According to Jane’s, the administration building was down the road to the right, a hundred meters or so beyond the main gate, overlooking the parade ground. Driving sedately along the potholed street, the two jeeps passed a platoon of men in ragged ranks drilling on the dusty parade ground and another group under an acacia tree listlessly watching a sergeant disassembling a heavy machine gun. Nobody paid them more than cursory attention as they slid to a stop in front of the single-story building of whitewashed cinder block.
Forte climbed out of the jeep and entered the building, followed by his men. Two stood on either side of the first door on the right, which bore a plaque that read “Commanding Officer,” while the others rounded up and bound the eight enlisted men in the building and deposited them in the orderly room. Forte then posted men at strategic points in the passageway, detailed one to keep watch on the communications room, and knocked on the door.
A voice barked: “Come!”
Forte opened the door and went in, followed by half a dozen of his men with their rifles at the ready. Unlike the other rooms in the low building, this was deliciously cool. The windows giving onto the parade ground were shuttered, and high in the wall an air-conditioning unit hummed contentedly.
Sitting behind the desk in an ample but neatly tailored tunic that splendid breasts strained to fill, straight golden hair reaching just to her shoulders, and imperious dark eyes framed by high cheekbones, Major Elena A. Maksimova–unless the nameplate on the desk lied–was the best argument he had yet seen for women in the service.
Two men, Soviet lieutenants, had frozen when Forte came through the door. One was a peasant at his desk on the left, the other a slender, dreamy-eyed fellow bending over some papers on the major’s desk.
“Good morning, Major,” said Forte politely. “You have SP-9 ‘Skidder’ surface-to-air missiles on this base. I am here to relieve you of some of them. When I get them, you will all be released unharmed.”
“You will never leave this base alive,” the major promised.
“Want to bet?” He pulled a silenced pistol from his belt and grabbed the woman roughly by the hair. He shoved the pistol under her ear.
Forte looked at the two lieutenants. The tall, dreamy-eyed one–his name tag said Karlinskiy–paled.
“I’m going to count to three: one–two–”
“No!” cried Karlinskiy, coming out of his trance. He threw himself at Forte but was pinioned by two of Forte’s men.
“You want to see her die, tovarishch?” sneered Forte.
“No, pleasel”
“Idiot!” screamed the major, and took a deep breath for a shout that would have brought the walls down.
Forte clamped his hand around her face, and her cry died aborning. She bit him, scratched at his face, and stomped on his foot with her service boot. From the pain, which brought tears to his eyes, Forte guessed it must have been about size eleven and hobnailed.
One of the men came to his aid with the adhesive tape, and a moment later she was firmly bound in her chair.
Lieutenant Potato-face hadn’t batted an eye. He sat in his chair, stolid and unconcerned.
“You seem like a reasonable man, Lieutenant Karlinskiy,” said Forte. “Now here’s the way it’s going to be: We get six ‘Skidders’ and everybody lives. We don’t get the ‘Skidders’…” He nodded toward his men-at-arms.
Karlinskiy swallowed hard and tried to avoid his superior’s maddened eyes.
“Just six?”
“Just six,” Forte assured him. “Take two of my men to help you load them in the jeep.”
Twenty minutes later, through the shutter louvers, Forte observed the discreet thumbs-up sign of his squad leader. A minute later he took a last look at the two Russian officers, gagged and bound to each other back to back.
In the corridor outside he mustered his men. “Radio?”
“Totaled,” said the man detailed for the job in the radio shack. “All the telephone lines cut and the PBX smashed.”
“Enemy situation?”
“Most of them are in the mess hall having lunch.”
“Let’s go.”
Forte led them out onto the veranda and down the steps. Without haste, they arranged themselves and their weapons in the jeeps and set off toward the gate. There Lieutenant Karlinskiy obediently signaled the sentries to raise the barrier as the jeeps approached, and they passed through without even slowing down.
At the junction with the dirt road by which they had come, the two jeeps took a right instead of a left and picked up speed as they passed from view of the guard tower. In the rear, the man in charge of the caltrops now began to distribute them liberally in the wake of his jeep.
They bounded down the rutted road, across dry streambeds, and around knolls burned clear of vegetation by brush fires and the searing sun, toward their rendezvous point seven kilometers on the other side of the camp from which they had landed.
Suddenly the road ahead of them blossomed with puffs of dust, and an instant later a MiG-23 thundered past, made a wing-over at two thousand meters, and came back at them head on. One jeep dashed to the left into the inadequate shelter of a shallow gully. Forte’s vehicle bounced off to the right and stopped under the spreading branches of an afzelia tree. The men dispersed, seeking cover wherever they could find it.
The MiG returned, its machine guns stitching the road they had been traveling seconds before.
Forte, prone behind a rotting log, looked at his watch. They were due to rendezvous with the Piper at 12:15. It was now 12:01. Unless they got out, and fast, other MiGs would come, and one of them would spot the Piper in its clearing in the forest and cut it to pieces. Their line of retreat would be cut.
“Jackson,” said Forte to the black who was lying under the jeep with the Russian officer, “you’re supposed to know how to fire these things.”
Jackson nodded.
“Well, do your stuff!”
Jackson clambered from his refuge and, with Forte’s help, quickly withdrew one of the “Skidder” missiles from its tube. He adjusted the sights, armed the propulsion charge and the missile, and balanced the launcher on Forte’s shoulder, facing back the way they had come. The MiG’s next run would come from that direction and would probably be low. Jackson aimed at the break between the hills, took a deep breath, and released half of it. His finger rested lightly on the trigger.
The MiG appeared without warning. It was going only five hundred kilometers per hour or so–any faster and he would be past his target before he saw it–and his relatively slow speed gave Jackson the fraction of a second he needed.
For an instant the MiG was in the cross hairs less than a kilometer away. He pulled the trigger.
Half a second later a shower of flaming debris rained down over fifty acres of countryside. Part of a wing whistled down through the air, slicing through a branch of the afzelia tree. In falling, it raked Forte and Jackson across the face and arms.
Karlinskiy ran for the bushes.
“Let’s go!” yelled Forte, brushing blood out of his eyes with his sleeve.
The jeep broke cover and lurched toward the road. The other jeep was already barreling down the road ahead of them.
Two minutes later they were loading the SP-9s aboard the Piper, which was waiting in the clearing with its props already turning over lazily.
Then they were airborne, hedge-hopping due west,
flying as near to the ground as the pilot dared in hopes that they would not show on the MiGs’ look-down radar. The sea was just ahead, breakers foaming along the palm-fringed shore. The pilot descended still farther, to wavetop level, and firewalled the throttle.
“I’ve got two bogies at 170 degrees, range 18 kilometers,” he said to Forte, who was standing tensely behind him. He pointed to the radarscope.
“Then we’d better give them something else to think about,” said Forte.
He took the small transmitter from his pocket and pushed the red button.
They were too far away by now to hear the explosion or even to see the black mushroom rising in the sky as the Swedru ammunition dump erupted in flames, ignited by the radio-controlled charge planted by Jackson.
“They’ve turned away,” reported the pilot.
“Good. What’s our ETA?”
The pilot punched numbers into the calculator on the instrument panel. “If we can cruise at nine thousand meters, we should touch down on the Alamo at 1:33.”
“Radar’s clean. Take her up,” Forte ordered. “But keep your eyes peeled for the nasties.”
Forte went back to the passenger compartment, where he allowed one of the men to tend to his cuts. They weren’t much, and even as the iodine burned into them Forte’s mind was on other things.
If they reached the Alamo on schedule, they would have two hours to make preparations before the three enemy planes were due to sow carbon black and anthrax over the Alamo. That is, if the whole damned thing wasn’t a hoax. The time was sufficient for all the action necessary; the problem was that the means no longer were.