his eyes widened. He attached the note to the back of
Powell’s seat, then photographed it with the digital camera, slipped the
camera’s recording disk into the transceiver and hit the XMIT button.

 
          
“I’ve
got one more picture for you, Hammerhead,” McLanahan said. “This one you’re not
going to believe.”

 
          
The
bullet from a soldier’s rifle had sliced Hermosa’s spinal cord in two. One hand
had been crushed as the left wheel of the escaping Sukhoi-27 had rolled over
it, and he had been tumbled down the runway for several meters by the hot, oily
jet blast of the Russian fighter. But somehow the ex-Cuban military aide was
still alive.