The Twisted Cross (42 page)

No sooner had he and his men dropped into the smelly armpit-high drainage ditch when the Nazi boats appeared. Using .50 caliber machine guns, as well as small rocket launchers, the Nazi sailors were plastering Dantini's tiny strike force and succeeded in pinning it down just about 500 feet from its objective.

Already five of his guys were severely wounded, the rancid water of the drainage stream making their critical wounds worse.

So it was under these circumstances, just as the Nazis were about to move in for the coup de grace on Dantini and his men, that he heard the strange screech of the approaching jet aircraft.

It was ear-splitting from ground level -a banshee-cry that was heard way before its source was seen. But when Dantini did first see it -despite the circumstances, he couldn't help but stare in awe at the airplane.

"So that's what it looks like," he thought as he spotted the red-white-and-blue fighter coming toward him at close to Mach 2 barely 20

feet off the surface of the Canal.

Dantini knew that Hunter was concentrating on deactivating the mines -in fact he knew that Washbucket #18 was just a tenth of a mile down from his present, precarious position.

So it was with complete surprise when he saw the F-16XEs nose light up as it was still a mile from him. Suddenly the Canal water started erupting as if it were being hit by a giant rain of fiery boulders. In an instant there was a lot of confusion out on the Canal. Fire and water mixed and filled the air with a strange-colored smoky vapor. Pieces of metal and wood and bodies were flying everywhere. The F-16XL streaked through this maelstrom in a nano-second, so fast it was almost too quick to be seen by the human eye.

When the smoke cleared, all four enemy boats were simply gone.

Twenty minutes later, so was the pump station.

All along the Canal, United American troops and pilots reported seeing the F-16XL, dodging groundfire, AA guns, SAMs while blasting enemy gun positions, bridges, boat facilities, fuel barges, while at the same time deactivating the underwater nuclear mines.

That Hunter's Mach 2 run of the Canal only took barely two and a half minutes at the most was lost in all the tales that came from it. People swore they saw the F-16XL not only blasting sites down along the banks of the waterway, but also dogfighting enemy F-4s two or three miles up, blasting SAM sites as far as ten miles from the Canal Zone, blasting a column of enemy tanks that had tried to retreat into Big Banana which was nearly 100 miles from the action.

Of these things folklore and legends are made.

The wildest story to come out of that incredible day of fighting was to be told over and over by 7th Cavalry commander Major "Catfish" Johnson.

And he, above all others, would swear his story was true.

The 7th Cavalry, having parachuted in two waves near the Atlantic side Canal locks, had been fighting a two-pronged battle against a numerically superior force of Canal Nazis for nearly five hours. Aided by the CATS gunships and the Free Canadian CA-10 Thunderbolts, advance elements of the 7 Cav finally reached the first set of locks only to find that Nazi reinforcements had made it there before them.

Now, with his entire unit pinned down just 100 feet from their objective, Catfish was considering calling in the CATS troop copters to pull the Cav out.

It wasn't that he was afraid for himself or his men. Like the original 7th Cavalry, he knew every one of them would fight to the last if necessary, especially against an enemy so repugnant as the Canal Nazis.

The reason he was considering the evacuation option was that they were fighting the area where Catfish knew the very last of the underwater nukes was located. He also knew that distance in war leads to desperation. And because they were battling the Nazis at the end of their communication line, so to speak, he knew that if anyone was going to get desperate, it would be the Cross officers charged with defending the locks. Taking the premise to its next logical conclusion, he knew if any of the nuclear bombs were to be detonated possibly by hand, it would

be here, the furthest Nazi outpost from The Twisted Cross's HO_ in Panama City.

So when planning for the mission, Catfish and Jones had agreed that, should things get very rough, the 7 Cav was to pull back.

And things had just gotten very rough.

The Nazis had brought up nine T-72 tanks and a dozen "Stalin Organ" multiple rocket launchers and with them were bombarding the 7th Cavalry, most of whom were pinned down along a highway which led to the locks.

One CA-10 was already down, crashed into the waterway, taking out a control station as it went in. Two of the CATS Chinooks were also hit and crashed landed. What was worse, scouts reported that several Nazi attack craft had moved up to the locks and that heavily-suited divers were preparing to go into the water. Catfish knew the only reason the Nazis would be going into the water was to do something nasty with the nuclear mines.

In the midst of all this, the F-16 appeared.

Looking down on the waterway from a slight rise, Catfish saw the jet fighter blazing down the Canal at 1200 mph. He watched as it neatly dodged two SAMs, all the while never diverting from its course, altitude or speed for more than a second.

But then, about a half mile from his position, the fighter ran into an incredible barrage of AA fire -a storm of AA shells that not even the Wingman could escape.

"Jesus, he's hit!" Catfish cried out, watching the action through his electronically-powered binoculars. A burst of smoke and flame had erupted under the fighter's left wing, probably from a 50-mm AA round. He instantly felt the pit of his stomach drop as he watched the F-16 pull up, smoke pouring from its underbelly.

Up it went - straight up, trailing flames and black vapor. Up until it was completely out of sight.

Catfish quickly checked his map and saw that the F-16 had been hit a quarter mile from the location of the very last underwater mine.

"Damn!" he cried out. "The crazy son of a bitch was able to get fifty-two of the bastards . . ."

Now through his own scope, Catfish could see the Nazi divers entering the water right over the last remaining active mine's location. He considered calling up his sharpshooters, but at the same time knew they would be too far away for a shot.

At that moment, the Nazis opened up with several larger guns they had brought up to complement their tanks. At the same moment, two Twisted Cross Phantoms arrived overhead and immediately peeled off and dropped napalm at the end of his column.

That was it. Catfish had seen enough. It killed him inside to do it, but he yelled back to his second-in-command to start getting the troops ready for a pullback and evacuation by air.

That's when he heard the strangest noise that had ever passed his eardrums.

At first it almost sounded like violins, oddly enough. Like an orchestra pit full of violins, all playing something different. Then the noise quickly changed pitch to something more electronic - almost like a blast of synthesized sound. And even quicker again, the noise took on another octave and it passed from a high piercing, oddly sweet sound to a full-throated roar

. . .

And it was coming from straight overhead.

Catfish looked up. His men looked up. Even the Nazis on the Canal locks looked up.

Out from the sun it came. Fire. Smoke. Noise. Power. It was the F-16XL.

"Christ, is it crashing?" the 7 Cav second-in-command cried out. "How can he make that airplane do that?"

Catfish had no idea. He couldn't have put it into words if he wanted to.

The F-16 was coming straight down -and not nose first. It was level -like a Harrier-but dropping like a rocket. It was still smoking heavily and one wing was completely engulfed in flames. Yet it kept on coming. Right down nearly on top of the boat the Nazi divers were using. And then, almost impossibly, the F-16XL appeared to go into a hover.

Catfish was not an aerodynamics expert, but he knew what he was seeing appeared to defy the laws of gravity and flight. Only later would he learn that the maneuver was actually a combination of something called a "vertical translation" and "pitched-axis pointing" -seemingly impossible actions for any airplane other than Hunter's Control-Configured/Supersonic Cruise and Maneuvering prototype-adapted Cranked Arrow.

All the while, just about every gun in the Nazis arsenal had turned away from the 7th Cavalry and was now shooting at the F-16.

"He's bombarding the Goddamn thing!" Catfish yelled out, as the F-16XL just seemed to hang in mid-air for the longest time. The 7th Cavalry officer knew that the deactivator pod must have been burning red -not from the flames on the F-16's other wing but because Hunter was cranking the power up so high, intent -to the death, if necessary -on defusing the last nuke.

In the middle of all this, one of the Nazi F-4s pulled • up and peeled off toward the strangely-configured F-16. It turned out to be a big mistake. No sooner had the enemy airplane turned in its direction did a Sidewinder flash out from under the flames of the F-16's wing and run a course straight and true right into the F-4's midsection. There was the usual huge explosion, and nothing left by a cloud of burning metal fibers.

A split-second later, the F-16 pulled up and roared away at an incredible rate of speed, still smoking heavily, its rear section almost entirely engulfed in flames.

Catfish had to shake his head to believe what he thought he just witnessed. It had seemed like the fighter had just been able to freeze time itself. Yet, in reality, it had hung-or actually did a tight circle -over the crucial spot in the Canal for no more than one and a half seconds. But it had been long enough, he would learn later, to scramble the radio signals of the last nuke and thereby disarm it.

"Unbelievable ..." he whispered.

They found Hunter six miles away.

The pilot of a CATS Chinook, on his way to providing fire support for the 7th Cavalry, radioed back to his base that the F-16 was down, crashed in a swamp about a mile in from the shore of Gatun Lake.

A MedicVac chopper was quickly dispatched from a United American troopship just approaching the Atlantic end of the Canal. Upon landing in the swamp, the medics first reported that the pilot looked unconscious - or worse. But after slopping through the waist-deep water they found Hunter was simply sound asleep.

He refused to be evacuated. Instead he insisted on being dropped off at the CATS island base. From there he spent the rest of the daylight hours serving as a waist gunner on one of the Chinooks. He was there when troops waiting on the ships offshore finally landed and reinforced the 7th Cavalry. Two hours later, the United American flag was flying over the captured locks.

He was there when the C-141 transports finally came in for bumpy but successful landings at Panama City Airport, relieving Shane's brave troops and spearheading the breakout toward the Pacific side locks. His Chinook was instrumental in the successful battle for the locks that followed.

He climbed into an F-20 around dusk and joined Fitzgerald's Wild Weasel F-105X

Super Thunderchiefs in another SAM suppressing mission over Panama City.

This action in turn cleared the way for a second massive B-52 strike on the center of the city which all but eliminated the last Nazi stronghold on the Pacific side of the Canal.

Midnight found him driving a Huey MedicVac chopper back and forth from the Panama City airport to the rented Big Banana air base. At 3 AM the next day, he was in the seat of a CA-10 Thunderbolt, flying alongside Major Frost on a nighttime mop up sweep of the Canal.

At dawn he was back in the swamp with his beloved airplane, supervising as one of the CATS mighty Sky Cranes lifted the damaged fighter out of the muck and onto one of the container ships offshore.

At noon, he was washed and dressed in a new flight suit and standing beside Jones during a brief ceremony at the Panama City Airport, during which Jones accepted the unconditional surrender of The Twisted Cross from a lowly officer in the Nazis' logistics section. As it turned out, he was the highest ranking officer left in the immediate area.

Everyone else, including the High Commander, had fled Panama City for parts unknown soon after the first bombs started falling on the capital city.

Hunter had just applied another coat of sun tan lotion to his face when he looked up and saw a young girl standing over him, handing him a package.

He stretched, flipped up his sunglasses and took the package from the kid.

"What's that?" Janine asked. She was lying on the beach beside him, soaking up the bright rays.

"I'm not sure," he said, wishing he had some money to tip the delivery girl.

"Go see Brother David," he said to the girl. "Tell him Hunter said to give you a gold piece."

The girl's eyes went wide with joy as she ran off the beach and back toward the huge pyramid-shaped Cancun resort hotel-turned-mission.

Lori, sunbathing topless on his other side, turned over and handed him a cold beer. Nearby, JT, Ben Wa and Fitz were playing poker with three of the other women "entertainers" who had taken sanctuary with the Fighting Brothers. Still further on, the commodore, Dantini, Burke and the entire four-man complement of the Cobra Brothers were setting up a large steel-grates-over-barrels barbecue stove in preparation for the shrimp and fish fry that was scheduled for noon.

Hunter popped his beer can -courtesy of Masoni and O'Gregg-and opened the package.

It was from Jones, a summary report of the war against The Twisted Cross which came to its successful

conclusion exactly two weeks before that day.

He quickly glanced over the casualty reports. All things considered, they weren't too high -a total of 741 men killed, 3083 wounded. Estimates of Nazi dead were put at 6200, with twice as many wounded. A total of 23 UA aircraft were lost, including two F-20s and one C-141. Sixteen helicopters had been shot down or damaged beyond repair.

On the other hand, only seven Nazi F-4s had survived the battle. They had been dispatched to Texas where they would be broken down and used for parts.