Sea fighter

by James H. Cobb

  They made no attempt to race from the scene, or to do anything else foolish to draw attention to themselves. They were leaving as they had come, as part of the meandering flow of small-craft traffic along the Gold Coast. There were no other weapons aboard the craft, nor any piece of military equipment or documentation. Should they be stopped and boarded by the Guinean military or police, as they probably would be before reaching home waters, there would be nothing to connect them with the Conakry attack.

  With its engine chugging softly, the pinasse turned away to the east, steering by the stars and by the flickering glow of the fires left behind in its wake.

  Over the ringing in his ears, Macintyre heard Christine Rendino give a soft, grating cry of pain and protest. Rolling his weight off her, the Admiral tried to get to his feet, blindly seeking for air that wasn’t tainted by dust and smoke and the acrid, sour stench of high explosives. As his hearing returned, he began to make out more of what was going on around them: the wail of an emergency vehicle siren, the belated iron honking of a Klaxon calling the base to battle stations, and the crackling roar of open flames. There were also weak calls for aid in half a dozen languages and cries of agony that could be universally understood.

  “What happened?” Christine asked, dazed.

  “Mortar barrage,” Macintyre replied shortly, helping the young female officer back to her feet. “Are you all right?”

  “I hurt all over, but no place too specific, so I guess I’m okay … Oh God!”

  Together the intel and the Admiral took stock of the holocaust that had broken loose around them.

  Out on the parking aprons, the French Transall had taken a direct hit. The aircraft and the fueling truck that had been servicing it were islands of incandescent wreckage in the midst of a lake of flame. The 747 air freighter was also engulfed in a haze of smoke, and the base fire trucks were converging on it in a desperate race to prevent another conflagration. Aircrews and linemen were running to the other grounded transports, checking for damage and making frantic preparations to tow or taxi the aircraft away from the spreading flames. Other blazes lit up the sky over the stores depots and in the base motor pool area.

  The arc lights had gone out, either killed by the attack or deliberately extinguished to make targeting for a second strike more difficult. Even so, the flickering illumination from the fires was enough to show that the headquarters building had taken a near miss. The revetments near the entryway were torn apart and the two Guinean army sentries on duty there lay sprawled in the sand spilling from the shredded sandbags. A short distance from where Macintyre and Christine stood, another white-clad figure also lay crumpled on the tarmac.

  “Emberly?” The Admiral took a step toward the fallen man. Then, from somewhere out on the flight line, there was a secondary explosion and a sudden flare of light. At his side, Macintyre heard Christine Rendino gave a choked moan of rising horror. Without thinking, he put his arm out to her, drawing her in and pressing her face against his chest, just as he would have tried to shield his own daughter.

  Only moments before, Christine Rendino had said that if Phillip Emberly didn’t take the West African Union more seriously, he’d get his head blown off. She’d meant the words as a warning, not as a prophecy.

  Upon later reflection, Christine Rendino would grimly conclude that some good had come with the Union attack. The base sections of the different national military missions had abruptly found themselves thrown together, working to extinguish the fires and tending to the wounded. Facilities would have to be shared as the base rebuilt itself and assistance was offered and accepted on all sides. Lines of communication would be established, reliances developed, bonds built in the great brotherhood of “them what’s been shot at.”

  Sometime after midnight, she found herself back in her office in the intelligence section. The window had been blown in and the glass scattered across the room, but beyond that things were intact. She sank stiffly into her chair and procured a condensation-wet can of Mountain Dew soda from the small ice chest wedged in behind her desk. Her summer whites were a bedraggled ruin, but then white was a stupid color for a military uniform anyway.

  “You wouldn’t have another one of those, would you, Commander?” Admiral Macintyre stood in her doorway, looking as smoke-stained and battered as she did. Christine started to get to her feet, but he waved her back. “Oh, stay put. As Halsey said, The shooting’s started, so we can dispense with all this damn jumping up and down business.’”

  “That’s good with me, Admiral,” Christine replied, digging another soda out of the cooler and passing it to the suddenly very human three-star. “Here you go, sir. It’s part of my private stash.”

  Macintyre popped the can’s tab and drank off half the contents in a single thirsty pull. “God, that might just let me get through the night. How’s TACNET? Did your people take any damage?”

  “We’re pretty much okay,” she replied. “The drone control station lost a transceiver antenna, but they have a spare in stock. And the guys over at the Predator group had a shell drop right beside their hangar. It only put a few holes in the wall, though. No personnel injured and no damage to the drones themselves. How bad did the rest of the base get it?”

  Macintyre brushed one of the office chairs free of glass fragments and sank into it. “Seven dead, three of them ours,” he replied. “Twenty-four wounded. Some losses in stores and equipment, but nothing that can’t be replaced. It could have been worse, except that Jim Stottard gets a gold star for the way he’s hardened this facility up. The supply depots and quartering areas are pretty well dispersed, and the revetments and blast walls he’s had built contained a lot of the damage.”

  Macintyre took another sip from the can. “Yeah,” he continued wearily. “It could have been a lot worse.”

  Christine flashed back to those hellish seconds out on the tarmac. She’d been in battle often enough before aboard the Cunningham, but there she’d at least had the psychological protection of the ship’s bulkheads around her. This night, though, she’d lain naked before the War Gods for the first time.

  She suppressed a shudder. “By the way, Admiral, thank you for knocking me on my face out there.”

  Macintyre shrugged. “Old instincts, Commander. Forget it.”

  “Whatever, sir.” She managed a grin. “And if you don’t mind, I answer better to Chris. I’m still just getting into this ‘Commander’ jazz.”

  Macintyre managed a grin of his own and an acknowledging nod. “Chris it is, then. And so, Chris, what happened out there tonight?”

  “A fast mortar strike almost certainly fired from a boat holding off the south end of the runway. It slipped in on us merged with the native coastal traffic and disengaged the same way. Twenty-four hours from now, with TACNET fully operational, we could hand you this guy on a silver platter. In fact, we probably could have spotted him working in. Since it isn’t, we can’t and we couldn’t, and he’s long gone. Sorry, sir.”

  “Forget that too. I’m aware that you and your people have been doing your damnedest to get your systems up and running. Unfortunately, our opponents are seldom obliging enough to work out a mutually agreeable schedule with us before starting their war. The major point is that Belewa has just thrown down the gauntlet. This so-called peacekeeping mission has just gone fangs out. And while this attack has resolved one of my problems, albeit in a pretty damn lousy manner, it also presents me with a larger one.”

  “Who do you bring in to replace Captain Emberly.”

  “Exactly. Phil Emberly may have had his limitations, but he was the only command-grade officer we had available who was current on the seafighter. Whoever I bring in as TACBOSS now will have to come up to technical speed on a new core weapons system for the Tactical Action Group. They’ll also need to develop an effective use doctrine for that weapons system while already deployed in an active war zone a
nd while coordinating operations for all of the other Action Group elements. And that doesn’t even touch on minor details like the restrictive rules of engagement, a fragmented U.N. command structure, a complex geopolitical scenario, and a severe manpower limitation!”

  Macintyre crumpled the soda can in his fist and tossed it into the wastebasket. “You wouldn’t know of any good professional miracle workers we could pick up on short notice, would you?”

  Christine found her eyes drifting toward the laptop computer on her desk and her mind drifting back to the e-mail she had read that afternoon. “Uh, well, I do happen to know of one who might be available, sir. And so do you.”

  She looked on expectantly, waiting for the Admiral to pick up on the hint. He did a moment later, a grin lighting his soot grimed features.

  “Yes!” Macintyre slapped his open palm down on the corner of her desk. “Where’s the communications center hidden around here, Chris? I need to talk with the Bureau of Personnel.”

  “It’ll be the middle of the night back in Memphis, sir.”

  “Then find out whoever the hell it is I need to wake up.”

  Currituck Sound,

  North Carolina 0027 Hours, Zone Time;

  May 4, 2007

  On a long blue and gold spring day, the little Cape Cod sloop had beat steadily southward within the long sheltering arm of Cape Hatteras. Lazily she had tacked against a mellow breeze, nosing curiously into inlets and by waters and following no particular course to anywhere.

  And now, with the coming of night, she tugged lightly at her mooring buoy. Her standing rigging creaked with the shift of the low swell and her mast tip inscribed lazy eights against a zenith glittering with a million piercing stars. Around her on the water, the moorage lights of the other yachts at rest in the small anchorage glowed companionably.

  “Tell me something, babe,” Vince Arkady inquired softly, his breath ruffling the bangs that swept low across Amanda’s brow. “Just what in the hell is a Seeadler?”

  Amanda Garrett, Commander, United States Navy, in another life, smiled lazily into Arkady’s rakishly handsome face. “It’s German, love. It means ‘sea eagle’.”

  “That’s a little pretentious for a twenty-four-foot cabin boat, isn’t it?”

  Amanda thumped her head firmly back down on her young lover’s shoulder. “I like it. It has deep connections with my first great love affair.”

  “Ah hah. Confession from your checkered past. This I have got to hear.”

  Amanda chuckled softly and shifted position, the two of them flowing into a new embrace on the clumped seat cushions—breasts to chest and thigh to thigh beneath the unzipped sleeping bag. After a dinner cooked in the sloop’s tiny galley, she and Arkady had lounged close in the cockpit, talking and watching the sun set. Gradually as the dusk settled, the making of conversation had segued smoothly into the making of love. As their clothing slipped away, the two had assembled this ad hoc bed on the cockpit floorboards, both of them savoring the freedom of the open sky above.

  Long bouts of slow, satisfying passion had followed, the kind shared between two well-versed and familiar lovers, interspersed with drowsing naps in each other’s arms and more sleepy pillow banter.

  “Okay, babe.” Arkady lightly kissed the bridge of her nose. “Start talking. Who was this first grand passion of yours?”

  “He was an aristocrat, I’ll have you know,” Amanda replied, giving her head a haughty toss. “He was a genuine Prussian count, an officer and a gentleman of the old school, and I but an innocent young thing of thirteen.”

  “Those Prussians start early, don’t they? What’d he do? Offer you a candy bar and a ride in his armored car?”

  Amanda lightly bit her bedmate’s shoulder. “He also died quite a few years before I was even born. His name was Captain Felix Von Luckner, also known to the Allies in World War One as ‘The Sea Devil’.”

  “And what did this Felix do to so arouse your passion?”

  “I’ll tell you. When he was thirteen, he ran away to sea, just like I desperately wanted to do. He left his father’s castle, abandoning his wealth and title and everything else to rove the world over as a common sailor aboard an old Russian square-rigger.”

  Arkady grinned and ran a hand down her flank. “I can see how that would work for you. Where’s the Sea Devil come in, and what does all this have to do with the name of your sloop?”

  “Well, eventually, my hero left the merchant marine and became an officer in the Imperial German Navy. When World War One broke out, he approached the German admiralty with an insane plan. He wanted to go a-raiding in the world’s last sailing frigate.”

  “A sailing frigate? In the First World War? You have to be kidding.”

  “Nope, and it was a brilliant notion in its way. Sail-powered, he had a global range because he never needed to refuel. And no one would suspect a sailing ship of being a commerce raider until it dropped its gun shields and opened fire. With absolutely nothing to lose, the Imperial Navy gave Von Luckner an elderly bark-rigged Brandenburg freighter. The count mounted a couple of small, concealed deck guns on her and renamed her …”

  “The Seeadler.”

  “Correct, Mr. Arkady.” She rewarded him with a light kiss. “At any rate, my beloved sailed away on Christmas Day, evaded the British blockade, and politely began to ravage the world’s sea-lanes.”

  “How do you politely ravage someone?”

  Amanda arched an eyebrow. “You have to ask? For all of his ferocious nickname, and in spite of being in the middle of one of the bloodiest wars in human history, the Sea Devil never took a life if he could avoid it. His technique was to sidle up alongside an Allied merchantman, put a shot across her bow, and capture her before any resistance could be offered.

  “All of the delicacies and alcohol from the prize’s officers’ mess would be transferred to the Seeadler, as would the contents of the ship’s safe. The crew and the male passengers would be put over the side in well-provisioned lifeboats, while the female passengers became the Count’s guests aboard his vessel. The prize would be scuttled, and the Count would transmit a radio message to the nearest Allied base, informing them of the lifeboats’ position. Then he would sail away to his next adventure.”

  Arkady was suitably impressed. “Now, that was a guy who knew how to make war.”

  “I agree. My count was eminently civilized … Mmm. If you insist on doing that, love, do it a little bit lower. Oh yes … Oh yes, yes, yes.” Amanda gave a squirm of appreciation for certain events taking place beneath the sleeping bag.

  “And how did you tie up with this latter-day Captain Kidd?”

  “Via a couple of old books by Lowell Thomas that I found in my father’s library. Count Luckner, the Sea Devil and The Sea Devil’s Fo’c’sle. They were full of wonderful sea stories as told by my count, some of which might even conceivably have been true. I must have read those books a dozen times over, and I fell hopelessly and desperately in love. So much so that when Dad bought me this sloop, there could be only one name for her.”

  “I see. And how did you get around the fact that the Sea Devil was on the other side during the Great War?”

  Amanda chuckled lowly and nestled closer, tucking her head under Arkady’s chin. “That was the best part of the whole love affair. I constructed this elaborate fantasy involving a beautiful young American woman, who peradventure resembled a somewhat more mature and filled-out version of myself at the time. She’s captured by the dashing Count Von Luckner, and after a number of thrilling adventures together in the South Seas, she, in turn, captures the Sea Devil’s heart and wins him over to the Allied cause.”

  Arkady exploded into helpless mirth, and Amanda retaliated with a firm pinch in a sensitive area. “Don’t laugh! The Count saved my life. If I hadn’t been able to escape with him to the South Pacific, I would have
smothered to death in Mrs. Mendelson’s fourth-period social studies class several times over.”

  Arkady chuckled again and eased back to his side of the cockpit. With deliberation, the aviator flipped the sleeping bag aside, laying Amanda bare to the starlight. For a long minute he studied each inch of her, the flow of tousled shoulder length hair sheening pewter in the faint silver glow, her fine planed features highlighted by shadow, her breasts, softened by mature womanhood yet still firm and high-riding, the smoothly curved lines of her dancer’s body, a strip of midnight slipping up between her thighs.

  “I’ll have to thank him someday, babe,” he whispered. “Losing you like that would have been a tragedy.”

  Amanda shivered for reasons beyond the cool breeze on her bare skin, and the spark of fire in her narrowing eyes came from something beyond the stars. Arkady covered her again, first with the sleeping bag and then with himself.

  Time passed. The Seeadler rocked cradlelike in the wake of a passing boat. Night drew on, the air chilled from cool to cold, and the first hint of the morning fog formed. Nestled warmly beside her lover, sleep should have come easily to Amanda, but didn’t.

  Even as the afterglow of her shared joy and passion had passed, that strange restlessness that had gnawed at her of late reasserted itself. And for the hundredth time she asked herself why.

  It was a brand of self-analysis that had grown increasingly frustrating over the past weeks. At this moment, she was at the pinnacle of her career. She’d commanded the ship she’d wanted. She’d had success in her endeavors and even a degree of fame, for what that was worth. Right now, everything she could ever ask for was within her grasp: honest love, companionship, and a bright future for the asking. And yet …

  Why not swallow the anchor? she self-argued savagely. Hang your medals up over the fireplace and tell this sweet boy beside you that you’re ready to marry. Have your child while you still have a couple of ticks left on your biological clock and then sit back in the sunshine and be content with all you’ve earned. Damn, damn, damn it, Amanda, what more do you want?