Chicago had been a different matter. It was the second site on the soccer team's schedule, yet it called for the Sky Horse to fly into the heart of a vast urban area without anyone knowing exactly who they were. While seeing a Coast Guard helicopter in the skies above the Windy City was not all that unusual, the team had to contend with the fact that they would have to pass in and out of three major radar nets, essentially as an unidentified aircraft. They got around this just as they used to get around various checkpoints when sailing in the containership during their first undercover mission: they simply and boldly lied to any air traffic control person who contacted them, claiming they were a training flight from the nearby military facility on the Great Lakes and while identifying themselves as Coast Guard never mentioning exactly what kind of CG craft they were riding in.
The overworked air traffic control guys at O'Hare, their hands full with the busiest airport in the world, let the team fly because they knew what to say and how to say it. Fox did the talking, as his authoritative yet smooth southern voice seemed to be the most convincing.
And apparently a helicopter landing atop a crack house disguised as a mosque was not much of an event in that part of the toddling town. The team members could clearly see people in their tenements or hanging in alleys as they flashed overhead. Because there were no graves this time, they'd resorted to the bacon instead. In all, the operation took less than 10 minutes, including the 2 minutes it took for them to find a place to set up the flag. It had been smooth all the way.
Nebraska, though, had been a mess. They rode in fine, everyone in position. But due to bad weather starting out, they'd arrived a little late. That's why it turned into such a tussle with the mooks at the peak of the Big Rock.
Taking one of the terrorists with them had been a last-minute decision. They thought he would give them some information on where the team bus was heading next and how it was getting there. But either the mook was particularly
clever or he misunderstood their demands. He took them up to Saint Helena, where the team was
supposed
to play its next match. But the bus wasn't there. The terrorist went out the door at 5,000 feet, courtesy of Puglisi. The team could still hear his screams all the way down.
Messyâbut in the end, the result of the Nebraska action was the same as the two previous ones. Four dead mooks, another two missiles confiscated and destroyed. Another bloody message left for anyone who cared to look for it.
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Now it was the next morningâand they were at it again.
Two minutes after they zeroed in on the latest cell-phone signal, the helicopter's engines were started and its rotor was spinning. Ryder was behind the aircraft's main controls; Gallant was turning on its makeshift laptop weapons system. Fox and Puglisi were sitting at the two cargo door guns. Bates was still glued in front of the cell-phone display.
They were getting good at this now.
Minneapolis Airport was 22 miles south of Lost View Lake. Bates's information said that the person who had dialed the cell phone was inside a quarter-mile area about a mile north of the airport. But a topographic map called up on one of the flight-control laptops showed no naturally elevated locations around the airport, places the terrorists would be drawn to. However, there was an amusement park in the general vicinity. The locator ring was practically burning a hole in it on the GPS map.
Once airborne, they raced down the length of the foggy lake using its cover for as long at they could. Then they rose and turned due south, going right over the heavily populated Litchfield area, no doubt attracting attention from below. The air traffic control people at Minneapolis Airport tried to raise them; they'd been picked up by the airport's radar when they were forced to go up and over some particularly hilly neighborhoods. But there was nothing they could do about that now. They simply shut off the radio, dipped back down to 200 feet, and went full throttle toward the amusement park.
Called the Great American Adventure Land, it was a huge
complex with everything from modern roller-coaster type rides to old-fashioned Ferris wheels. There was also a large water park, a concert arena, and many food concessions. One mile out, Ryder and Gallant clicked on their FLIR device. It gave them a heat register of the area. The first thing that jumped out at them was the hundreds of people lined up at the park's main gate, waiting for the waterslide attraction to open.
“Damn,” Gallant cursed. “This isn't going to be clean as we hoped.”
“Let's make it quick then,” Ryder replied.
They did a scan of the interior of the park. It took a few moments, but then they found two heat signatures at the top of the tallest hill of the park's roller-coaster-type attraction, something called Space Ride.
“Could be maintenance men,” Gallant said, compressing the image on the screen. “They have to check those things every day before they let anyone on them.”
“Could be our mooks, too,” Ryder replied. “It's the highest point this side of the Rockies.”
“Let's buzz them,” Gallant suggested.
And buzz them they did. Ryder put the copter into a quick, sharp bank, pulling a tight 180 degrees. This put their nose pointing directly at the top of the Space Ride's highest hill. Then he pushed them to full throttle.
They roared over the metallic peak a second later. What they saw was two men in soccer-style clothing, sitting very casually atop the roller-coaster hill. They watched the chopper as it went by, playing it cool, even waving in a bid to seem friendly.
But then Gallant saw something else: On the ground, 200 feet below the structure, clear as day, were two bodies. They were wearing bright yellow and blue shirts and caps. The overall color scheme of the Space Ride and the park itself was the same shades of yellow and blue.
The three men riding in the back saw the bodies, too.
“Those are mooks up there!” Puglisi screamed up to the pilots. “They threw those two poor bastards right off the top!”
“That seems to be the case ⦔ Fox agreed.
They turned sharply again and went back over the big hill. This time the two men weren't waving at them. Everyone on the helicopter could see the telltale suitcase and tube assembly that was used to transport Stinger missiles. The two soccer players were sitting on it.
Ryder looked over at Gallant. “That's enough for me,” he said.
Gallant just nodded. It was
that
time again.
He pushed a series of keys on one of the connected laptops. Its screen burst to life with an icon representing the large .50-caliber machine gun mounted in the chopper's nose. The word
READY
flashed on the screen. Gallant hit the enter key. The huge nose gun burst to life. Two seconds was all it took. The two terrorists, their launcher, and about fifteen feet of the top of the Space Ride's hill exploded into a cloud of fire and metallic dust. No sooner had this happened than a Northwest 747 airliner passed over the amusement park no more than 2,000 feet high and still climbing.
Ryder yanked back on the throttles as they passed over the remains of the big hill. There was no sign of the terrorists' bodies. They'd been vaporized.
“We won't have to waste a couple pigs on them,” Gallant said drily.
Ryder clicked the FLIR back on. The soccer cells always traveled together, four to a cell. This meant two more mooks were still down there somewhere. There was no way the team was going to let them go.
“There!” Gallant called out. He was pointing at the expanded FLIR screen that showed two figures running through the park's concert arena, heading toward the food court. “The other twoâI knew I could smell them all the way up here ⦠.”
Fox was already disconnecting one of the side door fifties from its swivel mount. They would have to do an insertion to take care of this. Bates started gathering up ammunition. Puglisi was checking his knives. Ryder and Gallant just looked at each other. One of them would have to go, too.
“My turn,” Ryder said. Gallant had done the Campo Raid and the Nebraska job.
But Gallant just shook his head.
“I'll go,” he said.
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Ryder swung the Sky Horse down toward the center of the park. There was an open area to the left of the waterslide, hard by the food courts.
Puglisi threw out the access ladder and started down almost immediately. Fox was close behind, holding the big fifty by its strap below him. Bates went next, his skinny postâhippie dude frame weighed down by two bandoliers of ammo. Gallant went down last, carrying Bates's gun as well as his own. And like Puglisi, Gallant was carrying a hatchet.
All four made it to the ground next to a huge attraction, a kind of high-tech fun house called the Angry Alien. Gallant gave Ryder the wave-off; Ryder immediately put some air under the chopper. He could see twice as many people pressed up against the park gate now. They were all looking in with great curiosity. Some were shouting; some were laughing. Some thinking it was perhaps a simulated battle being put on by the amusement park or maybe an antiterrorist security drill. Many were taking pictures and even videotaping the action. Ryder tried to keep his head together. It wouldn't be the first time the team had performed before an audience. During the Hormuz adventure, they'd made headlines on CNN more than once.
But that didn't mean he liked it.
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The two remaining terrorists
were
hiding close by the waterslide, as it turned out. They'd scrambled behind the sparse cover of an overturned picnic table. On their right was the food court. On their left, the entrance to the Angry Alien. To their rear was the huge wave tank, which was the size of a small ocean. In front of them, the four heavily armed, and armored, American soldiers were advancing on them.
The Islamic gunmen hadn't anticipated any of this. Why would they? They'd been led to believe that they would not
have to worry about getting caught or aggressively tracked down, at least not at first. They had been told that it had all been fixed. That when each four-man team was dropped off at their firing location there would be little to worry about concerning law enforcement agencies, that they'd be able to operate freely. They all had safe houses in Canada where they were to go once their individual missions were completed. As they understood it, someone high up in the U.S. government had even arranged it so they wouldn't have to stop for a search at the border.
So who then were these strange soldiers in their very strange helicopter? So suddenly they had blown away their two colleagues at the top of the roller coaster's big hill. This was not how the typical U.S. soldier acted. The terrorists knew this because each had fought Americans in either Afghanistan or Iraq. These days American soldiers did not shoot first and ask questions later but actually did the exact opposite. So sensitive were they to inflicting unwanted collateral damage, many gave up their own lives rather than harm an innocent civilian.
But not these soldiers. They'd turned their two colleagues into windblown gristle and now were making their way toward them. And they were trapped. There was nowhere inside the park for them to hide. The main gate was filled with hundreds of peopleâinnocents trueâbut the terrorists didn't have any firepower to shoot their way through them. The rest of the park was surrounded by a security fence that was simply too high for them to even consider climbing overâit had been erected to discouraged troublemakers from sneaking in. Plus they were armed only with pistols ⦠.
But that wasn't what drove all the fear into them. For now the soldiers were near enough for the terrorists to see them up close. The huge oversize helmets, the black combat suits, the gray body armor, the M16 lookalikes with trademark bayonets attached. But it was the patch the soldiers wore on their right shoulder that burned into their terrorists' eyes. The Islamic gunmen knew it well. It showed a billowing American flag with the silhouette of the Twin Towers on it. The initials
NYPD
and
FDNY
floating above. And below, a motto:
We Will Never Forget.
Seeing the patch told them who these bloody Americans from the sky were. Who they had to be.
They were the Crazy Americans.
The scourge of their comrades back in Hormuz and at Singapore and almost in Manila. The men who'd killed their sheikh, Abdul Kazeel.
Now they were
here
, in America, to get
them
.
Foolishly, in sheer terror, the terrorists began shooting at the Americans with their popguns. The badly aimed fire only served to pinpoint their position. Bates and Gallant opened up with their M15s immediately. The mooks were firing at them from behind nothing more than a wooden bench. Puglisi added fire, and the three streams of bullets pounded into the table, shredding it. One terrorist was blown away in the fusillade. The other scrambled away, fleeing into the entrance to the Angry Alien.
Ryder was watching all this from above, at least as best he could from a stationary hover. But then he was distracted from the one-sided gunfight by a flash of light off to his left. He looked out past the crowd at the main gate, out into the parking lot. That's when he saw the one thing he didn't want to see.