Sea fighter

by James H. Cobb

  A bead of sweat trickled down the back of her neck, and she impatiently flipped her cap into the HumVee’s backseat. “I’ll be shifting the TACNET command and analysis nodes out to the Floater sometime during the next couple of days. Like all of the other tactical elements, we’ll be running our show from out there. Barring any Murphys, we should have the whole package integrated and functional in about another twenty-four to thirty-six hours.”

  Macintyre nodded. “And how about everybody else?”

  “About the same status, sir. We’re all getting there. The problem is that we’re … that is, our people, the Brits and the French, are all getting there separately. It’s still a stovepiped command structure. Everybody’s still operating in their own little national boxes. There’s almost no cross-coordination going on. Everyone’s waiting for the official word about how the local chain of command is going to be set up.”

  Macintyre grunted and rested his arm on the open window frame of the Hummer. “I’m bringing in a word all right, Commander. But it may not be the one anybody wants to hear. Now, I need to know something else. How’s Captain Emberly doing with the Tactical Action Group?”

  Christine winced inwardly, suddenly feeling thin professional ice under her skates. If it had been Amanda sitting there next to her, she knew how she would have answered. On the other hand, she was out in the real navy now. She opted for the PC response. “I don’t have much input on that, sir,” she said, carefully wording the reply. “I’m sure that Commander Emberly will be able to fill you in better than I can.”

  “Dammit, pull this thing over!”

  Obediently, Christine pulled the Humvee over to the muddy roadside. Twisting around in the passenger’s seat, Macintyre fixed her with a stern stare. “Commander, when I spoke with Amanda Garrett about attaching you to my staff, she assured me of two things. One being that you are always aware of everything that’s going on around you. The other was that you always can be trusted to lay the facts on the line.

  “Now, I’m fully aware that Captain Emberly is the theater TACBOSS and that you are answerable to him in the chain of command. However, I am not asking you, as a junior officer, to professionally rate Captain Emberly while he’s not present. I am asking you, as one of my intelligence officers, to provide me with an assessment of a critical situation affecting this operation. Now, come across with it, young lady.”

  Christine sighed, her hands resting on the steering wheel. “Captain Emberly has done really good work with getting the seafighters ready to go,” she replied. “PG-AC l is working up rapidly, and the support bases for both it and Patrol Craft Group 9 have been established and are fully operational. I can’t fault the job he has done with his systems and his personnel. Beyond that, I can’t say, sir. I haven’t had the chance to work with him very much.”

  “Hasn’t he been working with you on a doctrine and operations plan?”

  She shook her head. “No, sir, he has not. Maybe he’s working on something with his own people, but he hasn’t been accessing either me, TACNET, or the theater database to any great degree. I also know that he hasn’t been making any medicine with anyone over at PC-9. I’ve had words with Lieutenant Commander Klasinski about this, and he and his Special Boat Squadron people are getting nervous over it. Mission planning doesn’t seem to be a priority with Captain Emberly.”

  Christine hesitated for a moment, then took a deep and deliberate breath and plunged on. “I’ve tried to bring the subject up with the Captain, but he keeps sliding me off. His primary focus has been on getting his hardware good to go and not on what he’ll be doing with it.

  “The impression I get is that all he thinks he needs to do is to wave a little high tech under the Union’s nose and the bad guys will all throw up their hands, scream ‘Lawsy me,’ and faint. Well, fa’sure it’s not going to work that way, Admiral. We have a damn tricky situation developing down here, and Captain Emberly needs to realize it real fast.

  “I hope that was straight enough for you, sir?” she finished apologetically.

  Macintyre nodded slowly. “Quite adequate, Commander. I was afraid of something like this. I agree. You can’t find fault with the work Phil Emberly’s done with the seafighter program up to this point. He’s a damn good R and D man, but that’s all he is. He doesn’t have any combat time under his belt.”

  Christine shrugged her shoulders. “There aren’t all that many of us that do, sir. Everybody has a first time out.”

  “I know. And, blast it, the seafighters are Phil’s baby. Besides, he’s literally the only command-rated officer we have who’s qualified on combat hovercraft. Still …”

  Silently Macintyre grimaced and faced forward again, slouched deeper in his seat. Christine found it easy to read his mind. Do you fire a promising young officer from his first command, almost certainly ruining his career without giving him his chance? Or do you risk a crew and a mission with an overconfident greenhorn? Or do you weasel and walk the line by trying to talk a test-bed sailor into a warfighter’s mind-set?

  Christine promised herself that she’d get out of the uniform long before she ever reached flag rank. “Life’s a bitch and then you die, sir,” she said sympathetically.

  Macintyre glanced up at her and a wry smile touched his face. “Words of wisdom, Commander. Drive on. You mentioned that TACNET was starting to produce some results. Anything indicative yet?”

  “Just that it’s real quiet out there for the moment. Union naval operations have dropped right off the scale ever since the interdiction was declared. Hardly any action at all along the Guinea coast.”

  “Any chance we might have them a little intimidated?”

  Christine Rendino shook her head as she popped the Hummer back into gear. “No way, sir. These guys are just lying low and scoping us out. The West African Union has a good Humint network operating inside Guinea. It’s sure money that they have us under observation. Right now, they’re gauging our force strengths and capacities. When they’re ready, they’ll start moving again.”

  “Do you have one of your famous prognostications on what that next move is going to be?”

  “That one’s easy,” Christine replied. “Eighty percent probability of a direct attack against the U.N. interdiction forces. Probably right here at Conakry. Also probably very soon, before we’re fully set up and ready for him.”

  “You seem sure Belewa is going to take us on directly?”

  “Fa’ certain sure, Admiral. Belewa can walk in and take Guinea anytime he wants to. He just has to kick us out of the way first.”

  Offshore, the rain had slackened and the mist had started to lift. A Guinean navy patrol launch slid past, its crew sprawled on the deck in various postures of lackadaisical unconcern. In much the same way, the crew of the pinasse lounged atop the cargo that filled its midships section. Only with them, it was a carefully staged pose. Alert eyes narrowed, and as they drew near their objective, each handpicked sea warrior ran his duties over in his mind.

  They could see the coast now. And beyond the surf line and the beach, they could also see the approach lights of the air base glowing blue in the growing dusk.

  With civil air travel at a standstill because of the unrest in-country, the U.N. military mission had taken over the old passenger terminal at Conakry International as its headquarters. Sandbag revetments and barricades of earth-filled oil drums had gone into place around the building’s exterior, converting the low-set concrete structure into an ad hoc fortress. Communications antennas sprouted from the roof and diesel generators snored, supplementing the uncertain local power grid.

  Inside, hastily erected partitions subdivided waiting areas and concourses into office space. The terminal restaurant was now a mess hall, serving up field ration meals around the clock, and weary members of the headquarters cadre caught an occasional fragment of sleep on the cots lining the hallways.

/>   The airport’s lounge had become the headquarters briefing center, the shelves behind the bar having been emptied out and the exterior picture windows closed off with heavy slabs of plywood. Only the frivolous split-bamboo furnishings remained, striking an incongruous note as the UNAFIN commanders gathered to speak about war.

  “Gentlemen, forget your nerve gases, your high-energy lasers, and your genetically engineered biotoxins. This is the premier superweapon of the twenty-first century.”

  The picture projected onto the wall screen was one of abject deprivation. A cluster of black Africans—men, women, and children—sat hunkered in the dust. Gaunt inside their rags, disease-warped and weary beyond their years, they stared with blank-eyed incomprehension into the camera lens.

  Christine Rendino paused for a moment to let the image have its impact, then she continued. “Excess population, gentlemen. There’s plenty of it lying around. It’s self-deploying with the occasional prod of a bayonet, and man, if you happen to be a Third World dictator, it’s efficient. You can get rid of a whole bunch of people you don’t like by burying them alive under a whole bunch of people who don’t like you.”

  She had a small audience; only half a dozen other officers sat in the semidarkness. However, even this little group was further divided. Emberly and Stottard sat at one table, while the two British liaisons were at another. Lieutenant Mark Traynor from the Royal Navy’s minehunter group looked cool and very old empire in the white socks and shorts of his tropical uniform. However, Squadron Leader Evan Dane, his counterpart from the Provisional patrol helicopter group, denied the heat in the gray Nomex flight suit of a naval aviator.

  Spare and wary, Lieutenant Commander Trochard, from the French navy’s offshore patrol, sat alone at yet a third table. The barriers dividing the representatives of the different military missions were invisible but decidedly present. Admiral Macintyre leaned against the wall at the back of the room. Scowling, he looked on as Christine doggedly continued.

  “Using an artificially created flood of refugees to destabilize a neighbor state has been a proven and accepted battle tactic in Africa since before Zaire turned back into the Congo. The Serbs tried it in the Balkans as well. You just have to have a certain … pragmatic attitude to employ the doctrine.”

  The voice of Squadron Leader Dane came out of the shadows. “It seems to me that by herding all of your enemies in one place, you’d just be making it easier for them to unite against you, Commander.”

  “You’re forgetting the Africa factor, the sheer poverty and lack of available resources. If you’re a subsistence farmer in the Guinea backcountry who’s being deluged by starving Union refugees, the refugees themselves present a far more immediate threat to your survival than the government initiating the problem. Once the food riots begin and the blood feuds get going, you can’t get the factions to work together. How do you organize an army to fight a common enemy when your soldiers are all busy fighting each other for the last handful of rice in the bowl?”

  Christine swept her pointer across the screen again. “Multiply this picture fifty thousand times over and you have what the government of Guinea and the U.N. aid agencies are having to deal with right now on a daily basis. Comparatively speaking, our problems are a little simpler, but just comparatively.”

  She clicked the projector controller in her left hand and the image on the screen shifted to one of the Premier of the West African Union. Clad in worn bush fatigues and with the cap pulled low and shading his face, he stood in front of a camouflaged armored vehicle.

  “This gentleman is General Obe Belewa, career army officer and professional military dictator. Unlike certain other Africans who have aspired to this office, such as the late and unlamented Idi Amin and Muammar Qaddafi, this guy actually knows what he’s doing.”

  Christine crossed her arms and leaned back against the wall beside the screen. “If you want an example, consider this. His first major action upon reorganizing his military after the Liberian takeover was to establish a joint army-navy NCO training academy staffed by the best of the old lifer sergeants from his ECOMOG garrison force.”

  Christine was pleased to see that she’d gotten some attention with that statement. Frequently a straight line could be drawn from point A to point B; good noncommissioned officers meant a good fighting unit.

  “That’s the way Belewa works,” she continued. “He puts his resources into training, logistics, and combat support. He will not acquire any weapons system unless he can also acquire an adequate technical base to service it. If you check out the West African Union’s Table of Organization, you won’t find a bunch of complex and expensive jet fighters and main battle tanks sitting around rusting because they can’t be maintained. What you will find are a lot of very basic infantry weapons: machine guns, rocket and grenade launchers, mortars, and recoilless rifles. However, these weapons will be in good working order, they will have plenty of ammunition, and they will be manned by people who know how to use them.”

  Offshore, the day was dying out beyond the Camayenne Peninsula. The crew of the pinasse used the last trace of the brief equatorial twilight to seek for the marker they had been told would be waiting for them.

  They found it. A tree branch bobbing upright in the low oily swells. A totally undistinguished bit of flotsam, it would have taken several minutes of careful observation to note any thing unusual about it at all. Specifically, that it wasn’t drifting with the sluggish tidal currents. It had been anchored a carefully calculated number of yards offshore.

  The captain cut the engine and more anchors splashed down, heavy stones linked by rope to the bow and stern of the little craft, holding it broadside to the shore …and directly in line with the lights of the buildings strung out beside the Conakry airfield runway.

  The briefing continued.

  “Belewa may be an army puke, but he also understands sea power and how to use it. While he’s been waging guerrilla warfare against Guinea by land, he’s also launched a parallel campaign off their coast. Fishing villages have been raided and coastal shipping has been shot up. In addition, every navigational aid along the Guinea coast has been taken out and the harbor approaches mined.

  “Major damage is being done here. By hitting the fishing villages, they’re cutting off a desperately needed food source. They’re also driving the villagers inland to further inflame the refugee problem. Disruption of coastal shipping is putting a further strain on the ground transport network, which isn’t all that much to begin with, and the mining threatens to isolate Guinea from both international aid and overseas commerce. Part of the UNAFIN blockading mission will be to prevent these incursions into Guinea’s coastal waters.”

  “A question, Commander.” Trochard, the French navy liaison, spoke in mildly accented English. “What kind of mines are we speaking of? What models? Where is their origin?”

  Christine glanced over at the British mine warfare officer. “You want to answer that one, Lieutenant Traynor?”

  The Englishman nodded. “So far, we’ve seen a very basic but effective moored contact mine of local manufacture. The West African Union has apparently set up a production line to build these weapons to a set standard. It’s rather clever really. They’re using old hot-water tanks as mine hulls.”

  There was a brief snort of laughter from Commander Emberly. Traynor only lifted an eyebrow. “It’s not all that funny, Commander. These mines carry a sixty-five-pound charge of civilian blasting gelatin, more than adequate to sink a patrol boat or put a hole in a freighter hull. A Dutch ore carrier has been badly damaged, and two coastal ferries have been sunk with a heavy loss of life. To date we’ve located and swept seven more of these damn things in the approaches to Conakry and Rio Nunez. Every one of them has detonated as advertised.”

  The American TACBOSS gave a noncommittal grunt and looked away.

  “What has the Guinea military been
doing through all this, Commander?” Macintyre inquired from the back of the room.

  “Pretty much what you’d expect,” Christine replied, “with the expected outcome. When the Union started hitting the coastal areas with their two- and three-gunboat raids, Guinea stepped up their naval cutter and police launch patrols and deployed platoon-size army garrisons to some of the coastal villages. The Union waited until the patrols and garrisons were in place, then swarmed the coast with a series of ten- and twelve-boat search-and-destroy sweeps. They shot hell out of the navy patrols and totally flattened several of the garrisoned villages. The local military was handed a decisive defeat and the Conakry government lost a heck of a lot of face with the coastal tribes.”

  “It strikes me that what we’re seeing here is Mao’s classic guerrilla warfare doctrine applied in a maritime environment.”

  “Exactly, Admiral.” Christine changed screen images again. This time the photograph was of a sleek and low-riding speed boat, perhaps forty feet long, and painted in a mottled gray and green camouflage. Its hull was open from bow to stern except for a small, enclosed helm station amidships. Driven by a pair of powerful outboard motors, it carried a brace of Russian made 14.5mm KPV heavy machine guns in a twin mount forward. Hardpoints for other automatic weapons were spaced along the Fiberglas bulwarks. Its crew, half a dozen fit and wiry Africans, clad only in ragged shorts, looked up belligerently at the aircraft taking the picture. They were a considerable contrast to the refugees seen earlier in the briefing.

  “This is the Union’s weapon of choice for littoral warfare. I’m sure you all recognize this little guy from the Good Old Days in the Persian Gulf. It’s a Boghammer gunboat, Sweden’s gift to the maritime terrorist. Cheap, fast, easy to maintain, and great for work in shallow coastal water. The Union has about forty of them in commission, operating in four ten boat squadrons. Two squadrons, the guys giving Guinea grief, base out of Yelibuya Sound in what was Sierra Leone. The other two operate over Frenchside, covering the coastal smuggling pipelines in from Côte d’Ivoire.