“I am pleased to hear it, Royalty. And we got Union guys coming out of the bush with their hands up. Those that can still walk, anyway.”
Amanda went relief limp in her seat. “Look at it this way, Mudskipper. At least we convinced them to surrender.”
The whisper mike at the other end of the circuit caught a faint but decisive snort. “Hell, two yards closer and you’d have convinced me to surrender too!”
Reviere Morbaya Tidal Estuary 0237 Hours, Zone Time;
June 5, 2007
Standing clear of the tidal channel once more, the Queen of the West blazed with real illumination. With her running and interior lights turned full up, she conducted a simultaneous loading and unloading operation. Her miniraider shuttled Marines, captured documentation, and Union prisoners out from the boat hide to the loitering hovercraft. There the documentation and prisoners were, in turn, winch-lifted to a hovering Marine CH-60 cargo helicopter for transport to Conakry.
The deck-to-helo transfer of unwilling individuals in total darkness was an exacting and tricky business. Even so, there was no other option. The Queen had other calls to make this night, and she couldn’t be burdened with unnecessary passengers.
Forward, under the cockpit, Danno O’Roark sat leaning forward into his console, his face held in his hands. “I’m dead,” he murmured. “I am so goddamn dead, my corpse stinks.”
At his side, his co-gunner and friend, the Fryguy, could only nod thoughtfully. “Yeah. That about sums it up.”
Suddenly, the Lady herself hunkered down between the two fire-control stations. “All right, gentlemen,” she said crisply. “Let’s hear what happened.”
Gritting his teeth, Danno described what had led up to the erroneous rocket firing, his gun-safety error, his fumbled miscall of the weapons menu, his buck fever and personal panic. He left nothing out and made no attempt to spare himself. He’d bitched his duty and had likely ruined any future he had in the Navy, but by God, he wasn’t going to further humiliate himself by trying to make lame excuses.
Captain Garrett only nodded when he finished. “I see,” she said finally. “Okay, Danno, I want you to write up a report on this event. Concentrate on what changes you think we need to make in our hardware, software and operational procedures to eliminate the possibility of this glitch happening again. Have it ready to go, oh, day after tomorrow. We’ll go over it with Lieutenant Commander Lane and see what we can work out. As the Queen’s senior gunner, we’re going need your help in getting this bug worked out of the system. Can do?”
“Yes, ma’am! Can do, ma’am!”
She straightened, giving the gunner’s mate a light slap on the shoulder. Turning away, Amanda Garrett left behind both an intensely relieved young man and yet another individual who would willingly charge hell at her beck and call.
“There they come,” Snowy called, peering aft from her cockpit side window.
Standing up, Amanda slid open the overhead hatch. With one foot on the arm of the navigator’s chair and a hand braced on the gunners’ saddle, she lifted her head and shoulders up and out of the cockpit for a look around.
At forty knots, the predawn air was deliciously cool and the slipstream whipped her with her own hair, each strand a microscopic tingling lash. A few stars still glinted in the zenith, but streaks of pink and gray on the eastern horizon heralded the sunrise. In the faint ruddy light Amanda could make out two sleek, dark forms overtaking the Queen, each shadow riding atop a pad of pale, faintly luminescent spray.
She dropped back to the deck and reclosed the hatch, locking out the wind roar and turbine howl. Steamer Lane was already in communication with the other two hovercraft.
“Frenchman and Rebel, Frenchman and Rebel. This is Royalty. Form up on me in starboard echelon. Proceeding to objective L3.”
“Very pretty rendezvous, Steamer,” Amanda commented. “We’re right where we’re supposed to be on our time line. The Tactical Action Group has earned itself a very well done so far tonight.”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you,” Lane replied. “About that time line, ma’am. If we crank up our speed a little we can get to that last Union hide while we still have some dark to work with.”
Amanda settled back beside the navigator’s console. “No, that’s really not necessary, Steamer. Hold your current speed and conserve your fuel. Our set ETA on target will be fine.”
Lane shrugged and glanced back over his shoulder at the second passenger in a “Well, I tried” manner. Stone Quillain slumped in the starboard jump seat, his flak jacket unzipped and his shotgun propped beside him. The big Marine smelled of caked mud and sweat and other organics, and his eyes glinted coldly in a face still streaked with camouflage paint.
“You know,” he said after a moment, “somebody’s bound to have gotten away from one of those other hides we hit.”
“There’s a pretty good chance of it,” Amanda agreed quietly.
“They could have gotten to a radio. Got an alert out. This outfit could know we’re coming.”
“It’s a safe bet they know something is up by now,” she replied, fixing her gaze at the dawn beyond the cockpit wind screen.
Quillain sat forward. “They’re going to have their security up. If we go busting in there after first light, we’re going to be spotted and they’ll bug out on us, sure as hell.”
Amanda refused to meet the Marine’s angry glare. Instead she lifted a Styrofoam cup from her console, taking a placid sip of the tea it contained. “Probably.”
“Hell, I’ve said all along that the L3 hide is the one we should have taken out first! It’s their biggest and the closest to Union territory. From that point they have their best chance of successfully executing an escape and evasion! They only have to run south along the coast for a few miles and they’re back in their home waters!”
“Quite right, Captain. As I said during the briefing, those are all very valid points.”
Amanda took another deliberate sip of tea and Quillain slammed back into his seat, muttering under his breath not quite loudly enough to earn a court-martial.
Matakong Channel 0519 Hours, Zone Time;
June 5, 2007
The fiery half ball of the sun edged above the low inland hills as the seafighter squadron stood through the straits between Matakong Island and the Guinea coast. The sky, clear except for the heat haze already building along the horizon, promised another searing equatorial day. The passengers and crew of a pinasse ferrying across to the mainland looked on with concern as the hovercraft formation blasted past.
“Good morrrrrrning, Africa,” Christine Rendino’s voice issued from the cockpit’s overhead loudspeaker, ebullient in spite of a night spent in front of the screens in the operations center.
“What do you have for us, Chris?” Amanda replied.
“Too much neat stuff to tell about. Currently, we have sixteen prisoners in the bag along with four confirmed hostile KIAs. We have over a hundred weapons captured, including four of those Union sea mines. The Brit minehunter guys are turning handsprings over that. Several tons of fuel ammo and supplies have been secured, and we have documents, documents, documents.
“I’ve had a quick look at some of the stuff the helos have brought in, and I can already tell you we have enough stuff to convince even a Berkeley journalist that Belewa and the West African Union are behind the Guinea insurgency.”
“That’s good, Chris, but what do you have for us now? We’re in Matakong Channel about ten minutes out from L3 hide.”
“I got ya a Predator over the hide at ten thousand feet. Real-time visual is up on your datalink.”
Using the Mast Mounted Sighting System, the AQ-1 reconnaissance drone could barely be seen, circling like a distant seagull over the site of the Union boat hide. Amanda accessed the drone’s datalink and a crisp digital television image filled the main m
onitor on her console. A secondary screen up forward on Steamer and Snowy’s control panel lit off as well, showing a smaller version of the same vista.
The view showed a patch of now all-too-familiar coastal mangrove swamp, sheltered inside the hook of a narrow peninsula that extended out beyond the northern side of the Forecariah River estuary. In the center of the patch, a narrow creek mouth cracked the densely forested shoreline.
“What’s happening down there?” Amanda inquired.
“We’ve got at least three Boghammers in the hide, and our ground sensors indicate twenty-plus people doing a lot of moving around. We’ve had intermittent radio traffic for the past two hours. Some commo with Union Army HQ in Freetown and a lot of attempts to contact the other boat hides. Nobody’s been answering the phone, and I suspect they’re starting to get nervous down there.”
“I told you so,” Quillain growled, peering over Amanda’s shoulder at the monitor.
Amanda ignored the comment, staring intently at the image. “Anything else? Any indication that they’re on the move yet?”
And suddenly there was just such an indication. A towering mushroom of scarlet flame and black smoke sprouted out of the tree cover.
“Whoa!” Christine exclaimed. “Big thermal! Big thermal! That was a gas dump blowing! Stand by! … Okay, Royalty, we’ve now got lower-grade thermal flares showing under the tree cover as well.”
Amanda nodded to herself. “Okay, their observation posts have us spotted. They’re torching their supply caches. Their ammo bunker should be next.”
As if keyed by her words, a second, muddier mushroom cloud rose above the trees, discharging tracers sparkling around its base.
Quillain sighed in disgust. “Well, there they go. They’re destroying everything before a bug-out.”
“Um-hmm,” Amanda replied absently. “If they were smart, they’d scuttle the Boghammers as well and escape overland to the Union border. But I don’t think they will. I’m betting that they’re going to try and get those gunboats out of there.”
She straightened abruptly, her seat back thumping Quillain back a few inches. Something glinted in the back of her hazel eyes now, a flame long kept hidden behind layers of patience and deliberation.
“Commander Lane, sound general quarters! Bring the ship to battle stations! Miss Banks, have the squadron clear for action! Surface engagement! Captain Quillain, have your Marines stand by for boarding!”
Steamer Lane hit the general alarm bell, its clangor sounding in the central bay of the hovercraft. Gunners and loaders scrambled back to their weapons. All hands re-donned their ear-shielding headsets as the side hatches slammed open and the stern gate dropped, the roar of the slipstream and the scream of the turbines flooding in.
“Fire control one and two, up! Pedestal mounts deployed. Loading surface engagement package. Hellfires and Hydras on the rails!”
“Portside 40 is up!”
“Starboard 40, standing by!”
“Stem 50’s manned and ready!’
Quillain hesitated for a moment in the rear of the cockpit, pressing back out of the way as Chief Tehoa swarmed up the ladder to man the cockpit guns. “I hope you’re right, Captain,” he said finally before dropping down into the hull.
Amanda hoped she was as well. Turning back to the tactical displays, she queried Operations again. “Chris, what’s happening in the hide now?”
“Ground search radar and FLIR indicate we have movement on the creek. Breaking tree cover soon … Yeah! We got three hostiles coming out! I say again, we’ve got three Bogs coming out of the crud. Check your visual!”
On the real-time video display, three sleek motor launches blasted out of the narrow stream channel and into open water. Running nose to tail, they punched through the low surf beyond the creek mouth and curved across the shallow bay, turning away from the onrushing PGs and heading for Union territory.
“I’ve got them!” Snowy called excitedly. “Steamer, they’re cutting around the point just outside of the shore break!”
Lane’s right hand came off the steering yoke for a fiercely emphasized thumbs-up. “Oh yeah, I see ’em, darlin’! Run, you motherfuckers! The shallows ain’t going to save you now !”
“Intercept bearing, Steamer,” Amanda ordered, coming forward to kneel between the two pilots. “Close until we’re just outside of effective machine-gun range, then hold station on them.”
Lane looked back at Amanda, his eyebrows lifted. “We’re not taking this bunch out?”
“Oh, we will,” Amanda smiled enigmatically, “eventually. But first I’ve got a few messages to send.” She reached back to her console and called up the command communications loop. “This is TACBOSS to squadron. Maintain echelon formation with the flag craft. Fire only on my order. I say again, fire only on my order.”
The Union gunboats howled across the width of Forecariah Bay, engines wide open and driving hard for the headlands at Passe du Nord. Streaming roostertails behind them, the forty-foot trimarans bucked and skipped as they cut across the troughs of the inbound ocean swells. Intermittently, a lightweight hull broke entirely free of the water on a seventh wave, soaring for an instant like a flying fish before smashing down again in an exploding welter of foam and spray.
Aboard the fleeing Boghammers, the Union seamen grimly clung to whatever handholds they could find and endured the battering. At the steering stations, the helmsmen looked back over their shoulders and pounded their throttles, trying to coax a few more revs out of the straining two-hundred horsepower outboards.
This had been their coast. There hadn’t been anything that they couldn’t either kill or disdainfully outrun. They had laughed at the coming of the American hovercraft, the “big winds that couldn’t blow.” The Union gunboatmen weren’t laughing now. Three snarling-jawed sea monsters held a rigid formation behind them, neither falling back nor closing the range, only awaiting their own pleasure and time.
Home was only a few minutes and miles farther down the coast, if those minutes and miles could somehow be bought. Boat captains yelled orders over the unmuffled roar of the engines and crewmen began flinging weapons and ammunition into the sea, trading armament for the extra turn of speed that might see them to safety.
With the Marine detachment ready for whatever might be demanded of it, Stone Quillain returned to the Queen’s cock pit. Shedding his helmet, he replaced it with a spare headset. “How we doing?” he inquired.
The question he wanted to ask was “What are we doing?” He knew full well that the seafighters had the speed and the reach to kill the Boghammers anytime they wanted. The big Marine couldn’t see why they were hesitating. But then, this Amanda Garrett female seemed to have a disturbing ability to see any number of things that he couldn’t.
“Very good, Captain,” she replied cheerfully. “We’ve cleared Passe du Sud, and that’s Point Sallatouk to port. It’s not far to the border now. Excuse me, have a little finessing to do.”
She accessed the command radio loop again. Quillain switched over as well, listening in on what this “finessing” was all about.
”Carondelet, Manassas, this is TACBOSS. TACNET imaging indicates that the Bogs have jettisoned most of their heavy armament. We can tighten it up a little now. Close to five hundred yards. Mister Marlin, keep the Manassas right in their wake and keep pushing. Mr. Clark, take the Carondelet to seaward and work in on their flank. Keep them shouldered against the coast. Mr. Lane, you enjoy surfing, you take the Queen in along the shore break. If these guys try for the beach, I want for us to be in position to cut them off.”
Three crisp acknowledgments sounded over the loop. Smoothly the three seafighters accelerated, pulling into their new stations in a half-circle behind the retreating Boghammers.
Quillain stared at Amanda. “You’re driving ’em!” he said, comprehension dawning. “You’re
herding ’em right up against the beach!”
“Exactly.” She nodded in grim satisfaction. “The fishing villages along this stretch of coast have taken a lot of grief from the Union navy. I think it will do local morale some good for them to see these gentlemen being run out of Dodge.”
The harried gunboats and their PG pursuers were running parallel to an extended stretch of white beach dotted with grounded pirogues and drying racks. On the magnified MMS display, a scattering of fishermen could be seen, preparing to trail their nets out for the morning catch. They stood and stared as the mismatched convoy tore into view. Their wives and children streamed onto the sand as well, drawn down from their coastal village by the echoing howl of the hovercraft turbines.
Wariness and fear was replaced by a growing realization that, for once, they weren’t the ones having to run for their lives. Backs were slapped and fists were shaken at the Union Boghammers. Mouths opened to cheer and to shout jeers and derision after the fleeing toothless gunboats.
“It’s psywar, Stone,” she continued. “As I said at the briefing, if we’re going to win this thing, we have to hit Belewa with whatever we can, whenever we can.”
“Captain Garrett,” Snowy Banks said, looking back from the copilot’s station. “We’re three minutes out from the Guinea border. After that, we’re in Union territory.”
“Very good, Lieutenant. Maintain pursuit. That’s the next message we’re going to send. No sanctuaries.”
“I beg your pardon, ma’am,” it was Lane’s turn to look back over his shoulder, “but do the U.N. rules of engagement give us authorization to enter Union territorial waters under these circumstances?”
“Who said this has anything to do with the United Nations, Steamer?”
They blazed across the invisible line in the sea that put them in hostile territory. When it became clear that the seafighters were maintaining the chase, the Union gunboats started angling in toward the beach, the Boghammer crews seeking escape on land.
Sea fighter Page 19
